The Drive To Explain

Today the CBC website carried a photo essay of famous publicity stunts. They covered both times Oprah got hoodwinked by writers, the lady who lied about a winning lottery ticket, and the Boston Marathon runner who took a shortcut.

They also decided to mention crop circles and the granddaddy alien story of them all, the Roswell autopsies. In these stories, of course, the CBC writers sailed into famously dangerous and murky waters.

The crop circle phenomenon is an enduring mystery, and rightly so. On the surface, it seems eminently explainable, and Doug Bower and Dave Chorley decided to do just that, telling the world that they had created some of the world's most amazing crop circles with little more than a length of wood and some string. What they didn't explain, and what the world media seems never to have asked, is how two bar buddies could have created mathematical marvels that would stretch the capabilities of a team of engineers and surveyors, in only a few minutes, often under the eyes of people who saw nothing special happening.

The televised Roswell alien autopsy, supposedly put together from footage of the actual event in 1947, is also mentioned as a publicity stunt. It may have been; the Roswell incident has spawned more imitators and takeoffs than Elvis. The real event, however, remains far too inexplicable for reason to rest easy. And I couldn't help noticing that this was the one story they didn't actually come out and call a hoax.

Mysteries are, by their nature, uncomfortable for our reasoning brains. Therein lies their allure; that is why we will reach for any explanation, sometimes in blatant blindness of the outstanding evidence.

There are many of us, however, who are content to let mystery be. This world would be a greyer place if we could explain all of it. Having some unsolveable mysteries reassures me that we will never quite be as big as the world in which we live.

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