Page Content (OCR)
This fallacy is an emotional one, and as such, it is even more devastating than the first two. It ensures that most researchers of the phenomenon, once fooled by a certain belief, will continue to be fascinated by succes- 80 REVELATIONS The human mind, which loves to jump to conclusions, has estab- lished a transition (B is true, and it was stated in the context of A, therefore A must be true) which is completely unwarranted. Pitfall Two: the Ratchet Effect This particular fallacy was discovered by a skeptic who noticed that most amateurs of the paranormal never went back to a baseline of normal belief once they had become convinced of a certain weird fact, even if it was later proven to be false. A perfect example of this fallacy is given by the current legends about live humanoids in the custody of the Air Force. Several independent researchers have become convinced that there were such humanoids in an underground base under Area 51. It took me months to find the man who was the source of the rumor. When he was interviewed, it turned out he had never seen any such humanoids. Yet the people who had believed in his story did not simply erase the statement from their mental blackboard. Instead, they started looking for any confirmation, any other hint, from any source, that little humanoids might be held in some underground base. Their belief had become too dear to them to be questioned, even when they knew its underpinnings to be wrong. Their assumptions about the world had been "ratcheted" one notch and could not come down again, no matter what the evidence was. This fallacy is not limited to ufologists. If you can get people to buy lottery tickets just once on the expectation that they might win a million dollars, they will probably go on buying lottery tickets even if they keep losing: it would now be too painful for them to let go of the pleasant realization that they might win a million dollars next week, especially as their losses (now viewed as investments) keep mounting. Pitfall Three: Spurious Data Sequencing