I’ve just learned about this incident (pardon the primitiveness of the website) from an episode of that show I have been watching via Netflix, Portal to the Unknown. And it has got me thinking about a subject I have given a lot of thought over the years, and that’s skepticism. There are two kinds, one being a very important bulwark against delusion and illusions when attempting to figure out what is really going on, and the other a mere tissue-paper mask hiding the same old bloody minded ignorance and prejudice that has plagued human endeavour since the dawn of civilization.

Let’s talk about that second kind.

It’s a large part of what passes for public skepticism today. It’s based on a slew of preconceived notions about what the truth looks like, sounds like, and smells like. It substitutes logically meaningless emotional responses like a sense of absurdity or a vague idea of the “laws of physics” allow for actual scientific reasoning, and causes people to do commit the ultimate crime against reason, which is to ignore the evidence in the face of what one “already knows”.

Let me make this perfectly clear : there is never any excuse to ignore the evidence. If you don’t feel like examining the evidence before making up your mind about the truth or falsity of a given statement, that’s your prerogative. Obviously, we cannot base every single decision in our busy and complex lives on a careful examination and sober analysis of the facts. Most of our decisions are, in fact, intuitive.

But if one chooses not to examine the evidence with an open mind and an absolute minimum of preconceptions, one then cannot turn around and claim to be doing so in the name of reason, logic, and rationality. That’s violently intellectually dishonest and a shameful betrayal of the very ideals of reason one claims to hold sacrosanct.

One thing that truly galls me is that often, theses so-called skeptics do not have a superior theory to offer to explain a given phenomenon. They mumble something about mass hysteria and consider that sufficient.

But any phenomenon that causes a number of people to simultaneously experience an extraordinary even and retain clear and consistent memories of it is worthy of deeper study, regardless of whether those memories represent something that “really happened” in an objective sense or not.

Take an old axe to grind of mine, the Phoenix Lights. Literally thousands of people saw strange lights in the sky over Phoenix, Arizona on March 13 1997. The police were flooded with nearly identical calls reporting said lights and the V-shaped craft into which they appear to have been embedded. The calls were consistent in what they described and came from a large geographical area and from people of all conceivable walks of life, including judges, doctors, and scientists. 99 percent of these people had no connection to any kind of UFO community or other group that might have “wanted to believe”. The lights, in short, pass any and all reasonable tests for whether or not something objectively happened or not.

And yet, it never became the Most Important Story Ever, like you would think it would. The governor of the state made some dumb joke about aliens at  press conference and everybody laughed it off and the story just plain disappeared.

If I had been there and seen the lights, I would like to think that I would not have rested until someone gave me a plausible explanation as to what the fuck happened. I don’t care whether you think it was aliens or not. I want to know what caused all these people to see the same extraordinary thing at the same time.

It is vastly insufficient to say “I don’t know what it was, but I know it wasn’t aliens!”. And “mass hysteria” is not a sufficient answer either unless you can also explain how mass hysteria works in general and how it worked in this particular instance to create the effect we are discussing.

In fact, if you take aliens out of the equation, the problem only becomes more urgent and more interesting, because no known phenomenon could cause all those people to have the same multisensory and detailed hallucination. It sure as fuck can’t be swamp gas, weather balloons, reflected headlights, or the fucking planet Venus.

I would agree that there is insufficient evidence to conclude it was aliens. I’ve never believed in that kind of unsupportable leap of logic… that if it can’t be explained, it must be aliens, or unicorns, or whatever pet theory people are keen to believe because it reinforces their existing beliefs and said beliefs make the world a more magical, exciting, and interesting place.

At least, that’s how I explain how people hold on to beliefs in things like angels or fairies or Clarke level aliens who have a message so vitally important to the human race that they only send it to one person and very badly, at that.

Why not just tap into the Internet and email everybody at the same time?

And the thing is, from a survival standpoint, these beliefs are adaptive as long as they do not interfere with normal everyday life. Whether it’s someone building a UFO in their back yard in order to “go home” or someone who goes to a special building once a week to connect with an omnipotent sky father. these beliefs are beneficial because they reduce stress, foster a sense of community, express people’s deep beliefs, and above all, make people feel connected to something bigger than themselves.

That last one is extremely important, and hard for us rational-realist types to find. We can find community and we can dedicate ourselves to causes we believe in, but that all important sense of being under the protections of a strong leader who can defeat any evil that threatens us cannot really be found in an entirely secular life.

That’s why, I think, that even people driven from the faith of their youth by the morally unacceptable attitudes and unanswered questions often retain a shred of it somewhere deep in their minds, Just enough to preserve that sense of connection.

Which has no relevance to the original topic of this post.

But you nice people must be used to that by now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.