One of the few good things to come out of the Watergate debacle that toppled president Nixon from office was the saying “follow the money.” If you want to know why people do what they do, or how the interests of various people are connected, follow the money trail paying special attention to who benefits and how. Keep in mind that there’s a lot of money to be made in pop culture and fandom.
In the early 1970s a couple of friends and I decided to check out some of the reports of hauntings we kept hearing about on Long Island where we lived. This was several years before the “Amityville Horror” incident focused public attention on our home turf, so no one paid much attention to the stories of hauntings or to “those nuts” who were investigating them. The occult/new age/paranormal was undergoing one of its periodic upsurges in popularity but that didn’t stop most people from thinking that we were weirdoes.
Back then we used tape recorders instead of digital recorders and inferred film instead of flir cameras… and we did our investigations accompanied by a psychic. Even under such primitive conditions it didn’t take us long to conclude that there was very little we couldn’t explain by natural means, and that what we couldn’t explain we could reproduce ourselves - sometimes quite easily. We even managed to double expose Polaroid instant pictures to produce pictures of ghosts and UFOs that most people were convinced couldn’t be faked.
Our group was together for less than a year before we disbanded. I took off to another state where I had been accepted into grad school for anthropology. While pursuing my degree, I learned quite a bit about perception and psychology, and how easy it is for us to fool ourselves into believing things that are not true.
One of the things I saw involved a psychologist randomly taking a key from a pile of car keys and without saying a word, finding the car that belonged to that key and unlocking the door. What the psychologist did was to have the owners who donated their keys for the experiment accompany him as he walked around the parking lot searching for the car that fit the key. He identified the owner of the key and found the car by reading the body language of everyone in the group. The owner of the key inadvertently identified herself and indicated which car was hers. This is what’s known as the “Clever Hans Phenomenon.”
Some years later an acquaintance – a professional magician of some renown – showed me a few tricks that emphasized misdirection and verbal set up by which he predisposed an audience to see magic tricks the way he wanted them to.
The psychologist read his audience, and the magician directed them to see what he wanted them to see. A few people, notably Darren Brown, have learned to do both quite impressively.
I already mentioned that back in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was an upsurge of interest in the occult/new age/paranormal that included an interest in modern paganism, particularly Wicca. A large number of people were interested in Wicca because they believed that it was a genuine survival of the preChristian religion of the British Isles. The belief was that to learn genuine Wicca one had to find a teacher who came from a long line of Wiccans. But there were none to be found.
Then, suddenly there was a virtual sea of self-proclaimed inheritors of a long, old Wiccan tradition, all of whom had been trained in secret by their grandmothers, now dead, or by an individual or group that could no longer be found. In fact, for a while being trained by a grandmother was a standing joke indicating that the claimant was almost certainly a fraud.
What I noticed, however, was that the first people who “came out of the broom closet” never had to prove their credentials while those who came later had to undergo an apprenticeship (sometimes quite expensive) as a trainee before their credentials were accepted. And interestingly enough, those first self-proclaimed teachers all seemed to make a good living writing books and teaching courses, and all of them seemed to gather a following. Like Jim Jones or David Koresh these early leaders seemed to be most interested in acquiring money, power, fame, and adoration.
In the end I helped, in a small way, prove that a few of those leaders were frauds… con artists, tax cheats, sexual predators, even pedophiles. In every case that I knew of the frauds were exposed by following the money.
It seems that there’s a new round of “first out of the broom closet” self-proclaimed teachers who lack credentials but have discovered that there are big bucks to be made. Only this time it’s not Wicca they are teaching but ghost hunting.
In the next installment I’ll explain in some detail why someone who studied purported paranormal phenomenon without the temptations or pressures of a television series (and thus a source of lots of money) is not impressed by all the new programs about ghosts, aliens, Cryptozoology, UFOs and the like.
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No, I’m not talking about Yogi or Gentle Ben. I mean real salmon-eating, tree-clawing bears out in Yellowstone or Yosemite. And I don’t mean bears in general, I mean specific bears.
There are some pretty small and esoteric fandoms, but until recently I was not aware that specific bears actually have fan clubs… groups of people who show up each year to spot and photograph specific bears.
I know, someone out there is going to say, “Of course, the scientists who study and track bears do just that!” But I’m not talking about the scientists whose job it is to study the bear population. I’m talking about average, ordinary people who know a particular bear’s range and habits, and show up each year where they believe the bear will be to spot them. In a way it’s similar to train spotting. Except the bears don’t run on tracks or keep to a strict schedule.
I’ve watched birdwatchers do some pretty ridiculous things to spot a rare bird. I remember watching boatload after boatload of birders step out of a boat into waist-deep water off of one of the island of the Dry Tortugas to get a glimps of a black noddy. The island is a bird refuge, and the birders wanted to see the noddy but not disturb them. So it came as no surprise to see the bear watchers do some strange things too. Noddies, however, are not known to attack tourists.
Personally I’m inclinded to accept bear-spotting as a hobby, thus a form of fandom. But I’m not sure if the gathering of fans each year could be called an event. Yes, bear watching is open to the public, but it’s not done at a specific time and place. Now perhaps if the bear watchers had a convention…
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I’m Dr Jim and I’m a fan.
I was born just after World War II, and one of my earliest memories is watching a few minutes of “The Life of Riley” on that mesmerizing new device called television. Jackie Gleason was in the starring role. The year was 1949 and I was hooked.
Shortly after I learned to read, I started collecting comic books: Superman, Batman, Action Comics, Mystery in Space, even Donald Duck. If I had that collection today I could retire a millionaire, but my mother, like most adults at the time, thought of my priceless collection as trash that collected dust and took up space. So, each year I was forced to surrender my precious babies to my cousins to read, after which they would be tossed out or burned in the fireplace.
Just before the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, I also discovered my first adult science fiction novel and fell in love with the works of Robert Heinlein. In quick succession I discovered Azimov, Clark, Bradbury, and a host of others. Again, I was hooked. Thus it was for-ordained that I would become a Trek fan, and later a Star Wars fan.
I fell in love again in the late 1970s when I discovered my first personal computer (Altair, IMSI) and my first video games (Pong, Space Invaders, Missile Command, Asteroids, and even Pacman).
All of this, however, was just the tip of the iceberg.
By 1979 I was no longer just a fan. I received my doctorate from Binghamton University and joined the army of scientists who were studying Pop Culture.
I loved going to fan events of all kinds. Sci fi cons, highland games, refairs, antique car shows…. For a while I even had the goal of spending my retirement traveling from fan event to fan event. The problem with my idea was that in order to go to all these events I had to know they existed, where and when they were being held, how much it would cost to get in, and the like.
The web is a good resource for finding events, but it has some serious limitations. The majority of fan event sites are dedicated to a single event. There are, or have been, a few sites that listed some fan events of a single kind. But they all suffered from one or more of the same drawbacks. Either they were woefully incomplete, or they had lots of entries but with no order to them, or they were not being kept up-to-date. The most frustrating example of this was a resource site (I won’t name it) that had an extensive database of retail outlets where one could find fan products. The problem was that the entries were listed alphabetically by the name of the retail outlets. The only way for someone to actually find a retail outlet that sold the product they were looking for was to search through the entire database entry by entry.
Creating Fandom was made to address this deficiency.
Our idea is to list as many fan events as possible, of all kinds, and to keep the listing up to date. But for such a database to be usable, it must have some way to search through the fan events and bring up only those kinds of entries a user is specifically looking for.
We needed a way to categorize fan events. We started by looking at the different things that have fans. For convenience, we refer to each of these as a fandom. Most of these fandoms are too small to have events. For example, to the best of my knowledge at the time I write this, the Gertrude Hoffman fan club has only two members. Every time they get together it could be called a Gertrude Hoffman Con. Even though such “events” might be open to the public, we won’t list them. It would be a waste of our limited resources to do so.
The universe of all fandoms is much larger than the universe of all fan events, and it has a much different shape. We took a look at which fandoms have events, and came up with a set of categories which we call “bundles.” All of the kinds of fandom in a bundle share important properties. The first bundle, for example, is composed of fiction genre that existed before the development of electronic media. It is subdivided into divisions that we call “fandoms” which include science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror, among others. Sci fi cons would fall under this bundle, as would horror cons, and mystery cons.
We wanted our site to be user friendly, so we came up with a search engine that guides users to choose a bundle, then a fandom, and then provide a state and a date range. In the near future we’re going to add alternate ways to search the database so that it will be more useful.
Right from the start we decided that we would not charge for this service. We’re fans and this site was created for fans. Besides, we can cover our expenses through selling advertising, and we can make this a truly great fan site by making this truly a fan site. If you’d like to help, please use the contact page to let us know. Let’s make this the place to find out about all fan events.
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