Tunn11
Justified & Ancient
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2005
- Messages
- 2,278
- Location
- Under the highest tree top in Kent
Is the current plethora of TV programmes on Fortean subjects helpful or harmful?
There have been discussions on various programmes under various topics but as a general issue are they doing more harm than good?
Many years ago such programmes or news items were pretty rare (Arthur C Clarke’s series, Patrick Moore’s can you speak Venusian and a few “silly season” news items) Now there are seemingly whole channels devoted to a few subjects. They seem for the most part, uncritical and fitted to a format to keep the audience watching.
Aliens are almost inevitably greys, ghost are spirits of the dead, or demons and the population and distribution of bigfoot is amazing. Our ancestors only learned to bang two stones together because aliens taught them. Anyone seeing a light in the sky starts speculating on alien life and the existence of “energies”, “portals” and “spirits” is unquestioned. Any tech used is rarely explained and any evidence rarely scrutinised.
There are exceptions of course but they tend to be buried under tons of credulous tripe.
So, back to my question. Is all this stuff helpful in bringing these subjects into some sort of mainstream or unhelpful in that it puts off serious researchers and forces some Forteana into even more obscurity?
There have been discussions on various programmes under various topics but as a general issue are they doing more harm than good?
Many years ago such programmes or news items were pretty rare (Arthur C Clarke’s series, Patrick Moore’s can you speak Venusian and a few “silly season” news items) Now there are seemingly whole channels devoted to a few subjects. They seem for the most part, uncritical and fitted to a format to keep the audience watching.
Aliens are almost inevitably greys, ghost are spirits of the dead, or demons and the population and distribution of bigfoot is amazing. Our ancestors only learned to bang two stones together because aliens taught them. Anyone seeing a light in the sky starts speculating on alien life and the existence of “energies”, “portals” and “spirits” is unquestioned. Any tech used is rarely explained and any evidence rarely scrutinised.
There are exceptions of course but they tend to be buried under tons of credulous tripe.
So, back to my question. Is all this stuff helpful in bringing these subjects into some sort of mainstream or unhelpful in that it puts off serious researchers and forces some Forteana into even more obscurity?