What Were They Thinking?

People are weird. We're such a strange combination of messy biology and competing motivations, sometimes we erupt into acts so odd it takes deep research to figure out what the heck we were thinking in the first place. The research, though, makes for good reading.

In 1997 in British Columbia, a former logger cut down a tree sacred to the local people just so he could protest (wait for it) the cutting down of trees. Yes, it takes an entire book to explain how that makes sense. The Golden Spruce goes into great detail concerning local mythology, colonial history, the logging industry and the strange workings of the protester's mind to piece together how such a thing could happen.

Back in the middle ages, every now and then the local peasants started dancing for days on end for no immediate reason, and it wasn't happy dancing, either. They cried out in misery, badly damaged their feet and sometimes literally exhausted themselves to death. The Dancing Plague tries to figure out why by chronicling one particular incident in Strasbourgh during the summer of 1518. Chances are, these very spiritual people were suffering so much from drought and plague that they just snapped, slipping into a terrifying trance, and as everyone knows, dancing is infectious.

Fringe-ology goes one step further and approaches all this weirdness with a stubbornly open mind. Steve Volk investigates UFO sightings, remote viewing, near-death experiences and a handful of other questionable material, coming out a touch more sympathetic to the believers and considerably more skeptical of professional skeptics.

Just take a look around at your fellow men and women. We are stranger and more mysterious than we think.