The “roll-off” factor
RICHARD GEORGE wonders why scepticism quickly replaces belief when we’re confronted with strange phenomena
The incidents seemed to roll off our minds...” So Hereward Carrington on investigating the Spiritualist medium Eusapia Palladino and the physical phenomena she reportedly produced. On the day, he, and his two colleagues from the Society for Pyschical Research (SPR), believed: next morning, scepticism reasserted itself.
Here is Charles Richet, addressing the SPR in 1899: “When we return to ourselves… we begin to doubt… I saw, no doubt; but did I see aright?” And here is philosopher CEM Joad in Harpers magazine in July 1938: “As so frequently occurs when one is investigating so-called abnormal phenomena, one finds it equally impossible to withhold credence from the facts or to credit any possible explanation of the facts”.
I can vouch for this “roll-off” factor myself. About 10 years ago, someone I knew died suddenly. A day or two later, the booster aerial on my boxy old televideo flew to the ground for no apparent reason. I don’t recall it being windy, or the window being wide open. I immediately wondered if this was my acquaintance violently asserting that she still existed. Next day I asked myself: “Which is more likely – that, or a gust, or my foot tangling with the flex?” I’m still convinced it wasn’t my foot or the wind. But before I began this article, I hadn’t thought about it for a long time. It had been, in the words of Alan Murdie: “Dismissed, forgotten or simply labelled as ‘Just One of Those Things’...”
I first encountered the world of the paranormal in the late 1970s. My father worked at a converted coaching inn in Stevenage called The Grange (formerly The Swan). An ostler, the story went, had murdered a maid and gone to the gallows. The caretaker saw a girl in grey ascend the main staircase and disappear through a wall; a little girl, daughter of a cleaner, saw a dwarfish black figure with a tall hat in an attic; and my father’s boss was knocked over by a “rushing shadow”. The case is fascinating, and not yet fully investigated.
But what about the “roll-off” factor? Ghost sightings are fixed in a point of space, at a point of time: but what about the witnesses? They have the rest of their lives ahead of them. Do they dismiss, or forget? And memory, as we well know, is unreliable. In any case, all these were single witness reports: could witnesses have confabulated a Grey Lady, or a Black Dwarf, rather than something else, because of what they had heard from others? How many ghosts are selfperpetuating?
In my life so far, I have had two UFO experiences. In July 2003, in my garden in St Albans, I saw a cross between a plane and a plastic bag.3 It moved like a plane, slowly and evenly; it seemed as far away as a plane; but it was tangled, and transparent. It isn’t much of a sighting. The prime suspects are a snarled-up scientific balloon,4 or an illusion caused by “floaters” in the vitreous humour of the eye, of which I have many.5 But I have always remembered it. Unlike the other incident.
A few years later – I can’t be more precise – I saw small ball-like objects in rectangular formation at sunset, in the direction of Luton Airport. I’d seen something similar on film. Again, it doesn’t amount to much: it could have been reflections, or even those pesky Chinese lanterns. But the point is: I’d forgotten. I dredged this up with difficulty. Why do some of these memories float like corks, and others sink like stones?
And there is another category of memories relevant here: memories of dreams. Most of them sink without trace; a few survive into long-term memory, like shells we’ve beachcombed. Our dreams, as much as the events that “roll off”, are our para-autobiographies.
Even if they do not amount, paranormally, to a hill of beans, experiences like these are important. They are damned
data; damned, in many cases, by ourselves. Even if we can explain them away, relegate them to the mental equivalent of the attic in The Grange, they have been ontological earth tremors, causing us to question our most basic assumptions about the world. They have stimulated our imaginations, and provoked our intellects to find solutions. Intellect and imagination: yin and yang. Inspector Morse and MR James. Indeed, healthy, open-minded scepticism may be more fortean than an uncritical, doctrinaire acceptance of the supernatural. Morse as a psychic investigator? James as a Cambridge detective? Now that would be interesting…
NOTES
1 Guy Lyon Playfair, The Indefinite Boundary, 1976, pp 68, 73, 97, 124. 2 In FT382:20. This is not quite the same as Mary Rose Barrington’s “jotts” or “jottles” (see FT392:2022 and Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopaedia of Ghosts and Spirits, 2000, p201).
3 In 2015 an object resembling a “very large inflated plastic bag” was photographed from a plane in the UK (www.mirror.co.uk/news/weirdnews/chilling-moment-ufo-followsplane-11685063), and in California, back in February 2011, “zappa134” posted footage of a similar object on YouTube (www.youtube.com/ watch?v=nDKGe9q9zMc). In response “Mocrobsky” claimed this sort of thing happened regularly in Argentina! 4 Nigel Watson wrote an article about balloons of various kinds being mistaken for UFOs in Paranormal Magazine 39:50ff, 2009.
5 This was a suggested explanation for a 1967 sighting by JBW Brooks at Moigne Downs, Dorset (Robert Chapman, Unidentified Flying Objects, 1969, p31.
2 RICHARD GEORGE is equally happy discussing forteana, the Classics, or Moby Grape reunion albums.