"Space-God" Debunking Revisited

 

 The possibility that "ancient aliens" visited Earth in the distant past is something that's always fascinated me. As I've written about before, it's an idea that was discussed in highbrow, pseudo-academic circles long before Erich von Daniken, but it's since become inextricably associated with his name due to the enormous popularity of his books. Von Daniken gives his target audience exactly what they want - easy-to-understand sensationalism, without having to worry too much about historical or anthropological credibility. The flipside is that he's a sitting target for debunkers.

Back in November 2015 I did a post called Space-Gods and Venusians, the latter part of which dealt with an early book-length debunking of von Daniken, The Space Gods Revealed (1976) by Ronald Story. Though I missed it at the time, a few months earlier (on 21 January 2015 - coincidentally 9 years ago to the day) fellow blogger Kid Robson produced a post of his own about another book, also from 1976, in a similar vein: The Gospel According to Science Fiction by John Allan (pictured above alongside Ronald Story's book).

Kid's blog usually focuses on comics and collectables, occasionally touching on other aspects of popular culture and nostalgia - and it's highly recommended to anyone interested in such things. Kid has recently been good enough to post a few guest pieces by myself, and he's just drawn my attention to that earlier post - Chariots of the Frauds - thinking it might be of interest to me. It certainly is, and with his permission I'll summarize the gist of it here (or you could just read the original by clicking on the link in the previous sentence).

As Kid points out at the start of his post, when von Daniken's books first came out they were such a hit with the public that ideas from them found their way into 1970s popular culture. To quote Kid:

Comic-book readers saw such themes played out in the four-colour pages of Jack Kirby's The Eternals, and TV programmes mined the topic for its rich seam of interest and controversy.

He goes on to talk about John Allan's book, which he says was written from a religious perspective, although that doesn't detract from the book's interest. Here's Kid again:

What I found interesting was how it dealt with so-called 'evidence' that, on a superficial level at least, seems quite persuasive. For example, according to von Daniken, there's an island in the Nile called Elephantinos, which has been so named for centuries, and is shaped, apparently, like an elephant. However, this shape can only be noticed from the air - so who, von Daniken wonders, went up to find out - and how did they do it?

This is characteristic of von Daniken. He poses a seeming mystery and leaves it at that, without investigating further. But as Kid says:

The Greek word elephantinos doesn't translate as 'like an elephant' as von Daniken claims, but simply means 'ivory'. Guess what, though? The island was once the site of an ivory market, hence, unsurprisingly, the name.

Even more tellingly, Kid points out that aerial pictures of the island don't actually look anything like an elephant - something I'll come back to in a moment. He concludes his post with a rhetorical question:

Was von Daniken ignoring the facts and loading the dice in his favour for the purpose of selling a few books, or was he serious in his speculations on the origins of mankind?

I'm sure everyone will have their own views on that question. Personally I'd put most weight on the first alternative - that, unless von Daniken was extraordinarily stupid, he must have realized he was twisting the facts and stretching the truth to get an interesting "story" across to his avid readers. But speaking as a writer myself, if that was a cynical ploy designed to sell books, then all I can say is more power to him! It's fair enough to speculate that ancient humans may have been helped along by aliens (I wouldn't rule out that possibility myself), but most of von Daniken's so-called evidence is flimsy to say the least. As I said earlier, this makes him an easy target for debunkers. I even had a go at it myself, ten years ago, in an online "Classroom" article called What Are the Flaws in the Ancient Astronaut Theory?

As for the specific case of Elephantine Island, Kid is quite right that it's shaped nothing like an elephant. Ronald Story makes the same point in The Space Gods Revealed, amusingly noting that the island "looks more like a spaceship than an elephant!" It's the large, vaguely phallic-shaped island in this image from Google Maps:

Pseudoscience and Science Fiction

It doesn’t seem that long ago (February and March this year) that I wrote a couple of posts featuring motley arrays of offbeat science fiction and pseudoscience books, which I described as research for a book I was writing. So I’m really pleased to be able to follow up those posts with the array of books pictured above – my author’s copies of Pseudoscience and Science Fiction, which has just been published by Springer. This is one of the world’s biggest academic publishers, based in Germany, and they really do have a very slick and streamlined system for getting books out quickly and to a very high professional standard.

I know what you’re thinking. Why should a prestigious academic publisher want to touch a book about such non-academic topics as pseudoscience and science fiction? Well, they do popular science books as well, and one of their ongoing lines is called Science and Fiction. Aimed at “science buffs, scientists and science fiction fans”, the series is a mixture of fiction (often written by professional scientists) and non-fiction. The latter primarily looks at the “real” science in science fiction, in a similar vein to some of Brian Clegg’s books (cf. From Science Fiction to Science Fact). But I felt there was a gap in the market that needed to be filled. What about the pseudoscience in science fiction? After all, pseudoscience is a lot more exciting – and much easier to understand – than real science, and hence much more fiction-friendly. On top of that, there are numerous examples of explicit interactions between science fiction and pseudoscience – much more than between either of those disciplines and academic science.

This is a subject I felt eminently qualified to write about. My house is filled with books, and perhaps two-thirds of them are science, pseudoscience or science fiction. Not to mention my vast collection of Fortean Times magazines, going back more than twenty years. I just searched the final text of Pseudoscience and Science Fiction for “Fortean Times”, and it appears 55 times in 180 pages! So I had great fun writing the book, and I really hope it will appeal to the target audience of “science buffs, scientists and science fiction fans”.

Here is the publisher’s blurb (I had nothing to do with the last paragraph!):

Aliens, flying saucers, ESP, the Bermuda Triangle, antigravity … are we talking about science fiction or pseudoscience? Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference.

Both pseudoscience and science fiction (SF) are creative endeavours that have little in common with academic science, beyond the superficial trappings of jargon and subject matter. The most obvious difference between the two is that pseudoscience is presented as fact, not fiction. Yet like SF, and unlike real science, pseudoscience is driven by a desire to please an audience – in this case, people who “want to believe”. This has led to significant cross-fertilization between the two disciplines. SF authors often draw on “real” pseudoscientific theories to add verisimilitude to their stories, while on other occasions pseudoscience takes its cue from SF – the symbiotic relationship between ufology and Hollywood being a prime example of this.

This engagingly written, well researched and richly illustrated text explores a wide range of intriguing similarities and differences between pseudoscience and the fictional science found in SF.

For some reason the publishers put a 2017 date on the book, but don’t let that put you off – it’s out now. It’s available both as a paperback and an ebook, and there are lots of ways you can get hold of your copy. Here are a few links (the Amazon preview is particularly generous, if you want to get a flavour of the content and style of the book):

• Get Pseudoscience and Science Fiction from Amazon.com
• Get Pseudoscience and Science Fiction from Amazon UK
• Get Pseudoscience and Science Fiction from Waterstones
• Get Pseudoscience and Science Fiction from iTunes
• Get Pseudoscience and Science Fiction from Google Play
• Get Pseudoscience and Science Fiction from Springer’s own website

Astronomical debunking

ESA’s Gaia spacecraft was in the news a few weeks ago, when it produced a detailed map of the Galaxy (pictured above). But images like these don’t really reflect Gaia’s main mission, which is to measure accurate positions and velocities for millions of individual stars. That’s something I was interested in 30 years ago, and in fact I co-wrote a paper on the subject in 1986. Tucked away in an appendix to that paper is my one and only all-out attempt at scientific “debunking”. It probably isn’t of much interest to anyone but me – but then I thought last week’s post (about a popular video game) would have mass appeal, and it only got 81 views. So I really don’t care any more. I’m going to indulge myself.

The paper in question was co-written with James Binney, who was my boss at the time, and quite an authority on galactic dynamics (he co-authored the standard textbook on the subject, and I think he’s now involved in the Gaia project itself). After I’d dug out a hard copy of May & Binney (1986), and carefully scanned it into my computer, I discovered that all my astronomical papers are freely available online. There’s one about Black Holes from The Astrophysical Journal, and seven others from Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Among the latter, there’s one called “Solar-neighbourhood observations and the structure of the Galaxy” – and that’s the one I’m talking about here.

The title may sound odd, because the “solar neighbourhood” is usually taken to be about a thousand parsecs across, while the Galaxy as a whole is fifty times that size. But it’s only in the solar neighbourhood that we can measure the velocities of other stars with any accuracy. You have to extrapolate from these measurements to work out what’s happening elsewhere in the Galaxy. That’s helped by the fact that the oldest stars in the solar neighbourhood – sometimes called “halo stars” or “Population II” – tend to move on wide-ranging orbits that take them all over the place.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, an American astronomer named Olin Eggen claimed that some of the halo stars in the solar neighbourhood were moving on very similar orbits, even though they were physically separate from each other – not gravitationally bound in a tight cluster. That’s known to occur with some young stars in the Galactic disc – they’re called “moving groups”, made up of stars formed in the same gas cloud which haven’t had time to disperse – but the idea of equivalent moving groups of halo stars is something else altogether. It’s not “bad astronomy” in the Velikovsky league, but it’s the kind of brash, attention-grabbing claim that really needs to be examined closely. And that’s what we did in Appendix B of our paper (at this distance of time, I can’t remember if it was my idea or James’s – probably his, though in either case it would have been me who did all the calculations).

Like I said at the start, we ended up debunking the whole idea, using a mixture of statistics and dynamical calculations. You can see the whole appendix in the scan at the bottom of this post. I have no idea if anyone actually read this part of the paper, or paid any attention to it (according to Google Scholar, the paper has only collected 41 citations in the last 30 years). I don’t know what the current thinking about “halo moving groups” is, either. My guess is that (with the Galaxy being a more complex place than it used to be) they’re not as a-priori impossible as we thought – although I’d still put money on the specific halo groups “found” by Eggen being nothing more than wishful thinking.

I just had a quick look at Wikipedia’s article about Olin Eggen. It says “He first introduced the now-accepted notion of moving groups of stars” ... but I imagine that refers to Population I groups, not Population II. I did pick up another interesting snippet from that article, though. It says “After his death he was found to have been in possession of highly significant historical files and documents that had apparently gone missing for decades from the Royal Greenwich Observatory”.

No comment.

The Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition

The Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition in Drumnadrochit was much better than I’d expected it to be. As the most hyped-up cryptozoological tourist attraction in Britain, I’d assumed the visitor centre would dutifully tell people what they wanted to hear, with dumbed-down science and lots of far-fetched speculation. But it’s nothing like that at all. It features a series of sober and intelligent audio-visual presentations, together with museum displays of research equipment, newspaper cuttings and relics recovered from various wrecks. As for dumbing down – visitors (even the ten-year-old ones) are expected to take words like “bathymetry”, “pelagic”, “thermocline” and “refraction” in their stride.

In a way the Loch Ness Centre is another example of the Scottish skepticism I was talking about last week. This is particularly noticeable in the case of the best-known theory of the Loch Ness Monster, that it is a long-necked marine reptile such as a plesiosaur which has somehow managed to survive since Jurassic times. Admittedly the Loch Ness Centre features this image in their logo (which you can see in the photo above), and in innumerable toys and other souvenirs for sale in the gift shop. But inside the exhibition they stamp on this theory right at the very start. Any creature that managed to emerge unscathed from the Mesozoic would have been definitively killed off during the ice age, when the whole of Scotland was covered by a kilometre-thick block of ice for tens of thousands of years. Anything in the loch today that is larger than a single-celled micro-organism must have arrived after the ice melted. And why plesiosaurs anyway? They were pushed out of their ecological niche by whales and dolphins, which are found in plentiful numbers in the waters around Scotland.

The seemingly deep-rooted idea that a long-necked monster inhabits Loch Ness only dates from about a hundred years ago. Prior to that, mysterious sightings in the loch always referred to a “huge fish” or a “strange fish”. The word “monster”, prior to the early 20th century, only cropped up in the context of St Columba – the 6th century monk who brought Christianity to Scotland from Ireland. According to legend, Columba “drove away a water monster” in the River Ness near Inverness. It’s important to note, however, that this is a legend relating to a specific event – a miracle associated with a saint – and not recurring monster sightings by ordinary people.

A later development in Scottish folklore were the “water-horses” that were said to inhabit various lochs, including Loch Ness. Called kelpies, these creatures would drag unsuspecting travellers into the water and devour them. A pair of kelpies are the subject of a huge modern sculpture near Falkirk, about a hundred miles south of Loch Ness. At 30 metres (100 feet) in height, this is currently the largest statue in Britain. I only glimpsed it a few times from the M9 motorway, but my cousin, who stayed in Scotland longer than I did, sent me the following photo that she took after I left (she sent it via Facebook, which has the annoying habit of converting good quality, high resolution pictures into small, low resolution ones):

The general conclusion at the Loch Ness centre – again essentially a skeptical one – is that historical accounts of “water horses” and “huge fish” most likely refer to sightings of Atlantic sturgeon. These can grow to several metres in length, and do indeed have a vaguely horse-shaped head. The biggest problem with any large animal living in the Loch is the lack of sufficient food, but that doesn’t apply to sturgeon which are essentially sea creatures that would only be occasional visitors to the loch. While sturgeon have been spotted in and around Scotland in past centuries, they are virtually unknown there now (except for the definitely-not-monstrous First Minister, of course).

As for modern sightings of long-necked or serpentine creatures – most, if not all, of these can be explained as misidentifications (together with a few deliberate hoaxes). The visitor centre gives plenty of examples of floating logs, swimming deer, waterbirds and boat wakes all looking like convincing Loch Ness Monsters. I only spent a few minutes looking at the Loch, but even in that time I took the two pictures below which give an idea how misidentifications might arise. The one on the left contains a few dark specks which, if you zoom in on them, you can see are birds in flight. A couple of them have distinctly arc-like shapes which could be mistaken for “monster humps” under different viewing conditions. The second picture shows a boat trailing a wake, with another long wave that has been churned up by the boat in the foreground. Again, under different conditions (e.g. in foggier weather) the latter could be mistaken for a long, serpentine creature just below the surface.

Scottish Skepticism

I met up with my Canadian relatives for a few days in Scotland last week, and while I was waiting for them to arrive in Glasgow I walked over to Kelvingrove Park to see the statue of Lord Kelvin pictured above. Despite his high-sounding name, Kelvin wasn’t really an aristocrat – he was born plain William Thompson, and only acquired his title at the age of 68 in recognition of his scientific achievements (he took the name Kelvin from the river that flows past Glasgow University, where he worked). Today – rightly or wrongly – Lord Kelvin is best remembered as the archetype of the arrogantly self-confident scientist who refuses to believe anything that isn’t already enshrined in a textbook.

This reputation is only partly deserved. It’s true that Kelvin was overly skeptical about technological advancement – for example in 1902, the year before the Wright Brothers’ first flight, he confidently predicted that heavier-than-air flight would never be practical. However, his most famous pronouncement was actually cleverer and more perceptive than it appears at first sight. In 1900 (at the age of 76) he gave a speech suggesting that scientific theory was virtually complete except for what he described as “two little clouds in the sky”. With hindsight, given the huge revolutions in quantum theory and relativity that would turn physics on its head over the next few decades, Kelvin’s assertion looks ludicrously pompous. Yet the two clouds he was talking about – the Michelson-Morley experiment and the ultraviolet catastrophe (or lack thereof) – were pretty much the only phenomena known at the time which couldn’t be explained without relativity or quantum theory. So Kelvin’s only mistake was to assume that these “two little clouds” would turn out to have simple explanations, rather than domino-toppling, paradigm-shifting ones.

Personally I don’t believe Lord Kelvin was the blinkered and close-minded skeptic that history makes him out to be. If you’re really looking for the patron saint of skeptics, you need to go back to the 18th century and another Scotsman – David Hume. I wrote about him in some detail five years ago (David Hume: a skeptic in the 18th century) so you can just click on that link if you want the details. To put it in a nutshell (and again this is just a personal opinion), Hume was a nasty piece of work who pioneered the aggressively hardnosed “If I haven’t seen it with my own eyes, it doesn’t exist” brand of skepticism.

Anyway, I spotted a statue of Hume a couple of days later in the centre of Edinburgh. Amusingly, it shows him dressed like an arty-farty ancient Greek philosopher – somehow I doubt that it’s a depiction Hume himself would have appreciated!

Space-Gods and Venusians

Glastonbury is one of the few towns in this part of the world that still has a healthy number of second-hand bookstores. Even better, all these shops have sizeable sections devoted to Fortean subjects. On a visit there last week I bought ten books from three different shops, including these two classic “skeptical” works from the 1970s: The Space-Gods Revealed (1976) by Ronald Story and Can You Speak Venusian? (second edition, 1977) by Patrick Moore.

As I’ve probably said before, the striking thing about Fortean books of this vintage is how much less aggressive and bad-tempered they are compared with the situation today. Believers were content to get their ideas across in a calm voice, without gratuitous ad-hominem attacks on their opponents. And the same was true of skeptical authors, as these two books show.

On the face of it, Can You Speak Venusian? isn’t a skeptical book at all. Its subtitle is “A Guide to Independent Thinkers”, and the views of these Independent Thinkers (on subjects ranging from the Flat Earth, the Hollow Earth and Atlantis to Creationism, Flying Saucers and Astrology) are presented in an objective way with hardly any explicit criticism. Instead, the author relies on the old adage “If you give someone enough rope they’ll hang themselves”. The identity of the author is a clue, too. Until his death three years ago, Patrick Moore was the presenter of the longest-running science series on British TV, The Sky at Night.

Patrick Moore was famous for being an eccentric as well as a scientist. As a result, he seems to have had considerable respect for other eccentrics, even if their views were the opposite of his own. As he puts it: “The Independent Thinker is a genuine, well-meaning person, who is not hidebound by convention, and who is always ready to strike out on a line of his own – frequently, though not always, in the face of all the evidence.”

The book’s title is a reference to the last of the Independent Thinkers described in it, one Mr Bernard Byron of Romford. He claimed to be fluent, by means of interplanetary telepathy, in not just Venusian but also Plutonian and Krugerian (the language spoken on one of the planets of Kruger 60, a red dwarf binary star). The book includes an example of written Venusian (part of Mr Byron’s translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet), while a sample of the spoken language can be heard in this YouTube clip.

Mixed in with Moore’s deadpan account of crackpot theories, there’s a hint of active mischief-making. In 1957 a UFO magazine called Cosmic Voice printed a series of pseudo-academic articles which included such dubious-sounding names as R. T. Fischall (artificial), E. Ratic (erratic), Hotère (hot air) and Huizenaas (who’s an ass?). Initially the editor – George King, the founder of the Aetherius Society – was happy to print these, but he later “came to the conclusion that some of his contributors were not quite so serious or so scientific as he had been led to expect”. King’s prime suspect was Moore himself – who of course denied the whole thing (the book also refers to the Adamski-style contactee Cedric Allingham, who is widely believed to have been another of Patrick Moore’s mischievous alter egos).

Can You Speak Venusian? contains only a couple of relatively brief references to Erich von Däniken, but he’s the central target of Ronald Story’s The Space-Gods Revealed, which also dates from the mid-seventies. I’ve written about the “ancient astronaut” hypothesis several times before (see for example this article and this blog post). I don’t think it’s the “stupid idea” many people believe it to be – on the contrary, it would be stupid NOT to consider extraterrestrial visitation as a potential explanation for certain ancient legends, images or artifacts. Where the ancient alien enthusiasts go astray (and lose the sympathy of most ordinary people) is in always preferring an extraterrestrial explanation to a terrestrial one.

But on top of that, there’s another annoyance about von Däniken in particular – the way he gets all the credit for ideas (sometimes quite clever ideas) that were expressed much more carefully and precisely long before he wrote Chariots of the Gods (see numerous books by Desmond Leslie, Morris K. Jessup, Pauwels and Bergier, Robert Charroux, Brinsley LePoer Trench and W. R. Drake, to name just a few). So I was pleased to see that The Space-Gods Revealed isn’t so much a debunking of ancient aliens per se, as an exposé of von Däniken’s slapdash style. Here are a couple of good examples:

• In support of his ancient astronaut hypothesis, von Däniken makes an astonishing claim: that “ancient Egypt appears suddenly and without transition with a fantastic ready-made civilization,” and that it is “without recognizable prehistory!” Is he serious? If he had looked at almost any one of the approximately twenty thousand volumes of books and periodicals that have been written on the subject, he would have realized the absurdity of such a statement.
• 
  
• The “evidence” claimed by von Däniken to represent the science and technology of the ancient gods falls far short of what might be expected from an advanced race of beings capable of interstellar space travel […] Von Däniken refers to the Baghdad batteries as if they were indeed the products of an advanced alien technology […] If they are really batteries, then they would be the most primitive form of simple cell possible.

Old Books of the Fortean Kind

Pictured above is a genuine piece of retro-forteana – Phenomena: A Book of Wonders, produced way back in 1977 by John Michell and the founding editor of Fortean Times, Bob Rickard. It’s one of several books I picked up for a pound each from the Bookbarn shop, just off the A37 about half-way between Shepton Mallet and Bristol. Until a few years ago, this was the best bookshop in Somerset – literally a giant warehouse packed with second-hand treasures. Unfortunately the main warehouse was closed to the public after they catalogued all their decent stock and put it online. But visitors can still browse through the leftovers – the books that were too uncommercial to be worth cataloguing – in a smaller warehouse next door. Everything is a pound – which sounds cheap, although I somehow managed to spend a total of £18 on my visit last week!

You can get a pretty good idea of the contents of the Phenomena book from the words on the cover. It’s a pretty standard compendium of all the usual fortean topics – frog and fish falls, spontaneous human combustion, cattle mutilations, levitation, teleportation, cities in the sky, entombed toads, werewolves and so forth. The last two items on the list are rather more cryptic – “Arkeology” is shorthand for the archaeology of Noah’s Ark, while “Accidents to Iconoclasts” refers to mishaps that befall people who dare to interfere with ancient sites. The “Mummy’s Curse” is the best known example of this, but another case described in the book occurred less than five miles from the place where I bought it.

Everyone has heard of Avebury and Stonehenge, but far fewer people know of England’s third largest megalithic site, consisting of three prehistoric stone circles at Stanton Drew in Somerset. The reason for the site’s relative obscurity may be that, in spite of its sprawling size, it’s not really that impressive to the eye – the individual stones are quite small, and the overall plan of the circles is difficult to make out. But perhaps that’s the way it’s meant to be. According to Michell and Rickard, the first person to attempt a detailed survey of the site was the architect John Wood in 1740. The locals told him that merely counting the stones was a bad idea: “Several have attempted to do so, and proceeded until they were either struck dead upon the spot, or with such illness as soon were carried off”. Ignoring such superstitions, Wood continued with his task “and as a great storm accidentally arose just after, and blew down part of a great tree near the body of the work, the people were then thoroughly satisfied that I had disturbed the guardian spirits of the metamorphosised stones.”

Here is one of my own pictures of Stanton Drew:

Another of the books I bought for a pound was a 1978 paperback called Explorations of the Marvellous, containing the text of a series of lectures given by various scientists and science fiction writers. Featured among the latter is John Brunner, who I’ve written about on at least one previous occasion. Brunner lived in Somerset for many years prior to his untimely death in 1995, and I suspect that some of his personal library may have found its way to the Bookbarn. On a previous visit there (about ten years ago, before they went onto the internet) I bought a hardback anthology that was neither edited by John Brunner nor had a story by him in it – yet it has his signature inside. So maybe it was his own copy of the book (it was a collection of science fiction erotica, if you must know).

By a further coincidence, Brunner’s lecture is all about forteana. More specifically, it’s about how shockingly sloppy some well-known fortean writers are when it comes to research and fact-checking. One of the most amusing examples he cites relates to a book I’ve never actually read, although it’s a classic of the genre – The Morning of the Magicians, by Pauwels and Bergier. Apparently they make the claim that one Professor Ralph Milne Farley “has drawn attention to the fact that some biologists think that old age is due to the accumulation of heavy water in the organism. The alchemists’ elixir of life might then be a substance that eliminates selectively heavy water.”  Brunner recognised this idea as coming not from a serious scientific treatise but from a science fiction novel he’d devoured when he was 12 or 13! The book in question was called The Immortals, and it was indeed by Ralph Milne Farley... but the latter was neither a professor nor a scientist. In these days of Wikipedia, it’s easy to do the fact-checking that Pauwels and Bergier failed to do:

Roger Sherman Hoar (April 8, 1887 – October 10, 1963) was a state senator and assistant Attorney General, state of Massachusetts. He also wrote science fiction under the pseudonym of “Ralph Milne Farley”.

The other fortean book I acquired last week came via eBay. This was The Fickle Finger of Fate, which I mentioned I’d ordered in last week’s post about Satirical Superheroes. The most fortean thing about the book is its author, John A. Keel – who as I said last time went on to write about Mothman, UFOs and Men in Black. But this novel from 1966 is just a lighthearted superhero parody featuring Keel’s own creation, Satyr-Man. It has a couple of mildly fortean elements – one character believes he is under a “Mummy’s Curse” (see above), and there’s a running joke about swamp gas and weather balloons (the most common ways the authorities used to debunk UFO sightings).

A satyr is a mythological half-man, half-beast with an insatiable sexual appetite. Coupled with the “ADULTS ONLY” warning on the cover, you might imagine this is a somewhat dirty book. But 1966 was still a year before America abolished its obscenity laws (see The Man who Helped to Free the World), so the book is heavily censored. For those who are only interested in such things, here is its one and only explicit sex scene:

“C’mere,” she grunted, pulling him to her as she ****** her **** and ****** ******** until he ***** ******* ***** and they **** *****. He lifted his **** ****** to **** ******, rolling across the rumpled bed with his mouth pressed to her ***** ********. Then she ***** his **** ******* and her hands ***** ***** ***.

“Ooooo,” she said.

“Ahhhhhhhh,” he said.

“Ummmmmmm,” she said.

“Hmmmmmmmmm,” he said.

Finally they **** ********** **** *** ******* **** *******. And then he **** ***** ******* *****. She **** *** ************! Outside the window, the surf continued to pound the beach.

How UFOs Conquered the World

 As you can see from the photograph, the latest addition to my collection of UFO books is How UFOs Conquered the World by David Clarke. Despite having a picture of a child on the cover, it’s one of the most grown-up books on the subject I’ve ever come across. My review of it appeared on Brian Clegg’s Popular Science site last weekend. At that time I hadn’t read any other reviews of the book, so I was pleased to see on David’s own blog the next day that both the Sunday Times and Magonia described it in very similar terms to myself.

The clever thing about this book is that it’s not about UFOs per se, but about how people think and talk about UFOs, and the way this has become inextricably interwoven with popular culture over the last 70 years. As David Clarke demonstrates, this is a subject that can be analysed methodically, intelligently and – most important of all – constructively. That’s what I was getting at when I described the book as “grown up”. It’s a refreshing antidote to the childish to-ing and fro-ing between uncritical speculation on the one hand and destructive debunking on the other.

The book’s subtitle is “The History of a Modern Myth”. This uses myth, not in its colloquial sense of “popular misconception”, but its original sense of “pre-scientific world-view”. As the author says: “To qualify as a myth a story does not have to be true or false, but it must express a conviction held tenaciously by its adherents. It is a defining characteristic of myths that, like the extraterrestrial hypothesis, they are immune to scientific scrutiny.”

I don’t want to repeat large chunks of what I said in the review, but I will quote one bit which highlights just how “immune to scientific scrutiny” modern ufology has become:

The X-Files went on to provide one of the most powerful tools in the cognitive dissonance arsenal, by popularising the idea that ‘They’ (the government, NASA et al) are actively concealing the truth about UFOs. This hypothesis – which Clarke points out is unfalsifiable – allows any awkward counter-evidence to be dismissed as ‘disinformation’.

One striking thing occurred to me while I was reading the book which I didn’t have space to mention in the review. As far as the extraterrestrial hypothesis is concerned, there is simply too much evidence for it, not too little. I’m not referring to evidence that would convince a court of law or a peer-reviewed scientific journal (neither of which has ever been convinced, of course), but evidence of the type commonly cited by UFO believers. There are too many UFO sightings (750 in the UK alone the year that Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released). There are too many Roswell-style “crashed saucer” incidents (more than 200, according to one website). And too many people claim to have been abducted by aliens (2.5 million British citizens, extrapolating from a survey carried out in 2014). Those figures are simply too big to make sense in the context of extraterrestrial visitation. On the other hand, they make perfect sense in the context of a social and/or psychological phenomenon.

Of course, some UFO reports may still be “true” (i.e. real extraterrestrial spacecraft) even if the majority are not. But the extraterrestrial hypothesis remains nothing more than speculation. On the other hand, it's an indisputable fact that there is a fascinating psychosocial phenomenon at play, independent of the truth or otherwise of the ETH. That’s what I meant when I said David Clarke’s book is constructive, not destructive.

You can read my full review here. I gave the book four stars, which in the context of the Popular Science site where it was posted means “Excellent book that any popular science fan would want to read”. From a Fortean perspective, however, the rating would be a resounding five stars – definitely as good as they come. You can get your copy by clicking on the following links:

• Get How UFOs Conquered the World from Amazon.com
• Get How UFOs Conquered the World from Amazon UK

Weird News

It may seem paradoxical to talk about “news” on a retro-themed blog, but the traditional Fortean fascination with weird news for its own sake – rather than being pitched as evidence for some specific theory or other – seems to be increasingly a thing of the past. I think that’s a shame, and it’s one of the reasons I still look forward to getting Fortean Times every month. While its online competitors are busy promulgating their favourite conspiracy theories, the magazine – as it says right there on the cover – remains dedicated to “The World’s Weirdest News Stories”.

There are a couple of really good ones in the current issue, January 2015 (pictured above, together with the January issues from 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2010). On page 9 there’s the story of a London shopkeeper who was robbed last September after being put in a hypnotic trance by a customer, the whole thing having been caught on CCTV. Then page 26 has a collection of stories, all from 2014, about various people who turned out to be alive after being declared dead by doctors.

While these stories may lack the kneejerk like-share-comment appeal of a Bigfoot sighting or UFO encounter, they do have two major advantages over big-ticket Forteana of that kind. For one thing, they’re not just anecdotal events – they’re a matter of public record, with multiple witnesses. Secondly, there’s no obvious CSICOP-style wet blanket that can be thrown over them. With Bigfoot, for example, the skeptics can always say it was a bear or someone dressed in an ape costume. On the other hand, I really can’t see how they could debunk the hypno-heist – except perhaps to claim the shopkeeper was a willing participant who helped set the whole thing up for the cameras. But if that was the case, I’m sure the police would have had something to say about it – wasting their time is a criminal offence in Britain, after all.

One of the strongest arguments against claims of the paranormal – or any kind of enhanced mental powers – is that if people really possessed them they would use them to make money. That’s another thing I like about this story: if a person was capable of hypnotizing someone into doing something they didn’t want to do, this is exactly the sort of thing they would do. They would be out robbing wine merchants, not wasting their time appearing on Britain’s Got Talent. The only thing I find suspicious about the story is that it only happened once – not a whole string of times.

The other story, about people “coming back from the dead”, is even harder to debunk. The doctor writes out a death certificate, and the victim is seen alive some time after that – it’s as simple as that. Of course, they didn’t really die and come back to life; they were alive all along and the doctor just made a mistake. But that’s not debunking the mystery – it’s confirming it. The mystery in this case is how someone who is alive can display all the symptoms of being dead. Whatever the explanation is, it’s unlikely to be a purely recent phenomenon – which means that countless people may have been unwittingly buried alive over the years!

If you look at the cover of the magazine, “The Return of the Living Dead” and “Hypno-Heists” are the second and third items listed under “The World’s Weirdest News Stories”. The first item is “Unidentified Flying Humans”, referring to the case of a commercial airliner which reported a near miss with a human-like figure last October.

Unlike the other two stories, this one was picked up big-time by numerous online Fortean blogs, forums and websites. The general approach was to give a single-sentence summary of the encounter and then use it as a springboard for wild speculations about (a) extraterrestrial visitors to the Earth, (b) highly evolved flying reptiles surviving undetected since the Jurassic period, (c) secret military research on personal flying suits, and any number of similarly offbeat ideas.

The piece in Fortean Times, written by Jenny Randles, takes a completely different approach to the same subject matter. Instead of extracting a few details from newspaper accounts and making them fit a pet theory, she took the trouble to find out more facts about the case, not fewer. It turned out, for example, that the plane in question was on a completely different heading and at a much lower altitude than it should have been, having just recovered from an aborted landing. That doesn’t explain the encounter, but it does make it more likely that it was a fleetingly glimpsed paraglider or something of that kind. This sort of data-driven thinking – as opposed to theory-driven – is another reason I like the magazine so much.

Hoaxes in the Age of Reason

Judging from Alex Boese’s excellent book The Museum of Hoaxes, the 18th century was something of a golden age for that particular art form. It’s probably no accident that this coincided with the so-called “Age of Reason”, sandwiched between the witch-burning Puritanism of the 17th century and the Gothic romanticism of the 19th. A hoax works best when the victims think of themselves as sophisticated, logically-minded intellectuals!

I was reminded of two of the most famous hoaxes of the 18th century by this picture I saw on the British Museum website. You may spot the reason immediately – but if not, bear with me and everything will become clear in the end. The picture dates from 1771, and shows a central figure wearing female dress while adorned with distinctly male accessories, including a sword and Masonic regalia (the picture is subtitled “The Female Freemason”). The subject is the Chevalier d'Eon, whose gender was much disputed – living first as a man, and then from middle age onwards as a woman.

Nowadays this would be seen as a transgender issue, but in the 18th century that simply wasn’t an option. Whether you were a man or a woman was simply a question of anatomy, and if you claimed to be one when you were actually the other then you were perpetrating a hoax. As it happened, d’Eon claimed to be anatomically female, but was eventually revealed by post-mortem examination to be anatomically male. So to that extent, the skeptics – like the creator of this print – were right.

You can tell the artist considered d’Eon to be a hoaxer from the two pictures he’s drawn hanging on the wall. These depict two of the most notorious London-based hoaxes of the 18th century. The picture hanging on the left shows Mary Toft allegedly giving birth to rabbits. This isn’t an exact reproduction of William Hogarth’s Cunicularii, which I described some time ago in Paranormal investigation, 18th century style, but it’s the same subject. As I described in that earlier post, the hoax was particularly aimed at “supposedly intelligent and educated individuals who ‘want to believe’... and hence are easily duped by hoaxers.”

The picture hanging on the right side of the d’Eon portrait depicts the “Great Bottle Hoax” of 1749. This was the result of a wager between the Duke of Portland and the Earl of Chesterfield regarding the gullibility of the public. The Duke claimed he could advertise a patently absurd feat – that a man was capable of squeezing himself into a quart bottle – and still fill a London theatre with people prepared to hand over cash to see it. The (non) event took place at the New Theatre in Haymarket, and the Duke won his bet easily – every seat in the house was sold, and many people had to stand or were turned away. I’ve seen conflicting descriptions of the ensuing events. Some say the curtains simply remained closed, while others say a man appeared, showed the audience a bottle, thanked them for their money, and promptly left. What all accounts agree on is the riot that followed – some versions even end with the complete destruction of the theatre!

You can read more about the Mary Toft case, the Great Bottle Hoax and other examples of 18th century hoaxes on the Museum of Hoaxes website.

Anomalous Progress

I belatedly realized that I missed a significant anniversary earlier this year. I’ve been buying, reading and hoarding Fortean Times for 20 years now. The earliest issue in my collection is FT67 (cover-dated February-March 1993), which was the first issue I ever saw in W. H. Smith (I’d bought a previous issue—FT60 I think—from another shop just over a year earlier, but I hadn’t been impressed enough to hang on to it). It was only after I started reading FT in earnest that I got interested in Forteana in any depth. I’d read various books on the paranormal and “unexplained mysteries” in the 1970s and 80s, but only at the popular mass-market level.

Looking back at those early FTs, it occurs to me that at some point in the last 20 years my attitude to Fortean subjects underwent a distinct change. I don’t mean anything as dramatic as a flip from “believer” to “skeptic” – I’ve never been close to either category. I’ve never seriously believed that UFOs are vehicles piloted by extraterrestrials, or that ghosts embody the surviving consciousness of dead human beings. But I’ve never been a skeptic either, in the sense of dismissing anomalous phenomena from consideration simply because they are anomalous. During the 1990s I became fascinated by a whole range of anomalous phenomena, and I was convinced that with sufficient study they could be fitted into the mainstream paradigm... at which point they would cease to be anomalous.

Some time around 2003 I changed my mind. The rosy-spectacled idea that the anomalous phenomena of today are the mainstream phenomena of tomorrow no longer seemed credible. The reality is that anomalous phenomena are self-perpetuatingly anomalous. This wasn’t because of anything that happened in or around 2003 – it was because I’d been following the subject with close interest for ten years. I wasn’t really aware of the change at the time, but looking back through my old FTs and remembering the way I responded to the various stories at the time, it’s clear that’s what happened.

Thinking about it analytically, there are two sides to the problem: (a) lack of progress in areas where you would reasonably expect to see progress, and (b) ongoing progress (or at any rate change) in areas where you would logically expect to see no change at all. I’ll explain what I mean.

When I first became an avid reader of all things Fortean in the 1990s, I was under the impression (as I suspect many newcomers to the subject are, whatever the time period) that the world was on the brink of a massive paradigm shift that would lead to the mainstream acceptance of many things previously considered paranormal. There were theories of “mind-matter unification” and “macroscopic quantum systems” that promised to explain a whole range of psychic and holistic phenomena. There were tantalizing hints that antigravity systems had been demonstrated in the laboratory. The ideas of Hancock and Bauval were going to revolutionize our understanding of ancient civilizations. And a lot more in the same vein.

The reality, of course, is that none of it ever comes to anything. The world of anomalous phenomena isn’t interested in solving mysteries... it’s interested in perpetuating them. I made the mistake (coming from a scientific background) of assuming the subject had something in common with science. But it doesn’t. Science starts with the evidence and looks for explanations of it. The vast majority of ufologists, ghost hunters and cryptozoologists do just the opposite – they start with an explanation and look for evidence to support it. That’s why the state of progress—as far as any real insight is concerned—is exactly the same as it was 20 years ago.

The only people who aren’t going to be disillusioned by the situation are the Conspiracy Theorists. From their point of view, it’s a no-brainer the Government will stamp on anyone as soon as they come close to revealing the Truth (personally I’ve never really understood this viewpoint – particularly as the Conspiracy Theorists themselves spend their lives expounding the very Truth the Government is supposed to be suppressing).

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a flip side to all this. While there’s been no perceptible progress in understanding anomalous phenomena in the last 20 years, there’s been an ongoing evolution in the phenomena themselves. In some areas, such as the continuing sagas of Roswell and Bigfoot, it’s almost like watching a soap opera. If Roswell was a real flying saucer crash, and if Bigfoot was a real species, you simply wouldn’t expect the underlying data to evolve over the decades in the way they have.

Back in the 1990s, another magazine I read occasionally was Magonia, which promoted the so-called “psycho-social” hypothesis. This is an unfortunate term, because it suggests everything is glibly dismissed as the product of a deranged mind or mass hysteria. But the Magonia people meant something more constructive than that. If I remember correctly, the basic idea was that the whole area of anomalous phenomena—the way they’re described, the context they’re put in, the way they’re investigated and the theories proposed to explain them—are all the product of a (largely unconscious) collective exercise in imagination. The analogy is with a role-playing game, in which the players are so immersed in the game they don’t realize it’s a game.

One of the big things in the early 90s was the “alien abduction” scenario, where the bulk of the evidence took the form of memories retrieved through hypnosis. That’s a perfect medium for the unconscious imagination to work in, particularly if prompted (again unconsciously) by the expectations of the researcher. I don’t think Magonia was accusing anyone of deliberate deception. Instead, the idea was that an apparently mysterious phenomenon could be created and developed spontaneously (possibly around the germ of a real but mundane event) based on current social and cultural expectations. Today, with the rise of the internet and social media, the possibilities for “unconscious collective creativity” are greater than ever before. And you never know what’s going to happen next.

I’m as fascinated by the world of anomalous phenomena today as I was 20 years ago. The only difference is that in those days I thought of it as a sub-branch of science. Now I think of it as a sub-branch of the entertainment industry.

An Early 20th Century Mad Scientist

Just before Christmas I got hold of a second-hand copy of Meet Mr Mulliner (1927) by P.G. Wodehouse. This consists of a series of “tall tales” narrated by the fictitious Mr Mulliner, which I bought in the hope that some of them might have a Fortean flavour (since I’m constantly running out of ideas for this blog). Unfortunately this isn’t really the case, although at one point Mr Mulliner does refer to “a subject on which I happen to hold strong views – to wit, the question of what is and what is not true to life”... and then goes on to say “I have suffered a good deal from this sceptical attitude of mind which is so prevalent nowadays.” These sentiments at least are something a Fortean can sympathize with!

The issue of “what is and what is not true to life” crops up in the context of a cinematic villain in the shape of an archetypal Mad Scientist. The discussion in question takes place at the start of the second story in the collection, entitled “A Slice of Life”, which was originally published in the August 1926 issue of the Strand magazine. That really was a long time ago. The only type of film that a cinema-goer could see in 1926 was a silent movie – the first “talkies” didn’t appear until the following year. And what might be termed “imaginative literature” was still in its infancy. The first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, appeared in April 1926, but the term “science fiction” hadn’t yet come into common usage – the genre was still referred to as “scientifiction”. So it’s interesting to see that the Mad Scientist was already a sufficiently well-defined cliché in 1926 that it could happily be referred to in a non-genre story (I’m talking about the out-and-out “evil” Mad Scientist archetype here, not the well-intentioned but misguided type like Victor Frankenstein).

Here is the opening dialogue from “A Slice of Life”, complete with its Evil Mad Scientist archetype, which prompts Mr Mulliner to rail against scepticism:

The conversation in the bar-parlour of the Anglers’ Rest had drifted round to the subject of the Arts: and somebody asked if that film-serial, The Vicissitudes of Vera, which they were showing down at the Bijou Dream, was worth seeing.

‘It’s very good,’ said Miss Postlethwaite, our courteous and efficient barmaid, who is a prominent first-nighter. ‘It’s about this mad professor who gets this girl into his toils and tries to turn her into a lobster.’

‘Tries to turn her into a lobster?’ echoed we, surprised.

‘Yes, sir. Into a lobster. It seems he collected thousands and thousands of lobsters and mashed them up and boiled down the juice from their glands and was just going to inject it into this Vera Dalrymple's spinal column when Jack Frobisher broke into the house and stopped him.’

‘Why did he do that?’

‘Because he didn't want the girl he loved to be turned into a lobster.’

‘What we mean,’ said we, ‘is why did the professor want to turn the girl into a lobster?’

‘He had a grudge against her.’

This seemed plausible, and we thought it over for a while. Then one of the company shook his head disapprovingly.

‘I don't like stories like that,’ he said. ‘They aren't true to life.’

Prophecies and Probabilities

Since I normally do my weekly blog post at the weekend, it just occurred to me that this is my last opportunity to jump on the Mayan Prophecy bandwagon. The basic idea is that the world is going to end on Friday (21 December 2012), because more than a thousand years ago a Central American civilization called the Maya said that’s what would happen. Most of what I’ve read on the subject has been debunking the idea, with a lot of effort being put into proving that the Maya never actually said the world would end on Friday. This is really funny, because it suggests that if the Maya had said the world would end on Friday, then there would be serious cause for alarm, but actually it’s okay because they didn’t.

The Maya were a sophisticated and clever culture – they built pyramids like the one on the right, for example (photo courtesy of Paul Jackson). But history is filled with sophisticated and clever cultures. In the Western world, ancient Greece and Rome have been revered as paragons of wisdom and insight since the late Middle Ages. During the 18th and 19th centuries, other ancient civilizations were added to the cultural pantheon: Egypt, India, China and several others. But not the Maya. The idea that the teachings of the Maya should be heeded above all the others is (to put it politely) of recent manufacture. The most catastrophic event in Mayan history was the coming of the Spanish conquerors in the 16th century, which resulted in the near-total obliteration of their cultural heritage. If they didn’t foresee that clearly enough to prevent it, why believe their powers of prophecy are better than anyone else’s?

Anyone who wants to take the Mayan Prophecy seriously needs to explain why the Maya—of all cultures—got it right when no-one else did. And there’s a bigger thing they need to explain – why anyone should believe that a date-specific prophecy made more than a thousand years ago is going to come true. There simply isn’t a precedent. In the whole of history, date-specific prophecies of disaster conspicuously fail to come true.

There’s a reason for this. Macroscopic physical processes are probabilistic, not deterministic. You can’t predict when catastrophes will happen, because even the catastrophes themselves don’t know. There are plenty of big disasters that will happen, with certainty, at some point in the future – even “apocalyptic” disasters on a scale greater than anything in recorded history. A supervolcano, or a massive geomagnetic storm—particularly if coupled with a weakening of the Earth’s magnetic field—could destroy the infrastructure that holds the modern, high-tech world together. That might not literally be the “end of the world”, but it would be the end of civilized society. Events like that have happened before in Earth’s history, and it’s a dead cert they will happen again. But there’s inherent randomness in the system, so it’s impossible to determine exactly when they will happen. It may be a thousand years from now, or it may be next Thursday. Or Friday.

The Met Office can’t even predict the weather next Friday (except in terms of probabilities), so it’s ludicrous to suppose the Maya could predict some catastrophe—to the exact day—more than a thousand years in advance. Even if they were in contact with extraterrestrial aliens who had computer technology millions of years ahead of ours, they couldn’t predict something that is fundamentally indeterminate. On the other hand, it’s equally foolish to say—as some extreme skeptics have—that there definitely won’t be a world-ending catastrophe on Friday. That’s effectively saying that such a thing is less likely to occur on that day than on any other day. In other words, the extreme skeptics give special significance to that particular day just as much as the extreme believers do!

Fifty Years of British UFO Research

As a sweeping generalization, British UFO researchers are less single-mindedly fixated on the extraterrestrial hypothesis (and concomitant beliefs such as alien abductions and government conspiracies) than their American counterparts. Of course there are exceptions on both sides, but British ufologists do tend to adopt a “more things in Heaven and Earth” approach to the subject. This was certainly the message that came across during the first day of the BUFORA (British UFO Research Association) 50th Anniversary Conference that I attended yesterday.

The first speaker was Lionel Beer, who (although he doesn’t look old enough) was a founder member of BUFORA back in 1962, before I had even started school. He talked mainly about the development of British ufology in the 60s and 70s, when it’s probably fair to say the focus was still on the extraterrestrial hypothesis here as in America. But I was really interested in what Lionel had to say about government involvement in the subject. He brought out a subtlety that hadn’t occurred to me before, but makes perfect sense based on what I know of that period in British history.

There is no doubt that during the 1970s the police Special Branch (whose responsibility was national security and counter-insurgency) took a strong and active interest in UFO groups. That’s a well-documented fact. But it’s not the same thing as saying that they took an interest in the subject of ufology. The British authorities in the 1970s weren’t all that paranoid about an alien invasion, but they were paranoid about far-right anti-government extremists. The authorities believed that certain far-right political activists were infiltrating UFO groups in order to recruit new members. That sounds very unlikely to me, because I’ve never met a far-right UFO enthusiast in my life (although I’ve met many far-left ones)... but the fact is that it’s what the authorities believed. And it’s certainly true that if you’re looking for people with a deep-seated hatred of the establishment, a UFO group is as good a place as any to start.

The second talk was by Heather Dixon, whose subject was “Developing an understanding of the Reality behind the Myths”. Essentially this was a very lucid exposition of the statement, often made by people in BUFORA, that “98 per cent of UFO cases turn out to have a perfectly rational explanation”. In some cases the explanation is physical—for example an astronomical object or atmospheric phenomenon—and in others it is physiological, for example sleep paralysis. Almost by definition, a UFO sighting is something that is novel and inexplicable to the witness, and outside their previous experience. If they have an interest in UFOs, or have been immersed in sci-fi popular culture, they may interpret what they see in ufological terms even if it is something completely different that is outside their experience, such as a rare conjunction of two astronomical objects.

Many people will dismiss this sort of talk as “scepticism”, but it’s really the only way to go about serious ufological investigation. In the real world, it’s inevitable that some UFO reports will turn out to have perfectly mundane explanations. At the same time, other cases—the ones Heather calls “High Strangeness” cases—defy rational explanation. Something is going on that science can’t explain. But that still doesn’t mean it’s extraterrestrials. Many people in the Western world, seeing something they’ve never seen before, will mentally pigeonhole it as a UFO because that’s the way they’ve been brought up. You sometimes hear patronizing statements about primitive peoples along the lines “of course, if they encountered extraterrestrial aliens, they would interpret them as gods or angels or spirits”. But why not the other way around? If a sci-fi geek encountered a god/angel/spirit he or she would interpret them as a space alien!

The next talk was by John Spencer, on the subject of “Political, Cultural and Social Influences of UFOs”. This was a strong contender to be the single best talk I’ve ever seen on the UFO subject... and I’ve seen a lot. Essentially it was about the “cultural tracking” aspect of the UFO phenomenon—the way UFO experiences reflect the technology, political issues and popular culture of the time in which they occur. Again, some people will dismiss this as scepticism, but it’s a real effect that has to be faced up to. This became particularly clear as John went through the history of the subject from the 1940s to the present day. In many UFO cases something undeniably extraordinary—and maybe even extraterrestrial—occurred, but the way it was described by witnesses is shaped by the concerns and obsessions of the time.

An interesting point John made is that the contactees of the early 1950s—people like George Adamski—recounted long conversations with the Space Brothers, in which the latter warned the people of Earth in dire terms about the dangers of nuclear weapons. But in those days, every thinking human being on the planet was worried spitless about the threat of nuclear weapons. The Space Brothers never thought to warn the people of the 1950s about something they weren’t already obsessing about, such as ozone depletion, greenhouse gases or global warming.

John’s take on the Roswell incident was also interesting. This took place in 1947, of course, but when I started reading about UFOs in the late 60s and early 70s it was never mentioned. Books of that time never bothered to mention the biggest UFO case of all time, even though it had occurred more than 20 years earlier. In order to believe in Roswell, you have to believe that the United States government is capable of lying, scheming and deception on an industrial scale. Cultural tracking wasn’t ready for that yet. So there was a long pause from 1947 to 1974, when the Watergate scandal proved beyond doubt that the United States government was indeed capable of lying, scheming and deception on an industrial scale. It was only in the post-Watergate world that people were culturally primed and ready to believe in Roswell.

The next talk was by the legendary Jenny Randles, via a live video link from her home in North Wales. Despite her lower public profile of recent years, Jenny was as lively and entertaining a speaker as when I first saw her almost 20 years ago. The subject of her talk was “solved” UFO cases—cases that have been definitively explained as non-extraterrestrial in origin. Who wants to hear about such things? Well I do, because I think such cases can tell you a lot about people’s perceptions and motivations, but apparently most people don’t—Jenny said her book on the subject ended up being sold for a fraction of the cover price in remainder bookshops!

One striking example came from the 1960s, when a glowing orange ball was filmed hovering over an English primary school, as well as being witnessed by dozens of 10 and 11 year old children at the school. Despite having all the hallmarks of a UFO, the cameraman thought it might have something to do with the fact that a US Air Force F-111 fighter-bomber crashed nearby on the same day (in those days, the USAF was allowed to maintain a small number of air bases in the UK, as a goodwill gesture from the British government—and by inference, the British people). But when the USAF saw the photo of the orange ball hovering over the English school, their response was along the lines “Nothing to do with us. The picture was taken 14 minutes before the crash-landing of the F-111, which at no point caught fire. So it’s nothing to do with us. No, sir. If you ask us, it looks like one of them there extraterrestrial spacecraft people are always talking about.” So contrary to popular belief, this was a case of the US authorities actually encouraging an extraterrestrial interpretation of a UFO sighting.

Many years later the truth emerged in a way that leaves no room for any doubt. When the F-111 first got into trouble, 14 minutes before the eventual crash-landing, the crew went through a standard procedure to reduce the risk of an explosion on landing. They ejected all the aircraft’s fuel, and used the afterburner to ignite it, causing a massive fireball. The US aircrew chose to do this immediately over an English primary school. Had it become known at the time that they had effectively placed their own safety over that of British schoolchildren, the goodwill of the British people would have evaporated... and the USAF would have been kicked out of the country. That’s the kind of cover-up and conspiracy I find easier to believe than the extraterrestrial kind.

The last talk I attended was by another living legend: Lionel Fanthorpe. Lionel is now 77, although he looks ten years younger. His talk was on the subject of six alternative theories as to what UFOs (the kind that don’t have mundane explanations) might be. Only one of the six involved extraterrestrials -- the others ranged from ancient Atlantis and Lemuria to the paranormal. There’s no use pretending the talk was anything but an excuse for Lionel to hold forth about the subjects he’s always been fascinated by: timeslips, werewolves, poltergeists etc. But needless to say it was the most entertaining talk of the day, and it did reinforce what I saw as the whole theme of the conference: that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of by the average ETH-believer.

The first Paranormal Investigator?

I mentioned Joseph Glanvill’s book Saducismus Triumphatus in my post about The Daemon of Tedworth a year ago. Since then, I’ve managed to find an online copy of the whole book, and it’s really very interesting. The Fortean world centres around the conflict between “skeptics” and “believers”, with Forteans sitting on the sidelines looking on in amusement. Glanvill’s book may be the first work ever written that specifically addresses this conflict.

In an earlier post I wrote about David Hume: a skeptic in the 18th century, and another one described William Hogarth’s satire on Paranormal investigation, 18th century style. But Glanvill lived in the 17th century -- Saducismus Triumphatus was published in 1681, the year after his death. The title is Latin for “Triumph over the Sadducees” -- “Sadducees” being Glanvill’s word for scientific skeptics and rationalists. Glanvill himself was an avid believer in the supernatural, largely because he considered that there was ample scriptural authority for its existence (in his day job, he was a clergyman).

The most interesting section of the book is called “Proof of Apparitions, Spirits and Witches, from a choice Collection of Modern Relations”. This is effectively a compendium of Case Studies collected by Glanvill over a period of many years. In this sense, Glanvill can be considered the world’s first paranormal investigator. And his mindset was exactly the same as that of a modern paranormal investigator. Just as David Hume, the world’s first militant skeptic, made the standard mistake of all skeptics (“If an event doesn’t fit in with my preconceived notions of what is possible, then it couldn’t have happened”) so Glanvill makes the standard mistake of all believers: “If a reputable witness says an event happened, then it must have happened exactly as they described it.”

One example will give the idea. Glanville’s tenth “Relation” concerns “The Apparition of the Ghost of Major George Sydenham to Captain William Dyke, taken out of a Letter of Mr. James Douch to Mr. Joseph Glanvill”. The witness in this case was an Army Officer, Captain Dyke, and therefore his testimony was automatically accepted as correct in every respect. The Captain had been friends with another officer, Major Sydenham, who was a devoutly religious man. Dyke on the other hand was a worldly cynic, and the two of them had many friendly arguments about the nature of God and the Afterlife. They agreed that whichever of them died first would visit the other on the third night after the funeral, and tell them the truth of the matter. In the event, it was the Major who died first, and the Captain duly kept a lookout at the appointed time -- but the Major’s ghost failed to turn up.

Then one morning about six weeks later, Captain Dyke was woken up by an unexpected visitor in his bedroom. It was the ghost of Major Sydenham! The ghost told his old friend: “I could not come at the time appointed, but I am now come to tell you that there is a God, and a very just and terrible one, as you will find if you do not turn over a new leaf!” Glanvill takes this as clear evidence of the afterlife and the existence of God -- he isn’t bothered by the fact that the Major’s ghost didn’t turn up when the Captain was keeping a vigil for it, but waited until he was sound asleep. If you ask me though, it sounds like a particularly vivid dream!

Wikipedia's Hive Mind

Since I started writing this blog, I've been doing a lot more internet research than I used to. And, almost inevitably, I've been using Wikipedia a lot more than I used to -- if only because it features so prominently in Google search results. For most mainstream subjects Wikipedia provides a reliable and objective source of information, but lurking under the surface there is something sinister. Wikipedia, by far the largest collaborative undertaking the world has ever seen, has developed a distinctive personality of its own... and it's not a pleasant personality. It comes across not so much in the visible content of the encyclopedia, but in what is omitted (or more accurately, deleted) from it, and the stridently authoritarian justifications to be found on the "Discussion" pages.

I've talked before about Wikipedia versus Forteana and the Shakespeare Authorship Question, but these are not isolated occurrences. The deletionists have targeted other heterodox ideas ranging from conspiracy theories to complementary medicine and climate change scepticism. If the material being deleted was simply the raving of an irrational crackpot, the situation would be understandable. But as often as not the deleted material was soberly written, well-balanced and carefully documented. The Wikipedia "hive mind" is systematically wiping out views it doesn't agree with... even if those views come from a Nobel Prize winner. The plasma physicist Hannes Alfvén is a case in point. Despite winning the Nobel Prize in 1970, his views on the subject of magnetic reconnection differed drastically from those of the scientific mainstream. In March this year, Michael Suede tried to insert a short, carefully researched section on Alfvén's views towards the end of the Wikipedia article on the subject. It was promptly tagged with a warning that "An editor has expressed a concern that this section lends undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, controversies or matters relative to the article subject as a whole". Shortly after, the whole section was deleted and Suede was banned from making further changes to Wikipedia.

So where does the Wikipedian Hive Mind come from? How can a collaboration between a potentially vast number of individuals result in such a clear-cut personality, with clear-cut interests, beliefs, opinions and prejudices? To answer these questions, we need to look at just what Wikipedia is, and how it functions.

Wikipedia was launched in 2001 as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". In practice, of course, "anyone" means "anyone with a computer and access to the internet". And there are a few other selection effects which may be less obvious. Wikipedia is written using an HTML-like mark-up language, which while it's relatively straightforward may deter the less technically inclined. Wikipedia doesn't pay, so people who are motivated by financial gain are unlikely to contribute... while those who have full-time jobs, and families to look after, may simply not have time to become involved. And no-one looking for personal fame is going to waste their time on Wikipedia: the use of anonymizing handles guarantees zero recognition in the world at large.

A recent study by the United Nations University in Maastricht analyzed the demographics of Wikipedia contributors. Most contributors are male: 87 per cent compared to just 13 per cent female. The average age of contributors is 26 years. Amongst Wikipedians as a whole, roughly a quarter are under 18 years of age, half are under 22, and three-quarters are under 30. Two-thirds of those surveyed were unmarried, and only 14 per cent had any children.

These statistics paint a clear picture of Wikipedians as young males with no family responsibilities. This explains some of the well-known characteristics of Wikipedia, such as its bias towards left-wing politics and its bias towards contemporary popular culture... but does it explain the bias against non-mainstream ideas and opinions?

An article a few year ago on the Times Higher Education website suggested that "what matters on Wikipedia is not your sources but the support of the community... the Wikipedia community that is, within which there is much talk about consensus, civility and reliable sources. Yet on closer examination, Wikipedians seem an unappealing bunch -- computer fanatics, generally male, usually teenagers. They see the world only from a youthful cab driver's perspective. If anyone disagrees with the Wikipedian consensus, their edits are reverted and they can be banned indefinitely."

What has happened is a classic example of positive and negative feedback loops. Individuals whose interests and world-views match those of the Wikipedian Hive Mind find their edits retained, and their opinions applauded on Discussion pages. So they contribute more and more -- that's positive feedback. Dissenters are subjected to negative feedback: their contributions are constantly altered or deleted, and they find themselves on the receiving end of sarcastic, often viciously ad-hominem, attacks on the Discussion pages. So they go away, and switch to doing something more rewarding somewhere else. As a result, Wikipedia conforms to the "one per cent rule": half of all edits are done by less than one per cent of users, and over two-thirds of articles have been written by less than two per cent of users.

Over the years, Wikipedia's collective personality has become more and more one-dimensional, reflecting the personality of the majority of its successful contributors. You might be forgiven for imagining that, with its emphasis on factuality and neutrality, this personality of Wikipedia's would be calm and rational and supremely objective. But not a bit of it. As Nicholson Baker wrote in the Guardian a few years ago: "There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking people's work... They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away". He quotes one of the victims of deletionism as saying "I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others' sandcastles", while another victim "likened the organized deleters to book burners".

Wikipedia's editors make a big thing about a "neutral point of view", but really no-one over a certain age demands or expects everything they read to be written in a perfectly neutral way. Grown-ups just want the basic information, from whatever point of view, so they can form their own opinions. Instead, with Wikipedia's practice of deleting all material that is deemed to be "not notable", we've ended up with something much more insidious than a biased point-of-view... an encyclopedia that is biased by what is included and what is excluded.

Wikipedia dimly recognizes that the inclusion/exclusion problem exists... or at least, it did at one time. There used to be a Help page providing specific guidance on how to avoid what it called "Information Suppression". However, the page has not been updated since 9 January 2007, and it's now prefixed with a statement that "This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear."  In other words, the information has been suppressed!