On Friday afternoon, the U.S. Senate confirmed Eric Lander’s nomination to become the 11th director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. The unanimous voice vote was brokered as part of a deal to postpone what had become a heated debate over the so-called Endless Frontier Act, thereby allowing the body time to vote down (or more accurately, block) an independent commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol riots before breaking for recess.
All of this was high drama for the normally staid world of science policy, but then everything’s gone a little strange in the world of U.S. science lately. Not one, not two, but three “scientific” “controversies” have entered the national consciousness. In isolation, each feels a little fringe-y, a little conspiracy-theoryish, but somehow they’ve all become relatively mainstream.
Conspiracy Door Number #1
UFOs! The U.S. intelligence agencies and the U.S. Department of Defense are expected to release a declassified report any day now on what, exactly, the U.S. government knows about “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” aka, UFOs. Openness to the possibility of UFOs has become increasingly acceptable in Washington circles in recent years, with even former President Obama telling a late night host that “that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.”
People who know about such things say that there are perfectly reasonable explanations for these unexplained phenomena, but who am I to keep you, my beloved readers, from a good UFO video? Please, enjoy this trio of declassified Navy videos, dubbed “Flir1,” “Gimbal,” and “Go Fast.”
Conspiracy Door Number #2
My followers on Twitter know that I’ve been fascinated by stories of what’s being called “Havana Syndrome” since its first appearance in the media in late 2016/early 2017. Over the past four years, various U.S. intelligence officers, State Department employees, and their families have reported a variety of neurological symptoms after experiencing a sensation of pressure in their heads. Many reported hearing “humming” sounds or feeling some sort of vibration before the onset of their symptoms. Most, but not all, of the cases have occurred outside U.S. borders.
I really cannot do this story justice; the gist is that no one seems to have a satisfying theory of what’s going on. The most-cited explanations to date have centered on coincidence, mass hysteria, or—my favorite—some sort of sonic weapon that operates beyond contemporary scientific understanding. An epic report by Adam Entous in last week’s issue of the New Yorkerblithely asserts a new theory, namely, that “agents of the G.R.U., the Russian military’s intelligence service, have been aiming microwave-radiation devices at U.S. officials to collect intelligence from their computers and cell phones, and that these devices can cause serious harm to the people they target.”
Death rays! Alas, as Cheryl Rofer writes in a take-down of the microwave theory for Foreign Policy, “Here’s the problem. Aside from the reported syndromes, there’s no evidence that a microwave weapon exists.” So that’s probably a no. But maybe?
Conspiracy Theory Door #3
Virologists and a team of scientists associated with the World Health Organization have dismissed the lingering theory that the virus that causes COVID-19 accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but that’s not stopping the Biden administration from launching a formal intelligence inquiry into the rumor. With tensions with China on a perpetual low boil, the Biden administration has been under pressure to investigate a theory that most scientists think highly implausible.
Even in their statements endorsing the creation of the inquiry, both National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins emphasized that a “natural origin” is a much more likely explanation. Still, they’ve couched their support for the inquiry in terms of “just asking questions.”
After all, it’s not impossible that the virus escaped from the lab, just as it’s not impossible that Russia has developed a new form of microwave weapon. It’s not impossible that Navy pilots have been keeping the existence of alien aircraft secret from the American public. It’s just not particularly likely.
So what, if anything, can this collective interest in “getting to the truth” tell us about our contemporary attitudes toward science, truth, and expertise?
In the philosophy of science, there’s a concept known as “falsifiability.” As developed by Karl Popper, the criterion of falsifiability holds that a theory is only “scientific” if it can be proved to be false. One wonders what kind of evidence adherents to any of these theories would accept as valid repudiation of the claim. The fact that all three issues involve classified information only makes matters worse—even if the declassified reports admit no evidence for the respective theory, believers can argue that “there must be more they aren’t telling us,” and they wouldn’t be wrong about that. Investigations based on “facts,” in other words, are unlikely to change many minds on the possibility of aliens, death rays, or Chinese malfeasance. A scientific attitude cannot resolve a xenophobic question.
But xenophobia has a long history in the United States. The more interesting question, to my mind, is why now? It seems to me that the collective experiences of 2020 and early 2021 have shaken something loose in educated Americans’ ability to assess evidence and risk. A global pandemic left at least 3.5 million people dead. A violent mob stormed the Capitol on January 6. A freak cold snap in Texas broke the electrical grid and plunged millions of Texans into days of freezing darkness. None of these events were impossible, but none of them seemed particularly likely.
So, sure. Aliens. Why not.