Deborah Hyde joins the Plutopia News Network podcast to explore why sane, rational people can sincerely report supernatural experiences — ghosts, werewolves, UFOs — without those experiences necessarily reflecting reality. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, social influence (including “mass sociogenic” phenomena), history, and folklore, she argues that anecdotes matter as human testimony but have limits as evidence because they aren’t controlled data. The conversation ranges from the many cultural uses of werewolf stories (allegory, scapegoating, witch-trial paranoia, even sympathetic tales) to Satan as a monotheistic “accounting device” for evil, and to modern belief systems like flat earth and anti-vax thinking as expressions of agency, fear, and distrust of expertise. Hyde emphasizes respectful skepticism — honoring people’s experiences while questioning interpretations — and notes how popular media reshapes folklore, why skeptics must be comfortable with ambiguity, and how studying “unreal” creatures still reveals real truths about human nature.

Deborah Hyde:

We do accept that human beings have lots of very strange experiences, and let’s dig into why the experiences may not represent reality, why perfectly sane people can have these experiences. And you can have independent neurological explanations, psychological explanations. Social explanations are a huge one. There are so many examples throughout history of mass sociogenic conditions where people go through dancing manias or something like that. Social influences on people really do make a difference to their perceptions and to their behaviour. That’s the whole point of it just being somebody’s experience, because you’re not dealing with data, you’re not dealing with controlled experiments or anything like that, you are dealing with anecdotes. And anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean nothing, but there is a limit to what it means.

Photo by Karl Withakay. Creative Commons license: CC BY-SA 4.0

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