If Science is a Medieval Court, UFO & Paranormal Researchers Don't Even Have the Status of Scrubbers

This is was inspired by Jenny Randles’ Ufology in 2020: Does ufology have a future? over at the Fortean Times.

What intrigues me’s NOT what the UFO/paranormal fraternity/sorority gets up to over the next ten years but what their nemeses the so-called sceptics’re go’n’o get up to.

We've very recently had the case of one bunch of scientists forming a committee to reach over the heads of less powerful, less media sussed, less influential colleagues who differ with them to declare to the general public the notion a giant meteorite killed off the dinosaurs is now an ESTABLISHED scientific 'fact'.

Before that we had the big Darwin versus Everything Else push which started last year, culminating in the BBC’s Darwinius Masillae fossil documentary selling the idea everything the God of the Natural Selectionists’d ever claimed had been scientifically proven by someone suddenly fortuitously realising Darwinius was actually the missing link – and this in spite of the scientists who claimed and continue to claim it's not even a precursor to the ape lineage.

We’ve also had the recent outbreak of younger scientists and their mentors claiming Science’s become akin to a feudalistic medieval court in which their superior or even breakthrough research’s being excluded from being published or even merely referenced in order to advantage the more mediocre less important work of high ranking establishment scientists who’ve built reputations based on past glories to establish strangleholds on media access, or the work of more middle ranking scientists who understand quality of work’s less important than knowing how to maximise the advantages of the networking system and arse kiss your way up the pecking order.

But you see what I’m getting at here? A clear party politics style pattern of let’s use our more powerful and greater influential media connections to cut out or discredit those who disagree with or oppose us, with the ultimate purpose of establishing us as the sole arbiters of what’ll constitute acceptable scientific ‘truth’.

So when I read Richard Wiseman on Alex Tsakiris’ Skeptiko describing the gradual emergence of new paranormal paradigms as “jumping from one ship to another. It used to be card guessing, dream telepathy, and there’s Ganzfeld, there’s remote viewing. The reason those jumps have occurred is this stuff does not replicate…I think the healthier attitude would be to say, “Hold on a second. How can we stop this? How can we stop this happening in the future so that in the next ten years we’re not in the same position again and we can reach some kind of closure?”” I find myself wondering whether such sentiments coming from such a media savvy self promoter professional sceptic as Richard Wiseman means the next phase of the big Darwin push’ll be an attempt to establish with the likes of such media powers as the BBC the idea of a specific time limit within which the paranormal field, (UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, ESP, etc)’ll be required to deliver EXTRAORDINARY definitive proof of itself, after which it’ll be come taken as established scientific fact as PROVEN untrue.

In short, the next ten years might see a push in the media to deliberately marginalise UFOs et al. out of existence, and if it succeeds these may be looked on as halcyon days.

alanborky