Close Encounters of the Blurred Kind.

"Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying in the yellow haze of the sun. There were children crying and colours flying all around the chosen ones. All in a dream. All in a dream. The loading had begun" - After the Gold Rush, Neil Young.

I was at The Bell in Whitechapel (as were many others, standing room only for those who didn't arrive early) for my first London Fortean Society event of 2020:- A Skeptic's Guide to Aliens with Professor Chris French, head honcho at Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub and the provider, in the past, of an excellent LFS talk about memory and identity as well as plenty of others that happened before I became a regular LFS attendee.

Chris has, in fact, been the most booked speaker since the inception of the LFS. Having seen him speak a few times before I knew him to be engaging, knowledgeable, and, best of all, funny. On Wednesday he did not disappoint on any of those scores. There was, however, a small danger that there would be some crossover with Paula Dempsey's excellent talk, at SELFS last November, on the history of flying saucers.

Paula was sat in the front row (one of at least three other previous LFS speakers in attendance). But not, I think, to check the Prof wasn't ripping off any of her material. But because it's a subject she's clearly very interested in and because he's a great speaker. He was, also, coming at the topic from a different angle to her. While Paula, uncritically, laid out a history of sightings of alien craft, French explored the psychological aspect behind claims of alien visitation and alien abduction and made it very clear from the get go that he was talking from a skeptical viewpoint.

The clue's in the title really - A Skeptic's Guide. Clutching my regulation pint of Red Stripe (sneered at by a real ale enthusiast - why do they get so worked up about people's choice of drinks?) in one hand and my notepad in the other I began eagerly scribbling down what I felt to be the salient, or amusing, points. The Prof began by going through a potted history of alien visitation which did overlap a bit with Paula's talk.

But that was fine. For one, it was mostly a different crowd and, two, the overlap was minor. Some stuff about the first flying saucer sighting, a brief history of ufology, and nods to Kenneth Arnold, George Adamski, and Barney and Betty Hill (which you can read about elsewhere on EIAPOE) was skimmed over pretty quickly, like a flying saucer over water, before Chris French started to get a little more specific.

The American astronomer J. Allen Hynek (a man who began as an alien skeptic but became a believer) is the person who came up with the 'Close encounter' classification system which, initially, consisted of three categories. (1) Sightings. (2) Physical evidence (photographs, marks on the ground). (3) Contact with an alien. These 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' became so popular that Steven Spielberg nicked the term for his 1977 sci-fi film.

Hynek stopped at three different types of close encounter but others went further. Close encounters of the fourth kind involves alien abduction (and the 5th, 6th, and 7th kinds develop these ideas even further) and that's the type this evening was, primarily, devoted to. Two of the first claims of alien abduction come from George Adamski and Antonio Villas Boas.

Adamski claims to have been taken for a ride in a Venusian spaceship in 1952 and Antonio Villas Boas (not be mistaken with Andre Villas-Boas, the former Porto, Chelsea, and Tottenham manager), in 1957, in Brazil, claimed he'd been taken up in a spaceship and seduced by a female alien who had barked like a dog when they had sex.

Betty and Barney Hill's case, in 1961, seemed to set the template for future stories of alien abductions as it was the first to mention probes (Barney claimed to have had a cylinder inserted into his anus). Barney divulged this, following hypnosis to uncover repressed memories, and the Hills were also able to draw up a 'star map' of the places they'd been taken to during their incredible journey.

But hypnosis has been proven not to be a reliable method for recovering memories and the star map they drew up bore no resemblance to any star system currently known by astronomers. Alien skeptic Philip J. Klass, in his 1989 book UFO Abductions:A Dangerous Game, suggests the UFO that the Hills reported seeing was most likely the planet Venus which was unusually close on the evening of their adventure.

Elsewhere, it's worth reminding ourselves that UFOs exist. There are definitely Objects we see Flying that we are unable to identify and are thus Unidentified. I've seen several UFOs. That doesn't mean that they CAN'T be identified and it certainly doesn't mean that ET is flying them. Even 95% of ufologists accept that most reports of UFO sightings can easily be dismissed as aeroplanes, satellites, Chinese lanterns, laser displays, or the planet Venus.

As Chris French went on to point out, most of us now have quite advanced cameras on our phones but the quality of photographic 'evidence' of alien visitation doesn't seem to have advanced at the same pace. They're mostly still very blurry, easily dismissed, or, quite clearly, deliberate hoaxes.

But as easily as most accounts of alien visitation or alien abduction can be dismissed, that doesn't account for people who really want to believe. Faith, as you see with religion, Trump, or Brexit, can often be much stronger than evidence. If we want to believe something badly enough, we'll believe it and if there are people out there writing books to confirm our biases (either because they believe the same or because they want to financially benefit from those who do) then that just shores up our certainty.

Of course, there were (and are) plenty of authors out there doing so. Whitley Streiber, in 1987, wrote Communion (described, iffily, on Wikipedia as his first "non-fiction" book) about his previously repressed memories of being abducted by aliens which were revealed to him under the hypnosis of one Budd Hopkins.

Streiber was a successful writer of horror novels and his imagination was so vivid that he insisted, when he was twelve years old, he was attacked by a skeleton riding a motorbike. Budd Hopkins was an artist (he'd knocked about with abstract expressionists like Rothko and de Kooning) who believed that aliens were visiting our planet and embarking on a cross breeding project by, to all intents and purposes, raping humans. Hopkins was seven years old when Orson Welles' 1938 radio version of War of the Worlds was broadcast and it scared him so much it is claimed it left 'psychic scars'.

Make of that what you will but these books didn't just provide a form of proof for believers. In their wake came a whole new load of claimants to alien abduction and the more stories that came forward the more common themes emerged (although one account of having an ovum removed and inserted into the abductee's nose remains uniquely peculiar). Tours of alien ships, long circular corridors, messages to humans about the dangers of pollution and nuclear war, and even the image of the alien (the 'grey' of popular imagination) became almost standardised.

Did this mean there was truth in the sightings or was there another explanation? Research did seem to suggest that following popular films or television programmes about extra terrestrials (The Outer Limits, V etc;), the next wave of contactee reports would almost inevitably favour visitation by aliens who looked remarkably like the fictional ones that had been seen on the screen.

Chris French made a very funny point about how nobody ever reported being abducted by Mr Spock because, presumably, that would sound just a bit too ludicrous. But the idea of being deemed ridiculous for reporting alien visitation is something that believers have considered in their work.

When trying to answer the vexed question of how many people have been abducted by aliens, many believers insist it is far more than  have reported such incidents, and though the idea of being laughed at is certainly one reason it is suggested that contactees don't come forward, there is also the belief that aliens erase their abductee's memories following contact so people simply don't remember, or even know, they have been abducted.

Which sounds like a very convenient get out clause (to me, a skeptic). Or perfectly logical (to a believer, a conspiracy theory is always hard to disprove because any attempt to disprove it, to a believer, is, of course, further proof of the conspiracy). A Roper poll asked vague questions about vague subjects in an attempt to find out if people who claimed they hadn't been abducted had, in fact, been abducted!

Respondents were asked if there were times, sometimes whole hours, they couldn't remember and if they'd ever found mystery bruises on their bodies. This sounds like a description of what was once a fairly standard Friday night and Saturday morning for me but they'd have taken these things as a sign that I'd had a ride in a spaceship with the Great Gazoo or that Mork had shoved a cylinder up my arse.

Those who'd overseen this poll decided that an estimated 370,000 Americans had been abducted by aliens. Which would mean 340 people every day since 1961! But that's including those who don't know they've been taken. Even if you leave them out there are, globally, thousands who claim conscious memories of alien abduction.

So, bearing in mind that the talk was called A Skeptic's Guide to Aliens, what's the pscyhopathological take on this? Are all these people crazy? Are they all liars? The prof says no. Research undertaken (and there's not been much recently, aliens just ain't trendy any more) shows that most claimants of abduction are not seriously disturbed.

But it did suggest that profiles of claimants of alien contact leaned towards those who are distrusting, had high levels of PTSD, childhood trauma, loneliness, and suicidal tendencies. Susceptibility to false memory is regularly linked with traits of dissociation, fantasy proneness, and, on the surface conversely, absorption. Reports also suggested that those who had reported alien contact were also more likely to have reported seeing ghosts, being telepathic, having healing powers, and other paranormal stuff.

Anything going really. Maybe even elevated attention seeking. But, mostly, not out and out lying. There are some clear hoaxes (Travis Walton's Fire in the Sky was cited) and the main reason for them appear to be either financial or social or both. There's money in seeing aliens, writing books about seeing aliens, and you get invited to lots of conferences to talk about seeing aliens and make lots of friends in that community. If you're lonely or poor or both, it's tempting.

None of that means there is no form of intelligent, or downright stupid, extraterrestrial life. But it does suggest that all the accounts we have so far, on balance, appear to be spurious. Chris French did an entertaining and informative job of making a fairly watertight case for his skepticism on the subject and I hope I've conveyed that to you.

I've not even covered diversions into Carl Sagan, SETI, Richard Dawkins, Carl Jung, 'highway hypnosis', the word 'hypnopompic', 'non-ordinary realities' (which sounds like the sort of thing Kellyanne Conway would come up with to defend more of Trump's bullshit), or the prevalence of sadomasochistic fantasy scenarios played out among those who claim to have been abducted. But I've hopefully given you a feel for another fascinating night with the London Fortean Society. Now, take me to your leader.