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The Rise of Denialism

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Skepticism is a good thing. It protects us from being hoodwinked and conned.

There is a particular brand of skepticism that goes a lot further though. It reaches into a form of extreme negative belief.

To avoid confusion I prefer to call this brand of faux skepticism - Denialism.

One of the hallmarks of this brand of belief system is that it attempts to shroud itself in the appearance of science.

However it is wholly unscientific and at best pseudoscientific in its approach.

True skepticism keeps its options open and is guided by the evidence. It does not have a fixed point of view.

It does not claim to have an absolute answer to everything.

Someone who can absolutely categorically tell you that UFOs do not exist is just as flawed in their thinking as someone who claims to know that we are being visited by aliens of various races in the absence of any compelling evidence to support it.

Absolute belief is absolute belief. The polarity of the belief is irrelevant -absolute belief either way is flawed and more akin to religious faith.

Much like someone who absolutely "knows" there must be an afterlife, someone who absolutely "knows" it to be impossible is also expressing a kind of religious thinking based on faith.

Negative faith is still faith.

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Don't Bother Me with the Facts My Mind is Already Made Up

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As I have said before I have an interest (albeit skeptical) in paranormal topics.

This seems to be an area where denialists seem to show up a lot.

As popular UFO lecturer (and nuclear physicist) Stanton Friedman puts it these people often have the attitude of:

"Don't bother me with the facts my mind is already made up."

These denialists will often look into any kind of event or report in a very superficial manner.

Quite often they will not even do the most basic of research.

After making their superficial assessment of the situation they will launch into a common set of strategies designed to fit the events into their core beliefs.

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Scientific Pretence and Personal Attacks - the Denialist Modus Operandi

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I believe that one of the reasons these people love engaging in this field is that it allows them to "pretend" to be scientific in an area of discourse where they know that they can get away with it.

If they tried to use similarly flawed arguments in conventional scientific fields their logic would quickly be ripped to shreds and they would not receive the same amount of attention that they do in more fringe subjects.

I think they perhaps see those who are involved in the paranormal as easy targets to score points against. They may pretend that they are doing it to advance science or to stop people being duped but their actions often present a different image.

That is of someone who is wholly serving their own ego.

Denialists often make up ridiculous explanations that defy rationality - often these are just as unbelievable as paranormal explanations.

Similar assertions would get them laughed out of the real scientific community.

For example a UFO seen by multiple people performing impossible maneuvers in the sky must have been the planet Venus.

Since when does the planet Venus, or any celestial body (even a meteorite) perform the kind of aerobatic manoeuvres that even the most advanced (currently known) aircraft would be unable to perform?

This is typical of the kind of illogical explanation given by denialists.

They will also make ridiculous pronouncements to discredit people - sometimes even professionals.

For example they will say that air force pilots are not reliable at recognising objects in the sky, or that police officers are terrible witnesses.

They will do whatever they can to suggest that the witness was unreliable, either due to being mistaken or due to outright lying - even when there are multiple witnesses.

A more despicable form of this appears when they start performing character assassination on witnesses.

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The Cash-Landrum Incident

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One example of this is the Cash-Landrum UFO incident.

In this case three observers witnessed a UFO appearing to be escorted by helicopters at night when they were driving home.

You can read a nice summary of the case by Micah Hanks here.

The two main adult witnesses (Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum) got out of the car to look at the object and were beset with health issues throughout the rest of their lives as a result.

From the reports of the case it appears that the witnesses were exposed to some kind of radiation/chemical agent that lead to significant ill health and a lot of medical expenses throughout their lives as a result.

They even tried (unsuccessfully) to sue the government to help pay some of these expenses.

Some particularly despicable denialists suggested that this was a hoax concocted to make money and suggested that the witnesses had deliberately poisoned themselves to bring about a lawsuit against the government.

This determination was made without any kind of investigation or true examination of the facts and it still gets thrown around as evidence that this case was a hoax.

The absence of any obvious logic in this assertion or any actual evidence to back it up - e.g. toxicology evidence seems to be irrelevant to such armchair denialists.

They seem to think it is acceptable to make unfounded accusations against people merely because they had an anomalous experience that contradicts their fixed belief system.

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Don't Know the Answer - Just Make One Up!

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It seems many denialists are incapable of leaving any situation as being simply unexplained. They MUST give an answer and it doesn't matter how outrageous or unfounded that answer is.

In some respects this kind of absolute thinking is similar to psychotic disorders where delusional beliefs arise.

Most mentally well, rationally-thinking people would accept that they cannot know or explain everything that happens one hundred percent of the time.

Life is not that simple and you don't always have the information required to make such a definitive judgment.

Denialists seem to do this routinely though.

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Conclusion - I'm Not Saying We Should Not Be Skeptical

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Before people get the wrong idea, I am not suggesting we should just believe everything.

True skepticism is a good thing. We should not believe anything and everything that people say.

This applies particularly to paranormal and supernatural claims. As someone once said "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

Whilst I find paranormal topics fascinating I have yet to see anything that really sways me to conclusively believe in any of the more extreme interpretations of such phenomena.

For example I believe that people "experience" ghosts but I have not seen enough compelling evidence to convince me that these are the spirits of dead people.

Similarly the existence of UFOs is intriguing but I have not yet encountered anything that convinces me that we are undergoing extra-terrestrial visitation.

That does not mean that we should completely close off our minds though. If great minds had done that throughout history then many great discoveries would not have been made.

In ancient times the very idea of electricity would have been considered magical and fantastical - now our whole civilisation is built on top of it.

Denying the existence of something without even examining the evidence is just as unscientific as believing in something without evidence.

To put it another way, going to either extremity of belief based on flimsy evidence is rarely (if ever) a good thing.

A true skeptic keeps an open mind and looks for good evidence. If there is insufficient evidence to make a determination, then they just admit that they don't know.

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