Note: Trends reflect the number of combined articles appearing annually in the New York Times and the Washington Post containing in the headline or lead paragraph the key words for psychic: "psychic" or "psychic medium" or "spirit medium" or "extrasensory perception," or "ESP," or the keywords for UFOs: "UFO" or "alien abduction" or "extraterrestrial." Source.
It troubles me to write, but a combination of signs point to a resurrection for the paranormal in American culture. As I have reviewed in past columns for the American Prospect and Skeptical Inquirer, the peak for the paranormal was the late 1990s, with attention dropping following the terrorist attacks of 2001.
Yet now with Indiana Jones trading biblical mythology for Roswell lore, The X-Files sequel set for worldwide release on July 25, and several new TV series scheduled for the fall that feature as a central plot line paranormal investigation, a familiar pattern is emerging, one that features a synergy between mass media products and the paranormal sub-cultures that have been mostly dormant since 9/11.
As the summer moves on, I will have much more to write about this, but for now, check out my previous columns, especially the American Prospect article that offers a cultural history of the paranormal. Below, I leave you with the trailer to the new X-Files movie.
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I don't know how clearly pop culture treatments or even journalistic attention reflects actual levels of belief in the paranormal. Only polling, not frequency of news stories or high profile fictional movies and TV shows, can reveal the prevalence and intensity of paranormal beliefs.
For example, Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who are, judging by comments threads, popular in the community of ScienceBlogs commenters - who I assume skew towards skepticism and atheism. So these entertainment/lifestyle choices are not indicative of personal acceptance of paranormal phenomena.
Isn't it likely that there's a conservation of woo going on? This graph picks two paranormal subjects --- but if we were to expand it out to more numerous forms, isn't it possible, or even likely, that we'd see a series of peaks, the sum of which stays relatively constant?
If I remember correctly, wasn't the early '90s a high period for "angels"? And the early 2000s were filled with conspiracy theory stories. When was the vampire peak? The seventies were filled with pseudo-Indian and Asian woo. The '80s had macrobiotics. You'd really have to do the full panoply of woo to ascertain any trend.
How many UFOs to the vampyre?
Yeah we all know those kooky X-Files and Indiana Jones fans are suckers that actually believe that crap. To claim anything less would be overly, well, skeptical.
Interesting, but I don't think thats a large enough sample to be significant. Looking at just two papers could be explained away by one of having hired a fan of the paranormal, who kept getting more stories published over time, and the other one just trying to not miss a story the other wrote about... Doing a similar search but taking into account a larger sample of local/regional newspapers would feel more legitimate to me. But even at that, how can you cancel out the effect of movies and their own cross-marketing? Perhaps by charting the box-office revenues and advertising expenditures of any movie or even tv shows and books that is even vaguely paranormal-related. Often times when a big movie (or museum exhibit even) comes to town, there are tie-in stories that make it into the various "news" sources. I expect to see a burst of articles about real archaeologists in the news around the same time as an Indiana Jones type movie is released, even discussing things completely unrelated to the movie, simply because for that moment in time they are close enough to a hot topic to catch the short attention span of the mass media.