[extropy-chat] FWD [forteana] First-string vs. second-string academics and the paranormal

[Terry Colvin]

-----Forwarded Message-----
>What are the differences, if any, between academics who are sympathetic 
>versus unsympathetic toward an open-minded interest in the anomalous or 
>paranormal? What, if anything, distinguishes academic "believers" versus 
>"skeptics" about parapsychology, UFO's, abductions, Bigfoot, Lake 
>Monsters, crop circles, etc.?
>
>I was reminded of this questions a couple of years ago when I attended a 
>UFO and "Earth Mysteries" conference at Bordentown, New Jersey. One 
>afternoon there I got into a conversation with a parapsychologist about 
>abduction researchers David Jacobs and John Mack and Mexican ufologist & 
>TV personality Jaime Maussan. He pretty much deconstructed Jacobs, Mack, 
>and Maussan as high-status white males who encounter the paranormal in 
>middle age after many years as prestigious, conventional "Establishment" 
>academics or media figures--and become unhinged by it, becoming 
>messianic evangelists for it--and, as I also sort of recall his adding, 
>using their newfound messianic charisma as a drawing card to attract women!
>
>Actually, that parapsychologist's observations strike me as pretty 
>applicable to Mack and Maussan, but less accurate for David Jacobs. John 
>Mack was and Jaime Maussan is a prominent high-status white male in the 
>top echelon of his field--Mack as a Harvard professor and 
>Pulitzer-winning author of a "mainstream" psycho-biography (of T.E. 
>Lawrence), Maussan as a popular, celebrated TV personality in his 
>country--who seem to have pretty much ignored the paranormal most of 
>their lives and then rather suddenly discovered it fairly late in life. 
>Abductologist and Temple University history professor David Jacobs, on 
>the other hand, strikes me more as a second-string academic, never 
>anywhere as prominent in intellectual/cultural circles as Mack and 
>affiliated with an institution (Temple University) somewhat less 
>prestigious than Harvard, who has dealt with UFO's most of his 
>professional life, having written his PhD dissertation on the UFO 
>controversy in post-World War II America. When I pointed out these 
>considerations to the parapsychologist, he conceded my point. However, 
>he still felt Jacobs was and is rather simple-minded and literalistic, 
>tone-deaf to the ambiguities and "liminalities" of the paranormal, 
>wedded to a crude (as he saw it) "nuts-and-bolts" belief in literal 
>physical aliens visiting, abducting, and exploiting us.
>
>
>This contrast between Harvard's John Mack and Temple University's David 
>M. Jacobs, I feel, suggests general distinctions in beliefs, attitudes, 
>interests, etc., between higher- and lower-status academics that might 
>be interesting to study sociologially.  Most ufologists with academic 
>affiliations, for instance, seem to be affiliated with second-string 
>rather than "Ivy League" institutions.
>
>In an area of controversy outside Forteana or ufology, I remember once 
>reading a _Scientific American_ news item about 1969 or 1970 summarizing 
>a then recent survey of American scientists' opinions on the Viet Nam 
>war. Physicists, chemists, biologists, astronomers, mathematicians, 
>etc., affiliated with higher-status schools (Harvard, MIT, Columbia, 
>Chicago, Berkeley, CalTech, etc.) tended overwhelmingly to be "doves," 
>strongly condemning our Viet Nam involvement and advocating immediate 
>U.S.withdrawal. Scientists affiliated with less prestigious schools, 
>however, tended presominantly to be "hawks," strongly supportive of the 
>Johnson and Nixon administrations' Viet Nam policies. Moreover, the 
>survey found a definite statistical correlation between institutional 
>prestige and political opinion--the more prestigious a scientist's 
>school, the more likely he/she was to be a "dove"--and the less 
>prestigious his/her school, the more likely to be a "hawk."
>
>Though the _Scientific American_ piece on American scientists and the 
>Viet Nam war didn't quite explicitly draw this conclusion, the clear 
>implication seemed to be that professors at high-prestige schools see 
>themselves as a "cultural �lite," "clerisy," and "the conscience of the 
>nation." They consider themselves a sort of secular modern counterpart 
>of the priesthood or the Hebrew prophets, while profs at second- and 
>third-string schoools see themselves as merely doing one more 
>white-collar middle-class job in society, not all that different from 
>lawyers, dentists, accountants, bank officers, used car dealers, or 
>middle managers. This may also have implications for Forteanism. Could 
>faculty at second- or third-string schools be more sensitized by 
>subliminal social resentment to "seeing through"the "Emperor's New 
>Clothes" aspects of self-anointed intellectual and cultural �lites, 
>focussing on Forteana as an aspect of reality systematically ignored by 
>those intellectual and cultural �lites? 
>
>The thought that most ufologists with academic affiliations seem to be 
>affiliated with second-string rather than "Ivy League" schools, though 
>there of course are exceptions, first popped into my head a couple of 
>decades ago while reading Frank Salibury's _Utah UFO Display_ (1974). 
>Frank Salisbury, I already knew from coming across numerous references 
>to him in other UFO books, was a Professor of Plant Physiology at Utah 
>State University--a school most people would agree is not quite in the 
>same league with Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, Chicago, Duke, UCLA, or 
>Berkeley. The _Utah UFO Display_ book jacket featured a photograph of 
>Salisbury with his wife and 4 or 5 children (as I recall) posed in front 
>of Salt Lake City's Mormon Tabernacle. The imagery hardly suggested the 
>values, sensibility, or outlook of an Eastern Establishment cultural 
>�lite intellectual! :-)  Salisbury, I thought, obviously inhabited a 
>very different sort of cultural world from, say, Noam Chomsky, John 
>Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish--or John Mack! :-)    
>Some people, I wryly reflected, might find Salisbury a bit "politically 
>incorrect" for that photo! :-)
>
>About the same time, I came across a reference, again like one of many I 
>had seen over the years in UFO books, to APRO consultant and abductee 
>hypnotist R. Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist in the counseling department 
>of the University of Wyoming. Again, it struck me, a school generally 
>regarded as not in exactly the same league with Harvard or MIT! On the 
>other hand, however, another APRO consultant and active abductee 
>hypnotist, James A. Harder, was a professor of engineeering at 
>Berkeley--and I'd also always thought of J. Allen Hynek's Northwestern 
>University as pretty much a top-drawer school.
>
>So, the correlation was certainly not perfect or absolute--but still was 
>sort of suggestive. The conclusion I drew was NOT that profs involved in 
>ufology are too dumb to get hired by good schools. Rather, it was that 
>the awareness of being at a school a bit outside the top scholastic 
>�lite may create enough of a sense of status resentment or inconsistency 
>to inspire a defiant interest in matters ignored or dismissed by the 
>"Academic Establishment." This, I would like to add here, is NOT always 
>necessarily a bad thing! It may sometimes be positively helpful for 
>objectivity, open-mindedness, and creativity to be somewhat "marginal" 
>or "liminal," to use sociologically oriented parapsychologist George P. 
>Hansen's characterization in _The Trickster and the Paranormal_ 
>(Philadelphia: XLibris, 2001) of the paranormal and the people involved 
>with it!
>
>Peace,
>T. Peter