When you prod a sleeping bear with a stick, you have one of two choices. Run away as soon as it wakes up and hope that you can run faster than a sleepy bear or stand your ground and do battle with the beast.

Wendy Connors decided to prod a sleepy bear this week on the UFO UpDates List by posting a thought provoking and informative piece about CSICOP - The Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Now I'm not quite sure what exactly prompted Wendy Connors to prod the bear, but prod it she did and got what would be the expected result - one cranky bear.

Now, I'm not going to go over all the posts regarding the thread - Illegitimacy of CSICOP and all the Re:'s that are attached to it. Instead, I'm going to let you go to the UFO UpDates List Archive and you can read and decide for yourself about who won, Wendy or the Bear.

The first respondent to Wendy's post was Bob Young who did a very good job of showing that a sleepy bear can only lash out very weakly in the first attack because the only thing Bob asked Wendy about was to show her proof of the claims she was making but Wendy didn't run away from the bear, she drew sword and got ready to do battle.

The reason I'm not going to go over all of this is because contrary to popular belief, I don't just read things on the UFO UpDates List and comment about them, I decide to do a little digging myself when something interests me and make up my own mind. With this being said, I decided to set out and discover what CSICOP was all about.

First, what intrigued me was their name... CSICOP. Rolls off the tongue in such a way that you would believe they were some policing unit, involved in parapsychology. But of course, they are nothing like that at all. All they are, is a bunch of people that have developed an interest in debunking.

When you spell out their name - Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal - you would think that they would be housed in a building where a bunch of scientists are working away in laboratories conducting all kinds of scientific research - but you would be dead wrong. The Committee actually does no 'research' or 'investigation'. Instead of interviewing people, examining photographic and other tangible evidence, they simply proclaim something to be "false", and we should simply accept this proclamation as the word as given by the almighty CSICOP, go away like the good little sheep we are, and say no more about it.

CSICOP started in 1976 and at that time, they did try to investigate something. They decided to target the statistical work of a French mathematician, Michel Gauquelin, whose work appeared to suggest there might be something to astrology. The problem they had was when their only astronomer, Dennis Rawlins, quit on them and announced that CSICOP was playing with the numbers, in order to prove Gauquelin wrong!

Damn, I'm betting that hurt... if you can't prove that 2 plus 2 equals 5... just use a pencil and change one of the 2's to a 3 - where I come from, we don't call that scientific investigation... we call it cheating!

By the way, I like to give everybody a fair shake and had a look at CSICOP's website to see what they were going on about. One of the stories that I saw was a report about a UFO being reported by a couple of people, one of whom tried following it in his car. CSICOP's answer was that what the people saw was simply nothing more than... wait for it... what else... Venus!

It scares the hell out of me that people, who cannot tell the difference between a planet and a craft of some sort, can seem somehow intelligent enough to get a driver's license! But what can I say? CSICOP would like all of us to believe all UFOs are nothing more than simply Venus!

CSICOP's position on UFOs and aliens can be summed up in what CSICOP's Founder and President, Dr. Paul Kurtz, once said in a television interview when the subject of aliens came up.

"If we are going to admit aliens, what are we going to admit next? Fairies? Elves? Where do we draw the line?"

Duhh... I wish I were a baby-bumblebee.....

To conduct scientific investigation, you have to maintain an open mind. It is abundantly clear that CSICOP's minds have been closed to anything that remotely challenges their belief system.....

But that's just my take on it....