- 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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