While it may be true that our eyes, brains and memories can deceive us in many different ways its an observation that's often used as a cop out in order to dismiss something a non-witness considers at odds with THEIR beliefs about the world. But in day to day life would be an extraordinary suggestion to reach for and quite nuts to accept.
In any other matter, how accepting would/should a witness to something be of the claims made by a non witness or non participant? ...
This - and some subsequent responses - afford me an appropriate juncture at which to mention the single most general and significant change in my own orientation toward Forteana.
First - a cursory sketch in very broad strokes to set the context ...
Over the more than half-century since I first became interested in Forteana (broadly construed ... ):
- I've had multiple personal experiences of high strangeness supporting the notion there's more to reality than the mundane, and ...
- I've had multiple such experiences along with one or more fellow witnesses who've validated the basic experiential / perceptual event(s), such that ...
- I'm confident that 'the extraordinary' is an actual aspect of my existence and environs.
By the same token, and on the other hand, during this same half-century I've personally and professionally:
- learned and experienced how easily perceptions can be misleading, misinterpreted, and even willfully manipulated;
- learned, observed, and wrestled with the fact that humans are not always - in some cases not even often - accurate or credible witnesses;
- learned, observed, studied, and even demonstrated how readily testimony (as contrasted with 'evidence') can be manipulated;
- learned, or at least concluded after intensive research, that all too many famous Fortean items that wowed me as a kid were outright hoaxes or at least hyper-inflated mythos derived from anomalous reports;
- observed and become increasingly appalled by the frequency with which people adopt or mimic the memetic garbage of the surrounding masses rather than making the effort to generate their own explanations or conclusions; and
- learned that some folks will say or do anything to make waves, get attention, or make money.
Now, having said that ... Let me describe the resultant shift in my thinking that allows me to deal with this dilemma and which relates to the framing of gattino's (and others') remarks ...
The most universal (and pesky) aspect of Fortean accounts is that they commonly consist of nothing beyond a witness's personal description of an incident / event - i.e., testimony that a second party can only take or leave. In some instances there are secondary elements which a second party may reasonably observe / assess on their own (i.e., physical or documented evidence).
It is a serious mistake to blur the distinction(s) between testimony and evidence, and it's potentially idiotic to assume testimony carries the same expository / explanatory weight as evidence.
I've come to realize it's just as serious a mistake to treat testimony (as is) as a true and complete record of whatever it was the witness perceived. The progression from perception to testimony isn't a single-step affair. Instead, it's a two-step process, which I'll sketch as:
-
Perception - The raw experience or apprehension of a possibly anomalous state of affairs, event, etc., and ...
-
Conception - The witness's translation of the raw experience into memorizable / expressible form.
The map is not the territory, and a witness's report is not the perception. The report can only be taken to represent the perception as filtered through, and hence biased by, the witness's descriptive / interpretive predilections and constraints.
Now back to what's changed in my thinking and interacting with regard to Forteana ...
I've become more of a critical / skeptical listener - not for the immediate purpose of convincing a witness there's a mundane or scientific explanation for his / her perception, but rather for the purpose of exploring how much of his / her report represents basic or raw experience versus biased or unjustified glossing added in the course of describing it to him- / herself or to others.
To be sure, there are often mundane / scientific explanations for anomalous experiences. Such outcomes are to be decided (or not)
after determining what the most accurate or detailed account of the initial perception may be.
This is why I've repeatedly explained my apparent interrogations of witnesses in terms of 'scrubbing the story'. I'm not laying the groundwork for pouncing with an already-presumed explanation; I'm simply trying to figure out what it is that warrants explanation and / or to determine how extraordinary it may be. [1]
IMHO this sort of up-front critical inquiry has become essential because the Fortean / paranormal 'industry' and modern communications capabilities (e.g., social media) bombard witnesses with pre-digested pigeonholes into which they often feel they must insert their reports.
Haven't you noticed how many first-person reports are already framed with regard to one or another conventional category of Fortean / paranormal phenomena? If someone sees an odd glowing sphere aloft outdoors it's gotta be a 'UFO', whereas seeing it in their home's living room makes it a 'ghost', and so on ... [2]
Anyway ... I'll stop there. This is the biggest such change I've experienced in exploring Fortean / paranormal subjects. There have been other shifts, but I'll address them separately as I'm able.
[1] It's because of this different intention underlying my interrogations that I have to dispute gattino's characterization quoted above, which is reflected in some of the subsequent posts. Just because someone asks for details or clarifications it doesn't mean they're seeking to refute you out of hand, and it's a mind-fuck to claim they are.
[2] Not to inflame a delicate social situation, but simply to cite a timely example ... Consider the case of recently-arrived Georgek. His decades of experiences and work spanned a number of Fortean / paranormal categories (UFO's, of course, but also EVP, spirits, and ghosts). I couldn't help but wonder whether and / or how he attributed distinctions among aliens, spirits, and / or ghosts as the ascribed others with whom he'd experienced encounters and interactions.