The NY Times' Lazy Look at Near-Death Experiences

 In a 2016 post I stated the following:

"During the past 30 years, the New York Times seems to have had the worst coverage of the paranormal given by any major newspaper. While it has outstanding coverage of politics, world affairs, sports, and entertainment, the paper will typically not cover important news about the paranormal. In the very rare cases when it does provide coverage of the paranormal, the New York Times almost always gives us coverage that is heavily biased, inaccurate, or uninformative."

In that post I gave many examples of the appalling shortfalls and glaring bias of the New York Times in covering claims of the paranormal.  While the paper has a slogan of "all the news that's fit to print," it would be more honest if the top left corner of the New York Times had a little square looking like the one below:

These days the New York Times is mostly behind a paywall. But we do sometimes get freely accessible articles showing how third-rate the paper's coverage is on topics such as anomalous psychic phenomena. An example was the "phone it in" article here by Jessica Grose, having the title "What I Saw When I Peeked Over the Edge of Consciousness." An archived alternate link is here.

The topic is near-death experiences. But we seem to get from Grose no signs  that she is any serious scholar of this very important topic, as well as some indication suggesting she has never seriously studied it. Instead of some decent scholarship, what Grose gives us is an example of what we can call "drive-by journalism."  Drive-by journalism can occur when someone forms an opinion on some topic by attending a single meeting or hearing a single speech by someone.  An example would be someone analyzing some church, based on only attendance of a single meeting of the church members. 

Grose does her drive-by journalism by attending a single weekend conference of a group called IANDS, which studies near-death experiences. IANDS stands for the International Association for Near-Death Studies. Showing zero signs that she has studied this topic in any depth, Grose gives us her impressions of the people she talked to. We have some photos that seem to have been selected to create the impression of emotion in the conference participants. The photographic impressions are misleading, because the IANDS group has long been devoted to the serious scholarly study of a topic of great intellectual significance. 

For many years the IANDS group has produced a website about near-death experiences, the website https://iands.org/. Besides scholarly articles, the website regularly publishes accounts of near-death experiences. Did Grose ever study any of these articles or accounts? She gives no evidence of doing that. Any serious scholar of this topic would have heard about IANDS years ago, but Grose makes it sound like she only recently heard about the organization after getting an email. 

After starting out her article with quite a few paragraphs showing no signs of any scholarship of near-death experiences, we get a taste of the depth of Grose's journalism on this weighty subject. It consists of comments about the clothes that people wore at the conference about near-death experiences. She writes this: 

"Then you had the experiencers and their spiritual fellow travelers, who appeared to be middle-aged. Some of them looked like stereotypical New Agers, wearing flowing boho skirts and bright colors. One young man rolled up his pant leg to show me a tattoo that said, 'Love.' But others looked aggressively normal. I saw a lot of people wearing graphic T-shirts, men in chinos attending light circles."

We have a paragraph discussing nineteenth century spiritualism and mediums. It is just the kind of paragraph we would expect in a New York Times article -- a paragraph failing to mention a single relevant  observational report. We hear not one word about topics such as how the London Dialectical Society did a long scientific investigation into the reports of paranormal phenomena so abundant at this time, and issued a long report finding resoundingly in favor of the reality of the phenomena.  We hear not one word about how the leading physicist William Crookes did a scientific investigation of the most famous medium of his time (Daniel Dunglas Home), and reported that he passed all tests very well, producing inexplicable paranormal phenomena. We get the old unhistorical suggestion that spiritualism arose to console those who had lost relatives in the American Civil War (1861-1865), a suggestion unhistorical because spiritualism had rose to great public prominence in the decade before that war started. 

Grose states: "From everything I heard at the conference and have read, the uniformity of people’s descriptions of their near-death experiences most likely has some kind of neurological explanation, even if technology isn’t sophisticated enough to account for all the details." There is no "uniformity of people’s descriptions of their near-death experience," and Grose's claim that there is such uniformity suggests that she has not decently studied this topic. Near-death experiences have a very great variety. But there are certain elements that recur over and over again, with a narrative element recurrence far greater than would be occurring if mere hallucination was the cause. 

According to four papers on the phenomenology of near-death experiences that I studied to make the table below, there are features that recur in a large fraction of near-death experiences.  The papers mentioned in the table below are these:

Study 1: The phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 78 subjects (link), a 1980 study, producing results similar to a smaller study group year 2003 in-hospital study by one of its co-authors. 

Study 2: "Qualitative thematic analysis of the phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 34 subjects (link), a 2017 study on people who survived cardiac arrest. 

Study 3: "Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands," a 2001 study of 62 subjects who were known to have suffered cardiac arrest and survived it, and who also reported a near-death experience (a subset that was 12% of a larger group of cardiac arrest survivors), link. The average duration of cardiac arrest was 4 minutes. 74% were interviewed within 5 days of their cardiac arrest. 

Study 4: "The Different Experience: A Report on a Survey of Near-Death Experiences in Germany," 82 subjects (link).

	Study 1	Study 2	Study 3	Study 4
Seeing a light or “unusual visual phenomena” such as lights or auras	48%	74%	> 23%	40%
Meeting other beings	55%	44%	32%	42%
Positive emotions or intense feeling of well-being	37-50%	29%	56%	50%
“Hyper-lucidity”		41%
ESP during the near-death experience	39%	12%
"Awareness of being dead" or awareness of dying		26%	50%
Distortion of time	79%	47%
Celestial landscape or other realm of existence	72%		29%	47%
Contact or communication with the dead	30%	23%	32%	16%
Out-of-body experience	35%	35%	24%	31%
Having some sort of nonphysical body separate from the physical body	58%
Passing through tunnel or similar structure	31%	26%	31%	38%
Life reviewed or relived	27.%	15%	13%	44%

We see here very much repetition of a core set of very distinctive features, but nothing that can be described as "uniformity of descriptions." And it makes no sense at all for Grose to be suggesting the idea that uniformity of descriptions (or strong similarity of descriptions) would be evidence that some mere hallucination was occurring. Instead, uniformity of descriptions or strong similarity of descriptions would be evidence that a hallucination was not occurring. 

Consider how erroneous Detective Smith is speaking in the conversation below:

Detective Smith: What did you see, John Davis?

John Davis: I saw Eddie Globermitt shoot the victim with a gun 

Detective Smith: What did you see, Mary Waters?

Mary Waters: I saw Eddie Globermitt shoot the victim with a gun 

Detective Smith: What did you see, Alan Bacon?

Alan Bacon: I saw Eddie Globermitt shoot the victim with a gun.

Detective Smith: Aha! Your descriptions are all similar ! That means you must have all been just hallucinating. 

Detective Smith here has got things backwards. The fact that all of the witnesses report the same thing is strong evidence for the objective reality that Eddie Globermitt shot the victim. And, similarly, if those having near-death experiences give very similar reports, that is evidence for the objective reality of what they are reporting, and evidence against any idea that a mere hallucination is occurring (a hallucination being something that can occur in an infinite number of ways). 

In the article Grose's faulty reasoning I just quoted has a link to an article. It is an article behind a paywall, one entitled "Psychedelic Experiences May Give a Glimpse Into Near-Death Experiences."  The idea is bunk. Skeptics have speculated that maybe humans have something like a cache of ketamine in their brains that might be released upon death. There is no evidence that any such cache of hallucinogenic substances exists in the brain, and no evidence that hallucinogenic substances are released upon death. And when people take hallucinogens, they have experiences not closely matching what is reported in near-death experiences. You can't explain experiences occurring when the brain flatlines (as it very quickly does during cardiac arrest) as psychedelic experiences, which require a brain that has not flatlined. 

Grose says, "It’s possible for patients to hear and see during resuscitation efforts." Near-death experiences are very often recorded during cardiac arrest, when brain waves very quickly flatline, within 15 to 30 seconds. Under materialist assumptions, no conscious experience should be possible in flatlining brains. Contrary to Grose's claim, there is no credible neurological explanation for near-death experiences and the out-of-body experiences they so often involve, and she provides no mention of any such explanation. When neuroscientists make their best attempts to explain near-death experiences, they often make misleading claims, and tend to give us full-of-errors papers like the one I discuss here. 

Sounding like dilettante dabbling and laziest reasoning from someone who never deeply studied the subject material, Grose's article is an example of the type of shoddy writing that the New York Times is typically guilty of when covering issues of the unexplained and anomalous. Sadly the New York Times rather often gives us equally poor journalism when writing about topics of biology, physics, cosmology, neuroscience and psychology, the main difference being that in those cases the paper's writers often take a "believe the weakest, flimsiest claims" attitude that is the opposite of the "reject strong observation claims" attitude the paper's writers typically take when covering the paranormal or anomalous. 

Not counting one little three-sentence quotation, we have in the article not a single quotation in which someone who had a near-death experience tells the full story of what happened. It is what we would expect from the New York Times, which is a kind of Pravda for materialists. For decades Soviet communists would read their daily edition of Pravda, which would always report that the world was working just exactly as a Soviet communist expected it to work. Similarly, the materialist reader of the New York Times always reads only stories that report the world working just exactly as a materialist expects it to work. 

Did the planning go like this?

We have an example of Grose's discarding of a clue in her statement below:

"A friend of mine died in a plane crash in the summer of 1996, right after we graduated from middle school. I remember being numb at her funeral. It felt impossible to accept that she and her lovely parents had met with such a horrible and sudden end. She started appearing in my dreams when I was in college, and I still dream about her at an irregular cadence.

The dream has the same contours every time. She is flying, birdlike, in the clouds above me, and she is whatever age I am when the dream happens. She says something like: You’re sad because you think I didn’t get to grow up. You think I didn’t get to go to college or fall in love or have children. But I want you to know that I’m in another place and I’m getting to do those things."

Rather than taking this recurring dream of high conceptual complexity as the important clue that it is, Grose says this: "My materialist explanation for these dreams is that I did not properly process my grief as a teenager and this is a way for my mind to work through the sadness of this loss." The explanation makes no sense. There is no robust evidence from materialist psychologists or materialist neuroscientists that recurring dreams serve any therapeutic effect such as alleviating sadness. 

Materialists such as Grose are ever-prone to throw away important clues whenever such clues annoy them. I am reminded of the materialist astronomer Carl Sagan, who stated, "Probably a dozen times since their deaths I've heard my mother or father, in a conversational tone of voice, call my name." Sagan threw away this  important clue, giving a silly explanation along the lines of "I hear their voices because I miss them." To read more about this tendency, read my post "Dogma-Doling Professors Discard or Ignore All Clues That Annoy Them," or my post "Poorly Reacting to Nature's Clues, Professors Act More Like Inspector Clouseau Than Lieutenant Columbo."

Problems With the Vickers Paper Polling Scientists About Extraterrestrial Life

 In 2025 there appeared the paper "Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life" by Vickers et. al. The paper had a survey on the topic of whether scientists believe in extraterrestrial life. Below are the results, from questions in which scientists were asked whether they think that on other planets there is life, complex life, or intelligent life. 

There are several problems with the paper and its survey, which I will now discuss.

Problem #1: A Voluntary Response Email Survey 

The survey worked this way: scientists were sent emails asking them to reply to the survey, and 44% of the scientists replied by answering the survey.  But it is known that surveys of this type tend to be unreliable measurements of opinion, particularly when they are about some controversial topic. The problem is that there may be a much higher tendency for people who believe in some controversial theory to respond to a survey that asks only about their belief in that theory, rather than ignore such a survey. 

For example, imagine you send a survey to scientists that is only on the topic of controversial Theory X, a theory which most scientists scorn or have no knowledge of. It could be that 80% of the scientists getting this email decide to ignore it, thinking to themselves something like this: "Theory X? To hell with that." But it might be very different for some small minority of scientists who believe in Theory X. After getting the email, they may recognize the survey as an opportunity to improve the status of Theory X in the scientific community; and they may therefore be much more likely to respond. 

I remember a time more than 40 years ago when I worked two full-time jobs for a period of months. My second full-time job was a temporary job working for the US Census Bureau in Boston. The US government wanted to find out what percentage of the population used the fishing and wildlife services supported by the US government.  Workers like me were given stacks of survey forms, each of which had the name of a randomly selected US citizen. My job was to call up such people, and insist that they answer the survey's questions over the phone, questions asking about how often they used the government-supported fishing and wildlife facilities. I would have to keep calling back later if someone claimed to be too busy to answer when I called.  I would very frequently get responses like this from annoyed people:

"Why are you bothering to ask me about such things? I have never gone fishing in my life, nor have I ever gone hunting. So the government shouldn't be asking me about such things!"

I had to explain to such people the concept of a survey of random people: that the only scientifically valid way to find out what percentage of people used the government's fishing and wildlife facilities was to ask randomly selected people about this topic, to keep asking until all of them answered the questions, and to be just as interested in getting "no" answers as "yes" answers.  The US Census Bureau knew how to do a scientifically valid survey. The people at that bureau knew that it never would have been valid to just advertise some survey about fishing and wildlife, and to record what percentage of people choosing to do the survey said that they used fishing and wildlife facilities.  If you did the survey that way, it might have been that most of the participants would have been those who loved to do fishing and hunting.  The survey might then have given very misleading results perhaps suggesting that most people in the US use the government's fishing and wildlife facilities, when in fact only a small minority of the population used such facilities.  

Too bad Vickers et. al. did not seem to have the same knowledge of the proper way to determine what percentages of scientists think a particular thing. You cannot find out what percentage of a scientist community believes in a theory by sending them a voluntary survey on only that theory, one that will tend to get more replies from those who believe in that theory.  For example, if you send physicists a survey about their belief in the controversial theory called string theory, there will tend to be a much higher response rate from people believing in string theory than those not believing in it. 

One way to reduce the problem mentioned above is to do a voluntary email survey asking about many different things, such as a survey asking 50 diverse questions. With such a survey there will not tend to be an effect in which believers in some controversial theory are much more likely to respond. 

Problem #2: A Slanting in the Questions

Professional pollsters know that the way that a survey question is asked can have a very great influence on what kind of response people give. For example, here are two questions about gun control you could ask people in the USA:

Question 1: Do you think people should give up their right to bear arms given them by the Second Amendment of the US Constitution?

Question 2: Do you support gun control to reduce all these terrible mass shootings that keep happening?

Question 1 is a question about gun control, one slanted to produce a "no" answer. Question 2 is also a question about gun control, but it is  slanted to produce a "yes" answer.

Now, what are the questions in the Vickers survey? The paper lists these survey questions:

(Statement S1 – ‘Life’): It is likely that extraterrestrial life (of at least a basic kind) exists somewhere in the universe.

(Statement S2 – ‘Complex Life’): It is likely that extraterrestrial organisms significantly larger and more complex than bacteria exist somewhere in the universe.

(Statement S3 – ‘Intelligent Life’): It is likely that extraterrestrial organisms with advanced cognitive abilities comparable to or superior to those of humans exist somewhere in the universe."

These set of questions are a terrible way to survey people about extraterrestrial life. The questions have a very strong bias, because they doubly-suggest the idea that the least complex extraterrestrial life  would be simple. Humans know of no type of life that is simple. Even one-celled bacteria are very complex organisms that require hundreds of types of protein molecules, each its own complex invention requiring a very special sequence of hundreds of very specially arranged amino acids. 

The first way in which the survey questions above slants things and introduces bias is by using the phrase "of at least a basic kind" in the line referring to Statement S1. The second way in which the survey questions above slants things and introduces bias is by using the phrase "complex life" in referring to Statement S2. This indirectly suggests that what is being talked about in Statement S1 is life that is not complex. But all known life is very complex. So we have a severely slanted set of questions in which subjects are being asked to whether they agree that life "of at least a basic kind" exist, with the very misleading insinuation that such life could exist without being complex. Using such phraseology is introducing severe bias, as if the scientists running the survey were trying to gin up a response as high as possible to the first question. 

Then there is the fact that the survey suggests a particular opinion rather than asking a neutral question. Instead of being asked neutral questions asking things like "is it likely or not likely that..." we have questions stating a particular belief and asking whether respondents agree. It is well-known by pollsters that questions asked that way tend to produce a higher agreement with the stated belief.  For example, if you have a survey stating "marijuana use is safe" and asking whether people agree with that statement, you will get a higher level of agreement than if you ask "do you agree or disagree that marijuana use is safe?"

What would an objective, well-designed survey have looked like? It might have neutral questions like this:

Question 1: What do you think about the chances that there is  microscopic life on some other planet? 

Answer 1: Likely

Answer 2: Unlikely

Answer 3: I don't know/no opinion

Question 2: What do you think about the chances that there is  visible multicellular life on some other planet, such as organisms with organs? 

Answer 1: Likely

Answer 2: Unlikely

Answer 3: I don't know/no opinion

Question 3: What do you think about the chances that there is  intelligent life on some other planet, life as intelligent as humans or more intelligent?

Answer 1: Likely

Answer 2: Unlikely

Answer 3: I don't know/no opinion

Problem #3: No secret ballot

As a general rule, we should pay little attention to any survey in which scientists are asked about whether they believe in something that allegedly most scientists believe in, whenever the survey is not a secret ballot poll. The reason is that when a poll is not a secret ballot survey, scientists may answer in some way that they think they are supposed to answer, fearing that they may get in trouble if they do not go along with the majority. 

We have no evidence that the survey in the paper "Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life" is a secret ballot survey. In this case the lack of a secret ballot is relatively minor, because there did not exist a common idea that scientists were expected to think one thing or another about whether extraterrestrial life exists. 

Problem #4: Describing the results with the word "consensus"

In my post "So Much Misleading Talk Occurs in Claims of a Scientific Consensus," I discuss the word games that scientists play when they use the notoriously slippery, problematic and ambiguous word "consensus."  The problem is that "consensus" is a word with a double meaning. The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives us two definitions of "consensus" that disagree with each other. The first definition is "general agreement; unanimity." The second definition is "the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned." The first definition specifies 100%, and the second definition merely means 51% or more. 

Scientists very frequently exploit this ambiguity in a misleading way, just as they very frequently exploit ambiguity in the word "evolution" (another term with different meanings). Scientists may brag about a "consensus" on some topic when there is no evidence that even 90% of scientists agree on the topic.  They thereby are trying to create the impression in many people's minds that scientists agree on some topic, when no such agreement exists. 

We have an example of this in the paper I am discussing. It ends up bragging of "a significant consensus that extraterrestrial life likely does exist," even though its poll shows a fair fraction of the responding astrobiologists failing to declare that they "agree" or "strongly agree" with the idea that extraterrestrial life exists, and about a third of the responding astrobiologists failing to declare that they "agree" or "strongly agree" with the idea that "complex" extraterrestrial life exists. Given the ambiguity in the word "consensus," and that half of the public interprets that word to mean "unanimity of opinion," such a belief level should not be described as a consensus; it should merely be described as a majority opinion. In fact, because of problems discussed above, we do not even have here any very strong evidence that most astrobiologists or biologists agree that extraterrestrial life probably exists.  A well-designed set of neutrally-worded poll questions without the question bias documented above might well have shown fewer than half of the respondents agreeing that visible  extraterrestrial life exists. According to the poll, the number of astrobiologists agreeing that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists was 58%. That level of belief should never be described as a consensus, but a mere majority opinion. 

A poll like this would not mean much

The Von Däniken Storyline Was Entertaining, But Not Very Illuminating

The Swiss writer Erich von Däniken recently died at the age of 90 from natural causes. Many millions bought his books promoting a theory that Earth had been visited by astronauts in the past. Very prone to try to diminish contrarians outside of its intellectual "ruling class," the New York Times has an obituary on von Däniken with a subtitle claiming that his 1968 book "Chariots of the Gods?" sold "hundreds of thousands" of copies. But a Yahoo article tells us that von Däniken's books sold 70 million copies. And a 1970's version of "Chariots of the Gods?" claims that there are 4,000,000 copies of it in print. 

The approach taken by von Däniken in his first best-selling book "Chariots of the Gods?" was not anything obviously unreasonable. Again and again he would discuss very impressive examples of ancient engineering or ancient architecture or ancient inventions. He would suggest that such works of engineering or architecture or invention were beyond the very limited capabilities of the humans living at the time, and he would suggest that this may be evidence that humans received assistance from extraterrestrial visitors. He would also draw attention to ancient artwork or ancient literary passages that could be interpreted as suggesting visitors from the sky. 

There were many subsequent books by von Däniken and others that expounded on these ideas. Mainstream authorities noticed all the book sales of  von Däniken, and expressed hostility. Much of that hostility can be explained as jealousy. I remember in the 1970's watching mainstream astronomer Carl Sagan on the Tonight Show denouncing  von Däniken and his claims. There were two reasons for  not trusting Sagan's criticisms. The first is that von Däniken's books dealt mainly with archaeology, and Sagan was no scholar of archaeology. The second reason was that Sagan himself had advanced speculations similar to those in von Däniken's books, a few years before the publication of  von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? book. In the pages preceding and following these two pages in his 1966 book Intelligent Life in the Universe, Sagan spent quite a bit of time speculating in the style of von Däniken. Maybe Sagan was jealous that von Däniken had made millions from a speculation that Sagan had earlier advanced, while Sagan had not profited from the idea. 

A huge boon for the ideas of  von Däniken occurred around 2009 with the premier of the Ancient Aliens TV show, which ran for many years. The show introduced many millions to his ideas, and he was frequently seen on the show promoting his theories. The theory that extraterrestrial visitations helped produce various ancient wonders was a good fit for a TV series. We got very many travelogue-type shows in which some series host would appear at some exotic world location, and speculate about how extraterrestrial visitors might have helped produce the ancient wonders at the visited site. This made watchable TV footage. 

In his 1968 book "Chariot of the Gods?" von Däniken never mentioned DNA or genes. But an idea involving genes became a key part of the Ancient Aliens TV series. For more than a dozen years the show pushed the same central explanation for human beings, one that does not work well to explain who we are and how we got here.  The core explanation offered by the show was that at one or more points in the past, extraterrestrials altered human DNA. 

We had a presentation of this core explanation at the 38:55 mark in the  "Alien Operations" episode of Season 6, which you can see on Netflix. At the 38:55 mark we had this presentation:

 Klemens Hertel, molecular genetics phD: "What we don't know about humans in terms of evolutionary genetics is based on what we don't know about genetics nowadays. For example, we do not know the genetic basis of the thought process.  We don't know memory. We cannot create any ideas of how changes occurred to evolve the human brain to the functional being that it is right now."

Narrator: Could this incredible map [of the human genome] eventually solve the great mystery of human evolution? Might it help explain why humans, unlike any other living species, can think, reason and have the power of speech, or why they can create art, music, and spend time contemplating the reason for their own existence?

Graham Hancock: "It's not until about 40,000 years ago that you get a very radical change in human behavior.  Our hunting strategies get better.  Our tools and our weapons get better. It's as though some untapped faculty of the human brain and of the human imagination switched on."

Narrator: "Is it possible that the reason humans suddenly evolved from primitive beasts to sentient humans is due to otherworldly intervention? According to ancient astronaut theorists, the answer is a profound yes." 

Gorgio A. Tsoukalos: "One of the basic tenets of the ancient astronaut theory suggests that a long time ago, our DNA was artificially changed by extraterrestrials. And we can see that this is exactly what happened,  because all of a sudden we made a giant intellectual leap, and all of a sudden we became Home sapiens sapiens. "

David Childress: "This was the time when the very first extraterrestrial genetic engineering took place. And in some ways, this was like phase one in the creation of modern humans beings as we know them."

Narrator: "Did extraterrestrials deliberately alter Homo sapiens DNA?"

The books of von Däniken contain similar speculations about DNA and genes. On this page and the next page of his 1976 book "Miracles of the Gods," von Däniken erroneously refers to DNA as containing "all the hereditary information and cell building plans of living creatures," a claim that is inaccurate because DNA does not have any plan or specification of how to build any cell or any of its organelles.  On page 218 of the same book,  von Däniken dogmatically states the shakiest of speculations, telling us, "Homo sapiens became intelligent only after the visit by extraterrestrial beings." On the same page he refers to "the extraterrestrial beings who made us intelligent by artificial mutations," referring most speculatively to gene tinkering of humans by visitors from some other planet. 

On the page here of the same book, von Däniken speaks as if he fully believes in "brains make minds" dogma.  On the page here of the same book, he says "when they 'grafted' their own genetic characteristics onto hominids," using "they" to refer to extraterrestrials, and hominids to refer to humans or human ancestors. Strangely, in the same sentence he claims that extraterrestrials transferred ESP powers from themselves to humans, by genetic manipulation. The speculation sounds like folly, because the well-established reality of telepathy and ESP has no neural or genetic or bodily explanation (which is part of the reason why materialists refuse to accept the strong evidence for ESP). 

You can summarize the typical explanations of today's Darwin-venerating biologist like this: "Evolution explains DNA; DNA explains bodies; bodies explain minds."  Every part of that explanation is wrong. Evolution in the form of unguided Darwinian natural selection does not offer a credible explanation of what we see in human DNA: about 20,000 types of genes that correspond  to more than 20,000 human protein molecules.  Each a repository of fine-tuned information representing a functional sequence of hundreds or thousands of well-arranged amino acid parts, such genes are too hard-to-achieve through an accumulation of random mutations as imagined by Darwinists. DNA does not explain human bodies.  Contrary to the myth so often told by biologists and chemists, DNA is not any specification for how to build a human body or even any of its organs or cell types. DNA does not even specify how to make the main components of cells: organelles and protein complexes. All that DNA specifies is very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up particular proteins. Very many scientists have confessed this reality, and at the post here you can read a list of more than 30 scientists and doctors who tell us that DNA is not a specification, blueprint or program for making a human.  

As for the claim that bodies make minds, it is false. There are very many reasons (discussed in the posts of the blog here) why the human brain fails to be an explanation for the human mind and human memory. Ironically, the molecular geneticist quoted above on the Ancient Aliens show actually pointed us a bit in the right direction by saying this:

"For example, we do not know the genetic basis of the thought process.  We don't know memory. We cannot create any ideas of how changes occurred to evolve the human brain to the functional being that it is right now."

Yes, and neuroscientists do not have any substantive idea of how a brain could cause someone to think or remember.  A very thorough study of the many physical shortfalls of the brain will lead to the idea that the brain cannot be the cause of human mental phenomena such as very fast thinking and instant recall and the lifetime preservation of memories. 

What does the Ancient Alien series (and von Däniken in the 1976 book Miracles of the Gods) offer as a correction to the bungled explanations of typical biologists? You could explain it like this:

Bad old thinking: "Evolution explains DNA; DNA explains bodies; bodies explain minds."

Bad new thinking, "Ancient Aliens"/von Däniken  style: "Evolution and gene-tinkering by extraterrestrial visitors explains DNA; DNA explains bodies; bodies explain minds."

What the Ancient Aliens series gives us is just a rather timid tweak on the old nonsensical explanations of 1960's biologists. So instead of the idea that we got the wonders of DNA by only blind unguided processes, we now have the idea that some of human DNA is the result of purposeful interventions by visiting extraterrestrials. That might be a move in the right direction towards a more credible theory of how we got human DNA.  But a huge problem is the show's continual speaking as if some suitable DNA explains how we got humans.  You cannot explain humans by the arising of suitable DNA. DNA does not explain the origin of the human body. And neither DNA nor human bodies explain the origin of the human mind. 

DNA does not explain the origin of any human body because DNA merely specifies very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids constitute a protein.  So we are left with the gigantic unanswered question: how is it that a speck-sized zygote in a newly impregnated woman is able to progress over nine months to become the vastly more organized state of hierarchical dynamical organization that is a full-sized human being? There is nothing in DNA and its genes and nothing known to biology that explains this progression, which is a miracle of organization a million times more impressive than a hotel-sized sandcastle with 100 ramparts and 20 turrets arising only from the wind and water at the edge of a beach. There is no hypothesis about extraterrestrials visiting long ago that can do anything to explain this ongoing marvel of hierarchical organization that is at the center of biology. 

Neither DNA nor anything in the brain explains the wonders of human memory and the wonders of the human mind.  DNA does not explain the arising of any human body, any human organ or any type of human cell, none of which is specified in DNA. So it does not work to claim that we got the marvels of our minds and memories because visiting extraterrestrials did something to alter our DNA. There is nothing in either our DNA or our brains that explains the main wonders of our minds. 

To explain the wonders of the human body and the wonders of the human mind, we need ideas far bolder than the rather timid idea that visiting extraterrestrials tinkered with human DNA. It is very strange that we seem to never get from the Ancient Aliens series the kind of reasoning that would best support its main explanatory claim. Such reasoning would require educating TV viewers about the stratospheric levels of fine-tuning and functional complexity of genes and protein molecules, and the mountainous heights of dynamic hierarchical organization in the human body. TV viewers would get an explanation of why the average gene is something as unlikely to arise by unguided processes as a well-written useful grammatical paragraph of 100 or 200 words arising from an ink splash. TV viewers would get an explanation of why you cannot credibly explain the origin of such repositories of functional information by imagining an accumulation of random mutations. TV viewers would be educated in the relevant probability mathematics, and fundamental principles such as that the chance of the accidental origin of a functional structure skyrockets in a geometric and exponential fashion whenever there is a simple linear increase in the number of well-arranged parts needed for such a structure. After such an education, the viewers could be told that it is just too improbable that unguided Darwinian evolution could have produced such wonders of functional complexity, and that we must postulate some guided assistance, which could have occurred by extraterrestrial intervention. 

But such a presentation seems to never occur on the Ancient Aliens show. Instead the show seems to spend the vast majority of its time trying to persuade us that various wonderful-seeming things (in history or in legend) are things suggesting extraterrestrial visitors in the past. The results rarely sound convincing, although the show does serve as an entertaining vehicle for educating us about facts and aspects of human history and bygone human culture. 

Erich von Däniken had a very erroneous conception of the nature of DNA and its genes, and a very erroneous conception of the nature of brains and memory.  For example, on page 48 of his book Gods from Outer Space, he falsely stated, "Today it is an accepted scientific fact that memories are stored in memory molecules and that RNA and DNA molecules transport memory molecules." No such thing was ever established by scientists. On page 23 of the same book he falsely stated, "DNA contains genetic information for building the cells, as well as all the other hereditary factors." On page 24 he just as falsely stated, "DNA is the perfect punched card for the structure of all life." On page 49 he falsely stated, "We know that the nucleus of the gene contains all the information needed for the construction of the organism." 

Containing only low-level chemical information, DNA and its genes do not specify the structure of bodies, organs or cells, and do not have instructions for how to build such things (as I discussed in 2016 and in many other posts on this blog). We cannot blame von Däniken for these misstatements, because we was simply parroting misstatements that were being made by many scientists at the time he wrote. It is ironic that von Däniken was condemned by scientists such as Carl Sagan, when it was a situation where von Däniken was building a "castle in the clouds" of speculation largely based on DNA myths that scientists such as Sagan had been guilty of promoting. 

For very much more on why the bad old thinking discussed above really is bad thinking, see my long post "Evolution Does Not Explain DNA, DNA Does Not Explain Bodies, and Bodies Do Not Explain Minds."

We should give some credit to von Däniken, despite his overconfident dogmatism and many errors. He was a very diligent person whose books sold in gigantic numbers, and you have to be doing some things right for that to happen. We can credit von Däniken with being smart enough to recognize that the standard account of human origins was not credible. But unfortunately von Däniken's scholarship of biology, brains, minds and human mental experiences was much weaker than his scholarship of archaeology. Having started out in the late 1960's with a weak theory attempting to fix the gigantic shortfall of scientific explanations of human origins, he stuck with that theory all of his life, never realizing that to bridge that ocean-sized shortfall you need a reality gigantically greater than just some extraterrestrial spaceships visiting long ago. 

Tischner's Clairvoyance Experiments

 The 1925 book Telepathy and Clairvoyance by Rudolf Tischner (which can be read using the link here) is one of innumerable published works providing evidence for clairvoyance. The best evidence the book prevents is test results in experiments involving the reading of text written on triple-folded slips of paper. 

Upon mentioning such a technique, a typical skeptical reader will probably be thinking something along the lines of: "Oh, I bet I know what was going on -- the person being tested discreetly unwrapped the paper to see the text." But according to Tischner there was no possibility of such a thing. The tests occurred in good lighting, with the testers sitting right next to the person being tested. We read that the subject being tested held the triple-folded slips of papers in his hand, typically looking away from it, and never holding the slips up to his eyes. 

On page 53 Tischner describes the technique used to test a person named Re, using slips of paper 3/4 of an inch by 1 inch:

"Re stood with his back to me watched by Mr. R., while I stood 15-17 ft. from him and wrote several slips with a soft pencil, rubbing the back of the slip with my thumb-nail every time, then folding it three times, making the fold in the middle of the long side every time, so that each fold was at right angles to the previous one and the folded slip similar to a postage stamp in shape and about half its size. I knew Hennig’s paper on the possible tricks used in reading slips, having recently reviewed it, so I took all the necessary precautions to prevent Re from practising any of them. I did not give Re a chance of seeing the writing-pad at a distance of less than 9 feet, and always locked it up in my desk immediately after writing. I mixed the slips several times and threw them up into the air, thus obviating sources of error due to my knowing the contents of the slip. Mr. R. also wrote some slips, using his pocket-book as a pad—and putting it back into his pocket as soon as he had finished writing : I watched Re carefully all the time. Re generally holds the slips between thumb and index finger, but he sometimes holds them in the hollow of his hand, with arm stretched out horizontally to one side or obliquely in front of him. It is rarely that he holds a slip to his forehead, in fact, he mostly turns his head away from the hand holding the slip and avoids looking in that direction. He will try holding the slip in the other hand if the visualization is long in coming ; this he may repeat several times, but there is nothing suspicious about the procedure, the change of hands being effected quite low down, not level with his face."

We read a long series of pages discussing individual tests. Page 185 summarizes the results in a series of tests in which the subject Re attempted to guess what was written on the triple-folded slips of paper. The first column gives what was written on one of the triple-folded slips, and the second column gives the corresponding guess. The third  column gives what was written on one of the triple-folded slips, and the fourth column gives the corresponding guess. 

These are obviously results way, way too accurate to be achieved by chance. 

In the latter part of the book Tischner answers some objections that such results might have been obtained without clairvoyance:

Page 151: 

"Henning states that it is possible to read the contents of slips written in pencil by the impression left on the pad. Experiment showed me that this was only possible when thin paper was used and the writer had a heavy hand, but I think that this would hardly be a source of error, as even the most simple and uncritical of experimenters would suspect something if the medium were to investigate the writing pad. I eliminated this possibility in my experiments. In no case was the medium able to see the writing pad ; it was either left in a room the medium did not go into, or it was locked up in a writing table, previous to his entering the room, or else the slips were written on the cover of a pocketbook, which was immediately pocketed....Henning goes on to say that it is possible for the medium to read the writing by following it with his fingers on the back of the slip as if it were Braille type. I wrote my slips with a very soft pencil, to obviate this possible source of error ; then I smoothed the back of -the paper with my thumb nail. In the cases when I wrote only one word or a figure I took care that the written part should not be on the outer layers of the folded slip."

Page 152:

"It is an experiment worth trying, to unfold a slip with one hand, and try to read it, in such a way that persons standing by your side and watching you all the time, never see you do it. It is too much for my credulity to think that this is possible. Even Henning does not pretend that it is possible to unfold a slip completely unobserved even when the observations are being done by the typically simple-minded and credulous observer he has in his mind’s eye. He says it might be possible to peep into the slightly opened slip as into an uncut book. I have mentioned previously that I folded my slips with the writing quite in the middle, so that it would be impossible to read them in this way, hence this objection cannot logically be brought up against my experiments."

Page 154:

"It was my endeavour to take into account all the precautions and objections hitherto suggested, and not only did I fail to detect any fraud (that would mean little), but neither I nor any of my co-workers ever had the faintest impression that there might be a trick of any sort in any part of the experiments. The course of the experiments is so clear and natural and so little suspect, that it would seem quite as logical to suspect that someone who was sitting there talking to me should be committing a murder that very moment."

Page 164: 

"As already mentioned, all the persons present during the experiments, including the members of the Medical Commission, were of the opinion that fraud was impossible under these conditions, and that any voluntary or involuntary exchange of signals was out of the question in the experiments, where no one present knew what the object was; the only remaining alternatives were chance of supernormal faculty of some kind."

On page 134 Tischner correctly states this : "Attention may be drawn to the fact that materialism is completely disproved if telepathy and clairvoyance cannot be explained by physical theories." On page 170 Tischner states this:

"These experiments alone would suffice to prove the existence of clairvoyance. So we must recognize that such different series of experiments performed with different mediums are a very much more conclusive proof. Trickery, chance, and guesswork, the favourite loopholes of the sceptic, are useless against such evidence ; we cannot but accept the fact of clairvoyance."

Tischner has done a good job of responding to objections he has read about experiments of the type he did. Doing something in the same vein, I can try to imagine a thought process of someone making such objections, and explain the invalidity of his thought process. 

I can imagine how a skeptic named Tristan might reason:

"We know from science that the mind is just the brain, or a product of the brain. And something like telepathy or clairvoyance could only occur if that was wrong. So from an experiment claiming to give evidence for some result overthrowing the scientific consensus, we should demand absolute perfection.  It would have to be the most perfect evidence, such as someone detecting what is inside locked steel boxes, while being videotaped the whole time. Any evidence less perfect than that we can throw away."

There are some fallacies in this reasoning. The first is that we do not at all know that the mind is just the brain, or a product of the brain. Such a claim is merely a belief dogma of materialists. Most of the evidence advanced to support such a claim is bad evidence,  such as the evidence typically appearing in today's neuroscience papers, which are a cesspool of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes, bad measurement techniques such as "freezing behavior" judgments, a lack of a decent blinding protocol, and cherry-picking data. There is actually to be found in the findings of neuroscience itself the strongest reasons for rejecting all claims that the mind is the same as the brain, or the mere product of the brain. I refer to things discussed in the posts of my blog here. The evidence that the mind cannot be the same as the brain and cannot be a product of the brain includes this evidence:

1. As shown in the many examples given here, here, here, here and here, contrary to the predictions of materialism, human minds can operate very well despite tremendous damage to the brain, caused by injury, disease or surgery. For example, removing half of a person's brain in the operation known as hemispherectomy often produces little change in memory or cognitive abilities. There have been quite a few cases of people (such as Lorber's patients) who were able to think and speak very well despite having lost more than 60% of their brain due to disease. Such cases argue powerfully that the human mind is not actually a product of the brain or an aspect of the brain.
2. Although it is claimed that memories are stored in the brain (specifically in synapses), there is no place in the brain that is a plausible storage site for human memories that can last for 50 years or longer. The proteins that make up both synapses and dendritic spines are quite short-lived, being subject to very high molecular turnover which gives them an average lifetime of only a few weeks. Both synapses and dendritic spines are a “shifting sands” substrate absolutely unsuitable for storing memories that last reliably for decades.
3. It is claimed that memories are stored in brains, but humans are able to instantly recall accurately very obscure items of knowledge and memories learned or experienced decades ago; and the brain seems to have none of the characteristics that would allow such a thing. The recall of an obscure memory from a brain would require some ability to access the exact location in the brain where such a memory was stored (such as the neurons near neuron# 8,124,412,242). But given the lack of any neuron coordinate system or any neuron position notation system or anything like an indexing system or addressing system in the brain, it would seem impossible for a brain to perform anything like such an instantaneous lookup of stored information from some exact spot in the brain.
4. If humans were storing their memories in brains, there would have to be a fantastically complex translation system (almost infinitely more complicated than the ASCII code or the genetic code) by which mental concepts, words and images are translated into neural states. But no trace of any such system has ever been found, no one has given a credible detailed theory of how it could work, and if it existed it would be a “miracle of design” that would be naturally inexplicable.
5. Contrary to claims that minds are merely an aspect of brains or a product of brains, we know from near-death experiences that human minds can continue to operate even after hearts have stopped and brains have shut down. As discussed here, such experiences often include observations of hospital details or medical details that should have been impossible if a mere hallucination was the cause of the experience.
6. If human brains actually stored conceptual and experiential memories, the human brain would have to have both a write mechanism by which exact information can be precisely written, and a read mechanism by which exact information can be precisely read. The brain seems to have neither of these things. There is nothing in the brain similar to the “read-write” heads found in computers. 
7. We understand how physical things can produce physical effects (such as an asteroid producing a crater), and how mental things can produce mental effects (such as how a belief can give rise to another belief or an emotion). But no one has the slightest idea how a physical thing could ever produce a mental effect. As discussed here, no one has any understanding of how a brain or neurons in a brain could produce anything like a thought or an idea.
8. We know from our experience with computers the type of things that an information storage and retrieval system uses and requires. The human brain seems to have nothing like any of these things. 
9. As discussed here, humans can form new memories instantly, at a speed much faster than would be possible if we were using our brains to store such memories. It is typically claimed that memories are stored by “synapse strengthening” and protein synthesis, but such things do not work fast enough to explain the formation of memories that can occur instantly.
10. As discussed here, human brains do not show signs of working harder during thinking or memory recall, contrary to what we would expect if such effects were being produced by brains.
11. Contrary to the idea that human memories are stored in synapses, the density of synapses sharply decreases between childhood and early adulthood. We see no neural effect matching the growth of learned memories in human.
12. There are many humans with either exceptional memory abilities (such as those with hyperthymesia or HSAM who can recall every day of their adulthood)  or exceptional thinking abilities (such as savants with incredible calculation abilities). But such cases do not involve larger brains, very often involve completely ordinary brains, and quite often involve damaged brains, quite to the contrary of what we would expect from the “brains make minds” assumption.
13. Results from the animal kingdom are inconsistent with claim that minds are made from brains and memories stored in brains. For example, animals such as crows with very small brains (and no cerebral cortex) perform astonishingly well on mental tests; elephants with brains four times larger than ours are not nearly as smart as us; and flatworms that have been taught things and then decapitated can still remember what they learned, after regrowing a head. Contrary to claims that the brain is the source of human thinking and memory recall, a full analysis of the signal delaying factors in the human brain (such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue) shows that signals in the brain cannot be traveling fast enough to explain human thinking and human memory recall which can occur instantaneously.
14.  The human brain experiences extremely severe levels of signal noise, so much signal noise that we should not believe that it is the brain that is producing human memory recall that can occur massively and flawlessly for people such as Hamlet actors and Wagnerian tenors. 

So, contrary to Tristan's reasoning above, we do not at all know that the mind is the product of the brain, or the same thing as the brain; and we actually have very many very strong reasons for rejecting such a claim.  So an observational result such as clairvoyance is not actually any such thing as an unexpected result. If our minds arise from some mysterious process different from neural origination, then "all bets are off" about the limits of the mind, and we have no basis for claiming that observations of clairvoyance are even something we should regard as unexpected. 

The second flaw in Tristan's reasoning is that it treats each result supporting clairvoyance or telepathy as if it were the only result supporting such things.  Such a treatment might be reasonable if there was little or no evidence for clairvoyance or telepathy.  For example, there is zero observational evidence that elephants can fly. So if someone were to try to submit evidence that elephants can fly (such as producing an eyewitness report), you might be justified in claiming that such a piece of one-of-a-kind evidence so unique would have to be bulletproof for us to believe in flying elephants. But the situation with clairvoyance and telepathy is totally different. There is nearly two hundred years of written evidence in support of claims of the reality of telepathy and clairvoyance, very much of it written by distinguished scientists and doctors.  

So, in fact, every time a new piece of evidence for clairvoyance or telepathy is examined, you never find yourself in any situation of "this goes against everything that has been observed up until now." Instead, the situation is the opposite. It is "this is consistent with a giant mountain of evidence that has already been gathered." Of course, such evidence goes unstudied and unexamined by skeptics such as Tristan. So with each new case in which they are examining evidence for clairvoyance or telepathy, they cry "this goes everything that has been observed so far." False claims like that only show what lazy scholars such people are.

What should actually be occurring when we examine some previously unexamined evidence for clairvoyance and telepathy is a reaction such as this:  "This is consistent with a huge body of evidence already gathered that establishes the reality of clairvoyance and telepathy, and it is also consistent with a huge body of facts already gathered which suggest that the brain cannot be the same as the human mind or the source of the human mind."

The photo below shows a slip of paper that I prepared, using the same process described by Tischner.  I wrote on a small piece of paper in pencil the name Zacharias, folding the paper three times, with the second fold at a right angle to the first, and the third fold at a right angle to the second. We see both sides of the resulting slip of paper. You can see that you cannot even read a single letter when a paper has been folded in such a way.