It Happens in Underground Car Parks

Overview

It Happens in Underground Car Parks is a 2012 non-fiction book by Paul Chant.

Synopsis

In this controversial study, world-renowned UFOlogist Dr Paul Chant gathers comparative data from around the globe and applies rigorous statistical methods to draw conclusions about the nature of paranormal phenomenon.

As in his earlier bestseller Demon City: The Haunting of Vancouver, Dr Chant relies on eyewitness accounts, usually in the form of personal interviews with the subjects, to obtain subjective impressions of supernatural and paranormal happenings over the last fifty years. It Happens in Underground Car Parks widens the scope of his previous study to include incidents from around the world, primarily the United States, England and Russia.

In his bold conclusion, Dr Chant applies strict principles of Geometric Psychometry and proposes a theory of Event Space Equivalency, which states that 90% of all paranormal activity take place in "underground-car-park-like space".

Publication History

This is Chant's first full book following the publication of Demon City in 2008. It is rumoured that Chant was given a six-figure advance by his publisher, which he largely spent to fund globe-trotting research trips during the writing of it.

The book was also serialised in the pages of the Los Angeles Globe.

Critical Reception

Chant's work was not critically well received. The following review by Joyce Kirk PhD, professor of Human Parapsychology at Local University New York, was published in the LA Globe Literary Supplement:

Utter claptrap. How Chant can tart up new age psychobabble with pseudo-mathematical symbology is quite beyond me. Chant has produced a monstrosity of monolithic dimensions and deserves to be burned at the stake of rational thought.

I find fault with every element of Chant's "research". His interviews, transcribed in prose of an increasingly lurid purple hue, are unstructured and follow none of the accepted methodologies. His statistical rigour leaves much to be desired. It appears that Chant subscribes to the school of selective data representation, to whit: if it does not fit the pre-conceived theory, leave it out.

Surely Chant's conclusions are a joke? To claim that spaces as diverse as a highway overpass, a strip of beach, the United Nations building, and Lafayette Park in San Francisco (to name just a few of his "psychometric hot spots") are all geometric analogs of an underground car park is a trip into the realms of fantasy. No doubt his next scholarly work will tell us that all interiors are analogs of a Shuggy Hall?

I can find no shred of a redeeming quality throughout this miserable attempt at a scholarly work. Which explains, I suppose, why that ass Brighter is serialising it in his gossip rag. Like attracts like (as I examine in depth in my latest book The Snake Oil Game). Print this then, Brighter, if you dare.