Acting is so riddled with superstitions that many of them have made it into common parlance – Break a leg! or, The Scottish Play, and so on. Most of the time these sayings are pretty harmless, closer to being idioms than actual beliefs, their purpose more in teaching young thespians to respect the communal space of the theatre than anything else. But unfortunately, as I discovered when I attended drama school, theatre has a more serious problem with superstition, one that runs much deeper – and it all starts in the studio.
For some context: I studied at a top British conservatoire in 2016. What became quickly apparent to me, after my first few classes, is that teaching acting is actually very difficult. And I don’t mean learning it is difficult – which of course, it is – but so is the actual act of teaching someone how to improve at the art form. Acting is an experiential skill – you get better by doing it, by practising it at a high level, much like a footballer learning to take the perfect free kick, or a fast bowler practising line and length. You’re given some good basic advice: Relax your body, speak up and don’t rush, don’t drop character until you’re out of sight of the audience, etc. But that only takes you so far.
What about the really tough stuff, like how to truthfully perform a scene in which you’re told your children have been murdered? (The Scottish Play, Act 4, Scene Three) Or when you get that dreaded stage direction – they laugh? Try that last one for yourself – genuinely try and make yourself laugh, I dare you. It’s like trying to force yourself to sneeze.
This is all without mentioning the subjectivity that comes with analysing what makes a performance good or bad which, if you ask anyone who has seen the many performances of Nicolas Cage, isn’t so obviously clear-cut.
Because of this difficulty in explaining the craft, at least in my experience, many acting teachers employ a kind of pseudoscience couched in artistic academese. Acting, many seem to claim, is about getting to the correct creative state, about inhabiting the soul of another, about finding the correct energy (the last one sounds more like advice you’d give to a Jedi rather than a serious student). It is a continuation of what seems to be a lot of discourse around art and artists – that creativity doesn’t come from the mind, but from the soul.
Different acting gurus have come up with their own methods in an attempt to codify this approach into something seemingly respectable, but most of their efforts are equally numinous, or even borderline quackery. Consider the following diagram that purports to explain the ‘method’ of the grandfather of acting technique, Konstantin Stanislavski:
Make sense to you? No, it doesn’t to me either, and I’ve studied it!
Or what about Sandford Meisner, who devised an exercise where actors were given a line, and told not to say it until something compelled them to say it, wherein Meisner pinched the back of the male student and put his hand under the blouse of a female student – does that sound constructive?
I’ve had teachers try and heal students’ disabilities with Reiki, talk about the ‘invisible rays of intention’ that actors might psychically receive, and have spent hours being told how to commune with the energy of inanimate objects to learn how to puppet them ‘truthfully’. This spurious pedagogy isn’t even well hidden – look at some of the courses of study as advertised on certain drama schools’ websites: ‘Body Centring Experiential Anatomy and Pilates,’ or promising to ‘Remove blocks or inhibitions to emotional and imaginative spontaneity’ or teaching you how to ‘…cultivate psychophysical connectivity’. I’d recommend looking at the websites of some of these schools for yourself, and you’ll see what I mean.
But why is this a problem? Is this anything more than just well-meaning hocus-pocus that, even if misguided, might help young actors get better? I think there is a concern here. Drama schools, as anyone who has attended one can attest, are also high-pressure, both in their student culture and in their teaching methods. The industry is oversaturated, and the competition to be the best, the most talented, the most beautiful, is fierce. Young actors will do anything to prove that they’re committed to the artform, to impress their teachers, including buying into a lot of this nonsense methodology. And then, at least in my experience, they come up against such spurious pseudoscience and find that it is impossible to actually implement, to act upon.
When they fail, their teachers can often be quite brutal. I once had a tutor pour a bottle of water over a classmate’s head when they thought she wasn’t focussing enough, or another who screamed obscenities when the young man forgot his lines, or in a whole-year feedback session tell them that they had no future in the industry because they didn’t understand the school’s methods. So young actors think their failures are a problem of character – their own character, as if their souls were defective because they can’t find the correct energy, whatever that means.
This continues into the industry, too, and, coupled with a general failure of pastoral care, is reflected in the data around performers’ mental health. A scoping review conducted by Dr Lucie Clements for the performers’ union Equity found that depression is twice as likely in performers than in the general population. The review also notes that, where six percent of the general public is thought to experience anxiety in any given week, in comparison, 24% of dancers, 32% of opera singers and 52% of acting students experience weekly anxiety.
The Equity review goes on to state that: ‘…negative relationships with others in positions of power in the workplace, who were demanding, unsupportive or authoritarian also created huge stress in the industry’ and that ‘…many papers have argued that education providers rarely provide sufficient support and acting students are predominantly underprepared in education for how to look after their psychological well-being once in the industry.’
These young actors surely won’t be helped with more yoga, more energy, or a more slavish subscription to a series of these ‘New Agey’ artistic methods, many of which were first formulated before the discovery of penicillin. What these young people require is evidence-based mental healthcare.
As for support in developing the craft of acting itself, I think perhaps there’s a more rational approach, one that doesn’t require energies or intentions. Acting is simple enough – it’s an illusion that happens in the mind of the audience when they see a clever combination of believable narrative and interpretable human behaviour, and not the soul of the actor, whatever that is. All a young performer needs to do is speak up, relax, and practise. If they’ve got talent, it’ll come naturally. I don’t think it’s more complicated than that.
And perhaps, if their teachers spent a little less time obsessed with energies and a bit more time on this craft and student care, our drama schools might both justify the huge debts that these young people leave with, and become kinder and more reasonable places, too.
In September 2019, I and few colleagues from Edinburgh Skeptics attended a lecture given by Ian M. Crane in a city centre hotel. Crane – who sadly died in early 2021 – gave a talk about the dangers of 5G and drew in several common conspiratorial tropes such as the New World Order, 9/11 truth, EU/US globalism and various others we’ve all come across over the years as skeptics.
Obviously, this was pre-Covid and it took that pandemic to bring the alleged dangers of 5G to the wider public. I’ve written about the disingenuousness of these claims elsewhere, so there’s no need to go into these right now, but just as 5G fears were around before they became popular, so fears of Electro Magnetic Frequency radiation have been around for far longer than mobile phones have existed. Indeed, much of the scaremongering goes back to the early days of their discovery.
A quick history lesson: the ancient Greeks knew about the strange effects on hairs when a piece of amber that had been rubbed on fur was held close. Seafarers around the world came to realise that some metals, when suspended, seem to point in a consistent direction. Eventually scientists such as Volta, Galvani, Ampere, Ohm, Hertz, Faraday, and Maxwell started to measure and work out what was going on, in the process lending their names to the science of radio waves – initially called Hertzian waves. It was soon realised that electricity, magnetism, and the radiation produced, were all part of the same system.
In 1888, Hertz transmitted and received electromagnetic waves over a short distance and within a few years, the first practical applications were developed in communications – albeit over relatively short distances.
In 1895, Roentegan discovered X-rays and within months, it was being used in a clinical setting, given the obvious practical ability to see bone structures within the body. However, the necessary huge exposure times caused burning and damage to the patients. There was an understanding that these waves could be extremely harmful.
The first real medical applications in the early years of the 20th century were accompanied by fears from both the public and other clinicians. The Los Angeles Daily Times in 1903 reported on a conference in a local hotel where demonstrations of:
Electro-Theraputics, X-Rays, and high frequency currents [which were] handled without insulation […] showing the value of the different forms of electrical energy in medical science.
However, the newspaper also reported that: “There were papers on ‘Radio-Phobia and radio-mania’” being presented. Clearly within a few years of the new science the public were expressing fears of the changes being wrought. Despite these fears, radiology, X-Rays and other innovations soon became commonplace in medical settings around the world.
Once Marie Curie had discovered that certain naturally occurring elements also emit radiation the public became excited by the possibilities. So much so that by the 1930’s they could buy radium infused chocolate, Cold weather clothing, cigarettes and even condoms and suppositories (although, to be fair most did not actually contain radium, they nevertheless used the name as a short-cut for glowing health).
Communication by radio became so all-encompassing to the modern world in the post war period that there was very little pushback by the general public. However, this was about to change. In 1972 the US government supported plans to stretch high-voltage transmission lines across 476 farms in rural Minnesota to meet the demands for more and more electric power in the mid-west. The farmers believed, with some justification, that their rights were being trampled on by politicians in league with big business and looked around for reasons why they did not want massive steel structures across their valuable farming land other than just because. One of these reasons was supposed dangers from electric currents and the radiation emitted by high-power transmission lines on their families and livestock living under the path of the wires.
The publicity of this cause made sure these fears soon spread among the public and by the 1980’s academics began to study what they believed were the adverse effects of living under power lines. Epidemiologist David Savitz published a 1988 paper on a childhood cancer cluster in Denver, Colorado and concluded that there was a link – though he has since gone back on this – which became the foundation of the EMF pylon scares of the 80’s and 90’s.
In November 1992, Florida businessman David Reynard appeared on the popular Larry King Live TV show talking about his late wife Suzy’s death from a rare brain tumour that he believed was caused by her heavy mobile phone use. “She had a tumour the size of a golf ball right here on the side of her head which is where the antenna would go when you’re using the phone,” Reynard said.
He sued the phone maker – NEC – in an infamous court case but was unsuccessful. However, the adverse publicity and widespread reporting of the case caused the industry to do more studies and to bring in stricter safety protocols around the radio emissions from cellphones. For a while, it looked like these scare stories would strangle the booming mobile industry. Since then, manufacturers must perform tests on what is called the Specific Absorption Rate demonstrating that their phones are within the limits set by the authorities.
This has not stopped similar fears being made about Smartmeters, WiFi, LED lights, Bluetooth and a host of other wireless enabled devices. Usually from companies willing to sell you the ‘solution’.
Mobile phones have been more or less ubiquitous for over 30 years and radio waves have been understood, measured and controlled for well over a 100 years. It is clear that there is no widespread adverse affect of the technology on human health, if there was it would have shown itself by now. As each generation of mobile technology comes out, as each new device using wireless technology is used, so campaigners hi-jack these changes to sow fears among the wider public. The science of Electro Magnetic Frequency radiation is extremely well understood, and their use is not going away anytime soon.
On the 2nd of November, 2021, author and journalist Laura Dodsworth retweeted a very strange video. Created by the Covid-sceptic organisation PANDA, it depicts a young woman walking slowly through a misty natural landscape. Scored with ominous music, juxtaposed with distant city noise echoing in the background, a hypnotic voiceover begins:
It is everywhere. From the news programming, to the media headlines, to the political speeches, to the education initiatives. It’s on the posters on the trains. It’s in the articles that you read. It’s in the text messages you are sent. You are right to feel that something is not right. You are right to feel that you are being manipulated… Governments and institutions globally have engaged behavioural teams with the prime purpose of altering your decisions and behaviours. It may feel easier to ignore what’s going on, but the only way to reduce its influence and break the chains is to think consciously about what and why. Listen to your intuition. It is telling you something is amiss. You are right.
Attempts to portray oneself as a lonely, crusading truth-teller in a dystopian world is certainly not alien to those claiming to challenge ‘mainstream narratives’ around the COVID-19 pandemic. And while such overtures would likely make even David Brent blush, it is easy to see why a video like this could be compelling to casual viewers. With undertones verging on romantic, it has an eerie, almost trance-like quality to it. It is both mesmerising and disturbing. Half guided meditation, half terrifying wake up call. The dream-like text combined with sparse yet serene natural landmarks makes the message of the video clear. This is about blocking out the corrupting noise of institutional power and trusting your gut. In order to ‘break the chains’ of government influence we must ‘listen to intuition’. We are ‘right to feel that something is not right’, because we are ‘being manipulated’. If you weren’t feeling afraid before watching this video, you certainly are now.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity of Covid-contrarianism will know that seeding gut-level suspicion at the expense of reality is a huge part of the movement’s modus operandi. This is why simple factual corrections seldom work on those sympathetic to these kinds of arguments. Their position is not a factual one – it is an experiential, emotional one rooted often in fear. While Covid-sceptics may outwardly profess sceptical values and claim that they are engaging simply in the business of rationality – ‘think consciously about the what and the why’ – their enterprise relies entirely on urging their followers to float along in an obscuring fog of confirmation bias. Untethered by inconvenient realities, unmoored by matters of fact. You must keep walking through the fog – you are right. Behind the facade of reason, nurturing spooky hunches is the entire sorry game.
In her retweet, Dodsworth captioned the video with one word:
Interesting.
Setting aside my own opinion that the word ‘interesting’ is at its best when not interchangeable with ‘hunch-affirming’, we should be extremely grateful to Dodsworth for sharing the video. Had she not, we might never have been exposed to one of the most exquisite, unintentional satires of conspiratorial thinking ever to exist. It is a withering deconstruction, verging on avant garde. In my opinion, by retweeting it, whether Dodsworth realises it or not, she perfectly and succinctly summed up the totality of her own written work about the pandemic.
Her Sunday Times best-selling book – ‘A State of Fear: How the U.K. Government Weaponized Fear During the COVID-19 Pandemic’ – is pitched as a sceptical examination of mainstream pandemic narratives. It purports to ask ethical questions about the U.K. government’s response to managing the spread of COVID-19. However, upon closer inspection, I believe it is full of the very same groundless appeals to fear that she spends 281 pages criticising. As well as referencing all of the usual unreliable sources cited by her far less palatable ideological bedfellows, her book is light on facts, heavy on hunches, and rife with misleading analysis.
As Dodsworth herself discloses at the outset:
This is a book about fear, not about data
I couldn’t agree more.
‘A State Of Fear’
Readers of this magazine may not be too familiar with Laura Dodsworth, owing to the fact that her work seems to have attracted almost no attention from critical media, and seemingly none at all from the scientific-Skeptic movement. This may be partly due to our own appetite for examining the most brazen, colourful strains of nonsense – the pandemic being no exception. While the more eye-catching claims surely deserve our attention, we mustn’t let this come at the expense of critiquing misinformation that comes across as more moderate or reasonable. After all, palatable nonsense can do just as much harm as obvious nonsense – arguably even more so under the veneer of respectability.
From a distance, Dodsworth herself does not come across as an extreme or overtly controversial voice. She does not doubt that vaccines provide essential protection. Her articles have been published by relatively mainstream, albeit conservative, outlets. To the uninitiated, she comes across as rather sensible. She is only asking questions, after all. And, on first glance, the central thesis to her book seems as though it could even be an intriguing one. Dodsworth contends that:
… the behavioural scientists advising the U.K. government recommended that we needed to be frightened. The Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) said in their report… “a substantial number of people still do not feel personally threatened… the perceived level of threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging”. In essence, the government was advised to frighten the British public to encourage adherence to the emergency lockdown regulations.
Dodsworth continues:
This book explores why the government used fear, the specific tactics, the people behind them, and the impacts of fear, including stories from people who were undone by fear during the epidemic. Most of all, this book asks you to think about the ethics of using fear to manage people.
Specifically, her consternation centres around the Behavioural Insights Team – informally known as the ‘Nudge Unit’ – and how they leveraged fear during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to ‘frighten’ British citizens into complying with restrictions and mandates. Founded under David Cameron’s 2010 coalition government, the ‘social purpose company’s’ notional remit is to influence public attitudes and decision making via behavioural economics and psychology so as to enhance civilian compliance with government policies. Notable campaigns in the past have included initiatives that purport to help reduce behaviours such as smoking, physical inactivity or texting while driving. Similar campaigns predate the existence of official ‘Nudge Units’ by quite some time. While Dodsworth acknowledges the value of such ‘laudable aims’, she writes scathingly about the organisation’s recent activities, it’s apparent lack of transparency, and the theoretical framework on which it is based:
The person who coined the term ‘nudge’, Cass Sunstein, said, ‘By knowing how people think, we can make it easier for them to choose what is best for them, their families and society.’ Isn’t it great that there are people who know what is best for you? Rest assured, there are many behavioural scientists and their advocates embedded and advising within the U.K. government, nudging you towards what is best for you… Making no bones about it, nudge is clever people in government making sure the not-so-clever people do what they want.
Dodsworth claims to have reached out to David Halpern, the founder of the organisation, for an interview. She received an evasive response, in which Halpern insisted he was an ‘admirer’ of her work, but declined to comment on any questions pertinent to Dodsworth’s area of concern. She claims to have spoken to:
… an anonymous scientific advisor deeply embedded in Whitehall. They told me that flattery is a very common tactic used by the government when people ask difficult questions. This echoed my suspicious gut feeling.
Suspicious gut feelings, as we will see, are in abundant supply in this book.
Hyperbole aside, and to be fair to Dodsworth, the question of whether it is ever acceptable for a government to use fear to influence the behaviour of its citizens does strike me as having the potential to be interesting – in the truest sense of the word. Is the use of fear by a government to alter the behaviour of its citizens, notionally for their own good, ever morally justifiable? Are there ever any political uses of fear that are both warranted and desirable? If so, when? And to what extent? Should the scale or severity of the perceived threat factor into the equation? Should the use of fear be proportional to that threat? If so, how might we best quantify, measure and calibrate each of those expressions?
This feels like fertile ground for a fascinating discussion – one which political theorists and undergraduates are already having, it should be said. Sadly, none of their work is referenced or engaged with in Dodsworth’s book – though she quotes at great length voices that happen to agree with her position already.
Dodsworth’s opening gambit might perhaps call to mind the government sponsored road safety campaigns in recent decades, which have seen the production of many horrifying TV adverts – famous for their shocking, graphic depictions of road accidents – warning of the dangers of careless driving. Such campaigns are often associated with reductions in driving deaths, according to government surveys, and might serve as examples of when political utilisation of fear is both warranted, desirable and effective. Does Dodsworth discern a difference between fear leveraged to reduce motor vehicle deaths and fear leveraged to reduce deaths from a deadly virus? In what ways do those examples differ? Why do those differences matter?
The potential for a capacious and rewarding debate on liberty, free will, truth and ‘the greater good’ is plainly present in Dodsworth’s premise. In all honesty, I was quite looking forward to one unfolding as I began reading her book. Unfortunately, it is a potential that she spends almost 300 pages squandering by way of flimsy sources, hyperbolic language, and selective evidence. Bluntly, it is simply not possible to have a productive, honest discussion of the question ‘did the government’s use of fear go too far?’ when such a question is essentially immediately followed with the unfounded suggestion that Covid wasn’t actually that bad.
After writing in her introduction that ‘this is a book about fear, not about data’, she continues:
Nevertheless, some additional data will be required to help you contextualise the threat of the disease with the policies for managing it, and you will find that in Appendix 1. A few facts and figures assist with framing the scale and dangers of Covid, and subsequently assessing whether escalating our fear was appropriate or not.
Indeed, Appendix 1 does appear to contain infection fatality estimates from a few different sources, including the CDC and Imperial College London. However, in the interest of fully ‘framing the scale and dangers of Covid’, it should be noted that ‘dying’ is only one potential outcome. There exists a whole host of other long-termeffects and life-alteringhealth outcomes that a SARS-CoV-2 infection can bring, of which vaccines can reduce the incidence. Neglecting to mention these isn’t exactly painting a full picture of the threat, and anyone doing so might well be considered a ‘Covid minimiser’.
This, though, isn’t even the most glaring red flag of Appendix 1. For alongside infection fatality data from public health agencies – which itself is notentirelyclear-cut – comes a reference to an ill-famed report from Professor John P.A. Ioannidis.
In the last few years, John Ioannidis has become notorious for his sudden and unexpected descent into anti-consensus views about the pandemic. Despite a position as a respected scientist and scholar, Ioannidis has made a number of false claims and untrue predictions about the pandemic. He co-authored a seroprevalence study which purported to find that, due to supposedly higher infection rates, SARS-CoV-2 infections were milder than initially thought. The study suffered from serious design flaws, and was roundlycriticised. Ioannidis once claimed that many lives were lost early in the pandemic due to improperly administered intubations. This too was unsupported by good evidence. At the very beginning of the pandemic, Ioannidis wrote a highly circulated piece in STAT, in which he suggested – all while being careful enough to maintain plausible deniability – that pandemic estimates may be greatly exaggerated due to a dearth of sufficient data. A rebuttal was published a day later, with others pointing out the piece’s dubious mathematics.
However, these incidents pale in comparison to the controversial report Dodsworth references in Appendix 1 for ‘A State Of Fear’. Even by Covid-sceptic standards, it is quite exceptional. The paper contains so many problems that it is difficult to list them all. One commenter on the preprint attempts to outline a handful of them below:
Somehow, this paper has become one of the most influential and frequently referenced sources in anti-vax circles, despite the fact that virtually none of the 61 studies Ioannidis cites sufficiently support his infection fatality rate (IFR) estimate. In many cases, he calculates a vastly underestimated IFR as a result of citing studies that use non-representative sampling to overestimate seroprevalence. Essentially, if we say that many more people have COVID-19 than actually do, the percentage of people dying from it looks smaller. It is a very effective way of minimising the ostensible threat of the disease. Many have pointed out the catalogue of flaws the report contains. Yet, in her book, Dodsworth cites it uncritically and without caveat. She even goes as far as to praise Ioannidis elsewhere as being a ‘voice of expert reason right at the beginning’ of the pandemic.
If an author demonstrates this kind of apparent indifference towards quality of sources and evidentiary standards, how can we be expected to trust them? How can they be expected to build an analysis that eventually reaches insight? If this report is intended to constitute the basis for Dodsworth’s supposed ‘framing’ of the ‘scale and dangers of Covid’, how can we expect her evaluations to be calibrated meaningfully to the real world?
Dodsworth’s unfortunate taste in experts only gets stranger. The first chapter of ‘A State Of Fear’ is entitled ‘Fright Night’, in reference to Boris Johnson’s 2020 televised address to the nation urging citizens to stay home. Dodsworth contends that this ‘doomsday speech’ constituted the first major dose of fear that the government administered to the British public in the pandemic – ‘imprinting’ it on our minds using ‘very specific wartime language’. She believes ‘that’s when it began’, although ‘the priming had started weeks earlier’. She writes:
I froze. Appalled by the words… But as I watched Boris Johnson’s speech to the nation, as he told us that we ‘must’ stay home, I also started observing his body language. Why was he clenching his fists so hard? Why the staccato speech? Something seemed ‘off’ and that triggered alarm bells… I was sure that the prime minister’s language was intended to alarm me, and that in itself worried me.
Dodsworth writes that ‘at a basic level that was hard to pinpoint, it didn’t feel genuine’, that Johnson’s performance suggested that ‘he did not believe in the essence of his words’, and that ‘his words set the tone for the three weeks to follow’. The notion that a prime minister, let alone one like Boris Johnson, might engage in duplicitous statesmanship shouldn’t be a radical or inconceivable idea to most people. However, as part of an attempt to scrutinise Johnson’s direct-to-camera message further, Dodsworth writes that she enlisted the council of ‘two experts’ for their analysis. One of whom is a licensed practitioner of Neuro-linguistic Programming, whom Dodsworth gainfully tasks with the job of ‘decoding Johnson’s body language’.
Neil Shah, founder of International Wellbeing Insights, is claimed to be an expert in ‘how to read non-verbal communication’. Dodsworth asked him to watch the YouTube video of Johnson’s speech and to give her a ‘blow by blow’ analysis of his ‘body language’. Dodsworth writes:
He [Shah] told me he would be interpreting a blend of signals because 55% of our communication is through body language, 38% is volume and tone and only 7% is the actual words we use.
Shah’s assessment includes the following:
Twenty-six seconds in and you can see the tension in his fingers. He is clenching so hard his knuckles turn white… The way he is jabbing his fists at us shows tension… There doesn’t seem to be congruence between his words and his body language. It suggests he is not speaking from the heart and doesn’t believe what he is saying.
To be clear, Neuro-linguistic programming is pseudoscience. Body language is an inexact science at best, and full of unsubstantiated myths at worst. Studies have failed to find a link between non-verbal cues and deception over and over and over again. The 7/38/55 percentage rule is largely a myth, with even its originator warning against its common usage today.
This, then, might seem like quite a peculiar way to begin a book dedicated notionally to thinking sceptically and rationally about government narratives around the pandemic. However, it starts to make a lot more sense once we understand what I would argue the book’s actual goals are, and how they differ from its stated goals. This book, in my opinion, is not in the reality business per se – it’s in the just keep walking through the fog, you are right business.
Just as Dodsworth contends that the prime minister’s message ‘set the tone for the three weeks that followed’, this opening chapter sets the tone for the rest of her book. In the name of uncovering truth, Dodsworth begins ‘A State Of Fear’ by asking a non-specialist from a discredited field to give a professional opinion, via a pseudoscientific practice, in order to sow gut-level distrust. Had Dodsworth applied even one fifth of the scrutiny to her so-called ‘expert’ as she does to Johnson’s speech, she might have realised fairly quickly that this was not a reliable analysis worth quoting. Especially not if she cared about being taken seriously. Moreover, the idea that Johnson may not have believed what he was saying can be true without it having any implications about the real world threat of COVID-19, or the real-world efficacy of public health interventions. Such a finding does nothing to support such conclusions in and of itself.
Indeed, as I move through each chapter, I can say wholeheartedly that ‘A State Of Fear’ is succeeding admirably in fomenting a hunch within me personally, though perhaps not the hunch originally intended. My suspicion about the low standards of evidence harboured by the author is only deepened as Dodsworth makes a plethora of misleading claims about face masks, lockdowns and death counts.
Dodsworth asserts that face masks were implemented due to the ‘signal’ of ‘social conformity’ they promote, and not because of any evidence of efficacy. She writes:
The behavioural psychologists love masks. They absolutely love them… Behavioural scientists pushed for masks because they create a ‘signal’, when in fact not a single Randomised controlled trial can demonstrate the value of mask wearing outside clinical settings.
The vast preponderance of evidence suggests that face masks can be a useful, yet imperfect public health tool during a pandemic. Some masks work better than others, especially when used in conjunction with other safety measures such as social distancing and proper ventilation. Just because protection is incomplete does not mean it is useless. Additionally, as many have pointed out, physical testing alone is deemed sufficient for a myriad of other public health tools, such as seat belts, motorcycle helmets, parachutes, life-jackets, and condoms. Nobody argues that these do not work due to a lack of RCT research.
In attempting to repudiate lockdowns as an effective measure for reducing transmission, Dodsworth makes a familiar argument concerning Sweden’s pandemic response:
To highlight one example, Sweden is often cited as a counter-factual [sic] to the U.K’s policies because it did not impose strict lockdown measures throughout the year… According to CEBM, Sweden only had a 1.5% increase in age-adjusted mortality. England and Wales, with the strictest lockdown in the developed world, saw a 10.5% increase in age-adjusted mortality.
As it happens, Sweden did ban public events of more than 8 people, and closed secondary schools more than once, both of which constitute ‘locking down’, according to voices on Dodsworth’s side of the aisle. Even Sweden’s state epidemiologist, who championed the country’s approach, insists that they ‘did close down enormously’, with streets remaining empty for much of 2020.
However, comparing Sweden and the U.K. in this way is inappropriate due to their vastly different geographical sizes and populations, both of which could help explain their varied outcomes. Sweden is a much larger country with much fewer people than the U.K. This means that the virus would have had to work slightly harder to make its way through the population. It would be far more analytically apposite to compare Sweden’s response to other Nordic countries with similar sizes, populations and response time-frames. Compared to countries like Finland, Iceland, Norway and Denmark, Sweden fared disastrously:
The conclusions Dodsworth arrives at with regard to lockdowns are only possible as a result of the inappropriate statistical comparisons she makes, which unfortunately misleadingly skew the analysis in her favour.
Elsewhere in the book, Dodsworth argues that the U.K. ‘lockdown itself caused a horrifying number of excess deaths’, despite very good evidence demonstrating that this isn’t quite the case. Bold claims about lockdowns causing excess deaths are common in Covid-sceptic circles, despite very little evidence to support them. Countries like New Zealand and Taiwan, which locked down but had little to no virus to contend with, had very little excess mortality. While nobody argues that lockdowns are harmless, the real story is much more complicated than the one Dodsworth presents.
Dodsworth quotes a SAGE report as predicting over 100,000 ‘non-covid deaths caused by lockdown and other impacts’, while neglecting to mention the very same report also estimated around 4,100 fewer non-Covid deaths as a result of ‘better air quality, lower prevalence of other infectious diseases, and reduced road injuries.’ In reality, many of the possible negative outcomes posited by the report, such as lower life-expectancy brought about by the recession, are a result of the government doing too little to contain the virus and locking down too late.
At most, we can say that the long-term impacts of lockdown will take quite some time to assess fully. What we cannot say is that we know lockdown contributed to a sharp increase in excess mortality. The best available evidence currently says otherwise.
In one of the book’s more reasonable passages, Dodsworth mentions that some non-Covid excess deaths may have been ‘due to delays in treatment, or a reluctance to seek treatment’. This is certainly true. Issues within the NHS, including a shortage of both staff and beds for patients, contributed terribly to the early months of the pandemic. Crucially, though, the reasons for this are due in large part to decades of chronic underinvestment in health services. Given that Dodsworth claims to be concerned about the negative impacts of lockdown on our collective health, it seems odd that she would go on to make commoncause with those who campaignmost fervently for the privatisation of the very health service that exists to help us.
In a chapter entitled ‘Counting The Dead’, Dodsworth casts aspersions on the true death toll of COVID-19. She begins the chapter inauspiciously by writing:
We humans keep dying. We always have. We always will.
She continues:
At a time when it is crucial to understand why people are dying we have less clarity due to the changes in registration and recording… The difficulty now is that although death tolls are confidently asserted, the relaxation of the death registration in order to cope with the worst case scenario means we don’t really know how many people have died of Covid.
Dodsworth is correct that we may never know how many people have died from COVID-19. However, almost every reason for this points to the true death toll being undercountedall over the world, not overcounted.
For example, Dodsworth writes that ‘there is uncertainty about some care home ‘Covid deaths’ actually being due to Covid.’ She quotes an anonymous ‘scientific advisor’ as saying:
We have no idea how many people died because of this disease, or poor clinical decision-making in the early days, or neglect in care homes.
While Dodsworth implies here that some Covid deaths in care homes may be attributable to ‘neglect’ rather than the disease itself – a point which would be impossible to disprove – it is far more significant that the near-complete absence of testing in care homes during the first wave means that care home COVID-19 deaths were almost certainly undercounted, which could add up to 10,000 more deaths to the UK’s COVID-19 death toll. This issue was raised by the ONS as early as June, who noted additionally that undiagnosed Covid in the elderly could sometimes present with symptoms that can look like dementia:
This could fit with recent clinical observations, where atypical hypoxia has been observed in some COVID-19 patients. In someone with advanced dementia and Alzheimer disease, the symptoms of COVID-19 might be difficult to distinguish from their underlying illness, especially with the possibility of communication difficulties.
Dodsworth, however, does not link to any research here to support her claim about Covid deaths in care homes. Instead, she quotes an anonymous care home worker in the north of England who offers a handful of individual anecdotes of ‘cases where Covid had been inaccurately put on the death certificate as the cause of death or an underlying cause of death.’ Dodsworth relays one such anecdote:
One resident, well into her 80’s, tested positive for Covid at the end of March 2020, when she had mild symptoms. She recovered, but went on to die in August. A covering doctor who had never met the resident, or seen the body, insisted that Covid must have been a cause of death.
The anonymous care home worker is then quoted as saying:
She actually died of old age, quite peacefully and contentedly.
Dodsworth then asks the reader:
How many times did this happen in care homes across the country? There is an abundance of anecdotal stories on social media from families or care home workers who say that Covid has been incorrectly put as a cause of death on the certificate.
Even if unverified anecdotes from social media were an appropriate source for such a claim, Dodsworth cites none here. She also interviews an anonymous coroner who shares a ‘similar story’. She writes:
They [the coroner] were called by a doctor they knew personally, asking for advice about ‘an old boy who’d had multiple kidney infections and died just eight hours later in the hospital.’ Against her better judgement, the doctor agreed to do a Covid swab, although she knew he’d died because of his kidneys. It was positive and she had to put Covid on the death certificate.
Dodsworth writes that she asked the coroner if they thought that this would turn out to be ‘a common tale’. The coroner responded:
We have no idea.
On the basis of this, Dodsworth concludes:
The Covid death total is probably inflated, because Covid has been used too liberally on death certificates… As all of my interviewees said, we have no idea how often it has happened, and now we never will. If, in the most horrible of circumstances, a resident was neglected or suffered some grave misfortune, it could be passed off as Covid.
It is important to notice what Dodsworth is doing here, as I believe it is a tactic that propels almost every argument in her book. She begins by highlighting existing uncertainty around COVID-19 death tolls, which is a genuine phenomenon – though not necessarily for the reasons Dodsworth claims. Then, she quotes from anonymous sources who relay a handful of worrying, unverified anecdotes about Covid being falsely attributed as a cause of death. Finally, she concludes that we simply have no idea how often this has happened across the country…
Based on threadbare sources and unverified anonymous testimony, Dodsworth seeds the idea of ‘inflated Covid deaths tolls’ being a potentially widespread problem across the U.K.. For all her talk of the government ‘planting ideas’ in the minds of its citizens, she has planted this idea in the minds of her readers. In perhaps one of the best examples of this, she writes:
The coroner told me an apocryphal story about a family holding a dead body up to a window so the doctor had ‘seen’ the body. He wasn’t entirely sure whether the story was a joke or not.
Referring to the anecdote as ‘apocryphal’ is ingenious. It allows Dodsworth notionally to dispute the story while still leveraging it for emotional effect, insulating herself against any criticism of sharing false, sensationalised stories for the purposes of horrifying her readers. She never technically said that she believed such a story to be true, after all. Mentioning that the coroner ‘wasn’t entirely sure if the story was a joke or not’ carries the furtive implication that even if it isn’t true, it’s the kind of thing that could be. Dismissing a horrific image after you’ve described it in detail still leaves the reader with a horrific image in their mind. ‘Imprinted’, as Dodsworth herself might say.
Reading ‘A State Of Fear’ almost feels like reading a whodunnit. A sinister inkling is born at the outset, encouraged as the story goes on, and matures eventually into full-blown conspiratorial dread. She refers to masking as a ‘cult’, and – in a passage that, for me, put to bed any notion of her position as a moderate voice in this discussion – draws parallels between the U.K.’s pandemic response and Nazi Germany:
The Coronavirus Act and Public Health Act were terrifyingly draconian (see chapter 15, ‘Tyranny’) and one could potentially draw parallels with Nazi legislation.
Her penchant for selective scrutiny pervades almost every page, writing favourably about some of the worst peddlers of misinformation in the pandemic. She writes uncritically about the Great Barrington Declaration, despite their proposals being foundationally flawed. She refers to Dr Clare Craig as someone who was unduly criticised for ‘asking controversial questions’, ignoring her patent record of Covid casuistry. She quotes Carl Heneghan at length, a British GP who once claimed that there was ‘no sign of a second wave’ in the middle of the second wave. In her acknowledgements, she thanks Zoe Haracombe – a HART member who once wrote that she wanted ‘ADE [Antibody-Dependent Enhancement] kicking in hard and fast soon!’ to harm people who chose to get vaccinated, thereby validating her vaccine scaremongering. For a voice as sensible as Dodsworth, these certainly are intriguing ideological bedfellows.
Her subsequent scholarly ventures raises interesting questions about the consistency of her stated beliefs too. Despite dedicating an entire book, many television appearances and a litany of articles to condemning the psychological targeting of British citizens for political purposes, she is currently promoting a new book co-written with Patrick Fagan, the former ‘lead psychologist’ of Cambridge Analytica. It was during his time there, according to InsideBE, that Fagan:
… learned the power and methods of data science mixed with behavioural science, to send the right people the right nudge at the right time… using big data to infer audience psychology and send targeted behavioural interventions, with a particular focus on personalised nudges…
His new book with Dodsworth is entitled ‘Free Your Mind: the new world of manipulation and how to resist it’. It is billed as ‘the must-read expert guide in how to identify techniques to influence you and how to resist them’. For what it’s worth, Fagan rejects the notion that the Cambridge Analytica scandal is about ‘ethics’, because ‘everyone is doing it’.
Readers might notice how antithetical this seems to Dodsworth’s cause – in my opinion, it’s rather like co-writing a book about the dangers of house fires with a known arsonist. However, interestingly, a 2017 study found some experimental evidence for a phenomenon known as ‘partisan nudge bias’, in which ‘individuals evaluate the acceptability of a policy nudge by instead assessing how they feel about the associated policy objective or policy sponsor’. Essentially, people are less likely to criticise ‘nudges’ that they happen to agree with, and more likely to criticise ‘nudges’ they personally dislike. So it is quite possible that Dodsworth may be applying some selective indignation here. After all, such a phenomenon appears to be supported by scientific research, which I would argue is more than can be said for many of the arguments in her book.
‘A State Of Fear’, funnily enough, appears keen to frighten you. It warns you that you are being ‘nudged’, while relentlessly nudging you from cover to cover. It advances a score of misleading claims – about masks, lockdowns, death counts, and government infractions on liberty comparable to Nazi Germany. In the absence of comprehensive evidence or reliable sources, it relies heavily on inflaming suspicions and stoking gut-level unease. As a result, Dodsworth’s response to any factual criticism could quite easily be ‘well, even if this particular thing isn’t quite true, you can’t deny that something doesn’t feel right here…‘ It is a one-size-fits-all stratagem that will likely continue to serve Dodsworth in whatever futureendeavours she pursues.
One thing should be painfully clear by now. Dodsworth’s Covid corpus engages in the very same baseless appeals to emotion she so vehemently decries. This foreboding feeling is the constitutional currency of her entire book – animating every argument, steering every chapter. In my opinion, there is nothing ‘sensible’ to be found here, only more fog. Rather like the eerie, trance-like video that she retweeted years ago, Dodsworth’s argument depends on persuading you to suspect that your worst, most sinister, most ill-founded hunches are correct. Do not fall for it.
I do not believe that Laura Dodsworth is campaigning against a state of fear. In my view, she is working tirelessly to perpetuate one.
In August of 1955, a group of family and friends in a rural Kentucky farmhouse had a battle with what they believed to be aliens from a flying saucer (see part one for the full story).
In the years since the harrowing events of that night, UFO enthusiasts have elevated the significance of this case far beyond its humble origins. The Kelly-Hopkinsville case has been featured on numerous UFO documentaries, highlighted in mystery shows, inspired fictional work such as the sci-film Critters, and been dramatically re-created in shows like Project Blue Book, and the goblins have even been immortalised as a monster in the popular game Pokémon.
But that first day after the events was troubling for the humble farmers. With no physical evidence for their story, the community quickly decided that the event had been a prank, a publicity stunt, or some other mundane cause – anything but a real encounter with the unknown. However, researchers like Joe Nickell have made a compelling case that the root cause of the “goblins” was likely a pair of territorial great horned owls. These large and sometimes aggressive birds have many features that match those of the goblins – perhaps most notably the large eyes and feather tufts that resemble the ears said to be on the goblins. The wings of the owls end in finger-like projections and when the owls hop along the ground with their wings up, in the dim single-bulb night of rural Kentucky it doesn’t tax the imagination to see how – with the proper framing of the night’s earlier fireball sighting – these animals might be mistaken for something more esoteric.
To really understand Nickell’s explanation of the incident one must avoid the temptation to reductively say that “the goblins were really just owls.” The more serious (and, plausible) explanation of the events of that night involves the psychological priming that comes from a media environment where UFOs and aliens were being reported in the media from witnesses and fiction alike. Davis & Bloecher’s work was notably titled Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955. The “and others” included many other examples of people reporting small humanoid creatures at the time, creating an atmosphere of narrative plausibility for stories and experiences that included this feature.
Recall that the incident begins with Billy-Ray saying he saw a flying saucer. He had gone out to the well to get water and came back with the water and that story. But nobody went to look because he was known to tell wild tales and exaggerate. Joe Nickell, in his 2006 comprehensive write-up of that night’s events, adds this:
As to the “flying saucer” sighting that preceded the encounter, there were area sightings of “meteors” at the time (Davis and Bloecher 1978, 33–34, 61–62). Most likely what was witnessed was a very bright meteor (or “fireball”).
You’ve got a small house full of people, a man telling a story of having seen a saucer crash, a narrative environment where stories of flying saucers and little people are in the news and you end up with a situation where aliens and flying ships are readily available framing devices for everything that was to come.
But skeptics of the close-minded variety have made some regretful conclusions about that night that do neither the truth, nor serious inquiry into these matters any service. Since I’m doing my own research into this case, and have made some conclusions, I believe I’m disallowed by the rules of Wikipedia to fix the entry on this case but I hope this discussion will inspire some clarification and improvement in the article. Let’s take a look at some of the claims that – at the time of this writing – still muddy the waters of understanding about what really happened that night.
The goblins did not come from a bottle
A major point of contention amongst skeptics around the events or some explanations of them, is whether or not the primary witnesses were drunk or influenced by alcohol. The popular online free encyclopedia Wikipedia – at the time of this writing – holds an erroneous bit of “evidence” as the basis for concluding that alcohol was the root cause of the sightings.
Psychologists Rodney Schmaltz and Scott Lilienfeld cite the alleged incident as an example of pseudoscience and an “extraordinary claim” to help students develop critical thinking skills. Although contemporary newspaper stories alleged that “all officials appeared to agree that there was no drinking involved”, Schmaltz and Lilienfeld suggest that intoxication may have played a part in the sighting.
I have many objections to that claim.
Nobody reported drunkenness in the primary documentation
There were 11 people at the farm, including children and alcohol is not a good explanation for the confounding and unusual sightings when only a portion of the witnesses might reasonably have been intoxicated.
There is not a rich psychological history of alcohol causing mass delusions (the hidden premise of blaming the bottle).
The wiki cites a paper by psychologists Rodney Schmaltz and Scott Lilienfeld but the paper was not a primary investigation of this case. The mention in the paper is a casual off-hand example and it should never have been used as a citation when the assertion is neither accurately attributed, nor representative of the evidence that was collected contemporaneously to the events.
The scholarly paper mentions both the Davis and Bloecher research and Joe Nickell, but neither source attributes alcohol as a contributing factor. This is deeply troubling if the goal of the skeptical editors is to promote accuracy within Wikipedia.
In other words, Wikipedia – which for many people is a primary source of learning about almost any topic – is written in such a way that it attempts to dismiss the events of this night as being sourced in a bottle. But it would be just as accurate for one to claim that the skeptic’s doubts come from a bottle as well.
I tried to clear this up previously, even corresponding with Schmaltz and Lilienfeld, but they’re not responsible for this being in the Wikipedia page. And I’m saddened that Lilienfeld passed away with my correspondence regarding this matter being among the very few interactions I had with a man I respected very much.
I’ve been complaining about this since 2017 and still haven’t managed to get this scrubbed from the Wikipedia article. It’s an embarrassment to the skeptic community that given the amount of reliable information we have about that night, people still insist on promoting an explanation that is neither supported by evidence nor by the psychology of mass psychogenic experiences.
Do we have any cases out there where one person drinks and ten see pink elephants? This whole alcohol induced mass hallucination thing is an embarrassment and needs to be struck from the deck of cards that skeptics use to explain the unusual.
Little Green Men?
Somehow the Kentucky Goblins case has become associated with the phrase “little green men.” Once again, this erroneous bit of information is enshrined in the Wikipedia article about the case.
The event is at the origin of the popularization of the words “little green men”. Prior to this sighting, flying saucer occupants were called “little men”; “little green men” were limited to the science-fiction culture, in particular the Mack Reynolds story The Case of the Little Green Men (1951) and in Fredric Brown’s Martians Go Home (1955). The day following the alleged sighting, however, local reporters started to call the creatures “little green men”, and the words were soon reproduced in many newspapers, quoted on the radio, and translated into other languages.
This is just wrong. If we go back to Davis & Bloecher’s work we can find the following entry:
The whole creature was seemingly made of silver metal that gave off eerie light in the darkness, like the light from the radium dial of a watch.
If that description was given to reporters, it may have been the source of the ‘little green men’ take on the creature – but it is important to note that the phrase LITTLE GREEN MEN was already in general use in the public and had been for a long time. Around the turn of the century the phrase appears in children’s stories to refer to sprites or other mysterious humanoids of the fairy lands – and it is also associated with Saucers before the Kelly case. Regardless, none of the original witnesses called the creatures green.
So Davis & Bloecher mention a “take on the creature” but don’t report it as being green. Even the original description is silver and metal that glows – but perhaps the inclusion of the “like the light from a radium dial” is what got people hooked on the idea? It is perfectly clear to the authors that this is an idea that has been glommed onto the case, not one that originated with the case.
Further, a rudimentary search into the history of “little green men” as an idiom will show you that the phrase has been around long before the 1955 incident in Kentucky. In fact, prior to some of the science-fiction related uses that started emerging in the 1930s, Little Green Men were already a well known trope but tended to be used to describe fairies and other wee folk. They were also notably the sorts of hallucinations that would come out of a bottle.
There is a deeply entwined mixture of pre-existing symbolism at play in this story. The dire economics of rural farming suggest that class discrimination may have been at work in the public’s ready dismissal of the peculiar night’s experiences. Add to that the metaphor of little green men and the already well known ties to drinking and fairy lore, and it is easy to see how stereotypes might have led to a prejudiced take on everything reported that night.
One possibility is that if we accept Nickell’s idea of owls as the real-world core of the sighting, it has been reported that sometimes owls nest in the presence of foxfire, a bioluminescent fungus that can cause rotting wood to glow. I am not saying that this is precisely what caused the glowing silvery appearance. Great horned owls already have a mixed feather colouration that can look silvery under some lighting conditions. Occam’s razor suggests we might conclude that the lighting conditions of the night were sufficient to give the lighter parts of the owl’s feathers a silvery appearance than to add in a story about the owls nesting in a tree where foxfire was present. While foxfire does glow, there’s insufficient evidence to suggest its narrative inclusion is needed to fully explain this aspect of the sighting.
Putting the Arms in Armchair Skepticism
One part of the story which got a lot of skepticism in the days after the event was the question of whether or not the farmers had actually shot out through their screened windows. The witnesses reported firing .22 and shotgun rounds, some through a screened window. In the aftermath, some people questioned whether or not the holes in the screen were actually consistent with the weapons alleged to have been used.
As I was reviewing the details of this case, I realised that I possessed all the tools to re-create this part of the story and just see if the holes created by those caliber weapons fired through a metal window screen would look similar to the photos and drawings of the window in the actual incident.
Here is a drawing of the original window. There is a photo in the book as well, but it did not reproduce very well.
Here is a close-up of my own results from firing the shotgun through the screen at a comparable distance.
I wasn’t sure what the results of this experiment would be, but I did take the time to video it. Here is that video:
As you can see, the results are quite close to those reported by the families in Kentucky. I feel we can put this particular mystery to bed and conclude that while we may not know how many rounds were fired that night, some did indeed go through the screen as described in the testimony.
There may be some innate urge amongst the people of a community to reject stories that are so strange that they are rendered unbelievable. This is not the kind of skepticism that is becoming of the rational community at large. Skepticism should be a methodology for discerning the likely truth, not for compartmentalising things we’re uncomfortable with into the realm of “lies.”
The locals – and some in the larger sphere of UFO culture critics – held conflicting beliefs about the events. While some – perhaps many – want the story to be a real and exciting 1950s style tale of alien invasion, others were simultaneously saying the whole incident came out of a bottle (it didn’t) and that the family was lying about even the mundane elements of the tale like shooting out of a window (they weren’t).
Flipping the Bird
One peculiar aspect of the witness testimony struck me differently than many investigators and I may have an explanation for it. Three times during the incident the creatures were shot at and their movement was described as them having “flipped.” (Davis & Blocher, pg 2, pp 57-58)
They were also described as gliding or floating, and having spindly legs. When they’re described as goblins – especially given the highly suggestive witness drawings from the night – it’s easy to assume we’re talking about little humanoids. But if Nickell’s owl identification is correct, then some of this behaviour becomes more recognisable as that of birds. The long arms and spindly legs are analogous to wings and bird legs. Owls are sometimes presumed to have short stubby legs, but an owl’s feathers hide a secret.
Owl Legs are considerably longer than people often assume. Photo via Bored Panda (c) 2017
I suspect that birds aren’t generally thought of as animals that will “flip.” However, some birds do have a propensity for this tactic. This is anecdotal, but when I was younger I frequently took part in bird hunts and it was not uncommon to hit a bird with one or two pellets but not take it down. The wounded birds would sometimes flip in the air and then recover and continue their flight. This struck me as unusual at the time, but then I discovered that a similar behaviour is common in a breed of pigeon. Roller and Tumbler pigeons are bred to encourage this trait.
While this may not be what happened that night, if we accept the owl hypothesis we need to also consider that the behaviour of these birds that night was not going to be typical. They were in a heightened and agitated state. They were not doing the sorts of things one typically sees in nature videos, silently hunting prey or looking sagacious on a tree-limb and asking their timeless question to the night. Given my experience seeing other breeds of birds flip and recover, I don’t think it impossible for owls to do the same but I have been unable to find an owl ethologist who might confirm this unusual (but perhaps not biologically impossible) behaviour.
Who Investigated That Night?
Another question that has become muddled through retelling is the question of what official entities were involved with the investigation that night. Stories recounting the events now include the local police, state police, the air force, Project Blue Book, Men In Black, newspaper reporters, local citizens, UFO hounds, and I’m sure others.
According to the Davis & Bloecher research, the entities investigating that night were primarily local law enforcement. Sheriff officials from Christian County and Terrell County Sheriff, the Hopkinsville Police Department and the Kentucky State Police were involved in the investigation. There were air force personnel there but it appears they were investigating on their own, not at the behest of the air force or (more particularly) Project Blue Book (Project Blue Book files on the Kelly encounter state that the incident was “never officially reported to the Air Force,” and “no official investigation was ever made.”).
There is a tremendous amount of confusion about some of this stuff, especially given that writers subsequently have seen the military, government and law enforcement presence and inferred much more official involvement than there is evidence for.
If only a couple of police had shown up, once again it would be unlikely that this story would still be around today. But we can infer a few things from the large number of people that did go out there. First, it would seem that whatever was going on, the report was being taken seriously. Second, the variety of responses from different agencies suggests that a network of friends and acquaintances may have called or informed each other that “something interesting” was afoot.
Was it the novelty of the claims? The fact that guns had been involved? It’s hard to know for sure, but I’m inclined to think that there was something in the air figuratively that all of these people would have been aware of and this incident seemed – on the face of it – to be the alien invasion the media had everyone primed to experience.
Only when they investigated, it quickly became clear that whatever was going on, it was not anything like War of the Worlds or Invaders from Mars.
Context Matters
The most thorough write-up on the case comes from Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher from the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). It is one of the most thorough amateur case investigations I’ve read and it is clear that both authors were serious and diligent as they tried to document the events of that strange night.
Their work was published in 1978 but Isabel Davis’ investigation took place in 1956, just a year after the event. The combined work contains a very thorough look at the eyewitness testimony, the contributions of the police and military investigations, feedback from locals, and photographs and drawings to illustrate the narrative details. The book also contains additional cases from the time that suggest that even if the skies of 1955 weren’t really littered with little humanoids, the minds of the people were. Cases from 1947 to 1955 are enumerated to give some context, although the information is presented in a journalistic fashion for the reader to draw their own conclusions.
There were many cultural things going on. There were many social-class things going on. There were likely many complicated psychological things going on. Monsters were a hot topic and it turns out that our goblin witnesses had been near another monster sighting just a week before.
The weekend of August 20th 1955 was just like any other that time of year…
They [Elmer, Billy Ray, Vera and June] were making their way down old U.S.41 from Evansville, Indiana where they were staying with the carnival they were working for at the time.
They were leaving Evansville the weekend of August 20th, but could that really be said to be “just like any other that time of year?” because something happened just a few days prior to their road trip that might be quite relevant.
On August 15, 1955 the front page of the Evansville Press read “Fights Off Claws. Woman Battles ‘It’ in Ohio River.”. The story details how a Mrs. Darwin Johnson (her name was Naomi) and a friend encountered something unseen in the river. As they relaxed in the water, Naomi felt something clawed and furry grab her leg and pull her down. There was a tense few moments before she and her friend managed to get free and out of the water. She received scratches but vowed to never swim in the river again.
This story is one of the many “one off” peculiar incidents that lie scattered amongst the larger and more well known monster stories of the time. But it was front page news in Evansville, and we know that Elmer and Billy Ray were in town when the event took place. They had nothing to do with the river incident, but there’s little chance they wouldn’t have been aware of it. Evansville was a good sized city in 1955 with a population of 120-140,000 people but it’s difficult to overstate how much more important newspapers were in communities in the 1950s compared to now.
This event wasn’t merely chronologically close to Kelly-Hopkinsville, separated by just a few days, it was also geographically close. And writers have tried to tie the two events together despite the lack of connective narrative tissue. There’s nothing to suggest that what happened under water in Evansville had anything to do with what happened in Kelly in a material sense. But people are absolutely influenced by ideas, as decades of social psychology demonstrate, and the idea that there are monsters lurking around us. For these hardscrabble farmers, monsters had left the realm of the speculative and become a plausible threat.
In other words, the events of that hot and terrifying Kentucky night are best understood as being a complicated interplay of strange and unusual incidents combining with readily available templates of alien invasion narrative to give quick (but probably erroneous) explanation to what was taking place. If there had been no meteor, or if they had successfully killed one of the “invaders” and it had been an owl, it’s possible that the entire incident would be a briefly unusual but now long forgotten hot summer night, lost in the diluting sea of the past.
Nothing about this story is made clearer by trying to reduce it to the drunken rambling of a family of struggling farmers, or to say “it was just owls.” The real explanation isn’t any one thing, it’s the complicated web of culture, perception, society, narrative, and psychology.
If we really want to understand the world’s mysteries through the lens of science and rationalism, we need to work on actually trying to explain these mysteries and not just explain them away.
The day was hot and humid. I was 15 years old, covered in mud, sweat and grime. And I was exhausted from exertion.
“Stop being a fucking pussy.”
Those were the words my rugby coach spoke to me at the time. Probably in response to some whinging remark I had made but, nonetheless, it has stuck with me to this day. My coach was telling me to suck it up and persevere. When I was growing up, the phrase “be a man” held similar connotations. But, as the world around us grows more complex and nuanced, so does the answer to the question: what does it mean to be a man?
The conventional concept of a man, brought upon us by previous generations, tells us we should be stoic, self-reliant and strong. Built upon a world where conflict was more likely, our elders’ take is one influenced by their times, just as we are by ours. With a cultural divide between generations, people harkening back to the “good ol’ days” are bound to find reason to complain. One example of such is a quote from the novel “Those Who Remain”, by author G. Michael Hopf, which you may have seen in online posts and comment threads.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
In the context of Singapore, the current generations of so-called “strong men” span from before the Second World War up to the 1980s – encompassing periods of strife and suffering like the Japanese Occupation, the Konfrantasi Period and the Racial Riots, to name a few. In contrast to the situations our parents and grandparents grew up in, we (referring to millennials and beyond) are growing up in relatively “good times”. Does that then mean we are the proverbial “weak men”?
The Manosphere seems to suggest so. It is a blanket term for several online groups such as Involuntary Celibates (Incels), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and Pickup Artists (PUAs). While their goals may vary, such groups and movements are united in the belief that society has thrown them away. Such movements’ formations can be seen as retaliations against feminism and the overall increase in awareness to the “female situation” (their phrasing). The movement is spearheaded by figures such as Jordan Peterson, Adin Ross, and Andrew Tate. They pass around talking points about false rape accusations and society’s degradation of Men and, with the echo-chamber effect of online interaction, a single incident can ignite a frenzy of confirmation (see: False Rape Accusation in Singapore).
What Is The Manosphere About?
Generally speaking, the collective movements and groups that form the Manosphere each have their own beliefs. However, there is a common ground in their talking points which can be summed up as so: men have lost their way in society. We are downtrodden and treated unfairly. We must reclaim our rightful place in it, despite what others or society itself may say. We deserve more. We deserve better.
But how does the Manosphere draw in “believers”? What pushes a reasonably well-adjusted man to go down this proverbial rabbit hole? According to Dr Debbie Ging, a Professor of Digital Media and Gender in the School of Communications of Dublin City University,
“Influencers such as Rollo Tomassi and Jordan Peterson, as well as a plethora of neo-masculinist life coaches, have become adept at weaponizing and monetising male anxiety, anger and vulnerability for their own political and economic agendas”.
Figures like Andrew Tate and Aaron Marino are looked up to as sages or gurus, outspoken wise men who drop nuggets of wisdom like Plato or Aristotle of antiquity. In an age where the modern man is lamented as soft, weak and submissive, such personalities display themselves as guides to becoming a “real” man. Often this comes with catchy, marketable taglines and terms like “Alpha”, a reference to a now debunked social hierarchy observed in wolf packs, “Sigma”, an extrapolation from the “Alpha” tag to denote those who see themselves as above it all, or “Top G”. The latter is most often associated with Andrew Tate and, like the previous examples, serve as a badge of honour or a sign of being “in the know”. Or in the context of the Manosphere, “red-pilled”.
Two wolves displaying dominant and submissive behaviour. Image by 258817 on Pixabay.
The huge amount of energy and money that goes into marketing these figures as solutions and men worth emulation should be noted, however. For example, Tate’s “Hustler’s University”, a series of chat rooms much like a Discord chat or Telegram channel with the influencer’s persona and doctrines as the focus. With a blown-up crisis and an “easy” solution at hand, a desperate young man may find himself attracted to the chance of becoming like Tate. Once he gets entrenched in the community, he becomes part of a self-sustaining system of confirmation bias and feedback loops. A strong and hostile “Us Vs Them” mentality becomes ingrained in his mind, along with the “desire” to spread the message and “awaken” more men. In the end, not only does he serve as a secured stream of revenue for Tate, he also recruits more people, expanding the community and the source of revenue.
Through the use of charisma, confidence and superficial signs of perceived “success” (supercars, being attractive to women, and having others look up to you), Manosphere influencers serve as aspirational figures to troubled men who were raised on “rigid gender norms” and are now experiencing a “desolate economic outlook”.
By preying on what was a small fear or doubt at the back of a young man’s mind, feeding him what he wants to hear and propping up a monolithic, generalised form of an “other” – be it feminism, society or “The Matrix” – figures in the Manosphere cultivate a web of manipulated and misleading information, as well as a network of sycophants that would support these claims, creating an illusion of consensus.
A Singaporean Perspective
Do Singaporean men buy into this way of thinking? We are a midway point between East and West, and recent incidents such as the “Wife-sharing” case found root in male-dominated forums such as SammyBoy and Hardwarezone. To get a sense of the common sentiment, I asked a Singapore-focused subreddit “What Does It Mean To Be A Man?”, with a link to a Channel News Asia (CNA) article that asked a similar question.
The answers I received varied but could be sorted into a few categories. Some were cynical, pointing out how life as a male in Singapore amounted to being a corporate slave. Some were humorous, quoting a song from Disney’s Mulan or the need to carry out National Service. Some were thoughtful, putting in time and effort into their responses. And some were pessimistic, their responses bemoaning men’s role in Singaporean society.
I’m not the first to ask the question, as other posts of similar nature demonstrate. However, an online forum with a largely anonymous user base is hardly the most trustworthy source for canvassing information. Especially so for the subreddit I used, which is much smaller than the “flagship” subreddit, r/singapore.
I decided to ask some of the men in my life what they thought, including S, a family friend and senior litigator at a law firm, and E, a student and someone who I felt might be familiar with the Manosphere. Indeed, E correctly identified that the its main talking points were “masculinity, misogyny and anti-feminism”, while S was not familiar with the term at all, perhaps due to his low use of social media. S explained that if the Manosphere typically attracted “complainers”, he doesn’t encounter them, as people working at his level are generally successful with less reason to complain.
A young man uses a computer desk. Image by F. Muhammad from Pixabay
When it comes to why men get drawn to these talking points, E told me, “A lot of young men do it out of insecurity due to issues in their own personal lives which can mentally affect them, leading to them becoming impressionable by these talking points especially if it appeals to them by allowing space for self-belief”.
Neither of my contacts felt Singapore was at major risk of succumbing to this way of thinking. E told me that, unlike in Western countries like the US, UK or Australia, “there is little talk about the subject probably due to the fact that there isn’t much need to promote men’s rights in Singapore in the first place.”
S agreed, noting that the loudest presence of the Manosphere was found in the West, where there is a wave of disillusionment in society and a growing lack of trust between the government and the people. He also noted that the circumstances of Singaporean society and that of the West are very different.
In the West, the “good ol’ days” are still in living memory and those that cling to them were often those who were on top of society back then. “You’ve got a lot of young, white men who look back to the glory days of the 1950s and 1960s where, without much education, [they could] secure a good job and provide for their families easily,” he said. Young (white) men in the West today want the ease their forefathers had, he told me, but ignore the multiple advantages they had back then because of “[the] racism and gender bias [that] was so entrenched in their societies”, adding “you wouldn’t have the opportunity to do anything unless you were a WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant).”
Singaporean streets at night, including the Civilian War Memorial that commemorates victims of the Japanese occupation from 1942-45. Image by pigbirdegg from Pixabay
Conversely, Singapore’s recent past is one of strife, subservience and suffering. Like many countries in Asia in the latter half of the 20th century, Singapore was a developing country. As such, there are no recent “good ol’ days” of economic prosperity for older generations to reminisce about and pine for, where one race or group of denizens stood superior to others. “Every generation does better than the previous generation in our developing economy,” S explained. “There’s a lot more to look forward to. There’s a lot more opportunity and a lot more prosperity with each new generation.”
There may be another factor helping to protect Singaporean men from the gravitational pull of the Manosphere: National Service. The increasing number of women serving in the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) means that more command positions are now filled with women, and young men who enter to serve their two-year conscription have more opportunities to see women perform their jobs competently, serving as positive role models and examples for the servicemen.
Finally, I asked whether a significant segment of the Manosphere demographic (males aged 13-18 years old) truly believed the teachings or if they were merely acting out, and both of my interviewees felt the latter more likely. “I think most just look up to the influencers at their current age”, E explained “However, as they get older and they consistently listen to the views of these influencers they might actually start to believe in what these influencers are saying and adopt this mindset in their daily lives.” S told me that in the past, those teenage boys might have found themselves joining groups like gangs in Singapore or becoming fans of a football club in England. “It’s all part of the growing up process”, he said.
So is Singapore at risk?
In short, I think the answer is no – thankfully. I was worried about the increasing number of voices in Singaporean online spaces that suggested otherwise, but they seem to be a vocal minority right now. That said, we cannot grow complacent. Like a daisy in concrete, just because the conditions aren’t optimal does not mean growth cannot happen. Singapore already faces threats of self-radicalisation and it is up to us, the everyday citizen, to know better and ignore the divisive and hostile rhetoric the Manosphere often employs.
Admittedly, I am biased in this case. I want to have children someday and want them to grow up in a society where they feel safe, treasured and are not hated for factors outside of their control. If my hypothetical future daughters have to face a world where such hostile sexism is the norm, I fear for them.
Despite its vulnerable position, Singapore is well defended against the Manosphere and the misinformation it peddles. We must continue to keep our guard up against such rhetoric, lest we slip and be hypnotised by it. And in the process, hopefully we can find our own answer to the question, what does it mean to be a man?
It’s not easy feeling impotent. The more desperate the situation the more it feels like you have to DO something. This may be a contributing factor to the idea that people are more likely to turn to prayer and other superstitions when met with the worst scenarios.
“I’m going to try all of those alternative remedies that you think are b*llocks!”
That was the first thing my brother Ali said to me when I saw him in the hospital. Such is the curse of being a (vocal) skeptic: there’s little or no doubt about your stance on medical interventions that deviate from the conventional. We disagreed on many things over the years (picture my face when he said “David Icke has a lot of good stuff to say if you ignore the lizard stuff”).
On this occasion I couldn’t argue though, or at least I chose not to. He had just been given a terminal cancer diagnosis. It had started in his lungs, spread to his liver, and was enjoying its travels so much that it had pretty much riddled the rest of his body. There was cancer on top of the cancer. Fractal cancer. Exponential cancer. Pick your superlatives. The outlook was as bleak as you could possibly imagine. It really wasn’t the time for getting into debates about claims of efficacy.
The previous time I’d been cancer-adjacent was with my wife Laura back in 2021, but her prognosis was considerably better. The (conventional) treatment was extensive and punishing, but she’s a survivor and a thriver. I did however take the opportunity at the time to delve into the murky world of cancer quackery on the internet. For more on that, check out our appearance on Dr Xand’s Con or Cure, or this article in the Glasgow Herald. Spoiler alert: social media is awash with bad ideas, and the level of engagement is such that the companies appear reluctant to clamp down on them – surprise!
My brother was well aware of the above, but there’s a big difference in attitude and approach when the chances of survival are much slimmer, so when he tried to form a desperate action plan, I kept diplomatically quiet. Also kept quiet at the time was my resolve to push back against any attempts to try anything that would hurt him physically, or carry any severe financial ramifications. For the more benign options though, if he wanted to try and regain some agency rather than lie back and accept his fate, then that was his call to make.
The National Health Service wasn’t passive either of course: some radiotherapy helped alleviate some of the pain around his spine temporarily, and chemotherapy was planned too. Unfortunately, Ali’s weight dropped so quickly that he was simply too weak to undergo such a tough intervention. The care he received was first class though, both in the hospital and at home, with carers coming in multiple times a day to complement the amazing round the clock vigilance from his partner. He got ALL the best (legal) drugs too. Free of charge.
A Reiki practitioner holds their hands either side of a woman’s head. Image from Pixabay, provided by rhythmuswege.
Such was the speed of his decline that he only got one opportunity to properly dabble with alternative medicine. Well, no medicine was involved, because the treatment in question was Reiki. For those who are blissfully unaware, Reiki is an ‘ancient’ Japanese technique that posits some kind of ‘life force energy’, and proponents believe that the practitioner helps to channel and supplement that energy with their hands. Sometimes there is actual contact between the practitioner and the patient, frequently there is not. It is of course nonsense of the highest order – a similar/identical treatment known as Therapeutic Touch was famously debunked by a nine year old girl. The chances of it doing anything useful were slimmer than my already emaciated brother
A well-meaning friend arranged for a ‘Reiki Master’ to come to the hospital and have a session with my brother. Unsurprisingly, he enjoyed it: considering the perpetual misery of being stuck in a bed in constant pain, the novelty of having an enthusiastic practitioner waxing off (and on, presumably) in his proximity must have carried some kind of novelty value at least. A family member later remarked that he had “perked up a little” after it. This was at a time when he was still unable to sit up, struggling to eat, and drinking sips of water through a straw, so my assessment of his perkiness was quite the opposite. Another spoiler alert: there was no miraculous healing from the Reiki.
As always though, we should be asking the question “what’s the harm?”. In this case, relatively little, but a simple thought experiment gives a very different answer: let’s consider a different scenario where my brother had been well enough for chemotherapy, and had responded well, or perhaps a rare and unexplainable case of spontaneous remission had occurred. Just imagine the aforementioned Reiki Master suddenly being convinced that they’ve got superpowers that pulled someone back from the brink, waving around their magic hands theatrically, but now scared to do finger guns in case they accidentally commit a felony.
There are of course already people out there who think such powers are real, including this practitioner, who recounts a second-hand story of Reiki helping to turn the tide of cancer at a crucial moment, or this (alleged) first-hand healing story. Fortunately such claims are rare and tend to sit a little lower in (my) Google searches, whereas further up in the SEO rankings, Cancer Research UK’s page makes it clear that “There is no scientific evidence that reiki can help prevent, treat or cure cancer.”
For Ali there was no miracle cure, nor a regular one. He was diagnosed on the 17th of October and he died on the 7th of December. The deterioration was as horrific as you’d imagine. The oncologists knew early on that he was past the point of no return, and they made it clear to us. If there’s one thing you can trust conventional doctors with, it’s the honesty to give you the worst of news and not fill you with false hope while they empty your wallet.
So, we did nothing.
Except, we didn’t: we visited, we comforted, we fed, we cleaned, we reminisced, we laughed, we cared, and we presented a united front of love and support. Old friends travelled far to visit, or sent heart-warming messages; neighbours offered to help. My four-year-old daughter even did some drawings to cheer him up. We stayed close by right until the very end, then we gave him a fitting send off. We even collected donations for Cancer Research UK. Now we mourn, we remember, we urge people to look after their health, and get to a doctor as quick as you can if you feel that there’s something wrong.
It still feels like it’s not enough. It probably never will, but it’s better than wasting time, hope, and money on the false promises of charlatans.
The story of the “Kentucky Goblins” has grown from a curious newspaper report into something much larger. In 2019 the independently produced paranormal investigation series Hellier begins with the idea that the creatures allegedly seen in Kelly, Kentucky in 1955 might still be here, using caves as a concealed network to travel throughout the state. In 2020 the TV series Project Blue Book used the case as the basis for episode four of their second season. The story has inspired creators of video games, movies, art, and of course hours and hours of podcasts. In the more than half-century since the events of 1955, there have developed numerous myths about the root cause of that night’s strangeness.
I’ve been researching the case for more than seven years and would like to share some of my findings, but for those who have never heard of this story I need to give you a summary of the events of that night. I will make this as brief as I can, but it is entirely because of the “drive-by judgements” that don’t look into the details of such cases that this story has continued to entertain my curiosity. You would need many paragraphs to recount all the details we do have about this case, and while there were newspaper reports at the time it’s largely the work of two UFO investigators that provide us with the best record of what went on that night. We’ll get to that.
The most detailed reporting we have of this event was the write-up from Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher. Davis went to Hopkinsville in 1956 to meet with as many of the witnesses as would agree to talk with her. Ted Bloecher was an avid UFO researcher as well, and he gives a tremendous amount of context to the case in the introduction to the field work that Davis performed. The combined work was published as a single volume in 1978 under the title Close Encounters at Kelly and Others of 1955. This was produced by the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), and while many skeptics will be dismissive of work produced by a UFO research group, the work is extraordinary citizen journalism. Any serious researcher into this case must read this book. It is available as a free PDF and a new edition is available online in softcover. This volume has some of the most detailed recollections of the witnesses and goes into much more detail than the original newspaper reports, which – unsurprisingly – largely considered the story as a novelty of nonsense and not a serious story (little has changed in how major media outlets cover this kind of stuff.) I will be quoting from this book quite a bit so I wanted to give context for the source.
The Story of the Encounter
A fireball shot through the sky on the night of August 21, 1955 above the rural community of Kelly, Kentucky. Kelly wasn’t a town, just a collection of farms about 8 miles north of the larger city of Hopkinsville. For this reason, the case is often called the “Kelly-Hopkinsville Encounter.” One of the farms was housing quite a few people that eventful night.
The matriarch of the farm was Mrs. Glennie Lankford (age 50) and her sons Elmer “Lucky” Sutton, John “J.C.” Sutton, and their friend Billy Ray Taylor. Glennie had three children by her second husband who were staying at the farm that night, aged 12, 10 and 7. J.C. Sutton’s wife and brother-in-law were present. Lucky’s wife was there, and Lucky’s friend, Billy Ray Taylor and his wife June were present. The farm was not usually quite this crowded.
This was not a wealthy farm. It was a rental, and success depended on growing enough crops to sell at profit to cover the rent. Glennie’s adult sons and their friend Billy Ray were working on a carnival in nearby Evansville, Indiana – about 70 miles north of Kelly. This is important, as we’ll discuss, because something had happened there just prior to these events that may have strongly influenced the witnesses in the little farmhouse.
Of all the people in the house that night, Billy Ray Taylor was noted for being an unreliable raconteur and teller of tall tales, so when he came back into the house just after dark and said he’d seen a spaceship land in a gully nearby, nobody took him seriously. They didn’t even bother to go look. (see part two of this article for more about this)
The sun set around 7:30 pm. The moon was waxing crescent, with about 15% – 20% visibility. The sources of light that we know about were a hanging incandescent bulb on a small porch, and some flashlights. I mention the lighting because when you consider what happened next, please don’t imagine a big fancy farm with exterior lighting like you’d get in a Spielberg movie. Instead, picture a lonely little grey farmhouse with no TV, one exterior bulb, and surrounded by dark fields and a few shadowy trees. The windows were open and covered with metal screens to keep out insects.
The dog began to bark and eventually crawled under the house with its tail tucked. It would not come out until the next day. What happens next is worth quoting Davis in full.
Approaching from the fields was a strange glow. As it came nearer, they could make out what seemed to be a small “man” — though a man not much like any they had ever seen before. He was about three and a half feet tall, with an oversized head that was almost perfectly round, and arms that extended almost to the ground; the huge hands had talons at the end of the fingers. The eyes were much bigger than human eyes, and glowed with a yellowish light; they were directed neither to the front nor to the side, but about midway between. The whole creature was seemingly made of silver metal that gave off an eerie light in the darkness, like the light from the radium dial on a watch.
The creature’s hands were raised now, ‘as if someone had told him he was about to be robbed.’ He was approaching the house slowly, moving toward the back door.
Davis, 1978
This was the beginning of a three hour encounter with what has been described as an “army of little men”, but stories can be deceiving and there were never more than two of the creatures seen together at any point. What happened next is what you might expect to happen in rural America when weird creatures show up after someone’s claimed a spaceship landed nearby: the men went for their guns.
When the creature was about 20 feet from the house, Lucky and Billy Ray shot at the thing and they said it went backwards – “did a flip” and then scurried off into the night. They moved to the living room where the ladies were, and they saw one of the creatures through the window and fired through the screen. They said they hit it again, and again it “flipped and disappeared”. (Davis, 1978)
What was it like that night? When the gunfire began – even though country people would be used to occasional use of guns against varmins and for hunting, this was perceived as self-defense of the farm and the kids were sent to hide as the men fired into the darkness at the creatures. This is a part of the story with disagreeing accounts – raising the question of exactly how extensive was the gun-play? Some neighbors reported hearing a few gunshots. Some heard nothing. Some people in the house talked about a lot of shooting, but there was little physical evidence of a massive gunfight. But there was certainly gunfire, from a 20 gauge shotgun and a .22 rifle and a 12 gauge shotgun. The 12 gauge shotgun was not fired through the screen, which is why I omit it in my experiments below.
The apparent immunity of the creatures to gunfire, their eerie glow, and their weird eyes was bad enough, but then the creatures proceeded to float and glide from tree to roof and other locations. They got on the roof and were said to have reached down towards Billy Ray’s head from the little overhang/porch. The things walked weirdly with legs that didn’t seem to bend right. There was an accumulation of weirder and weirder observations that thoroughly convinced everyone that they were being attacked by little spacemen. The “assaults” on the farm were sporadic and the men felt multiple times that their gunfire had scared the creatures away – only for them to show up again.
The fear in the household intensified, the gunfire continued sporadically, and by around 11 pm they couldn’t take the stress anymore and they quickly piled into two cars and raced the 8 miles south to Hopkinsville’s police station.
One of the confusing details in this story is who came to investigate and why. It’s often reported that the military had representatives there, which sounds ominous and akin to a conspiracy or X-files style mystery narrative. But let us resist the urge to turn this into a cinematic moment of the authorities rolling in to fend off invaders from space. Some military police did join the local city police in their investigation, but we’ll look into why they were there in a bit.
From 11 pm to 2 am the farm was hectic with investigators. These included local police, KY State police, and MPs from the nearby Fort Campbell base of the US Army. They scoured the area around the farmhouse, and searched the interior. The family waited outside until they were firmly assured no little creatures were lurking inside.
One notable moment that night involved a cat. In Davis’ account, this was called “an anonymous cat” but other reports mentioned the cat being chased (presumably to round it up and get it out of the way?) by a little girl. Based on the known children there that night, this would have probably been Mary Lankford (age 7 at the time). At one point during this busy and confusing search, one of the investigators stepped on the tail of this cat, which then yowled in pain. “You never saw so many pistols unholstered so fast in your life,” said Hopkinsville police chief Greenwell.
Notably, the police found a patch of luminous grass around the area where the men had been shooting at the little intruders. They also found shotgun shells and a squarish hole in the screened window. (Much more on that later, but even that night the investigators were joking about it – presumably because they assumed a shotgun would not make a small square hole when fired through a metal screen.)
The police left. Keep in mind that the farmers had no running water and few appliances. Billy Ray had been going to the well to get water when the original “space ship” sighting took place. So when the little creatures showed up again after the authorities left, the family just stood their ground and did not drive all the way back and try to get further help. I can’t help but wonder what might have happened if a single patrol car had stayed around until dawn. Without the lights and noise of many men searching the property, might the authorities also have managed to see what the source of this invasion truly was?
Just before dawn, the creatures stopped their assault and were never seen on the farm again by the family. By the time Isabel Davis made it to Hopkinsville in 1956 to do her investigation, the family had vacated the farm and were quite reticent to talk with anyone. In the absence of definitive proof that the night’s assault was real, the town heaped scorn on the family and it took a lot of coaxing to get the matriarch to open up about that night’s events.
In part two of this overview, we will look at what happened after the strange events at the Kentucky farm and how this humble incident has grown to loom large in UFO history.
Last year, a small majority in Japan supported restarting idled nuclear reactors for the first time since the Fukushima catastrophe, according to a poll in the country’s top business newspaper, the Nikkey. Some 53% of people said nuclear reactors should restart if safety can be ensured, while 38% said they should remain shut.
Even more surprising, studies showed that only one person died from the radiation caused by the Fukushima incident. This means that the biggest nuclear incident since Chernobyl has actually resulted in just one direct death, and the concerned population is already ready to move on from this trauma. Given this, how can a country like Germany, which is unaffected by seismic risk unlike Japan, stand by its choice of banning nuclear energy?
In broader terms, why are we so scared of nuclear energy? And are we right to be?
Let’s start from the beginning. Since Nagasaki and Hiroshima, our collective history associates nuclear energy with mass destruction. Christopher Nolan’s most recent movie is just another proof of the phenomenon. One quote from Oppenheimer most often used on social media is the following: “Now I am become death, the Destroyer of worlds”. The meaning of the quote seems pretty clear — Oppenheimer has personally unleashed a supreme power that can destroy the world (though this might not be a totally accurate reading of the original quote from the Bhagavad Gita). In a sense, the reputation is fair: nuclear weapons did change the geopolitics of the world, and the way we conducted war. But the problem is that we conflate nuclear energy and the atomic bomb.
So, if we now look strictly into nuclear energy, what is the public opinion? What does history remember? While nuclear disasters are catastrophic, it’s essential to acknowledge that we have made significant progress in managing nuclear energy. The Chernobyl disaster of 1986, for instance, resulted in approximately 4,000 immediate deaths and long-term health issues for those exposed to radiation. However, modern reactor designs, such as the Generation IV reactors, incorporate advanced safety features, and are therefore significantly safer.
Yet, assuring people that the new technology is safer is not always enough, and our emotions often cloud our judgment when a catastrophe has occurred. I interviewed Takeshi, a 24-year-old Japanese exchange student from NUS, who showed that opinions on nuclear energy in Japan are complex and evolving after Fukushima. Takeshi initially expressed strong opposition to nuclear energy, stating, “The first year after the Fukushima accident, when I became old enough to have an opinion on the subject, like many Japanese people, I was strongly against nuclear energy. The impact [of Fukushima] was terrible, and it had a deep emotional impact on the nation.”
However, Takeshi’s perspective has evolved over the years. He now recognises the need to address Japan’s reliance on costly and environmentally harmful fossil fuels, and he acknowledges the global concern of climate change. Takeshi reflects on this change: “My viewpoint has changed over the years. I studied a bit of geopolitics, so I began to consider Japan’s reliance on fossil fuels to fill the gap left by the closure of nuclear plants. I read articles, listened to politics… I know that it’s costly and has significant environmental consequences.”
Takeshi emphasises the importance of safety, stating, “I believe nuclear energy can have a role in Japan’s energy mix, but only if safety is the top priority.” He also suggests a balanced approach, indicating that new nuclear plant construction should be “evaluated on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the latest advances in nuclear safety measures.”
In summary, Takeshi is in favour of nuclear energy under certain conditions, specifically emphasising stringent safety measures and a simultaneous investment in renewable energy sources to diversify Japan’s energy supply. Speaking with him showed me the nuanced and evolving perspectives among young Japanese citizens regarding nuclear energy, considering both the traumatic history of Fukushima and the pressing need for sustainable energy solutions.
Regarding the Japan Government’s stance on nuclear energy, it seems that the general trend goes towards restarting the nuclear program. In an interview from December 2022, Tatsuya Terazawa, Chairman and Chief Executive Office, The Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ), shares that Japan’s Green Transformation (GX) plan aims to redeem nuclear as a key energy source. This decision is part of the country’s strategy to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, and Prime Minister Kishida himself instructed “the government to explore the possibility of restarting 17 nuclear plants”. More significantly, this comes after almost 11 years of inaction following the Fukushima incident.
Japan is not the only one to acknowledge the benefits of this type of energy. Many experts, including climate scientist Dr Ken Caldeira, advocate for the use of nuclear energy as a crucial element in sustainable development. He points out that nuclear power can provide a stable source of low-carbon electricity, which is essential for combating climate change. Furthermore, the International Energy Agency (IEA) emphasises that without nuclear power, the world’s efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C would be nearly impossible.
Nuclear energy does not exist in a vacuum; we must also consider the risks associated with alternative energy sources. The health hazards of coal, for example, are well-documented. Air pollution from coal combustion is responsible for millions of premature deaths worldwide annually. A study by the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that air pollution from burning fossil fuels causes 7 million deaths each year.
The dangers of fossil fuel extraction are also well-documented, as highlighted by incidents like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which led to 11 fatalities and extensive environmental damage. Oil spills are more frequent than we would like to admit, and they have disastrous consequences for our ecosystems and the livelihood of people relying on the resources of the sea. In 2022, the total volume of oil lost to the environment from tanker spills was approximately 15,000 tonnes. More than 14,000 tonnes of this can be attributed to three large incidents. These events emphasise the perils of relying solely on non-nuclear energy sources.
Then comes the increasing use of renewable energies. There is no doubt that they will shape our future, but they currently cannot fully meet the world’s energy demands. In 2021, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IREA) reported that renewable energy sources made up 29% of the global energy mix. Currently, other power sources are required to make up the shortfall, and for many countries, nuclear power remains an integral part of the energy mix. An illustration of that is the current energy mix of Germany: 44% renewable energy, 20% lignite, 11% coal, 14% gas and 6% nuclear.
Indeed, nuclear energy is a big point of divergence between the two leaders of the European Union. In 2011, following the Japanese catastrophe, former Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to fully abandon nuclear energy. This decision was criticised by its neighbouring countries, especially France whose energy strategy for the future strongly relies on nuclear energy.
The most frequent argument against Germany’s choice is that the nation is not subject to the same seismic risk as Japan. Japan is located on the famous “Ring of Fire,” an active seismic region where tectonic plates converge, making it one of the most exposed areas to earthquakes and tsunamis in the world. Consequently, the seismic risk in Japan is significantly higher than in many other regions of the globe, including Germany. However, we must acknowledge that Germany’s decision to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima accident was largely driven by domestic political considerations, public opinion pressure, and environmental concerns. Seismic risk was not the primary motivation behind this decision.
This struggle within the European Union seems to be one the pro-nuclear side is set to win. In July 2022, in a milestone vote for Europe’s climate and energy policies, the European Parliament endorsed labelling some gas and nuclear energy projects “green,” allowing them access to hundreds of billions of euros in cheap loans and even state subsidies.
To maintain its energy production, Germany decided to bet on liquified natural gas, through the Nord Stream 2 (NS2) project. But the contentious gas pipeline has come to represent Germany’s heavily scrutinised energy and security strategy. This strategy aimed to establish diplomatic connections through trade while providing domestic companies with affordable energy resources. Unfortunately, it resulted in Germany becoming overly reliant on Russian oil and gas. This overreliance granted Russia the leverage to manipulate energy provisions following its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, consequently plunging Europe into a severe energy crisis. Natural gas is not only more harmful in terms of CO2 emissions than nuclear power, but it also means less energy independence for the entire European Union.
Moreover, it is important to note that nuclear technologies are evolving, becoming safer and easier to implement across the world. Among these innovations are small modular reactors (SMRs), which are designed to be more compact, flexible, and inherently safer than traditional large-scale reactors. They can be mass-produced, reducing costs, and their modular nature allows for easier integration into existing energy infrastructure.
Additionally, thorium-based reactors have gained attention as a potential solution to address safety concerns and reduce nuclear waste. Thorium is more abundant and produces fewer long-lived radioactive waste products than traditional uranium reactors.
Longer term, ongoing research into nuclear fusion holds the promise of a nearly limitless, clean, and safe energy source, should the technology finally prove viable and scalable. Fusion research aims to replicate the conditions of the sun, where atomic nuclei merge, releasing vast amounts of energy with minimal radioactive waste. These innovative technologies collectively strive to enhance the safety and environmental impact of nuclear energy, providing alternatives to traditional nuclear power generation.
Nuclear waste management is a critical aspect of the nuclear energy industry. The long-term storage and disposal of nuclear waste is an ongoing challenge, but significant progress has been made in finding safer and more sustainable solutions. One notable development is the concept of deep geological repositories. These repositories involve the burial of nuclear waste in stable geological formations deep underground, providing multiple barriers to prevent the release of radioactive materials. Countries like Sweden and Finland have made substantial headway in implementing these repositories, with Sweden’s “Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory” and Finland’s “Onkalo” serving as leading examples.
However, according to a Greenpeace report on nuclear waste, numerous challenges still persist. Public perception and acceptance of deep geological repositories remain significant hurdles, often due to concerns over long-term safety. Additionally, regulatory and political obstacles can slow down the implementation of these solutions. The financial burden of developing and maintaining safe storage sites also poses a challenge. Moreover, the international community continues to grapple with finding consistent and standardised approaches to nuclear waste management. The quest for innovative and sustainable nuclear waste management solutions is ongoing, with a focus on enhancing safety, minimising environmental impact, and ensuring the long-term integrity of storage and disposal facilities. While progress has been made, addressing these challenges is crucial for establishing a secure and sustainable nuclear waste management framework.
In conclusion, nuclear energy carries undeniable risks, but it is vital to consider the implications of completely phasing it out. The transition to alternative energy sources is a complex issue, and experts like Dr James Hansen and Dr Ken Caldeira argue that a more nuanced approach is necessary to address our energy needs while minimising the impact on the environment and public health.
It is crucial to make informed decisions regarding our energy future, taking into account expert opinions and empirical data to ensure a sustainable and secure energy supply. Understanding the psychology of public perception and fear surrounding nuclear energy is essential to grasp why it often evokes strong emotions. Media coverage plays a crucial role, as sensationalised reporting of nuclear incidents can amplify public anxiety and create lasting impressions.
Cognitive biases, such as the availability heuristic, contribute to this phenomenon. People tend to overestimate the likelihood of events that readily come to mind, and nuclear accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima are etched into collective memory due to their notoriety. As a result, individuals tend to perceive nuclear energy as riskier than it statistically is.
Moreover, the psychological phenomenon of loss aversion makes negative outcomes, such as nuclear accidents, more salient and memorable, further influencing public opinion. These psychological factors can overshadow the broader discussions of the safety advancements and potential benefits associated with nuclear energy, leading to a skewed perception of its risks.
![Text reads:
"Atomsk's Sanakan
Some flaws in this study that render it's IFR estimate unreliable:
1) He uses many studies that over-estimate the number of people that were infected [and thus under-estimate IFR], since these studies were not meant to be representative of the general population loannidis applies them to. He doesn't even follow PRISMA guidelines for assessing studies for risk of bias in a study's research design. "Bias" here does not refer to the motivations of the study's authors, but instead that the design of their study would likely cause their results to not be representative of the general population.
2) He exploited collinearity by sampling the same region multiple times, in a way that skews his results towards a lower IFR. He conveniently tends to avoid sampling an area multiple times when that area has a higher IFR.
3) He adjusts IFR downwards for reasons not supported by the analysis he cites for that adjustment.
4) He takes at face-value areas that likely under-estimate COVID-19 deaths, such as Iran, causing him to under-estimate IFR further.
5) He uses inconsistent reasoning to evade government studies that show higher IFR, even though governments are doing much of the testing needed to determine IFR. That includes loannidis ignoring large studies from Italy and Portugal that are more representative of the general population they sampled.
6) His IFR from a study in Brazil contradicts the study's own IFR, and his explanation for that makes no sense. This conveniently allows him to cut the study's IFR by about a 1/3.
7) His use of blood donor studies does not make sense, even if one sets aside the fact that blood donor studies would over-estimate population-wide seroprevalence. For example, he uses a Danish blood donor study that leaves out deaths from people 70 and older, to claim an IFR of 0.27% for adults. When those researchers performed a subsequent study in which they included people 70 and older, they got an IFR for adults that's 3 times larger than loannidis claims [0.81% vs. 0.27%).
And so on."](https://www.skeptic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/atomsks-sanakan.png)
