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Subject: ::: On the Nature of Debunking :::

All Follow-Up: Re: ::: On the Nature of Debunking :::
Date: Wed, 07 Jan 1998 03:20:45 GMT

Confessions Of A Fortean Sceptic
1983 by Jerome Clark


 "There is something to be said for common sense.  Just because
  the debunkers are wrong, it doesn't necessarily follow that 
  therefore the proponents are right."  


The nadir of my career as a Fortean was reached in 1973 when I 
was researching and writing an article which subsequently 
appeared in Fate.  The article was later incorporated into the 
text of The Unidentified, a book co-authored by Loren Coleman, 
who is otherwise blameless in the horror story to follow.  

Years before then, back when I was 11 or 12 years old, I was 
rummaging through the library of the small Minnesota town where 
I grew up.  I came upon a book entitled _The Coming of the 
Fairies_ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  It dealt with a series of 
photographs taken by two young English girls who claimed that 
they regularly encountered fairies in a wooded area near their 
Cottingley, Yorkshire, home.  In due course they produced 
pictures of these beings.  The pictures, which appear in Doyle's 
book, struck me as hilariously unconvincing.  The fairies 
resembled nothing so much as cardboard cutouts.

Many years later I read Jacques Vallee's _Passport to Magonia_ 
and was taken with his attempt to link traditional fairy lore to 
modern flying saucer lore.  I began reading in the considerable 
scholarly literature on fairy beliefs.  In one of these books, 
Katharine Briggs's _The Fairies in Tradition and Literature_, I 
came upon a brief account of the Cottingley episode, about which 
Dr Briggs, one of Britain's leading folklorists, wrote: "As one 
looks at these photographs, every feeling revolts against 
believing them to be genuine."  Yet, noting some of the 
unexplained aspects of the affair, she went on guardedly to 
suggest that the pictures might be psychic photographs.

She was troubled by a few odd items of evidence, such as the 
testimony of three photographic experts who said they didn't 
know how the pictures could have been faked.

Intrigued, I reread Doyle's book and two others on the subject.  
I was impressed not so much by the testimony of the photographic 
experts as by the demonstrated inability of would-be debunkers 
to come up with plausible, non-extraordinary explanations.  
Typical of the blunders was Houdini's bold assertion that the 
models for the fairy figures came from a certain advertising 
poster.  This allegation was widely published and uncritically 
accepted.  But eventually, when investigators located copies of 
the poster in question they found that the fairies depicted on 
it looked not at all like those in the Cottingley pictures.

I was also interested to read that as late as the early 1970s, 
over 50 years after the events in question, the two photographers,
both now elderly women, seemed to stand by their earlier testimony.

So, following Briggs's lead, I cast all caution to the wind.  I 
was at least wise enough to concede that the Cottingley fairies 
didn't look real but dismissed that as a subjective consideration.
To me the absence of convincing negative evidence, coupled with
the presence of positive evidence (however thin), added up to the
conclusion that these might be authentic thoughtographs much like
those Ted Serios is said to produce.

To this day I can't believe how stupid and how credulous I was.

As we know now beyond any reasonable doubt, the Cottingley 
pictures are clumsy and absurd fakes.  In his 1978 book Ghosts 
in Photographs Fred Gettings reveals that the models from the 
figures came from a popular children's book of the period.  
Photo-analysis by William Spaulding's Ground Saucer Watch has 
shown that, yes indeed, the figures are of cardboard, just as
my 11-year-old eye had told me many years ago.

Robert Sheaffer, in his effort to debunk the story, contributed 
to the grand tradition of misleading nonsense by claiming, on 
the basis of the thinnest possible circumstantial evidence, that 
Theosophical writer Edward Gardner was the mastermind behind the 
hoax -- an assertion that quickly fell victim to Occam's Razor, 
but not before proving once again that the Cottingley affair 
could as easily make fools of disbelievers as of believers.

In their recent books, non-admirers of mine like Sheaffer and 
Martin Gardner have resurrected my foolish remarks on these non-
fairy/non-thoughtograph pictures in an effort to discredit me.  
Sheaffer even claims that he, as the man who commissioned 
Spaulding to analyse the pictures in 1977,  forced  me to 
relinquish my support.  He doesn't mention that, on the contrary,
I accepted this first truly solid negative evidence with almost 
unseemly haste, in part because I like to think I am 
intellectually honest and in part because on some level -- 
specifically the level of my psyche at which the embers of 
common sense still glowed, however faintly -- I had long 
suspected that in taking the pictures seriously I was making a 
very, very dumb mistake.

Another mistake was in assuming the existence of  thoughtographs,
the evidence for which is shaky at best.  In other words, I had 
attempted to explain a dubious claim with another dubious claim. 
Realising belatedly that I was lost deep in a jungle of Fortean 
unreality, I decided that it was high time to cut and slash my 
way through the undergrowth and return to safety, sanity and 
scepticism.  At the end of my harrowing adventure my hair was 
whiter but my head was clearer.

The moral of the story is this: 

(1) There is something to be said for common sense.

(2) Just because the debunkers are wrong, it doesn't necessarily 
    follow that therefore the proponents are right.

(3) The time had come for this proponent to do some serious 
    rethinking of his position.

                             -=oOo=-

There is a wonderful piece of verse by Spiritualist poet Ella 
Wheeler Wilcox.  Its title is  _Credulity_  and it goes:

 If fallacies come knocking at my door
 I'd rather feed and shelter full a score
 Than hide behind the black portcullis Doubt
 And run the risk of barring one Truth out.

 And if pretension for a time deceive
 And prove me one too ready to believe
 Far less my shame, than if by stubborn act
 I brand as lie, some great colossal Fact.

That sounds to me like a prescription for the kind of open-
mindedness that permits the brains to fall out of one's head.  
But it is an apt description of a mentality we encounter all too 
frequently on this side of the paranormal controversy.  It's the 
Will to Believe coupled with the Refusal to Disbelieve.  It is 
the mindset that is skeptical only of claims of fraud or error.

To achieve it, one starts with the love of mystery.  There's 
nothing wrong with that in and of itself.  The problem is that 
some of us, even after all this time, even after we have no 
excuse for not knowing better, seem more interested in pursuing 
mysteries than in securing answers.  To some, mystification is 
the beginning and end of paranormal inquiry.  Mysteries are to 
be preserved and defended at all costs.  And that may be why, 
after all this time, all we have to show for our efforts are a 
seemingly unending number of unanswered questions and a certain 
grotesque satisfaction in declaring, as one of the literature's 
enduring cliches goes, that such-and-such a mystery remains 
unsolved -- proclaimed, incidentally, as an expression of 
triumph, not as an admission of defeat.

I suggest we take a fundamentally different view.  If we are to 
make any progress in our inquiry, we would be better off 
celebrating the solutions of mysteries rather than the 
perpetuation of mysteries.

Charles Fort himself was less a lover of mysteries than an 
eccentric with a perverse taste for the kind of pompous humbug 
associated with authority figures who feel they must account for 
unaccountable phenomena about which they not only know little 
but apparently prefer to know little.  The resulting explanations
are predictably preposterous and it is not hard to conclude that
the explainers suffer from a case of anomaly phobia sufficiently
advanced to severely impair their reasoning faculties.

Anomaly phobia, of course, continues to claim its victims.  We 
all remember how the Air Force dealt with UFOs -- identifying 
them, for example, as astronomical bodies not even visible at 
the time of the reported sighting.  We have all seen the inept 
criticisms of psi, lake-monster reports and other anomalous 
claims.  We have listened incredulously to self-appointed 
protectors of the public welfare who assert, apparently with 
straight faces, that acceptance of unexplained phenomena is not 
only wrong but dangerous, perhaps even conducive to the collapse 
of civilisation.  Some of us have exposed the errors and 
baseless claims of the debunkers and recently we have seen 
scandalous revelations about the way these would-be defenders
of science and reason deal with evidence that runs contrary to 
their beliefs.

Reading Fort and tracing all that has happened since his time,
a number of paranormal proponents seem to have concluded that 
because some mundane explanations are bogus, most or all are 
bogus.  In ufology, for instance, the standard line has it that
90 to 95 per cent of raw reports are potentially explainable; 
still, to some in the field, just about any specific raw report 
of an object in the sky is of a UFO.  Some enthusiasts still 
believe that Jimmy Carter saw a UFO, not the planet Venus, and 
that many of our astronauts encountered UFOs in space.

More Forteans than we might care to admit still consider the 
Bermuda Triangle a genuine mystery, despite Larry Kusche's 
masterful expos‚ in _The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved_.
In fact, the Triangle, along with its similarly fictitious 
counterparts, the vile vortices of the world, still occupies a 
prominent place in the fertile imaginations of a few theorists.  
The alleged powers of Uri Geller and other metal-bending wonder-
workers are blithely assumed to be real and incorporated into 
extraordinary explanation schemes, even though the only thing 
about metal bending that has ever been established with 
undeniable certainty is that fraud figures largely in the 
phenomenon.  And our ranks are infested with guileless souls who 
still look to the novels of Carlos Castaneda as support for 
their metaphysical views.  All things are possible in a separate 
reality, we are told, but we are not warned that all things are 
possible as well in Cloud Cuckooland.

Those who wish to return to earth might consider some ways of 
getting back.  Here are a few:


1) Don't assume that the experts are always fools.
==================================================
Scientists and other scholars are not infallible, it need hardly 
be said.  They are human beings and they have human failings, 
prejudices and blindnesses.  But at the same time we must always 
remember that as specialists who have devoted their professional 
careers to their special areas of interest they are likely to 
know far more than you do about these subjects.  If you take 
issue with them, chances are they are right and you are wrong.  
It is even possible that you are a crank.

On the other hand, if a scientist pronounces on something 
outside his area of expertise, then he is an amateur and he has 
no greater claim on the truth than any other untrained 
commentator.  When an eminent astronomer presumes to tell us 
what to think about UFOs, it is often immediately apparent to 
anyone who knows the literature that the man is talking through 
his hat.  When, however, that same astronomer talks astronomy, 
better listen.  And if you don't agree with him, proceed very 
cautiously.


2) Don't believe every story you hear.
======================================
Some months ago my wife was babysitting for a married couple of 
our acquaintance.  The man was an officer in the Army reserve, 
holding a high security clearance which rendered him privy to 
various military and intelligence secrets.  He worked as a 
research scientist at a major university.

He regularly confided some of these secrets to his wife, who 
then confided them to my wife, who then told them to me.  Beyond 
recalling that all these presumed secrets were sensational in 
nature, I have forgotten most of them.  Of those I remember, one 
-- related in the midst of the Iranian hostage crisis -- was 
that our government knew that the Iranian militants had executed 
several of their American captives.  My informant also said that 
on a particular date the United States would invade Iran.  You 
get the idea.

I never believed any of this, needless to say, but I couldn't 
resist the temptation to ask him -- tongue firmly embedded in 
cheek -- if, as a man well versed in hidden truths, he knew if 
there were any substance to those stories about crashed saucers 
and pickled aliens purported to be in the Pentagon's possession. 
He immediately assumed a stern, official-looking expression and 
declared that that was something he couldn't talk about.  Not 
long afterwards, however, he added that the truth, if he were to 
confide it, would shock me.  On two or three subsequent occasions
he brought up the subject and let it be known that if I pressed
him at all, he would tell me the whole story.  For obvious reasons
I never bothered.

I mention this as a cautionary tale.  Remember, the man has 
impeccable credentials.  he is a military officer; he does have 
a high security clearance; and he is a research scientist at a 
major university.  And he is also, it is clear, a spinner of 
yarns.  Next time you read a story about a crashed saucer told 
by a man with similarly impressive credentials, remember him.

In fact, there is a whole branch of modern folklore waiting to 
be seized upon and catalogued by scholars of popular culture.  
These are what I call  Soldiers' Tales, or, the Horrendous 
Secrets I Learned in the Service.  We ufologists hear them all 
the time.  A few even purport to be firsthand accounts 
describing involvement in retrievals of crashed spaceships [like 
Wilson's purported "Project Pounce" -B:.B:.], the taking of 
spectacular UFO films, the witnessing of a fatal encounter 
between an aeroplane and a UFO, and so on.  Such stories -- or 
at least those with enough specific detail to permit follow-up 
investigation -- seldom check out.

I can only speculate on the motives of the yarn-spinners, but
it's not unreasonable to theorise that for many people the most 
important period of their lives was the time they spent in the 
military, when in fact some may well have been privy to secret 
information.  All human institutions, including intelligence 
agencies, have rumour mills through which stories may circulate. 
The environment in which such fantasies are related may give 
them a false authority.  Those individuals who pass into 
civilian life, may repeat the rumours in good faith.  Other 
persons, not acting in good faith, may simply place themselves 
inside the rumours to impress girl friends, wives and 
acquaintances [or publishers, as in the case of Phil "Forrest 
Gump" Corso -B:.B:.].


3) Don't get emotionally involved.
==================================
I have always been amazed at the tenacity with which some people 
hold to favourite beliefs and the rationalisations to which they 
will resort when these beliefs are threatened.

I remember reading an exchange in a Fortean journal between a 
critic of the Bermuda Triangle and a prominent promoter of same. 
The critic outlined some quite specific reasons for disbelieving
anything particularly mysterious is going on in that fabled region.
The proponent responded by remarking that the critic didn't know
what he was talking about because once, when the two were on a
television show together, he had asked the proponent if the New
Yorker were a newspaper!

Apparently this argument made sense to the proponent, but I
can't imagine its making sense to anyone else.  It is an extreme 
example of how emotional commitment to a position or to a 
specific claim can close us to rational argument and open us to 
irrational defensiveness.  It can lead us -- and this, by the 
way, is as true of debunkers as of believers -- to feel that the 
truth is greater than the sum of its facts.

It is easy to say that facts are all that matter.  It is not 
always easy, however, to act on that knowledge.  This is 
especially true at a time when paranormal and other anomalous 
claims are under attack by professional debunkers who gleefully 
jump on any mistake proponents make (while of course refusing to 
acknowledge their own) and do their best to paint these proponents
as fools who can't tell the difference between valid and invalid
data.  The effect is to force a proponent, if he isn't sensible
enough to know better, to assume a burden of infallibility.

Not long ago an ongoing controversy was settled when a certain 
item of information came to light.  This new information proved 
that the claim in question was fallacious because it had been 
based on erroneous assumptions.

The controversy had gone on for several years, with debunkers on 
one side of the issue and a prominent proponent on the other.  
The proponent -- let's call him X -- and his allies skillfully 
refuted the debunkers' arguments, most of which were demonstrably
false or irrelevant.  But finally an independent researcher, Y,
who had no particular stake in the controversy, discovered
disconfirming data which showed that, while the debunkers'
arguments were mistaken, their conclusion -- that the claim was
unfounded -- was correct.  The critics, predictably passing over
their own errors, equally predictably chortled about their victory
and had fun at X's expense.

X's response was to cast aspersions on Y's motives and to mount 
an emotional defence of the claim using post-hoc 
rationalisations and shaky arguments.  When I talked with him 
about the controversy, X talked less about facts than about face 
-- his own in particular and all anomalists' in general -- and 
about the use to which the debunkers were going to put Y's 
information.  He made it appear that the fate of all anomaly 
investigation rested on the preservation of the claim.  To him 
it seemed the finding of facts had become distinctly secondary 
to the scoring of points, just as it always had to those 
debunking opponents whom he so long had criticised so eloquently.

Let's not be afraid to admit it when we're wrong.  And let's not 
make the mistake of getting emotionally involved with -- or 
staking our professional reputations on -- a particular idea or 
a particular case.  That doesn't mean that we aren't entitled to 
our opinions about the merits of various claims or that we 
should refrain from expressing these opinions and citing our 
reasons for holding them.  It just means that we ought to 
understand clearly that what we believe and what is need not 
necessarily bear a blood relationship.


4) Don't hesitate to criticise.
===============================
Throughout this article I have referred to our critics the 
debunkers.  They call themselves  skeptics, which they aren't, 
and I think we ought to stop calling them that, too.  Marcello 
Truzzi defines the difference between the skeptic and the 
debunker as the difference between one who doubts and one who 
denies.  In the paranormal field there is, Fort knows, plenty
of room to doubt.

Unfortunately we hear too much from the deniers and too little 
from the doubters.  We are not likely to get rational arguments 
from those who choose to define the controversy in apocalyptic 
terms.  Anyone who believes, as some debunkers say they do, that 
civilisation will collapse if too many people believe that 
Bigfoot exists is not likely to concern himself with such small 
matters as reasonable arguments.  That is too bad for the rest 
of us because it means we have to look elsewhere for the kind of 
good critical review that anomaly studies urgently require.*

The true skeptics, at least those willing to put in the time to 
familiarize themselves with the literature, the issues and the 
personalities, are all too few in number.  Most can be found in 
the pages of Truzzi's superb journal _Zetetic Scholar_ which I 
recommend to all serious anomalists.

But it appears that the major part of the policing of the field 
will have to be done by us.  To our credit we have produced a 
surprising body of critical studies of various claims.  But much,
much more is needed.

The more we learn, the more we see the necessity for great care 
in assessing the data.  Some stories hold up under the most 
searching scrutiny.  Others, including some we hadn't expected
(such as the 1897 UFO calfnapping and the Barbados restless 
coffins), collapse and blow away.  We can be certain that more 
of the old favourites will meet a like fate.

I urge each of you to pick a particular case -- one that 
everyone knows to be true but that has not been documented in 
our time -- and follow it as far as it goes.  If you are able to 
substantiate it, great; then we have a solid piece of evidence.  
If you disprove it, that's great too.  Who needs a bogus mystery 
when we already have far more real ones than we can possibly 
deal with?

Let's not be afraid to criticise friends and colleagues -- or 
even ourselves -- when they or we stray from the paths of common 
sense and caution.  Along the way some egos will get bruised, 
but if those you criticise -- tactfully, I hope -- are as 
concerned with fact-finding as you are, they'll get over it.  We 
all make mistakes.  The only unforgivable mistake is the knowing 
perpetuation of error.


5) Don't assume that all mysteries, even the genuine ones, have
   extraordinary solutions.
===============================================================
Once, reflecting on his involvement with the mystery of the Loch 
Ness Monster, Roy Mackal remarked to me that he could never 
understand the resistance of so many scientists to the idea of 
Nessie.  After all, he said, Nessie is a ... rather mundane sort 
of idea.  We already have other larger freshwater animals such 
as the sturgeon...  Sometimes I think it would be almost worth the 
game if the phenomenon at Loch Ness were all that earthshaking.  
But it's not.  It violates no basic law of zoology to suggest 
that there are large animals in the loch.  

Many of us have come to assume that we are dealing with 
phenomena that border on the miraculous, phenomena that if 
understood properly would shake the scientific establishment to 
its very foundations.  That may be so in a limited number of 
cases, but in the great majority of cases I think it's wiser to 
conclude that the various mysteries will eventually yield to 
solutions that are not only un-extraordinary but also 
uninteresting.

The late F.W. Holiday once wrote a book in which he contended 
that Nessie is a strange phenomenal manifestation from another 
realm of being.  In reality, as Mackal and other zoologically 
trained investigators have shown, Nessie looks and acts 
precisely as any large animal would under the circumstances.

We read books that would have us believe fossilised footprints 
of Homo sapiens walked the earth millions of years ago.  Yet a 
recent scientific investigation shows that the prints are 
neither of great age nor of human origin.  They are almost 
certainly camel tracks and they may be only 8,000 years old.  
Skyquakes, sometimes attributed to UFOs, are now being studied 
by Thomas Gold and Steven Soter of Cornell University.  They 
have leaned that such phenomena have a geophysical explanation.  
The fabled moving rocks of Racetrack Playa, California, are 
caused by the interaction of wind and rain.

And so on and on.  We would do well to recall that before 
meteorites were understood they were considered so bizarre as to 
be utterly unbelievable.  There was a time not so long ago when 
meteorites were Fortean phenomena.

                             -=oOo=-

It is high time that we get serious.  And if we are going to be 
serious, then we are going to have to be cautious and careful.  
And if we are cautious and careful, we're going to look a lot 
more like skeptics than believers.  Which is fine, and in the 
true Fortean spirit.  Charles Fort was skeptical of establishment
humbuggery and so are those of us who follow in his footsteps.
That hasn't changed and I hope it never will.  But now it's time
that we train a skeptical eye on our own humbuggery as well.


* This is not to say, I wish to emphasise, that the debunkers 
are always wrong or that they have made no contribution whatever 
to serious research.  Some of their work does withstand critical 
scrutiny.  So, however, does some of the work of extreme 
believers.  My point is that debunkers' and believers' claims 
must be approached with caution, with judgement reserved until 
all sides have been heard from.


From: Magonia #12, 1983
http://www.magonia.demon.co.uk/magarc.htm



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