As I indicated a while back, Bob Ettinger was not the only person to turn up in my life with something to say that he wanted the whole world to hear. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are obvious crackpots. With some it’s hard to tell. You never know. Maybe this year’s Newton or Faraday is sitting in your waiting room, dabbing Clearacil on his chin. I have had at least five visitors and correspondents who had worked out the long-sought replacement for Einstein’s Unified Field Theory, a dozen who have solved all the secrets of the mind, twenty with new religious revelations, and God’s own horde of flying-saucer people. Some I can dismiss pretty easily. If they speak in koans and giggle at the doorknob, I just don’t listen, especially if they tell me they know someone who can read minds, or bend keys, or foretell the future. It isn’t that I am certain none of this is possible. Au contraire. I hope; and I wish with all my heart that it were real. But all the evidence for ESP, any kind of ESP, is terrible. It isn’t just that it is bad, it is evidence of that special kind, like the evidence for Laetrile or for the existence of God, which is utterly conclusive to people who are already convinced, and not worth examining to people who aren’t. As far as I know (which is far), there has never been a test of ESP ability conducted under conditions of enough rigor to eliminate the chance of cheating. Most of the great psychics have been caught faking. Most of the serious researchers, however bright and honorable, have shown themselves pitifully gullible. I’d love to believe in ESP, but the frauds and the dupes won’t let me.
In this arrogant, hard-nosed skepticism, which has won me many enemies, I am aided and abetted by my friend and neighbor, The Amazing Randi, who is even more hostile to the whole paranormal performance than I am. Randi has a standing offer to me to duplicate any “psychic” feat I can describe, under the same conditions as it was done by the alleged psychic. He has made good on it so many times, that I no longer bother to test him out. He has even taught me how to do some of the simpler routines, including the Uri Geller metal-bending event (with which I dazzled Arthur Clarke first time out), the Moscow-Leningrad Ladies’ Paranormal Tube-Spinning Feat (that takes a little more skill, but sometimes I can make it work), and the jazziest demonstration of infallible mind reading I have ever seen, so good that I hate even to talk about it. If I ever find myself weakening and beginning to believe in ESP, all I have to do is call Randi up, and at any hour of the day or night he will come over and talk to me until I am through the crisis. And yet—
And yet, well, look, folks. There is still that little part of the inside of my mind that wants to believe in ESP. And it is not entirely unsupported by my observation of the world. I have as many anecdotal experiences of ESP as anyone else. I can clearly remember a number of occasions when I knew what the next card in a deck was going to be. (But there were also a lot of occasions when I knew it just as well, but was wrong.) I have called friends to have them say they had just been thinking of me; burst into song at exactly the same moment as a companion burst into the same song; had a flash of inspiration that told me where to find a lost object. A few years ago, in Barletta, Italy, my wife and I were walking aimlessly about, and I mentioned to her that when I had been there last, twenty-odd years before, I had had a friend who lived in an interesting apartment on a courtyard. What kind of a courtyard? she asked. Well, I said, a lot like that one. And it turned out to be the very house. I can multiply anecdotes as long and as tediously as you can, whoever you are. But anecdotal evidence isn’t any kind of proof. As the French say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
But then there’s the case of the ESP teaching machine.
In 1972 I was invited to a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Seminar on Speculative Technology. It was a great weekend, one of the most exciting I’ve ever spent. A physicist from Stanford Research Institute named Russell Targ turned up with what he called an ESP teaching machine.
That was not the only attraction of the weekend; in fact, it was only a little extra helping of dessert to a marvelously stimulating meal. But I was taken with the machine. It was about the size of a bedside clock radio. The front of it displayed four colored slides, with lights behind them. Under each slide was a button. Inside the machine was a random-number generator, on the basis of which the machine would decide in advance which slide it was going to light up.
What one did with the machine was to try to guess which slide that was going to be. Having made your guess, you pushed the button for the slide you expected. Then the machine lit up the slide it had decided on. Sometimes it would be yours, of course. More probably it would not. You only had one chance in four of guessing correctly.
At the top of the machine a counter registered how many times you had guessed, and how many of those times you had been right. It was set to record a run of twenty-four trials—in which, of course, chance expectancy was that you would get six right. If you did get six, or five, or seven, that was all that happened. If you got substantially more (or less) than chance, the machine would light up a panel saying “significant to one standard deviation,” “to two standard deviations,” etc.68
It was a fun machine.
I played with it a lot—when I could get it away from the fifty other invited attendees at the seminar, Arthur Clarke and Marvin Minsky, Wernher von Braun and Krafft Ehricke, Bob Forward and Ed Mitchell. The first run I tried was significant to two standard deviations! Wow! My second run was a little on the low side. My third was lower still. I didn’t really keep a careful count, but actually after about ten runs the pluses and minuses pretty much evened out, so that there was no significant indication of anything happening one way or another.
All that is true, but in the interest of accurate reporting I must record one additional datum.
I am not sure nothing significant happened, because over the several hundred trials there were a few cases, maybe fifteen or twenty in all, when what I did was a little different from all the other cases. In those cases I observed myself reaching out to press one button, drawing my finger back, and then pressing another. I don’t mean that I just hesitated, or pushed a button I didn’t intend. I mean my finger actually touched one, and then ultimately pressed another. And on those few trials, under those circumstances, I wasn’t right just the chance twenty-five percent of the time, I was right more than half the time.
Does that prove anything?
No, not even to me. It is more anecdotage. I didn’t keep a count, my impressions are subjective and, anyway, there simply were not enough trials to mean anything. But I sure would like to borrow that machine for a week or two and try it all over again, with an objective observer to record what was going on and a careful tally of results.
That sort of approach to ESP is fun. What is a lot less fun is having someone tell me about the strange experience his uncle had in Palo Alto, California (I just won’t listen), and what is hardly any fun at all is having someone tell me about his own experience when it is apparent that there is something going on beyond the objective interest in ESP. A majority of ESP proponents make me feel acutely uncomfortable. Some are plainly and offensively out to hoodwink me and the world. Some have hoodwinked themselves. A lot are just pathetic. One of the unhappiest hours I ever spent was with one of the pathetic ones, a nice-looking, middle-aged lady who came to the Galaxy offices one day with a tale of woe.
It seemed she was being victimized by a ring of telepaths in Short Hills, New Jersey. The telepaths were all young and male. Some of them were black. They were listening in on all of her most secret thoughts, especially sexual ones. They were spying on her every hour of the day and night, and she could feel them ridiculing her and treating her with contempt. It was hard for her to discuss the worst parts of it with me, a strange male, because she was too well brought up to say the specific things easily. But obviously she was in serious torment of the soul.
I really did not know what to do with her. I tried to suggest that she might be imagining the whole thing. Oh, no! She was certain it was all real. I hint
ed that she might find it useful to talk to a doctor. The doctors hadn’t been able to do a thing for her. She was at her wit’s end. After an hour or so of her gentle weeping, I found a solution—not to her problem, just to mine.
I said, yes, thinking it over, she had actually made a wise decision in coming to the editor of a science-fiction magazine to tell her problem to. The only mistake she had made was in choosing the wrong editor. And I sent her up to John Campbell’s office.
Having alienated maybe a third of potential friends by saying that I don’t think the evidence for ESP is any good, I think it is now my obligation to alienate another third by saying that I think the evidence for flying saucers is even worse.
I have to admit that my early exposure to flying-saucer people was not, on the whole, the kind that conduces to reasoned investigation. Most of them I met on the Long John show. John made his reputation with them in the early days, people who claimed the saucer folk had flown them from the White Sands Proving Ground to lower Yonkers and back, people who had been given the ultimate secrets of the universe to pass on to the rest of us. (“Love thy neighbor and eat lots of yogurt.”) I hate myself when I attach pejorative labels to any group of human beings. So it is hard for me to say that all those early saucerers were either nuts or con men. But that was the way to bet it.
And one time on Long John’s show, just before we went off the air, I said so.
Before I was out of the studio the phone was ringing. It was from a man named George Earley, Connecticut State Chairman for the National Investigating Committee on Aerial Phenomena. “See here,” said George, “NICAP has in its files thousands of reported UFO sightings. Have you investigated them all? Come to that, have you investigated any of them? Or are you just taking the word of such notorious saucer skeptics as Willy Ley and Lester del Rey?”
Well, he had me fair and square. I had to admit it. I had never for one minute believed that any of the flying-saucer reports were really related to visitors from another planet, and I had not bothered to check any of them out, or even, really, to think about them much.
It is an interesting fact that almost all science-fiction writers are UFO skeptics. They always have been. Even John Campbell, who was perfectly capable of swallowing astrology, dianetics, and the Dean Drive, gagged on the saucer people. I think I know why. You cannot spend a large fraction of your life reading and writing about life on other planets without absorbing the notion that (as Einstein put it69) “the universe is not only stranger than we know, it is stranger than we can know.” Stories like Kenneth Arnold’s “disks that moved with a saucer-like motion,” the contactees’ pale, somber humanoids in Grecian togas, machines that stop car motors—they aren’t too fantastic for science-fiction people to believe in; they aren’t fantastic enough. A diet of ionized intelligences from the electrified planets of Betelgeuse immunizes you against little green men with red eyes.
The other thing that has turned so many of us against the UFO reports is that so many of them are pathetic and palpable frauds. But that’s not important, George Earley responded to that. There can be a million frauds. But if there is one true, indisputable account of a visitation from another planet, that is the most significant event in human history, and it outweighs all the frauds a millionfold. And that is true enough; and before I got off the phone, I promised George that I would either look into the matter seriously or keep my mouth shut.
So for two or three years, as time permitted, I looked into the flying-saucer world. I read all the recommended books. I went to UFOlogists’ meetings. I interviewed celebrated contactees. I even visited the scenes of some of the most famous sightings to glean what wisdom I could from the physical surroundings.
Since I put in so much time on it, I would like to salvage something from the effort and tell you at some length about the flakes and frauds I met along the way. But I don’t think it would interest you. It doesn’t even interest me. There were a lot who were just not able to distinguish between fact and fantasy, and another lot whose dull lives had suddenly been brightened by the attention they got from claiming to have met aliens. There were also a few who were making a solid buck by preaching to the gullible, and I liked them least of all.
And then there were the ones who were simply uncritical, and maybe a little ill-informed: a lady at a cocktail party who said, gosh, she’d seen plenty of UFOs in her time; there were quite a lot of them, flashing red and green lights, almost every night, over near where the helicopters landed. (“You mean you saw flashing red and green lights over near where the helicopters land and you call them Unidentified Flying Objects?”) And there was the New Mexico state cop in Socorro, showing Jack Williamson and me around the site where his colleague, Lonnie Zamorra, had had a famous sighting just a short time before. He also had seen UFOs, he said proudly, pointing off past the drive-in theater in the general direction of White Sands Proving Ground. He had seen one just the night before. It started out as a fairly bright yellowish light, zigzagged around the sky, growing dimmer and oranger, and finally disappeared. Jack and I looked at each other. As former Air Force weathermen, we had launched enough pilot balloons to recognize the description at once.
I must not give the impression that every UFO person I met was wicked or dumb, or even careless. George Earley is not at all like that. Neither was the aforementioned Lonnie Zamorra. I didn’t ever meet him face to face, but I spoke to him by phone, talked to his colleagues on the police force and people in the town, and I have to say he has the best testimonials to his honesty of anyone I can think of. (“Lonnie could be wrong, but he’d never make anything up.”)
Barney and Betty Hill, the famous “interrupted journey” couple from New England, were not only decent and respectable people but, in the short time I spent with them, made me think of them as friends.
I believe that Lonnie Zamorra saw something; I just don’t think it was an alien spacecraft. The late Dr. Donald Menzel thought it might have been a dust devil, which fits the facts at least as well as an alien spacecraft does. With the Hills, the story is a little more complicated. As it is reported, they were taken from their car one night, hypnotized, introduced to aliens in a spaceship, commanded to forget the whole experience, and returned to their car. Obediently, they had no conscious recollection of any of this. Then, much later, Barney had occasion to visit a shrink, who put him under hypnosis for other reasons, and the whole story came out. (And was confirmed by Betty, also under hypnosis.) What Barney said to me was that he was sure something had happened that night, but he was not entirely sure whether it happened in objective reality or only in their minds. And if he wasn’t sure, how can any of the rest of us be?
The Hills offered me a chance to listen to their tapes next time I was in Boston, for what help it might give me. We actually made a date to do it. But my plans changed, I didn’t go to Boston when I thought I would, I put off making a special trip; and then I learned that Barney had died. I wish now I had gone a little farther out of my way, not only to hear the tapes but because I liked Barney and Betty Hill.
UFOlogists complain that there is damn-all thorough and objective independent investigation of the saucer situation. They’re absolutely right. The only people who are motivated to put a lot of time into it are those who are already believers. Skeptics and the uncommitted may poke around in the field for a while as I did, but then they get bored—as I did. J. Allen Hynek is one skeptic who became a believer. He is a smart, sane, and well-informed person, and he has a project which I would like to see tried. The FBI, says Hynek, graduates a new class of agents every few months. For a graduation exercise they assign them an event—maybe a real crime, maybe a made-up incident—and the whole class swarms out over the area, interviewing everybody to put together a synoptic report of the whole occurrence. Well, says Hynek, since they’re doing that anyway, why not one time turn all that talent loose on a reported sighting? Talk to everybody. Balance the accounts against each other. Resolve the contradictions. Sift out the facts
. And, for once, see for sure whether the thing happened or not.
This strikes me as an eminently workable idea; I’ve already written my own congressman to tell him I’d like to see it done, and maybe one day it will be. I wish it had been done with the Hills, or Lonnie Zamorra; and I’ll admit that in my heart I kind of wish that it had proved them right. I wish, in fact, that I could believe any of the stories about sightings of alien spacecraft, because it would give me pleasure to have some proof that we are not alone in the universe.
But I don’t.
The statistics are against it. Even without a full-dress FBI investigation, confirming witnesses should have turned up to Zamorra or the Hills. None ever did. And with all those thousands of sightings, there should have been one that simply could not be dismissed. But there isn’t.
Logic is against it, too. Put it this way: if there really is an intelligent alien race capable of building ships of any of the sorts described, they would have to be pretty smart, right? At least as smart as, say, you and me? Well, then why don’t they act that way? I promise you that if I were an alien intelligence interested in finding out about the Earth, I would find a hell of a lot better way to do it than those dummies have.
So, after a couple of years of this, I wrote George Earley a letter:
Dear George:
I kept my promise. I looked into the evidence. And I still don’t believe.
You can’t stay in the same house for more than a quarter of a century without putting out some sort of roots into the community, and by the early 1960s I had acquired a couple. We had a bad fire around then: a defective electric-blanket switch started a bed smoldering when no one was looking, and by the time anyone perceived something was wrong, the master bedroom was in flames. Luck was with us. We had elected to have our fire on a Thursday evening at eight o’clock, which was when the local volunteer fire company held its monthly meeting, so they were all right on the scene. As soon as the alarm went in they were on their way, only a block away. They saved the house. In the process several thousand sheets of paper in my office just above the burning room were seriously scorched or trodden by firemen’s boots, and the whole house was well soaked; it took us a year to rebuild, and a lot longer to deal with the consequences. (Some manuscripts were destroyed forever; and for years after, on wet nights, you could smell the char.)
The Way the Future Was: A Memoir Page 25
