ufo

Jon Ronson often respects the people he writes about and has empathy for the people he writes about. Here’s an article in today’s Guardian about Robbie Williams’ search for answers. I think that’s what it is. I suspect that Robbie Williams, given his experience with psychics, is on a road to scepticism, by a circuitous route. I think there’s a lot of people, like Robbie, who are intelligent, and looking for answers, and find out bit by bit that the paranormal does not stand up to scrutiny. People like Robbie are distinct from those who are deluded or refuse to hear counterarguments. He’s actively seeking answers and discarding things that he finds out are false. Given he was in Take That from aged 16, he’s probably playing catch-up. Robbie Williams is the kind of person that should be visiting websites like The Skeptics Dictionary and reading about critical thinking. To get both sides of the story, in a spirit of balance.

Imagine a world before science: a world of the supernatural - hunches dictating belief, of sun blotting fallacy.  For some seriously lolworthy quackery and pseudoscience watch UFO uHnters.  For fuck’s sake.

I was sitting eating cheese with my friend Megan when lightening struck and their was a power cut.  I woke up. To find there was a thunderstorm outside and there had been a power cut.  And that I wasn’t friends with Megan and I’d run out of cheese.  Life’s like that.  One time, hiding behind a mud bank, while a farmer paced beyond with a shotgun, in a cold, grey Suffolk winter, having been chased by pigs, I can remember thinking “by God.  I’ve got cold feet.  And they’re wet”.  Porcine pursuit is scarier.  Being chased by angry future bacon  is disturbing.  Farmers get bored.  And shotgun shot isn’t lethal from a distance.  A pig will chew your bollocks off.

Although the porcine pursuit may have been motivated by curiosity rather than anger.  What kind of idiot hangs around to find out?   I was over the fence faster than George Blake. That night, lying on an insulating mat, on a slab of stone, in a very flat field, in Norfolk, I looked up at the sky and thought “there’s more black stuff than stars.  It must be better”.  And fell asleep for a bit, only to be woken a short time later by a coach load of UFO hunters from Birmingham, who I amused with drunken tales of being abducted by UFOs, which they bought wholesale, until I brought UB40 and the Second World War into it. Talking colons while lecturing about the bombing of Coventry was over egging the story.