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Encounters With the Paranormal: Science, Knowledge, and Belief
Do polygraph tests really detect lies? Can memories be implanted? What is the relationship between science and belief? Experts in the fields of biology, psychology, philosophy, social science, and forensic science bring their perspectives to controversies that affect how we perceive reality. From science's influence on beauty to UFO mythology to near-death experiences, this volume spans the gamut of pseudoscience today.
Mass Market Paperback
First published April 1, 1998
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March 28, 2025
ANOTHER COLLECTION OF ARTICLES FROM ‘THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER’
Editor Kendrick Frazier (1942-2022) was a board member of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), and a longtime editor of their magazine, ‘Skeptical Inquirer.’
He wrote in the Introduction to this 1998 book, “why is eyewitness testimony so suspect when it comes to some scientific claims? Do polygraph tests really detect lies?... Can memories be repressed, and, if so, can they be recovered? Can false memories be implanted?... Why do conspiracy theories have such strong appeal to man?... Do we have evidence for psychic functioning? Can trained psychics really help intelligence agencies locate secret enemy facilities?... [This book] explores these and scores of other questions. They all arise one way or another along the tumultuous interfaces between science, knowledge, and belief. The ... authors … bring scientific perspective to issues and controversies that continually make news, influence public policy affect what we think we know, and shape our perceptions and misperceptions of reality and the natural world.”
These chapters, many of them updated especially for this volume, originally appeared in ‘The Skeptical Inquirer’… the journal of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP)… [which is] an independent nonprofit scientific and educational organization established to encourage the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims from a responsible scientific point of view and to disseminate the results of such inquiries to the scientific community and the public… The general feeling of [those]… who helped found CSICOP was that by ignoring the many kinds of unusual claims and topics that have great popular appeal, scientists were … allowing many kinds of dubious or unsupported assertions to go unchallenged, and as a result … misinformation was being spread about and taken for fact… Even scholars sometimes have trouble sifting through the factual assertions, arguments, and issues that fall outside their own specialties.” (Pg. 9-10)
Carl Sagan suggests in the opening essay, “I’ve lately been thinking about alien abductions, and false claims of childhood sexual abuse, and stories of satanic ritual abuse in the context of recovered memories… there’s a maddening tendency of the skeptics, when addressing invented stories of childhood sexual abuse, to forget that real and appalling abuse happens. It is not true all these claims of childhood sexual abuse are silly and pumped up by unethical therapists… People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. Let us not dismiss pseudoscience or even superstition with contempt… The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them---the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth, that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons… This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status. Whereas, an approach… that recognizes that … skepticism is not well taught, might be much more widely accepted.” (Pg. 21-22)
Paul Kurtz states, “total skepticism is self-contradictory; for in affirming that no knowledge is possible, these skeptics have already made an assertion. In denying that we can know reality, they often presuppose a phenomenalistic or subjectivistic metaphysics in which sense impressions or ideas are the constitutive blocks out of which our knowledge of the world, however fragmented, is constructed… This kind of skepticism may be labeled ‘dogmatism’; for in resolutely rejecting the very possibility of knowledge or value, such skeptics are themselves introducing their own questionable assertions…
“There is yet another kind of skepticism… [which] I label the ‘new skepticism’ [which] has inquiry rather than doubt as the motivation… A key difference between this and earlier forms of skepticism is that it is POSITIVE and CONSTRUCTIVE… It is basically a form of ‘methodological’ skepticism… The new skepticism is not dogmatic, for it holds that we should never by an a priori rejection close the door to any kind of responsible investigation. Thus it is skeptical of narrow-minded atheism and aparanormalism. Nonetheless, it is willing to assert reflective UNBELIEF about some claims that it finds lack adequate justification. It is willing to assert that some claims are unproved, improbable, or false.” (Pg. 37-41)
Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt contend that “In the case of ‘Afrocentric’ science education, the phenomenon is nothing less than garish, although it remains strangely immune to criticism… The feminist critique of science is … less provocative in style, but it may, ultimately, have even more widely exclusionary results.” (Pg. 77)
Alan Cromer points out that in his ESP studies at Duke University, J.B. Rhine “felt justified in withholding low scores from his average because he believed the low scorers were deliberately (or paranormally) producing their low scores. Such self-deception is a common human failing not restricted to occultists. Mainstream scientists sometimes delude themselves as well…” (Pg. 98-99)
Victor J. Stenger argues, “The conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics… says nothing about consciousness. It concerns only what can be measured and what predictions can be made about the statistical distributions of ensembles of future measurements… the wave function is simply a mathematical object used to calculate probabilities.” (Pg. 127)
Paul Kurtz says of UFOs, “CSICOP and the ‘Skeptical Inquirer’ … have never denied that it is possible, indeed probable, that other forms of life, even intelligent life, exist in the universe. And we support any effort to verify such an exciting hypothesis. But this is different from the belief that we are now being visited by extraterrestrial beings in spacecraft, that they are abducting people, and that there is a vast government coverup of these alien invasions…” (Pg. 143)
James E. Alcock asserts, “Why is it that in this highly scientific and technological age superstition and irrationality abound? It is because our brains and nervous systems constitute a belief-generating machine, an engine that produces beliefs without any particular respect for what is real or true and what is not. This belief engine selects information from the environment, shapes it, combines it with information from memory, and produces beliefs that are generally consistent with beliefs already held. This system is as capable of generating fallacious beliefs as it is of generating beliefs that are in line with the truth.” (Pg. 156)
James Lett insists, “By their nature, human beings are meaning-seeking animals, but the sad conclusion of cross-cultural anthropological research is that most individual humans, and all human cultures, are content with the ILLUSION of meaning. For most people, it matters not … whether their explanations are true or false; it only matters that they are emotionally satisfying.” (Pg. 189)
Susan Blackmore suggests, “My hypothesis is that psychic experiences are comparable to visual illusions. The experience is real enough, but its origin lies in internal processes, not peculiarities in the observable world… they arise from cognitive processes that are usually appropriate but under certain circumstances give rise to the wrong answer.” (Pg. 201)
In a later essay, Blackmore says of Near-Death Experiences [NDE], “I think we can now see why an essential physiological event can change people’s lives so profoundly. The experience has jolted their usual (and erroneous) view of the relationship between themselves and the world… I believe that the NDE gives people a glimpse into the nature of their own minds that is hard to get any other way. Drugs can produce it temporarily, mystical experiences can do it for rare people… but the NDE can out of the blue strike anyone and show them what they never knew before, that their body is only… a lump of flesh… that they are not so very important after all. And that is a very freeing and enlightening experience.” (Pg. 283)
John Taylor, Raymond Eve, and Francis Harrod observe, “Until recently, most of the scientific literature arising in reaction to these [antiscience] claims have been devoted to ‘debunking’ such claims… Thus when sources are discussed, the advocates of fantastic claims are usually said to be ignorant, stupid, or disordered. These explanations do not go far toward explaining these beliefs---especially among people who are apparently not ignorant, stupid, or disordered.” (Pg. 313)
Martin Gardner says of ‘Repressed Memory Therapy,’ “No one doubts that childhood sexual assaults occur, but in almost every case the event is never forgotten. Indeed, it festers a lifelong source of shame and anger… Not only do victims of child incest not repress such painful memories… they try unsuccessfully to forget them. That traumas experienced as a child can be totally forgotten for decades is the great mental health myth of our time---a myth that is not only devastating innocent families but doing enormous damage to psychiatry.” (Pg. 397)
Unlike most previous CSICOP/SI collections, this book focuses too much on speculative reasons ‘Why are people so irrational?,’ etc., rather than actual ‘scientific’ evidence rebutting the paranormal.
Editor Kendrick Frazier (1942-2022) was a board member of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), and a longtime editor of their magazine, ‘Skeptical Inquirer.’
He wrote in the Introduction to this 1998 book, “why is eyewitness testimony so suspect when it comes to some scientific claims? Do polygraph tests really detect lies?... Can memories be repressed, and, if so, can they be recovered? Can false memories be implanted?... Why do conspiracy theories have such strong appeal to man?... Do we have evidence for psychic functioning? Can trained psychics really help intelligence agencies locate secret enemy facilities?... [This book] explores these and scores of other questions. They all arise one way or another along the tumultuous interfaces between science, knowledge, and belief. The ... authors … bring scientific perspective to issues and controversies that continually make news, influence public policy affect what we think we know, and shape our perceptions and misperceptions of reality and the natural world.”
These chapters, many of them updated especially for this volume, originally appeared in ‘The Skeptical Inquirer’… the journal of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP)… [which is] an independent nonprofit scientific and educational organization established to encourage the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims from a responsible scientific point of view and to disseminate the results of such inquiries to the scientific community and the public… The general feeling of [those]… who helped found CSICOP was that by ignoring the many kinds of unusual claims and topics that have great popular appeal, scientists were … allowing many kinds of dubious or unsupported assertions to go unchallenged, and as a result … misinformation was being spread about and taken for fact… Even scholars sometimes have trouble sifting through the factual assertions, arguments, and issues that fall outside their own specialties.” (Pg. 9-10)
Carl Sagan suggests in the opening essay, “I’ve lately been thinking about alien abductions, and false claims of childhood sexual abuse, and stories of satanic ritual abuse in the context of recovered memories… there’s a maddening tendency of the skeptics, when addressing invented stories of childhood sexual abuse, to forget that real and appalling abuse happens. It is not true all these claims of childhood sexual abuse are silly and pumped up by unethical therapists… People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. Let us not dismiss pseudoscience or even superstition with contempt… The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them---the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth, that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons… This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status. Whereas, an approach… that recognizes that … skepticism is not well taught, might be much more widely accepted.” (Pg. 21-22)
Paul Kurtz states, “total skepticism is self-contradictory; for in affirming that no knowledge is possible, these skeptics have already made an assertion. In denying that we can know reality, they often presuppose a phenomenalistic or subjectivistic metaphysics in which sense impressions or ideas are the constitutive blocks out of which our knowledge of the world, however fragmented, is constructed… This kind of skepticism may be labeled ‘dogmatism’; for in resolutely rejecting the very possibility of knowledge or value, such skeptics are themselves introducing their own questionable assertions…
“There is yet another kind of skepticism… [which] I label the ‘new skepticism’ [which] has inquiry rather than doubt as the motivation… A key difference between this and earlier forms of skepticism is that it is POSITIVE and CONSTRUCTIVE… It is basically a form of ‘methodological’ skepticism… The new skepticism is not dogmatic, for it holds that we should never by an a priori rejection close the door to any kind of responsible investigation. Thus it is skeptical of narrow-minded atheism and aparanormalism. Nonetheless, it is willing to assert reflective UNBELIEF about some claims that it finds lack adequate justification. It is willing to assert that some claims are unproved, improbable, or false.” (Pg. 37-41)
Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt contend that “In the case of ‘Afrocentric’ science education, the phenomenon is nothing less than garish, although it remains strangely immune to criticism… The feminist critique of science is … less provocative in style, but it may, ultimately, have even more widely exclusionary results.” (Pg. 77)
Alan Cromer points out that in his ESP studies at Duke University, J.B. Rhine “felt justified in withholding low scores from his average because he believed the low scorers were deliberately (or paranormally) producing their low scores. Such self-deception is a common human failing not restricted to occultists. Mainstream scientists sometimes delude themselves as well…” (Pg. 98-99)
Victor J. Stenger argues, “The conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics… says nothing about consciousness. It concerns only what can be measured and what predictions can be made about the statistical distributions of ensembles of future measurements… the wave function is simply a mathematical object used to calculate probabilities.” (Pg. 127)
Paul Kurtz says of UFOs, “CSICOP and the ‘Skeptical Inquirer’ … have never denied that it is possible, indeed probable, that other forms of life, even intelligent life, exist in the universe. And we support any effort to verify such an exciting hypothesis. But this is different from the belief that we are now being visited by extraterrestrial beings in spacecraft, that they are abducting people, and that there is a vast government coverup of these alien invasions…” (Pg. 143)
James E. Alcock asserts, “Why is it that in this highly scientific and technological age superstition and irrationality abound? It is because our brains and nervous systems constitute a belief-generating machine, an engine that produces beliefs without any particular respect for what is real or true and what is not. This belief engine selects information from the environment, shapes it, combines it with information from memory, and produces beliefs that are generally consistent with beliefs already held. This system is as capable of generating fallacious beliefs as it is of generating beliefs that are in line with the truth.” (Pg. 156)
James Lett insists, “By their nature, human beings are meaning-seeking animals, but the sad conclusion of cross-cultural anthropological research is that most individual humans, and all human cultures, are content with the ILLUSION of meaning. For most people, it matters not … whether their explanations are true or false; it only matters that they are emotionally satisfying.” (Pg. 189)
Susan Blackmore suggests, “My hypothesis is that psychic experiences are comparable to visual illusions. The experience is real enough, but its origin lies in internal processes, not peculiarities in the observable world… they arise from cognitive processes that are usually appropriate but under certain circumstances give rise to the wrong answer.” (Pg. 201)
In a later essay, Blackmore says of Near-Death Experiences [NDE], “I think we can now see why an essential physiological event can change people’s lives so profoundly. The experience has jolted their usual (and erroneous) view of the relationship between themselves and the world… I believe that the NDE gives people a glimpse into the nature of their own minds that is hard to get any other way. Drugs can produce it temporarily, mystical experiences can do it for rare people… but the NDE can out of the blue strike anyone and show them what they never knew before, that their body is only… a lump of flesh… that they are not so very important after all. And that is a very freeing and enlightening experience.” (Pg. 283)
John Taylor, Raymond Eve, and Francis Harrod observe, “Until recently, most of the scientific literature arising in reaction to these [antiscience] claims have been devoted to ‘debunking’ such claims… Thus when sources are discussed, the advocates of fantastic claims are usually said to be ignorant, stupid, or disordered. These explanations do not go far toward explaining these beliefs---especially among people who are apparently not ignorant, stupid, or disordered.” (Pg. 313)
Martin Gardner says of ‘Repressed Memory Therapy,’ “No one doubts that childhood sexual assaults occur, but in almost every case the event is never forgotten. Indeed, it festers a lifelong source of shame and anger… Not only do victims of child incest not repress such painful memories… they try unsuccessfully to forget them. That traumas experienced as a child can be totally forgotten for decades is the great mental health myth of our time---a myth that is not only devastating innocent families but doing enormous damage to psychiatry.” (Pg. 397)
Unlike most previous CSICOP/SI collections, this book focuses too much on speculative reasons ‘Why are people so irrational?,’ etc., rather than actual ‘scientific’ evidence rebutting the paranormal.
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