You have seen scientists debunk the paranormal before. You have seen the condescending eyebrow, the impatient sigh, the eye roll. Barry Markovsky is not that scientist.
He is the scientist who as a twelve-year-old boy lay on his back in the backyard of a Boston suburb, stared up at a moonless sky, and watched a point of light slow to a dead stop and reverse direction. He is the scientist who once woke from a dream about an earthquake, went to work at Stanford, and then felt the building shake beneath him an hour later. He is the scientist who walked into a haunted vape shop in South Carolina with a notebook, and walked out genuinely unsure whether the man he investigated was a liar or a true believer. He is the scientist who dated a naturopath and had to decide whether to tell her the truth about homeopathy. He is the scientist who spent years trying to pry a data set out of Transcendental Meditation researchers who kept inventing new reasons why he could never see it.
Dr. Barry Markovsky earned his Ph.D. from Stanford, spent decades on the faculties of the University of Iowa and the University of South Carolina, and served as director of the Sociology Program at the National Science Foundation. But his new book, Everyday Extraordinary, is not a faculty report. It is eighteen true stories from his own life, each one beginning with the raw moment of strangeness exactly as he experienced it, and then peeling it back. Not to ridicule. Not to dismiss. But to understand.
He has a name for the move that changes everything. He calls it the fourth response. When something inexplicable happens, most people move through three reactions in sequence. First, uncertainty. Then they look outward. Then they look inward. And then they stop. The fourth response is the one almost nobody takes. I wonder if I can make this happen again. That single question, applied to a lifetime of genuinely bizarre personal experiences, is what produced this book.
Tonight we are going to cover all of it. UFOs. Ghosts. ESP. Intercessory prayer tested on eighteen hundred heart patients. A Transcendental Meditation study that claimed to reduce casualties in the Lebanon War using collective meditation, and the years-long battle to get the data behind that claim. Conspiracy theories. Alternative medicine. Havana Syndrome. Astrology. Numerology. Psychics. And the deepest question of all: what does a man who has spent his entire career studying how beliefs form actually believe himself, in the places he cannot prove?
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