Paranormal Nation

by Marc E. Fitch

  Indeed, the UFO community can become a bit overzealous in the expounding of their theories. UFO proponents have put everything conceivable forth, from aliens orchestrating the JFK assassination to the mysterious black helicopters actually being flying saucers in disguise. The UFO community and the paranormal community in general are defined more by the lunatic fringe than by the moderate, logical, and researched middle. Also, those within the community tend to be at odds with each other, oftentimes perpetrating hoaxes and frauds against each other as a means to prove or disprove their theories. For instance, famed UFO researcher William L. Moore claimed that he was, in fact, a government spy meant to subvert the work of the UFO community. This occurred after Moore was accused of falsifying documents (MJ-12) and impersonating a federal officer. However, Moore’s claim that he was an operative actually secured his place in the UFO community and reinforced their beliefs. As in other instances in the realm of the paranormal, exposure of fraud often reinforces belief rather than dissuading the believers.

  A final, disturbing instance comes from the memoirs of Travis Walton, one of the most famous cases of UFO abduction in history. Many years after his supposed abduction, when his story was being made into a Hollywood film entitled Fire in the Sky, he was contacted by a man claiming that he was military personnel and that he had witnessed the UFO that had taken Travis that fateful night 25 years earlier. However, when the movie studio gave the man a polygraph, he failed. “The results were very strange—with some truly sinister implications. Not only had the man done very badly, things came to light which gave indications of deceit and suggested possible intrigue from high levels in our government!”21 Walton believes this person was an operative sent by the UFO skeptic and debunker, Philip J. Klass, who has a reputation for using unscrupulous and fraudulent means to attack UFO investigators. Klass and other skeptics’ methods create an even greater sense of paranoia in the UFO communities as they worry about government disinformation, fraudulent insiders, and dishonest skeptics. Their world is awash in half-truths, deception, and conspiracies due, in part, to their own actions, but also due to interference by both government and skeptics who pursue the UFO believers as if on some kind of crusade.

  However, this is exactly the kind of treatment that fuels belief, because it begs the question, why? Why would the government subvert the work of a group of amateur, independent UFO investigators if there was nothing to their claims? Why would skeptics employ such unscrupulous tactics while claiming to represent science? Their interest and blind dedication raises more questions than answers.

  As indicated before, the paranormal is defined more by the lunatic fringe than by the people who actually put forth the most intriguing questions and theories and work to support those theories. Unfortunately, hoaxes, fraud, disinformation, and facts all create a dilution of truth in these paranormal communities and thus drive their belief systems further and further toward the fringes of logic—the edge of reason, where truth and fiction become indistinguishable, and people start to become characters in their own spy novels. Examples have abounded in government conspiracy theories, extending primarily from the JFK assassination. However, the patterns of conspiracy theories and the effects on the investigators and the public have come to define some of the paranormal research groups. The paranormal exists in a realm where truth and fiction, fact and fraud are blended into one, indiscernible mess. Likewise, the conspiracy theories that have plagued the U.S. government through the decades result in a separate world of intrigue, fraud, manipulation, lies, and disinformation. Some of it true, much of it not. When gaps are left in the story, people begin to fill in the blanks using imagination and some semblance of logic.

  The difficulty inherent in examining an entity as large and fractured as the U.S. government is that there are various agencies with different goals—all separate, yet connected—with various people acting in their own interest and in the interest of the agency, doing what they think is right or will benefit them the most. Conspiracies often label this massive entity as merely “the government.” Theorists try to fill in the gaps in government agencies and personnel through inserting a logic that supports their belief systems. Somehow, a government cover-up of alien life just seems to make sense when looking at a massive bureaucracy that is difficult, if not impossible, to cleanly navigate. The best paranormal researchers understand this and limit the extent of their conspiracy think, while others let it spin wildly out of control. To them, a massive, world-changing secret is the only thing that can account for what the U.S. government has become, and this secret fills in the blanks for that which we cannot or will not answer or just don’t understand. It is the pursuit of a truth that may not exist, with the belief that this truth will somehow right the world and that the investigators will become key players in the salvation of mankind through the liberation of this truth. Unfortunately, the need to fulfill that role can sometimes override reason and actually obscure truth more than reveal it.

  Their efforts are actually an attempt to give meaning to a world that appears to have gone haywire. The JFK assassination marked a new era in U.S. history—one of chaos. The Cold War, social disruption, the expanding government and media, the exposure of real conspiracies by the government in the form of Watergate and Iran-Contra, the CIA testing LSD on average citizens, and knowledge of the government working with mafia thugs created a sense that the world had been turned upside down. And during this time, unidentified flying objects were appearing in the sky—things unexplainable by the witnesses and undisclosed by the government. Our minds try to make sense of it all, to form cohesion in chaotic environments; and for some, the only thing that forms this cohesion is the belief that an alien presence is visiting earth, and the world governments are keeping this truth from the people in an effort to maintain their hold on civilization.

  CHAPTER 6

  Social Change and the Paranormal

  The history of the paranormal has been one of feast or famine; periods of great renewed, fervent, and sometimes dangerous interest, followed by times of ridicule, skepticism, disbelief, or just plain old disinterest. These pendulous swings of paranormal belief and interest have shaped our modern world in immense ways, though often unbeknownst to the general public. But what brings these swings about? What causes the feast and the famine? Renewed public interest in the paranormal at particular junctures of human history is a signifier of massive social change sweeping across the culture and country. These times in history—the European witch craze, the rise of Spiritualism, the flying saucer invasion, and the satanic panic of the 1980s—all coincided with sweeping social changes, particularly in the realm of the sciences. The divergence of science and paranormal beliefs dates back to the European witch craze of the 1500s and the reformation of the Catholic Church; thus, we will begin our demonstration at this juncture in history.

  The coincidence of major scientific developments and fervent public interest in the paranormal is not necessarily directly related, but rather indirectly. What the trend of coincidence demonstrates is an indirect relationship between the two, spurred by a public reaction to the subsequent change in culture. As with anything in life, major changes encounter difficulty and resistance on many levels. The social changes that coincide with the uprising of paranormal belief systems stir public reaction and resistance. Any challenge to widely held personal belief systems such as religion will encounter great resistance, and this resistance to the incursion of science into cultural belief systems will meet with renewed interest in the paranormal. As with any uprising, the interest slowly dies out, or in some cases, the pendulum of culture swings far in the opposite direction toward complete disavowal of the old belief systems and incorporation of the new. Hence, the surges of paranormal belief and interest are public reactions to the sweeping social, ethical, and cultural changes brought on by major developments in science. Following this line of thinking, we will examine some of the major paranormal ages in history and examine the coincidence of cultural and
scientific changes. The times to be examined are listed above each section; however, the Bigfoot craze of the 1950s and ’60s will not be examined because it has already been examined in great detail in Joshua Blu Buhs’s fantastic work, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, and is, therefore, not worth repeating in this work. Also, please note that the dates listed for each of these uprisings are only approximations to give a point of reference and to outline the times when public interest was at its peak; nearly all the paranormal beliefs listed still occur today in varying degrees.

  THE EUROPEAN WITCH CRAZE

  Jeffrey Burton Russell writes in his work, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages, “The great witch craze, which built upon this wide popular belief [the devil], was a phenomenon of the Renaissance, and the witch craze was at its height in England at precisely the time that Shakespeare was at his.”1 The European witch craze was responsible for one of the deadliest and darkest times in the history of the paranormal, resulting in the deaths of over one hundred thousand people, mostly women. These days the witch-hunts are looked upon with incredulous disdain and ridiculed as ancient beliefs and medieval practices born in the dark ages of ignorance and religious fervor. However, the witch craze actually occurred during one of the greatest and most earth-changing times of scientific development and enlightenment—the Renaissance. This was the time of the Copernican revolution, the first printing press, the explosion in literacy and scholarship; it was the time of Chaucer and Shakespeare; it was the time when the scientific method was developed, and some of the greatest thinkers focused their attention on the empirical world—men such as Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and René Descartes, just to name a few. It was a time when the leading theology had all but abandoned the notion of the devil and his work in the world. “None of the main intellectual currents of the period was conducive to diabology. Scholastic realism had already played the Devil down, and now nominalism, mysticism, and humanism were even more inclined to ignore him. Yet at the same time the great witch craze began…”2

  But amidst these scientific, artistic, and philosophical revolutions, thousands were being burned at the stake across Europe for witchcraft. Trials were held with “evidence” based on nothing more than an accusation, and “scientific” tests to determine if someone was a witch included torturous acts designed to confirm the accusation. The public, fueled by sermons from priests and preachers, judges and the aristocratic elite, believed that on any given night, otherwise normal people were riding brooms or flying through the night air as unworldly creatures, to attend sabbats and Black Masses, which included orgiastic sex, ritual child murder, cannibalism, and pacts with Satan himself. These beliefs fueled one of the worst cases of mass panic and murder the world has ever known. But this panic was not fueled by the peasantry and the poor, though they were at the center of the panic; rather, it was fueled by the educated and elite intellectual class. It is often easier for us to accept the idea of ignorant townsfolk, pitchforks and torches in hand, surrounding innocent outsiders and killing them in a frenzy, similar to the famous scene from Frankenstein; but these were not mob killings, they were death sentences vetted by courts and magistrates, and presided over by the educated, wealthy, and pious.

  Belief in witchcraft was nothing new. The world up until this point was one of magical religious practice and understanding. The very nature of the cosmos could not be understood without the magical, miraculous intervention of God himself. However, accusations of witchcraft were rare, and the punishment not nearly as severe in the days leading up to the Renaissance. So what made this time of human history different? What spurred the murder of one hundred thousand people? Anne Llewellyn Barstow authored Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, which examined the feminist aspect of the European witch-hunts, something that, until her writing, had been largely unexamined. “The gender of the victims no more explains the entire witch craze phenomenon than the legal, religious, political, or societal-functional arguments. All these factors and the generally neglected economic changes as well, are part of a valid explanation.”3 No coherent explanation of any time in history is valid without the consideration of many, many factors, each of which could probably comprise a book in and of itself. This being said, however, in the context of examining the paranormal uprisings from the time of the witch-hunts through the current day, we should examine the common factors; in our case, the strong coincidence of scientific and technological development and renewed interest in the paranormal. While the religious, economic, social, and gender factors are all parts of the complete picture, it was the development of the sciences during this time that laid the groundwork for this paranormal fervor. The fast pace by which God, and the belief in God, was challenged stirred a reaction from the elite and educated down through the masses. These massive changes in the way the magical-religious world was viewed bred fear, panic, a loss of self among the mobs, and, most of all, a power vacuum, which the elite sought to fill. This time was ultimately about control: control of the cosmos, the people, the money, and the pulpit. But it began with the usurpation of God’s control over the cosmos.

  The Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, was published in 1486; however, it had very little impact until the witch craze had already begun and witch- hunters were carrying out their searches and persecution. It is possible that this was due to low literacy rates among the populace (though that was increasing rapidly); however, the witch craze, as indicated before, was largely perpetrated and prosecuted by the educated elite, but it still took nearly 80 years for the Malleus to truly be used as a hammer of witches.

  Some authors have focused on the Malleus more than others. In their Outbreak!: The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior, Hilary Evans and Robert Bartholomew write, “By presenting witchcraft as a new heresy and dissociating it from the old peasant sorcery, they were able to add urgency to their mission, to spread the fear that humankind was threatened by a new menace. This was readily taken up by many secular authorities.”4 The Malleus, following in the traditions of the Inquisition, made any form of magic heretical, and therefore it could be prosecuted under the laws of the Inquisition and punished by torture, imprisonment, and death. It also established belief in witchcraft as essential to Catholicism and rendered any denial of witchcraft also heretical. But the argument that this was readily taken up by scholars seems a bit extreme. Most scholars at the time were having difficulty trying to reconcile a good and just God with the existence of a powerful, personal devil; and many had already begun to write the devil out of their theology, maintaining that evil was merely a lack of the presence of God, or “privation of God,” as Russell puts it. Being that the belief in organized witchcraft is tied to belief in the devil, it seems that the Malleus might not have had the influence at first that it had in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Malleus did indeed become the handbook for witch-hunting (along with several other treatises and quite a bit of ad-libbing), but not until many decades later. This is not to say that there were not trials and convictions of witchcraft when the Malleus was written, but they did not reach fever pitch until subsequent centuries.

  Shortly before the witch craze began in Europe, Nicolaus Copernicus published De Revolutionibus, which showed the sun to be the center of the universe, rather than the earth. Published in 1543, De Revolutionibus essentially placed the earth and all her inhabitants on the outskirts of the cosmos; we were no longer the center of the universe. Not only were we no longer the governing body of the universe, Copernicus also developed the theories of guided celestial orbits. He laid the groundwork for nature to be known through empirical observation rather than by divine inspiration and literature. The work of Copernicus set into motion the work of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, as well as the philosophies of René Descartes and Immanuel Kant. It was truly a revolution of thought and belief systems, and the world was forever changed.

  Naturally, this did not happen overnight, and please do not draw the conclusion
that the work of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton caused the witch craze. In fact, had their ideas taken root earlier or more quickly, perhaps the witch craze would never have occurred. It was not their theories that influenced the craze, but rather a form of cultural cognitive dissonance and loss that resulted from these discoveries that spurred the craze.

  We must remember that the world was a very different place at that time. For centuries mankind had easily accepted that the earth and cosmos were governed directly by God. While there had always been debate among scholars regarding predestination as opposed to free will, it was generally accepted that God controlled the happenings of the universe. The idea that somehow there was an invisible force controlling the heavens, and that we did not sit at the center of God’s creation, shook the foundation of hundreds if not thousands of years of belief. The psychological impact of these theories was immense, tantamount to aliens landing on the White House lawn and telling the world that we humans were only part of a lab experiment that they somehow botched. The previously held ideas and beliefs, which centered on God as the creator and primary mover of the cosmos, were suddenly and very soundly refuted using empirical observation and evidence. Copernicus and subsequent scientific revolution removed control of the cosmos and nature from God.

  As discussed in the chapter entitled “Paranormal Hoaxes,” cognitive dissonance can have disastrous and extreme effects on both an individual and a community. The upheaval of a worldview can result in an extreme effort to preserve and somehow justify the traditional beliefs. Could the witch craze have been a case of mass hysteria spurred by the effects of cognitive dissonance? People will often take illogical, seemingly insane stances in an effort to avoid their worldview being proven inaccurate and will react violently in an effort to preserve their belief systems, something often seen in the study of cults. Jim Jones orchestrated the largest mass suicide in history in an effort to preserve the illusion of his religion. Considering the level of control, enforced by violence, which the church exerted over the entire population, life in Europe leading up to the sixteenth century was not much different from a cult. It supplanted science and reason with blind faith and enforcement through the Inquisition.