This is an atonement post for yesterday's "What I Did Today" blah fest. "Nothing" would have told the story.
According to a Harris Poll conducted the first two weeks in November, 32% of US believe in UFOs, while a whopping 42% believe in ghosts.
The US is easily the most educated nation in the world, mandated to provide free schooling for everyone grades K - 12. And college is available to anyone who wants it.
Just about every nation on four continents educates most of their populations (except, you know, freedom-loving shitholes like Saudi Arabia, where women don't need no schoolin'), and provide degrees for the gifted.
But the US provides for all, even the challenged, and we damn well should be the smartest people on earth.
So how can nearly half the best-educated people on earth believe in ghosts? My guess is fewer than 1% of the US claim interaction with a ghost. That's the flagship for this raft of believers?
UFOs are more plausible. My skepticism lies in the majority of sighting are reported from the backwoods, swamps, and deserts, while the visitors shy from lights, which would seem what attracted them to the third stone.
The same Harris Poll claimed 45% approve Darwin's theory of evolution, but no one has ever given a satisfactory rendition to me. Other references cite as few as 25% adherents, but I'll stay with the Harris' percentile, which means over half of US refute what is self-evident. In keeping with my simplistic understanding of rudimentary science, I give you the sparrow.
Birds of Eastern North America, by Sterry & Small, lists 23 species of sparrows, living east of the Mississippi.
23!
That is an incredible amount of variation for the smaller half of the continent, and it defies any other explanation.
So why do nearly as many people in the US believe in ghosts as accept Darwin's Theory, which even I can prove as irrefutable with an example everyone but cavedwellers see every day?
Maybe no one's looking.