Welcome to Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub!
⚠️ Important Update ⚠️
We now meet at The Plume of Feathers on the second Monday of each month!
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 has changed as of October 2025. We’ll now be gathering at The Plume of Feathers (19 Park Vista, SE10 9LZ) on the second Monday 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
The Rendlesham Forest UFO Case – Deconstructing a myth
Ian Ridpath
Writer
8 December 2025 Monday 19:30
The Plume of Feathers
19 Park Vista, Greenwich, SE10 9LZ
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.
N.B. This talk was earlier listed for a different day
January 2026
Your AI is not in love with you
(no matter how much you love it)
Kate Devlin
King’s College London
12 January 2026 Monday 19:30
The Plume of Feathers
19 Park Vista, Greenwich, SE10 9LZ
With millions of users on AI companion apps everyday, and millions more pouring their heartfelt feelings into ChatGPT, people are engaging emotionally with AI. For some, they are convinced that this love is a two-way thing, even while admitting they know that it’s just a piece of software. So why are folks falling in love with a machine? And is it a problem if they do? This talk will explore the surprisingly long cultural history of the artificial companion and the ramifications of our science fiction becoming fact.
Kate Devlin is Professor of Artificial Intelligence & Society at King’s College London where she leads the Digital Futures Institute. She is the author of Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots – a book that tells the story of technology and intimacy. Kate writes general audience pieces for a wide range of mainstream publications and regularly talks about AI and robots on podcasts and radio.
February 2026
The National Folklore Survey for England
Dr David Clarke
Sheffield Hallam University
9 February 2026 Monday 19:30
The Plume of Feathers
19 Park Vista, Greenwich, SE10 9LZ
This presentation will summarise the results from the National Folklore Survey for England that aims to capture an accurate snapshot of the traditions and beliefs of people who live in contemporary England. It is the first systematic survey of its kind since 1964 and aims to address the lack of data on the cultural value of folklore in post-Brexit, post-pandemic England as a source of resilience and community identity. It includes data on supernatural beliefs and experiences, contemporary legends and a range of folkloric traditions linked to the natural world, domestic life and the changing seasons. The 2-year AHRC-funded project is led by Dr David Clarke and a team of folklore specialists from Sheffield Hallam University, The University of Hertfordshire and Chapman University in California.
Dr David Clarke is Associate Professor at Sheffield Hallam University and is Project Lead for the AHRC-funded National Folklore Survey for England. He is co-founder of the Centre for Contemporary Legend at SHU and was curator for the release of the MoD’s UFO files archive at The National Archives 2008-13. His books include The Angel of Mons (2004), How UFOs Conquered the World (2015) and UFO Drawings At The National Archives (2017). His next book, Space Age Folklore, will be published by Reaktion books in 2027.
March 2026
The Hull Werewolf
Deborah Hyde
9 March 2026 Monday 19:30
The Plume of Feathers
19 Park Vista, Greenwich, SE10 9LZ
Was a werewolf really loping around Hull’s Barmston Drain in 2016? Folklorist Deborah Hyde investigates this modern manbeast mystery.
In 2016, a peculiar story hit local headlines – a werewolf was loping around Barmston drain, an eighteenth century canal in Hull. Such tabloid gold couldn’t stay local for long and national newspapers amplified the reports to the point that international publications like the Huffington Post repeated them. Rock star Alice Cooper even commented on social media. But what lay behind the sensational spin? How many eye-witnesses were there and what did they really say? The Hull Werewolf’s context – both folkloric and contemporary – is rewarding to examine, to illuminate the content and transmission of this popular twenty-first century cryptid tale.
A specialist in belief, folklore and the supernatural, Deborah is a writer, broadcaster and producer who explores the strange corners of culture. She has appeared on ‘Strange Evidence’, ‘Mysteries at the Museum’ and the hit BBC podcasts ‘Uncanny’ and ‘The Battersea Poltergeist’, and was Editor-in-Chief of ‘The Skeptic’ for a decade.
April 2026
What we talk about when we talk about AI
Wendy Grossman
13 April 2026 Monday 19:30
The Plume of Feathers
19 Park Vista, Greenwich, SE10 9LZ
We talk about “artificial intelligence” as if it were a single thing, but in reality it’s an umbrella term that can mean anything from a computer program that generates an image from a prompt composed of a few words or automates keeping meetings notes to a non-biological superhuman consciousness to which we seem as dumb as a computer program that prints “Hello, world” seems to us. The issue is exacerbated by a number of factors: the hype “AI” companies’ marketing people sprinkle on everything; the depictions in science fiction books, movies, and TV shows; and, not least, our eternal desire for companions and superhuman guardians and our ability to anthropomorphize absolutely anything. This talk will tease apart some of these threads, and provide some guidelines in deciding how to navigate the difference between the state of the art and fantasy.
Wendy M. Grossman is the founder and former editor of The Skeptic magazine. For 35 years, she has focused on computers, freedom, and privacy in books and for publications such as the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, New Scientist, Scientific American, and Wired. Since 2001 she has published a weekly blog, net.wars. She is also a sometimes folksinger.
May 2026
Horror Everything: 2016 – Forever
Dr Joe Ondrak
11 May 2026 Monday 19:30
The Plume of Feathers
19 Park Vista, Greenwich, SE10 9LZ
The history of horror is also the history of media, and key in understanding how we use media to play with the boundaries of what is real and what isn’t. In this talk, I explore and explain how horror fiction traditions are useful to understand contemporary conspiracy culture, moving from false documents and found footage to creepypasta and QAnon. Taking a formalist and stylistic approach, I demonstrate how social media platforms shape meaning, blur the boundaries of fact and fiction, and create a shared cognitive environment ripe for conspiracy belief.
Dr. Joe Ondrak is a leading expert in digital horror, both real and fictional. He has published extensively on extreme right-wing terror, disinformation, and conspiracy theories, as well as creepypasta and networked digital horror genres. He currently works as a subject matter expert in hate groups at Resolver and consults on digital extremist behaviours and activities. His chapter for the Routledge Companion to Horror Studies – The (New) Medium is the Monster: Networked Digital Horror – is forthcoming.
June 2026
The Common Cold: 30,000 Years of the Sniffles
Dr David Miles
Immunologist
8 June 2026 Monday 19:30
The Plume of Feathers
19 Park Vista, Greenwich, SE10 9LZ
Everybody knows what a cold feels like: miserable. The first cold virus was detected in a milk tooth shed over 30,000 years ago and ever since, the common cold has been a bane.
Yet while sore throats and blocked noses are annoyingly familiar, the processes that lead to them are not widely known and often misunderstood. Processes like the misdirected immune response that makes us ill with a cold instead of protecting us from illness. Like the way heating a building enhances cold virus transmission. Like the way that most cold viruses can only exist at all thanks to the society we’ve built over the last few millennia.
And, most importantly, what we can do about them.
David Miles is an infectious disease immunologist who spent ten years researching immunity to infections and the vaccinations that protect against them in various parts of Africa. He now lives in London and teaches on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s online postgraduate course. His first popular science book, How Vaccines Work, was published in March 2023 and his second, Sneeze: The History and Science of the Common Cold, will be published in March 2026.