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Id Hysteria Says More About Some People's Freudian 'Id' Than About Science, William W. Cobern
Id Hysteria Says More About Some People's Freudian 'Id' Than About Science, William W. Cobern
Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project
One of the dumbest things I have ever heard from an otherwise intelligent person came not quite a decade ago and from astronomer Alan Hale commenting on the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide (Hale, 1997). It is silly enough that he thought that his personal encounters with a few psychotic speculators regarding the Hale-Bopp comet represented a commonly held view of comets; but no, we learn from Alan Hale that the real reason 39 people in the Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide is that they were ignorant and superstitious. They apparently didn’t know that after all a comet is nothing more …