It sounded like a normal UFO sighting - this excerpted from a news report at: http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3176725.html

“Lord Nelson pub landlord Keith Gelderd and his locals watched the shapes glowing in the sky but were then greeted by house alarms going off as the whole village suffered a blackout..... There were seven or eight of us watching. As they moved towards us two more appeared. They were all in a line, then one moved 180 degrees around the one next to it. As they left all the electricity went off and you could hear alarms. Then it came back on again.”

It all seems innocent enough. A pub proprietor and a few patrons saw something strange followed by the village lights going out. That is not unusual as UFO sightings go. Equally usual was the response to this innocuous news story. In a story titled: “Insanity In The UK: Drinkers See UFOs as They Exit Pub” author Robert Paul Reyes implies that there is something fishy about normal folks seeing UFOs.

http://newsblaze.com/story/20090127084714reye.nb/topstory.html

To quote Reyes, “The first sentence of this article tells us all we need to know. It doesn't read a group of physicists attending a lecture on string theory claimed to have spotted UFOs as they came out of the lecture hall. It reads "a group of drinkers", drinkers being the operative word. The common denominator in a lot of UFO sightings is alcohol -- drink enough booze and you will see little green men from Mars and Oprah Winfrey piloting a UFO.”

I suppose we should be thanking him for this erudite observation. But all I see is a string of snarkey, unsupported suppositions. The first is that a group of physicists attending a lecture on string theory are “better” observers than normal English pub folk. Of course, this is pure hokum. He then goes on to imply that they only saw UFOs because they were a bunch of drunks. He completely ignores that in the original story it stated: "None of us was drunk."

Yet another assumption here is that drunkards see things. I no longer drink but had my fill in younger days. I cannot remember one time where I hallucinated from drinking. Passed out, displayed impaired judgment, vomited, did or said inappropriate things, felt the world spinning in circles, yes. But hallucinated? No.

Then to make his charade complete, he goes on to say, “I know some UFO true believers will say: What about the blackout? Was that just a coincidence? Coincidences do happen, but one of those drunkards who left the pub may have crashed into a telephone pole and caused the blackout.”

Well, there’s the solution to this story: people who said they were not drunk knocked over a telephone pole with their car - an event that was not reported and only appears to be a figment of Reyes’ imagination. Clearly Mr. Reyes was just making this stuff up as he went along. So, this presumptuous story begs the question: which party is the lying nutter here – the witnesses or Mr. Reyes?

So, why does a person make up stuff, rather than asking real questions about what is going on here?

In our culture we put limits on how or when we will believe people. One of the big taboos is when a person says: "I saw a UFO". Clearly such a statement is a thing which must be rejected by “smart” people. But, in this case, “smart” is only a case of accepting our cultural assumptions. When a person goes so far out on a limb to maintain those assumptions, this is not a case of being “smart”, but rather a case of out and out denial in order to skew to the status quo: no weird stuff for us thanks, it makes us feel, uh, weird.

Drinking the Koolaid

In November 1978 in Jonestown Guyana, 918 followers of cult leader Jim Jones performed mass suicide at the compound of “The People’s Temple” after drinking poisoned koolaid. This event coined the term “drinking the koolaid”. The followers of Jim Jones made the ultimate sacrifice, their very lives, in order to maintain their relationship with the cult.

Notice that the word “cult” is a root form of the word “culture”. Cult, culture: same thing – the only significant difference being scale. Our commentator, Mr. Reyes, drank the koolaid in order to maintain his comfy/cozy relationship with the status quo assumptions of his culture. This does not make him smart, wise, or rational. Performing a willful act of denial, without regard for logic, is just plain ignorant. That makes him a tool, a dumb puppet of the status quo, lacking any real volition.

We humans are a funny lot. We strive mightily to maintain acceptance in our culture. We let the culture decide what to eat, what to drink, what to wear and what to think. The followers of Jim Jones also did this – to the point of death. But we “regular folk” who ridicule cults do the very same thing when we join the military to kill or be killed in wars.

None of us are above this compulsive personality disorder: the corrosive obsession with acceptance. We will lie, cheat, obfuscate, deny, kill or die to maintain that acceptance. We may even believe this irrational behavior is good common sense. We are only a matter of degree away from the defunct followers of Jim Jones when we accept the subversion of logic or morality as the price for approval.

Stuff happens. We might consider that there may be more “stuff” to reality than our culture is willing to validate, or we can join the crowd and chug the koolaid of conventional wisdom. But it behooves us to understand that “conventional wisdom” may, in many cases, be an oxymoron. I suggest that the real drinking problem here is not with English pub goers who report UFO sightings; but with Robert Paul Reyes’ intemperate consumption of the cultural koolaid.

Drink up sailor!