The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [106]
The abductees taught me that people go through life trying on belief systems for size. Some of these belief systems speak to powerful emotional needs that have little to do with science—the need to feel less alone in the world, the desire to have special powers or abilities, the longing to know that there is something out there, something more important than you that’s watching over you. Belief in alien abduction is not just bad science. It’s not just an explanation for misfortune and a way to avoid taking responsibility for personal problems. For many people, belief in alien abduction gratifies spiritual hungers. It reassures them about their place in the universe and their own significance.15
I have often recounted my own alien abduction experience that happened in the 1983 bicycle Race Across America while I was traversing Nebraska. I had decided that I had slept too much in the 1982 race and I was curious to see how far I could ride in the 1983 event without stopping for sleep. I made it 1,259 miles in eighty-three hours, to the outskirts of a tiny town called Haigler. I was sleepily weaving down the road when my support motor home flashed its brights and pulled alongside while my crew entreated me to take a sleep break. At that moment, a distant memory of the 1960s television series The Invaders was inculcated into my waking dream. In that TV series, alien beings were taking over the earth by replicating actual people but, inexplicably, they each retained a stiff little finger. Suddenly my support team was transmogrified into aliens. I stared intensely at their fingers, grilled my mechanic on bike technology, and interrogated my girlfriend on intimacies that aliens could not possibly know (could they?). There, on the side of the road in the middle of the night, in full cycling regalia with my bike firmly between my legs for a quick getaway, I argued with the aliens, trying to avoid being abducted into the mother craft hovering nearby. I finally relented and went inside, only to discover that the interior of the UFO looked remarkably like a GMC motor home, so I lay down for the proverbial examination probe. Ninety minutes later, after a refreshing sleep break (and thankfully no probes), I was back on the bike cruising down the highway mildly amused by what had just happened. When the sun came up I had a good laugh about it with my support crew, and that evening I recounted the hallucination to the ABC Wide World of Sports camera crew, which can be viewed on YouTube.16
The bottom line is this: stories of UFOs and alien abductions are far more likely to be due to known psychological effects of terrestrial beings rather than to the unknown physical characteristics of extraterrestrial beings.17
Are We Alone in the Universe?
Are we alone in the universe? It is a legitimate question irrespective of how belief systems operate, and at this point science offers us an unambiguously ambiguous answer: we do not know. The answer still eludes us because no contact has yet been made. Why not? Whole books have been written to answer the question,18 and there are at least fifty answers to what is known as Fermi’s paradox—assuming the Copernican principle that we are not special, there should be lots of ETIs out there, and if so then at least some of them would have figured out self-replicating robotic spacecraft and/or practical interstellar space travel themselves, and assuming that at least some of those would be millions of years ahead of us on an evolutionary time scale, their technologies would be advanced enough to have found us by now, but they haven’t, so … where are they?19 Here is my Twitter-sized answer (140 characters): ETIs are probably out there but they have not been here because of the vast interstellar distances and their extreme rarity. Keep searching!
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a problem in patternicity and trying to discern a meaningful pattern of a communication signal from the background noise of space. SETI scientists have worked out systematic algorithms and rigorous standards