Scholarly Research of the Anomalous

This is the panel from the conference. From left to right, Darren Naish, Mike Dash, Bettina Bildhauer, Charles Paxton and Roger Musson.

Each of the speakers has published something to do with the paranormal in the academic press and each talk was extremely interesting.

Darren Naish talked about the evolution of sea monsters in terms of what people report and how some people have tried to classify these monsters into species based purely on eye witness sightings. Some of these eye witness reports have very little detail indeed so it is interesting to see what kinds of creatures people have come up with based on them!

The next talk was by Charles Paxton who talked about statistics and how the plural of anecdote can sometimes be data. His research involved getting some mug to dress up in a gorilla suit and walk (or not walk) in front of groups of people who were then asked to either describe what they saw or to make up what they didn't see. The object of this was to try to find out if there were any statistical differences in the accounts of people who were fabricating and those who were actually describing something they had seen. Interestingly, it was discovered that on average, people who were fabricating wrote down much longer accounts than those who were not. And this is something that has been found in criminal cases as well.

Roger Musson then talked about the Bala earthquake of 1974. This is more commonly known to UFO enthusiasts as the Berwen Mountain UFO incident. It was fascinating to discover how an earthquake location was calculated in the absence of suitably located seisomographs (all the instruments it was recorded on were actually in Scotland) and it involved sending a group of people round to interview locals on how strongly they felt the earthquake. This was later remembered as mysterious men in black asking curious questions about the event! This data was then "hushed up", or as was explained, the chief investigator subsequently found himself too busy to write up the data so it was many years before it was published.

Bettina Bildhauer then talked about monsters in medieval manuscripts. "Here be monsters" type stuff. She looked at the different types of monsters that were depicted, from the faintly plausible to the completely fantastic. Then she went through some of the descriptions that travellers to exotic lands had made of the various creatures they encountered. Some of them familiar to me such as the sciapods of India and some that I had never heard of such as a race of crane-headed people. She also talked about how menstruation in women was regarded as a very toxic thing in medieval times and how dragons were often depicted as female for a similar reason. Fascinating stuff.

Mike Dash then talked about artists depictions of paranormal creatures or events and what leads some images to catch on more than others. Often these images do not even bear much resemblance to the original description but they still become the default position, so much so that subsequent sightings of the creature in question will then begin to resemble the artists impression rather than the original description.

All fascinating stuff! Hard to pick a favourite as they were all brilliant. Great day out.