It was a wrenching transition, from space to
spacey. The Today show devoted much of its program one morning to
the successful rendezvous of the shuttle Discovery with the Russian
space station Mir, including a live interview by co-hosts Bryant
Gumbel and Katie Couric with the elated American crew aboard the
orbiting Discovery.
Immediately following Today, however, NBC turned its attention to
other, seemingly unwilling space travelers: ordinary humans who
claim to have been rudely kidnapped by aliens, taken aboard
spacecraft, subjected to humiliating experiments and returned to
Earth, stupefied but usually unharmed. This exercise in virtual
unreality was conducted, apparently without embarrassment, by The
Other Side, a daily, hourlong nbc talk show that takes what it calls
"an objective look at psychic phenomena, esp, ghosts, alternative
healing and more."
It is strange enough to see a major broadcast network giving
serious consideration to subjects like -- to pick a few recent
examples -- "My Co-Worker Is a Ghost," "Psychic Peeping Toms" and "A
Dead Celebrity Is Taking Over My Life." But The Other Side is just
the latest entry in a fast-growing TV genre that rivals the most
irrepressible supermarket tabloids in promoting pseudoscience and
the paranormal. No claims seem too outlandish for the ratings-hungry
producers: pets that are psychic; ufos that battle with Iranian
fighter pilots; people who travel in time or have "out-of-body"
experiences.
In addition to The Other Side, paranormal topics are pursued
relentlessly on Encounters, a Sunday-night show on the Fox network;
Sightings, a weekly syndicated program currently seen on 205
stations; and The Extraordinary, another syndicated show carried on
114 stations. NBC's long-running Unsolved Mysteries, which generally
deals with crimes and disappearances, is delving more frequently
into the paranormal. Meanwhile, Fox's slick, high-rated The X-Files
gives its fictional tales of the supernatural a whiff of
authenticity by framing them as cases from a unit of the fbi that
investigates paranormal phenomena.
As a group, these shows are a celebration of the nonexistent, a
feast for the eyes and ears of the gullible. While some TV
executives privately acknowledge that many of the subjects presented
are pure hokum, they argue that the shows are entertaining and do no
harm. "There's a seeker born every minute," puns Bradley Anderson,
producer of Encounters. "The people who watch paranormal programming
are looking for something to believe in."
They have apparently found it. The reason NBC embraced The Other
Side, says executive producer Ron Ziskin, "is the research
indicating that people are interested in it and believe it." A Roper
poll taken last year indicates that nearly a quarter of Americans
believe in extraterrestrial UFOS and astrology, and nearly a third
put stock in faith healing. Most startling, another poll found that
as many as 2% of Americans, or nearly 5 million people, claim to
have been abducted and taken aboard spacecraft by aliens.
One of them is Travis Walton, whose purported alien abduction was
the basis for the 1993 movie Fire in the Sky. Repeating his story on
The Other Side, Walton told of being hit "by a powerful bolt of
energy" one night as he approached a glowing disklike object
hovering over a highway. He recalled losing consciousness and
awakening inside a spacecraft, surrounded by aliens. To the
accompaniment of a hokey re-enactment, he described attempting to
escape, then being caught and subdued. Will Miller, the show's host,
posed a few skeptical questions, but looked impressed nonetheless.
"One thing we do know," he said, "is that many scientists,
government officials, medical doctors and academics agree that
something is going on here, something that deserves our
attention."
Sightings devotes its attention to similarly weird tales. In
recent weeks, for example, it has done stories on ufo hot spots, the
"most haunted mansion in America" and a ghost named Sallie, who has
tormented a Midwestern family, inflicting scratches on the
unfortunate father. In an earlier program, John Burke, a
"crop-circle investigator," discussed ice circles -- geometric forms
that have previously appeared in grain fields and now, he claims,
have begun to show up on frozen lakes and ponds. Instead of
ascribing them to the pranksters and bored farmers responsible for
the designs, the show suggested that they are created by artistic
extraterrestrials. Encounters too takes a gullible attitude toward
such stories as the purported governmental cover-up of a UFO crash
near Roswell, New Mexico, and the secreting away of three -- or
four, or seven -- little bodies of the alien crew.
Some guest "experts" have become quite familiar to fans of the
paranormal. Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, perhaps the university's
greatest embarrassment since LSD guru Timothy Leary, is a frequent
visitor on these shows, insisting that he believes patients who tell
him of being whisked aboard spacecraft. "Alien abductees are given a
terrifying message," he claims. "We are being given a choice to
change our ways." And James Van Praagh, a self-proclaimed medium who
specializes in communicating with the dead, is a regular visitor to
these shows. In comforting bereaved parents by pretending to deliver
messages from their departed offspring, he uses techniques blatantly
obvious to magicians.
Despite the nonsense that prevails on these shows, several of
them make a pretense of objectivity by including rebuttals by
scientists and skeptics. But any reasoned responses are generally
lost in a barrage of fanciful fiction. One critic of the paranormal,
Michael Shermer, a professor of science history at Occidental
College in Los Angeles, was invited to participate in an episode of
The Other Side that addressed alien abductions. According to
Shermer, host Miller urged him before the show not to be too harsh
on the "abductees." "Don't be a curmudgeon," Miller pleaded. On the
air, Shermer recalls, after he had made telling points about how
unlikely the abductions were, Miller tugged on his sleeve, quietly
urging him to stop.
What the paranormal productions have most in common is a paranoid
distrust of government, nasa officials, legitimate scientists and,
in general, the Establishment. All these institutions and groups, in
the opinion of many of the paranormalists, are engaged in vast
cover-ups, keeping the public ignorant about the aliens who pilot
UFOS, kidnap humans and create structures and monuments on Mars and
the moon. "We make a lot of hay about the idea that there is a
mistrust of government," admits Chris Carter, executive producer of
The X-Files. "One of our mantras on The X-Files is 'trust no one.'
I'm trying to entertain people in paranoid times."
Though producers treat these shows as mere entertainment, many
viewers do not. A study involving 187 students conducted by
communication professor Glenn Sparks of Purdue University found that
exposure to such programs heightened belief in the paranormal. And
when that exposure is constant, says University of Oregon
psychologist Ray Hyman, each new repetition of a paranormal tale,
even when related with a skeptical tone, "makes it more and more
believable." Scientists are worried, too, that the proliferation of
paranormal TV is contributing to the public's scientific illiteracy,
which they regard as a national liability in a high-tech age. "If
you are awash in lost continents and channeling and ufos," says
astronomer Carl Sagan, "you may not have intellectual room for the
findings of science."
Yet producers and hosts of the new batch of shows seem
unconcerned about any negative impact of their efforts. When Miller
was hired as host of The Other Side, he recalls, "I made a deal with
them. I said, 'You keep any sleazy stuff out, and I'll do all the
weird stuff you want.'" Miller has obviously kept his end of the
bargain. --With reporting by Hunter Whitney/Los Angeles and Lawrence
Mondi/New York