NICOLA BULLEY
This paper first appeared in the Spring edition of the 'Skeptical Intelligencer', 2023, p3.
The disappearance of Nicola Bulley on January 27th (2024) while walking her dog by the river near the village of St Michael's on Wyre, Lancashire, continues to command the headlines at the time of writing. For readers from abroad who may not have heard of this news item, Ms Bulley 'vanished' while walking her dog by a river, having dropped her children off at school. The police soon arrived at a 'working hypothesis', namely that Ms Bulley had fallen in the river and her body had been washed downstream, and maintained this position even after extensive searches of the river and the nearby estuary had proved fruitless. This was contested by many people, some directly involved, others having nothing at all to do with the case.
Conditions were thus in place for the emergence on social media of all sorts of theories and speculations, some of them the 'conspiracy theory' variety, to account for Ms Bulley's mysterious disappearance (note 9). Predictably, some individuals claimed to have located the whereabouts of Ms Bulley by clairvoyance, using devices such as crystal balls. Most disquieting of all was the appearance in the village of outsiders wandering around and even breaking into property, eventually causing the police to issue a dispersal order. One villager was confronted by three such individuals in his back garden; he was later described a TikTok accounts as 'dodgy'. Another local was informed by one of the three that he was a 'suspect' and said he would 'sweep (him) off his feet' after claiming the villager had touched him. This intense involvement of the media, both mainstream and social, was extremely distressing for Ms Bulley's family and friends, and the cause of great anxiety and concern for the villagers in general. Three weeks after Ms Bulley's disappearance, her body was found-in the river.
Currently the government is facing criticism from many quarters for its efforts to protect people from harassment and malign influences through social media, and the inconvenience and disruption caused by certain forms of protest, claiming that these represent an assault on freedom of belief and expression. But I suspect that the public are much more concerned about the threats to their freedom presented by the actions of other members of the public rather than the lawmakers, as illustrated by this case.