Fortean Times
Fortean Times (sporadically updated and not necessarily CT related)
FT198
p. 61 - Mary Magdalene divorced Jesus Christ according to Barbara Theiring.
FT199
p. 60 - Templar and the Grail book might be good reading.
FT201
p. 4 - Robin Ramsay on 7/7 CTs and a list of more officially recognised CTs.
‘The central impulse of the political conspiracy theorist is that ‘Event X’ isn’t what it looks like - we are being conned. The necessary conditions for such thinking are suspicion of the behaviour of states and their military and secret services, and perceived anomalies in the reporting of the events.’
‘There are now a wide variety of examples of the military and intelligence agencies of states in Western democracies considering, planning and executing atrocities against their own populations. A few examples:
‘• The bombing of the Bologna railway station in Italy in 1980, killing 85, initially blamed on left-wing groups, but subsequently officially admitted to have been done by some neo-fascists at the behest of the Italian secret service.
‘• The officially admitted collaboration between the British Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU) and Protestant terrorists in Northern Ireland in the murder of Catholics.
‘• The use by several European governments of the NATO-sponsored network Gladioto murder opponents and perpetrate acts of terror for political ends (See book review, FT197-.63).’
p. 24 - On the Himmler execution-order hoax, an example of just how well disinformation can be set-up/spread:
‘Most of the security at the PRO [Public Relations Office (in the UK)] is aimed at preventing documents being smuggled out, rather than in. The file containing the Bracken letters was opened to the public in February 2002. Allen came across the documents in autumn 2003, by which time they had already been presented to other readers on 21 occasions.’
p. 48-50 - A schema/taxonomy of UFO terminology.
p. 53 - Summary of Jan Bondsen’s book on the assassination of Swedish President Olof Palme. Saw the talk on this at UnCon06. Should have bought the book… Then again, I did have weight troubles coming home.
FT202
p. 74 - Letter
‘Thompson’s last tale
‘In a recent Konspiracy Korner, [FT198:23], Robin Ramsay outlines a conspiracy theory that Hunter S Thompson was murdered to suppress a 9/11 story he was working on. This theory largely rests upon the opening paragraph of an article by Paul William Roberts, a journalist for the stodgy but reputable Canadian Globe and Mail. At the start of Williams’s piece, he describes a phone call from Thompson on the night before his death, wherein
Thompson reveals his discovery of “hard evidence” of a 9/11 plot and his fears he’d be murdered in a manner that looked like suicide.
‘Pretty explosive stuff, except that it’s a gross distortion. Ramsay’s source for this theory was Alex Jones’s Prison Planet, a conspiracy website that reprinted only the inflammatory opening of Williams’s article (www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2005/020305thompsonwarned.htm). If we return to the source material (www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050226/HUNTER26/TPFocus/), we discover in the second paragraph that the conversation with Thompson is a complete fiction. Writes Williams of the phone call scenario: “That’s how I imagine a tribute to Hunter S Thompson should begin. He was indeed working on such a story, but it wasn’t what killed him. He exercised his own option to do that.” Let’s be clear here. Not only does Williams admit that the phone call didn’t happen, he stresses that Thompson killed himself. Primary sources make a big difference here.
‘So a journalist uses dramatic license to better illustrate the life of a flamboyant, tortured and at times paranoid writer. The conspiracy sellers relay the imaginary tale of murder and intrigue, but fail to mention that it’s wholly false. And so a new urban legend is born.
‘Kent Lewis
‘Vancouver, British Columbia’
(The increasing tendency to believe CT versions of events)
FT204
p. 24 - Robin Ramsay’s Konspiracy Korner
‘Talk of conspiracy really irritates some of our political commentators, on both the left and
the right. In America, the success of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11 provoked a deluge of criticism of ‘conspiracism’ from the left.
‘Here, for example, is well known American leftist writer, Norman Solomon: “[conspiracism] encourages people to fixate on the spectre of a few diabolical plotters rather than on the profoundly harmful realities of ongoing structural, institutional, systemic factors. Conspiracism is false consciousness.’
(Conspiracism)
In re the furore over ‘The DaVinci Code’ - ‘Meanwhile, back in the real world, as it were, a major conspiratorial story was the lead in Scotland on Sunday on 28 August, but wasn’t seen as ‘news’ south of the border. A former very senior (i.e., Assistant Chief Constable or higher) Scots policeman has provided an affidavit to the lawyers preparing the appeal of Abdelbaset All Mohmed Al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing and currently serving a life sentence in Greenock Prison. In the affidavit, the policeman avers that the crucial forensic evidence, a tiny fragment of a circuit board, which linked Libya to the crime, had been planted by the CIA, and that the British and American authorities knew the bombing had been done by Iranian-backed terrorist group the PFLP-GC.’
FT208
p. 39 - In a piece on cryptozoology a writer argues that as we have now found the justification for little people (Homo floresiensis) this seems to verify, to a degree, the existence of other mythical beasts.
p. 59 - ‘On Pseudo-Skepticism
A Commentary by Marcello Truzzi
Over the years, I have decried the misuse of the term “skeptic” when used to refer to all critics of anomaly claims. Alas, the label has been thus misapplied by both proponents and critics of the paranormal. Sometimes users of the term have distinguished between so-called “soft” versus “hard” skeptics, and I in part revived the term “zetetic” because of the term’s misuse. But I now think the problems created go beyond mere terminology and matters need to be set right. Since “skepticism” properly refers to doubt rather than denial–nonbelief rather than belief–critics who take the negative rather than an agnostic position but still call themselves “skeptics” are actually pseudo-skeptics and have, I believed, gained a false advantage by usurping that label.
In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new “fact.” Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of “conventional science” as usual. But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis –saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact–he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof.
Sometimes, such negative claims by critics are also quite extraordinary–for example, that a UFO was actually a giant plasma, or that someone in a psi experiment was cued via an abnormal ability to hear a high pitch others with normal ears would fail to notice. In such cases the negative claimant also may have to bear a heavier burden of proof than might normally be expected.
Critics who assert negative claims, but who mistakenly call themselves “skeptics,” often act as though they have no burden of proof placed on them at all, though such a stance would be appropriate only for the agnostic or true skeptic. A result of this is that many critics seem to feel it is only necessary to present a case for their counter-claims based upon plausibility rather than empirical evidence. Thus, if a subject in a psi experiment can be shown to have had an opportunity to cheat, many critics seem to assume not merely that he probably did cheat, but that he must have, regardless of what may be the complete absence of evidence that he did so cheat and sometimes even ignoring evidence of the subject’s past reputation for honesty. Similarly, improper randomization procedures are sometimes assumed to be the cause of a subject’s high psi scores even though all that has been established is the possibility of such an artifact having been the real cause. Of course, the evidential weight of the experiment is greatly reduced when we discover an opening in the design that would allow an artifact to confound the results. Discovering an opportunity for error should make such experiments less evidential and usually unconvincing. It usually disproves the claim that the experiment was “air tight” against error, but it does not disprove the anomaly claim.
Showing evidence is unconvincing is not grounds for completely dismissing it. If a critic asserts that the result was due to artifact X, that critic then has the burden of proof to demonstrate that artifact X can and probably did produce such results under such circumstances. Admittedly, in some cases the appeal to mere plausibility that an artifact produced the result may be so great that nearly all would accept the argument; for example, when we learn that someone known to have cheated in the past had an opportunity to cheat in this instance, we might reasonably conclude he probably cheated this time, too. But in far too many instances, the critic who makes a merely plausible argument for an artifact closes the door on future research when proper science demands that his hypothesis of an artifact should also be tested. Alas, most critics seem happy to sit in their armchairs producing post hoc counter-explanations. Whichever side ends up with the true story, science best progresses through laboratory investigations.
On the other hand, proponents of an anomaly claim who recognize the above fallacy may go too far in the other direction. Some argue, like Lombroso when he defended the mediumship of Palladino, that the presence of wigs does not deny the existence of real hair. All of us must remember science can tell us what is empirically unlikely but not what is empirically impossible. Evidence in science is always a matter of degree and is seldom if ever absolutely conclusive. Some proponents of anomaly claims, like some critics, seen unwilling to consider evidence in probabilistic terms, clinging to any slim loose end as though the critic must disprove all evidence ever put forward for a particular claim. Both critics and proponents need to learn to think of adjudication in science as more like that found in the law courts, imperfect and with varying degrees of proof and evidence. Absolute truth, like absolute justice, is seldom obtainable. We can only do our best to approximate them.
This article originally appeared in The Zetetic Scholar, #12-13, 1987.
p. 59 - Distinction between “crypto” and “para” sciences; cryptosciences study hidden objects whose existence can be proved by a public demostration (say, of a specimen) whilst a parascience deal with unexpected kinds of causality/events and the ‘proof’ of these will be by inference rather than evidential consideration.
