Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

The following morning, the editor of the Braxton Democrat visited the site, where he discovered skid marks and an odd gummy deposit in the field.

In the years since, true believers have tried to tout these findings as proof of a UFO landing, though Joe Nickell of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry interviewed locals as part of an investigation of the Flatwoods Monster in the year 2000 and was told that the landing evidence was actually left by a 1942 Chevy pickup truck belonging to one Max Lockard, who had driven out to investigate the spot during the night.

In his ensuing article, Nickell also explained away the rest of the legend surrounding the Flatwoods Monster.

The pulsing red glow he attributed to one of the three airplane navigation beacons visible from the hilltop, while the unidentified flying object was, he argued, actually just a meteor.

So moving now into, we will take the angle of a hoax here just given the nature of this particular case, but is this even real? With the media attention that flanked the Warrens and the Smurls, obviously comes intrigue, believability, but also equally criticism.

The then chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal was an outspoken professor named Paul Kurtz.

Kurtz spoke out against the Warrens saying that they were not at all objective, independent, or impartial paranormal investigators, which are all things necessary for science, right? You have a hypothesis, you set out to disprove your hypothesis so you can have a stronger thesis.

They're not really doing that.

He's, he's, um, he's solid.

But, uh, but yeah, um, and I, I think, uh, I think the, the book was published by, um, Prometheus, which is CSICOP's, uh, or whatever they're calling themselves these days, um, the, the skeptical, um-

Right, right

... group.

Okay, can we get somebody to give us an answer to this?

Well, it's interesting you should say that because our colleagues in the States at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry have launched a long battle now legally to have this homeopathy stopped in pharmacies and stuff like that.

Yeah.

Anyway, getting right round back to where we

That's very long.

That stands for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

They wanted to come in and do an investigation.

the phenomena going on, and they said, okay, we'll send two teams of researchers out there and see what's going on.

In a 2018 article, Beloff compared the case to classic hoaxes where teenagers produce sensational claims to get attention, suggesting the evidence could have been fabricated.

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, CSICOP, now called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, CSI, sent a team comprising stage magician Milbourne Christopher and investigative skeptic Joe Nickell.

Their presence was meant to debunk alleged paranormal activity while testing claims under controlled conditions.

However, they reported that while many incidents seemed fabricated, some evidence, such as recorded knocking sounds that could not be replicated in the lab, remained inexplicable or at least difficult to dismiss outright.

Nothing justifies this nearly universal elevation of soldiers to the status of perfect witnesses, yet we see it happen in every case.

The first truly skeptical explanation for this event came from Philip Klass, thirty-four-year senior editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology, founding member of CSICOP alongside Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, James Randi, and others, and prolific researcher and author on the subject of UFOs.

Klass dedicated two chapters of his 1983 book, UFOs: The Public Deceived, to this case.

His basic explanation is a meteor.

He was a well-known, he actually challenged a lot of paranormal and psychosomatic claims.

And he's actually was the founder of something called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and also founded his own foundation where he originally started as a musician and for a while, and then, you know, literally, by debunking things, and he disliked, he never described himself as an investigator.

He actually wrote basically how he was, you know, trying to worry about, like, trying to, he actually was more of a skeptic, and he would sometimes, like, for example, he found, like, for example, Peter Popoff, who was supposedly a servant, you know, a preacher, and he determined that Peter Popoff, performing all these miracles, was, he was able to debunk all that, and he was also able to debunk um uri geller's spoon bending trick on television uh live so he was definitely a really well ahead of his time and he actually took up magic also uh you know he took up being a magician after uh seeing harry blackstone you know and of course reading um books uh about like uh how to be a magician, and also studied a lot of, was very fascinated by Houdini as well.

So Randy also was a very interesting person, and he also, in his 20s, he posed as an astrologer to basically see how people were doing tricks.

But there is another way to look at what happened that night.

In 2000, investigator Joe Nicol, working with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, takes a fresh look at the Flatwoods case and reaches a very different conclusion from the witnesses.

Rather than an extraterrestrial craft, an unknown creature, Nicol believes that several ordinary things may have come together on a dark night, with fear and confusion doing the rest.

His explanation begins with the objects the boys see across the sky.