One day when Chicken Lichen was scratching among the leaves, an acorn fell out of the sky and struck her on the tail. ‘Oh,’ said Chicken Licken, ‘the sky is falling! I am going to tell the King.’ So she went along and went along until she met Henny Penny. ‘Good morning Chicken Licken, where are you going?’ ‘Oh, Henny Penny, the sky is falling and I am going to tell the King.’ ‘How do you know the sky is falling?’ asked Henny Penny. I saw it with my own eyes, I heard it with my own ears, and a piece of it fell on my tail!’ said Chicken Licken. ‘Then I will go with you,’ said Henny Penny.
OLD NURSERY TALE
The Griffith Observatory is one of Los Angeles’s great landmarks, a classic Art Deco pile topped with three huge copper domes. Perched on the southern slope of Mount Hollywood, the building commands a panoramic view of the LA basin below – and, through its telescopes, of the heavens above. It attracts two million visitors a year.
Seldom if ever in its seventy-five-year history has the Griffith drawn a bigger crowd than on 4 February 1962, when a rare conjunction of five visible planets coincided with a partial solar eclipse. By lunchtime, the approach-road was ‘a solid mass of cars lined up bumper-to-bumper for half a mile’. The astronomer Robert S. Richardson reported in the observatory’s house magazine, the Griffith Observer, that two anxious questions were heard again and again: ‘What is going to happen?’, swiftly followed by ‘What does it mean?’ One woman he met was weeping hysterically.
She was practically on the verge of collapse. ‘I know it’s silly to carry on in this way,’ she gasped between sobs, ‘but I can’t help myself … In talking to these ‘alarmed’ individuals, one gets the impression very strongly of an insecure personality, torn this way and that by vague doubts and fears. When confronted by a problem, they seem incapable of forming an independent opinion concerning it, but tend to rely on the judgment of others. They are so highly susceptible to suggestion that it would be very easy for anyone who has gained their confidence to take advantage of them. The barest hint that there might be something wrong could drive them to suicide or hysterics.
Since then, staff at the observatory have become wearily familiar with the symptoms. In February 1982, for instance, they were bombarded with calls from terrified LA residents asking if the world would come to an end on 10 March. The source of this panic was The Jupiter Effect, a book written by the British astrophysicists John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, who claimed that in March 1982 all the major planets would form an exceedingly rare ‘grand alignment’ on the same side of the sun – and that, as the earth passed between the sun and the massed rank of planets, it would be trapped in the middle of a gravitational tug-of-war. ‘A remarkable chain of evidence … points to 1982 as the year in which the Los Angeles region of the San Andreas fault will be subjected to the most massive earthquake known in the populated regions of the earth in this century,’ they warned. ‘In 1982, when the Moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars and with the other seven planets of the solar system, Los Angeles will be destroyed.’
The Jupiter Effect was published in 1974, and became a bestseller. It was soon discredited by scientists who pointed out that the essential premiss was wrong. Contrary to the impression given by Gribbin and Plagemann – and by the cover of their book, which showed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus et al. as neatly aligned as a row of chorus girls – the major planets would not be in anything like a straight line. Even if they were, no storms or earthquakes would ensue: they are so small compared with the sun, and so distant from it, that their gravitational effect is negligible. By 1980 even Gribbin himself had retracted the prediction, conceding that he had been ‘too clever by half. As the dread day approached, however, the scare was revived and fanned by TV stations and tabloids. ‘Astronomers and scientists are desperately worried that one of the most terrible disasters in the history of mankind may hit the United States,’ one newspaper reported, ‘killing untold millions and reducing the American west coast to rubble.’ The story was picked up far beyond California. An American physics professor visiting Sri Lanka was handed a pamphlet, based on The Jupiter Effect, entitled ‘The Great Tribulation – How Near?’ In Beijing, the People’s Daily felt obliged to reassure its millions of readers that ‘there is no regular causeeffect relation at all between this astronomical phenomenon and natural disasters like earthquakes’.
About thirty quakes occur daily in Southern California, most too slight to be felt, and 10 March proved to be an utterly average day. But why had Gribbin and Plagemann chosen the San Andreas Fault for their seismic cataclysm anyway? Edward Upton, an astronomer at the Griffith Observatory, had both posed and answered the question in a review of The Jupiter Effect back in January 1975: ‘Why this one-track emphasis on impending disaster in California, as if it were the only place on earth subject to major quakes? Why are there no similar predictions concerning Chile, Alaska, Japan, Indonesia, or a hundred other places? Could it be because in California, better than any other place on earth, one finds a fear of earthquakes combined with a proven market for sensational books?’ And, he might have added, sensational films and TV programmes. In the early weeks of 1988 staff at the Griffith Observatory were puzzled by another spate of phone calls asking, ‘When are the planets going to line up and cause that big earthquake?’ It was déjà vu all over again. The culprit this time was a film about the sixteenth-century astrologer Nostradamus, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, narrated by Orson Welles. The movie had been largely ignored on its initial release in 1981, but the reaction to its screening on cable TV seven years later was remarkably similar to that provoked by Welles’s 1938 radio production of War of the Worlds, which had convinced thousands of New Yorkers that the Martians had landed. Whereas War of the Worlds had been pure science fiction, however, the producers of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow claimed that it was a serious docu-drama. Standing in an opulent, vellum-stuffed library, Welles revealed that a new planetary alignment would bring ‘fire from the centre of the earth, the great earthquake’ to destroy Los Angeles – and ‘Nostradamus has given us the exact month and year: May 1988 … Incredible? Hrmmph. But true.’
Not true at all, actually. John Mosley, program supervisor of the Griffith Observatory, discovered that Nostradamus’ prediction was that ‘hailstones would fall larger than an egg’; the film-makers had improved on this by splicing together two lines from one quatrain with two lines from another. Nor, as Mosley informed hundreds of callers, was any planetary alignment due that spring; and such a line-up couldn’t cause an earthquake anyway. Perhaps he should also have pointed out that Nostradamus himself had little faith in the competence of most star-gazers. ‘Let the profane and ignorant herd keep away,’ he warned in one of his verses. ‘Let all astrologers, idiots and barbarians stay far off.’ In The Prophecies of Nostradamus, which went through more than twenty editions during the 1980s and 1990s, Erika Cheetham expressed her pain and puzzlement at this incantation: ‘Why does Nostradamus include astrologers among the people he damns? Is this yet another example of his trying to bluff the authorities?’ Or, more likely, a sly admission that he knew his celestial prophecies were all hooey? Even if judged on their own terms, Nostradamus-fanciers often have only the haziest idea of what they are talking about. Cheetham claimed in her book that ‘when Saturn and Aquarius are in conjunction with Sagittarius in the ascendant, towards the end of the century, we should expect a great war’. Since Saturn is a planet and Aquarius a sign of the zodiac, such a conjunction is astronomically impossible – a category mistake, as philosophers would call it. In Nostradamus: The Final Reckoning, Peter Lemesurier brooded on another of the old boy’s forecasts –‘Once he for 17 years has held the see, They’ll change the papal term to five years’ time’ – and concluded that if Nostradamus was right ‘then we are faced with the distinct possibility that on 16 October 1995, or possibly 22 October, Pope John Paul II will be asked to stay on for another five years’. A moment’s thought would show this ‘distinct possibility’ to be quite absurd, since popes – unlike British prime ministers or American presidents – are elected for life.
During the 1988 panic the Griffith Observatory set up a Nostradamus Hotline in the hope of dispelling the smog of nonsense that had descended on Los Angeles, but it attracted fewer customers than the local video stores which were renting out The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. ‘Travel agents, moving company workers, bottled-water suppliers, real estate agents and earthquake preparedness specialists say they’re observing a small but significant minority of Southern Californians either getting out of the area or getting prepared to survive the Big One,’ the Los Angeles Times reported on 6 May. A real estate agent in Beverly Hills revealed that ‘we’re getting a lot of phone calls about people leasing out their homes for the month. I’m not worried personally. I’m going to stay behind and make money with all the people who are splitting.’ A caller to a talk-show complained tearfully that his marriage was breaking up ‘because of a fight over what to do about the earthquake’. Extend-a-Life, a Pasadena firm specialising in ‘disaster supplies’ such as first-aid kits and thermal blankets, reported a ten-fold increase in sales during the first week of May. ‘Since Monday [2 May] the calls have become almost hysterical,’ the company’s chairman, Roberta Goldfeder, said. ‘A gentleman called from Beverly Hills who said that most of the people on his street were going to Florida and he didn’t know what to do.’
As writers of horror fiction have long known, many people take a perverse pleasure in being scared out of their wits – and resent anyone who tries to shatter their suspension of disbelief. A local TV weatherman, Fritz Coleman, was inundated with angry calls whenever he laughed at the Nostradamus craze. ‘The thing that makes me mad’, he grumbled, ‘is that we have satellites and all this technology and people would rather believe this guy with a beret from the sixteenth century.’
These superstitious irrationalists included a certain exgovernor of California, who was now coming towards the end of his second term in the White House. The memoirs of the former presidential aide Donald Regan – published just as the latest earthquake deadline loomed – revealed that ‘virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House chief of staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favourable alignment for the enterprise’. Before the 1985 Geneva summit she had been commissioned to study the star-charts of the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (a Piscean) for clues to his character and behaviour; she also fixed the exact time at which Reagan signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty in December 1987. Though Donald Regan didn’t name her, the press quickly identified the mystery adviser as Joan Quigley, an upmarket astrologer from San Francisco. In mid-April she had left for a month’s holiday in Europe – not to avoid the fall-out from Regan’s book but because she had foreseen a major earthquake in California on 5 May. Returning home on 7 May to find her prophecy unfulfilled, she told reporters that ‘she was confident any danger was past’.
Danger from earthquakes, that is. Saner citizens might have expected an eruption of scandalised outrage at the news that an astrologer held such sway over the most powerful man on planet earth. As with Nostradamus’ earthquake, however, there was no great seismic shock. Although Donald Regan claimed that Nancy Reagan’s dependence on Joan Quigley was ‘the most closely guarded secret of the White House’, most people seemed remarkably unsurprised. ‘I have known since Reagan was elected that they [Ronnie and Nancy] went to astrologers,’ the Washington Post’s style reporter Sally Quinn wrote, neglecting to add that she and her husband, Ben Bradlee, were private clients of the Post’s own resident astrologer, Svetlana Godilla. Others pointed out that back in the 1960s, when he entered politics, Reagan’s circle of advisers included the famous mystic Jeane Dixon. Even the left-wing columnist Alexander Cockburn, a tireless critic of Ronald Reagan, declined to make a fuss this time. ‘The image of two women, one of them peering into a crystal ball, guiding the policies of the United States, is irresistible in prompting coarse calumnies both on the termagant Nancy and on her pliant husband’s abdication of executive responsibility,’ he wrote in the Nation. ‘But reflection should excite a more kindly analysis. For most of human history, leaders burdened with at least as many cares as Ronald Reagan have sought counsel from planets or entrails, and who now chastises the Emperor Augustus for his naivete?’ Besides, why should anyone be astonished to learn that in his credulity, as in much else, Reagan was a fair representative of mainstream America? ‘The United States retains, unusually for an advanced industrial society, about the same per capita level of religious superstition as Bangladesh. What one of Jimmy Carter’s aides once referred to as the “abracadabra vote” is ample … [Reagan] has been nurtured in the same rich loam of folk ignorance, historical figment and paranormal intellectual constructs as millions of his fellow citizens.’ Astrology was entirely consonant with Reaganism and the twinkling penumbra of its faith in the ‘free market’ – an equally imaginary cosmic dispensation whose methods and purposes were beyond human understanding or challenge.
True enough, and all the more disconcerting for being so. A study of Wall Street stockholders found that 48 per cent used horoscopes when deciding what to buy or sell. Washington DC was second only to Berkeley, California – a famously wacky community – in the circulation figures for Dell’s Horoscope magazine. Even the sober Los Angeles Times carried a daily horoscope column by another of Reagan’s old soothsaying chums, Carroll Righter, the self-styled ‘gregarious Aquarius’ whose clients had included Marlene Dietrich, Princess Grace, Tyrone Power and Cary Grant. (Righter died in the week that Donald Regan’s book was published, having correctly predicted that ‘I will not make it out of the Taurean period.’ Since he was eighty-eight and in poor health, however, no extra-terrestrial guidance would have been required for this particular prophecy.) Like so many manifestations of folly, horoscopes also enjoyed bipartisan support: Caroline Casey, Washington’s leading astrological adviser to politicians, media figures, bureaucrats and Georgetown socialites, was the daughter of a former Democratic congressman. Liberals did it, conservatives did it: there seemed to be general acceptance of Nancy Reagan’s mitigating plea that allowing one’s life to be governed by mumbo-jumbo was a ‘harmless little pastime’.
Astrology might appear an odd, even heretical hobby for a man who proclaimed himself a Christian and often cited the Book of Revelation (which had itself been dismissed by one of his predecessors, Thomas Jefferson, as ‘the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy, nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams’). Here too, however, Ronald Reagan represented the spirit of the times. Over the past couple of decades many Westerners have acquired their own DIY faiths, hybrids comprising elements from Christianity, Hinduism, alchemy, geomancy, the teachings of the Dalai Lama, the ancient wisdom of Atlantis and much else. And, since we live in a ‘non-judgmental’ era, otherwise intelligent people will respect and even pander to these follies. When writing a regular column for the Observer in the early 1990s, I once sneered at a rival broadsheet, the Sunday Times, for introducing a weekly horoscope. You can guess the sequel: the Observer, Britain’s most venerable liberal newspaper, acquired its own horoscope page soon afterwards. Not to be outdone, The Times announced in a leading article at Christmas 1995 that ‘over our next 12 issues we shall consider what the next year holds in store for famous and less famous people born under each of the zodiac’s signs’. Here’s a sample of its editorials from the following fortnight: ‘According to the mystic meteorological mirror, Peter Pans born under the sign of Virgo possess the secret of eternal youth … Librans are cocksure creatures. They know what they want and they usually get it … With Mars as its ruling planet, Aries is naturally the sign of soldiers and sportsmen – men and women of action and dynamic resolve. Their element is Fire. They tend to live in the here and now
Those who defend horoscopes as harmless fun never explain what is either funny or harmless in promoting a contrick which preys on ignorance and fear. Professor Richard Dawkins has pointed out that a pharmaceuticals manufacturer who marketed a birth-control pill with no demonstrable effect on fertility would be prosecuted under the Trades Descriptions Act, and sued by trusting customers who found themselves pregnant. ‘If astrologers cannot be sued by individuals misadvised, say, into taking disastrous business decisions, why at least are they not prosecuted for false representations under the Trades Descriptions Act and driven out of business?’ he demanded. ‘Why, actually, are professional astrologers not jailed for fraud?’ But why stop at professional astrologers? When The Times began its flirtation with star-gazing I wrote a brief, light-hearted feature suggesting that six months in the slammer might bring the editor to his senses. This provoked another editorial from the paper once known as the Thunderer, denouncing me as a po-faced killjoy. ‘An arbitrary duodecimal division of the world’s population according to the time of birth is just that: arbitrary. But it happens to be a favourite Western speculation: amusing because so patently irreverent of all that we know and hold dear in this rational world.’
Where was this rational world? It was clearly not the place inhabited by the editor of The Times, or by millions of other people in Britain. As if to prove the point, the same edition carried a leading article in praise of the National Lottery, that monument to irrationalism and imbecility, whose first winner was to be chosen that evening. ‘The British puritanical heritage persists in finding a cloud before every silver lining,’ it sighed. ‘But for most of the nation tonight, a man is seldom as harmlessly employed as in fantasy about the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.’ It described the inaugural draw as ‘the greatest national collective experience’ since the end of the Second World War, adding proudly that ‘nearly every adult in the land – 40 million – has bought a ticket’. Echoing The Times, the minister responsible for the lottery scolded those few heretics who declined to participate for their ‘prudish’ and ‘sanctimonious’ refusal to enjoy (here comes that word again) the ‘fun’ of having a flutter.
Not so. Even the great rationalist John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia, confessed in his book Innumeracy that he plays blackjack in Atlantic City. (Blackjack is the only casino game where past occurrences affect future probabilities. In roulette, the likelihood of red on any given spin is always 18/37; in blackjack, the chance of drawing two aces in succession is not 4/52 × 4/52 but 4/52 × 3/51. The trick is to keep a careful count of what cards have already been drawn and increase your stake when the odds are slightly in your favour.) The objection to the National Lottery was not that it encouraged people to gamble but that it encouraged them to bet at such hopeless odds, heedless of Paulos’s timely warning that there was an ominous and widening gap ‘between scientists’ assessment of various risks and the popular perception of those risks, a gap that threatens eventually to lead … to unfounded and crippling anxieties’. The punters queueing desperately to buy their lottery tickets on the weekend of the first lottery draw were kindred spirits to the many Hollywood actors who cancelled their trips to the Cannes film festival during the first Gulf War for fear that they would be either blown up in mid-air or felled by an Iraqi Scud missile as soon as they set foot in Europe. These same stars never think twice before leaping into their limos to attend the Oscars ceremony. And yet, as Paulos noted, among the 28 million Americans who travelled abroad every year only about seventeen were murdered by terrorists – which works out at one chance in 1.6 million. Compare that with the probability of dying while riding a bicycle (one in 75,000), drowning (one in 20,000) or being killed in a car crash (one in 5,300). One didn’t have to be a po-faced puritan to find it rather depressing that 40 million British adults were innumerate enough to succumb to odds of 13 million to one. It may have been true, as The Times insisted, that ‘of course, you are adult and mathematically unchallenged, and know you are not going to win’. But most punters still cherished, however secretly and shamefacedly, a tingling hope which had been encouraged by TV commercials showing a huge finger of fate descending from the stars to point at a random, anonymous citizen: ‘It could be you … The official ‘expert’ recruited to advise the public on the chances of winning the jackpot was not a professor of statistics but Mystic Meg, a tabloid astrologer. Britain’s bestselling paper, the Sun, invited readers to rub their lottery tickets ‘on our psychically charged red dot’ to shorten the odds.
Those who lamented the decline of traditional Christianity in the twentieth century often quoted a line attributed to G. K. Chesterton (though there is no evidence of his authorship): ‘When a man ceases to believe in God he does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.’ Like so many aphoristic cliches, it collapses after a moment’s scrutiny – not least because nothing and anything are, in this context, effectively synonymous. A more telling version might be phrased thus: ‘If you believe in God, you’ll believe anything.’ Even the nononsense Margaret Thatcher was a devotee of mystical ‘electric baths’ and Ayurveda therapy. But she was a mere dabbler compared with more recent inhabitants of Downing Street. Cherie Blair found her devout Catholicism no impediment to flirtations with New Age spirituality – inviting a feng-shui expert to rearrange the furniture at No. 10 and wearing a ‘magic pendant’ known as the BioElectric Shield, which has ‘a matrix of specially cut quartz crystals’ that surround the wearer with ‘a cocoon of energy’ to ward off evil forces. (She was, predictably enough, ‘put on to the idea by Hillary Clinton’.) The Catholicism – if not Catholicism – of her tastes was further demonstrated in 2002 by the revelation that she employed a former member of the Exegesis cult, Carole Caplin, as a ‘lifestyle guru’. Through Caplin, the prime minister’s wife was introduced to an eighty-six-year-old ‘dowsing healer’, Jack Temple, who treated her swollen ankles by swinging a crystal pendulum over the affected area and feeding her strawberry leaves grown within the ‘electro-magnetic field’ of a neolithic circle he had built in his back garden.
It was long assumed that Tony Blair, who wears his Christianity on his sleeve, did not share his wife’s unorthodox enthusiasms. In 1999 he demanded the resignation of the England football coach Glenn Hoddle, who had told an interviewer that disabled people were paying off the bad karma they collected in previous incarnations. Blair thought this ‘offensive’, though it was not discernibly more offensive than the doctrine of original sin held by many of his fellow-Christians. From a Buddhist viewpoint, Hoddle was quite correct: no less a figure than the Dalai Lama confirmed as much, but added that ‘if you live in a Christian country, you should keep these views to yourself. It is difficult to have a mish-mash of religions.’ Not all that difficult, actually, as Blair confirmed when he and his wife underwent a ‘rebirthing experience’ under the supervision of one Nancy Aguilar while holidaying on the Mexican Riviera in the summer of 2001. The Times’s detailed account of the prime ministerial mud-bath is worth quoting at some length:
The ceremony took place at dusk. Mr Blair and his wife, wearing bathing costumes, were led to the Temazcal, a brick-coloured pyramid on the south end of the beach … Ms Aguilar told the Blairs to bow and pray to the four winds as Mayan prayers were read out. Each side of the building is decorated with Mayan religious symbols: the sun and baby lizards representing spring and childhood; a bird to signify adolescence, summer and freedom; a crab to represent maturity and autumn; and a serpent – the most sacred in the Mayan Indian culture – to symbolise winter and transformation …
Within the Temazcal, a type of Ancient Mayan steam bath, herb-infused water was thrown over heated lava rocks, to create a cleansing sweat and balance the Blairs’ ‘energy flow’.
Ms Aguilar chanted Mayan songs, told the Blairs to imagine that they could see animals in the steam and explained what such visions meant. They were told the Temazcal was like the womb and those participating in the ritual must confront their hopes and fears before ‘rebirth’ and venturing outside. The Blairs were offered watermelon and papaya, then told to smear what they did not eat over each other’s bodies along with mud from the Mayan jungle outside.
The prime minister, on holiday just a month before the 11 September attacks, is understood to have made a wish for world peace.
Before leaving, the Blairs were told to scream out loud to signify the pain of rebirth. They then walked hand in hand down the beach to swim in the sea.
Although Mayan rebirthing rituals are not yet available in Britain through the National Health Service, some of Cherie Blair’s other peculiar obsessions have already been adopted as official policy. In January 1999 the government recruited a feng-shui consultant, Renuka Wickmaratne, for advice on how to improve inner-city council estates. ‘Red and orange flowers would reduce crime,’ she concluded, ‘and introducing a water feature would reduce poverty. I was brought up with this ancient knowledge.’ Two years later the government announced that, for the first time since the creation of the National Health Service, remedies such as acupuncture or Indian ayurvedic medicine could be granted the same status as conventional treatments. According to the Sunday Times, ‘The inclusion of Indian ayurvedic medicine, a preventative approach to healing using diet, yoga and meditation, is thought to have been influenced by Cherie Blair’s interest in alternative therapy.’ An all too believable suggestion, since Cherie was a client of the ayurvedic guru Bharti Was and officiated at the opening ceremony for her holistic therapy centre in London.
The swelling popularity of quack potions and treatments in recent years is yet another manifestation of the retreat from reason and scientific method. According to a 1998 survey by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the use of homeopathic preparations in the United States more than doubled between 1990 and 1997. In Britain, by the end of the twentieth century the country’s 36,000 general practitioners were outnumbered by the 50,000 purveyors of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). When the British journalist John Diamond disclosed in the mid-1990s that he had cancer, he found himself bombarded with well-meant but batty advice, described in his final book Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations:
Have you tried squid’s cartilage? Establishment doctors scorn it, of course, but my aunt is still alive on squid’s cartilage two years after her oncologist gave her only six months (well, yes, since you ask, she is having radiotherapy as well). Or there’s this wonderful healer who practises the laying on of feet, with astonishing results. Apparently it’s all a question of tuning your holistic (or is it holographic?) energies to the natural frequencies of organic (or is it orgonic?) cosmic vibrations. You’ve nothing to lose, you might as well try it. It’s £500 for a course of treatment but what’s money when your life is at stake?
The alluring adjectives ‘complementary’ and ‘alternative’ are essentially euphemisms for ‘dud’: there is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t, medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that hasn’t. ‘There isn’t an “alternative” physiology or anatomy or nervous system,’ Diamond wrote, ‘any more than there’s an alternative map of London which lets you get to Battersea from Chelsea without crossing the Thames.’ In his introduction to Diamond’s book, Professor Richard Dawkins pointed out that if a healing technique is shown to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be an alternative: it simply becomes medicine. ‘Conversely, if a technique devised by the President of the Royal College of Physicians consistently fails in double-blind trials, it will cease to be part of “orthodox” medicine. Whether it will then become “alternative” will depend upon whether it is adopted by a sufficiently ambitious quack (there are always sufficiently gullible patients).’
It is a brave politician who risks incurring the wrath of those patients: 83 million Americans spend $27 billion a year on ‘alternative’ medicine, and most of them are entitled to vote. In 1992 the US government’s National Institute of Health was awarded $2 million of public money to establish an Office of Alternative Medicine (later the National Centre for Complementary Alternative Medicine). Within eight years, thanks to strenuous lobbying, Congress had increased the budget to $90 million. A few months before the presidential election of 2000, in an overtly political gesture, Bill Clinton announced the creation of a White House commission to ensure ‘that public policy maximises the benefits to Americans of complementary and alternative medicine’.
Even the sober British Medical Journal felt obliged to pander to the new quackery by running a series describing alternative therapies. ‘Our readers wanted it,’ the editor explained. ‘They want to know more about it because their patients are interested in it and because they are wondering whether to refer people. They want to know what works and what doesn’t.’ Yet, as Richard Dawkins noted, the pedlars of complementary medicine are uninterested in proving that their remedies ‘work’. Homeopathy has often been subjected to rigorous scientific testing since its ‘discovery’ by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann at the end of the eighteenth century, and it has always failed – most recently on a BBC Horizon documentary in 2003. This is scarcely surprising, as Hahnemann’s perverse ‘law of infinitesimals’ (the smaller the dose of a drug, the stronger its effect) means that there is effectively nothing to test. Homeopathic products are diluted in 99 parts water (and/or alcohol) and shaken vigorously; a drop of the resulting solution is then added to more water, and so on until the original substance has been diluted many millions of times. A typical dilution is 30C, that is, one part cure to 10030 parts water: even if it contained only one molecule of the homeopathic ingredient, the amount of water required would be far greater than that in all the oceans of the earth. And, of course, no substance can be diluted beyond the point where one molecule remains without disappearing altogether. (An even more fantastic ratio of 200C is claimed for Oscillococcinum, a product for ‘the relief of colds and flu-like symptoms’, whose active ingredient is a duck’s liver. If one molecule of the liver survived the dilution it would be mixed in 100200 molecules of water, more than the total number of molecules in the entire universe. Oscillococcinum had sales of $20 million in 1996, and all from a single duck’s liver – prompting US News & World Report to describe the hapless bird as ‘the $20-million duck’.) In a normal double-blind test, half the patients are given the ‘remedy’ while the rest take a placebo, but in the case of homeopathy the two doses are identical, since neither has any trace of the crucial ingredient. Hoist by their own law of infinitesimals, homeopaths argue that even if there is no molecule of the original substance in the medicine, the water somehow retains a metaphysical ‘memory’ of it. This idea has been promoted by the French scientist Jacques Benveniste, who submitted a paper to the journal Nature in 1988 claiming to have experimental proof. (When Nature sent a team of invigilators to the laboratory, he was unable to replicate his findings.) Benveniste has since extended his theory further, saying that not only can water ‘remember’ highly diluted substances, but that this memory can be taken electromagnetically from the water, stored digitally on a computer, emailed to the other side of the world and ‘played back’ via a sound card into new water – which instantly acquires the same properties as the original.
Like homeopathy, most alternative therapies are closer to mysticism than to medicine. This may explain their appeal to the British royal family, whose survival depends on another irrational faith – the magic of hereditary monarchy, which was so fiercely debunked by Tom Paine and other Enlightenment pamphleteers. Queen Elizabeth II carries homeopathic remedies with her at all times. Princess Diana was a devotee of reflexology, the belief that pressure applied to magical ‘zones’ in the hands and feet can heal ailments elsewhere in the body. Prince Charles has been a prominent champion of ‘holistic’ treatments since 1982, having been persuaded of their effectiveness by that absurd old charlatan Sir Laurens van der Post. In 1988 the Prince of Wales presided at the official opening of the Hale Clinic in London, which offers a choice of more than forty ‘alternative therapies’ such as acupuncture, aromatherapy, t’ai-chi, chakra balancing, colonic irrigation and bio-energy healing (‘the healer acts as a channel allowing the positive energy to pass through the patient with one hand and extracting negative energy with the other hand’). Eight years later he set up the Foundation for Integrated Medicine, and in 2001 lent his support to a proposal for a new London hospital that would ‘tap into the power of alternative therapy’.
Prince Philip, the Queen’s robustly conservative consort, was often said to regard his eldest son’s New Age interests with a mixture of hilarity and contempt. Yet he too had his eccentricities, having been an enthusiastic subscriber to Flying Saucer Review since the magazine began publication in the mid-1950s; and he was in good company. The founder-editor of Flying Saucer Review, the Earl of Clancarty, used his membership of the House of Lords to initiate a full-length parliamentary debate on UFOs in 1979, during which he revealed that not all aliens came from space: some emerged through tunnels from a civilisation beneath the earth’s crust. ‘I haven’t been down there myself,’ he said, ‘but from what I gather [these beings] are very advanced.’ He added that most visitors from other planets – and indeed from below the earth’s crust – were friendly, but ‘I’m told there is one hostile lot.’ (One is reminded of Professor Roger Scruton’s ingenious defence of the House of Lords as a more truly democratic chamber than the elected Commons: MPs would inevitably be brighter and more ambitious than the average citizen whereas hereditary peers, being selected by a mere accident of birth, were far more representative of the general population, including a few clever-dicks but also a fair proportion of blithering idiots.) Another peer, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Hill-Norton, contributed a preface to Timothy Good’s 1991 book Alien Liaison, which reported that the US government had captured several ‘alien spacecraft’ and had been test-flying them at ‘a super-secret base in the Nevada desert’. Describing Good as an ‘honest and reliable’ investigator, the former chief of the defence staff wrote that the allegations were ‘impossible, certainly for me, to dismiss’ unless they were ‘publicly disproved’.
How could one disprove it? The simplest method would be to point out that Lord Hill-Norton had heard nothing about the extra-terrestrial alliance, officially or unofficially, even though he would surely have been party to the conspiracy as head of the British defence establishment from 1971 to 1974 and then chairman of Nato’s military committee from 1974 to 1977. ‘You’d think I would have known,’ he agreed. ‘But I hadn’t the faintest bloody idea.’ A damaging admission, surely? Quite the opposite: it showed that the cover-up was organised at a very high level indeed –‘as high as 38 levels above top secret’, according to Timothy Good. ‘I doubt’, he told me, ‘if anyone in the Cabinet is aware of what’s going on.’ To prove his bona fides, he brandished a letter sent to him a few years earlier by Prince Philip. ‘There are many reasons to believe that they [UFOs] exist,’ the prince wrote. ‘There is so much evidence from reliable witnesses.’
One such witness was his own former equerry, Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley, who later became deputy chief of RAF Strike Command. In his memoirs, published in 1997, Horsley claimed to have met an extra-terrestrial creature named Janus while working at Buckingham Palace in the 1950s. ‘Prince Philip’, the creature told him, ‘is a man of great vision, a person of world renown and a leader in the realm of wildlife and the environment. He is a man who believes strongly in the proper relationship between man and nature, which will prove of great importance in future galactic harmony.’ What did this interstellar royal-watcher look like? Alas, Horsley confessed, ‘it is difficult to describe him with any accuracy; the room was poorly lit by two standard lamps and for the most part he sat in a deep chair by the side of a not very generous fire. In fact, I never really got any physical impression of him.’ Rather surprisingly, Horsley never mentioned the encounter to anyone at the time. ‘I was aged 33, very busy and had to get on with my job,’ he explained.
‘Oh God,’ a senior officer at the Ministry of Defence groaned when Horsley’s book appeared. ‘How unfortunate that the public will learn that the man who had his finger on the button at Strike Command was seeing little green men.’ Unfortunate, maybe, but not unusual. In the United States, two recent commanders-in-chief – Presidents Carter and Reagan – said they had seen UFOs. Indeed, it was impossible to live through the closing decades of the twentieth century without witnessing strange flying objects and alien visitors, often in one’s own living room. From Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET to Independence Day and Men in Black, film-makers both stimulated and fed the public demand most lucratively. The top-rated television show for much of the 1990s, The X-Files, jostled in the schedules with Third Rock from the Sun, Dark Skies and Millennium. (There was no respite in the commercial breaks: UFO imagery appeared in advertising campaigns for Kodak film, Volkswagen cars, Hostess hotels, Quisp cereals and Breath-Rite Nasal Strips, lending cosmic enchantment to even the most mundane products of human industry.)
‘The thing you have to remember about The X-Files is this,’ the programme’s creator, Chris Carter, told an interviewer. ‘It’s a fiction. If – and it’s a big if – anyone does believe it is true, that merely suggests we are reflecting something wider in society.’ Not all that big an if, as it turned out. By the mid-1990s the Internet was cluttered with websites which treated the tales of agents Mulder and Scully as gospel truth. A teacher in Ontario, Professor James Alcock, noticed that one of the ‘information sources’ most frequently cited in student essays was The X-Files. When he reminded them that it was fiction, they countered: ‘Yes, but it’s based on fact.’ In an article for the New York Times in 1996, Professor Wayne Anderson of Sacramento City College reported that over half the students in his astronomy class believed that the government had concealed the truth about the arrival of UFOs; they too cited The X-Files as a source.
‘I don’t know that it’s my responsibility to say that I’ve just created a fiction that is a fiction,’ Chris Carter told the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), a sceptical pressure-group which had proposed that each episode should be prefaced by such a disclaimer. But he acknowledged that his fiction invariably preferred supernatural explanations.
My intention, when I first set out to do the show, was to do a more balanced kind of storytelling. I wanted to expose hoaxes. I wanted Agent Scully to be right as much as Agent Mulder. Lo and behold, those stories were really boring. The suggestion that there was a rather plausible and rational and ultimately mundane answer for these things turned out to be a disappointing kind of storytelling, to be honest. And I think that’s maybe where people have the most problems with my show … But it’s just the kind of storytelling we do, and because we have to entertain … That’s really the job they pay me for, and that’s the thing I’m supposed to do.
This shoulder-shrugging defence was briskly rebutted by Richard Dawkins in his 1996 Dimbleby lecture:
Soap operas, cop series and the like are justly criticised if, week after week, they ram home the same prejudice or bias. Each week The X-Files poses a mystery and offers two rival kinds of explanation, the rational theory and the paranormal theory. And, week after week, the rational explanation loses. But it is only fiction, a bit of fun, why get so hot under the collar?
Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: ‘But it’s only fiction, only entertainment.’
Another campaigner against junk science, Professor A. K. Dewdney, coined the phrase ‘National Enquirer syndrome’ to evoke the pressure on media companies in a fiercely competitive market to come up with ever more sensational stories: ‘The edge moves increasingly into the realm of the incredible.’
Incredible is certainly the mot juste for Communion (1987), sub-titled ‘A True Story of Encounters with the Unknown’, in which Whitley Strieber revealed that at Christmas 1985 he had been kidnapped by extra-terrestrials who subjected him to ‘cerebral needle examinations and rectal probes’. Previously known as a horror-novelist, Strieber was a man who, by his own admission, had some difficulty in distinguishing fantasy from truth. For years he had told of how he was almost killed when a madman went on a shooting spree at the University of Texas, but in Communion he finally confessed that ‘I wasn’t there.’ Nor did he witness les événements of May 1968 in Paris, as he had often maintained. ‘Why do I need these absurd stories?’ he wondered. ‘They are not lies; when I tell them, I myself believe them.’ Yet Communion, for which he received a $1 million advance, was marketed as non-fiction and soon topped the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, inspiring a whole new genre. In a London bookshop a few years later, I counted nearly 100 studies of alien abduction – of which only one, by the American space expert and Aviation Week journalist Philip J. Klass, was at all sceptical. These volumes used to emerge from small, eccentric New Age presses but after Strieber hit the jackpot even the most reputable publishers discovered the profitability of piffle, rushing in with Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extra-Terrestrials Visiting Earth and Alien Agenda: The Untold Story of the Extra-Terrestrials Around Us.
Television programmes such as Unsolved Mysteries and Sightings were often scheduled after the network news, and the distinction between the two sometimes disappeared altogether, especially when famous anchormen were brought in to give spurious journalistic authority to the National Enquirer syndrome. In 1994 Larry King hosted UFO Cover-Up?, a two-hour ‘special’ broadcast live from Area 51, the USAF base in Nevada where UFO-fanciers believe extra-terrestrials work alongside air-force scientists developing secret aircraft and weapons. Although all four of his guests were conspiracy theorists, to create an illusion of balance King included brief pre-recorded interviews with Carl Sagan, the scientist, and Philip J. Klass, who has spent more than thirty years investigating and debunking yarns about flying saucers. ‘During the two-hour show the audience was exposed to less than three minutes of sceptical views on UFOs, crashed saucers and government cover-up,’ Klass wrote. ‘And because Sagan and I were taped many weeks earlier, neither of us could respond to the nonsense spouted by the four UFO promoters who appeared live.’
As the programme drew to a close, Larry King summed up: ‘Crashed saucers. Who knows? But clearly the government is withholding something …’ In fact it was King and his producer who were withholding information. Some weeks earlier, Klass had given them photocopies of formerly classified Pentagon documents from 1948 in which top intelligence officials proposed that ‘UFOs’ might be Soviet spy vehicles. If, as all ufologists believe, the US government captured several replicants following the crash of their spacecraft at the USAF base in Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947, why did the directors of naval and air-force intelligence still not know about it more than a year later? The inescapable question arises, as with Lord Hill-Norton: if defence chiefs, Cabinet ministers and heads of government were too junior to be trusted with the information (‘as high as 38 levels above top secret’, no less), then who on earth – or in heaven, for that matter – was in on the conspiracy? Despite having two hours of airtime at his disposal, however, King omitted to mention Philip Klass’s evidence.
In 1995 an exhibition called ‘Alien Encounters and Extra-TERRORestrial Experience’ opened at Disney World’s new ‘Tomorrowland’ in Florida and was promoted on a one-hour show on ABC which began with a few blurry videos of alleged UFOs. ‘This is not swamp gas. It is not a flock of birds. This is an actual spacecraft from another world, piloted by alien intelligence … Intelligent life from distant galaxies is now attempting to make open contact with the human race. Tonight we will show you the evidence.’
After a wholly uncritical recap of all the Roswell myths, an even more thrilling exhibit was produced with a flourish. When Jimmy Carter became president, ‘his staff attempted to explore the availability of official investigations into alien contacts’. The camera panned swiftly down a typewritten document, zooming in on two words: ‘no jurisdiction’. ‘As this internal government memo illustrates,’ the narrator declared, ‘there are some security secrets outside the jurisdiction even of the White House.’ Philip Klass recognised the document at once: it was a routine FBI reply to an inquiry from Carter’s staff about UFO sightings, explaining that the Bureau had no jurisdiction to investigate such incidents and referring the White House to the air force. But most other viewers presumably concluded, as they were meant to, that even the head of state was denied access to UFO secrets. The commercial purpose of this sleight-of-hand became all too obvious as the narrator reached his conclusion: ‘Statistics indicate a greater probability that you will experience extra-terrestrial contact in the next five years than the chances you will win a state lottery. But how do you prepare for such an extraordinary event? At Tomorrowland in Disney World, scientists and Disney engineers have brought to life a possible scenario that helps acclimatise the public to their inevitable alien encounters.’
In truth, the only inevitability was that television companies would continue to broadcast mendacious codswallop masquerading as investigative journalism. Their shamelessness is joyfully satirised in a 1997 episode of The Simpsons, in which Homer encounters a glowing, green homunculus in the woods outside Springfield. The ‘alien’ is eventually identified as his boss, the evil Montgomery Burns, who explains that ‘a lifetime of working at a nuclear power plant has left me with a healthy green glow’. Before discovering the truth, however, Homer suggests to Bart that they should go back and try to film the creature, in case it is ‘the real thing’. Bart agrees: ‘If it isn’t, we can fake it and sell it to the Fox network! They’ll buy anything!’ ‘Now, son,’ Homer chides. ‘They do a lot of quality programming.’ Whereupon both father and son collapse in helpless laughter.
The extra joke here is that The Simpsons was itself a Fox show, and thus from the same stable as The X-Files and countless trashy ‘reality programmes’ about mystery spaceships. The irony was redoubled shortly afterwards when Fox transmitted Opening the Lost Tombs: Live from Egypt, a ‘network special’ introduced by Maury Povich which claimed that the pyramids were built by travellers from outer space. As if to prove that there were now no boundaries between fact and fiction, or journalism and entertainment, the network trailed the programme with a lengthy item in its main nightly news bulletin. Fox News correspondent David Garcia reported that although Egyptologists considered ‘even the mention of UFOs or other-world intelligence as heresy’, some people believed that the pyramids were indeed ‘not of this earth’. He concluded his despatch thus: ‘A higher intelligence, or merely dedicated hard work? Which theory is correct? Neither is proven. It is the mystery of Egypt.’ Thus tabloid TV unwittingly echoed the argument of post-modernist philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard: that there is no such thing as reality – only a system of arbitrary signs, imagistic discourses and ‘multiple refractions in hyperspace’. (In his book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Baudrillard coolly insisted that even the charred corpses of victims were not ‘real’. No doubt their grieving friends and families were greatly consoled by the news.)
Paradoxically, despite their striking lack of interest in empirical reality and their conviction that a wild conjecture carries as much evidential weight as decades of scholarly research, the purveyors of fantasy yearn passionately for objective proof that will vindicate them: like the heroes of The X-Files, they believe that the truth is out there, somewhere, if only they could find it. In August 1995, after almost half a century of sleuthing by dozens of diligent investigators, it surfaced at last – a hitherto ‘secret’ film of surgeons conducting an autopsy on dead aliens at the Roswell airbase in July 1947. More enticingly still, it included a fleeting appearance by a man in a long coat who was said to be President Harry S. Truman. The scratchy black-and-white footage was screened simultaneously on American, European and Japanese television, to a chorus of awestruck gasps. ‘If that is a hoax, it a most elaborate and convincing one,’ said Congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico. Martin Walker, the well-respected Washington correspondent of the Guardian, filed a startlingly unsceptical 2,500-word despatch. ‘This film is the first hard evidence to emerge from the most celebrated and best-documented UFO event of all,’ he wrote.
Forget about Whitewater and Watergate and even the unsettled issues of who shot President Kennedy. The biggest conspiracy of all, that earth has been visited by aliens and their bodies autopsied on film, is clambering out of the bizarre underworld of the cults and into the realm of the rational and verifiable world … This does not look like some creation of the Hollywood special effects labs. This seems convincingly to be the autopsy of some kind of being.
He was right on one point: Hollywood special effects wizards had nothing to do with it. The autopsy was shot in southern England during the summer of 1994, by two men who had previously produced karaoke videos and films of animals singing nursery rhymes. ‘We found a barn in the quiet village of Ridgmont, Bedfordshire, through a farmer I knew,’ one of the hoaxers, Andy Price-Watts, confessed four years later. ‘I had an old paraffin lamp and we brought along a table, some sheets, overalls and rubber gloves. We filmed it in the evening to make it look as if it had been shot in the dark … We used a wig holder we bought for a few quid, which Eliot Willis, our tape operator, transformed using painted orange peel for the eyes. Elliot and the local butcher, Roger Baker, played the two medical staff. Roger got the part because he could supply the chicken guts we used as the alien’s innards. We were thinking of using pig guts, but they looked too human.’ Soon after the charade began, the farmer walked in to find out what was going on. ‘I suddenly thought we could use him,’ Price-Watts’s partner recalled. ‘There was an old scarecrow in the corner of the barn and we got the coat from it, put it on him and he had a little cameo as President Truman. We could hardly stop ourselves laughing as we shot the video, which took about an hour and a half to complete.’ The film was edited down to six minutes, processed into monochrome and then transferred between different video formats several times to make it look as grainy as possible.
Yet more harmless fun? ‘I want to believe’ was one of the mantras of The X-Files, and the cut-price English japesters certainly performed a useful public service by showing how this intense yearning could overpower the critical faculties of otherwise intelligent people. ‘Keep an open mind!’ broadcasters pleaded when they screened the bogus Roswell video. The Daily Telegraph, one of the few newspapers which spotted the film as a fake from the outset, had the best riposte: ‘If you open your mind too much, your brain may fall out.’
Myths are not static: they grow and spread like bindweed. It is no coincidence that the first great UFO scare began in 1947, a year after Winston Churchill warned that an ‘iron curtain’ had fallen across Europe, nor that the craze intensified in the 1950s – through sci-fi films such as The Thing from Another World, It Came from Outer Space and The Day the Earth Stood Still – at a time when Americans were building fall-out shelters and Senator Joe McCarthy was seeking out Reds. Warnings of an ‘alien threat’ to the United States provided useful, if often subliminal, propaganda for Cold Warriors. Similarly, the new surfeit of UFOria in the 1980s and 1990s, for which Whitley Strieber’s Communion was merely the hors d’oeuvre, fed the paranoia of right-wing conspiracy theorists who believed that their own government had now fallen under the control of sinister aliens. Whether the aliens in question were Jews, Bilderbergers, members of the Council on Foreign Relations or visitors from a planet of Zeta 2 Reticuli scarcely seemed to matter. By the early 1990s, American UFO magazines would often mention ‘black helicopters’ arriving at the scene of an alien abduction, which were alleged to be either cunningly disguised flying saucers or military surveillance vehicles; another recurring theme was the ‘implanting’ of microchips in the skulls of abductees. As Elaine Showalter pointed out in her book Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture, the same black helicopters ‘appear in the literature of right-wing militia and paramilitary groups; they link abduction narratives and other forms of paranoid conspiracy. Implants and microchips also turn up in the thinking of Timothy McVeigh.’ To vary an old cliché: the fact that ufologists are paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t out to get us. On 19 April 1995, McVeigh delivered a bomb which killed 168 people at the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. It was, until 11 September 2001, the worst terrorist attack on US soil.
Surveying the apocalyptic stew of religion, politics and militarism cooked up by modern American cults, the May Day 1995 issue of Time magazine concluded that nothing like it had ever been seen before: ‘America has bred its own sort of new political monster.’ A lengthy report on America’s ‘lunatic fringe’, published the weekend after the Oklahoma bombing, noted that the ‘new literature’ of these groups includes ‘a cult trilogy about a fantastical masonic group called the Illuminati … there is a belief that this occult elite is preparing to coincide a push for world domination with the advent of the third millennium’.
Fantastical, perhaps, but hardly new: the Illuminati – so named because they wanted to illumine the world with rational enlightenment – were founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a law professor at the University of Ingoldstadt who believed that ‘princes and nations will disappear without violence from the earth, the human race will become one family and the world the abode of reasonable men’. Generations of conspiracy theorists have fingered the Illuminati as the evil masterminds behind the French Revolution and the subsequent Terror, and although there isn’t a shred of evidence to support the case this is regarded merely as confirmation of how devilishly clever the plotters were at covering their tracks. By the end of the eighteenth century, Gothic novelists were already using the Illuminati to represent all the sinister forces that were scheming to undermine civilisation – rather like the KGB in cold-war thrillers, or Aunt Agatha in the Jeeves and Wooster stories. As Walter Scott wrote in Waverley, no author was ‘so obtuse as not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electric machines, trap-doors and dark lanterns’.
Sherlock Holmes used to remind Dr Watson that when you have eliminated the impossible ‘whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’. But the whole point of conspiracy theory is that nothing is impossible. What remains is everything, and so everything must be true: Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon, aided by four monkeys with typewriters; or, as the veteran American presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche has long maintained, the global cocaine-smuggling industry is controlled by the Queen of England. In the 1960s, some superstitious obsessives even found a sinister synchronicity between JFK’s death and the assassination of President Lincoln 100 years earlier: both men were shot in the head, on a Friday, in the presence of their wives; their alleged murderers were both killed before coming to trial; both Lincoln and Kennedy were succeeded by Southern Democrats called Johnson. What did it all add up to? No one could say, but it must mean something. ‘Only connect’ is the guiding principle of these inexhaustible gumshoes. Like Casaubon, who thought that a lifetime of research would yield up the key to all mythologies, they are convinced that by doggedly collating every scrap of fact or speculation they will eventually reveal the hidden hand behind the French Revolution, the assassination of President Kennedy and the Roswell UFO cover-up.
In his classic study The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Professor Richard Hofstadter explained that when discussing the ‘paranoia’ of conspiracy theorists, ‘I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I use the term much as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style. It is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself.’ These people are artists, creating a picture as teeming and nightmarish as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. And they are artists in an old tradition: the ‘cult trilogy’ which American right-wing militias of the 1990s found so persuasive was the latest in a genre whose lineage can be traced back at least as far as the Marquis of Crosse’s Horrid Mysteries (1796), a story about ‘a band of desperate Illuminati [who] strive for world dominion’.
Almost every contemporary cult, however weird, has its forebears, though the ancestry is seldom acknowledged. A sense of history is a handicap to apocalyptic fanatics: how can you announce with a straight face that the end of the world is nigh if you remember that people have been saying the same thing for centuries, and that they have always been wrong? In the late twelfth century, for instance, the Italian mystic Joachim of Fiore found a ‘concealed message’ in the Book of Revelation which proved that the Third Age – the culmination of history – would start some time between AD 1200 and 1260. In November 1260, as the final deadline approached, thousands of his desperate disciples began scourging themselves violently and continuously with iron spikes, having been assured that this would precipitate the final catastrophe and usher in an era of eternal peace and idleness. (In the Third Age, according to Joachim, every day would be Sunday.) God was unmoved by this orgy of self-flagellation: life went on, and they were left to lick their wounds.
Joachim’s failure to crack the scriptural code has not deterred others from having a go. In the early 1980s, American fundamentalists persuaded themselves that the ‘scarlet coloured beast’ with ten horns which appeared in the Book of Revelation was the European Community, as the accession of Greece in 1981 brought the number of member states to ten. This ingenious idea was rather spoilt when two more countries, Spain and Portugal, joined the EC in 1986 – whereupon the scripture-sleuths shifted their attention to a passage from Chapter 12 of Revelation: ‘After that there appeared a great sign in heaven: a woman robed with the sun, beneath her feet the moon, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.’ Dan Fuller, a doom-monger from Idaho, informed Time magazine in 1995 that the ‘mark of the beast’ actually referred to Bill Clinton’s fiscal policy, and the president himself must therefore be the Antichrist.
Clinton was in distinguished company. In England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ‘beast’ was usually identified as the Church of Rome. After Britain’s informal alliance with the Catholic powers in 1792, however, patriotic millenarians had to find a new candidate. Dr Johnson’s great friend Hester Thrale Piozzi was one of the first to record the change: ‘Here is an odd Idea now, that the Beast of the Revelation is this French democracy.’ Mrs Thrale, who had a limitless and entirely credulous passion for portents and prophecies, was struck by the fact that the new French government had succeeded that of Louis XVI, whose name in Latin ‘makes the number 666 exactly’. She added, for good measure, that the French Convention consisted ‘at one time of 666 people’. A few years later, she came up with another exciting discovery: Napoleon’s name in Corsican was N’Appollione –‘the Destroyer’ – and his titles, when translated into roman numbers, added up to 666.
Although the wild baroque imagery of Revelation naturally draws the starry-eyed gaze of those who seek hidden supernatural messages, the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) also has a magical allure, not least because every word of it was supposedly dictated by God to Moses. In May 1997 the following announcement was splashed across the front page of the Daily Mail: ‘Computers have discovered a hidden code in the Bible that predicts every event in history. Start reading this fascinating series today.’ The book from which the series had been extracted – The Bible Code, by a former TV journalist named Michael Drosnin – sold more than a hundred thousand copies in the next fortnight, largely thanks to the Mail’s hysterical hype. (Although in its editorials the Daily Mail poses as the voice of robust common sense, unbeguiled by political snake-oil merchants, its appetite for mystical gibberish is gluttonous. During the 1990s, scarcely a week went by without an enthralled feature on the Turin Shroud, the Knights Templar, the Ark of the Covenant, Nostradamus, Mayan prophecies or the lost city of Atlantis. ‘We had a UFO series recently,’ a Mail reporter told the Guardian, ‘with an Alien Hotline number which people could ring. The phone was jammed by thousands of readers claiming they had been abducted by Martians.’)
Drosnin’s main revelation was that a distinguished Israeli mathematician, Professor Eli Rips, had discovered a cipher in the Pentateuch which predicted the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the plays of William Shakespeare. The news caused great excitement on the Internet, where fundamentalist Christians of every hue proclaimed that God’s existence had now been proven beyond reasonable doubt. If so, however, the God in question must have been a very odd character. According to Drosnin, he foretold the arrival of the Shoemaker-Levy comet thousands of years before it actually appeared – and he named it, twice, in the scriptures. But since Messrs Shoemaker and Levy discovered the comet only in 1993, why should the Lord give them the credit that was rightly his?
Several mathematicians pointed out that the code-cracking method of ‘equidistant letter spacing’ could be applied to any large slab of text with similar results (or indeed to individual words: select every third letter from ‘generalization’ and you find ‘Nazi’). Drosnin was unimpressed. ‘When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I’ll believe them,’ he told Newsweek. Brendan McKay of the Australian National University took up the challenge: subjecting Melville’s novel to the Drosnin technique, he elicited the phrase I GANDHI THE BLOODY DEED – obviously a reference to the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, in October 1984. More damning still was a statement issued by Professor Rips, the man who had supposedly endorsed The Bible Code. ‘I do not support Mr Drosnin’s work on the codes, or the conclusions he derives. The book gives the impression that I have done joint work with Mr Drosnin. This is not true … All attempts to extract messages from Torah codes, or to make predictions based on them, are futile and of no value. This is not only my own opinion, but the opinion of every scientist who has been involved in serious codes research.’
In short, even Michael Drosnin’s ‘expert source’ admitted that the Daily Mail – and the thousands of customers who propelled his book to the top of the ‘non-fiction’ bestseller list – had been sold a pup. Yet the Mail returned to the story later that summer, on Saturday 30 August: ‘BIBLE CODE: THE PROOF. When the Mail revealed evidence that all the major events in world history were encoded in the Bible, it caused an international sensation. Did the words of God really predict the rise of the Nazis … the atom bomb … the Gulf War? Now one of the scientists who cracked the code tells just how it was done … Start reading it on Monday – only in the Daily Mail.’ Alas! Monday’s edition of the paper carried a brief update: ‘Due to pressure of space the new Bible Code series has been held over.’ The divine author of the Pentateuch, who allegedly foresaw all the major events in history, had not known that on Sunday 31 August 1997 Princess Diana would die in a car crash.
Nor had anyone else, of course. Three weeks earlier, when the princess and her friend Dodi Fayed visited a soothsayer in Derbyshire, the Mail marked the occasion by commissioning two professional psychics to assess their romantic prospects. ‘They’ll marry, I’m sure of it,’ wrote Jim Chivers. ‘The wedding will take place in about a year’s time and I think they’ll be very happy.’ Craig Hamilton-Parker, who conjured up visions of the future by ‘allowing his mind to float’, disagreed. ‘The relationship will fizzle out soon after Christmas. It will be Diana who walks away from it, but Dodi won’t give a damn when she does. The feeling will be mutual. In the meantime, though, they’ll have some fun. I can see them going on a skiing holiday together.’ Nine months after the accident, the Mail serialised a book by Rita Rogers, the Derbyshire psychic whose ‘extraordinary powers’ had so impressed Diana and Dodi. She disclosed that at her first meeting with Dodi Fayed the previous summer she immediately had ‘a feeling of danger’: she saw a black Mercedes and a tunnel, and ‘felt there was a connection with France’. Extraordinary indeed: only the most mean-spirited sceptic could have wished for some sort of corroborative evidence, such as a letter from Fayed thanking Rogers for the warning about driving through French tunnels. Meanwhile, after two instalments of the book, the Mail printed a small apology: ‘Due to pressure of space, the third part of our serialisation of psychic Rita Rogers’s book was held out of Saturday’s paper.’ Yet again, one of the Mail’s crystal-ball readings had been postponed because of unforeseen circumstances.
Viewed from a safe distance, mysticism can seem quaintly amusing, even endearing: look at the fondness with which Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm have depicted the Ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchists and other English cults that flourished in the 1650s, praising them for their ‘generosity of emotion’ and ‘burning confidence in a new world’. True, these zealots may have spouted a lot of tosh about the Second Coming and the Antichrist – the Fifth Monarchists thought the world would end in 1666 (one thousand plus the number of the beast) and were prepared to ‘resort to political action and, in the case of a minority, even violence’ to attain the millennium, rather like some American cults of the 1990s – but they also yearned for a society with no war, no private property and no king except Jesus. Thanks to their ‘revolutionary consciousness’, the chiliastic sects of the seventeenth century were treated by twentieth-century left-wingers as a progressive force. Writing of his beloved Ranters, Christopher Hill warned fellow-historians ‘to avoid the loaded phrase “lunatic fringe”, since lunacy, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder … and the “lunatic” may in some sense be saner than the society which rejects him’. Hobsbawm added that ‘millenarians can … readily exchange the primitive costume in which they dress their aspirations for the modern costume of Socialist and Communist politics’.
Yet there was little evidence of socialism among the Armageddon-awaiting cults of the 1990s, many of whom exchanged the primitive costume for army fatigues and AK-47s. Even milder New Age millenarians, who preferred cuddly toys to Great Beasts, were uniformly conservative. One of the more seemingly benign manifestations of eschatological craziness was the sudden reappearance of angels, heralded by Joan Wester Anderson’s Where Angels Walk (1994), which sold more than half a million copies in the United States. In 1990 Malcolm Godwin had written a book with the gloomy title Angels: An Endangered Species, but only four years later the heavenly host was flourishing. One of Anderson’s ‘true stories’ concerned a young woman who became nervous while walking through a park in Sydney, Australia, after dark. Suddenly she saw a large white Alsatian dog trotting along beside her. She tried to shoo it away, but without success; it accompanied her all the way to the other side of the park. Afterwards, the woman concluded that it must have been a guardian angel, sent to protect her from muggers: ‘There was just no other explanation for his arrival, his behaviour.’ William and Virginia Jackson once drove from Las Vegas to El Paso through Death Valley – and only later discovered that their car’s fan belt hadn’t been working. ‘How had they managed to cross a treacherous desert without a vital piece of engine equipment? Virginia believes they were protected by spiritual beings.’ Anderson’s book cited dozens of instances of drivers having their engines fixed by celestial motor mechanics who disappeared as mysteriously as they arrived.
As with so much harmless nonsense, however, the angelmania had a political sub-text. No less an expert than Billy Graham, in his book Angels: God’s Secret Agents, noted that ‘UFOs are astonishingly angel-like in some of their reported appearances.’ But whereas the crews of flying saucers were thought by American fundamentalists to be servants of Lucifer, the fallen angel, the white-clad creatures in Joan Wester Anderson’s stories operated a zero-tolerance policy on crime. An angel would help drivers swerve to avoid oncoming traffic only if they observed the speed limit. ‘Angelic protection never seems to occur when people are deliberately breaking the laws of society,’ she warned. But as long as we served God and kept to 30 m.p.h. in built-up areas, they would come to our aid if required.
Since angels cost the taxpayer nothing and are always on call, the state need not spend billions on social security, health care and unemployment benefit: God will provide. This message was made explicit in another collection of seraphim-sightings, H. C. Moolenburgh’s A Handbook of Angels. ‘The welfare state has made “spiritual lazybones” of us all,’ Dr Moolenburgh lamented, since those of us accustomed to ‘being served our every wish’ have no incentive to pray. If we break free of our welfare dependence, however, ‘then God sends his servants and man is helped in the most remarkable ways’.