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Whisper it quietly and go heavy on the caveats, but David Icke is right

I hope you can appreciate how difficult it was to write that title. I’ve written it by hand, three times; I’ve typed it four. And it hasn’t gotten easier any time. What I’m saying, without irony, is that the man who gave us the shape-shifting lizard alien conspiracy theory that totally didn’t rip off the television mini-series V (1983); the person who adjusted his conspiracy theory so that we are all prisoners living inside a computer simulation that totally wasn’t a rip-off of the 1999 movie “The Matrix”… that guy, is right. And more incredibly, he’s right because of his grand conspiracy theory.

Before I get into how this could possibly be true, I have to set the stage. The first character is obviously David Icke. If you’re reading this site, you know who he is. I have students that are amazed that not only does the lizard alien conspiracy theory have a discernable origin point, but that the origin is still alive. Icke, in the United States, has fallen by the wayside in the conspiracy world. He didn’t catch the Q wave, and he hasn’t innovated in the conspiracy world recently.

Our next character is really a group of characters. Icke has given them a clever label (that hurt too): the “Mainstream Alternative Media” (henceforth MAM). This is the group of conspiracy theory right-wing culture warrior extremists. This is Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Jack Posobiec, and all of their ilk. If someone is broadcasting a right-wing conspiracy theory that demonises diversity, “questions” vaccines, and supports Trump—these are the usual suspects. Icke puts them in one category because of one person, who is our next and final character.

The final person is so famous that he shows up on my news feed with such frequency that he tops Taylor Swift, and comes in second only to former president Donald Trump. This could only be Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and the company formerly known as Twitter. It is in this last position that he enters our story.

Our drama begins in September of 2018. Responding to a video of Alex Jones harassing CNN reporter Oliver Darcy, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey permanently banned Alex Jones, InfoWars, and any affiliated accounts, for violations of the site’s rules. The banning had a serious effect on Jones’ conspiracy empire. It became apparent that most people did not go to the primary website for InfoWars, they clicked on social media links. Twitter was the last holdout, and Jones burned the bridge with Dorsey.

Flash forward a few years, and to Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Initially, Musk claimed that he would never reinstate Jones’ account, because of the conspiracy theorist’s (Jones in this case) claims about Sandy Hook – claims that eventually cost him around $1.5bn in damages.

When Musk took over Twitter, he was cheered by people in the right-wing alternative media sphere. Their enthusiasm was grounded in Musk’s claim that he would “restore” Twitter as a social media safe space for extremist conservative voices. Musk was apparently going to bear the standard of free speech absolutism.

Plenty of pixels have been burned and ink spilled describing what has happened to the platform since Musk took over. I am not a person who feels competent explaining how companies are valued or how individual net worth is calculated. I cannot explain how the bots have taken over the platform, or even how we know that. I can say that Musk’s reign has not been marked by free speech absolutism. One of the earliest things Musk did was suspend the user account that tracked his private jet through publicly available information. He’s marked news agencies he disagrees with as state-affiliated media.

Eventually, however, Musk posted a public poll asking if Jones should be restored, claiming he would abide by the results of the poll. Overwhelmingly the result was that Jones’ (and the Info Wars’) accounts were voted for reinstatement, and Musk abided by the terms (unlike the poll that overwhelmingly said he should step down as CEO).

That is the first Act of the play. We’ve got our setting, our characters, and have established a backstory. We return to David Icke. Without getting into the intricate details of his conspiracy theory, and ignoring the lizard aliens/computer simulation – Icke’s account is a standard Illuminati omni-conspiracy theory. There is a “they” that controls everything. Sometimes this is through secret societies, sometimes through government agencies; the details of the theory are actually not important. Just know that the “they” control and own it all. They fix elections, control our water, and they forced us to get the 5G nanobot shots, everything. This evil cabal supports AI, something called the “transhumanist agenda,” hates fossil fuels, and wants to monitor all of our actions, online and off.

This article isn’t interested in debunking these theories; in my academic opinion, you really can’t debunk them since everything is part of the theory. I am interested in considering what the world would be like if the conspiracy theory was correct. This is where Icke becomes correct (still hurts).

It also needs to be said that Icke and Jones’s theories only differ on who the “they” is. Icke’s got his Lizard People, and Jones has the vague “Globalists” in charge. The two largely agree, and this agreement has thrown them at odds with each other (it’s a thing that happens in conspiracy theory circles – just look at the schisms in the Flat Earth community). 

Musk, through his purchase of Twitter, has enjoyed universal support amongst people like Jones. When the purchase was finalised, the InfoWars desk – manned by Jones – began courting Musk to get their accounts restored. Second chair on the desk, and individual recently released from prison due to his involvement in the January 6th attempted coup, Owen Schroyer, also courted Musk, begging him to restore the accounts.

Yet, Musk represents everything they claim to hate. Musk is the CEO of Tesla, the most recognisable EV car manufacturer. Musk is the CEO of Twitter, which makes money by selling user data to advertisers. Musk is trying to create a literal brain chip, which he claims has been successfully tested on a human being (it should be noted that, as of this writing, no one outside of Musk has verified this claim). Musk is pro-carbon credit. He claims that AI is the future and has created his own, called “Grok.”

Aside from a few right-wing culture causes (Musk is anti-“diversity hiring”, has at-best mixed feelings on trans people, and most importantly doesn’t think hate speech is a bannable offense), he ought to be villain number one in Jones’ eye. Elon Musk is an elite, he’s no different than Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, aside from the cultural issues.

Icke smells a rat in the MAM, and he’s calling them out. I’m focusing on Jones because he’s the only one that has taken the bait and invited Icke onto his show. Is Icke an ideological purist, who sees the hypocrisy in the MAM, or is he only doing this to draw attention to himself? The hosts of the Ockham Award Winning podcast Knowledge Fight (whose coverage first made me aware of this conflict), made the argument that the only reason that Icke is behaving this way is because he’s been rather marginalised in the conspiracy community. People, especially in the United States, are rather unaware of him. The hosts aren’t saying definitively that this is the reason that Icke is attacking Jones and the MAM, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

Jones took the bait because he must. At this point his struggle for relevancy is a struggle for survival. He needs the exposure, because he needs the revenue – and this was before his creditors voted to liquidate his possessions.

Here is Icke’s position: if Jones, Rogan, and all the members of the MAM were being honest, they would challenge Musk on his many problematic choices for their worldview. Which they don’t, ever. In the episode of Knowledge Fight I linked above, Jones falls over himself when a caller who sounds like Elon Musk appears… so much so that Jones basically surrenders his show to the caller, over Icke, who was his actual guest. This same thing happens again on 23 February: Jones essentially surrenders his show to this Adrian Dittman – who may or may not be Elon Musk.

In late last year, Musk appeared on Jones’ Twitter Spaces show alongside conspiracy theorists and extremists Laura Loomer, Jack Posobiec, and Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Jones treats Musk with such deference that it’s almost pornographic to describe it (note: I will not link to Alex Jones’ podcast directly).

Let’s assume (deep breath) that Jones, Icke, et al. are correct; this would necessarily entail that someone like Elon Musk could never be as rich or as powerful as he is without bending to the will of the “they” which control everything. It’s common sense within a world that is not common and does not make any sense. Icke points out a similar problem in a tweet on 10 December 2023, when during a slurry of rhetorical questions this really precise one pops up:

Where is the question of why the Cult, through its Deep State, which controlled Twitter and what could be posted, would suddenly sell it to ‘free speech absolutist’ Musk, who, as a result, has become the God of the very alternative media the Cult needs to direct and control so it goes here and no further?

The problem, ironically being pointed out by Icke, is bigger than just Musk and Twitter. It’s the problem all these theories have when they “win.” Trump, Brexit, Bolsanaro, Putin; if these people were truly enemies of the “they”, then how was victory achieved? If the Deep State truly opposed Brexit, then it would not have passed, it would never have come up for a vote. Remember, the “Cult” that Icke speaks of has magic on its side. According to Jones’ theory, the literal Devil is in charge; but, I suppose, that the Devil was taking a nap during the six months it took Musk to finalise his purchase of the company.

That’s where we return to the title of this article. Within Icke’s theory, he’s absolutely correct. We know from Musk’s release of the “Twitter Files” that there has been some manipulation of posts and visibility, and there has been censoring of various accounts and posts. There is no reason to think that “they” would allow Musk to purchase Twitter without their ability to continue to do so. In the Knowledge Fight Episode from 9 February, Jones admits that since his reinstatement his posts have been manipulated; Jones is currently making a claim that Musk/Twitter is banning his video site; let’s be clear this isn’t an ideological problem that Jones has, this is a personal problem and a problem that could very well be technical. However, the entire MAM should be gathering pitchforks and torches at the very idea that there could be censorship – after all, that’s the thing they claim they are absolutely against.

As Knowledge Fight host Dan Freisen points out, Musk is the exact type of person that Jones has been warning us for his entire career; a tech billionaire who is too rich to suffer consequences. What Musk gets is not just Jones overlooking positions that would normally be deal-breakers, but full-throated defence.

The point of this article is not engage in some joy at an internal schism of conspiracy theorists through the subject of Elon Musk (well… it is a little that). It’s to point out that conspiracy theorists, like Jones, are not ideological in any way when it comes to specifics. People like him are opportunists looking to exploit people’s fears in order to profit. Icke, no matter his motive, is at least being consistent within his own fantastical absurd conspiracy theory. Icke is narrowly right (still hasn’t gotten easier) that the MAM are being hypocrites at best, while at the worst their sucking up to Musk because of his wealth. We’ll know soon, as the social media company has just reinstated protections for trans users (in a weaker form) against harassment (via deadnaming and misgendering) that Musk vocally removed a year ago. This is the kind of situation that shows whether there is a line that someone like Musk can cross or not.

Electronic advertising is a climate crime that makes our public spaces more hostile

In recent years, Euston Station – one of London’s biggest and busiest train stations – has changed a bit. It used to be the case that train and platform information was displayed on a giant bank of boards that stretched the length of the 60-metre concourse, listing the next 15 trains to depart, while a few other boards detailed which trains would follow and which were due to arrive. This long bank of boards was above the entrance to the platforms, so everyone would wait crammed into the concourse, looking up at the boards.

Now, after a £1.5m redesign, train information has been moved to two double-sided banks of monitors, each a fraction of the size of the old ones, positioned orthogonally in the middle of the concourse, taking up space where people would otherwise be standing. As they’re much smaller, you can’t read them unless you’re close, so half of the concourse can’t make out the information. Plus, because they’re orthogonally placed, those in the seating area on the upper floor can’t see them at all, they only see the end of the bank of monitors.

Meanwhile, in that 60-metre space above the entrance to the platforms, highly visible from any part of the concourse (even the parts where the train information is impossible to see), is a very long, very bright screen, beaming out adverts. Currently, it pours bright green light into the concourse; an advert for Ovo energy, proudly inviting us to see energy from a different angle.

The bright green advertising board in Euston station

Not only is the Ovo ad incredibly bright, it’s animated in a way that makes it difficult to ignore, occasionally turning black, with the message “Don’t mind us. Just saving energy right now…”

The black screen version of the Ovo advert

It’s hard not to appreciate the irony. Passengers have been shunted into a more inconvenient experience, so that an advert can be prioritised over access to train information. That advert, in this case, is an energy-guzzling electronic screen, bright enough to be uncomfortable to stand near, advertising an energy company that’s so proud of its green energy credentials that their brand colours are chosen to highlight them. And then, periodically, the advert cuts to a boast about how it is saving energy, by turning around 95% of their pixels black.

Digital Out-Of-Home (OOH) advertising really bothers me. My home, in Liverpool, is in a Green Party council-run area. Recently, a new digital advertising board was installed – three metres high, a metre wide, and situated in the middle of the pavement on the route to the nearest supermarket. It mostly features stills from LBC news and an advert for itself – inviting businesses to rent out that advertising space. It’s distractingly bright, animated to catch the eye (regardless of being beside a very busy road), and situated where people have to walk around it to get to local amenities. Nobody asked for it, nobody wanted it, and nobody needed it. And it runs 24 hours a day, pushing advertising messages uninvited into the brains of anyone who walks, or drives, by.

Energy consumption

There are a few ways to estimate how much energy electronic billboards consume. The average power consumption of a full-colour LED billboard is estimated to be around 230 Watts (or 0.23 kW) per square metre. Typical screen sizes in the UK are small (1.8m by 3.7 m); medium (3 m by 9.1 m); or large (4.3m by 14.6 m). Those are converted from feet, where the measurements are much rounder, but they represent 6.66 sqm, 27.3 sqm, and 62.8 sqm respectively. Assuming each consumes at the estimated average hourly rate, for 24 hours a day, their annual power consumptions are 13.4 MWh, 57.4 MWh, and 126.5 MWh respectively.

I’m not the first to try to quantify this consumption. The action group Ad Free Cities looked at an LED digital billboard that advertising company JCDecaux applied for permission to install in South Bristol in 2021. The billboard, which is manufactured by Daktronics, would be classified as around medium size, and its technical specifications claim a typical power usage of 4,752 Watts, or 42 MWh per year.

Elsewhere, in January 2022 a Guardian article looked at small-sized digital screens, like the one I have to walk around on the way to the supermarket (a criticism that has been levelled at many similar screens, with pavement space inconveniently reduced to accommodate the advertising messaging). The Guardian found that each of these screens consumed 11.5 MWh per year – with 86 such screens on the streets of Manchester consuming 989 MWh per year in total.

For context, in 2020 the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy lists the average electricity consumption per household as 3.9 MWh per year, while Ofgen’s estimate is a little lower, at 2.7 MWh. But even assuming the higher usage, each of those standing screens on the streets of Manchester uses as much electricity per year as three households. A single medium-sized billboard screen – the likes of which catch the eyes of drivers on roads across the country – uses as much electricity as eleven households. And an extra-large, 62 sqm screen consumes as much energy as 32 households.

According to Statista, there are 14,560 advertising screens in the UK. No data is available on their cumulative area, but even if assuming, on average, they each had the consumption of a small-sized billboard, their total consumption exceed that of 50,000 households.

Back to Euston station

What about that billboard in Euston? No full technical specifications are available, but an announcement of OVO’s advert, in partnership with Saatchi & Saatchi and Goodstuff, describes it as a 60 m billboard. Given that its height looks to be around 4 m, we can reasonably assume the 60 m description refers to its length, not its area. If the 4 m height estimate is indeed reasonable, its area would be 240 sqm, and its approximate annual energy usage would be 484 MWh, or the equivalent of 124 homes.

However, as the ad claims, it periodically powers down to save money, by switching to a mostly black screen? If the screen is a modern LED screen, it would be possible to reduce energy consumption by switching pixels to a darker hue. If a black pixel used around a third as much energy as bright one, and if roughly 95% of the pixels in the “energy saving” video are black, and if we assume that the screen spends half of its time displaying the energy-saving ad (which, from observing it, it definitely does not) – given all those rough assumptions, this energy saving advert would still use the equivalent energy of 103 homes. While also being the centrepiece of a high-profile, back-slapping industry boast about sustainable energy usage and responsible advertising.

Ovo, Saatchi, and JCDecaux might say that their adverts are environmentally responsible, because they use renewable energy. And, in fact, they ran an ad campaign back in September where ads would show when the National Grid was running on renewables – which, of course, was the subject of a self-congratulatory news article in the industry press patting themselves on the back for this innovation. But is this really socially responsible? Or does it merely claim credit for only wasting energy when that energy is cheap to generate… wasting energy all the same.

The important aspect here isn’t just the cost in terms of energy consumption, but the opportunity cost; in other words, even when the energy is renewably sourced, it could still be used to power something more productive and useful than an advertising screen the size of a wall, particularly during a much-documented energy crisis. The issue is of cost-benefit, and when it comes to these ads, the only benefit is to the advertiser.

Economic benefits and costs

It is undeniable that Euston will be paid a large amount of money for use of its advertising space over the course of the year, and those 86 pavement screens were projected to net Manchester around £2.4m a year. But assessment of the impact of this revenue has to take into account that those advertising income streams would exist, to a comparable degree, whether the ads were bright digital videos or old-school paper-and-paste ads, where the energy outlay and environmental impact is lower. What’s more, one of the chief benefits of digital advertising spaces is that they can rotate and change, hosting multiple ads in the same space – multiplying the revenue for the companies who run the screens, without necessarily passing along that increased revenue to the public spaces in which they appear.

Where does the generated revenue go? In the case of Euston, it doesn’t seem to appreciably lower ticket prices, given that train costs have risen by 4.9% this year. In the case of Manchester and Liverpool, it isn’t increasing the spending available for public infrastructure, or lowering the burden on residents – a particularly important point, given that 82% of outdoor advertising is in the poorest half of England and Wales, with six times more advertising in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived.

I write all of this from the perspective of someone who has worked for nearly 20 years in the digital marketing industry (though never, it’s worth pointing out, in advertising), and most of that time was spent working with clients in the energy industry specifically. But at the height of an energy crisis, we are burning electricity for the sole purpose of having a company’s preferred message delivered to the public in places where they did not consent to see it, have no say in it, and cannot avoid it.

Public advertising is making our lives, and our engagement with the places that make up our day-to-day lives, shittier – and in the case of electronic adverts in particular, at the expense of the planet. While you’re told to turn your TV off standby over night, turn your heating down by a degree, and take personal responsibility for your carbon footprint, screens the size of walls are wasting more energy than your entire street, and the people behind them are patting themselves on the back for their responsible energy use, because they’ve never actually paused to consider what’s actually involved.

Electronic advertising is a climate crime, and it’s one we shouldn’t just stand by and allow to happen.

The Wikipedia conspiracy that wasn’t; or, why Wikipedia says Roswell was a balloon

UFO enthusiasts on Twitter and Reddit are concerned that a vast conspiracy manipulates Wikipedia articles to make UFO enthusiasts look ridiculous. Across three episodes of The Good Trouble Show, host Matt Ford and independent researcher Rob Heatherly laid out the alleged cabal and supposed evidence.

According to Heatherly, at or near the top are intelligence agencies. One step below is the nonprofit Center for Skeptical Inquiry and its fellows like science writer Mick West and Bill Nye (the science guy). It is unclear why, but the conspiracy imagines the CSI as CIA-funded. Finally, the CSI is accused of running Wikipedia via retired portrait photographer Susan Gerbic; she runs a private Facebook group.

This sounds a bit odd, especially to me, because as I listened to and read about these Wikipedia edits, I realized that I was behind a portion of them. I am not a CIA operative, a CSI employee, Mick West, or a member of Gerbic’s Facebook group. To hopefully give some insight into how Wikipedia works, I’ll use the “Roswell incident” article as a test case. By the end, you’ll have an explanation of how the free encyclopaedia came to say that Roswell was not an alien spaceship, without any assistance from the CIA.

Who writes a Wikipedia article?

Wikipedia bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” This invites a steady flow of new contributors, but also a broad range of problematic editors. Wikipedia can handle the nonsense and spam edits because experienced editors use tools that streamline finding and reverting disruption to articles. Editors can add any page to a watchlist and get notified each time the page changes. They can revert the most recent change with the undo button. Many editors have an additional rollback feature to undo consecutive changes. The optional maintenance tool Twinkle combines rollback with standardized warning/welcome messages.

A Wikipedia user with many edits is likely using these tools. Every change to any Wikipedia page, including every revert, is logged as a separate edit. Wikipedia officially has no hierarchical structure, but in his book Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia, Dariusz Jemielniak explains how editors build a reputation on the site, with their edit count often working as a quick way to evaluate another’s status in the project. Outside of Wikipedia, edits and edit counts are misinterpreted. They do not correlate to authorship. Very many edits are maintenance or other small changes. This edit/authorship confusion at least partly explains how the Mick West conspiracy gets so bizarre.

Who is Mick West?

Proponents of this Wikipedia/CIA conspiracy have an unusual method for uncovering the people behind Wikipedia accounts. As researcher Rob Heatherly has explained, many individual Wikipedia edits are fed into ChatGPT. Then tweets from science writer and podcaster Mick West are fed into ChatGPT. Finally, ChatGPT determines which editor is the most Mick West. There is a lot to question in this methodology. Why did the process start with the assumption that at least one editor was secretly Mick West? Why was ChatGPT fed his tweets and not his Wikipedia edits? He has an account on Wikipedia under his real name.

This flawed methodology is complicated by confusion over authorship. Across three multi-hour conversations, Heatherly and Matt Ford analyse the edits of a particular editor they have keyed in on as Mick West’s primary secret account. While Ford and Heatherly discuss content added or removed by this account’s edits, they ignore the summaries at the top of the page with information like “Tag:Undo”, “Tag:Rollback”, and “Tag:Twinkle”. These tags indicate that the editor is using one of those three automated tools to revert changes to existing content, not writing new material.

While Heatherly credits this editor with building Mick West’s page and labelling West as a “science writer”, that label is present in the very first version of the page created by an entirely different editor. Heatherly and Ford make note of how many times this supposed Mick West account has edited the page, but the editor has only added two sentences about an aspect of West’s career unrelated to science, skepticism, or ufology. While AI-based identification of authorship was dubious, it’s based on a misunderstanding of who the authors of Wikipedia articles are in the first place.

The confusion extends to the process aspects of the site, like talk pages. Every article and editor has an associated talk page. Any article on the site will have a link to its talk page, where editors can discuss writing the article. Wikipedia also has broader scope talk pages, like the sitewide noticeboards. These noticeboards are places to bring attention to problematic content. There are boards for many different issues like articles that don’t summarise cited sources (WP:ORN), articles that misrepresent the major views on a topic (WP:NPOVN), and articles that make extraordinary claims referring to dubious sources (WP:FTN). This last noticeboard features heavily in the CIA/Wikipedia cabal conspiracy.

The fringe theories noticeboard is misrepresented by Heatherly and Ford as either hidden or somehow part of an external organization. They cite an innocuous message that Susan Gerbic posted to this noticeboard (“Ohhh are you trying to coax me into another Wikipedia page on UFO’s…”) as evidence of a plot against a pro-UFO journalist. This discussion, preserved in the archives, is actually about an editor recently banned from another language Wikipedia coming to the English-language article for “Westall UFO”, and writing that teenagers and high school teachers saw an alien spaceship, for which the new editor was citing links of video search results. It’s not unusual to post problematic articles to a noticeboard.

It’s also not unusual for the editors making articles problematic to either be blocked from editing those articles or blocked from editing Wikipedia entirely. A March 2023 Cambridge study found that users leaving the platform after failing to distort an article had a uniquely positive effect on the quality of information on Wikipedia compared to other online platforms.

Among a lengthy Reddit thread accusing a secret cabal of manipulating Wikipedia’s coverage of Roswell, a conspiracy theorist posted an interesting series of links to older versions of the page from “before the anti-UFO Taliban rode all over it.” These older versions were the product of compromises between skeptical and pro-extraterrestrial editors. In 2014, Wikipedia editor jps made a noticeboard post after being reverted by UFO proponents at the Roswell article sarcastically asking, “Did you know that if we simply state that what crashed in Roswell, NM was a top-secret balloon, that this is not a ‘neutral’ POV?”

This discussion began moving the article away from a “both sides” presentation to a clearer presentation of the facts, which includes the 1947 retrieval of debris from a top-secret spy balloon. The article would say outright that reports of alien corpses near Roswell did not exist before the 1980 conspiracy book.

Photograph of the Roswell UFO Museum in New Mexico showing the front exterior. A truck and a car are parked outside and four different signs say UFO Museum Research Centre. Two green alien figures stand in front of its windows.
The UFO Museum in Roswell. Photo by J Dykstra, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

How can a 1947 crash begin with a 1980 book?

In 1947, newspapers and radio programs reported the military retrieval of debris near Roswell consisting of “tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks“. There was no mention of bodies or an intact craft. After about 24 hours, a press conference identified the debris as a weather balloon, and the press rapidly lost interest. Roswell was largely forgotten for decades.

Later, a retired officer came forward to call the weather balloon explanation a cover story, leading to Bill Moore co-writing The Roswell Incident. The book, published in 1980, combined the somewhat mundane 1947 debris retrieval with other unrelated UFO stories and began creating a hyper-narrative that could reach out and touch any aspect of the developing UFO myths.

Notably, Moore explained the strange absence of any Roswell news over 30 years by claiming that Silas Newton’s crashed saucer tale, which took place several hundred miles away and a year later, was also the Roswell incident. Newton had spent years selling oil-detecting machines that he claimed were based on alien technology reverse-engineered from a crashed UFO full of alien corpses, until he was convicted of fraud in 1953 because the devices did not work. Moore included the crashed spaceship full of dead aliens and left out the fraud conviction.

The book sold reasonably well, but not nearly as well as Moore’s previous work on the Bermuda Triangle. According to historian Robert Goldberg, it did attract several very significant readers. Several men came to Moore, presenting themselves as Air Force Intelligence Officers with inside knowledge of a UFO coverup. They offered Moore hard evidence of recovered alien technology if he would keep tabs on members of the UFO community and spread certain mistruths.

In the mid-1980s several UFO researchers received photographs of photocopies of purported top-secret documents. Karl Pflock found that the common thread among the individuals who received these anonymous deliveries was Moore. The documents lacked any kind of provenance, but told an excellent story of a select group of elite scientists, called the Majestic 12, who were allowed to study alien technology in secret.

At a 1989 conference for the Mutual UFO Network, Moore gave a speech to a shocked audience where he confessed to intentionally spreading disinformation, and claimed some responsibility for triggering the paranoid breakdown of UFO investigator Paul Bennewitz. The UFO community disowned Moore, but not the array of bizarre narratives that he had popularised.

Why would the government claim they had a crashed spaceship?

A line of thinking that I have heard before and seen in the Reddit and Twitter discussions is that if no alien craft crashed in Roswell, why would the government announce that they had recovered one? The short answer is that they did not. The initial press release did announce the recovery of a “flying disc”, but this came just weeks after the first flying saucer reports and amidst hundreds of saucer reports from around the country.

In the summer of 1947, flying saucers were an unknown quantity not yet associated with alien life. A close reading of the flying saucer reports found that sincere reports rarely gave alien or futuristic details. In an analysis of this first wave of saucer sightings from the Summer of 1947, Martin Kottmeyer found the reports to include elements from conventional aircraft like glass domes, cockpits, fins, legs, jet pipes, vapor trails, and propellers. Kottmeyer commented,

“Notable by its absence is any indication of extraterrestrial technology: no lasers, heat rays, paralysis rays or gases, mind control rays, power rings, levitation of people or objects, denaturalization, matter interpenetration, space-suited entities, robots, remote eyes, or even simple observation ports.” 

On the front page of the July 8, 1947 issue of the Roswell Daily Record, the famous one with the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region”, there is a smaller story that offers valuable context. Further down the page, under “Roswellians Have Differing Opinions on Flying Saucers”, the Daily Record reports that when surveyed about flying disks, “No one interviewed thought they came from sources outside the United States.”

But can’t Wikipedia give both sides of the Roswell debate?

In a way, it does. Wikipedia’s policy is to present a summary of reliable sources. When those reliable sources conflict, Wikipedia’s “Neutral Point of View” policy calls for articles to explain the conflict. Because of its age and significance, there are more reliable sources for Roswell than most UFO articles, including major newspapers, peer-reviewed journals, and university press books. They all say the 1947 debris came from a United States military balloon.

UFO enthusiasts may ask specifically about pro-UFO sources. Roswell is somewhat unique in that there are relatively reliable sources from pro-UFO authors. Karl Pflock conducted a decade-long investigation of every strange Roswell tale circulating in the UFO community and found no evidence at all of alien bodies or flying saucers. The University of Kansas published the work of PhD folklorist and alien abduction expert Thomas Bullard who has been a board member of the Center for UFO Studies. Bullard said it was a top-secret balloon. Beyond these sources is an array of contradictory narratives with varying degrees of connection to reality.

One pro-UFO article suggested on Reddit is a 2013 blog post by prominent Roswell author Kevin Randle. Randle’s criticism of the balloon explanation is almost entirely based on the amount of documentation proving the military launched a Mogul balloon on a specific day. However, the Roswell debris was identified as a Mogul balloon without documentation.

If the debris was not from one Mogul balloon, it could well be from a different balloon. Randle also makes the strange claim that “Mogul wasn’t all that secret… with pictures of it published in the newspapers on July 10, 1947,” while providing pictures of a weather balloon demonstration conducted for the press. Reliable sources agree that the July 10 demonstration was cover for Project Mogul. Finally, the documentation criticism is of a much higher standard than Randle has applied to evidence of an alien crash.

In their 1994 book The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt rely, in part, on the testimony of supposed eyewitness Frank Kaufman. In what should be a red flag, he claims to have been present for nearly every moment in the Roswell story. In the first chapter, the book straightforwardly provides a bizarre situation as an event from Kaufman’s life. Allegedly, he alone tracked a UFO on radar, reporting directly to a high-ranking general. Kaufman was not allowed to take his eyes off the screen for even a moment.

This already weird plan poses the logistical problem of what Kaufman should do when he must step away from the radar, since he has no other person to cover for him. The solution, which the book presents straight-faced as a pivotal moment in humanity’s history, is that Kaufman positions a series of mirrors pointing from the screen, around corners, and through the open door of the latrine. As you may suspect, there is no documentation that Frank Kaufman watched a UFO radar through his own personal funhouse while defecating.

Why volunteer at anything?

One of the pieces of evidence offered for the CIA/Wikipedia conspiracy is the supposed lack of a motive for people to build an encyclopaedia for no pay. I have written Wikipedia articles entirely as a volunteer.

Nobody has paid me to write this response piece. The answer to “why” is present in Rob Heatherly’s explanations for why he researches fringe theories. It is meaningful to the people who do the work.

Sources

Who writes a Wikipedia article?

  • Jemielniak, D. (2014). Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia. Stanford University Press.

Who is Mick West?

How can a 1947 crash begin with Bill Moore’s 1980 book?

  • Goldberg, R. (2001). “Chapter 6: The Roswell Incident”. Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America. Yale University Press.                                                
  • Moore, W. and Berlitz, C. (1980). The Roswell Incident. Grosset and Dunlap.
  • Jacobson, M. (2018). Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America.  ‎ Blue Rider Press.

Why would the government claim they had a crashed spaceship?

  • Kottmeyer, M. (2017). “Why Have UFOs Changed Speed Over the Years?”. Why Statues Weep: The Best of the “Skeptic”. Routledge.
  • Bartholomew, R. (Summer, 2000). “From Airships to Flying Saucers: Oregon’s Place in the Evolution of UFO Lore”. Oregon Historical Quarterly. Vol. 101, no. 2, pp. 192-213.

But can’t Wikipedia give both sides of the Roswell debate?

  • Bullard, T. (2016). The Myth and Mystery of UFOs. University Press of Kansas.
  • Pflock, K. (2001). Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. Prometheus Books.
  • Randle, K. and Schitt, D. (1994). The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell.

From the archives: Magicians, mediums, and psychics

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 1, Issue 6, from 1987.

This issue, as promised, we will explore the methods used by mediums to produce spirit manifestations. However, before we get down to the nuts and bolts of the various phenomena, I believe it is important to examine the mental set of the sitters and the setting they are in. This is the key to understanding how and why the generally crude methods of the medium pass muster in the séance room.

First of all, the sitter is in a highly receptive and suggestive state. Their belief systems have them primed to see and experience “spiritual” and “psychic” phenomena. Virtually anything that occurs in a séance can be laid at the feet of the spirits. Most séances are conducted either in total darkness or under a very dim red light. Having sat in more than one pitch-dark séance room, I know how disorienting and disconcerting it can be.

In order for the medium to do his or her job properly, there is almost always a cabinet in which they sit. This cabinet is usually just a curtain drawn around an area, usually eight feet by six feet, to make a closed-off cubicle. Occasionally, the cabinet is simply a curtain drawn across the corner of a room. This is usually the case if the séance is in a private home.

The use of the cabinet is explained as being necessary as a sort of condensing chamber for the psychic force and ectoplasm (the mysterious substance drawn from the medium’s body) which enables the spirits to materialise. Of course, what it is really used for is a place for the medium to do his or her dirty work without being seen. The fact that many mediums allow themselves and their cabinets to be searched means absolutely nothing. Most mediums have a “cabinet attendant” who is, in reality, the medium’s bodyguard and a person who can pass the necessary material to the medium when needed.

The cabinet attendant is explained as being necessary to protect the medium from malicious individuals who would grab ectoplasm, thereby endangering the life of the medium. Sitters are constantly told horror stories of mediums whose spirit manifestations or ectoplasm was grabbed and of the resulting injury and/or death to the medium. Of course, these are merely convenient stories to prevent people from grabbing the ectoplasm and getting a handful of luminous chiffon or worse, a handful of medium.

While the assembled sitters sing hymns, the medium, supposedly in the cabinet in a trance, rapidly dons a black outfit and then slips several yards of luminous chiffon and gauze out of a hiding place and proceeds to manipulate it in various ways. What the sitters see is amazing: a tiny ball of ectoplasm sending out shimmering tendrils which gradually grow into a fully formed materialised spirit. This figure could disappear in the same manner it appeared, or it could grow, shrink, expand, or instantly vanish. While it sounds crude, the effect is quite remarkable.

During such séances any number of different things can happen. If the sitters are regulars and well known to the medium, he may “apport” something for the sitter. Many mediums will move about in the dark and remove small items from women’s purses. The owners are carefully noted and the item filed away, reading to be apported back to the owner days, weeks, or months later. If the medium has access to the individual’s house on a social occasion, it is relatively easy to remove some small piece of jewellery from the bedroom and bring it back “via the spirits” at a later time. This is very effective if the person actually requests the object and it appears seconds later. Boy Scouts aren’t the only ones who know the value of being prepared.

Many séance regulars are people well known to more than one medium. They have regular files, usually quite detailed, that are shared from medium to medium.

An old person's hands holding and moving around a crystal ball. The person's sleeves have white, puffy elasticated wrists
A fortune teller and their crystal ball

Other “manifestations” that occur are voices out of a floating trumpet that answer questions. Well, the trumpet floating is no big deal. The usual trumpet is like a large megaphone with a luminous band painted around the large end. Using his hand or a collapsible reaching device, the medium is able to make it “float” all over the place. Whispering in the end causes distortion and projection of the voice and gives the impression of “spirit” voices. I’ve heard of some mediums manipulating several trumpets simultaneously.

One medium was especially clever. He was challenged by someone claiming to be a magician and psychic expert. The challenge was to cause voices to come out of a trumpet after the trumpet was dusted with a powder that would cause stains on the hand. The medium accepted the challenge, the lights were turned out, and voices came out of the trumpet. The medium had a piece of stiff cardboard rolled around his leg. Under cover of darkness, he removed it, formed it into a megaphone, and produced his phenomena.

This same medium had a stunt that caused all sorts of consternation even among his fellow mediums. He was offered thousands for the secret, but exposed it himself after he went straight. He was able to produce spirit voices from a trumpet while it was being held by a sitter. Imagine the effect! No miniature radios were used, and the trumpet could be thoroughly examined. The secret is quite simple: dressed completely in black and moving through the darkness like the old radio character The Shadow, the medium had another trumpet, painted black. It was into this trumpet that he spoke, aiming it at the trumpet held by the sitter. From a distance of three or four feet, he could cause the spectator-held trumpet to vibrate, giving a perfect illusion.

To materialise different spirits, the combination of simple masks and the luminous chiffon mentioned earlier works wonders. I remember reading of one medium, many years ago, who materialised the face of a very life-like baby. I understand she had it painted on her rather ample bosom.

Turning the lights on and exposing what is going on seems to have little effect on the true believers. Back in 1960, the spiritualist world was shocked by what became known as the Great Camp Chesterfield Exposé. Two researchers who were sympathetic to the spiritualist cause, Tom O’Neil, editor of the Psychic Observer and an ordained spiritualist minister, and Dr Andrilja Puharich (in his pre-Uri Geller manager days), equipped a dark séance room with infrared lights and a snooperscope, a night vision device, for the purpose of filming the materialisation of a ghost. The medium they were filming was Edith Stillwell. Her cabinet attendant was Mable Riffle. Both of these women were professional mediums with many years’ experience and very tough customers.

Unfortunately for them, they had little understanding of what the devices the researchers were using could do. The experiment was a disaster for the spiritualists. Looking through the snooperscope, Puharich saw that what were supposed to be spirit forms of shimmering ectoplasm materializing out of thin air, were actually figures wrapped in chiffon entering the séance room through a hidden door from an adjacent apartment.

The infrared motion picture film confirmed Puharich’s observations. Caught on film, dressed in gauze, were the familiar faces of Camp Chesterfield mediums, impersonating departed spirits.

O’Neil raged against this in his spiritualist newspaper and quite a scandal developed in the spiritualist community. Unfortunately, O’Neil died not too long after. His paper’s circulation had declined seriously as the spiritualist churches which had provided most of its subscribers and advertising revenue rather than rally to his support. Some said he died of a broken heart.

The strange and deeply unlikely tale of Gef the talking mongoose

Mrs S was recently looking through the various media platforms we seem to be paying for, trying to find a Saturday night movie we could both enjoy. Getting past the regular sequels, remakes, and reboots, she came across a film on Amazon Prime that she reckoned would appeal very much to my skeptical sensibilities. The movie had the whimsical title of Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose.

Official trailer for Nandor Fodor the Talking Mongoose on YouTube, thumbnail featuring Simon Pegg.

The film starred the ever-funny Simon Pegg as the titular Nandor Fodor, a real 1930’s parapsychologist, and the ever-brilliant Minnie Driver as his fictional assistant; alongside Christopher Lloyd, Paul Kaye, and the voice of Neil Gaiman as the elusive Gef the Talking Mongoose. The plot revolves around Pegg and Driver investigating the conversational creature that has taken up residence with the Irving family in their remote Isle of Man farmhouse.

This is not a movie critic site, so if you want to get a critique of the film itself, it gets a middling 46% on Rotten Tomatoes; but we quite enjoyed its portrayal of character-driven, whimsical nostalgia.

Though Fodor denies being a skeptic, the character, as portrayed, does demonstrate a healthy scepticism. Indeed, he relates the story of Harry Houdini’s war against spiritualism as something to aspire to. However, the word “skeptic” is levelled at Fodor as a specific accusation from fellow paranormal investigator Harry Price (Christopher Lloyd) when he is less than enthusiastic about visiting the island.

As is the way in movie portrayals of real-life events, shortcuts are used, characters invented or ignored, and liberties taken with reality, but the movie is pretty good at sticking to known facts. So, what are the known facts? Nandor Fodor (1885-1964) was born to a Hungarian family in what is now Ukraine. He had an eventful life: working in New York as a journalist, moving to London, writing books, and chairing several groups investigating mediumship and other paranormal events. Despite his passion for such phenomena, he retained a largely objective, scientific outlook. He had been an associate with Freud in Europe so had an interest in psychoanalysis, believing it had a part to play when investigating psychical phenomena.

The parapsychologist Nandor Fodor, from An Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, 1934. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nandor_Fodor_parapsychologist.png
The parapsychologist Nandor Fodor, from An Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, 1934

After meeting the British newspaper magnate (and Nazi sympathiser), Lord Rothermere, Fodor was persuaded to move to London to write for one of his titles. It was here that he wrote his Magnum Opus: The Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, thus cementing his reputation as the go-to authority on psychical matters.

There is a good, detailed bio available via Nature if you wish to know more, suffice to say that Fodor’s attitude to what we might call paranormal or supernatural phenomena varied throughout his life and whilst he tried to bring a scientific rigour to his investigations, he nonetheless could display a naivety and credulity in some of his conclusions.

Fodor did indeed visit the Isle of Man on the urgings of Harry Price to investigate Gef, but the story goes back to 1931 when the Irving family (parents James and Margaret, and their 13-year-old daughter, Voirrey) reported that Gef was living with them in their remote farmstead. It was soon picked up by the island’s papers as a slightly humorous local-interest story. The family claimed that Gef was an Indian Mongoose that was born on the sub-continent in 1852, but how it had made its way to the remote Isle of Man farmhouse was never made clear. The portrait of Gef on the Isleofman.com site gives a good description:

He soon had a fine command of English, not to mention a smattering of other languages and a repertoire of songs. A capricious character, he could be highly disruptive and rude at some times; playful and affectionate at others. Gef would catch rabbits to ‘earn his keep’ and make forays to neighbouring farms to spy on their affairs. He also enjoyed riding on the buses around the Island and would return with the latest gossip from fellow travellers. His hiding place was above a boxed-in partition in Voirrey’s bedroom and it was to the young girl that he remained closest.

When reporters from the London papers made their way to the island in search of a public-interest story, the case of the Dalby Spook (as it was known) became a tabloid sensation. However, though Gef made several tantalising appearances, he always remained elusively out of reach.

A sketch of Gef the talking mongoose by George Scott, from The Haunting of Cashen's Gap: A Modern "Miracle" Investigated, 1936.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gef_the_talking_mongoose.png
A sketch of Gef the talking mongoose by George Scott, from The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap: A Modern “Miracle” Investigated, 1936.

Mr Irving insisted he too could speak with Gef, and it was at his urging that Harry Price visited the island along with his friend, the editor of The Listener magazine, Richard Lambert. Disappointingly, Gef stayed away from his illustrious visitors. Irving later sent Price some fur and casts of paw prints he claimed were from the elusive mongoose, but experts from the Natural History Museum said the fur was likely from a dog (the family owned a sheepdog) and the prints, though unidentifiable were also likely to be from a dog-like creature.

Nonetheless, Price and Lambert wrote up their account in their book The Haunting of Cashen’s Gap (the farm was in that area of the island), which did some fence sitting as to whether there really was an erudite mongoose living in an IoM farmhouse, or there was a hoax being perpetrated by an imaginative, and likely lonely, teenage prankster with a talent for ventriloquism. But even Price, who was a firm believer in the supernatural world, was unconvinced that there was any real evidence of that in this case.

Price in the book reported that the farmhouse had several hollow wood-panelled walls that “[made] the whole house one great speaking-tube, with walls like sound boards. By speaking into one of the many apertures in the panels, it should be possible to convey the voice to various parts of the house.”

Fodor stayed with the Irvings for a week or so, but the creature remained out of sight and hearing, avoiding any further investigation. Like Price, Fodor remained unconvinced, and he put the phenomena down to a complex Freudian psychoanalysis, claiming Gef was a manifestation of a split personality he believed Mr Irving suffered from.  

Whether Gef really was a supernatural creature or was a creation of a family – or at least one of them – looking for publicity, fame, money or just LOLs, we likely will never know for 100% certain. The Irvings left the farm after the war and it was demolished a few years later. The subsequent owner claimed he had shot Gef as vermin (possibly in an effort to deter trespassers and unwanted visitors). Voirrey herself was insistent right up to her death in 2005 that he was not something she had created, however her friends remained firmly unconvinced as one friend, Kathleen Green, recalled many years later in a recorded interview.

Go check out Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose. We did enjoy it and it was nice to see skepticism portrayed in a relatively good light.  

Blue Pill or Red Pill: the effects of “The Pill Cabinet” and the formation of incel worldviews

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[Content note: mention of suicide]

“You take the blue pill… the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

“I’ll take the red,” the incel said.

Short for “involuntary celibate”, the term “incel” was coined to refer to an individual who bases a portion of their self-identity around their inability to find a romantic or sexual partner, despite their desire to. Initially, this might have been associated with a multitude of reasons, such as social awkwardness, or being a late bloomer. Today, however, the term most often comes accompanied with an abundance of misogyny.

By taking the red pill, the incel believes they’ve woken up to a world where feminism has taken over, and the balance of power is tipped not in favour of men, but of women. Their belief that men do not hold systemic power and privilege, but are actually subject to the whims of women and feminists’ power and desires, is the start of a rabbit hole that leads down to a cesspool of contemporary male supremacist movements.

As they go deeper, the incel gets increasingly dispirited by their perceived reality of a world that is increasingly acquiescent to the demands of what they believe to be a growing modern misandrist agenda disguised as feminism. By contrast, they believe that the acceptance of feminism by a relatively large portion of society in any capacity indicates the mainstream refusal to wake up; that everyone else is choosing the comfort of the blue pill, and societally-determined morality.

To make matters worse, the internet has a nasty “habit” of making the most controversial, inaccurate, and polarising content the most viral. It’s not very discerning. Plastered everywhere, even if for a short period of time — the internet moves on very quickly — the viral content garners attention beyond its intended audience. Unfortunately for us, a good portion of content that goes viral also tends to act as reinforcement for an incel’s false reality.

The world really does hate men. They joke about being anti-men. Everything men do is wrong, oh- unless he’s attractive. And further down the rabbit hole the incel goes.

Near the bottom of the rabbit hole is the black pill. Coined by the antifeminist communities themselves and seen as a last resort after realising that their attempts at making themselves more attractive to women are futile, the black pill represents a resignation towards a women-serving feminist world and the permanence of their incel status as a result of such.

Proposed solutions to this permanent state of being span a short range: death and violence. Suicide is openly discussed, with individuals essentially egged on by others in the same community. And while these are obviously tragic outcomes and very damaging to the incel as an individual, it holds no potential threat to others. The same can’t be said for other “solutions” proposed by members of the community: in my journey down the rabbit hole of the ins and outs of inceldom, the most extreme idea I came across on incel community sites is something referred to as “Going ER”.

An homage to Elliot Rodger, the man responsible for killing six and injuring fourteen before killing himself, “Going ER” suggests eliminating women and men who get what incels can’t (women) through murder. Extremist parts of the incel community deem him a hero, a martyr, and a role model. It is scary to think that Rodger could be lauded by men who have constructed their own worldview to justify their hatred for women. To think that there is a possibility they might follow in his footsteps, to be a martyr themselves, and to think that there might be people around you who actually agree to certain ideas behind inceldom, completely unbeknownst to you. All because they took the red pill.

Inceldom’s red pill definitely shows the individual a truth, but one that relies so heavily on the cherry-picking and warping of feminism is definitely not the truth the individual was so hoping for.

The majority of incels are men, and as much as those incels would tend to argue otherwise, men have been and still are the dominant group in our gendered society. They have shaped history, socio-cultural norms, morals; everything we know today has passed through the lens of a man. Notwithstanding the other factors that might affect the degrees of dominance a person might enjoy – such as racial, class or sexual identity – society for the most part remains structured around and for the experience of men. Women and non-binary people, as the Other, fall below men in that structured social order.

Feminism disrupts this engrained social order, but its aim to empower women to the same degree as men is inaccurately interpreted by incel groups as a desire to see women disempowering men. Alas, we are all mortal beings bound by subjectivity. The lens through which an individual views the world is shaped by the individual’s experiences, opinions, interpretations of reality around them, and their emotions.

Feminism, in terms of value-adding to women’s lives, means close to nothing for most men. Yet women have been acting in accordance with men’s reality for most of the history of society, due to androcentric norms and expectations. Ingrained in them and often acted upon unconsciously, women’s history of living in a double consciousness makes it even harder for men to comprehend the need for feminism.

In justifying the value of feminism and the need for it in a society where women and men alike have been behaving in ways tailored to a man’s worldview, communication is key, according to Professor Isaac Wilhelm, professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore, who told me that “blaming and shaming contributes to polarisation in an unproductive way”.

Prof. Wilhelm asserts that this does not mean that feminism should be about men, or that the movement should be entirely dependent on women pandering to androcentrism to be understood or accepted. Rather, it means that the desire to be understood cannot be unilateral. Incels, as damaging as their mindsets may be, are still a product of our society. Prof. Wilhelm proposes that some individuals get preyed on by other men selling the masculinity ideal because they are lonely and vulnerable in a society that highly values interpersonal relationships, especially romantic ones. It makes them susceptible to lies and antifeminist propaganda in hopes of finding commonality with others who share their experiences. The main issue is the insularity of these communities, where they act as echo chambers for inceldom and perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophecy of the undesired singleness, which in turn breeds increasing bitterness towards women.

In my opinion, insularity emerges from a centring of the self: in centring ourselves, we make ourselves, the individual, the “dominant group”. As such, no one is more legitimate by comparison. We judge and arbitrarily assign legitimacy to others’ experiences based on our own, and fail to realise that in doing so, we become naïve to outside perspectives. With every person doing the same thing, it is no wonder that we encounter such friction in attempting to smooth over divides in society, much less one as subversive as feminism.

As such, the decentring of the self seems to be a step towards reconciling the realities of feminism with the realities of those unaffected by the lack of this movement in society. Recognising that emotion and logic are not separate entities, but rather that logic resides within emotion and is contingent on our personal experiences.

Ultimately, feminists and incels share the same pill cabinet. The pills’ effects, however, depend on the worldview one is trying to treat.

References

Could ASMR be a possible explanation for some new age and spiritual experiences?

Anyone who uses YouTube will likely have come across clips of hyperattentive whisperers who seem to be attempting to beguile the viewer. Most of us probably know that these are ASMR (“autonomous sensory meridian response”) videos, even if we don’t get the head-tingles that the videos are intended to elicit. 

Around 20% of us – myself included – do get a physical reaction from these videos. ASMR videos first appeared around 2009, and for me they merely confirmed something I’d experienced all my life, but didn’t know how to explain, let alone name. My first recollection of ASMR was at the opticians as a young adolescent, as the optician leaned in, staring into my eyes and shining tiny bright lights to check my ocular health. A description of how it feels seems to vary from person to person, and indeed can feel slightly different from time to time, but generally it involves a warm, enjoyable, tingling sensation which runs from the top of your head down your face, neck and shoulders. 

It is both akin to – and yet also entirely unlike – the more commonly experienced sensation of a shiver going down your back, which people often describe as feeling like someone walked over your grave. By contrast, ASMR can be very pleasurable, to the point that some people will spend a lot of time and money on their favourite YouTube “ASMRtists” (the commonly-used term for people who make ASMR videos), much to the horror of The Spectator.

Pre-YouTube, it was much harder to intentionally experience ASMR. For me, some people’s voices seem to trigger the sensation, as does a certain kind of personal attention (no, not that kind of personal attention!). Sometimes visits to certain physical locations would have the same effect, and in particular cathedrals and other monuments built to convey majesty and awe in their adherents. I also found that school prayer occasionally did the same, especially when in church for Christmas. 

As I entered my rebellious teens and experimented with more esoteric spirituality, I discovered that meditation and reiki also gave me ASMR tingles. I wondered often as a young man whether this meant that the reiki, the prayer, or the magical or spiritual activity du jour was actually working, as I could certainly feel a very real physical reaction, plus a sense of personal calmness and peace in the aftermath of the ASMR tingles. 

It turns out I’m not the only one. While there are scant few comments online from those for whom locations trigger ASMR, plenty of people report getting ASMR in church and religious services. The possibility that physical sensations felt by those at worship might be ASMR being mistaken for the ‘Holy Spirit’ has been raised by Christians, with one commenter mentioning that experiencing the ‘Holy Spirit’ felt like “getting the chills or the willies and for me, it travels from my head down.” This is how many who experience ASMR would describe the sensation. This does not, of course, prove that what these worshippers are experiencing is anything other than what they believe it to be, but the similarity is remarkable. Is it possible that at least some of the physical sensations described by believers as ‘feeling God’s presence’ might in fact be explained by ASMR? 

Practitioners of new-age spiritual activities that induce the feeling seem to have no such qualms about ASMR. The name itself, autonomous sensory meridian response, was chosen in an attempt to find an objective term to describe it, and it is something of a gift to those who believe that meridians are energy – or chi channels through the body

I’m not the first to suggest that ASMR may function as a physical ‘proof’ of otherwise suspect practices like therapeutic touch and reiki. As Pain Science’s Paul Ingraham notes, ASMR sensations are “inevitably interpreted as ‘feeling the energy’ by eager customers” of such energy medicine practitioners: 

To me, a Reiki session looks like an ASMR-generating ritual with a New Age paint job — satisfaction guaranteed not by spooky healing powers, but by primate neurology. The ASMR is not only inherently pleasing, but artfully reinforces the vitalistic story the practitioner is telling.

The link between reiki and ASMR is so clear and strong that numerous ASMR channels are devoted to the combination, which some of our readers may have encountered on TikTok, where one reiki-ASMR video creator says they have been messaged by an alopecia sufferer who started hair regrowth after they had “begun watching my videos for stress relief.” 

There is indeed some research that suggests ASMR can be useful for easing feelings of anxiety, as well as reducing stress, improving sleep quality, and potentially even providing temporary pain relief and a lifted mood. If ASMR turns out to have some positive real-world effects for those who experience it – and it is still early days for this research – that seems harmless enough. 

But if the modest, temporary, subjective improvement that ASMR can possibly induce is experienced as part of reiki – or another form or new-age healing practice – and it then leads to or validates belief in such alternative practices, which can be both expensive and delay actual medical treatment, then that’s a more serious concern. 

Research will undoubtedly continue into something as widely experienced and poorly understood as ASMR, though a large volume of what’s published at the moment is looking at the online ASMR community, which is a straightforward and accessible study subject. Trying to tease out whether the feeling noted by some people in prayer is distinguishable from ASMR felt by someone in a church who is performing a placebo prayer seems a lot more challenging, and quite difficult to recruit to without seriously offending half of the participants.  

From the archives: media clippings from the death of Doris Stokes

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This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 1, Issue 4, from 1987.

As almost every newspaper reported, Doris Stokes died during the weekend of May 8/9 (coinciding (with no significance, we’re sure) with Mark Plummer’s visit to London. Psychic News caused a stir in a few places by running a large headline on the front page of their issue of May 9, “Doris Is On the Mend”.

Since then , there have been numerous press articles: the Mirror ran a series, “Doris Stokes – Trick or Truth?”; the Lewisham & Catford Mercury reported that her adopted son Terry claimed to have received a message from her after her death; the Sun reported that Doris Collins claimed to have received a message from Stokes as she was dying; the News of the World reported on the journey to the “spirit world” Stokes claimed to have made during a previous illness.

In an interview published in the (Scottish) Sunday Express, 5 January, 1986 , Stokes said she did not expect to act as a guide for other mediums after her death.

Doris Stokes was challenged a number of times to prove her powers were real. In addition to Randi’s standing $10,000 challenge, magician Paul Daniels offered a £10,000 challenge in the Sun, 9 November 1985, and Irish businessman Gerald Fleming, now living in London, offered first $20,000 Australian in 1978 and then later £100,000 if she could demonstrate her powers under properly controlled conditions. She refused the challenges. In an article in the Irish Evening Herald of May 28, 1986, reporter P.J. Cunningham wrote, “Mrs. Stokes has countered Mr. Flemings’ claims by saying he has a vendetta against her and dismissing him as an ‘ignorant Irishman’.” Fleming has made the same offer to Doris Collins, who has also refused to be tested.

Much of what appeared about Doris Stokes in print during her lifetime was uncritical. She published six books of claims with ghostwriter Linda Dearsley, she had a regular letters column in Chat, and there were many newspaper articles about her claims to have received messages from Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy (she even claimed the latter two told her they were “just good friends”).

However, there were dissenters. Magician and former British Committee Chairman David Berglas, in an interview with People, August 24 , 1986, said, “There is absolutely nothing that Doris Stokes can do that I can’t do myself… and I’m not psychic.” Paul Daniels, in discussing his £10,000 challenge, explained Stokes’ methods: “It is a mixture of artful questioning and people hearing what they want to hear.” Daniels also presented the skeptical viewpoint in the Mirror‘s “Trick or Truth” series, where he is quoted as saying, “I condemn those who make money callously from the sad, the lonely and the insecure. “

The Mirror added a brief article about Doris Stokes ‘ involvement in the Lamplugh case: Diana Lamplugh is quoted as saying that she received telephone calls from sixty mediums, all with different stories about what had happened to her daughter. Of Doris Stokes, she is quoted as saying, “Mrs. Stokes sounded like a very nice person , but nothing was found. In the end, I’m very sorry to say, she didn’t help us at all.” The Mirror concluded the series with a selection of readers’ letters, almost all of them in defending Stokes, and a few of them attacking Paul Daniels for taking a strong stand against her.

But the strongest, most detailed articles we’ve seen appeared in the Mail on Sunday on April 20 and 27, 1986, and were the work of journalists John Dale and Richard Holliday, the former of whom was also co-author of a three- part series on Uri Geller for the same newspaper.

Dale and Holliday investigated six of her most widely publicized cases. These were: the Yorkshire Ripper, the case of a boy found dead in the Bronx, two Lancashire murder cases, the New Zealand case of Mona Blades, the Baltimore disappearance of Jamie Griffin, and the Los Angeles investigation of the murder of Joe Weiss. In most of these cases, police officers told the reporters that Stokes gave them either no new information or information that was subsequently proved to be wrong. In the remaining cases, the Lancashire police disclaimed any knowledge of Doris Stokes’ having been involved in any way in the investigation, and the LA police told the reporters that they had never spoken with her.

Reporters Dale and Holiday concluded the first of the articles: “This year her books will once again top the non-fiction lists. After examining the evidence, we have found many reasons why some stories, at least, should be reclassified as fiction.”

Thanks to all who sent in clippings and information, from which this brief composite was compiled.