WE ALL DIE ALONE -- EXCEPT FOR CELEBRITIES, WHO DIE IN THREES

So: Are the deaths of Shirley Temple and Sid Caesar the second and third -- with Phlip Seymour Hoffman holding down first place --in the latest  "celebrity deaths travel in threes" sweepstakes (or curse!)  that some people believe in?

Or, Shirley Temple having shuffled off more than a week after Hoffman, are she and Sid the kickoff for new trio, with third-base player yet to be designated?

Depends on how you look at the "comes (or, more precisely, 'goes') in threes" craziness. I've always heard that for the triad of Big Name Deaths to be official, the deaths have to occur within a week. (Never have heard, by the way, just who it is who decides on whether or not a dead star belongs to a ghostly trio.)

In a good look at this silliness,  taken by Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon a few years ago, Williams took the position that the "deaths should come within a close time span." In which case put three mourning bands on your sleeve: one each for Hoffman, Temple, and Caesar.

But if the one-week rule time-span applies, the Hoffman died alone, and Temple and Caesar are awaiting the arrival of the final member of their threesome.

This particular variety of American Crazy has it roots, according to Williams and others, in the deaths in a plane crash, on Feb.,3, 1959, of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the "Big Bopper" (aka J.P. Richardson). That would seem to set both a tragic and also pretty high bar for celebrity death proximity. Hard to imagine "a close time span" getting much closer than theirs.

But while you can make a list, and a fairly long one, of musicians killed in plane crashes, that sort of thing doesn't have a lot of appeal for the numerology crowd who count fallen stars by threes. The pattern there has a lot more to do with the planes than the fact that the passengers included musicians.

For this sort of thing is all about pattern-finding. And then superimposing something /mystical/supernatural/conspiratorial/inexplicable/choose-your-own-description to "explain" the perceived congruence.

I'm far from the first to make this point -- Williams makes it well in her article, and countless others have been saying similar things for as long as people have detected patterns where there really are none.Not that those explanations every seen to take hold.

What does take hold, to a powerful degree, is the role of celebrity in our culture, and the amount of media attention given to celebrity deaths. When those deaths involve big names -- and in their times there were none bigger than Shirley Temple and Sid Caesar -- the media attention skyrockets. Add a tragic element and relatively young age, as with Philip Seymour Hoffmanm, and the attention not only skyrockets, but also lingers. News shows and sites were still talking about Hoffman's death, when Temple's, and the Caesar's, times came.

It';s all just coincidence, of course, no pattern at all. One wishes for Sid Caesar's professor character to come back, if only for a moment or two, to explain it all:

Und for ze true nature of ze pattern to be revealed, you musht be zertain to understood zat ze zelebrities deaths must first and foremost come at ze END of zeir lives!

 Caesar would do it better than that -- far!.

But of course, if he did come back for that last curtain call, his presence on the stage would kick off a far larger, and more important, discussion than the lack of patterns in the deaths of celebrities.

DR.JOHN E. MACK: ABDUCTEE INVESTIGATOR ABDUCTED BY HISTORY?

A procative, thoughtful essay on the late John Mack appeared recently on aeon, and is a fine reminder of this curious and in some ways troubled man, and the curious and in many ways troubled nature of his most famous -- and infamous -- work.

Dr. Mack (he was an M.D.) does not seem to be widely remembered today, but there was time in the early 1990s when he attracted quite  a bit of attention for what he insisted was a serious scientific investigation of the alien abduction phenomenon.

Dr. Mack's  bona fides were about as good as they get: He won a  Pulitzer Prize for his biography of T. E. Lawrence, was a psychiatrist and member of the faculty of the Harvard Medical School, the author of dozens of peer-reviewed papers, a recognized expert on childhood identity formation..

And he was fascinated by matters that people possessing such respected credentials and academic positions aren't supposed to be fascinated by.

As Alexa Clay points out in her essay, Mack paid a heavy price for approaching abductees -- experiencers -- with absolute seriousness and a fairly high level of scientific rigor. At least in public; Clay relates that in private Dr. Mack was far more credulous when discussing the possibility that the experiencers he interviewed had actually been abducted by actual aliens.

But public circumspection only goes so far, particularly when one's investigations include hypnotic regressions of abductees, just the sort of thing that attracts a lot of often lurid  media attention. Dr. Mack was investigated by a committee convened by the dean of the medical school.

I'll let Clay tell you the whole story via the aeon essay which I link to again here  -- her piece is quite good and also quite touching. But the points she makes about Dr. Mack's insistence that we investigate phenomena, that we open our minds to possibilities of perception, are good ones, whether one agrees with Mack or not.

It's no news to anyone who knows me that I don't believe in the presence of extraterrestrials among us. When OMNI launched its intensive investigation of the UFO phenomenon, and did so with an overtly skeptical, but willing to be be proved wrong, perspective, we caught it from both sides. The UFO believers thought we were stacking the deck against them, and the scientific community thought that it was sign that I'd gone over to the "dark side."

In fact, it was neither. What we were trying to do over the course of several issues, was to bring journalistic and investigative tools to bear on a phenomenon that deserved to treated seriously, if only because so many people do believe it.

I still don't believe that we have been visited, that the greys have walked among us and, in some cases, probed within us. But I continue to be fascinated by the phenomenon, and by all of the unexplained phenomena, unusual occurrences, and, outré and, well, outright weird belief systems and explanations of the universe that continue to thrive and even proliferate in a world more than well-equipped with the tools of science and rationalism.

Those tools, I believe, not only can be brought to bear on unexplained or paranormal or supernatural experiences and incidents, they should be, and more often than they are.

I am confident enough in the ability of those tools of rational, evidence and verification and reproducibility-based --  inquiry,which are the most effective tools our species has ever developed, and which get better all the time, o find the reality at the heart of the so-called mysteries that I would like to see more investigations, not fewer.

That's why I'm so glad that Alexandra Clay shared her memories of Dr. John E. Mack, investigator.

CHIP OFF THE OLD CROP CIRCLE

The twenty minutes (if that) of media attention paid to last month's crop circle stunt is a reminder that enthusiasm for "unexplained" phenomena that once fascinated and even captivated large numbers of people can pass.

While there remains a substantial shelf of books purporting to explain the circles and their generally extra-terrestrial or otherworldly creators, and a vocal if not large audience for such books and related materials, the circles seem to have faded from the general public's sphere of interest.

From my perspective this is of course a good thing. The less interest the public has in swallowing the easily explained so-called mysterious phenomena that, uh, crop up from time to time the better.

Yet I felt a certain, if somewhat cynical, wistfulness when the circle near Chualar, California provoked little more than yawns when the story of its "discovery" broke in early January.

Of all the unexplained -- at least to those who don't understand them -- phenomena that have flared and faded over the past half-century, crop circles were my favorite.

For one thing, the crop circles, most of them long-since admitted to be hoaxes by the hoaxers themselves, were lovely, some of them strikingly so.One writer went so far as to identify them as "An Art of our Time." 

For another, they were more benevolent -- other than to the crops their creation crushed -- than most supposed extraterrestrial or otherworldly visitations. No abductions, no bodily probes -- just complex patterns in the wheat and corn fields.

Sure, some people interpreted them as dire warnings from beyond our world, but mostly the circles were enigmatic, open to aesthetic appreciation as well plenty of pretty nutty speculation.

While circles have become blasé in the general press -- the stories I saw were off the front page and well below the fold in newspapers, and metaphorically about the same on the TV news -- there's still a fairly frothy crop circle culture out there, ready to point out that the Nvidia hoax was:

• a part of the larger conspiracy to make crop circles blasé and thus hide their true purpose from humanity 
• could not have possibly been created by humans in the first place 
• was plowed under almost immediately in order to hide confirmation of one of the above
• you get the picture

But most of the posts and comments and threads I've seen regarding the Chualar cricle were desultory at best, and verged on (or beyond) parody at worst.

The time of the crop circle as focal point for public attention, not to mention vast energies from beyond this our world, would seem to be past.

Nvidia's PR-prompted crop circle was a clever idea that would probably have gotten more attention than it did if it had just come along fifteen or twenty years sooner.

BILL NYE AND TONIGHT'S EVOLUTION DEBATE -- RIGHT GUY, WRONG STAGE

So tonight Bill Nye, the Science Guy (and a good guy he is) will be debating Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum. The topic: Evolution versus Creation.

Why?

For reasoning people, the matter is beyond debate. Evolution over time -- and the understanding that the  theory itself is constantly refined and thus more clearly understood over time as a result of scientific investigation -- is a fact. It is, in fact, the central fact of life on earth. I am confident that we will discover when (and if) we ever find any, that evolution is the central fact of life elsewhere in the universe. In the scientific community, and among the scientifically educated populace, when it comes to the validitry of evolution, there is no debate.

So, again why have one?

I think that Bill Nye, whom I admire, and whom I met a few times when I was editing OMNI, holds a deep and serious concern for the state oif scientific education and scientific literacy in this country. And he is right -- this is, after all, the country that is home to the Creation Museum, which uses all of the tools of museum display and presentation to show its quarter of a million annual visitors the "truth" of Biblical Creation.

The Science Guy's chances of persuading any believers in that fundamentalist "truth" of the facts of evolution as it is understood it are small to nonexistent. Biblical fundamentalism does not welcome, and often does not permit, debate. Believers in absolute truths are limited by the nature of their beliefs -- rational argument does not apply to them, because their beliefs do not rest upon anything like the rational system of thought that is the fundament of real science.  

But Bill Nye is a showman -- and a good one -- as well as a champion of science education, and I suspect he thinks that tonight's debate will be a good show.

I fear that he is going to be proved wrong, no matter how clearly and effectively he sets out his evidence and makes his points.

The debate is taking place at Ham's facility, which Ham calls a museum, as if it were one, and at Ham's invitation.

By giving this palace of foolishness whatever credibility as a venue for rational discussion his presence confers, Nye risks accomplishing the opposite of what he is setting out to do.

The investment, the architecture, the technology, the care with which the crazinesses of this so-called, self-titled, museum are presented in the same manner as real science museums present their own real, and actually evidence-based, exhibits all serve to paint creationism, and belief in the Biblical account of creation as a scientifically legitimate exploration of our past.

Children, one can easily imagine, would love the place, and come away convinced that the nonsense it contains is a valid explanation of the world which they will inherit.

And because the trappings and the cosmetics and the stagecraft of the place are effective with the gullible, and because as much as a third of our population is gullible, the prospect of Bill Nye failing to make points with the facility's founder on the founder's stage is not pleasant.

But one wishes Nye well. He is fighting the good fight for the cause of science and rationalism, of evidence and investigation and the fact of evolution.

He's just fighting it on the wrong stage tonight.

                                                      *

NOTE: The debate will be streamed live tonight, but I am not providing a link. In order to view the stream you have to give your email address, and it';s unclear who is collecting those addresses, and what will be done with them. The link is easy enough to find on your own, of course.

If you do visit the signup page for the live stream, don't miss the DVDs and other capture of the debate being shilled across the bottom of the page. Some money is going to be made from tonight's event, and I hope that, at least, Bill Nye gets some of it.