PZ Myers. 2003 Nov 19. A shameful confession. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/a_shameful_confession/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 01.

Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Wednesday, November 19, 2003

A shameful confession

I discovered by way of Gullibility isn't in the dictionary that there was a cute article in the City Pages weekly. It was all about Fate magazine. Everyone knows what Fate magazine is, right?

For the past 55 years, Fate [...] has been busy publishing stories about Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, time travel, astral projection, life after death, the latent psychic abilities of house pets, angelic visitations, haunted houses (which, as it happens, includes Galde's own), government conspiracies, the lost continent of Atlantis, voodoo cults, and, of course, UFO encounters. But this is no mere pulp tabloid. Authoritative, even academic, in tone, Fate dares to take all of the above seriously.

OK, so at least now you know. It turns out that Fate is published nowadays right here in Minnesota, and the editor, who is profiled in the article, is Phyllis Galde, a Lakeville woman. Despite the subject matter, the story isn't snarky (much), and describes the history of the magazine and the people who owned it, wrote for it, and read it with little condescension and only a mildly amused attitude. It brought back some old memories.

Which brings me to my terrible, terrible confession.

In my youth, back in the late 60s and early 70s, I was an avid reader of Fate magazine.

I know, I know. I'm a hard-assed skeptic, I sneer at all things superstitious and religious, and I ended up a scientist, for Jebus' sake. I should have been reading Hugo Gernsback publications, Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, I should have been building crystal radios and model rockets and mixing strange chemicals in the basement and dissecting road kill. Well, I did do all those things, but I also probably read every issue of Fate from 1965 to 1973.

How could that happen? I was just the kind of kid who read everything that fell in front of my face. And Fate was everywhere. My uncle was a subscriber, my grandmother read it regularly, they got passed around among my big extended family, they were in bus stations and barbershops. The City Pages article does a good job of explaining why:

Indeed, of all Fate's regular features, the most popular is "My Proof of Survival," in which readers write about their near-death experiences and brushes with divinity. Some of the stories are silly--a miraculous never-ending bag of potato chips, for instance--but most are sad and sweet and wonderful: dead parents and spouses returning to say goodbye to their survivors is a common one.

Reading through the heartfelt testimonials of Fate devotees, one gets a sense that they are, by and large, very much like Galde: Nice, normal people who simply choose to believe in a type of magic that's been wrung out of life. Their animating impulse is religious--a dream of a brighter, more comprehensible world, of life after death, of aliens and angels.

Fate was actually an effective inoculation against nonsense. At first, I think I read them uncritically, but it wasn't long before I started to question them. Every writer seemed to have a different vision of aliens, the afterlife, bigfoot, etc., but none seemed to have much depth or evidence. At the same time, I was hitting the library hard, spending most of my time in the natural history section (dinosaurs, of course, and then insects, and anatomy, and physiology...), and the differences were inescapable. I could read some supernatural anecdote, ask myself, "How do they know that? What did they do next?", and...nothing. The story was over. I could open a book and see a fossil, though, and ask the same questions...and there'd be a dozen more books with the answers, in more detail than I had imagined, with new, similar examples, and with a thousand new questions. Even better, I could make a trip to the natural history museum in Tacoma and see these things for myself. I learned by contrast how exciting and powerful science was, and that there was a greater magic in the real world than anything I'd find in tales of ghosts and UFOs.

I also learned how tediously boring and unimaginative that supernatural humbuggery was. Fate deified obsessive-compulsive scrapbook collectors like Charles Fort and delusional fantasists like Edgar Cayce; neither could compare with Roy Chapman Andrews.

Or even with Colin Clive.

(And now you know my other deep dark secret, who my childhood heroes were.)