overnment, authority in general and even Channel 4. What great news this is, given that those in power have shown over and over that they lie to us on a daily basis.

My part in the documentary led to me meeting a university psychology academic called Chris French from Goldsmith's College at the University of London. He's a BA PhD CPsychol FBPsS FRSA. Must be intelligent, then. French has produced some astonishing research. Mind, I use the term 'astonishing', as in 'astonishing that he bothered'. He and his colleagues questioned people about 'conspiracy theories' and this is what they found:

Those who trust authority are less likely to believe in conspiracies.

Those who distrust authority are more likely to believe in conspiracies.

Ain't academia great? How would we survive without these guys? Anyone with a brain could have told them what they would find before they even started, because of course that is bound to be true. If you don't trust authority you are going to be more open to claims that they are lying than if you think authority is benign and only there to serve the best interests of the people. Er, and?

As I said to French in our interchange on the programme, the point is not who will, or will not, believe in the conspiracy view of world events. The question is this: are the claims true and supportable by the evidence? In short, is the conspiracy happening or isn't it?

This, however, is too simple and direct for the concrete end of academia which, in my experience, is a very long end indeed. Never mind the evidence, it must be something in people's psyche that gets them to believe in conspiracies. After all, the conspiracies can't be true, because we don't believe them. So, let's have a survey and disappear up our own backsides pouring over the obvious, and let's forget little irrelevant details like whether the conspiracy is happening or not.

French told me they had found that those who believed in 'conspiracy theories' were more likely to be 'delusional' than those who didn't believe them. The psychiatric definition of 'delusional' is: 'A false belief strongly held in spite of invalidating evidence, especially as a symptom of mental illness: delusions of persecution'.

So how come no-conspiracy theorists are not considered 'delusional' when they believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq just because those in authority told them this was the case? Ah, but, you see, not to believe in conspiracies is more credible to academia because it supports the establishment version of events. It is like believing in extraterrestrial life. The idea that life as we know it has only evolved on this tiny little planet and nowhere else is considered credible because that's the establishment's view that people like Chris French are there to serve. Therefore, to believe that given the perceived vastness of space there has to be other life 'out there' is considered 'delusional' - 'He believes in little green men', and all that crap.

There is no better example of this phenomenon that I call 'reverse-credibility', than the Islamic hijackers theory about 9/11. It is credible to believe that nineteen hijackers who struggled to fly one-engined Cessnas at puddle-jumping flying schools could suddenly manifest the ability to fly jumbo jets with the most extraordinary skill. But, to say that this is clearly nonsense is a 'conspiracy theory' that attracts dismissal from people like French. He was trying to defend the official 9/11 story during our chat, including the hijacker-pilots-who-couldn't-fly theory.

I asked him for his definition of delusional with regard to his survey and he said it was those who answered 'yes' to questions like: Do you think that everyone is being tracked by their mobile phone?

Once again, whether they are or not is never addressed by French and company. Only his interpretation of the answer matters. The fact is that everyone can be tracked by their cell phone and many are when they are being particularly targeted. I don't believe that everyone is, because most people are no problem to authority and so there is no point.

But to believe that it might be happening when surveillance is increasing by the day is now considered 'delusional'. French doesn't know if the statement is true or false, but he believes it to be false and so anyone who thinks it might be going on must be delusional because he can't be wrong.

French told me there was no evidence for what I was saying in my books about a global conspiracy to impose an Orwellian state. I asked him the obvious question: Have you read any of them? His answer ... 'No'.

This is absolutely typical of his breed and I have met so many of these academic clones who parrot their song sheet 'science' and song sheet 'psychology'. They are not interested in evidence, only their own theories. Indeed, they are no-conspiracy theorists who never bother to check out the validity of what is being claimed by actually researching the evidence.

I said I couldn't take him seriously when he was saying on one hand that there was no evidence and yet not even bothering to read even one of my books to see what evidence was being presented. 'I knew you would take that line', he said. Well, what other 'line' is there to take in the circumstances?

If someone had rigid views on what it is like to travel by train when they had never been near a railway station, people like French would say they had a psychological flaw. But that's exactly what he and his colleagues do. They have concrete opinions without even a cursory look at the evidence, and then accuse people of being delusional for believing in something when, in the unresearched opinion of people like Chris French, there is no evidence! They are looking themselves in the mirror and they are too full of themselves to see it.

When I challenged French about dismissing evidence that he hadn't even bothered to read, he said he knew what I was saying from articles he had read in the media. Given that we are talking about one of the most miss-represented people of recent times, I had to laugh at the idea that anyone could find out what I was really saying, and on what evidence, from the news media. But, then, from the moment I began talking with the guy, I knew I was in Fairyland.

He told me that my work was based on a document called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he claimed was a 'proven fake'. I asked him how he knew that my books were based on that. He had seen it in the papers. The fact that this was provable nonsense, as a read of my books would immediately confirm, was once again irrelevant to him.

What I found most fascinating was to see this no-conspiracy theorist act in precisely the same way he claims for those 'conspiracy theorists' that he so dismisses.

He says that people believe in conspiracies without any evidence.

Yet he believes there is no conspiracy without looking at the evidence.

He says that 'conspiracy theorists' make everything fit their theory.

Yet he was constantly trying to find ways to make everything fit his no-conspiracy theory.

Chris French was everything he was accusing others of being. I asked him what he thought of the FBI claim to have found a paper passport from one of the '9/11 hijackers' near the Twin Towers, despite the planes crashing in fireballs, the towers turning to dust and thousands of bodies never being recovered. He told me that he had seen a story once of a gas explosion in a house that had caused lots of damage, but the person inside got out unscathed.

I said that the FBI had never produced the passport and, a year after they called a news conference to announce they had found it, the Bureau had told a television documentary team that the find of a hijacker's passport was 'a rumour that might be true'.

Now French theory one, that the paper passport did actually survive, was in deep trouble and another had to be conjured immediately. Maybe, he said, there had been a mix-up in communication and the people who held the news conference had been told it had been found when it wasn't. Had he ever checked that out? No. Would he ever check it out? No. As long as it could give his no-conspiracy theory an escape route, that's all that concerned him.

The common thread of our conversation was that French had to find a way of explaining everything to fit his theory. Any possibility that events could be orchestrated to achieve an outcome had no chance of breaching his firewall. He accuses others of constructing 'conspiracy theories' to make sense of a complex world when he is constructing no-conspiracy theories in precisely the same way.

French is not alone either. He's a blueprint, a program, which you find in the same positions all over the world. I was on a Canadian television news show a few years ago with a university psychologist straight off the production line that produced Chris French. He said that people believed in conspiracy theories because they had to find a way of making sense of a complex world. That is exactly what French said to me this week almost word-for-word, because they share the same computer reality.

I asked this Canadian guy to tell me about the Bilderberg Group. He wouldn't answer and banged on with his no-conspiracy theory. He then said that if what I was saying was true, why were the authorities allowing me to speak in Vancouver? I pointed out that we had spent the last month changing venues as each one pulled out under pressure not to let me speak and that a book signing at a major bookstore had been banned that very week for the same reason. The guy made a right prat of himself, but walked away oblivious of this fact.

After the filming, Chris French asked me if I would give a talk to the 'Skeptics Society' in a London pub. I said no, because there was no point. The Skeptics Society is a forum for concrete psyches 'devoted to promoting scientific skepticism and resisting the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational beliefs'. It would be like talking to a wall and I have one in front of me that I can use without any need to travel.

People say it's good to be skeptical, or sceptical as we spell the word in Britain, but it isn't. It is good to question and research, but that's not the same as being sceptical. A sceptic is someone who comes from a fixed position and then filters all evidence to the contrary, and the main method is by always finding another explanation for something, no matter how far fetched and ludicrous. By finding another means of explaining away something that challenges their fixed position, they can maintain the fixed position; and that's the whole idea of the exercise: defending their belief. It is irrelevant if the explanation they come with up is not valid - they never bother to research that. So long as they can find something, anything, that's enough to preserve the perception.

Look at that line again about the Skeptics Society: '... devoted to promoting scientific skepticism and resisting the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational beliefs'. Who decides what is pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational belief? They do, from their fixed belief in how things are. I have met a number of these people and many of them are utterly desperate to find ways of dismissing anything that is different to the norms that they slavishly worship.

This slavery to 'scientific' and society 'norms' means the sceptics that dismiss conspiracy research, like that related to 9/11, are the same people who attack and ridicule any suggestion of the so-called 'paranormal'. I have found this again and again with these characters. So, I had a right chuckle when I went to Chris French's webpage after our meeting to find out some more background about what he did. This is what I found:

My current research focuses on two main areas. The first is the psychology of paranormal beliefs and of ostensibly paranormal experiences. Although a large proportion of the population believes in the paranormal, the evidence presented to support paranormal claims is generally not very convincing in scientific terms. It would appear that on most (and perhaps all) occasions when individuals claim to have directly experienced the paranormal, plausible non-paranormal alternative explanations can be found.

These alternative accounts often rely on the imperfections in human information-processing studied by cognitive psychologists, such as those related to memory, perception, and judgement. The psychology of deception and self-deception is also of relevance in this area. I often appear on the television and radio offering a sceptical perspective on a variety of paranormal claims. I have recently set up the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit within the Department to act as a focus for research in this area.

That's what a closed mind does for you. You don't research to discover anew; you 'research' to confirm your current beliefs. Much of academia is another religion, another belief system repelling all borders. Academia often condemns and ridicules religion when it is one and operates in the same way. What unites them all? Concrete minds.