Middle-Aged Mulder Syndrome
MATT COLBORN argues that contemporary forteana needs to reconnect with a sense of wonder that it’s currently in danger of losing
In episode three of the 2016 series of The X-Files, Agent Scully walks in to find Mulder throwing pencils at her “I Want to Believe” poster. Mulder informs Scully that since their absence “much of the unexplained has been explained.” This has led to a deep disillusion on his part, hence the vandalism of Scully’s poster. “I’m a middle-aged man,” Mulder moans, wondering whether it’s time to put away childish things and stop hunting monsters in the dark. He has been struck with a case of “MiddleAged Mulder Syndrome”.
A similar disillusion seems today to pervade fortean circles. It seems easy to conclude that in the third decade of the 21st century “visions and miracles have ceased”. In successive issues of Fortean Times, case after phenomenal case is revealed as having mundane origins. An extant plesiosaur was probably not
responsible for a tragedy at sea in March 1962 (FT396:30-35); a small, stone built 19th century house in Leeds was not haunted (FT393:567), and a mysterious encounter with the ‘Risley silver man’ in the 1970s was not an alien but a hoax (FT397:36-41).
So it goes. The attrition rate, over decades, has been huge. Many apparently bona fide fortean events have proved bogus. David Clarke, reviewing an in-depth study demonstrating a mundane explanation for the Marfa Mystery lights, suggested that the mystery dissolves whenever rigorous scientific methodology is applied to “extraordinary” evidence (FT401:56). “All that is solid melts into air.”
This attrition has had a significant effect on the attitudes of several veteran forteans. Elsewhere, Dr Clarke has written of his disillusion with the extraterrestrial hypothesis and his current conclusion that the UFO field can be explained entirely in psychosocial terms. He sees UFO experiences not as evidence, but folklore. 1 He’s not alone in his disillusion. A similar pattern can be detected in other researchers in parapsychology and in cryptozoology. 2 Early, perhaps naive, belief gives way to scepticism, which can on occasion slide into cynicism and even resignation.
Susan Blackmore’s experience is classic, and well documented. 3 After a vivid out-of-body experience, she threw herself into parapsychology, only to fail to find any satisfactory evidence for psychic abilities. After repeated attempts
“Much of the unexplained has been explained,” he says to Scully
to find psi, and a period of illness, she gradually shifted her opinions in a sceptical direction and became a prominent critic of psi research. Reading her memoirs, it’s difficult not to sympathise with this shift. Science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke perhaps summed it up best when he complained that after spending large sums of Yorkshire Television’s money making his Mysterious World
( FT410:32-39, 411:42-47, 412:44-49) and Strange Powers programmes, that he had become “an almost total sceptic.” He noted that this has been “a long and sometimes embarrassing learning process.” 4
The research tools of the 21st century seem to have accelerated this process. Even Fort has not escaped a re-assessment. George Eberhart recently commented that Fort’s writing has “not aged well” and is “a difficult read” due to its “sprawling and oddly constructed paragraphs, abrupt sentence fragments” and “labyrinthine prose.” 5 This comment was made in his foreword to Volume Two of Martin Shough and Wim von Utrecht’s Redemption of the Damned book series. The volumes themselves make for sobering reading. Shough and von Utrecht have been able to demonstrate likely, relatively mundane explanations for many of Fort’s mysteries. They conclude that there is no need to posit any exotic or super-mundane reality to explain them. So poor Fort is damned more thoroughly by his followers than he ever has been by the sceptics. He stands accused of misrepresenting the mundane as mysterious and – fatal for an author – bad writing!
A significant attrition rate for phenomena that at first seem to challenge conventional worldviews is to be expected. Breaking the laws of physics is not an everyday occurrence. Henry Bauer, who has studied the sociology of anomalous claims in science, suggests that each proposed mystery – a UFO, lake monster or ‘wild talent’ – is a “long shot” that has only a small probability of being true. To put this another way, on average the sceptics will be right to reject any single ‘fortean’ phenomenon as genuinely mysterious; so Mike Dash was probably correct to suggest that the primary explanations for the broad sweep of fortean material are likely to be either psychological and/or cultural. 7
So a degree of scepticism is probably justified for any given claim of the fantastic. The problem is when healthy scepticism curdles into cynicism. This is the main symptom of Middle-Aged Mulder Syndrome: we have become so disillusioned that we refuse to accept the possibility that the Universe can surprise us.
This can manifest as a casual dismissal of a claim before thorough investigation, or an exaggeration of what we actually know. A recent example from FT: in the context of a review of Colin Wilson’s The Occult, the case of the physical medium DD Home is summarily dismissed. The “evidence” for Home, we’re told, “has been picked apart” thoroughly, and he has “been revealed for what he was: a gold-digging fraud.” (FT412:55). This assessment seems to me to go beyond the facts. In his book on the psychic, Peter Lamont, an historian and conjuror who doesn’t believe in psychokinesis, systematically reviewed each of the accusations against Home and found each wanting. 8 Lamont has elsewhere observed that certainties are often artificially inflated on both sides of paranormal controversies. 9 If belief is a bias, then so is disbelief: Lamont sees them as mirrors.
But the main problem with Middle-Aged Mulder Syndrome is that it tends to suck the wonder out of the world. For me, the significance of anomalous experiences is the confrontation with the unknown, and the realisation that the world might not be what it seems. For witnesses, too, these experiences can have sublime, numinous qualities that should not be casually dismissed in the rush to find a conventional explanation. It seems to me a tragedy if these imaginative, mythic dimensions of fortean experience are lost. So, I refuse to believe that Middle-Aged Mulder Syndrome is the inevitable endpoint of adult intellectual development in the fortean field.
Recently, I began to obtain compilation volumes of the early Fortean Times. The first three of these volumes, which range from the inception of FT in 1973 to 1980, are eye-opening. Critical thinking is, rightly, there from the start, but so is a sense of wonder and excitement. The enthusiasm and passion of the youthful, perhaps naive writers shines through each page. The illustrations, too, are evocative. My favourite is the cover of Issue 30, illustrating simulacra: a brooding forest with shadowy faces in tree trunks and rocks. In the pages, possibilities are opened up rather than closed down. The pages are saturated with a sense of wonder, and an openness to the unknown.
So perhaps the first step in recovery is recapturing a more youthful frame of mind. Humility before the Universe is crucial here. Despite claims to the contrary, human knowledge is far from being complete. Ignorance far outweighs knowledge. Our brains, too, are probably limited in what they are capable of understanding. So there’s always the possibility that a new case that we might study in a ‘fortean’ context will turn out to be genuinely game-changing.
Despite the high attrition rate referred to above, I’m far from satisfied that every single fortean phenomenon has been ‘proved’ to have conventional origins or mundane explanations. The best of parapsychology seems to me to offer at least a challenge to conventional ideas about consciousness. The occasional UFO case seems at least to strain the psychosocial hypothesis. And a residue of cryptozoological reports may still represent unknown or out-of-place animals.
We should also not forget the experiential, imaginative, intuitive dimension of the fortean realm. This is often present, even in cases with apparently ‘mundane’ origins. In his book Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur recounted ‘Val of Peckham’s’ experience of a UFO that “seemed to be watching her” and was “definitely intelligent.” This turned out to be the planet Venus. But as Harpur reminds us, Val “had the kind of experience we all have at some time, especially as children: that of seeing a world we had been told was dead as alive, intelligent, watchful.” 10 He cautions against being too literalistic in our interpretations, favouring instead a way of looking at the world that is more akin to Jung’s active imagination.
For me, fortean phenomena have always pushed key imaginative buttons. In the early days, I came to FT and books like John Michell and Bob Rickard’s Phenomena (1977) for a certain kind of experience, and a certain kind of thrill. I suspect that this is the case for many readers. One aspect of Fort’s genius as a writer was being able to communicate a picture of an organic, watchful, mischievous Universe that’s constantly throwing up surprises. If we take Fort’s writings as metaphorical rather than literal, then their strength and power seems to be in invoking that sense of an enchanted, watchful world. And as Iain McGilchrist has recently suggested, some recovery of this sense of an intelligent, animated Universe may be crucial for humanity’s survival. 11
At the end of the aforementioned X-Files episode, Mulder has at least some of his capacity for wonder restored by a fresh encounter with the unknown. This conclusion is essential. The rekindling of a sense of wonder seems to me the best tonic against the tired, jaded and cynical deadend that is Middle Aged Mulder Syndrome.
NOTES
1 David Clarke, How UFOs conquered the World, Aurum Press, 2015.
2 Darren Naish, Hunting Monsters, Sirius Entertainment, 2017.
3 Susan J Blackmore, In Search of the light: Adventures of a Parapsychologist, Prometheus Books, 1996.
4 Arthur C Clarke, Afterword to Childhood’s End, Gollancz, 2009, p. 240.
5 George M Eberhart, Foreword to Redemption of the Damned volume 2 by Martin Shough and Wim van Utrecht, Anomalist books, 2021, p. vii.
6 Henry H Bauer, Science or Pseudoscience, University of Illinois Press, 2001. 7 Mike Dash, Borderlands, Arrow, 1997.
8 Peter Lamont, The World’s First Psychic, Little Brown, 2005.
9 Peter Lamont, Extraordinary Beliefs, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
10 Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality, Viking, 1994.
11 Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things, Perspectiva, 2021.