The new age of gullibility

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Matt Ridley has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Is the Loch Ness Monster real? Many thousands of people think so. ‘Existence “plausible” after plesiosaur discovery,’ the BBC reported. ‘Hundreds join huge search for Loch Ness Monster.’ Not only that. The Beeb had live coverage of congressional hearings about possible UFO sightings in July. It ran a series on the yeti the previous month asking: ‘Is something out there in the Himalayas?’ Last year, an Autumnwatch presenter took seriously the possibility that large cats are roaming the countryside.

Have we been time-ported back to the 1970s? I know clickbait journalism these days requires you to set your gullibility rating to max, but these old, tired clichés of pseudoscience are scraping the barrel. What’s coming back next? Poltergeists, Ouija boards, extrasensory perception, reincarnation, the Bermuda Triangle, crop circles? Each generation has to learn that the world is very, very thinly populated with ghosts, aliens and undiscovered megafauna but very thickly populated with charlatans.