Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub

How They Hide the Truth from You
Meirion Jones, Investigative journalist

Twenty years ago the Freedom of Information Act was just coming into effect. It was going to be a new dawn of open government. Hoorah! For a brief window Whitehall’s deepest secrets were on view – some of them revealed by Meirion – and then Tony Blair realised that the last thing he needed was the cat out of the bag.

Find out how the Cabinet Office has managed to run a Clearing House – AKA Blocking House – concealing national and local government corruption and wrongdoing ever since. It is at its worst under Rishi Sunak but could we persuade a new government to let the sunlight in?

Meirion is best known for investigations into Bogus Bomb Detectors, Jimmy Savile, Vulture Funds and the Fake Sheikh. His stories have led to changes in the law and bad people going to jail.

Jeremy Paxman accused Meirion of exhibiting that “obsessional, slightly nutty commitment that marks out all successful investigative reporters”.

The quacks and charlatans of medicine
Dr Jenny Lange, Neuroscientist

Scientific research in medicine has led to many groundbreaking discoveries, from the development of vaccines to the treatment of many previously fatal diseases. Today our chances of surviving serious illness are better than ever, thanks to significant advances in medical knowledge. Yet history is littered with sham doctors, charlatans and quacks peddling bogus medicines and preying on those people desperate for a cure. In the age of social media and in the wake of COVID-19, the distrust in scientific experts has resulted in a new wave of fake medicines and false information that is spread at a rapid pace.

In this talk, Dr Jenny Lange delves into the history of grifters who capitalised on a lack of medical knowledge, selling fraudulent medicines that at best had no effect and at worst resulted in the death of their victims. From John R. Brinkley, the bizarre ‘goat-gland doctor’, to those who used radium therapy as a cure for everything from diabetes to impotence, to more recent fake medicines such as those promoted by the ‘Church of Bleach’, this talk will examine how easy it is to fall prey to medical quacks even today.

Dr Jenny Lange is a neuroscientist who specialises in uncovering the mechanisms of rare neurological disorders. Initially en route to becoming a psychologist, Jenny became intrigued by the field of psychopharmacology and completed a PhD in Neuroscience at King’s College London. She’s currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the UK Dementia Research Institute, University College London, as well as writing for PET Bionews.

The Rendlesham Forest UFO Case – Deconstructing a myth
Ian Ridpath, Writer

The Rendlesham Forest UFO incident of Christmas 1980 ranks as one of the top ten UFO cases in the world as voted by UFO believers and is often described as the ‘British Roswell’. Evidence for a series of sightings spread over two nights includes eye-witness statements from security guards at the US Air Force base near Woodbridge in Suffolk, a memo from a high-ranking USAF officer to the UK’s Ministry of Defence, and a real-time tape recording of events as they unfolded. This talk looks at the main points of the case and explains how the witnesses were fooled by a series of natural and man-made objects. The Rendlesham case is an instructive demonstration that UFO sightings can never be taken at facevalue no matter how reliable the witnesses may seem.

Ian Ridpath is an internationally renowned writer on astronomy and space and a well-known UFO skeptic. He was the first skeptic to investigate and explain the Rendlesham Forest UFO case after it hit the headlines in 1983. His investigations have grown into a major website which can be accessed here

http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/rendlesham.html

This talk will summarize his investigations of the case.