Dr Jim's Adventures in Fandom

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.