WEIRD SCIENCE

By LEON JAROFF

It was a wrenching transition, from space to spacey. The Today show devoted much of its program one morning to the successful rendezvous of the shuttle Discovery with the Russian space station Mir, including a live interview by co-hosts Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric with the elated American crew aboard the orbiting Discovery.

Immediately following Today, however, NBC turned its attention to other, seemingly unwilling space travelers: ordinary humans who claim to have been rudely kidnapped by aliens, taken aboard spacecraft, subjected to humiliating experiments and returned to Earth, stupefied but usually unharmed. This exercise in virtual unreality was conducted, apparently without embarrassment, by The Other Side, a daily, hourlong nbc talk show that takes what it calls "an objective look at psychic phenomena, esp, ghosts, alternative healing and more."

It is strange enough to see a major broadcast network giving serious consideration to subjects like -- to pick a few recent examples -- "My Co-Worker Is a Ghost," "Psychic Peeping Toms" and "A Dead Celebrity Is Taking Over My Life." But The Other Side is just the latest entry in a fast-growing TV genre that rivals the most irrepressible supermarket tabloids in promoting pseudoscience and the paranormal. No claims seem too outlandish for the ratings-hungry producers: pets that are psychic; ufos that battle with Iranian fighter pilots; people who travel in time or have "out-of-body" experiences.

In addition to The Other Side, paranormal topics are pursued relentlessly on Encounters, a Sunday-night show on the Fox network; Sightings, a weekly syndicated program currently seen on 205 stations; and The Extraordinary, another syndicated show carried on 114 stations. NBC's long-running Unsolved Mysteries, which generally deals with crimes and disappearances, is delving more frequently into the paranormal. Meanwhile, Fox's slick, high-rated The X-Files gives its fictional tales of the supernatural a whiff of authenticity by framing them as cases from a unit of the fbi that investigates paranormal phenomena.

As a group, these shows are a celebration of the nonexistent, a feast for the eyes and ears of the gullible. While some TV executives privately acknowledge that many of the subjects presented are pure hokum, they argue that the shows are entertaining and do no harm. "There's a seeker born every minute," puns Bradley Anderson, producer of Encounters. "The people who watch paranormal programming are looking for something to believe in."

They have apparently found it. The reason NBC embraced The Other Side, says executive producer Ron Ziskin, "is the research indicating that people are interested in it and believe it." A Roper poll taken last year indicates that nearly a quarter of Americans believe in extraterrestrial UFOS and astrology, and nearly a third put stock in faith healing. Most startling, another poll found that as many as 2% of Americans, or nearly 5 million people, claim to have been abducted and taken aboard spacecraft by aliens.

One of them is Travis Walton, whose purported alien abduction was the basis for the 1993 movie Fire in the Sky. Repeating his story on The Other Side, Walton told of being hit "by a powerful bolt of energy" one night as he approached a glowing disklike object hovering over a highway. He recalled losing consciousness and awakening inside a spacecraft, surrounded by aliens. To the accompaniment of a hokey re-enactment, he described attempting to escape, then being caught and subdued. Will Miller, the show's host, posed a few skeptical questions, but looked impressed nonetheless. "One thing we do know," he said, "is that many scientists, government officials, medical doctors and academics agree that something is going on here, something that deserves our attention."

Sightings devotes its attention to similarly weird tales. In recent weeks, for example, it has done stories on ufo hot spots, the "most haunted mansion in America" and a ghost named Sallie, who has tormented a Midwestern family, inflicting scratches on the unfortunate father. In an earlier program, John Burke, a "crop-circle investigator," discussed ice circles -- geometric forms that have previously appeared in grain fields and now, he claims, have begun to show up on frozen lakes and ponds. Instead of ascribing them to the pranksters and bored farmers responsible for the designs, the show suggested that they are created by artistic extraterrestrials. Encounters too takes a gullible attitude toward such stories as the purported governmental cover-up of a UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico, and the secreting away of three -- or four, or seven -- little bodies of the alien crew.

Some guest "experts" have become quite familiar to fans of the paranormal. Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, perhaps the university's greatest embarrassment since LSD guru Timothy Leary, is a frequent visitor on these shows, insisting that he believes patients who tell him of being whisked aboard spacecraft. "Alien abductees are given a terrifying message," he claims. "We are being given a choice to change our ways." And James Van Praagh, a self-proclaimed medium who specializes in communicating with the dead, is a regular visitor to these shows. In comforting bereaved parents by pretending to deliver messages from their departed offspring, he uses techniques blatantly obvious to magicians.

Despite the nonsense that prevails on these shows, several of them make a pretense of objectivity by including rebuttals by scientists and skeptics. But any reasoned responses are generally lost in a barrage of fanciful fiction. One critic of the paranormal, Michael Shermer, a professor of science history at Occidental College in Los Angeles, was invited to participate in an episode of The Other Side that addressed alien abductions. According to Shermer, host Miller urged him before the show not to be too harsh on the "abductees." "Don't be a curmudgeon," Miller pleaded. On the air, Shermer recalls, after he had made telling points about how unlikely the abductions were, Miller tugged on his sleeve, quietly urging him to stop.

What the paranormal productions have most in common is a paranoid distrust of government, nasa officials, legitimate scientists and, in general, the Establishment. All these institutions and groups, in the opinion of many of the paranormalists, are engaged in vast cover-ups, keeping the public ignorant about the aliens who pilot UFOS, kidnap humans and create structures and monuments on Mars and the moon. "We make a lot of hay about the idea that there is a mistrust of government," admits Chris Carter, executive producer of The X-Files. "One of our mantras on The X-Files is 'trust no one.' I'm trying to entertain people in paranoid times."

Though producers treat these shows as mere entertainment, many viewers do not. A study involving 187 students conducted by communication professor Glenn Sparks of Purdue University found that exposure to such programs heightened belief in the paranormal. And when that exposure is constant, says University of Oregon psychologist Ray Hyman, each new repetition of a paranormal tale, even when related with a skeptical tone, "makes it more and more believable." Scientists are worried, too, that the proliferation of paranormal TV is contributing to the public's scientific illiteracy, which they regard as a national liability in a high-tech age. "If you are awash in lost continents and channeling and ufos," says astronomer Carl Sagan, "you may not have intellectual room for the findings of science."

Yet producers and hosts of the new batch of shows seem unconcerned about any negative impact of their efforts. When Miller was hired as host of The Other Side, he recalls, "I made a deal with them. I said, 'You keep any sleazy stuff out, and I'll do all the weird stuff you want.'" Miller has obviously kept his end of the bargain. --With reporting by Hunter Whitney/Los Angeles and Lawrence Mondi/New York

With reporting by HUNTER WHITNEY/LOS ANGELES AND LAWRENCE MONDI/NEW YORK