The Darkness That Lurks In Our Mind

The Void (149), Prij

One of my favourite programmes in the mid 90s was Strange But True? - one of the very few programmes I ever watched on ITV. As a child just old enough to have grown up with Ghostbusters 2, I was fascinated by the paranormal in the same way the more exotic scientific phenomena, like blackholes, captured my imagination. Because it was broadcast on a Friday night, I was allowed to stay up to watch it. I clearly remember one particular evening, The Enfield Poltergeist episode (broadcast 20/10/95) kept me awake a lot longer. I was nine years old at the time so that's understandable. I was too young to have seen Ghostwatch, but I obtained a copy last year and at the age of twenty two I was disturbed enough to sleep with the light on.

Back in July I was lying awake one night with the window open. I go to bed early on a Friday because I have to get up early on Saturday morning for work. I had already been in bed around two hours without managing to fall asleep. By now it was midnight and I was on the verge sleep when I was startled by a noise outside. What at first I thought was water running down a pipe resolved into a loud growl. I live one floor up so either it was on my windowsill or in the garden and very loud. So loud in fact that my brother who didn't have his window open went out to see what it was (as the cat had gone outside). Neither of us could see anything in the dark, though the cat appeared and was watching the far wall that separates downstairs' garden from next door. Foxes occasionally wander this far down from the golf course and cemetery, but it would have had to have vaulted two fairly high fences to get into our garden, and jump the wall to get out the other side and I've heard foxes before but never that sound. Nevertheless, the most reasonable answer is that it was a fox but reason pales to emotion in forming impressions, and that is from which the mind jumps to conclusions.

In nature intelligence arises from evolutionary pressure for foresight. A cheetah, for instance, must consider whether its prey will move left or right in the split-second it lunges; the primates in the trees must co-ordinate their movement to reach out to that next branch that isn't yet in front of them. These all require projecting learned behaviour onto transpiring events and into the future. In humans too, this is predicated on accumulated experience - for example, children often understand aeroplanes as birds in the sky. Unfortunately the unknown (especially the unknown unknowns) is inherently in-experiential. This leads to a fork in the process of a cognizant mind: (A) investigate this new phenomenon, or (B) extrapolate from approximate experiences. Like the airborne femur becoming a weapons satellite in 2001, the second option jump cuts to the paranormal and its forerunner, religion.

[...] This is a problem that goes back many millennia. Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, etc. were "identified" as gods observing and directing the lives of the people of Greece and Rome 2000 years ago. The only thing that has changed is the personal myth assigned to these powerful and intelligent otherworldly visitors.
- commenter on Bad Astronomy

Extrapolation from experience need not be first hand experience. Consider the changing interpretation of Venus from deity to UFO - religious oral tradition served to explain [away] various astronomical and atmospheric phenomena. In the West and Near East, the Abrahamic religions' monotheism of course does not address these as deities. However, through the 20th century waning religious observance coupled with the rise of the mass media has not led to increasing scientific understanding. The media doesn't just influence children, with particular regard to advertising, but adults as well. Close Encounters of the Third Kind or The X-Files has supplanted religion, and overshadowed scientific rationalism to the point that confronted with an unknown bright light in the sky it is no longer Ishtar or Aphrodite or Venus that people see and it's certainly not the second planet from the sun, but in fact a flying saucer. Progress in this sense is simply switching to a more modern source of easy answers. As to whether alien life exists, I do not refute it but I'll discuss that at another time.

There's an interesting parallel in virtual worlds. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas continues to be the subject of legends and myths six years after release. Any sufficiently expansive virtual world will be met with the same ignorance as real life (CJ's Law?). In San Andreas, the sharks people claim to have spotted are actually dolphins and the moving blinking lights high up are supposed to be aeroplanes. The ghost cars are just vehicles that spawn on slopes and the supposed ghost of CJ's mother is a pedestrian briefly spawning in the wrong place - which recalls the rogue programmes in The Matrix sequels.

At the same time in the 90s as Strange But True?, my grandfather gave me a book he got from the Reader's Digest called Mysteries of the Unexplained. Its a collection of stories cut from newspapers and journals on various events and occurrences that defy explanation, split into several chapters: anomalies in time, unsolved crimes and appearances/disappearances, monsters and ghosts, the skies, and purported miracles. I laughed when my brother wouldn't sleep alone having seen The Mothman Prophecies at sixteen, but I'm always uneasy reading accounts of the paranormal at night even with the light on. I did watch The Blair Witch Project and The Exorcist on my own in the dark, though!

But somewhere out there, something is watching us. There are alien forces acting in ways we can't perceive. Are we alone in the universe? Impossible. When you consider the wonders that exist all around us... ...voodoo priests of Haiti, the Tibetan numerologists of Appalachia, the unsolved mysteries of - "Unsolved Mysteries." The truth is out there!
- Mulder, The Springfield Files

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