The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [49]
Temporal lobe stimulation may not account for every encounter with the paranormal, but Persinger’s research may be the first step toward demystifying a number of centuries-old puzzles. As he summed up for our show, “Four hundred years ago the paranormal included what in large part is science today. That’s the fate of the paranormal—it becomes science, it becomes normal.” Or, it simply disappears under the scrutiny of the scientific method.
Agents Who Stare at Goats
Belief in the paranormal is itself an extension of agenticity, as hidden powers are thought to emanate from powerful agents. During my graduate stint in experimental psychology in the 1970s, I saw on television the Israeli psychic Uri Geller bend cutlery and reproduce drawings using, so he said, psychic powers alone. For a while I kept an open mind to the possibility that such phenomena could be real, until I saw James “The Amazing” Randi on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, where Randi used magic tricks to duplicate Geller’s effects. (As Randi likes to say, “If Geller is bending spoons with psychic power he’s doing it the hard way.”) Randi bent spoons, replicated drawings, levitated tables, and even performed a psychic surgery. When asked about Geller’s ability to pass the tests of professional scientists, Randi explained that scientists are not trained to detect trickery and intentional deception, the very art of magic.
Randi is right. I vividly recall a seminar that I attended in 1980 at the Aletheia Foundation in Grants Pass, Oregon, in which a holistic healer named Jack Schwarz impressed us by shoving a ten-inch sail needle through his arm with no apparent pain and only a drop of blood. Years later, and to my chagrin, Randi performed the same feat with the simplest of magic. I attended that seminar at the behest of a woman I was dating named Allison, an Oregonian brunette attractive in a New Ageish way, before the New Age fully blossomed in the 1980s. She wore natural-fiber dresses, flowers in her hair, and nothing on her feet. But what most intrigued me in our year of distance dating were Allison’s spiritual gifts. I knew she could see through me metaphorically, but Allison also saw things that she said were not allegorical: body auras, energy chakras, spiritual entities, and light beings. One night she closed the door and turned off the lights in my bathroom and told me to stare into the mirror until my aura appeared. I stared vacuously into space. During a drive through the Oregon countryside late one cold night she pointed out spiritual beings dotting the landscape. I stared blankly into the dark. I tried to see the world as Allison did, but I couldn’t. She could see invisible intentional agents but I could not. She was a believer and I was a skeptic. The difference doomed our relationship.
By 1995, just as the heyday of New Age codswallop was winding down, a story broke that for the previous quarter century the Central Intelligence Agency, in conjunction with the U.S. Army, had invested $20 million in a highly secret psychic spy program called Stargate (also Grill Flame and Scanate). Stargate was a Cold War project intended to close the “psi gap” (the psychic equivalent of the missile gap) between the United States and Soviet Union. The Soviets were training psychic spies, so we would as well. The story of Stargate—a form of agenticity at the CIA—reemerged while I was writing this chapter in the form of a feature film based on the book The Men Who Stare at Goats by British investigative journalist Jon Ronson. This is a Through the Looking Glass–like story of what the CIA—operating through something called Psychological Operations (PsyOps)—was researching: invisibility, levitation, telekinesis, walking through walls, and even killing goats just by staring at them, with the ultimate goal of killing enemy soldiers telepathically.