WEIRD SCIENCE

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It was a wrenching transition, from space to spacey. The Today show devoted much of its program one morning to the successful rendezvous of the shuttle Discovery with the Russian space station Mir, including a live interview by co-hosts Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric with the elated American crew aboard the orbiting Discovery.

Immediately following Today, however, NBC turned its attention to other, seemingly unwilling space travelers: ordinary humans who claim to have been rudely kidnapped by aliens, taken aboard spacecraft, subjected to humiliating experiments and returned to Earth, stupefied but usually unharmed. This exercise in virtual unreality was conducted, apparently without embarrassment, by The Other Side, a daily, hourlong nbc talk show that takes what it calls "an objective look at psychic phenomena, esp, ghosts, alternative healing and more."

It is strange enough to see a major broadcast network giving serious consideration to subjects like -- to pick a few recent examples -- "My Co-Worker Is a Ghost," "Psychic Peeping Toms" and "A Dead Celebrity Is Taking Over My Life." But The Other Side is just the latest entry in a fast-growing TV genre that rivals the most irrepressible supermarket tabloids in promoting pseudoscience and the paranormal. No claims seem too outlandish for the ratings-hungry producers: pets that are psychic; ufos that battle with Iranian fighter pilots; people who travel in time or have "out-of-body" experiences.

In addition to The Other Side, paranormal topics are pursued relentlessly on Encounters, a Sunday-night show on the Fox network; Sightings, a weekly syndicated program currently seen on 205 stations; and The Extraordinary, another syndicated show carried on 114 stations. NBC's long-running Unsolved Mysteries, which generally deals with crimes and disappearances, is delving more frequently into the paranormal. Meanwhile, Fox's slick, high-rated The X-Files gives its fictional tales of the supernatural a whiff of authenticity by framing them as cases from a unit of the fbi that investigates paranormal phenomena.

As a group, these shows are a celebration of the nonexistent, a feast for the eyes and ears of the gullible. While some TV executives privately acknowledge that many of the subjects presented are pure hokum, they argue that the shows are entertaining and do no harm. "There's a seeker born every minute," puns Bradley Anderson, producer of Encounters. "The people who watch paranormal programming are looking for something to believe in."

They have apparently found it. The reason NBC embraced The Other Side, says executive producer Ron Ziskin, "is the research indicating that people are interested in it and believe it." A Roper poll taken last year indicates that nearly a quarter of Americans believe in extraterrestrial UFOS and astrology, and nearly a third put stock in faith healing. Most startling, another poll found that as many as 2% of Americans, or nearly 5 million people, claim to have been abducted and taken aboard spacecraft by aliens.