• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

POLL: LEAST Favourite Fortean Subject?

LEAST favourite Fortean subject? What doesn't interest you?

  • Ghosts

  • Cryptozoology

  • Urban legends / folklore

  • Ufology

  • Magic(k) and the occult

  • Earth mysteries

  • New science / strange science

  • Religion & cults

  • Conspiracies

  • Parapsychology

Results are only viewable after voting.
Magick is really boring, but if I had ABC's as choice that would be my pick instead.
 
While I enjoyed them greatly as a kid, being a huge monster fan, I have grown apathetic toward the sasquatch and Loch Ness monster. When I was younger it was easy to feel like something groundbreaking could come up the next day, but when I look back, it's essentially thousands of cases of 'I saw something weird' or 'They found some weird footprints.' Nowadays when I see a special on either, I tend to just keep going. It seems like anything new is just a varient on something I've already seen.
The same is true of UFOs, to a lesser degree. I can only hear 'they saw strange lights they cannot explain' so many times before I stop getting excited.
That being said, all things fortean interest me, and if something new and exciting were to surface on any of those subjects, I'd immediately become very interested indeed.
 
LEAST Favorite Fortean Category?

Mine's the Nasca Lines in Peru. Mea culpa, but I've never been able to work up any great interest in those scratchings in the earth. (Inca architecture, yes.)

Yours?
 
Perhaps any Fortean area of interest becomes a dead end once you've studied it long enough. Take UFOs, for example. Although there are still plenty of new cases and new sightings, there are no new theories - and so the debates surrounding the latest 'evidence' are carbon copies of the debates people were having 20 or 30 years ago.

Ghost hunters - despite their 'high-tech' equipment - seem quite unable to move on from 19th century Spiritism. And as for Cryptozoologists, if I have to read one more self-congratulatory piece about a bunch of middle-aged white men bumbling through the jungle getting excited over a few odd-looking footprints, I shall probably spontaneously combust.

What we need to liven things up isn't more evidence, or more research. It's more originality. And that's the one thing in scarce supply among pundits of the paranormal.
 
Invisible bicyclists.

Luckily, that´s a subject that doesn´t come up, too often.
 
feen5 said:
"Mediums, channelling, crystal power, ley lines any of that old rubbish (IMO), i suppose its still called new age)."
Click to expand...

Gee, this comes the day after I finally accepted the existence of ley lines, following many years of doubt. (Although NEVER CSICOP-style pseudo-skepticism.

As for crystals, I once had the following conversation with a New Ager:

"What exactly are crystals supposed to do?"

"They're so spiritual!"

"But what do they actually DO? How do they FUNCTION?"

"You don't understand - crystals are the Very Essense of Spirituality."

"Okay, okay - so what IS Spirituality?"

"Dummy, spirituality's what crystals give us!"

All Paranormalists ain't Forteans.
 
graylien said:
"Perhaps any Fortean area of interest becomes a dead end once you've studied it long enough. Take UFOs, for example. Although there are still plenty of new cases and new sightings, there are no new theories."

My take on this is - UFOlogy is old-hattedly moribund today because it has long-since PROVED its original Fortean postulate - that weird lights and strange shapes totally unexplainable by (and wholly unacceptable to) the Science of 1947 do indeed appear in the skies on a regular basis and have been witnessed by hundreds of thousands of reliable witnesses.

UFOlogy WON its case years ago but flatly refuses to accept its laurels.

Instead the factions get into shouting arguments as to whether those lights and shapes originate from Strontium Six or from secret Shaverian subterranean civilizations - when either of those explanations is likely as erroneous as the other.

My own supposition is that those atmospheric displays are an indication of some type of control mechanism for this planet. But even that admittedly vague semi-hypothesis is as wholly devoid of proof as the others.
Click to expand...
 
graylien said:
"Ghost hunters - despite their 'high-tech' equipment - seem quite unable to move on from 19th century Spiritism."
Click to expand...

Less than five percent of the material in my extensive "Survival" files comes from traditional "ghost hunting."

The cutting edge of today's research comes more and more from the quantum physics lab.

P. S. Ghost hunting "'high-tech' equipment" tends to be better or at least more expensive cameras - when whether or not ghosts CAN be photographed yet waits to be firmly established one way or the other.
 
graylien said:
"What we need to liven things up isn't more evidence, or more research. It's more originality. And that's the one thing in scarce supply among pundits of the paranormal."
Click to expand...

With the exception of a few abortive fits and starts there never has been any true experimental or laboratory Forteanism, and such a scientific approach screans out to be established. Unless, of course, ALL we are is newspaper clipping collectors. Now I have as many of those clippings as anybody else, mind you, nearly 30 file drawers crammed with 'em, but if that's the TOTALITY of our endeavour, I'm outta here. Collecting pictures of naked ladies will be far more exciting than that.

Forteans might do well to peruse the late Hereward Carrington's LABORATORY INVESTIGATIONS INTO PSYCHIC PHENOMENA (from the late 1930s) for an example of how things could progress.

Not that I've done all that much along this line myself. The most I've ever done is to make a cardboard three-dimensional scale model of the Chase Vault in Barbadoes, together with the coffins, to study the various ways in which those coffins could have moved and shifted within that confined space. But I'll submit that the majority of us probably haven't done that much. (God, I'd like to be in error on that last.)
 
I voted conspiracies- some entertaining whackos but in general nothing of substance or interest. Of course the lack of substance to prove a pet conspiracy theory is usually part of the proof that it does exist, and "they" are covering it up.

UFOs have probably had their day too, as has Bigfoot. When Mount Everest has become a tourist attraction, where do the yetis go?
 
TJ_Honeysuckle said:
"I voted conspiracies- some entertaining whackos but in general nothing of substance or interest. Of course the lack of substance to prove a pet conspiracy theory is usually part of the proof that it does exist, and 'they' are covering it up."
Click to expand...

There's no great problem from the POLITICAL end. A fairly (if not totally) convincing case can be made that the Weishauptian Illuminati, or at least members thereof, exerted some considerable influence upon the French Revolution. And evidentiary lines can be drawn from the French Revolution not only to early 19th Century proto- Communism but also to the foundations of 20th Century Fascism (which originally grew out of the Italian Fascist Party). For what it's worth, many early European Socialist historians CLAIMED descent from Weishaupt.

The problem arises when you try to link the Illuminati with later occult groups and orders. Now Conspiritologists place great emphasis on the fact that the German occultist Leopold Engel founded the "REORGANIZED Order of Bavarian Illuminati" in 1902 (it later became part of Aleister Crowley's OTO), utilizing the original Weishauptian rites and rituals which had mysteriously been passed down to Engel for this purpose. But those documents had been published and circulated by the Bavarian Government in the late 1780s and thus became widely available throughout German-speaking nations. So there's no good reason to suspect any "real" descent.

And tracing a descent from Weishaupt to modern Capitalism (certainly a neccessity for any world-emcompassing Conspiracy) becomes an utter impossibility.

Moreover, today's Conspiritologists have added "Reptilians," Satanic child molestation, Serial Killers, "Greys," subterranean empires, the Hollow Earth, UFOs and interstellar civilizations to this already-broiling "Illuminati" mess!
 
Moreover, today's Conspiritologists have added "Reptilians," Satanic child molestation, Serial Killers, "Greys," subterranean empires, the Hollow Earth, UFOs and interstellar civilizations to this already-broiling "Illuminati" mess!
Click to expand...
As I said, entertaining whackos....
 
The point that I was attempting to make is that many of the early Conspiritologists seem to have been quite eminently sane, even if their main theories are eventually proven to have been in error.

There are dozens of articles in early 19th Century British and North American magazines, attempting to link the Illuminati to the French Revolution, the German Union, the Tugenbund, the Carbonari, Young Europe and the infant Communist Party which make informative reading even today.
 
Bump ...

The poll results were lost somewhere along the way, so I'm re-booting the poll.
 
Conspiracies. :dhorse::sleep:

I thought we had a tinfoil hat smiley. :tfoil:
Ah, there he is. Thank you, Senator.
 
The poll categories are a bit of a blunt tool.
Cryptozoology in general fascinates me, as I'm sure unknown creatures still lurk in the oceans somewhere. It's just Bigfoot that bores me to tears.
I guess those wretched "In search of Bigfoot" TV docudramas killed it for me, as I knew damn well they would never find the slightest shred of evidence. And as for the P/G film - it is so obviously a man in a suit.
So sorry, but the possibility of colonies of a 2 metre tall primate/hominid existing in North America today is absolutely zero.
 
I voted Magic and the Occult, but it was either that or Religions and Cults. Ideally would have voted for both. And probably Cryptozoology as well. Never hugely interested in bigfoot to be honest.
 
New energy/physics.

It's always someone who hasn't understood the basics and Tesla, Tesla, Tesla.
 
Can we vote for more than one least favourite subject ? Ufology doesn't cover half of it.
 
Despite once actually seeing a flying object up close that myself and a fellow witness couldn't identify, before drones existed, it was moving in a straight line over us going in the opposite direction of the only very slight wind and making no sound (I licked my finger to test the wind direction), his older brother going to Fradley airfield the next day to confirm nothing was in that airspace at the time, a local UFO group hoping I'd speak with them at the time ... and that I found a black and white original UFO type picture inside a book I bought from a charity shop a few years back? ... UFology still bores the shit out of me.
 
Swifty said:
Despite once actually seeing a flying object up close that myself and a fellow witness couldn't identify, before drones existed, it was moving in a straight line over us going in the opposite direction of the only very slight wind and making no sound (I licked my finger to test the wind direction), his older brother going to Fradley airfield the next day to confirm nothing was in that airspace at the time, a local UFO group hoping I'd speak with them at the time ... and that I found a black and white original UFO type picture inside a book I bought from a charity shop a few years back? ... UFology still bores the shit out of me.
Click to expand...

Unidentified - yep, Flying Object - yep, UFO - strange and interesting. UFOlogy and UFOlogists ... give it a rest please.
 
Bad Bungle said:
Unidentified - yep, Flying Object - yep, UFO - strange and interesting. UFOlogy and UFOlogists ... give it a rest please.
Click to expand...
To be fair though, we could level the same criticism at nearly all forteana .. like when people used to say "I hate football, it's just people kicking a ball around a field" and then go on to say that tennis (or similar) is better .. a sport when it's "Just two people hitting a ball at each other" in other words.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top