From Free Life, Issue 27, September 1997
ISSN: 0260 5112

Walk into any large bookshop and you will find shelf upon shelf stacked with books testifying to the reality of flying saucers, spirit mediumship, and all manner of weird and wonderful phenomena. Indeed, there are not a few bookshops and an increasing number of magazines in this supposedly so scientific age which cater exclusively to this market. Nor are other media immune, as evinced by the recent showing on British television of a film of an (obviously faked) autopsy on a dead alien.

Of course, the fact that phenomena are strange, rare or even implausible doesn't mean we should dismiss them out of hand: there are people alive today who were born in an age when it was considered highly implausible by the man and woman in the street that rocket ships would land men on the Moon, or probe the stars. There is nothing whatsoever absurd about our holding extraordinary beliefs, as long as the evidence we adduce in support of them is equally extraordinary. Alas, it seldom is, but hardened sceptics often make the mistake of laughing in the faces of sincere - if ill-informed - people, and resorting to sarcasm and ridicule in order to belittle their views.

I am happy to say that one sceptic who never does this (except to outright loonies) is a long time correspondent of mine, and now - together with Simon Hoggart, a professional journalist - he has written what is, in my humble opinion, the definitive layman's introduction to Bizarre Beliefs.

Mike Hutchinson is UK distributor for Prometheus Books (the world's leading publisher of sceptical books) and an active UK Sceptic. Here, he and his collaborator cover a score of subjects from UFOs and alien abductions to the Loch Ness Monster and other elusive beasts. This book is lavishly illustrated, mostly in colour, and in it the authors tackle one by one the strange stories manufactured by fertile imaginations, lurid speculation, irresponsible media, and con men (and women) in search of a quick buck at the public's expense.

The matronly butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth Doris Stokes, for many years Britain's leading medium, is ruthlessly exposed as a wicked old woman who lived off her wits, made scores of incorrect predictions, and exploited the weak and the vulnerable. The Bermuda Triangle is revealed as a figment of a number of authors' imaginations, who have compounded speculation with sloppy research, adding to the list of mysteries, ships that went down hundreds of miles from the Triangle, often for very prosaic reasons.

Although, as stated, the authors generally refrain from sarcasm, sometimes the loonies' claims are so outrageous it is difficult not to ridicule them, and in the chapter on astrology they quote a nineteenth century sceptic who remarked "How we should pity the arrogance of the worm that crawls at our feet, if...it...imagined that meteors shot athwart the sky to warn it that a tom-tit was hovering near to gobble it up."

Nor do Messrs Hoggart and Hutchinson shy away from the few meaningful scientific attempts to put some flesh on the skeleton of the paranormal. As others before them, they have found a consistent pattern of shoddy controls, wishful thinking and outright fraud, even from the most prestigious of scientists. The sad but inevitable conclusion is that even people with the finest and most highly trained minds can and often do deceive us, can more often be deceived, and, most frequently of all, deceive themselves. The authors recognise this when they acknowledge that cold-readers often pick up clues from their clients subconsciously, and that many of them are sincere when they claim they can foretell the future and see into the past. They recognise too that, in spite of the element of deception, such people often serve useful social functions and may even provide better value for money than psychiatrists and trained counsellors. Which is a sad comment on the efficacy of any of the so-called social sciences.

If this book can be said to have a fault it is that does not contain a single footnote. However, it makes no pretensions to being an academic work, but for those interested in further study, sources are sprinkled liberally throughout the text, and the page of bibliography includes a number of books that will dispel forever any notion the reader may have that psychics can find missing children, that spirit mediums can talk with the dead, or that astrologers can make meaningful predictions about future events.

Vincent Gilmore