The 1990s were a high-water mark for the paranormal in pop culture. The prime example, of course, is The X-Files, which beamed alien visitations, government conspiracies, and all manner of cryptids and creatures into millions of homes every week. There was Unsolved Mysteries, the sort-of-hokey but always creepy true-crime and paranormal documentary show hosted by the inimitable Robert Stack. Even Disney got in on it with an X-Files-like show called So Weird, about a teenage “computer geek” named Fiona who investigates ghost sightings, crop circles, and ESP with her musician mom. Born in 1991, I missed a lot of those when they originally aired, but the reruns still let me pickle my brain on the paranormal. (During the summer, Lifetime aired reruns of Unsolved Mysteries back-to-back with The 700 Club; they have more in common than you might think.) I continue to chase the feeling those stories give me: that the world is so much bigger and more wonderful and more mysterious than I can begin to know.
But for every person who pursues the paranormal and debates conspiracy theories with a sense of fun and curiosity, there is also a darker side. Once, an individual person could believe in Bigfoot or that the moon landing was faked, and it wouldn’t have much of an effect on anyone else. But then 9/11 happened, and conspiracy theories went “mainstream,” with claims that the Bush administration was behind the attacks, that the planes were holograms, and that the government placed explosives in the towers and downed Flight 93 with a missile. With the rise of internet use, people with similar opinions could gather “evidence” to build their case and become much louder together than they could have been separately. By the time we got to Pizzagate and QAnon—a toxic blend of conspiracy theory, the paranormal, and blood libel—offbeat beliefs were for people who opposed mask mandates and called public-school teachers “groomers.”
In the second Trump administration, the appetite for paranormal speculation has grown—see J. D. Vance’s comments on aliens and Tucker Carlson’s assertion that he was attacked by a demon. These may be harbingers of a bigger shift. We are “going to become a culture that is far more willing to entertain the paranormal than it ever has,” says Christopher Bader, a professor of sociology at Chapman University. Speaking on a panel about religion and the paranormal in September, Bader pointed out that 90 percent of nones—the fastest-growing religious group in the country—hold some kind of paranormal belief. Bader defines those as any belief that lies outside religion and science, the two main “meaning-makers” in our society. The boundaries are fluid and are determined by what mainstream belief leaves out, not by anything inherent in the individual belief itself. If a Bigfoot print were discovered, Bader says, bookstores would move all the titles about Bigfoot from the paranormal section to the science section. If a major religion started incorporating Bigfoot worship into its practice, they would move those titles to the religion section. But for now, since Bigfoot is accepted by neither part of the meaning-making mainstream, it’s categorized as “paranormal.”
The nones themselves seem especially outside the meaning-making mainstream, part of a “middle group” who are neither absolute materialist atheists nor members of religions that require strict, exclusive belief. And as increasing disaffiliation weakens a religious institution’s power to maintain orthodoxy among those who do stay, that group is likely to become larger—convinced, in Bader’s words, that “there are powers and constituencies that are beyond what we can see and prove.”
A growing belief in the paranormal could be unsettling to many people. I imagine many religious institutions will not be happy about increased interest in tarot readings or amateur demonology. They’d be right in pointing out that, without a unifying truth underneath them, hyperindividualist spiritual quests can risk becoming shallow or selfish. And there’s always the possibility that certain kinds of exploration could pose grave spiritual danger. Perhaps there really are forces better left alone.
There are other things to be concerned about. Though paranormal beliefs are distinct from conspiracy theories, there is certainly overlap, and fringe beliefs tend to reinforce each other. To riff on one famous example: if you believe in Bigfoot, you hold a paranormal belief. If you think the government killed a park ranger to cover up Bigfoot’s existence, you also hold a conspiracy theory. If you believe that the government has been hiding alien remains at Roswell since 1947, you believe a lot of other things—that aliens exist and have reached us, and that the government can get away with such a coverup—that have political, social, and philosophical consequences. We ought to be careful what we choose to believe, why we believe it, and what our beliefs can accumulate into. As another panelist, Jason Aukerman, said, “If you’re willing to give…an active belief to something for which you have no evidence, what other areas are you willing to give your belief to without evidence?” That an election was stolen? That the Earth is flat? That your neighbor is a witch?
Those are all real things to fear. Still, I’m going to try to see growing belief in the paranormal as something that could be positive. As the panelists pointed out, the active pursuit of other kinds of belief, spirituality, and practice outside of formal religion shows that the hunger for meaning and truth persists. Religions might take this as an opportunity to show themselves as a place where meaning is ready to be found. But they could have some things to learn or relearn from young seekers too: the wildness of God, the marvels of the cosmos, and the beauty in the yearning, tentative words on Fox Mulder’s wall. I want to believe.
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