Skinwalker Ranch - Laser Beam Stops and Starts in Mid Air

[FatPhil]

I imagine they'd go the FOX news route, "This program is for entertainment purposes only, and not meant to be factual".

I know I recommended the Francis Wheen book /How Mumbo Conquered the World/ many months ago, but it's my toilet reading, and progress is slow. However, in Chapter 5: The Catastrophists (Chapter 4 was a real slog - it was about postmodernism and the rot in academia that it kicked off), I've just come across this quote, and it seemed relevant, context should be derivable before you're too far in:

"I don't know that it's my responsibility to say that I've just created a fiction that is a fiction," Chris Carter told the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), a sceptical pressure-group which had proposed that each episode should be prefaced by such a disclaimer. But he acknowledged that his fiction invariably preferred supernatural explanations.

My intention, when I first set out to do the show, was to do a more balanced kind of storytelling. I wanted to expose hoaxes. I wanted Agent Scully to be right as much as Agent Mulder. Lo and behold, those stories were really boring. The suggestion that there was a rather plausible and rational and ultimately mundane answer for those things turned out to be a disappointing kind of storytelling, to be honest. And I think that's maybe where people have the most problems with my show ... But it's just the kind of storytelling we do, and because we have to entertain ... That's really the job they pay me for, and that's the thing I'm supposed to do.

Content from External Source

 

[Mendel]

the Francis Wheen book /How Mumbo Conquered the World/

My intention, when I first set out to do the show, was to do a more balanced kind of storytelling. I wanted to expose hoaxes. I wanted Agent Scully to be right as much as Agent Mulder.

Content from External Source

This is, of course, not "balanced" at all. You can't balance "the paranormal exists" with "the paranormal does not exist". If it exists half the time, it exists.
You can kinda teach skepticism by demonstrating that not all claims are true, but unless you allow for the position that none of the claims are true, you're not balanced.

Scooby Doo did pull this off (afaik), to the entertainment of many.
Skinwalker Ranch does not.

 

[jarlrmai]

Scooby Doo has had a few iterations since the original cartoon and in some of them the (ggg..) ghosts are real, which I feel is a betrayal of the ethos of the original.

 

[FatPhil]

My intention, when I first set out to do the show, was to do a more balanced kind of storytelling. I wanted to expose hoaxes. I wanted Agent Scully to be right as much as Agent Mulder.

Content from External Source

This is, of course, not "balanced" at all. You can't balance "the paranormal exists" with "the paranormal does not exist". If it exists half the time, it exists.

You don't seem to be quite grasping the concept of "fiction".