I followed about half of these threads, but with the block quoting and the glasses-pinching responses they are just way too Reddit...
I have, on the other hand, watched quite a bit of Simon. He's a tricky one... I go through a week where there's just something interesting about him, and then more and more things rub me the wrong way and I realize, why the heck am I listening to this guy? What I want to say is, there is a ton of stuff to be debated surrounding Simon's claims, far more than "should we believe him?" "I have an open mind." "No friend, you have a closed mind." Etc. Every thing he says brings up several questions, and while I know that he tries to be concise for his audience, he (as an intelligent man) must know that other intelligent people will naturally have certain pressing questions about his testimony, and when he doesn't answer them, he gradually gives the impression that he isn't for clear thinkers after all, but rather for those who believe/want to believe/feel they should believe him. If you operate on faith alone, and your faith happens to select Simon Parkes as target, then great; but if you believe that reason is integral and vital to the human experience, this isn't good enough. Here are just a few of the things I have wondered:
-What exactly is his dimensionality? I have watched many hours of him by now, and the fact that he never attempts to describe it is puzzling.
-How does he know that his alien friends are honest with him? If his answer comes down to intuition or faith, that's fine; but unless our intuitions somehow align with his intuition on something that is still more distant for us than it is for him, we will not find this convincing.
-I have heard him describe his experiences many times, but the quality of the description always strikes me as odd. He describes things very vaguely, as if in a dream, only the vagueness does not seem apparent to him as it does to dreamers. There is never any hint of a phenomenological or in-consciousness account, meaning, "it really feels like this", "it occurs to me like that", "the entire experience proceeds in such and such a way". And this is from someone who is highly sensitive. He adopts a uniform, oracle-like tone in everything he says; while I don't mean to say that he's full of himself, this seems quite odd when you consider that some of the things he says are accounts of experiences, real and extraordinary events that happened to him; others are inferences and the result of human research; still more come from the "portal" he has received to a giant bank of alien knowledge on which he can draw instantaneously and which he has possessed all his life; and who knows what else. This leads to
-He is very cagey about how he knows things. He is always polite, and tends to sound even-keeled, and I'm not asserting that he is attempting to lie or mislead. My problem, again, is with his omissions considering that his professed goal is to reach as many people as possible. Why should he hide or leave out the source for his statements nearly all of the time? One interviewer or audience question is about drawing DNA strands, and the very next question is about US presidential candidates. And yet you'd think that the line of questioning was continuous, and he was asked how he likes apple and peach pie.
-He is extremely "left-brain" dismissive. Really I mean any rational faculties. In new age circles, this makes him not an outlier, but another one of the pack. Very few people are so far over on the reason-feeling spectrum that they will believe things like this. What I would like to see, and what I would find far more convincing, is if Simon could appeal to rational minds as well as purely emotional minds. In fact, he should appeal to balanced minds, since those who can think as well as feel are in the strongest position. But he doesn't seem to find it important that he present himself to the vast majority of mankind, or to the vast majority of intelligent, educated mankind. He condemns formal education, and he might have a point -- lots of artists, inventors, and scientists have had gripes with it -- but it seems that he also condemns all critical, orderly, or rational thought as well. To ask the kinds of questions that curious, philosophical people ask, will get you nowhere with Simon. He isn't trying to demonstrate anything, let alone the p-word (prove). He strings together many salient areas -- income inequality, global war, conspiracies in general, world history, of course ET -- and seems to be fine with operating associatively: people associate many world phenomena, or many world mysteries, with a negative sequence of events. But this negative sequence can lead you to a thousand different explanations and solutions. Why choose Simon's? I never feel that he sees that he must compete with many other claims to truth.
-His audiences. Ok, it needs to be acknowledged. These are people, very heavily skewing female, almost all older than, say, 45. They are not scientists, or professionals, or politicians; but neither are they young artists or laborers or curious business people. It's a fairly depressing audience. This is a blunt criticism, but if they weren't sitting at a Simon Parkes lecture, they'd probably be gardening, or at Bible study, or at a bake sale, or helping with their granddaughter's dance recital. There is an acute lack of diversity. You are trying to save the world; your message, and your message practically alone, can help people. Is this not a problem? Do you not agonize over how, again and again, the people in the seats are white 62 year olds named Shirley? Think of all those you aren't reaching. And not just because they're too ingrained in the system or not "evolved" enough; that's a cheap response. He acknowledges that all of mankind is going through a transitional period, and many people out there have doubts. The fact that he isn't drawing a diverse group should be a calamity. Getting another retired divorcee with a fondness for flowing dresses to sign up for a soul reading doesn't cut it.
-Not acknowledging mental illness. He speaks of people being attacked, subjected to various long-distance wave technologies, given "implants" of some variety, and the like. We need to remember that this is all based on his ability to Skype-"diagnose" people in a few minutes. There are people with a wide variety of conditions, who turn to many places for help. (Compare the cost of a psychiatric consultation to a session with Simon.) Even if devices like this do exist, and there are secret organizations that target people because they are on a special list of super-DNA-strand-connectors (leaving that aside for a moment), you need to realize that the confidence he's putting in himself is breathtaking. To know that someone has an implant or is a mind control victim or whatever else, all over Skype, and when he himself knows the incredible power of human and alien technologies to deceive? You need to connect the dots here, because he can make it sound very routine and clinical. This is really astounding what he's claiming, and if he's wrong even once, he can cause immense harm to someone who is in real suffering.
-Adoption (or not?) of scientific terminology. He uses all of the following: energy, dimension, wave, electromagnetic wave, DNA, time travel, portal (?), implant, traveling faster than the speed of light, as well as allusions to earth science, atmospheric science, etc. When he uses these concepts, he doesn't specify whether he means the concept in conventional science; an altogether different concept in alien/spiritual/extra-dimensional understanding; or some kind of blending of the two. All this goes back to the points about reason or faith. How can someone with even a good high school understanding of mathematics, physics, biology, etc. accept this? He seems to accept human scientific understanding as legitimate, albeit primitive, so I don't think he can really be rejecting "energy" as the concept exists in physics. Most new age thinkers can't be bothered to define things like this, and they seem to use whatever term suits them, but Simon is claiming true understanding from advanced sources, which should mean accurate representation. He uses these terms way too often not to be thorough about this, about where our understanding is correct, about what precisely he means, etc. To use them without clarifying these things essentially indicates that he doesn't expect his audience to want the same thorough understanding the he presumably possesses, and it additionally indicates that it doesn't bother him that he alienates huge parts of the population by being vague and misleading.