Subject: Getting Back
From: "sean_b_palmer" <sean@...>
Date: 04 Apr 2006 12:38
Hi everyone, It's been over five years now since I first set up this mailing list, and thumbing through the members list I see a lot of old names that I haven't spoken to for many years now. The whole anomalous light thing is a kind of tertiary hobby for me, so I don't get as much time to spend on it as I'd sometimes like, but I have been hacking on the new site [1] recently and am doing a fair amount of research. It's been interesting to see just how few advances have really been made in the field in the previous few years, though that's nothing new--it's a field that progresses at somewhat of a crawl. It's a shame because I think that the personalities involved--Adams, Strand, Devereux, Persinger, Derr, Akers, Clarke, et al.--are very strong and if they made a push to proselytise the efforts in a cleaner way than has been heretofore acheived, they'd garner a lot more interest. In other words, it's a sad reflection that there are only seven scientists working on the problem when there should be several hundred. And several hundred is hardly past being a clique itself, but at least it's something. As Akers has said (pers. comm.), the push has to be towards getting papers produced; but on the other hand, what is there to theorise about when much of the subject still centers around anecdote collection rather than fieldwork? Of course, fieldwork is time consuming and expensive and requires a grand operation. I certainly can't afford to do it, and I wouldn't be able to interest my institution in it; so that leaves independent funding from philanthropists, which I'm not going to get. Which is why I'm continuing to invest the time that I have to spend on the subject in filtering out as much of the evidence as already exists and presenting it for the public, whilst adding my own interpretations on the way if I have any. I try to keep that to a minimum, but every so often I start to see some interesting trends. Anyway, that can come on the site. I mainly post here just to see if anyone else around these parts is still interested in pursuing these lights, and also to make sure that Yahoo! Groups doesn't delete the group for inactivity :-) Cheers, [1] http://inamidst.com/lights/ (mysterylights.com redirects there) -- Sean B. Palmer, UK, 2006 http://inamidst.com/sbp/