Paranoid creativity

 I've been a member of the Society for Scientific Exploration since its founding more than 40 years ago.

We believe that science has improperly failed to study carefully such topics as cryptozoology (Bigfoot, Yeti, Loch Ness Monsters, etc.), UFOs (or UAPs), extrasensory perception (ESP), possible survival after death, near-death experiences, out-of-body events, and other “psychic” phenomenon; and more.

None of us takes all of these seriously, but each of us has at least one pet topic that we firmly believe to have a strong element of actuality in the real world.

All of us have the experience of not being taken seriously, of having our intelligence questioned, of seeing ourselves maligned in the media, most hurtfully by science journalists and science writers. As a result we enjoy, as one of my colleagues remarked, a well-earned paranoia.

It is not often pointed out that paranoia has its benefits as well as its handicaps. Among the benefits is a stimulus to unfettered creativity. Our creative abilities are also enhanced by our experiences exploring unpopular, maligned, topics that are unfortunately beset by all sorts of pranksters and hoaxers, for instance stage magicians who perform apparent feats of mind reading, spoon-bending by mind power, all sorts of card tricks, apparent levitation, and so on — the common feature being the magician's ability to misdirect the audience’s attention so that they fail to recognize what is really going on.

In the attempt to obtain a more sympathetic hearing from the scientific community, we had once decided to invite science writers and journalists to a meeting at which our President would offer a prepared introduction and then respond to questions.

We all have fairly long histories of intellectual activity, which means inevitably that none of us is as young as we used to be; and our President was well advanced in age and not as nimble on his intellectual feet as he had been in his prime. So we had prepared quite cleverly and carefully for that meeting.

Of course we had teleprompters for the opening prepared remarks. But we wanted to impress the audience with our President’s intellectual agility and wide-ranging knowledge, so we prepared him and the rest of the proceedings accordingly.

Every reporter was welcomed upon arrival by one of our members, asked for his name and affiliation, and also what topic he would like to ask about, because —  as we were careful to say — we wanted to make sure that a full range of possible topics would be covered in the limited time available.

That allowed us to choose questions and questioners to which our president could respond most convincingly and impressively; if need be with a little surreptitious help from facts and numbers flashed to one of the teleprompters. We also arranged the seating so that our President could quickly identify the reporters on the list of names that we had provided him with.

Those preparations were of course quite time-consuming, so the seats were only slowly occupied by the invited reporters, and the proceedings only began an hour after the previously announced starting time. But we had provided obvious reasons for the delay during that hour by having various of our members bustle back and forth in full view, checking microphones and stage arrangements and chatting with some of the already seated reporters.

We were gratified that it all turned out to be rather successful from our point of view, at least some of the media reports of the meeting said that we seemed to take a rational view of at last some of those widely denigrated topics; and our President garnered some plaudits for his wide-ranging knowledge and intellectual agility.