Fringe-ology (17 page)

De Bono argues that the West's tradition of settling disagreement by debate or argument is an example of
over
reliance on logic. In debate, the best debater wins. In argument, the person whose case best fits the rules of logic and the
current
evidence wins. And yet, scientists themselves report that their best discoveries often don't come when they are slumped over a pen and paper, poring over data, thinking oh-so-logically. They come, as neuroscientist Terry Sejnowski put it in chapter 3, when they're in the shower. Or brushing their teeth. Or sleeping. Biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi said science depends on “seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”

In sum, logic is a partner to freer, associative thinking. Logic can help define the contours of a problem, but sometimes, in order to find a solution, we have to go beyond such strictures to find the unseen path.

My favorite example of sudden insight is that of the Irish mathematician, William Hamilton, who spent fifteen years on the problem of generalizing the square root of –1. The answer came to him whole and suddenly, as he walked in the street. Lacking a pencil and paper to write the formula down, he took a penknife from his pocket and carved it into the stone of a nearby bridge. “An electric current seemed to close,” he later wrote, “and a spark flashed forth.”

Dr. David Jones, at Newcastle University, long collected such accounts and gave a series of BBC lectures on the topic of inspiration. He cited the result of a survey of 1,450 American scientists conducted by two research chemists in the 1930s. Their finding, subsequently published in the
Journal of Chemical Education
, was that “hard, rational thought” traced the contours of the problem to be solved, not its answer. Think about the problem, they advised, then go do something else. Don't allow worry or anxiety into the brain. And suddenly, while driving a car or sleeping or bathing, the answer will pop, suddenly, and seemingly fully formed, like the mathematician's formula, into view.

De Bono's methods are designed to help people get outside the rigors of the logical thinking we're usually trained in, to create these flashes of insight and make new conceptual connections on a regular, predictable basis. Logic does have its weaknesses: Logic is based on society's current storehouse of accepted knowledge, and as we've seen, that storehouse changes all the time. To refer back to the previous chapter, five years ago the average physicist would have been happy to take the position in a debate that quantum effects play no important, measurable role in biological systems. The available evidence would have supported that case, while opponents would have been arguing mostly from
possibility
. But today, biologists are chasing after quantum effects in plants and animals. The very grounds of the debate have shifted, and in just a few years' time.

In his book,
Oracle Bones
, Peter Hessler describes how the rulers of China's Shang Dynasty pondered cracks in turtle shells. In the sound of the shells snapping, it was said, they heard the voices of their ancestors offering advice. From our modern perspective, the cracks meant nothing. But through the lens of creative thinking, these cracks gave their interpreters a place to stand outside the rigors of logic, to dream, to allow their minds to associate freely and make new connections. Oracle bones comprised a regular practice of a stable society, a dynasty that lasted hundreds of years.

In this respect, people who look at that relatively small number of unexplained UFO cases and wonder if aliens are visiting the planet, who carry it along with them as a possibility, are far from stupid. They are merely engaged in some creative thinking. And if, some day, they turn out to be right, their interpretation of the reports they've read of unidentified flying objects will have led them to the right conclusion— like cracks in a turtle shell—faster than current evidence alone could have gotten them there.

The possibility of visitation holds more credibility than skeptics, or the rules of formal debate, might allow. Given the size of the universe, our distance from other potentially habitable planets, the energy sources and the top-end speed of which we're aware, it seems exceedingly unlikely another civilization could find us and get here. And personally, I'd like to see incontrovertible evidence before I start believing aliens have visited the planet. But I also don't agree with the skeptics when they
ridicule
such belief. After all, an alien society would be just that—alien. Debates about their methods of propulsion, and their motivations—Why would they bother with a dairy farming community?—are by definition utterly hopeless. Their supposed inability to find us and get here is a product only of our own current understanding—and might hold absolutely no relationship to reality.

Of course, none of this means E.T. exists. And when I attended a weekend “UFO Awareness Day” here in Philadelphia, I was stupefied by the level of emotional commitment some attendees had to their far-out concepts: some spoke of a “hidden” planet, Nibiru, that they believe will impact Earth in 2012; some talked about reptilians, an evil race of lizard-looking aliens with forked tongues; and many harped on alien abductions.

Like the skeptics who argue against them, they take it all so seriously. And in this point of relatedness, I think, the combatants on either side too often fail to acknowledge what the rest of us know about aliens: they're fun.

From rock star David Bowie's androgynous alien creation, Ziggy Stardust, to the identity politics of the recent film
District Nine
, aliens have provided a creative launching pad for explorations of everything from fashion and human sexuality to issues of race and international relations. Aliens in fiction have allowed us a window through which we get to see ourselves, and they serve as an oracle bone for our culture. That said, some people don't have the luxury of considering the question of E.T. solely at the multiplex. Some people have the issue thrust upon them. The people of Stephenville, for instance, never asked to play host to a paranormal controversy. The people of Stephenville just looked up.

I
N THE WEEKS AND
months after the sighting, it slowly became apparent that the Stephenville Lights were good candidates to stay in that unknown category. The military's behavior was one reason. After two weeks of maintaining they had no jets in the area, they reversed course, saying ten F-16s had been flying maneuvers outside the nearby Brownwood Military Operations Area. They proclaimed their initial denial “an internal communications problem.”

After spending about a week in Stephenville, I left believing that the military was either directly involved or had some interest in whatever flew over this small Texas town in January 2008. Again and again, locals told me that the days after the sighting were filled with flyovers by military jets and helicopters. “I had a lot of media who were in town covering the story, asking me,” says Angelia Joiner, the reporter from the
Empire-Tribune
, “ ‘Does this happen every day?' ”

“I've lived here my whole life,” says Matt Copeland, one of the owners of Barefoot Athletics, “and I had never seen anything like it. There were jets flying overhead, sometimes really low, all the time.”

The military denied they were doing anything unusual. “I think they were trying to discredit the witnesses to the national media,” says Joiner. “Because if there is all this stuff flying over here, then maybe people just got confused.”

Believers tend to think of military conspiracies to cover up the existence of aliens. But I wonder if the military was covering something up, whether that something was some secret military craft. If so, this would not be the first time witnesses saw a paradigm-busting technology and thought it extraterrestrial. UFOlogists concede the U2 spy plane and the sleek, black, triangular stealth bomber were likely responsible for waves of UFO sightings. The object in the Stephenville sightings had flown outside the military operating zone, but who knows? Maybe Stephenville, on January 8, 2008, had in fact been the site of a test run for a new military project?

I bring this up because a military craft is one of those more logical possibilities (and one that fits the reported facts better than flares or some odd weather phenomenon). But I also mention it for another reason: if something radically new was flying through the Stephenville area that night, I'd argue for the overall accuracy of the town's eyewitnesses. Certainly, if there was some sort of advanced military technology tooling around, their testimony that they saw something they couldn't explain would seem to me completely correct—and no laughing matter at all.

In this sense, I see the people of Stephenville as standing in for all eyewitnesses to the paranormal—ordinary people who didn't ask for weirdness, or to be seen as somehow strange themselves, yet had this cartoonish mantle thrust upon them. In the early days after the sighting, they weren't out there telling the assembled media they saw craft from another civilization—just that they saw something that outstripped any technology they know about. I'd argue that in this claim, the evidence suggests they were correct. And yet, given our nation's UFO problem, they found their own credibility undermined in subtle ways.

Allen, Sorrells, and Joiner note that the national press chose to report the same culturally coded details, again and again: Sorrells was deer hunting when he had his sighting; Allen claimed the UFO was “as big as a WalMart.”

As a journalist, I can tell you: I'd use the WalMart line, too. It's colorful and evocative. It's a great quote. But it is also true that, like Sorrells's hunting, the WalMart reference seems to peg Allen in a specific socioeconomic and cultural place. “I regret saying that now,” Allen told me.

At the time the media glare got hottest, Pam Kinsel, a member of the high school science club, spoke to a reporter and gave voice to the community's worst fear: “[The sighting] makes us look like we're a bunch of retarded hicks,” she said.

At the time, in early 2008, the depths of this country's UFO problem had recently been revealed in dramatic fashion: Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich was running for president of the United States during an October 2007 Democratic primary debate when a UFO shot him down. It was the usually sober-minded political journalist Tim Russert who pushed Kucinich under the equivalent of a paranormal bus: “This is a serious question,” he began, lest anyone think he was joking. “The godmother of your daughter, Shirley MacLaine, writes in her new book that you sighted a UFO over her home in Washington State.”

The crowd can be heard at this point, laughing and gasping as Russert continues, “[She writes] that you found the encounter extremely moving, that it was a triangular craft, silent and hovering, that you felt a connection to your heart and heard directions in your mind. Now, did you see a UFO?”

“I did,” said Kucinich, “and the rest of the account—”

The crowd started groaning and gasping again, and Kucinich reminded the crowd what UFO really means: “It was an
unidentified
flying object,” he said. “Okay? It's unidentified. And I saw something. . . .”

The crowd buzzed with laughter, the point made: Woe be unto you, who admits to seeing something you can't identify.

The elfin-looking, pointy-eared Kucinich was a marginal candidate. He was never going to win the primary, anyway. But his run was effectively ended by Russert's question.

He had been wise enough, over the years, never to bring up the sighting himself. But MacLaine had ended his hiding for good, with her book,
Sage-ing While Age-ing
, which described a twenty-five-year-old sighting at her home. Intriguingly, they were near a military base, and military helicopters were spotted trailing after the object there, too.

In the wake of Russert's “serious question,”
The
Wall Street Journal
published a front-page story portraying Kucinich as silly. And the rest of the media piled on—the twenty-five-year-old sighting he had never discussed now serving as a metaphor for his frivolous candidacy.

This all went down just a couple of months before the people of Stephenville had their sighting and rendered them keenly aware that the Stephenville Lights marked them, in many minds, as an unsophisticated tribe. But the people I found were smarter than all that. They understood how deer hunting and WalMart had been used as emblems of the lower class, to be slapped on their foreheads by a media eager to play into cultural stereotypes. And over the course of my time in Stephenville, I encountered several locals who sized me up on the Internet and told me all about it in a manner that was at once straightforward cow-town Texas and utterly contemporary America.

“I checked you out on Google,” Frank Burke, a spirited old man, told me. “I saw the kind of stuff you wrote at your old job . . . the
Philadelphia
Weekly
? You're all right.”

I'm not going to argue that the people of Stephenville qualify as technophiles just because they learned to use the Internets well enough to work the Google Machine. But I was impressed that they had gone deep into my history, beyond the magazine where I work now to my previous newspaper job, and that they used my clips on crime and politics and traditional journalistic subjects, to assure
them
selves, the UFO witnesses, that
I
wasn't some kind of nut. And I note that if these are modern-day hicks, then hicks as we have ridiculed them simply do not exist in great numbers anymore.

The majority of the media, however, seems to have missed this particular memo.

After reviewing all the news accounts I could get my hands on, I've determined that the most telling, wrong-headed cheap shot to the people of Stephenville was ultimately delivered by a writer from the
Los Angeles
Times
: “The night sky above Stephenville is a jet black canvas that seems the perfect backdrop for the sharp white specks of stars,” the
Times
's subsequent article reads, “and any imaginings of strange glowing lights.”