Skeptics in the Pub (8/12/08)

This, my fourth Skeptics in the Pub, was a SitP with a difference. It featured a debate between two speakers, Nick Pope and Chris French, but just for fun they were both playing Devil’s advocate and arguing in favour of each other’s position. The idea for this event came when Chris and Nick were invited to be interviewed on TV and present the case for and against UFO’s being Extraterrestrial, as they have many times. In the dressing room, Nick turned to his opponent and said: “Chris, we’ve been through this routine so many times we could easily swap roles and table the other’s case.” So thus was last night’s event born. The bill’s title was Believer versus Skeptic, but Nick considers this unfair; it’s an oversimplification and polarization. In fact Nick is one of the most cautious UFOlogists on the scene and is seen as a virtual Skeptic by much of the UFO community; what’s more he and Chris are fairly similar in their approach, and indeed some of their opinions.

Nick Pope is the public face of the UFO phenomenon, both in Britain and abroad. He has become famous for being “Britain’s Fox Mulder”. When he was in the Civil Service he was head of Secretariat AS-2 at the Ministry of Defence, the official UFO investigator for the government, one of only a tiny few people in the entire world to hold such position since the closure of Project Blue Book. Today he’s a freelance UFO journalist, but is still employed as a pundit whenever a UFO story comes out in the news. This has been a busy year for him because this summer played host a virtual nationwide flap (EG: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/06/more-ufos-reported-in-midlands.html ). I’ve met Nick before back in June in Glastonbury at the Now That’s Weird conference which I write about here: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/06/now-thats-weird-conference-2008.html ; scroll down for my review of Nick’s speech. Here’s Nick’s website: http://www.nickpope.net/ . I first wrote about Professor Chris French long before I first attended SitP: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/01/chris-french-mba-gold.html and http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/01/who-really-runs-world.html . He was the first person to whom I awarded the prestigious Materialist Bravery Award. Since then many others have won it: the Skeptic Susan Blackmore, three of my friends, Steve, James and Howard, and also the screenwriter Russell T Davies and others. Chris is a psychologist and heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit (Sounds like a politically-correct way of saying “parapsychology”!) at Goldsmiths Collage http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/psychology/staff/french.php . His job is to study the psychological factors of paranormal beliefs and the phenomena involved. He has become a kind of rent-a-Skeptic, taking over the role Susan Blackmore played a few years ago. He is as much a media personality as Nick, although he takes the Skeptical stance every time. See the TV show Who Really Runs the World in the above link.

I was not in a very good mental and physical state for SitP this time. I went there straight from the funeral of my best friend’s brother and it had been a heart-rending experience; my friend had wept as he read the eulogy and it hurt me to see him in such grief. I was also feeling very poorly, suffering from a bad cold with dizziness, aching limbs and lack of energy. I really belonged in bed with a hot water bottle, but I decided to grit my teeth and get on with it; who says only women can do that! I arrived early and got the chance to have a private drink with Nick to reacquaint ourselves. He remembered me from Glastonbury, but didn’t mention whether he’d read my conference report or not. If he had then he didn’t proclaim any disapproval or offence at my review of his address! We went to the cellar bar and saw his girlfriend Tab who is a fellow UFOlogist; here’s her site: http://www.roswell.org.uk/ . Then the event began and both speakers were posed the question: “Is Earth being visited by an Extraterrestrial civilization?” and given 20 minutes to answer.

Chris opened for the “Yes” camp: He began by coming clean that he had been a disinformer for the government all these years! His wages had been cancelled so he’d decided to blow the whistle! It makes perfect sense that the universe is full of life because of the Drake Equation, a mathematical formula for assessing the likelihood that there are advanced, intelligent species in our Galaxy capable of creating a technological civilization to the point we could make radio contact with them. The conclusion of Frank Drake, the equation’s inventor, was that there are probably thousands of such civilizations, and even if you reduce the factors by as much as possible you come up with a figure of =10. So ET is definitely out there, and if he’s out there then why shouldn’t he be visiting us? After all, we ourselves are now a space-age race; albeit for only just over 50 years and we’ve barely begun on that path. Other species may have been at it for millions of years and have got a lot further. But the Drake Equation is just a theory; is there any direct evidence to back it up? Yes there is: actual reported encounters with bizarre, advanced vehicles and non-human, intelligent beings. These encounters are not only reported by hippies and “loonies”, but by sober, trained observers like pilots, police officers and military personnel. These reporters are often backed up by radar, multiple sightings, signals and photographic evidence. Sometimes the surroundings to the encounters are affected with identifiable evidence like high radiation levels and marks on the ground which have been properly documented. Many of the researchers who carried out the first investigations into UFO’s like J Allen Hynek and Nick himself, were originally Skeptical but became believers. The reported Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a term Hynek coined, with alien beings also cannot be written off as delusion and lies. Sane and sober people profess visits, contact and abductions by these beings; very often they are not asleep or under the influence of drugs etc, and so discounting dreams, sleep paralysis, hypnopompic experiences and hallucinations. What’s more not every witness has been given the highly dodgy treatment of hypnotic regression and many retrieve their memories from the same state of consciousness as they relate them. Skeptics need to beware that they don’t fall into the fallacy of making an unfalsifiable claim. What would convince them? It’s highly unlikely that there’ll be a flying saucer landing on the White House Lawn; the ET’s, whoever they are, obviously wish to remain covert. Simply claiming “intelligent creatures wouldn’t behave like that” is anthropomorphizing; we have no way or predicting or sympathizing with what an alien mind would think. Let’s use Occam’s Razor: Which is more likely, that all these normal and healthy people are liars and psychotics; and that all the copious evidence is faked… or that some of their reports are real and that the phenomenon is real: We are being visited by aliens from other planets in advanced spacecraft.

Nick the “Skeptic” then took the floor: UFO’s have been reported in the mainstream media and been the subject of million-pound investigations by many governments for over 60 years and what have we got? Badly-exposed, grainy photographs, unsubstantiated personal reports and clever CGI mock-ups like the “Haiti UFO” (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=up5jmbSjWkw ). The equipment necessary to produce a very good fake visual record is now available from PC World for a few quid! Chris decided to employ Occam’s razor, well so did Nick! Which is more likely? That sophisticated alien beings fly trillions of miles across space from distant stars to make a couple of crop circles and insert an anal probe into a few terrified Wiltshire yokels, and then just fly all the way home again?... or that there are no aliens and these events have a more mundane explanations, psychological and sociological, even if we can’t isolate them exactly yet? Also the laws of physics have created a universe unfriendly to interstellar travel; it’s as if God intended us to stay on our own planets! The energy expenditure necessary to even approach a significant fraction the speed of light is virtually infinite and at slower speeds journeys between solar systems would be far longer than any biological or mechanical lifetime. The Drake Equation determines how likely it is that ET is out there, but that’s a totally different kettle of fish to determining how likely it is that he has made it to our front door. As far as the idea that the governments are covering up the ET presence, it seems highly unlikely that they could get away with it for 60 years when they can’t even leave a laptop or data-disk in the hands of their staff without them losing it on the train or letting it falling behind a radiator and causing a media scandal! How on Earth could they hope to keep such an explosive secret as aliens being present!? Some hard evidence is touted in the form of implants; they’re doing the circuit at UFO conferences to be examined by wide-eyes UFO-enthusiasts, but none of these objects have been subjected to conventional scientific analysis. Apart from crop circles, all of them obviously man-made, there is no hard evidence at all. Abductees, according to some studies, are actually not a completely homogenous cross-section of the population and actually do have minds predetermined to fantasy and assumption. They are very vulnerable as a result of their psychoses and are therefore easy victims for unscrupulous UFOlogical conmen. Hypnotic regression is a terrible way to gather data because science doesn’t even know what the altered state of consciousness called hypnosis is! It’s still a mystery. If it was more reliable then the police and courts would be using it. And why do so many aliens look just like the ones in sci-fi? This is a cultural psychological phenomenon with no objective reality at all. UFOlogists themselves are usually not scientifically trained and range from being incompetent to downright corrupt. UFO’s are an industry that makes its stars very rich and famous. They spawn conferences, books, DVD’s and other very lucrative sidelines, even an opportunity to meet Robbie Williams. The last thing UFOlogical establishment wants is a down-to-Earth, everyday explanation for everything its devotees believe in.

Both speakers then got a 5-minute rebuttal. Chris explained how just because something appears to break the laws of physics doesn’t mean it does. When the Wright brothers first flew their plane in 1902 the local newspaper didn’t bother covering the historical moment because “everyone knows flying is impossible!” Physics does support the idea of “shortcuts” to direct travel through space with wormholes which remove the need for long journeys between distant stars. What’s more the government is covering it up; all these laptops and disks that go missing etc is a part of the conspiracy! They’re staged events to lull people into a sense of false security! And certain MoD officials (Ha ha!) are frontmen who’s job it is to sew confusion and disinformation. Nick’s own book was approved by the government before it was published. Nick riposted by saying that all these so-called “expert” witnesses are not expert at all. Pilots and policemen are trained to observe, but only observe within the parameters of their own job description. If someone tried to break into your house they’ll send a squad car straight away because they’re trained to do that, but on one occasion when the police were called to a UFO sighting the coppers who turned up wandered around like lost sheep unable to decide what to do. If you want a reliable UFO-witness then you’re better off asking a bird-watcher, and strangely few of them ever report UFO sightings.

After the break there was a very amusing and riotous Question-and-Answer session, but some serious points were made like how UFO experiences can be related to cultural differences without necessarily abandoning the ETH, Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. People have been reporting encounters with alien beings a long time before we started watching then in sci-fi movies. In fact we’ve been reporting them as far back in history as we can look. Of course they used different terminology like “goblins”, “demons”, “trolls” “faeries” etc, but the experiences were incredibly similar. The modern space alien format is merely how we see this strange archetype in the 21st Century Western cultural context. This aspect fascinates me; I only differ from Chris in that I don’t think it’s all in our heads. Chris (the speakers went back to flying their true colours now) sees this as interesting from his psychogenic hypothesis, but it is also very telling from the ETH, and this was my own principle question over the evening’s proceedings.

I’m a believer in the ETH myself, but I see it in a different way to its popular image and ironically it is the Skeptical Chris’ perspective that is the most progressive in that area. The popular perception of the ETH, and the one mostly discussed by the speakers, is that UFO’s are nuts-and-bolts solid objects, like far more advanced equivalents of our own spacecraft, piloted by flesh-and-blood physical creatures like ourselves. I think recent research indicates otherwise. The UFO phenomenon, or at least part of it, may be far more closely related to other kinds of paranormal manifestation like ghosts, poltergeists, remote viewing etc. This idea was first explored by John Keel and was met by hostility from mainstream UFOlogy, in the same way that classic ETH-believers were themselves on the receiving end of hostility from the Skeptics. Even UFOlogy, it appears, is not without dogma. My friend Brian Allan (http://www.p-e-g.co.uk/ ) is interested in this question and I’ve had many interesting discussions with him about it. I am particularly intrigued by my own visit to Ann and Paul Andrews’ house’ Ann and her son Jason are repeat-contactees; I wrote about my visit here: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/11/my-trip-to-haunted-house.html . During my few days as Ann and Paul’s guest I learned, not only from reading Ann’s books, but from my own experiences in their house, that UFO encounters are accompanied by other forms of paranormal phenomena that are not conventionally or causally related to them. It’s a big subject, but to outline it: UFO’s may not be solid and physical, but may actually be etheric, coming not from Zeta Reticuli, but from non-physical hyperspatial realms, places beyond the Universe as we know it.

Last night’s Skeptics in the Pub was the best yet, enormously lively and entertaining .I felt completely at home there and now give an embarrassed laugh at my early misgivings about being “the only Woo in the village!” I felt completely at ease there. I met several other non-skeptics including Dave from Probe (http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/04/uk-probe-conference-march-08.html ). The two speakers were virtually a comedy double-act! They made constant sarcastic jokes at each others’ expense, but it was all very amiable and fun; you can see they’re great friends despite their differences. I’m glad I forwent the hot water bottle and Lemsip and braved my illness to attend!