CJ on the Ideology Driving the Distinction Between Ghosts and Poltergeists

Yesterday CJ put up yet another fascinating piece about ghosts and parapsychology, in which he attempts to develop and clarify some his own ideas on the subject. I’ve been responding to the other pieces he’s written about it, in which he’s also covered UFOs and the social stress theory of paranormal sightings. My comments have been well received by him and he hopes other people will do the same.

Before the 19th century, ghosts were a noisy lot. They moaned and rattled chains in haunted houses, and when they appeared to witnesses spoke. Often this was to complain that their physical remains were unburied and they could not rest without them being found and given a decent send off. Other times it was a dire warning about their post-mortem state and the sins that had led them there. One ancient Greek writer recorded that decades after a particularly bloody battle the ghosts of those slain used to rise up regularly to talk to the local farmers, giving them advice on the proper way to cultivate their vines. Then in the 19th century a change occurred. Instead of being noisy and communicative, ghosts instead became silent visions. There have been at least one bit on the history of ghosts. The one I remember was by Finucane, which, if I recall correctly, was published by the Humanist publishing house Prometheus Books. This apparent change and others in spectral behaviour supports the sceptical argument that ghosts, whatever they are, aren’t spirits of the dead but more likely a psycho-social phenomenon, changing as society and expectations of what ghosts are and how they should behave change.

The Magonian’s reviewed one of these books way back in the 90s, and concluded that the apparent reduction of ghosts to silence was bound up with Victorian attitudes towards the lower orders. Ghosts, like proles and tradesmen, were things that should be seen and not heard. The Society for Psychical Research, set up in the 19th century to examine ghosts and other phenomena, thereby recorded ghosts as noiseless. In his piece yesterday, CJ described how his research decades ago convinced him that no such change in the ghost phenomenon had occurred and that ghosts were definitely not, or not always, silent but were often noisy. Going back through the SPR’s literature, he found out that he wasn’t the only person to make this discovery, but that Tony Cornell and Gauld had also come to the same conclusion at the tail end of the 1970s. So why did the SPR, dedicated as it was and is to the objective study of the paranormal, decide that ghosts were a visual, quiet phenomenon?

The answer lies in the fraught relationship the early SPR had with the Spiritualists and their own theory on the origins of ghosts. During its investigations, the SPR debunked a number of fraudulent mediums. This led to the organisation being viewed by Spiritualists such as Stainton Moses and others as hostile and determined to discredit Spiritualism and other psychic phenomena. As a result, Moses and the other Spiritualists departed from the Society. One of the other organisation the SPR managed to alienate was Madam Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. Blavatsky claimed, amongst other psychic powers, to be in receipt of messages from Koothumi and the other Ascended Masters. These took the form of physical letters fluttering down from the ceiling at the Society’s meetings. The SPR was called in to examine the phenomenon. Their man was a lawyer, who already had under his belt the metaphysical scalps of various fraudulent mediums. He examined the house, and found that there were gaps in the floorboards in the room immediately above that in which Blavatsky and co held their seances. These were large enough for someone to post one of these metaphysical letters down to the room below. His report concluded that this was the most probably answer. Understandably, Blavatsky and her supporters were very definitely not pleased and there was a rift between them and the SPR until the 90s or so. The SPR then issued another report repudiating the findings of a century or so before and concluding that the appearance of the letters was genuinely mysterious and paranormal.

In fact there are very good reasons for doubting Blavatsky’s claimed mystical powers. Ireland’s greatest modern poet, W.B. Yeats, fell afoul of her for daring to question the truth of her spiritual pronouncements. Blavatsky claimed that if you crushed a flower at the time of the full moon, and placed a jar over its remains and allowed the moonlight to shine through, you would see the spirit of the flower. Yeats noted that it was a full moon that night when Blavatsky said all this, and suggested they try it. At which point Blavatsky threw a strop, and Yeats ended up being ejected from the Society. On another occasion, Blavatsky claimed to be able to levitate a glass. ‘Go up,’ she said, and it rose up. She then commanded it to go down, which it did. The demonstration of psychic powers would, however, have been even more convincing had she not been holding the glass at the time. There has been a book on the Theosophists written from a sceptical standpoint, which also suggested that Colonel Olcott, an American army officer who was one of its leaders, was there as part of a scheme to weaken British rule in India. It also suggested that Olcott’s interest in the young Indian lad, Krishnamurti, whom the Society had decided was the new messiah, was less than spiritual. In the end, Krishnamurti broke with the Theosophists by teaching that everyone had the spiritual power to save themselves. He also aroused the scorn of the late Fleet Street TV critic, Clive James, when he was interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge on British television in the 70s. Muggeridge was deeply interested in religion and questions of faith. On his programme, he remarked on how Krishnamurti seemed serene and self-realised. What was the old boy’s secret? The secret, the great sage told him, was simple: stop thinking. James was not impressed, as society, in his hopelessly two-eyed view, has advanced through a lot of people thinking very hard. This included whoever had made Krishnmurti’s very elaborate shirt and particularly the whole through which he stuck his self-realised bonce. Another friend of mine had absolutely no time for the Theosophists because of one of their spokesmen’s apparent attitude to the Holocaust. One of them had appeared on British TV back in the 60s or so, and stated that Hitler’s attempted extermination of the Jews was all due to their bad karma. He very definitely wasn’t impressed at this noxious opinion, and I’ve no doubt very many other severely normal Brits shared his views.

But back to ghosts. The SPR’s characterisation of ghosts as a purely visual phenomenon wasn’t due to social snobbery. The Society at the time was indeed packed with the great and good of Victorian and Edwardian society, including scientists, philosophers and politicians, some of whom became Prime Minister. It’s a very far cry from the situation today, where there is considerable official scepticism to the paranormal and parapsychology is regarded by many as a pseudoscience. Despite its socially elevated membership, the Society weren’t snobs. They would pay the membership fees of ordinary, less lofty individuals who wished to join but couldn’t afford to. The reason for their view that ghosts were quiet and silent came from their theory for the origins of ghosts. They believed that ghosts were a kind of hallucination generated by another mind. This could be a living person or deceased. Thus, spooks, when they appeared, were silent. They coined the term ‘telepathy’ for the mental faculty they believed allowed people to create such psychic images. In the 1920s the English philosopher C.W. Broad believed in the reality of telepathy, reasoning that it must exist to allow the spirits of the departed to communicate in the hereafter.

But the SPR did not believe that telepathy was the only psychic ability. They also believed that some individuals could move objects by the power of their minds, a phenomenon they named psycho- and telekinesis. The two terms are almost synonymous, but CJ states that psychokinesis particularly means movement by a mind. Hence, presumably, that poltergeists were also the creation of a mind, including that of the person at the centre of the phenomenon. The SPR therefore drew a distinction between ghosts – silent and visual – and poltergeists – physical and audible. Ghosts that made a noisy were placed in the poltergeist category. CJ found that there was in fact no distinction between the two, and so coined a new term, polterghosts, to make this clear. Ghosts could also make a noise and throw objects about.

I suspect that the Magonians’ view that the SPR’s ideological decision that ghosts were purely visual was due to social snobbery comes from the experience some of them had with various leading members of BUFORA, at one time the leading British UFO organisation. Although I wouldn’t like to say this is the case now, some of the leading lights of that organisation had very right-wing view. They recalled a talk at one BUFORA meeting by a man, who stated that when the UFO aliens finally took over the world, they would restore it to its traditional agricultural economy and social order, which they would rule ‘with a rod of iron’. Which suggests that this chap was a member of the aristocracy and hankered after its restoration after it was deposed by the growth of mass, industrial society. He, and other, similar members of BUFORA, also apparently viewed the UFO phenomenon as a weapon against modern science and the low social origins of the men and women who pursued it. Instead of properly brought young ladies and gentlemen from the public and grammar schools, who studied respectable subjects like the Classics, these were frightful plebs from the secondary moderns. When two scientists from Cambridge appeared at a BUFORA meeting, the host sneered at them as the ‘petty godlings of the laboratory’. Not surprisingly, the pair didn’t appear again.

I think in fact many of Britain’s leading scientists were probably educated at public and the former grammar schools. As for the situation today, in the few times I’ve had anything to do with the established UFO societies, including BUFORA, I haven’t seen any social snobbery. Back in the 90s I went to a couple of meetings of the Bristol UFO Bureau, which was one of the country’s oldest UFO organisations, dating from the 50s. Rather than being anti-science, many of their members were also members of the city’s Astronomical Society. At one meeting one of the lecturers from Bristol university gave a talk on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, while a lady from the Astronomical Society talked about Mars and where it could be seen in the sky at that time of year. I think they may have invited someone from the local Rationalist Society to attend the meeting as well. When I went again, a little while later, I found a copy of the Rationalist’s account of the meeting. He described it as marked by hysterical credulity, at one point writing ‘What wouldn’t they believe?’ This clashed with my experience, which was that the people there listened quietly and respectfully, as people usually do at meetings, and that the tone was quietly inquisitive rather than highly charged emotionally. Yes, before the meeting some people were discussing whether NASA had faked the moon landings, but this was because there was a piece about that conspiracy theory and the photos from the Moon’s surfaced that apparently showed this in that day’s issue of the Independent. Bristol’s Rationalists evidently shared Carl Sagan’s fears that the West was about to drown in a tidal wave of superstition, abandoning science for astrology and the New Age. Despite the popularity of the X-Files on TV at the time, I saw little evidence at the BUFOB meeting that there was any kind superstitious hysteria there.

There have been very many changes in the ghost experience and accounts of the afterlife over the centuries. In the ancient and medieval worlds apart from ghosts there were also walking dead, the corpses of the deceased wicked rising from the grave to spread disease and death as recounted by William of Newborough in his Chronicle. Apart from zombies in Haiti, I am not aware of any similar phenomena in the modern west beyond the flicks of George A. Romero and other ‘orror directors. But if the ghost phenomenon hasn’t changed, and the spooks are as noisy and disruptive as they ever were, then this does provide evidence that they’re an objective phenomenon and not a socially determined hallucination.

For further information see: https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/12/ghosts-working-notes-part-3/

38 Degrees Petition Against Voter ID Laws

‘Last year, voters in England and Wales cast their votes in local elections. When it comes to our right to vote, the results are trickling in and it’s not looking good, David. [1] Voting shouldn’t be difficult. But we’re already hearing story after story of people being denied their right to vote and it’s estimated that across the country, the new rules stopped many from voting. [2] The millions of missing voters, and those most often turned away are more likely to be from already underrepresented groups. [3]

At the next general election, the whole UK will be subject to Voter ID. The Government knows this isn’t working, even Jacob Rees-Mogg admitted it. [4] But they’re not committing to do anything about it. So it’s up to us, David. A HUGE number of politicians, democracy organisations and election expert insiders have already called for a different approach. [5]

We’re not just saying no to voter ID. We’re providing them an alternative – one that has been proven to work in encouraging people into registering to vote, not putting them off. [6] Anyone with the right to vote in this country should be able to do so.

That’s why we’ve joined forces with the UK’s leading democracy organisations and expert insiders to encourage politicians to scrap the unworkable voter ID laws and instead introduce an easier alternative, like Automatic Voter Registration. Will you join us? It only takes 30 seconds to sign:

Yes, I’ll join 

No, I won’t 

Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) is already used in dozens of countries around the world and has proven itself to be effective in improving registration rates. [7] AVR would automatically register eligible citizens through interactions with public services, removing the need for separate registration processes.

This simple approach ensures that everyone who is eligible to vote is registered, removing unnecessary barriers to participation which are denying people their right to vote. [8]

Our 38 Degrees community votes for all parties and none, but we’re united in our belief that every eligible voter should be able to make their voice heard.

So today we’re asking if you’ll join us in calling on politicians to make voting easier, not harder to make sure that no one is locked out at the next election? It only takes a few seconds to sign:

Yes, I’ll join 

No, I won’t 

Thanks for all you do,

Amoke, Jonathan, Tom and the 38 Degrees team

NOTES:

[1] BBC News: Boris Johnson turned away from polling station after forgetting ID
The Independent: Veteran in Army for 27 years turned away at polling station as military ID not allowed
The Guardian: Voter ID: 14,000 were denied vote in England local elections, watchdog finds
[2] See note 1

[3] The Electoral Commission: Voter ID demographic analysis research

[4] Sky News: Jacob Rees-Mogg suggests requiring photo ID to vote was attempt to ‘gerrymander’ which ‘came back to bite’ Tories

[5] Electoral Reform Society: Voter ID rules criticised by MPs, election watchdog and election administrators

ICDR: VOTER ID SCHEME IS A “POISONED CURE” AND MUST BE REFORMED FINDS PARLIAMENTARY INQUIRY

[6] The Brennan Center for Justice: AVR Impact on State Voter Registration

[7] Institute for Responsive Government: AVR Reduces Racial and Economic Disparities in the Election Process

[8] See note 7′

Forthcoming Arise Festival Events

‘REGISTER HERE: Vulture Capitalism – Grace Blakeley & Jeremy Corbyn In Conversation

Online. Mon. May 20, 6.30pm. Register here // RT here // FB share here.

Grace Blakeley & Jeremy Corbyn will talk about her new book Vulture Capitalism – the book you need to understand what is happening in the world around you – & what you can do to change it. (Order the book  here.) Join us for this very special event!

In Vulture Capitalism, acclaimed journalist Grace Blakeley takes on the world’s most powerful corporations by showing how the causes of our modern crisis are the intended result of our capitalist system. It’s not broken, it’s working exactly as planned.

Hosted by Arise – A Festival of Left Ideas. Free event, but solidarity donations essential to hosting & streaming costs – please donate £20 or what you can afford here.

ALSO COMING UP:

1) Class War in Britain – the Miners’ Strike 40 Years on

Online. Sat. June 1, 1- 4pm. Register here // RT here // Invite & share here. 

An afternoon of online political education, discussion & debate on one of the most important struggles in our history, including what really happened; the role of the state & media; & lessons for solidarity & socialism today.

With: John Hendy KC, who represented the NUM in the 1980s // Mike Jackson, Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners co-founder // Ian Lavery MP, striking miner in 84/5 & former NUM President // Chris Peace, Orgreave Truth & Justice Campaign // Jon Trickett MP, councillor elected during the strike & campaigner for coalfield communities.

Plus: Sabby Dhalu. Stand up to Racism // Carolyn Jones, Morning Star // Mish Rahman, LP NEC // Matt Willgress, Arise // Sarah Woolley, BFAWU.

Hosted by Arise – A Festival of Left Ideas. Media partner – Labour Outlook. Free event, but solidarity donations essential to hosting & streaming costs – please donate £20 or what you can afford here.

2) IN-PERSON CONFERENCE: A Labour Movement Agenda for a Labour Government

All-day, Saturday May 25, Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London, WC1H 9BB. Register here // Retweet John here.

John McDonnell MP // Mick Lynch, RMT General Secretary // Rebecca Long Bailey MP // Fran Heathcote, PCS General Secretary // Asad Rehman, War on Want // Ellen Clifford, Disabled People Against Cuts // Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography // Lord Prem Sikka // Mary Robertson, Lecturer at QMUL // Andrew Fisher, IPaper Columnist //Jess Barnard, Labour NEC // Johh Hendy KC, IER // Jacqui McKenzie, Human Rights Lawyer // Ann Pettifor, author, The Case for the Green New Deal.

Hosted by Claim the Future. Supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung London Office. Circulated by Arise & Labour Assembly,‘

Brainscanning for Ghosts

This is my response to the second part of CJ’s article arguing that ghosts are a kind of hallucination, nevertheless created by something with an objective reality outside of the human brain. The second part of his essay is more speculative and possibly more controversial, arguing as it does that contemporary brain scan technology and the attempts to create artificial telepathy through technology could lead to devices to see ghosts technologically.

There are already devices aimed at ghost hunters which claim to be ghost detectors. As I understand them, they work by detecting minute changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, which, it is claimed, is produced through the presence of a ghost. This is rather a specious assertion, and in my experience the serious psychic investigators such as those in ASSAP are highly sceptical of it. The technology that CJ suggests could be used to see ghosts is different. He is impressed with recent advances in the use of brain scans to read people’s minds. In one experiment, a man was able to play chess through mentally thinking out his moves, which were detected by the machines. I recall another experiment in which people were played something by either the Beatles or Pink Floyd. Their brains were being scanned while they listened to the music, and the experimenters were able to reconstruct from the scans what the test subjects had heard. It wasn’t perfect – the scientists said that it sounded like the band was singing underwater, but it was definitely recognisable. And then there is Elon Musk and his desire to create genuine artificial telepathy through his neuralink implants.

CJ is well aware of the totalitarian dangers of this technology, and the possibility that it could be used by highly oppressive regimes to monitor the thoughts of their subjects. He cites the psi judges in the 2000 AD strip ‘Judge Dredd’, to which could be added Agent Bester and Psi Corps in the 90s SF TV series Babylon 5. The latter character’s name is undoubtedly no accident. It looks like a homage to the SF writer Alfred Bester, the author of The Demolished Man. This is about a millionaire planning a murder in a future society with telepathic police monitoring the citizenry. Closer parallels to what CJ is suggesting, however, are in the 2000 AD strips ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ and ‘ABC Warriors’. ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ was set far in Earth’s future, where the bulk of the planet’s population live underground and the world renamed Termight – Mighty Terra. It is ruled by Torquemada, Grand Master of the Terminators, successors to the medieval military orders of the Crusades, who have turned humans’ fear of aliens into a religion. In one story describing the past of the alien hero’s human companion, Purity Brown, it is revealed that the Terminators use such technology to monitor and suppress dissidents. Purity’s father, a tube engineer, keeps his hatred of Torquemada well hidden until one night he has a dream. This is detected and he is arrested. Yes, I’m sure it’s based on a passage in Orwell’s 1984, just as I don’t think it’s an accident that the mobile surveillance vans used for this kind of surveillance in the strip look like the old TV detector vans which used to go about looking for people watching TV without a licence. There’s always been a very strong element of satire in 2000 AD.

The ABC Warriors is a long-running strip about a group of former war droids, led by the square-jawed, patriotic Hammerstein, to fight evil and oppression on Mars. In one episode, the Meknificent Seven, as they are dubbed, are sent into a Martian city, whose ruler prefers to communicate only through technological telepathy. The city is divided into various quiet zones in which citizens must keep silent so that the ruler’s machines can monitor their brains for subversive thoughts. There’s also a satirical edge to this story as well, as there is a subversive graffiti artist sending the ruler and his secret police up. One of his murals depicts the ruler and his head of secret police in a kiss, much like Banksy’s painting of two policemen.

There are real dangers and possibilities with this technology. One of the videos on YouTube discussing it describes an experiment in which people had their arms linked through the technology to another person’s brain. This person was then able to move the first person’s arm against their will. This brings us very close to a possibility the British scientist J.D. Bernal outlined in his book, The World, The Flesh and The Devil, in which one person could be mentally linked to a control a group of robots. Or alternatively, Star Trek’s Borg, a technological gestalt organism in which the individual is totally subsumed into the group. In the 1960s and ‘70s some scientists predicted that it would be possible to technologically implant false memories, exactly like the premise of Philip K. Dick’s short story, ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’, filmed in 1990s with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Total Recall. At the moment we seem to be safe from such intrusive technological surveillance. As CJ points out, the equipment at the moment uses sensors directly connected to the skull, so it won’t detect people’s thoughts from a distance. As he also reminds us, people’s brains are also wired slightly differently, so what could pick up A’s secret cogitations may not pick up B’s private thoughts. Mercifully for democracy and freedom.

There are two ways brain scanning technology could be used to allow people to see ghosts. One would be through monitoring the visual cortex of a medium, so that others are able to see the spooks he or she sees, either through monitors or being technologically linked to him or her and experiencing what he or she feels through impulses fed directly into their brains. But, if I’m following CJ’s argument correctly, this is not what he’s talking about. I think he means using the brain scanning technology on the environment, not an individual, living brain, in order to reveal the presence of a ghost.

CJ reminds his readers that the 19^th century founders of the Society for Psychic Research concluded that ghosts were hallucinations, but generated remotely by other minds and brains. The SPR’s constitution states that one of its aims is to investigate unknown powers of the human mind. The Society coined the term ‘telepathy’ to describe this process, although the concept existed long before its foundation. It was originally called ‘thought transference’. In the early part of the century, one of the pioneering lady novelists of the period wrote a story in which a young woman develops this ability. She then encounters a man with same telepathic abilities, and is left terribly alone when his telepathic presence vanishes. I think CJ believes that the brain monitoring technology could be used to artificially see ghosts if it was directed at the environment and the specific spot where the ghost was located. It would then pick up the impressions from the disembodied mind generating the illusion of a ghost, which would then be reconstructed into an image or sound by the technology, or piped directly into the experimenters’ visual cortex so they could ‘see’ it for themselves. He is, however, somewhat sceptical of anyone inventing ‘ghost goggles’.

It’s a thought-provoking and challenging idea. Let’s see if we can further unpack what might be involved here. I think this idea assumes that, even though the person generating the ghost hallucination has passed on, nevertheless they left behind something analogous to the human brain. Something so similar, in fact, that even though other instruments may say that there is nothing there save empty space, the technology used to scan living minds can nevertheless be used on it with something like the same results. But this brings us back to what this mind or brain stuff could be. Arthur C. Clarke, in his novel The City and the Stars, has its young hero meet and befriend a disembodied mind in space. The novel is set thousands of years in the future in which space travel has ceased and the Earth become a desert, desolate except for a single city. The disembodied mind is the result of experiments by human scientists at the height of civilisation and interstellar travel, which succeeded in embedding minds on space itself. Something similar was described in the BBC adaptation of John Christopher’s Tripod’s trilogy. The alien invaders in their citadel in the French alps use living computers created by another alien civilisation, who similarly embossed volunteers from their culture on space-time.

Back in the 90s, an American neurosurgeon, Hameroff, suggested that quantum processes in human brain cells generated consciousness and would continue after death, thus preserving the identity of the deceased and generating ghosts and Near Death Experiences. Philosophers have suggested that consciousness is an integral part of the universe along with matter and energy. And way back in the 1920s a New Zealand scientist had much the same idea. In his view, not only did the universe contain the elementary particles of matter, such as atoms, electrons, protons and neutrons, but also a particle of mind – the Mindon. This comes close to the 18^th century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz alternative theory to atoms, monads. Atomic theory, then being seriously revived and considered by European scientists and philosophers, was regarded with suspicion through its association with atheism, as laid out by the ancient philosopher Lucretius in his De Rerum Naturae. Leibniz instead argued that there were similar particles, monads, which also contained elements of consciousness and soul. These gradually gained in size, intelligence and supernatural power, following the divine will.

The problem here is that we don’t know what kind of mental stuff ghosts are composed of, or how it could interact with material technological bodies. Anything embossed directly on Spacetime without particles of matter, such as atoms and electrons, is, I would say, far beyond the ability of our technological devices to detect. Remember that brain scans work by detecting the minute bioelectric signals passing through the matter of the brain. Although these signals are minute, they nevertheless arise through a material process. We have no means to read disembodied minds. The same problem arises if the minds of ghosts are generated by quantum events. We have no means to monitor these outside of the bioelectric and chemical changes in the brain.

There is another problem in that brain scans are set up for the particular structure of human brains. Even if the ghosts have or constitute the type of brains that generate hallucinations, as the SPR theorised, we again have no idea, if these brains are organised in the same way mortal, embodied brains are. It may be that they’re totally different in structure, in which case the scanning equipment may not work.

This may not be an obstacle to getting usable results, however. Psychic research is replete with instances of ghosts and poltergeists interacting with electrical equipment. There are cases of electrical machines working in poltergeist cases despite being disconnected. People have also received phone calls from deceased friends and relatives. In some cases, they had carried on a normal conversation unaware that the person was dead. Some time later they may find out that the other person was no longer alive and that their phone had been disconnected. I think there are also cases where people have apparently received phone calls, either from ghosts or from supposed space being or Ultraterrestrials, despite their own phones being disconnected. And then there is the Electronic Voice Phenomenon. This follows the research of Konstantin Raudive, and is when a tape recorder or other electronic device records the voices of the dead, even when they are inaudible to the experimenters. In one version, the researcher tuned his or her radio to a dead channel, and waited for fragments of speech to come over the airways. This method of supposedly hearing the voices of the dead is controversial and there is considerable scepticism about it. Signals from other channels can bleed over into others, so that the snatches of speech heard may actually come from people who are very much alive broadcasting on another channel whose signals for a few moments got onto to the supposedly empty one.

There is also the problem of pareidolia. The human brain appears wired to find patterns, even when there is no pattern there. This includes people mistakenly hearing Satanic messages when they play records backwards. This was demonstrated a several decades ago at a Cheltenham Festival of Science by the editor of Dr Who Magazine, talking about the science behind the series. To demonstrate how the human brain can be fooled into hearing coherent speech in cacophonous noise, he played a piece by AC/DC backwards. This just sounded like white noise. He then read out what people had supposedly heard when doing this. This was the rock band admitting that Satan was their lord and that he tortured them in their garden shed. He then played the same track again, and you could actually hear these words, even though nothing like it had actually been said and it was an entire illusion. People experimenting with EVP therefore run the risk of hearing entirely illusory messages across the airwaves coming from the white noise and interference on radios, at least of the analogue type.

The EVP also raises the question of whether ghosts could also be recorded on video tape by video cameras. There have been a number of attempts by researchers to photograph ghosts, as well as photos by ordinary people of spectral figures. Again, there have been many cases of fraud here, most notoriously by the 19^th century spirit photographer Hans Mummler. Obvious methods of faking such photos include double exposures. One explain for photographs of ghosts was that camera exposures are longer than that of the human eye, and so cameras could capture on film objects that were otherwise too faint to be seen. There are, however, very few, in any, uncontroversial photographs of ghosts. Some spectral figures have supposedly been caught on camera, including CCTVs. There was much excitement a few years ago of footage from a stately home of a door opening and someone in 16^th century costume looking out, long after the period actors employed at the historic palace had gone home.

Way back in the 1980s there was a piece of conceptual art, Belshazzar’s Feast, which was shown on Channel 4 and reviewed on Did You See…? Hosted by Ludovic Kennedy. This was a piece of animation, in which a cartoon fire blazed against an entirely black background while a ‘strangulated voice’, as Ludo called it, described the horrific messages that people had supposedly received while watching television after closedown. 24-hour broadcasting on television really began in the 90s. Before then, broadcasting stopped at 11 or 12 O’clock at night, after which there was only the ‘snow’ pattern you otherwise got through interference. Despite this, some had stayed up late watching their TVs and received frightening messages about alien invasions. The film is still about, and I think it might even be on YouTube. I wonder if this is, again, another example of people finding messages in what is just noise.

Despite this, I am not aware of anything similar to the EVP occurring with visual cameras. I’d be more than willing to hear otherwise, but I have not heard of people at ghost investigations recording a moment or so on their phone cameras, only to replay it later to find a ghost present with them. When recording ghosts, their seems to be a difference between sound and vision. One may be recorded, the other not.

Considering the numerous examples of ghosts and poltergeists interacting with electric devices, it is possible that brain scanning technology could be used to record ghosts in the same way it records sounds and impulses from living minds, despite the apparent absence of anything material to scan and record from. I doubt that such experiments are going to be made soon. At the moment, scanning equipment for the brain is large and expensive. I cannot see hospital authorities, stretched for resources, agreeing to let such valuable equipment be used for something to apparently frivolous as finding ghosts.

But this does not mean that something like it may not occur spontaneously. I can imagine technicians in some of the older hospitals becoming confused while performing a normal brain scan, perhaps while setting the machine up and doing a few preparatory checks, to find signals from a brain despite no person actually being connected to the machine. A case like this, while fascinating and worth investigating in itself, would also go some way to corroborating CJ’s suggestion that further scanning using the equipment for the Visual Cortex itself could indeed render ghosts visible.

For further information, see: https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/10/cjs-working-ideas-on-ghosts-part-2/

Norman Finkelstein: Israel Isn’t a Jewish State. It’s a Lunatic State

Okay, here’s a bit of politics and it’s going to be highly controversial. Norman Finkelstein is a Jewish-American scholar and critic of Israel and its slow motion ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. In this video from YouTube, he gives his perspective as a Jew on Israel. He states very clearly that it isn’t a Jewish state, but a lunatic state. A type that goes against everything he believes is Jewish. He points to how proud Jews were that four of the leading intellectuals that created the modern world were Jewish – Einstein, Marx, Freud, and some would say Jesus – were all Jews. Jews surged with pride at this fact. The life of the mind loomed large for Jews. Standing behind a perimeter fence to target double amputees has nothing to do with a Jew or Jews. This is why he doesn’t believe that Israel constitutes a Jewish states according to what he grew up to understand as a Jew.

He’s not alone. This is why many Jews have taken part in the protest marches waving placards with the slogan ‘Not In My Name’ and ‘Not Again For Anyone’. Among those attacking Netanyahu for his war crimes are Holocaust survivors, who clearly deserve to be listened to because of their experience of genocide. Not that you would know this from right-wing news organisations like GB News and various internet commenters, who want you to believe that the only people marching against the ethnic cleansing of Gaza are fanatical Muslims with a genocidal hatred of the Jews and the desire to turn Britain into a Muslim state under sharia law.

The Ghost and the Brain

This is another response to a recent article by CJ, a very long-time psychical researcher and member of the paranormal research group ASSAP. Over the past few days he has written a two-part article discussing the Psycho-Social Hypothesis of the UFO experience and its possible flaws, which I have also responded to. Now he has put up a similar thought-provoking essay on the possible neurological origins of the ghost experience.

CJ states that we don’t just see with our eyes, but with our brains. There are particular sections of the brain devoted to turning the electro-chemical impulses from our peepers in to vision, and our conscious visual perception of the world around us. Among other parts of brain mentioned by him is the visual cortex located at the rear of the skull. People who have received an injury to this section of the brain may become cortically blind. There’s nothing wrong with their eyes or optic nerves, but the blow to the visual cortex means that they cannot translate the impulses from the eyes into images in their brains. There also a related phenomenon in which the cortically blind nevertheless seem to have some kind of vision subconsciously. When these people are asked to point to a person or object, they are perfectly able to do so with accuracy, even though they aren’t consciously seeing anything. To them, it’s all guesswork, even though something more than this is operating.

This leads to the thorny question of what is actually going on when people see ghosts. Scholars, theologians and spiritualists have been discussing the nature of spooks since the days of the Greek philosophers. And many people, who believe that scepticism only arose in the 18^th century Enlightenment, would probably be astonished how much scepticism towards ghosts, demons and magic there was in the Middle Ages and before. Theologians had to wrestle with the problem of how ghosts could be seen, if the soul was immaterial. They concluded that there was a third form of material between the soul and ordinary matter. This was spirit. It was extremely tenuous, but nevertheless could be seen, and so could souls when they were embedded or cloaked in it. In the 19^th century some Spiritualists suggested that the deceased were made of matter as we are, but this was at a higher vibration and so usually invisible to us. This followed 19^th century theories about the ether and how atoms were some kind of whirlpool within this attenuated stuff that pervaded the entire cosmos.

A similar explanation has been used by Contactees and members of UFO-based New Religions to explain their contacts with the space brothers. These religions arose before humans had sent probes to the neighbouring planets and discovered how hostile they were to organic life like ours. George Adamski, dubbed by UFO Magazine ‘the great pretender’ because of his notorious hoaxes, claimed that he had met and interacted with men and women from Venus and Mars. Mars, unfortunately, is not the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs full of beautiful alien princesses, feudal warlords and alien creatures. Nor is the world of canals of Schiaparelli. It is an almost-completely airless world more like the Moon, and any life existing there is probably microbial. Venus is not C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra either, or the various primordial swamps suggested by previous scientists. It’s a hell world of sulphuric acid rain, a mean temperature of 400 degrees and an atmospheric pressure 40 times that of Earth. Any life departed from its rocky surface many millions of years ago. But several decades ago, a gentleman from the Aetherius Society tried to explain away this divergence from his religion’s teaching on Wogan. Debating the issue with astronomy presenter and broadcaster Patrick Moore, the presenter of the Sky at Night, this said that the aliens on Venus with which his religion claimed to be in contact, had not been detected because they were at a higher vibration.

Back to ghosts, CJ appears to be following the view of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research that ghosts are hallucinations, though of a different nature from that experienced by schizophrenics and others with mental health problems. They suggested that ghosts were hallucinations caused by other minds, living or dead. Crisis apparitions are one example. These are when a person suddenly sees an image of a friend or loved one on the verge of death. The SPR believed that they are caused by the dying individual telepathically sending out an image of themselves to the percipient. The theory that ghosts were telepathic impressions from other minds is the central premise behind L. Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic ghost story, The House and the Brain.

There is clearly something to this. There are ghost encounters that do indeed suggest that the experience is in some sense hallucinatory, but nevertheless also objective, generated by something or someone. In one of the cases investigated by Tony Cornell, an academic and veteran paranormal investigator, he and a colleague were called out to a haunting in a woman’s house. Their car broke down along the way, and so one of them stayed to get this sorted out while the other went on to talk to the woman. When he arrived, she explained to him that there was a red-headed woman by the fireplace. His fellow turned up a few minutes later, having heard nothing of the previous conversation. When he came in, he asked who the woman by the fireplace was. This suggests that there was an objective element to the experience, in that there was something or someone there generating the image of the woman seen by the house’s occupant and one, but not both, of the ghosthunters. This has given rise to the Stone Tape theory, based on the ideas of T.C. Lethbridge, in which there is something in the environment that records mental impressions, and which replays them to certain sensitive individuals. These people then experience them as ghosts.

If this is correct, then it raises the question of what changes or features in the visual cortex or other structures of the brain involved in vision, that allow genuine mediums and clairvoyants and ordinary people to perceive ghosts. The brain, it has been said, is the most complicated organised structure in the cosmos. At the moment there are controversies over the possible existence of neurological differences between certain sections of humanity. There has been a long-time debate over whether there is a difference between the brains of men and women, and whether this is the cause of different mental abilities between the sexes. Obviously this is intensely controversial. A few decades ago one neuroscientist discovered that the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two hemisphere’s of the brain, was thicker in women. This discovery was received with fury by some, and there have been demonstrations against the neurologist, including physical assault, one of which left him with a fractured skull. See the relevant article in the volume The Human Brain Evolving. Differences in brain structure have also been claimed as the origin of homosexuality. A Californian doctor, LaVey, claimed after extensive dissection of the brains of gay men, that one section of their brains was more similar to heterosexual women than to hetero men. And it has also been claimed that gay women’s brains are similarly more like that of heterosexual men than heterosexual women. This appears to be the accepted view. But some neurologists have questioned whether men’s and women’s brains are all that different. These doctors and surgeons point out that you can’t immediately tell the sex of a brain from its appearance. There may be immense problems examining the question of a neurological origin of the ghost experience.

And it is questionable whether the theory that ghosts are some form of hallucination actually explains all the varieties of the ghost experience. Looking through Hillary Evans’ excellent Seeing Ghosts, it is clear that people’s experiences of seeing and encountering ghosts is extremely varied, and often doesn’t simply consist of seeing or hearing them. Some of the encounters in the book are about instances where the percipient had eaten with a supposed ghost in a café or restaurant, only to find out later that this person had been dead for days before. Yet when they met them, they behaved like a fully embodied, corporeal being. And what about poltergeists, the noisy ghosts that throw objects about? These appear to have a physical reality, at least in their effect on the homes and property of the people haunted by them. They aren’t hallucinations, although the entity responsible for the hurled plates or whatever may also be invisible and immaterial in itself, just as the ghost causing the hallucinatory experience in that model is also objectively invisible and immaterial. It is possible that there is no single ghost experience, but a variety of related or apparently similar phenomena, and so no single explanation is possible. Or it may be there is a single ghost phenomenon, but that it involves a number of factors and processes, including hallucinations, but that these may vary according to types of experience. CJ has stated that this is the first part of his discussion of ghosts and hallucinations, and promised that in his next piece he’ll return to the subject of UFOs. I await both with interest.

For further information, see: https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/09/ghosts-working-notes-part-one/

Fairies, Aliens and Folklore: A Response to CJ’s ‘What Are UFOs?

A few days ago the mighty CJ put up a piece on his website asking the question ‘What Are UFOs?’, in which he took aim at elements of the psycho-social interpretation of the phenomenon. CJ’s a long-term member of ASSAP, one of Britain’s leading paranormal research organisations. Unlike the Society for Psychical Research, which concentrates on laboratory research, ASSAP was set up to investigate paranormal phenomena in the field, whether they be ghosts, fairies, crop circles, time slips or flying saucers. CJ’s been investigating such phenomena since the 1980s, following very strict scientific protocols, and has a wealth of practical experience.

At the heart of his essay are two questions. One of these is on the nature of folklore itself. What is it? Does it include popular superstitions like not putting your shoes on the table or crossing on the stairs? Where does folklore begin and literary, composed culture end? For example, when football fans start singing Beatles’ songs on the terraces, does it become a piece of folklore? What are the authentic features of traditional fairy encounters, and, indeed, is there are a single class of being that comprises the fairies?

In fact, these are questions folklorists themselves have been discussing for a very long time. Books on folklore, such as Linda Degh’s Legends, often begin with that very question. And what counts as folklore is very wide. Folklore can be thought of as any popular custom. The folklorists of the 19^th century viewed it in terms of an ancient, timeless popular culture arising from a particular ethnic group, preserved in the rural customs of agricultural communities. There was supposed to be a distinction between this timeless, popular culture, the authors of which were unknown, and literary culture produced by the educated upper classes.

This distinction between elite, educated culture and that of the masses has more or less collapsed. The more you examine folksong and folk literature, the less it seems to be the timeless remnant of ancient beliefs and practises. The Marshfield mumming play, in which the hero fights an enemy, is killed, but restored with a pill from a doctor, has been one of those folk customs whose origins have been claimed to lie back with the dying and rising gods of pagan antiquity. Research back in the 90s by contrast claimed that similar plays dated no earlier than the 18^th century, and were commonly performed at local fairs. Similarly, songs and dances travelled across Europe, taken from one country to another by itinerant musicians from quite an early date. A 16^th century writer, for example, remarked on English musicians going to fairs to hear the latest tunes and catches from other performers in Germany. Instead of autochthonic expressions of the essential soul or spirit of a particular ethnic group or locality, people were swapping tunes and songs across countries and continents. Musicologists have suggested, for example, that there are African elements in western sea shanties. As for their connection to particular areas, that was frequently just where folksong collectors like Cecil Sharpe happened to pick them up. While he marked them down as coming from Suffolk, Yorkshire, Somerset or wherever, this didn’t mean that the songs were exclusive to those areas.

Nor is folklore restricted to rural communities. The focus on them by the early researchers no doubt was part of the reaction of some parts of educated society to the rise of science and the machine age in the 19^th century. This was felt by some intellectuals as a threat to traditional western culture and its metaphysical assumptions. And so scholars investigated the ancient traditions and stories of rural communities, collecting stories of witches, ghosts, giants and fairies as well as rustic tunes to preserve this popular, pre-industrial culture and its basis in the supernatural against the new, scientific materialism.

At the same time, other scholars questioned this focus on the countryside and asked whether towns didn’t have their folklore as well. Yes, they did, and there was a burgeoning interest in what became known as urban legend in the ‘90s, following the publication years earlier of Jan Harold Brunvand’s books on phantom hitch-hikers and so on. And the actual subject matter of folklore can be more or less anything that has entered popular culture. One book on folkloristics covers subjects as diverse as Navajo Indian pottery figures for tourists, American barn types, and jokes and humour in American gay culture. These latter have a deeper social purpose than just amusement. They were often told to subtly find out whether the person being talked to was gay or not. Some jokes would be only understood by other gays. If the person told the joke smiled and laughed, it could be assumed they were a fellow member of the community. And new forms of urban folklore were emerging all the time. One example of this was the photocopylore that turned up in offices and workplaces, in which someone had photocopied or faxed a particularly remarkable or humorous piece and pasted it up in the office. Several of these, I remember, were jokes at the expense of American football players on scholarships at universities, as well as the general drudgery of office life.

And this is where UFOs come in. The second question of CJ’s critique is whether fairies really can be identified with today’s UFOs and aliens. This is based on the books of Fortean writer John Keel and the American-French astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee. They noted in their books – UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse by Keel, Passport to Magonia by Vallee- that UFO encounters often followed the same motifs as fairy lore. UFOs and their occupants. They suggested that UFOs and their alien pilots are the 20^th century successors to traditional fairy beliefs. But the imps and goblins of previous centuries have had to change with the times. In modern, technological society people no longer believe as they did in fairies. These have therefore been replaced by the imagery of Science Fiction and space travel.

Some of the motifs of traditional fairy lore do indeed seem to fit the UFO phenomenon. Evans-Wentz in his classic The Fairy Faith in Western Europe, quotes ‘an old Irish mystic’ as saying that the fairies are an older race, who come from the stars. Some of the UFO aliens reported from Scandinavia and also from Italy certainly resemble the short gnomes and goblins of western European fairy tales. And some of their activities also resemble those of past supernatural entities. The abduction phenomenon, in which people are forcibly taken aboard alien craft and raped to produce half-human hybrids, is very similar indeed to medieval tales of demons having sex with sleeping mortals, and even jinn in the Islamic world. One Arab story has three maidens made pregnant by a jinn, who enters their house through a gap into elsewhere opening in their bedroom wall. He is accompanied by a number of lights. And just like the aliens, who take their progeny away from those who bore them, so this jinn takes back into his world his children by the girls.

There are several problems with the identification of today’s aliens with fairies. One of these is with the collection and recording of such traditional narratives, that CJ identifies as a problem. He states in his article that European fairy lore is very much a literary phenomenon, influenced and shaped by writers like Shakespeare, and that we have difficulty knowing what ordinary people really believed about them. This is a fair point. Jeffrey Burton Russell in his history of witchcraft in the Middle Ages discusses fairies and their origins as it affects the later development of witch beliefs. Roman civilisation had a number of supernatural beings below the gods and their messengers, the daimones. These included tree spirits, the dryads, and lamias, part-women, part snakes. Belief in such beings persisted after the fall of the Empire into the 7^th century in Spain until they were somehow replaced by the fairies. He identifies the latter’s origins in the Latin fatare, ‘to enchant’, and states that there seems to be little difference between supernatural fairies and witches when they first appear on the continent.

It is suggested that fairies are ultimately based on the three fates that are believed in Greek folklore to appear at a child’s birth to cast its destiny. Other historians have suggested that there was an international fairy cult stretching over Europe and the Middle East, whose remains have sometimes survived to the present as in Romania. In the west under pressure from the witch hunters the fairy cult’s central beliefs were distorted. In the original fairy belief, young women left their bodies to meet the Queen of the Fairies and enjoy a round of singing, dancing and the company of the young men they fancied. Under the pressure of the witch-hunters’ interrogation, however, this became the witches’ sabbat, in which they flew to meet the Devil and instead of a pleasant feast, ate foul food among other lurid horrors.  In this manner, the elite concerns of the witch hunters served to transform traditional folk beliefs.

Western fairy lore has been the source and subject of literary romance since the Middle Ages. Medieval authors wrote and sang tales of the quests of heroic knights, assisted by benevolent fairies like Oberon, and these tales remained popular after the end of the Middle Ages. By the 17^th century authors started writing their own fairy stories as conscious literary inventions, and this has carried on down the centuries with much-loved tales like Peter Pan and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter tales. These have shaped to a greater or lesser extent the popular image of fairies. It was Shakespeare, apparently, who added the gossamer wings. As for their size, Oberon is described as about the size of a child of three or older. He’s small, but not tiny. And sometimes glimpses of popular beliefs about the fairies can be seen. For example, church records from 12^th century Exeter record the local bishop forbidding the local people from putting small objects, including bows and arrows, in their barns for the elves to play with.

CJ also talks about the differences between various kinds of fairy creature, such as barguests and other spectral entities. Are they of the same type as brownies, goblins and so on? These creatures may be very different from each other, and so it is reasonable to ask whether they refer to the same types of supernatural entity.

Keel and Vallee, however, did not argue that there was a simple equivalence between fold fashioned fairies and UFOs. To begin with, fairies were not the only supernatural creatures modern UFOnauts resembled. Vallee in one of his later books discusses the similarity between UFOs and their pilots and the pagan gods of the Ancient Near East. Keel also discusses medieval demonology. While demons are supernatural, they were also generally considered a separate set of beings than the fairies, although sometimes the two were identified with each other. Keel and Vallee also didn’t think that UFO aliens were literally fairies either. Rather, the phenomenon that took the form of fairies, demons, angels and other supernatural beings in the past now took the form of spacecraft and aliens in the UFO mythology. They saw them therefore as ‘Ultraterrestrials’ – beings from beyond our reality. Vallee considers that they come from parallel universes, a view that he has incorporated in his SF novels such as Fastwalker.

The investigation of the links between fairy beliefs and UFO lore does not end with the views of Keel and Vallee, however. Their books provided the foundations for the Psycho-Social Hypothesis, which goes further than this. It maintains that there is little or no objective reality to UFO encounters. They are primarily internal, psychological experiences that take their imagery from contemporary culture. In the past this was the myths about gods, demons and fairies. Today the content and imagery are taken from Science Fiction. These experiences may be sparked by a real phenomenon, such as a misidentified sighting of Venus or aircraft and the content generated by poorly understood psychological or neurological phenomena, such as sleep paralysis. Back in the ‘90s there was considerable interest in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as the source of such illusory encounters, and it does seem that it can explain some. Those suffering from it may experience hallucinations that do draw on contemporary culture and folkore. One poor fellow who had it used to see a witch, complete with cauldron, in his kitchen during attacks. But this explanation seems to have fallen from favour in recent years, possibly because there is no single explanation for UFO encounters.

But although the imagery is that of aliens and space travel, behind them lies traditional fairy motifs. Thus, Joe Simonton’s encounter with small aliens while out prospecting in the Rockies also follows one convention of traditional fairy lore. In fairy tradition, precious fairy objects taken from their owners by the heroes become, in the light of day, perfectly ordinary and worthless. Fairy gold, for example, becomes a pile of leaves. Simonton found the aliens cooking pancakes. He was offered one, and took it back to be analysed. It was then found to contain nothing more exotic than flour and salt. Back in the 90s the lawyer and TV host Clive Anderson had a pair of ufologists on his late night show, Clive Anderson Talks Back. These two blokes described their encounters with aliens. As proof these were genuine, the aliens had given one of guys a rock, which he duly produced. Cue audience laughter. A rock could provide convincing proof of the reality of the phenomenon, if it was made of some exotic material from one of the planets, say regolith from the Moon or Montmarillonite from Mars. But this, however, was just an ordinary stone.

There is a wider point about the Psycho-Social Hypothesis. As it rejects a supernatural or paranormal basis for the experience, it does not matter whether the material generating the experience is based in authentic folklore or not. The fairy literature behind encounters with aliens resembling fairies may be literary, such as the small, winged aliens who asked a British housewife baking Christmas cakes back in the 70s if they could have one, but this does not affect the nature of the experience itself. Not all ufologists, whose views have been influenced by the PSH go so far as to deny that there is a paranormal element to the UFO experience. Jenny Randles stated in one edition of her small press UFO magazine, Northern UFO News, that there was a paranormal element to the experience which was using the motifs of traditional fairy lore and SF. Kevin McClure, another long term writer and researcher of the world of the strange and paranormal, came to a similar view. There was a genuine paranormal phenomenon behind the experiences, which was using traditional supernatural tales and SF to communicate with us. This was the basis for his extremely short-lived magazine, Alien Scripture, with its subtitle ‘Who is talking to us and why?’

CJ states that theGareth essay is just one of a projected series in which he will discuss what UFOs are. In part 2 he intends to examine other features of the phenomenon. This should be interesting. Although the Psycho-Social Hypothesis has established itself as a major alternative explanation to the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis for UFO experiences, there are definitely questions to be asked about it. One is that sometimes paranormal encounters do not resemble established folklore or literary tropes. Gareth Medway argued this in article published by Magonia back in the ‘90s. I think Gareth’s a priest or leading member of one of the new pagan religions in Britain. He was also the author of The Lure of the Sinister, a book that cast a very sceptical eye on the various Satanism scares that have occurred over time and that were causing hysteria and distress then with rubbish stories of the terrible abuse of children in Satanic orgies. In his article, he discussed a paranormal vision a man experienced out riding one evening. This fellow reported seeing something like a fist rising up from the ground. He had no explanation for the vision and was genuinely confused by the experience. The next evening, just as he was out riding again, he experienced the same vision. Gareth argued from this that if such encounters were based on folklore and popular culture, then the vision should have conformed to the contemporary imagery of the time. But it didn’t. And I’ve no doubt that there may be other problems with the Psycho-Social Hypothesis and other explanations for the UFO phenomenon waiting to be investigated.

I look forward to what CJ says in part two.

For further information, go to:https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/06/what-are-ufos/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3VCjJDO6tTcifznYHpDoUhHXVnYjQBpMeFnIJ4RLeGnxPDmefDSqsdsa4_aem_AYHr2BLRWzM6VP4g4Sb2M1eQvTF1mH6xUlD3z77kKpYv3RzWOrKnNgEtXrRJu121Y_Fi291mnyBHGQ194PTYrRv4

1978 Beeb Film on Day Trip to Lundy Island

This comes from the BBC Archives YouTube channel, from the 70s programme Day Out. I think this might have been a local programme. It was shown after the evening news, about Ten O’Clock-ish as I recall. I think one of its hosts was Angela Ripon, but I can’t be sure. It travelled over the West Country, and the programme I recall most was about Simmon’s Yat in Gloucestershire. This village was preyed upon in the 18th century by a gang of naked highwaymen. What caused this nudity? They reckoned that people recognised you from your clothes, and so dispensed with them when committing their acts of robbery.

Lundy’s an island off the coast of Devon. It’s a small, steep place – the presenter mentions that at times the winds have blown the cows off the cliffs onto the rocks below. There’s a church, a pub and a local shop, from which he buys a postcard. This already has a stamp affixed, though it’s on the right side, not the left. This is because the GPO packed up the local post office sometime ago, so the local landlord opened his own post box and started selling his own stamps. They cost a penny more than the Post Office’s, which is to cover the cost of getting it to the mainland.

The island has a long and interesting history. The story mentions that its surrounded by many wrecks, and it’s a favourite of marine archaeologists. The archaeology department at Bristol University used to train some of their students on Lundy. It also has seals and a diverse array of sea life, and so I believe it was one of the first places in England to become an offshore marine nature reserve. In the early Middle Ages it was briefly a Viking base. In the 14th century it was settled by a community of monks. in the 16th or 17th centuries it was held by the Barbary pirates from north Africa before they were cleared off by Cromwell.

Back in the 1990s there were plans to hold a two-week gay Pride style festival there. The organisers were to make it a gay republic, issuing its own currency and with its own monarchy. It was cancelled, unfortunately, through lack of interest. I wondered if it was just too far away for most people, especially from the main centres of gay life in England, Brighton and Manchester.

1977 Programme on the Mysterious Gnome Kidnappings in Formby

This is another video from the Beeb Archive channel, and comes from a programme ‘Voice of the People’. It’s about a local crimewave in Formby when people had their decorative garden gnomes stolen. It started with one It began with the theft of one family’s beloved garden ornament, who was cut off at his feet because he was fixed to the ground. The thief left a ransom note demanding 25 pence left in an envelope at the local car park. 25 pence was worth rather more in them days, when I think you could buy cheap chews for half a penny and 2000 AD for 16p. The thief then started stealing others’ gnomes as well. The programme has a naturally jokey approach to the topic, talking about underground coppers hunting the thief and jokes about trying to restore the broken gnome with the National Elf Service. It goes on to speculate about a mad millionaire in his castle determined to have the biggest gnome collection of them all, illustrated by a suitably sinister figure on a piano. Eventually the thief put all the gnomes back. The only clue to his identity was that he had big feet by the foot prints he left behind.

I’m putting this up because there was a craze for such thefts as late as the ’90s, mostly done as pranks. The thief or thieves would steal the gnomes, but pretend it had gone for its holidays and so send back postcards to the family of the gnome from locations around the world. In America there was a similar craze for stealing the pink flamingos with which some families decorated their front yards. The landlords of one house, that had been let to students, found 100 such birds in their basement.

1964 Tonight Documentary on the Cave Dwelling Villagers of Troos in France

This video comes from the BBC Archives channel on YouTube, and is about the village of Troos, forty miles from Paris, where the people live in caves dug out of the hillside. The village used to be site of a medieval fortress. The people are troglodytes, a word that means simply cave dwellers, but it has unfortunate connotations of subhuman cavemen and women, which these people clearly aren’t. Their homes’ frontages seem otherwise unremarkable, except that they are more or less flat to the hillside. Inside, they have all the amenities of the average French house of the time. They’re cheap, and cool in summer and hot in winter. The locals would, however, prefer a modern house, and are being priced out of their homes by wealthy Parisians, who want a nice, fashionable holiday home. Just like so many rural communities are seeing their houses bought up and priced out of the reach of local people in Britain today.

There are people living in similar accommodation today. A few years ago I read an article in an archaeological magazine about a community in rural Scotland whose homes were similarly dug out of the local cliff. And people used to how their homes dug out of the cliffside in Bridgnorth. Bridgnorth is divided into an upper and a lower town, and to get to the upper town from one side means either using the funicular railway or taking a long, winding route up. And cut into part of the cliff face are homes very much like those of Troos. I know people from there, who said that the advantage of these homes was that if you needed an extra room, all you had to do was dig out. I think this was stopped along with further construction of such dwellings, by the local council because of fears it was weakening the hillside.