Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief generates many more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of results. For instance, beginning in the 1990s, conspiracists decided contrails, the skinny clouds of water vapor that form around jet-engine exhaust, are exotic chemicals, part of a secret government scheme to test weapons or poison citizens or mitigate climate change—and renamed them chemtrails. When I googled “chemtrails proof,” the first page had nine links, the first seven of those linking to validations of the nonexistent conspiracy. When I searched for “government extraterrestrial cover up,” in the first three pages of results, only one link didn’t lead to an article endorsing a conspiracy theory. After a Cornell psychologist’s widely reported experiment purported to show that people can telepathically know the future, a team of psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania and three other universities tried replicating it seven times—and found no evidence supporting precognition. When I googled the two papers, “Feeling the Future” and “Correcting the Past,” the dubious and more exciting first one had seven times as many search results.