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Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: hsm@unislc.slc.unisys.com (Helge Moulding)
Subject: AFU Notes on _The Demon-Haunted World
Date: Wed, 8 May 1996 14:49:47 GMT

AFU Notes by Helge Moulding
_The Demon-Haunted World_
by Carl Sagan

See my bookreview elsewhere.

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 antisciences. 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.
--
Helge "Billions of books to read!" Moulding