Why are you a skeptic - Felicity Goodyear-Smith

This week, long time skeptic Felicity Goodyear-Smith tells us her story...

NZ Skeptics used to be called the New Zealand Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and was co-founded in 1986, with Dennis Dutton as the first Chair. Dennis was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury and started Arts and Letters Daily, a website which aggregated essays, book reviews, and other articles about art, literature, science and politics, augmented by Dennis' pithy comments.

In 1993 as a GP and a police doctor who had specialised in the area of sexual assault, I started to see increasing numbers of cases whereby fathers were accused by their adult daughters of having regularly and brutally sexually abused them, sometimes in the context of satanic ritual cults. A hallmark of these allegations was the complainants had no memory of such events until their memories were ‘recovered' during psychotherapy, because each memory had been immediately ‘repressed'. Their elderly parents were bewildered and distressed by these claims and were adamant that the events had never occurred. I started to research, publish and speak out about this phenomenon, which was eventually debunked as having no scientific validity.

In 1995 Dennis Dutton invited me to debate memory repression theory at the Skeptics conference against psychologist Gordon Hewitt. I argued that there was currently no scientific evidence which substantiated memory repression theory and the validity of recovered memories. Hewitt agreed, but then he told some anecdotal accounts which appeared to support the theory. I recall that the audience was not impressed with his promotion of unverified stories as credible evidence. We both agreed that in the absence of corroborative evidence, there is no way to distinguish between a historically accurate recall and a pseudo-memory, regardless of whether the memory is said to be continuous, partially recovered, or fully recovered.

Until that point, I had never heard of Skeptics. My husband and I joined and we have enjoyed attending many conferences over the years and reading the newsletters. In mid August 2010 I organised the annual conference in Auckland. Our family had recently visited Hawai'i and we had climbed to the summit of Mauna Loa, the largest volcano on the planet. The climb goes from 600 to 4000 metres, with a landscape of barren lava rock for the last 1000m. On the way we picked up a number of tiny lava drops called Pele's tears. There was a myth that Pele, the wrathful goddess of volcanoes, would unfurl a curse on anyone who removes her ‘tears'. We took the risk and included one tiny stone in each conference package, warning people that if they were worried they could mail them back to Hawai'i. Several weeks later, on 4 September, Christchurch was rocked by a huge earthquake. Chair Entity Vicki Hyde, who lived there, suggested that Pele's curse had come true. However no calamity beset our family, the original culprits. Did anyone post their rock back?