Mikefule
Justified & Ancient
- Joined
- Dec 9, 2009
- Messages
- 1,282
- Location
- Lincolnshire UK
Part of my job used to be designing training material for a small team investigating household and motor insurance fraud. For those of us who are interested in the sort of Forteana that involves reports of anomalous sightings (UFOs, Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster (LNM), ghosts etc.) there are some similarities to the thought processes.
I thought I’d share some ideas here for those with a broadly similar approach to Forteana to my own: what I think of as “honestly sceptical” — as distinct from being determined to debunk everything as a hoax or misidentification.
The insurance claims investigator and the honestly sceptical Fortean are both faced with reports that may or may not be true, supported by unusual or unsatisfactory evidence, or sometimes by none. In both cases, they normally have to work to “the balance of probabilities” rather than applying scientific levels of proof or the criminal law standard of “beyond reasonable doubt.”
In the early days of developing training material, I relied on two common maxims that most Forteans will recognise, whether or not they agree with them:
Putting these into context:
In this order: what part of the claim, if any is:
I think this is a potentially useful approach to any anomalous report. Let’s unpack those four words:
In the case of Forteana, we are perhaps all guilty of finding things plausible or implausible depending on our own life experiences and preferences. For example, I often go out into the countryside without my smartphone, so perhaps I find it easier to accept that someone who claims to have seen an ABC did not have their phone with them at the time.
In the case of Forteana, it may seem improbable that the same person saw an ABC on their first visit to Dartmoor, another on their first visit to the Norfolk Broads, and another on a day trip to the Peak District. However, if you accept in principle that ABC sightings happen, then you should not discredit this person’s evidence simply because of the low probability of it happening to one person three times.
In the case of Forteana, inconsistencies may sometimes arise from witness error, or from two witnesses experiencing two different phenomena. However, consider a person who is adamant that they saw the LNM during a trip to the Braemar Highland Games one May about 10 years ago. The games are always in September and until this inconsistency is resolved, his account is open to challenge. If they can demonstrate that they visited that area in both May and September of the same year, then the explanation that they had simply misremembered the details may be acceptable. However, if they described it to one person as “serpent like” and to another as “fat and broad, like a turtle,” this inconsistency would be harder to explain away.
What sealed the claim as “impossible” was the size of the window, which was substantially smaller than the speaker cabinets he had described. With no evidence of damage to the downstairs door locks, we had to conclude that either no theft had occurred, or that the thieves must have gained access through an unlocked door. The story about the window and the drainpipe was demonstrably impossible and the claim was rejected.
In the context of Forteana, there is an additional and interesting additional aspect to this. If a report contains one or more details that are impossible, there are two available conclusions:
If you have a similar attitude to mine, then each time you hear something out of the ordinary, ask yourself, “What is it about this report that is implausible, improbable, inconsistent, or impossible?”
Implausible will help you to identify your own preconceptions; It helps to remember that improbable only means “unlikely” and therefore implies “possible”; inconsistent gives a focus to your further inquiries; and impossible either means that something has been conclusively disproven, or that there is a potential new field of knowledge to discover.
I thought I’d share some ideas here for those with a broadly similar approach to Forteana to my own: what I think of as “honestly sceptical” — as distinct from being determined to debunk everything as a hoax or misidentification.
The insurance claims investigator and the honestly sceptical Fortean are both faced with reports that may or may not be true, supported by unusual or unsatisfactory evidence, or sometimes by none. In both cases, they normally have to work to “the balance of probabilities” rather than applying scientific levels of proof or the criminal law standard of “beyond reasonable doubt.”
In the early days of developing training material, I relied on two common maxims that most Forteans will recognise, whether or not they agree with them:
- “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” (Carl Sagan)
- “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” (Attributed variously)
- An extraordinary claim requires only sufficient evidence to support it. The standard of evidence does not have to be higher just because something is unusual. In fact, the converse is more nearly true: a claim that is in no sense unusual may often be accepted with minimal evidence or none — unless of course there a specific reason to doubt it.
- The absence of evidence that would normally be expected to be available is a form of evidence.
Putting these into context:
- An extraordinary insurance claim may be the theft of a £10,000 diamond ring from a person with low income and with a home and lifestyle consistent with that low income. However, a document showing that the ring was recently inherited, accompanied by a jeweller’s valuation, would be sufficient. That is the same standard of proof that would be required if a wealthy person were claiming for a ring of similar value. However, in both cases, a claim for a £150 ring might be accepted with no evidence other than a consistent description of the item.
- An extraordinary claim to a Fortean might be a sighting of the LNM. However, 10 seconds of focussed video footage showing clear morphological detail, with background to provide context and scale, and with verifiable provenance and unedited file properties, would be all it would take to persuade us that it was a genuine sighting. That is not actually a lot of evidence.
- If a customer, however wealthy, claimed for a £10,000 Patek Philippe watch, the absence of a receipt may not be important. However, imagine a customer who could not provide a receipt, or details of where he bought the watch, or a bank statement showing the payment, or the manual, or the certificate of authenticity, or service records, or even a photo of himself wearing it. The insurer would not be entitled to insist on all of these things, but they would be able to argue that he could not provide at least some of these things rendered the claim “not yet valid”.
- In the case of the LNM, if someone texted me to say that he had been sitting by the loch for 20 minutes watching the monster at close range, but he had no photos or video of it, I would not believe him. However, if he told me he had seen a red kite 10 miles outside its usual range, I would happily take his word for it.
In this order: what part of the claim, if any is:
- Implausible
- Improbable
- Inconsistent
- Impossible
I think this is a potentially useful approach to any anomalous report. Let’s unpack those four words:
- “Implausible” means that something is not convincing, or does not seem likely. This says more about the person who is unconvinced than it does about the subject they find unconvincing.
In the case of Forteana, we are perhaps all guilty of finding things plausible or implausible depending on our own life experiences and preferences. For example, I often go out into the countryside without my smartphone, so perhaps I find it easier to accept that someone who claims to have seen an ABC did not have their phone with them at the time.
- “Improbable” means that something can happen, but it is very unlikely. The chances of winning the National Lottery are 45,057,074 to 1 if you buy one ticket. It is incredibly improbable that you will win. However, every week or so, someone does.
In the case of Forteana, it may seem improbable that the same person saw an ABC on their first visit to Dartmoor, another on their first visit to the Norfolk Broads, and another on a day trip to the Peak District. However, if you accept in principle that ABC sightings happen, then you should not discredit this person’s evidence simply because of the low probability of it happening to one person three times.
- “Inconsistent” had a very specific meaning for us in the fraud team: it was when two things presented as fact could not both be true at the same time. Therefore, at least one of them — if not both — must be untrue or at least inaccurate. If an inconsistency was identified, we would try to resolve it by clarifying our understanding of the facts and then, if necessary, challenging the customer to explain the discrepancy.
In the case of Forteana, inconsistencies may sometimes arise from witness error, or from two witnesses experiencing two different phenomena. However, consider a person who is adamant that they saw the LNM during a trip to the Braemar Highland Games one May about 10 years ago. The games are always in September and until this inconsistency is resolved, his account is open to challenge. If they can demonstrate that they visited that area in both May and September of the same year, then the explanation that they had simply misremembered the details may be acceptable. However, if they described it to one person as “serpent like” and to another as “fat and broad, like a turtle,” this inconsistency would be harder to explain away.
- “Impossible” was the holy grail for us as fraud investigators. “Impossible” means that something cannot possibly have happened at all, even allowing for a reasonable degree of reporting error.
What sealed the claim as “impossible” was the size of the window, which was substantially smaller than the speaker cabinets he had described. With no evidence of damage to the downstairs door locks, we had to conclude that either no theft had occurred, or that the thieves must have gained access through an unlocked door. The story about the window and the drainpipe was demonstrably impossible and the claim was rejected.
In the context of Forteana, there is an additional and interesting additional aspect to this. If a report contains one or more details that are impossible, there are two available conclusions:
- The report is simply untrue. You cannot have seen the ghost of a drowned fisherman weeping by the waterside at Rutland Water when you were a child in the 1950s, because the lake only came into being in 1976. Therefore, I call BS.
- Or, we need to modify our understanding of what is possible or impossible. For example, there are proven cases of asexual reproduction (parthenogenesis) in several species of snake. Early reports of this may have been regarded as “impossible” but further investigation has shown that our scientific understanding was wrong: it is rare, but it can happen. Similar considerations may apply to other Fortean phenomena such as ball lightning, or dowsing: one day we may develop a scientific understanding of how it works.
If you have a similar attitude to mine, then each time you hear something out of the ordinary, ask yourself, “What is it about this report that is implausible, improbable, inconsistent, or impossible?”
Implausible will help you to identify your own preconceptions; It helps to remember that improbable only means “unlikely” and therefore implies “possible”; inconsistent gives a focus to your further inquiries; and impossible either means that something has been conclusively disproven, or that there is a potential new field of knowledge to discover.
