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Last week I blogged about lying: “Everyone Lies: Why?”
Deception is one thing, self deception is quite another. This week TED.com has posted my new TED talk, delivered at the last TED conference, in which I present material from my forthcoming book on the neuroscience of belief, tentatively entitled The Believing Brain, a central theme of which is how we are so easily deceived and how we deceive ourselves. Here is a brief summary of the thesis of the talk, although because it is so visual I strongly recommend watching the TED video.
As a guest on a recent radio program, I took calls from people who’d had some ghostly experience. It’s not true that such callers are always trying to challenge the evil skeptic: “I saw my grandfather’s ghost at the foot of my bed, explain that, Mr. Skeptic!” In this case, most of the callers (I think) were genuinely hoping for some insight. Although I certainly couldn’t speculate about what their experiences might have been, I was at least able to avoid making some common mistakes that often cost skeptics their credibility.
First, you’re not going to convince a ghost believer by saying “We have no evidence that ghosts exist, nor is there any plausible hypothesis by which they might exist.” No ghost believer in history has ever heard that, said “Aaahh,” smacked themselves in the forehead, turned over a new leaf, and gone forth with a new perspective on reality. Logically, you have just as much evidence that ghosts don’t exist as they have that ghosts do exist. So it’s a weak argument. Thus, no good can come from starting off by contradicting their belief. The only thing it accomplishes is to establish an antagonistic tone. Continue reading…
I’m a big fan of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intellience) and I think their search program constitutes the best chance we have of making contact. In fact, on a recent Saturday I was rained out of my normal 4-hour bike ride, so I read SETI scientist Seth Shostak’s new book, Confessions of An Alien Hunter (published by National Geographic), a brilliant and fun read. Seth has a fantastic sense of humor and in his book he presents some of great one-liners to use when dealing with UFOlogists, alien abductees, and the saucerites. For example:
Regarding the time it would take to traverse the vast distances between the stars, which would be millions of years (it will take Voyager II 300,000 years to reach a nearby star), Shostak notes: “That’s a long time to be squirming in a coach seat.”
I was visiting my friend Jim (name changed to protect the embarrassed) when he happened to mention that for a few weeks now, his neighborhood had been receiving regular UFO visits.
At first I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg or what. I knew Jim to be a reasonable guy, not given over to the supernatural. Moreover, he was the UFOlogists’ favorite type of witness: A pilot. (Because, as we all know, pilots cannot be mistaken about anything seen in the sky.) But I also knew that Jim could be pretty darn stubborn once an idea got into his head. I realized he was quite serious, and from what he said, a lot of people in the neighborhood were equally serious about it. Well, quite obviously, I had to see it.
So he took me outside into the dark, and what a surreal experience that was. He simply said “Let’s go,” and had the mannerism of every expectation that we’d see the UFO. Like it’s always right there for the taking. Continue reading…
The March 10 episode of my Skeptoid podcast dealt with a number of strange skulls from around the world. One that’s perhaps best known among the strange skull aficionado crowd – if there is such a crowd – is the “Starchild”. It’s the partial skull of a hydrocephalic child who died in Mexico about 900 years ago. At least, that’s what it is according to nearly every knowledgeable person who has seen it. But according to Lloyd Pye, it’s an alien hybrid. Continue reading…
It has finally happened. After decades of skeptics proclaiming that they would drop their skepticism about UFOs and alien abductions if only an extraterrestrial intelligence would contact them directly, it has finally happened right smack in the middle of the Skeptics Society offices. An ET appeared one day to lay to rest once and for all whether or not ETs have visited earth. And the aliens have a message and a warning about what we earthlings are doing to our planet: Continue reading…
I’m not sure why Stanton Friedman selected me as the subject of his writings these past couple of weeks.
I’m certainly not the first, or even the most articulate, to challenge his mission of promoting belief in alien visitation. Writing about Roswell last year, I referred to him as an obsessed UFO wacko, but he’s been called worse by others. Anyway he called me petty, ignorant, cavalier, lazy, biased, and an anti-UFO fanatic, so I guess we’re…even? Continue reading…
Back in June of 2001, my friend John and my brother Todd and I thought it might be a swell lark to fly out to Area 51 and have a look around. Not that we expected to see alien spacecraft, but it’s always neat to visit such a pop culture icon, and I thought we had a reasonable expectation of seeing (or hearing) some new aircraft. Todd and John are both pilots so we rented a plane, and flew to Las Vegas.
It was too late the fly that day, so we rented a car and drove north to the site of the famous White Mailbox, which is all over the Internet. It’s white, but for some reason half of the people on the Internet call it the Black Mailbox. If an attraction lacks mystique on its own, give it a confounding name. That’ll draw the tourists.
I had to laugh when I read fellow Skeptologist Brian Dunning’s article about the UFO True Believer™ Stan Friedman hating him. What an elite club! Friedman is no fan of me, either. A few years ago I wrote an article for Sky and Telescope magazine about UFOs, basically making the same claim I made here last week: if all these UFO sightings we hear about were real, the majority of them would be seen by amateur astronomers.
A reader wrote me on Facebook that he was listening to the “Paranormal Podcast”, another of the usual promoters of nonsense inexplicably allowed to remain in the Science & Medicine section of iTunes. The guest was Stanton Friedman, the principal author of the Roswell, Travis Walton, and Betty & Barney Hill UFO mythologies. Anyway, at 25 minutes into the episode (#56, but don’t bother listening as it’s only a 15 second blurb), Stanton mentioned that he “came across a piece on the Internet” the other day that got “40 flat-out false claims” about the Betty and Barney Hill story, and added with a condescending chortle that he “couldn’t believe it.” It was the online transcript of my Skeptoid episode on that story.
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