If you want to win an argument remotely related to science you may NOT want to quote someone:
- With NO scientific training
- With NO experience WORKING in the sciences
- With NO scientific accomplishments.
Furthermore, you MAY want to quote someone playing with a full deck.
Nice catch? .... well you caught something all right, but I hope there is a cure for it.
1- Dan, tell us something about your background.
I was born, raised and received my professional training in filmmaking and media production in the New York CIty area.
As a child I had many precognitive dreams. These experiences taught me
that our normal perception of reality wasn't the whole picture, and that
things went on "behind the scenes" to which our normal senses, and our
scientific instruments, seem to be blind. This instilled in me a healthy
skepticism toward the limited picture of reality we've been fed by our
culture.
In the mid-1960s I was invited by John Keel to
accompany him on his research trips to Point Pleasant, West Virginia,
where the mysterious Mothman was scaring the wits out of local
residents, cops, and no-nonsense private pilots who had seen the
enigmatic creature in full flight. This was my first exposure to "high
strangeness," and it also taught me a lot about irrational and
politicized skepticism. John wrote about some of my adventures in his
book, *The Mothman Prophecies*, from which the Richard Gere movie was
loosely adapted. It still freaks me out when I recall that I walked
across the Silver Bridge less than a week before it collapsed into the
Ohio River!
During the 1980s I became involved in the research
into the apparent anomalies on Mars, initially working with Richard
Hoagland and later with the Society for Planetary Seti Research. I'm
still on the fence about some of these Mars features, but to me the most
interesting part of that experience was my encounter with the bizarre
irrationality and bullying tactics of the debunker community, many of
whom fancied themselves scientists but were happy to behave perfectly
unscientifically when it came to controversial subject matter.
Since about 2001 I've been producing some
documentaries about scientific research into the afterlife. If you think
the notion of ET brings out the bottom-feeding debunkers, just try
getting into any inquiry that questions, on science's own terms, the
materialist belief that the mind is the brain and that death is the end
of awareness. That really drives them crazy!
