Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
- the discipline out of which it emerged. The pseudosciences
sometimes intersect, compounding the confusion - as in telepathic
searches for buried treasures from Atlantis, or astrological economic
forecasting.
But because I work mainly with planets, and because I've been
interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the pseudosciences
that most often park themselves on my doorstep involve
other worlds and what we have come so easily in our time to call
'aliens'. In the chapters immediately following, I want to lay out
two recent, somewhat related pseudoscientific doctrines. They
share the possibility that human perceptual and cognitive imperfections
play a role in deceiving us on matters of great import. The
first contends that a giant stone face from ages past is staring
expressionlessly up at the sky from the sands of Mars. The second
maintains that alien beings from distant worlds visit the Earth with
casual impunity.
Even when summarized so baldly, isn't there a kind of thrill in
contemplating these claims? What if such hoary science fiction
ideas - resonant surely with deep human fears and longings -
actually were coming to pass? Whose interest can fail to be
aroused? Immersed in such material, even the crassest cynic is
stirred. Are we absolutely sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt,
that we can dismiss these claims? And if hardened debunkers can
sense the appeal, what must those untutored in scientific scepticism,
like Mr 'Buckley', feel?
For most of history - before spacecraft, before telescopes, when
we were still largely immersed in magical thinking - the Moon was
an enigma. Almost no one thought of it as a world.
What do we actually see when we look up at the Moon with the
naked eye? We make out a configuration of irregular bright and
dark markings - not a close representation of any familiar object.
But, almost irresistibly, our eyes connect the markings, emphasizing
some, ignoring others. We seek a pattern and we find one. In
world myth and folklore, many images are seen: a woman
weaving, stands of laurel trees, an elephant jumping off a cliff, a
girl with a basket on her back, a rabbit, the lunar intestines spilled
out on its surface after evisceration by an irritable flightless bird, a
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