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Prediction - No Spaceship
On October 14th

By Michael Goodspeed
Thunderbolts.info
10-13-8
 
In the nearly 20 years that I've followed with great curiosity the UFO question, I've attended a handful of UFO conferences/symposiums. The reason I haven't attended more is, they are rarely if ever a source of any new or novel information. Rather, they are opportunities for speakers to hawk their various books, DVDs, newsletters, and UFO paraphernalia to (what they hope is) a receptive, enthusiastic audience.
 
With that said, I was pleasantly surprised a few years ago, when I had the good fortune to attend the Seattle Chat Club's 2005 UFO/Paranormal Conference and Sasquatch Symposium. The lineup of speakers included such well-known "alternative media" figures as Dr. Nick Begich, Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center, Lloyd Pye of the Starchild Project, and author and abduction researcher Budd Hopkins. It was Hopkins with whom I had the great pleasure of sharing a cup of coffee and approximately thirty minutes of informal Q & A.
 
The timing of my conversation with Budd was rather serendipitous. A few months earlier, he had appeared on the (now largely forgotten) Peter Jennings' ABC special, "Seeing is Believing," and his wounds from the shows biased and sloppy treatment of the abduction issue were clearly still fresh. Budd was especially aggravated by the producers' attempt to explain the abduction phenomenon as a relatively common medical ailment known as "sleep paralysis." According to Budd, the vast majority of "abductees" he's worked with were not sleeping nor even in bed at the time of their experiences -- a detail not included in the shows final edit. (Also not included was most of the best evidential data accumulated by many researchers over roughly 60 years of UFO investigations. But hey, it's only UFOs, so need no for any journalistic vigor).
 
We also briefly discussed another hot UFO issue at the time -- the startling (and to many totally mystifying) notoriety of a man who called himself "The Prophet Yahweh" (real name Ramon Watkins). Less than two weeks earlier, a Las Vegas TV-news reporter and crew had been filming an interview with Mr. Watkins when what seemed to be a mysterious object was filmed, supposedly at Watkins' beckon. (Video available here: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=PrQsQQ83Wrg). Of course, when one watches the video, the reporter has to point out the object to "Yahweh," and "Yahweh" himself sounds like he doesn't quite believe it.
 
Unfortunately for Watkins/Yahweh he didn't have the good sense to quit while he was ahead. He told the same reporter that the next week, a UFO would come down low enough for all of Las Vegas to see it. (If such a sighting happened, it must have, as the saying goes, "stayed in Vegas.")
 
The mention of "The Prophet Yahweh's" name to Hopkins (and a few other conference speakers with whom I briefly chatted) elicited a rueful grin and a shake of the head. Surely, these investigators who have spent so many years struggling against pseudo-skepticism can't appreciate when some self-anointed "prophet" attracts major media attention, only to soil the whole field of inquiry with a bunch of self-aggrandizing claims and bogus predictions.
 
Three years after the "Prophet Yahweh" fiasco peaked, the UFO "community" (and I use this term generically, since in my twenty years of following the issue I've seen absolute zero evidence that such a "community" exists) may face a similar dilemma with the now very visible predictions of an Australian woman who calls herself Blossom Goodchild.
 
Up until a couple of weeks ago, I had never heard of Blossom Goodchild, and I still know little about her background. What is known is this: Ms. Goodchild claims to be a channeling medium who receives telepathic messages from an agency of "Cosmic Beings" that she identifies as "The Federation of Light." She asserts that this agency has informed her that on October 14th of 2008, "a craft of great size shall be visible within your skies. It shall be in the south of your hemisphere and it shall scan over many of your states." The "Federation" supposedly elaborated, "We give to you the name of Alabama." (View Ms. Goodchild's latest YouTube video/monologue on the subject, http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=SFyK2N4RG_o).
 
For reasons that aren't clear to me, this highly specific "prophecy" has become something of an Internet phenomenon. The above YouTube video has been seen well over 100,000 times, and countless blogs and forums that discuss the "paranormal" are heavily focused on the prediction. As justifiably jaundiced as I am toward these types of prophecies and "channeled" material, I see no need to comment on Ms. Goodchild's personal credibility at this time (and again, I know very little about her background). But I would like to make a couple of points that should resonate with anyone who actually cares about the UFO question and other ongoing "paranormal" inquiries.
 
First and perhaps most important, as strange as it might seem, some people in the general public take these types of predictions quite seriously. Even though many of the forums and websites discussing the October 14th prophecy tend toward frivolousness, the story would not have such legs without a sizable dose of fervency. Most of us remember the horrific specter of the Heaven's Gate tragedy of 1998, when cult-leader Marshall Applewhite and dozens of his followers committed suicide, apparently in the hope that their departed souls might "beam up" onto a UFO that they thought accompanied the Hale-Bopp comet. The notion of the Hale-Bopp UFO companion was popularized on the Art Bell radio show, and in fact, many in the media openly pointed fingers at Bell for his apparent lack of journalistic discretion.
 
Indeed, Bell himself was a favored punching bag of pseudo-skeptics, and with good reason. Art had no compunctions with using his radio show to empower known liars and charlatans, including self-styled prophets who have built careers out of essentially screaming, "The sky is falling!" The same people who claimed fifteen years ago that Denver would be the new west coast before the turn of the millennium (Gordon Michael Scallion) or that North Korea would incinerate South Korea with a nuclear weapon in the late 90's (Ed Dames) are still regularly featured on Coast to Coast AM, the show established by Bell and whose tradition of morbidness and fear-mongering is maintained by George Noory (albeit in a less incendiary manner than Bell).
 
The primary reason it is irresponsible to popularize and empower "false prophets" is not because psychic abilities aren't real. (Of course, the evidential case for psychic phenomena is many tiers wide and deep, a fact only a pseudo-skeptic would deny). Charlatans are a major impediment to the quest for truth largely due to the illusory credibility they lend to the world's self-described "skeptics" -- individuals who claim to speak for science, but instead speak only for their own ideological zealotry.
 
When the James Randis of the world stick to beating up on refuted "psychics" like Sylvia Browne, they are generally on safe ground. But when they wage their trademark ad hominem rampages and lightweight dismissals against accredited scientists like Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, they tend to embarrass themselves, or worse. In a 2000 interview in Dog World magazine, Randi specifically claimed to have debunked Sheldrake's findings on canine ESP. But when pressed to provide evidence of the purported debunking, he could not do so.
 
Sheldrake elaborates in his own synopsis of the controversy:
 
"Randi also claimed to have debunked one of my experiments with the dog Jaytee, a part of which was shown on television. Jaytee went to the window to wait for his owner when she set off to come home, but did not do so before she set off. In Dog World, Randi stated: 'Viewing the entire tape, we see that the dog responded to every car that drove by, and to every person who walked by.' This is simply not true, and Randi now admits that he has never seen the tape." (See http://www.sheldrake.org/D&C/controversies/randi.html)
 
This was not the first time Randi had embarrassed himself with untrue statements. In fact, the late Eldon Byrd won a legal battle against Randi (with no monetary award) when Randi accused him of being a convicted child molester. (Interestingly, the Wikipedia site, in its predictably numbing defense of all things pseudo-skeptical, almost manages to twist Byrd v. Randi into something like a victory for Randi -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi#Eldon_Byrd).
 
Now coming back to Ms. Blossom Goodchild and her prediction of a major UFO sighting on October 14, 2008, I reiterate that I know little about her, and I have no interest in condemning her personally. Although I think her prediction is at best irresponsible, everyone has the right to stake his or her credibility in easily verifiable terms (which Ms. Goodchild has done). I'm going to go out on the world's tiniest limb and predict that no spaceship will appear on October 14. I would love nothing more than to be wrong, and I'm sure every serious UFO inquirer feels these same way. But assuming I'm not wrong, my second prediction is certain to be true: The world's pseudo-skeptics will gleefully parade Ms. Goodchild as an alleged demonstration of UFOlogy's absurdity. And when this happens, mark it up as another "victory" for disingenuousness, arrogance, meanness and zealotry over reason, dispassion, objectivity and truthfulness.

 
 
 
 
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