Resist the urge to be defensive. No one is attacking you.

There's no need to haul off and start claiming that "nothing was discovered".

Like in the Scole Experiments. The "intelligences" actually discuss a new energy with the physicist [an energy akin to electricity or magnetism that we're apparently on the cusp of discovering]. They went into highly detailed discussions of it, and even gave schematics for a machine that would draw upon it.

So who knows if it may lead to something decades down the line?

I think of it like Leo Szilard, a nuclear physicist on the Manhattan Project. He was having problems building the first hydrogen bomb. He ended up reading a novel by H.G. Wells that was written thirty years earlier [a novel, by the way, which coined the phrase "atomic bomb"] and he had a Eureka moment, and discovered the concept of nuclear fission. And he credited Wells with it.

But it took 30 years between Wells having the idea, and men of science finding a practical application for it.

Likewise with idiot savants. Who knows what the subconscious of one of these people might produce [these people who claim to be alien abductees, or in touch with spirits]. They may [like H.G. Wells] have imaginations that produce legitimately intelligent things that will sit on the shelf for decades before you or I ever hear about a practical application for it.

So I'll try and be humble and not scoff when the people at Scole said, "There's a third energy, one very like electricity or magnetism, that you're just on the cusp of discovering . . ."

This might actually be true. But I have no illusions that wham, bam: the second someone comes up with an idea, two seconds later the Scientific Community will embrace it with open arms and implement it.

Hell, look at the controversy regarding cold fusion. The scientists who discovered it were called liars and charlatans. Their careers were ruined. And now, thirty years later, scientific institutions are quietly admitting that they might not have been charlatans after all. Several universities have confessed to being able to reproduce most of their claims.

So there was an initial rush to judgment, a knee-jerk reaction to accuse people of fraud.

Same thing happened to the Wright Brothers. Are you aware that none other than Popular Mechanics declared their flying-machine a hoax? The Wright Brothers invited them to an exhibition, but the good men at Popular Mechanics didn't need to bother with going, since they knew it was fake in advance.

Oops!

Same thing with Edison's phonongraph. A professor of acoustics at the Sorbonne in France [a man named de Ville] said that it was a hoax, too. "It was done with ventriloquism," he claimed. He too [like the writers for Popular Mechanics] didn't need to bother with actually studying the matter. He just "knew" in advance.

The history of science is littered with these embarrassing lapses on the part of the Establishment.

Institutions, even Scientific Institutions, have a bad habit of being human. And like all things that are human, sometimes emotionalism trumps rationality, prejudice eclipses objectivity, stodginess and conformity get in the way of advances.

It takes decades for things to happen, where you think it takes mere minutes.

• Footnote: You'd be surprised at the nutty way the human mind works and how many legitimately scientific things were the product of bat-shit insane people. Like Nicola Tesla. Read up on his "visions". He would actually have waking hallucinations, where he'd see machinery glowing before his eyes. The hallucinations were so vivid that he would jump back, thinking they were real. It was his imagination's way of bodying forth ideas. And you know what? He would build the products of these hallucinations and they would work . . . which is how we have alternating current today, the remote control, and the radio. He created all these things, and he did it being a nut. The human imagination works in a lot of eccentric ways. My theory is that some of these people are experiencing similar things. (Not all, obviously. But a small subset.) And I think that they're just rationalizing and trying to make sense of what their mind is doing, and their psyche is furnishing them with things like aliens and ghosts. But it's really all their own minds.