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June 14, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:12:19
Edition 398 - Professor Chris French

Renowned scientifc sceptic Professor Christopher French examines some of the things many people believe are paranormal...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
As ever, thank you very much for all of your emails and your reflections on the show, things you've been saying, people you've been suggesting to come on the show.
I'm working my way through all of that.
And I'm trying to answer as many emails individually as I can.
Now, if you send me an email that needs a response of some kind, then I'm trying as quickly as I can to get to send you one of those.
Nothing much to do in the way of shout-outs this time.
Just a little message for a guy called Andy.
And Andy, when I say this, you'll know who this is.
You sent me an email recently in an encrypted format.
I wonder if you can do me the favor of sending me that email in plain text, just so that I can see it properly.
I'd be very grateful for that, and then we can take it from there.
So that's for Andy.
If you want to get in touch with me, you can go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
That is theunexplained.tv.
It's the one-stop shop for this show.
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But, you know, these days everything is going up in cost.
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You might not about that.
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Thank you for that.
The guest on this edition of the show is a man called Professor Chris French, very well known in the media here in the UK.
I've had him on the radio quite a number of times over a lot of years.
He's based at Goldsmiths University in London, who do groundbreaking research on many things, including robotics.
They've got a leading researcher in robotics and sex robots there in Cape Devlin, who's written and spoken a lot about that subject.
But the particular topic for Chris French, and you may know this if you've heard my show before, is anomalous phenomena and how they may be explicable or explainable.
Chris French is the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the psychology department at Goldsmiths.
He's a fellow of the British Psychological Society and of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a patron of the British Humanist Association.
He's published more than 150 articles and chapters covering a wide range of topics.
We're going to talk about the other side of paranormality.
Those things that we may be inclined to jump immediately to a conclusion that yes, it was a UFO, or yes, the plate did move, or yes, that medium told me something that she couldn't possibly have known.
We're going to flip the coin from there to maybe more rational explanations, or certainly the need for more research.
Chris has done extensive research into not only mediums, but many other fields.
We're also going to talk about magic on this edition.
So just for once, this is not for the true believers, I don't think.
This is for all of us who believe that there may well be more in heaven and earth than we are able to see.
But those of us who retain also a skeptical point of view and try to be balanced about things, I think you know if you've listened to me for long enough that I have experienced and seen enough things in my life to believe that what we see is not all there is.
So to that extent, I am a convert.
But I have to say that, for example, I get sent an awful lot of videos of claimed UFOs and I have them checked out.
And very, very often, they are perfectly explainable as aircraft, birds, or whatever, or artifacts of cameras.
That's not to say that in a few percent of cases there isn't something truly unexplained there.
And that is the reason that I'm doing what I do.
So that's what I'm doing on this show.
Please keep in touch with me.
Always good to get your emails.
And thank you very much for your support on this show.
Okay, Professor Christopher French in London.
Like I said, he's the head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department of Goldsmiths University in London.
Chris, thank you very much for coming on my podcast.
My pleasure.
You are, according to, I mean, you know this yourself, but this is for the benefit of my listener, head of the anomalistic psychology research unit in the psychology department of Goldsmiths University in London.
That is one hell of a title.
What does that mean?
Well, basically, anomalistic psychology is primarily focused upon trying to see we can find non-paranormal explanations for ostensibly paranormal experiences.
So it's coming up things with a pretty skeptical perspective, but saying, is it possible that we can explain things like alien abduction claims, people who think they've seen ghosts or they've got psychic powers, you know, the whole range, everything from alien abductions to zombies we're interested in.
Is it possible that we might be able to explain these things without having to talk about paranormal forces?
In other words, just in terms of known psychological processes.
So are you a professional debunker?
I think that word debunker kind of has negative connotations.
Yes, I do spend some of my time what you would call debunking.
But to be honest, I'm far more interested in what's going on when People have those weird experiences that they undoubtedly really do have.
I'm interested in trying to understand what's going on psychologically when people hold beliefs that I personally find kind of a bit of a challenge.
I don't think they're supported by good empirical evidence.
Again, I might be wrong.
I would label myself as a skeptic, but for me, an important part of scepticism is to always be open to the possibility that you might be wrong.
So are you happy to be proved right, or are you waiting to be proved wrong?
No, I mean, I'll be honest, I'm human.
And one of the things that I'm very aware of from my own research is that we have a very strong bias towards confirmation, verification of our own views.
And that's one of the reasons why you have to tread very carefully.
That's one of the reasons why I think a scientific approach is the best approach, because at least then you can try and control for your own inevitable biases.
And anyone who says to you, I come at this completely objectively from a completely neutral perspective, I think they're fooling themselves.
I don't think there is such a thing.
To be human is to be biased.
I mean, the single most pervasive cognitive bias that we all suffer from is what we call confirmation bias.
We look very carefully at any evidence that seems to challenge our beliefs, but any evidence that seems to support them, yes, we're just quite happy to accept that as it is.
Thank you very much.
You know, and we all do that.
Anybody who says they don't, as I say, they're just fooling themselves.
And do you think that there is, clearly you do by the sounds of this, a lot of self-delusion, perhaps more now than there ever was?
I think it's always been around.
I think it's part of being human, to be quite honest.
And it's not always a bad thing.
You know, this is, it's kind of, you know, just in terms of my own personal history with respect to these kinds of topics, as I think I've probably told you before, Howard, I used to believe in a lot of this stuff up to kind of well into adulthood.
I would have definitely counted myself as a believer in lots of paranormal stuff.
Well, that's interesting then.
What evidence up to that point had you believing?
Well, it was just that basically most of the stuff that was around in terms of books, TV programmes, magazine, newspaper articles was all very, very pro-paranormal.
It was generally, you know, there was no critical skeptical perspective presented.
And I just actually kind of swallowed what I was told.
I'd see something on TV or I'd read something and take it at face value.
It was only kind of when I discovered the joys of skepticism back in the early 1980s that I realized that there was another perspective on this stuff, there was another approach.
And I think what's changed, I mean, you kind of said, you know, is there more kind of credulity, if you like, around now?
I don't think necessarily there is, but there have been some important changes insofar as kind of what would once maybe seen as being kind of quite outlandish ideas, like say flat earth belief and so on.
Now, thanks to the internet, people can find each other.
They can organize.
I'm sure you're aware, there have been kind of big conferences for flat earthers recently.
And it's something that's kind of caught on.
I'm sorry to break this to you, Howard, but it's fairly compelling evidence it isn't flat.
It's coming as a bit of a shock, I have to say.
You take some time off after the programme to recover.
But I mean, I don't think another factor that's here that's important is, you know, people kind of, with respect to kind of conspiracy theories, people sometimes think it's a kind of modern phenomenon.
Now, you know, I'm sure you're aware, it just isn't.
Conspiracy theories have been around since the dawn of recorded history and probably before that.
But again, what's different is, first of all, that these kinds of ideas and claims can kind of gain traction that they couldn't before, thanks to the good old internet.
And also, of course, we now have a president in the White House who's pretty much made conspiracy theories and fake news a kind of main part of the mainstream.
And I think that is different.
That's something we've not seen before.
Okay.
So you actually think that the fact that people have a greater ability to commune with each other, to communicate, to exchange ideas, to bolster their own beliefs by communicating with other people who believe the same thing, you actually think that that ability has given the more outlandish beliefs a strength that they may not have had 40 years ago?
I think that's right.
I mean, once upon a time, if you knew anybody, going back a couple of decades, if you knew anybody that sincerely believed the earth was flat, they probably just kept to themselves a lot.
They wouldn't really know anybody else probably who shared that belief.
But now, of course, they can find each other via the internet.
They can bob Facebook groups.
They can get together for social meetings.
They can exchange ideas.
I mean, it works on kind of all aspects.
I mean, again, looking back a few years, I say for me, discovering the joys of skepticism back in the 1980s, it was a very kind of niche area.
I mean, skeptics are weird, let's face it.
I'm the first one to acknowledge that.
I kind of would now take the position that there are kind of good psychological reasons why people might find certain kinds of beliefs very, very easy to accept because of our kind of evolutionary history.
And in some ways, it's the skeptics who are slightly weird who say, well, hang on, I want to see the evidence for that.
I'm not going to accept it just because it's, you know, it's in the newspapers or it's in a magazine.
I want to know what the evidence is for that.
But again, we can organize now like we could never do once before.
So there are kind of local skeptics groups up and down the country.
There are international conferences.
There are national conferences.
There are publications.
So, you know, as I say, well, it's right across the spectrum, whether you're talking about skeptics or believers.
People can just be more organized.
Right.
And let's flip it on its head for just a second.
Let's flip the coin here, spin the mirror.
Do you think that paranormal belief could be booming and flourishing because, rather than feel secure in numbers, because of the many threats to people these days and to their economic security and political threats and terrorism and all the things, climate change, all the things we have to worry about, do you think that people sometimes coalesce around paranormal beliefs to make themselves feel a little more comfortable, a bit more secure?
I think you've actually hit the nail on the head there.
There's quite a lot of evidence to show that all forms of what I would call magical thinking, so under that umbrella term, I would include paranormal belief, traditional superstitions.
For me, as an atheist, I put religious beliefs there, belief in unfounded conspiracy theories.
All of those things for me are examples of what I would call magical thinking.
And the evidence very strongly suggests that all of those things tend to increase at times of uncertainty, when we feel things are out of our control, when we're not sure what's around the next corner.
And so, you know, the two kind of obvious examples for me at the moment would be what's Trump going to do next and Brexit.
You know, there's such a lot of uncertainty.
I've never known a period like this in my lifetime for people just not knowing what's going on, what's happening.
And as I say, there's also, we're kind of being flooded with fake news.
There's a tendency for some people at least just to accept any information they're given without bothering to check it because it just fits with their preconceptions.
As I say, we're all prone to that to some extent, but at least some of us are aware of it and maybe try to be a bit careful.
We do actually, some of us do actually care about the truth, I suppose, is the bottom line here.
I think there may well be a measure of this, and I do get a sneaking feeling, but then I come at it at a different perspective from you.
I personally think that some of these things may be true, but a lot of them are not true.
But that's a whole other issue.
But what we're saying here is that in terms of conspiracy theories, in a world where people are running out of things and people to believe in, they have to find things to believe in.
Yeah.
And I think, I mean, there are all kinds of reasons why people might be motivated to believe in conspiracies.
I think there's a general tendency that we don't like the idea that bad stuff can just happen just totally out of the blue.
We like to feel that things are a bit more ordered than that.
So the idea that some tragic events, the death of Diana, for example, could just be due to a slightly tipsy driver.
That doesn't feel right.
That's just kind of too unpredictable.
So instead, the idea that even if it's something bad, there's something in control that made that happen.
There's some conspiracy behind it.
But of course, in the case of Diana, we're not going to go down that particular rabbit hole here because we could be debating that issue for a very long time.
But there were factors in that that seem odd.
Like, for example, she wasn't taken to the nearest hospital.
She was taken to another hospital.
And we later learned that it was the French practice to treat people more at the scene than we do here.
So that was one of the things that was said to be odd, but in fact isn't.
Then there was the mystery disappearing Fiat Car and people who've, and then the many claims of people who've disappeared or died around that, which you must have seen.
Well, yeah, I mean, again, like you say, I really don't want to get into kind of the details of discussing any particular conspiracy because I think for our purposes, that would be fairly pointless.
And the other thing to say is, of course, that psychologists and other social scientists and political scientists who have an interest in conspiracy theories, we're not denying that sometimes conspiracies really do take place.
What about JFK then?
Did JFK get killed by a lone gunman acting on his own?
Just said we wouldn't do.
I know, but just in that, in the daddy of them all, in the case of the daddy of all of the conspiracy theories, there are a decreasing number of people who believe that it was just Lee Harvey Oswald.
I think the statistics have gone up and down, but there's a lot of people who believe that it wasn't just Lee Harvey Oswald.
But interestingly, if you break it down and look at who believes in each particular conspiracy theory, that's quite a small number.
It's not like there's one alternative theory to the so-called official story that everybody buys into.
Some people think it's the CIA, some people think it's the FBI, some people think it's the mafia.
You know, there's a whole, there's not just one JFK conspiracy theory.
There are dozens of them.
And they're all mutually contradictory.
They can't all be true.
If any of them are true, there can only be one of them.
So, you know, I mean, and that's one of the things that makes trying to reason with conspiracy theories something of a frustrating exercise.
If you take the really, really big conspiracies, JFK, the fake moon landings, 9-11, every time you nail down one particular claim and say, well, that can be explained because of X, Y, and Z. That's what was happening there.
They say, oh, yes, but what about such a thing?
And they raise something else.
So it's frustrating.
It's like trying to nail jelly to the wall arguing with these people.
And as I say, just to go back to my main point, any one individual conspiracy may actually turn out to be true.
Maybe not some of the more outlandish ones.
I mean, I really, you know, I don't feel the need to spend a lot of time examining the claim that the Earth's being run by shape-shifting lizards.
I just think that's so implausible.
I'm not going to go there.
Well, I do know people who would take you to task on denying that one, I have to say.
But what you're saying is that one or two conspiracy theories may in the fullness of time be proved to be correct, but that doesn't make them all right.
Well, it's not just that.
What I'm interested in from a psychological point of view is the fact that some people are much more readily drawn to conspiracy theories than others.
You know, to the extent that you and I could make up a conspiracy now between us on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, and we could put that in a survey along with other kind of more well-established conspiracy theories, and we would get a few percentage of people who would say, Yeah, I believe that's true.
On the basis of what?
No evidence whatsoever.
We just made it up, you know.
Pete, there's research to show that, I mean, yeah, I think you had Dan Jolly on your programme a while back, and I mean, Dan has worked with Karen Douglas, and Karen's got a great team of people, but the research that that team have done show that people will even believe in mutually contradictory conspiracy theories.
And of course, what explains this is that it's not so much that they believe, back to what I was saying before, in one particular conspiracy, there's just a general distrust of the official story.
And sometimes beliefs that are proved pretty much to be completely outlandish and totally wrong, even when that happens, and I'm looking at the other side of it here, but even when that happens, those particular beliefs will still be propounded.
You know, there is the one about Prince Harry and that James Hewitt, the man his mother had an affair with, is really his father.
Even though he's denied that, the chronology doesn't suggest that.
And just looking at his face and his facial characteristics certainly gives the lie to that.
And yet, even though all of those things have been said, and the principal person involved in that particular, you can't really call it conspiracy theory, but theory, has said absolutely not, and the fact that the chronology doesn't allow for it, nevertheless, people are still saying it.
Well, this is it.
I mean, and these kind of, I mean, one thing about conspiracy theories more generally is that they're often kind of immune from falsification.
There's a friend of mine, Stephen Law, a philosopher, who talks about intellectual black holes.
There are certain kinds of belief systems that once you're inside them, it's very difficult to get out.
Because, and again, with respect to conspiracy theories, for a lot of them, the idea is that you don't have to accept any evidence that appears to contradict the theory because that will have been put there by the conspirators.
That's misinformation, that's disinformation, you can ignore it.
The only information you need to take seriously is information that supports the conspiracy theory.
Now, you know, if you buy into that mindset, well, you're never going to get out of it.
There's nothing that could falsify your view, you know.
But equally, you cannot deny that security agencies and governments at various levels do sometimes reverse engineer the truth.
They lay false trails for people.
They try to make sure that some of the deeds that are done in their name sometimes don't get found out.
So we can't always say that when somebody says that something is not what it appears to be, that that's rubbish.
No, I'd agree that that is.
And again, of course, that's going to complicate the picture.
You know, I mean, to my mind as a sceptic, you know, why is it there's always so many sightings of UFOs near military bases?
Well, I think a rather plausible explanation of that would be that sometimes they're testing secret military technology at those bases and they don't want people to know about it.
They're not going to admit it.
So if somebody sees something weird in one of those areas, they'll just prefer that that person is dismissed as being some kind of UFO nutter.
And yet I talked to somebody who was working on a military base in America in the 60s, a very celebrated case, and this person was on duty and he was one of the military personnel absolutely panicked when the missiles there that were primed and ready to go just in case the Soviets decided to kick off closed themselves down because of the presence of something very strange hovering over the place.
How do you explain that?
Is that mass hysteria?
Well, again, I don't know.
I'd have to look at the, I mean, again, I would have to look at the individual details of the claim, you know, did it fit in with other known facts, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, the problem is that most of us don't have the time to do that.
And, you know, with respect to these kinds of UFO claims, I mean, as I say, I used to be a believer in a lot of this stuff.
And I know that sometimes evidence can be presented in such a way that it appears to provide a very, very compelling case.
But very often, and I know this on the basis of personal experience, once you start digging deeper, the cases sometimes just crumble, they fall apart.
I mean, for me, you know, Roswell was such a case.
Rendlesham is such a case.
Why Rendlesham?
Because I think there are more plausible explanations.
I think one of the reasons that Rendlesham has become such a classic in, and I think it is a great, it's one of the best cases, you know, no question.
I think it's better than Roswell, personally, you know, but then again, I'm British.
Well, there are times when I agree with you, I have to say.
Yeah, I mean, I think that what makes these really classic cases, the ones that last and last and last, is because I don't think there's just one factor that played a part there.
I think there were a number of different things.
And again, it's a long time since I've really been in depth in terms of my knowledge of Rendlesham.
But it strikes me as very plausible that the lighthouse sighting was one of the things that contributed.
But there were other things as well.
Well, there are people who say that the lighthouse affected that the lighthouse nearby was shining across that area and giving that kind of ethereal impression.
But other people say, no, that could not have been the fact.
And one of the things that overarches all of it is that, you know, seasoned military people, some of them on those nights, were left very scared.
I can believe they were left very scared.
I mean, there's a kind of myth that, you know, professional people wouldn't make these kinds of errors, couldn't get themselves into a state over these things.
And I mean, yes, they could.
There are well-documented cases of airline pilots reporting that they can see a craft just a few hundred meters or just whiz past them.
And you look at the analysis, you look at what, was there anything happening in that part of the sky in that direction at that particular moment?
And you realize it was a meteorite literally hundreds of miles away.
But you're not immune to these kinds of effects just because you're a professional.
And yet again, I know in many ways we're talking generalities about these things, and it's pointless talking about specifics.
But in terms of what you just said, earlier this year, there were the, or I think it was just at the back end of last year, the case of the commercial airline pilots.
I think one of them was from Virgin, but there were one or two others off Ireland.
And they all reported seeing something.
And it made all of the newspapers.
And I even played on my radio show a recording of the air traffic controllers conversations about that in Ireland.
It was a most bizarre thing.
And I don't think up to this point it has been explained.
No, again, you know, I think that it may well be that we won't ever have a definitive explanation for that.
That does not automatically equal ET.
For me, it's more likely it was some kind of natural phenomenon as yet unidentified.
It might have been ET, who knows?
But I mean, it's quite interesting that the way that if you look back at the history of ufology, you know, again, I know I'm telling you stuff you already know, Howard, I appreciate that.
But as you will know, it's 1947, big year.
You know, we had both Roswell and we had the phrase flying saucer entering the language for the first time.
And there was a series of so-called flaps after that, where there were sightings across, you know, lots of people making sightings across America and in other parts of the world to the extent that they founded Project Blue Book and so on and so forth.
They were worried about it.
But if you look back at the opinion polls from that time as to what do you think these strange aerial phenomena are due to, you have things, I mean, the frontrunner was kind of secret Soviet technology.
But also people say, you know, weather balloons, meteorological phenomena, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
ET didn't appear as an option even.
It wasn't part of the public consciousness then.
Whereas now we so readily make that link to, oh, there's something up there in the sky and I don't know what it is.
It must be an extraterrestrial.
That's a huge inferential leap.
It's far more likely to be one of those other things that were on that list.
And yeah, we just made that link automatically now.
You know, we all do it.
I remember as a teenager being desperate to see a UFO.
You know, I used to scan the night sky in the hope that I'd see something.
But even if I did, you know, these days, there's all kinds of laser displays, there's Chinese lanterns, there's all kinds of stuff.
But just because you don't know what something is doesn't make it an extraterrestrial.
And what about those people, some of them not inclined to believe conspiracy theories or anything wacky very readily, who found themselves, they say, being abducted and taken aboard craft?
Betty and Barney Hill, of course, the daddy of those stories, but many, many others.
The Pasca Gula case, of course, which has only just been rediscovered, retalked about by the person involved in that, the people involved in that.
These people can't all be making it up, or can they?
I don't think they are making it up.
I mean, my personal view on this is that, I mean, a minority of the cases, and I do think it would be a minority, may be deliberate hoaxes.
I think there's some good evidence that the Travis Walton case was almost certainly a deliberate hoax.
And yet I have interviewed Travis Walton a couple of times, and I have to say that in terms of the story he puts, it is both powerful and to my ears, and I've heard people telling what we call porky pies here.
That's rhyming slang for lies.
You know, his account to me sounds completely credible or sounds very, very credible.
Let's put it that way.
Yeah, I mean, one, I mean, there are lots of aspects of it that I find at least dubious, shall we say, not least the fact that apparently he phoned his mother a few days before he was abducted to kind of say, if I do ever get abducted, mum, don't worry, I'll be fine.
Yeah, right.
Do you know that happened?
Well, of course, I mean, have you read, you've read presumably Philip Klass's analysis of this case.
And I've talked to the man himself.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I envy you there.
I've never had that pleasure.
But yeah, again, I kind of tend to go along with Phil Klass on this one.
But again, I've not done any first-hand research into it.
I've never, you know, I don't claim that kind of expertise.
But all right, let's just kind of let the general point pass that some of these cases could potentially be deliberate hoaxes.
That's one possibility.
As it happens, I don't think that most of them are.
I think that most people who claim alien contact probably sincerely believe that they have had alien contact.
But for me, a more plausible explanation is that we're dealing with false memories here.
And there is certainly some evidence to support that notion.
If you look at the personality profile of the people who claim alien contact, they show a lot of characteristics of people who would tend to be more susceptible to false memories on the basis of what we know from psychological studies in that area.
But Betty and Barney Hill were professional people, very grounded.
Again, you're going back to this thing that, oh, they're professional people, therefore, this couldn't apply to them.
Yes, it could.
It could.
You know, it could apply, you know, if I come on your show in two weeks' time and I claim that I have been abducted by aliens or I've had a profound near-death experience or blah, blah, blah, and you know, and all that other stuff I was saying two weeks ago, that's complete bullshit.
That's all wrong.
I didn't know what I was talking about then.
It doesn't, it doesn't, just because I'm saying it doesn't actually make it true.
I'm not saying that I or you or anybody else is not susceptible to some of the kinds of phenomena, the biases, the hallucinatory experiences, the false memories.
I think these are things that affect everybody to a greater or lesser extent.
But in some cases, they lead to people claiming alien abduction.
In some cases, they lead to people claiming that they've had past lives.
There's a whole range Of different things that could end up as being the result.
So, you know, we have to kind of look at the available evidence as a whole and come to a decision as to what we think is the most likely.
And that's all we can do.
Anybody, again, I said before that anybody who claims that they're totally objective and neutral when they look at this stuff is just only fooling themselves.
Anybody who claims that they are certain that they have the answer on a lot of these issues, I think, again, you can't be certain.
You could just say, this is my best guess as to what's happening on the basis of the available evidence as I read it at the moment.
And what of, if you're talking about past lives, what about one of the most famous ones in this country?
They even made a television documentary about it, about the little boy who had an apparent memory of living on a little Scottish island.
And they took him to that Scottish island, which I think is called Barra.
And the little boy seemed to know details of the history of that place that he couldn't have known, knew things like the plane would land on the beach there, little seaplane thing or whatever it was would land on the beach there, the particular time of day, that somebody was run over by a tractor, I think it was, there he knew that, and that had happened decades before.
How could a little tiny boy know those things?
Well, I was actually in that documentary.
Yes.
I met Cameron's mum and she was, I mean, again, I mean, people often ask me when I do talks on this, so, you know, I'll inevitably get asked the question, have you ever come across anything that you couldn't explain?
I was having a chat with Richard Wiseman.
He said, just say no and move on to the next question.
But no, I don't do that.
I kind of cite a couple of examples because, again, I don't know what the definitive explanation was in that case.
I wouldn't claim to.
There were some things, if you recall, that didn't seem to be borne out by the historical evidence that was available.
There were some things that did seem kind of quite a challenge to skip.
Well, there was a skeleton of very strange evidence.
Maybe there were half a dozen points there that we were left scratching our heads about at the end of that documentary.
I'm sorry that my mind was playing tricks with me.
I'd forgotten that you were in it.
Sorry.
That's forgivable.
I think I was one of the most less memorable parts.
No, sure, you were very good.
I just can't remember.
I didn't ever get to meet Cameron, I think his name was.
I did get to meet his mum.
They brought his mum down to my office at Goldsmiths.
And my role in the programme was to kind of offer some kind of skeptical perspective, suggest some alternative explanations, which I did to the best of my ability.
I didn't get to, as I say, meet the little boy himself.
I didn't get to go and visit the island myself.
I wasn't with them when they did that.
But I do remember watching the programme.
And I mean, again, in terms of scientific evidence, it's not got very much value at all.
But I distinctly remember how his behaviour changed the moment he went into that house.
You know, because up to that point, he was a kind of bouncy little, I think he was about 10 at the time, wasn't he?
You know, kind of lively little kid.
But the moment he walked in, he just completely changed, just walked around silently looking at everything.
Yeah, and it made quite an impact on me.
So that's one of, I say there are two programs that I refer to as being things where, you know, I've got a mental box that's got a question mark on it.
Things where I think, yeah, that was really intriguing.
I would like to know what was going on there.
Well, it's nice to know that you do believe there's a certain percentage of things over which that question mark should hang.
Now, ghosts, you made the papers recently talking about ghosts, some research that was done at Goldsmiths to do with the fact that people report ghosts and a lot of the time they're in a state where they're falling asleep or they're lying on the bed and they're kind of in a dreamy, sleepy kind of state.
And quite often they report ghosts and strange presences at that time.
And I think you put it all down to sleep paralysis.
I put a lot of it down to sleep paralysis, certainly.
I mean, because sleep paralysis is a kind of known phenomenon.
It's something that can be induced in the sleep laboratory.
We know more or less what causes it in terms of the kind of psychophysiology of what's going on.
And I get sense, lots and lots of first-hand accounts from people of their own sleep paralysis experiences, and they are absolutely terrifying.
I can understand why people are scared witless.
But, you know, I mean, I like to be able, wherever possible, to kind of reassure people and say, well, I'm sure it is absolutely terrifying, but I think that what you're talking about is probably this thing called sleep paralysis.
And it's a, you know, it's a scientifically recognized phenomenon.
It's under-researched, and certainly it's under-researched in terms of the best ways that people should try to, you know, strategies for coping with it and for dealing with it.
But, you know, to let them know, first of all, they're not the only person in the world who is having this experience.
And secondly, to give them at least a few tips based on little more than anecdotal evidence at the moment, unfortunately, as to how they might try to get a grip on it and cope with it.
Some people are saying that that condition that we all get into, that sleep paralysis condition and the conditions close to it, open up portals to other dimensions that we do not fully understand.
From what you're saying, it sounds like you believe that they just open up portals to deeper recesses of our brains.
Effectively, yeah.
It's a hallucinatory experience.
You know, as I say, it can be induced in the sleep laboratory.
We can see that despite the fact that someone may just describe an episode of sleep paralysis, we could see that actually there was nothing else in the room with them.
There was nothing else happening.
You know, I mean, hallucinations, we know they happen.
Nobody would dispute that.
And I mean, hallucinations amongst the non-clinical population.
Again, just because you might have some hallucinatory experiences, people get very defensive if you imply that maybe it was a hallucinatory experience because they think that basically what you're saying is you're crazy.
That's just not true.
Hallucinations can happen to and do happen to anybody.
Do you have to be in that kind of less than conscious state?
They can happen under all sorts of circumstances.
There are many, many cases of people, say, getting stranded on mountains and hallucinating that there's some kind of guide leading them to safety.
we only get the stories from the people who get back.
We don't get the stories from the ones whose guide led them over a crevice, you know, and got to certain death.
But, you know, but these experiences can happen under a variety.
They can happen under a range of different circumstances.
But how could I be in a radio station at the top of a tower in Liverpool doing a late-night talk show, filling in for a guy called Pete Price, who is a legend up there?
And, you know, I was absolutely focused, completely wide awake.
Yes, it was one o'clock in the morning, but it was a four-hour show.
And it was one o'clock.
The news was on.
We were going to go to commercials after that, so I had four minutes to go upstairs, go to the loo, go to the toilet for our American listeners, come back down and go back to the studio.
And I am absolutely in the zone, completely focused and totally awake.
Outside the studio door, I see a little guy wearing an old-style workman's overcoat, a cloth cap, shiny black boots.
He looked at me, and as he looked at me, he disappeared in front of my eyes.
And I walked into the only other person who was there was the producer.
It was in the little booth, in the control room.
And I said, Jonathan, I've just seen something really strange.
I said, I don't know what's wrong with me tonight.
And he said, you've seen him, haven't you?
Now, we hadn't had a conversation about that.
I'd never heard about the fact that there was a ghost claimed there.
But other people had reported exactly what I had seen.
I had no idea about that.
What could that, was that?
Was that a kind of mass hallucination?
All of those people who see that workman in the tower at different times?
Are we all deluded?
Again, I'm going to put that one in my box with a question mark on Howard because I don't have a definitive explanation for you, okay?
Some of my listeners will be saying, oh, this is all very interesting.
Okay.
So some of this can be explained, you think, as sleep paralysis.
I was interviewing a woman from the Philippines who lives in the States now called Adele Casalez-Rocha.
And I would definitely recommend that you speak with her about your researches because she's researched an awful lot of cases in the Philippines.
And there's one case here that I'm thinking of of a family who, and most of this happened in the 60s, but right up until like the 90s, who were tormented by presences and all sorts of things.
And in fact, the man of the house, the patriarch figure, ended up very sadly killing himself.
But people, not only him, were reporting something like a bat with a six-foot wingspan that was terrorizing those people in that place called Little Baggio in the Philippines.
But it wasn't only him.
I mean, he was a man who was depressed, so he did have some issues.
And some of that depression, I think, led from the things that were going on in that house, but perhaps not all of it.
But a servant, people had servants in those days there in the Philippines, also saw it.
Other people saw the same thing.
And how can that be?
Does that go into the question mark box?
I mean, again, I would have to look at the details of the specific case.
Certainly we know that your belief systems, your expectations can have an influence on the imagery that you might experience during an episode of sleep paralysis.
So that is one possible factor.
There's some very interesting cross-cultural studies of sleep paralysis and the way that it can influence what you might actually perceive.
I mean, sleep paralysis, for me, is one of the big factors involved in alien abduction claims.
And a colleague of mine who was doing research on sleep paralysis, again, this is anecdotal evidence, but it's quite interesting.
One of the people that he had been studying who suffered from sleep paralysis repeatedly, but had never had the experience, he didn't know there was any link between sleep paralysis and alien abduction claims, but when he found out about it, the very night, that very night when he went to sleep, he had a sleep paralysis attack on what appeared as part of his imagery, a four-foot high grey alien.
And he'd say, you know, even at the time it was happening, he knew exactly why this was happening because that was the day he'd heard about this link.
So, you know, what happens with sleep paralysis, I think in terms of the imagery, the things that you actually see, it can sometimes be very, very idiosyncratic indeed, you know, just totally weird.
But also, people will tend to see certain kind of figures that are part of maybe their religious belief system or whatever it may be.
So there could be an element of that in the particular story that you tell.
If any of these experiences were happening kind of outside of the possibility of sleep paralysis, there could be other factors that might explain it.
And what about hypnosis?
People who are put under hypnosis and they dig out recollections of alien abductions or perhaps past lives or other strange things.
What do you make of those accounts?
Well, I think, I mean, again, I mean, I think with hypnosis, we can be even more certain that we're dealing with false memories because we know that hypnosis can be used to implant false memories, you know, in experimental studies.
But in documented cases that I've looked at, those memories, those recollections, you know, they've just arisen.
They've come out.
Yes, well, yeah, it depends.
I mean, I would make a distinction between those past life memories which are spontaneous, where no hypnosis or any other kind of memory recovery techniques have been used.
And then there are those where hypnotic regression.
We know that hypnotic regression leads to false memories.
For example, I mean, quite apart from the kind of paranormal related stuff, and I can talk about that quite happily in a second if you like, but a lot of us have seen hypnotic regression back to childhood.
And if you see somebody going through this, they're hypnotizing regress back to the age of seven, say.
Remember when you were at your birthday party when you were seven, and they appear to be reliving it.
And their behavior changes, their vocabulary, their voice changes, their mannerisms, everything.
It can be, you know, it can be quite spooky, quite impressive.
But when you actually analyze the behavior properly, when you get developmental psychologists looking at it, it's quite clear that what's actually happening is you've got a situation there where you've got adults behaving the way they think seven-year-olds behave, not the way that actual seven-year-olds do behave.
So sometimes they'll appear to be able to do things that actually no seven-year-old could actually do, and other times they'll kind of appear befuddled by stuff that a seven-year-old could do quite easily.
So there's no question about it.
It's a role enactment that's happening there.
It's not a genuine mental time travel situation where somebody's now back in their seven-year-old body, so to speak.
So we know that.
We also know that people often with kind of hypnotic past life regression claims, the details just don't check out.
You sometimes get situations, for example, where you might ask the person who's been hypnotically regressed back into a past life.
You ask them, kind of, well, what year is it?
And they'll say, 50 BC.
Well, think about it.
They didn't call it 50 BC in 50 BC because C hadn't happened yet.
No, there are all kinds of other problems.
And again, another kind of nice example, experimental work where you can show that what people report during hypnotic past life regression is heavily influenced by the expectations you need them to have.
They've done studies where they hypnotically regress people and they'll say, oh, and one of the interesting things we've found is that whenever people are hypnotically regressed, they're always the same gender as they were in this life.
And you get another group where you say, oh, one of the interesting things we've found is that very often in past lives, people aren't actually the same gender as they are in this life.
And guess what you get?
You get reports that correspond to what they've been led to believe.
So clearly, it's not genuine.
And also the other big, big giveaway is that you get the Hollywood version of life in that era.
You don't get the historically accurate version.
So there's no question at all that hypnotic past life regression is based on false memories.
And hypnosis generally, you can't use evidence that if you've hypnotized a witness, say, in a criminal case, you cannot use evidence in court because it's recognized that hypnosis causes false memories.
We don't fully understand the workings of the brain.
It is a miraculous thing and we have hundreds of years probably of research to do into it before we do fully understand how it works.
But do you believe that everything that occurs to us, even if we cannot consciously record it, is recorded in there some way?
Absolutely not.
That's definitely not the way memory works.
We just know that's the case.
And this is one of the fundamental problems with, you know, that affects a lot of kind of misconception.
That's probably the number one misconception about how memory works.
Memory is a reconstructive process, and that's why it's error-prone.
So whenever you remember anything, you're basing that report that you're giving on memory traces that are more or less accurate from the incident itself, gaps that you may have unconsciously filled in later.
Sometimes you may have got things right, sometimes you may have got things wrong.
There's a whole host of things going on.
And memory is incredibly malleable.
You know, we know that.
There's no question about it.
We have techniques that we can use to reliably implant false memories in a large proportion of the general population, which in itself is quite a worrying prospect.
It is.
Yeah, but we have that.
We know that memory does not work like a video recorder, a video camera accurately recording every detail of everything you experience.
That is just not how memory works.
We spoke on my radio show earlier this year a lot about mediums.
So I don't want to speak a lot about mediums now, but I know that you have your views of mediums and you are not at all convinced by any of it, I don't think, for reasons that I understood.
And yet, there are people who will tell you the most remarkable researched accounts of mediums.
There is a man who you will know, Alan Gould now.
Alan Gould I first met a very long time ago in the 80s when I was just a student.
And I went to interview him about these things at the University of Nottingham.
And he told me a story about a colleague of his who'd passed over.
And information was relayed to him through a medium purporting to relay information from this colleague of his who said, does Alan still like steak?
Was the message that was given back to Alan.
Now, Alan didn't know, couldn't have known, that every time he was due to visit this colleague, he always asked his wife, the colleague, make sure you get a nice piece of steak for Alan.
Now, Alan didn't know that that person was concerned about or knew about Alan's predilection for steak.
And that seems pretty evidential to me.
I'm not really telling the story as well as he does.
Again, we'd have to look at the details of the story.
A lot of the time, these stories end up...
they get better and better.
Any bits of the story that don't really fit the main narrative tend to get dropped out or altered a little bit and so on.
So you have to go back and try and, now with something like this, it's an interesting anecdote.
That's all it is, Howard.
Okay, well, in my own lifetime, there's a medium that I know.
he actually, many, many years ago went to my mother and father's house, and I was recording an interview with him.
And while we were there, this I'm talking about a very long time ago now, during that student era, he did a reading for my mother and father.
And he said to my father, my father wasn't really a man who was, you know, my father was no pushover, you know, ex-policeman, no pushover at all, even though he'd had some experiences that we cannot explain.
But he said to my, the medium said to my father, is somebody near you going through a divorce at the moment?
And he proceeded to give him a few details about this.
And my father categorically said, no, there is nobody around me at work going through a divorce at the moment.
And at the very end of it, and I've got this on recording and both my parents are dead now, but I still have this recording of them and the medium.
At the very end of it, my father said, oh, yes, there is somebody near me going through a divorce, very near to me at work, going through a divorce at the moment.
And the details that he'd given were correct.
Now, I guess you might say that that was just kind of information mining by the medium, would you?
It could have been.
It would depend.
You'd have to look at the reading as a whole.
And, you know, what proportion of what the medium said actually seemed to make sense.
I mean, the way to test this properly, and, you know, people have done this.
I've done some studies like this, Richard Wiseman, various other people.
You would have to have a situation where the person that the reading is being done for isn't aware of the fact that the reading is being done for them.
So the way that we test mediums when we've tested them, we will get them to do their readings for a number of volunteer sitters, but they don't get to see the sitter.
That's important because you can tell things about a person from their appearance.
They don't talk to them.
They don't get any feedback from them.
They're quite happy to do the readings on this basis, I should add.
You know, there's no point in testing people.
They say, well, I can't do it under those conditions.
But they'll do the readings.
Then we will get the sitters to come back later in the day and say, okay, here are all the readings.
Which is the one that was done for you?
I think that's a good test.
If mediums can really do what they say they can do, there ought to be one reading there that's got a lot of detail that applies just to that person.
They're going to think, oh, this is me.
This is the one that's for me.
They don't pass that test.
Now, that is the way to test it.
If you've got a situation where somebody knows that a reading is being done for them, they are doing the work of trying to think, well, how do I make sense of this?
What could this be referring to?
You know, as I say, if somebody can do a reading for a complete stranger and come out with lots of accurate details that seem to fit, then that's superficially impressive.
I do know, I mean, you're familiar with cold reading, Howard.
I know lots of people who are kind of very, very good cold readers.
And I can watch them doing a reading and think, my God, that's incredible.
How did they figure that out?
I've even passed myself off as a psychic on Richard and Judy once, just purely on the basis of cold reading.
And I don't claim to be great at it by any means, but even I could do it and convince somebody that I had psychic powers.
So are you saying that in the research you did, none of the mediums reading for those sitters was able to give accurate enough and specific enough information to satisfy your criteria?
Exactly what I'm saying.
Yeah.
Okay.
Do you plan to go back to that research or is that a done deal?
It seems to be a little bit of a waste of time.
I mean, you know, because I don't personally think that it's going to deliver the goods.
And, you know, it'd be great if I had an infinite, you know, number of hours in a day and infinite resources.
Then yes, I would definitely kind of do some more of that.
But, you know, as it is, I don't think it's a very promising line of research.
So, you know, I will see, you know.
How could you say, which you did, that, you know, I've interviewed extensively Guy Lyon Playfair.
So you know what I'm about to say.
How could you say, which you have, that the Enfield poltergeist is not the paranormal case that a lot of people believe it was?
Well, because unlike Guy, I kind of am aware of the way that eyewitnesses can be unreliable.
You know, in that particular case, we do know, and you will not deny this, that the kids were caught faking stuff.
But Guy, Lion Playfair, would have said, ah, yes, but there were other stuff they could not possibly have faked.
There was a lot of stuff that, you know, he swears was not, it couldn't have been at all faked.
It was from the Society for Psychical Research who went in and just concluded that the kids were faking it all.
You know, I mean, again, we could back into about this one all night.
I mean, again, it's one of the kind of cases that will never die.
I must have taken part in at least three documentaries about the Enfield Poltergeist case by now, and it will no doubt raise its head again.
It's always going to be there.
But what we're going to need to really establish whether any of these claims about mysterious forces and people with amazing powers are true, I think the historical evidence is interesting.
We shouldn't ignore it.
It's never going to convince people.
We need something that's happening now under well-controlled conditions where we could actually say, yeah, okay, yeah, we've really established there is something going on there.
And it's always when you get under those well-controlled conditions that these effects just seem to evaporate.
Now, back in May, you were involved in something called Smoke and Mirrors, an exposition or exhibition to do with the psychology of magic.
Talk to me about that.
Yeah, this is a really great exhibition, I would say, on at the Wellcome Collection near Euston Station.
It's on until September.
It's free.
And there are also a series of free talks associated with it.
So check out the website if you want to go to any of the talks.
But it's a fascinating exhibition.
It's basically partly about the psychology of magic, partly about the history of psychical research and the role that conjurers and magicians have played in investigating some of these kinds of claims.
And as I say, I think it's got very good reviews.
I think people would enjoy it.
I think you would enjoy it, Howard.
There's lots of really interesting kind of exhibits there and so on.
The talks that I was doing were basically around the theme of what we call top-down processing, the way that your beliefs and your expectations can influence you when you are presented with kind of ambiguous information.
And so in particular, I was talking about EVP, the electronic voice phenomenon.
And, well, there were three main areas that I covered.
One was EVP.
One was the claim that there are satanic messages embedded in rock music and pop music, but you can only hear those messages when you play the records backwards.
And the third area was something called reverse speech theory, which was this ridiculous pseudo-scientific idea that whenever we speak, we're actually producing simultaneously two different messages.
One, the one that you are hearing now with your conscious mind, is a legend.
This is a theory produced by a guy called David Oates.
I know I've spoken with him quite a number of times.
And I have to say, some of the examples that he plays really do sound convincing.
But you were saying that, and I think what you're about to say is that David Oates research claims that what people say as they're speaking, like we're speaking now, the real meanings behind where they're coming from are hidden in reversing what they say.
You can hear other messages, the truth, in fact.
He says that the left hemisphere of my brain is producing the message you're consciously hearing now.
I would tend to agree with him on that part.
But if you recorded what I'm saying and play it backwards, and maybe some of your listeners will do this, it would be great.
I would love to have some fantastic examples of reverse speech from my own voice.
That'd be brilliant.
But yeah, there are hidden messages there that you can only hear if you've recorded my speech and played it backwards.
You must have heard those examples.
Some of them are very weird.
I mean, some of them, I really, if I listened to them 50 times, I wouldn't hear anything strange in them.
But some of them do seem to be interesting, at least.
Well, I strongly suspect that if you were to play all of them, I mean, I play lots of them to audiences that I do talks for.
And the point I make is that you cannot actually hear the message until somebody tells you what the message is.
Well, yeah, 80% agree, but in some cases, when we've done this live on radio, I have heard words in the backwards message.
In a lot of cases, I haven't until I've been told, I have to say.
Okay, so sometimes just purely by chance, in a vast amount, I mean, remember what you're getting when you have him on your program.
They're his best examples.
Okay, they're the ones that after having trawled through thousands of hours of backwards speech, he's found something that, oh yeah, that does sound a bit like the word such and such.
So it sounds to me like you think that's a pseudoscience.
I don't think it.
I mean, I know I said we should never be certain about something, but I'm as damn close to certainty as I possibly can be on this one.
Well, if David Oates, if you're listening, the man's name is Professor Chris French.
I'm sure you're happy to give your email address.
But what about electronic voice phenomena?
I have interviewed so many people who have played me examples of things they've recorded at so-called haunted locations.
And you've definitely been able to hear on replay, you know, the words of a child saying, mummy, they're coming to get me or something like that.
Well, again, I mean, I think it would very much depend on the individual circumstances.
I mean, I did a, again, I think it was, oh, it was this morning a few years back where the paranormal investigator in question was playing his EVP.
And I have to admit, it definitely was someone singing Celine Dion songs.
And it was terrifying.
I just don't think it was a ghost, that's all.
So it was obviously Celine Dion songs being sung badly, yes?
Very badly.
But I mean, you know, you've got a situation where sometimes you might be inadvertently recording the voices of living human people.
You've got a situation where sometimes it's possibly just kind of random background noises on very poor recording equipment.
A lot of the clips that you'll get if you go to the websites are very, very short.
They're very, very, you know, very, very poor sound quality.
And again, this was the very point that I was making in these presentations I've been doing at the Smoke and Mirrors exhibition, where I'll play people this stuff and I'll say to the audience, so what do you think that was?
And they don't know.
They just don't know.
They have no idea.
And I say, well, actually, if on the website, it's this.
And I play it again.
And yeah, you can kind of hear that now.
And that's top-down processing.
That's the way our expectations are influencing the way that we perceive ambiguous stimuli.
And again, I'm sure there's an example you're familiar with, not from the EVP literature, but from the back masking literature.
As far as I'm concerned with respect to back masking, the top of the satanic pops is Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin.
And that is just a beautiful, beautiful demonstration of the power of top-down processing.
I've been doing this for years now.
I'll crowbar it into any talk I do, whether it's relevant or not, because it's just such a good demonstration.
You play the clip forwards, and having given the context of saying it's about satanic messages, I'll usually say to the audience, I suspect that for most of you, it will sound totally like backwards gibberish, but one or two of you will pick up on one or two words.
And sure enough, there's always a couple of people who say, I think I heard the word Satan.
Well, again, that's top-down processing.
What's the word you're most likely to hear?
a satanic message, it's the word Satan.
And then I show them the kind of paragraph that people claim is really there, and I play it again.
The second time I play it, it sounds completely different.
It's the same sound file, it's just that now you have the expectation in mind that there is that message there.
And it's great, it's a great demonstration.
I love to watch people's jaws drop as they listen to it, but the message is not really there.
They didn't have the technology to do it, there was no way they could have done it, but it's a fantastic demonstration of the power of top-down processing.
What would you do if you saw a ghost?
Would you just say to it, you're an artifact of my brain?
I'm suffering from sleep paralysis.
You're not really here.
I mean, again, just because I had one of these experiences doesn't give it any more or any less validity than anybody else's.
I could hallucinate.
I have hallucinated.
I have woken up in the night and seen figures at the bottom of the bed.
I remember many, many, many years ago.
I mean, it was admittedly after a night on the RAS, but wake up in the early hours and seeing my then-girlfriend standing at the foot of the bed.
I kind of did a double take and she was gone.
And I kind of phoned her and said, were you okay last night?
Are you okay in the night?
Yes, she was fine.
You know, she was fine.
But had she been ill, or heaven forfend, had she actually died, my God, you'd have never convinced me in a million years that I hadn't seen, you know, had a paranormal experience.
As it was, I think it was just a result of a little bit too much alcohol.
But we cannot.
I don't know.
It's rather like me being on a ship in the Middle East that was being tossed about by a tidal wave up the Mediterranean.
And I thought I was going to die.
And my thought, which I thought might well be my final thought, was mum.
And I was calling for, I was in my 20s.
And I actually called mum, well, in my head, she heard it.
She had no idea that was happening.
She heard me call her all of those miles away, 2,000 miles away, whatever it is.
Again, these kinds of experiences are intriguing.
They are reported.
I have had experiences where my mum has called me and said, you know, they're completely what I said to my girlfriend.
Were you okay?
Yeah, it was fine.
So we couldn't even really begin to try to evaluate what's going on there if we knew how many times people have those kind of experiences and actually, you know, there's no connection between the other person being in distress.
They're intriguing and it keeps me interested.
It keeps me open to the possibility that there might really be something in some of these claims.
But I have to say, my current position on the basis of my current reading of the current evidence is I'm not convinced.
You know, I might be wrong.
The kind of evidence that would be more likely to convince me rather than an endless stream of anecdotes, however interesting and intriguing they may be, would be evidence from well-controlled studies under well-controlled conditions.
And the history of psychical research and parapsychology to date has been a history of false dawns.
It's always, oh no, now we've really got the technique that's really going to demonstrate that telepathy is real or that precognition is real.
And then 20 years later, it's something else.
So, yeah, you know, I'll keep an eye on it.
But I've kind of, you know, my interest has turned more from that towards, well, let's look at those situations where we know this can happen.
We know that people can sometimes think they've had a paranormal experience when they haven't.
And even if at the end of the day, the parapsychologists do prove that sometimes telepathy is real, sometimes precognition is real, that would be fantastic.
It'll be an amazing scientific breakthrough.
But also, it wouldn't, it would have helped them to get there by helping them to sort the wheat from the chaff, the stuff that genuinely was paranormal from the stuff that just looked as though it was paranormal, but actually wasn't, had another explanation.
So, you know, what I'm doing, I still think is worthwhile, whatever the final verdict is on whether the paranormal is real or not.
So can I sum up your position as being rather like Joan Arma Trading in her biggest hit, love and understanding?
She starts with the words, I am not in love, but I am open to persuasion.
Similarly, you are open to persuasion about these things.
You just haven't been persuaded.
Exactly.
I mean, actually, I've tended to go in the other direction, as I said before, from being a believer to being, as I say, I kind of went from a being believer to being what I now view as being a kind of fairly extreme sceptic, to coming back towards the middle ground, to accepting that, first of all, that most people who claim to have psychic powers are probably not deliberate frauds.
They genuinely believe it themselves.
I also believe that actually believing in some of this stuff can be psychologically helpful, even if it's not true.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
I mean, you know, people who believe in life after death, to take the obvious example, they're probably not going to have the same fear of death as people who don't believe in life after death.
You know, it can be psychologically comforting.
A belief in reincarnation.
But you still think they're going to get a shock at the end when they discover that it is the end?
Well, they're probably not, because I say it's going to be, there's a famous quote, I can't remember it word for word, from a guy called C.D., Professor C.D. Broad.
I think it's along the lines of, if I should find myself surviving after bodily death, I think I'd be more annoyed than anything else.
But I'll probably just have to wait and see, or more likely, wait and not see.
So, you know, if I'm right and they're wrong, they'll never know it anyway.
That sounds like heavenly intervention you just had in the background there, Chris.
An angel that's appeared in the room, so I've got to go now.
Okay, if people want to read about you and your work, do they go to the Goldsmiths website?
What do they do?
Yeah, that's probably the best thing.
Although I think last time I was on, I said that I'm terrible at updating the website.
But if you go to www.gold.ac.uk forward slash A-P-O-U for a normalistic psychology research unit, you can find some of the stuff that we do.
There's also an email.
You can subscribe to the email list.
It just tells you when kind of talks and events are on and so on and so forth.
It's free.
So yeah, that's probably the best place to go to.
Thank you for giving me your time again, Chris.
That's okay.
Nice talking to you, Howard.
Take care.
Professor Chris French, and I'll put a link to his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
We have more fantastic guests coming up through the summer here on The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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