Natural Born Sceptic

I'm a natural born sceptic.  I learned a long time ago the perils of believing things because you'd like them to be true, instead of following the actual facts.  The media these days is full of stories about 'miracle cures' for diseases, scientific research that could be the key to longevity, of how scientists studying 'near death' experiences have 'proved' the after life exists and many more.  The problem is that, when you start looking into these things with a critical eye, asking what the actual facts are, you quickly find that the stories are all fanciful extrapolations by journalists.  Sure, the research they talk about actually exists, but its findings are rarely so clear cut as the stories want you to believe.  Indeed, the conclusions made by the researchers are actually far more modest and in fact they don't claim to have proven the existence of the hereafter, found a cure for cancer or found the fountain of life.  At best, they might be stages in the path to achieving all of those things, but it isn't going to happen any time soon.  But at least these stories, deceptive though they might be in their presentation, have some basis in truth, so the casual reader might be forgiven for believing them.  The web, however, is also awash with utterly fake stories, written to sound credible, which a lot of people seem to simply accept at face value, when even the most cursory research would reveal their fakeness.  It scares me how unwilling, or unable, so many people are to apply any kind of critical thinking to what they read and sea.  Look for hard, credible proof, if it isn't there, then the story is fake.  They seem quite happy with simply accepting the supposed authority of the piece in question.  

Take the story that giant human skeletons were found in the US around the turn of the last century - this one is often stated as fact, claiming that the bones were publicly displayed, had baffled archaeologists or were evidence that American Indian legends about races of giants were true.  But if you actually look into the story, you'll find that there's not one iota of truth to it - it all seems based upon anecdotal claims made about the discovery of these skeletons by miners.  But there is no physical trace of such bones, no photographs, no record of them being displayed.  Even the size of these 'giants' is disputed, with the earliest reports claiming a more modest size for them - taller than average, but not giants.  But the story has been embellished by successive generations of tabloid journalist, with their exaggerations now being presented as fact.  It's the same with much of the nonsense that surrounds UFO sightings and alien abductions - when you get down to it and start looking for facts, you find them to be very thin on the ground.  Again, it's all anecdotal with no independent witnesses or physical evidence.  Conspiracy theories are the same: they simply don't stand up to scrutiny as they are inevitably based upon a wilful misinterpretation of actual facts, the invention of 'alternative facts' and an unwillingness to accept logic.  Most damning is the fact that, even where these people claim to actually have hard evidence, they are never prepared to expose it to independent scientific investigation, Why?  Because they know that it can't and that would undermine their whole warped belief system.  Instead, they fall back on the excuse that the scientific establishment is all part of the conspiracy to suppress their 'secret knowledge'.  In fact, anyone who uses logic and reason to discredit their pet theories is part of the conspiracy.

I was put in mind of all this by an article in The Guardian I recently read. It was a review of a new 'documentary' that 'compellingly presses the case' for the existence of aliens and government knowledge of them.  It was clear that the author had been impressed by the parade of retired military types and government employees all earnestly testifying as to the 'truth' of these claims.  Nonetheless, they had, eventually, to concede that it was all short on actual proof.  Even the supposed former government 'insiders' didn't seem to have any direct experience of any of the stuff they claimed was being covered up by the authorities.  It was all 'I was told' or 'There was this project I couldn't get access to', which puts it into the realm of being purely anecdotal evidence, which is far from being proof of anything.  But hey, they used to work for the US government and said that they used to have high security clearances, so they must know something, mustn't they?  Well, not really.  Here in the UK we have Nick Pope who, like me, once worked for the MoD in Whitehall.  According to him, he ran the 'UFO Desk' and saw all these reports about sightings and knew how seriously the military took them.  Since leaving the MoD he's traded on the supposed 'authority' this has given him to churn out books about UFOs and become a regular 'talking head' on crackpot TV shows - he's the UK's self-styled 'UFO expert'.  Interestingly, I once spoke to the guy who took over that 'UFO Desk' after Pope left and he told me that everything that Pope had claimed was utter bollocks.  Moreover, I'm pretty sure that I had a much, much higher security clearance than Pope ever had (I worked in Defence Intelligence at the time) and I can't say that I ever found myself exposed to any evidence of crashed saucers, alien technology or abductions.  Then again, maybe I'm part of the conspiracy...