TV Stunts

N 1964, Betty and Barney Hill, a married couple from New Hampshire, USA, shot suddenly to fame when they claimed to have been abducted by aliens. While driving one night in the White Mountains, they had seen a bright object, like a flying saucer. After being taken on board and subjected to an unconventional medical examination, their next memory was of arriving home, with two hours unaccounted for. Barney reported that the aliens’ eyes seemed to continue round the sides of their heads and they had no noses or mouths.

These memories surfaced with the aid of hypnosis, 12 days after they had viewed the “Bellaro Shield” episode of The Outer Limits, a hugely popular TV series of the time, which explored the theme of abduction. That episode had featured aliens with wraparound eyes and no noses and mouths. The ‘abduction’ of the Hills was a media sensation, later becoming the subject of a book and of a made-for-TV film.

Fascination with the possibility of extraterrestrial life goes way back in time — it even occupied the musings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. But, as psychologist Susan Clancey points out in her fascinating book, Abducted: how people come to believe they were kidnapped by aliens (Harvard University Press, £14.95), it wasn’t until the Hill case that “the American imagination began putting all of this together into a single plot”. Statistics from a UFO organisation showed that, whereas there had been about two claims a year of abduct- ion by aliens between 1947 and 1976, there was a 2500 per cent increase in such reports within two years of the made-for-TV film being shown.

Clancy doesn’t claim that TV is at the root of belief in abduction by aliens. (She concludes that such belief serves as a “transformative event” for some, furnishing an explanation for psychological distress and unsettling experiences and providing “meaning for an entire life”, in the way that religious experience often does.) But TV was the medium through which unfamiliar, outlandish images could be passively absorbed and then actively converted into a personal reality.

The insidious impact of TV on human development and behaviour features both in this issue, and in the next one. As we learn in a deeply disturbing book, Remotely Controlled: how television is damaging our lives — and what we can do about it, reviewed on page 41, watching television is even more of a passive activity than we might think and the likely long-term effect of excess viewing on young people’s brains is truly frightening. (Author of the book, psychologist Dr Aric Sigman, will be our next issue’s interviewee.) Dr Nick Baylis, an extract from whose inspiring book, Learning from Wonderful Lives, starts on page 29, offers a salutary observation. As a child, he was an admirer of many TV heroes but “In what seems like several thousand episodes of Star Trek, I don’t remember even one scene in which Captain Kirk spent his Saturday morning slumped in pyjamas watching The Fonz...”. His message, and one of many we should take away from Sigman’s book, is that the human brain learns by actively exploring, thrives on doing and excels when striving for mastery. We have a need to feel a sense of competence and achievement, wherever it is that we choose to direct our energies: it is a human given.

Any decent education system should create the environment to stimulate young brains to learn, and then encourage children to become confident, curious learners. While the latest White Paper on education takes yet another crack at shuffling the system about, we look at how letting the true experts get on with the job can be what makes the difference. (See “Confidence in the classroom”, on page 24, for an interview with Irmeli Halinen of the Finnish National Board of Education.)

Of course, television may stimulate interest — and activity — by widening horizons, and certain ‘reality shows’ even provide role models, in the form of people giving their all in competition to achieve their dearest ambitions. But, alas, such shows don’t rely just on the contestants’ skill for their interest value. The current series of The X Factor (a search for a star singer, highly popular with pre-teens and teenagers) is a case in point. It is a razzmatazz of cuts and zooms and flashbacks, veering between suspense and emotional highs and lows, as the camera ranges rapidly over close-ups of the contestants fervently discussing their aspirations, their brief ‘TV spectacular’ performances to excited studio audiences, the reactions on their faces as they listen to the judges’ verdicts, the tension as they await the results of the public vote and the consequent elation or tears. Paradoxically, what comes across is not the focused attention required for success but the constant distraction.

What is the government doing about the stultifying effect that this sort of thing has on young people’s brains? It is phasing out analogue TV, so we can all have digital, and a plethora of ‘choice’.

The Editors

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