Be Sceptical Of The Sceptics!

Be sceptical of the sceptics. Sceptics often want to have their cake and eat it too. Unfortunately, sometimes that cake is obtained through their deliberate fraud and deception.

Sceptics bag those who claim psychic abilities, seeing monsters, etc. as fantasy prone and seekers of the limelight, yet praise to the hilt the real abilities of two old codgers who claim to have created the initial batch of crop circles. That the two old farts were fantasy prone and seekers of the limelight never entered their minds! Yet anyone crunching the numbers and distances could have quickly determined that the crop circle ‘two’ could not have accomplished what they said they accomplished. They did achieve their 15 minutes (and then some) of fame.

Alien abductions are another case in point. Sceptics suggest that all such claimants are not only fantasy prone but actually dreaming it all up, be it lucid, day, normal, at the awake-sleep interface or the sleep-awake interface. However, each and every individual is just that, an individual with a unique personality, experiences, memories, mental state, and so on. All dreams are unique dreams to that individual. No two individuals have the exact same dream for obvious reasons. So if reports of abductions share many common elements across the board of all individuals who so report them, then maybe being fantasy prone and dreaming of being abducted might have nothing to do with the subject. Perhaps the commonality is that the abductions are real events really remembered, vaguely, in part, or in total. Further, alas for the sceptics, not all abductions happen to people asleep in their bedrooms. Abductions have happened to people wide awake in broad daylight; people awake driving their car, etc.

Arch sceptics in their eagerness to disprove anything and everything that even remotely smacks of the paranormal even resort on occasion to making it all up as they go along. Here’s a case in point. Let’s look at a sceptical guru Joe Nickell’s tome “Real-Life X-Files: Investigating the Paranormal” (University Press of Kentucky; 2001). He has a chapter on ‘The Roswell Legend’ about the UFO crash near Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947. He states: “the ‘Roswell Incident,’ as it is popularly known, was propelled into history on July 8, 1947, by an unauthorized press release from a young but eager public information officer (PIO) at the Roswell Army Air Base.” The young eager public information officer, who Nickell can’t even bother to name [it was Lieutenant Walter Haut], most certainly did not release an “unauthorized” press release. No PIO officer would issue a press release off their own bat without the direct order and approval of the Base Commanding Officer [who was Colonel William Blanchard] or in their absence, the Deputy Base Commander. Every Roswell tome makes it crystal clear that Colonel Blanchard dictated the press release to Haut and ordered Haut to then distribute it to the various media outlets. Nickell’s account is pure fabricated fiction. But Nickell doesn’t stop there with one inaccuracy. Nickell goes on to state that “… the young officer was reprimanded and new information was announced… “. Lieutenant Haut was NEVER reprimanded. He couldn’t have been reprimanded since Haut was acting on the direct instruction from the Base Commander. Further, the Base Commander, Colonel Blanchard was himself never reprimanded for having ordered the press release. Blanchard rose to become a four-star general, something unlikely in the extreme had Blanchard been formally reprimanded. Whether Nickell perpetrated a deliberate fraud/lie making this all up out of thin air or whether he was just being lazy by not checking out the real bona-fides of the scenario, it’s hard to say. The upshot however is that Nickell is totally discredited as a serious sceptic. He has an agenda, a biased agenda.

But Nickell isn’t the only careless sceptic. There’s also James Randi, often billed as “The Amazing Randi” for his abilities as a professional magician and escape artist. But it’s Randi’s professional work as a debunker of all things paranormal that he’s most famous for. One such tome of his is titled “Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns and other Delusions” (1982). Why “unicorns” are in the title is beyond me since they are never mentioned in the text nor are they listed in the index. Be that as it may, Randi didn’t do his homework when associating book titles and contents or their authors. For example, he says that John Fuller waxed lyrical over the Betty and Barney Hill UFO abduction incident in his book “Incident at Exeter”. Actually, Fuller’s recounting of the Hill’s abduction was in his book “The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours ‘Aboard A Flying Saucer'”. Randi’s other oops was saying that the co-author of George Adamski’s first UFO book was the Earl of Clancarty, otherwise better known as Brinsley Le Poer Trench. Alas, the co-author of Adamski’s book was not Trench, but Desmond Leslie! If you can’t believe the sceptics, who can you believe?