Critical Thinking Feed

An exploration of the validity of the Silurian hypothesis, which posits the existence of a pre-human intelligent race on Earth.

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“Gretchen, I’m sorry I laughed at you that time you got diarrhea at Barnes & Noble. And I’m sorry for telling everyone about it. And I’m sorry for repeating it now.”
—Karen Smith in Mean Girls 1

Popular culture, including literature and film, often extols the value of friendship and the important emotional role it plays in the lives of women and girls. From The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Anne of Green Gables to films such as Steel Magnolias, Thelma and Louise, and Bend It Like Beckham we see portrayals of female friendship that highlight social and emotional support as it occurs across the lifespan. Such tales are often centered on self-discovery, and the value of generous and loyal friends. And yet, popular culture has also given us products that focus on the dark side of female relationships in films such as Mean Girls (the theatrical release poster had the tag line “Watch Your Back”), the television show Gossip Girl, and numerous songs from artists like Taylor Swift with Better Than Revenge and Katseye with Mean Girls. These works emphasize the competition that can occur between women, even those who appear to be friends, over sexual partners and social status in one’s peer group. The ubiquitous nature of social media today has also raised concerns about this type of aggression between females. While there are substantial benefits to friendship,2, 3 there can also be significant costs.4 Our friends can be our most trusted allies but they can also betray us in the name of competition. Before delving into the depths of female friendship and fiendship, it is important to understand evolutionary forces that shaped same-sex friendships in general as well as how natural selection may have differentially influenced male versus female same-sex friendships. 

In general, across our evolutionary past, same-sex friends would have played a crucial role in our survival and fitness. For example, potential benefits of friends would have included protection against rivals or other threats to survival, enhancing one’s status and access to mates or resources, transmission and development of culturally important skills, social support in raising children as well as navigating other relationships, and emotional support to help manage stress and social challenges.5 The number and quality of these same-sex relationships are associated with better mental well-being and physical health for both men and women.6 However, since men’s and women’s same-sex friendships evolved in different contexts to solve somewhat different adaptive problems, there are significant differences in their same-sex relationships.7, 8 Friendships between men evolved in a side-by-side group context. Historically, this would have been men forming alliances with one another for purposes of hunting, protection, and warfare. As such, they tend to center around a shared activity (e.g., sports in modern society). In addition, these friendships tend to be hierarchical in nature and often involve direct competition (including physical contests of strength, skill, or both). In contrast, women’s same-sex friendships evolved in a face-to-face, one-on-one context in which women formed alliances with one another for purposes of alloparenting (that is, the care of offspring by individuals who are not their biological parents, from feeding and grooming to protection and socialization), emotional support, and sharing of resources and social information. Historically, upon marriage, women typically left their own kin behind and relocated to their husband’s community.9 Therefore, in the absence of others who would be invested in their well-being, these social alliances between women would have played an important role in their own survival as well as that of their offspring (and therefore of the group they had joined). Today, friendships between women are more intimate than friendships between men and tend to center around mutual disclosure, trust, and empathy. Even in contexts where there is an activity involved (the popular “Stitch-n-Bitch” groups, for example), the shared activity typically tends to come second to the emotional bonding between the women. Compared to their male counterparts, competition between female friends tends to be more indirect and involves reputation-damaging gossip, social exclusion, and subtle undermining of each other’s interests. 

In addition to differences in friendship interaction style, the structure of male and female same-sex friendships also influences how men and women react to interlopers who may threaten these friendships.10 Male same-sex friendships evolved in a context that historically included banding together to defend their group against threats from other groups. Consistent with this, men (compared to women) report greater feelings of friendship jealousy when primed with a threat of intergroup conflict. Furthermore, since a larger coalition of same-sex friends would mean greater benefits accrued from those relationships, men report greater friendship jealousy (compared to women) over the prospect of losing acquaintances. Women, on the other hand, tend to engage in one-on-one interactions with their same-sex friends, and report experiencing greater loss and friendship jealousy over the prospect of losing a best friend (compared to men). This loss is compounded by the fact that, compared to men, women invest more time and energy to develop their close, intimate relationships, thus making it harder to replace their close friends. The greater self-disclosure between female close friends also makes the dissolution of such close friendships potentially more damaging to one’s reputation if the ex-friend spreads rumors about them or shares their secrets. These features motivate women to protect their friendships. 

The shift from friendship to fiendship comes into play when jealousy is triggered by the friend themselves versus an interloper. As indicated above, women tend to use indirect competition strategies. Specifically, while men are more likely to engage in direct physical aggression with their competitors, women are more likely to engage in relational aggression,11 which involves attempts to harm others by damaging their social ties.12 Often done covertly, this social sabotage involves behaviors such as excluding the so-called friend (e.g., giving them the silent treatment or intentionally leaving them out of some interaction), gossiping or spreading rumors about them (e.g., sharing their secrets), and attempting to turn others against them through public embarrassment. Relational aggression in female same-sex friendships seems to peak in adolescence.13 Since this aggression occurs between friends, not just rivals, it is often perceived as a personal betrayal. Relational aggression can also be subtle, though, making it hard for the so-called friend to detect. It could include backhanded compliments or manipulating the “friend” and setting them up for failure. One example would be setting them up for failure or public embarrassment by encouraging them to wear an unflattering outfit or approach a potential romantic interest knowing they’ll be turned down. Since intimacy and emotional closeness is prioritized in female same-sex friendships, being betrayed or excluded by someone one considers to be a close friend can be especially hurtful. Research suggests that this type of betrayal in adolescence is often associated with negative academic and psychosocial outcomes, including feelings of depression, anxiety, poor self-image, suicidal ideation, and social withdrawal as they find it hard to trust others.14, 15 Prospective longitudinal studies have found that girls’ peer victimization experiences of relational aggression between ages 7 and 10 were associated with an increased risk of self-harm behaviors in late adolescence.16 The observed self-harm behaviors included cutting themselves as well as swallowing pills, with roughly 27 percent of adolescents reporting they engaged in those behaviors with suicidal intent. In addition, other longitudinal studies suggest that girls who experience peer victimization in middle childhood are more likely to develop eating disorders by early adolescence.17

While it is clear that women engage in aggression, albeit commonly in a different form than men, it’s important to understand the motivation behind it as well as the forms it takes. In general, greater female aversion to risk of physical injury promotes the pursuit of low risk and indirect strategies of same-sex competition. What are the drivers behind such competition between women and girls? They are largely intrasexual competition for social status and mates. For the majority of human history, women have lacked direct access to resources, relying on male provisioning and protection for themselves and for their children. As a result, same-sex peers are primary rivals for acquiring and retaining partners willing and able to invest and protect. We see echoes of this in the behavior of modern women, who dislike and work actively against rivals who threaten their romantic prospects, often directing their animosity toward physically attractive and sexually unrestricted peers. Cross-cultural research has demonstrated that men have a preference for physically attractive youthful women as sexual partners18 and studies examining female behavior with regard to online dating profiles to trends in cosmetic aesthetics suggest that women compete with other women over their attractiveness to men, aiming to look more youthful and attractive than their competitors.19, 20, 21 It is worth pointing out that beautification can be seen as a tactic in competing for male attention22 but also a vehicle for pursuing social status in social and workplace spaces.23 High status can also influence access to resources and valuable allies. High status individuals are in demand as friends. It is also worth noting that high status girls bully lower status ones, though they do so using less overt strategies than boys, sometimes taking on an authority or maternal role for the group, and enforcing equality among the rest at the risk of social exclusion.24 A number of studies suggest that high social status in adolescent girls, especially when indexed by peer perceptions, is linked to dating success, sexual activity, and the use of indirect aggression. It is somewhat less clear whether the status leads to increased aggression (due to lower costs) or that the covert aggression leads to increased popularity. However, some evidence suggests that physical attractiveness results in greater social status, which can be defended through indirect aggression—by keeping attractive rivals from one’s own social circle.25

A wide range of studies have examined aspects of intrasexual competition in women and how they play out in terms of friendship. Across several studies, April Bleske-Rechek and colleagues found that women are less willing to be friends with a woman who is sexually promiscuous; women perceive sexual promiscuity as undesirable in a same-sex friend, they deceive their friends about their own engagement in mate poaching, and they are more likely to be upset by imagined scenarios of a same-sex friend acting sexually available toward their partner, as well as attractiveness enhancement by friends.26 The researchers also found that attractiveness plays a role in the perceptions of rivalry within friendship dyads with pairs both agreeing on who was the more attractive woman (outside judges agreed as well), and the less attractive women seeing more rivalry in the friendship than their more attractive friend.27 Interestingly, at least one study has also shown that these competitive tactics are sensitive to costs in that women are more likely to engage in clothing-based enhancement when with an acquaintance than with a close friend, but even then only when there was a desired male present. This again suggests that intrasexual competition mechanisms are sensitive to possible friend relationship costs and are more likely to be activated when a rival is seen as a legitimate threat (such as being more attractive).28 Despite being in possible conflict over mates or status, women rely on their cooperative friendships and there is a cost to jeopardizing them. 

The underlying reason is that women rely on same-sex friends for help, information, and other forms of social support. As previously described, ancestral mating and residence patterns often created an environment where women needed to build close social relationships with other biologically unrelated women. As a result, women may not only be averse to open competition but also have strong friendship preferences that encourage them to avoid other women who are highly competitive or highly status driven in favor of those who show indications of being kind, committed allies in order to develop valuable cooperative supportive friendships. Our ancestral adaptations for forming friendship ties likely shaped preferences designed to acquire same-sex friends able to help women accomplish evolutionarily recurrent tasks such as competing for status among peers, access to social information and resources, as well as caring for offspring. Recent studies of friend preferences suggest that women (particularly in comparison to men) highly value female friends who provide emotional support, intimacy, and social information.29 And even though women may report that their friends compete with them for attention from desirable men, they also report substantial emotional support as well as mating advice and companionship in mating contexts (bars, clubs, etc.).30

However, success may be best achieved by pursuing both cooperative and competitive goals at the same time. Researchers such as the late Anne Campbell and more recently Tania Reynolds have highlighted how women can pursue both by cloaking their intrasexual competition in prosocial gossip or other relatively low risk tactics that can do reputational damage to a rival while preserving own reputation and avoiding damage to status in their peer group. As discussed previously, the indirect aggression favored by women and girls focuses on social manipulation. In some cases, the victim would never know who the primary aggressor was if the tactics concentrated on social ostracization, stigmatization, and gossip. Rumors can be easily spread without the original source being singled out, protecting their reputation while damaging their target (through accusations of sexual promiscuity, disloyalty, and so on), and shielding them from retaliation. Women utilize their friends to gather and disseminate social information, including gossip about rivals, particularly when those rivals are perceived as a legitimate threat to their status or romantic opportunities. Experimental studies suggest that more attractive rivals wearing more provocative clothing increase women’s tendency to spread reputation damaging information, even when women report liking the target of their damaging gossip, and more so for highly competitive women.31 Preliminary results seem to confirm what many women may have experienced, namely that reputation damaging social information does cause harm to the target, in terms of how men and women may view and interact with them. Further, not all women are as likely to inflict such reputational harms, highlighting why less competitive women and those high in loyalty are seen as more valuable friends. 

Cartoon by Oliver Ottitsch for SKEPTIC

This also highlights the possible costs of being seen as someone who engages in overtly malicious gossip. If women prefer friends who are kind and loyal, those who are seen as malicious gossips are less likely to be preferred as friends and may also be seen negatively by desirable romantic partners. The problem then is how to engage in damaging gossip without being seen as malicious. How can sharing such information perhaps be seen in a prosocial light? There are at least two different strategies that may achieve this, perhaps involving a degree of self-deception or lack of awareness of one’s own motivations. The first is to disclose one’s own victimization, which may not be perceived as gossip but rather as sharing a painful experience and request for emotional support. There is evidence that women are more sensitive than men to friendship violations that suggest the friend is not a loyal and kind friend as well as being more likely to disclose such treatment to others. In addition, research has found that first person disclosures of mistreatment were more trusted than third party reports, and female perpetrators of that mistreatment did suffer reputational damage as a result of the victim sharing that narrative.32 These covert victimization narratives can effectively damage the same-sex peers that are targeted for their perceived misdeeds in terms of desirability as a friend and social status. In addition, a number of women articulate that they are sharing this information out of concern—not malevolent intent—for the target of their gossip. Researchers have also explored such concern-based gossip, demonstrating that women endorse more concern versus harm-based motivations for engaging in gossip and that concerned gossipers were viewed more positively by social and romantic partners than were malicious gossipers. Interestingly, concerned gossip harmed perceptions of the target as much as did malicious gossip, indicating that negative commentary on an individual that is framed with concern harms the targets reputation and insulates gossipers from reputation damage (due to lower perceptions of maliciousness).33 The tendency to engage in these forms of gossip may explain the fact that many women report being targeted by gossip while relatively few report spreading negative rumors. There is a degree of self-deception about one’s motivations that makes these effective tactics for covert female intrasexual competition. 

The popular neologism for this type of close friend is “frenemy.” The term “frenemy” has become popularized in the last twenty years or so and is defined as a “person with whom we outwardly show characteristics of friendship because of certain benefits that come with the façade.”34 Studies suggest that people maintain such “frenemyships” because there are relational benefits such as shared social networks, status, and information sharing that may outweigh the cost of terminating the relationship—though there may be high levels of covert competition and social manipulation.35 It is clear that same-sex friendships can be some of our most valued and rewarding relationships, ones that are lifelong and help us navigate the challenges of life. Yet, they can also be damaging, with frenemies causing harm in the pursuit of their own goals. As a result, choosing same-sex friends wisely is an essential skill as is the ability to engage in covert competition. In other words … keep your friends close but your frenemies closer. 

“It is better to have an enemy who honestly says they hate you than a friend who’s putting you down secretly.”—Unknown

As a gentle reminder that you will have an hour of sleep robbed from you tonight, enjoy this episode on Daylight Saving Time Myths from the archives!

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On his February 22, 2026 blog the estimable evolutionary biologist, outspoken atheist, and (relevant here) staunch defender of determinism, Jerry Coyne, takes me to task for presenting “a muddled argument” in my case for compatiblism (in an excerpt in Quillette), which was based on a longer chapter in my book Truth: What it is, How to Find it, and Why it Still Matters.

First, let me acknowledge that this chapter in my book is in Part III, or “Known Unknownables.” Following Donald Rumsfeld’s famous epistemological trilemma, that includes “Known Knowns” (things we know that we know), “Known Unknowns” (things we know that we do not know), and “Known Unknowables” (things that are not ultimately knowable).

In this section of the book I include consciousness (the easy problem is understanding the neural wiring; the hard problem that I claim to be unknowable is what it’s like to be the wiring), God (I know of no scientific experiments or rational arguments that can prove its existence one way or the other), and why there is something rather than nothing (what do you mean by nothing, anyway?). So, in a sense, Jerry’s determinist position is, in my understanding of the problem, no more or less likely to be true, depending on how one defines the problem itself. I have defined it in a way that compatibilism works, whereas Jerry has defined it so that determinism works.

Second, this is why I reference the survey by David Chalmers, the philosopher who made famous the “hard problem of consciousness,” along with his colleague David Bourget. They asked 3,226 philosophy professors and graduate students to weigh in on 30 different subjects. Here is what they found regarding the free will issue:

Accept or lean toward:

Compatibilism

59.1%

Libertarianism

13.7%

No free will

12.2%

Other

14.9%

Now, on one level, it is irrelevant how many people believe something, along the lines of what Philip K. Dick meant when he defined reality “as that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Yet, as I argue, there is something revealing about these figures. Namely, if the most qualified people to assess a problem are not in agreement on an answer—and the free-will/determinism problem has been around for thousands of years—it may be that it is an insoluble one, a known unknowable.

Third, therefore, it is entirely possible that a highly qualified, educated, and intelligent thinker like Jerry Coyne can make a compelling case for determinism, while at the same time a highly qualified, educated, and intelligent thinker like the late Daniel Dennett can make an equally compelling case for compatibilism (and Coyne and Dennett have locked horns on this very matter).

I agree with Jerry and Dan that we live in a determined universe governed by laws of nature. But I disagree with Jerry that this eliminates free will, or if you prefer “volition” or “choice” (again, this entire field is, to use Jerry’s term, “muddled” with confusion of terminology). My compatibilist work-around is “self-determinism,” in which while we live under the causal net of a determined universe, we are part of that causal net ourselves, helping to determine the future as it unfolds before us, and of which we are a part. My compatibilist position is based on the best understanding of physics today. Let me explain.

Physicists tell us that the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy, means that time flows forward, and therefore no future scenario can ever perfectly match one from the past. As Heraclitus’ idiom informs us, “you cannot step into the same river twice,” because you are different and the river is different. What you did in the past influences what you choose to do next in future circumstances, which are always different from the past. So, while the world is determined, we are active agents in determining our decisions going forward in a self-determined way, in the context of what already happened and what might happen. Thus, our universe is not pre-determined in a block-universe way (in which past, present, and future exist simultaneously) but rather post-determined (after the fact we can look back to determine the causal connections), and we are part of the causal net of the myriad determining factors to create that post-determined world.

(Jerry inquires why I didn’t discuss quantum uncertainty in my analysis. The reason is that Dennett debunked this decades ago in Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, when he pointed out that any such quantum effects that alter other deterministic physical laws would not grant any type of free will or volition, for it would just mean that some percentage of your “decisions” are just random noise in the machine.)

Given the muddleness of terminology here, let me bring in the philosopher Christian List and his three requirements of volition from his book Why Free Will is Real:

1. Intentional agency—the capacity to form an intention to pursue different possibilities;
2. Alternative possibilities—the capacity to consider several possibilities for action (this is the “could have done otherwise” element);
3. Causal control—the capacity to take action to move toward one of those possibilities.

As List explains in more detail:

Specifically, we need to know whether what the person did was freely performed, as characterized by the three bullet points above. Was it an intentional action? Could the person have done otherwise? Was the person in control? Or, if what the person did was not freely performed, we need to know whether the person’s free will was at least implicated in the run-up to it: Was there a free decision to get drunk in the first place, for instance? Of course, moral responsibility might well require more than that…but I do take the presence of free will somewhere along the relevant chain of events to be a necessary condition for a salient form of moral responsibility.

Of course, Jerry and other determinists like Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris could just redefine the problem by saying that even the capacity to form an intention was pre-determined by atoms, molecules, and neurons, as is the capacity to consider several possibilities for action and the capacity to take such action. This is why I quoted Dan Dennett from my podcast conversation with him on this very challenge:

Determinism doesn’t tie your hands, nor does it prevent you from making and then reconsidering decisions, turning over a new leaf, learning from your mistakes. Determinism is not a puppeteer controlling you. If you’re a normal adult, you have enough self-control to maintain your autonomy, and hence responsibility, in a world full of seductions and distractions.

Since determinists often reference people suffering from extreme drug addiction or alcoholism, or those with a brain tumor that led to their bad behavior, like Charles Whitman in the Texas school tower shooting incident, I asked Dan about Sam Harris’s quote that “it’s tumors all the way down,” and Robert Sapolsky’s descriptor that “it’s turtles all the way down.” Here Dennett identifies the error in this line of reasoning:

Well, I like the way you put it very much, Michael, because I think you put your finger on the mistake that Sapolsky is making there. And Sam Harris makes it too. No, it’s not tumors all the way down. It’s machinery all the way down. But there’s good machinery and there’s bad machinery. And if we have bad machinery, then yes, we’re disabled to some degree. But what about people who have good machinery? They’re not disabled. Why can’t we hold them responsible? Now, some people are, alas, through no fault of their own, not responsible for what they do. And that might well include people with terrible, terrible youths, who didn’t get a good upbringing, or who had a horrific upbringing. And so we have to decide, as society, given that this is a dangerous person, what’s the humane, good thing to do? I don’t think there’s an algorithm or a bright line for distinguishing somebody whose brain is good enough from somebody whose brain is a little too disabled. We just have to make the decision.

Dennett then brings home real world examples:

We do it all the time. You’ve got to be 16 to get a driver’s license. Some 15-year-olds would be perfectly safe as drivers. Some 21-year-olds would not. But the law has to have a bright line and so it chooses one. We might argue whether we want to raise it or lower it, the way the drinking age has been raised or lowered, or the way the driving age has been raised or lowered. We have to have a policy and we have to stick to it and we can change it as we learn more and more. But what we don’t do is just say, “Oh, it’s disability all the way down.” No, you’re not disabled, I’m not disabled. I want to be held responsible. I think you want to be held responsible too.

Coyne is unhappy with my invoking of “emergence” and says I’m being rude to him and Sapolsky and Harris in accusing them of “physics envy,” but that’s what it is! Here, for example, is Sapolsky defending his belief that free will does not exist because single neurons don’t have it: “Individual neurons don’t become causeless causes that defy gravity and help generate free will just because they’re interacting with lots of other neurons.”

In fact, billions of interacting neurons is exactly where self-determinism (or volition or free will) arises. This is why I like to ask determinists: Where is inflation in the laws and principles of physics, biology, or neuroscience? It’s not, because inflation is an emergent property arising from millions of individuals in economic exchange, a subject properly described by economists, not physicists, biologists, or neuroscientists.

Rather than quoting myself again, I will invoke the geneticist and neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell from his book Free Agents, in which he shows that the determinist’s reductionistic approach to understanding human thought and behavior is not just wrong, but wrong-headed! How?

Basic laws of physics that deal only with energy and matter and fundamental forces cannot explain what life is or its defining property: living organisms do things, for reasons, as causal agents in their own right. They are driven not by energy but by information. And the meaning of that information is embodied in the structure of the system itself, based on its history. In short, there are fundamentally distinct types of causation at play in living organisms by virtue of their organization. That extension through time generates a new kind of causation that is not seen in most physical process, one based on a record of history in which information about past events continues to play a causal role in the present.

Thus, I conclude that the free will/determinism issue is an insoluble problem because we may be ultimately talking past one another at different levels of causality: the reductionist’s atoms, molecules, and neurons versus the emergentist’s brains, people, and societies.

Choose a side. The choice is yours!

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The question of whether or not we have free will has been pondered by philosophers, psychologists, theologians, neuroscientists, and by many of us in our own conversations and thoughts. Nearly two thousand years ago, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus declared, “You may fetter my leg; but not Zeus himself can get the better of my free will.”1 But Epictetus also believed in a deterministic world where each event is determined by preceding causes. How can this apparent contradiction be resolved?

In the 1940s, Bertrand Russel saw no reason that human volitions would not also be determined in the same way that inanimate processes are determined. Further, he saw the determined nature of volitions as incompatible with a person being the true source of his own actions. Russell supposed that an evil scientist could, by use of psychoactive drugs, manipulate a person to perform certain actions. And this hypothetical manipulation did not seem to Russell so different from normal life, where people are manipulated to do what they do by natural causes outside their own control.2

Fifty years after Russell published his critique of the Stoic notion of free will, several other philosophers made the same argument.3, 4, 5 Today, the continued quandary contributes to a sustained lack of consensus on free will. According to surveys, most people—including most philosophers—believe in some form of free will, most under the rubric of compatibilism.6, 7 Novelist and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer summed up the dilemma, “We must believe in free will, we have no choice.” 

However, the debate still rages in the world of academic philosophy, in a broader audience reached by podcasts and popular books written by scientists, and among readers of Skeptic. Here I will try to convince you that free will is real and not an illusion. I’ll argue that far from being exemplars of rationality and skepticism, the main arguments against free will make unjustifiable logical leaps and are naïve in the light of cutting-edge scientific findings. 

Throughout the philosophical literature,8 resolving the question of whether or not we have free will has often revolved around two criteria for free will: 

1. We must be the true sources of our own actions. 
2. We must have the ability to do otherwise. 

I argue that humans meet both criteria through two concepts: scale and undecidability. 

Scale and the True Sources of Our Actions 

In an article in The Journal of Mind and Behavior,9 I argued that many of our actions are caused by our wills; that is, by our conscious desires and intentions. This is not disputed by most (what I’ll term) free will deniers. They more often dispute that our wills are free, not that we have wills and that our actions often follow from our wills. Sam Harris, one such determinist with a large general audience, has said that the subjectively felt intention to act is the proximate cause of acting. Harris makes the same basic claim as renowned scientist Francis Crick,10 philosophers such as Bertrand Russell11 and Derk Pereboom,12 and many others. They claim that in addition to the proximate cause (the will), our actions have ultimate causes lurking behind them that are the relevant causes to consider when judging whether or not our wills are free. The ultimate causes beyond and beneath the surface of our wills, they argue, make them unfree. What are these ultimate causes? Harris identifies genetics and environmental influences as “the only things that contrive to produce” his particular will.13 Molecules beyond DNA have also been offered as ultimate causes of our decisions. Biologist Jerry Coyne argued that, “Our brains are made of molecules; those molecules must obey the laws of physics; our decisions derive from brain activity.”14 Robert Sapolsky, a prominent neuroendocrinologist, is publishing a book this year, detailing many such mechanisms that, it is claimed, obviate the role of willed choices.15

My mind does not exist as a molecule nor as a historical epoch, nor as a socioeconomic class. Yet my mind does exist.

What’s wrong with this line of reasoning? Consider the following question as an analogy: Are apples red? Suppose we all agree that apples have color. The question is whether the color is red or non-red. To answer the question, determinists would look beyond the proximate color of the apple. Realizing that the apple is nothing but atoms, they would examine many of the carbon atoms on the surface of the apple. They find that not a single carbon atom is red. Since none of the atoms are red, and the apple is nothing but atoms, they would conclude that the apple can’t be red. The error is that though they agree the apple has a color, they try to examine the nature of the color at a scale (a carbon atom is smaller than the wavelength of red light) where color is incoherent. The fact that they found no redness at that scale shouldn’t lead them to conclude anything about the color of the apple. 

Likewise, the fact that determinists find no personal authorship or freedom in the actions of molecules shouldn’t lead them to conclude anything about the nature of the will. We agree that we have wills, that we have subjectively experienced intentions that influence our actions. The question is whether our will is free or unfree. To look at molecules for the answer is a scale mistake. DNA and neurotransmitters observed at the molecular scale exhibit no will whatsoever. With that knowledge, is it compelling that they exhibit no free will? No. That should tell us that determinists are looking at the wrong scale to find answers about the will, just as looking for answers about redness at a scale where color is not meaningful. 

The right scale for finding answers to the question of apple redness is the apple scale, not the atom scale. The right scale for finding answers to the question of freedom of the will is the agent scale, not the molecule scale. Searching the molecule scale is just one example of this error. There are many other wrong scales where a confused determinist might look for answers about the will. He or she may zoom out temporally into an irrelevant timescale, including the time before the will in question existed. In the above analogy, this would be like conceptualizing the apple as merely a step in a process of agricultural industry. Since agricultural industry is not red, should we conclude that the apple is not red? The question about the will can only find its answers from a scale where the will exists as a will. Expanding the timescale to include the time before the person was born renders the question incoherent. 

If we keep our analysis in the scale where the individual agent exists, not zooming too far in nor too far out in space, time, or level of organization, then the primary and ultimate cause of my actions is me. The will emerges from the complex interactions of many small parts. It’s literally not true to say that it’s caused by any particular small part. It is caused by many small parts, but only when taken together all at once. And that’s the same thing as the whole person. So my thoughts and actions are deterministically caused by me. The molecules of which my brain is made are simply irrelevant to this fact. So I am the true source of my own actions, and there are no other “ultimate” causes. My mind does not exist as a molecule nor as a historical epoch, nor as a socioeconomic class. Yet my mind does exist. René Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” convinces me of this.16 In order to claim that my choices are really caused by a molecule or a historical epoch, one must refer to the dynamics of a scale where I (that is, my mind) cannot be found. Eliminating the mind from the analysis is not a valid way to answer a question about the mind. 

The Ability to Do Otherwise 

There is a temporal asymmetry in the question of whether I could have done otherwise. In the question’s typical form, it is backward-looking. It asks about what could have been in the past, and, at first, it seems like a coherent question. I did one thing yesterday, and we wonder if I could have done something else. But what if we wanted to figure out whether or not I’ll have free will tomorrow? From that temporal angle, the question of the ability to do otherwise stops making sense. In a forward-looking sense, the question becomes manifestly nonsensical. Can I do otherwise in the future? Otherwise? Other than what? Other than the thing I will do? The question stipulates that I will do a certain thing, and simultaneously asks whether or not I can avoid doing that thing. The stipulation contained within the question makes the answer trivial. No, of course I can not do something other than the thing I will do. In order for the question to have any significance in the forward-looking tense, it must be modified. The question can not directly stipulate that I will do a certain thing. The question must ask whether or not I can do something other than what I’m expectedto do, not other than what I will do. 

The will emerges from the complex interactions of many small parts. It’s literally not true to say that it’s caused by any particular small part.

Human choice is temporally asymmetric and must be analyzed as such. This point could be missed without properly situating our analysis at the correct scale. An inappropriate focus on the dynamics of little particles could obscure the truth. The laws of physics that describe or govern the interactions of particles do not specify a direction of time. If we could watch a video of two protons colliding, we would have no way to know whether the video was being played forward or in reverse. This is called time reversal symmetry. This symmetry holds true in a wide variety of particle interactions.17 Time appears asymmetric only at scales where emergent phenomena transpire. Large collections of particles obey the second law of thermodynamics, which is not time reversal invariant. As astrophysicist Matt O’Dowd put it, “Zoom in to individual particle interactions and you see the perfect reversibility of the laws of physics. But zoom out, and time’s arrow emerges.”18 A consideration of scale leads to a recognition of temporal asymmetry in human choice. 

In analyzing the ability to do otherwise, we should consider only a forward-looking ability because choices, by their nature, are forward-looking. We don’t deliberate or make choices about the past. Choices are always about something, and those objects of choice always lie in the future, thus choices are always forward-looking. At the time when a choice is actually made, there is as of yet no “what” as in “Could have done other than what?” I have not already made the choice, so there is no established action to have done otherwise. There can only be expectation of what I will do. If my actions are in principle perfectly predictable, then I do not have the ability to do otherwise in a forward-looking sense. If my choices are in principle not predictable, given total knowledge of the present world, then I do have the ability to do otherwise in a forward-looking sense, which is the only sense that makes any sense. Given the different dynamics found at different scales, the ability to do otherwise needs to be understood as temporally asymmetric; that is, as always forward-looking; as the ability to do something which is in principle not predictable. We do have that ability, and it derives from our self-referential nature. 

Self-Reference and Undecidability 

The fact that I am the relevant cause of my own actions comes with another important implication: I am a causally self-referencing entity. If a molecule were the relevant cause of my action, this would not be true in the same way. The molecule has no capacity for self-reflection, but I do. I can ask myself, “What will I do? What could I do? What should I do? What do I want to do? What would I do if I wanted to do X and should do Y?” Self-referential questions like these affect the choices that I make; and those choices change the self-referential questions that I ask. 

At the relevant scale, self-reference is causally important. I am a system which analyzes its own inputs, character, and potential outputs; generates new outputs based on those analyses; and feeds those new outputs back into itself as inputs which affect the outputs, which affect the system’s character. I am an output of and an input for my own processing. Framing the human self-referential nature in this way brings us to the concept of undecidability. 

A system that exhibits undecidable dynamics cannot be predicted, given complete knowledge of its present state. Computer scientists and mathematicians have proven that this fundamental unpredictability shows up in some algorithmic computations, mathematical systems, and dynamical systems (including physical systems).19 Though an unpredictable dynamical system may evoke the concept of chaos, undecidability is not chaos; it is a different sort of unpredictability. IBM research scientist Charles H. Bennett makes the difference clear: 

For a dynamical system to be chaotic means that it exponentially amplifies ignorance of its initial condition; for it to be undecidable means that essential aspects of its long-term behaviour—such as whether a trajectory ever enters a certain region—though determined, are unpredictable even from total knowledge of the initial condition.20

If a system exhibits undecidability, then it is unpredictable even given total knowledge of all of its constituent parts. Undecidability makes deterministic systems fundamentally unpredictable in principle, not as a result of merely lacking precise measurements. If humans can exhibit undecidability, then we meet the second main criterion for free will: the forward-looking ability to do otherwise. Scientists recently made such an argument feasible by explicating what features of a system give rise to undecidable dynamics. In 2019, Mikhail Prokopenko and his colleagues conducted a comparative formal analysis of recursive mathematical systems, Turing machines, and cellular automata. They come to a clear conclusion: 

As we have shown, the capacity to generate undecidable dynamics is based upon three underlying factors: (1) the program-data duality; (2) the potential to access an infinite computational medium; and (3) the ability to implement negation.21

If humans do have these three properties, then we meet the criteria for undecidable dynamics, which means we can take actions that are fundamentally unpredictable, which means we have the ability to do otherwise in a forward-looking sense, which means we have free will. 

First, consider program-data duality, which in this context is the ability for self-reference. The word “duality” simply refers to the typical distinction between program and data with which we are all familiar. A human at time 1 has a certain overall state of mind, coinciding with a certain overall physical state. The state at time 1 is a program, in that it entails implicit rules about what the system would do, given certain types of data. The streams of perceptions taken in at time 2 are data, which get processed according to the implicit rules. In addition to processing basic sense data, this duality allows for a program (or implicit set of rules encoded in the state of a human) to process other programs as data. For example, a human can process ideas, hypothetical scenarios, mathematical operations, and representations of the self as data (thus self-reference). 

The question about the will can only find its answers from a scale where the will exists as a will. 

The next requirement for undecidability is the potential to access an infinite computational medium. The computational medium is the substrate on which the state of the system is represented. In a computer, the computational medium would be the memory and storage. The set of all possible states of the system is called the state-space. For example, the state space of a computer would be the set of all possible configurations of its memory and storage. If we knew that a certain system had an infinite state-space, we could infer that the system has access to an infinite computational medium. 

It can be informally proven that humans have an infinite state-space. How many different thoughts is it possible for a human to have? That question includes sub-questions, such as how many things is it possible for a human to see? The state of your visual perception is one small part of your overall state. Think of the number 74. Now think of the number 74 with your eyes closed. Those two occasions of thinking of 74 occupied two very different points in your state-space because of the difference in visual perception. 

To roughly estimate how many overall states are possible while thinking of 74, we would need to do something like multiply the number of possible visual perceptions by the number of possible auditory perceptions by the number of possible sensations of heat and cold by the number of possible gradations of feeling sadness or happiness, and so on. Also, you may think of 74 while remembering, for example, the time you thought of 106 or 107. And the next time you think of 74, that will be yet another point in your state-space, since you’ll recall that you’ve thought of 74 before. There may be an infinite number of possible states in which you might think of 74. And there are many conceivable numbers other than 74, and many things to think about other than numbers. 

An obvious objection might be that a human and his brain are physically finite. In what sense can an organ that fits inside a skull be infinite? As a starting point, consider the 100 billion neurons that make up the brain. As a simplification, a neuron can be considered to be “firing” or “not firing.” So a simplified brain has 100 billion binary cells. Such an array of cells could instantiate 2^100,000,000,000 distinct patterns of on-or-off activation. That’s a big number. For comparison, there are estimated to be roughly 10^80 atoms in the observable universe.22 The number of atoms in the universe is an infinitesimally small number compared to the number of activation patterns possible in a simplified brain. And what about a real brain? A real brain is made of neurons which are not simply on or off. Some neurons show gradations in voltage and neurotransmitter release, meaning that they have many possible states between “on” and “off.”23

Undecidability makes deterministic systems fundamentally unpredictable in principle, not as a result of merely lacking precise measurements.

Besides neurons, there are many other variables in the brain that are not captured by the simplified on/off variable. Each neuron can vary in the amount of neurotransmitter in its vesicles ready for release, and the state of the receptors on its soma and dendrites (that is, to what degree they’re blocked by other molecules). There can also be variation in the amount of neurotransmitter that is floating free at any moment in the space between any two neurons. There are minute variables that will likely never be measured yet do, theoretically, make a causal difference. For example, in what spatial direction is each neurotransmitter molecule oriented? A neurotransmitter molecule must fit into a receptor in order to carry on a signal. For the molecule to fit, it must be facing a certain direction relative to the receptor. So the spatial orientation of the molecule before binding must have some nonzero effect on the binding affinity. How many different patterns of analog spatial orientation might trillions of neurotransmitter molecules be capable of? That alone may be infinite. The variable of “firing” or “not firing” does not capture any of these variables. So the actual number of possible overall brain states is some large exponent greater than 2^100,000,000,000 which is a large exponent greater than the number of atoms in the universe. 

Whether the human state-space is technically infinite or merely practically infinite (larger than any other number computed for any purpose in all of science), it will not be exhausted in the meager 100 years of a human lifespan. This means that the self-referential loops of processing do not need to stop at any predetermined iteration or level of abstraction. So for the purpose of analyzing the choices of a human, the state-space and computational medium are functionally infinite. 

The last element required for undecidability is the ability to implement negation. Negation in this context refers to the ability of a logical system to produce an output which is exactly contrary to the processing which led to the output. It is equivalent to the liar paradox, which is exemplified in a statement such as “everything I say is a lie,” or more formally, “this statement is unprovable.” The liar paradox is a self-referential statement, which can not be judged to be true or false without a contradiction. Self-reference is fundamental to this paradox because the statement refers to its own validity. If humans can implement this paradoxical logic into their thinking, then humans meet this requirement for producing undecidability. The fact that humans came up with the liar paradox thousands of years ago is evidence that humans can perform the logical operation of negation. 

Conclusion 

All three factors underlying the capacity to generate undecidable dynamics are present in humans. First, we exhibit program-data duality when we process ideas, hypothetical scenarios, mathematical operations, and representations of ourselves as objects of thought. Next, we have the potential to access an infinite computational medium. This is demonstrated by the fact that we can think of any one of an infinite number of objects of thought, which implies an infinite state-space, which implies an infinite computational medium. Finally, we have the ability to implement negation, demonstrated by the inception of the liar paradox in the minds of humans. If these three elements are sufficient to generate undecidable dynamics, then humans are capable of generating undecidable dynamics, which means we cannot be accurately predicted. And that means we have the ability to do otherwise in the forward-looking sense. 

Figure 1. Relational map of concepts. The truth of each concept supports the truth of the concepts downstream from it. This diagram illustrates how the concepts described throughout this article contribute to the overall reality of free will.

Figure 1 shows the relationships between the concepts discussed in this article. An understanding of the human agent at the scale where conscious humans actually exist leads to recognition of the self as the source of one’s actions, recognition of the relevance of temporal asymmetry to human choice, and recognition of self-reference as causally relevant to human actions. Self-reference, in combination with access to an infinite computational medium and the ability to implement negation results in undecidable dynamics. This entails the ability to do otherwise in the forward-looking sense, which is the only sense that makes any sense when temporal asymmetry is taken into account. The resulting total picture is that we (humans) meet two criteria for real free will: the forward-looking ability to do otherwise and being the source of one’s own actions. 

Viewing human agents as whole humans instead of as molecules makes it clear that humans are the cause of their own actions, and also leads to a focus on the human features such as self-reference, that generate undecidable dynamics. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was right. Neither Zeus, Bertrand Russell, nor the scientists recapitulating the latter’s argument 77 years later can diminish our free wills.

In what will certainly fail to go down as the news of the century, Imane Khelif, male boxer and women’s boxing Olympic medalist, has finally publicly admitted in a February 2026 interview that he is indeed biologically male. A large part of society specifically chose not to see. And another part chose not to care that eighteen months ago, two men were given a free pass to an abuser’s dream: the ability to not only assault women on an international stage, but the chance to be celebrated for it.

The 2024 Paris Olympics gold, silver and bronze medals, as designed by Chaumet (Credit: LVMH)

Boxers Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan entered the 2024 Olympics as a sex they were not and they did it with the full knowledge of the IOC. Two men, who according to an official release by the International Boxing Association in July of 2024, had failed more than one sex test for female eligibility in 2022 and 2023, and had been disqualified from female competition. For their fraud, both were rewarded with gold medals at the Olympics. One female boxer, Angela Carini, had to make the agonizing decision to forfeit rather than participate in the dangerous charade. How surreal it must have been to make that unbelievable yet necessary call, to not only go against everything one has trained for, but everything one stands for as an athlete, professional, and disciplined fighter.

For any inclined to give Khelif the benefit of the doubt that perhaps he just didn't know… if one is being raised as female and never begins menstruation at puberty, it will absolutely be examined why that is. Once illness and female conditions are ruled out, one is left with the “condition” of being male. In this case, a male with 46, XY 5-alpha reductase deficiency, as a medical report of his drafted back in 2023 outlined, later leaked to Le correspondant.

No one’s personal condition is ever a legitimate reason to disadvantage or endanger another demographic.

To ignore such disorders of sexual development in order to adhere to traditionally physical sex ideals is fairly common practice in conservative and religious countries, and African nations have a history of scouting such male individuals for the purpose of dominating women’s sports, to the overwhelming ignorance of the global athletics audience. As a result, most are still under the incorrect impression that athletes like Caster Semenya, the South African runner and two-time Olympic gold medalist, are simply women with higher testosterone and absolutely unaware of the reality that these are athletes with a male karyotype. Semenya confirmed in the Court of Arbitration for Sport to have 5-ARD, a genetic condition resulting in the inability to develop typical external male genitalia.

These disorders are unbelievably unfortunate for a multitude of medical reasons, beyond being tokenized and weaponized through identity politics. However, no one’s personal condition is ever a legitimate reason to disadvantage or endanger another demographic.

He just counted on larger society not bothering to care. And on that, he wagered well.

Nevertheless, such practice also happens to explain why Khelif, a Muslim in a Muslim nation, was conveniently free from traditionally mandated female attire, and able to be so comfortably hands-on with his fellow male trainers. And beyond that undisguisable situation, one must also genuinely ask why he never chose to appeal the International Boxing Association’s 2023 disqualification for failing to meet female criteria, or why he refused to participate in subsequent female competition that requires testing for sex.

So he knew. His family and community knew. He just counted on larger society not bothering to care. And on that, he wagered well.

It is the inevitable outcome of a societal ideology riddled with complacency for female safety and dignity.

Because despite the protests of the female boxers, certain boxing association officials, and few but genuine feminists against the unbelievable misogyny being broadcasted globally, many decided to protest calling a spade a spade. Widespread social media commentary of the ideologically-captured claimed that Khelif and Lin were simply masculine-looking women who shouldn’t be insulted for appearances beyond their control. That it was (stop me if you’ve heard this before) right-wing propaganda and Nazi TERF bigotry to suggest that such supposed gender nonconformity made them male. The pick-me cherry on top, of course, is that it was peak misogyny to call them men at all.

But this was only to be expected when the mainstream media “reporting” on such a farce fully fed this break from reality. During the 2024 games, at very best legacy organizations legitimized Khelif as the incorrect sex, and at worst, denigrated anyone pointing out the opposite truth. From the official Olympics reporting that ignored the situation itself entirely, to BBC and NYT accounts that comfortably crowned Khelif a woman, to USA Today fluff that belittled a serious slap in the face to females into “unhinged controversy,” the overwhelming majority of outlets at best passively accepted and at worst actively furthered the grotesque farce unfolding in front of the world.

Chromosomes, anatomy, and human sight are disregarded in favor of false passport markers and old photos of pink dresses, because apparently that is the only acceptable (and desired) proof of what “woman” means. 

Yet beyond entrenched media preferences is another incentive as well. This was, and is still, today’s gender misogyny in action. Ironically, those who consider truth too “offensive” for the prioritized male in question never seem to consider the unimaginable offense for the women, who must not only unfairly face a recognizable man, but are expected (as women usually are) to simply take it with grace and a smile. So, concessions will be made to spare male feelings in the name of “inclusion,” ultimately excluding women from their very own opportunities.

Chromosomes, anatomy, and human sight are disregarded in favor of false passport markers and old photos of pink dresses, because apparently that is the only acceptable (and desired) proof of what “woman” means. It is the inevitable outcome of a societal ideology riddled with complacency for female safety and dignity.

Fortunately, despite a seemingly ingrained forfeit of biological honesty, the tide is beginning to turn, with the release of necessary reports and a new, supportive political landscape. The once sacrosanct gender ideology is now beginning to be questioned as a whole in the mainstream, no longer only by brave feminists. We can see the effects of this in the athletic realm through changes in various governing organizations, including World Boxing itself, who are beginning to demonstrate the bare minimum of competition integrity through mandating sex testing for eligibility. And as IOC relies on individual sport federations to set eligibility standards, this nightmare will hopefully one day all but completely fade into history.

 Imane is and was always exactly as his own name states.

As it tends to go, many who put on blinders then will now be miraculously blind to the harm they supported. Khelif’s unforgettable selfishness will get purposely memory holed, along with their own unforgivable enablement in this feint of reality. But as USA Today once wrote in support of Khelif and wild disregard for truth, this indeed “can never happen again” … just not in the way that they meant.

Imane is and was always exactly as his own name states. And now that the rest of the world can no longer pretend that they do not know, they will have to finally decide whether they still believe men are entitled to women's earned opportunities, or if they are truly for women after all.

A review of Parallel Lives of Astronomers. Percival Lowell and Edward Emerson Barnard by William Sheehan. (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2024. Hardcover, 687 pages)

Of the two astronomers whose lives and accomplishments are chronicled in William Sheehan’s Parallel Lives of Astronomers, Percival Lowell was far better known than Edward Barnard. Lowell is famous for having championed the idea that the canals on Mars were built by intelligent beings. The origins of the idea that there were canals on Mars lay in the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli’s report of “canali” on the red planet in 1877. The word is best translated as “channels” but was popularly mistranslated as “canals.” Since in the latter part of the 19th century canals were being built all over the world by intelligent humans, the implication was that the “canals” on Mars were built by intelligent aliens.

A major theme of the book is that Barnard and Lowell in many ways were opposites of each other. Barnard grew up in poverty in Nashville, Tennessee. He became interested in astronomy as a nine-year old working in a photography studio. He received some academic training in astronomy and was a superb and objective observer. Unlike Lowell, his mathematical skills were comparatively weak. Lowell came from an extremely wealthy Boston family and his interest in astronomy began in college. He graduated from Harvard in 1876 with honors in mathematics. The topic of his graduation speech was the nebular hypothesis of how solar systems came together from collections of gas and dust around a sun. These contrasts (and others) between Lowell and Barnard provide an intimate view not only of the two men, but of much of the history of astronomy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially regarding Mars because the two men were at opposite ends of a raging debate among astronomers and the general public on the matter of the nature of the canals. 

From a skeptical point of view, the most interesting organizational concept that Sheehan uses is the distinction between top-down and bottom-up processing. He uses this to contrast the approaches used by Lowell and Barnard in their interpretations of what they saw through their telescopes and later in photographs. Lowell was a largely top-down man, starting with an idea and then searching for evidence to support it. Barnard continued to make observations until he believed he had enough data to come to a conclusion. Lowell focused his astronomical interests largely on the canal debate, while Barnard was one of the most productive observational astronomers of his day. The top-down versus bottom-up distinction allows Sheehan to use basic concepts in perception to explain the differences between the two men in their position on the reality of the canals.

Perception is a function of two very different processes that together usually lead to an accurate perceptual experience of the world. Bottom-up processing refers to the incoming sensory inputs from the various sensory systems. These, alone, are not sufficient to specify what is actually out there in the world. Top-down processing refers to the expectations, beliefs, and knowledge that we all have about the perceptual world. These are needed for the brain to interpret and make sense of the information that is brought in by bottom-up mechanisms. Almost always these two sources are in accord and the world is perceived accurately. 

Between the series of fleeting images hitting the retina of the observer and the final drawing or description of what the observer saw, the constructive nature of perception has ample room to create perceptual experiences of structures that were not there in reality.

However, sometimes expectations, beliefs, and knowledge can be wrong, and the incoming sensory input may be distorted or incomplete. Under these rare circumstances, people can and do actually perceive things that are not there even though they are not intoxicated or psychologically impaired. Thus flying saucers, sea monsters, Big Foot, and the like, are perceived when the sensory input is minimal, often seen in fleeting glimpses at night and in the distance. The Loch Ness Monster never swims up the Inverness River through downtown Inverness at high noon on a pleasant sunny day for vacationers to witness. Final perceptual experiences are a function of the sensory inputs as well as expectations and beliefs. Thus, perception is said to be a constructive process and one that can produce incorrect experiences. The canals of Mars fall directly into this perceptual cognitive model.

Before reading the book, I had the mistaken impression that when looking through a telescope, one saw a fairly stable image of whatever object the instrument was focused on. Nothing could be further from the truth. The image of a planet as seen through a telescope is just a tiny disc of light. To make matters worse, that image is far from stable, especially for the telescopes in use in Lowell and Barnard’s time. The book makes clear how unstable those images could be. Momentary changes in the characteristics of the air above a telescope would make the image waver, fade in and out of focus, and change in other characteristics from moment to moment. 

Even when “seeing” was excellent, all one saw were successive glimpses of the target object. Then those glimpses had to be constructed by the brain into a coherent impression of what the target was. Between the series of fleeting images hitting the retina of the observer and the final drawing or description of what the observer saw, the constructive nature of perception has ample room to create perceptual experiences of structures (i.e., canals) that were not there in reality. 

Sometimes expectations, beliefs, and knowledge can be wrong, and the incoming sensory input may be distorted or incomplete.

Astronomers had known since the early 19th century that such non-sensory factors could influence perceptual judgments in their observations. Thus, different observers reported different times at which a planet or star crossed a line in a telescope reticule. These differences were recognized by the term “personal equation.”  But the idea that perception was constructive in the sense that honest observers could perceive structures that were not present had to wait until at least the start of the 20th century before it was recognized.

Following his Harvard graduation, Lowell was expected to go into his family business of highly profitable textile mills. As an intelligent, curious young man he found that prospect stultifying. To make matters worse, he was involved in a serious scandal. He had proposed marriage to a daughter from the sniffy Boston upper crust, but then withdrew the proposal, something that just wasn’t done in that time and place. As a result, Lowell was effectively banned from that elite circle, so in response in the early 1880s he travelled to Japan and Korea and wrote several books on Asian culture and became part of the Korean government delegation to the United States (in 1883). He continued to live in Asia until 1893. 

That Lowell continued his interest in astronomy before actively pursuing the mystery of Mars was demonstrated by the “astronomical references and imagery [that] are scattered throughout the Far Eastern books and if gathered together would make a long list” (p. 97). That interest turned into a lifelong obsession in 1892 when he read French astronomer Camille Flammarion’s book La Planete Mars et ses Conditions d’habitabilite, in which the author argued that the “canals” were evidence of an advanced civilization. Lowell was wealthy enough to fund the creation of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, which opened in 1894. 

In his autobiographical writings, Barnard noted that he became interested in the stars while walking home from work in the dark. One star “seemed to be slowly moving eastward among the other stars.” This struck him as unusual because the other stars “seemed all to keep to their same relative positions,” (p. 121) while this one did not. This was clear evidence of an early careful observer who had, unknowingly, seen not just another star but the planet Saturn. When he was 19 years old, Barnard was given a book written by the Reverend Thomas Dick, who believed that all the planets of the solar system were inhabited. The book included simple star charts that Barnard “rushed to compare with what he could make out in the small patch of sky visible from the open window of his apartment” (p. 126). The book, a later fellow astronomer and friend wrote, “awakened a thirst for astronomical knowledge which … never ceased to be controlling” (p. 126). Around 1880 or 1881, Barnard was given a simple telescope by an older friend at the photography studio where he was still working. He later received a scholarship to Vanderbilt University, but never finished his degree. Such things were less important in the late 19th century, and in 1887 he obtained a position at the Lick Observatory outside of San Jose, California, one of the earliest mountain-top observatories so positioned to rise above atmospheric turbulence and local city lights.

During their long careers, both Lowell and Barnard observed Mars. Their different approaches—top-down versus bottom-up—permeated how they interpreted and represented the image that fell on their respective retinas. Figure 1 (from page 291 in the book) shows this difference beautifully. On top is Lowell’s version of what he saw in 1894, while Barnard’s representation from the same year is below. Overall, the images are similar in general outline. However, Lowell has added to his drawing numerous lines, which he contended were the canals, and details not present in Barnard’s. This is a classic example of constructive perception. Lowell saw similar geometric patterns on Mercury and Venus, although he apparently did not attribute them to intelligent design. 

Figure 1. Lowell’s map of Mars from 1894, published in Mars (1895), Plate XXIV. A new projection by Joel Hagen, for comparison with the Barnard map below.A map of Mars compiled on the basis of Barnard’s unpublished drawings from 1894, produced by astronomer-artist Joel Hagen. The projection has been chosen to match the map of Lowell on p. 227, so as to emphasize the striking differences. (Credit: Joel Hagen)

While Lowell was seeing things that didn’t exist, Barnard was busy with more fruitful astronomical activities. In 1895 he became a professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, which gave him access to the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. It was there that he spent the rest of his life and professional career. Wisconsin is not known for warm winters and the observing platform of telescope at Yerkes was not heated. Nonetheless, Barnard would observe almost compulsively, night after night, even in the bitter cold. He was famous for having extremely good eyesight, which made him an excellent observer. During his long career he was an active member of the astronomical community. He made numerous important discoveries including over 15 comets and the fifth moon of Jupiter. Barnard’s Star, whose motion relative to the sun he determined in 1916, was named after him in 2017, although it had been recorded photographically in the 1880s. It is a red dwarf that is one of the four stars closest to Earth. 

Perhaps Barnard’s most important contribution is the explanation for what are known as dark nebula, sometimes called “Barnard objects.” When the Milky Way is looked at through a telescope, there are large dark areas that appear to contain no stars. Why certain areas of the galaxy didn’t contain any stars was a mystery. In fact, these areas do contain stars, but their light is blocked by huge clouds of interstellar dust. The understanding of the nature of the dark nebula provided an important insight into the evolution of stars and planets. Another major accomplishment was his photographic atlas of portions of the Milky Way. The work, which is stunningly beautiful, took years to compile and wasn’t published until 1927, four years after his death in 1923. 

During his active career Barnard did not ignore the controversial issue of the canals on Mars. He photographed Mars through the great telescope at the Yerkes Observatory in 1909, when Mars was “in opposition” to the Earth—as close as it would be for many years in the future, and was an ideal time for observation and photography. These photographs showed no canals. Barnard was not as vocal in the great canal debate as some other astronomers. It was the brilliant Greek-French astronomer Eugene Antoniadi (1870–1944) who became Lowell’s most serious detractor. Sheehan includes the often acrimonious debates between Lowell and Antoniadi in the story of the contrasts between Lowell and Barnard. 

Final perceptual experiences are a function of the sensory inputs as well as expectations and beliefs … perception is said to be a constructive process and one that can produce incorrect experiences.

During the time that Barnard was active in astronomical research and writing, Lowell was not inactive. However, his activities and interests were heavily focused on the issue of the canals. He lectured frequently and wrote widely defending his view that the canals were real. He, too, took photographs of Mars through the telescopes at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. But constructive perception works just as well with photographs as it does with images seen through a telescope.  

Both Lowell and Barnard made contributions to astronomy; Barnard as a careful scientist and Lowell as a popularizer who inspired many to an interest in astronomy, including Robert Goddard and Carl Sagan. In terms of fiction, Lowell’s argument that the canals were the products of intelligent Martians led to the writings of H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Sheehan’s book goes into great, but never boring, detail about the lives and work of both men. The book is beautifully illustrated. There are pictures not only of the protagonists as they, to paraphrase Shakespeare, “strut and fret their hour upon the stage” but of their drawings and photographs of Mars and important locations in their stories. It is beautifully produced with copious references and notes. Unfortunately, the publisher did not provide an index, but with the 150th anniversary of Schiaparelli’s observation in 2027, Sheehan’s book is especially resonant.  

In the span of just weeks, two major U.S. releases captured the nation’s attention: Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos’s darkly playful alien tale, and The Age of Disclosure, a documentary staged like science fiction, where whistleblowers insist that nonhuman craft exist and the government is concealing the truth about alien contact. Their timing is not accidental. Both arrived on the heels of the first public congressional UFO hearings in over fifty years, in the middle of a nationwide spike in reported sightings. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) documented 757 new UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) incidents between May 2023 and June 2024—more than in many previous years combined—and some analysts now describe 2025 as the most active reporting year in history. We are not just witnessing reports of the unexplained; we are witnessing the psychic temperature of a country—its anxieties, conspiratorial hunger, and collective imagination—made visible.

At the end of Bugonia, when the alien empress finally speaks—exactly as the conspiracy theorist had foretold—she delivers her verdict to her crew, all of them dressed in strange, animal-like furred spacesuits: “We believe it is over. They have had their time. And in their time they have imperiled the life they share, and so we have decided their time will end.” The aliens then waddle away in eerie unison, and the empress punctures the protective Earth bubble. What follows is an instant apocalypse: humanity wiped out in a scene that resembles the visual language of the Rapture—a sudden and absolute religious experience. 

Poster for Bugonia (2025), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Image courtesy of Focus Features/CJ ENM

But The Age of Disclosure, Dan Farah’s latest sci-fi-styled documentary production, framed as a serious exposé of government UFO secrecy, ultimately reveals nothing new. It offers no evidence, only a procession of interchangeable older men linked to government or aerospace who repeat secondhand stories about witnesses who said they back-engineered crashed spaceships, recovered “biologics” (the new fancy term for aliens), and looming threats. At the watch party I attended, a few of us sat nonplussed at the end because, although the film insists danger is near, we wondered: danger from what, exactly? 

Why are aliens capturing our cultural imagination now? 

Most alien or UFO reports1 involve sightings of lights, orbs, or spheres that move oddly or swiftly and vanish silently—a pattern that has remained consistent over time. Some observers also report cigar-shaped objects or triangular craft. Many of these phenomena are reported worldwide. In 2025, the National UFO Reporting Center had already logged 2,174 UFO/UAP reports by midyear, a sharp increase from 1,492 reports during the same period in 2024. This rise may reflect the establishment of the AARO and renewed government attention, which have made reporting easier and less stigmatized, not to mention nudging people to look up more and notice what was previously missed (Starlink satellites are often reported as UAPs). Increased public awareness through media coverage, documentaries, and congressional hearings also encourages people to report sightings they might previously have ignored. This explanation, of course, presumes the alien sightings are real. Are they? 

An alternative interpretation—commonly referred to as the Psychosocial UFO Hypothesis—traces back to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, whose 1958 work Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, proposed that UFOs reflect psychic and cultural realities, not extraterrestrial ones.2 Jung suggested that flying saucers emerge in the collective imagination during eras of social disorientation, technological upheaval, or existential threat, functioning as modern myths that carry the weight of collective anxiety and longing. Rather than evidence of literal beings from another world, UFOs become symbols of fear, hope, salvation, or invasion—a projection of what the psyche cannot resolve. From this view, alien encounters are psychologically real even if not physically tangible: They reveal something true about the human mind and the cultural moment, not necessarily the cosmos. 

It is unsurprising that UFO sightings are on the rise today. Scholars have observed that UFO reports tend to increase during periods of societal crisis—such as existential uncertainty, geopolitical tension, or rapid technological change—reflecting collective anxieties rather than objective phenomena.3 In times of social distress and distrust, people are more likely to assign meaning or threat to ordinary or ambiguous events. Some psychological-cognitive theories suggest that ambiguous stimuli—lights in the sky, radar blips, or unexplained objects or events—are interpreted through cultural narratives and heightened pattern seeking.4 This is sometimes called the “low information zone,” in which blurry photographs and grainy videos stimulate the mind to fill in the missing spaces or connect the dots into meaningful patterns of an extraterrestrial nature. 

We live in a time of deep distrust in politics, corporations, and the media, which makes people question what they are told. Heightened fears from draconian COVID policies (“they closed the schools, restaurants, and parks so the pandemic must be really bad!”), hypermediated climate collapse (“if we don’t do something in twelve years all is lost”), threats of rising fascism (“Trump, MAGA!”), threats of an AI takeover (“the singularity is near!”), and rising nihilistic political violence (“burn it all down and start over!”) have created a pervasive state of anxiety. This fear, combined with distrust of formerly trusted institutions, fuels conspiracy thinking, including beliefs about aliens. With few reliable frameworks to navigate uncertainty, many turn outward for explanations or as distractions from personal responsibility. 

In Bugonia, Lanthimos suggests that conspiracy beliefs often emerge as a response to real pain and injustice. The film’s central conspiracist grew up with an addicted, neglectful mother and later lost her to a medical experiment. His belief in aliens and corporate malevolence is not baseless; it is rooted in trauma, exploitation such as pharmaceutical misconduct and corporate neglect, and social alienation. In this way, the film does not simply mock conspiracists as “crazy,” but explores the social and psychological conditions that give rise to such beliefs. 

To these we can add two more conditions contributing to Americans’ increasing belief in UFOs: the decline of religious faith and a reduced reliance on instinct and common sense. 

As traditional faith wanes, many turn to belief systems grounded not in evidence or instinct but in ideology and narrative—UFO conspiracies being a prime example. Belief is migrating from shared moral and religious frameworks to culturally mediated myths that promise meaning and belonging. In this sense, aliens function as a modern sacred avatar, a substitute for God, mystery, and existential structure. 

This mindset—that what you see may not be true, or what you don’t see is probably true—has fundamentally contributed to the widespread and enduring belief in a U.S. government cover-up of UFOs.

The complexity of contemporary society has been linked to a reduced dependence on intuitive judgment and common sense, making individuals more susceptible to being drawn into ideology and conspiracy theories.5 This effect has been amplified over the last two decades by our deep immersion in the online world, coupled with persistent global political instabilities. These factors have ushered in an era of “alternative facts” (on the right) and “postmodernism” (on the left) for many Americans, where the core assumption is that there is more than one truth or no truth at all. 

This mindset—that what you see may not be true, or what you don’t see is probably true—has fundamentally contributed to the widespread and enduring belief in a U.S. government cover-up of UFOs. Thus, even though most individuals have never personally seen or experienced a UFO firsthand, they are readily pulled into the conspiratorial narrative and accept it primarily because of the powerful surrounding cultural and ideological framework. It’s ideology over instinct. 

Common Sense and Instinct 

Evolutionarily, humans developed heuristics to make rapid decisions in uncertain environments—recognizing patterns, detecting threats, and navigating social hierarchies. These shared mental shortcuts form a basis of common knowledge, allowing groups to act cohesively, from identifying safe foods and interpreting emotional cues to cooperating in collective tasks. This intuitive knowledge also extends to social cognition: Humans can rapidly infer intentions, predict behavior, and synchronize actions with others, often without conscious reasoning. In this sense, common knowledge is not arbitrary but adaptive, providing a shared framework that increases survival, cooperation, and cultural stability. As Steven Pinker argues, common knowledge is foundational to human society because it enables social coordination and complementary decision making.6 Much of this understanding operates beneath awareness, signaled through involuntary behaviors like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech—embodied expressions of the intuitive knowledge that binds us. 

Paradoxically, people often engage in elaborate efforts to obscure, ignore, or deliberately avoid acknowledging common sense and, tragically, their own instincts. The tendency to avoid recognizing widely shared knowledge is well-documented in psychology and sociology. This behavior, known as information avoidance, allows individuals to shield their happiness, preserve existing beliefs, or maintain social standing. Research also shows that information avoidance can serve as a coping mechanism in situations of uncertainty or threat, helping people reduce cognitive dissonance and emotional discomfort.7

People sometimes engage in information avoidance not merely to protect their beliefs or personal happiness, but to align with a group ideology and secure a vital sense of belonging. According to Social Identity Theory,8 individuals derive meaning, status, and self-esteem from the groups they belong to; consequently, they may reject information that threatens the group’s worldview. Specifically, people may set aside their personal instincts or empirical skepticism to be part of a community—be it political, spiritual, ideological, or conspiratorial—that claims to possess special, hidden, or insider knowledge. Aligning with a group that asserts access to deeper truths, secret insights, or a more “awakened” understanding often feels more meaningful and elevating to one’s identity than simply accepting one’s ordinary, concrete life.9

In addition, people often bypass common sense by relying on cognitively unfalsifiable ideas—using claims for aliens such as “trans-dimensional,” “telepathic,” or “unperceivable by ordinary minds,” which place the phenomenon in a realm where no evidence could ever contradict it. This creates epistemic shielding, where the claim becomes immune to challenge: Any lack of proof is simply reframed as expected, since the phenomenon supposedly exists beyond ordinary perception or logic.10 This often involves setting aside common-sense reasoning—such as the implausibility of coordinated alien visits, the immense logistical challenges of secrecy, or the extreme hazards of space travel. By suspending these rational doubts, individuals can fully engage with the group, strengthening both cohesion and commitment to shared beliefs like UFOs. 

Believing the government hides alien knowledge signals social intelligence and alignment with the modern order of suspicion, whereas trusting official explanations can appear naïve or even irrational—suggesting that disbelief in conspiracy has become more deviant than belief itself.

System Justification offers another cogent explanation for why people override instinct, even without empathy-driven motives. This psychological process leads individuals to defend and reinforce the prevailing system or worldview, even when it may run counter to their own interests.11 In the context of UFO belief, the dominant “system” is no longer governmental authority but rather the conspiratorial worldview itself. Institutional distrust has become the cultural status quo, so accepting the narrative of a cover-up functions as a way of justifying and maintaining that system.12 Believing the government hides alien knowledge signals social intelligence and alignment with the modern order of suspicion, whereas trusting official explanations can appear naïve or even irrational—suggesting that disbelief in conspiracy has become more deviant than belief itself. 

A further reason that common sense is bypassed in UFO narratives stems from a psychological profile that makes the alien stories uniquely meaningful to the participants. The key players in The Age of Disclosure documentary, reflecting the wider UFO conspiracy community, are largely older White men, often from the Baby Boomer generation, including many former Cold War intelligence and military personnel. They were trained for decades to perceive patterns, secrets, and threats everywhere, interpreting anomalies like radar returns, classified flights, and black-project aircraft. This environment rewarded suspicion, dramatic interpretation, and assuming hidden motives—a mindset that doesn’t simply switch off upon retirement. Once retired, many lose their high status and sense of purpose; they miss being “in the know” and having a mission. UFOs restore all of that, allowing them to be relevant again by “exposing secrecy,” “protecting humanity,” and “warning people about what’s coming.” This powerful way of restoring identity and meaning creates a significant blind spot for rational facts or instinct, cementing a narrative where they matter again. 

A more common-sense approach—one uninfluenced by ideology—would align closely with how neuroscientists are beginning to frame the perception of unidentified objects. A trio of researchers, for example, recently posed this question: How can we “explain why healthy, intelligent, honest, and psychologically normal people might easily misperceive lights in the sky as threatening or extraordinary objects, especially in the context of WEIRD (western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic) societies”?13 These researchers draw on predictive-coding theories of perception, which suggests that the brain constantly generates top-down predictions based on prior experience. When sensory input is ambiguous or weak, such as distant lights in the sky or other celestial stimuli, perception becomes highly subject to existing beliefs and expectations. Frohlich, Christov-Moore, and Reggente argue that in Western contexts, where skepticism and distrust of institutions are amplified, psychologically normal people are more likely to interpret ordinary phenomena as potentially extraordinary, thereby reinforcing their mistaken beliefs and fostering the acceptance of conspiratorial explanations.14

Illustration by Marco Lawrence for SKEPTICDecline of Traditional Faith 

Another factor reinforcing the heightened interest and belief in UFOs is the dramatic decline of traditional faith systems in the U.S. and globally, especially in Europe.15 We are living through a moment of profound spiritual and cultural upheaval, marked by widespread secularization. Data from the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Studies (2007–2024) clearly illustrate this shift in the United States: The share of Americans identifying as Christian has dropped significantly from 78 percent in 2007 to 62 percent in 2023–2024. Much of this shift is driven by the growth of the religiously unaffiliated—those identifying as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular”—the “nones.” Furthermore, a stark generational divide exists, as only approximately 46 percent of younger Americans (ages 18–24) identify as Christian, contrasted with about 80 percent of older generations. Related measures of religious practice have also declined, including the share of Americans who believe in God “with absolute certainty,” pray daily, or attend regular services. 

These trends are not isolated to the U.S., reflecting global secularization that affects major world religions, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. A 2023 analysis of the World Values Survey data found that age and income are among the strongest predictors for decreasing religiosity, confirming that modern economic and demographic shifts correlate strongly with this decline.16 The consequence of the decline in traditional religious structures (churches, organized faith, and institutional religion) is the creation of a spiritual and cultural void. This vacuum can then be filled by alternative spiritualities, existential searches, or other belief systems that offer meaning, structure, and a sense of the transcendent—including UFOs, alien-mythologies, “otherworldly” beliefs, and nature mysticism. 

As younger generations grow up without strong religious roots, their search for meaning and a comprehensive moral framework often shifts toward political, psychiatric, or identity-based frameworks rather than centuries-old orthodox religions. While these new frames of belief are influenced by contemporary cultural anxieties, they tend to be less stabilizing and reassuring than traditional faith and wisdom. Studies of the culture wars indicate that, instead of offering equanimous guidance, these ideologies frequently contribute to an “us versus them” positionality, demanding allegiance to a specific side rather than fostering broad acceptance or spiritual integration.17, 18, 19

A Desire for Faith 

When social anxieties intersect with waning religious practices, a spiritual void emerges, which faith, in its deepest sense, functions to fill. Paul Tillich described faith as the recognition of what is ultimately important in life, providing meaning and courage in the face of despair.20 Faith counters the secular demand to find fulfillment solely in the material present by offering a framework of ultimate value that extends beyond the empirical, fostering trust that reality holds order, purpose, and goodness beyond human comprehension. While it does not remove suffering, faith situates pain within a larger narrative of redemption or spiritual growth, offering hope, belonging, and the resources to endure the “unlivable self.” In this light, participation in alien beliefs can, in part, be interpreted as a search for a similarly powerful spiritual experience. 

For Carl Jung, the emergence and widespread cultural interest in alien experiences and UFOs were a form of spiritual projection. He posited that this phenomenon arose from a collective longing for something transpersonal—a desire for meaning and connection beyond the material world—driven largely by the decline of traditional spiritual practice and the sociopolitical existential crisis in the West. Jung argued that, regardless of their physical reality, what UFOs primarily represent to people is the archetype of salvation or integration, serving as a potent symbol of hope that something external might save humanity from its own crises. 

This powerful psychological need quickly spilled into the social sphere: By the early 1950s, the world saw the beginning of UFO religious communities, almost all of which were tied to the emerging New Age Movement.21 This established a distinct, if unconventional, religious community that has since expanded into a diverse landscape of cults, spiritual groups, and online movements. These modern mythologies offer their adherents not only an answer to the cosmic riddle but also a sense of belonging, a moral framework, and a promise of ultimate transformation—functions historically reserved for organized religion. 

We are not just witnessing reports of the unexplained; we are witnessing the psychic temperature of a country—its anxieties, conspiratorial hunger, and collective imagination—made visible.

The world of UFOs deeply echoes religious communities, particularly in how the phenomenon inherently divides people into believers and nonbelievers, subsequently demanding an alignment with a collective ideology or community for those who accept the narrative. In particular, abduction narratives strongly resemble spiritual transformation stories, carrying powerful mythic, symbolic, and spiritual overtones that speak to a profound human need. These experiences often involve narratives of a calling, being chosen, initiation, and transformation, placing the individual in touch with a greater, transcendent, and mysterious unknowable power.22 In this way, both alien abduction and traditional spiritual experiences—such as deep prayer, apparitions, mystical visions, or spiritual possession—can be viewed as powerful modern myths. They serve as psychic containers for deeper psychological realities, suggesting they both function as potent cultural frameworks for expressing profound feelings of internal conflict, such as disconnection, trauma, or identity crisis, and a fundamental longing for transcendence or an escape from the confines of a prescribed self. 

If participation in UFO belief systems satisfies a spiritual longing, what’s the harm? Perhaps none. However, when such belief requires individuals to suppress instinct, embodied perception, and common sense, the stakes shift. We risk creating tension with the fundamental architecture of evolutionary biology and psychology. To override these deeply ingrained perceptual systems in favor of a socially constructed narrative demands a significant cognitive sacrifice—one that erodes the innate trust in our instincts that has historically kept us alive. Over time, this override may dull the very intuition evolution shaped to help us discern reality from story. 

We cannot expect young Americans to find faith in religious institutions, as many are still working to repair the trust of congregants they have long disenchanted. Yet faith—faith in something, anything—is essential to begin filling the emptiness left by a lack of meaning. Without faith in a larger cosmic order—be it a sense of karma, a belief in something greater, or a feeling of being loved or held by a transcendent whole—our younger generations are far more likely to attach to an ideology introduced to them on social media, which often leaves them unattached to an embodied instinctual reality. 

Into this void step alien narratives.

Area 51 may want to dust off the welcome mat. Not one, not two, but three interstellar objects have drifted through our solar system, now referred to as “interstellar interlopers.” Astronomers labeled them as 1I/‘Oumuamua in 2017, 2I/Borisov in 2019, and 3I/Atlas in 2025 (the prefixes refer to the order of discovery of the interlopers). While most astronomers see unusual but ultimately natural cosmic debris, Harvard astronomer and Galileo Project head Avi Loeb has stepped up to suggest these anomalous interstellar visitors could be alien technologies, possibly even a threat to humanity. Before we start waving white flags at space rubble, it’s worth noting that the rest of the scientific community is responding with something far less dramatic: data. Most scientists, armed with models and common sense, see nothing more exotic than fast-moving rocks and comets with unusual chemical compositions.

Avi Loeb: Prophet, Seer, or Publicity Seeker? 

Avi Loeb is no UFOlogist conspiracy theorist with an active imagination. He holds Harvard’s Frank B. Baird Jr. Professorship of Science and has spent most of his academic life developing rigorous theories about black holes, galaxy formation, and the early universe. So, when he started speculating about alien artifacts drifting through our solar system and writing several popular books about extraterrestrials, it’s no surprise that a bevy of UFOlogists treated his words as something akin to the “next coming.” 

In recent years, he has become known less for his contributions to cosmology and more for a far more audacious proposition: that humanity may have already encountered extraterrestrial technology created somewhere beyond our solar system. The shift has turned him into a public figure with an unusually large following for an astrophysicist, even as it strains his standing among colleagues. Admirers see him as refreshingly fearless and he has inspired my young students to go into the sciences (he regularly posts emails from them on his Medium blog); critics describe him as a man who has allowed publicity to eclipse prudence. The tension between those two views defines the controversy that now surrounds his work. 

The ‘Oumuamua Puzzle and Loeb’s Radical Interpretation 

When astronomers in Hawaii identified an unfamiliar object sweeping through the solar system in October 2017, they immediately realized it was something unprecedented. The object—later named ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “messenger from afar”)—did not behave like the comets or asteroids astronomers routinely study. Its elongated appearance, lack of visible outgassing, and slight but measurable change in velocity puzzled researchers. 

A large team of scientists, led by Karen Meech at the Institute for Astronomy in Hawaii, published a widely cited paper in Nature in 2017, concluding that ‘Oumuamua originated from outside our solar system. Building on the data from that paper, Avi Loeb and his graduate student Shmuel Bialy (now at the Israel Institute of Technology) proposed in a 2018 Astrophysical Journal Letters paper that ‘Oumuamua might be a “fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.” That is, of course, a possibility—as is a cosmic teapot in orbit. But science does not require disproving every far-fetched alternative. The burden of proof lies squarely with Loeb and his collaborators. 

In his boldly titled book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, Loeb offered a hypothesis that captured worldwide attention: perhaps ‘Oumuamua was not a natural relic at all but rather a fragment of engineered technology, possibly a thin, reflective structure propelled by starlight. He emphasized that he wasn’t announcing definitive proof (despite the book’s title), only pointing out that an artificial origin could not be ruled out. Nonetheless, his willingness to discuss this prospect publicly pushed the story far beyond the walls of academia. 

Here are a few unique characteristics of ‘Oumuamua: 

1. ‘Oumuamua’s light curve. A light curve is a graph that shows how the brightness of an object changes over time. In 2019, Sergey Mashchenko analyzed the light curve from ‘Oumuamua, concluding that “the most likely model for ‘Oumuamua is a thin disc (slab) experiencing moderate torque from outgassing.” ‘Oumuamua’s brightness varied dramatically because it tumbled, suggesting an extreme aspect ratio (possibly 5:1 or more). That implies it was either very elongated like a cigar or very flat like a pancake. The shape is unlike anything in our solar system, and “non-comet-like.” 
2. ‘Oumuamua’s acceleration. Astronomers observed ‘Oumuamua making a nongravitational acceleration, that is, it sped up slightly as it left the Sun’s gravity well. 
3. ‘Oumuamua lacks a “comet” tail. Typically, comets coming in from the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt or from within the Oort Cloud surrounding our solar system contain ice gases. Comets can develop two main types of tails. An ion (or plasma) tail forms when the solar wind—a stream of charged particles flowing outward from the Sun—interacts with gases from the comet. The solar wind ionizes these gases by stripping away electrons, and the resulting charged ions are then swept directly away from the Sun by the magnetic field carried in the solar wind. This produces a straight, narrow, bluish tail that always points directly away from the Sun, no matter which way the comet is moving. A dust tail, in contrast, is created when sunlight exerts radiation pressure on tiny dust particles released from the comet’s nucleus, pushing them away from the Sun. Because these dust particles follow slightly different orbits from the comet itself, the dust tail is broader, curved, and usually whitish or yellowish; it lags slightly behind and follows the curve of the comet’s trajectory around the Sun. 
4. ‘Oumuamua reflected more sunlight than typical asteroids or comets. 
5. ‘Oumuamua’s velocity entering the solar system was similar to the average speed of stars in the Sun’s neighborhood. Loeb pointed out that this was unusual and “unlikely by chance.” 

Occam’s razor, named after William of Ockham (1287–1347) by Libert Froidmont (1587–1653), suggests that scientific hypotheses should consist of the smallest set of possible elements. For example, while staying in an old English hotel room, the lights flicker, the floor creaks, and the room gets chilly. You could conclude it’s the ghost of a Victorian child with unresolved issues—or, per Occam’s razor, you could check the wiring, the floorboards, and maybe close a window. When in doubt, blame the insulation before the afterlife. Occam’s razor doesn’t prove the simpler explanation is correct—just that it’s preferable until better evidence arises. It’s a tool for model selection, not an avenue to absolute truth. 

Admirers see Avi Loeb as refreshingly fearless and he has inspired my young students to go into the sciences; critics describe him as a man who has allowed publicity to eclipse prudence.

Let’s examine the data for ‘Oumuamua in this light. The elongated or flat shape: In three research papers, Steven Desch and Alan Jackson proposed that ‘Oumuamua is a collisional fragment of nitrogen ice from an exoplanetary Pluto-like body. Not only does this explain the flat shape, but the lack of observable H2O, CO, CO2, lack of dust, and especially the magnitude of the nongravitational acceleration. I asked Desch what he thought of Loeb’s ideas about ‘Oumuamua and he responded: “Suffice it to say he [Loeb] long ago stopped being a serious scientist making innocent inquiries, and now unstoppingly manufactures doubt in the service of positioning himself as some sort of science maverick.” Sebastian Lorek’s and Anders Johansen’s theoretical work demonstrates that flattened, disc-shaped planetesimals can form naturally through the gentle gravitational collapse of a rotating “pebble cloud” in a protoplanetary disk. Lorek and Johansen emphasized to me that “the formation of flattened objects like ‘Oumuamua is a completely natural outcome of planetesimal formation.” 

By contrast, Loeb postulates that ‘Oumuamua may be a light-sail—a thin, flat structure propelled by radiation pressure (i.e., the momentum of photons from starlight or sunlight). Photons carry no mass, but they do have momentum. When they hit a surface (especially a reflective one), they impart a tiny push. Over time, this small force accumulates, especially in the vacuum of space where there’s no friction. The challenge with using solar radiation for propulsion is that its force decreases with the square of the distance from the source (1/r²). While this pressure is weak but usable near Earth’s orbit (1 AU), it becomes vanishingly small at interstellar distances. In the vast space between stars, the photon flux is so low that even the nearest stars provide no meaningful thrust—effectively leaving a light sail adrift with nothing to push it along. 

AI-generated rendering of a hypothetical alien light sail, the type of technology Avi Loeb proposes could explain ‘Oumuamua’s unusual acceleration through solar radiation pressure.

As for the nongravitational acceleration of ‘Oumuamua out of our solar system, Loeb believes that it can’t be explained by outgassing, because no gas or dust was detected. He proposed that the acceleration was caused by the solar radiation pressure hitting a light sail. If ‘Oumuamua were an ultra-thin object, just 0.3–0.9 mm thick and tens of meters wide, it could have experienced enough radiation pressure at its closest approach to the Sun, which was 0.25 AU, or one-quarter of an Astronomical Unit (the distance from the Earth to the Sun, 1 AU) to account for the motion—without requiring any expelled material. However, in 2023, Jennifer Bergner and Darryl Seligman showed that entrapped molecular hydrogen (H2) in water ice could have been released from ‘Oumuamua’s body as it warmed, producing the observed nongravitational acceleration without a visible coma (the cloud of gas and dust that typically forms around a comet when it gets close to the Sun). This supports the view that ‘Oumuamua was a comet-like planetesimal rather than anything technological. Although the study centered on chemistry, a consequence is that ‘Oumuamua must have had a very high surface-area-to-mass ratio for H2 outgassing to be effective. Such a requirement is naturally met by a thin, sheet-like geometry (a flattened body), again consistent with the disc-like shape inferred by the light-curve analyses. In short, even its puzzling acceleration can be explained by natural processes acting on an unusually flat, icy object. 

The Galileo Project and Loeb’s Expanding Quest 

Rather than retreat from public engagement after ‘Oumuamua’s exit from the scene, Loeb broadened his search. In 2021, he launched the Galileo Project—funded entirely through private donations—with the goal of systematically looking for physical evidence of extraterrestrial technology. The initiative includes specialized camera systems aimed at tracking unusual aerial phenomena and an expanded effort to locate interstellar debris. 

One object in particular drew Loeb’s attention: a meteor that exploded over the Pacific Ocean in 2014. A U.S. Space Command memo suggested the meteor may have originated outside the solar system. Loeb seized upon the idea that remnants from this event might still rest on the ocean floor, potentially offering clues about materials forged beyond our stellar neighborhood. So in 2023 he orchestrated an expedition off the coast of Papua New Guinea to retrieve microscopic debris from the area where the meteor had disintegrated. Funded by a cryptocurrency entrepreneur, the mission blended scientific ambition with adventure-story drama—all captured by a documentary crew (to be aired in 2026). 

The expedition recovered tiny metal beads—mere fractions of a millimeter in diameter. Laboratory analyses revealed unusual ratios of heavy elements that did not neatly align with common terrestrial or meteoritic compositions. Loeb interpreted the findings as suggestive of an exotic, possibly interstellar, origin. He stopped short of outright claiming discovery of alien technology (the tiny spherules were not exactly the dashboard of the Millennium Falcon), but he made clear that he considered the possibility worth exploring. 

Many experts quickly objected. Planetary scientists noted that it is extremely unlikely for an object traveling at such high velocity to leave behind intact solid fragments. Others questioned whether the spherules could even be tied to the 2014 meteor, or whether the meteor itself was truly interstellar. Critics argued that uncertainties in the military data make firm conclusions impossible, and that Loeb was again presenting the most sensational interpretation well before the evidence justified it. 

The interstellar comet 2I/Borisov streaks through our solar system in this 2019 image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Unlike ‘Oumuamua, Borisov behaved like a typical comet, showing a bright coma and tail. The telescope tracked the comet’s movement, causing the background stars to appear as colorful streaks of light—a result of combining observations in different wavelength bands that give the image some disco flair. Credit: ESO/O. HainautThe interstellar comet 2I/Borisov behaves like a typical comet. 

2I/Borisov is considered interstellar because it entered the solar system on a hyperbolic trajectory—with an orbital eccentricity greater than 3—meaning it is not gravitationally bound to the Sun and must have originated from outside our solar system. Its inbound velocity (approximately 32 km/s) and trajectory indicate it came from the direction of the galactic plane, rather than from within the Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt. Unlike ‘Oumuamua, which baffled astronomers with its lack of cometary features, Borisov behaved exactly like a typical comet, complete with a bright coma, a dust tail, and outgassing of familiar volatiles like water, carbon monoxide, and cyanide. 

Avi Loeb has suggested that Borisov may still deserve scrutiny as a potential technological relic—noting that it was more pristine than expected for a comet traveling interstellar distances, possibly implying unusual origins. However, most scientists interpret Borisov as strong evidence that other planetary systems form comets much like our own does. Its ordinary composition, active sublimation, and typical behavior all suggest it is natural, and in fact, it reinforces the view that cometary bodies are common ejecta from planetary systems throughout the galaxy. In Galileo Project Zoom meetings of late, Loeb has conceded that 2I/Borisov is a comet (Skeptic magazine’s Michael Shermer is on the Galileo Project team and attends the Zoom meetings). 

3I/Atlas: The Third Interloper 

3I/Atlas’s inbound excess velocity was about 58–61 km/s, far above the escape velocity of the Sun, indicating an origin outside the solar system (that is, it is not gravitationally bound to our solar system). Astronomers traced its incoming direction to the constellation Sagittarius and predict it will depart toward Gemini. Unlike the enigmatic ‘Oumuamua (which showed no outgassing) and more like 2I/Borisov, 3I/Atlas immediately revealed a coma and dust activity, behaving in most respects like a typical comet. Its trajectory and motion suggest it may have originated from the Milky Way’s thick disk, making it plausibly older than our solar system. 

Hubble’s image of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS (365 million kilometers from Earth, July 21, 2025) shows a bluish, teardrop cocoon against streaked stars. While Avi Loeb suggests its sunward jet may be artificial, the consensus confirms it behaves like a natural comet. Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA); Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)

From the start, astronomers have viewed 3I/Atlas as a natural cometary body. Observatories around the world (including Hubble, the James Webb Telescope, and the Very Large Telescope in Chile) tracked its movement, noting that it started releasing gas and dust at large distances from the Sun—an unusual but not unprecedented behavior. Spectral studies revealed a coma rich in CO2, CO, and diatomic carbon (C2), while surprisingly low in water vapor, which typically dominates solar system comet outgassing. Polarimetry also showed an unusually strong negative polarization signal—meaning the light scattering off the coma’s dust was more directionally polarized than expected. (Polarimetry is the study of how light becomes polarized after it reflects off or scatters through materials like dust or gas. In astronomy, it’s used to analyze light from objects such as comets to infer the properties of their surfaces or comae. When astronomers applied polarimetry to 3I/Atlas, they found unusually strong negative polarization, suggesting its dust grains are very fine or have unusual textures—possibly hinting at a unique interstellar origin or formation environment.) These characteristics, while distinct, are seen as falling within the natural diversity of cometary compositions, especially for bodies formed in ultra-cold outer regions of a planetary system. 

Researchers note that 3I/Atlas offers a unique opportunity to expand our understanding of planetary formation beyond the solar system. Its high CO2 content, early activity, and evolving tail structure suggest it likely formed in a cold, distant part of its home system—perhaps analogous to our Kuiper Belt around a distant solar system. Its compact nucleus (likely under 1 km in size) and slowly rotating, modestly active profile, contrast with the wildly tumbling, inert ‘Oumuamua. Scientists have emphasized that 3I/Atlas aligns with the expected behavior of a comet ejected from another stellar system, and they see no need to invoke exotic explanations. 

Nevertheless, Avi Loeb has once again challenged the consensus. In public commentary and academic preprints, Loeb has listed a set of anomalies that, in his view, warrant consideration that 3I/Atlas might be artificial in origin. Among the features he highlights: 

• The comet’s entry angle aligns closely with the solar system’s ecliptic plane, a statistically unlikely coincidence, he argues. 
• Its antisolar jet initially pointed toward the Sun, rather than away, which Loeb suggests could imply directed propulsion rather than random outgassing. 
• Its mass-to-acceleration ratio seems extreme given its apparent size. 
• Spectral data show a high nickel-to-iron ratio in the coma, which Loeb suggests hints at industrial production instead of natural construction. 
• 3I/Atlas’s inbound direction is near that of the so-called “Wow!” signal, a fact Loeb labels “curious” rather than conclusive. The Wow! signal was a strong, unexplained radio burst detected in 1977 near the hydrogen frequency—a band considered promising for interstellar communication. It lasted 72 seconds, came from the direction of Sagittarius, and has never been observed again, making it an intriguing mystery in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. 

Although intriguing, there is nothing alien about the 3I/Atlas’s jets. The presence of multiple jets pointing in both sunward and antisunward directions suggests that 3I/Atlas has several active regions on its rotating nucleus. As different surface areas are exposed to sunlight, localized jets of gas and dust are released, sometimes curving due to the object’s motion or erupting from regions not directly facing the Sun. This directional variety is a hallmark of cometary activity and reflects a complex interplay between surface composition, thermal dynamics, and rotational orientation, a more likely explanation than alien technology rocket thrusts and maneuvers that Loeb proposes. 

Both features fall within known cometary behavior and don’t require invoking alien technology.

The same can be said for other characteristics Loeb deems of alien origin. The high acceleration relative to 3I/Atlas’s apparent size can be explained naturally by low-density, volatile-rich materials like CO2 or CO ices producing sustained outgassing. Similarly, the elevated nickel-to-iron ratio in its coma may result from observational bias—nickel is more easily detected in cometary gas, while iron often remains locked in dust. Both features fall within known cometary behavior and don’t require invoking alien technology. 

Loeb’s position, as with ‘Oumuamua, is that extraordinary anomalies merit open-minded hypotheses. He does not claim that 3I/Atlas is definitively artificial, but argues that its distinctive properties should not be dismissed. He has proposed that it could represent alien debris, a probe, or some unknown technological object using controlled outgassing or exotic materials. Critics in the scientific community largely disagree, emphasizing that all of 3I/Atlas’s features—from its CO2-rich chemistry to its sunward jet and trajectory—can be explained by known physics. Observations of other comets with similar jets or compositional profiles provide natural precedents. 

While most planetary scientists remain confident in a natural origin for 3I/Atlas, its detailed study is ongoing. Loeb’s speculations, while provocative, remain unsubstantiated.

In late 2025, NASA officials released detailed observations of 3I/Atlas, and their conclusion was unequivocal: “It looks and behaves like a comet, and all evidence points to it being a comet. But this one came from outside the solar system, which makes it fascinating,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya. Indeed, high-resolution images from spacecraft showed 3I/Atlas with a normal cometary coma and tail—essentially indistinguishable from ordinary long-period comets aside from its hyperbolic orbit. In other words, 3I/Atlas is far more likely a natural interstellar comet than an extraterrestrial spacecraft. 

In the end, 3I/Atlas has reinforced a key message: interstellar objects are not all alike, and some may appear quite strange by our standards. While most planetary scientists remain confident in a natural origin for 3I/Atlas, its detailed study is ongoing. Loeb’s speculations, while provocative, remain unsubstantiated. Whether the anomalies he flags prove to be outliers or just unfamiliar variations within a broad population of extrasolar comets, 3I/Atlas has already deepened our understanding of how planetary systems beyond our own may evolve—and what fragments they might fling into the void. 

A Netflix documentary crew has followed Loeb’s work for several years, including his 2023 expedition to recover interstellar meteor fragments from the Pacific Ocean. The film, which Loeb has confirmed is in production, is expected to be released in 2026 and will chronicle his search for extraterrestrial technology. It reflects not only his scientific ambitions but also his increasingly prominent role in the public imagination.

Smartphones, High-Definition Cameras, and the Disappearance of Paranormal and Supernatural Phenomena—a Skeptical Analysis

Over the past decades, we have witnessed a quiet yet decisive transformation in the history of human beliefs: the apparent disappearance of major paranormal phenomena that for millennia fueled mythologies, religions, folklore, and countless reports of supposed extraordinary manifestations. UFOs hovered over mountains and deserts;1 colossal creatures such as Bigfoot, the Yeti, or the Sasquatch roamed remote forests;2 spirits, apparitions, and ectoplasmic entities materialized in abandoned mansions;3 miracles occurred before the eyes of the devout;4 demonic possessions defied rational explanation.5 Today, all these phenomena seem to have taken permanent leave, an intriguing coincidence emerging precisely at the moment humanity begins to carry in its pockets (or better yet, in its hands) ultra-high-definition cameras capable of recording every detail of daily life, or any anomaly, with unprecedented precision.6

Before examining the role of smartphones, it is important to distinguish beliefs from manifestations. National opinion polls show that belief in paranormal phenomena remains high. A 2005 Gallup survey indicated that roughly three in four Americans believed in at least one type of paranormal experience, including haunted houses, communication with the dead, and astrology.7 Trend analyses aggregating data from Gallup, Harris, Pew, and other institutes show that, despite recent technological advances, these beliefs have remained remarkably stable, with only small declines in some items and even increases in specific beliefs such as ghosts and haunted houses.8 A more recent Gallup synthesis, from 2025, shows that 48 percent of American adults believe in psychic or spiritual healing and 39 percent in ghosts, while between 24 percent and 29 percent endorse six other supernatural beliefs; compared to 2001, variations are modest, with declines of only 6 to 7 percentage points in phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance.9 Literature reviews indicate that, in different countries, beliefs in spirits, UFOs, and other extraordinary phenomena remain widely disseminated among modern populations.10, 11, 12, 13

In other words, beliefs persist and remain widespread, but the supposed phenomena that should generate clear and reproducible evidence seem increasingly absent precisely at a moment when we possess technology capable of recording them with great clarity.14, 15 This shift invites a skeptical exercise: Why have paranormal and supernatural apparitions disappeared exactly when it became possible to document them unequivocally? For centuries, human testimony was the primary source of such accounts. However, scientific literature consistently demonstrates that testimony, even when sincere, constitutes extremely weak evidence: It is susceptible to perceptual illusions, cognitive biases, cultural expectations, and reconstructed (and often false) memories.16, 17, 18

They systematically avoid sharp, high-resolution cameras while tolerating grainy footage captured with old cameras or shaky amateur recordings. 

In recent decades, quantitative studies on spontaneous reports of “anomalous” experiences also reveal a telling pattern: Although belief remains high, the number of people claiming to have personally experienced paranormal and supernatural phenomena tends to decline or stabilize at low levels compared with previous decades. Population surveys in the United Kingdom, for example, indicate that around 25 percent of adults report having seen a ghost, a number smaller than the prevalence of belief in ghosts, which remains above 40 percent.19, 20, 21 The discrepancy between the high prevalence of belief and the lower prevalence of reported experiences suggests that direct accounts do not accompany the persistence of belief, a pattern compatible with the growing impact of recording technology. 

Recent experimental evidence reinforces this fragility. Contemporary studies show that up to 30 percent of participants incorporate false details into memories of extraordinary events after minimal suggestions or exposure to ambiguous images.22, 23 This type of cognitive vulnerability helps explain why, even before photography, reports of supernatural phenomena were so abundant despite the absence of reliable physical documentation. 

With the popularization of photography in the late nineteenth century, the first “records” of ghosts, materializations, and spiritualist phenomena emerged, almost always blurred, overexposed, composite, or manipulated.24 The skeptical science of the time, from Darwin25 to Houdini,26 had already warned of fraud, lighting tricks, and honest mistakes. Even so, these images fueled a fertile social imagination that was poorly equipped for the kind of critical analysis we now consider trivial. 

Yet something fundamental changed when next-generation smartphones became ubiquitously available. Never in human history has there been a moment when billions of people possessed cameras with optical stabilization, precise sensors, 4K recording capacity, and the ability to capture phenomena instantaneously and share them within seconds. 

Paradoxically, this same technological infrastructure has fueled an entire subculture of “ghost hunters” and smartphone-based spirit-detection apps. Ethnographic research on ghost-hunting communities shows the intensive use of high-definition cameras, motion sensors, and apps that simulate paranormal measurements, but despite millions of recordings, no verifiable fact regarding the existence of ghosts has been established in a robust manner.27, 28 Independent assessments of these groups further show that most of the supposed evidence, shadows, electromagnetic noise, or video distortions, corresponds to optical or acoustic artifacts already extensively described in the technical literature and often replicable under controlled conditions.29 Even more rigorous investigative protocols, such as controlled-environment monitoring with multiple cameras, have never produced replicable or consistent results. In other words, the capacity to search for evidence has increased exponentially, but the quality of the “proof” remains trapped in artifacts, ambiguities, and wishful interpretations. 

Curiously, alleged extraterrestrials seem to prefer deserted roads, swamps, or isolated campgrounds, and maintain a distinctly selective shyness.

At the same time, astronomers equipped with powerful, high-definition telescopes that observe the sky 24 hours a day have never recorded a single robust piece of evidence for objects of nonhuman origin. By contrast, systematic surveys conducted by professional astronomers estimate that more than 95 percent of investigated UFO reports correspond to satellites, rocket re-entries, aircraft, balloons, or common atmospheric phenomena.30, 31 This pattern was already known before the widespread adoption of smartphones, but it has become even more evident as observational instruments have grown more precise. Curiously, alleged extraterrestrials seem to prefer deserted roads, swamps, or isolated campgrounds, and maintain a distinctly selective shyness: They systematically avoid sharp, high-resolution cameras while tolerating grainy footage captured with old cameras or shaky amateur recordings. 

The same inexplicable selectivity affects the great mythical creatures. Bigfoot, whose existence contradicts all biological logic, since no hominid species could survive in absolute isolation for hundreds of thousands of years without leaving fossils, consistent tracks, feces, or reproductive communities, vanished abruptly with the advent of modern smartphones. Recent research in ecology and environmental DNA biomonitoring, now used to track rare species, has likewise detected no genetic trace compatible with large unknown primates in North America, even in extensively sampled regions.32, 33 This kind of negative evidence reinforces the biological implausibility of a hidden large-bodied hominid. Hunters, hikers, mountaineers, and rural residents, all equipped with sophisticated cameras, have ceased to report sightings of the once-elusive primate. What remains alive is only the echo of old stories, always sustained by isolated footprints or shaky video footage. 

Ghosts and spirits, likewise, seem to have adapted poorly to technological advancement. For centuries, claims of apparitions spread globally, reinforcing the sense that the supernatural was a universal feature of human experience. However, the more we improved our ability to record images, the more these ectoplasmic entities retreated into the invisible, or into the past. Today, there are no sharp, verifiable, or even minimally convincing records. It is as if the very ontology of such beings were incompatible with high-precision sensors, as if the supernatural had vanished precisely when it could finally prove its existence to skeptics. 

From a methodological standpoint, this persistent absence of records is consistent with analyses in the philosophy of science applied to paranormal claims: If a phenomenon supposedly interacts with the physical world, it should be detectable by physical instruments; if it never is, despite the exponential growth in instrument sensitivity, then its existence becomes an increasingly implausible hypothesis.34

The same decline affects miracles and exorcisms. Although religious videos showing supposed instantaneous healings still circulate, such recordings never exhibit high-definition imagery, verifiable continuity, or transparent documentation. Sociological research on healing rituals also shows that, although millions of people report subjective experiences of “spiritual healing,” there is no video documentation of instantaneous, verifiable cures that meet minimal clinical criteria, such as independent pre- and post-examinations or transparent medical history.35 Medical literature likewise documents that many such claims can be explained by imprecise diagnoses, spontaneous remissions, or confirmation biases.36 The more sophisticated our recording technology becomes, the more rarefied extraordinary events appear to be. 

Demons, once so present in cultural narratives, seem to have developed a profound aversion to high-resolution equipment. Beings allegedly so powerful, capable of opposing gods, tormenting humans across civilizations, making people speak extinct languages and levitate, now seem terrified of ordinary individuals armed with devices that could finally reveal their true face. 

Some may argue that these phenomena still occur, but people have simply stopped recording them, even while carrying cameras virtually 24 hours a day. However, such a hypothesis runs entirely counter to contemporary behavior: We live in an era in which trivial dance trends accumulate millions of views, minor accidents are filmed from multiple angles, and any unusual animal becomes viral within minutes. Studies on the psychology of digital sharing show that unusual, threatening, or extraordinary content is significantly more likely to go viral, especially when it includes clear visual elements.37 This pattern makes it even more improbable that supposedly extraordinary phenomena would occur without sharp recordings, or that someone would deliberately refrain from filming or disseminating them. 

Just when these phenomena could finally verify themselves before omnipresent cameras, they remain invisible.

Within this context, suggesting that people witness aliens, mythical primates, miracles, ghosts, or demons and simply “forget” to record them is, at the very least, an exercise in involuntary humor. In a world so deeply connected and driven by the banal as well as the exceptional, a video that confirmed, and definitively proved, any one of these phenomena would generate an almost infinite number of likes and would instantly elevate its creators to the category of highly profitable, widely recognized influencers. 

The pattern that emerges is clear and epistemologically eloquent: The massive availability of recording devices has not reduced the prevalence of paranormal beliefs, but it has made the absence of robust evidence even more striking. Opinion surveys indicate that beliefs in ghosts, haunted houses, UFOs, or astrology remain widespread and, in many cases, have been stable for decades.38, 39, 40 However, when everyone can document the world with near-forensic precision, the territory of the supernatural does not expand toward clear evidence; it remains confined to ambiguous accounts, grainy videos, and testimonies vulnerable to perceptual illusions and cognitive biases.41, 42 New cameras do more than capture reality: They make it increasingly difficult to sustain, without embarrassment, that which depends on shadows and low verifiability. 

In this context, it makes little sense to speak of the “end” of paranormal beliefs; what we observe is a growing mismatch between persistent beliefs and absent evidence. On a planet where much of the population carries in their pockets, holds in their hands, or mounts on the dashboards of their cars, high-resolution cameras with immediate access to social media, one would reasonably expect an explosion of sharp recordings of ghosts, demons, intervening deities, UFOs, or mythical primates, if such entities truly interacted with the physical world in any minimally recurrent or plausible way.43, 44

Instead, what accumulates are decades of opinion inquiries showing stable beliefs and a colossal volume of “evidence” that collapses under the first skeptical examination. The coincidence remains striking: Just when these phenomena could finally verify themselves before omnipresent cameras, they remain invisible. 

The most parsimonious explanation continues to be the same one skeptics have long articulated: It is not that the phenomena have decided to retire or hide themselves; rather, there were never any paranormal phenomena to be recorded, only human interpretations of natural events, illusions, and frauds.

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A review of This Book May Cause Side Effects: Why Our Minds Are Making Us Sick by Helen Pilcher.

In the early years of Viagra, “the little blue pill” that generated such excitement about its sexual effects on men, I read an account by a woman who decided to try it herself, because isn’t what’s good for the gander good for the goose? (Answer: Not always.) She took that little blue pill and described the exhilarating night of lovemaking that ensued. The best sex she’d ever had! Rapture divine! When she awoke in the morning, she saw that the blue pill she had swallowed was an Aleve (naproxen). At least she didn’t get a headache.

Most people know about the placebo, the inert “sugar pill” given to a control group in a clinical trial when the experimental group gets the active medication. This method allows researchers to rule out the effects of expectations on a new drug’s medical benefits, if any. (Placebo-controlled tests of Viagra for women found that women did slightly better on the placebo, which ended Pfizer’s efforts to double their market.) Expectations can be powerful: the bigger the biologically inactive placebo—a larger pill, a bigger injection—or the more complex the intervention, even a sham surgery, the greater its benefits. Placebos have been used in many settings, most dramatically on the battlefield, where suffering, dying soldiers plead for morphine that has long run out of supply. Given a saline solution but told it is that powerful pain-killer, their pain vanishes.

This Book May Cause Side Effects: Why Our Minds Are Making Us Sick by Helen Pilcher. (Abrams Press, 2026)

Where the placebo goes, can the nocebo be far behind? In This Book May Cause Side Effects, Helen Pilcher, a science writer and TV presenter with a PhD in cell biology, delves into the placebo’s “evil twin”—the myriad ways that our negative expectations affect us. If you had chills, fatigue, or headaches after getting a COVID shot, she writes, they were likely due to your being told those are frequent “side effects.” If you read the list of symptoms that your newly prescribed drug “might” produce, chances are you will experience one or more of them—and possibly decide not to take that drug after all. “If just the thought of eating a certain food makes you feel sick,” she writes, “it’s highly likely that placebo’s evil twin has struck again. Indeed, many of those who believe they have intolerances to certain ingredients, such as lactose or gluten, may well owe their misery to psychological rather than physical processes.” When self-reported “gluten intolerant” people are given gluten-free bread but told that the bread contains gluten, very often they develop gastrointestinal symptoms. “And when some gluten-intolerant people are covertly fed regular bread but told that it’s gluten-free, they don’t get symptoms,” Pilcher writes. “It’s the idea of gluten that they are intolerant to, rather than theprotein itself.”

The combination of “sometimes” with dramatic anecdotes weakens her case that the nocebo affects all illness.

Pilcher makes her case for the nocebo’s malevolent antics in 12 chapters, starting with deaths from hexes to “psychogenic” deaths that have no apparent physiological cause to the downsides of labelling mental and physical illnesses and thereby creating more cases of them. “The nocebo effect can conjure blindness and paralysis, seizures, vomiting and asthma attacks. With no brain injury in sight, it can trigger the symptoms of concussion … With no allergen present, it can induce features of an allergic reaction—watery eyes, runny nose and an itchy rash—that are indistinguishable from the more common, pollen-triggered alternative.” 

There is really no scientific reason to distinguish placebos from nocebos, since both terms describe the way that beliefs, expectations, and apprehensions affect our bodies. But the nocebo is hot; “the nocebo effect has been promoted from academic footnote to nerdy hot potato,” she notes, and Pilcher makes the most of that hotness. The nocebo “is far more pervasive and potent than most people had realized,” she writes. “All symptoms, all illness and all disease has [sic] the potential to be negatively impacted by the thoughts that swirl around inside our heads.” All disease? Yes: “Hiding in plain sight, the phenomenon is part of all illness and all disease, where it makes us more unwell than we need to be.” Does she literally mean “all” or do all diseases merely have the “potential” to be impacted?

That fuzziness undermines her reporting. To be sure, giving us details of every one of the many studies she describes could become stultifying; yet, by not providing actual numbers and percentages of people in an experiment who were affected by a nocebo, and by speaking vaguely of “most” people or “some” people who have the “potential” to succumb, we cannot assess the strength of the finding. For example, she writes that in one study, “people who were falsely ‘diagnosed’ with the ‘bad’ version [of a fictitious gene that allegedly influences their response to exercise] did much worse. They had less endurance and their lung capacity was reduced.” “People”? All of them? One tenth? How many people? 3? 30? Lung capacity “reduced” by how much? How long did that reduction last after they went home? Or, in noting that “some” people die from the stress of bereavement or surviving a plane crash, she adds “that’s certainly not to imply that intense stress is going to kill us all. These deaths are rare. You are far more likely to muddle your way through life’s major stressors than you are to die from them, but sometimes it happens.” The combination of “sometimes” with dramatic anecdotes (Johnny Cash died four months after his wife June) weakens her case that the nocebo affects all illness. Did he die of a broken heart? Or complications from diabetes, respiratory failure, autonomic neuropathy, and pneumonia? 

90 percent of the symptoms that people reported when on statins were also what they experienced when on the placebo.

More worrisome is Pilcher’s enthusiastic endorsement of experiments long discredited and unreplicated, such as Robert Rosenthal’s “Pygmalion” study, in which teachers allegedly raised the IQs of the randomly chosen students they had been told would intellectually bloom that year, simply by the power of their expectations. And because Pilcher so enjoyed meeting Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychology professor who became famous for her decades-old “chambermaid” and “counterclockwise” studies, she suspended scepticism, not even doing a quick google search that would have revealed what was wrong with those studies. In the former, hotel maids were said to have lost weight and lowered their blood pressure simply by being told their activities were “exercise” rather than “work.” But the experimenters relied on the women’s subjective self-reports, so they could not rule out whether the women actually—consciously or subconsciously—increased their activity level or changed their diet. And the 1979 “counterclockwise” study, which supposedly showed that having eight men in their 70s live in a simulated 1959 environment for a week would physically reverse their frailty and other signs of aging, was never published in a peer-reviewed journal or replicated. (It later became a made-for-TV stunt with celebrities.) Langer actually said to the participants, "we have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this, you will feel as you did in 1959." No bias there.

Although these lapses give one pause, Pilcher provides the details in other studies that rise to a “wow” level. In one, 60 patients who had stopped taking statins because they couldn’t stand the side effects were persuaded to try again. They were given 12 bottles of pills: four containing statins; four containing identical-looking placebo pills; and four empty bottles. The patients used one bottle per month, in a randomly prescribed order, over one year, recording their symptoms daily on their smartphones. The study was double blinded, so neither patients nor doctors knew which tablets the participants were taking (or none). The researchers found that 90 percent of the symptoms that people reported when on statins were also what they experienced when on the placebo. This means that most of the side effects of statins are caused by expectations, not the tablet’s content. 

You’ve nothing to lose and possibly a world of delicious bread to gain.

In her final chapter, Pilcher offers ways of countering, if not overcoming, the nocebo’s influence. Reframe the aftereffects of an injection not as painful “side effects” but as evidence the medication is working; if you need a medication, cautioning that 20 percent of the people taking it get headaches, focus on the 80 percent who don’t; and if you have been diagnosed with a serious disease, you can ask your doctor for “personalized informed consent:” telling you about possibly serious symptoms that would require medical attention, but none of the milder symptoms were more likely to be evoked by the nocebo. And if you are one of the thousands of people who think they are allergic to gluten—unlike those with celiac disease, who most definitely are—why not ask a friend or partner to subject you to a nice double-blind experiment? You’ve nothing to lose and possibly a world of delicious bread to gain.