Why People Believe Weird Things

About the Author

Michael Brant Shermer was born September 8, 1954, in Los Angeles and raised largely in La Cañada Flintridge, California. As a teenager in 1971 he converted to evangelical Christian fundamentalism, evangelizing door-to-door for roughly seven years before abandoning those beliefs in graduate school — an experience this book's own Prologue and Chapter 1 draw on directly, and one Shermer has said left him with genuine empathy for believers rather than contempt for them. He earned a B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University (1976), an M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton (1978), and, in 1991, a Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University, with a dissertation on the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's co-discoverer of natural selection.

Between his master's and doctoral work, Shermer spent roughly a decade, from 1979 to 1989, as a professional ultra-marathon cyclist, competing five times in the grueling, largely sleepless Race Across America and becoming a founding member of the Ultra Cycling Hall of Fame; a common cycling neck-strain injury, "Shermer's Neck," is named for him. That career is not incidental biographical color for this particular book — it is the direct, load-bearing source of Chapter 6's central case study, discussed in full below, in which extreme sleep deprivation during the 1983 race triggered the hallucinatory "abduction" experience the chapter opens with. While competing, Shermer taught psychology at Glendale Community College in the evenings, later becoming adjunct professor of the history of science at Occidental College and, from 2011, an adjunct professor at Chapman University teaching a course called "Skepticism 101."

In 1991, Shermer co-founded the Skeptics Society in Los Angeles together with artist and fellow skeptic Pat Linse, with the assistance of his then-wife Kim Ziel Shermer; the organization publishes Skeptic magazine, which Shermer still edits, and by the mid-2010s reported more than 50,000 members. From April 2001 to January 2019 he wrote a monthly "Skeptic" column for Scientific American. Why People Believe Weird Things, published six years after the Skeptics Society's founding, was Shermer's first book-length statement of the project and remains his best-known and most widely cited work; he went on to write more than a dozen further books, including How We Believe (2000), The Believing Brain (2011) — which formalized the "patternicity" concept for which he later became best known, a term that, this site's own research confirms directly against the book's full text, does not itself appear anywhere in Why People Believe Weird Things — and The Moral Arc (2015).

Shermer's own reputation within the skeptic movement he helped professionalize has not been free of controversy. Beginning in 2013, and reported in detail by BuzzFeed News in 2014 and by Inside Higher Ed and other outlets after a 2018 speaking engagement at Santa Barbara City College, multiple women went on the record accusing Shermer of sexual assault and harassment; Shermer has consistently and publicly denied the allegations, characterizing them as false, and no criminal charges were filed. The controversy led several institutions, including Illinois Wesleyan University in 2019, to cancel scheduled Shermer appearances. This is a matter of Shermer's personal conduct, separate from and not addressed in this thirty-year-old book, but it is well documented in reliable, independent reporting, and omitting it from an honest account of the man behind the Skeptics Society would understate the real controversy that has followed him.

Historical Context & Origins

Shermer wrote the first edition of Why People Believe Weird Things in the mid-1990s, six years into the Skeptics Society's existence and roughly midway through the same decade that produced Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World (1995) — a book this site's own entry on Sagan documents Shermer as a fellow traveler of, both men having built their skeptical projects on the institutional foundation of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), which Sagan co-founded in 1976 alongside Philip J. Klass. Where Sagan's book was a valedictory general-audience defense of science from one of the most credentialed scientists of the century, Shermer's was a working skeptic's field report, built directly out of the specific claims he had spent years personally investigating on television talk shows — NBC's The Other Side chief among them — rather than out of a single scientist's broader philosophical reflection.

The book's alien-abduction chapter arrived at a specific cultural high-water mark for the phenomenon it examines. The X-Files had premiered on Fox in 1993; Budd Hopkins's and Whitley Strieber's abduction memoirs had built a large popular readership across the 1980s; and, most consequentially for this chapter specifically, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Mack's Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens appeared in 1994, just three years before Shermer's book, giving the abduction movement its first sustained endorsement from a tenured faculty member at one of the country's most prestigious universities. Shermer devotes direct, extended attention to Mack in both the original "Abducted!" chapter and, in the 2002 revised edition, the newly added Chapter 18, making this book one of the earliest book-length skeptical responses to Mack's specific claims, published while the controversy over Mack's Harvard tenure was still actively unfolding.

Stephen Jay Gould's foreword, "The Positive Power of Skepticism," situates the book within an older, harder-nosed tradition of scientific skepticism than the made-for-television debunking Shermer's own talk-show appearances might suggest; Gould and Shermer were not casual acquaintances but fellow travelers in the same organized-skepticism and evolutionary-biology circles of the period, a connection that gave the book real institutional credibility on publication beyond Shermer's own still-young Skeptics Society. The 2002 revised and expanded edition — the edition cited throughout this entry, matching the edition this site's own New Jersey/Northeast Drone Wave case file already cites directly — added a new eighteenth chapter, "Why Smart People Believe Weird Things," built in part around Shermer's continuing engagement with Mack's work through the late 1990s.

Structurally, the book also arrived several decades after this site's own UFOs Explained (1974), Philip J. Klass's case-by-case aviation-trade-press skepticism, but took a deliberately different approach: rather than working case by case through specific famous UFO sightings the way Klass had, Shermer's chapter is organized around a single, sustained cognitive argument — that the abduction experience is a real psychological event with a mundane, explicable cause — illustrated by his own hallucination, the Roswell autopsy film, and the broader abductee community, rather than by a survey of individually contested radar and photographic cases.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The book is organized into five parts and eighteen chapters (in the 2002 revised edition). Part 1, "Science and Skepticism," opens with Shermer's own "Skeptic's Manifesto" (Chapter 1), which recounts his conversion from fundamentalist Christian to professional skeptic during his cycling career, and Chapter 3, "How Thinking Goes Wrong," which catalogues twenty-five named fallacies of reasoning organized around what Shermer calls Hume's Maxim — quoting David Hume's own 1758 formulation directly: "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." This single principle, applied consistently, is the book's real methodological spine, and Shermer explicitly reapplies it, word for word, in the alien-abduction chapter discussed below.

Part 2, "Pseudoscience and Superstition," contains the book's most directly relevant chapter to this site's subject: Chapter 6, "Abducted! Encounters with Aliens." It opens with Shermer's own story: on the night of August 8, 1983, 1,259 miles into the Race Across America and suffering extreme sleep deprivation, Shermer awoke from a forced forty-five-minute nap convinced his own support crew were hostile aliens who "looked, dressed, and spoke" exactly like his real crew, testing them by asking questions — including whether his mechanic had glued his bike tires on with spaghetti sauce — that he believed only the real humans could answer correctly. He credits the specific imagery to the 1960s television series The Invaders, in which aliens were identifiable by a stiff little finger, and recalls searching his crew's hands for the tell. Applying Hume's Maxim directly to his own experience, Shermer concludes: "Obviously I was not abducted by aliens, so what is more likely: that other people are having experiences similar to mine, triggered by other altered states and unusual circumstances, or that we really are being visited secretly by aliens from other worlds?"

From that personal case, the chapter's "Autopsy of an Alien" section turns to physical evidence: the black-and-white film aired by Fox on August 28, 1995, purporting to show a genuine 1947 Roswell alien autopsy, sold to producer Ray Santilli by an anonymous source. Shermer lays out twelve specific, itemized objections — including that Santilli provided Kodak only a small, generic strip of leader rather than enough footage to reliably date the stock; that a cameraman would not have been left unguided and out of focus during "the most important event in human history"; and, most tellingly, two independent professional consultations he quotes directly: pathologist Ed Uthman's observation that the on-camera prosector "acted more like an actor in front of a camera than someone who was cooperating in a photographic documentation session," and German surgeon Joachim Koch's identification of the alien's specific physical anomalies — enlarged head, widely spaced eyes, six fingers and toes — as consistent with Opitz trigonocephaly syndrome ("C-syndrome"), a real, rare human congenital condition, rather than an extraterrestrial physiology.

The chapter's next section, "Encounters with Alien Abductees," draws on Shermer's own experience as the recurring "token skeptic" on NBC's 1994 talk show The Other Side, where he interviewed self-described abductees describing egg harvesting, alien-human hybrid pregnancies, and implanted tracking devices, and dined afterward with about a dozen of them — finding them, in his own words, "neither crazy nor ignorant," but "perfectly sane, rational, intelligent folks who had in common an irrational experience." From there Shermer builds his central causal argument: that alien-abduction narratives function as a self-reinforcing cultural "feedback loop," dating in its modern form to NBC's 1975 dramatization The UFO Incident, whose artists, Shermer notes, created the now-canonical bald, large-eyed "grey" alien image later adopted by Whitley Strieber's Communion (1987) and thousands of subsequent abductee accounts. He connects this directly to hypnotic regression and false-memory research, citing psychologist Elizabeth Loftus's work on implanted childhood memories and Professor Alvin Lawson's Cal State Long Beach experiment, in which hypnotized students with no abduction history nonetheless "elaborated in great detail" invented abduction narratives on request, and to the clinical literature on hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations and sleep paralysis — citing psychologist Robert A. Baker's identification of Strieber's own famous encounter as "a classic, textbook description of a hypnopompic hallucination."

The book's added eighteenth chapter, "Why Smart People Believe Weird Things," returns to the abduction material through the specific case of Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, using it to state the book's most quoted single thesis: "smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." Shermer formalizes this around two named cognitive mechanisms — the Intellectual Attribution Bias and the Confirmation Bias — arguing that credentialed intelligence makes a person more effective at rationalizing a pre-existing belief, not less susceptible to forming one in the first place.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

Shermer's own 1983 Race Across America hallucination, near the American Southwest's broader UFO-belief landscape but specifically located just outside Haigler, Nebraska, functions as the chapter's organizing case study rather than a claimed genuine UFO encounter: severe sleep deprivation, not extraterrestrial visitation, produced an experience Shermer describes as subjectively as vivid and convincing as any real memory, including detailed, seemingly diagnostic "tests" of his crew that his sleep-deprived mind judged conclusive at the time.

The 1995 Fox-broadcast Roswell "alien autopsy" film, tied to the 1947 Roswell Incident this site's own Case File #001 documents in full, receives the chapter's most granular technical treatment: Shermer's twelve-point rebuttal, including the two independent professional medical consultations quoted directly above, remains one of the more detailed contemporary skeptical dissections of the Santilli footage published in book form, predating by years the 2006 admission by effects artist John Humphreys that the footage was a reconstruction.

Betty and Barney Hill's 1961 abduction claim is not examined here as a standalone case the way Carl Sagan's own book treats it in detail, but Shermer credits NBC's 1975 dramatization of their story, The UFO Incident, as the specific origin point of the now-standard bald, large-eyed "grey" alien imagery that Shermer argues subsequently shaped almost every abduction account that followed it, including Whitley Strieber's.

Harvard psychiatrist John Mack's Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994) receives the book's most sustained single-figure critique, spanning both Chapter 6 and the added Chapter 18. Shermer quotes Mack's own admissions directly against him — that there is "no firm proof abduction was the cause" of any claimed disappearance, that alleged surgical scars were "usually too trivial by themselves to be medically significant," and that the evidence overall was "maddeningly subtle and difficult to corroborate" — and quotes Arnold S. Reiman, the Harvard Medical School professor emeritus who led the university's formal review of Mack's research, on the pressure Mack's Harvard affiliation created for the institution: "He's not taken seriously by his colleagues anymore, but in the interests of academic freedom, Harvard can afford to have a couple of oddballs."

Critical Reception & Controversies

Contemporary trade reception in 1997 was largely favorable. Reason magazine (November 1997) called it an "episodic book" covering "a wide range of subjects, in a wide range of manners," specifically praising its "cogent debunkings" of phenomena like fire-walking while noting the alien-abduction material sits alongside more "substantive" chapters on creationism and Holocaust denial as the book's real center of gravity. The Los Angeles Times (June 15, 1997) called it "the perfect handbook to thrust on anyone you know who has been lured into conforming paranoias" of the era. These two review excerpts are cited here via Wikipedia's own sourcing of the original 1997 trade press rather than from a direct fetch of the original periodicals.

The most substantive and specific critical engagement came from within the skeptical movement itself: Robert Todd Carroll, creator of The Skeptic's Dictionary, called the book "a welcome addition to the growing body of skeptical literature" but pushed back directly on its central psychological claim. Where Shermer argues people believe weird things chiefly because "they want to… It feels good. It is comforting. It is consoling," Carroll countered that "Shermer seems to have overlooked or underemphasized some fundamental reasons why people believe weird things," arguing that "ignorance, for example, seems to be the main reason" for many specific weird beliefs, and that "the will to believe explanation seems too facile" on its own. Carroll also directly disputed Shermer's treatment of altered states of consciousness — the same framework the abduction chapter leans on for hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucination — writing that he found Shermer's EEG-based argument for classifying sleep and coma as altered states "puzzling," since "I certainly would not include sleep or coma as ASCs because they are not states of consciousness at all," a technical objection that bears directly on how rigorously the book's own sleep-paralysis explanation for abduction testimony is argued.

A different kind of critical response came from outside organized skepticism entirely: religious-studies scholar David Halperin, author of a full-length academic study of UFO belief, has written specifically about Shermer's own 1983 "abduction" story, questioning why a purely physiological sleep-deprivation hallucination would default to the specific cultural template of alien abduction rather than some other narrative, and suggesting that professional debunkers' own psychological investment in these stories can run as deep, if differently shaped, as believers'. This does not challenge Shermer's conclusion that no genuine alien encounter occurred, but it is a genuine, publicly available scholarly critique of how confidently the book's own explanatory framework accounts for its central anecdote, rather than a hostile dismissal of the book.

More generally, reviewers sympathetic to the book's project have still flagged its episodic, talk-show-driven structure as a real limitation: the book reads, by design, as a working skeptic's collected case notes from a specific stretch of 1990s television appearances rather than as a unified academic monograph, and it does not claim the kind of original, sustained fieldwork this site's own UFOs Explained entry documents Philip J. Klass conducting case by case. No book-length rebuttal from within organized ufology specifically targeting the "Abducted!" chapter's claims has achieved wide, independently documented currency; the debate around Mack's work in particular was carried out mainly through Harvard's own internal review and contemporary press coverage rather than through a direct published response to Shermer specifically.

Influence & Legacy

Why People Believe Weird Things remains Shermer's best-known single book and functioned as the founding public statement of the project he had begun institutionally six years earlier with the 1991 launch of the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine; its commercial and critical success helped establish Shermer, alongside Philip J. Klass and Carl Sagan, as one of the most publicly recognizable American skeptics of the following three decades, culminating in his 2001–2019 monthly "Skeptic" column for Scientific American and, in 2006, the National Capital Area Skeptics' own Philip J. Klass Award — an explicit institutional acknowledgment linking Shermer's own work back to the same 1974 book this site's library already covers.

Within this site's own catalogue specifically, this exact book is already cited directly and substantively across at least three separate case files: the New Jersey/Northeast Drone Wave (Case File #304), which lists it in its own recommended-reading and sources sections and draws on Shermer's cognitive framework for explaining how a real, limited technological phenomenon generated a much larger wave of secondary misperception; the Bornel Conservatory Fireball (Case File #249); and the Montluel Cloud-Distorting Object (Case File #247) — making it, independent of this entry's own research, already one of this site's working secondary sources rather than a title added here for the first time without prior site history.

The book's specific cognitive-bias vocabulary — the Intellectual Attribution Bias and Confirmation Bias, formalized in the added "Why Smart People Believe Weird Things" chapter — anticipates, without yet naming, the broader "patternicity" and "agenticity" framework Shermer developed later, first in a 2008 Scientific American column and then at book length in The Believing Brain (2011); readers encountering "patternicity" attributed loosely to Shermer's work in general, including in some of this site's own case-file citations, should note that the specific term does not itself appear anywhere in Why People Believe Weird Things, this entry's own direct check of the full text confirms — the two books share an author and a continuous line of argument, but not a shared vocabulary.

The chapter's critique of John Mack also sits inside a documented institutional story larger than the book itself: Harvard Medical School's own formal review of Mack's research, led by Arnold S. Reiman and quoted directly in this book, concluded with Mack retaining his tenure and his PEER research center but not his standing among Harvard Medical School colleagues, a genuine academic controversy this book engaged with in close to real time rather than after the fact, giving Why People Believe Weird Things a claim to being one of the earliest skeptical books to directly confront a credentialed academic's endorsement of the abduction phenomenon.

The Book

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