Roger, how strict are you with witnesses in regard to remembering things correctly?
Do you think it's possible to forget details from many years ago, or to get those details mixed up?
Do you always maintain that a person is lying, and therefore not to be trusted, if they make an inaccurate statement about something that happened years ago?
I can think of reasons why Heironimus—or anyone—might say he hadn’t stumbled although he had. He says to himself, “I’m not a clumsy person, so I wouldn’t have stumbled.” Or he says to himself, “I did a great job, so how could I have stumbled?” Or he says to himself, “I don’t remember any stumble in the replays of the PGF I’ve seen, so there wasn’t a stumble.” Therefore, he convinces himself—the work of a fraction of a second—that he
didn’t stumble. Once that conviction has had time to embed itself solidly in his mind, his memory would have reconstructed itself to conform.
I think this sort of process of misremembering is what memory experts describe as common. So I’m willing to cut Heironimus some slack on this point. Maybe his memory
is playing tricks on him, as Long suggested to him (TMoB, p. 416), despite Heironimus’s peevish denial. I wouldn’t place too much stress on any one flub in building a case against someone (unlike Vortigern99 vs. Barry Keith). I don’t view things in black or white, but shades of gray, probabilistically.
I
have been insistent that claims here that Heironimus “forgot” what happened, as though the matter had slipped his mind, were incorrect. Heironimus emphatically stated that he
didn’t forget. The term his apologists should have used was “misremembered.” Probably, now that you’ve brought this up, that’s what they really meant. I should have thought of it then, when I responded, and offered them that out.
I look at Heironimus’s misremembering on this point in the context of his numerous other flubs, which convince me that his tale is an invention. Given that this false claim of his fits that “invention” pattern, that’s what I think is the more likely option (than misremembering). Here is a summary I wrote eight years ago about his story changes. (I’d make a half-dozen revisions to it now.)
“Herroneous vs. Herroneous: His 43 Story-Changes,” dated 6/8/08, is on Henry May’s scribd site at:
https://www.scribd.com/document/35026515/ART-Herroneous-vs-Herroneous
(There’s also a 45-item version floating around the Internet somewhere. I have accumulated many more of his flubs by now.)
What if we change the time frame, and they are making a statement about an event within the last few weeks, and they are inconsistent?
Or in short, do you hold all those who speak about the PGF to the same standard of accuracy regarding telling their version of events?
Mind you, I agree with you about BH, and this is not a new position for me.
I think you are using different standards with different witnesses.
First, I don’t think I was being strict with
Heironimus, but rather with his apologists who suggested that he’d just forgotten something. (See above.) Viewed in isolation, or even in the context of his other flubs, I’d be willing to make excuses for him. What do I know?
I’m more willing to cut slack for PGF proponents than for Heironimus, because of the murkiness of the evidence and the complexity of the case and the difficulty of tracking things down about it. If proponents were speaking off the cuff and made a questionable claim, I’d be forgiving, especially if their tone hadn’t been too sure-of-itself. Heironimus, OTOH, has personal knowledge of his claim, so he lacks the “out” of ignorance. And he made a sure-of-himself statement.
I’m not very biased in favor of the PGF. I’ve said I was troubled by some of the phony-looking frames in the PGF, and that I gave it only a two-thirds chance of being real, which is less than most proponents’ estimates. And I’ve been harsh on some Bigfoot proponents. For instance, in April I a few Bigfooters an e-mail with the subject line, “15 mistakes or eyebrow-raisers in 3 pages of Byrne's book.”
Please cite the instance where I used a more lenient standard on a PGF proponent. I may have, but if so I suspect that the circumstances justified it.
