In
my previous post Does the New York Times Have the World's Worst
Paranormal Coverage? I discussed the dismal record of the New
York Times in covering the paranormal. I stated the following:
During
the past 30 years, the New York Times seems to have had the worst
coverage of the paranormal given by any major newspaper. While it has
outstanding coverage of politics, world affairs, sports, and
entertainment, the paper will typically not cover important news
about the paranormal. In the very rare cases when it does provide
coverage of the paranormal, the New York Times almost always gives us
coverage that is heavily biased, inaccurate, or uninformative.
But maybe there is a
little hope that the New York Times is trying to improve its
previously atrocious record in regard to covering the paranormal.
Recently the New York Times had two decent stories on the topic.
The first story, a
very important one, revealed that the US government had a secret
program to investigate UFO sightings, one that was funded with 22
million dollars from 2007 to 2012. For years mainstream pundits have
been scoffing at people claiming that the government was doing secret
research on UFO's. People making such claims have been dismissed as
“conspiracy theorists.” Apparently these “conspiracy
theorists” were actually correct about secret government activity.
Besides this story,
the New York Times also published on the same day a detailed account
of a UFO sighting. They interviewed Navy pilot David Fravor, who was
asked to use his Navy jet fighter to investigate an unidentified
object in the sky. Fravor reported that the vehicle “accelerated
like nothing I've ever seen.”
More
details on the secret government program are given in this
interesting Politico story on the program, which notes, “The
revelation of the program could give a credibility boost to UFO
theorists, who have long pointed to public accounts by military
pilots and others describing phenomena that defy obvious
explanation.”
The
Politico story states the following:
The
“unidentified aerial phenomena” claimed to have been seen by
pilots and other military personnel appeared vastly more advanced
than those in American or foreign arsenals. In some cases they
maneuvered so unusually and so fast that they seemed to defy the laws
of physics, according to multiple sources directly involved in or
briefed on the effort and a review of unclassified Defense Department
and congressional documents.
But if the New York
Times gives us a glimmer of hope that it may be improving its
previously appalling record of covering the paranormal, we get no
such glimmer of hope from the British Broadcast Company. The BBC
recently gave us an appalling example of gaslighting witnesses of the
paranormal.
The
term “gaslighting” has recently been used in connection with all
the discussion about workplace sexual harassment and sexual abuse. A
wikipedia page defines gaslighting as “a
form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted
individual or in members of a targeted group, hoping to make them
question their own memory, perception, and sanity.” The term is
derived from the Ingrid Bergman movie Gaslight,
in which a wife detects signs that her husband may be a murderer.
The husband tries to deal with these inconvenient observations by
convincing his wife that she is going mad.
We
can understand how gaslighting might work for a woman who witnessed
sexual harassment or sexual abuse. The woman might be told that this
may have occurred while she was drunk, or that she may be “fantasy
prone,” or that memories from ten years ago are not reliable, or
that she committed “confused perception,” or that she may be just
remembering some vivid dream she had, or that she may be just
engaging in “confabulation.” And if 10 persons witnessed some
person in high power groping them or suddenly exposing his genitals
to them, all ten of the witnesses may be gaslighted. Once the
gaslighting has finished, we may just think of all these witnesses as
crazies or unreliable observers who cannot be trusted.
Just
as witnesses of sexual harassment and sexual abuse can be gaslighted,
witnesses of paranormal phenomena may be gaslighted. Such gaslighting
is going on in this BBC video entitled “The Psychology Behind Paranormal Beliefs.” The video makes the misleading assertion that “Some
paranormal experiences are caused by brain damage.” This is not
correct in any substantial sense. Putting aside psychotic
hallucinations, which no paranormal investigator regards as a
paranormal experience, there is no common form of paranormal
experience that is caused by brain damage.
The
rest of the video attempts to suggest that there may be perceptual
problems in those reporting paranormal experiences. There is no
reliable evidence that this is correct. The people who report
paranormal experiences are not substantially different from those who
do not. The BBC page refers to an earlier BBC story also engaging in
outrageous gaslighting of paranormal witnesses, trying to suggest
they may have brain damage or perceptual problems. The evidence
given to support these claims is extremely skimpy, and we have a case
of trying to weave a fabric from a few scattered threads of evidence.
This
gaslighting of witnesses of the paranormal is every bit as deplorable as a sexual abuser's gaslighting of the witnesses of
his sexual abuse or sexual harassment. There is no substantive evidence
that those who report ghosts, UFO's, ESP, Bigfoot sightings, or near-death
experiences have brains, minds or perception tendencies any different than
those who do not.
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