I think American culture used to be much more credulous toward paranormal bullshit. Uri Gellar and whatnot. Psychic powers, telekinesis, dowsing rods... Miss Cleo. Religious cranks doing their think-of-the-children routine about Ouija boards and crystal energy as if the woo-woo nonsense might work.

In the 1970s people were convinced there would be scientific confirmation of psychic powers.

When I read The Exorcist book the old priest is trying to figure out if the girl is really possessed or if she's just 'using the psychic powers all teenagers are able to demonstrate to a degree'.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-most-believe-in-psychic-phenomena/

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

That's a fair distinction. Later printings of Asimov's "Childhood's End" begin with an apology, because even he thought an infectious hivemind was merely speculative fiction.

Nonetheless: it's unlike bigfoot and UFOs, where only the proliferation of cameras made "I seent it!" grossly insufficient evidence. This was always kind of stupid. People bought it based on vibes, took it quite seriously for some damn reason, and apparently clung to it through the turn of the millennium. Psychic nonsense in particular coincides with the popularity of stage magic, hypnotism, and seances - all supposedly distinguished as demonstrable events within a rationalist worldview. They were gently legitimized by Zener cards and spirit phones, which were vague enough to bicker about, instead of being an obvious hoax like the Cottingley Fairies.

Meanwhile, young-earth creationists remain convinced science will vindicate them. Any day now.

I still feel like, if ChatGPT was a thing in the 90s, there'd be people convinced the government secretly had fully sentient superintelligences they kept to themselves. It would be a constant undercurrent referenced on talk radio and seeping into public discourse. Really, 9/11 conspiracy theories might've been the final peak for such amorphous claims. Even COVID denialism was just "nuh uh" followed by wishful thinking. Idiots chugged horse dewormer and mumbled about laboratories, but any grand wackadoodle narratives were confined to political cartoons that read like parody. Both cases were surely tempered by the fact a lot of people died. You can freely yap about bigfoot at the local dive bar. You could start a screaming row by suggesting anything happened besides what the entire country watched in real-time.