Believing Is Seeing

The Tale of Little Gretchen Greengums

The following short story is presented to help you remember some of the weird ways our brains can cause us to believe in things that aren’t real. It’s about a good girl who was not a good skeptic and suffered a most grisly fate as a result: brain rot and a derailed life. Please remember this tragic tale whenever you find yourself on the brink of accepting an extraordinary claim that lacks overwhelming evidence. Maybe it’s true, but do make the effort to think before you believe. Recall what happened to little Gretchen Greengums whenever you are tempted to believe in something unusual for no good reason.

NO DOUBT about it, young Gretchen Greengums was a winner. Hands down, she was the smartest and most popular kid in the tiny town of Rottbridge, population 7,495. Greengums was special, and everybody knew it. Cute as a button, too. Nobody cared that she had a wicked overbite and a frightening set of eyebrow ridges that might have looked a tad thick on a Neanderthal boxer. There was just something special about the girl, and the whole town loved her for it. Gretchen was so beloved and respected that no one bothered to oppose her when she ran for president of the fifth grade class. She was the rare overachiever no one resented. Many adults predicted that she was sharp enough and motivated enough to make it all the way to the top. More than a few openly talked about her having the potential to one day run the town’s most prestigious and successful business, a factory that recycles used kitty litter to make dentures and decorative tobacco pipes. But Gretchen had even bigger plans than that.

Her goal was to head off to college after high school and earn a degree in astronomy. She wasn’t shy about telling anyone that she was going to either prove or disprove string theory and crack the mysteries of both dark matter and dark energy once and for all. Nobody in town had the slightest clue what she was talking about, but they knew enough to respect her ambition and not to doubt her.

GRETCHEN WAS NO SPAZ. In addition to her lofty academic goals, she also dreamed of being the best baton twirler in the world. She already had won the annual Pro-Am Rottbridge Baton-Twirling Championship three years straight. Everyone just knew she would go pro one day. All she needed was a little more seasoning, a bit more height on her back throws, and she would be ready for the big leagues. Yep, she was the real deal, the total package, the golden child of Rottbridge. Gretchen Greengums was going places. But, out of the blue, everything changed one strange autumn day.

During a twirling practice session all by herself out on the YWCA field, Gretchen tossed her baton high in the air like she had done a million times before. But this time, while looking up, something odd caught her attention. Up in the sky, something was hovering in the air. It was strange. Definitely no plane, she thought. As the baton fell to earth beside her, she just kept staring up. “Cripes! What in heckfire is that thing?”

Alternating jolts of fear, curiosity, and excitement surged through her little body as she began to figure out what it was. “Wait, I know! It’s a UFO! Just like the one I saw in that show on the Pseudohistory Channel last week! Holy moley! It’s even shaped kinda like one of the spaceships they showed! It must be aliens! What else it could be?”

Believing is seeing. We don’t really see with our eyes as most people assume we do. We see with our brains because our brains construct a scene based on images that come in through the eyes. It’s never a perfect reflection of what’s actually there in front of us. Furthermore, what the brain sees can be strongly influenced by what the brain already believes. Even if she wasn’t completely convinced by it, Gretchen’s recent viewing of a nonscientific TV show about UFOs may have primed her to “see” something that wasn’t there.

Gretchen analyzed the object carefully. Her mind raced. She placed her hands on top of her head and said out loud that this was the most important day of her life. No longer hovering, the object began moving away toward the distant horizon. “It’s gigantic,” she said aloud to herself, “Maybe 1,000 feet wide! No way is this a balloon or a blimp. It’s gotta be a spaceship. Gotta be!” She began to imagine what the occupants might look like. Questions flooded her mind: What is their planet like? How smart are they? Are they friendly? Will they share their knowledge with us? What if they’re mean? What if they wanna eat us or something like that?

Our brains find meaningful patterns, even when none are there. When we look around at the world, our brains naturally search for patterns and try to connect the dots in visual noise or clutter to form whole images—even when the dots don’t really connect and there is nothing actually there. In this case, Gretchen is looking at nothing more than a flock of birds in the distance, a likely cause of many UFO sightings. Without her being aware of it, Gretchen’s brain instantly connected the dots and created one solid image out of several individual birds flying in formation. Furthermore, the late-day sun is reflecting off of the birds’ bellies, making them appear unnaturally bright. She thinks it is so big because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to accurately estimate the size of something in the sky if you have no idea what that something is.

GRETCHEN WAS NO IDIOT. She remembered something her third-grade teacher once said to the class about being skeptical of UFO sightings. She blinked hard and slow twice, took a deep breath, and tried to look at the scene before her with fresh eyes. She clenched her teeth in total concentration and stared at the UFO with all the mental focus and intensity she could muster.

But it was still there. “No!” she said, “This really is real. I’m not imagining it and there is no way that big thing is a plane or a helicopter or anything else like that! I can’t figure out what it is. It has to be an alien spaceship!”

We don’t see everything we look at. We can stare at a scene and believe that we are paying close attention to it but still miss important things going on right in front of our eyes. Inattentional blindness is a standard problem that comes with human brains. Remember the gorilla experiment cited earlier in this chapter. Gretchen is so focused on the “spaceship” that she fails to notice another flock of birds close by that fly by right in front of her field of vision. If she had noticed them, she likely would have realized what it was she was seeing in the distance. Notice that Gretchen also makes the mistake of thinking that her being unable to identify the object is somehow a good reason to conclude it must be an alien spaceship. A good skeptic would have opted for “I don’t know.”

Gretchen continued to watch the object for another few minutes. But as the Sun set behind her, the UFO vanished. Stunned by what she had just experienced, she took a deep breath. “Whoa! I just saw a UFO, a spaceship from outer space!” Her hands trembled, but she wasn’t scared anymore. Now she was excited. This is fantastic, she thought. Now I know for sure. Aliens are real! We are not alone!

Gretchen took off for home, running as fast as she could.

Smart and honest people are sincerely wrong all the time. Most people who claim to have had a paranormal or supernatural experience are probably not lying or suffering from a serious mental illness that might have caused them to experience what they did. Most likely, they really did see or experience something. But that “something” is probably an internal brain experience of one kind or another that normal people can and do have when their brains misinterpret real events or confuse fantasy for reality. For this reasons, it is not only the claims of others that we need to be skeptical of. We also must be skeptical of our own thoughts and perceptions.

When she arrived at home, Gretchen told her family about the UFO. The next day, she told everybody at school about it. Because of Gretchen’s reputation for being smart and honest, everyone was inclined to believe her. “Wow,” said her teacher, Mrs. Flurston. “I guess this means alien are real. How exciting! Hey, students, what do you say we do a special lesson on UFOs this week?”

“Yay!” yelled the students. Mrs. Flurston then told the class that she would bring in a few “excellent and educational” Pseudohistory Channel DVDs she had at home. She said one shows how Hitler had used alien spaceships to nearly win World War II. The kids cheered again, even louder this time. “Another one of the DVDs explains how aliens visited us thousands of years ago and left a few pets behind by mistake,” said Mrs. Flurston. “Those pets, it turns out, were our distant ancestors!” This time the students all stood up and clapped wildly.

Little Kevin Handfurt, the cute class clown with a weak bladder, raised his hand enthusiastically and blurted out that he could bring in his daddy’s “science books” about the UFO crash at Roswell. “It’s even got real pictures of the alien bodies!” he said. Mrs. Flurston nodded approvingly. The boys in the front row high-fived each other. Some of the kids punched the sky in celebration. Even Todd McSfinster, the grumpiest kid in class, got in the spirit. “Finally!” he said, “We get to learn some real science. It’s about time!”

One classroom couldn’t contain this much energy for long. By the end of the week, the whole school was buzzing about Gretchen’s UFO, and soon after that, the whole town was. When Gretchen got home from school one day, she was greeted in the living room by a reporter from the local newspaper who had been waiting to interview her. The very next day, an article about her was on the front page of the town paper. It included a sketch of the spaceship, based on Gretchen’s description. The illustration included several details that Gretchen didn’t actually say that she saw, but the artist thought it would make it more interesting for people so he added them. She never saw any strange markings on the side, missile things attached to it, or an alien waving from a window like the newspaper sketch showed, but the general shape of the object was about right, so Gretchen didn’t say anything.

The last sentence of the article read as follows: “The town of Rottbridge can only applaud Gretchen Greengums’s extraordinary courage for sharing this story of her close encounter. While there are many questions still left to be answered, we now know, thanks to this one special little girl, that we are not alone in the universe.”

Even better than the article, Rottbridge’s mayor, the Honorable Earl Wayne Chipply, publicly and officially praised Gretchen at a special town-hall ceremony. He even presented her with a fancy plaque suitable for hanging. During the event, the mayor called her a hero. He also said that he too was a believer and encouraged everyone to keep watching the skies because “they are definitely up there.”

Reputation and titles aren’t everything. When it comes to extraordinary claims, a person’s credentials and reputation matter, but only so far. These things aren’t nearly as important as good evidence. Always remind yourself that the person making an unusual claim—no matter how impressive his or her accomplishments or reputation for honesty may be—is human and therefore is capable of mixing up fantasy and reality just like anyone else. Also be on guard about placing too much trust in the news media. Journalists are human, too, and that means beliefs, biases, and weak skepticism can and do creep into their work. We also must be careful about the natural human tendency to look up to, follow, and believe authority figures. Just because people may be in positions of power and trust, such as a mayor or an educator, doesn’t mean they can’t fall for bogus beliefs just like anyone else.

TIME FLIES FOR HEROES. Fifteen years after seeing the UFO, Gretchen was still smart and still cute. But she was not quite as popular as she used to be. Things were never the same for her after that day. She became convinced that the spaceship would come back, so she spent more and more of her time looking up and waiting. Over the years, the townspeople, then her friends, and finally her own family grew bored with the story. They still liked her well enough, and most people thought Gretchen meant well, but after years of UFO hunting with nothing to show for it and all the constant talking about aliens, the whole thing grew stale and a bit embarrassing. There was just something about a young woman in the prime of her life, with so much potential, constantly staring up at the sky and doing nothing else that some people didn’t feel comfortable with. But she didn’t care. Day after day, night after night, Gretchen stood with her head facing up, scanning the sky, looking for that UFO.

“Look down, once in while!” her father screamed at her one day. “For Pete’s sake, you’re wasting your life staring at clouds all day!” But Gretchen kept looking up and hoping the aliens would return. Sadly, all that looking up made her lose sight of her dreams down here on Earth.

Gretchen never did go to college. Never took over as boss at the kitty-litter recycling factory. As soon as she graduated from high school, she devoted herself full-time to “alienology.” She devoured every book, magazine, and website she could find that promoted belief in UFOs and aliens. She read about alien abductions, the famous crash at Roswell, secret activities at Area 51, and people who were in communication with aliens. She attended lectures by people who said they had been aboard UFOs and taken trips in space. She partied with Raelians one wild weekend in Vegas. She played her Close Encounters of the Third Kind DVD so many times that one day her DVD player just up and died.

Gretchen’s greatest moment of glory probably came when she appeared for twenty-seven seconds in a primetime Pseudohistory Channel documentary titled Nostradamus: Human Savant or Alien Astrologer? She told them her UFO story on camera, but it didn’t make the final cut. They only used her comments about aliens probably having the ability to predict the future and her statement that therefore there’s a good chance that Nostradamus was one of them or at least consulted with them.

Gretchen had no interest in reading books that were skeptical of UFO claims and refused to listen to the perspectives of professional astronomers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researchers, astrobiologists, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) officials on this subject. She felt she knew better than all of them. After all, she had seen a spaceship with her own eyes—not them. To her, it made no sense to waste time considering possible alternate explanations, so she devoted herself to researching stories and mining data only from those who believed. Her older brother was skeptical and often tried to argue with her about UFOs, but she wouldn’t have it. “He didn’t see, so he doesn’t know,” she said to herself. “Besides, it’s not like he can disprove my story.”

Confirmation bias can prevent us from thinking clearly about our beliefs. We all tend to pay attention to and remember information that supports our beliefs while shying away from and forgetting information that challenges or contradicts them. Everyone does this, which is another reason why being a good skeptic is so important in everyday life. If you care about truth and reality, if you don’t want to waste your time believing nonsense, then you must be aware of confirmation bias and resist it. You have to work at keeping an open mind and considering other ideas and evidence, no matter how foreign or uncomfortable they may feel. It’s also not the skeptic’s job to disprove extraordinary claims. It’s the responsibility of the person who makes the claim to prove it.

That big UFO day was a long, long time ago. Gretchen’s gone gray now. She is winding down a life that certainly no one would have predicted for her half a century ago. She never did leave Rottbridge. Never did take a stab at string theory. Despite all that potential, she never competed in another baton-twirling event after fifth grade. To this day, she still walks around town with her face angled upward. When she talks to people on the street, she rarely makes eye contact. Too busy looking up. It wasn’t only her social life and career that suffered. Gretchen paid a physical price as well. Today her legs are gnarly sticks of scarred flesh. All that staring up at the sky doesn’t make for safe walking down on the ground. Over the years, she’s slammed into so many fire hydrants and park benches and collided with so many skateboarders that it’s a wonder she’s still alive. If you didn’t know better, after one look at those mangled and dented shins, you might assume she’s a retired Muay Thai fighter who had spent a long career battling in Bangkok. Yeah, that day Gretchen saw her UFO changed everything about her.

Gretchen spends most of her time these days alone in a small apartment, writing and posting her UFO newsletter on the web. She’ll play that DVD of her twenty-seven-second Pseudohistory Channel sound bite for anyone willing to watch. A couple of times a year, she gives a lecture on “UFO Science” at the Rottbridge public library. Pretty much the same small audience shows up every time. There are the diehard believers, the homeless people, and a few who get lost looking for the romance-novel section. But Gretchen never fails to deliver. When it’s show time, she glows with enthusiasm. “I know intelligent extraterrestrials are visiting us,” she says. “I saw them with my own eyes. They are here.”

HER UNBLINKING STARE IS CREEPY TO SOME. But others seem inspired to believe. “I can remember that day so clearly, all those years ago,” she says. “The spaceship hovered right above my head. It was silver with flashing lights. It had strange markings on the hull. There were missiles or some kind of auxiliary rockets on the sides, too. I could even see a window, and I could see an alien with a large head inside. He was very pale, either gray or white. I’ll never forget his eyes, large, black eyes. And then he waved at me. Yes, it was a moment I’ll never forget.”

Science has shown that our memories are unreliable. Our brains do not provide accurate replays of past events for us to watch. They construct our memories from bits of information. When doing this, our brains edit and embellish. Things are left out, things are added in. Sometimes other memories are mixed in. Sometimes things we saw in a movie, watched on TV, or read in a book are added to the mix. And all of this can happen in a way that feels right to us. Memories of things that never happened can feel 100 percent accurate. This is why confidence, honesty, intelligence, and reputation have little to do with whether or not a person is remembering something accurately. Trust people, but don’t trust their memories.

Gretchen checked out at the age of eighty-seven. Right up to her death, she clung to her belief that she saw a spaceship long ago. It never occurred to her that she could have reacted to that event differently. She never imagined that her UFO was nothing more than a flock of birds, the setting Sun, and her own brain conspiring to fool her. She had never heard of confirmation bias or inattentional bias. She never learned that memories are fallible fabrications of the brain. No one ever advised her that it is better to live with an unanswered question than to pretend to know something you don’t. No one had ever suggested to that bright little girl that it was important for her to think before she believed.

The loss goes two ways. It wasn’t only Gretchen who paid a price for not being skeptical enough. Everyone else lost too. Gretchen’s family lost the joy and reward of watching a daughter strive for big things. The town was robbed of one of its brightest lights. In real life, it works this way, too. Our entire world is diminished when minds, filled with potential, are sacrificed on the many altars of irrational belief. Sadly, it happens every minute of every day. Millions of people who are much like the fictional Gretchen have their wonderful and powerful brains smothered and dimmed as their skulls are packed with the cheap sawdust of unproven and unlikely claims. Given the many very serious problems humankind currently faces and will face, I’m not sure that we can afford to keep losing so much intellectual wealth each generation. It seems to me that we need all the brainpower we can muster, including yours.