- "We are... experiencing a time of resurgence of fringe beliefs, when ideas mostly dismissed by science are being embraced and are spreading throughout popular culture." (Intro)
- "By themselves, these ideas don't necessarily breed paranoia or violent ideas. Much of what attracts people to these fringe beliefs is a belief in a world of wonder and marvel, a world outside the ken of humanity, a world just out of reach. But our fascination with things unexplained, our obsession with these things hidden from view, our need to believe in the monsters at the margin - these drives, through the decades, have contributed to a rising sentiment of distrust in science, in academic institutions, and in government." (Intro)
- "Diffusionism looks for coincidences, similarities, and accidents that bear a superficial resemblance, and then constructs theories based on those false pattern recognitions. It is to take the messy soup of human history, it's supreme varieties and differences, and find them in enough random correspondences that you can distill everything down to a simplistic creation myth." (Ch 1)
- "What Donnelly proved was that if you could spin a wild tale with just the right mix of fact and fiction; it would burn itself indelibly in the public's minds, and it would prove almost impossible to disprove, regardless of how flimsy your evidence was. A little bit of scientific gloss, some specifics for garnish, nothing that could be factually verified one way or another, and something that played to people's sense of wonder and magic - these kinds of stories are remarkably durable....Donnelly's canny mixture of myth and science created a new borderland, a dreaming place beyond our borders." (Ch 1)
- "Scientific mistakes are important for stigmatized knowledge and conspiracy theories, too, because a mistake proposes an alternate explanation for the world, and once it's debunked and forgotten, it can exist in the minds of some as secret, dangerous knowledge that the institution is trying to suppress." (Ch 2)
- "Fringe ideas, stigmatized knowledge, conspiracy theories - so many of them begin here, in times of major upheaval, in uncertainty and anxiety, and in fear of change. When there is a major cultural shift in how we understand the world, and when the vectors for acquiring and evaluating information undergo upheaval and change, it's only natural for some people to respond with a mixture of fear, resistance, and confusion." (Ch 2)
- "Spiritualism offered the promise that there was life after death, and that one could still communicate with loved ones after their deaths; it offered, through seances and table session, a version of the communion and community traditional churches offered; through its reliance on female mediums, it offered an alternative to the male-dominated structures of patriarchal religion." (Ch 2)
- "If the current age was messy, uncertain, and terrifying, Theosophy offered reassurance that we'd lost some earlier purity, but that it could be regained. Lost continents like Atlantis and Lemuria helped further bolster this picture of the universe, suggesting earlier civilizations that were more advanced and less degraded than our own. If we could find traces of these lost places, we might be able to cultivate our spiritual understanding of their inhabitants better, and reclaim some of their majesty." (Ch 2)
- "The word 'utopia,' as coined by Thomas More, literally means 'no place,' a nonexistent space. Both Atlantis and Lemuria are utopias: places that don't exist, that we fill with meaning precisely because there are no facts against which to measure that meaning. They are whatever we put into them." (Ch 3)
- "The fringe theories and conspiracies that stick best are those that strike the perfect mix of specificity and vagueness - enough specificity to seem grounded in fact, but not so much detail you can prove it one way or the other." (Ch 3)
- "It wasn't merely houses that were haunted; our reality is haunted, our textbooks are haunted, our sciences and understandings are haunted." (Ch 5)
- "A hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that it is all-encompassing: everything is further proof of a grand, hidden design, and nothing is chance or random. The conspiracy theorist ultimately creates a system that accounts for everything. In this way, it is itself a kind of science or religion: a grand unified theory that seeks to explain all of creation (its only problem is its specious and unsubstantiated basis)." (Ch 5)
- "Cryptids these days are all about tourism. Nearly every well known cryptid has a hometown, and nearly every one of those towns has embraced their local celebrity. Whether or not they are given fearsome names, like the Loch Ness Monster or the New Jersey Devil, most now have diminutive nicknames.... Whatever their origin stories, eventually such figures become part of the fabric of the local community." (Ch 6)
- "Cryptids are a distinctly modern phenomenon, and they exist not in the world of saints and miracles, but scientists and taxonomies." (Ch 7)
- Cryptozoology also remains one of the best examples of something like Fortianism - a field devoted to Fort's principles of extreme doubt, avoidance of dogma and established authority, and a somewhat tangential relationship to institutionalized science. This was a field, they believed, that could be separated from the hoaxes and hucksters, and elevated to a level of seriousness that rivaled other disciplines.... Cryptid hunting had long been a rebuke to science.... Now, instead, it would reconfigure itself as cryptozoology, no longer a critique of science, but instead, its imitation." (Ch 7)
- "In his definition, he purposely built in a very specific idea of winder. A bizarre beetle, a new kind of tree frog, and interesting deep sea fish - none of these... qualified as cryptids. To count, a candidate must have at least one trait that was truly singular - unexpected, paradoxical, striking, emotionally upsetting, and thus capable of mythification. To count as a cryptid, the creature must be itself a critique of science, a rejection of the everyday. They don't just go beyond the reach of science; their mere presence is an affront to it." (Ch 7)
- "Cryptids don't just live at the geographical margins, they exist perpetually at that margin between the scientific and the fantastic." (Ch 8)
- "Cryptids require physical spaces that can't be fully reached, fully documented, fully inhabited by civilized people. They require the borders between places, the edge lands. Cryptids are nothing without their habitat, and their habitat was, at least for a time, destroyed by colonialism and capitalism throughout the nineteenth century, as the blank spaces on the map were filled in, and as cultural differences were more and more assimilated through trade and tourism." (Ch 8)
- "The Jersey Devil is a perfect emblem for American culture, in which an indigenous folk belief is transformed into a morality tale, which is in turn remade first as a swindle, and then as a harmless entertainment and source of regional pride. To say then, that monsters or cryptids live on the margins, is always to be asking, whose margins? Whose civilization?" (Ch 8)
- "One of the hallmarks of the cryptid is that it eschews civilization. As Everest has become crowded with tourists, there have been fewer - not more - yeti sightings. Of course, the reasoning goes, the yeti is fearful of humans, and thus must have retreated off the mountain for more forbidding ranges. The claim to see a cryptid then is not just a victory, it is also a boast, that you too have left civilization, that you are welcomed by nature in a way that weekenders and other explorers are not." (Ch 12)
- "In conspiracy theories, less is often better. There's enough detail to peak interest, but everything else is left undefined. The conspiracy theorist then fills out the picture." (Ch 13)
- "In the Sasquatch and the yeti, believers could see the racial other as inferior, as the uncivilized brute from which we must distinguish ourselves - a caricatured slur, directed at colonized people or ethnic minorities. In the Space Brothers' contactee myth, this has been reversed: the Venusian as an idealized Aryan perfection, a body to aspire to. Perhaps most bizarre, then, is how many white ranchers out here have adopted the rhetoric of the West's indigenous populationsP a formulation in which white men could live out a fantasy of being the racial other.... Settlers were once used as a tool by the federal government to drive native bribers off their lands.... Now they, in turn, feel abandoned by the government, their usefulness expended." (Ch 22)
- "One of the ways conspiracies function is by taking the ordinary and suddenly devoting an inordinate amount of attention to it. Just as taking an ordinary word and repeating it endlessly will make it sound strange and foreign, so too will focusing intently on the mundane often make it feel sinister, haunted, conspicuous." (Ch 24)
- "The past - a foreign continent that can never be reached - can be whatever we dream it to be.... The past is a mythic landscape; people can paint what they want to on the past, because it's far enough away that people can make it look whatever they like. People always want to believe things used to be better." (Ch 25)
aug 20 2022 ∞
jan 7 2023 +
