Carl, thank you for your reply, I appreciate you taking the time. This is what I think, and please correct me if I'm wrong in any of the details, I am going purely what seem to me to be the agreed and cited relevant points here, I've not read McKenzie's book.
I don't feel any of these points lend anything to the authenticity of the account. A clear 'thrust' of the narrative is just that, but that narrative was created 30 years after the event as I see it. Again, correct me if I'm wrong but one of the men remembered nothing significant about the affair, and the remaining two were in contact with each other for some time before their version/versions were passed on to McKenzie. I won't labour that point as you'll be well aware of how much room for distortion this
could have produced.
I don't find their willingness to reveal their identities unusual myself, I'm very used to people doing this and in an area where they will be very aware that what they're saying is certain to be read and seen by those they know.
As to the where and when, do we actually have a date for this exercise? If we do, has anyone checked back on the local weather reports for that day in the area to see how well they correspond with the men's accounts? If not, it's still worth doing as we could see if anything there corresponds with their story. I don't know Suffolk, but the weather in other parts of Britain can change anytime, a frost in August though is in my experience, pretty unusual. Either way it'd be hard to imagine anyone British finding anything strange about their accounts of the changes in temperature, wind, or lighting. Even if they'd recounted it the next day, but they didn't.
Again Carl, 'clearly defined' in the story that was passed on 30 years later. Is there any way to check how accurate this was? And as I'm sure you'd agree, for anyone to have a clear idea of the sequence of events after that length of time is a little bit suspicious. It seems more entirely reasonable to me to question whether this clarity wasn't in fact reached as the two men discussed the event in Australia three decades later.
And again these details were supposedly recalled 30 years later. After three decades they could identify the exact time the bells stopped wringing, when the unnatural silence set in, the weather changed, the shadows became flat? As you've carried out post graduate work on memory, can you cite anything that supports a level of recollection this good? Can you cite any studies that evaluate the likelihood of bias arising from the men's conversation prior to their presenting their story/stories to McKenzie? Or can you tell me exactly by how much their versions differed? Were they dissimilar enough to still essentially the same story but with understandable divergence in detail accounted for the subjectivity of each man's memory, or are they so similar as to suggest they'd been negotiated and 'agreed', unconsciously or otherwise, sometime much closer to their passing them to McKenzie, such as during their correspondence? This is why I mentioned a suspension of disbelief earlier.
For me that's one of the worst problems in this business, it wasn't like the medieval village of Kersey at all. The church, they claim, wasn't visible yet the 'street view' image confirms the fact that the tower is clearly visible at the end of the road they must have been on as it where the both the ford and the Bridge House are. And according to this site
http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/kersey.htm the tower was completed by the mid 16thC. So if this was a time slip, and the church wasn't visible, then we can eliminate any date after the mid 1500's. Fair enough perhaps, but if we do accept that they saw the village as it was at that time, how could the shop as it appeared toward the end of the reign of Henry VIII be so unchanged in the intervening 500 years so as to be still identifiable in a photograph? I don't see how this could be the case.
Perhaps the idea though is that the church itself was outside the time slip, allowing for the time period they experienced to be much later, but then what's the evidence for that? It's implied in the account that they had a bit of a look round.
'but in the laneway the windows in every house reflected back darkly except for one where there was a whitish-coloured wall showing inside, but the window-panes were too small to see through properly and mostly greenish in hue. We looked through windows, or at least one window, and I clearly remember a smallish room with a rear window. There was no furniture inside, no curtains, the white paintwork was dingy and had the appearance of ... a distemper or whitewash, certainly not of modern day quality.. There were no gardens in front of the houses, no electrical wires or antennae.'
They failed to spot the pub though, which I believe has been there since the 14th C. The pub is three doors up from the ford. So it sounds to me that either they in fact didn't look around too much, or their recollection is deeply flawed. I think you'd spot a pub looking through the windows.
Had they turned the other way though they'd have found themselves walking toward the church passed what are today smallish residences, so it's possible that this is the way they went and missed the pub. But then if that's the case where's the mystery? Remove their reaction to the place, which isn't indicative of anything objective, their accounts don't sound particularly unlike what you might reasonably expect from a very rural village in the mid 1950's. We read in the Smithsonian Magazine link that arrangements had been made to hide the overhead wiring. Yet the photos at the link provided by dream_decoder show that right by the ford there was at least one telegraph pole, visible in the 1955 and 1960 photos. But is this enough of a detail to favour a some totally fantastic explanation over two of the kids failing to spot something as mundane, and/or recounting it when they were discussing their 'strange' experience 30 years later?
Similarly, the carcasses 'rotting' in the butcher's shop, as I've said previously to get the best taste out of beef you hang it for weeks, the outside isn't going to look too hot. And this is a time before too much regulation, especially if this was done for private use. Do we know that much about the men's early backgrounds, were they rural, or urban, how experienced might they have been with meat handling. Were they witnessing something truly strange, or something which just seemed strange to them?
Laing's feelings were just that, his impressions. I've known people to get spooked over nothing but their own reactions to something otherwise pretty neutral, I think most people have.
I'm not sure it's a very good idea to compare one very suspect interpretation with another, there is as far as I know, as little objective evidence for the Versailles incident as this one so I think it could be dangerously misleading. But I definitely agree this really isn't looking like a time slip.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd have a few concerns about McKenzie quoting the Versailles incident to the men either. Whether intentionally or not, it certainly sounds like he was leading them. In fact it's certain, he provided information to his witness who then confirmed it as being 'spot on'. It makes no difference as to how apt a description this was for the men's experience,
it came first from McKenzie. So I think it's entirely reasonable to wonder how much of the rest was?
It could be significant if we didn't already have serious reason to be concerned about how possible it would be to retain enough detail from 30 years previously to make the identification. We also have evidence above that McKenzie was at least rather poor at taking care not to influence the men he was interviewing. Further questions arise from this about McKenzie's methodology, such as did he know the history of the house, how many postcards did he send Laing, did he for example use some form elsewhere as a control? Did he check just how many butcher's shops there'd been in Kersey? Did he make any attempt to provide some context for this apparent anomaly? It doesn't look like it to me based on what I've seen, but I'm happy to be corrected.
What do we have in the way of evidence? An impression of something odd recalled to a researcher who clearly wasn't careful about his interviewing style, and no methodology presented here at least so we can get an idea of to the extent this happened. There's also no clear idea of what sort of phenomena it's supposed to represent in the first place either. In fact the only strange features would be the men failing to recall seeing the church, and the telegraph poles next to the ford. That isn't that weird to me.
So I'd agree this is a significant case, but it's more similar to the Bampton incident for me, the strangest thing for me is that like Bampton it's still considered as strange.