Ash Mowat is one of our volunteers in the Civic Engagement Team. Ash has been looking into the relationship between pseudoscience and unexplained phenomena. In Part 1 of this blog post, Ash explores the science of pseudoscience and the papers of the Eugenics Society held in the University of Edinburgh Archives. In Part 2, he looks at a letter in the University Archives from Arthur Conan Doyle, describing ‘psychic disturbances’. In this final part, he looks at UFOs and some material in the archives about ‘retrievals of the third kind’.

UFOs and extra-terrestrials

It is perfectly reasonable to apply scientific processes to conclude that is likely or at least probable for there to be intelligent and technologically advanced life elsewhere in the universe, even if we have as yet no evidence of even microbiological life outside of our own planet.

NASA research starting with an estimated of some 300 million potentially habitable planets in our galaxy, is using the Kepler telescope to filter through these. Some 2800 exoplanets have been identified, and by using the Drake equation a few hundred possible earth like planets calculated to have better potential for facilitating the development of intelligent life and scope for technological advances. [1]

(Image above from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentagon-started-taking-ufos-seriously )

The problems posed to any communication with, let alone a visitation from, any alien life out there is complicated by issues of distance and timelines. The very nearest located potential earth like planet in over 30 light years away, and most of them farther still. Current technology and known physics prevent travel of such distances. The lightweight unmanned NASA vehicle Voyager travels at tens of thousands of miles per hour yet would still take tens of thousands of years to make such a journey. [2] Even if a piloted ship could travel at such a speed, how vast must the crew and vehicle be to avoid inbred genetic collapse over such long a time, where would all the food fuel and water come from, and what physical and psychological harms would be suffered by any such crew living their entire life on a cramped spaceship in the depths of space. Werner Herzog’s faux documentary film the Wild Blue Yonder explores some of these conflicts in an entertaining and provoking piece of art.

Aliens or indeed humans may develop better travelling technologies, but one other barrier are timelines not matching between distant worlds. Our earth is some 4.5 billion years old, yet modern humans first emerged out of Africa around 70,000 years ago. Further, we’ve only had the ability to send radio waves and later vehicles into space for some decades. Other planets may have intelligent life and technology but only for periods of time that precede or come after our own.

Perhaps the most likely, if still improbable, communication from another planet may be detected as a radio signal via NASA SETI project, and not in an actual visit to our earth by some hopefully benign aliens.  Sadly, even were such a signal received it would be so old in origin as not to permit a response to a civilisation and planted that may now be dead and gone.

To assert that UFOs have actually visited our planet is another matter, and one that requires serious evidence.

A visit to the University of Edinburgh archives on UFOs

I visited the library to view ‘Retrievals of the third kind: a case study in alleged UFO’S and occupants by military history, dated 1978’. [3]

The case study itself was forwarded with a covering letter to the then Prime Minister of Canada, the letter sent from Andrew Michrowski. The letter proposes consideration to establish a global scientific group to be established to investigate all reported UFO, and devolve this from a military jurisdiction over allegations of secrecy. The letter boldly declares “there is a vast number of scientists and technical persons (probably in the tens of thousands) who either have had contact with UFO phenomena, or who have been able to come out convinced of their existence”. There is no supporting evidence of this level of scientific belief in UFOs either in the letter or case study.

The letter also reports the former United Nations secretary general Mr U Thant to have publicly stated “aside from the proper redistribution of food, the UFOs present the most important problem in the world”.

The case study itself was written by Leonard H Stringfield, a published author on UFO events. In it he outlines that those involved in UFO research mainly adopt one of two positions as to what they are, either they’re a psychical or parapsychal event, or alternatively they are an actual visitation from an alien race with the advanced technology to develop vehicles that can make the immense journeys required to reach us. The author of the case study favours the latter. He misuses, at least in the scientific sense, the word theory: “there are many other provocative splinter theories…theories are free and a dime a dozen”. That might be a harsh observation to make, as theory is used more loosely in general conversation, nevertheless this is from someone calling for scientific research.

He refers to around 13 thousand reports of alleged UFO’S held with air force base in Washington but available for the public to study. Air force base established “project blue book” in 1957 to specifically investigate reports of UFOs.  It closed in 1969 during when they concluded “nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge.” [4]

There was a flurry of public interest in UFOs in the USA in the 1950s[5], the period focused on in these case studies. Interest had waned in the 1960s, perhaps because of the interest from the developments in US and USSR manned space travel missions. However, the year before this case study was written, the blockbuster movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, had been released and rekindled interest in UFOs.

The 22 examples in the case study are termed “retrieval of the third kind”, a term coined by its author to mean examples when crashed alien spacecraft were found and taken into storage by US military, often with the bodies of aliens themselves that had died in the incidents. The cases all focus on the US military in terms of witnesses, and occur in remote desert areas often near military bases. The author is suspicious of a conspiracy of silence “we must also take a new look at the possibility of a grand official cover up”. He includes the military, secret service agents, and the media of being involved in this.

Before detailing his twenty or so alleged incidents he states “I cannot refute the credibility of any of my informants”, but also “I do not possess single affidavit to prove that any one of my informants has seen a retrieved craft or its occupants.  I only have their testimony.”

All the testimonies are quite short and quite loosely detailed. They often share a lot of similarities, for example the space crafts are widely described as metallic, something like aluminium, and about 30 feet in length. The aliens themselves are commonly recorded as being of small stature, between 4 to 5 feet tall. Similarity could indicate consistency, but equally it could be suggest copycat reporting, or the influence of images of UFOs and aliens in popular science fiction books, television or movies.

The testimonies are a mixture of anonymous and named individuals, often employed or connected with the military.  They all report senior staff firmly warning all witnesses to remain entirely silent. Craft and, where discovered, alien bodies, were removed and placed into storage in US army bases, one testimonial citing that up to 30 aliens were held from various crash episodes. The author includes two rudimentary drawings (see below) he made of an alien face and hand, based on a description given to him by one of the witnesses of an alleged encounter with one.

There’s a lack of independent witnesses, i.e. members of the public. There’s a description of film footage taken of an alien craft, but no film itself, no photographs, no physical evidence provided of any UFO’S or their occupants. That lack of proof does, of course, fit with the author’s stance of a conspiracy of secrecy and cover ups.

Ultimately, I’m reminded of the quote by the late, great cosmologist Carl Sagan[6]: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. It seems, to me at least, that for then and know, the UFO and alien visitations to earth are best confined and enjoyed within the realms of science fiction.

Conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories purport to identify and expose instances such as when powerful people, governments or institutions, abuse power, exert harm, and evade punishment (my definition). Sometimes genuine conspiracies do occur, consider the decades of the tobacco industry burying and suppressing evidence of the medical harm of cigarettes in an effort to evade responsibility and retain their profits.[7] Or equally actions by the Catholic and other churches to deny the existence of child sexual abuse and to protect rather that report perpetrators.

The term conspiracy theory now mostly alludes to improbable events that overlook evidence that refutes them.[8]

As an example, I was brought up to believe in an early and popular example, that JFK was not assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald alone or at all, but that he was a victim of an internal US political conspiracy to end his presidency due to his liberal views on racial equality and wishes to have dialogue with opposing Communist Russia and end the Vietnam war. [9]

Such conspiracy theories can be a form of comfort or escapism, where it is harsh and hard to accept that in a random act, a lone and unspectacular individual killed a person of power, influence and renown. There can be a desire to import that some wider actors and influences must have been involved, to make sense of such a national loss. (Not that JFKs personal, political or pioneering legacy has uniformly lived up in biographies and testimonies, but that’s another subject well explored elsewhere).

My perhaps biased and certainly uninformed beliefs in this area were further instilled after watching Oliver Stone’s JFK movie in 1991. This film presented a dizzying array of plots involving the CIA, the mafia, anti- Castro Cuban groups, and revealed a colourful array of likely involved assassin cohorts. It’s a very entertaining movie, mostly due to the performances, but since I’ve read further into the crime, I now totally accept the view that the film is entirely bogus, harmful as false history, befuddled with implausible nonsense, and of the opinion that Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed JFK and was not connected with any others in a conspiracy to do so.

(Image above from https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-one-thing-in-politics-most-americans-believe-in-jfk-conspiracies/ )

Two books in particular, American Grotesque by James Kirkwood (1970) and Case Closed by Gerald Posner (1993) convinced me, at least, to accept Oswald acted alone. Firstly, the premise of all the conspiracy theories seem wholly implausible (how many hundreds or thousands of people would have to be involved in and stay silent on an event involving US Government, the Mafia, ballistic and other investigators, the majority of the actual crime witnesses, hospital and autopsy staff etc.).

Secondly, the investigator Jim Garrison who took the conspiracy case to the US courts, was exposed in both these books to have been unprofessional in dealing with often unreliable and prejudiced witnesses, in poorly asserting evidence, bias towards members of the gay community, and prone to personal grandeur and paranoia. Case Closed also meticulously, at least to me, dismisses all evidence beyond reasonable doubt that Oswald alone committed the murder, eliminating convoluted preposterous plots and distilling the facts forensically.

This is my view. Clearly, I have not seen or ready anything like all the evidence on all sides on the JFK killing, therefore it’s entirely valid for others to still pursue and doubt the official findings of the case.

More recently, Covid virus origins and related issues such as Government responses and vaccine and other interventions have become rife. The tone and views expressed in Covid debates can themselves illustrate the bridge between genuine scepticism and concerns, aside from the more unhinged and unfounded discussions. For example, Covid vaccine pioneer Dame Sarah Gilbert, has correctly asserted the right to question scientific progress without by doing so being necessarily irrational or deluded.[10]

For example, some people question the safety and long-term efficacy of Covid vaccines, given how rapidly these were developed and deployed.  To have such doubts is not evidence of uninformed thinking, as with HIV and AIDS we’re yet to have a vaccine after over 40 years (although fortunately we’ve an effective virus suppressing treatment). Distinct from such rational questioning, beliefs in a laboratory created virus deliberately spread and endorsed by Bill Gates or others, deserve neither serious attention nor credence. Worse still are the grotesque and deeply damaging conspiracy theories denying School Shootings or terrorist events despite overwhelming evidence of their occurrence, often monetising for the purveyors of such lies, and always an appalling insult to the victims and families affected.

Finally, I’d like to end on an entirely personal view on debating opposing views with others. Personally, I love to converse with those whose opinions differ from mine, and indeed relish when a point I’d not considered is raised and I consequently revise my position.

There are two categories of debate, however, that I’m reluctant to engage in: the hateful and the ludicrous. The hateful includes white supremacists and holocaust deniers, the ludicrous flat earth society believers. It can prove a draining and damaging pursuit to be exposed to discussions with such fervent believers of nonsense, especially where confronting someone wholly indisposed to change their mind. That said, we’ve a collective duty as people to always inform and educate always against all mistruths, and happily there are experts and journalist dedicated and equipped to help inform and re-educate people, who may have been groomed by others into adopting such beliefs.

[1] https://www.seti.org/press-release/how-many-habitable-planets-are-out-there (accessed 3.1.2023)

[2] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ (accessed 2.1.2023)

[3] https://archives.collections.ed.ac.uk/repositories/2/archival_objects/66302 (accessed 5.1.2023)

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book (accessed 4.1.2023)

[5] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220714-the-ufo-sightings-that-swept-the-us (accessed 4.1.2023)

[6] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard (accessed 5.1.23)

[7] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agreement (accessed 5.1.2023)

[8] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory (accessed 4,1,2023)

[9] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination_conspiracy_theories (accessed 4.1.2023)

[10] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/26/vaccinologist-sarah-gilbert-vaxxers-astrazeneca-we-need-to-be-better-prepared-for-a-new-pandemic (accessed 6.1.2023)

Ash Mowat is one of our volunteers in the Civic Engagement Team. Ash has been looking into the relationship between pseudoscience and unexplained phenomena. In Part 1 of this blog post, Ash explores the science of pseudoscience and the papers of the Eugenics Society held in the University of Edinburgh Archives. In Part Two (of three), he looks at a letter in the University Archives from Arthur Conan Doyle, describing ‘psychic disturbances’. 

Part Two: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: A letter describing “psychic disturbances”

I paid a visit to the University of Edinburgh archives to view a letter from the creator of Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle. [1]

Arthur Conan Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1876 to 1881. He had an interest in paranormal events and by 1887 had made public that he was a spiritualist. [2]

The letter is in response to an unnamed individual and is undated, and discusses reports of “psychic incidents”. He acknowledges that the events described to him by the letter’s recipient as being “consistent with those that break out so often in what are called poltergeist hauntings”.

He refers to “most famous case” in what is now known as the Epworth phenomenon of 1716, incidents of knockings and other disturbances lasting several months, with implied validity given the family status (Reverend Samuel Wesley, and son John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church). [3]

He then makes reference to the “most important still” events at Hydesville New York state in 1948, the episodes affecting the Fox sisters from 1848. [4] Once again, the chief reports were of mysterious knocking and others sounds, allegedly being generated by a spirit that could answer yes and no questions with a tapping sound.

It would be very interesting to know the date of this letter of Doyle’s, as by 1888 the Fox sisters had admitted that they had faked the entire events.

In the letter Doyle remarks, without further explanation, “it is when the female child is approaching the age of puberty that this phase of psychic phenomenon is most violent, although occasionally a lad is at the centre of this strange source. “This is a puzzling statement to say the least and not exactly scientific.

Intriguingly he mentions an incident when he was personally able to intervene to stop such a psychic disturbance. “Last month where a home was almost uninhabitable, I was able to offer some advice and the nuisance was brought to an end. “ It would be interesting had he been able to give details on what his solution entailed.

He concedes that there are some reports in the field that are either faked or otherwise invalid, such as when the child “is either through the force of suggestion or out of pure mischief begins to stimulate the phenomena….an unprejudiced judgement is needed in such circumstances. “

It is notable that he says that an unprejudiced judgement, rather than scientific proof, is required. Looking at the history now, it seems strange that such an educated man as Doyle would have embraced spiritualism. Indeed, even at the time there was scepticism and reported faked incidences. However, whatever our academic achievements, we are all open to adopt beliefs that may not live up to scientific rigour. His famous creation Sherlock Holmes famously said “If you eliminate the impossible, then whatever remains, however implausible, must be the truth”. In the absence of any firm evidence to support such psychic events, it appears in this case that not enough elimination was carried out.

An interesting insight into Victorian spiritualism, specifically that of celebrated medium Daniel Douglas Home, is explored in University of Edinburgh report by Peter Lamont of 2004. [5]

In this fascinating history, the author refers to a “crisis of evidence” whereby those who were sceptical that séances were genuine events were yet confounded when such “phenomena was ostensibly validated by scientists.” Such phenomena in his appearances included apparent levitation of people.

Home appears as anomaly, as unlike most mediums he is reported never to have charged for his services. Further we hear, “ in 25 years of conducting services, he was never caught cheating, despite many attempts to catch him, he was tested more thoroughly than any medium in this period, and he convinced many non-spiritualists in the existence of a natural (which became known as psychic) force”.

Home attracted formidable followers and patrons, and took a formal stance of exposing and denouncing fake spiritualists. Examples like this can indicate why a qualified Physician like Arthur Conan Doyle might yet be persuaded by spiritualists, although his declared belief in them came later in 1887 than with Home’s practices, as he’d retired by 1876.

The interesting conjecture of this post is a switch on the role of evidence. In that if no-one, despite extensive contemporaneous and subsequent testing, has been able to confirm that Home’s displays of psychic events were simply tricks and been able to explain how they were achieved, does this mean his séances have any weight as actual evidence that they were genuine?

[1] https://archives.collections.ed.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/83640(accessed 5.1.2023)

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle(accessed 6.1.2023)

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Rectory,_Epworth(accessed 7.1.2023)

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_sisters(accessed 6.1.2023)

[5] https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/files/11872202/Spiritualism_and_a_mid_Victorian_crisis_of_evidence.pdf(accessed 6.1.2023)