Great to see you writing here again Hayley, and I'm glad you've tackled Uncanny head-on like this. I wondered if there was a reason for you not being involved beyond that first season, so it's reassuring to know you had similar misgivings to those of many of us listening. The repeated insistence that "if you're a skeptic then you need to provide a logical explanation for (insert phenomenon here)," drove me to stop listening to Robins and his output a year or two back out of sheer frustration. In some ways I guess it reflects the entire BBC practice of false equivalence, and it's troubling that this kind of paranormal programming is making such a resurgence in a time when even the basic tenets of objective reality are frequently rejected in the media.
Thanks, Mark. One of the episodes I contributed to as a talking head was genuinely interesting and I spent hours pouring over different sources, even going as far as to research oven models for known faults, only for most of my contribution to be edited down.
Then, at the live event, I sat opposite the person who sent that story in and was asked to explain away their experience to their face in front of a live audience, essentially, and I wasn’t willing to sit there and speculate at someone.
Those experiences around that one case really made me sit back and go “hmm, I need to rethink my priorities here.”
All of which flies in the face of the idea that it's an "investigation", doesn't it? It's sad to hear they essentially ambushed you into what amounted to a confrontation, especially when your intention is always to respect the experience of the individual who went through it.
Great to see you writing here again Hayley, and I'm glad you've tackled Uncanny head-on like this. I wondered if there was a reason for you not being involved beyond that first season, so it's reassuring to know you had similar misgivings to those of many of us listening. The repeated insistence that "if you're a skeptic then you need to provide a logical explanation for (insert phenomenon here)," drove me to stop listening to Robins and his output a year or two back out of sheer frustration. In some ways I guess it reflects the entire BBC practice of false equivalence, and it's troubling that this kind of paranormal programming is making such a resurgence in a time when even the basic tenets of objective reality are frequently rejected in the media.
Thanks, Mark. One of the episodes I contributed to as a talking head was genuinely interesting and I spent hours pouring over different sources, even going as far as to research oven models for known faults, only for most of my contribution to be edited down.
Then, at the live event, I sat opposite the person who sent that story in and was asked to explain away their experience to their face in front of a live audience, essentially, and I wasn’t willing to sit there and speculate at someone.
Those experiences around that one case really made me sit back and go “hmm, I need to rethink my priorities here.”
All of which flies in the face of the idea that it's an "investigation", doesn't it? It's sad to hear they essentially ambushed you into what amounted to a confrontation, especially when your intention is always to respect the experience of the individual who went through it.