Polish Trade-Union Organizer Lech Walesa appeared in my room last night.
To be precise, he appeared in my bathroom. Even more precisely, his face appeared in my towel. It's one of those really shaggy towels, and something resembling the old rebel's distinctive face and moustache appeared smack in the middle of it. I saw this while pissing.
What was going on, I thought? What did it mean, standing there in the bathroom at 10:20pm, on an otherwise mundane evening? Was this a sign? Was some nefarious trap about to be sprung on Lech Walesa? Or perhaps this was proof that the Battle of Armageddon is to be fought in Warsaw? Was this a sign the aliens – THE GREYS – would start their final push for global domination with the Polish government? Was there enough time to warn all relevant government entities??
Too frequently I do the stupid thing and bash on the crazy people of the world who believe in conspiracies. The General Conspiracy Nut: the Illuminati, in association with the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergers, secretly manipulates all events behind closed doors in shadowy meetings; the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, with an assist from Israel; aliens traveled extraordinary distances across the galaxy and crashed their fancy spacecraft near Roswell, NM; a who’s who of villains – including the CIA, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Castro, Dallas Police, and evil homosexuals from New Orleans – plotted the assassination of JFK; the USS Eldridge, as part of a Navy military experiment gone awry, was teleported from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard to Norfolk, VA, with some sailors grotesquely materializing inside of bulkheads; the greys are in cahoots with our own Joint Chiefs of Staff, exchanging technology in an underground base near Dulce, NM; etc.
I bash on them because some idiotic human interest story appears on cnn.com, or in one of our local rags here in northern NM. Case in point: in the June 3rd Santa Fe New Mexican, an article headlined ET Touchdown? takes us to Angel Fire, where a circle of dead grass in a Moreno Valley pasture has been labeled an “authentic landing site” by New Mexico MUFON assistant director Dee Gragg.
Gragg is also a professor at NMSU, something I find slightly terrifying for a guy whose initial reaction to a circle of dead grass is that, clearly folks, we’re dealing with an extraterrestrial spacecraft landing site. How is it that guys like this are allowed to teach? At any rate, there are two reasons why this story is a textbook case of the asinine, and they are so obvious that no more time ever need be wasted on them, and yet in the face of such relentless idiocy, they’re worth repeating:
1) No conspiracy theory regarding UFOs has a single, solitary scrap of physical evidence to back it up. Any UFO case you can name – The Roswell Incident, Travis Walton, Betty and Barney Hill, Kenneth Arnold, the Phoenix Lights, Rendlesham Forest – has no physical evidence to prove it. Period. None, nowhere. Sure as shit a circle of dead grass in a Morena Valley pasture is not physical evidence of a UFO landing site. It is, in fact, physical evidence of dead grass.
2) Everyone finds a way to believe what he wants to believe. As Michael Shermer points out, “Psychologically we are superstitious creatures. We are pattern-seeking animals that find patterns in random noise. That’s a very human, natural thing to do.” Shermer is taking the high road by excusing – or at least, explaining – people who see dead circles of grass and deduce in the next 1.5 seconds with no empirical evidence whatsoever that it’s a UFO landing pad. However, I shan’t be joining him on the high road. I’ll stampede onto the low road and say what Shermer meant to say: people are fuckin’ idiots. I understand that we’re forever seeking patterns in randomness, but there comes a time when you stop fucking around, get at least a high school education, and realize: oh hell, we’re wired to seek patterns in randomness. Maybe seeing Lech Walesa in my towel doesn’t mean shit. Maybe, in fact, I made it up; Lech wasn’t actually in my towel, but it just appeared that way, because there are so many little fibers on the towel that, by chance, sometimes it appears to form a pattern and resemble a person or thing.
But Gragg is the counterpart to the dude who sees Christ’s face in a fucking tortilla, of all fucking places, and announces to the world that Christ is reaching out to us through a tortilla. Cue hordes of ignorant losers who make the pilgrimage to the house of the guy with Christ in his tortilla. You would think, given the big deal they make out of it, that this is some sort of sign, that something important, even IMMINENT is afoot – yet, nothing EVER happens after Jesus is sighted in a tortilla or on the side of a building. Christ doesn’t appear in the flesh, triggering the Battle of Armageddon, and humans don’t start magically treating each other with dignity and respect. People line up to view the Christ tortilla, and then they go back to their lives, no more or less illuminated than they were that morning. And it's all over, as suddenly as it began. Back to the same old prejudices, the same old bullshit. Same as it ever was.
Think on this: this sort of crap has been going on for centuries. Surely we – as a species – have at last arrived at a clue, that, say, maybe there really is something to the scientific method. You know - maybe if there is a Christ, and he's trying to send a message, there are about a bazillion better, more easily understood ways of doing so, than depositing his likeness in a tortilla. But people don’t get a clue. Ever. A lot of people I know rail against organized religion, then turn around and talk about the merits of the Roswell Incident. It’s a curious double standard; conspiracy nuts slagging off fundamentalist christians. Had the conspiracy nuts lived in Italy in 1633, they would have been the same zealots who censured Galileo for suggesting that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe. Because both of these groups – religious fundamentalists and conspiracy buffs – have a belief system grounded in superstition, not science. They’re far more alike than they’d ever care to admit. In fact, it’s only because of people like Galileo, and Newton, and Einstein, and Gould, that our self-imposed shackles of ignorance are every now and again loosened, and we perceive a little truth in our lives.
But fighting that kind of ignorance and insanity – the insanity of conspiracy nuts – is a losing battle. You’ll never convince them otherwise, because they need no evidence, and have disposed of critical and analytical thinking. Getting worked up over the Angel Fire article is only proof that I still suffer from arrested development. I should be able to laugh at it and move on. But every now and again the frustration at the idiocy reaches critical mass… Can't we do any goddamn better at this stage?
