Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (18 page)

If cryonic suspension technology ever matches the hopes and expectations of cryonicists, it may be feasible that someday one could choose to be frozen and reanimated at will, maybe even multiple times. Perhaps one could come back for ten-year stretches every century and essentially live a thousand years or more. Think of future historians able to write an oral history with someone who lived a thousand years before. But alas, as yet the entire field remains high-tech scientific speculation, or protoscience. Here are just a few of the problems:

1. We do not know whether anyone frozen to date or anyone who will be frozen in the foreseeable future will ever be successfully revived. No higher organism has ever been truly frozen and brought back alive.

2. The freezing technology appears to do considerable damage to brain cells, though the exact nature and extent of such damage have yet to be determined since no one has been revived to put it to the test. Even if the physical damage is slight, it still remains to be seen whether memory and personal identity will be restored. Our scientific understanding of where and how memory and personal identity are stored is fairly unsophisticated. Neurophysiologists have come a long way toward an explanation of memory storage and retrieval, but the theory is by no means complete. It is possible, though seemingly unlikely, that complete restoration will still result in memory loss. We just do not know without an actual test case. If cryonic revival does not result in return of considerable personal memory and identity, then what's the point?

3. The entire science of cryonics presently depends on future technological developments. As cryonicists Mike Darwin and Brian Wowk explain, "Even the best known cryo-preservation methods still lead to brain injuries irreversible by present technology. Until brain cryo-preservation is perfected, cryonics will rely on future technologies, not just for tissue replacement, but also for repair of tissues essential to the patient's survival" (1989, p. 10). This is the biggest flaw in cryonics. Ubiquitous in the cryonics literature are reminders that the history of science and technology is replete with stories of misunderstood mavericks, surprise discoveries, and dogmatic closed-mindedness to revolutionary new ideas. The stories are all true, but cryonicists ignore all the revolutionary new ideas that were wrong. Unfortunately for cryonicists, past success does not guarantee future progress in any field. Cryonics presently depends on nanotechnology, the construction of tiny computer-driven machines. As Eric Drexler (1986) has shown, and Richard Feynman demonstrated as early as 1959, "There's plenty of room at the bottom" for molecular-size technologies. But theory and application are two different things, and a scientific conclusion cannot be based on what
might
be, no matter how logical it may seem or who endorses it. Until we have evidence, our judgment must remain, appropriately enough, suspended.

Historical Transcendence— Is It So Small a Thing?

Given these prospects, where can the nonreligious individual find meaning in an apparently meaningless universe? Can we transcend the banality of life without leaving the body? History is the one field of thought that deals with human action across time and beyond any one individual's personal story. History transcends the here-and-now through its fairly long past and near limitless future. History is a product of sequences of events that come together in their own unique ways. Those events are mostly human actions, so history is a product of the way individual human actions come together to produce the future, however constrained by certain previous conditions, such as laws of nature, economic forces, demographic trends, and cultural mores. We are free, but not to do just anything. And the significance of a human action is also restricted by
when
in the historical sequence the action is taken. The earlier the action is in a sequence, the more sensitive the sequence is to minor changes—the so-called butterfly effect.

The key to historical transcendence is that since you cannot know when in the sequence you are (since history is contiguous) and what effects present actions may have on future outcomes, positive change requires that you choose your actions wisely—all of them. What you do tomorrow could change the course of history, even if only long after you are gone. Think of all the famous people of the past who died relatively unknown. Today, they have transcended their own time because we perceive that some of their actions altered history, even if they were unaware that they were doing anything important. One may gain transcendence by affecting history, by actions whose influence extends well beyond one's biological existence. The alternatives to this scenario—apathy about one's effect on others and the world, or belief in the existence of another life for which science provides no proof—may lead one to miss something of profound importance in
this
life. We should heed Matthew Arnold's beautiful words from his
Empedocles on Etna
(1852):

Is it so small a thing, To have enjoyed the sun,

To have lived light in the Spring,

To have loved, to have thought, to have done;

To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes—

That we must feign a bliss Of doubtful future date,

And while we dream on this, Lose all our present state,

And relegate to worlds. . . yet distant our repose?

6

Abducted!

Encounters with Aliens

On Monday, August 8, 1983, I was abducted by aliens. It was late at night and I was traveling along a lonely rural highway approaching the small town of Haigler, Nebraska, when a large craft with bright lights hovered alongside me and forced me to stop. Alien creatures got out and cajoled me into their vehicle. I do not remember what happened inside but when I found myself traveling back down the road I had lost ninety minutes of time. Abductees call this "missing time," and my abduction a "close encounter of the third kind." I'll never forget the experience, and, like other abductees, I've recounted my abduction story numerous times on television and countless times to live audiences.

A Personal Abduction Experience

This may seem like a strange story for a skeptic to be telling, so let me fill in the details. As I explained in Chapter 1, for many years I competed as a professional ultra-marathon bicycle racer, primarily focusing on the 3,000-mile, nonstop, transcontinental Race Across America. "Nonstop" means racers go long stretches without sleep, riding an average of twenty-two out of every twenty-four hours. It is a rolling experiment on stress, sleep deprivation, and mental breakdown.

Under normal sleep conditions, most dream activity is immediately forgotten or fades fairly soon after waking into consciousness. Extreme sleep deprivation breaks down the wall between reality and fantasy. You have severe hallucinations that seem as real as the sensations and perceptions of daily life. The words you hear and speak are recalled like a normal memory. The people you see are as corporeal as those in real life.

During the inaugural 1982 race, I slept three hours on each of the first two nights and consequently fell behind the leader, who was proving that one could get by with considerably less sleep. By New Mexico, I began riding long stretches without sleep in order to catch up, but I was not prepared for the hallucinations that were to come. Mostly they were the garden-variety hallucinations often experienced by weary truck drivers, who call the phenomenon "white-line fever": bushes form into lifelike animals, cracks in the road make meaningful designs, and mailboxes look like people. I saw giraffes and lions. I waved to mailboxes. I even had an out-of-body experience near Tucumcari, New Mexico, where I saw myself riding on the shoulder of Interstate 40 from above.

Finishing third that year, I vowed to ride sleepless in 1983 until I got the lead or collapsed. Eighty-three hours away from the Santa Monica Pier, just shy of Haigler, Nebraska, and 1,259 miles into the race, I was falling asleep on the bike so my support crew (every rider has one) put me down for a forty-five-minute nap. When I awoke I got back on my bike, but I was still so sleepy that my crew tried to get me back into the motorhome. It was then that I slipped into some sort of altered state of consciousness and became convinced that my entire support crew were aliens from another planet and that they were going to kill me. So clever were these aliens that they even looked, dressed, and spoke like my crew. I began to quiz individual crew members about details from their personal lives and about the bike that no alien should know. I asked my mechanic if he had glued on my bike tires with spaghetti sauce. When he replied that he had glued them on with Clement glue (also red), I was quite impressed with the research the aliens had done. Other questions and correct answers followed. The context for this hallucination was a 1960s television program—
The Invaders
—in which the aliens looked exactly like humans with the exception of a stiff little finger. I looked for stiff pinkies on my crew members. The motorhome with its bright lights became their spacecraft. After the crew managed to bed me down for another forty-five minutes, I awoke clear-headed and the problem was solved. To this day, however, I recall the hallucination as vividly and clearly as any strong memory.

Now, I am not claiming that people who have had alien abduction experiences were sleep deprived or undergoing extreme physical and mental stress. However, I think it is fairly clear that if an alien abduction experience can happen under these conditions, it can happen under other conditions. Obviously I was not abducted by aliens, so what is more likely: that other people are having experiences similar to mine, triggered by other altered states and unusual circumstances, or that we really are being visited secretly by aliens from other worlds? By Hume's criterion of how to judge a miracle—"no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish"—we would have to choose the first explanation. It is not impossible that aliens are traveling thousands of light years to Earth and dropping in undetected, but it is much more likely that humans are experiencing altered states of consciousness and interpreting them in the context of what is popular in our culture today, namely, space aliens.

Autopsy of an Alien

Humans have achieved space flight and even sent spacecraft out of the solar system, so why couldn't other intelligent beings have done the same thing? Perhaps they have learned to traverse the enormous distances between the stars by accelerating beyond the speed of light, even though all laws of nature known to us prohibit this. Perhaps they have solved the problem of collisions with space dust and particles which would shatter a spacecraft traveling at such enormous speeds. And somehow they have reached such technological sophistication without destroying themselves in their versions of war and genocide. These are very hard problems to solve, but look how much humans have accomplished since 1903 when the Wright brothers lofted their tiny craft into the air for twelve seconds. Should we be so arrogant as to think that only we exist and that only we could solve such problems?

This is a subject discussed at great length and in great detail by scientists, astronomers, biologists, and science fiction writers. Some, like astronomer Carl Sagan (1973, 1980), believe that the odds are good that the universe is teeming with life. Given the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, and the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, what are the chances that ours is the only one that has evolved intelligent sentients? Others, like cosmologist Frank Tipler (1981), are convinced that extraterrestrials do not exist because if they did they would be here by now. Given that there is nothing special about the timing of human evolution, it is fairly likely that if intelligent beings evolved elsewhere, at least half of them would be ahead of us in biological evolution, which should put them far, far ahead of us scientifically and technologically, which means they would have found Earth by now.

Some people claim that not only have aliens found Earth, they crash-landed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and we can see what they look like on film. On August 28, 1995, the Fox network aired what has come to be known as the "Roswell Incident," which featured footage of an autopsy of what appears to be an alien body (see figure 9). The footage came from Ray Santilli, a London-based video producer who claims to have come across the black-and-white film while he was searching the U.S. Army archives for footage of Elvis (who served eighteen months in the military) for a documentary on the singer. The individual who sold him the footage (reportedly for $100,000) remains anonymous, Santilli maintains, because it is illegal to sell U.S. government property. Santilli, in turn, sold use of the footage to Fox. The U.S. Air Force has stated that the wreckage at Roswell came from a crashed top-secret surveillance balloon—"Project Mogul"—launched to monitor Soviet nuclear testing from the upper atmosphere. Given that the cold war was heating up in 1947, it is not surprising that at the time the Air Force was reluctant to discuss the crash, but this gave rise to decades of speculation by believers in UFOs, especially those with a bent for conspiracy theories. There are, however, numerous problems with the alien autopsy film as evidence of an alien encounter.