“If a UFO lands in a forest and there’s no one there to see it, was there ever really a UFO?” – Mark Pilkington, Mirage Men

The American religion, wrote literary critic Harold Bloom, is only superficially Christianity or any of its mainstream varieties. If you look under the surface of the diverse varieties of Christian faith there is a singular, distinctively American core religion that has more in common with the Gnosticism of the church of the first centuries AD than it does with the more doctrinal Catholic and Protestant churches that replaced it. Gnosticism is a religion founded on direct personal experience, direct knowing of reality (which goes by a variety of names of which God is only one among several).

If you think about it, UFOs are perfect symbols of such a Gnostic religion. For example, I Know What I Saw is the title of a recent documentary by James Fox (the most significant and sober film treatment of the subject of UFOs) and the phrase “I know what I saw” is expressed verbatim or in paraphrase by many of the interviewees in that film. Indeed it is expressed by UFO witnesses everywhere. (The phrase is also used by witnesses to Sasquatch and other extraordinary phenomena.) It means knowing that is based not on the testimony of science or mainstream common knowledge, but on direct personal experience with something most of society dismisses as impossible or as fantasy.

As more and more Americans witness unexplainable objects in our skies, and as more and more reputable authorities (military personnel, pilots, astronauts, government officials) go public verifying the reality of a UFO presence, the more I believe UFOs will become a central symbol in the American Gnostic religion. We don’t know what these objects are, or even if they represent a single phenomenon. There is no evidence they are from space, and the extraterrestrial hypothesis is losing ground among many believers—there are other explanations. But whatever they are, seeing is believing, and the more people see them, the more they will become central features in the American religion.

Jacques Vallee has written of UFO cults as harmful tools of manipulation. But I’m not sure that direct personal experience is such a bad basis for a religion, in the sense of belief in — or rather, knowledge of — something “higher” that passeth understanding. Awe and wonder, a questioning of common sense and of the limited nature of science, are the typical effects of such extraordinary experiences and thus are an effective destroyer of human arrogance, something churches no longer do a good job at.

The weird and sort of shady neighborhood of the blogosphere I haunt was lately abuzz (a-twitter?) about a new book called The Big Brain, by neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger. I haven’t read it yet, but I gather it’s an account of the evolution of the large human neocortex. It is making news, however, for reviving interest in a paleoanthropological anomaly that had been forgotten since the first few decades of the last century: the Boskop race (or species) of hominids that supposedly inhabited part of South Africa for about 20,000 years.

The Boskops were thought to be remarkable because their brains were 25-35% larger than those of modern humans, indicating a significantly superior intelligence. They also possessed pedomorphic (childlike) facial features: large eyes, small mouth, etc. Pedomorphia in human evolution has been taken as indicating “advancement”: Adult humans look like overgrown baby chimps, the same way the Boskops looked a bit like overgrown baby humans. It suggests they were smarter, perhaps “more evolved,” than us—that is, more removed from our nearest great ape ancestors.

According to those early paleoanthropologists, this population of baby-faced, big-headed hominids went extinct only about 10,000 years ago. That’s an eyeblink ago—practically within cultural memory.

Lynch and Granger have already been criticized for ignoring the fact that subsequent paleontologists discredited the existence of Boskops altogether. These people were not a separate species, those critics argued, but were just a subsection within the normal human range of variation. The paleontologists who first described them were actually just arbitrarily separating them from the normal human remains found in the same region. Boskops were held to be a statistical fiction, in other words, and not paleontological reality. And thus, until The Big Brain, the whole Boskop question went into the dustbin of discredited science and was forgotten for 80 years.

I certainly don’t know enough to give an opinion on the science behind Boskops, but the whole question of a possibly more intelligent variety of human that once walked the earth alongside Homo sapiens sapiens is really, really interesting. It has already been suggested on a number of blogs (including Cabinet of Wonders) that Boskops, if they were real, could be the evolutionary origins of “alien” Grays: The big brains and big eyes certainly suggest such an idea. It’s fun to think about, if you like thinking about such things.

But what interests me as much as the possible hominid, “cryptoterrestrial” origin of aliens is the nature of our resistance, or even abhorrence, of the idea of more advanced hominids sharing our planet. I don’t think it can be chalked up merely to an inferiority complex. I think it has to do with a major cultural—and especially scientific—imperative of our times: to think of the human race as singular and undifferentiated when it comes to intelligence. The very possibility of slightly more intelligent hominids reopens the door to seeing mental endowments as unequally distributed, the basis of scientific racism.

Past centuries were dominated by racist thinking. Variations in intelligence between human groups were accepted as obvious fact by the European imperialist societies, and this idea legitimized all forms of exploitation and injustice. The scientific racism of early anthropologists is still a bitter memory in academe, linked inextricably to the worst excesses of European Fascism. No one wants to go down that path again. As a result, there is a tacit imperative in the social sciences to chalk up apparent differences in intelligence to variation in culture and environment. Whenever a maverick scholar bucks this convention and puts forth a view of racial differences in intelligence, as the authors of The Bell Curve did in the mid 90s, it causes a furore. No ink is spared in the effort to discredit the idea.

The political reasons are sound and obvious, and the scientific argument that all modern humans have the same innate cognitive endowment is one that I have always been persuaded by. But I’m open minded enough to think that political correctness could be biasing the science. Scientists absolutely do not want to face the possibility that the world’s peoples might not be equally endowed with mental ability. We may not want that to be true — but preferring a certain picture of reality doesn’t necessarily make it so.

Could the Boskops’ fate in 20th century anthropology have been linked to the basic reluctance to consider a scalar rather than categorical nature of inherited intelligence? To answer such a question, I think it’s useful to consider the other cryptoterrestrial that enjoys equal disrepute among modern scientists: Bigfoot.

I’ve often suspected that the scientific establishment’s dismissal of the possibility of “less intelligent” bipedal hominid cryptids is related to its resistance toward the idea of more intelligent beings like extra- or crypto-terrestrials. Imagine what would happen if it were to be established that there were slightly less intelligent hominids living in the world today: not slightly less intelligent in the sense of apes or dolphins, but slightly less intelligent in the sense of children or impaired adults: that is, within but at the extreme low end of normal human variation. What if they turned out to be essentially primitive humans, but lacking our linguistic capabilities and thus having inferior cultural capacity?

Chimps are sometimes said to possess the intelligence of 3-year-olds. What if there were creatures in the forest that basically look like big hairy versions of us, and that possess the intelligence of 8- or 10-year-olds?

No one wants to face such a possibility. While we concede an amazing range of biological difference throughout the animal kingdom, living humans are the exception: We don’t want any dangerous gradations, any continuity with lesser or higher forms that would make the distinction blurry. We need a buffer between us and our nearest ancestors. Sasquatch would obliterate that buffer.

The political dangers are real, not only because it would pose an ethical conundrum about what rights to grant Sasquatch, but because it would by extension reopen the question of intelligence variation in human populations. Are blacks perhaps really inferior to whites (as The Bell Curve argued)? Could they be somewhere on a continuum between whites and Sasquatch? It’s an abhorrent idea, but proof of Sasquatch would reopen the door to that kind of thinking.

Are Asians perhaps really smarter than everyone else? Are they a missing link between blacks and whites, on the one end, and alien Grays on the other? Again, the discovery that there are advanced cryptoterrestrials among us, a smarter offshoot of humanity, or even a past race of super-gifted South Africans, would, again, encourage such ideas.

I suspect that keeping that door shut is part of the reason scientists and other respectable people don’t even allow the “cryptid” question to be raised, and why it is consigned to certain disreputable neighborhoods of the blogosphere.

I’ve been writing here lately about UFOs, which is something of a departure for me. But for a long time I’ve been interested in things Fortean—amazing or paranormal experiences, mysticism, the occult and the paranormal, or fringe-science topics like extraterrestrials and Bigfoot—in short, things that transcend the humdrum and everyday. Part of the reason is, I’m interested in what it means when someone witnesses something (like a flying saucer or a tall hairy hominid) “with their own eyes.” Those of a Fortean bent are necessarily interested in, and are committed philosophically to, the value and validity of individual experience.

Individual experience is, in a very fundamental way, opposed to science, and the scientific method. The latter is a set of processes whereby the individual, subjective experiencer, the human, is removed as much as possible from the gathering of knowledge about the world. This presents a problem for Forteans who also, like me, consider themselves scientists.

I think this conflict is worth confronting, because it may shed light on some of the cultural fascination with Fortean subjects. I’ve watched a lot of documentaries about Bigfoot and UFOs in the last few years, and the antagonism between science and experience can be seen clearly in all of them. One of the universal elements in such films is the token skeptic representing “the Scientific Establishment” (as Peter Graves puts it in my favorite Bigfoot film, The Mysterious Monsters). This character is the one who throws cold water on our belief; he is invariably portrayed as the Enemy, the antagonist, the stubborn authority who refuses to accept the weight of firsthand accounts. In debunking the phenomenon in question, he’ll point out the susceptibility of the mind to tricks of the imagination, to social fads, and to wishful thinking. In other words, this person distrusts personal experience, no matter how seemingly sane or sober.

This “skeptic” character clues us in to the appeal of Bigfoot and other “paranormal” phenomena. It is not simply that people wish for Bigfoot or UFOs to be real in order to give some meaning to their lives, or because they want something to believe in. (Although, sure, it’s partly that—we all, on some level, “want to believe.”) The other part is this: We–we Forteans, we back-woods Rednecks, we ordinary people–are rooting for Bigfoot or for UFOs to be real because these things represent the hope, the real possibility, that science could just for once lose the epistemological wrestling match against personal experience.

The “American religion,” as Harold Bloom has observed, is essentially Gnostic, based on the fundamental value of personal experience. This “religion” is visible in all our current debates over things like global warming and Creationism. This puts Forteans who, like me, are basically rational liberal agnostics, in strange company. What rational liberal agnostic Forteans have in common with conservative American Christians is a resentment of the meta-message of science: that the testimony of our eyes, and of common sense, is invalid.

No one likes to be told that the sense they make of the world and their lives is mistaken—it is invalidating in the extreme—and yet “you are wrong” is the tacit signal sent by most science, from Galileo right down to modern neuroimaging. A scientist telling me that my worldview is inaccurate or biased, that what my parents taught me at their knee is untrue, and that what I may have seen with my own eyes on a desolate road or over a cornfield is an error, is not going to win me as a friend.

This is why I cringe every time an eminent liberal humanist scientist like Richard Dawkins writes a book about why God doesn’t exist. Such prophets of science have fallen prey to the delusion that humans are governed principally by reason, and that they persist in holding unreasonable beliefs simply because they have not been exposed to the scientific evidence. But people will go to great lengths to defend their right to bear their experience. Put yourself in the shoes of someone raised in a conservative Christian community: If this apostle of science seems to belong to a culture that I am alienated from and that represents values I have been brought up to abhor, his rational arguments will only galvanize my own knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, my anti-scientism.

I use the phrase “right to bear experience” advisedly, because there is some way in which the gun debate in America directly reflects this basic rift between science and experience. Arguments against gun ownership tend to follow the same lines, and to preach to the same choir, as arguments for evolution or global warming; they point to evidence as if facts, statistics, trends, etc. were enough—that you just have to make people wake up and smell the data. Proponents of science are unaware that rational scientific discourse conjures the image of someone who “knows better” coming into one’s home and snatching away one’s ability to construct one’s own worldview out what one’s elders have tought one at their knees and, most importantly, what one has seen with one’s own eyes. It is exactly akin to the Redneck bogeyman fantasy of a liberal bureaucrat coming into one’s home and taking away one’s firearm.

The individual is sovereign in our hearts, whether we consider ourselves liberal humanists or conservative Fundamentalists. Scientists and writers who seek to popularize science would do well to recognize this fact. Though I consider myself a scientist, I hate how offensive and tactless science often is. I wish it would learn some manners. And I wish scientists would come up with some new way of talking that accepted and honored the sovereignty of personal experience as something more than simply a negligible statistic (the n of 1). Because the fact of the matter is that no one, not even a scientist, can receive science or scientific data except via a subjective, biased, personal experience. We live in our experience, and there is, in the end, no escaping it.

The point of such a recognition would not be to reawaken the whole early-1990s constructivist-deconstructionist move, catching science in unproductive loops of navel gazing and self-critique, but rather to make science more polite, more tactful, or more humane. Science will be more successful, the more it learns to win friends and influence ordinary people. In the meanwhile, scientists will continue to be cast as the Enemy in documentaries about UFOs and Bigfoot and all the other things that are not dreamt of in their philosophy.