Office to rent in Lewes

Lewes Forum thread

Go on, tell 'em what you think

Lewes Forum New message

Lewes Skeptics in the Pub - Mike Dash

On 25 Aug 2011 at 11:31pm Lewes Skeptic wrote:

The next Lewes Skeptics in the Pub is next Wednesday 31st August 8pm at the Con Club.

Mike Dash worked for Fortean Times for nearly 20 years from 1983. During that time he oversaw the launch of the scholarly annual Fortean Studies (1994-2000) and wrote Borderlands (1997), an examination of the evidence for a wide variety of strange phenomena. Its miserable failure, in terms of sales at least, was (his publisher informed him) likely due to its excessive scepticism.

Trained as an historian at Cambridge and King's College London (where he obtained a PhD), Mike has focussed his own efforts on archival research, not least on an unnecessarily-ambitious 28-year project to unearth contemporary reports of the early Victorian bogeyman known as Spring-heeled Jack. He was also a watch leader with the Loch Ness and Morar Project from 1983 to 1987.

Mike will be speaking on "Assessing the evidence for strange phenomena" and drawing on his extensive casebook to cover subjects ranging from dodgy hypnotic experiments conducted with the severed heads of guillotined criminals to the infamous "Mince Pie Martians" UFO case that took place in Birmingham in 1979. Without wishing to spoil the surprise, he concludes that most Fortean phenomena can be attributed to a rich stew of hoax, misperception, wishful thinking, fantasy-proneness and little-known physiological processes occurring deep within the human brain.

Check it out here »

On 26 Aug 2011 at 11:30am 'ere be monsters wrote:

I'm not convinced that it's going to happen!

On 27 Aug 2011 at 9:26pm Peter Von Byron wrote:

I have had some out of this world experiences, not sure they would be appropriate to recall here! Many a times I have heard someone say to me, UFO. Best, Peter