Super Spooky Halloween

Super Spooky Halloween Lady Science Download

01:23:24

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg

Guest: Kate Sheppard 

Producer: Leila McNeill 

Music: Careful! by Zombie Dandies

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The scientific study of the paranormal and supernatural might seem contradictory, but we discuss how fringe sciences have made concerted attempts to break into the mainstream, oftentimes perpetuating the same gender inequalities of modern science and medicine. Historian of science and long time contributing Lady Science editor Kate Sheppard joins in to talk about Margaret Murray and her witch cult hypothesis. 

Show Notes

Visitation and Violence: Gender and the UFO Phenomenon by Anna Reser

Vulgar Women, Queer Men, and Unruly Spirits by Leila A. McNeill

Forced to the Fringe: Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult Hypothesis by Kathleen Sheppard

#FolkloreThursday

Further Reading

The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England by Alex Owen “In the Laboratory of Spirits: Gender, Embodiment, and the Scientific Quest for Life Beyond the Grave 1918-1939” by Beth Robertson

The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology by Kate Sheppard

“Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her and Why?” by Jacqueline Simpson

The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny by Susan Lepselter

Transcript

Transcription by Rev.com

Rebecca: Welcome back to the Lady Science Podcast, a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of the Lady Science Magazine.

Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co- editor in chief of Lady Science. I'm an artist, writer and a PhD student. I study 20th century American culture and the history of the American space program in the 1960s.

Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, one of the founders and editors in chief of the science. I am a historian of science and freelance writer with words in various places on the internet. And currently, I'm a regular writer on women in the history of science at Smithsonian.com.

Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor. When I'm not working with the Lady Science team, I can be found writing about museums and public history around the internet, mostly on Twitter, and managing research projects at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. So for this episode, and in the spirit of Halloween, we're going to be talking about some of the historical connections between the study of the supernatural and the study of science.

Rebecca: And we'll talk about how UFO-ology patterns itself on mainstream science and reproduces all of its problems with women and gender. Leila will talk about 19th century spiritualism and the attempt of 20th century scientists to measure and analyze the supernatural. And I'll talk a little bit about folklore Thursday, a place on Twitter where people share interesting bits of folklore history. Finally, a longtime contributing editor to Lady Science Magazine, Kate Sheppard, will join us to talk about her fascinating research on the esteemed archaeologist Margaret Murray, and her groundbreaking work on the folklore of witchcraft.

Anna: My piece about you ufology, it's called visitation and violence, gender and the UFO phenomenon, it's on Lady Science, we'll put a link in the show notes. But basically, the piece is about how UFO narratives, especially abduction narratives, contain all of these sort of anxieties about rape, violation and female body, gender and generation. And they are sort of constructed within this... What's usually considered I think, a fringe scientific field or a pseudo scientific field of ufology, and that ufology patterns itself on so called mainstream science, and tries to construct different types of evidence based on a pattern that we recognize as mainstream science.

Anna: So what I mean by that is that people go out and try to photograph UFOs because that would be considered like very hard evidence, or they try to get like castings of marks on the ground, where a UFO might have landed, they document, cattle mutilation, so especially like physical evidence of things that are supposed to have been caused by extraterrestrials or their vehicles, that's the most kind of important ufological evidence. And that all kind of conforms to what we would expect. And like a scientific field to do go out and collect physical evidence.

Anna: Another thing that comes up a lot is like radiation signatures at like landing sites somehow are supposed to indicate the presence of extraterrestrial craft. So there's this kind of like going out looking for the physical evidence of visitation. And then there's this whole other chunk of you ufology that has to do with these abduction narratives. And like, in person, visitations between humans and extraterrestrials, and particularly in abduction narratives, there's a lot going on there about gender and bodies and sexuality. Think of anal probes, that kind of thing.

Anna: There's like a really pronounced strain of these abduction narratives. It has to do with women, human women being abducted, and impregnated by the aliens. Sometimes, that's accompanied by a kind of like, the woman will have like, she will have been told by the aliens that her giving birth to this sort of hybrid human-alien child is going to like, save the human species. So there's a lot of work, I think that's been done about like these kind of rhetorical tropes about redemption and like, savior narratives that the aliens are going to come and save humanity.

Anna: But what I'm really interested in is the way that if you pick apart this tension in ufology between like the need to have this hard evidence, because that sort of validates ufology as the science, and then all of this, like eyewitness accounts and reports that were kind of like retrieved by hypnosis, or repressed memories of abduction. These are like extremely soft evidence. And so we would see science, as we understand it in the mainstream, not really being very impressed with these kind of pieces of evidence.

Anna: So if there's no physical proof that anything happened to you, and all you have our memories of being abducted, it's very difficult to validate that in a scientific way. So I think, there's something really interesting here about the way that you ufology struggles with these two sort of important sectors of its practice and the kinds of evidence that are involved there. And I think it's worth noting that all of this sort of like soft evidence has to do with mostly women being abducted and all this sort of narratives about impregnation and generation, kind of fall on the soft side of the evidence scale for ufology, and then the hard side, doesn't really have anything to do with human bodies generally.

Anna: So I think, for me, looking at fringe sciences and pseudo sciences, and tracing where they kind of pick and choose, I guess, which parts of science are going to be most useful to them, or which sort of images of scientific practice they can kind of appropriate to reinforce their own legitimacy. And that, just like in modern science, in modern mainstream science, like the eyewitness account, the embodied knowledge of someone who has had an experience is generally much less valuable than, like the body of a mutilated cow, I guess.

Anna: And so that's just one of the things that I've been kind of exploring with, studying pseudoscience is a way that it kind of models itself on science. And that modeling process really, I think, highlights some of the contradictions and issues that what we consider mainstream science has with gender and bodies and women's knowledge and testimony, eyewitness accounts, hard and soft evidence. So that's kind of what I was exploring in the piece. And I'll just say that there was a book called "The Resonance of Unseen Things" by Susan Lepselter that just won a really big anthropology prize.

Anna: And it's about the rhetoric of the uncanny and conspiracy theories having to do with you ufology. The subtitle is "Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny." So, I didn't read it, but it sounds really good, but also it sounds like something I would have to read in the middle of the day with all the lights on, just because this stuff really