The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (2 page)

Most scientists would reply that this is precisely how they operate, and in principle this is perfectly true. In fact, they are human beings, and are subject to boredom, impatience and touchiness like the rest of us, which means that they can easily drift over the borderline that separates scientific detachment from emotional commitment.

One of CSICOP’s less dogmatic members was the mathematician Martin Gardner, whose book
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science
is an amusing and delightful study in “cults of unreason”. We can read of the prophet Voliva, who believed that the earth is flat, of Captain Symmes, who believed it is hollow, of Cyrus Teed, who believed it is shaped like an egg and that we are living on its inner surface. Gardner is wickedly amusing on the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the cranks who believe that the Great Pyramid contains information about the second coming of Christ. But after half-a-dozen chapters the reader begins to find this attitude of constant superiority rather cloying. Is the author some kind of super-intellect who has discovered the secret of eternal truth? Is he quite sure that dowsing for water is a laughable superstition, that everyone who has seen a UFO is deluded or mistaken, that the continent of Atlantis was a figment of Plato’s imagination, that Wilhelm Reich’s later ideas were pure lunacy? It is surely a question of where one decides to draw the line. I am inclined to agree that Immanuel Velikovsky was, in the last analysis, a crank – that is, that his theories about the connection between Venus and Biblical catastrophes are the result of inspiration rather than careful scientific reasoning. But many of his inspired guesses were amazingly accurate – for example, his belief that earth is surrounded by powerful magnetic fields. And there are influential philosophers of science like Sir Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi and Abraham Maslow who believed that all scientific thinking is based on “inspiration” rather than on careful scientific reasoning. In short Gardner seems to me to be drawing his line in the wrong place.

I have written a biography of Wilhelm Reich, and I agree that Reich was dogmatic and paranoid, as well as being a thoroughly disagreeable character. But then, the trouble with Reich was that he had, like so many other psychoanalysts, borrowed from Freud a mantle of papal
infallibility. All neurosis is sexual in origin, and a neurotic person is incapable of facing up to the sexual nature of his problems. You disagree? It only proves that you have sexual problems that you are afraid to acknowledge. In this respect Reich is like Dr Johnson; if his pistol misfires he will knock you down with the butt. Anyone who disagrees with him must be “mentally sick”. But Gardner’s own book is full of this same tone of brutal dogmatism. There is an underlying assumption that he is infallible. And while the reader is willing to entertain this as a possibility, he would like to know more of the methods by which Gardner arrives at his unshakeable certainties.

In fact, it would be disastrous if Gardner’s attitude became widely accepted and part of the “conventional wisdom”. The progress of human knowledge depends on maintaining that touch of scepticism even about the most “unquestionable” truths. A century ago, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was regarded as scientifically unshakeable; today, most biologists have their reservations about it. Fifty years ago, Freud’s sexual theory of neurosis was accepted by most psychiatrists; today, it is widely recognized that his methods were highly questionable. At the turn of this century, a scientist who questioned Newton’s theory of gravity would have been regarded as insane; twenty years later, it had been supplanted by Einstein’s theory although, significantly, few people actually understood it. It seems perfectly conceivable that our descendants of the twenty-second century will wonder how any of us could have been stupid enough to be taken in by Darwin, Freud or Einstein.

Gardner devotes a chapter to attacking the ideas of Charles Fort, the New Yorker who spent his life insisting that scientists are too dogmatic, and ought to be more willing to question their basic assumptions. He objects that, since Fort is merely a destructive critic, with no theories of his own to offer, he is basically barren. There is an element of truth in this. But Gardner fails to grasp that what Fort is really objecting to is the rigid, commissar-like attitude that characterizes his own book. Fort is arguing that scientific discovery has its roots in a sense of wonder, and that a sense of wonder, even with a touch of gullibility, is preferable to a kind of humourless Marxian dogmatism. Newton himself was fascinated by alchemy, and regarded his greatest work as his commentary on the Book of Daniel. Does this qualify Newton as a crank? Obviously not. The inference is surely that it is more fruitful to be intrigued by the possibility of some prehistoric monster in the depths of Loch Ness than to dismiss it as a childish absurdity. It is more fruitful to concede that UFOs may be real than to dismiss them as hallucinations. It may even
be more fruitful to admit that the evidence suggests that Shakespeare may not have written his own plays, or that Andrew Crosse created life in his labouratory, or that Orffyreus may have discovered the secret of perpetual motion, than to take the attitude that such extravagances are not even worth discussing.

The career of another “sceptical” friend, Ian Wilson, has also provided me with a great deal of wry amusement. A Roman Catholic convert, he began by writing an important book that argued that the “Holy Shroud of Turin” is genuine. He followed this with a book about reincarnation entitled
Mind Out of Time
, which brilliantly attacked a number of cases of alleged “memories of past lives”, like the famous Bridey Murphy case. (The Catholic Church has officially condemned the notion of reincarnation.) He was then asked to participate in a television series based on the files of the Society for Psychical Research, and although he was again able to use his debunking technique to considerable effect in cases like that of the “Croglin vampire”, he had to admit that in other cases, particularly those involving ghosts, the evidence simply could not be dismissed. When Wilson turned his attention to “the after-death experience” (in a book of that title), the same thing happened, and even after dismissing much of the evidence as fraudulent, he ended by acknowledging that the overall case for “survival” was very powerful indeed. A more recent book of Wilson’s,
Superself
concerns unusual powers of the mind, including dowsing and healing, and ends by acknowledging the reality of what might be called the “superconscious mind”. Here we have an example of a man who has the patience and honesty to study many cases of apparently paranormal powers in some detail and who ends with his scepticism deeply eroded – although he finds himself too embarrassed to come out openly and admit that he has, in effect, made a 180 degree turn.

Another interesting example of the “wholesale” attitude toward paranormal phenomena can be found in a book entitled
Secrets of the Supernatural
by Joe Nickell and John Fischer. The authors’ aim is to solve a number of mysteries through the investigative approach. The first chapter describes an investigation into a haunting at Mackenzie House, in Toronto. They cite various witnesses, who claim to have seen ghosts over the years and some who have heard spooky noises at night. They then describe how they spoke to the caretaker of the house next door, who demonstrated that various noises made in the basement were “telegraphed” to the “haunted house”.

The authors leave us in no doubt that many of the “spooky” noises in Mackenzie House were the result of a rumbling boiler. But this fails to
explain the ghost sightings of the witnesses. The tacit assumption is that the demonstration about the noises allows us to dismiss actual sightings. In fact, it may or it may not. If you happen to believe, as I do, that there are such things as ghosts, then you would require a further demonstration that the sightings of a shadowy woman and a man in a frock coat were also the result of the rumbling boiler.

Sceptical investigators all seem to make this same curious logical error. William James pointed out that if you want to disprove that all crows are black, you do not have to try and prove that no crows are black; you only have to produce one single white crow. So a bookful of cases of fraud or excessive gullibility proves nothing except that those particular cases are fraudulent. But one single case of a paranormal event for which the evidence is overwhelming
does
demolish the argument that the paranormal is, by definition, fraudulent.

The truth is that the expansion of human knowledge depends on asking questions. A cow learns nothing because it cannot ask questions; the cow’s world is exactly what it looks like, nothing more and nothing less, and there is nothing to ask questions about. But when Thales saw an eclipse he wanted to know what caused it. Newton asked the apparently absurd question: why does an apple fall to the ground instead of staying where it is? And Einstein asked the ultimately absurd question: what would it be like to sit astride a beam of light? All these questions led to fruitful results. If Martin Gardner had been standing behind them with folded arms, they would probably have decided to keep quiet.

Consider a question raised by the zoologist Ivan Sanderson. On a moonlit night, on a dust-covered road in Haiti, he and his wife both experienced a curious hallucination of being back in Paris in the fifteenth century. (The story is told in full in “Time in Disarray” in this volume.) Gardner would declare that this is a question that should simply not be asked unless the answer is that Sanderson was either drunk or lying. But it is obvious that he was neither. Those who knew him (and I have a letter on my desk from one of them at the moment) agree that he was an honest man who was not remotely interested in the “supernatural”. It is also worth asking how Sanderson’s servants knew he had been involved in an accident – although it occurred in a remote and deserted spot – and that he would be home at dawn.

And so is another question that Sanderson’s experience leads him to discuss: whether the mind is identical with the brain. He mentions a case of a man who died in a New York hospital, and who an autopsy revealed to have no brain, only “half a cupful of dirty water”. This sounds, admittedly, like another of those absurd stories that are not
worth discussing. But in the early 1980s Professor John Lourber of Sheffield University discovered a student with an IQ of 126 whose head was entirely filled with “water”. A brain scan showed that the student’s brain was merely an outer layer, only one millimetre thick. How can a person function with virtually no brain? Lourber, who specializes in hydrocephalis (“water on the brain”) replies that he has come across many cases of perfectly normal people whose heads are filled with 95 per cent of fluid, and that 70 to 90 per cent is actually quite common.

If a person can think without using the brain, the obvious conclusion would seem to be that the being who does the thinking exists apart from his brain.

The real problem posed by experiences such as that of the Sandersons is one concerning the nature of time. All scientific reasoning, even the least dogmatic, tells us that it is totally impossible to slip back into the past or foretell the future. Where the past is concerned, we can admittedly speculate that the “time slip” is some kind of “tape recording”. But a vision of the future should be a total impossibility, since the future has not yet happened. In spite of which, there are many well authenticated cases of “glimpses” into the future. (I once presented a television programme about one of these – an Irish peer named Lord Kilbracken who dreamed repeatedly about the winners of horse races, and won money by backing them.) It seems to follow that there is something fundamentally wrong with the vision of the world presented to us by our senses – in fact, we have only to think for a moment to see that there must be something wrong with a logic that tells us that everything has a beginning and an end, and then presents us with the paradox of a universe that apparently has neither.

This is why the views of CSICOP should be treated with suspicion. It is not simply a question of whether ESP or telepathy deserve to be taken seriously, but whether – as Martin Gardner would like to believe – the universe is ultimately as rational and “normal” as a novel by Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope. This is an easy belief to maintain, because the universe that confronts us when we open our eyes in the morning looks perfectly “normal”, and it is unlikely that we shall encounter any event during the day that contradicts this assumption. But then the universe looks “unquestionable” to a cow for the same kind of reason. We know that the moment we begin to use our intelligence to ask questions, the universe becomes a far more strange and mysterious place. Most scientists would, in fact, agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment, for science begins with a sense of mystery. But a certain type of scientist – and they are, unfortunately, in the majority – would also
like to believe that the mysteries can all be solved by the kind of simple deductive logic employed by Sherlock Holmes. And the problems presented by “time slips” or precognitions or synchronicities, or by poltergeists and out-of-the-body experiences, make it clear that this is wishful thinking. We can only keep science within comfortable logical boundaries by refusing to acknowledge the existence of anything that lies outside those boundaries.

It may seem reasonable to ask: Where is the harm in that? No one blames a policeman for not being interested in mysticism or philosophy – that is not his job. Why blame a physicist for taking no interest in poltergeists and ESP?

The answer is that his preconceptions about the universe also involve preconceptions about the human mind. In the nineteenth century it made no difference whatever whether a scientist was interested in psychical research or regarded it as a delusion. But by the second half of the twentieth century, science was speculating whether the universe might contain eleven dimensions and whether black holes might be an entrance into a dimensionless “hyperspace” – even whether we might be able to use black holes to travel across the universe. Russian and American scientists have been experimenting with ESP as a means of communicating with submarines under the polar ice. Suddenly the question of the limits of the human mind has become a question of major scientific importance. If we are merely chance products of a material universe, then our position is basically that of spectators, and the extent to which we can “intervene” is limited. But if – to take just one example – Sanderson’s vision of fifteenth century Paris was not a hallucination, but was some kind of glimpse of a hidden power of his own mind, then it would challenge the whole Darwinian picture of evolution.