EGM

There have been some significant changes within the ASSAP Executive which functions as the board of trustees and directors who run ASSAP on your behalf. There have been a number of resignations from the Executive following the realisation that ASSAP was not being run and managed in accordance with the correct Articles of Association, our constitution, and that ASSAP custom and practice had grown up which was not covered by the rules. The Executive carried out an online consultation which established the need for an expert consultant to be hired by the Executive, Willow Tree Consulting was appointed and advice sought from the Charity Commission and Companies House who regulate charitable companies like ASSAP. The result of this was that ASSAP should legally be governed by the 2007 Articles that had been registered with the Charity Commission and were in force as far as they were concerned.

However, the 2007 ASSAP Articles in their current form do not allow general meetings, Annual General Meetings, AGMs, and Extraordinary General Meetings, EGMs, to be conducted on line, or for notices for those meetings to be sent out electronically. Neither do they adequately provide for meetings of the Executive to be held online either.

Consequently, the current Executive is calling an EGM by sending you this letter on paper to your registered postal address you have registered with us so that we may communicate with you to formally invite you to attend an Extraordinary General Meeting. This is solely for the purpose of passing the set of motions set out below to legally enable online participation for general and executive meetings which we consider is in the interest of all concerned, and will bring the 2007 Articles in-line with current practice

The meeting (Members Only) is to be held on Saturday the 1^st of February between 12 noon to 3pm in The Charles Suite of The Chesterfield Hotel which is located at 35 Charles Street, London W1J 5EB. 

If you will be attending, please email us at egm@assap.ac.uk so we can put your name on the list for the hotel.

Once we have gone through the Articles of Association and voted, we then will have three guest speakers.

12.00pm - EGM Meeting                                                                                                                                                        

  1.00pm - Deborah Hyde - Woolpit Fairies 

What are religion, witchcraft, sorcery, magic and superstition? Are they even very different from each other? Or are some of them more sensible and respectable than the others? Deborah wants to know about things which probably don’t exist: why do people believe in them if they’re not there? She has been fascinated with ghosts, poltergeists, fairies, demons, vampires, werewolves and more, since childhood. Deborah regularly speaks and writes about religion and belief. You may have heard her on ‘Team Skeptic’ on the popular BBC podcast ‘Uncanny’.For ten years, Deborah was the editor of The Skeptic Magazine, the UK’s only regular magazine to take a critical-thinking and evidence-based approach to pseudo-science and the paranormal.            

Talk            

Two children appeared in the harvest fields of twelfth-century East Anglia. They were wearing strange clothes, they didn't speak English ... and they were green. We would probably dismiss this as a story or strange imagining, except that there are two independent and reputable sources for the tale. What can we say today about this odd event? Were the people of Woolpit visited by the fairies?

                                                                                    

  1.30pm - Naomi Ryan - The Spirit of the Law - a Legal Perspective on Ghosts      

Naomi Ryan is a criminal barrister and lover of all things macabre. After qualifying with a Masters in Law from St Catherine’s College, Oxford, she taught criminal law to undergraduates at St Hilda’s College Oxford and University College London before embarking on her career as a criminal barrister, where she both prosecuted and defended. She now works as an advisory lawyer on criminal matters within the Civil Service and occasionally writes about the darker side of legal history. She regrets that she has yet to cross-examine a ghost.             

Talk        

Lawyers will often claim that the law strives for objectivity and impartiality. They are in the business of making rational and reasoned arguments and have no time for the mysterious or macabre. However, in reality, the supernatural has been a regular topic in legal proceedings since Henry VIII made witchcraft a criminal offence in 1541. Not only have ghosts been blamed for criminality, but they’ve been witnesses to crimes and even attempted to solve their own murders. In each case, the judge and jury have not simply ignored the weird witnesses. Instead, they subjected the supernatural claims to the same harsh legal scrutiny as any other case. 

So join Naomi Ryan and examine some of the strangest cases in legal history, in which the Fortean meets the forensic, the bizarre is examined by barristers and the strange is investigated by the state. Learn about deaths that have been blamed on ghosts, decide whether it is lawful to kill a spirit and most importantly, discover whether you can return from the grave to avenge your own murder.                 

  2.00pm - Professor Chris French - Psychology of Alien Abduction    

Chris French is Emeritus Professor and Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a Patron of UK Humanists. He has published over 200 articles and chapters covering a wide range of topics. His main current area of research is the psychology of paranormal beliefs and anomalous experiences. He frequently appears on radio and television casting a sceptical eye over paranormal claims. His most recent books are Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience (2014, with Anna Stone) and The science of weird shit: Why our minds conjure the paranormal to be published by MIT Press (2024).           

Talk

Are aliens really visiting our planet on a regular basis? Are people really being abducted by aliens and subjected to bizarre medical investigations? Even worse, are the aliens engaged upon a sinister cross-breeding project to produce human-alien hybrids?

This talk will cover psychological aspects of various types of alien contact claim, ranging from simple sightings of “unidentified flying objects” to alien abduction experiences. Along the way, we will review the history of UFOs within society and discuss the risks inherent in the “memory recovery” techniques employed by some ufologists.

It will be argued that all claims of alien contact can be plausibly accounted for in terms of known psychological phenomena such as sleep paralysis and false memories.