Title:
The Demon-Haunted World
Carl Sagan
Publisher:
Random House, 1995
ISBN
0-394-53512-X

Carl Sagan and AFU have a lot in common. Like many AFUisti, Sagan sets out to lift the shroud of mystery from many superstitions, pseudosciences, and anti- sciences. His targets run a gamut of familiar AFU threads: space aliens and flying saucers, the satanic panic, a variety of conspiracies, and dowsing and similar New Age frauds, to name a few.

Sagan invites us to use our skeptical faculties when considering these phenomena. (Is it Sagan that started the recent trend to spell "skeptical" as "s-c-e...?" He does it only once, but I've noticed it several times on AFU in recent months. If so, no one else mentioned reading this book...)

This book is a good basic text for AFU. In particular, Sagan lists several pages of basic fallacies, and how they work (pp 212-17). He considers the history of a number of phenomena, like UFOs, and how that history has a bearing on their mythical nature. For instance, he retraces the "creation" of the mythical flying saucer from the original lights in the sky to the alien autopsy movie, and the growth of the alien abduction stories from the first reported instance to the most recent bit of psychological malpractice by Dr John Mack.

Is it a coincidence that on page 13 he uses the term "Old Hat?"

One item I did note, since I had spent some time a few months ago, reading The Darwin Myth, was that Sagan has an idea of Darwin's motivation that, at least to me, appears at odds with the facts presented in Myth. Other than that, keeping in mind that my fact checking consisted of *no* serious work, I found the book quite enjoyable, and am giving it an AFU bookshelf score of seven.