The title of the recent article is "Gawd Bless America: UFOs? Psychics? Documentary Debunks the Paranormal". And if you watch the trailer you can see that it is a film made by idiots for idiots. And of course it does not debunk the paranormal since it is not in any way a serious investigation into paranormal phenomena. It's a twenty-something guy and a 68-year-old guy who don't know anything about the subject going around the country, apparently, interviewing "believers" and practitioners on the fringe of such subjects as UFOs, crop circles and psychic phenomena.
What prompted the making of the movie, according to the story, is that the older guy was ticked-off by his experiences: the "money he's spent on psychics, UFO paraphernalia and other paranormal pursuits over the past few decades. He nearly lost his house in the process. Among his purchases: several trips to UFO-friendly Roswell, N.M., nearly a decade's worth of sessions with a personal psychic and even a special helmet that supposedly prevents aliens from reading his mind." Ok, this guy is a gullible moron, but his bad judgement had nothing to do with the paranormal.
(If I sound harsh, I'm just tired of people who are either too lazy or too dumb to find out what paranormal research is really about before they trash and ridicule it. Can you tell?)
The article says they interviewed "experts" on alien abductions, ghost hunting and crop circles. Well, if they referred to themselves as "experts," then the filmmakers are talking to the wrong people. There are no experts in this field, only people who do research and investigations to try to understand the phenomena.
The film doesn't come out until March, but it's obvious from the article and the movie trailer that they had no intention of actually investigating the paranormal. In fact, you can't even call what they do debunking; it's just an exercise in silliness and sophomoric "humor" at the expense of goofy people who believe weird things. With their mission to "uncover quacks," the article says they "hit five states in 15 days, punking a crop circle expert, a psychic, a so-called 'UFO summoner' and others along the way."
Wow - great investigation. Great debunking. Saying that uncovering quacks in this field debunks the paranormal is like saying uncovering quacks in the field of medicine debunks the entire medical profession. You can find people on the far edge or lunatic fringe of virtually every subject or field of study who have a lot of crazy beliefs, but that doesn't mean the subject itself is ridiculous.
Did they talk to Stanton Friedman, Richard Dolan or numerous other people who have made a serious study of the UFO phenomenon? No, they talked to a guy who said he could summon UFOs at will. Yeah, that's what UFOlogy is all about, guys. Boy, you sure blew that one out of the water. How foolish.
Did they talk to Budd Hopkins who has made a serious exploration of people who believe they have been abducted by aliens? No, they "met a self-proclaimed human-alien hybrid who said he couldn't die. After the man claimed that his mother had been artificially inseminated by aliens, he went on to demonstrate that he could hold on to electric cords and get shocked without harm."
In other words, they had no intention of really exploring the paranormal, they just wanted to go after a few easy targets for a few cheap laughs. It doesn't take a genius or a person with good filmmaking skills to do that. It's rather easy to find kooks and poke fun at them, but it neither proves nor disproves anything. We could just as easily ridicule inept documentary filmmakers and then declare that all documentaries are worthless.
