DLINE: UFO believers aren't seen as crazy
SECTION: LIFESTYLE; Pg. 7
HEADLINE: UFO believers aren't seen as crazy
BYLINE: NANCY ROSS-FLANIGAN; Knight-Ridder Newspapers
BODY:
Until lately, scientists didn't care about answers to those questions -they were too busy trying to debunk the beliefs to delve into their roots.
But now they're focusing new research on what they call pseudoscience and coming to conclusions that surprise them: Believers fall into at least two separate categories, researchers find, and both groups have sensible reasons for believing what they do.
""Up to now, most scientists have tended to depict believers in pseudoscience as ignorant, psychopathic, backwoods ignoramuses or something along those lines, but we strongly suspected it was not that simple,'' says Dr. Raymond Eve, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Arlington who reported his findings at a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
""What we've been trying to focus on is understanding, through the eyes of the believers, why it makes sense to them to believe what they do. ''
The scientists define ""pseudoscience'' as the belief that there is a scientific basis for things that can't be explained through accepted scientific methods.
In a study of 338 college students, Eve and colleagues first surveyed beliefs on a variety of topics -everything from UFOs, space aliens and the Loch Ness monster to the belief that there is scientific evidence for Noah's Ark and for the biblical account of creation.
Then they tried to see if people who held certain beliefs had anything else in common. Distinct patterns showed up when the results were analyzed. For one thing, there were only two groups of believers. But what surprised scientists most was
The first group included students who believe that evidence of Noah's Ark has been found on Mount Ararat in Turkey and that there is abundant scientific evidence for the Bible's description of creation. This group tended to have traditional, conservative beliefs in other areas - they were more likely to be against abortion, opposed to homosexuality and in favor of school prayer, for example.
Their beliefs were based on ""tradition, faith, authority and revelation,'' says Eve. ""In the words of one respondent, 'God said it, I believe it, that's the end of the argument. '''
The second group didn't believe the Noah's Ark and creation stories, but did embrace what Eve calls fantastic science: tales of mysterious monsters, sunken continents, psychic powers, ancient astronauts and UFOs.
The researchers had expected that instead of one large group, they might find several subgroups -people who believed in UFOs, for example, but not in ESP. They were surprised to find that people in this group believe in all sorts of mysterious, but unrelated, phenomena.
Their common bond? Not so much shared beliefs as shared disdain.
""They don't see much virtue in fundamentalist religion of any stripe, nor do they think that science is all that good a way of knowing things, because they perceive it to have led to militarism, pollution, rampant consumerism, interruption of interpersonal relationships and so on,'' says Eve. These believers feel that neither science nor religion has all the answers, so they're more willing to explore the unorthodox.
In short, says Eve, people who believe in UFOs, ESP and the like aren't doing it out of ignorance or mental instability.
""It's quite rational,'' he says. ""They just proceed from different assumptions. ''