Scott Rhee's Reviews > The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained

What transpires in a person’s brain to go from “Sure, it’s possible that the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, the lost continent of Atlantis, and alien UFOs may exist” to “Oh, they exist for sure, and anybody who tells you differently is somebody who is trying to suppress the truth”? What causes that mental switch to be flipped from everyday wonder and curiosity to radicalized fanatical belief?

Colin Dickey attempts to explain this phenomenon in his book “The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained”.

Dickey, like most rational-minded people, is a skeptic who also happens to be, like most rational-minded people, fascinated by stories of the unexplained. It’s a very human thing to be captivated by “true” stories of events that have no scientific explanation.

Indeed, one aspect of those people who become radicalized true believers is an almost-pathological mistrust and fear of science.

Many of us are all too aware of the anti-intellectual, anti-science beliefs that warp people’s views and can be a danger to society. We have seen it at its peak in the Trump Era, with politicians who completely ignore or deny the evidence supporting global climate change, parents who completely ignore the societal health benefits of childhood vaccinations, and people who blatantly disregard the state mandates for wearing masks and practicing social distancing due to Covid-19 because they believe that the pandemic is a government-created hoax.

But this anti-science conspiracy-theory paranoia has been around for decades, if not longer.

Dickey starts out by examining the history of the theory of Lemuria, an ancient lost continent (similar to Atlantis) that sank in the Indian Ocean thousands of years ago. It is a fascinating theory that is based on what any and all reputable scientists now considers an indisputable hoax and egregious pseudo-science. And yet there are still millions of people today who believe that Lemuria once existed.

The same is true for the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and most stories of UFOs. All of these started out as hoaxes perpetrated by, in most cases, people who just wanted a few bucks from newspapers that would publish their photos. Most of these people later went on record claiming that it was an elaborate lie, that their photos were doctored or faked. And yet, today, there are pseudo-scientists, calling themselves cryptozoologists, whose life goal is the search for these mythical creatures and millions of “UFOlogists” seeking the truth of alien visitors.

It’s both funny and sad, depending on how one looks at it. Regardless of how one looks at it, though, it also attempts to satisfy a human need, according to Dickey.
That need is the sense of mysticism and the divine that humanity is losing in this world of ever-increasing scientific and technological knowledge. Where nearly every inch of our planet has been mapped, we no longer have places on our maps that say “here there be monsters”, and, according to biologist John Napier, “[m]an needs his gods—-and his monsters, and the more remote and approachable they are, the better.”

It is this need that is embodied in the now-famous poster of a UFO over the desk of Fox Mulder, the FBI agent investigating alien conspiracies in the iconic TV show The X-Files, which reads, “I want to believe.”

But why, in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, do some people continue to believe in things that simply aren’t true? In the book “When Prophecy Fails”, researchers Leon Festinger, Henry W. Rieckon, and Stanley Schachter studied doomsday cults and what happened to believers after the “end-of-the-world” deadlines came and went. Oftentimes, these believers double down on their beliefs rather than face the possibility that their beliefs are wrong. Quite simply, Festinger et al “argue that once you’ve irrevocably begun down a path, it becomes increasingly harder to admit you’re wrong, and you’ll increasingly distort the facts and adopt ever more fantastical ideas rather than change course. [p. 165]”

It’s a very believable and understandable defense mechanism. It certainly helps to understand why some people deny the facts about global climate change or the existence of Covid-19. In some ways, it even helps to understand the irrational beliefs that some people have about the unverified, and unverifiable, “facts” of Joe Biden secretly hordeing billions of dollars of bribe money from the Russians or the “facts” of rampant voter fraud throughout the United States in this past election. They want to believe so badly that not believing is simply not an option.

It’s okay to keep an open mind. It’s even okay to occasionally question science and scientific findings. It’s this ability to question and refute findings that has, for the most part, helped humanity by keeping things on the up and up.

But one can go too far in refuting the science, and this, according to Dickey, is extremely dangerous: “[G]radually but inexorably, a search for wonder and mystery, for the sublime, for the enchanted world just out of our grasp, can descend into paranoia. The longer that sublime remains unknown, unseen, felt but not reached, the more the mind spins for explanations. [p.222]”

Until one starts finding explanations in the unverified, the unverifiable, and “alternative facts”. And we’ve all seen, in the past four years, where that’s gotten us…