You Have to Have Something to Disbelieve Behavior: There is something in humans that likes to solve mysteries. But often, people need the questions as much as the answers. By DONNA LARCEN and COLIN McENROE, THE HARTFORD COURANTLos Angeles Times Monday July 6, 1992 Home Edition View, Page 6 Type of Material: Wire
Ah, sweet mystery of life. . . .
Finding the mysteries is no trouble. We've got a million of them. Who shot JFK? Who built the pyramids? Are there UFOs? What happens when we die? Is the Shroud of Turin really the image of Jesus? Who was Deep Throat? Why was I born?
"We need to have mysteries," says Dr. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Connecticut Health Center and editor of the Journal of Near Death Experiences. "The world can be a very frightening place, and a lot of our struggle is with having to control our environment. So I think we need to retreat into fantasy, abandon reality and think about things that are beyond our knowledge."
There is also something in us that likes to solve puzzles. That could explain the fascination with the NBC show, "Unsolved Mysteries," which addresses murders and disappearances of ordinary people but also has looked at Amelia Earhart, the Bermuda Triangle, the shroud and UFOs.
"People find these stories fairly familiar," says Tim Rogan, coordinating producer of the show. "They say, 'I know something about this, but what's happening?' People always want answers, and it's hard for them to accept that there are questions that won't be answered, that may take even longer than a lifetime."
There is also a life-affirming quality about the quest for answers.
"Problem solving for all living creatures has high life-survival value," says George Michael Evica, an English professor at the University of Hartford, known for his work on the JFK assassination. If you solve the problems of eating, shelter and reproduction, "then you can get to the pinnacle of problem solving." At the top is human culture, where lie these great mysteries.
The solution to any mystery has two parts. The first is a set of facts that constitute a proof. The second is a willingness to believe those facts. The willingness is often harder to get than the facts.
"I think that's true," says Joe Nickell, a science writer in Lexington, Ky. Nickell says a lot of people are either too quick to debunk a mystery or too eager to embrace it out of sheer love of the wondrous. He tries to persuade people to investigate each case on its merits.
Nickell has investigated the Shroud of Turin, Our Lady of Guadalupe and the "crop circles" of England. He says he meets people who are angry to learn he has explanations that do not require the intervention of gods, angels or UFOs.
"You get the feeling that these people don't want an answer," he says. Nickell says that some fascination with the paranormal is a way of saying: "Well, science doesn't know everything, and . . . I don't want it to."
"You hope the facts transcend personalities," says Kenneth L. Feder, anthropology professor at Central Connecticut State University. "But it's also people interpreting reality."
Feder's book, "Frauds, Myths and Mysteries," offers scientific explanations that debunk paranormal claims about Stonehenge, Atlantis, the Shroud of Turin and Swiss author Erich von Daniken's theories that creatures from outer space visited Earth in prehistoric times.
Even though he considers himself a hard-headed scientist, Feder admits: "We've all got those things we hold near and dear to our hearts." If you have 20 years of energy and emotion invested in a particular position, you're not eager to see it overturned, he says.
Mark Twain once wrote: "Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to stick to possibilities."
Some cases are so weird and complex as to resist explanation.
Take the JFK assassination. Few puzzles have been subjected to such exhaustive scientific, investigative and forensic study. And yet, the solutions floating around today depend more on personal interpretation than facts.
"One of the problems is a multiplicity of data, and much of it is contradictory," Evica says. "Solving the JFK mystery has a profound moral dimension for humanity. It goes beyond the clutter of data and gets into our passion, our history."
Some mysteries rest mostly on faith. If Jack insists that aliens from Zetta Reticula abduct Earthlings, examine them with gamma rays, erase their memories and return them, and Jill does not believe him, there is no way to resolve their difference.
"My research is sometimes the fodder of good-natured ribbing among my academic colleagues," says Kenneth Ring, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut who has written two books on near-death experiences and a new one on near-death experiences and alien abductions called "The Omega Project." Ring, on a book tour, made the comment on the "Larry King Live!" television show.
In his book, Ring quotes a 1987 Gallup poll showing that a majority of Americans believe UFOs are real. And near-death experiences, or NDEs, are gaining more acceptance from the public and attention from the medical world.
In his book, Ring describes his own hesitancy to believe in alien abductions.
Like his students who are skeptical of near-death-experience literature, he found "what dissolves the doubt of the doubting Thomases in these classes is not, I think, so much what these NDErs say as it is something about the convincingness of their presence. . . . (It) almost compels one to conclude something like, 'I don't really understand what happened to these people, but obviously something very important and profound did; at the very least, I am now sure that they are not making this up.' "
That approach may be pretty slim on science, but our fascination with death, the great beyond and aliens is fed by being able to talk to someone who experienced these things and lived to tell about it.
"I haven't found anything else that has the same profound impact as the near-death experience has," Greyson says. "But Ken Ring says those who claim alien abduction seem to."
So? Are Jack and Jill doomed to disagree forever?
"As a scientist I'm supposed to say no," Feder says. "We'll figure everything out eventually."
The problem, he says, is getting people to believe what science figures out.
When carbon dating showed that the Shroud of Turin is no more than 700 years old, Feder says, "the devout Shroud of Turin guys rejected categorically the carbon dates."
The only impenetrable mysteries, he says, are the ones about which so little information is available there is no way to test any hypotheses. Nobody knows why ancient people built Stonehenge, he admits, and there is no way to test anybody's theories about it.
Feder disputes theorists who claim that Stonehenge, the giant figures at Easter Island and other marvels of prehistory must be the work of extraterrestrials, because primitive peoples could not have made them. In his book, he dismisses this as a fallacy he calls, "our ancestors, the dummies."
"There seems to be not just a little European ethnocentrism at work here," he writes archly.
When a mystery springs up--huge, flattened circles in crop fields in southern England or a weeping statue--credulous people quickly embrace it. Scientists, often venturing far outside the field of actual expertise, weigh in with competing theories that sound persuasive. Hoaxers may come forward to claim responsibility, and other experts may then claim the hoaxers are lying.
Nickell says part of the problem with paranormal mysteries is that they are all so peculiar it is impossible to have an established procedure for checking them out.
"We probably do have to go through this knock-down, drag-out process," he says.
Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times, 1992.
LARCEN, DONNA, You Have to Have Something to Disbelieve; Behavior: There is something in humans that likes to solve mysteries. But often, people need the questions as much as the answers.; Home Edition., Los Angeles Times, 07-06-1992, pp E-6.