Are people blind to unexplained phenomena because their brains simply can’t handle anything they don’t understand? This story, quoted in social science circles and popular with New Agers, was repeated in the recent film What The Bleep Do We Know? – “When the tall European ships first approached the early Native Americans, it was such an ‘impossible’ vision in their reality that their highly filtered perceptions couldn’t register what was happening, and they literally failed to ‘see’ the ships.” 1

A more detailed account, “allegedly found in a diary in Magellan’s own handwriting”, 2 describes how South Americans could see the boats that the explorers landed in, but not the ships anchored offshore.