I’d like to share a story with you all. It relates to ID tangentially but makes I think the same point.

I have an aunt whom I love very much, but she is one of those crystal/hippie/sees auras/talks to dead pets sorts.

Once when I was in college, over Christmas break, I went down to Va to visit her. She has a lot of friends who share her new age interests. They and my aunt were quite excited to see me as a physicist. I thought ohhhh boy, they want me to verify something for them.

Sure enough they began to tell me excitedly that there was a UFO landing just down the hill by the neck of woods about 150 meters from my aunt’s house. They all excitedly told me that they saw a great light in the trees, and that there was a procession of alien beings performing a ritual down there. They were marching through the trees with blue lights.

“Really?” I said. Now I was 19 and still respectful of my elders. I was not going to be harsh to a bunch of 40-60 year old people.

I asked “did you get your cam?”

“No you’re right we should have, we were too busy watching.”

“Ok, did you go down there to check it out?”

“No”

“When was this?”

“Just two days ago.”

“I said lets see if there is anything still down there.”

When we go there, we found blue Christmas lights strung through the trees and a great big Arc light that the neighbor used to illuminate his huge artificial tree.

The point is that once people want to believe something, they will happily go off and reinforce each other’s illusions.

I like to point out to my students that if other life has gotten here, if they are smart enough to figure out how to cross the light years, they would not be so fascinated with the human rectum. It just is not that much of a scientific challenge, and after all of those probings (if true) the most interesting thing the aliens would be able to figure out is that about one in ten don’t mind so much.

The deeper point here is one of psychology. The ID people have a certain mass delusion no different than the UFO people. It is just that the ID people have the authority of religion behind them.