Well, let Billy Meier bring it on!

It would not be difficult to have a panel of scientists examine that physical evidence and then submit their findings to peer-review.

Testimonies of witnesses to an event does not ‘prove’ an event has happened exactly the way it has happened. It could well be the witnesses are completely right about the event or could be completely wrong on some or on the entire incident. Witness testimony is permissible in the court of law only when it fits into totality of the circumstances, reliability of witnesses & many other factors.

“In fact, Sathya Sai Baba has performed “miracles” which literally millions will swear eyewitness testimony to and is considered divine and holy by easily tens of millions of people.”

Though the events witnessed by the people at some times in the Billy Meier case might be counted as non-terrestrial or miraculous in nature, the kind of witnesses, differ variedly with those of witnesses of religious events(Sathya Sai Baba miracles, fatima, ……). In religious events , the witnesses are generally believers of the phenomenon, hence they are biased & several other contributing factors that shape our judgements on the phenomenon.

Even though in Billy Meier case, there are skeptics, investigators who witnessed ‘unexplained’ events, photoghraphed beamships at night and during daylight(in one instance 5 photographers were present, photographed the same aerial phenomenon with 5 cameras), reliable witnesses, …. Inspite of these all, from strict scientific perspective, these could be termed as “Interesting & need further physical evidence to test, until then the judgement is suspended”. The witnesses could all be right, but the scientific procedure does not allow it. Here science cant be much of a help.

That being said, we can now move onto the ‘physical evidence’ that can be tested and reach conclusions.

You made far-fetched assumptions built on premices defying logic and reason and magically extrapolated to yet another far-fetched conclusion, the validity of which could only be supported by the blind acceptation of your assumptions, with which incidentally all began – a kind of metaphysical sophism.

1) Is there any evidence of the existence the ‘spirit-form’ – let alone the reincarnation of the same?
2) Is there any evidence of the theft – let alone the ‘un-Earthly forces’?
3) Is there any evidence of the existence of the ‘Plejaren’ – let alone the ‘non-interference “prime directive”‘?

You would notice, that religions use the same approach to ‘demonstrate’ the existence of god: they assert his qualities (Attributes) and argue, that the same qualities ‘prove’ his existence.

As for the witnesses, allow me to remind you, that there are more recorded witnesses of the miracles of Jesus, the apparition of the ‘Holy Mother’, ‘Fatima’; the sightings of Big Foot, … aliens and UFO’s!
Besides, science is not a competition of witnesses.

Or how can their witness-evidence be rationally dismissed?

To put it simply, I see your 120 eye witnesses, and raise you a few million more. In fact, Sathya Sai Baba has performed “miracles” which literally millions will swear eyewitness testimony to and is considered divine and holy by easily tens of millions of people.

So forgive me if 120 eyewitness accounts don’t impress me terribly much.

The rest is more special pleading and post-hoc rationalization.

Would there have been so many inventions and improvements to our quality of life if we never had day dreams, contemplations, imaginations or explored the unknown?

You forgot to finish the sentence – would there have been so many…. if the bad and wrong ideas hadn’t been rejected? The answer is no, my friend. So remember, just as important as dreaming up the next new idea is getting rid of the old bad one.

Would there have been so many inventions and improvements to our quality of life if we never had day dreams, contemplations, imaginations or explored the unknown? I don’t think we would have. Progress and evolution in consciousness is a direct result of all these things. “I have a dream” – to quote Martin Luther King for example.

So being a progressive thinker and a dreamer will help us evolve, rather than cause stagnation. We as a human race could be so much wiser, our lives could be so much more satisfying, and not just for the minority, for everyone on planet Earth, if only we would be dreamers or just plain open-minded.

Putting the validity of the material evidence aside for now (metal alloys, beamship sounds etc) I’d really like to hear your opinion, and Steven’s and anyone else’s who would care to write something, about the 120 witnesses, please. What significance do they bring to the “pro-Meier camp” or “anti-Meier camp” even? Or how can their witness-evidence be rationally dismissed? Here is some information about them: http://www.futureofmankind.co.uk/Billy_Meier/The_Witnesses

Thanks.

Let’s assume Meier HAS been telling the truth all along and his spirit-form IS more than 60,000,000,000 years old;

First off, the cognitive trap you have immediately fallen into is begging the question. You have assumed your conclusion before beginning, thus your analysis afterwards is just a post-hoc error.

Furthermore, the universe is only roughly 13.6 billion years old, so his “spirit” cannot be 60 billion years old. Unless you wish to postulate some sort of spirit that can jump from universe to universe and is merely currently in ours – which would again be special pleading and post-hoc analysis.

The rest of your points are merely re-hash of exactly that same error. The rest of the error stems from that fact that you have never been able to cite any other source of evidence outside of Meier himself. For things of such low a priori likelihood, converging lines of evidence from independently verified sources and different methodologies are needed. Otherwise you are telling “just-so” stories which are always very easy to do post-hoc.

The way I see it, one would need to establish the existence of ESP prior to such an experiment for a number of reasons.

I do see your point about having multiple replicates of a two-armed prospective trial that might elucidate some difference. If I am undertanding you correctly, the idea is the Cohort A would be the “ESP believer” group and Cohort B the “non-believer” or “skeptic” group. You would then do whatever tests for ESP and come up with a result. You then repeat this over and over again (once again we are assuming a hypotheical “best-case” scenario where all experimental controls and designs are in place optimally). So then, you would have 3 possible outcomes.

1) There is no statistically significant difference between the two cohorts.
2) Cohort B shows statistically significant “better” ESP outcomes.
3) Cohort A shows statististically significant “better” ESP outcomes.

For each of 2 & 3 the effect size can be anywhere from small to large (i.e. P-value is significant, but the ESP-ers got 52% right vs the 48% of the skeptic group, or ESP-ers got 90% right vs the 49% of the skeptics).

So lets look at what each outcome would mean.

1) The experiment is a wash, no ESP was demonstrated, no skeptic effect was demonstrated. In other words, exactly what we’d expect a priori.

2 – [with a small effect size]) We would be forced to chalk it up to noise or Type 1 error, since it is inconsistent with our a priori hyptheses. Either that or we would have to conclude that the is some sort of enhancing effect on ESP from skeptics being around.

2 – [with a large effect size]) We would be forced to say either our design was bad (most likely), that there is some other confounding factor which we haven’t been able to account for (2nd most likely), or that there is a strong ESP enchancing effect from skeptics being around (least likely).

3 – [with small effect size]) We would conclude that it was due to noise (Type 1 error) since our Bayesian likelihood is quite low, a small effect size would simply not be sufficient evidence unless looked at from a strictly frequentist perspective (most likely), that our design was bad and/or there was a confounder for the same reason, or that we had sufficiently demonstrated both ESP and the skeptic negating field at the same time (least likely, but by definition possible to be the outcome by chance with no actual effect 5% of the time).

3 – [with a large effect size]) This is essentially the exact same scenario as with a small effect size, except that we would have to make a serious Bayesian analysis. We are still subject to Type 1 error, noise in the signal, and bad study design. But the large effect size makes us question those and look to see if there isn’t something there. The problem is that now we have two Bayesian analyses to make – first that ESP exists and second that it is subjectable to “skeptic fields.” Lets, for argument’s sake, assume that the effect size was sufficient to satisfy a Bayesian analysis for one of those variables. It would not be for both unless the effect size is so large it would have been plainly obvious that ESP existed in the first place (i.e. the psychics got pretty much every single thing right now matter how intricate the prediction was and the skeptic group was right at pure chance levels).

So basically, everything will either demonstrate what we expect with no ESP or skeptic fields, give us the standard equivocal Type 1 error scenarios that we would also reasonably expect, or it was have to be so plainly obvious ESP was real we wouldn’t be having the discussion about it in the first place. Otherwise, you are still left with only one reasonable conclusion – a confounder. Because your study design was looking at skeptic fields, not ESP, demonstrating what is a skeptic field means that you must have something to explain that effect. You either have to assume ESP or some other confounder. Since the Bayesian analysis of ESP has such low a priori probability, the only reasonable conclusion is a confounder. Thus, you must establish the existence of ESP before checking to see if “skeptic fields” can affect it.

I wrote that mostly off the top of my head, so I am open to anyone critiquing it. And I also want to be clear that I am just discussing this academically to understand things myself, not to try and bash davidsmith. Nor do I think you actually believe ESP to be real… unless I am misreading you?

While I am in no doubt that you have studied the human mind in great detail, and I understand how my reasoning could be considered “special pleading” (but isn’t a very “special” phenomenon that appears to have occurred anyway), I don’t understand how such a well read person as yourself can be so certain that Meier is a hoaxer when there are so many variables at play here. Indulge me, please…

Let’s assume Meier HAS been telling the truth all along and his spirit-form IS more than 60,000,000,000 years old; that his spirit-form was previously incarnated as half a dozen other prophets including Jmmanuel (Jesus) and Mohammed; and that some of the Plejaren’s ancestors who used to live on Earth WERE partly responsible for our current state of affairs; and that they DO have a prime directive but want to make amends for their ancestors misdeeds. Now everything else looks plausible doesn’t it?

All this looks plausible:

1) They contacted him because his spirit-form is the oldest on Earth (and he’s the only one who can withstand their vibrations etc).
2) Many of his photos were stolen and manipulated, or replaced with forgeries, to discredit him by Earthly and un-Earthly forces who wish to prevent another human revolution and any change from the status-quo.
3) The not-so-utterly-convincing material evidence was provided by the Plejaren because of the now valid reason of the non-interference “prime directive”.

How can I determine truth here? Occam’s Razor cant help us here because there is so much that we as a human race still do not know about the universe. We therefore have to make many assumptions when dealing with this “ET” phenomenon (thus invalidating Occam’s Razor). I personally think the many forms of evidence on my website as a whole, provides logical proof that the Meier case is 99% probably true. For me it’s the 120 witnesses and their accounts that make the biggest difference to me, for others it might be high levels of Thulium found in some of the metal alloys and evidence of it having undergone some kind of cold fusion processing, but you might prefer something like this: http://www.futureofmankind.co.uk/Billy_Meier/Will_Humanity_Wake_Up%E2%80%A6In_Time%3F

Thank you for the stimulating debate. It IS educational for me also and I hope I haven’t fallen into any known neuroscience traps again! (But please let me know if I have)

James

“In this senario/design, testing for the anti ESP effect is not possible because research bias alone would account for any effects before we started looking at effects that have not been established and have no known mechanism. ”

Well, that would depend on what your hypothesis is. If the hypothesis is simply “experimenters who identify themselves as sceptics tend to produce null results while believers produce positive results”, you could test that quite easily. In effect, the hypothesis is about experimenter bias, but we wouldn’t be able to tell with any great deal of specificity what kind of bias just from that design. Of course, we’re talking about a purely hypothetical design here with no details but, assuming the design is sound, we would obviously be able to rule out certain kinds of bias.

“If he wants to use a skeptic’s presence as a double blinded variable that is a different study altogether. My understanding is that the “anti ESP” effect has been used to explain why ESP is hard to detect or why posistive studies are not replicated by others. No matter how you slice it, with no mechanism it is special pleading”

Granted, the better way to test for “anti ESP” would be use the participant group design, but in either case, how could it be special pleading when we are conducting a prospective test? I understand your concern about this being an issue of special pleading when an “anti ESP” argument is used as a definitive post-hoc explanation for failed replications by sceptical investigators. But, as I think someone said earlier, science is in a better position when it can use unexpected data to generate testable hypotheses. If, at the moment, the hypothesis is simply “sceptical investigators tend to generate null results and believer experimenters tend to generate positive results” then that looks testable to me. It would certainly be interesting if true.

While I agree that the type of experiment I’m suggesting would need to be replicated numerous times, it still seems like a testable hypothesis. I don’t really get your reasoning behing having to prove ESP first, before doing this kind of experiment. You could quite easily state two hypotheses before you do the experiment. One would predict that only the believer group will get positive results, so you could treat that as an independent test of ESP, and the other hypothesis would predict a difference between your two groups.

Also, if this kind of experiment consistently came up with a difference between the two groups, the absence of an effect in the “sceptic” group would not necessarily have to be interpreted in paranormal terms. For example, it could be down to psychological inhibition of response generation rather than “an ESP field that collapses around sceptics”.