One-third of Americans believe in ghosts and UFOs: poll wrote:Thu Oct 25, 10:40 PM
By The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - It was bad enough when the TV and lights inexplicably flicked on at night, Misty Conrad says.
When her daughter began talking to an unseen girl named Nicole and neighbours said children had been murdered in the house, it was time to move.
Put Conrad, a homemaker is firmly in the camp of the 34 per cent of Americans who say they believe in ghosts in a pre-Halloween poll by The Associated Press and Ipsos. That is the same proportion who believe in unidentified flying objects - exceeding the 19 per cent who accept the existence of spells or witchcraft.
Forty-eight per cent believe in extrasensory perception, or ESP.
To put the roughly one-third who believe in ghosts and UFOs in perspective, it is about the same as, in recent AP-Ipsos polls, the 36 per cent who said they are baseball fans; the 37 per cent who said the United States made the right decision to invade Iraq and the 31 per cent who approve of the job President George W.Bush is doing.
A smaller but still substantial 23 per cent say they have actually seen a ghost or believe they have been in one's presence, with the most likely candidates for such visits including single people, Roman Catholics and those who never attend religious services. By 31 per cent to 18 per cent, more liberals than conservatives report seeing a spectre.
Those who dismissed the existence of ghosts include Morris Swadener, 66, a U.S. navy retiree.
He says he shot one with his rifle when he was a child.
"I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a white ghost in my closet," he said.
"I discovered I'd put a hole in my brand new white shirt. My mother and father were not amused."
Three in 10 have awakened sensing a strange presence in the room. For whatever it says about matrimony, singles are more likely than married people to say so.
Fourteen per cent - mostly men and lower-income people - say they have seen a UFO. Among them is Danny Eskanos, 44, a lawyer who says as a teenager he watched a bright light dart across the sky, making abrupt stops and turns.
"I knew a little about airplanes and helicopters and it was not that," he said.
"It's one of those things that sticks in your mind."
Spells and witchcraft are more readily believed by urban dwellers, minorities and lower-earning people. Those who find credibility in ESP are more likely to be better educated and white - 51 per cent of college graduates compared with 37 per cent with a high school diploma or less, about the same proportion by which white believers outnumber minorities.
Overall, the 48 per cent who accept ESP is less than the 66 per cent who gave that answer to a similar 1996 Newsweek magazine question.
One in five say they are at least somewhat superstitious, with young men, minorities and the less educated more likely to go out of their way to seek luck. Twenty-six per cent of urban residents - twice the rate of those from rural areas - said they are superstitious, while single men were more superstitious than unmarried women, 31 per cent to 17 per cent.
The most admitted-to superstition, by 17 per cent, was finding a four-leaf clover. Thirteen per cent dread walking under a ladder or the groom seeing his bride before their wedding, while slightly smaller numbers named black cats, breaking mirrors, opening umbrellas indoors, Friday the 13th or the number 13.
The poll, conducted Oct. 16-18, involved telephone interviews with 1,013 adults and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
There are a signifigant portion of people out there who believe in this stuff . . . but only in a general sense. We need to push the belief fraction much closer to 100% and we need to start getting the practical details out to more and more people. Otherwise, when the time comes, we're going to be defenceless.
