Okay, sit back folks. Here's the scoop:

The talk was about an hour and a half long, and was him lecturing for half an hour, a half hour slide show, then him talking again. When he was introduced, my heart sank: he has given this talk 500 times. I knew then that any comment I made he would have heard a dozen times before, and would know how to deal with it.

The crowd had a few True Believers in it, a few students from the physics department where I work, and a representative "normal" crowd. There were perhaps 50-70 people there.

The talk itself was really quite dull. Instead of pictures and videos of objects, he had slides of government documents with names blacked out. The slide show was accompanied by a taped voiceover he had done, replete with eerie music (he used various themes from the "Close Encounters" soundtrack). He had lots of crude drawings from eyewitnesses, which drew chuckles from the crowd because it was so, well, 1970s. We're talking shaky line drawings of circles with lights, cigar-shaped outlines and the like. Nothing I hadn't seen in UFO TV shows since 1970.

He mentioned Betty and Barney Hill, as I knew he would: I found a transcript of his talk online, posted by an audience member who saw him once and taped him. I sent it to James Oberg, a noted UFO debunker, who gave me some tips.

Betty and Barney Hill are people who claim to have been abducted by aliens in the 1960s. It's a famous case; she was hypnotized and regressed to remember the incident.

During the talk Q&A, I stood up and said "Betty was interested in UFOs long before she saw the psychiatrist. That explains why she thought she was abducted. She had been talking to her husband for months before she got therapy, which would explain why his story was so similar to hers. The doctor later published, saying he did not believe she was abducted (there were a lot of social pressures on her at the time which might have started this episode), a point the speaker neglected to mention. Finally, I had read that Betty Hill was disgusted with the way UFOs were treated by the True Believer community. I inferred that she no longer believed she had been abducted.

I was astonished at what Hastings then did: he agreed with all my points, except the last one; he said Betty Hill believes she was abducted but was indeed unhappy with the way research was being done.

Let me repeat this: he agreed with me. I basically negated his whole Hill abduction story, but he said I was right, but he somehow spun it to make it seem like he was the one who was right. He constructed his sentences in such a way that it was difficult to follow his point, and then when he was done he would immediately go to the next questioner, not giving the first questioner time to rebut. After he answered my question, I knew that to a non-skeptical audience member who wasn't paying close attention, it looked like he showed just how I was wrong. In fact, he did nothing of the sort.

His tactics were clear. This guy would say mutually contradictory things two in a row throughout the whole talk, but couch what he was saying in such a confusing way that it could be difficult to follow him. You are left with the feeling (if you are not too skeptical) that he knows what he's talking about.

My friends were all laughing after the talk. I was disappointed that my question was handled in such a way that it made him seem right while I was wrong, but like I said, I knew that the Q&A wouldn't go well since he had so much experience. I have never talked to a UFO person before, so honestly I was out of my league, I wish James Oberg had been there though.

Incidentally, I got a rebuttal to my editorial in the student newspaper. A student frothed about how unfair I was, not giving any specific examples of why UFOs aren't real. The guy completely missed my point: I wasn't trying to debunk anything specific. Quite the opposite; I was trying to debunk UFOs in a general way, to get people thinking about how the "evidence" is presented, and to question the research methods. It would take volumes (literally) to debunk UFO specifics, but it isn't necessary, as I saw during the talk. You just have to listen to the way the stuff is presented.

The kicker: the editorial rebuttal was written by an anthropology student. I fear for the future of science sometimes. :wink:

edited for spelling/typos