An SFU professor who is halfway through his quest to find out why people are enthralled by everything from UFOs to Ogopogo has caught our attention – if only because journalists pride themselves on being the biggest skeptics.
Paul Kingsbury has spent two years researching the subject, and we were kind of hoping he would reveal that aliens were real and living in the White House (which would explain a lot) or, at the very least, that the ghost of John A. Macdonald has a cryptic message for Justin Bieber.
Instead, he kind of says people pursue Sasquatches or ghosts because, as he told CBC, “it’s the perfect object of desire … in terms of a blurry image, a strange sound, a cast of a footprint in a forest. It always incites desire – and it’s forever out of reach.”
Well, that pretty well sums up 90 per cent of lottery ticket buyers and folks who are hoping to find an affordable house in Vancouver.
Now the professor throws in a bunch of academic yada yada to jazz it all up, saying that studying those who want to believe in the unbelievable will help us learn about the power of desire and how belief in a shared idea can bring humans together.
Or, in layman’s terms, it helps us to learn about just how stupid and gullible human beings can be after thousands of years of falling for everything from prophets to e-mail scams.
Kingsbury also says we like to believe we live in a modern age, but we’re actually surrounded by mythical themes including sacred and divine places.
And he’s not just talking about Lord of the Rings.
Let’s face it, human beings are suckers for a mystery, a conspiracy that may explain a mystery, or even a far-fetched explanation that just tickles our imaginations.
Throw in our overblown human egos and you have a recipe for disaster.
How else to explain our neverending belief in such things as horoscopes? In karma? In justice? In Batman?
We think we either know the answer to everything or can find the answer to everything.
Kingsbury’s search for the “why” of people searching for mythic monsters and such is just another example of our delightful and insatiable curiosity about everything and anything in the universe.
