UFO Update

Mark Honeychurch - 15 April 2024

For those who were paying attention when reading the newsletter from two weeks ago, when I published a plea for help from an ex-member of the NZ Skeptics regarding a photo his mother had taken in Auckland, you may have noticed something odd. Despite claiming to be a skeptic, there was a strange sentence in the middle of the email we received. It read:

“On the one hand I personally believe we are not alone here on earth because of my own personal experiences.”

Knowing something because of personal experiences? That sounds like anathema to skepticism. As skeptics we learn that our brains are fallible, and can be tricked in many different ways. Our own personal experience is not a perfect way to view the world - it’s a great tool, but it likes to approximate, extrapolate and use lots of other shortcuts in order to help us experience a coherent view of the world outside of our bodies, when the information it’s receiving is patchy and unreliable. So, no, we shouldn’t trust our personal experiences - at least when they disagree with known science, a materialistic view of the universe, or the collective understanding of the world that 8 billion of us have sort of pieced together.

I bristled when I read that sentence - and I’m hoping that some of you reading this may have done so as well. It was an immediate red flag for me, and let me know that I should be careful when interacting with the person who messaged us - that I should be polite in my interactions, but stay alert for more signs of weird beliefs. I chose to publish the email and the photos, as I figured it was a fun question to ask, and I wondered if anyone might actually have a plausible answer. But I also chose to remove the person’s name, as I wanted to keep a distance from someone who, despite having been a member of our organisation, appears to not be totally on board with the fundamentals of skepticism.

Fast forward to last week, and we received a second email from this person - this time an application to be considered for our $100,000 prize. I’ve decided not to hide their name, as I want to preserve their Twitter and YouTube links for people to access:

Good day.

My name is Vernon Elliott I am actually an old NZ sceptic member way back when Dennis Dutton was alive and fronting your organisation.

Years later I started putting my visions to the test and publishing them on an online forum where people would see if they came true or not.

Then after that I joined twitter where I continued to share visions. These visions were specific to my interests in the gold price and Bitcoin price. These were predictions to the dollar calling highs, lows and a false bottom all many years in advance. In fact my gold prediction to $5554 significant number and above has been in play for over ten years.

Billions of dollars changed hands at my predictions for both gold and Bitcoin. So yes I truly believe I had or maybe still have the power of future vision. I am a rational thinker and I can not explain how it is possible and neither can anyone else.

If you wish to look further into this my twitter account is @vernonkelliott and the site where I published my predictions was on Silver Stackers an Australian forum.

My online activity seems to be completely monitored these days so I think it’s probable you will not even receive this message.

But in the interests of what is possible & what is not I think it’s important I try to contact you and share information with you.

Actually I joined the NZ skeptic society when my Dad was following the late Guru Sai Baba and was in my opinion being tricked into sending the organisation a load of money and look for miracle’s that to me were merely simple magic tricks and hocus poucus.

The lesson I learnt there was belief’s are stronger than facts and I failed in showing Sai Baba as a con man.

I did an interview with Joanna Summerscales in 2019 for YouTube which if you can watch to the end you can see there are other people who can verify at least two of my early years experiences because they saw what I saw.

The link for the video on YouTube is here

As you can imagine when these experiences happen to me being a logical thinker / skeptic it did take a bit of a toll on my health. But you know now I believe that these things happened to me because I would be strong enough to fight through my own cognitive dissonance that what I did multiple times was impossible.

I haven’t used vision in years as I really felt I was playing with fire.

That’s my true story so thanks for taking the time to read it. If invited I would have a go at your challenge so you could see what is possible if you didn’t think enough evidence is there already.

Best wishes

Vernon Elliott

I’ll let you all be the judge of whether we’re dealing with someone with real psychic powers, or someone who’s deluded themselves. Suffice it to say that the NZ Skeptics have no plans to test Vernon’s claims.