The Skeptic podcast, bringing you the best of the magazine’s expert analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal since its relaunch as online news source in September 2020.
Movement is really good for us – all physical activity contributes to our health and wellbeing. It helps improve mood, increases bone density, helps regulate blood sugar, increases cardiac function, and reduces the risk of many diseases. But what happens when the primary motivators for many – weight loss and muscle gain – become easily achievable through alternative means?
As an exercise scientist, I have consistently been struck by the profound impact of physical activity, extending beyond the prevention of lifestyle diseases. For example, long-term studies, tracking individuals across their lifespans, reveal a striking reality: being in the bottom 20% for fitness is comparable to smoking a pack of cigarettes per day.
Risk factors established by the Aerobics Centre Longitudinal Study show low physical fitness was associated with an equal or greater risk of all-cause mortality of other known risk factors.
Adapted from Blair et al (1996) – PMID: 8667564 Low fitness: The least fit 20% of the participants as measured by their ability to intake oxygen (VO2 Test) Smoking: Self reported current or recent smokers Hypertension: Systolic blood pressure greater than 140mm Hg High Cholesterol: Total cholesterol greater than 6.2mmol l-1 Overweight: Body mass index greater than 27kg m2
Furthermore, maintaining higher fitness levels offers significant protection against all causes of death in older age, even in the presence of common risk factors, such as high cholesterol, hypertension, high BMI, smoking, diabetes, and COPD.
A study of Californian men shows increased exercise capacity is associated with a reduced risk of all-cause mortality, even in the presence of established risk factors.
Adapted from Myers et al (2002) – PMID: 11893790 Hypertension, COPD (Cardio-obstructive pulmonary disease), and diabetes: As reported diagnosed in their medical records. Smoking: Self reported current smokers High BMI: Body mass index greater than 30kg m2 High Cholesterol: Total cholesterol greater than 5.7mmol l-1
Physical activity and body weight are often conflated in discussions surrounding health. “Move more, eat less” has served as the simple mantra championed by health experts. This mindset, while acknowledging that energy balance is fundamental to changing body composition, reduces every mile run and weight lifted to an entry in a calorie ledger. This transactional view of physical activity, though perhaps well intentioned, has often turned physical activity into a chore – a necessary penance for dietary transgressions, rather than an enjoyable and integral part of a healthy life.
Moreover, by anchoring physical activity so firmly to weight loss, we’ve inadvertently constructed a moralistic framework rooted in willpower and self-control, overlooking the complex biological, genetic, and environmental factors that influence energy intake and expenditure.
The obesity map from “Reducing obesity: drivers and trends – literature review” that shows the complex web of factors that drive the wheels of energy balance at the centre.Source: UK Government
However, the tectonic plates of weight management have shifted. The advent of pharmacological interventions, particularly the GLP-1 receptor agonists like semaglutide (Ozempic and Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro), offer a powerful new method for achieving weight loss by primarily targeting energy intake. These medications work by mimicking gut hormones that regulate appetite and satiety (fullness). Scrolling social media reveals numerous reports of users experiencing significant reductions in appetite (often termed ‘food noise’) and a greater sense of fullness after consuming smaller meals.
Unlike many past weight-loss therapies, these medications are non-invasive, have few side effects, and don’t tinker around the edges. GLP-1 receptor agonists offer substantial weight loss with the next generation of these drugs, retatrutide, showing up to 25% loss in body mass during scientific trials. For many who have struggled with conventional weight management strategies, these medications offer an effective tool that demands less conscious effort in terms of dietary planning and anxiety.
While these revolutionary weight-loss medications are relatively safe to use, they come with a catch. Rapid and substantial weight loss, regardless of method, leads to a reduction in lean body mass. This isn’t just about losing fat; it causes a notable depletion of muscle. When our bodies seek fuel during a caloric deficit, they aren’t discerning, breaking down both fat and muscle tissue.
So, why should we care about preserving muscle mass if we’re not elite athletes or fitness models? Muscle is absolutely critical for physical resilience, enabling us to independently navigate daily life with ease, while protecting us from succumbing to disease. It plays a vital role in maintaining a stable metabolic rate, influencing how efficiently our bodies use fuel and stabilise blood sugar. For older individuals, muscle mass is a key predictor of all-cause mortality. That is, death due to any reason. Research consistently links greater muscle mass to increased longevity.
Furthermore, muscle mass is increasingly associated with improved survival in the face of serious diseases like cancer. While muscle atrophy has long been a focus for researchers (such as myself), it was typically studied at the extremes; in athletes aiming for peak performance, or in severely ill patients suffering muscle wasting due to conditions like sepsis, AIDS, cancer, or prolonged immobilisation.
However, the pharmaceutical industry isn’t simply betting on GLP-1 receptor agonists for weight reduction; there’s a parallel, equal focus on developing drugs to safely preserve or even increase muscle mass. Beyond traditional anabolic steroids, with their well-documented and often severe health impacts, entirely new classes of muscle-enhancing compounds are entering the scene.
Firstly, we have Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARMs). These compounds work by selectively binding to anabolic (muscle-building) receptors in muscle cells, mimicking some of testosterone’s effects – but, importantly, they interact less with androgenic (masculinising) receptors found in other tissues. While their muscle-building effect might be less potent than full-blown steroids, SARMs generally come with a more favourable side-effect profile and are often administered orally or transdermally (through the skin), making them considerably easier to use.
Secondly, there are next-generation treatments that specifically target the internal molecular mechanisms that put the brakes on muscle growth. Within our muscles, there are regulating proteins called Myostatin and Activin A. Think of these like a household thermostat, constantly monitoring muscle levels and applying the brakes to growth unless there’s a specific stimulus, such as exercise or hormonal signals. New drugs that inhibit these proteins are showing promising results.
A paper released this year showed that these inhibitors, when administered to non-human primates and mice in combination with semaglutide (the drug found in Ozempic and Wegovy), caused not only loss of a significant amount of body mass but to end up with more muscle mass than they had before the treatment began. This hints at a future where we might not just manage weight, but precisely sculpt body composition, with pharmacological precision.
What role does physical activity play in this evolving landscape? One hopeful possibility is a profound shift in perspective. Liberated from its primary association with weight loss, physical activity could be re-evaluated as something non-transactional – an intrinsic source of joy through movement. Physical activity could be embraced for its ability to foster community, whether through team sports, group classes, or shared adventure experiences. It could be engaged in for the simple pleasure of moving through space – experiencing the elements outdoors, finding rhythm in dance, or building the endurance to conquer a mountain trail. Ultimately, physical activity serves as a profound form of self-expression, an outlet for creativity, and how we connect our bodies with the world and people around us.
However, there’s also a dystopian vision and it demands careful consideration within the discourse. The perceived ease and effectiveness of drug-induced weight and body composition could result in overlooking physical activity’s benefits. There is a risk that a societal view emerges where pharmaceuticals are seen as the “silver bullet” to improve health, which could diminish the perceived importance of promoting active lifestyles. Additionally, with an overburdened healthcare system, these medications could be the low-hanging fruit for time-strapped GPs.
This concern of policy changes is not merely a theoretical slippery slope. The UK government is already trialling the impact of weight-loss drugson people’s economic value. While studying lifestyle interventions from an economic and sociological perspective is valuable, we should remain skeptical of political policies. The focus of pharmaceutical products as first-line health interventions could come at the expense of supporting activities, developing spaces for activities, and providing leisure facilities.
A healthy society will always benefit from a population encouraged to be physically active. Not just to manage weight, but for the countless benefits that extend beyond body shape. The inherent value of movement, for mental health, cognitive function, social cohesion and pure human flourishing, must never be compromised for individual pharmacological approaches to health.
Ultimately, the evolving landscape presents both a challenge and an opportunity to change the discourse. It’s an opportunity to strip away decades of baggage that have burdened physical activity with being just a weight management tool. We can reclaim physical activity for what it is: a fundamental human need, a source of enjoyment, a builder of biological resilience, and a vital component of a rich, full life.
It’s time to champion and invest in environments and cultures that encourage active living for its intrinsic rewards, ensuring that even as medicine advances, the profound and multifaceted benefits of physical activity remain a central pillar of our wellbeing.
The inflow of refugees into Germany in recent years has occasioned a crisis with religious and political dimensions. Shootings and attacks supposedly with religious motivations have been linked to migrants and refugees in the country. Discussions about religion, especially Islam, have generated heated debates and polarised the German public.
While these issues may reflect relatively recent tensions in Europe, they mirror experiences from my own country, Nigeria, where Islamic militant group Boko Haram has been waging a campaign of violence and bloodshed to enthrone sharia law and turn Nigeria into an Islamic state.
Nigeria is a country in West Africa with a population of over 200 million. According to existing statistics, Christianity and Islam are officially the ‘dominant religions’. However, this religious situation has not always been the case. Compulsion, coercion, intimidation, violence, and manipulation by local and foreign religious actors have largely been responsible for the spread.
Before the introduction of Islam and Christianity, those who lived in the place called Nigeria today professed different faiths: traditional or indigenous faiths. Africans had religious beliefs and practices different from Islam and Christianity. They worshipped gods, Sango, Amadioha, and Ogun, different from the Christian and Islamic gods. Traditional religions have priests, holy men and women, human beings, mere mortals, who claim to be god’s messengers, called to represent God or gods, and be a go-between for the communities. They offer special prayers, preside over religious activities, rituals, and ceremonies. Traditional faiths motivate people to do some good, care for their neighbours, the sick, and the aged.
A sculpture in the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in Osun State, Nigeria. The grove is dedicated to the Yoruba goddess Ọṣun, the deity of fertility, love, and fresh water.
Also, traditional religions motivate people to do evil and commit horrific crimes. Traditional faiths make priests and worshippers lie and make things up. In an attempt to provide a coherent cosmology, indigenous religions make people believe what is not true, what has no evidence. The religions make some people think that they are special or have supernatural powers because of their claimed relationship with god. The priests deceive, manipulate, and exploit people with impunity.
When they say something, true or false, right or wrong, they claim that the gods said so. They write books, but they claim that god wrote them. That the gods revealed or dictated the content, of course, always in their language. And they expect people to believe or accept whatever the gods supposedly said or revealed without question, even when the ‘revealed’ is questionable or probably untrue. The priests impersonate the gods and appoint themselves as the messengers. They openly and publicly declare that god sent them, spoke to them, and communicates with them. And anyone who dares question or challenge the priests is accused, not of challenging humans but of questioning God, of disobeying the gods. And such a person could be killed as a form of punishment.
When the priests are hungry and need food, they claim that the gods are hungry, or they say that the gods are angry and need to be appeased. They ask people to bring food for the gods. When people bring food such as chicken, goats, cows, or rice for sacrifice. And priests, and their families consume them. They kill the chicken or goat. They drop the feathers and sprinkle some blood for the gods. Just imagine that. Do gods eat feathers? Come back the following day, the feathers are still there, as if the gods refused to eat them. The drops of blood have dried up. Flies and ants eat up the rest. But the meat has disappeared into the stomach of the priest, family members, and associates.
People go to priests with their problems, seeking answers and solutions. And the priests would leave them to go inside, sometimes they would go into the bush pretending to consult the gods for answers and solutions. After a while, they emerge to tell the people what the gods said or have decided. Sometimes they stare at pieces of bones, stones, and cowries, pretending to be talking to somebody, their ancestors, spirits that others cannot see, they pretend to be seeing, making gesticulations as if they are under the influence of some power or force. In the name of god, they sanction or justify anything, including ritual sacrifice of animals or sometimes of humans; they determine the witches in the community and the punishments that they would serve.
Advent of Christianity and Islam
This was the prevailing situation when Arab jihadists/scholars, and Western missionaries arrived and introduced their faiths and gods centuries ago. Christian and Islamic imperialists, who migrated to Africa, imposed their faiths on the region and its peoples. They came as conquerors, and enslavers, and had little reckoning for Africans, African gods, religions, prophets and prophetesses, sacred texts and traditions. They regarded African traditional god worshippers as non-believers, Kafiir, or infidels to be conquered, converted, and forced to embrace the ‘true gods’ and faiths of Christianity and Islam. Their religions, the foreign gods, and prophets that they introduced were better and superior to African religions, gods, and prophets. They turned Africa into a battleground as they compete to dominate and control the region, its people, and resources. The religious competition persists and has left a lot of darkness and destruction in its wake. The only difference is that today, the prosecutors of this religious battle and conquest are no longer Arabs or Europeans but Africans.
Christian and Islamic imperialists conquered and subdued African traditional worship and worshippers; they turned African cities into Christian and Islamic cities. In many cities across the region, some of the tallest and most magnificent buildings are churches and mosques. Most Africans who contribute to erecting these structures, not occupied at night and scantily used during the day, live and languish in overcrowded apartments, slums, and shanties. Some churches and mosques were built where traditional worship centres were formerly located. In Nigeria, Muslim jihadists and theocrats are pushing and moving southward to convert and Islamise; their Christian counterparts are moving northward to Christianise and evangelise. There is stiff competition between and within Christianity and Islam.
Religious extremism and its discontent
To gain dominance and majority, Christian and Islamic imperialists have used structural and physical violence, including the destruction and desecration of traditional religious icons, forcing African traditional worshippers to embrace these foreign religions. The two Abrahamic religions regard traditional religion as fetish, false, and an inferior faith. The Christian faith claims to be a mission to save and civilise Africa and get Africans to embrace the Christ god, the saviour of the world, the way, the truth, and life. While the Islamic faith has largely used violence and intimidation to discount, demean, and demote other gods but its own, Allah, Muslims claim their prophet is the greatest, that is greater than all prophets. Promoters and propagators of Islam prosecuted holy wars, and the most infamous was the 1804 jihad of Sheikh Uthman dan Fodio, which led to the establishment of the Islamic emirate political system in northern Nigeria.
A crowd gathers outside the Abuja National Mosque, in Abuja, Nigeria
Religion is not merely a belief or about belief in god or the afterlife, but also power and control over other humans, especially women and children. In post-colonial and post-independent Nigeria, religion has been politicised. Political traditional religion, Christianity, and Islam have held sway in most parts of the country. The politicisation of religion and the religionisation of politics have undermined the ability of states and governments to guarantee equal rights of citizens, the humanity of Africans, and neutrality in religious matters.
In Nigeria, Christians and Muslims believe that their holy books are superior to the constitution and laws of the country because they are of the view that these texts have been written by their gods. These texts embody eternal truths, handed down by their gods as absolute guides to humanity. Believers value their religion, prophets, and texts more than human life. Any adjudged act of sacrilege, any attempt to correct, fault, or criticise Christian and Islamic texts, or highlight any shortcomings in the lives and teaching of the prophets is considered a serious offence, sometimes punishable by death.
For instance, in Kano state, an Islamic mob beheaded a Christian man for allegedly desecrating the Quran in 1996. A prominent Islamic scholar in Kano led the mob to commit this atrocity. In Gombe state, Muslim students beat their female teacher to death and set the corpse ablaze for allegedly throwing a copy of the Quran on the floor in 2008. In 2022, Muslim students beat a female Christian girl to death and burnt the corpse for allegedly making posts on a WhatsApp platform that they claimed insulted their religion and prophet. Suspected desecrators and blasphemers are attacked and murdered with impunity. Those who denounce these murderous religious behaviours are deemed enemies of religion and god. They are accused of racism or Islamophobia.
An interesting thing about Nigeria is that no religion has an absolute monopoly. While Christianity is dominant in the South, Islam dominates the North. In parts of Nigeria where Christianity and Islam are dominant or in the majority, clerics and political allies enforce their sometimes antiquated, antediluvian, anti-human canons on the society. But where they are in the minority, like Muslims in southern Nigeria or Christians in northern Nigeria, they complain about persecution, marginalisation, and exclusion. Political Islam, expressed in the campaign to implement Sharia law in Muslim majority states, and in the jihadist and Boko Haram fight to realise one of the versions and traditions of the Islamic state, wreaks havoc in Nigeria. In Sharia-implementing states, non-Muslims and minority Muslim groups are targeted and treated as second-class citizens. Their rights are flagrantly violated. Individuals cannot express their rights to freedom of religion or belief, including rights to express their belief or non-belief in religion.
So many Africans profess or identify as traditional religionists, Muslims or Christians, not necessarily out of conviction but more out of fear, out of fear of being persecuted, attacked, or killed if they say what they think or believe; if they change their religion or belief. Christian and Islamic faiths owe their dominant demographics mainly to violence, coercion, and intimidation of Nigerians, nay Africans, to entrenched and systemic deprivation and violation of the right to freedom of religion or belief.
In 2014, a family sent a young man who came out as an ex-Muslim to a mental hospital, and the Sharia state government turned a blind eye to it. In 2020, the police arrested him for allegedly blasphemous comments about the Prophet of Islam. He was later convicted and sentenced to 24 years imprisonment, reduced to five years on appeal, and was then released. This ex-Muslim was so maltreated because, for the Islamic establishment in Nigeria, apostasy is a disease; once a Muslim by birth or conversion, always a Muslim. One cannot deconvert or exit the faith unless one has some mental health challenges. Non-belief is forbidden.
Lessons for Germany
Religions tyrannise the lives of people in Nigeria, hampering the state’s ability to treat all citizens equally under the law. Germany must draw lessons from the situation in Nigeria and other parts of Africa and avoid mistakes and missteps that fuel extremism. Germany should tackle religious tyranny in all forms, without exception. It must uphold freedom of thought, speech, and expression, including the freedom to criticise religious beliefs. Criticism is a potent way of highlighting bad, mistaken, and harmful religious ideas and practices. It is an intellectual virtue, and a moral duty. Germany must guarantee the right of people to say what they think about religion, including what they find absurd, doubtful, and objectionable about religious teachings and icons. The country must not privilege any religion; it must guarantee equal rights of religious and non-religious people.
Religions hold people socially and intellectually hostage in Nigeria, and in other parts of Africa. Religions sanctify mental slavery, blind obedience, and contempt for the rule of law, reason, science, and human rights. This must not be the fate of Germany and its people in this 21st Century. Germany must stand for the values of reformation in addressing religious issues at home and abroad. It must uphold the ideals of Aufklarung, or Enlightenment, in confronting challenges associated with migration and refugees in the country.
In the beginning I was a believer. As a young teenager I was impressed and astounded by the Apollo moon landing missions, and it seemed only logical that aliens far more advanced than us would investigate and probe our planet.
Having exhausted the very limited stock of UFO books in my local library, I went on to help set up the impressively named Scunthorpe UFO Research Society (SUFORS) based at the Grange Farm Hobbies Centre. We had weekly meetings on a Wednesday evening and we even ran two very successful disco nights to raise funds.
Image: Nigel Watson
So what made me and many others a believer? What did we believe? From the ‘believers’ point of view there is sufficient evidence to indicate that UFOs exist. There are hundreds of classic cases that have been investigated in detail by ufologists since 1947, plus the governments of the world no doubt have archives full of UFO evidence. The US government has secretly collected flying saucer wreckage, recovered alien bodies and back-engineered the alien technology. If that is not sufficient, then there is the fact that millions of people have reported seeing UFOs throughout the world, before and after 1947.
Even if the vast majority can be written off as misidentifications, delusions, fantasies, mirages or outright hoaxes there still remain a kernel of cases that represent something beyond our realms of understanding. Like the Disclosure addicts of today, we at SUFORS wanted the public and the authorities to acknowledge that extraterrestrial craft and their occupants were visiting us on a regular basis.
From the sceptical point of view this is all tosh. Millions of witnesses can be wrong, because human witnesses are not very trustworthy especially when they view something unusual under stressful conditions. Venus can easily turn into a spacecraft full of tentacled aliens that seems to be following your car, or the Moon can look like an extraterrestrial vehicle landing in your back garden. I’ve had cases where people have excitedly told me they’ve seen UFOs in the sky only to discover they have seen laser displays, or particularly bright stars. Most ufologists get all types of reports that they can easily identify.
The type of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) people ‘see’ go through different phases and fashions. Only a few years ago Chinese lanterns were the main cause of UFO sightings. I must admit they do look otherworldly as they glide silently in the night sky, and if viewing conditions are poor or limited they could easily give the impression of a formation of UFOs or a solid triangular object carrying lights. Today any light in the sky is an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), which are caused by misidentifications, civilian drones, secret or foreign military drones, or non-human intelligences.
When visiting the Warminster area in the late 1970s, I was riding in a car when a UFO was spotted. The driver stopped the car in the middle of the road and myself, the driver and the other two passengers got out to view this spectacle. It just looked like a classic flying saucer decked with lights, moving slowly towards us at an altitude of a few hundred feet. My thoughts were that I’ll have to cancel my subscription to Magonia and re-align my ideas about ufology in the light of this UFO. As another car stopped behind us and its passengers came out to join us to watch the UFO coming ever nearer, the scene was charged with excitement. Would it land and cast out luminous extraterrestrials? Would it send us a message in lights and sound like the closing scenes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Unfortunately, the spell was destroyed when we started hearing the sound of engines and the craft revealed itself to be an advertising airship. If it hadn’t come so close to us we would have been convinced we had seen a genuine UFO. We’ve all probably had similar experiences where something extraordinary at first sight is eventually discovered to be a mundane object seen at a strange angle or in strange circumstances.
I think we should look at all the possible mundane explanations for a sighting before it is categorised as a ‘true UFO’ or ‘unknown’. This is no easy task as we have to bear in mind the physical factors related to the sighting (location, time, physical effects if any) and the psychological circumstances (the reliability of the witness). Too often ufologists, especially under pressure from the media, declare a sighting to be of something from outer space before the facts are adequately considered. Certainly even the best investigated cases contain assumptions and flaws in them and that mundane explanations can account for most of them.
ETH Crisis
The Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) was the default explanation for us at SUFORS, but through a series of articles in Flying Saucer Review (FSR) the US journalist John Keel strongly put forward the case that UFOs, Men in Black and aliens were not physical entities but what he called ‘ultraterrestrial visitors’ who occupied and manipulated the super spectrum. It was his contention that these ultraterestrials have since time began manipulated and played with the perceptions of humanity, for their own unimaginable reasons.
Jacques Vallee in Passport to Magonia supported the notion that modern-day UFO encounters are just a techno/secular version of old folk tales, fairylore and religious visions. Furthermore, in the 1850s to the 1920s strange lights or things in the sky were regarded as ‘phantom airships’. Then there were ‘mystery aircraft’, followed by ‘foo fighters’ in the Second World War, and ‘ghost rockets’ before we got to ‘flying saucers’ in 1947.
Image: Nigel Watson
Heady stuff, and we at SUFORS lapped it up, and publications like the Merseyside UFO Bulletin (MUFOB) went on to explore Keel’s and Vallee’s ideas in more detail. Other influences by the end of the 1970s was Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CE3K) film and the setting up of the UFO Investigators’ Network (UFOIN). The latter obtained many high strangeness reports from the public as a result of all the publicity surrounding the release of CE3K.
After investigating many UFO reports in and around my home town of Scunthorpe, I was dissatisfied that the majority were of lights in the sky that could be explained as aircraft, birds, or balloons. I thought the flow of high strangeness cases from MUFOB and UFOIN would help clarify matters, as accounts of communications and contact with aliens would surely provide the proof we wanted.
My investigations originally appeared in MUFOB (later Magonia) magazine, and I collected them in Portraits of Alien Encounters (VALIS, 1990). It includes UFO witnesses and experiencers who were plagued by a life-changing poltergeist or other ghostly experiences, telepathic messages, alien communications, strange coincidences, visions of the future, Men in Black, robots, angels and abductions. These were not easy to explain by most conventional standards.
Now I have written Portraits of Alien Encounters Revisited, which is a revamped version of the older book with new information about the original cases and some new cases and theories have been added.
In the period between the original book and the new edition, many theories have come and gone to explain these outlandish, high strangeness cases. These have ranged from the Birth Trauma Hypothesis, to geophysical effects, the influence of rare plasma and ball lightning phenomena, sleep paralysis, fantasy proneness, false memories and the like. The pages of Magonia largely promoted the psychosocial hypothesis (PSH) that takes into account the psychology of individual UFO witnesses and their wider social context.
Image: Nigel Watson
The PSH looks at the subject as being the product of human perceptions, or should we say misperceptions, that lead to the belief in alien invaders from outer space, ultraterrestrials, time travellers and other exotic sources ‘out there.’ The PSH is not out to prove that UFOs are real, but that they are real in terms of the impact on humanity.
So is ufology just tosh? Hard-core sceptics would say yes, but they are equally guilty of having their own preconceptions and obsessions. The worst just dismiss UFO cases as impossible and rubbish without even glancing at the facts, others want to use the same explanation to cover all UFO cases (e.g. that they are all mirages), which is just as bad as saying they are all flying saucers from outer space.
Given the slippery nature of UFO reports, sceptics can come up with all sorts of novel explanations for a case that does not always stack up to reality. There have been many mundane explanations for Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of nine flying saucers in 1947, and many attempts to explain the UK’s Rendlesham Forest Incident. Yet In both examples, these explanations range from the possible to the desperate.
If you are inquisitive about ufology you have to wade through this mire of evidence and explanation, sometimes we do get insights into the subject and make discoveries, other times we feel like we are sinking in the mud like a Glastonbury festival-goer. These are the joys and dramas of ufology.
Paranormal Perspectives: Portraits of Alien Encounters Revisited by Nigel Watson, is currently available now in paperback and ebook.
Last month, after many years of delay, the UK finally brought key provisions of the Online Safety Act into force. These new rules create a ‘duty of care’ for online platforms, requiring providers to take action to remove illegal content (such as depictions of sexual abuse), as well as legal content that may be harmful to children.
If you’ve been following UK politics for a while, this may all feel very familiar. Under David Cameron, the government attempted to implement similar blocks at the Internet Service Provider level, requiring broadband and mobile providers to block explicit content unless users specifically opted in. Critics at the time pointed out that the plan was based on an emotionally-loaded and thought-terminating appeal to ‘think of the children!’. In debates about online harms, this phrase is a rhetorical nuke. Once detonated, it permits no further discussion beyond ‘so you want to hurt children, then?’
Later efforts by Theresa May, initially as Home Secretary, later as Prime Minister, introduced the Investigatory Powers Act, also known as the ‘Snoopers’ Charter’. In part, this introduced a requirement for operators of encrypted online services, such as WhatsApp, to add a ‘backdoor’ to allow authorities to inspect people’s private communications. This too was done in the name of protecting children.
The latest regulations, which became law in the final days of the Rishi Sunak government, take things a step further. In practice, the ‘harmful content’ referred to largely (though not exclusively) means pornography. That’s why, as of July 25th 2025, UK users of many websites are being met with mandatory age verification checks. This includes the obvious targets like Pornhub, RedTube, and XVideos, but also social networks such as Reddit, Discord, and Bluesky, where explicit material can live alongside more general content.
There are a variety of ways these verification mechanisms can be implemented. Take Bluesky’s system, for example. Bluesky validates through a service called KWS, which is provided by Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite. Users can either submit a credit card number or have an AI guess their age based on a facial scan. Both options have significant problems.
In 2024, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) evaluated facial age estimation software by testing six systems on eleven million images of people with known ages. The report is very large, but we’re interested in three key metrics, which reveal the limitations of this sort of scan.
First is the mean absolute error, the average gap between the estimated age and the true age. This ranged from 2.3 to 5.1 years, depending on the software used, how it is configured, and the quality of photographs. That’s negligible if you’re 56 and mistaken for 51, problematic if you’re 23 and blocked for ‘looking’ 17, but potentially dangerous if you’re 13 and waved through as appearing 18.
Second was the binary false negative rate, the percentage of adults which are incorrectly flagged as underage. This occurred in 4% to 30% of cases, again depending on the system, setup, and photo quality. This would mean a significant number of adults attempting to access legal content would be incorrectly blocked.
Finally we have the binary false positive rate, the percentage of 13-17 year olds who were incorrectly estimated as adults. This reached as high as 45% in some cases, again depending on various factors. While this represents an extreme, and typical results were better, it still means a significant fraction of younger teens could potentially be granted access to adult services.
NIST also notes that these systems are prone to demographic biases. For Asian and African faces, the error rates were much higher; some age estimates for African people had an error as large as 40 years. Additionally, while NIST does not cover this specifically, these systems will also likely break down when estimating the age of people with certain types of disability.
But never fear! If you fail the face scan, or you just don’t fancy it, you can instead prove your age with a credit card. In theory this works, because UK credit cards can only be issued to over-18s; in practice it excludes huge swathes of adults. According to the website Merchant Savvy, 35% of UK adults have no credit card at all. This figure jumps to 71% when considering just 18-24 year olds, the group most likely to have failed the face age scan.
At a rough estimate, if 30% of the adult population fail the face scan, that’s 16.5 million people unable to access adult services they are legally permitted to access. If 35% of those also have no credit card, that is over five million adults who are left frozen out.
Moreover, the credit card check does not even reliably block children. Teenagers can and do borrow – or steal – cards from parents. Even well-meaning parents may unwittingly hand over a card for what they think is a harmless account check, not realising it grants access to explicit content.
Leaving aside the verification step itself, the protections put in place to prevent unverified users from accessing adult services are often more of an obstacle than a barrier. Some sites display verification overlays that can be removed using the web browser’s built-in developer tooling, or by using ad-blocking technology. These are not hypothetical weaknesses: both these methods currently work on some major adult sites, including from a mobile phone. Our elaborate age verification process can therefore be circumvented by anyone with basic digital literacy, including the teenagers the system was designed to protect.
Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, are an even more obvious route. Because these checks are applied only to UK users, routing your traffic via another country bypasses them entirely. Many VPN service providers specifically advertise their product as being useful to bypass geographic blocks, and have been doing so for years. In the immediate aftermath of the age verification coming into force, one VPN provider told the BBC they had seen an 1,800% spike in downloads.
Research from Stanford University, published in pre-print in March, found that similar laws in the United States also led to a significant rise in VPN searches. Perhaps more concerning, the same research indicated a 48% increase in searches for porn sites known to refuse to implement the age gate. These are often the least regulated sites, with the fewest safeguards, and therefore the places most likely to carry harmful or even illegal content. This creates a perverse incentive where the law pushes users (including teenagers) toward the very sites most likely to host the content the legislation was meant to address.
Even if the technology worked flawlessly, the privacy implications are serious. Age verification is usually tied to an account, meaning you must now sign up and log in to access adult content. These records become a liability in the event the website suffers from a data breach, such as a hack, potentially exposing the personal information and viewing history for users of that service and opening them up to significant social stigma or even blackmail.
Beyond porn, the Act applies to all ‘user-to-user’ services. This means services where some users create content and other users consume it, for example Facebook, Discord, Reddit, forums, chatrooms, and so on. This places heavy moderation requirements on these platforms. Large companies can absorb the compliance costs, but smaller, niche communities cannot. Volunteer-run forums like furry.energy (an LGBTQ-friendly Mastodon server), Dads with Kids (a forum for single fathers), and Green Living (a sustainable lifestyle forum) have already shut down rather than risk fines.
The impact is not evenly distributed: marginalised groups often lose their spaces first, while discussion consolidates on large platforms that survive by monetising user data.
The Act also risks locking out teens from non-salacious but nevertheless ‘mature’ discussions. Reddit has already added age verification to forums for sexual assault survivors, queer and trans discussion forums, and eating disorder support groups – spaces teenagers may urgently need.
Even Wikipedia is threatened by this law; since users both write and consume their content, it technically qualifies under the law and could be forced to put some articles behind logins and age gates. The Wikimedia Foundation attempted to pre-emptively challenge the applicability of the new regulations to Wikipedia via a judicial review, but in a ruling on August 11, Mr Justice Johnson dismissed the foundation’s claims. It is now within the power of Ofcom, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, or any future holder of this post, to determine if Wikipedia will be subjected to the Act’s most stringent requirements, including user identity verification. This classification can be done effectively arbitrarily, as the Act grants the Secretary of State broad powers to redefine Ofcom’s codes of practice without additional legislation and only minimal justification.
The Act also places a burden on encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal, and Apple’s iMessage. Despite these powers already existing in some form (thanks to the Snoopers’ Charter) the Act again demands that authorities have ‘backdoor’ access to private conversations, just in case they carry harmful content. Experts point out there is no such thing as a ‘good guys only’ backdoor – once it exists, it can be abused by anyone – including by hostile foreign governments who could use the same mechanisms to obtain access to the private communications of British citizens and officials.
Following the receipt of a ‘technical capability notice’ under the Snoopers’ Charter earlier this year, Apple has already withdrawn some privacy features from the UK market rather than comply. Other platforms, including Signal and WhatsApp, have indicated they would exit the UK entirely before weakening their encryption. This creates a precedent where UK citizens will find themselves cut off from the privacy protections available elsewhere in the world.
In response to this pushback, the government has pinky-promised they will not enforce this part of the Act until such time as it is technically possible to do so. This, however, remains little more than a policy promise, which could be discarded on a whim tomorrow. The promise has no legislative support, the legal powers remain on the books regardless of current enforcement intentions, and future governments could activate them without new legislation.
None of this is to deny there’s an issue to solve. Today’s teenagers have instant access to extreme forms of pornography that were rare or inaccessible even 20 years ago. Material which at one time would have been considered niche BDSM content, is now considered mainstream content. Practices which were once the preserve of the fetish community (such as degradation, choking, and hair-pulling) and were enacted with a framework of negotiation, enthusiastic consent, and safeguards for all involved, are now presented without that context, as if that is what sex is usually like.
This can and does shape expectations, particularly affecting the kinds of acts young women are being expected to perform during their first and tentative sexual experiences. This is not an imaginary problem, and ready access to pornography does seem to be a proximate cause, but the blunt instrument of the Online Safety Act is poorly suited to addressing it.
How else might this problem be effectively addressed? Children and teenagers are perfectly capable of understanding the difference between fantasy and reality when given the appropriate tools. No-one is watching RoboCop and thinking that is how policing works. Teenagers need to understand that porn also presents a fantasy world; it is not reflective of real sex, or typical sexual relationships.
A 2020 pilot study of a porn literacy programme found that after a single workshop, the percentage of teens who wanted to emulate porn dropped from 44% to 29%, and the number who thought porn was a realistic depiction of sex fell from 26% to zero. As part of the workshop, the teens were taught that they needed to ask for consent for each new sexual act during a sexual encounter, and that certain acts (e.g. anal sex, spanking, degradation) may not be as widely enjoyed by women as they might presume after watching porn. Importantly, there was no increase in porn consumption after the workshop, and no reported distress from discussing the topic openly.
While small in scale (just 31 participants, no control group), these results are consistent with wider research: education reduces harmful misconceptions without intrusive surveillance or censorship.
The Online Safety Act is tackling the wrong end of the problem. Age verification tools are inaccurate, intrusive, and easily bypassed. Compliance demands drive out smaller communities and centralise control in large corporate platforms. It risks pushing curious teenagers towards less safe spaces while simultaneously denying them access to beneficial ones.
If the goal is to protect children, the answer is not to slam the door, but to give them the critical skills to navigate what’s behind it. That is to say, comprehensive, non-judgemental sex and media literacy education.
The Online Safety Act may be well-intentioned, but it is a fundamentally flawed attempt to legislate away a complex social issue.
The Skeptic podcast, bringing you the best of the magazine’s expert analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal since its relaunch as online news source in September 2020.
Throughout the world, teenagers stare endlessly at their phone cameras, looking for the perfect angle by tilting their heads and inspecting their jawlines. They scroll endless TikTok videos with captions reading “keep mewing and be a chad”, and “bring your ex-girlfriend back by developing hunter eyes”. The comments on the video range from admiration to concern, but engagement algorithms don’t care. Thousands of likes, reposts and affirmations act as constant echo chambers reinforcing the “For You” page. Keep scrolling, and you will start finding more routines that increasingly border on hazardous.
Welcome to ‘looksmaxxing’, an endless void of beauty routines aimed primarily at younger audiences. Looksmaxxing was initially born out of incel (involuntarily celibate) forums, but exploded across social media, combining self-improvement trends with pseudoscience.
One former devotee of looksmaxxing is Darius Ng, a student at Singapore Management University. Darius recounts his story of being belittled for being under 165cm tall. “How are you going to find a girlfriend like this?” he recalled being asked often throughout his polytechnic to early university days.
From there, he stumbled across a Reddit thread claiming to improve your looks beyond just height – it seemed innocent enough, and he was hooked instantly. As someone who was always self-conscious, Darius concluded that his bad luck with romance was the unfortunate result of being below average height. Looksmaxxing offered an alternative viewpoint, where he could compensate for his short stature by making other changes to his looks.
Darius fully embraced the trend, starting with a disciplined skincare routine, then moving on to facial exercises and ‘proper’ tongue placement. “It allowed me to improve parts of myself that could be controlled,” he told me. However, this slowly became an obsession with his looks and self-worth.
Darius’s experience is not uncommon; it reflects a wider phenomenon of a generation of young men struggling with growing insecurities, made worse by a highly visual digital culture. They turn to quick hacks, hoping not only to improve themselves, but to also meet increasingly impossible beauty standards.
To understand how looksmaxxing became popular, we must trace its roots to the underlying anxieties of the digital generation. The term “looksmaxxing” originated from online communities like Reddit’s r/LooksmaxingAdvice, and infamous incel forums. Young men who are isolated and often confused about their lives and place in the social hierarchy find themselves landing in these communities, exposing themselves to extreme theories about dating, attraction, and the role physical appearance plays in establishing social status.
Some ‘looksmaxxing’ simply encourages proper skincare and grooming, but other practices are more sinister. Photo by Lumin on Unsplash
At first glance, looksmaxxing seems to be just another form of self-improvement, focusing on skincare, proper grooming and fitness. But it turns stranger the further down the rabbit hole you go. As the communities grew larger, looksmaxxing began to promote radical and often dangerous practices. These include “mewing” (where specific tongue posture techniques claim to sharpen your jawline), “bone smashing” (applying repeated blunt trauma to the face to stimulate bone growth), and “hunter eyes” (specific facial exercises aimed at developing a deep-set, predatory gaze).
What separates looksmaxxing from other self-improvement and beauty trends is its focus on ‘hyper-masculine’ traits. It is about achieving the optimal and ideal version of yourself – informally known as becoming a “chad”, someone with dominant facial structures built symmetrically, pronounced cheekbones and sharp jawlines. The goal isn’t just to look good; it’s to dominate and beat the competition socially and romantically.
TikTok and Instagram have turned these ideas into short-form and visually appealing content, showing before and after pictures edited by filters, day-in-the-life looksmaxxing routines, and influencers who monetise affiliate links for supplements, jaw trainers and other devices. Social media algorithms reward extreme content, and young men, many of whom feel inadequate and have low self-confidence find comfort in what looksmaxxing promises: control, transformation and attention. As the clinical psychologist Tom Hildebrandt notes, “Psychologically, it’s essentially an erosion of the sense of self.”
What is often missing from these guides and left unaddressed is the emotional toll it takes on a person, ranging from body dysmorphia to an addiction to peer comparison. In this high-pressure digital age, how someone looks is not just an identity but a project that is never quite finished.
Darius’s introduction to looksmaxxing came through a YouTube recommendation, “How to get a more defined jawline – in only 5 minutes!” Then, the algorithm started feeding him more content to improve his facial features. “Next thing you know, I just started scrolling on TikTok and Reddit as well”.
Bone-smashing involves applying blunt trauma to the face, in an attempt to stimulate bone growth via Wolff’s law.
What began as a casual interest quickly intensified. Darius established complicated routines, practising mewing before going to school, performing exercises to sharpen the jawline, and even experimenting with “bone smashing” in hopes of remodelling his face.
However, height remained his primary insecurity. In Singapore, the average male height is around 173cm, and dating apps make it easy to filter by height. Couple this with the fact that – often for very understandable reasons – women in Singapore are generally more selective than men, which adds to the insecurity. “I felt the need to overcompensate in every other possible way,” he told me, which led to Darius spending several hundred dollars on height maximising insoles and supplements, including ingredients that various influencers claimed could add inches to your height even after puberty.
The looksmaxxing community provided not just techniques of self-improvement, but a form of collective identity. “We seemed to have our separate language and understanding of society,” Darius recalls. “We would even analyse celebrities by their ‘canthal tilt’ or ‘golden ratio’. It felt very scientific, like we just found out what made people attracted to each other”
Over time, Darius reached a turning point. First, he noticed no significant changes despite religiously following the looksmaxxing routines. During one particular gathering, his friends told him they did not notice any difference at all, and that he was “delusional”. This started to make him reflect. He noticed how looksmaxxing communities constantly moved the goalposts, introducing new techniques without ever addressing that their previous recommendations failed to deliver. He also recognised the toll on his mental health: “Every time I looked in the mirror, I started to notice every flaw that no one else could see. It started to become tiring.”
Today, Darius still practices some of the healthy habits that he learned, such as skincare and fitness, but has abandoned the obsessive pursuit of physical perfection. “I realised I was able to find solutions to my self-confidence issues that had nothing to do with my jaw or my height, things that I could not change.”
Looksmaxxing exists in a peculiar grey area. Some practices are evidence-based approaches to enhancing appearances, while others delve into questionable territory with minimal medical and scientific support. Mewing is the pinnacle of looksmaxxing’s scientific murkiness. The technique is named after British orthodontist John Mew – who, in 2022, faced a misconduct hearing at the General Dental Council (GDC) for advising harmful treatment to children. Nevertheless, his mewing technique remains the most widely practised looksmaxxing method globally.
“We worry that people are using a technique that is unproven, unmonitored, unsupervised and based on misleading claims,” explains Matthew Clover, the director of clinical practice at the British Orthodontic Society.
Even more worrying are the higher-risk practices. “Bone smashing”, applying pressure to facial bones to stimulate remodelling of the face, has no scientific backing but carries significant risks of fracture and nerve damage. “Bonesmashers” claim to apply the principles of Wolff’s law, which states that bone grows in response to stress. However, as Dr. Bruce Y. Lee told Forbes, “You aren’t a freaking ice sculpture. You can’t simply carve out how you want your face to look.” Wolff’s law is an oversimplification of how our bones work, and there are significantly more factors that contribute to bone density and strength other than stress.
What makes looksmaxxing particularly difficult to evaluate is its strategic mixture of legitimate and questionable claims. The combination of basic evidence-based advice – like getting enough sleep and staying hydrated – and completely unsupported claims about facial exercises or supplements, makes the pseudoscience more believable because of the presence of those obvious truths.
Looksmaxxing isn’t simply aesthetics, for many people it is also a source of agency. For young men who feel powerless in social or romantic situations, these communities offer things that they desperately crave: explanation, control, and belonging. When dating apps and Instagram filters reduce attraction to simple settings, modifying your face can feel like an easy solution to level the playing field. Psychologist Dr. Linda Papadopoulos noted that young men are increasingly internalising beauty pressures once reserved for women. “Reducing self-esteem and then selling you a product to ‘fix’ something has been a great way for entire industries to make money,” she explains.
For many young men, looksmaxxing pours clearly defined metrics for masculinity into an identity void. Defined jawlines, specific muscle-to-fat ratios, and ‘ideal’ facial proportions are very appealing in an otherwise ambiguous environment around gender expectations. It transforms uncertainty into a routine. For those who feel overlooked, it promises visibility; for those who feel lost, it offers guidance.
Scientific research backs this emotional appeal. A 2024 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that appearance-related motivations for self-improvement among adolescents and young adults are strongly associated with self-esteem regulation and social status concerns. Looksmaxxing speaks to a fundamental human need to be seen, to belong, and to be heard.
The constantly moving goalposts of looksmaxxing culture can leave adherents overwhelmed and anxious.
Perhaps the most glaring aspect of looksmaxxing culture is its constant evolution and inflow of new information, making it nearly impossible for proper scientific evaluation and critical thinking to keep pace. The sheer volume of information puts a strain on our mental capacity. Instead of empowering users to take control of their appearance, it can leave them overwhelmed and anxious from the number of choices. “The more I scrolled, the less I know,” Darius explains. “One day it’s improving your negative canthal tilt, the next day it’s about tongue posture, then suddenly everyone’s talking about testosterone cycles.”
Worse still, much of the content lacks medical grounding. TikTok creators with no dermatological training recommend treatments that can cause long-term skin damage. YouTube channels promote supplements or workout regimens that may not be FDA-approved for teenagers. The visual nature of these platforms lends credibility to transformation claims, but as Dr. Nina Vasan, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, warns, “We’re beginning to see the harmful impact on mental health: loneliness, anxiety, fear of missing out, social comparison, and depression.”
Further complicating matters, algorithms ensure users primarily see content supporting these techniques. They naturally create confirmation bias, if you engage with content about mewing working, you’ll see more success stories, creating the impression of overwhelming evidence.
In Singapore, SG Her Empowerment (SHE) highlighted that youths are increasingly exposed to unsolicited content relating to body image and unhealthy eating and exercise behaviours on social media platforms even without actively looking for it. The lack of control over what we choose to see reinforces anxiety over our looks and makes it harder to distinguish between correct and false information.
Nevertheless, engaging in some parts of looksmaxxing, such as basic skincare and fitness regimes, can still help you develop a sense of agency and control over your life. This proactive approach to self-improvement aligns with general self-care principles and can lead to increased confidence and self-worth. As Darius told me, “Not gonna lie, I still care about how I look,” he admits. “But I guess it’s no longer a do or die for me. I still work out and take care of myself, not because of some arbitrary standard but because I simply want to.”
His experience highlights bigger questions faced by young men navigating self-confidence and societal pressures. How can they acknowledge and improve their appearance without becoming obsessed? Where is the line drawn between healthy self-improvement and harmful obsession? And how can they develop true confidence in a culture that often reduces our self-worth to superficial numbers?
As looks-based products and “techniques” continue to surface, society faces important questions about the balance between self-improvement and self-acceptance. The looksmaxxing trend represents just one aspect of the wider issue of digitalisation and self-importance.
For Darius and many others, the most important discovery wasn’t some hidden technique to look better. It was the realisation that improving social connection and confidence doesn’t simply lie in perfectly sculpted facial proportions, but in the far more challenging but rewarding task of developing a self-worth that goes beyond just physical appearance. Real confidence comes when you realise your meaning extends beyond just how you look. That’s something no facial exercises or supplements can give you.
As a resident of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the North of England, I get more upset when I see conspiracy and woo being demonstrated in my home than when I see it elsewhere. I know that’s irrational, but like many other places, Geordies are a fiercely proud lot. We love our city, we take delight in showing it off, and anything that does it dishonour is something to rally against.
We have our fair share of reiki, psychics and the occasional public protest against vaccinations and 5G, but when I learned that The Great Resist conference was going to be hosted right here, just on the other side of the River Tyne, I was both appalled and excited. I know many skeptics have visited events like this before, and listening to their experiences has always provided a fascinating insight into the often-dangerous subjects being discussed, and the people who discuss them. However, I had always wanted to see what they were like for myself, so I snapped up a ticket; the £9 fee seemed quite the bargain.
I bought it under a pseudonym, partially because if they were Googling names, they might find mine and link me with Skeptics in the Pub Online or Newcastle Skeptics, but mainly it was because I just felt really cool saying I was going undercover. Ultimately, it was important to me that I was able to blend in and learn, to be able to have conversations with people, not debate with them. I didn’t go to persuade anyone they were wrong, or debunk; I wanted genuine conversation, not an argument.
Back to Basics
This was the 4th Great Resist conference, which they call “the people’s answer to The Great Reset”, this time with a focus on “Getting Back To Basics”. To the untrained eye, the lineup of speakers and talk titles might look quite innocent. For example, Kimberley Isherwood with Taking a Primary School Class, Mark Byford with Farming or Famine and Mark Edwards and Jason Davies with Keeping the UK United. Who could possibly take issue with such seemingly innocuous subjects like that?
The Great Resist Programme. Source: David Glass.
In an interview a few weeks prior, the organiser, Liz Phillips, told us this conference was going to be different, it was going to be much more interactive and “not just us being talked at for 5 hours”. But, spoiler alert: it wasn’t interactive, and they did speak at us for five hours; in fact, it was closer to seven hours.
The actual conference was fairly standard in terms of structure. The host, Liz, would introduce the next speaker(s), and they would come on stage to excited applause and three or four very yappy dogs barking. It was unclear if the dogs were happy or upset with the content of the conference. The presenters would then talk about their chosen subject, usually with very little structure, but always with Liz running the slides from her ancient laptop (for the tech folks out there, it was running Windows Vista.) I had not realised there were so many ways to run Microsoft PowerPoint incorrectly.
The Venue: No Champagne, Just Cheap Drinks and Theories
The chosen venue was a pub in Gateshead called The Teams & District Social Club. Many people in the UK will be familiar with this kind of venue, perhaps more so if they live in the north. They are social hubs for local folk to get together, have a pie and pea supper with a pint, maybe play some bingo or watch the ‘turn’. They are known for being cheap to visit and often run down, because they exist in deprived areas. You probably won’t find a bottle of Champagne at one, but you will certainly be able to grab a pint of stale beer for a fraction of the cost of a city centre bar. This club was no different, right next to a motorway, through an underpass with a questionable aroma, and in a very deprived part of town.
We were later asked to offer thanks to the venue manager for letting us use their function room, as they were sympathetic to the cause (cue cheering and applause) and reminded that a previous event was shut down in Liverpool (cue booing).
The Faces in the Room
The conference was fairly well attended, with around 80-100 people in attendance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people I spoke to were friendly, excited to be part of something, and were sporting all kinds of slogans on their clothing. One gentleman’s blindingly bright white hoodie exclaimed in bold black letters that he was UNVAXXED, UNMASKED and UNAFRAID. Another chap was wearing a peculiar necklace, which, at first, I thought was a remote-control key for a car, as it had a flashing blue LED. But when I asked about it, he shouted at me, “These are bullshit detectors!”
For a moment, I thought my cover was broken and he’d immediately seen through my ruse. Should I have worn a fake beard? Thankfully, he laughed and said he was joking, pointed to his wife, who was also wearing one, and told me they were to “protect them from radiation”, and that they “absorb negative ions”. He went on to say he was a former street protester but had become jaded with the loud and brash nature of how the demonstrations had become. He said they were “too angry” and “nobody listened any more”. I don’t think he intended to be quite so pithy when he said, “I prefer the carrot of conversation instead of the stick of shouting at people.”
The only person who didn’t seem to be in a good mood was a chap who I later found out considered himself to be a sovereign citizen. He seemed pretty angry about recently being arrested and kept in a jail cell for 18 hours, apparently without food and drink, despite the police officer assuring him he would be given something that would satisfy his keto diet.
One stark observation I made was I was one of the youngest people there. I’m in my late 40s, so that’s no small feat, but perhaps it is indicative of the type of people who can fall into conspiratorial rabbit holes. The people I spoke to were mostly retired or out of work; one gentleman was even quite surprised at me asking what he did for a living before telling me of a string of businesses he had run throughout his career, and how he had done quite well until his wife had a stroke and things began to decline.
The theme of past trauma did seem to be a common one, and folk were seemingly quite keen on talking about it. It was enough to make me wonder if those more extreme life events were triggers for conspiratorial thinking, and if these conferences were perhaps a form of perceived group therapy. It turns out, there is research out there that suggests slipping into conspiracism is an adaptation to historical trauma.
The full Speaker Schedule of the Great Resist. Source: David Glass
The Content (or lack thereof)
It’s difficult to write anything about the actual talks. Much of the content was the usual repeated misinformation, misrepresentation or misunderstanding of data, and long, meandering rants.
After the (delayed due to technical issues) introduction, and a shout-out to the Metric Martyrs of local fame, the conference was opened by Godfrey Bloom, who talked about the treasury and finance, a dry way to start any conference. He continued to say how the UK was in huge debt with many unemployed, including “millions and millions” of illegal immigrants. Putting aside the misuse of the word “illegal” here, UK Government statistics tell a different story; in the year ending March 2025, there were 44,000 irregular arrivals detected. Bloom then claimed we have until Easter 2026 for the current government to collapse.
Mark Byford, The Bowler Hat Farmer, didn’t make it as far north as Newcastle. Source: David Glass
Next up was the Bowler Hat Farmer, Mark Byford, but this was a prerecorded video only; it seems he was not the only speaker who found the North East a little too far to travel to. We learn that “solar panels are suicide”, this year will be the last full harvest we will ever have, and in the future, we will have no more avocados “because of carbon”. Much of his talk, however, seemed more like an advertisement for his farm shop.
Kimberly Isherwood and Lucia Thomas then came on to talk about sex education for children. Throughout the talk, they showed us copies of the school curriculum from Wales and were determined to tell us that educating children about their bodies was akin to sexualising them and encouraging them to engage in sexual activity. Of course, even a cursory glance at research tells us that sex education significantly reduces adolescent pregnancy.
The Direct Democracy Referendum on immigration. Source: David Glass
The one bit of interactivity we were promised before the conference came when they gave us a diagram of a body, to pair up with the person sitting next to us, and point at where we like to be touched. The elderly gentleman beside me did not want to participate, but more on him later. They went on to talk about sexual abuse and how teaching children the same words for genitalia gives paedophiles a “password to consent”. They also were the first to bring up gender as an issue; transphobia was a common theme at this conference.
Then we had Neil Petrie to talk about Direct Democracy, or at least we were supposed to, but he was ill. Instead, the replacement Allan Shipman made a valiant effort to take up the mantle. He started by asking us if he should do 15 minutes instead of 30 so we might get a break, to which the audience gave an emphatic “yes”, which he then ignored and did his full slot saying “that’s democracy!” He talked about his attempt to run as an MP, though his 28 votes were not enough to get him elected. His talk was littered with some topics you may be familiar with: Andrew Bridgen, The Light Paper, Brexit, and Nigel Farage, all of which were roundly applauded.
The Light Paper on display at the Great Resist. Source: David Glass
Perhaps my favourite talk of the day was the gentleman who was previously sat beside me and refused to tell me where he wanted to be touched. He was Rev. Philip Foster, and claimed to be well-read on climate change. He is a retired Church of England vicar who was wearing a delightful white suit and fancy tie, and despite his beliefs, I liked him a lot. Opening with a quote from the Psalms, his talk was a remarkable mishmash of unrelated data and claims. At one point, I had to stifle a snigger when he said, “Coal exists because back then, fungus hadn’t been invented yet.” I’m sure he misspoke, but given the extremely religious nature of his talk, perhaps it was his god who was the inventor.
Other facts included that cows don’t emit methane via flatulence, car dealerships are fined £15,000 for each car they sell that isn’t electric, and CO2 is not a pollutant, but actually a life-giving gas (the BBC does not understand this), and you can tell this is true because roadside verges are covered in grass. He also managed to sprinkle in a little more religion and, of course, some more transphobia.
One attendee wears the T shirt of a Scottish anti-geoengineering group. Source: David Glass
Next up were a trio of speakers to teach us the dangers of 5G, ULEZ and 15-minute cities. First was Nicholas Martin who gave a machine-gun approach, starting with “I’m not a conspiracist” and darting around topics such as RFK Jr and Trump, nanotech in vaccines, transhumanism, and how Gorbachev was a nice chap, then getting more insidious with torus quantum fields used as mind control, and how 5G is the linchpin for the World Economic Forum to monitor and control us all. It was at this point that I was wondering if this was a brain dump or a filibuster.
The second of the trio was Gateshead native Mark Steele whom I was most excited to see speak live. He is well known locally for pestering the local council about the dangers of 5G, to the point that he has been given an injunction to stop him from harassing staff. Disappointingly, however, I found his talk to be a tedious, long-winded series of misrepresented technical diagrams and jargon, delivered with a self-congratulatory smugness.
Finally, Eileen O’Connor spoke about the Radiation Research Trust and more dangers of 5G, in particular a group called SCRAM – Seriously Concerned Residents Against Masts. She continued that 77% of people will become ill due to masts and how DNA damage from 24 hours of mobile phone usage is the same as receiving 1600 x-rays at a hospital.
Frustratingly, we still had more to go, and despite already overrunning by an hour, they pushed on. Ray Savage talked about policing and how we should “bring back the old bobbies”, as current police recruiters want 5% of new members to have “psychopathic tendencies”. We were interrupted by a tech audio problem, and when we got going again, we were treated to more references to former British MP Andrew Bridgen and Robert Malone, both notorious antivaxxers. It was at this point that many people’s phones were sporadically making noises; perhaps they were just as desperate to go home as I was.
Sadly, we could not go home yet. The penultimate talk was by Mark Edwards and Jason Lloyd Davies, one of whom was wearing a British flag as a cape. Thankfully, they were brief and to the point, inviting us to consider a united UK. And the last talk, another prerecorded video, this time by Richard Vobes, on getting back to basics – finally, we were going to address the theme of the conference! Sadly, it was another dry monologue, and perhaps if we weren’t all so exhausted, Richard’s charismatic style might have held more interest.
The Silence after The Echo Chamber
The Direct Democracy manifesto. Source: David Glass
Some things stood out to me. First of all, most people on stage had something derogatory to say about trans people. Sometimes it was hidden in a sly side comment, but mostly it was just outright, explicit transphobia. It’s almost impressive that trans issues can be linked with climate change, ULEZ and farming.
The other standout for me was how receptive people were to the ideas being presented. As long as the concept didn’t match conventional or mainstream thought, it was applauded and cheered, and the crowd didn’t seem to care to apply any critical thinking to anything presented.
The content was undeniably harmful, especially for anyone lacking a critical mindset. On the surface, it echoed fear and misinformation, but dig just a little deeper, and it quickly fell apart. I’m grateful I could attend the conference forearmed with a skeptical toolkit, fully aware of what I was stepping into. I’d be interested in attending similar events in the future, mainly for the conversations and perspectives. It’s good to get out of my own echo chamber every now and then. That said, it’s an exhausting experience that is not for everyone, and definitely not something I plan to turn into a regular habit.
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Tick the Yes box to the right.
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Tick the No box to the right.](https://www.skeptic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/20240908_153548-375x539.jpg)
