There are, so far, two published
“reviews” on my book Illuminations, one in the Magonia blog by Peter Rogerson,
and another one in the Fortean Times by Jerome Clark. I put the word “review”
in quotation marks because they are not really book reviews. They are rather
what I would consider “denunciations” of someone thinking differently than
them.
The key argument of my
book is about presenting a hypothesis, based on parapsychology, to propose an
explanation about some, but not necessarily all, UFO events. As well, faithful
to the notion of hypothesis I do not claim having the “Truth”. It seems pretty clear
that the notion of “hypothesis” has escaped these two reviewers, because in the
end their “reviews” were simply promoting their beliefs that either the
psycho-social hypothesis (PSH) can explain (implicitly ALL) UFO sightings,
or the extra-terrestrial hypothesis (ETH) is (also implicitly) the only valid
explanation for ALL truly unexplained UFO sightings. In the end, they
are both proving by their very own writing what I wrote in my Introduction: when
it comes to UFOs people are stuck between the “nil hypothesis” (in its more
sophisticated version through the PSH) and the ETH. This doctrinarian situation
is at the very core of the UFO studies problem. The letter “H” for “Hypothesis”
in “PSH” and in “ETH” is absolutely not deserved.
It is fascinating to
read people making grandiloquent claims about the superior scientific value of
the PSH, while none of their writings quote the sociological literature or used
accepted operational models from sociology and psychology. For instance, highly
relevant approaches like Berger and Luckmann’s social construction of reality, Serge
Moscovici’s social psychology of social representation, or Maurice Halbwachs’ notions
of collective memory, or even Durkheim’s concepts of collective consciousness,
are not even mentioned in their “analysis”, let alone actually used in a
scientific way. Why? Because sociologists know the limits of their science, and
therefore the PSHers would have to admit the same…a believer can’t admit having
his “truth” limited.
For the ETH, and the
focus on the physical traces (CE-2) mentioned many times by Clark, I can only
say that the greatest expert of CE-2, Ted Philips, is now agreeing that the UFO
phenomenon is at its core a paranormal event. What more could one say about
analyzing CE-2 evidence?
Finally, both Rogerson
and Clark wrote about my approach being a rehashing of the 1970s. First, I have
been clear in my book that I picked up where it was left off, because not much
of worth has been produced (with the exception of people like Vallée, Randles
and a few others who persevered) since the collective delirium caused by the
Roswell / Majestic-12 non sense. Indeed, that period was a lot ado about
nothing. I integrate a number of new ideas and concepts that did not exist in
the 1970s. Science is not about fashion, it is about research and incremental
improvement. The PSH and especially the ETH have been going nowhere for a long
time now, so it is time to resume doing serious research, based on hypotheses.
