The Fortean/paranormal/conspiracy thread

[Carbomb]

I reckon I'd read a novel based on a universe where every single conspiracy theory ever is true. The Illuminatus! trilogy was awesome, but is quite old now. Would be good to have one for the modern era.

[BomberPat]

1 minute ago, Carbomb said:

I reckon I'd read a novel based on a universe where every single conspiracy theory ever is true. The Illuminatus! trilogy was awesome, but is quite old now. Would be good to have one for the modern era.

It's something I've kind of always wanted to write - I remember thinking reading David Icke when I was younger that, with how adept he is at tying up disparate ideas and drawing connections between entirely unrelated events, he could have made one hell of a novelist.

Aside from the obvious contradictions you'd run into - is the world Flat or is it Hollow, did we land on the Moon and find evidence of alien life, or did we never go there at all, or whatever - I think you'd drive yourself mad trying to write it. I doubt I'd have the commitment, let alone the skill.

Pretty much everything I try and write usually ends up tying into at least one conspiracy theory or other, though - they just provide so many great concepts for a good story. I'm trying to write a fantasy story at the moment, and it's taking a lot of effort not to just turn it into a Hollow Earth thing for no real reason.

[Egg Shen]

ive never seen an episode of ancient aliens, is it worth a go?

[BomberPat]

Depends on your tolerance for bullshit. It's not good, by any measure, but can be a laugh.

Format is pretty much invariably;

"Here's an impressive ancient monument. The people who supposedly built it lived here in olden times, so it must have been nearly impossible, and besides, they were brown. Let's lie about the weight/size/shape/positioning/functionality of part of this monument to make it sound like it would have been literally impossible to build, while again reiterating that these people were brown and a long time ago, so weren't smart enough to build things on their own. Here's a carving of a bloke with a long head, or like he might be wearing a space helmet, therefore he must be an alien".

Throw in interviews with "experts" like Sitchin and Von Daniken, and you're away.

[King Coconut]

I can't watch it. You can probably tell by my contributions to this thread that I have no tolerance whatsoever for this shit. I can stretch to 10 minutes laughing at the bigfoot hunters before I start screaming at the TV. Ancient Aliens had no chance. 

[Egg Shen]

32 minutes ago, King Coconut said:

I can't watch it. You can probably tell by my contributions to this thread that I have no tolerance whatsoever for this shit. I can stretch to 10 minutes laughing at the bigfoot hunters before I start screaming at the TV. Ancient Aliens had no chance. 

then why are you reading the thread?

[Keith Houchen]

Probably the same reason as me, there is a world of difference between talking about stuff like this and believing stuff like this.  This thread dissects these theories with reason for most of the time, Astro in particular has some real fascinating insight into origins and the delusions of a lot of them.

[Surf Digby]

I don't know if it's just because I'm older and more cynical or whatever but all the Fortean stuff (Forteana?) just seems so wank and silly these days.

When I was young the stuff that I read (and I read a shit load of it) generally made me believe it was possible, whereas a lot of what's out there now is either pushed too far in its presentation or it's just so utterly stupid that it's instantly dismissed as bollocks.

For example, I don't remember any of my books mentioning the Earth being flat unless it was a reference to how 500 years ago sailors had fuck all idea where they were actually going because their charts were all wrong. To be pushing the idea now that the Earth is actually flat after all and NASA are just pretending it's round is just being stupid for the sake of being stupid.

I'm not totally against the idea behind Ancient Aliens, as if aliens have visited us, why would it be now and not 200 or 2000 years ago? When I read this stuff as a kid, it was left slightly ambiguous, in a sort of "if they weren't visited by aliens, how could they have charted these stars that can't be seen with the naked eye?" way. This I'm fine with, writing off anything slightly unconventional as "well, it must be aliens" just makes me switch off.

[BomberPat]

I'm in a similar boat - though I grew up with Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, the X-Files starting up, magazines like "X" and, of course, Fortean Times, where this stuff seemed to be presented everywhere as a "isn't this mysterious?!" or "what if?" scenario, whereas now you seem to get far more people presenting it as fact. It's far more interesting to me as a curio or a thought experiment than someone presenting it as a fully-formed world view, which is normally just irritating.

It doesn't help that, as we get older, it's easier to see the obvious flaws in this stuff and to get exasperated with it far quicker.

My understanding of the Flat Earth thing is that some people started it for a laugh; it was basically an experiment to prove that, with enough pseudo-science and convincing sounding buzzwords, you could make anything sound plausible, and the point was to make people think about what they're taking at face value, by presenting such an absurd stance in a way that made it sound almost legitimate. The problem is that you can never underestimate human stupidity or gullibility, nor plan for the fact that - especially online - ideas and content have a life of their own once you release them into the wild. I get the impression that a lot of people who claim to believe it are trolling or just having a laugh, but out of context they become indistinguishable from those who believe it for real, which gives the impression of it being a more widely believed theory than it actually is, which in turn causes it to spread more, which causes more people to believe it, and so on. It's all a bit Foucault's Pendulum - inventing the conspiracy brings the conspiracy to life.

[Astro Hollywood]

27 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I'm in a similar boat - though I grew up with Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, the X-Files starting up, magazines like "X" and, of course, Fortean Times, where this stuff seemed to be presented everywhere as a "isn't this mysterious?!" or "what if?" scenario, whereas now you seem to get far more people presenting it as fact. It's far more interesting to me as a curio or a thought experiment than someone presenting it as a fully-formed world view, which is normally just irritating.

This is a good take on it. I got my first issue of Fortean Times over 25 years ago, and by that point, had already been into the unexplained for years, since getting my first Usbourne Mysteries of the Unknown as a five-year-old.

What a thing of beauty! Then followed for me all the Usborne books about ghosts or UFOs; the Brooke Bond tea cards about unexplained mysteries, and so on. And back then, all these things were presented as a mystery, with Leonard Nimoy in a tight turtleneck, sat on the edge of a desk, and it was all incredibly evocative. But at a certain point, when the internet became saturated, discussions became more 'us vs them', where you had to pick a side. Are you a sneering sceptic in a fedora, blindly sleepwalking behind all the other sheeple, or are you a 'spiritual person' with an open mind? It's likely that message boards were the thing that helped religify everything into such a pitched battle of black and white, where there seems to be very little middle ground these days.

Most Haunted was a fantastic example of this utter devotion. Every single thing that ever happened, from gusts of wind or taps was DEFINITELY A GHOST, and couldn't ever just be the noises of a settling house, which would still happen even if a house was haunted. The sheer rage from the fanbase at 'sneering sceptics' who dared suggest that any of the hundreds of weekly sightings of an old monk on a webcam might not be legit, or that Derek Acorah was full of shite just fanned the flames of those who didn't buy into it wholesale, creating side-taking incredulity where no actual discussion could be had. This also seemed to take the personality trait of being 'spiritual' mainstream too, as though it's automatically a plus point for a person to see the cover of Take a Break magazine in the newsagent, where I Miscarried Because of my Ghost Dad's Farts, and Fired For BO Cos Dead Perv Haunts My Shower and automatically believe it, because "well, there must be something in it, mustn't there? Must be awful believing in nothing. Besides, these crystals have done wonders for my fibro."

Forteana, being unexplained, gifts believers and non-believers both the same armour of protection as religion. There, you can be as smug as you like, going on and on about how right you are, knowing nobody can ever prove their argument one way or the other. Unlike being dead sure about a piece of trivia but knowing someone could pull out their phone at any moment and prove or disprove you ("Dean Gaffney never won an Oscar, you cunt!"), religion has the unassailable get-out clause of "We'll find out when we're dead, won't we?" This works with pretty much all Forteana too. Bigfoot exists? Show me a body! Bigfoot doesn't exist? Prove it!

Also, once you've gone all-in and devoted a big chunk of time and energy to something, you really, really don't want to be wrong about it, or all that time has been wasted. See former poster Dynamite Duane and his antics on here. The whole conspiracy subculture is full of people who are utterly terrified of being wrong for this reason, and so are unable to put their point across without raving about it, meaning anyone wanting to discuss from the other side like wise has to shout just to be heard.

 

[BomberPat]

Brilliant post.

When it comes purely to the Forteana side of things, it's worth bearing in mind that Charles Fort never presented this stuff as fact - he just wanted to collate notes and news stories on the unexplained, on weird phenomena. His work was more analogous to something like Ripley's Believe It Or Not than to modern conspiracy theorists. And maybe that's the problem - that it all became conspiracy, rather than mystery.

There was always an element of it - UFO stories invariably bleed into government cover-ups and Men In Black, and Area 51 stories seemed to be everywhere when I was first getting into this as a kid, but the mystery was always first and foremost, the conspiracy was an afterthought, a convenient way to explain why we don't know the truth. Now, it's less about the mystery, and more about the mechanisms by which the conspiracy is executed - rather than marvelling at the prospect of, say, a crashed UFO in the Arizona desert, people are getting outraged at the government for the imagined conspiracy. The focus has shifted. It stopped being about questions and started being about answers, and where's the fun in that?

 

You're absolutely right about the ideological armour that religion or belief in conspiracies grants you - the idea that the lack of proof Bigfoot exists is somehow equal to the lack of proof that Bigfoot doesn't exist, rather than recognising that the burden of proof falls pretty heavily on one side of that equation. But with the conspiracy theorist, the logic is often even worse than "well, you can't prove it's not" - because there's a get-out for every counter-argument. All official records, and people in the know, contradict your version of events? Well of course, they would say that. Once utterly convinced their stance is right, evidence to the contrary only serves to reinforce their notion of a conspiracy. It's an utterly self-centred world-view, and while it's always been around, I do agree that the internet has a lot to blame for how much more widespread it seems to be now. The worst example is the concept of the Mandela Effect, which I hate - that people can be so self-centred that they would sooner believe that they've travelled into an alternate dimension than admit that they got something wrong, or didn't remember something properly, is staggering, and those who buy into it will never recognise it as such.

[Astro Hollywood]

38 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Brilliant post.

When it comes purely to the Forteana side of things, it's worth bearing in mind that Charles Fort never presented this stuff as fact - he just wanted to collate notes and news stories on the unexplained, on weird phenomena. His work was more analogous to something like Ripley's Believe It Or Not than to modern conspiracy theorists.

Aside from his incredible collation of stories, Fort was primarily a satirist. You get the sense in his books that he doesn't even believe the theories he's putting across (like this one, used to explain mysterious falls of fish or frogs, which was a huge thing back in the day), but is using them to mock the scientific minds of the day. Whenever I think of what it means to be a Fortean, I think of his quote "One measures a circle, beginning anywhere." To me, this means we should apply the same thinking to theories both fantastical and sceptical. That's why I get so angry when sceptical 'admissions' are immediately accepted at face value. The famous Surgeon's Photo of Loch Ness has been 'debunked' as a hoax. Why? Because a noted hoaxer, who'd previously been caught faking footprints with an elephant's foot umbrella stand in the 30s, confessed on his death bed. Case closed. No need to suspect a man who'd previously lied to get his name in the press would lie again, for the title of THE MAN WHO HOAXED THE WORLD. There's no proof, the story doesn't add up (and doesn't even account for the second, less famous picture taken on the same roll), but explanations are never questioned. I've lost count of the amount of people who claim to have been behind the famous Bigfoot film (none of whom are the men who actually shot it).

Fort rallied against this in one of his books, as in the case when a town woke up one morning to find thousands of winkles and oysters scattered everywhere, over a huge area, hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean. People stopped scratching their heads when a newspaper suggested it was likely "a prank by some negros." Mystery solved!

While we're on the subject of belief, here's a question for regulars to this thread. What do you believe in? There are countless incidents I've no idea how to even begin to explain, but when you think of the big ones, here's the ones that I buy.

Orang Pendek. Super convincing eyewitness reports, and I genuinely think there will be solid proof within the next decade. The thing that really made me think about it differently, in terms of "if something's there, how come it's not spotted all the time?" was hearing a sighting report from someone who'd lived out there for 20 years as an animal researcher. In all that time, they'd only seen a tiger twice, and an elephant once. And those are animals we know exist.

Bigfoot. I just buy it. Once you stop thinking in terms of Bigfoot and the Hendersons, and think of it as a surviving remnants of neanderthal species in great uncharted and inhospitable forests, yeah, maybe. It's hard to separate it from the Bigfoot Industry of televised rednecks, but measure every circle from the beginning, and it doesn't seem so crazy to me. And when I say Bigfoot, I mean any of the variously-named wildmen sighted all over the world; Yowie, Almasty, Yeti; same thing.

Mokele-mbembe. I don't know that I believe it believe it, but I really want to. And the stories out of that region are so compelling, again, in an area that's unbelievably hard for people to gain access to.

Edited July 4, 2017 by Astro Hollywood

[HarmonicGenerator]

Great posts, Astro. Cryptozoology is the most fascinating part of all these subjects for me.

[Egg Shen]

yeh good stuff Astro, i'll read into them things.

[BomberPat]

Cryptozoology is probably the area of "Forteana" that interests me the most. Even the examples I don't believe in fascinate me.

I'd struggle to pin down one example that I definitely believe, though there's plenty I'd like to believe. I used to work in conservation, and while I was never lucky enough to do field work, I spoke to many who did, and they have coloured my thoughts on cryptozoology ever since, and not necessarily in a positive way.

I found myself getting annoyed recently with people convinced that Tasmanian Tigers still survive in mainland Australia, despite having died out there hundreds of years ago. While, in general, I find it more likely that there are "revenant species" or undiscovered surviving examples of species once thought extinct out there than genuine cryptids, the Tasmanian Tiger is extinct. I would put considerable sums of money on no one being able to prove otherwise. What frustrates me about it is that I've seen, and been part of, the work that goes into genuine conservation efforts, and how difficult it can be to secure funding, permissions etc., let alone public interest, and there are people out there putting themselves through hell to make these projects work, to try and protect, or even just monitor and study, animals we know are out there, but on the other hand we have people more invested in chasing ghosts and rumours.

That said, I've never met a conservationist, biologist or archaeologist who doesn't harbour at least some hope, and some interest, if not belief, in the idea of major undiscovered species.

 

I don't believe in Bigfoot. There are no great apes in North America, or anywhere like it, nor - as far as we can tell - have there ever been. Not only have we never found a Sasquatch body, we've never found any evidence of ape species in America in the fossil record. Apes exist in the tropics, not temperate regions of the northern hemisphere - for a breeding population to exist, in climate not suited to the genus, in an area where they would be competing with bears etc. for food and territory, yet in the decades that people have been actively searching for them, leave no bodies, no hair samples, no scat, and so on, I just think is entirely implausible. Similarly, I don't believe it could be an extant Neanderthal species - I just can't see any way that's possible - for a large mammal to go undiscovered for that long would be one thing, for a hominid to, some 30-40,000 years after disappearing from the fossil record, I think is totally impossible. I also don't think descriptions of Bigfoot match what we believe Neanderthals to have looked like - Neanderthals were far closer to modern humans, so much so that there's a school of thought that they should be reclassified as a sub-species of Homo Sapiens.

That said, I don't believe that the countless sightings and prints and so on can all be written off as hoaxes, and I absolutely believe that many people who have reported sightings honestly believe that they saw something. So while I'm not going to do the "so, there must be something in it" thing, I would be prepared to eat my words if I could be proved wrong. I would love to be proved wrong, on any of these. Me being wrong would make the world a far more exciting place!

Orang Pendek is one I find far more likely, and it's one of the cryptids I do believe in, though with sceptical caveats. The descriptions of sightings are largely consistent, it has a reported diet and behaviour that's similar to folk stories about other ape species, and would be consistent with the diet of something like an Orangutan or a gibbon; the size estimated by many who witness it would make a gibbon unlikely, but with darker haired animals, especially when only seen from a distance or fleetingly, it's notoriously difficult to gauge size (see Big Cat sightings in the UK that turn out to be domestic cats; sightings are almost invariably of a large black cat, despite that being a decidedly uncommon colouration in big cats), so they may be a larger gibbon. Personal theory is that they're an isolated group of Sumatran Orangutans, possibly a separate subspecies.

 

Outside of deep sea creatures, I would say Amazonian or Asian cryptids are far more likely to exist than those reported in more populous or well studied areas. There's enough wild or relatively unpopulated land for it to be plausible, and through good old-fashioned prejudice amongst researchers and anthropologists, always the possibility that local reports were ignored, or written off as either folklore or fanciful descriptions of known species.

The problem with a lot of cryptozoology is that it focuses on "sexy" animals; there are new species discovered every day, and cryptozoologists would always point to stuff like the Coelacanth or any recently discovered species as evidence that we don't know what's out there, but the majority of cryptids are large, charismatic megafauna. It's far less plausible that something like that exists out there, but it's a far more exciting prospect than discovering a new type of fish or beetle.

Edited July 4, 2017 by BomberPat