Greetings, fellow sceptics,
I am naturally delighted that so many of you have noticed me. It is even possible that you may able to help. The curse of sceptics, however - and as some of you will certainly be aware – is hubris: when pride in being a sceptic becomes an obstacle to reason. How many of you, for example, might once have dismissed reports that stones sometimes fall out of a clear blue sky?
Being educated more in science than the arts, then becoming a soldier before I was twenty, graduating, still in the army, as an engineer, did nothing persuade me that I was missing anything in religion that was not either wishful thinking or deliberate - and usually cynical - fraud.
Then, aged 29 - a fateful age - I offended the then British government very seriously by writing and circulating a paper arguing that the attempt to use the army to suppress political protest in Northern Ireland would not reduce violence but could only provoke more.
In 1971 this was rank heresy. The British government was totally convinced that military force was necessary. I expected to be court-martialled, but at least I would then be able to explain my reasons.
Instead, nothing happened. The army general whom I had been briefing for the previous six months replied quite affably, but described my argument as ‘banal’. And that was all.
A few weeks later I was invited to attend a military hospital in the far south of England for hearing tests. Shooting had in fact left me, like many soldiers, fairly deaf. This was well known. Now the very senior army doctor who interviewed me so cheerfully suggested that my young wife – we had been married less than a year - ‘take a little holiday with you as well.’
A staff car, with two drivers for the long journey, arrived next day.
Some hours later, as we arrived, I noticed that this hospital was the chief military psychiatric hospital.
Oh, well, I thought, hearing problems are essentially nervous.
My naivety lasted only another five minutes: when one of my two drivers, a corporal, followed me into reception and was asked by the sergeant, who had just saluted me: “Have you got your patient’s papers, Corporal!’
Ah, how clever.
Some weeks later I asked the hospital’s deputy-director, a full colonel, what would he have done if at this point I had slugged the sergeant, then the corporal, pulled the actual driver from the car and made a bid for freedom.
By this time, the colonel had certainly saved my sanity and had, arguably, saved the rest of my life. Now he only shrugged, “I knew as soon as I met you that some bloody fool had made a mistake. But, if you had done that, we would have warned the MPs and the civil police, and they would have brought you back.”
But that first meeting had only confirmed that I had abruptly lost all the protection that the usual presumption of sanity provides outside the walls of psychiatric hospitals; that I had lost all the weak but the indispensable defence of rank, social status, independence: in short, I had lost everything that assures anyone of their identity together with their freedom.
And I was angry.
Angry because had been so confident; so trusting of social forms; so sure of those whom I had trusted.
One of the latter was then the most influential political journalist in Britain. I had boundless admiration for his skill as a writer and his moral profundity. Much later the colonel told me that he had taken my paper into his London club, had dropped it in the lap of one of the senior military members, and had told him: “This is from one of your people. You had better fix him.”
Some years later, he confirmed this by letter, without any apology, telling me: “But it doesn’t seem to have done you any harm.”
Now, as I stared my own reflection in the mirror on my officers’ quarters bedroom, I was only vaguely aware of the potential harm he had set in train. This was very real. In our final interview the colonel told me of his anger at being ordered to begin the most potentially damaging psychiatric treatment as soon as I arrived. Only his professional integrity and his own observation had held him back. A lesser many would have obeyed the government.
Alone and deeply distrustful, even of him, I realised, as any sceptic should, that up to this moment I had always served a far higher level of intelligence than my own: that I was not independent, that I was its agent.
Without hesitation, I dropped to my knees, put my hands together as I had as a child, and said aloud, and angrily: “I need some help.”
The effect of this was utterly astonishing.
It was also, of course, physically impossible.
The whole is recorded in far more detail than I can give here in the chapter entitled ‘Source’ in my website.
Please read it, as sceptics, and tell me what you would have done if this had been you.
Please also look for my book on Amazon entitled 473959; and also for the (appallingly amateurish) YouTube series I have made called Messianic Mathematics, in which I explain why the simple word ‘messiah’ deserves a more thoughtful response than the automatic knee-jerk response that some of my American friends warned me would be sadly inevitable from ‘conservative Christians’.
I responded to their good intentions that was that I have not the least interest in persuading conservative Christians, or conservative Muslims, or conservative Hindu, etc, etc, of anything at all.
They are conservatives. I rather hoped to discourage their interest.
But should there be such a response from the Randi Forum?
First investigate: stones sometimes do fall from the sky.
Colin Hannaford, z.Zt. Lich, Oberhessen, Germany
R) His qualifications are impressive, but he's been putting a series of ads in Private Eye, the latest of which states: "I am a messiah. I will talk to you via youtube on 24th July".
