Fringe-ology (15 page)

As a journalist, I'm trained to look for metaphors. So I took one look at that picture and thought of Hameroff's own recurring childhood dream of standing at the universe's edge. He looked at this image and saw only . . . garbage. He gets so much of this stuff, in fact, that he can't do anything but throw it away. “I feel bad about it,” he says. “In a lot of cases, you can just tell, this is their life's work and they're looking for somebody to help them. But if I started looking, I'd never get back to my own stuff.”

Hameroff is too busy doing his stuff to read theirs. He likes to spend time outside, hiking. He loves college basketball. He is, in fact, so far from New Agey that when I asked him if he meditates, he looked at me like I'd grown a second head. “Well, sometimes I get quiet and just kind of slow down and gather my thoughts,” he said.

Up close, Hameroff is a worker. And his mentality might best be described as pugilistic. His performance at the Beyond Belief conference was typical Hameroff. When I asked him why he gave the speech he did, he said, “They pissed me off. They were basically saying, you know, philosophers and scientists should be the ones making all the decisions. Let's replace organized religion with . . .
us
.' And I just thought, ‘This is bullshit.' And besides, everything I said,
is
possible. They just don't want to hear it.”

Perhaps the best place to find the real Stuart Hameroff, the worker and the fighter, is at his semi regular conference on consciousness at the University of Arizona. Whatever Hameroff's critics think of him, they acknowledge the contribution he makes through these conferences, which were first put together by David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher most famous for setting forth the “hard problem” of consciousness at the first Tucson conference in 1994.

In Chalmers's estimation, which has swept the field, it is easy to put down seemingly automatic tasks, like driving a car, to computation no different than an insect darting this way and that. The hard problem is the one of conscious experience:
Why is it I'm aware of myself and my own personal narrative and where this particular drive to the supermarket fits into all that? Why is it that I experience the color red on the stoplight as I do?
“From an evolutionary perspective,” Chalmers told me, just recently, “it's hard to understand why we would
need
consciousness.”

Chalmers himself is an atheist and
some
thing of a materialist. He doesn't buy his friend Hameroff's idea of quantum consciousness operating inside the microtubules. But he does like the Penrose-Hameroff idea that consciousness is a fundamental property. Consciousness . . . just is. “It's been close to twenty years since I first wrote about the hard problem,” he says, “and we're not any closer to an answer now than when I wrote it.”

This may come as something of a surprise to the reader, particularly if you're out there surfing the edge of the consumer science magazines, where every new neurological discovery wins headlines. Something that is rarely written about, in the midst of all the hyperbole, is that research at the level of the neuron isn't getting us anywhere in terms of answering the larger philosophical question of consciousness. One physicist I corresponded with, in researching this book, even said he finds all the intense focus on the neuron a bit . . . suspicious. Marshall Stoneham, at the Centre for Materials Research in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London, told me in an email, “I often get uptight after hearing scientists reading too much into matches of, say, thinking about X and the measurable brain signals that can be observable at the same time. It's the Tolstoy problem:
War and Peace,
Epilogue 2. The Russian peasant, seeing a steam engine, will assume it is being pushed by the smoke, whereas the smoke and the motion have common origin and are not cause and effect. And I am cautious about making complex quantum explanations, even though we do believe quantum physics underlies the natural world and how things happen.”

Stoneham's take strikes me, and more importantly Chalmers, as being eminently reasonable. We're still working on the issue, after all, and pretending we've got answers before we really do won't serve anyone. The prospect of being the one to nail down the answer, however, is so appealing, that the Tucson conferences are legendary for offering combatants a chance to test their mettle. I spoke to one French neuroscientist, Arnaud Delorme, who said the conferences have become more combative now that Hameroff is in charge of organizing them.

“When Chalmers was in charge, the conferences had a different feeling,” he says. “Chalmers is a philosopher, and philosophers admit they don't
know
the answer. They are trying out different ideas. With Hameroff, he is a scientist and so he is used to debates where someone should win and someone should lose because they have the facts.”

The field of consciousness studies, however, just doesn't cross that threshold yet. And for a moment I think of Anton Zeilinger, a great scientist who realizes his own inability to reach some definitive scientific conclusion about the nature of reality. I admire Zeilinger because instead of making great assumptive leaps to arrive at some ultimate vision, he seems to have accepted the mystery and sought out the kind of professional who can understand his plight: a philosopher.

In contrast, Hameroff probably does lack the philosopher's light touch. In one of his more infamous exchanges, he battled one of the world's most famous philosophers—Daniel Dennett. In his 1991 book,
Consciousness Explained,
Dennett argued that the problem of consciousness is in fact no problem at all. Our sense of self, the sensation of eating an apple, all these things we call consciousness, are just illusions triggered by the mechanistic computations of different collections of neurons. Dennett's vision of human experience is, in fact, so reductionistic he seems to equate us with zombies—machines that, in essence, only think we're thinking. At one conference Hameroff told Dennett, publicly, “You know, Dan, maybe the reason you like this idea is because you're a zombie. And maybe the reason I see things differently is because, I'm not.”

Hameroff told me he was half-joking. But Dennett took offense. “I wound up apologizing,” says Hameroff. “I guess he only likes the idea of being a zombie if we're all zombies.”

The scientists Nancy Woolf and Jack Tuszynski, who have each collaborated with Hameroff on papers furthering the investigation of quantum consciousness, both say Hameroff sometimes leaves a public talk he's given and turns to them, a bit too late, for advice. “Hey,” he says, “did I go too far in there?”

But in person, one on one with some time to reflect, he is far less likely to offend—or step into the ether of his ideas. In fact, when I ask him about the window quantum consciousness opens upon a potential life after death, he closes it. Maybe halfway. “Well, I've certainly never said it's a definite,” he says. “But it is possible. These near-death experiences could be the beginnings of that experience, some kind of dreamlike experience of pure consciousness, which is temporary.”

“Whoa,” I said. “I've never heard you say that before.”

We were sitting, at the time, in Hameroff's kitchen. Over his shoulder I could see fat cactuses and an endless sky. “You've never heard me say
what
before?”

“That life after death could itself be
temporary,
” I said.

My head was spinning a bit with the irony of it—death might yet await us, after life after death. “Oh yeah,” said Hameroff. “It could be.”

He went into a brief explanation. A coherent sense of self in the afterlife might be dependent upon quantum entanglement, but entangled particles can in fact be separated. (There is a potential out here, for believers. Time behaves so differently at the smallest levels of the quantum scale. Maybe once we're all a part of the great cosmic hoo ha, we never experience our own disentanglement—even if it happens.) I let this cold comfort wash over me. In myriad books and articles, mystics prattle on about the quantum afterlife, as if its eternal nature is a certainty. And Hameroff has been quoted on the subject numerous times. But until I asked him, I never knew he saw life after death as a potentially terminal condition.

What so impressed me about this moment, however, was Hameroff's ease, his utter lack of concern. Paranormal belief is so often put down to a simple fear of death. But Hameroff had mentioned this possible, final death with a stunning casualness. I saw and sensed no more emotion in him than I did the previous night, at dinner, when he pronounced his broiled fish mediocre. I laughed, there in his kitchen, about how wrongheaded so much of our thinking is about the paranormal: if he had proposed his ideas because he was a pie-eyed believer, he would hold some kind of spiritual belief. If he had opened a window to the mystical because he was scared, he wouldn't close it so casually.

In the end, I think, he proposes his ideas for one reason only: he found himself, finally, out at the edge of the universe—the man taking over for the boy in his childhood dream. And once he got a chance to take in the view, all he saw there is what's possible: a picture in which the ultimate reality of every line and shape is uncertain; a picture in which our own minds are perhaps more fundamental than even our bodies; in which mind was there at the beginning, like time and space, waiting for us, and abiding after we're gone.

UFOs and the Strange Lights Over a Texas Town

I'm trying to listen to the leaves speak, trying to steal secrets from fishes in the creek.

—Jewel, “Stephenville, TX”

L
ee Roy Gaitan didn't know quite what to make of this. Ricky Sorrells was a big, quiet man, and central Texas cool—meaning he kept to himself, he took care of his family, and he never caused trouble. But on this day he came to Gaitan's front door, eyes wet with the threat of tears, telling Gaitan that he didn't know what to do anymore. “I think I saw something,” Sorrells told him, “that I shouldn't have seen.”

Gaitan could only nod. Because whatever it was that Sorrells saw, Gaitan figured he saw it, too. Weeks later and from a greater distance, but probably the same thing. Lots of people in the trio of little farming communities, Selden, Dublin, and Stephenville, had seen it. But Ricky's encounter was the longest and the closest, and after he was discovered by the media, the most controversial.

“I didn't know what to tell him,” says Gaitan.

Well, who would?

The military won't leave me alone
, Ricky told him.
They keep flying over my house.
Gaitan was an officer of the law, a police constable. And he stood there and heard Ricky out. Sorrells fought the tears back. He held it together. He thanked Gaitan. Then he packed his big body inside his truck, and he left.

A tiny, dairy farming community of roughly 17,000 people, Stephenville is one of the many small towns in Texas where everyone knows each other and life is largely about routine: breeding cattle, birthing new calves, maintaining water misters to keep the animals cool in summer. Football season is king. The Yellow Jackets, the local high school team, draw 7,000 fans with homemade noisemakers into the stadium to watch them play. But in January 2008, all of that seemed threatened. Literally overnight, the town had a choice—to remain a proud cow town, or to embrace perhaps the most notable mass-UFO sighting in American history.

The attention Stephenville received in the wake of that sighting knocked residents just about flat. An international volunteer group that investigates sightings, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), arrived within days to interview witnesses. The streets were filled with television trucks, including a CNN crew, and reporters flew in from as far away as Japan. Angelia Joiner, the only full-time reporter on the staff of the local newspaper, the tiny
Empire-Tribune
, started doing radio interviews and even CNN's
Larry King Live
. Not everyone liked this new status. In fact, when the news first broke, and the
Empire-Tribune
ran a headline about the UFO on page 1, the paper's managing editor cried. She figured the people of her town would become nationally known as fools. And who could blame her?

This country has a UFO problem, after all. You might not have been aware we have one, or thought about it in these terms, but we do have a UFO problem: namely, we don't seem to understand what UFO really means. So here it is: a UFO is an unidentified flying object. So any time we see some object flying in the sky that we can't positively identify, we've seen a UFO. But in the same way the words
paranormal
and
supernatural
have been conflated, we now equate UFO with alien spacecraft.

How this came to be is easily understandable. If we've learned one thing in this book already, people don't like the unknown very much. And so, if we believe we're being visited by other civilizations, we read the piles of books and articles on unexplained lights in the sky, then fill in the massive gaps—with wild tales of alien races, interstellar technology, and government conspiracies. If we don't believe, we hear someone saw an unexplained light in the sky and assume, first, that he's claiming to have seen E.T. Then we figure what he
really
saw was an airplane, Venus, swamp gas, or a helicopter, and he must be a bit foolish—maybe even a UFO nut. Then we laugh.

Our UFO problem is profound enough that it leads some of us to pretend that we
do
know. Our UFO problem is stressful enough that it could even lead a man like Ricky Sorrells to the constable's porch, fighting back tears—and thrust the whole town of Stephenville into the civic equivalent of an identity crisis. And if that's the case, well—just what can we do about our UFO problem, when we seem so fundamentally incapable of letting the unknown be simply that?

S
TEVE
A
LLEN THOUGHT HE
was headed for a quiet night.

A businessman with his own trucking company, Allen knocked off work a little late that day and drove to a friend's house. The date was January 8, 2008. The temperature felt crisp at 50 degrees. A small fire burned in a ring on his friend's property, and the evening promised to be a pleasant one. The sky in Selden, Texas, bordering Stephenville, is vast, and the elevation where Allen stood is high. But that night the cool temperatures sucked all the moisture out of the air, and Allen, who also flies small planes as a private pilot, marveled at the visibility. Central Texas is not Key West, Florida—it's not built for tourists, but the sunsets are equally spectacular, lighting the sky in soft orange hues. Allen had missed that night's show. But the sky that stretched out all around him was easing into a smooth, majestic twilight.

Allen planned to stay a while, with a few friends, and reached into his jacket for a cigar, which he accidentally dropped in the grass. As he bent down to pick the cigar back up, it happened. Something in the air distracted him. A white light in the sky suddenly blazed into his peripheral vision. As he stood back upright, he saw, moving from east to west, a group of bright white lights. The lights spanned what he took to be a single object from corner to corner. He had never seen anything like this. It was huge, and even more incredibly for an object flying so near and fast, it made no sound at all.

Someone asked the obvious: “Do you see that?”

The rest murmured their assent and fell quiet.

The lights moved across his entire field of view, quick as mercury, until finally they were in a position due west of him. Then they stopped. Allen could never make out any actual craft. All he saw were the lights he took to represent the edges of one object, which now appeared to be hovering. Considering the direction the object had traveled, he figured he was looking at its back end—the lights of which suddenly blinked into various configurations before going suddenly, blazingly white, like the arc of a welder's flame.

Then it was gone.

The thing took off with the easy speed of an exhalation.

The silence stretched on for just a moment. And finally, the three witnesses looked at each other. One of them, who doesn't want his name published, headed for his truck.

“Where are you going?” Allen called to him.

But by the time the words left his mouth, Allen could see the guy had already departed for, well—the Land of Get Up and Go. For him, this unknown light had presented itself as something to be feared. And as his truck rumbled off, down a small dirt road, Allen and his remaining friend, the property owner, Mike Odom, went inside.

You won't believe what we just saw
, they said to Odom's wife, or something like that. And they were right. She didn't.

As a kind of reality check, Claudette Odom called the friend who had just bugged out, to see if he could confirm this crazy story.

He answered his cell. “Go outside,” he told her.

He was on the main road now, and he could see the lights doubling back. “It's headed your way.”

The three of them all bolted outdoors, and sure enough, there it was. This time it came in lower, maybe 1,000 feet above the ground. Still silent. But after just a few seconds, they heard the roar of two military jets trailing it. Selden, Dublin, and Stephenville all sit within 15 or 20 miles of the Brownwood Military Operations Area (MOA). Consequently, the locals see jets conducting exercises often enough to recognize them. These jets were also low to the ground, seemingly chasing the object, and their afterburners were turned on. The noise they made was deafening—a sound out of wartime.

This repeat sighting lasted just seconds. And one of the things that stayed with Allen is that those jets fell further and further behind the object, till they all flew out of sight.

There were other witnesses who saw strange things in the central Texas skies that same evening. In fact, between about 6:15
P.M.
and 7:30
P.M.,
dozens of witnesses saw
some
thing. Reading over the reports later generated in the media and by investigators who arrived at the scene, witnesses sought prosaic explanations. But the object they saw didn't descend, dim, or drift with the wind like a flare. Sometimes it appeared stationary, just hovering, before hurtling off at a rate of acceleration beyond that of a jet or helicopter. And whatever it did, it remained silent.

A police chief in Gorman, Texas, driving along the highway, said he saw one white light at first, which he assumed was a flare, until he noticed that it didn't appear to be descending or dimming. Then it just shut off, like a lamp light with the power cut. And in that same moment, three lights appeared in the space around it. He watched for a while but couldn't match it up with anything he had seen before.

Not far away, Lee Roy Gaitan, the county constable, had his sighting well after sunset. He and his family were going to watch a movie on Pay-Per-View that night, so he went out to his car to retrieve his wallet. The stars were fully visible in the sky. Just above the tree line, he saw a single, glowing reddish-orange light. The trees were a little more than a football field away, and the light seemed to hover just a bit higher than them. The light blinked off, then on again, a little nearer. He went inside to get his family. His wife just snickered and refused. His young son came back out with him, and now he saw numerous white lights that flickered in varying patterns before moving off, in one unified formation, at a terrific rate of speed. Though the lights appeared nearby, and he imagined their rapid departure must have taken a lot of power, there had been no sound.

I spoke directly to a handful of witnesses of what soon became known as the “Stephenville Lights.” I spoke to the investigators who went to the scene, and I reviewed the reports they filed and the news accounts that ultimately appeared all over the country. I interviewed Angelia Joiner, the local reporter who talked to more witnesses, more intimately than anyone else could hope to, because they trusted her. And looking over all the material gathered, I must admit, there is no real, clear narrative possible here—or at least no clear narrative that utilizes all the available, credible information and arrives at a neat conclusion. As a reporter, I've encountered the same thing in homicide trials. Even seemingly allied witnesses, there for the prosecution, say things that don't match up. So it isn't just bias at work. It is the confabulation inherent in memory. Did the gunman come in from the east side of the street, or the west? Was the gun black or silver? Big or small? Did the gunman fire one time or three? Did he say anything? I've heard eyewitnesses disagree about all these details. The sighting of a UFO makes the whole process even harder because, well, c'mon: bright white lights in the shape of a massive, half-mile-long rectangle? That wink on and off, assume different patterns and blaze away at speeds that make F-16s look slow? Such occurrences don't fit into our daily store of experiences. And so the mind is set to racing through potential prosaic explanations—and more extreme possibilities. Worse, when a vacuum of data surrounds a mysterious sighting, people at the fringes of belief and unbelief come to dominate the conversation. And the effect is such that witnesses have to think long and hard before talking at all.

Allen, the private pilot, went home that night and told his wife what he saw. He suggested he might call the newspaper. She said
Please don't
. In fact, she told him he shouldn't mention what he saw to anyone. It wasn't that she didn't believe him. She was just being protective. It is hard to come off as sane when describing an event that sounds
in
sane. Allen had seen something he could not identify; and culturally, in America, that means one thing: E.T. He was now the bearer of the stigma associated with the paranormal.

Allen understood his wife's concerns.

He even shared them.

He told her he'd sleep on it. Then, the next day, he picked up the phone and called Angelia Joiner at the
Empire-Tribune
.

L
IFE HAPPENED FAST AT
that point, not so much in Stephenville as
to
it. Joiner's story, published on January 10, with Allen as her main source, brought forward numerous witnesses. The majority of them, including police officers and a judge, have never been publicly identified. Such is the stigma associated with
unidentified
flying objects. But Ricky Sorrells did go on the record.

Sorrells is a machinist, husband, and father, and a few weeks before the January 8 sightings took place in Stephenville, he witnessed an event he later thought was connected. Sorrells was off work that day and decided to spend a few hours deer hunting. He has a secluded property, with neighbors he would need to hike or drive to reach, the nearest one a half-mile away. He got his rifle and stalked into the woods, thinking he'd be alone the entire time. After a few minutes of hiking, however, he got tripped up in some brush and, as he steadied himself, looked up. There it was. Right over his head. Maybe three hundred feet in the air. Barn-metal gray. Massive. He couldn't see from one end to the other, could not see an edge, could not see the sky. His first instinct was to lift his riflescope to his eye and take aim. His breath was coming fast, his heart beating hard. Even as he realized a rifle bullet would do no damage to something this big, he continued looking through his scope. An aircraft loomed above him, without any rivets or visible seams. Its underbelly, however, featured a series of inverted cones, projecting up a very short distance into the object. And slowly, his understanding racing to catch up with his senses, he realized the object made no sound.