Michael Shermer, skeptic and science advocate, critiques paranormal claims like EVP (90% explained by noise) and UFOs (most dismissed as misidentifications or leaks), arguing anomalies lack evidence to overturn established theories. He rejects life after death, near-death experiences (NDEs tied to oxygen deprivation), and alien abductions as cultural artifacts, citing controlled experiments debunking dowsers and mediums. Shermer’s skepticism stems from exposure to fraud during graduate studies, yet he acknowledges intuition as evolutionary, not supernatural. While dismissing extremism in skepticism, he aligns with secular solutions for morality and environmental issues, urging evidence over faith—even in doomsday scenarios or terminal illness interventions. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I've been to you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's living time zone, all of them covered by this program post-poke datum.
I'm Mark Bell.
An honor and a privilege to be with you about halfway through the weekend that I get to spend with you.
And I think we've got a full show ahead.
First, there is some sad news.
It seems that Betty Hill has passed away.
I'm getting a number of reports.
That's not absolutely confirmed yet, but popping up on web pages and such that Betty Hill has passed away.
An update on Anne Strieber.
I spoke with Whitley several hours ago, and for those of you that don't know, during the first hour of last night's program, I was supposed to have Whitley on, I got a panic call saying, oh my God, Archie's collapsed, and he hung up.
And the next thing I knew, his brother had called and said, well, it looks like Anne may have had some sort of diabetic episode.
Then I heard from Whitley that, no, very much more serious, a stroke.
And today he says, indeed, an aneurysm, which is really something, I guess she still has full movement, amazingly.
She can move everything, and she can talk, although she can't talk because of all the tubes that they give you when you have something like that.
But generally alert, I guess, in stable condition, but a very serious situation, an aneurysm.
And there's some kind of procedure where they pass something through your veins to get to the aneurysm in your brain, if you can believe that.
And that's what she may undergo as opposed to brain surgery.
So it's a very serious situation.
And your prayers for Anne Strieber will very much be appreciated, of course.
If we get an update during the program tonight, we'll be sure and get it to you.
So the passing of Betty Hill.
And there's your status report so far this evening on Anne Striber.
There has been some help, by the way.
Thanks to people who are listening to this program.
And I'll let Whitley, if he does, call and update us.
He's been there 20 hours, and by now, 24 hours without sleep.
And so, because it occurred just prior to showtime last night.
So he's at the hospital where he's sure he'll be for at least a week.
And so she has quite a procedure to undergo.
Anyway, that's the update.
And Betty Hill, very sad.
Now, if true, now, an awful lot of the believers, the witnesses, the researchers have passed on.
But the skeptics live on.
The skeptics definitely live on.
Tonight we'll have one of them here, Dr. Michael Shermer, is a skeptic of almost everything we talk about.
So actually, it should be a very interesting show.
Really should be.
And by the way, this interesting show can be heard free of charge on the web tonight.
It is our Streamlink weekend, and it just kind of kicks off a demo of what we can do here on the web.
It is way cool.
I mean, you can listen tonight for free until 6, I think, in the morning.
And you can also, if you're a member, which is very cheap, you can make MPEG-3Es of the programs, you know, like 30 days or so.
It's way cool.
Anyway, if you want to see what it's all about, go onto your computer and listen free of charge.
And we're happy to offer that as a way to introduce you to its many charms.
The most feared militant group in Iraq, that would be the Movement of Terror master-minded by Al-Zakari, declared its allegiance to Osama bin Laden, so they're getting together.
This occurred Sunday, saying why it agreed with al-Qaeda over a strategy, the need for unity against the enemies of Islam.
It's in quotes.
That would be us, of course.
The declaration, which appeared on a website often used as a clearinghouse for statements by militant groups in general, began with a Quran verse encouraging Muslim unity and said that El-Zakari considered bin Laden, quote, the best leader for Islam's armies against all infidels.
Massachusetts Senator Kerry accused President Bush on Sunday of planning a surprise second-term attempt to privatize Social Security and forecast a disaster for America's middle class.
End of the road for the middle class.
The U.S. Army Reserve Soldiers, this was an interesting story tonight, who refused orders to drive a dangerous route, were members of one of a few supply units whose trucks are still unarmored, said their commanding general.
The soldiers now under investigation previously focused on local missions in safer parts of Iraq and had never driven a convoy north along the attack-prone roads passing through Baghdad.
And so when it came time for them to do that, they considered and said, Too dangerous.
Police on Sunday were still trying to determine who was driving a stolen truck loaded with illegal immigrants that smashed into other vehicles, rolled over, killed six, injured 15, some critically.
Immigration and customs enforcement officials questioned a man they said was a driver, but he turned out instead to be a passenger.
So we'll have to wait and find out about that.
I want to say again tonight, the Federal Communications Commission has passed regulations governing and essentially saying, okay, to broadband over power lines.
That means that now across America, they will begin to put the Internet on power lines.
This is an interesting technology that is feared by many who think it's going to be the end of shortwave broadcasting.
And indeed, in areas where BPL passes by, and I might add, through your home, you're not going to be able to hear shortwave broadcasts.
You're not going to be able to hear Radio Moscow or the BBC or Radio France International or any of the other zillion shortwave broadcasters out there anymore, because BPL will be virtually broadcasting from your power lines and covering all of those frequencies that you can now hear those shortwaves.
So good listening, folks.
It won't last long if BPL is what it is feared to be.
The headline, actually, I read this to you last night, but I want to just go over it one more time.
Air Force pursuing anti-matter weapons program was touted publicly.
Then came the official gag order.
The U.S. Air Force, apparently, is working on an anti-matter weapon.
And then there was a lot of reports of it.
And then they had a gag order and they can't talk about it anymore.
An anti-matter weapon!
Boy, I'll tell you, science fiction is beginning to sound more like science now, isn't it?
An anti-matter weapon.
Yikes.
Seven young Japanese were found gassed to death in a car yesterday in what appeared to be the latest in a group suicide involving strangers who met over the internet.
The four men and three women are believed to have been teenagers.
God, that's sad.
Or in their 20s, perhaps.
The rented vehicle was found in a secluded car park in Minano, north of Tokyo.
Portable charcoal stoves were used to fill the car with carbon monoxide, the windows sealed with tape, and the vehicle covered with a plastic sheet.
Now, police began to search Minano on Monday after a friend of one of the dead received a text message saying, simply, I'm in Manano.
There are seven of us, pardon me, in the car, and we committed suicide with stoves.
And the number of dead, of course, shocked Japan.
The group suicide fits, though, a pattern.
This goes over the last 18 months or so, and 50 have died in similar suicides in Japan.
All of a sudden, the young people in Japan are beginning to kill themselves.
That's so weird, isn't it?
Newspapers have reported dozens of cases in which depressed young people have used the internet to find someone else with whom to die and then do it.
Last month, Ford found dead in almost identical circumstances.
So they're making pacts, getting together, and committing group suicide.
Now, they're facing an epidemic of suicides, actually, in Japan, last 12 years, really.
There was a long recession, a national loss of self-confidence since the bursting of the bubble economy they had there.
well I I wonder how our our bubble is doing the FDA on Wednesday approved This is right down many alleys.
Approved an implantable computer chip that can pass a patient's medical details to doctors speeding care.
VeraChip's radio frequency microchips, the size of a grain of rice, have already been used to identify wayward pets and livestock, and nearly 200 people working in Mexico's Attorney General's office have been implanted with the chips to access secure areas containing sensitive documents.
It is the first time the FDA has approved the use of the device, though in Mexico more than 1,000 people now, scannable chips, have actually been implanted in people.
The chip serial number pulls up the patient's blood type and other medical information.
All you've got to do is pinch a syringe and the microchip is put in onto the skin in a procedure that takes less than 20 minutes, leaves no stitches, but radiates like a bandit.
So I wonder how you feel about that.
And when they cometh to you, to delivereth your chip beneath the epidermis, how are you going to react?
Or will you say, no, it is the very devil itself, 666 has arrived, and it shall not be implanted in me.
You'd hear a lot of different answers to that one.
Hey, you know, we'll ask tonight's guest, Dr. Shermer.
He would have to say yes, right?
Being a skeptic of anything of that, well, we'll ask.
This is kind of interesting.
It relates to the show that I did with Tess Gerritson.
You remember she talked about the Rebellion that occurred on the shuttle.
The mutiny, as it were, on Skylab 4.
Well, I've got somebody who was on the inside.
Dave writes, I've met Gary Carr, the commander of that mission, several times and spoken with him at length on several topics.
Mr. Carr informed me that his crew was ahead of schedule in every regard and had been for several days.
They gathered enough solar astronomy data to keep the scientific community busy for the next decade.
After repeated requests on the day of the mutiny to take a little personal and Earth observation time, astronaut lingo for looking out the window, and having those requests refused, dismissed and ignored by Mission Control in Houston, Commander Carr, with the morale of his crew in mind, informed Houston, well, they wouldn't be accepting any further assignments on this day, and they turned the receiver off.
That was the day of the mutiny, December 25th, 1973, Christmas Day.
Harry Carr would probably never admit this, but at the time, writes Dave, he was one of NASA's top astronauts, motivated, energetic, as smart as they come, being groomed for Mars in the early 80s if funding had been there.
Then shuttle flights.
He would have commanded a lunar landing had he been about five years older and had joined the astronaut corps about five years earlier.
His action to boost the mental and emotional health of Bill Pogue, Ed Gibson, and himself absolutely and without question killed his flight career.
And rightfully so, some would argue.
Perhaps the crew of Skylab 4 would have been in better spirits had the NASA PAO and administrators not bowed to a temperance league and allowed the boys to bring a little white wine, for example, to celebrate their freeze-dried, dehydrated, irradiated, and thermostabilized Christmas dinner.
How did the Russians and the Miracrez tolerate the hardships of long-duration spaceflight?
Hope you enjoyed reading these little factoids half as much as I did hearing your voice on the air, Dave.
And I won't give Dave's last name, but Dave, thank you.
So there's the real story of what happened.
And then there's this little nugget.
Only in China would you have this reaction.
The headline is, Satellite smashes Chinese house.
A Chinese satellite has smashed into a villager's house on its return to Earth, according to the country's media reports.
The satellite destroyed the building in Sichuan Province, but officials say no one was hurt.
A local newspaper printed a picture of a kettle-shaped capsule, which appeared to be about two meters long, lying amid broken bricks, beams, and roof tiles.
The satellite was part of a space probe to carry out land surveys and other research, according to the news agency there.
Quote, the satellite landed in our home.
Maybe this means we'll have good luck this year, said the tenant of the wrecked apartment.
what do you think about this scandal since you called or as a fellow that it in the port with the war and then all of a sudden all of a sudden turns out that they have feelings with the phone If you're talking about China and France, of course they had dealings with Saddam.
BPL will start perhaps just above the broadcast band, if not in it, and go to about 80 megahertz, I guess.
And that's going to wipe out goodbye citizens band, goodbye, shortwave broadcasting, goodbye, amateur radio to some degree, goodbye public safety stuff to some degree.
I mean, it's incredible what they are getting ready to do.
It's just unbelievable.
unidentified
Isn't the FCC supposed to stop that type of interference?
I mean, aren't they supposed to weigh the plus and minuses of this?
or is michael powell just on the take needs just as corrupted anybody else on hill high uh...
look i don't know what to tell you i I can't imagine a nation that would intentionally destroy shortwave listenership across an entire continent, a whole country like this.
It's just to me, it's unbelievable what they're doing.
I don't have an answer for you.
You know, all we can do is pray that it's not going to be as bad as it seems like it will be in those areas affected.
the death knell for shortwave listening and information from outside the u_s_a_ you don't count me there you know you don't count me there Want a time travel?
unidentified
Go back to past shows on Streamlink.
Sign up online at coasttocoastam.com.
Well, you just don't realize Jacka Hooker.
Jacka Hookah.
Hookah.
Hookah.
Jackahoo.
When you hold a jacket.
When your arms so tight, let me know everything's alright.
I'm hooked on a feeling.
I'm high on the reading.
But you're in love with me.
It's as sweet as candy.
It's tasted on my mind.
Girl, you got me thirsty for another cup of wine.
Got a bug from you, girl.
But I don't need a cure.
I should stay up again, if I can for sure.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from East to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From West to the Rockies, call ART at 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
But it's going to be fun to have a skeptic here, I think, and we'll pummel him with questions.
And we'll see what he's all about.
And so I'll rely, you know, on the computer.
So if you get a chance, go to the website, coastcoastam.com.
Go to Fastblast.
And should something occur to you that just has to be asked why in the course of the conversation, I'll try and monitor the screen fairly closely and see if you come up with any zingers.
And they're going to try and fix this aneurysm, Whitley told me, with some kind of really weird thing where they put something through your vein and go all the way into your brain.
Here comes digital television, and it's going to have to happen.
And the answer, I've got HDTV, sir, and not only is it ready, but when most Americans see real, high-definition television, their jaw is going to drop as far as it did on the day that they first saw color from black and white.
unidentified
Oh, it's phenomenal.
But just check this little caveat about the equipment on the second page.
Yes.
It says, don't feel like dealing with HDTV yet.
You may not have a choice.
The FCC says it's phasing out analog TV transmission in 2006.
I know it's going to be a stressful thing on the American public, and I know it's going to be already stressful on the broadcasters who are having to install new equipment.
But I am in favor of this.
And I'm telling you right now, it's high time the U.S. revolutionized its television system.
The rest of the world has been ahead of us too damn long.
The Japanese and the Europeans have television and have had for years.
It's been much better than ours.
But on the plus positive side, what the caller said is true, 2006, it's going to have to change.
And it will be worth it in the end, albeit some pain of now.
I'm telling you right now that if you have not yet seen real high-definition television, when you first do, your jaw will drop every bit as far as it did the day you first saw color from black and white.
That's how different it is.
And it's high time America caught up.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified
Real quickly on your subject for the moment, I'd be wonderful if you would express that new television system in pixels.
There's so many people with cameras now that would understand that without seeing it.
And I can assure you, sir, after the normal 525 stand lines, you're going to just drop your jaw when you see it.
unidentified
The present television is as bad as my old vision.
The subject of the Internet coming in over your power lines, that equipment has existed as an industrial product for the purpose of the transmission lines clear back as far as I would know anything about.
Yes, while what you're saying is true, all they've done, sir, is transmit somewhere below 500 KC, kilohertz, some kind of signal that reads your meter.
That's all they've done.
But, sir, what I'm trying to get through to you is what they're going to do is they're going to go from the top of the broadcast band all the way to the top of shortwave at 30 megahertz and then beyond, and they're going to be transmitting this awful jamming sound that's going to block out all the foreign broadcasts.
unidentified
I understand that.
The point I want to accomplish is in the power industry, they would not use that equipment itself, particularly on the northeast coast.
The power grid is so bad of shape, and the telephone lines that coordinate this are in such bad shape.
I had to go back 50 years and put in my own equipment to prevent reclosures on power generation.
But what I want to really accomplish is that they can shut off all this foreign news coming in here that doesn't come through our censorship.
And for you to not think they're going to put it in the Northeast is naive at best.
Oh, baby, it's going in.
The dollar bill rules here.
And if you can deliver internet over the very same power lines, no matter their condition, and I might have the worse their condition, the more radiation there's going to be.
So this is a real setup for disaster.
A number of countries have tried what we're about to do here in the U.S. and decided to hell with this and kicked it out.
There were some tests done in scattered communities from Virginia down to Arizona.
And it terrorized the local amateur operators, shortwave listeners, and people like that.
And so I'm telling you, this is going to be something and not something good.
West of the Rockies, you're on there.
Turn your radio off, please.
unidentified
I just turned it off.
Thank you.
Yes, I was saying about how the people are skeptics and everything.
And I had a chance first time to see on your internet.
I've been listening to your show for about a year, at least a year.
Well, some of them seem very real, and some of them are fake.
Look, this program does not or should not give you the expectation of absolutism.
In other words, if we put up a picture, let's say, oh, I don't know, of a beast, for example, like the Elmendorf beast that is not recognized, not understood, not genetically right with anything on earth, that doesn't mean that we've found something totally new yet.
We're always out on the edge, and so a lot of what we put up, maybe somebody cooked up in Photoshop, you know, or maybe somebody, one thing or another, these days it's getting much harder to tell.
So you always have to be wary, and you have to imagine that what you see and hear on this program may be total bunk.
Or it could be a jewel of information, a virtual diamond that you will not pick up anywhere else but here.
And so that's what happens when you live out on the edge.
That's what this program is all about.
International Line, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hello?
Hi, Art.
Hi.
Two points, one about sunspots and one about aliens.
Okay, in the Edgar Casey readings, he actually says as much that these sunspots are aggravated by the, quote, turmoil and strife that have been and that are the sin of man.
He says this repeatedly through a certain reading.
Sunspots are not completely predictable at the macro level, but the fuller look at this, and we can precisely tell you how the sun is going to build and wane in actually 22-year cycles and break it down to 11-year cycles and be quite right.
For any given day or week, we can be wrong, and there can be a very large amount of activity suddenly.
But over an 11-year cycle, it's completely and utterly predictable.
Now, whether within that cycle, mankind in some way influences the action of sunspots, I don't know.
That's pretty speculative.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified
Yes, Arnard.
I'd like to talk about the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump site, proposed dump site more than proposed.
Yes, and I wanted to mention that, you know, I do think there's a reason not to go for Budnarik or one of the third-party people because this is a very serious issue, and Kerry has been very consistent against it despite what the other side is saying.
And Bush implied to Nevada voters that he had an open mind.
And I think if you go on their website, I can't get into detail.
It's too detailed.
But if you go on their website, if you look at the mass of what they claim, how much it'll cost over a hundred-year period, they claim it'll only cost $655 billion, and you actually look at the scale of the project, the whole thing is completely phony.
It's going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars more than that, considering the scale of the project.
And considering it's more than 100 years, they're projecting it.
So, and of course, it'll really go on longer than that, we know, but they only go up to 100 years.
If BPL would be six feet in the ground if it was up to me, you preaching to the choir, you've got to get somebody like Powell at the FCC or, you know, like, now it's too late.
I mean, I've been warning about BPL for I don't know how long and warning and warning, and now it's past.
Blowing it sky high is the job of my guest coming up, Dr. Michael Shermer.
He is a skeptic.
In fact, Dr. Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine.
So he's got to be like the 800-pound gorilla of skeptics.
He's director of the Skeptics Society.
See, there you go.
Monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology, and the co-host and producer of a Fox Family series entitled Exploring the Unknown.
Wow.
Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine, his MA in Experimental Psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University.
He's author of several books, including The Science of Good and Evil, Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share, Care, and Follow the Golden Rule on the Evolutionary Origins of Morality and How to Be Good Without God.
Can You Be Good Without God?
In addition, he has appeared on many national television programs as a skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims.
Yeah, I think there's a similar effect with the psychics, that there's a lot of self-deception going on there.
They get a lot of reinforcement from their followers that they're doing something very effective, and that makes them think that they are effective.
And so what kicks in then is something called the confirmation bias, where we look for and find confirmatory evidence for what we already believe, and we ignore disconfirmatory evidence.
And so this is what fuels conspiracy theories.
Once you have the conspiracy Theory in place, it's easy to find evidence to support it and just ignore all the evidence that doesn't fit.
And you don't need much evidence to reinforce something you really want to believe.
So, for example, people that go to psychics, we've tape-recorded the readings, and you can count the number of hits and misses just based on the people nodding yes or no.
And the hit rate is pretty low.
It's like 10 to 15 percent correct.
And in that context, you think, well, why would anybody believe that?
But in fact, what you see is them saying, well, it's incredible.
But Doctor, surely we do not understand everything about the human brain yet.
We're far from that.
Yes.
Right?
So doesn't it stand to reason that perhaps there are people scattered among the frauds out there who really have developed a portion of their brain that we don't know anything about yet and are able to do things like predict events or look.
Take remote viewing, for example, something that apparently most people have a discipline.
Yeah, I took a course in it and I taped a whole show on it and so on.
Okay, the first part of your statement was correct.
There's a lot we don't know about the human brain and the mind and what is mind and where is consciousness located, where is the sense of self located, things like this.
Well, we have some idea of how, and that the fact that there's a level of uncertainty, that itself is built into the fabric of nature.
But that doesn't mean that the level of uncertainty leaps across that space gap to a macro level at which neurons occur.
So although it's true that the wave function doesn't collapse until it's observed, the moon exists whether it's observed or not because the quantum effects are all washed out at the macro level.
Nevertheless, we don't understand how the macro communication or the quantum communication, which appears to occur at the speed of, well, gee, much faster than light, instantaneously, we just don't even begin to get that.
Well, from a skeptic's point of view, in other words, that if this actually is really happening, it's so impossible, according to everything we understand with physics, right?
And what happens when remote viewers are remote viewing is they're doing this kind of psychological game where they're drawing little pictures of things.
And then at some point, somebody has to make an interpretation of whether that drawing is a hit or a miss.
And that's where the subjectivity comes in.
It's not an objective science.
It's not where you have a multiple choice and they've statistically gotten a significant number of hits above chance.
And when you do set it up like that, there is no effect that needs explaining.
It's the same thing with all the psychics.
There's simply nothing to explain.
Whether quantum effects are weird or not, they don't have to be employed because there's nothing to explain.
When you put psychics under controlled conditions, the effect fades.
It disappears.
They only operate well when there's a subjective element of what constitutes a hit.
So I'm getting a red dress.
What does that mean?
Oh, the red dress means my mother gave it to me when I was eight.
No, but if there's a target, for example, of a remote viewer staring at a bridge in Great Britain and somebody over on this side draws a bridge and the surrounding countryside, I mean, that's a pretty good hit, isn't it?
Well, from what you just described, yeah, but that's not actually what happened.
And no, you read the sort of tabloid equivalent explanations of these things, and it sounds impressive.
When you actually read the scientific papers about it, you see where the flaws are, and the effects are not real.
The effects are not replicable.
This is one of the problems of sort of voodoo science, is where one lab gets an effect and no one can duplicate it, like with pole fusion.
It's not impossible.
It's entirely possible.
It's just that once the announcement was made and other scientists rushed out in their labs to do it and nobody could replicate it, well, within weeks we realized, okay, there's something else going on here.
I mean, even if Americans are too dogmatic or closed-minded or whatever, you have people in Japan are trying to replicate cold fusion.
There's some people in Europe.
If it was real, somebody would have nailed it down by now, because it's been, you know, 15 years now.
Yeah, 15 years.
So when an effect goes on and on like that, like aliens, UFOs, Loch Ness, Monster, Bigfoot, you know, decades go by and no one can find a body, no one can find physical evidence, that should be a clue that skepticism is probably most appropriate.
Now it begins Now that you're gone Needles and pins What like you've done Watching back fly Till you return Lighting the back door And watching you burn
Now it begins Day after day This is my life Burn And the warnings on them beer cans Going to be buried in them landfills No
deposit, no sad songs And no return Yeah, it's only going to take about a minute or so Until the factories blow up the sun out And you're going to have to turn your lights on just to see And then lights are going to be neon Saying fly our jets to paradise And the whole damn world's going to be made of styrene So listen to my brothers When you hear the nightlym's sigh And you see the wild ones flying Through the great polluted sky There won't be no country music There won't
be no rock and roll Cause when they take away our country They'll take away our soul Yeah To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 7757271295.
The first time caller line is area code 7757271222.
To talk with Arc Bell from East to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
From west to the Rockies, call Arc at 800-618-8255.
International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country spread access number, pressing option 5, and filing toll-free 800-893-0903.
Subject ghosts or electronic voice phenomena, the voices of the dead, actually.
Dr. Shermer, welcome back.
I've heard some rather clear recordings, actually, over many, many shows of people.
I don't know, these people are pretty good people up in Utah, and they haven't written a book.
They're not making any money.
They never come on here and sell anything at all.
They simply gather together with recorders and go to graveyards, places like that, and get these voices for which there appears no other possible explanation.
You rule out, you know, radio stations, they're brand new tapes, never been recorded on previously.
So, you know, where do the voices come from?
I try and shoot holes in it myself, but the voices are there.
Saying relative things, by the way, I might add.
Contemporary things, showing they're in the moment, that sort of thing.
It's the same problem the SETI people have in determining whether a signal that's coming from outer space is part of the regular background noise you get, or whether it's a signal like aliens are sending a significant number, something like that.
You know, I haven't heard every single tape anybody's made, but the ones I hear, you know, they're never really all that clear.
You know, usually the claim it says something like, here, you can clearly hear he says whatever.
And when you hear it without that context, it just to me sounds like noise.
Well, let's stick with the ghost part of it for a second and drift over toward are you skeptical entirely of life after death, life or consciousness, continued consciousness of any sort after physical death?
Yeah, I don't think there's any evidence for it at all.
I think the best chance we have for that ever happening is through computer technology.
That is, if we eventually can scan Our neural patterns, our networks of information that represent our personalities and memories, ourselves, into computers.
Silicon is a much more durable medium than the electric meat of our protein.
And that can last a lot longer until we have a still hardier medium to download our memories into and into the distant future.
But that's pure science fiction at the moment, although there are some people that are working on this.
But I don't know that that invalidates the whole Bible and the fact that, I mean, you obviously then don't embrace the concept that Jesus walked on earth as a man, huh?
I think there probably was a man named Jesus who definitely was a man who walked on earth.
What I cannot make the leap of faith, and that's really what it has to be, is that he was a man of God.
Is that he was God.
That he was reincarnated, that essentially he was brought back from the dead.
That, I think, is not a provable tenet.
That is an article of faith.
You either take the leap of faith and believe it, or you don't.
And if you don't believe it, there's no point in being a Christian.
You should be a Jew or something else.
Well, and this is the problem I see with the whole science and religion business, is that the attempt to use science to prove articles of faith is diverting the whole point of religious faith.
The whole point is just to believe, not to prove it.
If you could prove it, what's the point of just believing?
Everybody should be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim.
Well, no different than anybody of a commitment of anything else, like a political commitment.
People that are heartily supporting Kerry or Bush are no different than people that heartily support Christianity or Judaism.
These are beliefs that are arrived at for mostly psychological-emotional reasons.
They're behavioral commitments that have to do with how you were raised, the belief of your parents, your peer groups, your teachers, your upbringing, that sort of thing.
It has very little to do with science, reason, logic.
It's a whole host of psychological factors.
So people believe in Christianity for the same reason that they're Democrats or Republicans.
I think there's something to that, although I don't think there's a God gene or a God module specifically.
I think it has to do with a larger suite of behavioral, psychological things that are going on.
For example, the whole idea of using God as an explanation for things, that's one aspect.
But most people don't go to church in order to have some explanation for the origins of the universe and that if you can only teach about the Big Bang, then people wouldn't believe in God anymore, or something like that.
Why do you think it is that even if you go to the deepest jungles of South America where you find the tribe that has never encountered the rest of modern humanity at all, and they indeed worship something or another?
Religion plays a really important role in uniting people, encouraging cooperation.
And this is where my book comes in of the evolution of morality.
Religion plays a really important social role of reinforcing altruistic, pro-social, cooperative behavior.
In other words, you should be nice instead of nasty, because we all know humans have a propensity to do nasty things.
So religion was the first organized institute on the scene that codified the rules of good behavior into writing, to actually put it into stone, literally.
And so what happened was about 5,000 years ago, before that, all humans were living in small bands and tribes of a couple of dozen to a couple hundred individuals, in which most behavior control could be enforced through informal means like shunning and guilt and shame and pride and joy and things like that.
And most everybody was either related to one another or they knew one another.
So it's easy to control people's behavior that way.
Once populations started to grow to larger sizes, in thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands, there was too much anonymity.
People didn't know one another, they weren't related to one another, so why should I be nice?
i don't know what i was like that So you actually have sort of a group selection going on here in evolution where groups that are more cooperative and pro-social are more likely to be successful.
So we actually have within us, I argue, a tendency to be moral, to be good, if it can be reinforced through culture and society.
And that's what these institutions are for.
I'm not saying religion is bad, in fact, religion is really good for a lot of these things.
It's just that it was the first on the scene, so it has a 4,000-year head start over secular institutions.
So what happened in the Enlightenment 400 years ago was the thinkers said, look, these are values that are good in and of themselves, even if there is no God, or even if you believe a different God, or you're committed to a different religion, we still hold these values to be self-evidently true, sacred, whatever term you want to use.
And those are the founding fathers of our country.
So the separation of church and state is actually better for religion because it protects religion.
And it says to everybody who lives here, these are the rules we're going to live by.
In fact, that's the limitation of religious morality, is it's based on a reward and punishment system.
What a secular system of morality says is that these values exist in and of themselves, that people have value in and of themselves, and will be better as a group if everybody does these things.
And it's better if you do it now because there is no next life to be rewarded or punished.
I think it's a higher moral value to be good rather than to not be good because people have value in and of themselves and it's better for the group than the religious system, which is based on some payoff in the distant future.
I would rather know that you want to be good and nice to me because you value me, as opposed to because you think you're going to get paid off or you have fear of punishment from God.
I think it would be a higher moral value if you just held those values in and of themselves because people have value.
And that's the point, I think, of the Enlightenment values that we cherish in this country that are built into the Constitution.
Regardless of your religion, these values are important.
What the secular system in America is trying to do is to say we should raise our kids to be this way and have these values, regardless of what religion you are.
Even if you're not religious at all, these are still good values.
And so we've only had a little over 200 years to think about this and talk about it culturally.
But religion's been doing this for thousands of years, and they do it pretty well.
You'll go to Sunday church service and they'll rap it to you.
Maybe that's the future.
Dr. Michael Shermer is here.
unidentified
There's something happening here.
What it is ain't exactly clear There's a man with a gun over there Telling me I've got to beware I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound?
Everybody look what's going down There's battle lines being drawn
Where are those happy days?
They seem so hard to find I tried to wage for you, but you have close to mine Whatever happened to our love I wish I understood It used to face a lie, it used to face a fool So when you need me darling, can't you hear me?
It's so nice The love you gave me nothing, this can save me, SOS When you're gone, how can I even try to go on?
When you're gone, go and try, how can I carry on?
Two children!
with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Dr. Michael Shermer is obviously a bright guy, and that makes it a lot, a lot harder to, I guess, to listen, really.
If you're out there listening, he's obviously a very bright guy.
Now, if we had someone on the air saying, well, you know, I don't believe in the afterlife because, wow, I ain't never seen it.
Well, you could deal with that.
But this is a really bright guy saying, well, no.
In a moment, we're going to take a few moments out, actually, and try and connect with Whitley Streeber, whose wife collapsed about an hour before the program in his airtime last night, get an update on how she is.
that coming up if we're lucky you All right, about an hour before he was due to be on the air last night, I talked to Whitley, who's just in a panic, told me, my God, Ann's collapsed, clicked, that was it.
And we've been following this story ever since.
First thought to be perhaps diabetes-related, and then perhaps a stroke.
Here's Whitley Streeber, my co-author and my very good friend, with the latest on Ann's condition.
And I just have to tell you that I can't help thinking about how many others of us in this community have had sudden catastrophic accidents and so forth just in the past few years.
And John Mack died only just a couple of weeks ago.
She has, what, I guess they've done an MRI or whatever, a CAT scan.
unidentified
No, they've done all the basics.
And I might also thank the Art Bell listeners who were part of the Kaiser Permanente staff who came to the hospital last night immediately.
And they were useful.
Those people were our lifeboat.
and it was a tremendous thing, and now there's a There's a doctor who has come forward who helped us get into a hospital that was very difficult to get into where it is.
You described to me sort of a procedure she's going to go through in which something is inserted through a vein somewhere and it goes all the way up to the brain to try and fix the aneurysm.
Is that what's happening?
unidentified
This is what's going to happen is they're going to insert this thing in her leg, goes all the way up the body, through the veins, into the brain, and into the aneurysm where it becomes a coil.
And it just replaces the aneurysm with the coiled platinum.
I just wanted to come on to just thank everyone who helped us and everyone who prayed because I know this is a group of people who knows how to pray a lot of them.
So this is going to launch a pretty good discussion, actually.
A really good one.
Dr. Shermer, welcome back.
Hey.
Dr. Shermer is a skeptic.
Now, Dr. Shermer, there have been, let's talk about the power of prayer for a second.
We're asking people to pray for this man's wife, Anne, who has, well, you just heard.
Now, there have been double-blind studies, Doctor, on the power of prayer.
Very well-controlled, scientifically controlled experiments on the power of prayer, in which a group of sick people are prayed for, double-blinds, and then a group of, they're divided, and one's prayed for and one's not.
And inevitably, the one prayed for makes a far faster and better recovery.
I'm going to add to the equation here a little bit.
And in these experiments, young and foolish years ago, I did, oh, I don't know, eight or nine or ten several regarding people's health, and then a few that produced rain in areas that had absolute drought and no forecast for rain.
We did some amazing things.
Not in the name of God.
We just did mass concentrations.
And so I guess what I'm saying is, you know, either leave God's name in this or not, if you wish.
But I'm concluding, and many others are scientifically, that there is a mass consciousness effect and that it's real.
And there's quite a bit of science behind it.
Princeton is doing some very good things with that.
Duke University is doing some things.
I mean, there's some serious people doing things with this.
Well, there's also been some really good critiques of the methodologies that I just summarized in an article for Scientific American that will be out next month.
But the more serious problem methodologically is this is pointed out in several studies in Lancet, in which they did an analysis of all the significant studies you referenced.
And that is there's no consistency across the studies.
So like, for example, in the two famous studies with heart patients, they measured lots of different things.
20, 25 different measures, outcome measures were taken.
And the difference between the prayed for group and the non-prayed for group was insignificant for all but, I think, six of the measures.
No, I think it was four of the measures.
And in the other study, it was four different significant measures that were significant.
The ones that were significant in one were not the ones that were significant in the other.
So there was no consistency across the studies, no replication across the studies.
That was another methodological problem there.
And so these things are fraught with, well, methodological difficulties, to say the least.
And it sounds nice, and it is a warm, human, social thing to do, to care for our friends and loved ones.
And that's fine.
And to know that you are a member of a community and a family with people and friends that love you, that does make a difference.
Well, intercessory prayer, that is where the person doesn't know they're being prayed for and you're asking something or someone out there to intercede on some higher spiritual plane or dimension or some such thing.
Why do you think that the studies would have reached these prestigious universities if there wasn't significant reason for somebody with an awful lot of education to say, hey, there's something going on here?
One, we live in a very religious country, and two, there's a huge movement to unite science and religion, and it's largely driven by the Templeton Foundation.
And this is one of those interesting social phenomena where you follow the money.
A lot of these studies, most of them, in fact, are funded by Templeton money.
And that's okay.
This is a free society, and Templeton can do their research.
Have you considered the possibility that, boy, it would be a rough day for skeptics, I know, but that science eventually is going to be able to prove some of this.
Well, what they're doing at Princeton with this large computer that's then connected to a whole bunch of other computers geographically scattered around the globe.
They report back to the mama computer, and they have seen incredible things like the needles going right off the charts a few hours before 9-11.
I mean, it's all sort of in the same alley, this mass consciousness kind of thing, where there are some prayer results that are startling to, I think, even scientists.
Well, I mean, we can certainly use the Internet as an example of this sort of networking of human individuals across the globe, certainly.
Is there some other form of energy that we don't know about that acts like the Internet?
The so-called hundredth monkey phenomena or something like that that I do know something about.
No, I don't think so.
I mean, not that we know of.
What we have are a Lot of weird anomalous things that happen that we try to explain, and since science can't explain all these things, we then turn to suprascience or paranormal explanations or whatever.
I think it's okay to just say, you know, this is a really weird, spooky thing, and we don't know what the explanation is, and maybe someday we'll have a natural explanation.
But before we say something is out of this world, let's first make sure it's not in this world.
I'm just suggesting that some of the things are you familiar with the Brookings Institution study that says that if aliens landed, why you might not want to tell the populace because they couldn't tell you.
you don't think there's any chance that our government perhaps has had contact with aliens and might have craft or bodies or something you think that's just all i think that's probably not the Yeah, they sure do.
And I think that probably explains a lot of these anomalies.
I mean, the lying about national security secrets, which we know goes on all the time, that can account for why information has big blocks of blacked-out type on it, that kind of thing.
And I heard this from G. Gordon Liddy when I was on his talk show.
And I figured, well, this guy knows more about conspiracies than I do because he was in on one.
And so I'll ask him.
And he explained to me that the problem with conspiracy theories are twofold.
One, competence, and two, the leakage problem.
One, competence.
Government officials are generally fairly incompetent.
Bureaucrats are generally unable to pull off their jobs, let alone elaborate conspiracies.
And two, there's the leakage problem.
You can't get people to keep their mouths shut.
People just like to talk.
And the bigger the conspiracy, the more people would have to be involved.
And the chances of keeping them from going on Larry King Lie, the next on Oprah, and so on, book contracts, television shows, and so on, that would be so appealing.
Well, I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I am saying I am in only half of what I am It's so clear to me now My
heart is on fire And you talk about anything And you talk about anything You got the beam.
Give up the booze and the one nightstand And then you settle down It's a quiet little town And forget about everything You know he'll always keep moving.
You know he's never gonna stop moving.
Cause he's rolling.
He's the rolling stone.
When you wake up, it's a new morning.
The sun is shining.
It's a new morning.
You're going home.
To talk with Art Bell.
Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
To talk with Art Bell from East of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Updating you in case you just joined the show on the radio with me is Dr. Michael Shermer.
And he is a founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine.
He's director of the Skeptic Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology, co-host and producer of a Fox family television series called Exploring the Universe, has a BA in psychology from Pepperdine, M.A. in Experimental Psychology from California State University, Fullerton and Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University.
He's a smart guy, but he's skeptical.
Very, very, very, very skeptical.
And I wonder, Doctor, are you at all skeptical of why we went to war with Iraq?
I think it's pretty obvious that there were a lot of political, economic reasons that really have nothing to do with terrorism.
I think most people, at least that are not committed Bush supporters, recognize that fact.
That at some point we were all supportive of Bush going into Afghanistan.
He had 90% approval ratings at that point and so on.
And then the diversion, the sharp left turn into Iraq, I think obviously was a mistake in retrospect.
At the very least, it would be nice to hear from the administration something along the lines of it seemed like a good idea at the time.
We thought that's what the evidence showed about weapons of mass destruction and so on.
Obviously, we were wrong.
So let's just try to make the best with what we have.
Now, at least that would make the American people feel like, okay, you know, they're leveling with us.
It's the problem we talked about earlier.
Do governments lie?
Yeah, they do.
And we all know it.
And that's what makes it so difficult to get behind the administration when they're incapable of admitting any kind of wrongdoing or even just mistakes.
Not moral mistakes.
Just, you know, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Even Kerry voted for the war at the time because it seemed that's where the evidence was.
And to have a leader who's incapable of subtle nuance and saying, I was wrong, that's kind of scary.
We really need, in a complex world like this, we need a leader capable of saying, I changed my mind.
I have new evidence and I have a different opinion.
There's a good article in today's New York Times magazine about the faith of George W. Bush, and he shows, the article shows that when you have a deep faith commitment that you're absolutely right no matter what, then you cannot be steered in a different direction no matter what the evidence is.
And that's scary.
That's not what you want in a political leader in a complex world that's always changing.
You need somebody who's flexible.
There's plenty I like about George Bush, but this is really a serious problem.
There's been a number of really good controlled tests of water witchers in a laboratory where there are buckets of water and these are opaque boxes in which inside there are big five-gallon jugs of arrowhead water or just empty jugs of arrowhead water.
And the water witcher, the water dowser, has to determine which boxes have the water and which don't when they can't see through the boxes.
well that's you know there's hope that i suppose if most humans I mean that I'm saying there will never be any evidence to support it, to support the claim that there is or is not a God one way or the other.
If most humans in the world were colorblind and only a very small percentage of them actually had the ability to see color, do you think that would mean that color doesn't exist?
unidentified
What in the world is people like you saying this color thing is baloney?
Right, but most people don't believe in God because they've actually seen God or heard the voices or whatever.
I mean, this whole idea of the God module that we talked about before, the God module in the brain, I think that goes a ways toward explaining some of the religious visionaries of the past, where they hear voices, they see angels, the angels speak to them, God speaks to them, that sort of thing.
But most people, when you ask them why they believe in God, they don't say because God spoke to me one night or, you know, I saw a vision and the archangel Michael appeared in my bedroom.
I'm interested in knowing why the world works the way it does, and that includes why people believe what they believe, including why scientists believe what they believe.
I mean, scientists believe all sorts of wacky things, too.
I wrote a chapter for my Why People Believe Weird Things book.
I wrote a new chapter for the second edition called Why Smart People Believe Weird Things.
That's the interesting problem.
And the answer, in short, is that smart people are better at rationalizing beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.
So scientists, professors, academics, and so on are really good at justifying, say, political beliefs, social attitudes, and so on that they hold.
But they didn't arrive at those beliefs for any sort of rational, academic, logical, scientific reasons.
They arrived at them and hold them for all kinds of emotional reasons.
But they're smart, so they're good at justifying them and giving reasons for the belief.
It's sort of something that a lot of people believe right now, but mainstream everything is in the middle of denial about it.
There's this amazing thing going on in the world now where if you look at the North Pole and you look at the South Pole, Doctor, they're melting.
They're actually melting.
And this will potentially, according to a lot of people who are studying such things, have a gigantic effect on the ocean currents, which in turn then will have a gigantic effect on our weather.
And all of a sudden, we're beginning to see all these articles written by perhaps some would call them people on the fringe saying something really awful is going to happen with regard to our environment.
I think there's really good evidence that global warming is real and happening at a fairly specific rate, and that whether it's human-caused or naturally caused or a combination thereof is not as clear.
There's not as much scientific consensus on that.
Although in the last year or so, there's been more evidence to show that humans have had some role, although it looks like sunspot activity and other natural phenomena also probably play a part in that.
We know now from climatological studies that the environment in, say, the past 100,000 years or so has taken some wild swings, huge swings, that could have dramatic effects.
And not in the course of thousands of years, but dozens of years.
Not in the matter of days like in that film, but in the course of a few years to a few dozen years, you could get some pretty wild swings.
Now we're starting to see these suggestions that there's a kind of a breakpoint and an acceleration at this breakpoint that occurs.
It gets past a certain point and it becomes runaway.
And many, or not many, but some are now starting to say that switch has now been thrown and the process of the acceleration into what you just talked about is actually underway now.
I'll tell you one thing that kind of put me off on a lot of the extreme environmentalism movement that began in the 70s when I was in college was I believed all those doomsday claims that were being made by like Paul Ehrlich, for example, about population bomb.
And by the 1980s, there'd be no more oil, no more rainforest, and so on.
And none of that happened.
And so that kind of turned me off on some of that.
I thought, you know, these extremists on the environmental movement, they were really wrong.
If a psychic says something to somebody or if they come to believe something is true and so they proceed with that faith toward their objective, what's the harm?
What's the harm?
If it actually helped them, no matter the mechanism that produced the drive that got them to go there, then where is the harm?
In other cases, I think it's better to live in a world of reality rather than non-reality.
I mean, in some cases, doing drugs may be great for stress.
Drinking may be great for dealing with some problems, but it has other long-term consequences that are not so beneficial.
I think paying a psychic $3.95 a minute when it's just a scam rip-off, you'd be better off going to a professional trained psychotherapist or a counselor or just talking to a good friend who won't charge you anything.
well maybe but but again if you believe that what that's like it says is true and the placebo effect of is is constant in this area and i believe that it is because it's it's it's I mean, don't you believe the same percentage of placebo would occur with believed words from a psychic as believed words from a doctor followed by a sugar pill?
I mean, I'd rather they go for somebody like a Tony Robbins who is at least telling them to set goals and some practical things rather than pure foo-foo stuff.
Well, so, for example, somebody let's say is suffering loss, death, and grief.
They've lost a child or some such thing.
They go to a psychic.
Are they really going to be able to deal better with grief by pretending that their loved one is not really dead, but is still alive on a different plane and if they believe that, if that's really important?
I mean, but what if a doctor believes that, and for good reason, I might add, maybe even verifiable reason, that a patient who believes that they will get better by a giant percentage will.
And a patient who thinks they're going to die is damn well going to die.
And if there's a difference in belief, then it's on the doctor's side.
Well, that I had bad thoughts, that the family members think, oh, we didn't pray hard enough, or we didn't think positive enough thoughts.
It's our fault he died because the doctor said if we thought positive thoughts or if he thought positive thoughts, this cancer would go away and it didn't.
And when we come back, Dr. Michael Sherman's going to be all yours.
He's a pretty bright guy, so you better come well-armed, I would suggest.
from the high desert in the middle of the night, I'm Art Bell.
unidentified
We're a world on fire, no one can save me but you The street world is out, make foolish people I never dreamed that I need somebody like you I never dreamed that I need somebody like you I
never dreamed that I need somebody like you I never dreamed that I need somebody like you I never dreamed that I need somebody like you I never dreamed that I need somebody like you I never dreamed that I need somebody like you I
never dreamed that I need somebody like you I never dreamed that I need somebody like you I never dreamed that I need somebody like you I never dreamed that I need somebody like you I never dreamed that I need somebody like you I never dreamed that I need somebody like you I never dreamed that I could be a good girl I never dreamed that I could be a good girl I never dreamed that I could be a good girl I never dreamed that I could be a good girl I never dreamed
that I could be a good girl Wanna take a ride?
To touch with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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To touch with Art Bell from east to the Rockies, call toll-free 800-825-5033.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
My guest is Dr. Michael Shermer, who's a compassionate skeptic.
What is a compassionate skeptic?
well somebody doesn't leave at all skeptical of everything but they watch their words a little bit when they talk to those who have faith you
Once again, Dr. Michael Shermer, Dr. Shermer, are you at all skeptical of our government's claim to be able to take all of this horrid, horrid nuclear waste that we have and put it in a mountain about just not that many miles away from me called Yucca Mountain, and that the claim is that they can keep it safe for tens of thousands of years if they have to.
First time, Color Line, you're on the air with Dr. Michael Shermer.
Hello.
unidentified
Hello, Art.
I'm a great fan.
I wish you had a TV show.
Dr. Shermer.
Hey, I'm as big a skeptic as you are, and I agree with 99% of everything you said.
And I even share your religious and political views to the extent that you express them.
But now, some things are pretty hard to explain.
For example, during one of the solar eclipses that was going to be visible 100% down in Mexico, astronomers, as you can imagine, and just amateur astronomers, professionals, and TV records, and TV cameras of high quality recorded a multiple sighting of UFOs that were physical.
They reflected sunlight.
There was shadow underneath them.
It was thousands of witnesses and pictures from different angles observed the phenomenon.
There were between, I don't know, 10 and 25 of them doing maneuvers that are just impossible by modern aircraft of any known kind.
I mean, that might not be secret.
Now, how do you, and in a related sighting, well, not a related sighting.
I don't know about the one in particular that you're bringing up.
I haven't heard of that one.
But in general, it's a good question because a lot of these things are not just a planet Venus or a weather balloon or a visual hallucination or illusion or something like that.
In fact, we have a very interesting UFO that flies over our house every New Year's Day morning at 8 a.m.
It's the stealth B-2 bomber that flies from Edwards Air Force Base right over the Rose Parade, right down Colorado Boulevard and Pasadena, and then it circles around right over my house and does another flight down the boulevard.
It is so unbelievable that if we didn't know about stealth technology, if it was out in the desert and it was kind of dusk and you weren't quite sure and you believed in UFOs and you saw that thing, you would definitely think it was some sort of UFO.
I mean, it's really weird looking.
It just looks like a black hole in the sky, triangular hole in the sky.
It's pretty spooky.
But we know what it is in that case.
So what are the chances that the other things we don't quite know what they are represent aliens from another planet or just another form of type of stealth aircraft that we just don't know what's going on in our top secret government?
I'm calling just outside of Statesville, North Carolina.
I'm a truck driver.
Okay.
I don't have any PhDs or NDs or anything, but I wanted to ask the fine doctor if he can explain the origin of the Big Bang as far as who did it, what did it, and how it was done if he doesn't believe in God.
The Big Bang is indeed a mystery, a big mystery, Dr. Shermer, that all of this that we know of, apparently, according to science, came from something smaller than a quark.
hold on no this isn't there i mean you're shifting it out of the realm of after all materially this We have some explanations of what might have triggered the Big Bang.
One explanation is a collapsed star, a collapsed black hole, in another universe.
That could have been the trigger.
There might be multiple universes.
I know you know about this because you've had guests on your show talking about this.
I do.
Multiple bubble universes.
Our universe is just one of many universes, perhaps an infinite number of universes.
And any universe that has the kinds of laws of nature that we have that create atoms, which lead to the creation of stars, which leads to stars to collapse into black holes, which might create other universes, are more likely to survive.
That is, they're more likely to launch other universes.
So, you know, when the individual photons go through the slit in the double-slit experiment and they appear to interact with other photons that aren't really, they don't seem to be there in our universe.
Listen, I wanted to bring the NDE subject up to us.
There's a Dr. Elizabeth Kubla-Ross that did a study of about 20,000 patients who went through that.
And one of the things that popped out to me was that people who are blind from birth, blind from birth, when they had an NDE, could see and describe down to the detail of colors of a shirt, jewelry, facial expressions, etc.
Do these things represent something out there or inside our heads?
And I think it's an inside-the-head phenomenon.
I think it's a kind of experience that has to do with oxygen deprivation to the brain, shock and trauma, the kind of thing that happens in surgeries, near drownings, car accidents, heart attacks, that sort of thing that people experience.
Part of the problem is we don't have a full, really satisfactory explanation for it.
We have some ideas, the oxygen deprivation as being one.
But because we don't really quite understand what consciousness is, we're not going to know what an altered state of it is, whether it's a hypnotic state or near-death experience or out-of-body experience.
This is one of those areas where there's still some mystery.
I mean, because our brains are all structured in the same way.
They operate in the same neurotransmitter substances.
They all have synapses, and the neurons talk to each other the same way.
So, of course, we're going to have common experiences.
You would expect that.
And culture determines these things in large part.
I mean, you know, I think the whole alien abduction experience, the whole phenomenon, is a cultural experience.
It has to do with the fact that we live in the age of science and science fiction and space exploration.
And people 500 years ago, they had similar experiences, but they were describing demons, incubi and succubi, because they lived in a demon-hunted world.
But to cheat, I've had experts on lie detection on the show, too, and they say, no, no, no, it's not easy to beat it unless you actually believe your lie.
I did a show on how to beat the lie detector test once, and we brought in this ex-cop who makes his living giving courses mainly for defense attorneys and their clients on how to beat it.
When this guy told me, I said, oh, come on, there's no way I'm going to be able to do this.
And I tried it, and I could spike my blood pressure by like 60 points in a matter of seconds just by squeezing your sphincter muscle while you give the answer.
It's the most unbelievable thing.
But it's absolutely true.
The lie detector test is not a reliable thing.
It should not be used in court.
Well, it isn't allowed to be used in court.
And it shouldn't be because it's not reliable, and it's easy to beat.
And first of all, as I mentioned earlier, anybody can talk to the dead.
It's getting them to talk back.
That's the hard part.
And one of the techniques that they use to make it seem like they're doing that is called a cold reading technique and warm reading technique, cold reading technique.
You literally read somebody cold you've never met, throw out lots and lots and lots and lots of comments and questions.
Hundreds of them in a one-hour reading, dozens in a two-minute reading, and you see what sticks.
And oftentimes you'll get one or two of these kinds of specific things.
I wrote an article about this, How to Be a Psychic for a Day.
On our webpage, we have the techniques and the kinds of statements that you just made.
There's hundreds of those that work really well with people, like the watch.
He's telling me something about the watch.
Turns out most people keep most men keep their dad's watch.
Women jewelry, the flag at the funeral.
That's a common one.
There's a whole list of these things that are true for general psychic readings.
Like I'm getting something about a scar on your left knee.
Do you have a box of photos in your cupboard you've been meaning to put in a photo album?
If it's a woman, you have an earring that you've lost the pair to, but you're hanging on to it in case you find it.
Dozens of things like that that are very successful.
Not for everyone every time, but if you rattle off a couple dozen of those, you'll get three or four very specific, really weird hits, such that people like the caller will say, wow, it's incredible.
I can't explain how he got X. Well, that's how you explain it, that they throw out a lot of things like that.
I mean, if you are the other two, I'm not sure you're morally straight on there at all.
To comfort somebody who has lost a loved one may be a life continuing act.
Maybe.
I'm Mark Bell.
Good morning.
You're listening to Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
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Man, to believe in nothing or to be in doubt about everything in life, even the existence of our immortal soul and God and everything, that's a strange place to be, but it is the one that my guest is in,
doctor michael shirmer and he's all yours more in a moment so Once again, Dr. Michael Shermer, you know, I said it during the break, Doctor.
You know, to believe in nothing, literally, to be in doubt about virtually everything must be a very bleak, cooled existence, isn't it?
The psychic's not telling you what that meaning is.
So you will see them say things like, red dress.
I don't know what it means.
What does it mean?
And the person will then sit there and think for a minute and say, oh, I know that my beloved, before they passed over, they bought a red dress for my sister, or something like that.
So it's not the psychic telling the person getting the reading what the meaning is, it's the person getting the reading telling the psychic what it is.
It's really a psychodrama where the person getting the reading, they're the ones really doing the reading, not the psychic.
I would like to ask you to look inward a little bit, if you're able to do that, into the world of skeptics that you inhabit.
Those who follow your very skeptical leadership.
Listen, I've interviewed a lot of them, and I must say it is not true of you, but most of the skeptics that I've interviewed are actually manic about it.
And I wonder if you've noticed that trait in those that follow you, that there are many who are just they actually do their cause more harm because they're so manic about it.
You're not like that.
I wonder if you acknowledge that within your group of believers.
And, you know, born-again evangelical Christians, most of them are very thoughtful, nice people, and they're embarrassed by the abortion clinic bombers and extremists like that.
Most thoughtful Muslims are embarrassed by the extreme fundamentalists who have a lot of extra buildings.
I mean, one of the beauties of science is that it has this built-in self-correcting machinery in which if you're not skeptical of your own claims, somebody else will be.
In fact, they'll get bonus points for finding out where you went wrong.
That's part of the system, and it's a pretty brutal, harsh system, the whole peer-review system, where somebody's going to look for, specifically try to find where you screwed up and where you went wrong.
That's the harsh part of science, but it's also its greatest strength.
Just exposure to a driving curiosity myself, and then exposure to a lot of fraud and nonsense that I personally experienced, just trying all kinds of wacky things just to see what works.
Really more, my God, I'm a scientist, or I want to take a scientific perspective.
And it wasn't a moment.
It was a lot of moments.
Really in graduate school, I was taking a course on evolutionary theory that met Tuesday nights from 7 to 10.
And then the class adjourned after that and went to the local bar where we sat and had adult beverages and talked about the Big Bang and God and religion.
And that's where it happens, really over a six-month period.
unidentified
Also, I'd like to ask another question concerning intuition.
You keep talking about psychics and mediums and that type of thing.
It would be totally subjective to assume any attribute within the human design, but why discount intuition altogether and support intellect so strongly?
Actually, there's a lot of really interesting research on intuition.
Turns out on many things, we're very intuitive.
We're very accurate with our intuitions in that particularly social relations, the ability to read emotions in people's faces, the sense of a situation being dangerous, that there's something wrong, the sense you have about another person's integrity, the quality of their character.
Okay, here's what I think is going on with intuition in general, is that we evolved in a social environment as well as a physical environment.
And it was really important for our ancestors to be able to read social situations, be able to judge other people quickly, be able to assess relationships between people.
That's equally as powerful a part of our evolutionary history as is other things.
The physical environment, for example.
So I think we've developed good skills, intuitive skills at that sort of thing.
And I think some people are better at it than others.
So when we talk about women having more intuitive power than men, something like that, I don't think it's a secret, mysterious, paranormal power.
I think it's just being tuned into your social environment, and women tend to be more tuned into the social environment than men are.
And so, yeah, I think there's something to intuition there.
Dr. Schimmer, I was just, this is kind of a broad question for you, but on the aspects of mental illness and how, you know, the people go through psychotic stages hearing voices, and, you know, they are a danger.
Okay, they get locked up, they get on medication, and generally they're dealt with in a way, you know, that just seems like, okay, you're mentally ill, you're touched.
And it sounds like that's what some of the stuff is in the Bible and stuff like, you know, people always say they talked to a spirit or they heard voices and, you know, stuff like that.
And I was just wondering your thoughts about is there really cure in the, I'm not telling people to get off their meds or anything, but I'm saying, do you think there's a real cure for mental illness?
It's the third of my trilogy, Why People Believe Word Things was about science and pseudoscience, How We Believe was about science and religion, and the science of good and evil is about the science of morality.
So, you know, it's all sort of a package of trying to set up a scientific worldview and live a life that is based on reason and science.