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One of them is Travis Walton, whose purported alien abduction was the basis for the 1993 movie Fire in the Sky. Repeating his story on The Other Side, Walton told of being hit "by a powerful bolt of energy" one night as he approached a glowing disklike object hovering over a highway. He recalled losing consciousness and awakening inside a spacecraft, surrounded by aliens. To the accompaniment of a hokey re-enactment, he described attempting to escape, then being caught and subdued. Will Miller, the show's host, posed a few skeptical questions, but looked impressed nonetheless. "One thing we do know," he said, "is that many scientists, government officials, medical doctors and academics agree that something is going on here, something that deserves our attention."
Sightings devotes its attention to similarly weird tales. In recent weeks, for example, it has done stories on ufo hot spots, the "most haunted mansion in America" and a ghost named Sallie, who has tormented a Midwestern family, inflicting scratches on the unfortunate father. In an earlier program, John Burke, a "crop-circle investigator," discussed ice circles -- geometric forms that have previously appeared in grain fields and now, he claims, have begun to show up on frozen lakes and ponds. Instead of ascribing them to the pranksters and bored farmers responsible for the designs, the show suggested that they are created by artistic extraterrestrials. Encounters too takes a gullible attitude toward such stories as the purported governmental cover-up of a UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico, and the secreting away of three -- or four, or seven -- little bodies of the alien crew.
Some guest "experts" have become quite familiar to fans of the paranormal. Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, perhaps the university's greatest embarrassment since LSD guru Timothy Leary, is a frequent visitor on these shows, insisting that he believes patients who tell him of being whisked aboard spacecraft. "Alien abductees are given a terrifying message," he claims. "We are being given a choice to change our ways." And James Van Praagh, a self-proclaimed medium who specializes in communicating with the dead, is a regular visitor to these shows. In comforting bereaved parents by pretending to deliver messages from their departed offspring, he uses techniques blatantly obvious to magicians.
Despite the nonsense that prevails on these shows, several of them make a pretense of objectivity by including rebuttals by scientists and skeptics. But any reasoned responses are generally lost in a barrage of fanciful fiction. One critic of the paranormal, Michael Shermer, a professor of science history at Occidental College in Los Angeles, was invited to participate in an episode of The Other Side that addressed alien abductions. According to Shermer, host Miller urged him before the show not to be too harsh on the "abductees." "Don't be a curmudgeon," Miller pleaded. On the air, Shermer recalls, after he had made telling points about how unlikely the abductions were, Miller tugged on his sleeve, quietly urging him to stop.