Among the ufologists

March 01, 2018 by Andrew Stuttaford in NEW CRITERION

The New Criterion, March 1, 2018

International UFO Museum and Research Center, Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

After losing my way last summer in a tiny town best known as the deathplace of Billy the Kid, I eventually located the right desert highway. Outperforming the alleged aliens who, seventy years before, had allegedly crashed their alleged spacecraft nearby, I swept past a welcome sign decorated with—in honor of a cow town’s real and imagined pasts—cattle and a flying saucer, and reached Roswell, New Mexico, in one piece:

The City of Roswell invites UFO enthusiasts and skeptics alike to join in the celebration of one of the most debated incidents in history.

History is not what it was.

Baymont Hotel, Roswell, NM, June 30, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Alien kitsch at my hotel’s front desk, an alien face on the elevator floor and each elevator button too.

Applebee’s held itself aloof, but Arby’s was ready to “welcome” unsuspecting aliens. A little green matador graced the walls of a Mexican restaurant, and the striking architecture of one local McDonald’s paid tribute to a saucer that never was. Downtown, an immense metallic construction with a pointed rocket nose turned out to be an old grain silo, a disappointment dispelled by a $2 “black light spacewalk” in a nearby souvenir store, the not-exactly-NASA Roswell Space Center.

Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

The Roswell story—or, appropriately, its fragments—can be found scattered across American culture. It starts in mid-June 1947 when ranch hand William “Mac” Brazel, a link to a legend of the Old West (his uncle may have killed Billy the Kid’s killer), stumbled upon the debris that propelled him into a legend of a space age that had yet to arrive.

Brazel wasn’t impressed by the “bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper, and sticks” strewn out there in the desert, but a week or so later he heard that a sighting in Washington State had triggered America’s first proper UFO “flap” and, critically, a $3,000 reward for physical evidence of one of these contraptions. Even then it was a few days before Brazel (who had no phone) “whispered kinda confidential” to the sheriff during a routine visit to Roswell, some seventy-five miles away. The sheriff contacted the authorities at the Roswell airfield, home, perhaps fittingly, to the only unit on the planet then equipped to drop an atomic bomb: there are those who speculate that it was New Mexico’s role—from Los Alamos to White Sands—in so much of the development of America’s nascent nuclear arsenal that (supposedly) drew extraterrestrial observers to the Southwest. It was two humans, however, the intelligence officer Jesse Marcel and a colleague, who retrieved the wreckage from Brazel. On July 8, the base’s commander ordered his public information officer to put out a press release, and that’s what Lieutenant Walter Haut did:

The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group . . . was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc.

The wreckage had become a disc, the disc became a headline: “RAAF [Roswell Army Air Field] Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region,” was the Roswell Daily Record’s headline on a front page, still available for sale across town in formats ranging from T-shirt to magnet.

In the release, Haut also explained that the disc had been inspected, “then loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.” It was there that Brigadier General Roger Ramey let the air out of the balloon by telling the press that the wreckage was a balloon, or, more precisely, what was left of a weather balloon and the radar reflectors it had been transporting. The Roswell Daily Record ’sheadline was bleak: “General Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer.” A “harassed” Mac Brazel, it related, was sorry he had “told” but added that “he had previously found two weather observation balloons on the ranch, but . . . what he found this time did not in any way resemble either of these”—intriguing, but not intriguing enough to be talked about for the next three decades.

Roswell, NM, June 30, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

But people continued to watch the skies. The suspicion that there might be something up there bubbled away, ginned up by an eager press and spinners—mad, Munchausen, mercenary, or misguided—of tall tales that won a huge following. An obsession fed by an entertainment industry that in turn echoed and amplified the stories that its own creations provoked among the credulous, flying saucers were made all the more believable by Sputnik, Vostok, and Gemini. If we could do it, why couldn’t they? Even Uncle Sam was curious and, with unknown Soviet weaponry also in mind, carried out studies—most famously Project Blue Book—into UFOs, only to conclude by the end of the 1960s that aliens were not involved. Many Americans (and not just Americans) disagreed, and it was revealed last December that between 2007 and 2012 the Pentagon ran a secret project (with an afterlife that apparently still continues) to take another look at what might be up there. Its investigations turned up some thought-provoking reports as well as startling video and audio recordings, but the fact that its funding has—so we’re told—been eliminated is pretty good evidence that there is no evidence that anybody green has come calling.

The postwar fascination with UFOs attracted the attention of Carl Jung, a man with a weakness for the strange. In a letter to the editor of the New Republic in 1957, Jung essentially conceded that—whatever UFOs were—they were real, but the title of his Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1958) gives the game away, and its text is high Jung: Platonic months, “spring point enter[ing] Aquarius,” mandalas, manifestations of anxiety about atomic war. But the dodgy old sage was not wrong to spot traces of the spiritual in this phenomenon. The wave of interest in UFOs has occasionally curdled into flying-saucer cults, and some of their descendants, despite Heaven’s Gate’s opening to oblivion, still flourish today.

Roswell, NM, July 2, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Both the Bible and concerns about the dangers of UFO cults helped inspire “Challenges to E.T.,” a conference held that seventieth- anniversary weekend in the Roswell Mall, a complex most notable for the crashed saucer lodged in the roof of its movie theater, and some way from the goings-on downtown. Perhaps that was just as well. Whatever the underlying reason for this gathering, its focus seemed to be on rejecting “the extraterrestrial hypothesis” in favor of just about anything else outré enough to draw a crowd, from human experimentation to, well, I’ll just quote from the best introductory slide I have ever seen: “Demons and the Pentagon: What the Hell?”

More benignly, belief in powerful, otherworldly aliens has a niche in the catch-all spirituality of our own time, a belief inspired by a notion, however weird, of technology, while satisfying an all-too-human craving for enchantment. The “God gene” is not easy to escape: those who would not normally consider themselves religious appear to be more likely to believe in ufos than their churchgoing contemporaries. Then again, why choose? In one store downtown, aliens shared shelf space with Jesus, Mary, and, if I’m not mistaken, a Hindu deity.

A British speaker at “Challenges to E.T.” did more than most to decode the enduring interest in the Roswell Incident, comparing it with his country’s long-standing fixation with Jack the Ripper: people like a puzzle. I watched the audience at a session elsewhere in town, gripped by a grainy computerized reconstruction of otherwise illegible wording on the piece of paper—the “Ramey Memo”— photographed in the general’s hand as he studied what was either the wreckage from Roswell or, some maintain, a tawdry substitution for the real thing: “Now we come to a really intriguing group of words, which are clearly visible as on the ‘disk’ with discernible quotation marks around ‘disk’ . . . ”

But Roswell’s puzzle was meant to have been solved by Ramey. For decades it seemed that it had, remaining largely forgotten until the late 1970s. As recounted in the invaluable UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth (1997), a work in part anthropological study and in part persuasive forensic debunking, one of the preconditions for its resurrection was a growth in distrust of the U.S. Government (who else would have concealed the wreckage?), a precondition that the U.S. Government did its best to foster. It’s telling that a leading “ufologist,” Stanton Friedman, a retired nuclear physicist no less—has described Roswell as a “cosmic Watergate.”

Suspicion of dark doings by the government is as American as dark doings by the government. The sight of conspiracy theorists being welcomed into a red, white, and blue town is not so very contradictory. Banks and fast food joints advertised their support for the police and the military while street lights were topped with alien head globes but wrapped in Old Glory (July 4th was approaching). And there is something splendidly American about the way that a remote city of fifty thousand not known for very much milks the cash cow that didn’t fall to earth.

A section of downtown had been blocked off. Businesses vied for the best alien (“or patriotic”) window display. Supplementing a distinctive collection of stores—Alien Invasion, Alien Headz, Alien Stop, Alien Zone—were booths offering alien this, alien that, and alien tat. Vendors sold snacks of any description and snacks beyond description. There were pony rides, a water slide (the temperature was in the nineties), an alien costume contest for pets, and an alien costume contest for humans. A man under a canopy invited passers-by to “receive prayer,” while a rival peddled an enlightenment all his own: “The hierarchy of the cosmos and the connection between God, aliens, and man.” Attractions in front of the fine early-twentieth-century courthouse included a welcome tent, the Ten Commandments carved in stone, and a signpost to the planets. Bands played soft rock and Tejano, a borderlands mingling.

Alien Costume (pet) contest, Roswell, NM, July 1, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

A block or two away, at the International UFO Museum and Research Center, much expanded since, oh yes, my last visit in 1995, there was work to be done. Travis Walton discussed his abduction by aliens in 1975, a distressing if dubious story subsequently turned into the unexpectedly entertaining Fire in the Sky, a movie released during the early ’90s abduction boom. Other stars in the Roswell Galaxy spoke on the government cover-up, physical evidence of the crash, and additional matters that, if proven, would change our understanding of everything. Yet a touch of carnival had crept in. A flier (“the alien bodies! wow!”) promoted a workshop hosted by the “alien hunter” Derrel Sims (admission $10).

More than a touch: to be sure, there was a well-stocked library crammed with ufological scholarship, but the gift shop struck a more frivolous note: alien T-shirts, alien sweatshirts, alien sippy cups, alien key-rings, alien pens, alien onesies, alien ashtrays, alien beanies, alien magnets, plush aliens, plastic aliens, blow-up aliens, everything alien except the real, elusive thing. Educational materials lined the walls of the main hall—those photographs that can’t always be so quickly explained away, pictures of “ancient astronauts,” the usual—but a replica of the robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still stood still nearby, not far from a recreation of that infamous alien autopsy and an engaging display in which a flying saucer whirled behind four forbidding animatronic aliens. The UFO museum, “a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization,” may maintain a claim to represent the “serious side” of UFO research, but it subverts that seriousness with a wink and a nod.

International UFO Museum and Research Center, Roswell, NM, June 30, 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Many of those thronging its premises understood that very well. Yes, true believers parted respectfully when Stanton Friedman made his way through his flock and gathered earnestly around Travis Walton. But others seemed less convinced, sci-fi curious perhaps, intrigued maybe, believers even, but without the conviction to take their belief very seriously. They were playing a game they half-hoped was real. Others were just there for the fun, their pilgrimage more Mardi Gras than the Camino de Santiago, four girls in shiny skirts and headphone hairstyles, three middle-aged ladies in “alien” eyeglasses vamping in front of those forbidding aliens as the dry ice billowed. Uncle Sam sauntered around the main exhibition hall on stilts, his presence a salute to the doomed spacecraft’s touchdown into American folklore.

The deliberations weren’t confined to the museum and the mall. The Roswell Daily Record hosted a series of lectures in a conference room behind K-Bob’s Steakhouse. At the city’s convention center, topics included abductees’ civil rights and, the horror, “the origins of the UFO ridicule factor.”

Bryce Zabel, one of the creators of Dark Skies, a UFO-conspiracy TVshow from the mid-nineties, once observed that “true or untrue . . . Roswell is seminal.” True or untrue.

It took more than Vietnam and Watergate to bring a long-lost moment in New Mexico’s history back to life. Possibly it was only a coincidence that, as is noted in UFO Crash at Roswell, tales of crashed saucers were beginning to come back into vogue in the late 1970s, but it was then that the not-always-reliable Jesse Marcel (by now, he said, a believer in UFOs, certain that the wreckage “was nothing that came from earth”) gave an interview to National Enquirer, a magazine known for publishing items that could be believed, half-believed, or believed not at all.

Other stories too were recalled: the same issue of the Roswell Daily Record that had featured Walter Haut’s press release had also contained a report of how the “hardware man” Dan Wilmot, “one of the most respected and reliable citizens in town,” and his wife had witnessed “a large glowing” object “zooming” over Roswell on July 2, 1947 (awkwardly a week or so after Brazel had discovered that mysterious wreckage, an inconvenient truth that failed to deter some of the faithful or the fraudulent from treating the two stories as one).

The Wilmots’ account was at least published contemporarily. Vern and Jean Maltais were not so timely. Two prominent members of the long cavalcade of hoaxers, grifters, pseudo-sleuths, opportunists, attention-seekers, and fantasists who have contributed to the ever-shifting Roswell narrative, they emerged in 1978 to claim that they had been told by a friend that he (and, naturally, given the rich cast of characters who wander in and out of this saga, some archeologists) had discovered alien wreckage (and small alien corpses) in the Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico, or maybe somewhere else. This was enough for Charles Berlitz, a linguist (one of those Berlitzes) and the author of books on Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, and other concocted mysteries, and the ufologist William Moore. With the help of research by Stanton Friedman, they published The Roswell Incidentin 1980, a farrago of speculation that arguably did more than anything else to turn a spurious crash into a genuine sensation. The most interesting thing about it was how well (very) it sold.

As the Roswell industry grew, clarity shrank, dates blurred, locations went walkabout, saucers changed shape, there was one crash, there were two, the aliens all died, one survived, a local undertaker was asked about the availability of undersized coffins, a “missing” nurse saw more than she should, the military (a mean-eyed, red-headed colonel or captain, a black sergeant) bullied witnesses into silence, evidence was stolen. Documents showing that Eisenhower was briefed were later shown to be forgeries and set off a schism, but were the forgeries created to discredit those who were coming too close to the truth?

As it happens, there probably was a cover-up, of sorts. The U.S.Air Force published two reports in the mid-1990s, just after TheX-Files, a television show that played off (and further popularized) the Roswell myth while weaving it into a dense conspiratorial mix that spread far beyond the small screen, had begun its long run. The first, the exhaustively researched and at times drily amusing The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction, brings a touch of much-missed Mission Control rigor as it cuts through the miasma, both pre-modern and post-, which envelops so much of the Roswell debate. If you’ll forgive the spoiler, its writers found “no evidence of any extraterrestrial craft or alien flight crew.” What they did find “[was] . . . a shadowy, formerly Top Secret project, code-named mogul,” involving the launch of “balloon trains” some six-hundred feet long and laden with sensors designed to detect whether the Soviets had successfully tested a nuclear device (America’s nuclear weapons monopoly only ended in 1949). Given the secrecy that surrounded mogul, Ramey either didn’t recognize the Roswell wreckage or was unwilling to identify it: either way, he left enough of a gap for the conspiracy theories to seep through.

The Roswell Report: Case Closed was a sequel designed to address the question of alien corpses. Rather charitably, it suggests that recollections of these extraterrestrial unfortunates were the result of memories—muddled over the decades—of Air Force anthropomorphic test dummies parachuted from high altitudes over the desert and, separately, two accidents in which Air Force personnel were killed or injured in the late 1950s.

To some, these reports were merely a new twist on an old cover-up. Facts rarely get in the way of a good story or a satisfying cult. The Roswell show rolls on, sporadically spiced up by the rise and fall of ever-more-innovative embellishments and now graced by a hereditary nobility of sorts: at one meeting we were invited to applaud descendants of the principal witnesses, proud to carry a torch that sheds no light. No matter: according to a 2013 survey, roughly a fifth of Americans believe that a saucer crashed near Roswell and the government covered it up. The UFO museum received some two hundred thousand visitors in 2016 and fifteen thousand people reportedly showed up for the seventieth anniversary celebrations.

No pilgrimage is complete without a procession, no Mardi Gras without a parade. On the Saturday night of my visit, we lined Main Street as hot dusk cooled into warm darkness, some in costume, some prudently sporting tinfoil hats, one (your correspondent) clad in a white linen jacket that had already attracted some comments from more casually dressed attendees earlier in the day. At around 9 P.M., the Electric Light Parade began; illuminated floats and illuminated cars coasted by, escorted by a retinue of illuminated aliens and a zig-zagging skater encased in a glowing green saucer. The High Desert Pipes and Drums of Albuquerque brought up the rear, its marchers illuminated and kilted, drums beating and pipes skirling their way through—of course—Scotland the Brave into the New Mexico night.

Dead Zone

December 08, 2004 by Andrew Stuttaford in articles

National Review Online, December 8, 2004

Lily Dale, September, 2004 © Andrew Stuttaford

If the painter Thomas Kinkade has redesigned Heaven—and who’s to say that he hasn’t?—it might look a little like Lily Dale, a tiny community about an hour south of Buffalo. On a gentle-breeze, blue-sky, no-cares, endless-summer sort of day, gingerbread Victorian cottages doze alongside tranquil, flag-festooned streets. The houses’ colors—white, yellow, gray—are, like their inhabitants, mainly muted, gentle by design or faded by the years. Only occasional flashes of eccentricity—an unexpected plague of stone angels here, a rash of concrete cherubs there—signal to visitors that there’s something not quite right, not Shyamalan wrong, but odd nonetheless, about this idyllic village nestled so prettily against a quiet lake.

Even Lily Dale’s visitors (those that are visible anyway—I’ll explain that remark later) seem more subdued than the typical vacationing hordes, more Trappist than tourist, chatting among themselves in low tones as they stroll towards their destinations. Once—over a century ago—there was a Ferris wheel here, a bowling alley, dances, even (oh, the thrill!) speeches by Susan B. Anthony, but those excitements have passed, vanished into history and stiff sepia images. But guests can still wander under the shade of trees more than a hundred years old now, and, if they choose, across a series of small, perfectly kept parks—immaculately green as they sweep down in the direction of the lake, itself smooth, untroubled, and inviting, gently lapping up against the eastern edge of town.

And the sense that there’s something celestial about this place is only reinforced by a small white-pillared “Forest Temple” half-hidden amid some trees and by the “Healing Temple” that can be found nearby (yes, yes, I was “healed,” blue light discovered burning within me, long story). Bells toll at certain times of day summoning the faithful to meditation, ritual, and to quavering old tunes played on a quavering old organ, the singing of quavering old hymns of spirit messages and eternal light.

These people are, quite clearly, not Baptists.

To find out more, enter the cool, dark Leolyn Woods. Like so much in Lily Dale, they are unexpected survivors, a rare scrap of old-growth forest. Walk straight ahead. Don’t be tempted by the questionable attractions of the pet cemetery. Look instead for an ancient tree stump—Inspiration Stump, they call it here—and the people gathered there to hear from the hereafter. They have turned up for the daily “message service,” a séance, stand-up style, at the stump, starring the quick (a rapid succession of mediums) and the dead (a host of the dear departed—dads, moms, a brother or two).

If you’re ex, Lily Dale is in.

People have been bothering the dead in Lily Dale since 1879. That was the year in which a handful of pioneers, enthusiastic participants in the great wave of spookery and table tapping that gripped those supposedly sensible Victorians, first bought property here. It was to be a permanent site (only Spiritualists can own property in “the Dale,” even today) for enlightenment, and communication with corpses—a “White Acre,” wrote Mrs. Abby Louise Pettengill (its 1903 president), “where all may receive the benediction of the unseen world.”

She would have been pleased to see (and perhaps she did, who knows?) the small but expectant crowd waiting one Friday evening in Lily Dale’s Assembly Hall for a benediction from another world, in their case a chinwag with ET. Like Spiritualism before it, much UFO mythology is an attempt to reconcile mystical and superstitious impulses with the unwelcome realities of an age of science. And like Spiritualism it soon descends into mush-mutterings of otherworldly visitors, enlightened beings, and contact with the mysterious, thrilling unknown, talk which the late (or not) Mrs. Pettengill would surely have relished.

And when it comes to enlightened beings, there’s no better guide than the human speaker that night, writer and soulapath (don’t ask) Lisette Larkins. She’s the author of Listening to Extraterrestrials: Telepathic Coaching by Enlightened Beings; Talking to Extraterrestrials: Communicating with Enlightened Beings; and, alarmingly for those of us familiar with the work of Fox Mulder, Calling on Extraterrestrials: 11 Steps to Inviting Your Own UFO Encounters. After an hour or so of New Age banality and musical interludes that would have insulted Yanni, an alien turns up, but, dismayingly, via Ms. Larkins rather than in person. Repeatedly shaking her head from side to side, alien Lisette starts speaking in a slow, faintly mechanical voice slightly reminiscent of Hillary Rodham Clinton. She is purportedly channeling messages from our extraterrestrial visitor, but the vague beatitudes and something about “connecting” reveal only that this particular alien is from Planet Hallmark. That’s not worth the price of admission. For 30 bucks I expect Klaatu barada nikto or, at least, sexy Sil from Species.

Where flying saucers hover, other nonsense is never far behind. Sure enough, the Crystal Cove, Lily Dale’s gift shop, is a supermarket of superstitions, a casbah for the credulous, its pick-’n’-mix spirituality a perfect symbol of the intellectual confusions of our age. It’s all there: the supernatural bric-a-brac (Celtic crosses, misting bowls, chalices, spell books, fortune-telling kits, candles, Ouija boards, strange hanging things); the tarot (tarot of love, fairy-tale tarot, universal Waite tarot, basic tarot, spiral tarot, Lord of the Rings tarot, unicorn tarot, dragon tarot, tarot of the Sephirot, herbal tarot, renaissance tarot, quest tarot, tarot of a moon garden, Morgan-Greer tarot); cosmic kitsch (fairies, angels, fairies, unicorns, fairies, various goddesses, fairies, the goddess, yet more fairies, wizards); and the inevitable Native Americana, complete, naturally, with Native American tarot.

Despite that very contemporary willingness to accept any reassuring mumbo-jumbo, however ludicrous, so long as it can be wrapped in vaguely mystical garb, in its core Lily Dale clings to the traditions of its slightly off, determined founders, those earnest Victorians convinced that table-tapping, séances, and other conjuring tricks could give them what generations had dreamed of: proof, scientific proof, that we all enjoy an encore in a place some called Summerland. According to Spiritualism, nobody dies. We “pass,” we don’t die. There is no death, only a “transition.” Nevertheless, for a faith that revolves around eternal life, Spiritualism has always had a rather morbid fixation with that dicey moment that, as a pessimist, I still call, well, death. In all its prettiness, there’s a touch of the funeral parlor about Lily Dale, something a little oppressive, something too hushed, too over-scented, too much.

In a way this is inevitable. It’s death that brings the living to Lily Dale. Offer the grief-stricken and the lonely the chance, any chance, to talk to those that they have lost, and some will try their luck. And where there are the desperate, there will be those who take advantage of them. You can see their traces in Lily Dale’s museum, most strikingly in a collection of relics from the Gilded Age, a golden age, quite clearly, of bunkum. There are the slates on which the spirits allegedly scrawled their enigmatic messages, the spirit trumpets that floated through the air, even the peculiar, strangely compelling paintings that supposedly materialized onto canvas untouched by (living) human hand, paintings of the passed, paintings of spirit guides, even, helpfully, a painting of the spirit world to come. It looks, yes, a little like something Thomas Kinkade might have done, but since its artist was dead at the time, it’s churlish to carp.

In our scientific age, our time of reason and progress, our era of Kabbalah, crystals, alien abductions, Wicca, homeopathy, goddess worship, Al Gore, past-life regression, astral travel, psychic hotlines, recovered memories, Feng Shui, and creation “science,” all that old sideshow spiritualism seems somehow something of a relic, too crass, too embarrassing, too crude for an epoch so spiritually sophisticated that Madonna is a major religious figure. The trumpets have been stilled: “physical mediumship” is rarely practiced in Lily Dale these days, but the hunger that nourished it still remains.

You can see it—neurotic, compulsive, relentless, and not a little sad—in the capacity crowd packed into the Dale’s auditorium to listen to the medium James van Praagh “Making The Psychic Connection” between, ambitiously, “Heaven and Earth.” We’ve each paid $80 to hear him.

That’s more than twice the price of an extraterrestrial, but, in the dim galaxy of contemporary superstition, James Van Praagh is a star. Like Amy Fisher and Adolf Hitler, he too has been the subject of a TV miniseries (played by Ted Danson!), a cultural accolade matched only by his multiple appearances on Larry King Live. He’s a best-selling author and recording artist and a man who, judging by his website, survived a childhood that combined the worst of Jeffrey Dahmer (“an average child, he remembers having a tremendous fascination with death”) with the best of Joan of Arc (“an open hand appeared through the ceiling…emitting radiant beams of light”). Despite a weakness for the saccharine (“When a bright smile overcomes tears, it becomes a smile that can light up the world”), Van Praagh is also highly entertaining. He’s John Edward with good jokes, a Frank Cannon moustache, and a way with the ladies who make up the bulk of his beguiled and besotted audience.

Some are there just to gawp at the dead men talking (many spirits, yikes, are “here with us today”), while others have come to be soothed by Van Praagh’s soft-soap sermons. “Death” is painless, everybody’s immortal, and we all end up in Heaven. “Step into that world,” he purrs, “there’s no judgment.” It’s a perfect gospel for a society in full flight from the notion that we should ever have to account for our actions. Some spectators, sadder, unhinged, pleading, are there for the answers, and the comfort, that reality cannot provide. Sharon has survived “a couple of terminal illnesses” but is not satisfied with the advice of her doctors (she’s led away to speak to a “medical intuitive”), while others, weeping, choking up, voices cracking, tell of sick friends, of children killed in motorcycle accidents, of relatives lost to cancer, and the rest of the carnage we call daily life.

These are people who want to believe. When Van Praagh starts tossing out ambiguous communiqués from beyond, it doesn’t take long before someone can be found who thinks that these messages might be for her. Another quick succession of references, names, and clues follow, all seemingly precise, but in reality vague enough to allow the respondent to find something in it for herself and, in replying, give Van Praagh further, invaluable guidance for his next step, and, ultimately, “validation”: the supposedly specific factoid needed to prove that long-dead dad is indeed with us that day. It looks to me a lot like an old technique known as “cold reading.” All it takes is a quick mind, intuition, and (no problem here) an audience that has lost connection with reality.

Still, Van Praagh manages, there’s no denying, some remarkable hits: coincidence, or, perhaps, well…

Whatever the explanation, none of my dead relatives shows up. Much as I would like it to, this proves nothing. They were a reserved lot and none of them would have been seen dead in a place like the auditorium. With the thought that somewhere more discreet might be more inviting, I decide on an individual consultation with one of the many mediums that have set up shop in Lily Dale. She’s a kindly soul, a late middle-aged woman with twinkling eyes, a jolly smile, and 40 of my dollars. Within a few minutes, and, shall we say, some gentle prompting on my part, she has proof that both (a twofer!) my grandmothers are with us in the room. As they’ve been dead for nearly 30 years, that’s quite a family get-together, like a childhood Christmas back in England, even if I can’t actually see the guests.

And if I believe that, I’m the Christmas turkey.

Faking a Prophet

September 29, 2001 by Andrew Stuttaford in articles

National Review Online, September 29, 2011

The e-mail arrived on my computer, garlanded with exclamation marks and entitled "Holy Smoke!!" It was a day or so after the slaughter at the World Trade Center — murders, it seemed, that had been forecast nearly half a millennium ago by Nostradamus, the 16th Century French seer. He had written, I was informed, the following words:

In the year of the new century and nine months,
From the sky will come a great King of Terror,
The sky will burn at forty-five degrees.
Fire approaches the great new city…
In the city of York there will be a great collapse,
Two twin brothers torn apart by chaos.
While the fortress falls the great leader will succumb.
Third big war will begin when the big city is burning.

Spooky, eh? A lot of people seemed to think so. All over the country Scullys were transformed into Mulders. There was a run on Nostradamus books (the New York Times reported that in the week of September 11th no fewer than three editions of Nostradamus were in the Amazon Top 25, a feat more typically associated with that much younger wizard, Harry Potter). At least one website dedicated to the far-sighted Frenchman has had to suspend part of its service due to "excessive load." Amazingly, the extra demand had not been foreseen.

The problem, however, is that the two chilling quatrains are as bogus as Big Foot, as credible as a Clinton, as ridiculous as Roswell. Of course, this sort of thing has been happening for years, sometimes, even, in a good cause. In 1943, in an attempt to terrify the notoriously superstitious Nazi leadership, fake quatrains prophesying their doom were parachuted, like some mystical maquis, deep into the heart of occupied Europe.

More recently, a quatrain purporting to warn that in December 2000 "the village idiot" would be proclaimed leader of "the greatest power" consoled bitter Democrats in the aftermath of the presidential election. They should have known better. The verses were obviously faked. As we all know, the real "village idiot" went abroad and grew a beard.

Turning to the "WTC" verses, the latest, and easily most tasteless hoax, we find that the second quatrain ("In the city of York…") is entirely made up, much of it a borrowing, ironically, from a 1990s paper by a Canadian student looking to demonstrate how ambiguous sounding verses can be used to "predict" anything. The four lines of the first quatrain are, by the low standards of this field, somewhat more authentic. They appear to be cobbled together from random, and heavily modified, pieces of the great man's work. To take one example, there is a reference in the prophecies to a year and a number of months, but the year is 1999 and the number of months is seven (something that led the seemingly innumerate fashion designer Paco Rabane to shut up shop and flee Paris in, August 1999, ahead, he thought, of an imminent crash landing by the space station Mir). Russia's cosmic jalopy, however, continued to lurch round the planet while unkind skeptics gathered outside Mr. Rabane's shuttered offices, champagne glasses in hand, and celebrated an apocalypse averted.

The first "WTC" quatrain is not, in fact, the only example of cut and paste prophecy in the Nostracademy. Followers of the enigmatic Mr. Baines of the Nostradamus Society of America (it is worth visiting their website, just for the Vincent Price-style greeting) will know that their latter-day sage has adopted what he calls a "collage method" to interpret the prophecies. Using this technique, with its unfortunate reminder of that old saying about chimpanzees, typewriters, and Shakespeare, it was possible to claim that the World Trade Center attack (which, apparently, left Nostradamians "shocked but not surprised") was predicted in the Frenchman's writings. By jumbling up the words from no fewer than five quatrains, Mr. Baines has assembled a passage that appears to show that the knowledgeable Nostradamus had forecast the tragedy.

It appears not far from the age of the great millennium
In the month of September from the sky,
Will come the great king of terror,
At 45 degrees, the sky will burn,
The bird of prey appears and offers itself to the heavens
Instantly a huge scattered flame leaps up.

And so on…

With nearly one thousand quatrains to choose from to make up a text, this ghoulish grab bag of mixed-up verse proves absolutely nothing — other than some people's desperation to find meaning in gibberish.

And that is something that Nostradamus makes it very easy to do. A physician who built, amazingly, a reputation as an effective doctor on the basis of his "cures" for the plague (sawdust, cloves, roses, and a few other bits and pieces) he was, clearly, a remarkable salesman with a good sense of what was going to pull in the paying customers. So, in the introduction to his principal work, he cleverly portrays himself as an exciting man of mystery, an intriguing wand-toting Merlin "sitting by night in [his] secret study."

The verses themselves are filled with the sort of magical sounding apocalyptica that will always find a readership, and even today enliven any long wait in the supermarket checkout line. Of course, the wily seer took care to couch his warnings in such vague terms that he could never ever be proved to have got the future wrong. It was, grumbled a perceptive contemporary, the Englishman William Fulke, a clever trick. The "craftye Nostradamus," he complained, wrapped his predictions "in such dark wryncles of obscuritye" that no man could make any sense of them. But that is only partly the point. The ambiguity of the text actually adds to its attractiveness. Humanity likes a riddle. Besides, readers could fill in the gaps with their own imagination. They might not be able to make any sense out of the quatrains, but they could make nonsense, and for most people that would do just as well.

So, take a quatrain such as this:

When Venus will be covered by the Sun
Beneath the splendor will be a hidden form:
Mercury will have exposed them to the fire,
Through warlike noise it will be insulted.

And, so far as the authors of Nostradamus — Prophecies for Women are concerned, those lines can be reinterpreted as follows: "The mercurial nature of women will already have begun to expose men to a fiery new aspect of life, and through militancy on the part of women this maleness will be exposed and insulted."

Now there's something to look forward to.

In the view of the writers of Prophecies for Women, Nostradamus had put the PC in prophecy. He had, apparently, predicted a "paradigm shift that will place women in most of the positions of power throughout the civilized word during the years of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries," including, the authors guessed, the November 2000 election to the presidency of a certain former Texas governor. Wow. Except that it was meant to be Ann Richards. Oh well.

Other seemingly more successful predictions, the ones we tend to hear about, are the results of similarly wishful thinking, much of which is dissected in James Randi's indispensable and marvelously sarcastic The Mask of Nostradamus. As Mr. Randi shows, essential tools for the true believers include credulity, shaky historical knowledge, dubious translations, dyslexic anagrams ("Pay, Nay, Loron" for Napoleon) and a refusal to contemplate the harsh facts of Renaissance cartography. "Hister," I'm afraid, is the old name for the lower Danube; it is not, as is often claimed, a coy reference to a future Fuhrer.

But for many, probably most, people, none of Mr. Randi's arguments will make any difference. The notion of prophecy is more fun than dull reality, and, in a curious way, it can be a comfort to the gullible, a reassuring, if misleading, suggestion that there is at least some predictability and order in a changing world. It fits too with the mood of our superstitious times, with its shifting, uncertain notions of truth. These days, skepticism doesn't sell, and logic no longer convinces, even if it ever gets a chance to make itself heard. James Randi's book can be difficult to find, but his 16th century competitor fills the cyber shelves. Nostradamus enthusiasts at Amazon.com can buy The Prophecies, The Complete Prophecies, The Unpublished Prophecies, The Secret Prophecies, The Further Prophecies, The Final Prophecies, The New Revelations, The Secrets, The Dream Book, The Conversations (Volumes One, Two, and Three), The Essential, The Code, The Visions of The Future, The Final Reckoning, The Conspiracy, Across The Centuries, Predictions of World War III, and, most alarmingly, Comet of Nostradamus: August 2004 — Impact!.

On a personal note, I would be grateful if those people who have ordered Nostradamus 1999: Who Will Survive? could contact me. I have a bridge to sell them.

Dead Men Talking

August 12, 2001 by Andrew Stuttaford in tv reviews

National Review Online, August 12, 2001

Who, these days, is prepared to act their age? Teens carry on as if they were 30, the middle-aged think that they are 20, and now, if a new TV hit is to be believed, the dead are behaving as if they were alive. The show, Crossing Over with John Edward, a surprise success for cable's Sci-Fi Channel, stars the eponymous Mr. Edward. He's a fast-talking psychic with slow-witted fans, many of who like to believe that this former ballroom-dancing instructor can put them in touch with the dear departed.

For what is, presumably, a matter of fantasy, Crossing Over is surprisingly matter-of-fact. The introductory tune is mildly spooky, with a hint of the X-Files, but the rest of the format is more daytime talk show than nighttime séance. There are no Ouija boards, no startling emanations of ectoplasm, no tables are tipped. Those who prefer more mumbo in their jumbo need to look elsewhere (perhaps to Mr. Edward's series of audio tapes: his Unleashing Your Psychic Potential, for example, offers listeners the recipe for a ritual psychic spring-cleaning, something, in case you are wondering, which involves sage and plenty of Kosher salt).

On Crossing Over, the tone is conversational and relaxed. The audience sits in front of the seer, ranged in expectant rows on a dais. By talk-show standards, it appears to be a fairly upscale crowd, ranking perhaps half way between Oprah and an Al Gore town meeting. Well, I did say "fairly" upscale. Women outnumber men, and if the dead are present, they are low key and discreet, at least to start with.

Mr. Edward begins the proceedings briskly. As his fans will already understand, the great man is surfing the interred-net hoping to pick up a name, a fragment of a name, or any clue, indeed, that will sound vaguely familiar to one of the people in the room. It doesn't take long (for a show about eternity, Crossing Over is very rapidly paced). Mr. Edward typically comes out with a syllable or two, "Francesca," say, or "Francis" or "Fran." After a few moments, a member of the audience will normally react, eagerly proffering a candidate, "Francesco," perhaps, for consideration. If Francesco turns out to have "passed" ("kicked the bucket," "bought the farm," or "croaked" are not acceptable terms on this program), that will be enough for the psychic. He'll turn into a quick-fire interrogator, Sam Spade on Speed, with a bewilderingly fast Q & A designed to show that ex-Francesco is now in touch.

Mr. Edward will ask the audience member about cats, dogs, colon surgery, mantelpieces, ceramic teapots, anything. Surprisingly often (and surprisingly quickly), the psychic will succeed in turning up some precise little reference that could "only" have come from the dead man. Let's say that ex-Francesco loved ceramic teapots. By supposedly prompting the psychic's question about ceramic teapots, ex-Francesco will, to use the jargon of the show, have provided "validation." The dead guy will have "come through" by putting the idea of ceramic teapots in John Edward's head. Well, that's what the audience clearly wants to think. Crossing Over is a show for the sort of people who would have preferred The Sixth Sense to have a more upbeat finale. The amiable Mr. Edward is pleased to oblige. Bereaved relatives turn out not to be so bereaved as they had once thought, and the ratings keep on rising (particularly among women, a group previously under-represented among the dank ranks of Sci-Fi Channel viewers).

To be fair, some of Mr. Edward's findings are indeed remarkably specific. These discoveries are usually accompanied by little gasps and shouts of recognition among the not-so-bereaved-after-all. Their astonished comments are always along the same lines, "oh my God how did he do that wow that's amazing," but subtitles are provided when the exact wording of the audience's amazement comes across a little inarticulately. This happens more often than you might think. If there is one thing muddier than the reasoning on Crossing Over, it is the diction.

Then again, I have no idea either how Mr. Edward does it. Maybe it is, as is claimed in the introduction to the show, all "real." The only people who know for sure are the dead and they are not talking, to me at least (Granny, phone home). If I had to make a guess, Mr. Edward is probably an extremely able "cold reader." Cold reading is an old "psychic" trick. The term is basically a fancy way of describing the use of intuition, empathy, guesswork and, initially, very, very general questions (Francis, Francesca, Fran) to come to that one remarkable revelation that convinces the credulous that the spirits are indeed "coming through." It takes skill, which Mr. Edward certainly has, and it also takes, how can this be put politely, a certain special something in the minds of his subjects.

It cannot be put politely. Those special somethings are naivety, superstition, and a problem with rational thought, qualities that are all too common in this supposedly sophisticated country's current high tech re-run of the Dark Ages. It is a ridiculous phenomenon, and Crossing Over is very far from being its only example. What makes Mr. Edward one of its more representative figures, however, is not only his show (or considerable commercial success), but the peculiarly maudlin banality of his vision of the afterlife. It is the vision that is the sub-text to Crossing Over, but which is set out more explicitly elsewhere, notably in Mr. Edward's "inspirational" novel, What If God Were the Sun? This is a book modestly described by its publisher as "incomparable" (and, in a way, it is) but the seagulls on the cover are fair warning. Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s know what that can mean.

To describe this novel as sugary is an understatement. Diabetics should not read it except under close medical supervision. For page after page, the reader is subjected to a sickly sweet mash of simpering truisms and New Age folklore. The conclusion, of course, is that there is no conclusion. As he "crosses over," the narrator, "Timothy," finds himself floating through a "tunnel of light" with a "sensation of overwhelming love and peace," which, mercifully for the rest of us, he cannot "put into words."

Arrival on the other side is, it turns out, a little bit like Thanksgiving, only worse. All the relatives are in town ("Uncle Dominick and Aunt Gina…Aunt Marsha and Grandpa Jack, too") and so are in the in-laws (including those impolite enough to die before our hero had the chance to get to know them first time round). Before you ask, yes, this is meant to be Heaven, not Hell. And that is to be expected. The notion of Hell is far too judgmental, far too demanding for this sort of New Age cosmology. There's no St. Peter blocking the gate, just a rather vague "life review" designed to give "a type of closure." We leave Timothy surrounded by his family and his "oldest and dearest" friend, his dog Chester. "It's so wonderful to know that our beloved pets are waiting on the other side to meet us, too!"

It's not exactly Valhalla, is it? Other belief-systems have offered the prospect of a rather more inspiring afterlife than this perpetual family reunion. Unfortunately, these usually came with a fairly substantial downside. Just ask Dante. To take another example, the Ancient Egyptians believed that the newly deceased had to appear in front of Osiris, the Judge Bork of the Underworld. This was a "life review" with consequences. The hearts of those judged guilty would be fed to a beast that was part-lion, part-crocodile and part-hippopotamus. There would be no Chesters in their future.

That is not the sort of talk that many of Mr. Edward's fans would like to hear. They are looking for the comfort of faith without its rigor. They want the prospect of Heaven without the danger of Hell, and, above all, they seem to need the cozy reassurance that nothing has consequences, not even death. And why shouldn't they? After all, it would seem to be a perfect creed for a society that sees the term "endless self-indulgence" as a promise, not a criticism.

Wait a minute. Didn't I say that Crossing Over was a "surprise" success? What was I thinking?

Revenge of the Nerds

July 29, 1996 by Andrew Stuttaford in articles

National Review, July 28, 1996

BUFFALO Midsummer. A thousand years ago our ancestors danced around bonfires and, doubtless, slaughtered a maiden or two. These days we like to think we have moved on. True, the scandinavians still throw a good Midsommar, but even there virgins are not sacrificed, at least in the conventional sense of the word. Progress, schmogress. For all our science we still live, as Carl Sagan puts it, in a demon-haunted world. Naturally, there have been changes. The nearest soothsayer is only a 900 line away. Of course we no longer think that ghouls will steal our offspring--but give those creatures space ships and we will believe they are abducting children, carrying out ghastly experiments, and, for all we know, spoiling the crops. Scratch away our sophisticated veneer, and the New Age very quickly goes dark.

All is not lost, however. The epoch of Shirley Maclaine has its opponents, and one thousand of them recently gathered outside Buffalo. The occasion was the first World Skeptics Congress, a four-day-long-discussion of "Science in the Age of (Mis)Information" sponsored by CSICOP—the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal. CSICOP does what its name would suggest. Over the past twenty years it has encouraged the exposure of a sorry sequence of spurious spacemen, cranks, and charlatans. CSlCOP's fascinating magazine. Skeptical Inquirer, sells around 50,000 copies across the world, but none, probably, in any supermarkets. Much of the Congress covered familiar ground. Aliens, junk medicine, and psychic detectives all took their knocks, Patriots will be glad to know that this nonsense is not just an American problem. China seems obsessed by Pseudo-Qigong (don't ask), but, hey, that's a country with fifty million Communists, and they will believe anything. Perhaps the Chinese should turn to India, to the monomial Premanand, for help. Confusingly, Premanand's style was high guru (flowing white hair, beard, orange clothing) but his message was not. The fakirs are fakers, and in an entertaining talk Premanand demonstrated just how they do it.

This would not have been news to Skepticism's stars, many of whom were on display. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould spoke, preceded by a Darwin impersonator. Magician James ''the Amazing" Randi was on hand, outwardly unscarred by years of litigation with Uri Geller. In between drags on, appropriately enough in this anti-witchcraft crowd, a Salem, Aviation Week and Space Technology's Philip Klass was signing copies of his UFOeuvre. Full refunds ("not just the royalty") were promised in the event of a proved landing.

More surprising was the appearance of X-Files creator Chris Carter as a guest speaker. With his compelling stories of the occult and the alien, often filmed in a pseudo-documentary style, Mr. Carter might have expected a rough ride. He need not have worried. The Skeptics were a pushover, clever to be sure, but with more than a hint, shall we say, of the school chess club about them. They never stood a chance against the sly cool of Chris Carter, media wizard and surfer. Besides, most were fans, shocked only when their guest revealed that he had never watched an entire episode of Star Trek.

Anyway, The X-Files is fiction, nothing more. Much more serious, in the view of the Congress, was media response to paranormal "facts." The wildest claims are accepted at face value, turned into documentaries, and shown on prime time. A scientist may be asked to comment, but for about thirty-seconds, most of which ends up on the cutting-room floor (this may sound familiar to conservatives). In part, this is inevitable. The paranormal is fun. An alien autopsy is great TV, rather more exciting than four chemists gathered round a Bunsen burner. ''What we need," said one speaker, 'is LA Science." He should not hold his breath.

Some knew what to blame: Commercialism, or at least its alleged surrogate on earth. Mention of the name Murdoch generated slightly forced laughter. Murdoch the bringer of joy, the destroyer of words. Scientific types, the skeptics see themselves as high-minded, spelling-bee sorts of people who still give money to NPR. TV was meant to be the great educator: McNeil, not Oprah; Kunta Kinte, not Beavis. Instead, ran the argument, commercial pressures have led to a debased medium, serving only to fuel the prejudices and superstitions of a degenerate mob.

It's a neat explanation, but it is only part of the story. Intellectually, after all, the mob has always been in poor shape. That's why it is the mob. What has changed is the attitude of the opinion-forming classes. Temple University professor John Paulos highlighted part of the problem. The Kaczynski-haired Paulos is, as the title of his most recent work suggests, a mathematician [who] reads the newspaper and, as his acerbically insightful talk made clear, he is not impressed. Numbers are bandied about, he says, but with little understanding even in the media's more upmarket corners. It is not difficult to agree. All too often Right Data are replaced with numerical assertions that are left unchallenged and unanalyzed by a press too slovenly, innumerate, or biased to care.

To the Skeptics, an honest bunch looking for objective, critical thought, this must be anathema. The Joe Fridays of philosophy, all they really want is the facts. Instead they find themselves in a subjective, post-modern world. In the past their fight was straightforward and pleasantly elitist, the enemies trailer-park science and bayou religion. Now the problem is among their own, within the intelligentsia and the academy. History has been abolished, to be replaced by the study of alternative myths, while science itself is suspect, a product, allegedly, of white male power.

Ironically, much of this rubbish comes from the Left, once a reliable source of support for Skeptics, particularly on religious matters. Skeptics, to say, the least, arc unlikely to be great churchgoers, and there was a time when that could imply a sort of leftism. No immortality—except for the Rosenbergs. CSICOP itself has close ties to CODESH (the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism), an interweaving visible even at the Congress's bookstall. The alien and the paranormal were on display, but so were the great thinkers (Voltaire, Darwin, Kevorkian), the Bad News Bible, The Trouble with Christmas and, most shockingly of all. Lessons of the Locker Room: The Myth of School Sports. Is nothing sacred?

Not much, probably, to many of the Congressgoers. But should that imply a liberal tilt? In an era when the First Lady communes with the dead, conventional political afllliations can truly be said to be breaking down. When what one speaker described as "preposterism" rules, the rationalist can no longer rely on traditional allies. True, the Congress felt vaguely liberal. Naturally enough, the Religious Right took a pounding, and, at a guess, most attendees would still vote Democratic, if a little uneasily. The voice of the Old Left could still be heard in some of the speeches and in a feeble anti-Rush Limbaugh joke or two, but it was fading away, just (to take Matthew Arnold somewhat out of context) another pan of liberalism's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar."

Thirty years ago the stupidities of the Sixties pushed many social scientists into neo-conservatism. Today's junk intellectuals with their crystals and their shamans, their ludicrous universities and their "politics of meaning,'' may do the same for the skeptical and the scientific. Rationalism can then complete its reconnection with the thought of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, a journey which must take it rightward, if never to Ralph Reed. This should be welcomed. Skeptics may be an ornery lot, but their search for that objective truth is somehow very American. Indeed, it is as American as the apple pie that Eve never baked.