Welcome to Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub!
Greenwich SitP is currently the only branch of SitP in South East London. The idea is simple: Once a month, we all meet up in a pub to hear a guest speaker and enjoy a drink or three.
Our regular meet-up spot will change as of the start of 2025. We’ll now be gathering at The Duke of Greenwich (91 Colomb St, SE10 9EZ) on the second Wednesday of each month, unless otherwise noted. Talks will begin at 7:30pm. Although the talks are free and open to all, we would appreciate a small contribution towards covering speakers’ expenses (suggested donation: £4).
Stay updated on our latest events right here on our website, or connect with us on:
- Meetup: Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub
- Twitter: @greenwichsitp
- Bluesky: @greenwichskeptics.org
- Mastodon: @GreenwichSITP@mastodon.world
- Facebook: Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub
We look forward to seeing you at one of our informal gatherings soon!
Our Next Talk
Has Elvis Really Left the Building?
A Short History of Celebrity Séances
Dr Kate Cherrell
Writer and broadcaster
9 July 2025 Wednesday 19:30
The Duke of Greenwich
91 Colomb St, Greenwich – SE10 9EZ
Since the creation of the modern celebrity, séance and the supernatural have been unhappy bedfellows, allowing audiences to incite or imagine interactions with their idols. Mediums and psychics have built careers on the backs of dead celebrities, with many long-dead pop stars unknowingly spurring an entire subsection of psychic memoirs and after-death experiences. Neither Elvis, John Lennon nor Princess Diana have had restful afterlives, but have experienced decades of public appearances and sightings, captured on film, vinyl and countless paperback books.
Para-social relationships are an inherent part of the celebrity/consumer cycle, but they do not finish at the point of death. Rather, they transform and elevate, where personal ideas, beliefs and senses of self can be projected onto a spectral blank slate. Looking at popular culture within the history of celebrity séance, we can learn more about ourselves and our societal needs than what Oscar Wilde and Michael Jackson had for breakfast. This lighthearted talk takes a sideways look at the weird world of celebrity seances in western history, from Elvis’ spectral adventures in Watford to Mark Twain’s post-mortem literature.
Dr Kate Cherrell is a writer and broadcaster specialising in paranormal history and popular seance. Her academic interests include 19th century gothic, periodical culture and modern spiritualism. She is the author of Begotten (2025) and Buried England (2026) and writes commercially on supernatural history. As a paranormal historian, she has co-hosted Haunted Homecoming (Discovery, 2022, 2024) and Unexplained: Caught on Camera (Discovery, 2023), and has provided historical expertise on upcoming television shows for major broadcasters. She has edited the blog Burials and Beyond since 2017 and can usually be found in some dark, dusty corner with a big glass of wine and a good book.
August 2025
Facing up to AI: Are you Fooled by a Fake Face?
Dr Sophie Nightingale
University of Lancaster
13 August 2025 Wednesday 19:30
The Duke of Greenwich
91 Colomb St, Greenwich – SE10 9EZ
The advent of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) has taken the ability to generate fake content to a new level. Early approaches using Generative Adversarial Networks became popular for image synthesis around 2018 with the inception of NVIDIA’s StyleGAN architecture. Since then, the emergence of more powerful AI-based diffusion models has democratised access to image synthesis—allowing almost anyone to create diverse images via simple text prompts. These diffusion models bring new uncertainty around image authenticity. AI-generated imagery can have positive uses, however, nefarious exploitation of these images is often seen in the political sphere, and wider harms include financial fraud and catfishing. As GAI becomes increasingly sophisticated and accessible, this in turn increases concerns about people’s ability to sort real faces from fake ones and raises questions around how these technologies might lead to an erosion of trust in societal and democratic institutions and processes.
In this talk I will discuss research examining people’s ability to distinguish between real and AI-generated faces. I will present the results from a series of experiments examining the realism and trustworthiness of faces generated using 1) Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and 2) AI-based diffusion models.
Sophie is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Lancaster University. Her research interests mainly focus on the intersection of technology with human cognition and behaviour, particularly in security, legal, and forensic contexts.
Her work covers a range of topics including drawing on psychological and computational techniques to improve the detection of digitally manipulated/synthesised media and examining issues of bias and fairness in the application of technology. She currently holds a Future Leaders Fellowship and previously completed her postdoc at the University of Berkeley, California and PhD at the University of Warwick.
September 2025
Using Data to Counter Quackery and Alternative Medicine
Michael Marshall
Project Director of the Good Thinking Society
10 September 2025 Wednesday 19:30
The Duke of Greenwich
91 Colomb St, Greenwich – SE10 9EZ
As skeptics, it’s easy for us to warn people about the harms of alternative medicine at an individual level, but what can we do when quackery is being pushed by authorities, or when the problem is too widespread for a one-on-one approach? From NHS homeopathy to midwifery alt-med, via quack charities and dubious overseas cancer clinics, professional skeptical investigator Michael Marshall will explain how a dogged approach to analysing publicly available data can help us understand what we’re up against, and provide the media with the evidence they need to publish stories that make a difference.
Michael Marshall is the Project Director of the Good Thinking Society, Editor of The Skeptic, and President of the Merseyside Skeptics Society. He regularly speaks with proponents of pseudoscience for the Be Reasonable podcast, and presents investigative reporting on the Skeptics with a K podcast. His work has seen him organising international homeopathy protests, going undercover to expose psychics and quack medics, and co-founding the popular QED conference. He has written for The Guardian, The Times, The New Statesman and New Scientist.
October 2025
How They Hide the Truth from You
Meirion Jones
Investigative journalist
8 October 2025 Wednesday 19:30
The Duke of Greenwich
91 Colomb St, Greenwich – SE10 9EZ
Twenty years ago the Freedom of Information Act was just coming into effect. It was going to be a new dawn of open government. Hoorah! For a brief window Whitehall’s deepest secrets were on view – some of them revealed by Meirion – and then Tony Blair realised that the last thing he needed was the cat out of the bag.
Find out how the Cabinet Office has managed to run a Clearing House – AKA Blocking House – concealing national and local government corruption and wrongdoing ever since. It is at its worst under Rishi Sunak but could we persuade a new government to let the sunlight in?
Meirion is best known for investigations into Bogus Bomb Detectors, Jimmy Savile, Vulture Funds and the Fake Sheikh. His stories have led to changes in the law and bad people going to jail.
Jeremy Paxman accused Meirion of exhibiting that “obsessional, slightly nutty commitment that marks out all successful investigative reporters”.
November 2025
The quacks and charlatans of medicine
Dr Jenny Lange
Neuroscientist
12 November 2025 Wednesday 19:30
The Duke of Greenwich
91 Colomb St, Greenwich – SE10 9EZ
Scientific research in medicine has led to many groundbreaking discoveries, from the development of vaccines to the treatment of many previously fatal diseases. Today our chances of surviving serious illness are better than ever, thanks to significant advances in medical knowledge. Yet history is littered with sham doctors, charlatans and quacks peddling bogus medicines and preying on those people desperate for a cure. In the age of social media and in the wake of COVID-19, the distrust in scientific experts has resulted in a new wave of fake medicines and false information that is spread at a rapid pace.
In this talk, Dr Jenny Lange delves into the history of grifters who capitalised on a lack of medical knowledge, selling fraudulent medicines that at best had no effect and at worst resulted in the death of their victims. From John R. Brinkley, the bizarre ‘goat-gland doctor’, to those who used radium therapy as a cure for everything from diabetes to impotence, to more recent fake medicines such as those promoted by the ‘Church of Bleach’, this talk will examine how easy it is to fall prey to medical quacks even today.
Dr Jenny Lange is a neuroscientist who specialises in uncovering the mechanisms of rare neurological disorders. Initially en route to becoming a psychologist, Jenny became intrigued by the field of psychopharmacology and completed a PhD in Neuroscience at King’s College London. She’s currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the UK Dementia Research Institute, University College London, as well as writing for PET Bionews.
December 2025
The Rendlesham Forest UFO Case – Deconstructing a myth
Ian Ridpath
Writer
10 December 2025 Wednesday 19:30
The Duke of Greenwich
91 Colomb St, Greenwich – SE10 9EZ
The Rendlesham Forest UFO incident of Christmas 1980 ranks as one of the top ten UFO cases in the world as voted by UFO believers and is often described as the ‘British Roswell’. Evidence for a series of sightings spread over two nights includes eye-witness statements from security guards at the US Air Force base near Woodbridge in Suffolk, a memo from a high-ranking USAF officer to the UK’s Ministry of Defence, and a real-time tape recording of events as they unfolded. This talk looks at the main points of the case and explains how the witnesses were fooled by a series of natural and man-made objects. The Rendlesham case is an instructive demonstration that UFO sightings can never be taken at facevalue no matter how reliable the witnesses may seem.
Ian Ridpath is an internationally renowned writer on astronomy and space and a well-known UFO skeptic. He was the first skeptic to investigate and explain the Rendlesham Forest UFO case after it hit the headlines in 1983. His investigations have grown into a major website which can be accessed here
http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/rendlesham.html
This talk will summarize his investigations of the case.