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Paranormal Research “Castes”
I just finished Colm Kelleher’s book Hunt for the Skinwalker, which is about the paranormally infamous Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. The book itself isn’t especially well written, but it’s still a fun subject. Anyway there were two or three things from the book that I thought might be worth quoting here as I thought they were kind of interesting. This comes from page 207:
In the future, an adventurous sociologist might consider writing a paper that examines the “caste” system in anomalies research. The “nuts and bolts” UFO research people regard the “psychosocial” research people with disdain. UFO researchers in general regard the cryptozoologists with contempt. Cryptozoologists who embrace the possibility of a paranormal connection to Bigfoot sightings are generally viewed with derision because of the prevailing view that Sasquatch is an undiscovered primate species, not an interdimensional playmate of alien beings. Likewise, the paranormal researchers view the UFO researchers with disdain, while the ghost hunters keep their distance from everybody else. And all this hostility and contempt is a vain and so far unsuccessful attempt to earn a small measure of respect and acceptance (and maybe funding) from mainstream science, a lofty but unlikely goal.
The quote is slightly paradoxical since Kelleher wrote this book as part of an investigation of the ranch mounted by the National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS). And he seems to be saying that any of these people getting funding is absurd because of their approach, but at the same time he himself was part of a group that got funding to do something very similar.
But anyway I thought his main point about there being a certain amount of hostility between different “camps” when it comes to paranormal research is an interesting one. However, it’s kind of hard for me to judge the legitimacy of what he is saying, since I’m squarely in the middle of all these different groups: I enjoy hearing all the viewpoints and sort of mashing them together. I wonder if he’s right though. Or if he was more right about the separation of these groups in the past. It seems like with the increase in popularity of these subjects online over the past few years, that there have become more and more people like me - people who take a sort of “holistic” approach to strange phenomena. Seems like the lines between these factions that he is describing are crumbling. And that may be a good thing for all of us, since it may take a multiplicity of perspectives to really wrap our minds around strange phenomena.
October 30th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Reminds me of the amusing pagan hierarchy.
October 30th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
nids isn`t mainstream science funding. it`s funded by this guy;
http://www.nidsci.org/bios/bigelow.php
a self-made millionaire who bought the ranch that is the basis for the skinwalker book. i am fascinated by the subject and would love to know more, but after listening to george knapp`s interview on coast to coast about his experiences i tend to see it as similar to whitley strieber`s communion………it gravitates, over time, to fiction. i gave strieber the benifit of the doubt regarding alien abduction but now i see him as a liar. he jumbles up fiction, mythology and religion into a pile for people to search through for some fact or evidence that never comes.
that`s my unfortunate conclusion drawn form years of listening to these people go over the same old shite for new ears. i want to believe, like the poster says, but after a while the usual suspects reveal themselves. the only one that i see as having any credibility any longer is stanton friedman.
October 30th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
Not related and you may have already heard about this, the matrix trilogy has been rereleased as a 10 disc set with commentary on the movies including by you guessed it Cornel West and Ken Wilber.
October 30th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
i think you’re probably right about all the camps coming together.
i think it was more the case in the past that they were all fighting for the approval of the reality priesthood, whereing they might get the golden handshake and be allowed int othe tent of consensus reality.
what’s changed, i htink is that increasingly, there is the sense that there is no such tent to be gotten into.
reality free for all!
October 30th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
Brekin, try to keep it on topic!
Alistair, after reading that book, I’m not convinced one way or another about anything that happened there. Unfortunately, it was a poorly written book and didn’t offer much food for thought in any particular direction.
Zac, definitely agree that people are realizing that shits pretty much a free for all at this point…
October 31st, 2006 at 10:12 am
Maybe off topic - hand slap accepted - does a reality free for all mean that nothing is real, or any old thing you feel/think to be real is real? And I don’t mean to get into a touchy feely discussion about how if it’s real for you, it’s real. I can concede yes to that statement but it doesn’t make things “actually” real. Monsters under the bed are real for a 3 yr old maybe, but they aren’t in fact there. I know this cause I used to be 3. Alistair’s comment on Whitly Streiber is dead on. I used to give WS some credibility, but he’s so all over the map with his heartpouring style about the godamm URGENCY of every little doomsday scenario he can dream up. Should he be let into the reality tent? Then all we’d have is more disinfo and mystery mucking up people’s ability to discern any real truth to what is happening around them.
Well…back to work. Later.
October 31st, 2006 at 5:02 pm
i personally take a pretty esoteric view on the world in general and believe that we create our own reality by creating a resonance in thinking and acting consistantly. having said that i would be as a three year old in my excitement and wonder if there was some proof………or certainly documentation of the some of the events at the skinwalker ranch, other that it being a local conscensus experience for a select few people while they were in some meta-state of phenomena. i have read much since i was a child about ufos, bigfoot, ghosts, evp, etc. and have had some unusual experiences myself and the conclusion i have come to is that these are real experiences for people, sometimes in fairly large groups, but don`t maintain any stability or consistancy for objective analysis.
October 31st, 2006 at 9:34 pm
Why does “objective analysis” make things real? What does it even mean to be objective? It’s impossible since we are subjects. This I think was also the mistake of the people from NIDS who researched this ranch. They let their beliefs about reality get in the way of their experience of it.
As to SubstanceM’s comments, I have addressed what I think is the simplest and most useful answer to the “what is real” subject in my podcast:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006.../podcast-02-ah-to-be-a-caveman-again/
Essentially, my answer is that: reality is that which can be experienced. Then it is up to you to deconstruct your beliefs about what types of experiences you consider to be valid. Why do “external” sensory experiences get higher billing than “internal” experiences? Where exactly is the line between internal and external experience? Why don’t we also consider certain physical senses as “more real” than others: sound over sight or taste over touch? What if the mind is nothing more than another type of sensory organ, one which perceives different sets of characteristics from the others?
November 1st, 2006 at 12:06 am
i entirely agree tim. if you get a chance, watch the move called the secret. it goes right to the heart of what the inside/outside struggle is all about. once you get to a point where you attain some control over an inside reality that you like, then the outside reality begins to follow suit.
the objective analysis that i was refering to is the conditioning to stable sameness that we all recieve. it`s more commonly known as culture. for the people who experienced the phenomina at the skinwalker ranch what they saw was real. for us on the outside what we read in a book has to be taken on faith, which relies on our pre-concieved ideas about such things.b
November 3rd, 2006 at 12:37 pm
I wouldn’t put too much weight in the “caste” notion of paranormal investigators. This seems to be the opinion of a disgruntled and perhaps unfunded few.