The Restless Heart: Quantifying Paranormal Pursuit in American Society
“The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you.” (DeJong, 1955)
Restlessness defines those who seek the truth. Those with the intense curiosity to devote their lives to the belief that something unknown and perhaps unknowable, is out there. Those for whom the paranormal is simply, the normal. These experiences are overwhelmingly positive for those who choose to pursue them, and create community, strong feelings of unity, and connect issues of faith with emotions of uncanny presence. For those that experience them, they experience them as real.
When it comes to explorations of ghosts and communing with the hereafter, the cryptozoological hunt for forest creatures long lost to history, or the abduction encounters of an alien race, we need to draw upon clear distinctions between what is happening, and the causal conclusions we derive from our observations. We are less interested in the subjective conversation surrounding the reality of ghosts, monsters or aliens, but rather people’s lived experience of that which goes bump in the night, and what effect it has upon us as humans. It’s effects over the reality of the experience itself. It’s the sociological observation and quantification of such phenomena amongst Americans which serves as the central premise of Bader, Baker and Mencken’s research into the paranormal (Bader et al., 2017).
Like those of more traditional faith, their research concerns a fundamental questioning of why we believe, and they attempt to extract insight into this through the sociological methods of direct observation, qualitative surveying, existing demographic data, field interviews at communal gatherings, and analytical measures of sociodemographic and religious belief. In several instances, they directly join the hunt for evidence that the truth is out there.
There are a number of case studies they lean on for their observations, primarily interviews with those claiming to have been abducted by aliens or otherwise having communicated with the non-terrestrial (Bader et al., 2017, p. 107), as well as direct experience of those looking for Bigfoot in remote areas of the West Coast (Bader et al., 2017, p. 132), and those seeking to receive signs from the departed as evidence that death is not the end (Bader et al., 2017, p. 81). Bader, Baker and Mencken then correlate these observations with existing data sets conducted through surveys over a number of years, and draw their sociological conclusions as to what might cause some to believe, and others to be skeptical.
They primarily lean on data from three waves of the Baylor Religion Survey in 2005, 2011 and 2014 (Bader et al., 2017, p. 241), and two waves of the Chapman University Survey of American Fears in 2014 and 2015 (Bader et al., 2017, p. 241). These surveys were primarily conducted through random dialing phone sampling, with no prior screening for religious belief, and sized at around fifteen hundred participants each. Comparisons of demographic elements such as gender, marriage, active religious practice and political persuasion are correlated with varying degrees of belief intensity in paranormal experiences. There is a quantitative rigor applied to the methodology, but in their combination of these findings with their own qualitative observations, they fall short in drawing causation where at best there is tenuous correlation. In many ways, their own research echoes the interpretive elasticity of those they are observing, in attempting to find evidence for that which they already believe.
Issues of non-replicability, post-hoc theorizing, the inappropriate use of statistics, opaque documentation of materials and data, and lack of peer review are all evidence of challenges in evaluating not just the research of those observed, but their own research itself. We’re unaware of undisclosed flexibility in their data collection, where, just like the paranormal hunters, such analysis allows anything to be presented as significant, and there are numerous examples throughout their research where they draw more generalized conclusions about the American population overall.
With such latitude in observation and collection, we can ‘discover’ just about anything, and the research draws upon behavior of hypothesizing after the results are known, describing a result derived from data exploration as though it had been predicted all along. That we are looking for confirmation of an existing paranormal belief, rather than starting from a place of validating something’s absence.
Replication in paranormal research is acknowledged by Bader, Baker and Mencken as inherently challenging, given the highly speculative and subjective nature of the observed evidence, and we have to adjust our thinking of what it means to have a successful replication at all. Finding a fresh footprint in the woods isn’t nearly the same thing as a grainy 35mm film of a large mammal walking between the trees.
In particular, Bader, Baker and Mencken lean on a discussion of how technology and the democratization of the tools of information distribution have only broadened these questionable research practices, and driven more distance and division between those willing to put the effort into their own research, and scientific method aimed at empirical, iterative, cumulative learning. Authoritative group voice is given to individual anecdotes, and we conclude that if enough people on the internet agree, then it must be true. This is a division which grows stronger each year, and is reflective of larger sociological trends of those who choose to believe the perspectives and evidence of science, and those who don’t. For many, the combination of these sentiments and a global pandemic has been a fatal cocktail.
But confirmation bias is strong in both the research of the paranormal hunters, and in Bader, Baker and Mencken’s work. The search for evidence which will confirm a pre-existing belief or theory, while ignoring or down playing data which counters those beliefs. Hindsight bias, where researchers transform evidence which might have countered a theory into evidence which ultimately supports the researchers’ position is also present, as well as selective deletion of outliers in order to influence or artificially inflate statistical relationships is here too. This is most apparent in their extrapolation of a sample size of around fifteen hundred participants into conclusive, statistically significant behaviors for what the more than two hundred million adult Americans think about the paranormal. At best it’s weakly correlated. At worst it asserts causation where there is none.
Specifically, replication allows us to build confidence in our findings, and helps us to understand how generalizable certain findings are. Without replication, we cannot generalize. In looking at the external validity, the extent to which the results translate to other populations outside of those observed, Bader, Baker and Mencken apply the same spurious correlations and convenience sampling to those they are researching, instead of applying a more rigorous proportionate stratified random sampling approach, where the respondents more accurately match those same proportions in the population. They discuss this extrapolation a little in their methodology, but ultimately infer that their findings are universal. That their research generalizes more broadly, when there’s no evidence to suggest it does.
However, this is not to discount the lived experience of the ghost hunters, alien abductees, or those seeking evidence of the Sasquatch. These beliefs are real, even if the data suggests a high degree of skepticality, and it’s this common sense which leads us away from the uncertainty of scientific method, and towards beliefs which fit in with the narrative patchwork of things we already understand as true. Combined with the cynical commercialism of pseudoscientific claims, anecdotes are empowered to trump evidence, and confirmation (rather than falsification) is given undue weight.
Creating the impression of scientific validity or controversy where none actually exists lacks the deductive, replicative and corrective mechanisms for uncovering that which we know to be true. Paranormal research trades on ambiguity, anecdotal evidence, unrepresentative sample sizes, and the belief that cryptozoology is simply that which is yet to be found. Yet despite all of this, the researchers’ subjects and observations experience all of this as very, very real.
Bader, Baker and Mencken draw a number of causal conclusions from their research, initially around gender, with women more likely to believe in enlightenment-related paranormal topics than men, aligned with stronger belief in predictive experiences such as astrology, prophetic dreams and horoscopes, whereas men are more likely to express belief in discovery-related subjects such as direct evidence of Bigfoot or UFOs ((Bader et al., 2017, p. 233). On a broader scale, those from economically marginalized backgrounds gravitate towards stronger paranormal belief too (Bader et al., 2017, p. 234).
In terms of correlation with existing religious belief, those who are not religious at all and those with deep faith (in terms of biblical literacy and regular service attendance) exhibit the lowest levels of paranormal belief. Those in the liminal space of moderate religiosity appear to have the strongest belief in the paranormal. Those with deep religious belief also tend to have stronger emotions of supernatural evil forces such as demons, speaking in tongues, or hearing the voice of Satan.
More broadly, more than half of Americans have at least one such belief in paranormal experience, although there is high variability in the number of these beliefs based on sociological factors such as education level or income (Bader et al., 2017, p. 236).
So how might we explain such widespread paranormal belief and interest in the American population? Is it merely reflective of our cultural, foundational identity system of religious freedom and collective assertion that all are welcome to believe what inspires them best? Is it a restless curiosity inherent in American identity to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no man has gone before? Or is it a belief that something unknown and unknowable is always out there in the wilderness to motivate us into learning more about ourselves? That by doing the work of developing our own hypotheses, gathering our own evidence, and drawing our own conclusions, we are more empowered in our learning journey because we’ve done the work ourselves.
The very idea that something unknowable is being revealed is common in both religious and paranormal belief, with David Bryce Yaden’s work exploring our fascination with these subjective experiences at scale across communities and cultures (McDaniel, 2016). Getting comfortable with the study of such subjectivity and anecdotal evidence is challenging for many, and there is clear delineation in societies across lines of gender, education level, economic status and existing religious practice in Bader, Baker and Mencken’s work which seeks to illuminate and quantify these differences. The ritual of the paranormal hunt, be it tracking footprints in the mud or listening for bumps in the night, service the limbic discharges bio-genetic structuralists observe for attempts at maximizing the sense of security and comprehension which comes from the equilibrium of such revelation (McDaniel, 2022).
But it’s a distinctly American restlessness which characterizes the manifest pursuit of the unknown, and the seeking out of the avatars and apparitions which may or may not reveal grander truths about the world. In this, we deviate from scientific method, and take such observations into our own hands, empowering ourselves and those with the same perspectives to do the work together. And in that work, we find meaning, purpose, and a greater connection to that which is not us.
So while Bader, Baker and Mencken’s causal conclusions are questionable, they accurately reflect behaviors which provide positive meaning for those who choose to pursue evidence of the paranormal. In drawing correlations across sociological aspects of gender, race, religious belief, educational background, and economic status, they attempt to generalize the ritual behavior of such restless pursuits and normalize our comfort level with the subjectively skeptical.
Inadvertently illuminating deviance from scientific method, they draw upon observations and direct lived experience of overwhelmingly positive feelings of unity, presence and community, irrespective of the degree to which we believe in the paranormal itself. And in doing so, they reflect larger acceptance that the unknown, unknowable, and uncomfortable is simply part of what makes life so rich.
Not everything in our lived experience can be explained, and if it can, then it can be explained away. But our relentless, restless pursuit of a resolved limbic uncanny, our elastic expansion of faith beyond established religion and scientific method, our willing inhabitation of the limbic spaces of the paranormal and cryptozoology, and our attempts to make sense of the beyond are in themselves of enormous sociological value.
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