A blog post at Scientific American asks: "Should Scientists Take UFOs and Ghosts More Seriously?" If the question were instead whether anyone should take UFOs and ghosts more seriously, I think my answer would be that lots of people are already way too serious about them. The journalist interviewed in the post seems to be of the view that scientists unscientifically reject all sorts of paranormal phenomena that really ought to be investigated—the evidence for them is so strong! But wouldn't it be more accurate to say that all sorts of claims about UFOs and ghosts and communication with the dead and telepathy and psychokinesis and astrology, et cetera, et cetera, have indeed been investigated, and found deficient?
Most of it is manifest quackery. When magicians move inanimate objects with "mental energy," they are entertaining us. The contract between performer and audience is that the former will, by misdirection and trickery, create an illusion that will amuse and astound the latter. But if the performer claims for himself "gifts" and "powers" from a spirit world, that's something else. In the clip above, Uri Geller was unable to exhibit his supposed psychic powers on an episode of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. "I don't feel strong," he explains to Johnny, who had worked as a magician early in his career and perhaps for that reason was skeptical enough to have sought advice before the show from the paranormal investigator James Randi on what steps could be taken to ensure that Geller would have to demonstrate actual paranormal abilities rather than mere magic tricks. The result was Geller pleading for more time, I guess to gather his powers, and much fussing and fidgeting on his part while Johnny coolly smoked. Yes, kids, there was a time when you could smoke on TV. That's how long it's been since Geller was exposed as a fraud on The Tonight Show. But now it's 2020 and Scientific American is interviewing a New York Times journalist who thinks this kind of nonsense isn't getting a fair shake from scientists!
At one point, the interviewer, alluding to the journalist's book Surviving Death, asks: "What is the best evidence you've seen for life after death?" Her answer begins:
That is a huge question. The evidence that I have pulled together in Surviving Death comes from so many places, historical and contemporary, experiential and scientific. It's the full gestalt that provides the best evidence. I think the cases of very young children who report accurate details of a past life, complete with nightmares about the previous death and knowledge from the previous career, are compelling when the memories can be verified and the previous person is identified. If one does not accept rebirth as an explanation, then something else very "paranormal" is going on. . . .
So: it's either reincarnation or something else very paranormal-ly—heads she wins, tails she wins. The rest of the answer trails off into the truly bizarre—"actual-death experiences" (as opposed to less impressive near-death experiences), "mediumships" between the dead and surviving family members, name-dropping of the intellectual elite (William James, with no mention of his conclusions), and so on. But notice how, before really getting on a roll, she appears reluctant to site any specific evidence and instead invokes "the full gestalt." The interviewer doesn't press her for details but does provide hyperlinks to supposed studies about "the cases of very young children who report accurate details of a past life."
Scanning the list of these studies, I'm struck by how the field is apparently dominated by a single lead author, Jim B. Tucker of the University of Virginia. In this NPR interview from 2014, Tucker describes how a 2-year-old boy in Louisiana had nightmares and explained to his parents that he had been shot down in a plane at Iwo Jima in World War II. Turns out that several of the details of the boy's story "checked out"—an American pilot had been killed over Iwo Jima, he had taken off from a ship with the same name as the one provided by the young boy, he had been killed in a manner similar to the one described by the boy, and the pilot in the plane next to him had a name (Jack Larsen) that matched the name of a "friend" given by the boy.
I wish the interviewer had pursued Tucker on some of the details, beginning perhaps with the language abilities of 2-year-olds, who usually have a vocabulary of about 250 words and would therefore be incapable of telling a detailed story about how in a previous life they'd been killed in an air fight at Iwo Jima after taking off from an aircraft carrier named the Natoma. The interview continues:
Reporter: And how old was James when he was making these claims?
Tucker: Well, it started when he was 2—and a very young 2.
Reporter: That's amazing.
Tucker: Like with most of these cases, it faded away by the time he was 5 or 6 or 7, which is typical. But it was certainly there, quite strong, for some time.
How amazing? The church lady would probably say "How convenient!"—that it's typically very young children who have these memories, which then fade. Fortunately, Tucker has access to them before that happens. But you could still talk to the parents. I'm more interested in them, anyway. Are they, as my mom used to say, "a little different"? The NPR interviewer exhibits no curiosity on this point.
If you root around on the Internet for stuff about Jim B. Tucker and the paranormal, you are soon referred to another case, concerning a 10-year-old boy who reported having a previous life as a movie extra and, later, a Hollywood agent. The NBC Nightly News, with Lester Holt, did a credulous report about him. Being I guess a rare instance of an older kid with memories of his former life, he appeared on camera with his mother, and the two of them described to the reporter how in a movie book he had pointed to a picture of this obscure actor, Marty Martyn, and said, "That's me!" This made it possible to try and match details of Martyn's life with the boy's memories of his supposed former life, when he was Martyn. Tucker touts 50-some inexplicable matches, but to me they seem explicable in terms of their consistent generality—he was rich, he had nice cars, he had a swimming pool, he liked to sun bathe, his address had either a "Rock" or a "Mount" in it. This seems like an impressive list, but many are related: if one is true, others follow. ("In a previous life, I played basketball in the NBA; also, I was tall, athletic, affluent, and owned nice cars.") Notwithstanding the two proffered possibilities, the address is more specific, and Tucker discovered that Martyn once lived on a street named "Roxbury." Of course he regards this as a match, but, strictly speaking, it's merely similar to one of the two possibilities. (I'd be more impressed if the boy had said he'd lived on Rockymount Road and Martyn had lived on—Rockymount Road.) It seems the decisive piece of evidence establishing reincarnation, or "something paranormal," pertains to the usually unambiguous question of the date of someone's death. The boy indicated his previous life had ended at age 61, but Tucker knew that Martyn's death certificate said he died at age 59. Then, somewhat mysteriously, "new information" came to light suggesting Martyn had actually died two years after the date given on his death certificate. More amazingness! How exactly did that work? And if the boy is a better source than the death certificate for when Martyn died, because it was his former life, then why was he a little off on the name of the street he lived on? Jim B. Tucker doesn't seem interested. NBC News doesn't seem interested. It's more fun to be amazed.
As a philosopher once noted, people have a thirst for things that are against reason, and they do not want to make it too hard on themselves to slake it. Fine, let them have their fun. I'll only complain when they complain about not being taken seriously.
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