Is There Anything You've Grown LESS Sceptical Of?

Iris said:
I used to think myths and legends were just fairy stories.
Now I'm wondering if maybe there's a glimmer of truth in some of them.
Lately I've wondered if Medusa and the Gorgons didn't have actual snakes for hair but maybe dreadlocks and the tale was distorted over time?
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I‘ve always thought that the cyclops was some poor bloke who’d lost an eye in a bar fight.
 
Good idea for a thread and interesting to hear other's thoughts. Since joining this forum I think I've generally become more sceptical of fortena, but there are a couple of areas I'm less sceptical about now.

One is UFOs/UAPs etc. I believe 99+% of sightings can be explained but a small % really make me pause for thought. Unfortunately the field seems full of idiots or those out to make a quick buck which has unfortunately muddied the waters somewhat. I'm also more open to the idea of life after death, not in a religious sense, but that there may well be more to consciousness than what science currently suggests. Perhaps tellingly, I have had two significant experiences in these two areas over the past few years so that is probably a major factor in why my perceptions have changed.

I find the idea of holographic universe compelling but a bit disconcerting. I do strongly feel like there is something more to reality, 'beyond the veil' so to speak, which feels both scary and fascinating. The nature of reality is, for me, the ultimate mystery.
 
I think scepticism is the approach anyone should adopt, that said I'm just coming out of a pretty militantly disbelieving of everything out of the norm phase. Except for certain subjects particularly my once favourite Fortean field Cryptozoology. Seriously now, how in the face of the evidence we have for species decline across the planet can anyone try and support the existence of large or even medium sized unclassified species?

So personally I'm not less sceptical I'm more appropriately sceptical and less blindly dismissive.
 
Cloudbusting said:
Since joining this forum I think I've generally become more sceptical of fortena,
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Out of interest, is that sceptical of entire concepts within the field, or just of cited cases? As an example, as you mention with UAPs I personally believe in British big cats, but I don't believe in 90+% of the reported sightings.
 
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I'm warming to the ancient civilisations stuff, like Chariots of the Gods. Read all those books as they came out as my father was keen on everything Fortean.

While they've been repeatedly debunked, the ideas haven't gone away and Techy and I enjoyed hearing about them at a couple of conferences the year before last.
 
escargot said:
I'm warming to the ancient civilisations stuff, like Chariots of the Gods. Read all those books as they came out as my father was keen on everything Fortean.

While they've been repeatedly debunked, the ideas haven't gone away and Techy and I enjoyed hearing about them at a couple of conferences the year before last.
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I read those books decades ago and they were exciting, like adventure fiction stories. From my interpretation of the books, I thought the ancient alien astronauts helped everyone with their technology - including Europeans - and so never thought it was racist to explain away the non-European technology. My interpretation may be flawed, but I was so surprised to read here in Forteanaland, that they are now considered racist. I can't be bothered to read them again, but they were really exciting!

Escargot, you had some real experiences with paranormal stuff (something floating off the wall in front of you and your son). Has your scepticism or beliefs changed because of those experiences?
 
stu neville said:
Out of interest, is that sceptical of entire concepts within the field, or just of cited cases? As an example, as you mention with UAPs I personally believe in British big cats, but I don't believe in 90+% of the reported sightings.
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When I say I've become more sceptical I'd say that's generally in relation to famous cases which tend to dominate certain fields, particularly those in the UFO field and odd/notorious cases such as 'The man from Taured'. Whilst this has sometimes proven to be a bit disapointing it's not a bad thing. I appreciate when someone has really delved into a particular case to find a probable solution, and sometimes the truth proves to be stranger than fiction. If anything, it makes the remaining small % of unexplained fortena events even more mysterious. :)
 
Endlessly Amazed said:
I read those books decades ago and they were exciting, like adventure fiction stories. From my interpretation of the books, I thought the ancient alien astronauts helped everyone with their technology - including Europeans - and so never thought it was racist to explain away the non-European technology. My interpretation may be flawed, but I was so surprised to read here in Forteanaland, that they are now considered racist. I can't be bothered to read them again, but they were really exciting!

Escargot, you had some real experiences with paranormal stuff (something floating off the wall in front of you and your son). Has your scepticism or beliefs changed because of those experiences?
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When apparently paranormal things have occurred they've seemed natural. I've never had to change my mindset over things.

The ex, though, that was different. So much weirdness happened, especially around our eldest, that he went a bit potty.

Having the Phantom Drip splatting on his head, being haunted by our ghost cat, having his mind blatantly read by me... it all adds up. :chuckle:
 
stu neville said:
Out of interest, is that sceptical of entire concepts within the field, or just of cited cases? As an example, as you mention with UAPs I personally believe in British big cats, but I don't believe in 90+% of the reported sightings.
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It’s a good point. I have grown jaded in my years having seen the main pins of Forteana debunked but that’s not to say I’m throwing the baby out with the bath water.
 
There seem to be two kinds of skeptics (or sceptics) out there. There's the genuine sceptic, who along with our hero a certain Mr. C. Fort, emphasises acceptance rather than belief. It was, I understand, Isaac Asimov, surely a sceptic to his toes, who once said that all new science begins with someone noticing something and thinking "that's strange . . . ." In other words, the genuine sceptic doesn't automatically reject something just because it sounds weird, but carefully considers any evidence or observations that might be available.
Then there's what I call the pseudosceptic, who pretends to be a sceptic but is in fact more of a True Believer in - and fanatical defender of - the prevailing scientific Status Quo - at the moment the Mechanistic-Materialist Paradigm, or MMP. Typically, he refuses to even listen to new observations that aren't sanctified by the MMP; I would hazard a guess that it all stems from a deep-seated, but unacknowledged, fear of being wrong - and, in really severe cases, a fear of even admitting to a fear of being wrong; I sense an infinite regress building up here . . . .
Personally, I don't believe in anything very much, these days (I'm 76). I suspect a great many things; I suspect that some of my suspicions might turn out to be true - or at least, to point towards some kind of truth; but I don't believe any of them.
This means, I suppose, that I'm pretty much a sceptic about everything; from astrology to the Big Bang. Much of today's science is certainly useful; electronics, quantum mechanics, have given us everything from modern medical diagnostics to the laptop computer I'm writing this on to cars that talk back to us . . . . but I don't take any of it as the last word on any subject. What was it our noble founder said? Something about "the proper clothes to wear, for a while . . . ."
 
Endlessly Amazed said:
I read those books decades ago and they were exciting, like adventure fiction stories. From my interpretation of the books, I thought the ancient alien astronauts helped everyone with their technology - including Europeans - and so never thought it was racist to explain away the non-European technology. My interpretation may be flawed, but I was so surprised to read here in Forteanaland, that they are now considered racist. I can't be bothered to read them again, but they were really exciting!
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I hear you, Amazed. As far as I can tell the ancient Astronaut theory=Racism trope originated with one blogger by the name of (this is from memory) Scott Calvino who comes across to me as a rather egocentric kind of guy and one pursuing his own peculiar agenda.(He seems to want to bracket Daniken in with H.P Lovecraft - which strikes me as a very long shot, and lacking in serious evidence to give it backing). Nothing wrong with that, of course - but the mud he has slung seems to have stuck.

I have tried to raise the same point on another thread as you have above - with examples, but I just met the broken record. It might be best to see this as all part of the well intended but misapplied `wokeness` and so called `cancel cutlure` which can be a bit of an irritant nowadays.

It is true that Daniken is guilty of making one unfortunate remark - about the black race being a `mistake` that was made when the extraterrestials were genetically modifying apes into humanity. It's an apalling thing to say - but it seems to have been a one-off as that is the line which gets endlessly recycled to show Daniken is some kind of white supremacist (instead of just a prejudiced Swiss hotelier from a certain generation).

In any case Daniken is not the only A.A spokesperson - not even the main one. Peter Kolosimo, the Italian, was writing at the same time and is probably a better one to read (albeit hard to get hold of nowadays).

I'm afraid that I've become just as sceptical about Ancient Astronauts as I have so many other things however.(I do still find the Nazca lines in Peru tyo be hard to explain within conventional archeology though).
 
@Zeke Newbold - I so appreciate your posting and the new information.

I am now getting off-topic. Trigger warning for the woke dominant culturists: the refusal of some (most?) of the dominant-group members to acknowledge the phenomena of some non-dominant culture group members who are racists/ethnicists/religionists against the dominant group members. I have been vigorously attacked verbally and physically because I am a member of the US dominant group. I have been told more than once that my racial group started as a science experiment in Africa 6000 years ago by an evil magician so we are inherently evil (thanks to the founder of the Black Muslims in the 1950s, building on Marcus Garvey's work). No kidding. So why is this racist nonsense not being discussed and condemned publicly? I don't mean here in forteanaland, I mean generally anywhere in the US. After the physical injuries from my attack, I lost most of my ability to be normally trusting about some members of a non-dominant group.

I think white wokeness is a weird, and perhaps Fortean part of human nature; and seems to me to be part of a vague guilt over being part of the dominant culture.

OK, back to the regularly scheduled channel of less skepticism.
 
@Zeke Newbold - Nazca lines: When I first read about them, I started to conjecture what they were for and why anybody bothered, as they were a huge expenditure of resources, much bigger than stonehenge. I came up with:

Alien astronauts built them, but not for navigation since they seemed to navigate from the stars without Nazca lines. Rejected because no other confirmatory evidence and that people did it seemed a simpler explanation.

Ancient man built them for unknown reasons. Their mere existence seemed to me to imply a high level of political and economic organization since a lot of manpower would be needed to do this. Engineering and conceptual work: far less than building South American drystone temples. Any first year art or engineering student today could plan this out to scale using low tech paper, a pencil, and a ruler, as long as they could measure out the landscape.

Why bother? Political ruler’s mad scheme, a priest’s mad scheme, an artist’s mad scheme…. Mad scheme seems to be a theme in my thinking. Hmmm. But it is an astonishing, glorious thing!
 
Ack, Endlessly Amazed, I could tell you a tale or several...But it happened to white folk so it doesn't matter.

Joseph Needham claimed the Chinese invented everything. People questioned his politics a bit, (This was in the days of the Cultural Revolution) But, as far as I know, no-one has queried that particular assertion.

Doesn't mean to say other folks didn't develop these technologies, though
 
Kondoru said:
Ack, Endlessly Amazed, I could tell you a tale or several...But it happened to white folk so it doesn't matter.

Joseph Needham claimed the Chinese invented everything. People questioned his politics a bit, (This was in the days of the Cultural Revolution) But, as far as I know, no-one has queried that particular assertion.

Doesn't mean to say other folks didn't develop these technologies, though
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I had never heard of Joseph Needham, so I looked him up in Wikipedia. He seems to have been a contemporary of Edgar Snow, a British supporter of Chinese communism. I am not a historian, but it seems kinda far-fetched that any group invented just about everything. I think that technologies as well as material goods were traded from Arabia and Egypt to India to China. Any practical idea was adopted and improved.
.....my Polish family told me that most things were invented in Poland and then stolen by the others. :)
 
I used to leave the subject of life after death to one side and considered mediums frauds. Now ive a high degree of confidence in the likelihood of some kind of survival. And having been convinced of the sincerity and curiosity of one particular medium I corresponded with online, who seems genuinely objective, uncertain and fascinated by his own experiences, concluded well if he's genuinely experiencing it - whatever it may be - he surely can't be the only one. That doesn't mean ive ever seen a truly impressive display of it anywhere, outside of other people's anecdotes.

I stopped paying attention to ufology years ago, but recent events which have been covered seriously in mainstream US media (though i suspect not reported much over here as far as i know) have me intrigued again and ready to believe there is a something other than us behind it.
 
Time/dimensional shifts
When I was a kid, the only time-shift story that seemed to be discussed (endlessly) in the books about the supernatural that I read was the Moberly-Jourdain one at the Petit Trianon. I could conveniently discount that though as probably just being the imaginings or misconceptions of the two witnesses.

Nowadays, there are a multitude of accounts of supposed timeslips (albeit of varying degrees of reliability). The internet has provided us with a means to diseminate and gather such accounts that would have been unthinkable even thirty years ago. On the whole I've been forced to consider that such events may actually occur. They've become one of the Fortean areas of interest that I'm increasingly convinced will be shown one day to be genuine.

Alien Big Cats
I've always believed that these are real, flesh and blood creatures living and breeding in the UK. My parents and uncle and aunt saw one in the West of Scotland one summer when we were on holiday there. However, beyond that; there are too many people - many of them well versed in the wild (and domestic) creatures of Britatin, who believe that they exist. It's not a subject on these boards that I visit very often; as far as I'm concerned it's 'case closed'. :)

Ghosts
I believed in ghosts utterly when I was young. Then came to disbelieve. Now, I'm back in the believers camp. Most I think are images - just glimpses, of people or events from the past (through what mechanism I don't know). A few (very few), though, seem to be actually sentient. Which is worrying as it suggests that there is something after death (which is a concept that I'm not really comfortable with).
My uncle saw a ghost; only to be laughed at by the whole family, later his account was corroberated by a previous resident of the same house who had seen the same thing years previously. I believe they exist.

Life after death
Gah! :confused: I just don't know. If I believe in sentient 'aware' ghosts (or apparitions/spirits/shades/phantoms/call them what you will), then that means that there actually is something after death. Which, presumably, means that I should be doing something to improve myself spiritually or to help others (although, if I'm doing these things to ultimately bank karma, that's not very altruistic of me is it!). Which, being the self-centred, selfish bastard that I am is not going to happen. If there is such a thing as reincarnation; I'm screwed!
 
I think I am less credulous and more interested in the actual event than I used to be. The world is weirder than we can comprehend with the tools we have.
I have shifted towards believing in non Earth based intelligence taking an interest in us, Humans we are exploring the universe why would other species not do this. Not sure about most UFOs being evidence of this, TBH a UFOlogist I met a couple of years ago really put me off the whole subject

I no longer consider it possible that Nessie exists and reluctantly have to deny that there is a nothing like Bigfoot stalking these islands, however ABCs are definitely stalking around the west country.

When I was younger I was convinced of the reality of ghosts, not so sure now. They may be something other than spirits of the departed, interesting topic
 
Frideswide said:
or that something is making the appearance of it, for reasons unknown.
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What is Capgras syndrome for the dead?

I have had a few visits with dead loved ones - direct and not mediated by spiritualists or psychics - and am quite sure it was the actual person (or dog) and not an impostor. Impossible to prove to anyone else.
 
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Eyespy said:
I no longer consider it possible that Nessie exists and reluctantly have to deny that there is a nothing like Bigfoot stalking these islands, however ABCs are definitely stalking around the west country.

When I was younger I was convinced of the reality of ghosts, not so sure now. They may be something other than spirits of the departed, interesting topic
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Agree with all of this.


Except - I don't there is a Bigfoot creature stalking anywhere on the the planet. But I do believe that every country in the world has some sort of "wildman" folklore and tradition...and because of this - they are seen. They "exist". But not in a way that cars and shoes exist.

And yes - ghosts "exist". Obviously. People have seen ghosts in every epoch, in every country. However - do I think they are the spirit of Aunt Nellie who likes to spend her time opening and shutting doors, knocking mugs over? I really don't think so.
 
Coastaljames said:
And yes - ghosts "exist". Obviously. People have seen ghosts in every epoch, in every country. However - do I think they are the spirit of Aunt Nellie who likes to spend her time opening and shutting doors, knocking mugs over? I really don't think so.
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Yes, ‘ghosts’ have been witnessed for so long and by so many people, there is something, but i don’t believe they’re ‘earthbound souls, although people do report visits from dead relatives.
 
Coastaljames said:
. However - do I think they are the spirit of Aunt Nellie who likes to spend her time opening and shutting doors, knocking mugs over?
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When ghosts are described in literature and fillums doing this it's not a frivolous habit.

They are trying to attract attention, as in Ghost. Seems a good plan!
 
Ghosts do not know they are dead and wander for a couple of years and then figure it out they are dead.

My wife has seen a couple of ghosts particularly her dead father.

The closest I have ever come to a ghost is my computer room turned ice cold while I was seating at my desk.

I felt a presence, but never saw any form of a ghost.

I am puzzled why the temperature turned ice cold.

What would cause this temperature change ?
 
charliebrown said:
Ghosts do not know they are dead and wander for a couple of years and then figure it out they are dead.

My wife has seen a couple of ghosts particularly her dead father.

The closest I have ever come to a ghost is my computer room turned ice cold while I was seating at my desk.

I felt a presence, but never saw any form of a ghost.

I am puzzled why the temperature turned ice cold.

What would cause this temperature change ?
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Dead people would be pretty cold
 
charliebrown said:
Ghosts do not know they are dead and wander for a couple of years and then figure it out they are dead.

My wife has seen a couple of ghosts particularly her dead father.

The closest I have ever come to a ghost is my computer room turned ice cold while I was seating at my desk.

I felt a presence, but never saw any form of a ghost.

I am puzzled why the temperature turned ice cold.

What would cause this temperature change ?
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Air conditioning?
 
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