| Dr David Clarke – Renowned Author, Lecturer and Journalist
Dr David Clarkes Website (Interview by Michael Murphy) |
| Michael: Hi David, you’re a renown author, lecturer and journalist…what got you involved in the Paranormal/Supernatural particulary UFOlogy? |
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David: Hi Michael. Well I can trace it back to childhood. I remember going on a family holiday to Scotland when I was 9 or 10 where we visited Loch Ness and I was fascinated by the story of the monster. I was always gathering stories about spooky happennings from friends, grandparents etc. But with UFOs I got hooked after watching Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1978; shortly afterwards, or before, there was an item on the TV news about UFOs filmed by a TV crew in a plane over New Zealand. It was actually the top news item on TV on New Year’s Even. From that point I just devoured everything I could find on the subject: books, magazines, films etc and began collecting stories and interviewing people. It what led me ultimately on the course which took me into journalism.
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| Michael: Have you ever seen anything supernatural yourself? |
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| David: Afraid not! Not through want of trying. I’ve seen any number of ‘odd lights in the sky’ but nothing I would describe as supernatural. Usually I’ve been able to resolve what it was by simply applying commonsense. It’s easy to let your imagination overule your commonsense, particularly when visiting eerie places, or haunted houses. Once you are aware of a story or legend, it’s very difficult to remain objective. |
| Michael: What is your opinion on the so-called Longdendale Lights? |
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| David: The Longdendale Lights have fascinated me for many years, and although I’ve had lots of people write to me offering potential solutions I’m still no nearer understanding what this phenomena actually is. I’ve been collecting stories for around 20 years now, and since I’ve had a section on the lights added to my website every now and again I get additional stories emailed from various parts of the world. Usually from people who had a bizarre experience in the valley with the lights, but didn’t tell anyone at the time. Then they had been poking around on the internet, and came across my website, and wanted to tell me about their experience. The most common description is of a brilliant blue or white light that fills the whole valley, lighting up everything with an eerie incandescence, that persists for a period of seconds or minutes, and then blinks out. But there are also descriptions of balls of pulsating light, often above the Bleaklow area, or strings of moving lights. These of course are the type of phenomena that have led the Glossop Mountain Rescue team on fruitless wild-goose chases in the past. They have records of these types of sightings going back to the 60s. And I’ve spoken to people whose parents and grandparents saw, or heard traditions about, similar lights in the valley back to the last century, long before aircraft, cars and other obvious sources of light arrived. So it’s a baffling mystery. But there are lots of other locations around the globe where lights of a similar nature are seen over long periods of time, so that often they get a name in folklore, such as ‘The Marfa Lights’ in Texas, or the Min Min Lights of Australia. In the past they would have been called Will o’the Wisps or Jack o’Lanterns, but now people tend to believe in spacepeople rather than fairies or spirits, so lights in the sky tend be portrayed as visitors from other planets. |
Michael:You’ve done lots of work in the media on TV, Radio, Newspapers…whats the most astonishing thing you’ve read, heard or seen? |
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| David: If you’re asking about UFOs in particular, I would say some of the incidents reported by pilots, both military and civilian, who have had mid-air close encounters, or near collisions in some cases, with unidentified flying objects. There is one case from 1956, detailed on my website, where a number of RAF Venoms were scrambled to investigate a strange object that was buzzing a nuclear-armed airbase in East Anglia (Lakenheath). There’s no doubt something unusual happened, as three or more radars – both ground based and air interception – detected something, but the pilots could not see anything visually. Various attempts have been made to explaint this and similar incidents, but because many of the records have been destroyed it is very difficult to reach any conclusion. But it’s a shame that the military has tended to playdown these incidents, although they are extremely rare, I feel that scientists should have been involved in the investigation as opposed to bureaucrats who were simply not interested in the data. |
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Michael: Do you think science will one day be able to prove paranormal phenomena? |
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| David:Well by definition paranormal means something “beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding” (Oxford English Dictionary), so I think the answer has to be “no”. |
Michael: Do you watch Most Haunted on Living TV? What is your opinion of the show? |
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| David:I’ve watched it a couple of times but it just made me cringe. It’s a textbook example of how not to conduct an investigation of any alleged ‘supernatural’ phenomena. At the end of the day programmes such as this are about entertainment. Many people like being scared, that why horror films and Hallowe’en remain so popular, so this is just for some people a method of scaring yourself in the comfort of your own home. In order to take part you also have to suspended disbelief and take it as read that there are such things as “spirits” and “ghosts”, whatever they may be. It’s not the sort of programme I would waste too much time watching, other than from deconstructing how and why it works from a socio-psychological point of view! |
Michael: Have TV shows such as Most Haunted and X-Files etc have affected the way the population as a whole believes in the paranormal? |
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| David: Despite what we are told, i.e. that people are more cynical and materialistic nowadays and fewer people believe in strange things, the opposite is actually the case, and always has been. We are superstitious and credulous by nature; physiologically and psychologically, were aren’t much different to our ancesters tens of thousands of years ago, just that we believe in different weird stuff. All the surveys that are done show that lots of us profess to “believe” in ghosts, life after death, angels, visitors from other planets, etc. And these are just impersonal telephone surveys. When Gillian Bennett did a PhD on supernatural belief at Sheffield back in the 80s she quizzed a group of women in-depth, getting to know them and carefully constructing questions about supernatural beliefs they held. The results showed that levels of belief in ghosts, ‘things in houses’, returning dead, etc were actually much higher in the general population than phone surveys suggested. So TV shows like Most Haunted and X-Files are simply reflecting that belief, not necessarily directly causing it. It’s already there. |
| Michael: What do you friends and family think of your chosen profession? |
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| David: Well my profession is actually journalism, so that’s not all that odd! It’s just that I chose a niche in journalism, writing about the supernatural, that I suppose is a little unusual. Everyone I know finds the subject fascinating and it ensures a continual supply of stories, and people always asking for my opinion about this or that odd experience that happened to them or someone they know! |
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Michael: Do you ever go on paranormal investigations (if yes, where, when and incidents) |
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| David: Not so much now, but certainly in the past. I have participated in overnight vigils at haunted houses (Conisbrough Castle and The Old Queen’s Head pub in South Yorkshire for example), and also attended ‘skywatches’ organised by UFO groups in Longdendale, Yorkshire Dales, etc. But I can’t think of single occasion when anything noteworthy happened – but it’s always been good fun and chance for like minded people to discuss their interests, which can only be a good thing. |
Michael: Is there anybody in the paranormal profession past or present you would like to work with? |
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| David: The writer who originally inspired me to get involved was John Keel, from New York, who wrote a series of books on Fortean phenomena and UFOs in the 60s and 70s. His book – recently turned into a film starring Richard Gere – called The Mothman Prophecies remains my altime favourite. For those who haven’t read the book ro seen the film, it is all about a series of bizarre events that take place in small West Virginia town in 1966-67. These includes sightings of a bizarre winged being (‘The Mothman’), UFOs, animals disappearing, strange eerie feelings etc, all of which lead up to a tragedy when a bridge collapses, sweeping many of the people involved to their deaths. It’s almost like the supernatural world was intruding into the natural world as a premonition of what would eventually happen. The way Keel wrote the story up really gripped by teenage imagination and I’ve been a great fan of his wrok ever since. I got to meet him and do an interview in 1991 when he visited Sheffield to give a talk at a UFO conference. But meeting one’s guru is never quite what it’s cracked up to be! (that’s another story) |
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