The Media, Scholarship, Science, Right, Left, Center: Who Really Cares About the Truth? - Part 4

The paranormal

My first paranormal experiences were spectacular, when I was 16, which ruined me as a mainstream scientist before my career even began. Five years later, Brian O’Leary had the same experience while performing the same exercise, which ruined him as a mainstream scientist. We could no longer drink the scientific establishment’s materialist Kool-Aid (or sherry). Only then did our big adventures begin. A voice in my head (1) led me on mine, and my life was soon ruined. Brian soon left the Establishment’s fold, had his life shortened by his adventures, and scrambled for the rest of his life. I am sympathetic to those who argue that we should have never opened our eyes and kept playing the lucrative game, but sleep was just another, more long-lasting, form of death to us.

I performed many investigations and paranormal feats on my journey, as did Brian. Brian was also a prominent advocate of scientific investigation of the paranormal. He realized that dealing with non-physical phenomena was beyond the purview of today’s science, and Brian argued that we needed a new science, in order to account for paranormal phenomena. Inventions such as Sparky Sweet’s upend the current “laws of physics,” and what my friend witnessed blows orthodox physics out of the water. NDE investigations have been one of my areas of study for many years. The evidence is very robust that the deaths of our physical bodies are far from the end of existence (there is no end). Orthodoxy is spectacularly wrong in many areas, but it has the wealth, power, and zillions who kneel before it.

As we learned how inadequate mainstream science was, we also became aware of the scientific establishment’s attack dogs, and the leader long ago was none other than Brian’s erstwhile colleague Carl Sagan, who was the rock star of organized skepticism. But Carl did not play fair, as Brian saw on the Face on Mars controversy and many others. Sagan’s debunking of Velikovsky’s ideas was so poorly done that it kept the Velikovsky controversy alive longer than it should have been.

I became aware of organized skepticism in the 1980s, and in 1997, I had extensive dealings with a noted “skeptic,” who was a habitual liar who attacked me on the Internet for a decade, after he showed his true colors in the house organ of organized skepticism. He was a functional psychopath. I found that to be true of “skeptics” in general. Brian also had a “skeptical” stalker in his last years, who dogged him across the planet when he spoke publicly.

A leading space debunker tried to invalidate Brian’s Martian credentials in an idiotic exercise. I heard from another of that space debunker’s targets, and that debunker boasts of his spook connections (as Phil Klass also did) to his targets, in an attempt to intimidate them. And the intimidation often works. The closest that Brian came to disclosing the apparent attempt on his life by the spooks was in his last book. He was afraid that they would finish the job if he spoke publicly about it. One of them is still alive, which is why I don’t name him. As with David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, I wait until they are dead before naming them.

But it is a mistake to think that all “skeptics” are part of a “conspiracy,” although many are. This is once again the 1% conspiracy and 99% complicity dynamic that I have often written about. The “skeptics” are often so blinded by their ideological fervor that that they simply can’t see what is obvious to anybody else, which brings to mind the adage that nobody is as blind as those who refuse to see.

Robert McLuhan discovered in his studies that “skeptical” debunkers are rarely familiar with the evidence, as they go about their debunkery. With such behavior, those debunkers tacitly admit that the targets of their debunkery are not worthy of even knowing the basic facts about. That is an ethically bankrupt stance to take and begs the question, but it is practically a universal among debunkers, which I consider just another example of my journey’s primary lesson. Much of my effort has been like Diogenes’s quest for the honest man. I have encountered some truly great human beings, but they have been very few and far between. If those debunkers are not consciously dishonest, then Brian’s question becomes relevant: Are we a sentient species?

These kinds of dynamics play out across orthodoxy and the fringes, and there is plenty of chaff on the fringes, too, which I have spent a great deal of time sifting through. I can’t regret doing that, as it sharpened my tools of discernment, but I can’t afford to dive into rabbit holes to nowhere any longer. I have too much important work to do, but people constantly try to drag me into their rabbit holes, which even if valid often would have marginal importance. I’ll deal with some more of them in coming posts.