Communicating Astronomy with the Public Journal

“The truth is out there”: Tracking the rise of pseudoscience (page 16)
Impey, C.

The rising tide of misinformation is compromising civic discourse, and the pervasiveness of pseudoscience threatens rational decision-making on scientific issues. This paper uses Google Books and Google Trends data to report on several types of astronomical pseudoscience in English language books since 1800 and English language online searches since 2004, with a particular focus on the United States regarding Internet searches. These tools can be unreliable for diagnosing subtle or short-term trends, but they are robust for major trends over long timescales. Astrology, UFO and related terms have increased in occurrence in books over the past half-century and in web searches since 2004. In the 21st century, there is a striking rise in the occurrence of the word horoscope in books and its use in web searches. Mention of UFO has increased steadily in books since 1950, and spikes in web searches in the 21st-century track with a national UFO reporting database. Three aspects of the “culture” of UFOs have appeared much more frequently in books since the 1990s: alien abduction, crop circle, and ancient astronauts. For web searches since 2004, the first two dominate, with the search peaks generally correlated with the release of related movies. By all these measures, pseudoscience is on the rise.

Suggested Citation (APA)
Impey, C. (2024). “The truth is out there”: Tracking the rise of pseudoscience. Communicating Astronomy with the Public Journal, 35, 16-24. https://www.capjournal.org/issues/35/35_16.pdf