Aliens On Earth.com Resources for those who are stranded here UFOs | Paranormal | Area 51 People | Places | Random Top 100 | What's New Catalog | New Books Search... for keyword(s)   in Page Titles in Book Title/Author in Contents of Pages ---other searches--- Metacrawler Yahoo FAST Search Google Altavista Dogpile Inference Find Northern Light IWon.com MSN Search Las Vegas Sun Our Bookstore is OPEN Mothership -> UFO -> Updates -> 1998 -> Aug -> Here

From: Jerome Clark <jkclark@frontiernet.net>
Date: Sat, 01 Aug 98 12:46:59 PDT
Fwd Date: Sat, 01 Aug 1998 18:06:07 -0400
Subject: Re: Why Migraines Don't Explain UFOs


> Date: Sat, 01 Aug 1998 12:48:56 +0100
> To: updates@globalserve.net
> From: John Rimmer <j_rimmer@library.croydon.gov.uk>
> Subject: Why Migraines Don't Explain UFOs

> > From: Jerome Clark <jkclarke@frontiernet.net
> > Date: 31 Jul 98 17:48:50 PDT
> > Subject> Re: Why Migraines Dont't Explain UFOs

> <snip>

> >Just as justifiably one could dismiss Rimmer's views as merely
> >a "psychological reaction" to things that make him uncomfortable.
> >We could then go on to speculate, without evidence, about what it
> >is that causes John to hold such clearly misguided beliefs.

> Be my guest. Arthur Shuttlewood promised to do this many years
> ago, but never got round to it.

My point, John, is that such an exercise would be pointless -
purely speculative, unhelpful, lazy, and probably actively
misleading. My second point is that this is essentially the same
result you guys come to at the end of empirically unfounded
speculations about witnesses. Except that you don't admit it.

On another list I recounted a recent non-UFO episode from the
community in which I live. I then applied PSH reasoning to it,
and the consequence was an interpretation that bordered on the
grotesque, and one that nobody could ever take seriously. The
lesson is that Purely Speculative Hypotheses make more sense
from the safe distance of the armchair than from actual human
experience at uncomfortably close range. If they were applied to
any but UFO experiences, they'd be seen as inappropriate or even
crazy.

>>Since as a general rule witnesses do not "immediately" jump to
>>that conclusion, this statement is, well, about as perceptive as
>>we have come to expect from PSHers.

>There is the phenomenon, which Jerry has written about, called
>the 'escalation of hypotheses'. A witness sees an unexplainable
>event and tries to define it in terms with which s/he is
>familiar - "perhaps it's a plane", but it's not making a noise
>so that hypothesis is (rightly or wrongly) rejected. "Maybe it's
>a satellite", no, it's moving too fast and just changed
>direction. Eventually, if the conventional suggestions run out,
>the witness can move on to unconventional ones. At that stage
>the escalator may have gone one floor too far. It's then that
>the ETH turns up to provide another stage to the escalator.

In fact, the ETH is probably a notion to which only a relative
handful of witnesses come. Many simply decide that what they
have seen is some inexplicable unknown. Many deal with the
cognitive dissonance by trying to forget about it. The social
sanctions against belief in visiting spaceships are still pretty
severe, and ridicule remains an effective weapon about heterodox
testimony. Look at some of the more unhinged responses to even
the ultraconservative pronouncements of the Sturrock panel.

>it's at this stage that all the little extras start to turn up -
>"but I could see windows", "it seemed to follow me", "it was
>very close" - for which the evidence is rather more dubious.

What evidence do you have for this assertion? To how many
witnesses does this apply? Everyone whose experience is
otherwise inexplicable, I suspect.

>These elements occur with IFO and UFO reports - Hendry again -
>unless, as some of our less sceptical bretheren seem at times to
>be close to saying, _all_ UFO explanations are the work of
>wicked debunkers. The reaction to Hendry's book at the time
>seemed to come very near to this position.

Having followed the response to Hendry's book - wildly
uncritical, in my observation - I can tell you that John's
statement here has about as much to do with reality as PSH
claims typically do, which is not much. I recall that at the
time Phil Klass made a similar claim - that ufologists hated the
book - when in fact it was received enthusiastically in the UFO
press. (See my comments on that matter, as well as on Hendry's
strong differences with debunkers, in my "Phil Klass versus the
`UFO Promoters'," Fate, February 1981 [recently - or shortly to
be - posted on the Science, Logic, and the UFO Debate website].)

That was not, alas, because there was nothing to criticize in
Hendry's sometimes sweeping claims. It is too bad that few
reviewers took him to task (George Earley in Fate is the only
one who comes to mind, and there all too briefly) for these, but
in those days ufologists actually thought they had something to
prove to the newly invigorated debunking movement, and that may
have made them less than eager to criticize Hendry, for fear of
finding themselves at the receiving end of a charge like the one
John hurls above. It is particularly unfortunate that Saunders
did not take on Allan's use (or misuse) of statistical
methodology.

>Jerry may prefer one Mark Cashman to a thousand PSHers (could
>there really be that many of us?), and I don't doubt the quality
>of his work. But it is naive to assume that an interview with a
>percipient would be sufficient to determine a person's
>perceptual ability, and that an on-site reenactment can hope to
>even approximate the conditions of the original event.

Reading remarks live the above, I cannot resist the conclusion -
it has crossed my mind before - that John is gloriously unread
in the field reports of ufology's best investigators. The word
"naive" more properly applies to John here, I'm afraid.

Let us all be grateful that John and his friends did not decide
to go into police work. If they had, it is hard to imagine their
accepting any testimony that would convict any criminal. Let us
all be grateful, too, that the human sensory apparatus, the
product of several million years of evolution, is not so
miserably and consistently dysfunctional as John would have us
believe, lest our streets be littered with corpses of persons
who couldn't manage their way across without getting killed by
drivers unable to perform behind the wheels of dangerous, heavy
moving machines. Let us be grateful, too, that the particular
variety of social pseudoscience advocated and practiced by
Purely Speculative Hypothesizers is largely confined to ufology
and the debunking literature.

Jerry Clark