One humongous thanks, for taking the time to explain.
The blogs are currently down hopefully they will be back up soon and new material will be added and the old material will be available.One humongous thanks, for taking the time to explain.
I have been wondering for some time about the Charles Fort Institute and where intrinsically they fit in.
Who are they, why and how, etc.!
Again, it was the realisation I had no idea about this at all.
However, thanks to your most helpful response, I do now.
That would be, 'now', as in a couple of minutes ago there, when I found the, quite proverbial, 'missing link''...
This one:
https://forteana.org/
Honestly, until these recent clarifications, I have always spoken of the 'Fortean Times' forums.
I shall now duly spend some time reading through what already looks to be fascinating background material via forteana.org.
It's hard to please everyone. It seems obvious the audience preferences are splitting into mulitple directions as to what they want the magazine to be. (That may even differ for various parts of the world as well.)
Well that was my point. The world isn’t reenchanted. It’s still quite explainable. I don’t have a problem with that. It’s my preferred point of view. As I pointed out above, the skeptical tendency for FT is not new and may be a reflection of a larger cultural shift. Honestly, we’re in trouble when we head the opposite way. Less skepticism/critical thinking is not good. See: politics today.
There are some of those, of course - it depends on the person and the topic. I'm not a fan of work by some most notable "skeptics" but when they want to be taken seriously, they do dig into the weeds and find the problems with the non-skeptical evidence. Skeptics like Shermer have made asses out of themselves by talking about topics they know absolutely nothing about. A small group of us used to call ourselves the "Bigfoot skeptics" at the skeptic conventions because the rest of the crowd would treat cryptozoology and paranormal topics as a dumb waste of time. It was typical for the card-carrying skeptic to just call believers stupid and think that was a good response. I didn't. A more serious problem is that committed believers won't even read material with a tinge of skepticism or critical analysis because the cognitive dissonance is too much. In order to truly know your topic thoroughly, you must know the arguments people make against it.
No one uses “swamp gas” anymore, thankfully. But remember who you can thank for that trope. (Not a skeptic.):ufo:
So er, not even the Flat Earth article than? Oh well.
Nah. I actually like owls as explanations. They make sense (although glowing ones...not sold yet). Shall we move to otters for lake monsters? Those are also real creatures that people mistake for other things too.Who, Hynek? Sorry, I don't click on links that don't tell me where it's going.
Hynek was a skeptic who changed his mind, wasn't he? He began to believe in ALIENS! (I'm not a big UFO fan tbh).
Has "swamp gas" been banned by the skeptics charter? Well, that's a start.
Can you work on Owls next?
NF uses the term "swamp gas" .. you'll notice that because he used it in his post.
I see many things as part of a continuum, including these varying possible paranormal explanations for so many elements, and that I always took the Fortean outlook as one where even if you didn't believe in an individual piece of the puzzle, that the claims themselves could lead to something original, interesting, unknown yet completely real. For example, maybe you don't believe in ghots, but claims of ghosts over time and across cultures might lead to something? I thought that is what the magazine was supposed to be, based on my experience with this board, which tips more often into skepticism than not these days, but still feels more open, more willing to look at the circle from multiple perspectives, than the published articles of the magazine.
... could be exactly how most of the current writers for the magazine sees things, and I think we are the poorer for it if that is how reality appears to folks, a choice only between two poles, and not a continuum of possibilities. Particularly in the world of the paranormal claim, because I certainly feel that there are still possibilities in looking at cases and trying to find new connections and new possibilites, as opposed to stomping them flat in a fit of skepticism.
I can only speak for myself, but my Forum articles have tended to highlight absurdities, whereas the longer articles have presented a synthesis of facts and opinions as we know them, however I'm careful to not be judgmental. The Patterson film was - as you yourself know - derived at least in part from discussions we had on here, but I was absolutely clear that I could draw no firm conclusion at the end as to whether or not the film is real (however, real or not, the footage itself is Fortean by dint of its very controversy and now iconic status.) The Alien Autopsy piece in the current issue concludes it is a fake, end of - both the vying main protagonists say they made it in SE England in the early 90s. What's remarkable about it was the timing, how much it exploited the mid-90s zeitgeist, and how there are still people out there convinced that it's real and that the CIA have covered it all up via misinformation: I didn't delve into that as I only had a finite amount of space, and that's a rabbit hole miles in length.
