To defend science, the Paranormal Challenge devises experiments to test claims of X-ray vision, telekinesis, and other paranormal abilities

为了捍卫科学，"超自然挑战 "组织设计了一些实验来测试关于X射线视觉、心灵感应和其他超自然能力的说法。

WWhen Gary Arnold first heard the noise, he was alone in the library at the local college where he teaches writing. He was enjoying his lunch and reading a copy of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the story of a man whose life is changed by the unexpected spectral visitors.

加里 · 阿诺德在当地一所大学教写作，当加里 · 阿诺德第一次听到这个声音的时候，他正独自在大学的图书馆里，享受他的午餐，读着查尔斯 · 狄更斯的《圣诞颂歌》，这个故事讲述了一个人的生活被不期而至的幽灵访客所改变。

He heard it in his right ear, a staticky, high-pitched crackle that reminded him of old dial-up modems. It was odd, but it also seemed important, so he pulled his inexpensive feature phone out of his pocket. He hit the voice memo button and for several seconds just recorded the room, and whatever was in there with him.

他在右耳中听到了这个声音，一种不稳定的、高亢的噼啪声，让他想起了老式拨号调制解调器。这很奇怪，但似乎也很重要，所以他从口袋里掏出他那个便宜的功能机，他按了一下语音备忘按钮，几秒钟之后就录下了房间里的一切，不管里面有什么。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


When he played the recording later, there was no evidence of the noise he remembered, only the crackle of the phone’s mic and his own quiet presence. But when he played it back again, and turned the volume way, way up, he heard in the amplified sound of his own solitude something that astonished him. It was a voice, whispering through the static: “Mr. Arnold.”

当他后来播放录音时，没有他记忆中的噪音的证据，只有手机麦克风的噼啪声和他自己安静的存在，但是当他重新放一遍，把音量调大，调大，他在自己的孤独的、放大的声音中听到了令他吃惊的东西，这是一个声音，通过静电低语: “阿诺德先生。”

It happened the next day, too. Again, it began with the ringing in his ear; again Arnold reached for the voice recorder; and again upon replay he heard what sounded to him like a reply to a question no one had asked: Is anyone there? And the voice on the tape said: “Yes, people.”

第二天，这种情况也发生了，阿诺德又一次伸手去拿录音机，再次重放时，一遍又一遍地重复着，他听到了一个在他听来像是对一个没有人问过的问题的回答： 有人在吗？录音带上的声音说: “有，人类。”

Over the next two years, Arnold grew convinced that these experiences were not flukes of imagination or sense, but something otherworldly, something that needed to be shared. While Googling one day in search of someone who might be able to verify his recordings, Arnold came across something called the Paranormal Challenge, a contest offering $250,000 to anyone offering indisputable proof of supernatural abilities. The contest is run by the Center for Inquiry Investigations Group, a branch of a global nonprofit dedicated to the promotion of science and secularism. Over the years it’s devised experiments to test people who claim they can read minds, dim lights with the power of their brains, and peer, X-ray-like, through people’s skin. So far none have passed the test or claimed the prize.

在接下来的两年里，阿诺德越来越相信，这些经历不是凭空想象或凭感觉而来，而是某种超自然的东西，某种需要被分享的东西。
有一天，阿诺德在谷歌上搜索可能能够验证他录音的人时，发现了一个叫做“超自然挑战”的组织，这是一个提供超自然能力无可争议证据的竞赛，奖金为25万美元，这次竞赛由调查研究中心组织，这是一个致力于促进科学和世俗主义的全球非盈利组织的分支，多年来，该研究所设计了一些实验来测试那些声称自己可以通过大脑的力量读取人们的思想、调暗灯光以及像X光一样透视观察他人的人，到目前为止，还没有人通过测试或获得奖项。

Arnold submitted the online application in August 2020. The cash would be nice, he thought, but even better would be the validation of someone else confirming that what is happening to him is real.
AArnold’s experience is unusual, certainly. But he is far from the only person in the United States to recently develop a fascination in what can’t be seen, or explained, or reasonably supported using the standards of science and evidence.

阿诺德在2020年8月提交了在线申请，他想，奖金固然不错，但更好的是有其他人来证实他身上发生的事情是真实的。
毫无疑问，阿诺德的经历是不寻常的，但是，他绝不是美国最近唯一一个迷恋那些不能被看到，不能被解释，或者不能用科学和证据的标准来合理支持的东西的人。

It’s a curious quirk of human nature that when major change is afoot, be it technological, social, or cultural, the number of people who profess belief in the paranormal goes up as well. The Victorians became obsessed with spiritualism and seances during the Industrial Revolution, when the introduction of new technologies like electricity and telephones made the seemingly miraculous a part of the fabric of daily life. The legend of Bigfoot crossed into popular culture from indigenous folktales and logger camp lore in the late 1950s, when booming economic prosperity for many Americans (particularly white suburban ones) also meant a shift from physical labor to the monotony of office jobs.

这是人类天性中一个奇怪的现象，当重大变化正在发生时，无论是科技、社会还是文化上，声称相信超自然现象的人数也会增加。
工业革命时期，维多利亚时代的人们迷恋上了灵媒和通灵术，当时电和电话等新技术的引入使得这些看似不可思议的东西成为日常生活的一部分。
20世纪50年代末，大脚怪的传说从土著民间故事和伐木工营地的传说进入了流行文化，当时许多美国人(尤其是郊区白人)的经济繁荣也意味着从体力劳动到单调的办公室工作的转变。

Our current era is no different. Christopher Bader, a professor of sociology at Chapman University, started the Chapman University Survey on American Fears with two colleagues in 2014, as part of his research on belief and religion. In the years from 2015 to 2018, when the survey specifically inquired about paranormal phenomena, the percentage of respondents who professed belief in everything from haunted houses to Bigfoot got bigger every year. For example, in 2015 41.4% of people believed it was possible for a house to be haunted by spirits, 18.1% thought aliens have recently visited Earth, and 11.4% believed Bigfoot was real. By 2018, 57.7% believed in haunted houses, 35.1% in alien landings, and 20.7% in Bigfoot.

我们现在的时代也是如此。
查普曼大学社会学教授克里斯托弗贝德2014年和他的两个同事一起发起了查普曼大学“美国恐怖调查”，作为他对信仰和宗教研究的一部分，从2015年到2018年，当调查专门询问超自然现象时，声称相信从鬼屋到大脚怪的所有事情的受访者的百分比每年都在增加，例如，在2015年，41.4% 的人认为房子可能被鬼魂困扰，18.1% 的人认为外星人最近来过地球，11.4% 的人认为大脚怪是真实存在的，到2018年，57.7% 的人相信鬼屋，35.1% 的人相信外星人登陆，20.7% 的人相信大脚怪。


Source: Chapman Fear Survey

来源: 查普曼恐怖调查

The fastest-growing religious affiliation in the U.S. are people with no religious affiliation, Bader says, or “nones” in sociological parlance. It’s a broad category that includes both atheists, agnostics, and people whose beliefs don’t fit with any formal religious organization. A large percentage of nones also say they believe in the paranormal. People who accept the paranormal are also more likely than those who don’t to believe in conspiracy theories.

贝德说，在美国，增长最快的宗教归属是没有信仰的人，或者用社会学术语是“无宗教信仰”，这是一个宽泛的范畴，包括无神论者、不可知论者，以及那些信仰与任何正式宗教组织都不相符的人，很大一部分人也说他们相信超自然现象，接受超自然现象的人也比不接受的人更有可能相信阴谋论。

Once those beliefs are there, they are really hard to dislodge. Our brains are exceptionally good at discounting evidence that doesn’t fit with what we already believe, and at prioritizing information that confirms our pre-existing perceptions, said Chris French, a emeritus professor of psychology and head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. It’s incredibly hard to talk people out of what they believe to be true.

一旦这些信念存在，它们就很难被驱除，伦敦大学金史密斯学院心理学荣誉教授、异常心理学研究组组长克里斯弗伦奇说，我们的大脑非常善于忽略那些与我们已经相信的东西不相符的证据，并且优先考虑证实我们先前存在的感知的信息，要说服人们放弃他们认为正确的东西是非常困难的。

That doesn’t stop people from trying.

但这并不能阻止人们去尝试。

Three years after Arnold first heard the voices, seven adults gathered in a windowless theater in Los Angeles. They checked their phones and adjusted their face masks while waiting for Arnold to dial in for the initial testing phase of the Paranormal Challenge.

在阿诺德第一次听到这些声音三年后，他们一边检查自己的手机，一边调整自己的面罩，等待阿诺德“拨号”进入超自然挑战的初始测试阶段。

At his wife’s urging, Arnold had filled out the online application. “I communicate with invisible entities daily,” he wrote in the section asking him to describe his claim. “These beings know me and my family by name and claim in their own words to be ‘alien’ and ‘otherworldly’… they will perform even with other people present.” Arnold had proposed that he enter a Faraday cage — a tent that blocks electromagnetic signals — and make contact with the voices there, a proposal the Investigations Group rejected as expensive and irrelevant. If Arnold could, as he claimed, make contact with the entities anywhere, a signal-proof cage wouldn’t be necessary.

在妻子的催促下，阿诺德填写了在线申请表，“我每天都与看不见的实体交流，”他在要求他描述自己说法的部分中写道“这些实体知道我和我的家人的名字，用他们自己的话说，他们是‘外星人’和‘异世界’.....即使有其他人在场，他们也会表演。”
阿诺德曾建议让他进入一个“法拉第笼” (一个屏蔽电磁信号的帐篷) ，与那里的声音取得联系，调查小组拒绝了这个建议，认为这个建议昂贵且无关紧要，如果阿诺德能够像他声称的那样，在任何地方与这些实体取得联系，那么就不需要一个屏蔽信号的笼子。

Instead they proposed an alternative: If Arnold, with the voice’s help, could identify eight of 10 face-down playing cards correctly — a feat whose odds the group has given roughly one in 80,000 odds of occurring by chance — they would invite him out to Los Angeles for an in-person test of his abilities and the chance to win $250,000.

他们提出了一个替代方案：
如果阿诺德在声音的帮助下，能够正确识别出10张正面朝下的扑克牌中的8张——这个壮举的几率大约为8万分之一——他们将邀请他到洛杉矶，亲自测试他的能力，并有机会赢得25万美元。

Gary Arnold holding the cell phone that he uses to hear and capture the voices he hears. “I communicate with invisible entities daily,” Arnold stated in his submission to the Paranormal Challenge, ,run by the Center for Inquiry Investigations Group.


图：加里 · 阿诺德拿着手机，他用来这个手机听和捕捉他听到的声音
“我每天都与看不见的实体交流”阿诺德在接受“超自然挑战”时说

While waiting for Arnold to dial in, his reviewers watched a short film Arnold posted online, a collection of staticky audio clips subtitled with the messages he perceives in the noise.

在等待阿诺德拨通电话时，他的评论者们观看了阿诺德在网上发布的一部短片，这是一部静态音频剪辑集，配有他在噪音中感知到的信息的字幕。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


To Arnold, the words in the amplifications were clear. To this listener, at least, the words aren’t intelligible. When I listened to the clips in his homemade documentary, Subterranean Seance, with the laptop turned away so I couldn’t see Arnold’s captions, they sounded indistinct, similar to the noise of palm smacking the top of a live microphone.

对阿诺德来说，这些夸张的话语是清楚的，至少对于听众来说，这些话是不容易理解的，当我听他自制的纪录片《地下通灵》中的片段时，笔记本电脑转过去，我看不到阿诺德的说明文字，它们听起来很模糊，就像手掌拍打麦克风顶部的声音。

The challenge is a quirky and quixotic mission for all parties involved. While Americans are roughly split on the question of whether ghosts or spirits exist, only a vanishingly small number of them believe they have the power to communicate with them directly — or are willing to give up a Sunday to investigate the claims of those who do.

对于所有相关各方而言，这是一项离奇而不切实际的任务，尽管美国人在鬼魂或灵魂是否存在的问题上存在大致的分歧，但只有极少数人相信自己有能力与鬼魂直接沟通，或者愿意放弃一个周日来调查那些与鬼魂有联系的人的说法。

The theater where Arnold’s test was scheduled to take place sits one floor below the offices of the Center for Inquiry Los Angeles. CFI is home to a host of programs and organizations with a humanist or skeptical bent. These include the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, an organization the British evolutionary biologist founded to promote secularism after writing his 2006 book The God Delusion; the 44-year-old Skeptical Inquirer magazine, a bimonthly publication devoted to debunking paranormal and pseudoscientific claims; and the Investigations Group, a largely volunteer body that bills itself as the world’s largest paranormal investigations effort. The organization brought in $5.4 million in revenues in 2019, 75% of it from individual donors.

阿诺德的测试安排在洛杉矶调查中心办公室下面一层的剧院里进行，CFI（洛杉矶调查中心）是许多具有人文主义或怀疑主义倾向的项目和组织的所在地，这些组织包括“理查德道金斯理性与科学基金会”(Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science) ，该组织是英国进化生物学家在写完2006年的《上帝错觉》（The God Delusion）一书后为促进世俗主义而成立的；有44年历史的《怀疑论者》（Skeptical Inquirer）杂志是一本致力于驳斥超自然现象和伪科学说法的双月刊；以及“调查小组”(Investigations Group) ，这是一个主要由志愿者组成的机构，自称世界上最大的超自然现象调查组织，该组织在2019年收入540万美元，其中75% 来自个人捐赠。

“One hundred percent of the people we’ve tested completely believe in their own ability.”

“我们测试的人中，100% 的人完全相信自己的能力。”

When the challenge first began, said Jim Underdown, executive director of CFI Los Angeles, they were prepared for an onslaught of applications from people looking to land the prize through some kind of deception: Magicians confident that their skills could stand up to the scrutiny of investigators, or people concocting fraudulent schemes to walk away with the money.

洛杉矶 CFI 执行董事吉姆 · 安德敦说，当挑战刚刚开始时，他们已经做好了准备，应对那些希望通过某种欺骗手段获得奖金的申请人的大量申请：“魔术师们”自信他们的技巧能够经受住调查人员的严格审查，或者可以编造了欺诈性的计划，拿走奖金。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


That hasn’t been the case. Applicants come from all over the world and make all kinds of claims, but the one thing they have in common is that every single person appears to genuinely believe they do, in fact, possess abilities that science cannot explain.
“One hundred percent of the people we’ve tested completely believe in their own ability,” Underdown said.

但事实并非如此，申请者来自世界各地，提出各种各样的要求，但他们有一个共同点，那就是似乎每个人都真诚地相信他们确实拥有科学无法解释的能力。
“我们测试的人中，100% 的人完全相信自己的能力。”安德敦说。

That’s certainly true for Arnold. After his first experiences in 2017, the ringing became more frequent, with Arnold snapping on his trusty voice recorder more and more often. As he played back the audio clips, he began to piece together an understanding of the entity, or entities, communicating with him in this novel way.
They knew his name. They knew the names of his family members. They were not human — he knew this because he asked him once what they were, and they said “otherworldly.”

对阿诺德来说确实如此，2017年第一次听到这种声音之后，电话铃声变得越来越频繁，阿诺德越来越频繁地打开他信赖的录音机，当他播放这些音频片段时，他开始拼凑出对这个实体或存在的理解，用这种新奇的方式与他交流。
他们知道他的名字，知道他家庭成员的名字，阿诺德知道他们不是人类，因为他曾问过他们是什么，他们说是“异世界的存在”

Arnold is 53 years old, a lifelong resident of southeastern Pennsylvania, and a happily married father of two teenagers. He knows what you’re thinking: He sounds insane. He gets it. There was a time he would have thought the same thing. He was raised in a Christian household and had little interest in the paranormal beyond watching the occasional ghost hunter documentary on cable for entertainment. He has an education and understands auditory pareidolia — the brain’s desire to seek understandable words and sounds in the garble of random noise — and hallucinations, and all the ways the mind can fudge the perception of reality. That’s just not what he believes is happening to him.

53岁的阿诺德终身居住在宾夕法尼亚州东南，是两个十几岁孩子的父亲，他知道你在想什么： 听起来很疯狂，他明白这一点，曾几何时，他也会有同样的想法，他在一个基督教家庭长大，除了偶尔在有线电视上看一些捉鬼纪录片以外，他对超自然现象没什么兴趣，他受过教育，理解听觉幻想性错觉 ( 大脑渴望在杂乱的噪音中寻找可理解的单词和声音) 和幻觉，以及大脑能够伪造现实感知的所有方式，他不相信这种事情会发生在他身上。

He says he has had brain scans, that he’s talked to his family doctor about this, and there’s nothing medically wrong. (OneZero could not independently confirm this.) He compares himself to the titular elephant in the Dr. Suess book Horton Hears A Who about a sensitive elephant whose giant ears pick up the cries of a tiny, endangered civilization — Whoville — that no one else can hear. The other animals in the jungle (especially the sour kangaroo, easily one of the bitchiest characters in American literature) mock and persecute Horton when he tells them about the Whos. They say it’s all in his head. Arnold doesn’t say this part, but the book’s conclusion makes clear that Horton was right all along.

阿诺德说他已经做过脑部扫描了，并且和他的家庭医生谈过这个问题，医学上他并没有什么问题。( OneZero 无法独立证实此事) 他把自己比作《霍顿与无名氏》一书中名义上的大象霍顿 ，书中讲述了一头敏感的大象，它巨大的耳朵能听到一个小小的濒危文明—— Whoville ——的哭声，其他人听不到，丛林中的其他动物(尤其是酸溜溜的袋鼠，美国文学中最恶毒的角色之一)在霍顿讲述无名族的故事时嘲弄和迫害他们，说这都是它的幻觉。阿诺德没有说这一部分，但书中的结论清楚地表明，霍顿始终是对的。

Gary Arnold holds a rock with a fossilized fern imprint in a park in Elkton, MD.


图：埃尔克顿的一个公园里，加里 · 阿诺德拿着一块蕨类植物化石的石头

Only a handful of the 100 to 150 applicants to the Paranormal Challenge who contact the center each year actually make it to the testing phase, Underdown said. Many stop responding to emails about the specifics of their talents or won’t agree to any proposed testing criteria. Applicants who show signs of mental illness are gently discouraged from pursuing their claims, though it’s not a disqualifier on its own. Previous applicants that have made it to preliminary testing have claimed they could dim light bulbs with their minds, view people’s organs through their skin, and tell just by looking whether the subject of any photograph is currently alive or dead. One woman flew on her own dime to Los Angeles from Ohio to prove to Underdown that she could make him pee his pants with the power of her mind, only to change her mind and withdraw her application shortly after landing.

每年参加超自然挑战的100到150名申请者中，只有少数能够进入测试阶段，许多人不再回复关于他们天赋的具体细节的电子邮件，或者不同意任何拟议的测试标准。有精神疾病迹象的申请者会被婉言劝阻，不要再追求他们的主张，尽管这本身并不是一个取消资格的因素。之前已经通过初步测试的申请者声称，他们可以用意念调暗灯泡，穿透皮肤观察人的器官，并且仅仅通过观察任何照片的主体现在是死是活，一位女士自费从俄亥俄州飞到洛杉矶，向安德敦证明她可以用意念的力量让他尿裤子，但她在降落后不久就改变主意，撤回了申请。

There’s a tongue-in-cheek quality to the Paranormal Challenge. Inviting people to prove their skill as a dowser or telepath is a bit of a campy publicity stunt to draw attention to the center’s more serious work campaigning against potentially harmful examples of pseudoscience in public life. The Investigations Group has led campaigns against bracelets that claim to enhance the wearer’s athletic abilities, bogus alternative medicine courses passing as legitimate continuing education for health care professionals, and self-proclaimed psychics who market their services to vulnerable individuals.

超自然挑战有一种半开玩笑的特质，邀请人们来证明他们作为通灵者或心灵感应者的技能有点像做作的宣传噱头，以吸引人们对该中心更严肃的工作的关注，即反对公共生活中潜在的有害的伪科学，“调查小组”发起了反对声称提高佩戴者运动能力的手镯、冒充合法的保健专业人员继续教育的假替代医学课程，以及自称是灵媒的人向脆弱的个人推销他们的服务。

The Center for Inquiry, the Investigation Group’s parent organization, devotes the bulk of its resources to defending the separation of church and state and atheists’ rights. “To move forward, we need to discard old superstitions, prejudices, and magical thinking and embrace facts, evidence, and critical thinking,” the center’s mission statement reads. “It’s about more than whether or not God exists. It’s about more than whether ghosts roam among us, aliens hover above us, or psychics can see within us.” What’s left over after the superstition is discarded are a lot of the community bonds that people find in church: communx with people who believe with equal fervor the things that they do, a desire to convert other people to their way of thinking, and a sense that their most dearly held principles are under siege. On this latter part, they’re not entirely wrong.

“调查小组”的母体组织“调查中心”，将其大部分资源用于捍卫政教分离和无神论者的权利。该中心的使命宣言写道“为了向前迈进，我们需要抛弃旧的迷信、偏见和奇思，拥抱事实、证据和批判性思维”。
“这不仅仅是上帝是否存在的问题，这不仅仅是关于鬼魂是否在我们周围游荡，外星人是否在我们头顶盘旋，或者灵媒是否能看到我们的内心的问题”，迷信被抛弃后剩下的就是人们在教堂里找到的许多共同纽带: 与那些对自己所做的事情有同样热情的信徒交流：渴望改变他人的思维方式，以及分享他们最珍视的原则受到攻击的感觉，关于后者，他们并非完全错误。

By the time a person is committed deeply enough to their paranormal beliefs to apply for something like the Paranormal Challenge, “there is no way that the skeptical groups will ever make any inroads with them. If that is their goal, it won’t work,” Bader said. “When someone’s deeply invested in a belief system — and I’ve seen this with conspiracy theories and paranormal beliefs for a long time — there’s always a ready explanation [for why a test fails]. The difficulty is to figure out how we can get people to a place where they’re ready to question their own beliefs.”
当一个人对自己的超自然信仰足够坚定，并申请类似“超自然挑战”这样的活动时，“持怀疑态度的团体是不可能对他们有任何影响的，如果这是他们的目标，那就不会奏效。”“当一个人对一个信仰体系投入了很多时间ーー我已经在阴谋论和超自然信仰中看到了这一点ーー总有一个现成的解释[为什么测试失败]，困难的地方在于，我们如何才能让人们愿意质疑自己的信仰。”
There have been skeptics for as long as there has been belief. At the moment, however, standing up for science feels particularly quixotic. A few thousand people read Skeptical Inquirer; many more millions read conspiracy pages on Facebook. The misinformation just keeps growing. “It’s been a bit disheartening for me,” Underdown said. “It’s like, holy shit, where do we start? I mean, this is massive, this mountain we need to chip away at. But I think it starts with understanding it.”

只要有信仰，就会有怀疑论者。然而，此时此刻，为科学挺身而出显得格外不切实际，也许有几千人阅读《怀疑问询报》 ，但还有数百万人在脸书上阅读阴谋论专页，错误的信息越来越多“这对我来说有点令人沮丧,”安德敦说“这就像，该死的，我们要从哪里开始呢？我的意思是，这座山是如此巨大，我们需要凿开它，但我认为，这要从了解它开始。”

“We need critical thinking more than ever at the moment. We may be on the verge of an effective vaccine for Covid, but there are so many people who will refuse to take it because of all this misinformation.”

“目前，我们比以往任何时候都更需要批判性思维，我们可能即将研制出针对新冠的有效疫苗，但由于所有这些错误信息，有太多人拒绝接种。”

The issue with believing that the Earth is flat and the moon landing was faked or that it’s possible to bend spoons with your mind is not just that these things aren’t true. It’s that ignoring the evidence that they aren’t true makes the believer more likely to accept other demonstrably false things that pose a danger to themselves and others: that the coronavirus is a hoax, for example, or that vaccines are dangerous instruments of government control, or that the nation’s politicians and entertainers are secretly evil pedophiles who must be stopped.

相信地球是平的，登月是伪造的，或者可以用意念弯曲勺子，其问题不仅仅在于这些事情不是真的，问题在于，人们无视证明这些东西不真实的证据，使得信徒更容易接受其他对其自身和其他人构成危险的明显错误的东西：例如新冠病毒是一个骗局，或者疫苗是政府控制的危险工具，或者这个国家的政客和艺人是秘密的、邪恶的恋童癖，必须被阻止。

“The problem with fringe beliefs is that often one conspiracy begets another,” writes author Colin Dickey in The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession With the Unexplained. “Once you’ve decided that the consensus is wrong about a given arena of scientific knowledge, it’s easier to cast suspicion on other consensus beliefs as well, and once you’ve made the choice to doubt mainstream science, it can be hard to pick and choose which orthodoxies to discard.”

作家科林 · 迪奇在《不明身份者: 神秘怪物、遭遇外星人和我们对不明身份的迷恋》一书中写道：“边缘信仰的问题在于，往往一个阴谋论会招致另一个阴谋论 ”，“一旦你认定，在某个特定的科学知识领域，共识是错误的，那么就很容易对其他共识的信念产生怀疑，而且一旦你选择怀疑主流科学，你就很难选择抛弃哪些正统观点了。”

The current pandemic has proliferated in part because of a lack of national consensus on the basic scientific fact of its existence and lethality. Action on climate change has stalled for decades while politicians have turned a scientific discussion into a cultural debate. Rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to protest a coordinated attack on democracy that never actually happened. Believing in things that aren’t true has become a national, if not global, emergency. We’re all stuck in a version of the Paranormal Challenge, one with much higher stakes than prize money.

目前新冠疫情之所以激增，部分原因是全国对其存在和致命性这一基本科学事实缺乏共识。几十年来，应对气候变化的行动一直停滞不前，而政治家们已经把科学讨论变成了文化辩论，暴徒冲进国会大厦，抗议一场针对民主的有组织的袭击，但实际上并未发生，相信那些不真实的东西已经成为一个国家，甚至是全球的紧急情况，我们都被困在了相当于某种类型的“超自然挑战”中，但赌注比奖金要高得多。

“We need critical thinking more than ever at the moment,” French said. “We may be on the verge of an effective vaccine for Covid, but there are so many people who will refuse to take it because of all this misinformation… I don’t think there has ever been a point in my life when things have felt as out of control and uncertain as they do at this moment.”

“我们现在比以往任何时候都更需要批判性思维，”弗兰奇说“我们可能即将研制出针对新冠的有效疫苗，但是有太多人因为这些错误信息而拒绝接种......我认为在我的生命中从未有过哪个时刻事情像此刻这样失控和不确定。”

Arnold’s test for the Paranormal Challenge never happened. He bailed on the playing card test, invalidating his application for one calendar year, and afterward he and Underdown exchanged testy emails about what was actually agreed to on test day. (After the story’s publication, Arnold said family circumstances also contributed to his decision to skip the test.) Rather than subject his abilities to quizzing by nonbelievers, Arnold has decided to focus on sharing his message with a more receptive audience. He has made a half-hour documentary that’s mostly clips of his recordings and shots of himself talking to a hand-held camera.

阿诺德的超自然挑战测试根本没有发生，他放弃了卡牌测试，在一年内撤销了自己的申请，之后他和和安德敦就测试当天的实际约定交换了一封愤怒的电子邮件( 该报道发表后，阿诺德说家庭环境也是他决定不参加考试的原因之一)，阿诺德决定把重点放在与更乐于接受的观众上，以分享他的观点，而不是让那些不相信他的人来测试他的能力，他制作了一支一个半小时的纪录片，其中大部分是他的录音片段和他自己对着手持摄像机说话的镜头剪辑。

“What I’m going public with is, it’s true we’re not alone,” he says. He knows this is hard to accept. He felt that way once, too. But “sometimes,” he says, “you need to adjust your way of thinking when you’re confronted with evidence that your thinking is wrong.”

“ 我要开诚布公的是，我们并不孤单，这是事实，”他说，他知道这很难接受，他也曾经有过这种感觉，但是“有时候,”他说，“当你面对的证据表明你的想法是个错误的时候，你需要调整你的思维方式。”
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upxe: An earlier version of this story misstated in which ear Gary Arnold believes he hears paranormal signals and where he lives. He hears the signals in his right ear, and he lives in southeastern Pennsylvania.

更新：这个故事的一个早期版本被错误的描述了，在这个版本里，加里 · 阿诺德相信他听到了超自然的信号，以及他住在哪里，他是右耳听到信号的，他住在宾夕法尼亚州的东南部。