Most everyone in the skeptic community has a hot-button subject that really gets their heart racing. Mine is psychics. Not the kind of psychic that you meet at the Halloween party or the fortune-telling tent at the county fair. Giving commonsense advice and having a bit of fun is like going to a haunted corn maze: it's just fun and the average person should understand that it is all fake and purely for entertainment. What I have a problem with are those people who say they can communicate with your dead family members. The worst are the ones who claim to solve crimes, find missing bodies, and say they have worked with the police department­. I call these people "grief vampires."

I've seen videos of mediums being caught in what looks like a hot read, but they were random acts that just happened to be caught on video. There were no controls; the medium could claim they received the information directly from the "spirit world" and not the tattoo with a date, initials, and "RIP" on a forearm. What we needed was solid evidence. My other motive for engaging in this venture was that I had grown frustrated with people posting "someone should do something." I had the idea if I could prove a hot read, then we might just be able to expose that medium with incontrovertible proof. For the two of you that need a reminder, a cold read is a set of standard generalities applied to a total stranger; a hot read is information gained from outside sources before the reading. I wanted to leave the bait in plain sight without being suspicious. For this, I exclusively used Facebook as part of Operation Bumblebee, a sting I organized over the Internet in order to show that it’s possible to catch a psychic in a hot read.

Our first target was psychic Chip Coffey, who was to have a show near me in San Jose, California. We have had dealings with Coffey in the past and gathered quite a bit of information about how he operates.

I and other attendees from those shows have written about what happened in detail. Coffey claimed to be clearly communicating with our nonexistent family members. What we did not write about was the four months of work the team had been doing behind the scenes on Facebook to try to catch him in a hot read. Because we were still working on other projects, we could not release that information at the time.

I put out a call on Facebook among my skeptic friends that I was starting a project to expose a psychic; forty-five people joined and I started a private Facebook group for planning. I instructed people to start a Facebook page for a fictitious psychic believer. Not to go over the top, but to look like someone who had the money for potential future readings and shows, and could maybe even go on a themed psychic cruise. The pages friended each other and were closed to all viewing while we developed these characters.

Facebook is the place to be—Coffey has almost 400K fans.

Several people were instrumental behind the scenes: Amanda Devaus and Ross Balch from Australia, Amy Kelly from New York, Ann in Florida, Mike Jarsulic in Chicago, and Jay Diamond, Linda Lawrence, Jim Preston, Scott Smith, Derek Serra, Greg Dorias, and John Friedman all from California. Mark Edward and my son, Stirling, were much needed advisers and sounding boards. We spent months talking to each other about our "pretend" lives, sharing photos of our cats, talking about books and movies, and checking into restaurants that we might not have actually gone to. We talked about the good ole days even though most of us had never met before. What we were trying to do was to create real looking Facebook pages: occasionally posting popular memes, celebrity photos, and of course paranormal topics that we fully supported. We uploaded photos of people who showed parts of faces and were slightly blurry so that the photos would be useful for almost anyone who would eventually be attending the October 2014 show. From May through August 2014, we didn't know who that would be and were just working to create realistic Facebook people.

At the beginning of this operation, I let it be known on my fake Facebook page that I had a son named Matthew who had died when he was three. I uploaded photos of my real son, Stirling, from birth to age three and everyone commented on the photos. I talked every few weeks about having dreams about Matthew trying to reach me.

These conversations continued until late August when I started finalizing the end game. We knew that Chip Coffey's website gives the attendee several opportunities to let his or her Facebook friends know he or she is planning on attending his show. We know that by clicking on these features Coffey's staff would receive a notification of who would be attending the show. This is where it started to get really tedious and complicated.

Next I posted that I was looking for people to attend the San Jose and Los Angeles events, and we needed funds to make this possible. One mistake skeptics make is to buy the cheapest ticket possible when they attend a psychic event, and psychics know this. One previous Coffey event that happened in Los Angles failed partly because one of the organizers faked up tickets which drew attention to us. I planned on buying the VIP tickets, which were $161. I raised $900 from skeptics on Facebook in about twelve hours with the promise of more if it were needed.

I received assurances from Sheldon Helms, whom I had worked with once before during a Sylvia Browne protest at TAM 2012, and Jan Wachtel, from my local skeptic group, Monterey County Skeptics. Jim Preston and his wife as well as my son, Stirling, all attended to take copious notes and act as witnesses if Chip should hot read any of us. Because they were not going to be part of the bait, they could sit in the back and get the cheap seats. For the Los Angeles show, Linda Lawrence, Emery Emery, Dan Geduld, and Heather Henderson promised to attend.

According to Coffey's website, each attendee had to show ID at the door. In order to not be Googled and shown to be skeptic activists, we altered the names or used maiden or middle names to match our real IDs. We used gift Visa cards for our online purchases so even that could not be traced back to our real names.

Now we were really ready to start baiting the hot read. All Facebook pages opened up so that we could friend outsiders and start posting on Chip Coffey's Facebook page. We talked openly about attending the event, each time tagging the event page and mentioning what day we would be attending. We had a lot of Facebook friends that had nothing to do with the project. We joined cat video clubs as well as other non-paranormal groups to make us look like we were real people.

During this time we were more open about who we would like Coffey to contact. We posted photos and told stories about our loved ones. We posted on Chip's Facebook page telling him and anyone watching how excited we were to be meeting him. We made it as easy as possible for one of his staff members to learn all about us.

We then set up controls. Every one of our show attendees had their Facebook passwords changed, and once they arrived at the venue they were "checked in" at the location, tagged the Coffey event, and then one statement was made for Coffey's team to find. An innocent statement that could have been repeated as if it came directly from the spirit world, but in fact our team had no clue what that statement might be. All of our attendees were informed to agree to whatever Coffey told them if called on.

As you will read from the blogs that recounted what happened at the Los Angeles and San Jose events, Chip Coffey did not use these Facebook profiles at all to get a hot read. He did clearly communicate with our nonexistent family members, but he learned about those because we had been loudly chatting to everyone around us about who we were there for. When he stated from stage that he was "getting an older woman and a child," we sprang on that statement as coming from our people. Then we just rode it through agreeing to everything he said.

In our opinion, everything he said that entire night could have been a cold read. Everything was general, and the audience gave lots of feedback and information. At least a third of the room had paid $160 to get a seat near the front. People who have invested this much money and time reading his books, attending his live shows, and memorizing his TV performances are likely to overlook any mistakes he might make and not be interested in an alternative explanation for his accuracy.

The only thing that could be considered a hot read was the statement he made to me: When I said privately to his manager during a break that I was worried that my son Matthew would be too young to contact, I was assured that Chip had reached children who were stillborn. Then when Chip spoke to me thirty minutes later he said, "You said you are worried that I won't be able to reach your son." The only person I had said that to was his manager.

After all this work, months of preparing, and over $900 given to the Chip Coffey experiment, all we could be reasonably sure of is that he did not know we were skeptics and he did not know we were lying, and he claimed to have seen the two nonexistent people we pretended to have: a sister for Jan and my son Matthew. He "spoke" to Wade's dead mother who was really alive and is nothing like the personality that he described. He even smiled through the photo session we had paid extra for. In my opinion, there was nothing more we could have done to make it as easy as possible for the Coffey team to find our bait and repeat it back as messages from the other side.

I know the argument could be made that even psychics have a bad day and "it doesn't work like that," but if he was able to clearly see all that he had seen that night, hundreds of statements down to one woman from the spirit world showing him a bottle of Vicks Vapor Rub, then you would think that one of these spirits would have told him to avoid us. Yet he didn't.

I've heard from many skeptics that they expected us to stand up and disrupt the show saying that we had made up the people with whom Coffey said he was clearly communicating. That might have been satisfying at the moment, but we weren't there to educate this audience. They probably would not have listened anyway, and we would have been escorted out, unable to gain more information. Our goal is to educate a much larger audience.

We had the team. We had these very detailed profiles. We wanted to try again; this time with a phone psychic.

To be continued...

A medium made a seemingly impressive guess about a hummingbird on a national television talk show. A follow-up investigation finds it not so striking after all—for the birds, in fact.

“She couldn’t have known that!”

I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard that from an amazed client of a psychic or medium. We skeptics spend a fair amount of time trying to understand and explain how mediums can appear to know details about people—living or dead—they’ve never met.

Of course, classic cold reading techniques explain why so many find this illusion persuasive. Cold reading can incorporate a number of skills mediums use to give the “sitter” (client) the appearance of communicating (in both directions) with the dead. Such techniques may include, but are not limited to:

• Observing the sitter’s clothing, jewelry, hairstyle, demeanor
• Listening closely for regional accents, level of vocabulary/education
• Watching body language for cues of acceptance or resistance
• Making statements that have meaning or significance to most people
• Making statements that sound very specific to the sitter

It’s that last category that I want to tackle here, because it’s the accuracy of those specific guesses that seems to impress people most about mediums. But the question of accuracy can only be addressed when the guesser’s ammunition is known.

A gun analogy may help illustrate this concept. Which is more impressive, hitting a target with a .22 caliber rifle, or a shotgun? Psychics and mediums use shotguns, and many carry gobs of shells. A blazing 12-gauge occasionally hitting a small target—say, a hummingbird—just isn’t that remarkable.

I tried to explain this idea a couple of years ago on The Dr. Phil Show when Dr. Phil became impressed by a guess made by alleged medium Rebecca Rosen. Rosen is one of a relatively small number of mediums who command big bucks and have long waiting lists of eager customers.

Dr. Phil’s experiment was to record video of Rosen and me each reading ten strangers in a small room at Paramount Studios. It was my first reading, while she had done thousands at that point. The next day, we shot the live show with an audience present. My goal was simply to show that even a green amateur like me could convince people I had psychic powers by using simple techniques. I believe I did—three of the ten sitters cried, which ironically gave me a great sense of relief because it meant I was convincing.

The readings were heavily edited before they were aired, but at one point, a woman grew astonished that Rosen had known about her hummingbird tattoo. Here’s a transcription of that segment:

Rebecca Rosen: I’m supposed to talk about a hummingbird . . .

Woman: Oh my God!

RR: Nice! That’s from your guide. And your guide is saying the hummingbird’s your sign from me to know this is real and to know I’m with you.

Woman (crying): Oh my God! That’s my tattoo!

During the live taping the next day, Dr. Phil seemed to agree with the woman that this was amazing. I tried to explain:

Dr. Phil: So Jim, what do you say about that?

JU: I say she’s a lot more experienced and she got a lot more guesses out. Part of how this works is, do a lot of guesses. (There is an edit here. Whatever I said next was cut.)

Dr. Phil: She goes to hummingbird. . . .Now come on, that’s a pretty random guess, if you’re talking about a guess.

JU: Phil, if she would have said, “You’re the person who’s got a hummingbird tattoo,” then I would have been impressed. That’s not what happened. She said I’m getting a hummingbird.

Dr. Phil: She was speaking directly to this woman. Listen, don’t set up a paper tiger (sic) and then tear it down. You know she was talking directly to that girl.

JU: I don’t know how many guesses she made with that girl. She might have guessed 500 things . . .

Dr. Phil: Well, how many are you going to go through before you say hummingbird?

Again, my next comment was edited out. But Phil was right. I had no way of knowing how many guesses she made. My cold reading of the ten people lasted about fifty minutes. I assume Rosen probably had a similar amount of time, but since only a few minutes of our readings aired, and they were highly edited, there was no way to know if Rebecca was using a shotgun or a .22.

That episode aired in May of 2012. For a long time I wondered if Rebecca Rosen was a great cold reader, a prodigious guesser, or just lucky.

James Underdown on the Dr. Phil Show episode that psychic Rebecca Rosen appeared on.

Then I got lucky. Someone I know—I’ll call her Lucille —paid $1,000 for a reading from Rebecca Rosen. Rosen’s rate (at that time) was $500 for a one-hour telephone reading, but the $500 rate meant getting in a year-long line. Lucille, who was grieving the sudden loss of her fifty-something-year-old husband, felt like she couldn’t wait, so she ponied up the grand. That’s just over $16.66/minute if you’re counting.

Rosen includes a recording with every reading and Lucille loaned it to me for analysis. The first step toward analyzing the 59 minute and 7 second reading was to write out everything that was said. (Many thanks to Susan Gerbic for her invaluable help transcribing the recording.) I color-coded the entire reading so I could see how Rosen was spending her time.

I wanted to know how many questions Rosen asked and how many guesses she made. The guesses were divided into two categories: 1. Statements she made that could be verified by Lucille or her family and friends. 2. Statements she made that concerned what the deceased or other “spirits” were up to during the reading.

Here are some statistics about what happened during the reading:

• The full recording lasted 59:07, but Rosen actually spoke for only 45:45. The rest of the time consisted of Lucille or her two daughters speaking or of pauses. At that rate, she costs almost $22 a minute!
• During the nearly one-hour reading, Rosen asked 148 questions—about one every twenty-four seconds.

“Well, how many (guesses) are you going to go through before you say hummingbird?”

• 410 guesses!
• Rebecca made 371 statements dur­ing the almost forty-six minutes she spoke (one every 7.4 seconds!)
  • Of the 371 statements, eighty-eight concerned the real world and could be checked for their accuracy. For example, “So he showed me the death in the car.” (The man did not die in a car.)
  • The other 283 statements Rosen made concerned matters happening in the spiritual realm like “He’s jumping up and down” or “He’s telling me to tell you he shaved his beard off” or “He wants me to tell you guys that he has changed his name over there.” Conveniently for Rosen, there is no way to fact-check these kinds of declarations, but they still sound like communicating with the dead.
• There were thirty-nine more statements that were more like advice: “Yeah, so you’re asking how do I lose weight, simply cut that [sugar] out and you lose weight,” for example.

Rosen’s asking of 148 questions may not be in the true spirit of reporting from the “other side,” but it did serve a few purposes. It ate up time—both in the asking and in the sitters’ answering—which is not a bad idea when you’re getting paid by the hour. Asking a question every now and then keeps others in a conversation engaged and feeling like you care about them. Also, the answers to the questions may steer Rosen toward better future guesses. Here’s a good example of this from the reading:

RR: Is he [the living husband of one of the sitters] trying to start a new business?

Answer: He has a lot of business ideas.

RR: There is a lot that he’s like overwhelmed with. . . . They’re showing me his head’s spinning with the new work or taking on one more project. . . .

The answer steered her toward a more believable follow-up guess.

If the number of questions she asked was a surprise, the number of statements she made was astounding. Rosen’s total of 410 statements (one about every seven seconds) is where her expertise lies. Try making up a statement about someone (real or imagined) once every seven seconds and see if you can sustain that for even five minutes. This extraordinary number of guesses sheds new light on the “hits,” or accurate statements, that she got. By keeping the guesses flowing at a rapid pace, she greatly increases her overall chance at saying something significant to the sitter. It’s as clear an advantage as target shooting with a shotgun instead of a rifle.

I learned that Rosen’s mention of a hummingbird to the woman on the Dr. Phil Show was not particularly unusual for her. It’s just another BB in her shotgun shell. Rosen fished for some kind of “bird” significance about four minutes into Lucille’s reading when she mentioned a “hummingbird or type of bird that sings to you.” In yet another Rebecca Rosen recording I acquired, a bird-related guess pops up again. There she said of the sitter’s (deceased) mother, “She has used a bird . . . a pigeon . . . a seagull . . . and you know it’s a direct sign from her.”

Apparently, mentioning hummingbirds (or birds in a general sense) pays off often enough to throw it out there. In the three examples of Rosen’s work I had access to, she tried hummingbird twice and a more generic bird reference the other time. Other repeat guesses included playing poker, jumping up and down, smiling, family pictures, someone named George, a dog, Rob or Bob, David, Dan, being pregnant, San Diego, April, and so on. By the way, augury—the practice of divining of the future by observation of natural phenomena like the behavior of birds—is millennia-old. We seem to notice the birds. Hell, I saw a hummingbird the other day. Which one of my many dead relatives was that?

So here’s the answer to Dr. Phil and anyone else who asks, “How could she have known that?”

She didn’t know that. She asked lots of questions, made an extraordinary number of statements and some of them happened to mean something. Many—most, actually—meant nothing, were impossible to check, or were demonstrably wrong. And the onus of finding significance in any statement was on the sitter, who desperately hoped the contact with the dead loved one was real.

Sitters like Lucille spend their readings scanning their memories to make sense of the multitude of guesses that are heaped at them. When a few of the guesses happen to connect with a real person—a recent event, a piece of jewelry—from the sitter’s life, the connection is seen as a sign that their departed loved one is not really completely gone. Even if no connection can be made between a guess and a sitter’s life, they are assured it will eventually make sense. When Lucille couldn’t connect something Rosen said to her life, Rosen would say things like “You think about it” or “I would look into that.”

It’s the perfect racket. Guess until you’re blue in the face and hope you touch a nerve. And if you don’t, just convince your high-paying clients your words will someday be meaningful. They’ll either keep searching until our random world turns a guess into a prophecy, or forget to even try. Either way, the check will have cleared. People pay mediums because the illusion of communicating with the dead taps all too well into our desires, our pattern-seeking, dot-connecting minds, and our heavy hearts.

What do you really get for $1,000? An expedition (loaded with shotgun shells) hunting for the occasional hummingbird.

This is the second half of the psychic project Operation Bumblebee. This part of the project I named Operation Ice Cream Cone, for no other reason than it made about as much sense as anything else. My goal is two-fold: first to catch a psychic in a hot-read and second to report back in detail to the skeptical community in order to train and encourage others to continue where we left off. If you have not already read about the first part where we went to psychic Chip Coffey’s Los Angeles and San Jose shows then read about it here.

As I left off in the last report, we had been unable to catch Chip Coffey in a hot-read. It is very possible that Coffey does not use hot-reading; he managed to get through his show in our opinion with nothing more than cold-reading tactics. We spent over $900 and months preparing for the two shows we attended, but I decided we would try one more time. This time we were going to use a phone psychic.

We closed down all the fake Facebook pages so that only friends could view them. We dumped people who were not in the project. Then we hid (not deleted) most of the references to us seeing Chip Coffey. Australian Michelle Franklin joined the project and took over a fake Facebook page. We changed names and photos on most of these pages and scrubbed clean our threads and the “about” page for each personality.

I selected Heather Henderson to be the sitter, and once she agreed I took over the Facebook page she had been running, changing the password and email. I didn’t want Heather to know what the specifics of her story were; this was a control so that the psychic could not say he read Heather’s mind. She didn’t know what her own story was.

The next thing we needed to do was to find the next psychic. I wanted this person to be mid-range in price, $200–300 for a half hour reading. We needed it to be someone who was okay with recording the phone call. I wanted it to be someone who has done some TV and claims to have some upcoming “exciting news” happening soon. And they must have a strong Facebook presence. In other words, I wanted someone comfortable with social media and hungry; someone who was busy and willing to take some risks. Not too long of a waiting list. And they must claim to be a medium.

I spent hours going through websites, videos, web searches, and testimonials. Recording and having permission to record was extremely important to our sting, otherwise how would we be able to gather the evidence to prove what we had discovered?

I finally settled on James Van Praagh. He no longer does private phone readings, possibly because of this reading. But Van Praagh does endorse a list of psychics. And if we caught one of these people, I felt that that would say a lot about Van Praagh’s psychic abilities. I narrowed it down to seven mediums and then went into more depth researching them. After reviewing their websites, some seemed very dated; others very professional and current. Some seemed more social media aware with links to Twitter, Facebook, and other common social outlets. Some mentioned podcasts and YouTube; others used words like “tape recording” and wanted to connect only by phone.

After rating these seven, I got it down to two: Joseph Tittel and Tim Braun. Both were running their careers like professionals, everything very modern and social media aware. Braun called us back first, and we accepted.

Though these psychics want you to call or contact them by email or website, I didn’t want to go that route until I had contacted them on Facebook and received a personal response back. I wanted to be sure that they had the opportunity to look at Heather’s Facebook page.

It was necessary for us to make Andrew look like a normal thirteen-year-old and Heather like a normal mother. I did not want to give too many details but wanted to bring out his personality and give the medium some interesting things to discover.

Andrew died in September 2010 after being on a cruise in the Caribbean. He had been given a camera for that trip and was enjoying taking photos. He also loved non-traditional pets and had an elderly (widowed) next-door neighbor named Joe who kept snakes and lizards that Andrew thought of as his own. He went to Joe’s house a couple times a day to take care of his pets. We posted photos of these pets along with their names in a photo album on Heather’s page. Dan/Amanda posted a memory of how Andrew loved strawberry ice cream and remembered that he wanted to open an ice cream shop when he grew up.

The main story we worked on for weeks was that the next door neighbor Joe had died. Heather was very upset and wondered if Andrew had welcomed Joe to the spirit world. She said she had been having dreams that Andrew wanted to tell her something; she was really worried that they would not find each other. Heather spent the weeks waiting for the reading to happen by helping Joe’s son clean out the house his father had lived in for over forty years. They had garage sales. She also asked if anyone wanted the glass aquariums that the lizards and snakes had lived in—all of them had died years ago and were hopefully there with Andrew (and now Joe).

Finally we had a date, Tuesday November 18 at 4:00 p.m. with Tim Braun. At that point we escalated posting on Braun’s Facebook page, liking his posts and talking to his fans. I sent several more posts hoping to get a response, but really it was just in the hopes he would take another look at Heather’s Facebook page and see all the bait we had left there.

Finally the date arrived. Heather and Emery have a recording studio as they are the hosts of Ardent Atheist and Skeptically Yours podcasts. I had given Heather a script of everything she needed to know, and told her where she could elaborate. She was told to agree to just about anything Braun told her, and sound vague if needed, as she does not know what we have written on her Facebook page.

Heather was wonderful: she cried and laughed and really sounded the part. I have the entire phone conversation here along with a transcript of what was said. Braun started and ended with a meditation for Heather and encouraged her to practice meditation every day for twenty minutes, then she would find that she would better be able to connect with Andrew on her own.

Heather’s mother (who really is dead) and her mom’s sister (who does not exist) came through right away. Braun said that the women were stepping back and letting Andrew come forward. He came through quite clear (Braun said this many times throughout the sitting). He saw him riding his motorcycle or bike out in an open field. Hanging with friends, one special friend Ryan or Brian was mentioned a couple times. Andrew said he was enjoying school now that he was in spirit; he was studying (Braun said he didn’t know what he was studying) but Andrew was making a lot of friends, but missed some that were still alive. Andrew apparently didn’t like school here on Earth, but is sure enjoying it now that he is dead. He can eat anything he wants and it won’t affect his health or make him fat, and he can materialize anything he wants. He is eating a lot of Cool Ranch Dorito chips and burgers.

The messages that Andrew wants to make sure Heather understands are that he misses her, thinks she was a great mother, but Andrew wants his mom to stop smoking (she does not smoke), start reading the books she keeps buying but does not finish, give his favorite bike away that she is holding onto, and she does not have to continue visiting his grave. She should remember him in her heart like his dad does. (Dad is also nonexistent.) Heather was very vague if the father of Andrew was around, so Braun asks “Are you living with the father?” Heather explains “yes, but we don’t get along well these days.” “Well Andrew wants you to cut his dad some slack,” he says, “Don’t be so hard on him, Mom.”

Andrew wants to talk about a tree or trees that have grown really big. Braun isn’t clear if these trees were planted in Andrew’s memory or not. Braun then asks if Heather has another son that is still living. Heather tells him that there is another child named Emery. Braun has a really hard time understanding this name, and eventually near the end of the sitting is calling him Emmerson. (This child is also nonexistent.)

Braun is adamant that Andrew wants Emery to know that he is watching over him, trying to help him out. He wants his mom to start focusing her attention on this remaining son. (The nonexistent son wants his nonexistent mother to start focusing on her other nonexistent son.) There is no vagueness; he says he is clearly talking to them. And there’s no confusion who they are talking to, Heather is the one all the messages are for.

Braun asks how Andrew died and Heather explains that he was hit on the head with a baseball during a game. Braun tells her that there was no pain; except for some reason Braun’s own head is hurting as Andrew explains that he was hit in the head. Also Andrew wants his mom to know that there was nothing she could have done to prevent it and that it was sudden and he didn’t suffer. She should not feel guilty or upset; Andrew reports that he didn’t want to die, but that he is very happy where he is. And when the time comes (years and years Braun assures her) Andrew will be there to welcome her to spirit.

There was no mention of a cruise vacation and Heather asked, as I told her to, about the vacation that they took right before he died. Braun says that Andrew does not seem to want to talk about that. But he mentions that if Heather goes to Florida, Andrew will be there with them.

Braun signed off without trying to get a hook in Heather. Despite that, Heather had agreed to most everything that Braun said; he didn’t aggressively try to get her to return for another reading. He was polite and professional the whole time, encouraging her to seek out grief counseling with a support group of parents who have lost children. He said that if she wanted to call back that would be fine but warned her that his waiting list was two to three months long. He asked her to leave a comment on his Facebook page if she enjoyed the reading and to share it with friends because he was trying to raise his “likes.” I was really surprised how businesslike and professional the whole experience was.

No mention of Joe, or of all the pets that he had. Yet there are at least four dogs in spirit with Andrew. Heather asked if one is a black lab and Braun said he has no idea, only sees dogs. No mention of strawberry ice cream, no mention that Andrew wanted to open an ice cream store when he grew up, in fact no mention of anything that was on the Facebook page at all. Nothing, a total failure of all the preparations we had made for weeks. I’m convinced that there was nothing more we could have done to put that Facebook page under Braun’s nose. Everything he needed to get a hit was clearly located in plain sight if he would have clicked on the links.

So again, just like with the Chip Coffey event. We way over prepared. We were careful and detailed. In the end we proved that in the cases of Coffey and Braun, neither used Facebook to get a hot-read, at least this time. I don’t think it was because they were “on to us” or suspicious in any way. I personally think that either they don’t ever hot-read or they didn’t in these cases. I think that there is no reason for them to bother. It is much, much easier to cold-read throughout the readings. Braun kept to general statements that you would think are fairly universal about a thirteen-year-old boy. He didn’t like school, rode a bike, misses his mom and friends, loved junk food and dogs. What more do you need? That fits just about every male thirteen-year-old living in America today.

We didn’t catch either psychic medium in a hot-read. We lied in both operations, which some skeptics seem very concerned about. We gave over a thousand dollars to psychics and some people have asked “Where is the sting?” And all of the above are true. I stand by our work and am happy to address all of these concerns if asked. As far as the sting, yes there hasn’t been a sting yet. It’s going to take some reporter somewhere to contact the psychics and get their side and then report back, and that is going to make one great story.

Research continues to find that violent video games play a negligible role in societal violence. But the politics of a culture war won’t let the idea go.

In May 2013, Christopher Harris went on trial for the murder of a family of five in Beason, Illinois. With overwhelming forensic evidence as well as testimony by his own brother indicating he was guilty, Harris’s defense chose an unusual tactic. Harris claimed it was not he, in fact, who committed the murders but the family’s fourteen-year old son Dillen Constant. Dillen, the defense claimed, had a history of attention deficit disorder, school problems, and had several violent video games in his bedroom. According to Harris, it was Dillen who killed his family. Harris claimed he happened to walk in on the multiple murders and had to defend himself from Dillen by beating Dillen fifty-two times with a tire iron, incurring only a blister himself.

Harris was supported in his defense by a video game violence researcher who agreed that Dillen’s history of attention deficit disorder, school problems, as well as possession of violent video games placed him at risk for aggressive and violent behavior (Rushton 2013).

During cross examination, however,the expert in question acknowledged that he was not a clinical psychologist, held no professional license, had not verified information given to him by the defense, and had not questioned Dillen’s surviving family or other witnesses. Related to video games, the expert acknowledged he did not know how often Dillen played violent video games (an analysis of the game console’s saved games suggested play was infrequent), acknowledged most young boys play violent video games, acknowledged research cannot document links between video games and violent behavior, and at one point stated that even games such as Pac-Man could be considered violent video games under some definitions. One of the assistant district attorneys was later overheard saying, “The most offensive testimony I’ve ever heard in my life, I think” (Rushton 2013). Harris was convicted.

Thus the theory that violent video games increase aggression continued to fail when evaluated by independent courts. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court considered an effort by the state of California to regulate violent video game sales to minors (Brown v. EMA, 2011). In speaking about studies California used to support its regulatory efforts the majority decision of the court said:

These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning). Instead, “[n]early all of the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology” (Video Software Dealers Assn. 556 F. 3d, at 964). They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule real-world effects, such as children’s feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a nonviolent game.

Just prior to the decision, Hall, Day and Hall (2011) warned that the scholarly community risked a credibility crisis by making increasingly extravagant claims about the alleged dangers of violent video games, much as the alleged dangers of “immoral” comics purported by psychiatrists in the 1950s are now generally considered a cautionary tale about moralistic excess in science.

In a previous article in the Skeptical Inquirer (Ferguson 2009) I discussed some of the serious methodological issues that have limited much video game violence research. These have included aggression measures that bear little resemblance to the types of behaviors of interest to the general public (for example filling in the missing letters of words such that kill is more aggressive than kiss, or giving consenting opponents in a reaction time game bursts of annoying noise), the unstandardized use of aggression measures (which potentially allow researchers, even in good faith, to select outcomes that best fit their hypotheses while ignoring those that don’t), and the failure to control carefully for variables such as gender and family violence that might explain correlational relationships between video game violence and aggression (or failure to inform general audiences that controlling for these other variables reduces correlations to trivial levels). Unfortunately, to a great degree, these problematic issues persist in the field. The field continues to ignore the warnings of Hall, Day, and Hall (2011) by making big claims based on weak and inconsistent data. In this article I explore the culture and politics of video game research for some explanation for why this may be.

Science, Morality, and Culture

Let me note upfront that there is nothing unscientific about the hypothesis that video game violence may cause aggression. The hypothesis is a perfectly reasonable empirical question. Further, I wish to be careful not to paint with an overly broad brush. Some scholars who have found links between video games and some aspects of aggression have been very careful to speak within the limits of their data (e.g. Giumetti and Markey 2007; Williams 2013), and I have nothing but respect for their work. The issue is when scholars speak beyond their data in pursuit of moralistic or advocacy goals. Arguably, in the months following Brown v. EMA (2011) the rancor of the video game field calmed somewhat. Not surprisingly, the tragic Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012 changed the climate significantly once again. It is probably difficult to overestimate the impact that mass shootings as cultural events have had on the video game violence field. When shooters are young males—such as in the case of Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza—that these individuals are often found to have been players of violent games is typically treated as a startling and critical revelation, usually ignoring that almost all males in this age category play violent video games at least occasionally (Olson et al. 2007). Despite this, some young shooters such as the Virginia Tech shooter were ultimately found not to be avid gamers (Virginia Tech Review Panel 2007) despite rumors to the contrary, and the U.S. Secret Service report on school shooters (2002) found little evidence that such individuals are particularly inclined to enjoy violent media more than anyone else. In the official investigation report by the state of Connecticut (2013) it was found that Lanza had more interest in playing non-violent video games like Dance Dance Revolution than violent ones, although, like most young men, he owned some of both. Yet the social narrative linking violent games to mass shootings is a powerful one, providing an explanation for the unexplainable and providing an illusion of control over the uncontrollable. Thus we find a kind of societal confirmation bias in which cases that don’t fit the narrative (such as Virginia Tech) are simply discounted. In the case of older and/or female shooters, the issue of video game or media violence is typically ignored altogether.

One question is what impact these social narratives and social fear of mass shooters have on video game violence research. For instance, in a recent essay (Ferguson 2013) I noted that the language of video game researchers changed remarkably after the 1999 Columbine massacre, from language that acknowledged inconsistencies in the data to language of absolute certainly of harmful effects, despite little change in the actual data. In his discussion of moral panic theory Gauntlett (2005) notes that moral panics persist, in part, because society provides incentives for certain types of conclusions—those supporting the panic—over others at least in the short term. Thus it becomes easier as a researcher to get a research grant arguing that video games are harmful, to get newspaper headlines, and to get esteem from professional organizations. The political pressure on scientists was made apparent in the weeks and months following Sandy Hook. In the early months following Sandy Hook, only rumors, ultimately unfounded, suggesting Lanza was an avid violent gamer, were available to the public, not facts. Yet politicians such as Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia, and Rep. Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, called for “research” while advertising very clearly for the results they wished to see. For instance, Senator Rockefeller seemed particularly incensed by the Brown v. EMA (2011) decision and, in calling for a National Academy of Sciences study of media violence, stated, “Recent court decisions demonstrate that some people still do not get it. They believe that violent video games are no more dangerous to young minds than classic literature or Saturday morning cartoons. Parents, pediatricians, and psychologists know better. These court decisions show we need to do more and explore ways Congress can lay additional groundwork on this issue. This report will be a critical resource in this process” (quoted in Terkel 2012). This is hardly a call for careful, objective research with no a priori assumptions about what it “should” find.

An example of the problematic mixture of politics and science is also exemplified in a report examining media violence commissioned by Wolf, a longtime anti-media advocate. Rep. Wolf, who chairs the congressional committee overseeing the budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF), asked the NSF to produce a report on youth violence including the influence of media violence on societal violence. The resultant report (Subcommittee on Youth Violence 2013) concludes that the mass media are definitively linked to societal violence potentially up through and including mass shootings.

The report makes this conclusion by simply failing to cite, with almost surgical precision, the multitude of studies that would challenge this conclusion. The only exception was the citation of Joanne Savage’s work (Savage and Yancey 2008) implying proven links between media violence and violent crime, despite the fact that Savage concluded the exact opposite. I argue that this report is a classic example of the risks of politicized science, particularly following a traumatizing national event. By contrast, almost simultaneously, an anti-media advocacy group, Common Sense Media (CSM), released a report on media violence (2013). Although I disagree with the conclusions of this report, I applaud CSM for honestly reporting research both supporting and contradicting their concerns and framing their arguments in a thoughtful and careful way. The CSM and NSF reports can, in fact, be compared side-by-side to illustrate my concerns. When a media watchdog can produce more careful science than a subcommittee assembled by the National Science Foundation, the time has come to reevaluate what we are doing in the field.

The Role of Professional Organizations and the Scientific Culture

One interesting development is that, in recent years, a contrast has emerged between conclusions on video game violence researched by independent evaluators such as the U.S. courts, as well as government reviews by Australia (Australian Government, Attorney General’s Department 2010) and Sweden (Swedish Media Council 2011) and even the U.S. House of Representatives in the months following the Sandy Hook shooting (Gun Violence Prevention Task Force 2013), and conclusions expressed in policy statements of professional advocacy groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP 2009) and American Psychological Association (APA 2005). It’s probably difficult to underestimate the impact these policy statements by the AAP and APA have on debates regarding video game violence, as they are often cited in support of fears or even regulation and censorship. By contrast, independent reviews tend to be far more skeptical. Part of the reason for these discrepancies appears to be that professional advocacy groups have typically not conducted independent reviews. Rather they assembled committees of scholars highly invested in a particular theory, did not invite more skeptical scholars, and these scholars, in essence, reviewed their own work and declared it beyond further debate (something I’d love to be able to do one day).

These reviews should not be mistaken for careful, objective evaluations of the research field. To their credit, the American Psychological Association is currently reviewing their policy statement on video game violence, although it is unclear whether it has entirely learned the lesson of previous problematic statements. Wisely, scholars directly involved in media violence research were not included on the task force, and all seven members of the task force are very reputable scientists. Unfortunately, even a brief Internet search reveals that four of the seven have taken public anti-media stances in the past. Two were signers of an amicus brief in Brown v. EMA supporting California’s attempt to ban violent video game sales to minors. One was a coauthor on the problematic NSF report mentioned earlier. The most minor of the four collaborated with a well-known anti-media scholar in the past and made anti-media statements to the press. My intent is not to disparage these individuals but to suggest that if the APA’s intent had been to select an ostensibly neutral committee of evaluators, they widely missed the mark. Perhaps partly in response to this, a group of 230 scholars recently wrote to the APA asking them to retire their problematic policy statements on media violence (Consortium of Scholars 2013). Policy statements often tell us more about the committee than the science and highlight the fact that it’s possible to “tilt the machine” toward a predetermined conclusion through the selection of specific committee members.

Ultimately, however, it is the culture of the media scholars themselves that has been problematic. In one recent essay, a prominent scholar labeled all those who disagree with him as “industry apologists” (Anderson 2013). Science is about open inquiry, skepticism, attempts to critically replicate findings, and put the burden of proof on a theory to be replicated. Yet, in this field, the burden of proof is often reversed, with skeptical scholars personally subjected to ad hominem attacks. Increasingly, like other areas of social psychology, the “harm” position of video game violence is suffering a crisis of replication (see Ballard et al. 2012; Charles et al. 2013; and Tear and Nielson 2013 for just a few recent examples). Youth violence continues to plummet during the era in which video game sales have skyrocketed (Childstats.gov 2013). And yet I’d argue that at least parts of the academic field of video game violence have stubbornly calcified around an inflexible ideology and view all critics not as scholars who respectfully disagree but as enemies of a lesser moral fiber (hence the “industry apologists” comment). More than one outside researcher has asked me what it is about aggression researchers that makes them so aggressive. Perhaps that is what we should be asking: Does conducting video game violence research make you aggressive? If so, perhaps we should put warning stickers on academics. But jesting aside, the time has come to reevaluate the culture of video game research and what it has done to the objectivity of the data it has produced. At the current stage, the field risks becoming little more than opinions with numbers. Still, I note a new cadre of researchers doing excellent work (as exemplified by the scholarship on display throughout Quandt and Kroger 2013) wherein games are examined as an integral part of society rather than assumed a priori to be an enemy of it. This does not rule out the possibility that media influence us, of course, but rather places media within society, and the process of media as user-driven rather than content-driven, idiosyncratic rather than generalized. This trend toward greater sophistication in games research has been a relatively new trend, and it’s one I hope will thrive despite an academic culture that often actively discourages it.

References

American Academy of Pediatrics. 2009. Media violence policy statement. Pediatrics 124(5): 1495–1503.

American Psychological Association. 2005. Reso­lu­tion on violence in video games and interactive media. Online at https://www.apa.org/about/policy/interactive-media.pdf.

Anderson, C. 2013. Games, guns and mass shootings in the US. The Bulletin of the Inter­national Society for Research on Aggression 35(1): 15–19.

Australian Government, Attorney General’s Department. 2010. Literature Review on the Impact of Playing Violent Video Games on Aggression. Commonwealth of Australia.

Ballard, M., K. Visser, and K. Jocoy. 2012. Social context and video game play: Impact on cardiovascular and affective responses. Mass Communication and Society 15(6): 875–898.

Brown v. EMA. 2011. Online at http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/08-1448.pdf.

Charles, E., C. Baker, K. Hartman, et al. 2013. Motion capture controls negate the violent video game effect. Computers in Human Behavior 29: 2519–2523.

Childstats.gov. 2013. America’s children: Key national indicators of well-being, 2010. Online at http://www.childstats.gov/.

Common Sense Media. 2013. Media and Violence: An Analysis of Current Research. San Francisco: Common Sense Media.

Consortium of Scholars. 2013. Scholar’s Open Statement to the APA Task Force on Violent Media. Online at http://www.christopherjferguson.com/APA%20Task%20Force%20Comment1.pdf.

Ferguson, C.J. 2013. Violent video games and the Supreme Court: Lessons for the scientific community in the wake of Brown v EMA. American Psychologist 68(2): 57–74.

———. 2009. Violent video games: Dogma, fear and pseudoscience. Skeptical Inquirer 33(5): 38–54.

Gauntlett, D. 2005. Moving Experiences: Under­standing Television’s Influences and Effects. Luton: John Libbey.

Giumetti, G.W., and P.M. Markey. 2007. Violent video games and anger as predictors of aggression. Journal of Research in Personality 41:1234–1243.

Gun Violence Prevention Task Force. 2013. It’s Time to Act: A Comprehensive Plan that Reduces Gun Violence and Respects the 2nd Amendment Rights of Law-Abiding Americans. U.S. House of Representatives: Washington, DC.

Hall, R., T. Day, and R. Hall. 2011. A plea for caution: Violent video games, the Supreme Court, and the role of science. Mayo Clinic Proceedings 86(4): 315–321.

Olson, C., L. Kutner, D. Warner, et al. 2007. Factors correlated with violent video game use by adolescent boys and girls. Journal of Adolescent Health 41: 77–83.

Quandt, T. and S. Kroger. 2013. Multiplayer: The Social Aspects of Digital Gaming. Routledge.

Rushton, B. 2013. Backdooring it: Defense maneuvers around setback. Illinois Times. Online at http://illinoistimes.com/mobile/articles/articleView/id:11440.

Savage, J., and C. Yancey. 2008. The effects of media violence exposure on criminal aggression: A meta-analysis. Criminal Justice and Behavior 35: 1123–1136.

Subcommittee on Youth Violence. 2013. Youth violence: What we need to know. Online at http://wolf.house.gov/uploads/Violence_Report_Long_v3.pdf.

Swedish Media Council. 2011. Våldsamma datorspeloch aggression – en översikt av forskningen 2000–2011. Online at http://www.statensmedierad.se/Publikationer/Produkter/Valdsamma-datorspel-och-aggression/.

Tear, M., and M. Nielson. 2013. Failure to demonstrate that playing violent video games diminishes prosocial behavior. PLoS One 8(7): e68382.

Terkel, A. 2012. Video games targeted by Senate in wake of Sandy Hook shooting. Huffington Post. Online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/19/video-gamessandy-hook_n_2330741.html?utm_hp_ref=technology&utm_hp_ref=technology.

Virginia Tech Review Panel. 2007. Report of the Virginia Tech Review Panel. Online at http://www.governor.virginia.gov/TempContent/techPanelReport.cfm.

Williams, K.D. 2013. The effects of video game controls on hostility, identification, and presence. Mass Communication & Society 16(1): 26–48. doi:10.1080/15205436.2012.661113.

The popular online dating site eHarmony claims that its matching methods are both successful and scientific. But a closer look at the evidence suggests otherwise.

As long as there are lonely hearts there will be a market for matchmakers. The emergence of the Internet has of course revolutionized many things, and the search for compatible mates is no exception. Online dating is a huge business, with dozens of websites offering people the chance to find love in cyberspace.

Like many services for which there is competition, online dating sites struggle to distinguish their services from all the others. After all, the premise is pretty basic: men and women searching for each other based upon their interests and profiles. There are only so many ways to “sex up” the process (so to speak); there’s really not a lot of room for “new and improved” ways of connecting people.

However there is one important area in which online dating services try to compete: better ways of matching clients. Like many other businesses, online dating sites like to adopt the veneer of scientific validity. Websites such as eHarmony.com, True.com, and Chemistry.com claim to use science to help people find compatible partners and, eventually, love. But how good is the evidence for their claims?

eHarmony’s Scientific Claims

Perhaps the best-known dating service claiming to mix science with seduction is eHarmony. According to the company’s website, its marriage profile, “developed by a team of clinical experts . . . is rooted in classical psychometric theory—which uses well-established standards to measure mental abilities and traits in a reliable way.” The site makes direct and explicit claims about the scientific validity of its matching program, which it calls a “Compatibility Matching System.” On the website under a section titled “Compatibility Science,” eHarmony states:

Based on his thirty-five years of marriage counseling and studies of thousands of married couples, eHarmony founder Dr. Neil Clark Warren exhaustively researched what makes marriages succeed and fail. His findings? Chemistry is not enough. . . . By studying the difference between happy and unhappy married couples, Dr. Warren’s team of researchers found 29 Dimensions [a registered trademark] that help predict great relationships. These compatibility dimensions include: Core traits like emotional temperament, adaptability, curiosity, and intellect; values and beliefs, such as spirituality and feelings about children; and relationship skills, such as conflict resolution. (eHarmony 2011a)

Again appealing to the authority of science, the following paragraph explains how the “Science of Compatibility” is used by eHarmony: “Our Compatibility Matching System matches you by taking into account the 29 Dimensions of Compatibility that help predict the potential for relationship success. The results are single matches unlike anything you will find anywhere else.”

In all, the words science or scientific appear five times within three short paragraphs on that web page. On a page that lists the eHarmony research team (“mandated to advance the scientific understanding of human relationships”), many of the members have titles like “Senior Director of Research and Development,” “Senior Research Scientist,” and “Research Scientist” (eHarmony 2011b). In short, eHarmony’s claims to science and scientific validity are both explicit and implicit throughout the company’s literature. Furthermore, a representative from eHarmony (Breton 2011) told me explicitly that “eHarmony’s matching system was developed using an empirical, scientific process.”

Other eHarmony Claims

All this seems very impressive, but there are questions about the validity of eHarmony’s much-vaunted “scientific, 29-dimension” tests. Does its “science” greatly improve the quality (or odds) of a match? How well do its tests construct validity? What were the control measures? What is the scientific evidence for these claims?

Steven Carter, director of research at eHarmony, wrote an article in the APS Observer (published by the Association for Psychological Science) about his work. Instead of offering data or empirical evidence that eHarmony’s matching system is valid (or superior to other dating sites’ systems), Carter (2005) boasted about how helpful his work was to lonely singles and that “working at eHarmony has, in many ways, been a dream job.”

While Carter offered little support for his claims, he did state that “to date, we estimate that over 9,000 eHarmony couples have married.” That statistic, if true, clearly doesn’t tell the whole story, as it cherry-picks the successes and omits the failures. How many of the eHarmony matches were incompatible? If, by one count, there are more than twenty million eHarmony members looking for matches or marriage, 9,000 may not seem like that impressive a success ratio. Furthermore, the real question would seem to be how many of those 9,000 marriages lasted longer than average; for all we know, most of the eHarmony couples may have since divorced.

Evaluating the Claims

Oddly, no references to studies scientifically validating eHarmony’s methods appear on the company’s website. Nor was I able to find any published research in an online literature review. There is actually very little available information about eHarmony’s methods, which raised a troubling question in the mind of Robert Epstein, a contributing editor to Scientific American Mind: “Why would a major company such as eHarmony, which claims to have 12 million members, not subject its ‘scientific, 29-dimension’ test to a scientific validation process?” (Epstein 2007). He noted that eHarmony representatives presented a paper in 2004 that claimed eHarmony couples were happier than couples who met through other means, “But this paper still has not been published, possibly because of its obvious flaws.” Four years after Epstein wrote that, there still appeared to be little or no data on eHarmony’s methods.

I contacted Paul Breton, the director of communications for eHarmony, to ask for research: “I am specifically interested in any published studies or research that has tested the construct validity of the compatibility measures that eHarmony uses, and any research that demonstrates that eHarmony relationships last longer than average. Also, please provide references to any published studies or research by Neil Clark Warren on the subject of relationships, marriage, or compatibility.”

Breton (2011) responded with a lengthy (1,400-word) email that read like boilerplate copy lifted from a press release. Breton mostly addressed questions I had not asked, including whether eHarmony’s tests improved the chances of a match; whether eHarmony offers services to same-sex partners; how eHarmony measures the quality of their services; whether eHarmony clients were satisfied with their services and matches, and so on.

In the final paragraph Breton finally addressed my query: “Two peer-reviewed papers have been published or are in press that have used data from eHarmony couples and are relevant to the efficacy of eHarmony’s matching system. They are summarized below and attached for reference.” Breton’s email ended with a list of nearly twenty articles and pieces by eHarmony Senior Director of Research and Development Dr. Gian Gonzaga, though none of them were relevant to my query.

A Closer Look

I was slightly surprised that eHarmony only provided two studies, and as I read through the studies I immediately found problems.

The first study, “Assortative Mating, Convergence, and Satisfaction in Married Couples,” (Gonzaga, Carter, and Buckwalter 2010) had nothing to do with the scientific validity of eHarmony’s tests or measures but instead discussed marital satisfaction in general.

The abstract noted, “This work investigates assortative mating and convergence in personality and their effect on marital satisfaction. Measures of personality were collected from a sample of married couples before they met and twice after they were married. Results showed evidence for assortative mating but not for convergence in an average couple.” As far as I could tell, the only relevance to eHarmony was that all three coauthors were employed there. This was clearly a red herring.

I then reviewed the second study (Carter and Buckwalter 2009). This piece was coauthored by Steven R. Carter and J. Galen Buckwalter (both of eHarmony; the following conflict of interest disclosure appears at the bottom of the title page: “The reader should be aware that the authors are employed by, and have a financial interest in the success of, eHarmony.com, Inc.”). This piece

investigates the effects of a broadly adopted online matchmaking site on the nature and quality of married couples formed. Measures of personality, emotion, interests, values, and marital adjustment were collected from a sample of married couples who had been introduced by an online matchmaking service, and from a sample of married couples who had met through unfettered choice. Results showed that couples introduced by the online matchmaking site were more similar. . . . We conclude that online matchmaking services based on predictive inference and proscribed selection can be observed to have a significant and meaningful impact on marital quality.

In other words the eHarmony team concluded, unsurprisingly, that couples introduced through an online dating service (say, for example, eHarmony) tended to be more similar than couples who met randomly—and that this similarity would likely lead to a better or longer-lasting marriage. That was it; I read the entire study, and there was not a single word about any evidence for the claim that eHarmony is based on scientific principles, or that its much-hyped, carefully constructed “29 Dimension” questionnaires were scientifically valid.

I then became curious about the journal in which this piece appeared, Interpersona. Why were eHarmony’s top scientists publishing their research in a journal I’d never heard of? I did some research and discovered that it’s published by something called the Brazilian Association for Interpersonal Relationship Research, which I had also never heard of. I did an online search (in late 2011) and found a grand total of six hits for this organization on the World Wide Web (the Journal of the American Medical Association, by way of comparison, has nearly ten million hits). Clearly this was not a prestigious or well-known professional organization; in fact, by all appearances the Brazilian Association for Interpersonal Relationship Research is a dummy organization, and its journal Interpersona is basically a vanity press for interpersonal dating researchers to get work e-published. The fact that eHarmony’s top researchers published here raises serious questions.

Dr. Warren’s Research

I also searched for evidence that Neil Clark Warren, the marriage and relationship expert behind eHarmony, has created important work in, and published on the subjects of, marriage or relationships. A 2011 search of several academic databases (including PsycInfo and MedLine) did not reveal a single article published by Neil Warren on the subject of marriage, compatibility, or relationships. If Warren has been researching the subject for the past thirty-five years as is claimed (“based on his 35 years of marriage counseling and studies of thousands of married couples, eHarmony founder Dr. Neil Clark Warren exhaustively researched what makes marriages succeed and fail”), why hasn’t he published it? You would expect that a scientist or researcher who has spent decades studying a topic would have published on it. (Warren is author of several books on relationships, though anyone can write a book of relationship advice.)

Breton (2011) admitted that Warren had little or no role in creating eHarmony’s current matching system: “While Dr. Warren founded eHarmony and has played an important role within the company, he is not the sole (nor even a primary) person involved in conducting academic-style relationship research or developing our matching algorithms.” This is probably just as well, since it appears that despite his thirty- five years of “exhaustive” research, Warren never published a single study on the topic.

More Questions about Validity

I responded to eHarmony’s Breton with a few simple questions:

You reference the journal Interpersona, which neither I nor any of my colleagues have heard of. . . . Is this the highest profile publication that eHarmony’s research has appeared in? Have any of your team published in any mainstream, peer-reviewed psychology or sociology journals . . . such as American Psychologist, or International Journal of Applied Psychology, or Journal of Experimental Psychology, or British Journal of Psychology, or Psychological Bulletin, or Psychological Review, or Social Psychology, and so on?

Breton responded, saying:

The critiques you raise seem to confuse “scientific” with “fully transparent.” One can still use a scientific method, which eHarmony does, without exposing every last detail to the public. . . . eHarmony’s matching system was developed using an empirical, scientific process. The founding research team administered a standard measure of marital satisfaction (the Dyadic Adjustment Scale) to thousands of married couples and rank-ordered the couples on the basis of their relationship satisfaction. Then a separate survey was administered to assess the personality traits, values, attitudes, and beliefs of the couples to determine what qualities distinguished the happiest couples (those in the top quartile) from all the others. Using those insights, a final survey instrument was developed to predict which pairings of single individuals would share the most commonalities with the happiest married couples in the survey.

The next statement from eHarmony’s director of communications was particularly telling:

While many of the details of those studies have been published, not everything has been disclosed in a peer-reviewed journal. As a rule, academic journals in the behavioral sciences do not publish articles that validate or promote the efficacy of for-profit technologies. There are also intellectual property considerations eHarmony has to balance. None of this, by default, makes eHarmony’s scientific process any less valid. Furthermore, while there are many merits to peer-review, it is not the only measure of scientific validity.

Here we have several interesting admissions, including that “not everything” (in fact, nearly nothing) about eHarmony’s research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals. Breton’s claim that peer-reviewed journals do not publish articles that validate or promote for-profit technologies is specious: respected scientific journals routinely publish studies and articles about the validity and efficacy of for-profit technologies, including pharmaceutical drug studies, medical implants (new artificial hips or joints, for example), experimental therapies, and so on. Furthermore, scientists employed by for-profit organizations regularly publish research that does not reveal trade secrets or proprietary intellectual property.

I concluded my correspondence with Breton:

I don’t think I’m confusing “scientific” with “fully transparent” at all. I’m simply requesting references to published studies in peer-reviewed journals regarding the scientific validity of eHarmony’s tests, which you claim have been scientifically validated. I specifically requested published studies “that investigate and test the validity of eHarmony’s compatibility tests (not relationship advice in general).” The two references you provided, from Interpersona and Personal Relationships, do not contain anything about the validity of eHarmony’s testing methods, scientific validity, or matching system. Unless you can provide me with references, I will assume that you cannot provide published, peer-reviewed research that specifically tested and validated eHarmony’s compatibility tests. I know how to read journal articles [and] so far you have not shown me anything resembling good science behind eHarmony’s methodologies. If you have the studies I’m asking for, give me the references. If you don’t, then just admit it.

I never heard any more from eHarmony.

My search for the science behind eHarmony had come to an end. I had searched the eHarmony website in vain for any reference to studies or research validating eHarmony’s tests, measures, or matching criteria. I searched the psychological and medical literature, both for scientific research done by the company’s founder, Neil Warren, or by any current employees, and found nothing. Finally, I contacted a representative for eHarmony, who was ultimately unable to provide a single reference (published or unpublished, peer-reviewed or not) to any research confirming the scientific validity of eHarmony’s methods. Surely if eHarmony had conducted solid, scientific research validating its methods it would be happy to publicize them. In fact, eHarmony has several hallmarks of pseudoscience, including a reluctance to subject its claims and data to peer review.

In 2013, eHarmony’s senior research scientist, Gian Gonzaga, gave a presentation at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in which he tried in vain to convince his colleagues of the scientific validity of eHarmony’s methods. Gonzaga, while reiterating that eHarmony’s formulas are secret and proprietary, offered evidence from unpublished, nonpeer- reviewed studies that he claimed demonstrated that a couple’s questionnaire scores correlated with relationship satisfaction years later. Critics such as the University of Rochester’s Harry Reis, who coauthored a study of eHarmony’s methods (Finkel et al. 2012), saw the matter differently. According to John Tierney (2013) of The New York Times:

He and his coauthors argued that eHarmony’s results could merely reflect the well-known “person effect”: an agreeable, non-neurotic, optimistic person will tend to fare better in any relationship. But the research demonstrating this effect also showed that it’s hard to make predictions based on what’s called a dyadic effect—how similar the partners are to each other. . . . “If dyadic effects are real, and if eHarmony can establish this point validly, then this would be a major advance to our science,” Reis said. But he and his colleagues said that eHarmony hadn’t yet carried out, let alone published, the sort of rigorous study necessary to prove that its algorithm worked. . . . To verify the algorithm’s effectiveness, the critics said, would require a randomized controlled clinical trial like the ones run by pharmaceutical companies. Randomly assign some individuals to be matched by eHarmony’s algorithm, and some in a control group to be matched arbitrarily; then track the resulting relationships to see who’s more satisfied.

Reis’s coauthor, Northwestern University’s Eli Finkel, added, “Nobody in the world has the treasure chest of resources for relationships research that eHarmony has, so we can’t figure out why they haven’t done the study.”

Of course, plenty of people can find compatible matches on eHarmony (or any other dating service) without the help of scientifically validated tests; wonderful, lasting relationships sprout all the time by random chance. But if people are choosing eHarmony over a competitor because they believe that there is some validated science behind the matching, they are likely being misled. Caveat emptor.

References

Breton, Paul. 2011. Personal communication with author (February 16 and February 18).

Carter, Steven. 2005. For modern-day cupids, data replaces dating. APS Observer 18(2) (February).

Carter, Steven, and J. Galen Buckwalter. 2009. Enhancing mate selection through the Internet: A comparison of relationship quality between marriages arising from an online matchmaking system and marriages arising from unfettered selection.

Interpersona 3 (Suppl. 2) (December): 105–25.

eHarmony.com. 2011a. Scientific Matchmaking. Available at www.eharmony.com/why/science; accessed October 20, 2011.

———. 2011b. Research Team. Available at www.eharmony.com/labs/category/research-team; accessed October 20, 2011.

Epstein, Robert. 2007. The truth about online dating. Scientific American Mind (February/ March): 33.

Finkel, Eli J., Paul W. Eastwick, Benjamin R. Karney, et al. 2012. Online dating: A critical analysis from the perspective of psychological science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 13(January): 3–66, doi:10.1177/1529100612436522.

Gonzaga, G., Steven Carter, and J. Buckwalter. 2010. Assortative mating, convergence, and satisfaction in married couples. Personal Relationships 17: 634–44.

Tierney, John. 2013. A match made in the code. The New York Times (February 12): Page D3.

Supporters of alternative medicine and purveyors of quack remedies love to criticize conventional medicine and science. They keep repeating the same tired arguments that are easily rebutted. This handy guide will help skeptics answer common criticisms from doctor-bashers.

Doctor-bashing is a popular sport practiced by believers in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and purveyors of quack remedies. Since they can’t compete in the arena of science, their only recourse is to criticize science-based medicine—as if pointing out its imperfections somehow proves their own methods are superior! It’s like creationists who imagine that controversies about small details of evolution somehow prove that “God did it.”

The sport of doctor-bashing involves A LOT OF CAPITALS, miz-speld wurds, egregious errors of grammar and usage, abuse of logic, misrepresenting the facts, rejecting the scientific method, gratuitously insulting individuals rather than grappling with the issues, and so on. If players can find a way to compare doctors to Nazis, they get extra points. They tediously repeat the same false accusations and flawed arguments that have been rebutted ad nauseam.

I thought skeptics might find it useful to have a list of some common CAM arguments along with their rebuttals. These are not meant as debating points, since trying to debate true believers is as useless and frustrating as trying to glue ice cubes to the ceiling. But these points might be useful in discussing the issues with people who have not yet donned the jersey of a doctor-bashing team.

1. Science doesn’t know everything.

Comedian Dara Ó Briain said it best: “Science knows it doesn’t know everything, otherwise, it’d stop. But just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

2. There are other ways of knowing.

Sure there are: intuition, imagination, dreams, revelation, tradition, speculation, the “stoned thinking” favored by integrative medicine guru Andrew Weil, anecdotes, and personal observations. All of these can lead people to strong beliefs, to the illusion of knowledge; but until those beliefs are tested, we can’t trust them to reflect reality. Only the scientific method can lead to the kind of reliable knowledge that took humans to the moon and transformed AIDS from a death sentence into a chronic disease with near-normal life expectancy.

3. Science is only a belief system, just another religion.

Science is founded on only two underlying premises: that there is a material world, and that we can learn about how that world works. Science doesn’t “believe” anything; it asks and verifies. It has an excellent track record of practical success. The scientific method unquestionably works.

4. Science keeps changing its mind.

Yes, and that’s a good thing. Scientific conclusions are always provisional. Scientists follow the evidence wherever it leads, and they often have to change course as new evidence becomes available. CAM refuses to change its mind even in the face of clear evidence. Scientific medicine stops using treatments if they are proven not to work; medical history is littered with discarded theories and practices. CAM never rejects any treatment and hardly ever tests one of its treatments against another to see which is superior.

5. Science is dogmatic.

Yes, they inconsistently argue that science is dogmatic while also arguing that science keeps changing its mind. Dogmatism is found in CAM, not in science.

6. You are just robotically supporting the official party line of mainstream medicine.

When a body of experts evaluates all the published research and issues evidence-based guidelines, it’s worth listening to what they have to say and trying to understand why they say it. Evidence-based guidelines are general guidelines, not cookbooks: doctors are meant to use judgment in applying them to individual patients. There is a difference between the appeal to authority (“He’s a professor at Harvard, so we should believe everything he says”) and accepting the consensus of experts who know more about the field than we do. If ten top mechanics agree that your carburetor needs replacing, it is reasonable to replace the carburetor. It is not reasonable to listen to your barber if he says you can fix the carburetor by sprinkling lemon juice on it. All too often, CAM advocates are the ones who are parroting unreliable “authorities” who don’t know what they’re talking about.

7. Doctors are afraid the AMA will take away their licenses if they support unapproved treatments.

This one is really silly, since the AMA has no regulatory authority and the majority of doctors don’t even belong to the AMA. Only state licensing boards can take away a medical license, and they seldom do that even when a doctor is using irrational treatments or outright quackery.

8. You skeptics are biased against CAM.

We are biased . . . in favor of science and reason. We are biased against claims that have been tested and disproven and that are incompatible with the rest of scientific knowledge. We are biased against health care providers telling patients things that are not true, presenting opinions as if they were facts. We are biased against using placebos because that constitutes lying, and lying is unethical. We are not biased against any CAM treatment just because it is CAM; we contend that there is only one medicine, that treatments have either been proven to work or they haven’t, and that all claims should be held to the same standard and tested by the same scientific methods.

9. Big Pharma is paying you to promote their products and discredit CAM. (The Pharma Shill gambit)

That accusation is unfounded. I don’t know of a single critic of CAM who is being paid by pharmaceutical companies for anything. We don’t accept gifts from drug companies. We don’t get kickbacks for prescribing certain drugs. We have no incentive to favor drugs over other treatments. For that matter, subsidiaries of pharmaceutical companies manufacture many of the diet supplements on the market, so we might just as well accuse you of being paid by Big Pharma to promote its products. What about Big Supplement?

10. Doctors are afraid of the competition.

Most doctors already have all the patients they can handle. CAM has only a very small share of the healthcare market. It’s not that doctors are afraid of competition, it’s that they are concerned for their patients’ welfare and don’t like to see them lied to, given ineffective treatments, persuaded to reject effective treatments, and persuaded to risk their health and their money.

11. Doctors only treat symptoms, not the underlying cause of disease.

Don’t be silly! Doctors treat the underlying cause whenever possible. If a patient has pneumonia, they don’t just treat the fever, pain, and cough; they figure out which microbe is responsible and provide the appropriate antibiotic. If a broken bone is painful, they don’t just treat the pain, they immobilize the fracture or insert a pin so it can heal. If a patient is in agony from pain in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen, they don’t just treat the pain, they try to figure out if the underlying cause is appendicitis, and if it is, they operate. The very people who accuse doctors of not treating “the underlying cause” are often the ones who think all disease is due to one bogus underlying cause (subluxations, disturbances of qi, poor diet, etc.). I once Googled for “the one true cause of all disease” and found sixty-three of them. (See SI 34(1), January/February 2010, available online at http://www.csicop.org/si/show/one_true_cause_of_all_disease/.) They also tend to use a single treatment (when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail).

12. Science-based medicine can’t explain why some people get a disease and others don’t, or why people get sick at a particular point in time.

Neither can CAM. But doctors do have some pretty good ideas why it happens: exposure to infections, number of organisms that get into the body, genetic factors, toxins, immune deficiency, chance, and so on. CAM proponents claim to fully understand why it happens, attributing it to some single cause that impairs optimum health (like a subluxation or a disturbance in qi or improper diet). But they have not been able to show they understand the answer to that question any better than conventional medicine does, or that their understanding leads to better patient outcomes.

13. Conventional medicine kills patients. (The “Death by Medicine” gambit)

Critics gleefully cite statistics for drug reactions, medical errors, and iatrogenic deaths; their numbers are usually wrong, but even when they are correct, it is irrational to look at those numbers in isolation. Harms must be weighed against benefits. Medicine saves far more people than it kills. Many of those who develop treatment complications would have died even sooner without treatment. All effective treatments have side effects. Doctors look at the risk/benefit ratios and reject treatments where the risk is greater than the potential benefit. The risk/benefit ratio of CAM should be compared to that of conventional medicine; if there is no benefit, no degree of risk can be justified. There is no evidence that CAM saves lives, and it can kill if it is used in lieu of effective lifesaving treatments.

14. Doctors are only out to make money.

Most doctors go into medicine not because they want to get rich but because they want to help people. There are much better ways to get rich. Medical education is long (eleven or more years after high school), grueling, and expensive. Doctors typically work long hours and are on call for emergencies. They incur substantial debts for their education and need years to repay them. The nice houses and cars don’t come until long after graduation, and few doctors make really big bucks. A much easier way to make money is to market bogus remedies or spread misinformation (like Dr. Oz, Andrew Weil, Burzynski, Daniel Amen, Kevin Trudeau, and all the companies that sell diet supplements and miracle weight loss aids). Boiron sold 566 million Euros worth of homeopathic remedies (e.g., water or sugar pills) in 2012.

15. Your minds are closed.

We are open to any new treatment, no matter how implausible, if only it can be shown to be safe and effective. Before we can ask how it works, we must ask if it works. If homeopathy had shown the same spectacular degree of success as penicillin, everyone would be using it. When Helicobacter was proposed as the cause of ulcers, it only took a few years for the evidence to accumulate and for antibiotics to become the treatment of choice. When a treatment like acupuncture has been studied for decades and even for centuries and its effectiveness is still uncertain, it is only reasonable to stop studying it and spend our research money elsewhere. We don’t need to keep an open mind about perpetual motion or a flat Earth, and we don’t need to keep an open mind about homeopathy. CAM advocates are the ones whose minds are truly closed. Most of them hold their beliefs so firmly that they reject any evidence to the contrary. One practitioner told me he would keep using his pet method even if it were definitely proven not to work, because “his patients liked it.”

16. Doctors don’t do prevention.

They most certainly do! Who do you think invented vaccinations and preventive screening tests? Don’t you know about the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force? Medical doctors routinely advise patients about weight control, diet, seatbelts and other safety topics, alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, exercise, etc. Studies on these topics are constantly appearing in the major medical journals. And there’s no evidence that the preventive efforts of CAM providers result in any better health outcomes than those of MDs.

17. Doctors don’t know anything about nutrition.

They understand the science of nutri­tion, advise their patients based on the available scientific evidence, and refer to dietitians for specific diet plans. CAM providers claim to know more about nutrition, but they usually give pseudoscientific or unfounded diet advice.

18. CAM is better because it’s holistic.

CAM appropriated that idea from mainstream medicine. In medical school, doctors are taught that good medicine requires caring about the whole patient, not just treating the disease. Part of the standard medical history is a “social history.” Good clinicians consider the patient’s family, lifestyle, job, stresses, education, diet, socioeconomic status, beliefs, and everything about the individual that might have an impact on medical care.

19. Alternative treatments are individualized and can’t be subjected to the same tests as pharmaceuticals.

Any treatment can and should be tested by scientific methods. For instance, homeopaths could prescribe individually in whatever way they chose and the remedies they prescribed could then be randomized with placebo controls and dispensed by someone else with double-blinding. And the objective outcomes of individualized CAM treatments can be compared to those of standardized conventional treatments.

20. Natural remedies don’t get tested because they can’t be patented and there’s no profit in it.

Nonsense. About half of prescription drugs were developed from plants. The plant itself can’t be patented, but the drug company can isolate the active ingredient and patent that, or even improve on it with a synthetic version that is more effective, more consistent, and has fewer side effects. They can patent a unique method of converting a plant into a pill. There’s plenty of money to be made in herbal medicines, diet supplements, and even plain old vitamins: they generate billions of dollars in profits every year.

21. Treatment X worked for me.

Maybe, maybe not. You can only know that you improved after the treatment; you can’t know for sure that you improved because of the treatment. That could be a post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy. You may not be able to imagine any other possible explanation, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Barry Beyerstein explained some of the many ways people come to believe that a bogus therapy works: the disease ran its natural course, a severe phase of cyclic symptoms reverted to the mean, the original diagnosis or prognosis was wrong, more than one treatment was used and credit was given to the wrong one, there was a placebo effect, they confused temporary mood improvement with cure, and psychological needs can distort what people perceive and do. (See http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/altbelief.html.)

22. You shouldn’t knock it if you haven’t tried it for yourself.

Trying it for yourself is not a reliable way to find out if a treatment works. Personal experience can be very compelling, but it is all too often misleading; in fact, it tends to interfere with one’s ability to objectively evaluate the scientific evidence. If the symptoms resolve, you have no way of knowing whether they resolved due to the treatment or whether they would have gone away anyway without treatment. Or whether some other factor caused the improvement. That’s why science uses control groups. If you try a remedy and get better, it’s reasonable on a practical basis to try it the next time you have the symptoms, but it’s not acceptable to cite your experience as proof that “it works.”

23. Huge numbers of people use X, and they couldn’t all be wrong.

Oh yes they could! The argument from popularity is a fallacy: popularity is no indication of truth. Just think of how many people believe their horoscopes or consult psychics. For centuries, everyone believed bloodletting was effective in balancing the humors to treat disease. Only when it was properly tested did doctors discover they’d been killing patients instead of helping them.

24. It’s been used for centuries: it must work, or people wouldn’t have kept using it.

This is the argument from antiquity, the “ancient wisdom” fallacy. Our ancestors may have stumbled onto a few effective remedies by trial and error, but they didn’t have the advantage of scientific knowledge, and they didn’t know how to test remedies. It could be ancient wisdom, but it could just as well be ancient error carried over from a prescientific era.

25. It’s natural, therefore it’s safe.

Not necessarily. Many natural substances are deadly poisons. Any natural remedy must be tested for efficacy and safety by the same standards we use to test “unnatural” remedies like pharmaceuticals. Herbs are drugs too, and anything that has an effect can have a side effect. If presumably “safe” herbal remedies were tested as rigorously as prescription drugs, some of them would prove unsafe.

26. There is proof that X is correlated with Y (cites study).

Correlation does not prove causation. The rise in the number of diagnoses of autism correlates almost perfectly with the rise in the sales of organic food, but that doesn’t mean organic food causes autism. Apparent correlations can be due to chance, error, poor data collection, and many other things. There may not really be a true correlation, and even if there is, that doesn’t tell us whether X caused Y or Y caused X or whether X and Y were both caused by Z.

27. There are hundreds of studies that show X works.

Most of the studies cited by supporters are in animals or test tubes; others are opinion pieces, speculations, and irrelevant studies. They won’t tell you that there are other, better quality human clinical studies that show it doesn’t work. Studies can be found to support almost any claim. Half of all published studies are wrong, for a variety of reasons that were explained by Ioannidis. (See http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124.) You can’t just look at positive studies: you have to look at the entire body of published evidence. That’s where systematic analyses come in. And even they may not reflect reality: there may be negative studies that we don’t know about because they were never published: the file drawer effect and publication bias. And remember what Carl Sagan said: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” It would take an extraordinary amount of evidence indeed to overthrow all the established science that tells us homeopathy can’t possibly work as advertised.

28. We don’t need studies; we have plenty of testimonials.

Ten anecdotes are no better than one; 100 are no better than ten. Anecdotal evidence is unreliable, no matter how many anecdotes you have accumulated. This lesson has had to be relearned over and over again throughout the history of medicine. Just think of how many testimonials there were for bloodletting throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Anecdotes are useful, but only as a guide to what to investigate with scientific studies.

29. Are you accusing us of lying?

No. We believe you are sincerely telling the truth as you see it. We believe you had the experience you related. But that doesn’t mean your interpretation of your experience is true.

30. If you think X doesn’t work, why don’t you do a study to prove it?

It’s not that we think X doesn’t work, it’s that there is no evidence to make us think it does work. It is not up to us to prove a negative. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. If I told you that putting a poker chip in your gas tank would give you better mileage, you should ask me to prove it. You are not obligated to design and conduct a controlled study to prove it doesn’t work.

31. The medical establishment would drum out any doctor who tried to publish studies going against the party line, showing that X worked or that condition Y was real.

Quite the contrary. Peer review would critique the study. If it was a good study, it would be published; then others would investigate. A doctor who discovered a new disease or treatment would be honored. The idea of treating ulcers with antibiotics instead of antacids went against the party line, but Drs. Marshall and Warren won a Nobel Prize for discovering the role of Helicobacter pyloris. Luc Montagnier was awarded a Nobel Prize for discovering the virus that causes AIDS only two years after the first reports of “gay-related immune deficiency syndrome.” Real diseases and new treatments are quickly recognized by the medical community.

32. You can’t know about it if you haven’t experienced it.

Yes you can. You don’t have to have been bitten by a snake to know how to treat a snakebite. Male obstetricians are proof that you can deliver babies without having been pregnant yourself. We can know that antibiotics work for pneumonia without having had pneumonia ourselves. We can read the medical literature and learn far more from it than we could ever hope to learn from personal experience.

33. They laughed at Galileo. (The Galileo gambit)

Or any other lone genius who was ignored in his time. Sure, any crank might turn out to be right, but most cranks don’t. If someone makes a questionable claim, we can look at his evidence. If he makes an idiotic claim without evidence, he deserves to be laughed at.

34. X is officially approved by . . . so it must work.

Proponents cite some organization or authority, such as Medicare, insurance companies, state licensing boards for acupuncture/chiropractic/ naturopathy, the WHO, the courts, some hospital or clinic. . . . These organizations are not authorities when it comes to scientific truth; often they are not even experts in science. They are influenced by factors like politics, expediency, customer demand, economics, lobbyists, legal maneuvering, etc. No matter how many authorities approve of a treatment, it must still be properly tested to determine safety and efficacy.

35. The NCCAM is studying it, so there must be something to it.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine is strongly influenced by politics and has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars studying improbable treatments with no scientific merit. The studies they have funded have never proved that any CAM treatment was effective. (See “Measuring Mythology: Startling Concepts in NCCAM Grants,” SI, January/February 2012.)

36. Studies show it doesn’t work, but what if it only works for me and a small minority of people like me?

That’s possible, but not very probable. If it worked for a significant minority of people, it would have shown up in the data, would have affected the statistics, and would have changed the outcome of the study. If the minority was too small to affect the study outcome, what’s the likelihood that you would be one of the special few that it actually worked for? The odds are against it, and there is no rational way to choose the one treatment that might work for you out of all the various treatments that have been tested and shown to be ineffective.

37. I was misdiagnosed/mistreated by a doctor. I will never consult an MD again. Now I rely on my naturopath/chiropractor/acupuncturist/ homeopath (or on the testimonials of my friends).

If you get food poisoning, do you stop eating? If you get a bad batch of gasoline do you start putting water in the fuel tank instead? Anyone can make a mistake, and some doctors are incompetent. The rational solution is to find a more competent science-based doctor, not to switch to a less competent non-science-based source of advice.

38. I can’t afford conventional medicine; CAM costs less.

If it costs less but doesn’t work, that’s false economy. Water costs a lot less than gasoline, but it won’t run your car.

39. My doctor said nothing was wrong with me, but my CAM provider did a test conventional medicine doesn’t do and found a condition that needed to be treated.

If conventional doctors don’t do a test, didn’t you ever wonder why they don’t? Maybe they have a good reason. Has the test been validated? What is its specificity and sensitivity? Is a positive result more likely to be a false positive than a true positive? It may well be one of the many bogus tests and bogus diagnoses that abound in the world of CAM.

40. Conventional medicine doesn’t have an effective treatment for my disease.

CAM doesn’t either. They may tell you they do, but they will only offer false hope and waste your time and money. It might be wiser to accept that there is no effective treatment and concentrate on finding ways to cope with your illness and improve your quality of life.

41. Conventional medicine does some terrible things. Why don’t you put your own house in order before you criticize others?

Conventional medicine is flawed, but it is constantly criticizing and policing itself. Current practices are continually being reevaluated and discarded if they are found ineffective. CAM has no such tradition of self-criticism; CAM practitioners never reject any treatment even if the evidence clearly shows it doesn’t work.

42. Only 15 percent of mainstream medicine is based on evidence.

False. That estimate was based on a misunderstanding of a study from half a century ago that was never intended to estimate the percentage of treatments based on evidence. Bob Imrie reviewed the literature and found that 78 percent of treatments are based on compelling evidence, 38 percent on randomized controlled trials. (See http://www.veterinarywatch.com/CTiM.htm.) Academic neurologist Steven Novella estimates that nearly 100 percent of the treatments he recommends are based upon the best available evidence combined with plausible and rational extension of what is known, as well as adequate evidence for lack of harm (http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/how-much-modern-medicine-is-evidence-based/). But think about it: even if a system were only 15 percent based on the evidence from scientific studies, wouldn’t that be better than a system based on nothing but testimonials?

43. Why would so many doctors use CAM and recommend it if it didn’t work?

Medicine is an applied science, and doctors are not scientists. Medical students have to absorb vast amounts of information in a short time; they are unlikely to question their teachers, they don’t have the time to read the experimental evidence for what they are taught, they are not taught how to evaluate research studies, and they are not educated about the flaws of CAM. A lot of MDs know about science but don’t really understand the scientific method, and there are those who understand it but choose to ignore it. There are those who are “shruggies,” who think false claims from CAM don’t matter, and there are those who are too overworked to keep up with evolving knowledge.

And finally:

44. If CAM makes people feel better, why deny them that? Even if it’s just a placebo, isn’t that a good thing?

No. Placebos are unethical. Placebo effects tend to be small in magnitude and brief in duration, and disappointment soon ensues. Using a placebo may delay or replace effective treatment. Placebos can make asthma patients subjectively feel like they can breathe better when objectively their lung function is unimproved and they are still at risk—asthma attacks can be fatal.

As the T-shirt says, “Science: It works, bitches.” No other basis of medical care can begin to compete with it. The doctor-bashers are playing a losing game.

Professor Edzard Ernst has written the story of his life as a doctor and a scientist, in A Scientist in Wonderland: A Memoir of Searching for Truth and Finding Trouble.

Despite a youthful ambition to become a jazz musician, he studied medicine and became a medical research scientist, taking up appointments in Germany, Austria, and finally in England.

Professor Ernst’s reverence for the pursuit of truth through the application of scientific methods led to an appointment as the world’s first chair in alternative medicine. Clashes were inevitable and this memoir provides a unique insight into the cutthroat politics of academic life and offers a sobering reflection on the damage already done by pseudoscience in the field of medicine.

Edzard Ernst: I studied medicine a long time ago in Munich. I'm German‑born. My first job was in the homeopathic hospital, so I was exposed to all sorts of alternative medicine. Initially quite impressed with it, then I took a job in London and become a scientist, worked in some basic research for a while, went back into clinical medicine, became professor of rehabilitation medicine, first in Hanover, and then took over a large clinical department in Vienna.

During all this time, alternative medicine was sort of a hobby for me. One day I saw a post advertised in Exeter, England, for the first chair in complementary medicine, which is the same as alternative medicine. I applied; I got it, built up a research team. We did some decent work for about twenty years, and now I'm retired for about three years.

Kylie Sturgess: You’ve recently written a memoir, A Scientist in Wonderland ‑‑ A Memoir of Searching for Truth and Finding Trouble. How did you come up with the title? It’s a very catchy one.

Ernst: My working title when I started writing the book five years ago–I worked a very long time on this book–was “Alternative Medicine: The Inside Story.” I felt there was so much to be told and there were so many misconceptions with the public about alternative medicine that it would be necessary to tell the truth about it.

Then some people saw a first draft and they said, “No, no, this is not going to be interesting enough. You need to write a much more personal book. You need to write where you come from, your background, and so forth.” In other words, it was turned into a memoir, initially somewhat against my will. I don’t like talking about myself, nor writing about myself all that much.

Sturgess: It can be very challenging. I’ve noticed that there’s been some very strong reactions from what I’ve seen on your site. Did you expect positive reactions? There’s mostly a lot of praise.

Ernst: I was involved in a couple of quite public disputes, for instance, with the Prince of Wales, with my own institution, with my own university. I’m not at all surprised that the reactions are strong, and probably we haven’t even seen the start of it.

Before the book was published, it was seen by lawyers and I had to omit quite a few passages from it, because they were thought to be libelous. I was involved in a libel case recently here in Britain, which is very, very unpleasant. I wasn’t the subject of the libel case, but Simon Singh was sued by the chiropractors for our last book. That was really most unpleasant. Mostly for him, but also for me.

No, I’m not at all surprised to receive strong reactions. I expect there will be even stronger ones. My own university hasn’t even begun to react.

Sturgess: Gosh. Are you looking forward to seeing what’s being said?

Ernst: I just hope that the lawyers did a good job and they can’t sue me for libel!

Sturgess: Fair enough! How about we go back to the beginning? Since this is after all a memoir, and hopefully not spoiling the book. What was it like in the early years when you first trained in alternative and complementary medicine? What were you feelings about it back then?

Ernst: As I said, I was exposed as a junior doctor to this area, and I was quite impressed by it. Then it became a hobby, and we did occasionally a bit of research here and there. When I took over the Exeter post, I was of course aware that I had to leave my own feelings and preconceptions behind and should work as a scientist, as unbiased and objectively as possible.

We tried to do that as a team. It worked quite well until the results of our research were predominantly negative. This led to more and more upset with the alternative practitioners, with lobby groups, with Prince Charles’s lobby group, with Prince Charles personally, and eventually even with my own university, who initially thought I was doing fine–without exaggerating, initially I was a bit of a star in that university.

Then feelings soured because Prince Charles filed an official complaint through his first private secretary. This was very strange. People in this country are really quite anxious in certain positions to get a knighthood. My two superiors did receive a knighthood once they had mistreated me–no causal connection implied, because otherwise I might get sued for libel.

But that’s how it went. I went from being well‑appreciated to basically being treated like dirt.

Sturgess: It’s very uncomfortable to leap through that in the first place, but having to revisit in a memoir, what was it like writing the book and having to look at those facts all over again?

Ernst: That is quite a strange feeling, because it brings it all back again. Luckily, I had long started writing a diary and kept copious noted and emails, so I had something to fall back on. Nevertheless, the feelings come back and in a way, there’s a danger of writing something that tastes of sour grapes. I tried to steer away from that and just be as factual and sometimes lighthearted as possible, but, of course, it’s not easy.

On the other hand, it’s also therapeutic. Once you have gone through this type of experience, you have the urge to tell the story. In a way, it’s good to tell it, and it’s even better to see that at least some people appreciate it.

Sturgess: Now, of course, one of the things that’s raised in regards to the book, the zeitgeist of cultural relativism. It’s a big problem in ethics and it’s a big problem in science. Just how difficult did it get during those times?

Ernst: From the beginning, I made it very clear what our research agenda was: efficacy, safety, and health economical studies. So I was going to stay very clear of all this post‑modernism that flies about in my field of research and in some other fields.

I believe that was the right decision. I don’t think highly of this relativism. I feel science provides tools to find the truth, or if we can’t find the truth, at least approach the truth. If we start from the premise that your truth is as good as mine, if not better, and many truths exist, we are in trouble.

This is not at all what I’m trying for as a scientist and as a medic. For me, a treatment either generates more good than harm or it doesn’t. It’s perhaps, to some people, quite simplistic, but to me this is the only way to make real progress.

Sturgess: Now I’ve seen ongoing discussion, it still continues on today, about the intersection between media and science communication. How well does the media and science serve each other, in your opinion?

Ernst: That’s an interesting question. At one stage in Exeter, I was told I wasn’t supposed to talk to the media anymore. Not that I ever went out myself to talk to the media. I just was trained to give polite responses when journalists inquired about my work.

At one stage, I was so much in the limelight of the British press that I got almost daily emails or telephone calls, and I duly replied to them. At one stage, for my dean, this level of attention to my work seemed to be too much. He instructed me to seek his approval. I told him to go yonder and multiply. I just ignored it, because he effectively was interfering with the freedom of press, with academic freedom, et cetera.

The media can be tricky. Most scientists are scared stiff to talk to journalists. I was brought up differently. I always thought that the media can be helpful. They certainly are not always helpful and if I had a pound for every misquote, I would probably be quite a rich man. I tried to use the media in the best way possible, and in alternative medicine this is important.

You might talk to colleagues, to scientists, to doctors about the value of this or that therapy, but in alternative medicine, you would be missing the target. In alternative medicine, you need to talk to the man or the woman in the street. It is they who make the therapeutic decisions, often entirely without any assistance from healthcare professionals. This is why the media become much more important than in any other field than of medicine.

Having realized that, I tried to be as productive as I possibly could with the media, and I had good help. Here in Britain we have the Science Media Center, and they were extremely helpful in establishing communications. They often invited me to give presentations to journalists, et cetera.

I think, in my field, the media have the potential to do a lot of good, and I try to channel them in that way.

Sturgess: You’ve written about the past in a memoir. How do you see the future?

Ernst: My personal future is to carry on. I have a very busy blog, and I write almost daily on the blog. I started a new book with an American co‑author. I give lots of lectures and I still do some bits of research. I will carry on doing the sort of things that give me pleasure.

The future for alternative medicine, I really don’t know. Here we have powerful people like Prince Charles who’s one day going to be king. He certainly has an alternative bee under his royal bonnet. He seems to want to force‑feed the nation on alternative medicine, which I don’t think is a very good idea.

In other countries, there are equally powerful lobby groups. If I had had any choice in the future, alternative medicine would have to follow the path of any good healthcare, and this has to go the path of evidence‑based medicine. That’s the long and short of it, basically.

The official site is http://edzardernst.com.

Or: What Do Bill Maher, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rand Paul, and Chris Christie Have In Common?

The 2016 Presidential campaign is off to a rousing start, and who would have predicted that one of the first hot-button issues of the political season would be national immunization policy? Thanks to a highly publicized multi-state outbreak of measles that began in January and continues to this day, considerable attention has been focused on the increased number of parents rejecting the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations for childhood vaccination. On February 2, President Obama made a strong statement in support of vaccination, characterizing the scientific evidence for safety and effectiveness as “pretty indisputable.”

For a couple of weeks, the glare of media attention on this issue was so bright that the entire class of presidential hopefuls was required to state a position, and a few of their responses drew quick attacks.

United States Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky holds a doctor of medicine degree from Duke University School of Medicine, but on February 3rd he was quoted saying, “I’ve heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children, who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.” In an attempt to recover from the criticism that followed, Rand Paul later asserted that all parents should get their children vaccinated and allowed a reporter to accompany him as he got a Hepatitis A booster shot.

Similarly, after initially suggesting that vaccination is a parental choice, Chris Christie was forced to clarify his position, saying that “there is no question kids should be vaccinated.”

Finally, as what might be called “Vaccine Week” wore on, some science-minded people began to wonder whether comedian Bill Maher, a long-time member of the anti-vaccination crowd, might change his tune. After all, he is pro-science on global warming; surely now that measles outbreaks were becoming more common he would see the light and change his position on vaccination. (Spoiler alert.) Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. On his Friday, February 6th HBO show, Maher said “I’m not an anti-vaxxer.....” but then went on to cast doubt on the safety of immunization, going so far as to suggest that vaccinations might be weakening our immune systems.

Vaccine Week demonstrated something quite remarkable about this issue: it creates strange bedfellows. The table below presents my own—somewhat subjective—categorization of recent positions taken by the President and those most likely to be in line for his job. Although, to my knowledge, he is not a presidential hopeful, I also included Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. because he is an outspoken Democratic activist who has lobbied members of Congress on the alleged perils thimerosal, a preservative that has not been used in childhood vaccines since 2001. Just last summer Kennedy published a book on thimerosal, and he has recently restated his concerns in the context of the current measles outbreak.

Table 1. Political figures, their political affiliations, and their position on the vaccine issue. *Not a presidential hopeful but outspoken on the issue.

A quick look at this table shows that, unlike most other political issues, the immunization question does not break down on party lines. To further muddy the political waters, I would place Bill Maher, who appears to be a liberal on most issues (he reportedly voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and contributed to President Obama’s 2012 campaign), in the Democratic (liberal) parental choice box with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Vaccines and Moral Foundations Theory

Recent research in social psychology may shed some light on why people of varying political stripes might share this anti-science view, taking very different paths to arrive similar positions. Moral Foundations Theory, introduced by Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph and outlined in a highly readable form in Haidt’s 2012 book The Righteous Mind, suggests that liberals and conservatives can be separated on the basis of five moral values.^[1] Joseph and Haidt’s research (with various colleagues) identifies the five foundations listed in the table below and has shown that liberals and conservatives express these moral values in roughly the manner I have indicated in the table. Conservatives value all five of these moral foundations to a moderate degree; whereas, liberals give great weight to the Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating foundations and much less to the other three.

Table 2. How liberals and conservatives use five values of Moral Foundation Theory. (Based on Figure 1 of Graham, Haidt, and Nosek, 2009.^[2])

This theory may help explain the liberal attack on vaccines. Liberals are moved by the caring dimension of Moral Foundation Theory, and more than any of the other foundations, caring for children plays a role in the liberal opposition to vaccines. Parents in the anti-vaccine movement care deeply about the well-being of their kids and have been sold a false story of fear. Unfortunately, their caring appears to be very locally focused. A similar sense of concern does not extend to the other children and adults they imperil by choosing not to vaccinate their children.

Because doctors, the CDC, and other authority figures are the ones recommending vaccination, one might think there is an anti-establishment aspect to the liberal attack—and perhaps there is—but according to research by Haidt and others, liberals are less moved by the Authority/Subversion moral foundation. Instead, it appears that the Fairness/Cheating foundation plays a more important role. The villain of the liberal anti-vaccination melodrama is typically the powerful pharmaceutical industry.^[3] The CDC is thought to be controlled by Big Pharma, and last summer anti-vaxxers claimed that the CDC was suppressing damaging data about vaccinations. According to this narrative, powerful business interests are pursuing vaccine profits at the expense of the weak and vulnerable. As I mentioned in last month’s column, a similar David and Goliath narrative applies in the anti-genetically modified foods movement.

The liberal motives driving Democrats into the anti-vaccination movement are fairly clear, but does Moral Foundations Theory provide any answers to why some conservatives are “parental choicers” on this issue? As originally described, the theory does not appear to help much. However, the use of the words “choice” and “voluntary” by some conservative candidates is a hint to a different motivation for this position—one that Haidt and colleagues have recently begun to explore. After initially limiting their research to conservatives and liberals, Haidt’s group recognized that libertarians—a growing force in American politics—may be motivated by somewhat different moral principles than either Republicans or Democrats, and they have begun to revise the theory accordingly.

In a 2012 study, Haidt and colleagues began by looking at how libertarians line up on the same five moral foundations of the original theory.^[4] What they discovered was that libertarians look like liberals on the last three moral foundations, relatively unmotivated by issues of Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, or Sanctity/Degradation, and more like conservatives on the remaining two dimensions, moderately concerned with Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating. All of which indicates why libertarian views can sometimes appeal to either liberals or conservatives.

Table 3. Libertarians in comparison to conservatives and liberals. (Based on Figure 1 of Iyer, Koleva, Graham, and Haidt, 2012.)

In general, libertarians were not strongly moved by any of the five original dimensions of Moral Foundation Theory. In fact, Haidt has described libertarians as being “very much like liberals but just lower in compassion.” Using a number of other measures, the 2012 study produced a picture of libertarians that is remarkably consistent with the philosophy put forward by Ayn Rand. Relative to conservatives and liberals, libertarians were (a) rationalists—moved more by reason than by emotion (note that Reason is the name of a popular libertarian magazine) (b) fierce defenders of liberty and individual freedom, and (c) more individualistic and less collectivist in their concerns. For the libertarians in the study, both economic liberty and lifestyle liberty were very important.

These findings suggest that libertarians, who appear to be a growing sector of our electorate, have different personalities and value systems than either conservatives or liberals. In order to accommodate these results, a recent revision of Moral Foundations Theory includes a sixth moral foundation, Liberty/Oppression, which libertarians value much more strongly than any of the original five.^[5]

So how does this help us understand the conservative appeal of the anti-vaccination movement? In the case of Chris Christie, it may not help. He is not a libertarian and, in fact, has been a critic of libertarian foreign policy positions. Sometimes—and perhaps especially in the case of someone like Chris Christie—there is little rhyme or reason to the things a politician will say. Recall that Christie was also involved in the unjustified quarantine of a nurse who had treated Ebola patients in West Africa. In that case, he was willing to squelch the individual rights of the nurse in the interest of the collective wellbeing—directly opposite of his vaccine position. Hard to figure.

In the case of Rand Paul, the connection is obvious. The Kentucky Senator is the son of Ron Paul, perhaps the most visible representative of libertarianism in the United States. Although, like his father, Rand Paul is a member of Republican Party; he is a strong supporter of libertarian values. In this case, although libertarian rationalism might put him on the side of vaccination, liberty is the overriding virtue of libertarianism. A concern for individual freedom, combined with the libertarian’s diminished sense of compassion and collectivism could easily lead a candidate—even a candidate physician—to support parental choice over public health.

So, some liberals and libertarians appear to have found common ground in the promotion of parental choice on vaccination, but according to Moral Foundations Theory, they arrive at their positions for different reasons.^[6] Liberals appear to be motivated by compassion (emotion) and a sense of unfairness. Libertarians share the pro-vaccination valuing of reason but are unmoved by collectivist concern. Instead, individual freedom is their dominant moral principle.

Disclaimer: the above represents my own interpretation of vaccine policy resistance in light of Moral Foundations Theory. I don’t believe any study has provided actual data connecting the six moral foundations to views on child vaccination. But this analysis seems reasonable based on the available information.

A Final Question

Can this kind of research on moral and political motivations help us in the effort to promote science-based policies? It might. The interpretation above suggests that different appeals are needed to answer different kinds of objections. In the case of vaccine resistance, we need liberal anti-vaxxers to be more reason-based and more knowledgeable about the methods of science. Their compassion is admirable, but their poor understanding of evidence and their choice of a perceived (but false) individual good over the collective good are obstacles. Libertarians, on the other hand, are more accepting of reasoned argument but lower on compassion. Most importantly libertarians are reluctant to sacrifice individual freedoms for the general good.^[7] So, in this case, it may be more effective to choose arguments that appeal to reason and, perhaps, to the individual freedom of movement and choice enjoyed by those who live in a society free of infection.

Often in the past, science advocates have seemed to adopt a single approach. They have raised the flag of science and evidence and used it to beat down the claims of pseudoscientists and shamans. But now that many issues of science and the public good have become so sharply politicized, it may be time for the champions of science to become a bit more politically savvy. Science doesn’t care about your personal politics. Its power transcends the political world. But as issues of science become more politicized, it may be time for science advocacy to get more political too. Understanding the different moral and political motives behind the rejection of science can only help.

Earlier this year, Lars Andersen–a self-described painter and writer from Denmark who first became interested in ancient archery practices about ten years ago–produced a video that quickly gained close to thirty million views on YouTube: “A New Level of Archery.”

However, Andersen’s high-speed stunts and even faster claims about archery were not left unchallenged. Snopes.com soon posted a summary of just how many tricks were repeatedly filmed (although not digitally manipulated)–but that wasn’t quite the full story.

Anna Maltese, an artist, digital painter and archer, joined forces with long-time skeptical filmmaker John Rael, to produce A Response to Lars Andersen: a New Level of Archery. With 450 thousand views and climbing, it is a measured and not-without-a-sense-of-humour researched response to a number of odd claims in Andersen’s video.

The video is written and narrated by Anna Maltese, produced and edited by John Rael, with videography and photography by Matt David.

Anna Maltese: I’m an animator, or I was up until a couple years ago.

I was an animator on The Simpsons for over ten years, and I left because I wanted to devote more time to archery, kung fu, and digital painting. I’ve been an archer for the better part of a decade now, and I’ve been an archery instructor for about four or five years, I think. I am a bow maker, as well. I compete sometimes, and my stage performances started from working at Burning Man.

As a performer, I’m part of a fire archery group that was born out of an idea from Burning Man. We burned down, on cabled arrows, a five story, many ton Trojan Horse, packed with explosives, packed with pyro. Basically, we were a crew of about nine people, and we developed a fire arrow that could be reused safely.

It took about eight months to develop a working prototype for that, but luckily my partner is a project manager at JPL, as well as being president of our archery club, and someone who shoots at an Olympic level, so I had some good resources to draw upon!

It’s a lot of fun. We perform it at different events, and we practice out at a dry lake bed about once a month. It’s a good crew, dedicated people; we always have a crack safety team. We abide by a lot of archery rules, and a lot of fire safety rules.

Kylie Sturgess: Have you noticed a boom in archery due to pop‑culture? Hunger Games is one of those films that seems to sell toy bows in toy stores all the time. Is it good for the sport?

Maltese: Calling it a boom is kind of an understatement…

Sturgess: Really?

Maltese: Yeah, it’s kind of nuts! Yes, I have noticed a boom, and yes, it is good for the sport.

Where I teach, at the Pasadena Roving Archers, we have beginning classes every Saturday morning that are totally free. You can come down and at about 7:15 in the morning, the line really starts getting long, very quickly. We had to completely readjust our teaching schedule and our classes.

We normally have to turn away about thirty to forty people each morning, but after the boom–after Avatar came out, and then Hunger Games, and Avengers–we have to start turning away more than that! It’s been incredibly good, although it has come with its downside. Just as a result of its popularity, the weekend before Brave came out, our storage bin was broken into and all of our teaching equipment was taken.

It was enough to completely create a whole new archery program for someone, and that week, we were freaking out. But thanks to the generosity of people all over the country–from the Eastern Sports Foundation, and from Samick, which makes excellent bows­ the donations came pouring in, both in money and equipment. And the Saturday after the movie opened up, we were right on all new equipment.

It was really, really thanks to all of them, but the reason why that happened, of course, was because the sport has become so popular. It’s a wonderful thing for archers; it’s a wonderful thing for ranges and for the sport; and it makes you feel good to go out there and shoot, it’s a fantastic experience.

Sturgess: How did the video, “Lars Andersen: A New Level of Archery” come to your attention? People were tagging you on Facebook, you mentioned that at the start of the video… Do you often come across information about archery that deserves a closer look, or was this one particular out there example?

Maltese: I was tagged in the video about thirteen times, and I’m not the only one! Every archer I know and every archery instructor I know has been tagged in this video, multiple times.

Each of them was just getting rather exasperated, because it’s like, “There’s so much to unpack in this video.” It’s primarily on social media, but that’s the same way with a lot of extraordinary or exaggerated things.

As to the second question, I do occasionally come across information about archery that needs a little bit of re‑examination. A good example of this is what’s called “the bow finger,” where I get told from people who generally aren’t in archery, “Oh, did you know where the middle finger gesture for ‘fuck you’ comes from?” The middle finger claim is that, in warfare in Western Europe, and specifically in Britain, archers captured on the battlefield would have their middle fingers chopped off, and that would make it impossible to shoot anymore.

That’s the claim that’s been debunked several times. The middle finger gesture is obviously just a phallic gesture, but regardless, even though it is the weight‑bearing finger in archery, there’s no real reason why an archer would not be able to shoot afterwards.

We have people in the Paralympics who don’t have hands actually shooting with their teeth and specialized bows. I’ve got to give a shout out to the Paralympians on this; it’s amazing what these people can do. We have people that work with the Wounded Warriors project, who are working with vets, rehabilitating them in sports and in life, and giving them something to do. They’re shooting with specialized release triggers that they hold between their toes. They’ll still be shooting out there every day–it makes me feel that I’m not doing enough with my life!

You occasionally come across odd claims–getting back to what we were talking about–but unlike martial arts, there aren’t as many odd beliefs about archery. This is a particularly–how to put this?–This is a particularly viral example.

Sturgess: Is archery prone to having fads or claims made about the practice in the same way as… I don’t know how much you know about martial arts and some of the claims made about their practices? Is there a similarity, you think?

Maltese: I would say that archery does not have as many fads or claims made about it, but there’s a couple. The bow finger one that I referenced is one, but mostly archery is about what works.

There are so many disciplines in archery, so many different techniques, and it really just comes down to where the person was born, and what surrounds them in their environment, and what the dominant discipline is in their day.

In California, we’re lucky in that the range that I go to, the Pasadena Roving Archers, and the range where I teach, you find compound shooters. You find Olympic recurve shooters, you find a lot of traditional shooters, and there are a lot of different disciplines to draw upon.

Basically, archery is about what works for you, and there is a lot of networking that goes on in the archery community, so there’s a load of things that people try out differently to fit what works for them. I do martial arts; I’ve been in it for a few decades; I do kung fu. Yes, I’ve heard a lot of claims about it, and it’s kind of wacky sometimes. I don’t see that as much in archery. Archery is a very practical sport.

Sturgess: Do you ever get people who use superstitions in archery? They might have certain rituals that they engage in.

Maltese: I haven’t noticed that at all, actually. Yeah, it could be just who I’m around, I guess, but for the amount of time that I’ve been in it–it’s been for the better part of a decade­–I haven’t really seen anybody using any kind of ritual to fix. I guess I’m not sure; could you clarify it a little?

Sturgess: For example, someone might have a lucky charm, or “I always use this particular stance,” because that works for me. Particularly with sports–sports superstitions are one of the most studied forms of superstitious behavior–you have certain people that have lucky socks, or say no, that’s my bow, or “I only use the red arrow.” I’m only using examples off the top of my head, but we can also see that in cricket or dance, those sorts of things.

Maltese: Yeah. I think I know what you mean. In baseball, apparently, baseball has many very superstitious things?

Sturgess: Absolutely.

Maltese: Yeah, I haven’t actually seen or heard anybody using a lucky charm or trinket in archery! That’s a good question though. That’s interesting, because I’ve never even thought about that, actually. It’s just something people don’t do.

Sturgess: “You have to put on the red wig and the green dress, otherwise, you’re not going to hit the target!”

Anna: “You have to wear your shoes backwards, on the wrong feet! That really makes for the best stance!” Well, I don’t know if it counts, but it is a very mental sport. Ninety-nine percent of it is just your mental state; you can have a really bad day, get to the range, and do everything technically right, as far as you know, but have a really bad shooting day.

That goes for all sports. It’s about disciplining your mind to not listen to all the chatter that’s going on, regardless of what kind of day you’re having, and just go through the nock and draw and release sequence.

Like I said, it’s very based on mental discipline. There are tricks we do to fool ourselves into not giving into that mental chatter.

One of the things that my archery club president always says is, “Feast or famine.” If you have a really good shot, take a moment and just feel how that shot went. Why does that shot feel good in your muscles, in your tendons and alignment? And then shoot another arrow, and then shoot the next arrow.

If something goes way off, if you take a bad shot, don’t dwell on it. Just go right back to shooting. The most that I can say in terms of things like superstition, for sports superstition, is they’re just the little tricks that we do. There are little tricks that we do to discipline our minds like that. Don’t focus on what went wrong, focus more on what went right.

Sturgess: From Facebook posts to video, how did that happen?

Maltese: You mean the rebuttal?

Sturgess: Absolutely, how did that come to be? It’s one thing to say to thirteen people who are tagging you: “Right, here’s a Facebook note, this is what I think they are saying,” to then go: “this deserves to be filmed.” How does that happen?

Maltese: I did a Facebook post just because so many people had been tagging me, and I couldn’t reply to all of them. On that Facebook post, I had a couple of requests, most notably from my friend Christina, to do a YouTube video on it.

My boyfriend, John Rael, has a web series called “Skeptically Pwnd,” where he, in a comedic way, goes about debunking claims that people make. I approached him about doing it and he was more than happy to. I began writing up a response, the rebuttal. There was a lot to unpack and I was not sure if it would be too long.

He was hoping to keep it down to below five minutes; then he read it and he said, “Actually, we’re going to include all of this. It’s going to be long, but I don’t care; content is good. This is good content.” I think this was the longest video he’s ever made, and I broke it down into twelve different items. I actually ended up cutting some things out, just for time, and we put it up, and that was that.

Sturgess: How have people responded?

Maltese: Overwhelmingly positively, actually. It’s been interesting. Not having a web series, I didn’t know what to expect! I didn’t know how far it would go but apparently, it got a little more viral than we thought it would be. The response has been wonderful, especially from other archers, from other archery instructors, from archery equipment distributors.

The Facebook post that I wrote up originally ended up being the inspiration for my fellow instructor and coach, Jim MacQuerrie, who runs the GeekDad blog. He wrote up the response, as well, and it’s from other archers especially, it’s been very, very positive.

I have a lot of people private messaging saying, “Thank you very much for writing this up,” because so many people are tagging me in this, and I just don’t have the energy to go through this again and again. I have a couple of people saying, “You are more polite than you could have been.” I’m like, “Yeah, I like being polite!”

Again, archery is about what works. The criticisms that other archers have had for this particular individual–involving his relative consistency, or questions of sloppiness or what have you–I don’t really feel like addressing those.

Because if it works for him, then, it works for him; archery is about what works. The things that I wanted to focus on in the video were simply the historical claims, and that’s what I pretty much did.

Sturgess: Actually, here’s another question. Has Lars Andersen himself responded?

Maltese: No, I have no idea. I don’t think so. I doubt I would even show up on the radar!

Sturgess: Really? Even with the viral video? Wow.

Maltese: I guess it depends on how viral the video gets. Again, I’m new to this kind of thing. I don’t know. I don’t go out and try to make a lot of viral videos.

I enjoy helping John on his video series, but I doubt that I would come up on the radar. It’s just one video, and there are a couple of other response videos out there.

Sturgess: When it comes to investigating claims like these, do you have any suggestions about approaching them or communicating them in a skeptical manner?

Maltese: I can’t claim to know what works best. I guess skepticism is about what works for people in terms of their approach. You have a lot of different, you have the more–I don’t want to say aggressive but–proactive, maybe, approaches. Like yourself, and then, you have people who just pretty much gravitate to their interactions with other people.

Sturgess: I know what you mean; you can’t get much more obvious than having a site which says “token skeptic” in the title!

Maltese: I just mean proactive. Like getting a podcast out there and addressing issues. Even with that, you have different approaches. You take a very friendly and continual way of doing it, someone like Richard Dawkins has a bit more of a… how do you say it?

Sturgess: He takes it to a different level. Dawkins is quite willing to go out and challenge creationists to their faces, for example. At one of the last conventions, he marched outside the venue and walked straight up to a whole bunch of them who were proselytizing and was quite happy to discuss religion to their faces. I, on the other hand, would be less willing to do that!

Maltese: Right. Both of those approaches speak to different audiences, in a sense. I guess it really depends on what audience you want to speak to, honestly. For me personally, I tend to try a more conversational method, and that’s what works for me.

I got a little more snarky in the video than I usually do, but that’s as a result of the fact that I am on a web series that’s called “Skeptically Pwnd,” where the logo is one character kicking another in the nuts! That’s sort of the format. I was actually going to go through a much more dry and analytical approach, and that wasn’t what we ended up going with in the end. Basically, I like to do a lot of homework, I like to do a lot of research, and I like to be exceedingly careful–I like to double and triple check. I can’t just have one data set that I use!

That’s one of the criticisms that a lot of other archers have, about Lars Andersen, is that first of all, the claims that he was making were very vague about which historical documents he was using. The one that he points to in the video is an example; it’s a data set of one, actually.

Sturgess: That’s not very good, is it? No, even if you’re not particularly scientific!

Maltese: The methodology is not that sound. Another source that he uses is another book called, “Saracen Archery,” but he doesn’t make that statement. He didn’t bring that up in that video, and it’s hard to dissect and address claims when the person who’s making the claims doesn’t back it up with their research or with specifics.

You really need to be specific about this. I guess what suggestion I would have is use more than one data set, rely on multiple sources, and do good skepticism. There are basic rules within skepticism. As for the approach, that’s really up to you. Like I said, I favor a more conversational approach, and that someone else might favor a different one.

For the past three months, California has been in the grip of a measles outbreak that has affected 126 people thus far with more cases anticipated. Only about 92 percent of children in California public schools are currently vaccinated, which, obviously, is not enough considering that the outbreak started at Disneyland and about half of all patients are under the age of nineteen.

Measles was actually considered eradicated from the United States in 2000, with a few cases occurring now and then thanks to infected travelers entering the country. That was just a few years before celebrities such as Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy rallied parents to stop vaccinating their children on the false belief that vaccines actually cause diseases. Thanks to them, last year more than 17,000 children entered kindergarten in California with a non-medical exemption for vaccination, meaning their parents hold a “personal belief” that allows them to put both their own children and others at serious risk of a deadly disease.

So, what do we do? Many people like myself, who believe in both the scientific consensus on vaccinations as well as public education, believe the answer is to do everything in our power to teach people the facts that demonstrate the safety and efficacy of vaccines as well as the dangers of avoiding them.

The problem with this is that facts may not be as compelling as we want them to be. Researchers Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have spent the past few years conducting studies that seem specifically designed to depress science communicators. Last year, they published a paper in which they showed that correcting myths about the MMR vaccination actually decreased a parent’s intention to vaccinate. Even showing participants images of sick children was counterproductive, increasing their belief that vaccines are connected with autism.

Last month, they conducted a similar test using the common belief that the flu vaccine causes the flu. The results were the same: correcting the misconception only decreased the subjects’ self-reported intention to get vaccinated.

At this point, we can only guess as to the reason why this happens. Do people hold their anti-vaccination beliefs so deeply that correcting a misconception only encourages them to spend time digging around for another reason to hate vaccines? If so, then the answer may be to address the underlying reasons for the belief instead of the scientific facts. For instance, perhaps the belief is rooted in a fear of government control over individual choices.

That hypothesis makes it all the more ironic that the more immediate solution is government control over individual choices. California is close to passing a law that will end the personal belief exemption for the MMR vaccine, forcing parents to either vaccinate their children, home school them, or move to another state. The people who believe that this will threaten their religious freedom ignore the fact that religious freedom stops where the threat to public safety begins, and measles has clearly become a very real threat to public safety.

But will the law (which already exists in West Virginia and Mississippi) only encourage the anti-government anti-vaccine activists to band together and renew their efforts to fight for their freedom to harm innocent kids? Time will tell, but personally I think it’s still worth trying. After all, just telling them the scientific facts doesn’t seem to be working.

On December 18, 1975, George and Kathy Lutz and their three children moved into a six-bedroom Dutch colonial home in Amityville, New York. But soon they were driven out, they claimed, by horrific supernatural forces. Ghosts? A poltergeist? Demons? Let’s take a look, as new claims continue to surface.

The Horror Tale

The Lutzes lasted just twenty-eight days before fleeing the house, reportedly leaving behind their possessions except for a few changes of clothes. Just three weeks later, they were telling an incredible tale.

The Lutzes claimed they had been attacked by sinister forces that ripped open a two-hundred-fifty-pound door, leaving it hanging from one hinge; threw open windows, bent their locks, and wrenched a banister from its fastenings; caused green slime to ooze from a ceiling; slid drawers rapidly back and forth; flipped a crucifix upside down; caused Kathy to levitate off the bed and turned her, briefly, into a wrinkled, toothless, drooling ninety-year-old crone; peered into the house at night with red eyes and left cloven-hooved tracks in the snow outside; infested a room in mid-winter with hundreds of houseflies; moved a four-foot ceramic statue of a lion about the house; produced cold spots and stenches; and caused other ostensibly paranormal phenomena, including speaking in a masculine voice, “Get out!”

These claims were detailed in the book, The Amityville Horror: A True Story, by Jay Anson (1977). However, the tale was a suspicious admixture of phenomena: part traditional haunting, part poltergeist disturbance, part demonic possession, with elements curiously similar to those from the movie The Exorcist thrown in for good measure.

In fact, the story soon began to fall apart, and in time a civil trial yielded evidence that the reputed events were mostly fiction.

‘Poltergeist’ Antics?

Although claims in The Amityville Horror book and movie once seemed to have been laid to rest, in 2013 the case resurfaced again. This time the oldest child of the troubled family, Daniel Lutz, who was nine at the time of the brouhaha, has come forward to claim the essential story was true and that he and his stepfather George had been “possessed.”

A documentary, My Amityville Horror (2013), focuses on Daniel, who revises discredited material. For example, he says that on the day the family moved into the house, while carrying boxes into one room, “there was [sic] probably four- or five-hundred flies.” He says he killed them by swatting them with a newspaper, but that when his mother came the dead flies had disappeared. This leaves one wondering whether he had simply made up the incident. Again Daniel tells how a window smashed down on his hand, causing it to swell to several times its size before it quickly returned to normal. That is, of course, unlikely in the extreme.

In fact, such scenes raise the possibility that many of the alleged incidents—which some have described as “poltergeist” effects—could have been staged or falsely reported by Daniel. For instance, according to The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson (1977, p. 28), Daniel and the other children were suspected by their mother of having blackened a toilet bowl by throwing paint into it.

Daniel Lutz certainly had a motive to play poltergeist. Like other unhappy children who secretly act out their hostility, he was unhappy with his situation and wanted to effect change. Daniel hated his stepfather, calling him “the biggest f---ing a-----e you could ever meet,” and boasted that he was glad he was dead. An ex-Marine, George was, according to Daniel, a violent disciplinarian who beat him. And so he admits, “I started destroying this guy’s world every opportunity that I walked into” and would “just do anything to get him” so that “we could go back home.”

Throughout the documentary, Daniel Lutz retells many of the now-familiar Amityville incidents in elaborate fashion, often claiming things happened to him that were previously attributed to his parents. Distinguished psychologist (and CSI Fellow) Elizabeth Loftus explains on camera how people can fill in gaps in their memory with exaggerations and even outright additions, so as to make things seem more dramatic and interesting. At the end of the video, Daniel is asked by the director if he will take a lie detector test. He refuses. His younger brother and sister do not appear to endorse his claims: they declined to be interviewed for the documentary.

Revelations

Unfortunately for both the possession claim and the poltergeist-mimicking hypothesis, however, there is much better evidence as to what really happened at Amityville: the tale was mostly deliberate fiction. Some of the reported events were simply made up, while others were exaggerations of mundane occurrences.

William Weber—an attorney seeking a new trial for his client, who had murdered his parents and siblings in the Amityville house the previous year—admitted colluding with the Lutzes on a book deal. Weber told the Lutzes, for example, how one murder victim’s body had lain in the room for over eighteen hours, yielding a stench and maggots; the Lutzes subsequently developed this for their demonic tale, using what Weber calls their “creative imagination.” Again, Weber says he showed the couple numerous crime-scene photographs, some of which revealed “black gook” in the toilet bowls, which he attributed to police fingerprint powder. Weber says that he and the Lutzes “created this horror story over many bottles of wine that George Lutz was drinking.” (See Kaplan and Kaplan 1995, 174–86, and Nickell 1995, 122.)

Additional, clear evidence that major events in The Amityville Horror did not occur came from researchers Rick Moran and Peter Jordan (1978) who discovered, for example, that there had been no snowfall at the time the Lutzes allegedly discovered cloven hoof prints in the snow. Other claims were similarly disproved (Kaplan and Kaplan 1995).

Still More Revelations

On three occasions I talked with Barbara Cromarty who, with her husband James, purchased the house after it was given up by the Lutzes. She told me not only that her family had experienced no supernatural occurrences in the house, but that she had evidence the whole affair was a hoax. Subsequently, I recommended that a producer of the then-forthcoming TV series That’s Incredible, who had called for my advice about filming inside the house, should have Mrs. Cromarty point out various discrepancies for close-up viewing. For example, recalling the extensive damage to doors and windows detailed by the Lutzes, she noted that the old hardware—hinges, locks, doorknobs, etc.—was still in place. Upon close inspection one could see that there were no disturbances in the paint and varnish (Nickell 1995).

A transcript of the September 1979 trial of George and Kathy Lutz vs. Paul Hoffman—Hoffman being perhaps the first writer to publish an account of the Amityville happenings—reveals the Lutzes’ admission that virtually everything in The Amityville Horror was pure fiction (Stein 1993, 63). Indeed, Newsday columnist Ed Lowe observes: “It had to have been a setup since Day 1. The day after the Lutzes fled, supposedly in terror, they returned to hold a garage sale—just lots of junk. It was obvious they hadn’t moved in there [the $80,000 house] with anything worth anything.” Lowe added, confirming the findings of other investigators, “And during the entire 28-day ‘siege’ that drove them from the house, they never once called the police” (quoted in Peterson 1982). Lowe should know: His father was the Amityville police chief at the time of the alleged demonic events.

References

Anson, Jay. 1977. The Amityville Horror: A True Story. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Kaplan, Stephen, and Roxanne Salch Kaplan. 1995. The Amityville Horror Conspiracy. Lacyville, PA: Belfrey Books.

Moran, Rick, and Peter Jordan. 1978. The Amityville horror hoax. Fate May: 44–45.

My Amityville Horror. 2013. A Lost Witness Pictures Production, aired on Sundance NOW, March 17.

Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Peterson, Clarence. 1982. Demonologists hellbent on selling ‘Amityville II.’ Chicago Tribune (September 23).

Stein, Gordon, ed. 1993. Encyclopedia of Hoaxes, Detroit: Gale Research.

At first glance, you might think that Australian artist Alexia Sinclair has produced a photo for a glossy fashion magazine. The glamorous, fantasy-like image is of three people – but one of them is being inoculated.

It’s an artistic interpretation of Dr Edward Jenner in 1796, and is one of a series for Art of Saving a Life. The Gates Foundation, headed by Melinda and Bill Gates, commissioned more than thirty world-renowned photographers, painters, sculptors, writers, filmmakers, and musicians to impress urgency on the global community to reach all children with the life-saving vaccines they need.

The hope is that the works will inspire people to think–and act–on how important vaccines are to modern health systems.

Photo courtesy of © Alexia Sinclair 2014

Set in an 18th century English doctor’s surgery, this stunning portrait features Dr. Edward Jenner inoculating James Phipps, the first person to receive the smallpox vaccine. Dr. Jenner’s pioneering work in the late eighteenth century led to the eradication of smallpox in 1980. Alexia created and photographed the entire tableaux. The aristocratic woman in the center represents how smallpox did not discriminate, affecting the rich and poor alike. The many flowers throughout the piece symbolize the global impact of smallpox, and the skulls on every bottle the ephemeral nature of life and death.

Alexia Sinclair: I always wanted to be an artist and I didn’t know what type–so like most creatives, I went off to art school and I studied all of the kinds of art you can do. I just sort of naturally moved into photography and that kind of image making, because I like to create theatrical pieces and the camera became a tool for documenting the kind of theatrical creations I like to do.

Kylie Sturgess: They’re very theatrical! When I first saw them, I thought “Ooh, Peter Greenaway!” How would you describe your art?

Sinclair: I find it really hard to describe. It’s a massive process, and I think what I do is not really like a defined thing, as such. It’s changing all the time. I started out using a camera when I left art school, and then it became all about digital manipulation and I became really obsessed with Photoshop.

Then I moved back to where I started–which was set building and constructing things–before I moved into post‑production. They’re equally difficult. I guess every time I feel I nailed something, I start to throw something else into the mix. There was a lot of costume making and hand painting things. I’m an artist, that’s all I can say!

Sturgess: You go all in; it’s amazing. As you said, with the costuming, there’s creation of characters, a certain fantasy element–it’s really quite fascinating.

Sinclair: Yeah, it’s everything combined, and very hands on. Now we’re doing a lot of video as well, and that’s a whole other thing, again. Challenges, that’s where my desires lie!

Sturgess: How did the opportunity to contribute to saving a life come about? Were you always interested in, for example, vaccine preventable diseases?

Sinclair: I am really interested in them, but it was just fortuitous because I was head‑hunted for it. I’m not verbal about... I don’t sit online and go on to these websites where people have a rave about how they feel about it. I’m just somebody who does vaccinate, has vaccinated my daughter, and learned a lot about it.

I do personally feel passionately about it, but I don’t feel like I want to use all of my tiny amounts of time that I have to myself to sit and discuss vaccines. I like to put that energy into producing a piece of art that allows other people to discuss the issues of vaccinations. It came about because yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know how they discovered me, but I’m known in certain circles.

We just received an invitation, and we’re living outside of Sydney at the moment, inland, on quite a large area of bush land. This man turned up with a letter with an invitation from the organiSation. It was really interesting, actually.

Sturgess: I think if I saw something with Bill and Melinda Gates on it, I’d think, “Oh, another Microsoft ad.”, but no, it was a proper invitation?

Sinclair: “Wow, I got a letter from Bill! You know, my mate Bill!” It was really a bit of a moment, it was really lovely.

Sturgess: Are there any particular challenges when it comes to communicating a scientific message via art? What was it like? Brainstorming, thinking about, “How do I do this right?” What was it like?

Sinclair: Well, I put a lot of thought and research into anything I do, long before. If I’m going to do costuming that’s inspired by another period, then I need to study that period, fashions and trends, and everything of that period.

It’s the same when they say, “We’d like you to do a campaign on smallpox.” You jump online and you Google smallpox–and you don’t want to have just had your breakfast; it’s repulsive!

Sturgess: True, yes.

Sinclair: It was a really big challenge, and they said they wanted me to talk about the story of Edward Jenner and his discovery of an inoculation. It was the greatest killer in the history of the world, and it’s been completely eradicated. It’s a really big, big issue to think about and cover.

Then I said, “Well, I’m not a documentary photographer.” This disease doesn’t exist anymore, so that’s wonderful–and I couldn’t document it, but, also, I couldn’t show smallpox as a repulsive disease. One, because it’s not what I do as an artist and it needs to sit within the style that I do, and two, because I think that we see repulsive images all day long and they don’t mean anything to us anymore.

Really, I had a lot of thinking about how I could produce something that had layers of meaning, and allow people to have discussions about what those symbols within the work meant, and let that story unfold that way.

You mentioned that there are flowers throughout the whole work, and that came about because I discovered that the Chinese referred to all the little pustules that you get with smallpox as heavenly flowers.

So, there’s a great motif: I can spread all these thousands of little flowers throughout the work, and it will look like the disease spreading throughout the work. That’s deep!

Sturgess: Yeah, and there’s the actual vaccination going on there with the characters; it’s just so vibrant.

Sinclair: Yeah, there’s the story of how Edward Jenner convinced his gardener to allow him to vaccinate the gardener’s son. It’s this lower class little boy sitting there, and then there’s Edward Jenner, the middle class, and then the central figure who’s covered in the flowers is an aristocratic figure. That shows that disease doesn’t discriminate, and disease is something that affects all levels of society.

There’s this story going on, and all the little bottles in the background, they all have a skull with flowers showing life and death, and lots of symbolism there.

Sturgess: It’s very intricate. Of course, yours is one of a series of works. You’re one of several–not only Australian artists but international–artists contributing to the project.

Sinclair: Yeah, we’re up there with Annie Leibovitz, so I was happy to get in the New York Times! That’s pretty exciting, lots of really big people. We never have had any idea who was in it. We knew that there were lots of big people, but we went into it very blindly. I know a lot of people were asking, “Who else is in and what are they working on?”

I later discovered that we were the guinea pigs, among the very first, and they used our video. I think it’s being released as a thing to follow, so I feel like we got the really biggest, tremendous disease of all to cover. We threw half a year into the project, and I’m really glad that is being released because we’ve been bubbling away for a really long time.

Find out more at Art of Saving a Life and the Australian artist Alexia Sinclair at her website www.alexiasinclair.com.

In Elyn’s junior year of high school, houses started talking to her.

You are special. You are especially bad. Look closely and ye shall find.
There are many things you must see. See. See.

The houses weren’t speaking—not in the usual, audible sense—but nonetheless, they were transmitting their messages to her, through her own mind.

“I instinctively knew they were not my ideas,” she explains in her autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness. “They belonged to the houses, and the houses had put them in my head.”

Elyn has schizophrenia. She’s not “a schizophrenic.” This term, she holds, can be dismissive and pigeon-holing. Rather, she is a person with schizophrenia, and she has lived with the accompanying delusions, hallucinations, and chaotic thinking virtually all her life. But Elyn didn’t grow up to be the stereotypical person with schizophrenia; thanks to modern medicine, she grew up to be Elyn Sacks, PhD, a professor of law at USC, and a MacArthur Fellow. And that line about not being “a schizophrenic”? She delivered it at TEDGlobal2012. Her talk has been viewed over two million times.

Professor Saks is just one of the success stories in the medical treatment of schizophrenia. There are about three million others who live with schizophrenia in the United States alone, and twenty-four million worldwide. So this fall’s announcement that schizophrenia is likely not one, but as many as eight disorders, could impact treatment for almost as many Americans as there are people in Los Angeles.

The research, released by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, was published in The American Journal of Psychiatry and immediately heralded as one of the greatest breakthroughs in schizophrenia history. But USC’s Dr. Carlos N. Pato, who co-authored the study, warns that such thinking is an overreaction, and even dangerous. “It’s very important not to assume that these [findings] present the answer,” he told me. “The reality is that they’re each different windows into what’s happening and help guide us into developing new treatments.” Pato’s caution was echoed by other experts who declined to comment in this article because of some controversy surrounding the finding.

Still, most are hopeful. Dr. Stephen Marder of UCLA has spent virtually his entire career studying schizophrenia, its causes, and how to treat it. He calls the research “very promising.” Marder doesn’t just work in the lab. He also counsels people who have schizophrenia, or who have a loved one who deals with the disease. He says people don’t usually come out about having schizophrenia because of fear of how others will judge them. “There is a huge stigma,” he said. “It has the unfortunate effect that many people with the illness really don’t talk about it openly.” Saks, he notes, “is one extraordinary exception.” Together with Saks and others, Dr. Marder has been working on research of twenty people with schizophrenia who buck expectations of people with mental illness; they hold down jobs, have college degrees, and even, in one case, run a nonprofit. Saks recently wrote an Opinion piece for the New York Times, in which she explained that work, in fact, helps many people control their schizophrenia symptoms. “Work has been an important part of who I am,” one person in the group relayed to Saks. “When you become useful to an organization and feel respected in that organization, there’s a certain value in belonging there.”

But these people are, by and large, the exception. The U.S. homeless population is disproportionately schizophrenic, and people who don’t treat their schizophrenia with medication are thirty-seven times more likely to die from suicide. It’s statistics like these that drive so much urgent research into schizophrenia’s causes and potential treatments.

The study, which examined more than 4,000 people with schizophrenia (and compared them to people without it), identified gene clusters that were common among individuals with schizophrenia symptoms. Sometimes, if a person had a cluster, it was nearly certain that they would have the associated symptoms (certain clusters carried a likelihood of 70 to 100 percent). In all, they found forty-two clusters that spelled a high chance of schizophrenic symptoms, and at least eight distinct disorders under the umbrella we normally call “schizophrenia.” Pato says it is likely even more than eight, with many subtypes for each syndrome.

The greatest part of this news, for researchers and patients alike, is its promise for future treatments. By identifying the clusters at play, future treatments can be much more targeted and specific. Inherited genes probably play the biggest role, Marder says, but he and Pato both agree that infections could also be part of the puzzle. For example, Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite best known for living in cat feces, has been pointed to as one potential culprit. But many uncertainties remain.

“What we’ve done here, after a decade of frustration in the field of psychiatric genetics, is identify the way genes interact with each other, how the [genetic] ‘orchestra’ is either harmonious and leads to health, or disorganized in ways that lead to distinct classes of schizophrenia,” senior researcher Dr. C. Robert Cloninger said.

Still, the work continues.

“I believe this is scientifically exciting,” said Pato. “But for me, it is a new question. Is what we found in this data going to prove to be true?”

That’s the big question. And until new treatment emerges, three million Americans will be waiting on the answer.

“You Are Smart,” a daily feature for commercial radio, made its national debut recently with host, Jim Underdown, executive director of CFI–LA and founder of the Independent Investigations Group (IIG).

“I offer a familiar topic (such as UFO’s, homeopathy, or other subjects), state the credulous position, and then summarize the skeptical alternative. Then, I suggest that the listener decide the truth for him or herself, ending with the words, ‘…because you are smart,’” Jim explained.

The goal of “You Are Smart” is to tell the listener how evidence-based thinking might help them find the best information to answer any question, which folds nicely around CFI’s mission to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values.

The two-minute feature is like an elevator pitch: a brief snapshot of evidence-based thinking that anyone could express in the few minutes it takes to ride an elevator to the desired floor.

2-2-2

“You Are Smart” debuted in Hawaii two weeks ago. A few days later a radio station in the Eugene, Oregon market picked it up as well.

Jim continued, “I find it somewhat amusing that it plays multiple times in shows hosted by Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and others in Hawaii. I think it stirs up the audience a bit, which is great!”

“I record the raw audio with a handheld flash recorder wherever I happen to be and email the audio file to our sound engineer who adds music and processes the whole file for each episode. Then, the episodes are distributed to each affiliate,” said Jim.

The feature’s national sponsor is The Critical Thinking Company, which produces educational material for children of all ages. Visit them at www.criticalthinking.com/smart to receive $53 in free products plus receive an additional 20% off your purchases if you enter the coupon code “smart.” Please order and share these items with your kids or with the parents of kids you know.

The feature is actively seeking affiliates. Jim explains, “We offer ‘You Are Smart’ to commercial radio stations at no charge. Once the commercial radio station becomes our affiliate, then it may sell a local sponsorship to a local business. In Hawaii, our local sponsor is the University of Hawaii Extension which pays the radio station directly.”

So, if you know someone at your local radio station who would like to attract a local advertiser with a quality feature, tell them about “You Are Smart,” and have them contact our radio syndication professional, Bill Oxley, at billoxley@gmail.com.

The drive from my apartment to the haunted house was about twenty minutes, but I found myself wishing it would take longer. I wanted more time to get a handle on what I was going to say, how I was going to tell the family that their house was not haunted by a demon or angry ghost.

In theory, it should have been a straightforward conversation, not unlike telling a nervous child, “There’s nothing under the bed, now go to sleep.” It should have been a comforting and satisfying task for a prominent, experienced skeptical investigator. In practice, however, there were real people with real fears and real feelings, people who had been misled and lied to. And I’d probably have to lie to them again—or at least not tell them the whole truth.

• • •

About two weeks earlier I had gotten a call from a panicked woman named Monica who believed her house was haunted. She, her husband Tom, and their two-year-old daughter had fled their home just after Halloween and had not been back since. They were staying with her mother and were desperate for help with what was lurking in their bedrooms and hallways. Though busy with many other projects, I agreed to look into it because the family was clearly genuinely frightened, and because I was intrigued; though I had done scientific and skeptical paranormal investigations for years, this was one of the most complex and in-depth ghost investigations I’d attempted.

It was also the first time I’d interacted closely with a family whose home was believed to be haunted. I investigated their claims over the course of about ten days. I sat with them at night, waiting for angry spirits to appear. I listened to their hopes and fears. I was not merely their volunteer scientific ghost hunter; I became their counselor and confidant. I didn’t realize it at the time, but by agreeing to take on this case I had accepted a host of implicit, hidden ethical responsibilities.

The case involved many classic ghostly phenomena, including white orbs and demonic faces in photos, mysterious cold spots, and ghostly voices and footsteps. Tom even claimed that he’d been physically attacked by the ghost. Tom, raised Roman Catholic, had called a priest to perform an exorcism on the house on October 30. Tom later said he felt that the procedure was done just to humor him, and the disturbances got worse. Later that night they fled the house and were afraid to return except in daylight.

Their daughter had been displaced, moved out of her home, and was clearly aware that her parents were terrified. As my visits continued, and they could tell that I was taking them—and their experiences—seriously, the family gradually grew more comfortable in their home. My presence reassured them. There had been no new phenomena, and with each minor mystery I explained they grew more confident that not everything they had taken as a sign of haunting necessarily was one. (My investigation is far too complex to go into here, but it can be found as the fifth chapter in my book Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries.)

I was knowledgeable, credible, and treating them respectfully. Tom and Monica both felt comfortable enough downstairs (on the sofa and floor) while I was there, but neither would sleep upstairs. With each visit I did more investigation, solved more mysteries, and then returned as time allowed (I investigated the case on my personal time, mostly nights and weekends). I planned to meet with Tom and Monica one final time to discuss my conclusions.

• • •

So here I was, returning to the decreasingly haunted house for the fourth or fifth time, to give Tom and Monica my final word on what I found. I realized that what I said to them would carry great weight; they trusted me. If I had told them their house really was haunted, they might have moved into a hotel or put the house up for sale.

What do I tell them? I asked myself.

As I said, the answer should have been simple. The completely honest answer was that I was certain that there was no ghost in the house, and there never had been. I had explained all of the ghostly phenomena through careful, skeptical investigation, and shared the results of each experiment with them at each step, so they could see for themselves what the answer was.

But I had also spent enough time around the family to know that they both believed that they had probably experienced something weird and supernatural in their home. I couldn’t tell them that there had never been any spirit or ghost in their house, because though it was true, they might not believe me. Though they accepted my scientific, rational explanations, I could tell that they harbored small lingering doubts and believed that at least some of their strange, scary experiences at least could have been real.

I was well aware of just how powerful personal experience and belief can be. All the arguments and evidence in the world won’t convince people who glimpsed what they believe is a UFO or ghost that they might be wrong. I had to leave the door open to the possibility that they might still deep down be convinced that a ghost visited them. My ability to help them hinged upon whether they believed I understood what was going on, and if I stated flat-out that ghosts do not exist, I would lose my credibility with them. So I couldn’t tell them the truth.

Still, Tom and Monica had already been lied to enough. The couple had watched TV shows like Ghost Hunters, which misled them into misinterpreting normal phenomena as supernatural. Monica had gone to the library and bookstore to find books on ghosts and hauntings—none of which were skeptical and only fanned their fears. They even consulted a local psychic—who, without doing a shred of actual investigation or even setting foot in the home—lied to the family, telling them “Your house is full of ghosts.”

I wrestled with the ethics of what to tell them. If I told them that I chased away an evil spirit, was it a cop-out? Was it a lie? Would I lose my credibility (or self-respect) as a scientific paranormal investigator? Was it any different than a doctor prescribing a placebo treatment, knowing that it had no active ingredient but would make the patient feel better?

I realized that my larger purpose as a skeptical investigator (in this case at least) was less about investigating ghosts than about helping people. I abandoned my planned skeptical speech about ghosts; this family didn’t care about EMF detectors or types of hauntings or the scientific explanation behind why people hear “ghostly” voices in random sounds or why Ghost Hunters is bullshit. They wanted to sleep in their own beds and not be terrified in their own home at night. They wanted their daughter to sleep through the night without crying. They needed comfort, not skeptical analysis or science-speak.

• • •

When I arrived at the house I sat down with Tom and Monica while their daughter played nearby. I pulled out a notebook, scanned my notes briefly and officiously, and chose my words very carefully: “We went through the ghostly phenomenon one by one, and we came up with normal explanations for all of them. . . . Now, I guess it’s possible that there was something here before I started investigating. I wasn’t here, so I don’t know. But I can tell you that I looked at everything you gave me and I haven’t found any evidence of a ghost or demon or spirit or anything else. Basically, if there was something here before, it’s definitely not here now. You don’t need to worry.”

I had begun the investigation a scientist and ended up a witch doctor. It wasn’t a role I was completely comfortable with, but when I saw their relieved reactions I knew I’d spoken the right incantation. I’d chosen the right magic words, phrases, and belief loopholes to allay their fears. I hadn’t really lied, but I hadn’t really told the truth; I did the best I could.

When audiences see ghost investigation on television, it’s easy to forget the real people affected by genuine fear and panic. Those who experience ghosts are not stupid, gullible fools to be mocked or ridiculed. They are ordinary people just like our friends, neighbors, and family who don’t have the skeptical knowledge to recognize when they are being misinformed by unethical ghost “experts.” This ghost investigation was not a funny lark or a midnight candlelight romp through a graveyard or abandoned warehouse to taunt unseen spirits. This was not a TV show or a game; these were real people who were losing sleep, chain-smoking, and showing signs of psychological disturbance.

All turned out well; I followed up with them a week later, and because of my investigation the family was home for Thanksgiving. I wrote up my investigation in Skeptical Inquirer (and as a chapter in one of my books) and moved on. I used the experience and insights I’d gained from that case in later investigations, but otherwise thought little more about it.

Then, the following year I got an email from a fellow ghost investigator who’d read my case study on this haunting, how I solved the case and handled the family. He wrote:

I would like to thank you for your “case book” report on the haunted house in New York State. It was exactly what I was looking for. I am the Archdeacon of the northern territory of the Province of Quebec and am currently being asked to investigate a similar situation north of Montreal. Although I am an Anglican Priest . . . I tend to approach investigations of haunting with a great deal of scepticism. Although as a Priest I must be open minded about the eschatological beliefs of my faith my main concern is really a pastoral one for those who are living in fear.

He asked for advice about his investigation techniques, and concluded with comments that echoed my own experience:

I hate having to resort to “priest craft” and feel like a witch doctor playing a game of psychological “gotcha” when I am forced to (luckily only a few times in my career). I would much prefer to take the approach you have taken and show step by step that there is no basis for the “haunting” and then bless the house for the comfort of those who live there. However, usually the people want to “fight” supernatural forces with more supernatural forces. If that is their firmly held worldview it is difficult for me during my short involvement with the people to do other than just play along for their own benefit.

In the end I feel like a cheat because they really do not accept the rational expiations and I have to play witch doctor. People often seem to prefer to believe they are being stalked by a malevolent spirit whilst they sleep than believing that it is just a particular type of dream state. Perhaps people find the rational descriptions of things takes the mystery out of life. I find the opposite—science can produce in me feelings of awe similar to poetry and music. Yet I do not seem to be in the majority here. The only thing that worked with this family was to play the part of the exorcist.

I suggested to him that perhaps what we experienced was a case of “the devil you know”—rational, scientific explanations may seem like egghead mumbo-jumbo to a layperson, while if they believe they are being tormented by evil forces, it’s at least an archetype they understand. The good-versus-evil idea is easier to grasp than the nuances of anomalous psychological experiences.

I was struck that a nonreligious professional skeptical paranormal investigator struggled with the same ethical ghost-investigation issues as an Anglican Archdeacon. We both used science and skepticism to solve mysteries and help those who’d been misled—sometimes by their own senses or logical lapses, other times by unethical, misinformation-spewing ghost hunters and psychics.

We had both been forced, if not to lie then to at least pretend, to be something we were not. I have a deep and profound respect for the power of truth and science, but at times the will to believe reduces us to witch doctors and exorcists.

Felipe Nogueira

This is the first in a series of regular columns by Brazilian journalist Felipe Nogueira. He is a graduate student in medical sciences in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a prolific blogger. –Ed.

Jerry Coyne is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and an important popularizer of evolution and science in general. His latest book is Why Evolution Is True, in which he shows the evidence for the theory of evolution and debunks many creationist arguments with clarity.

Can you explain why evolution is not just a theory?

Jerry Coyne

It’s a theory and a fact. Theory in science has a different meaning from what most people think of. In the debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, someone in the audience said evolution is just a theory, implying it’s just a guess or speculation. In science, a theory is a proposition or an explanation that purports to draw together a number of facts to explain a phenomenon. Evolution is called a theory because Darwin proposed this explanatory mechanism for all these diverse facts. So, evolution—like the atomic theory or the germ theory of disease—is both a theory and a fact at the same time, but a theory in the scientific sense, which is a well-established explanation for a diverse group of phenomena.

In your book you wrote that the theory of evolution is not just the statement that evolution has happened; it includes why and how evolution happens.

It’s the statement of what has happened and why it has happened. [The paleontologist] Stephen Jay Gould made that pretty clear, although he thought a theory was the explanation why and the fact was the thing itself. It’s a matter of taste how you call a theory, but it’s not a matter of taste that the theory of evolution is something that has been confirmed as true over and over again, and that is what is important to emphasize when you come up against this misconception.

But aren’t the words “theory of evolution” equivalent to “modern evolutionary synthesis”?

The theory of evolution that I talked about in my book is the one most people hold, pretty much the one Darwin proposed, which involves elements of evolution, gradual transformation of population (genetically, although Darwin didn’t know genetics), and splitting of lineages. So, you get one species forming more, and you have a branch on the tree of life. That gives the result that any pair of species has a common ancestor and organisms look like they are designed, which is the result of natural selection. That is a Darwinian theory of evolution. Neo-Darwinian theory is based on genes and there are other processes like genetic drift and horizontal gene transfer. They are important, and they have been confirmed as true, but for the average person who disbelieves evolution, what they are disbelieving is those five propositions I just outlined.

What do you think is the most common misconception about evolution?

One that is very common in children involves instantaneous transformation of population, like thinking that every individual turns into something else rather than a gradual genetic change in the composition of the population. Another one is that there is not much evidence for it, that we don’t have the evidence for one type of animal turning into another over time. But the fact is that there’s lots of evidence, people just don’t know about it.

What about those creationists/intelligent design proponents’ ideas that the wing or the eye is too complex to appear by gradual changes over time?

Darwin was the first one to deal with the eye in The Origin of Species, showing we have all degrees of eye development in living species and there is no problem envisioning how you go from one to another. Secondly, we have this paper by Nilsson and Pelger (1994) in Proceedings of the Royal Society. They made a simple model of the evolution of a complex camera eye from a light sensitivity eye spot, like you have in plenary worms. They made very conservative assumptions about what mutation rates might be, about what the selection pressures are, and in a few thousand generations they saw this eye spot evolve into a complex eye. So, we have two kinds of evidence that dispel the idea that the eye is too complex to evolve.

People think the only evidence we have for evolution is the fossil record, but even without the fossil record, evolution is true. So, what are the other ways to corroborate evolution?

I think [Richard] Dawkins made that point. We have enough evidence from other areas that we could document evolution without the fossil record. The evidence we have showing the organisms are related; the embryological data, that only makes sense in the light of evolution; the biogeographic data, which I described in my book, is very powerful evidence for evolution; vestigial organs; the existence of vestigial genes: the human genome has genes for making egg yolks and yet we don’t do it, those genes were inactivated. How do you explain that, unless we evolve from organisms that originally did make egg yolks, which we did? Ten years after Darwin, almost every biologist and rational layperson accepted evolution, and yet there was no fossil record that actually showed evolution. But for many people the fossil record is the most convincing thing. When you can really show them a feathered dinosaur, that kind of evidence is very powerful.

Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene focused on the gene-centered view of evolution. But evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr criticized this view. What is the current accepted view of the target of selection? 

When you use the words “target of selection,” you are sort of anthropomorphizing the process, because selection is not some force that is out there. What we mean is what the unit of differential reproduction that causes evolution. I think Dawkins is generally right. In almost every single case that we know of, we can reconstruct what happened and see the basis of evolutionary adaptation, and it’s basically the gene itself. In many cases that we manage to localize where selection started, it’s on the gene level. But there are conceivably other targets of selection. Group selection has been used to explain things from the evolution of altruism to sex. First of all, groups don’t proliferate and go extinct as fast as the individual. Second, I can’t think of an adaptation that is good for the group but bad for the individuals, which you would expect to see if group selection occurred, overriding individual selection. You can think of the gene as the replicator, and the individual whose reproduction is affected by interacting with the environment as the vehicle for the gene.

Another misconception is that evolution is just a random process.

That’s a good one: [the question] “How all this can happen by chance?” is easily dispelled if you understand what natural selection is, but it’s very common. And in America evolution is connected with all kinds of religious things, [as if] if you believe in evolution, you have to give up your morality. That’s probably the main reason why religious people oppose evolution in America, and maybe Brazil as well, because it is a religious country. They say “what basis do you have to be moral, if you are just an evolved animal, like a chimpanzee?” And that’s a misconception as well that comes from a misunderstanding of where morality really comes from.

I think science can tell us a lot about our morals. What do you think about it?

It can say a lot more about morals than people think it can. One of the people actually engaged in this is Frans de Waal. He had written a book about the evolutionary origins of morality. Our instinctive moral feelings are designed to care for our children. Frans de Waal had shown that social primates and other animals have behaviors that are remarkably similar. Also, Paul Bloom showed that children, before they can speak, show a sort of innate moral stimuli, empathy, caring for those you’re familiar with and a sense of fairness. I think that sense of fairness is in our genes. This kind of scientific anthropological and developmental exploration tells us something about our morality. They can’t tell us what is right, I still believe that, in opposition to Sam Harris. I don’t think science can tell us how to behave. I think we should be helping people in Africa, which we’re not really related to at all.

How does religion make the understanding of evolution more difficult?

In Brazil, it’s a lot less of a problem than in the United States. Your country is Catholic and the official position of the Catholic Church is that evolution is okay. But they have some positions which are explicitly anti-evolutionary. One of them is that Adam and Eve were real people and we are all descended from Adam and Eve. We know now about the human population that the ancestor of modern humans could not have been smaller than 2,000. Catholics also think—and the pope said this—that humans are different from other creatures because God gave us a soul. Where is this soul? When did it come into human lineage? What’s the evidence that it exists, if there is any? If you accept science but reject it in those areas where it conflicts with your faith, I don’t think you are behaving fully scientifically.

Reference

Nilson, D.E., and S.A. Pelger. 1994. A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 256 (1345) (April 22): 53–58.

There are countless ghost hunters around the world, most of them doing what science writer Sharon Hill would dub “sciencey things.” Here we present a case study in bringing more scientific methodology to the pursuit. –Ed.

The following contains excerpts from a study completed in 2013 for Ghost Hunters Wollongong (GHW). We are an Australia-based group of researchers and investigators interested in claims of the paranormal. This example was edited on request and does not reflect the full report and associated data provided to Benjamin Radford, the University of Wollongong, Harper’s Mansion staff, and our members. The full version is available for purchase via email request at ghosthunterswollongong@live.com.au.

Background

As early as 2010 we began exploring the ever-growing trend of popular paranormal television shows. With my background as a science educator, I soon found problems in the “science” claimed by these investigators. It seemed that there was very little time in which the scientific method was actually employed to corroborate their evidence. After many investigations we decided there had to be a better way of confirming the actual environmental conditions and any unexplained activity that were sporadically reported, such as temperature changes, unexplained light and dark anomalies, electronically captured noises, etc.

Harpers Mansion

The building of Harper’s Mansion began in 1834 by James Harper, a wealthy landowner in the town of Berrima, New South Wales. It has had many occupants since then and many claims of paranormal activities. These include an apparition of the ubiquitous “lady in white,” and psychics claim to have felt the presence of spirits at the location.

From our perspective, we had investigated the mansion twice previously and noted that we had experienced more so-called EVPs (electronic voice phenomena, or ghostly voices) here than at any other location. This seemed to make it a good candidate for investigation, as we were familiar with the environment.

Outside view of Harper’s Mansion in Berrima, New South Wales, Australia.

In conducting this experiment we sought out a clearly testable hypothesis that could stand up to the requirements of scientific rigor. Though it was difficult with so many claims made by paranormal investigators, we wanted to narrow the field to easily recordable, scientifically relevant, and most commonly reported claims.

Therefore, our chief aim in conducting this experiment was: “We will show an increase in the number of recorded changes within the physical environment tested.”

Baseline Measurements

While most groups today conduct a baseline in situ on the day, or perhaps with some investigators walking around the location on a prior visit, this is grossly inadequate as an accurate record of the “usual” conditions that may exist on the night of an investigation. For some three months, each week prior to our start date, GHW set up our baseline in and outside the house to record the conditions during the time the experiment was to occur, and also over a forty-eight-hour period around the time of our investigation.

Equipment used included three data loggers to measure temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure and two motion-activated cameras. The cameras and loggers were placed in the same position as they would be for the actual experiment.

Experimental Controls

Cameras and loggers were placed both inside (upstairs and downstairs) and also outside the building in storage shed (data logger) some twenty meters from the main house. Each independently measured the changes occurring during a single forty-eight-hour period each week, for four weeks, totaling 192 hours of measurement.

Results

Daily changes in temperature, atmospheric pressure, and humidity over any one forty-eight-hour period were recorded and graphed and showed no significant changes outside the normal daily fluctuations that occurred naturally and were compared to recorded changes in conditions by the Bureau of Meteorology. No visual changes were captured by our cameras.

The Experiment

The experiment itself consisted of running thirty pre-recorded questions that were looped to run twice over a twenty-seven minute period each night as our equipment recorded any changes within the physical environment.

Questions asked of any ghostly occupants were all different and presented a range of information we wanted to know. These would involve directly provoking personal information regarding the past occupants of the house (as this is claimed to be a way to illicit a response), general information about the present state of the house and town, and future predictions. Questions were divided into three sections and for each a set of ten questions were asked.

Equipment

• Two mini DV cameras (infrared). One for filming the area leading from the bedroom to the hallway and our equipment, the other covering the investigators during the experiment.

Investigators’ view of bedroom at Harper’s including central recorder, decibel meter, and speakers.

• Three data loggers measuring for atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity as previously set up for the baseline.

• Two motion-activated cameras (infrared) as previously set for the baseline.

• Six digital voice recorders (Olympus VN-8100PC) and 1 central digital recorder (Olympus WS-811). This recorder was placed at the center of our experimental setup. Four were located north, south, east, and west of the central recorder. One was located downstairs, directly below the central recorder, and the last outside the building near the western side of the building closest to the road.

• One lux meter that recorded readings every second for the twenty-seven minute duration.

• One motion activated sensor that activated an alarm when movement was present (aka the “shadow detector” used by many paranormal groups).

• Two geophones located in both the hallway and in the bedroom.

• One decibel meter on a table located directly above the central recorder.

• One computer to provide a visual representation of the lux readings, while another computer delivered our audio of the questions to be relayed, in real time, from the bedroom (upstairs) to a speaker downstairs, and outside to another speaker.

Experimental Controls

• Our audio to ask questions via the pre-recorded computer file, simultaneously eliminated problems associated with timing when correlating data after the experiment. This also prevented any contamination/variance by the investigators asking the questions in person each time.

• Investigators were removed from the building for the second looping of the questions to further eliminate any human contamination.

• One camera running simultaneously to the other (from a separate room; see above) recorded our investigators to eliminate ourselves as the source of any visual or audio changes during the experiment.

• Six digital recorders acted as controls to decipher sounds picked up in the location that were not coming from the one designated “EVP” recorder located in the area where “ghosts” were asked to speak on each occasion. Once sounds were not pinpointed as coming from the central recorder, they were eliminated from the census of data as originating from another possible source.

• A decibel meter was placed above the central recorder to act independently as confirmation to any sounds picked out on our central recorder or for independent sounds to be recorded not from the central recorder (another claim made by paranormal investigators often that sounds are found on one device but not on another).

• A lux meter and various other visual controls as mentioned in the equipment section would act to verify any changes in light recorded or captured visually on cameras.

• The investigators were seated and stationary during the first part of the questions discounting sounds made by moving, as is often seen on TV shows purporting to show actual ghost voices.

• Investigators recorded observations on sheets of anything audible or seen during the questions to later compare to the recorded data.

• All doors were locked prior to, and following, investigators entering and leaving the building. Shades were drawn and rooms checked for stray light sources.

• Equipment was placed in the same spot for each session. Baseline equipment was placed in the same spot as the three months prior to starting the experiment.

• Sessions were run concurrently on the same nights of the week (Monday and Tuesday) at the same starting time (7:00 pm) Starting times are within a one-minute margin of error.

• All equipment was checked prior to each session for batteries, and files erased for each session. New tapes were used for each session in cameras requiring tapes. • Only investigators were present during controlled conditions.

• A computer-generated silence of ten seconds was inserted between each question (and for 30 seconds at the end of each section of questions) to further eliminate contamination of the audio.

Results

Over four months from May 2013 to August 2013, we conducted a total of twenty-seven sessions and approximately twelve hours of recording. Our audio recorded only four anomalies, which were found to be “drop-outs” on the audio, most likely due to the computer’s screen saver kicking on, and no increase in responses was recorded. No audible responses were detected and recorded while the investigators were present.

Visual evidence of momentary light fluctuations was restricted to one evening, June 25, occurring concurrently with recorded vibrations picked up by our geophones. At this time the town was experiencing the heaviest rainfall (and subsequent wind squalls) of the month. Investigators noted we could “feel” the natural movement within the building and hear door frames rattling.

Light levels stayed constant except for when investigators left at 7:12 PM.

There were no variations of the light levels from the baseline recorded during our sessions except when the investigators left the building walking past the meter. An example is shown above in which investigators leaving can be seen at 7:12 pm.

The graph below is an example for the decibel meter. It illustrates three sets of ten questions, represented by a peak and trough, during the experiment. Each trough represents the baseline for the room on the evening recorded and is ten seconds long. No unexplained disturbances were indicated over the period of the experiment.

No unexplained disturbances in decibel readings were indicated throughout the experiment.

Atmospheric pressure, temperature, and humidity also remained constant for the test periods as shown before in the baseline. No “bunching” of data occurred that would indicate sudden and/or sustained drops or rises in these measurements over a short period of time, as is often claimed by paranormal groups.

Including these eight changes to the physical environment existing within the controlled period of the experiment, changes amounted to 0.5 percent of the total data collected during each of the 1,620 questions asked where a possible response could be given under controlled conditions. These changes could easily be interpreted as a margin of statistical error on our part when conducting a wide-ranging experiment over such a length of time.

For the true believers, here is just a tiny portion of our debunks, which were easily explained away through our recording coverage as occurring in other locations, rather than in the room itself.

Conclusion

While no evidence was found to support any kind of paranormal activity at Harper’s Mansion, we do not intend our work to conclude that this would rule out any evidence at other locations. Rather, our work was designed as a field study to be applied at different locations as a more accurate way of scientifically measuring the existence of any such phenomena if they exist. We feel that as long as investigators will continue to believe in the paranormal and investigate—and they will—then why not try to solve the mystery once and for all.

Imagine you have just moved to a new home and you are settled in bed. Perhaps peering into the dark nooks of the house can any of us imagine that we would hear or see unfamiliar sights and sounds and find them mysterious? On ghost hunting vigils we are acutely aware of the signals our senses are receiving, in fact that is the point, straining to hear and see (usually in the dark), in an unfamiliar location. It is no wonder we find the unusual and unexplainable.

I think I can speak for the group when I say we all remain open to any ideas, but if it is real answers you desire, then better methods need to be applied than the ones we see offered to the public in today’s popular beliefs on ghost hunting and the paranormal. Some simple science can go a long way in solving the quite real fears people often have in these cases. Good luck in your future investigations.

Acknowledgments

Many, many thanks to Meagan Archibald (lead investigator GHW), John Keith Walker-Smith (treasurer and committee member of the Harper’s Mansion Management Committee, National Trust of Australia NSW), Danny Grammel (investigator), Frank Oliveri (investigator), Ben Radford (author, columnist, investigator and research fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine), Assoc. Prof. Rodney Vickers (head of physics, associate dean—education & faculty of engineering and information sciences, University of Wollongong), and David Borger (physics teacher).

As announced in a previous column, I will be writing James Randi’s biography. We will probably be starting a fundraising campaign this spring. If you want to support the project or just receive news and updates you can send me an email here: massimopolidoro1@gmail.com and I will keep you informed. Meanwhile, here is the second part of a sample chapter from the book that I hope you will enjoy.

So, how did The Amazing Randi escape not only from the cell that kept him a prisoner but also from the building of the police station in Valleyfield Quebec, as described in Part 1 of this article? Here is the ingenious solution devised by Randi.

Just two days after the extraordinary escape, Randi wrote to his friend P. Howard Lyons, editor of the Canadian conjuring magazine Ibidem, with all the details still fresh in his memory.

In it, Randi even drew a map of the Valleyfield police station that helps to clarify how things were actually accomplished:

The letter “C” indicates the main entrance door, where Randi first entered along with Danny Dean (acting as his assistant) and where the police and the reporters greeted them. The main part of the building is occupied by offices, a recreation room, and a washroom. On the far left a solid, metal door, with a small, barred window on top, led to the jail block that housed only five cells. The cells were empty, as usual—Valleyfield was small enough that its main occupants were petty criminals in for a night’s stay or locals who might need to sober up for a few hours before being sent home.

“So, now, you gotta picture this,” explains Randi. “You had a big metal door, with a very solid lock on it, that you had to enter in order to get to the block. It used a different key than the one used to open the cell doors inside, I guess, but it didn’t matter. What was important was that it opened inward, and you shall soon see why that was very nice for me.”¹

Randi and the chief entered the block, followed by the party of onlookers.

“I got as many people there as I could possibly have. I wanted a lot of people that they had to work around.”²

Randi wanted to get locked in the cell furthest away from the entrance door to the corridor. This way he could not be seen when they opened the main door to check if he was okay—and in that cell there was also a small barred window with a view to the outside. Precisely—and not incidentally—on the same side where the car was parked.

“Of course, I manipulated things in order to get that specific cell. ‘I need some light and ventilation,’ I said, so one with a barred window was the best. Now, as with a magic show, the magician runs the show. They don’t know what is going to happen. They’ve never locked a magician up in jail before. They have some ideas about how they’re going to do it, but I’m way ahead of them.”³

Randi took off his clothes, but he was not left in his underwear shorts, as he would later remember it, probably because that’s what happened in many other jail escapes he performed. In a surviving clipping from Le Progrès of October 14, two pictures show Randi during the performance. In one he is sitting on a wooden chair, his wrists locked in handcuffs that are linked together below the chair with other handcuffs. His ankles are cuffed as well to the chair with leg irons. The article specifies that five cuffs were used: “Two for the feet and three for the hands.”⁴

In the photo Randi is wearing a white shirt, socks, and his pants are rolled up below the knees in order to show the leg irons. With his goatee, heavy eyebrows, and dark hair combed back, he looks fiercely at the cameraman. The tiny cell has only enough space for him sitting and for the bunk nailed to the wall. In the second picture, Randi is still sitting in the cell but now the barred iron door is closed, and Chief Marleau, with his thin moustache and his official cap, looks half-seriously at the reporters while he turns the key and locks the door. On the cell wall, above Randi, is a barred window of approximately two feet square.

Before getting into the cell, then, Randi had removed his shoes, tie, belt, jacket, coat, and hat and put them in the cell at the far end of the corridor.

The cell doors, however, had a very interesting and difficult additional locking mechanism that made it impossible to open them even with the key.

“All of those cells locked at the same time, with a bar on top of the cells that went all the way down the corridor and had little pegs at each cell, and that hooked into the top of the doors. It was a mechanism that could be operated only from outside the cell block. So, even if you had the individual key, you couldn’t open it because this little peg was in there.”⁵

Randi was handcuffed to the chair, the chief locked the door, and the party of people exited the block through the steel main door. At this moment the outside mechanism locked all of the cell doors with the additional metal bar, and it took about twenty seconds to wind the pegs into place. The Chief then asked if they could close it up and the big solid door was shut. Randi was left inside all alone, and the wait began.

In a letter to his friend P. Howard Lyons, Randi drew a map explaining how he accomplished his escape.

“They are right outside that door, there’s no way I’m going to get by them. They’re all there, the press is lined up, paper and pens in hand, cameras ready. The chief of police is having a wonderful time: ‘What do you think, Chief? Is he gonna be able to do it?’ And the Chief replies: ‘No one’s ever broken out of this jail and no one will,’ they are pouring coffee and so on.”⁶ Meanwhile, Randi was already halfway through his escape.

“It started the exact second that they turned their backs on me. As soon as they started to leave, I worked my way out of the cuffs immediately, no problem there. So they were walking down the corridor and there was a whole gaggle of them, eleven or twelve people. It took them a while to get down the hall and go through the door and finally shout: ‘Should we lock the door now?’ And I said: ‘What?’ And they repeated: ‘Should we lock it now?’ And I pretended I’m hard of hearing because I needed more time.”⁷

It took them a couple of minutes to get out, enough for Randi to slip off the handcuffs, get free from the leg irons, and open the door with the duplicate key that he had hidden under the mattress of the bed.

“When I entered the police station I had the duplicate key I made from my impression two years earlier hidden in my shoe. When I undressed in the cell, and after I was searched, I got hold of the key again as I carefully folded and stacked up my clothes.”⁸

“Now when they turned the bar at the far end, I had already pushed the door open a bit, which they couldn’t see because it was inset from the wall. They couldn’t see that it had been swung open so when the bar went to deadlock, the peg was not engaging the door.”⁹

When they finally went, Randi could already walk out the cell door, if he wanted, but there was still work to be done: “First I took all the handcuffs and put them in a chain. I attached one to the bar door and the one at the other end to the chair which I left tilted on an angle. This way, the chair was leaning to pull the door shut as soon as they operated the bar at the other end, which they had to do outside before they even opened the other door. Then I went out to get my clothes, because my duplicate key could open all the locks in the block. I got dressed and waited.”¹⁰

The first five minutes were up. From the small barred window on the metal door Chief Marleau made his call: “Halò, monsieur Randi. Ça va?” “Oui, Ça va!”

Randi continued his preparation. First he made a signal from the barred window in cell “D.” Gerry, an accomplice who had been hiding in the car until that moment, saw the signal and started to honk the horn. Beep! Beep! Beep!

Randi closed that cell door again and quickly unscrewed all the light bulbs in the block. Finally, he waited in the dark at the opposite end of the cell that had incarcerated him only a few minutes earlier.

Ten minutes had passed. The voice from the opening in the door came again: “Monsieur Randi. Ça va bien?”

No answer. The beeping sound from the car outside got more insistent.

“Monsieur Randi? Je suis le chef de police, vous êtes bien?”

Still no answer. The beeping continued.

Now everyone was concerned that something had happened. They turned the big wheel that pulled the bar back and a crashing noise was heard coming from the jail. He must have fallen!

It was actually the chair in the cell that had fallen as soon as the catch that kept the bar door open was released from the outside, allowing the door to close and latch.

The big metal door was opened and everybody rushed in, but it was pitch black. The policemen turned their flashlights on, but everybody was moving forward, toward Randi’s cell, and nobody could see Randi behind the door.

“The Police Chief ran down to the end and I remember his exact words: ‘Oh merde!’ They all got down to the far end. Notes! Photographs! ‘Chief, stand by the door!’ The Chief was discombobulated, the horn was still sounding outside.”

Now, how was that accomplished? “As soon as their backs were turned I just stepped out and started walking down the corridor. I saw some cops down the hall, jumped into cupboard “B” and saw on the glass door that they had walked by. I went out and into the washroom. I exited from the window and reached the car into the parking lot. I switched places with Gerry, who got inside the trunk of the car, and I continued on beep beep beeping.”¹¹

Thirteen minutes had passed. Randi had vanished from his cell, everybody was very excited, and nobody had a clue about his whereabouts. Danny took advantage of the chaos and locked the window in the washroom, erasing even that last possible hint to how Randi had escaped. The awful noise coming from the outside was now unbearable.

“Will someone stop this racket!” ordered the exasperated Chief of Police.

His men started to head out to comply, when a constable suddenly shouted: “Look outside the window!”

“They looked outside the barred windows and there I was, sitting in my car beeping the horn with a big smile. The Chief came over to the door and he literally took his hat off, and said: ‘I have to take my hat off to that! What you did is just impossible!’ And of course it was! We did a wonderful week at the theatre, I must say.”¹²

Notes

1. Interview with Penn Jillette and Kim Scheinberg, March 11, 2005.

2. Ibid.

3. Various interviews with Penn, Ibid, plus: Kim Scheinberg and Angus Johnston, February 28, 2010.

4. “Evasion sensationelle à la station de police de Valleyfield,” Le progres de Valleyfield, Oct. 14, 1954.

5. Penn et al, ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Penn et al, plus interview with Massimo Polidoro, June 24, 2014.

8. Polidoro, ibid.

9. Penn et al, ibid.

10. Polidoro, ibid.

11. Angus and Kim interview, plus Polidoro, ibid.

12. When Penn Jillette heard this story for the first time (conversation with Randi of March 11, 2005) his comment was:“That’s just beautiful! The really great thinking is the horn honking ahead of time. Because you never think that that’s the way you use a confederate. Why would you have an assistant to honk a horn? Well, because it messes up the timing! Just fabulous.”

Once again, farmer Paul Trent’s famous UFO photos from McMin­nville, Oregon, are a hot topic in UFOlogy. Kevin Randle discussed the photos on his blog A Different Perspective, and a torrent of comments from researchers followed. Not just frothy opinion but highly detailed, meticulous comments about the camera angle and position, the weight and size of the hypothetical model, the load on the wires and a possible bend in them, etc. Ultimately this is important, but such matters are unlikely to give us a final answer. There is one thing about this case that everyone can probably agree on: as Randle says, “There are only two conclusions to be drawn about the pictures taken in McMinnville, Oregon. They either show a craft from another world, or they are a hoax. I do not see a third possibility.”

Partly in response to this, I wrote a long special report on the current status of the Trent photos on my BadUFOs blog. Space does not permit putting it in this column, so I include only the highlights here. You can read the long version, and see all the photos, at http://tinyurl.com/BadUFOsTrent.

On May 11, 1950, farmer Paul Trent of McMinnville, Oregon, snapped two photos of an object that he claimed was a flying saucer (the term UFO hadn’t been invented yet). There are inconsistencies in Mrs. Trent’s accounts of where her husband was when the object was first spotted and who went inside to get the camera. The Trents did not immediately tell anyone about the photos or rush them off to be developed. Instead, the film containing the invaluable flying saucer photos was left in the camera until Mother’s Day, so that a few unexposed frames would not be wasted. More general information on the photos is on my website at http://debunker.com/trent.html.

The first of Oregon farmer Paul Trent’s two photos of a supposed “flying saucer,” May 11, 1950.

The famous (and to some, infamous) Condon Report included the Trent photos in its section of Photographic Case Studies as Case 46 (http://goo.gl/vaKe81). The principal investigator was William K. Hartmann—who, incidentally, was the first person to come up with the presently accepted theory about the origin of the Earth’s moon. This analysis attracted a lot of attention from UFOlogists, particularly because of Hartmann’s conclusion that

This is one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two witnesses. It cannot be said that the evidence positively rules out a fabrication, although there are some physical factors such as the accuracy of certain photometric measures of the original negatives which argue against a fabrication.

Hartmann acknowledges, however, that a fabrication is possible:

The object appears beneath a pair of wires, as is seen in Plates 23 and 24. We may question, therefore, whether it could have been a model suspended from one of the wires. This possibility is strengthened by the observation that the object appears beneath roughly the same point in the two photos, in spite of their having been taken from two positions.

The sole factor suggesting that the object is distant is a measured anomalous brightness on the underside of the object in Photo 1, compared with the brightness of the shaded underside of the oil tank. The assumption is that, in the case of a model, the two shaded regions ought to have about the same brightness. Since the underside of the object is brighter than the underside of the tank, the assumption is that atmospheric scattering is the cause, and hence the object is at a significant distance from the camera. However, if any of the assumptions are incorrect, the photometry results are meaningless. Among the possible violations of those assumptions:

• The object is translucent, allowing light from the sky to pass through.

• The object has a mirror surface at the bottom, thus we are seeing a reflection of the bright ground and not a shaded surface.

• The underside of an object suspended several feet above the ground from the wires receives much more illumination than that of a tank near the ground, next to a wall. (I would expect this to be true.)

There are very distinct shadows on the garage in both photos, although the Trents claimed that the photos were taken around sunset. The problem is that the wall faces east, and the sun is in that position (about 90 degrees azimuth) at about 8:20 am PDT. If the photos were actually taken in the morning, then the Trents were lying about the circumstances of the incident. I found that, measuring the shadows, we can greatly restrict the size of the object casting the shadows. In fact, it is so small that it is almost certainly less than one degree. This eliminates every possible source of illumination except the sun.

In 2004, researcher Joel Carpenter (1959–2014) created a website on the McMinnville photos, making a very good case that the object was directly beneath the overhead wires and close to the camera. He suggests that the object was a mirror from an old truck. I have restored Joel Carpenter’s original McMinnville photos website (changing only the links), and placed it on the Internet Archive at http://tinyurl.com/CarpenterTrent.

One of Carpenter’s findings is that Trent’s camera was surprisingly close to the ground when the photos were taken. For some bizarre reason, Trent did not stand up to photograph his UFO, but instead crouched down. Carpenter explains,

Instead of moving toward the object and shooting the photos from eye level in the unobstructed front yard, he shot the two photos up, from a very low level, from the back yard. For reasons explained above, it seems likely that he actually used the viewfinder on the body of the camera while kneeling. The overall geometry of the positions and the attributes of the camera suggest that he was attempting to frame a nearby object in such a way as to maximize the amount of sky around it and enhance its apparent altitude.

In other words, Trent walked away from where the UFO was supposed to be and instead walked toward where the presumed model was hanging from the wires and crouched down close to the ground to make his “UFO” appear distant.

Since the camera moved a significant distance between Photo 1 and Photo 2, can the two Trent photos possibly be viewed as a stereo pair, to reveal the object’s distance? In 2010 an anonymous researcher calling himself Blue Shift did so on Above Top Secret (http://goo.gl/OEsXCi). When you cross your eyes to see the image in 3D, the “UFO” is seen to be small and relatively close to the camera compared with the distant hills. Another way of demonstrating the same thing: a montage by David Slater demonstrates that when the two Trent photos are overlaid so that the wires are lined up, the images of the “UFOs” line up as well (http://goo.gl/5JwJ6e). Both these demonstrations show that the “UFO” appears to be fixed with respect to the overhead wires.

In 2013 a group of French skeptics (IPACO) did an in-depth investigation of the McMinnville photos (http://www.ipaco.fr/ReportMcMinnville.pdf). They began with the usual description of the line of sight to the object in each photo, presumed suspension methods, etc. They concluded that the object is a small model.

More interesting is the second part of the report, completed two months after the first part: Evidence of a Suspension Thread (page 29 of the IPACO report). They do not claim to detect the suspension thread directly but instead statistically. They conclude, “For the TRNT1 picture, the presence of a negative peak (thread darker than the sky) was clearly observed which matched exactly to the supposed attachment point, with a significant difference of 2,38 sigma, for a tilt angle equal to -11°. . . . Application of the same method to the second picture TRNT2 provided comparable results, with a tilt angle of -10.29° and results of over 2.5 sigma.”

Now, another researcher has weighed in. Jay J. Walter of Phoenix, Arizona, the author of the suspense horror novel Blood Tree, did his own investigation. Working from high-resolution scans of first-generation prints that I sent him (scans I have now posted on the Internet Archive for anyone to research at http://archive.org/details/TrentHighResScans), he did his own photo enhancement using the venerable program ArtGem. He said that even using a 4.2ghz quad core 64bit processor with 8 gigs of system RAM, he was still getting “out of memory” errors. However, he persevered and produced a series of photos appearing to detect portions of a suspension thread above the object in both photos. The purported string cannot be seen across its entire length, which is consistent with the French skeptics being able to detect it only statistically. It is significant that Walter and the French team were working with different scans.

Another of Walter’s purported discoveries is what he calls a “logo,” an apparently flat area with two holes, where it appears a logo plate might be attached or possibly even a handle. Is this real, or is it simply “pareidolia”—seeing a pattern where none exists? Confirmation is needed.

Walter suggests that the object in question is an appliance motor shroud, approximately eight inches in diameter. “I think Trent walked to the garage one evening, tied a string to an appliance motor shroud via an old bolt, tossed the shroud over a wire and tied the other end of the string to an anchor near the ground, then took the two pictures. Logical, practical, and so much less effort for him than other theories. People just do what they do and Trent wasn’t going to go to too much effort just to fool his banker buddy.”

Do these new findings finally debunk the Trent photos? They would, provided they can be independently confirmed by other researchers, using other high-resolution scans from first-generation prints or the original negatives. Until then, people will continue to argue about such matters as the gauge of the wires and whether the model, if it was a model, would have to be five or six inches in diameter.

Indiana has been in the news lately, and most of what we’re hearing isn’t good. First, the long-running comedy show Parks and Recreation came to an end, cutting off a rich supply of charming images of small town Indiana life. Then on March 26, Governor Mike Pence signed a bill that I’m fairly certain Leslie Knope would not have supported: the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” (RFRA). Although the Governor claims the bill “is not about discrimination,” it is widely interpreted as being very much about discrimination. In June 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby found that the 1993 federal version of the RFRA allowed “closely held” companies such as Hobby Lobby to deny contraceptive benefits mandated under the Affordable Care Act. Suddenly it was easy to see how RFRA could be used to deny services to gays or anyone else whose demographics were unsupported by the religious views of a business owner.

The media storm about the RFRA almost completely obscured another action taken by Governor Pence on the same day. The governor declared a public health emergency in Scott County, where seventy-nine new cases of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection have been identified since mid-December in a location that usually has a total of five cases per year. A team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was called in to Scott County, and the state initiated several efforts aimed at combating the outbreak.

Among the responses authorized in the governor’s emergency declaration was a needle exchange program—for thirty-days only and only in Scott County. The sad irony is that had Indiana implemented needle exchange programs before now, the current outbreak might not have happened.

The science is clear. Needle exchange programs, or what are more properly called Syringe Services Programs (SSP), work. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, puts it this way:

Recent studies have affirmed SSP’s efficacy in encouraging and facilitating entry into treatment for intravenous drug users (IDUs) and thereby reducing illicit drug use. Numerous studies have also documented SSP’s effectiveness in reducing the risk of HIV infection among IDUs and their partners.^[1]

In 2011, the U.S. Surgeon General, Regina Benjamin, entered the following statement into the Federal Record.

[SSPs] would be effective in reducing drug abuse and the risk of infection with the etiologic agent for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. This determination reflects the scientific evidence supporting the important public health benefit of SSPs.

Two decades of research on SSPs shows that giving heroin and other intravenous drug users clean needles has two really important effects:

1. It decreases the rate of HIV infection in users and their partners; and

2. It actually decreases rates of addiction by exposing users to people who can help get them into treatment.

Yet in a striking rejection of science and the public interest, federal law prohibits the use of federal funds for SSPs, and many states have drug paraphernalia laws that make it impossible to introduce SSPs. As Anna Maria Barry-Jester points out in a piece at FiveThirtyEight.com, most of the prohibiting states are red. States that allow syringe programs are more likely to be blue. Indiana is a mostly red state with laws that currently make SSPs impossible—except, as it turns out, in emergencies. In a statement that flies in the face of evidence, Governor Pence said on March 26, “I don’t believe that effective anti-drug policy involves handing out paraphernalia to drug users….” In fact, an effective anti-drug policy would do just that.

Thankfully, a wiser politician, Republican state legislator Ed Clere, disagrees with the Governor and has introduced a bill that would make SSPs legal throughout Indiana. In another sad bit of irony, Clere introduced the bill last year and it failed.

This appears to be one more instance of a political or moral ideology trumping the available evidence to the detriment of public health.^[2] Opponents of SSPs are reluctant to give heroin and prescription drug users the tools of their addictions, something that probably seems immoral to them. Supporting SSPs might make a politician vulnerable to claims of condoning drug use and being “soft on crime,” both of which would be particularly damaging in red states. But when an HIV outbreak becomes a public health emergency, even Republicans come looking for evidence-based solutions.

The Real Drug Emergency

By temporarily allowing needle exchanges in Scott County, Governor Pence has made a tiny step in the right direction, but the inadequacy of the response becomes obvious when you step back and take a look at the wider effects of intravenous drug use in the United States. Consider the following graph from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.^[3]

Figure 1. National Overdose Deaths—Number of Deaths from Heroin. The figure above is a bar chart showing the total number of U.S. overdose deaths involving heroin from 2001 to 2013. The chart is overlaid by a line graph showing the number of deaths by females and males. From 2001 to 2013, there was a five-fold increase in the total number of deaths.

Infection with HIV is a horrible personal tragedy, but it is not the death sentence it once was. In contrast, death from overdose is the end of a life—often a young adult life. Furthermore, overdoses from heroin are only the tip of the iceberg. The wide availability of modern prescription opioids has made overdoses of commercially manufactured pain medications much more common than heroin overdose, as Figure 2 shows.

Figure 2. Number of Deaths from Prescription Drugs. The figure above is a bar chart showing the total number of U.S. overdose deaths involving opioid prescription drugs from 2001 to 2013. The chart is overlaid by a line graph showing the number of deaths by females and males. From 2001 to 2013, there was a 2.5-fold increase in the total number of deaths.

Prescription drug addiction is an enormous problem in the United States. The HIV outbreak in Scott County, Indiana, stemmed from intravenous use—not of heroin—but of Opana (14-Hydroxydihydromorphinone), a powerful prescription pain medication made by Endo Pharmaceuticals. Indeed much of the current demand for heroin appears to be coming from users who first become addicted to prescription medications and then move to heroin when the price or availability of the street drug is more favorable.^[4] This is a classic case of economic choice with substitutable commodities.

Scott County is an economically depressed rural area in southern Indiana, and it has had a serious drug problem for several years. A 2012 National Public Radio story on the high rate of prescription opioid use in Scott County reported that there had been thirty-one overdose deaths in the previous year, a substantial increase. There have been vigils for victims of overdose, and County Sheriff Dan McClain recently worried that an entire generation might be lost to drug addiction. But despite this festering problem, drug use in Scott County only became a public health crisis when it turned into an HIV outbreak. Between one and three dozen overdoses per year in a county of only 25,000 residents was not an emergency. Why?

Moral and Immoral Health Problems

It seems to me the answer can be found in our differing reactions to drug overdoses and HIV. Drug addiction bears a heavy weight of moral stigma, perhaps even greater than the stigma associated with HIV infection. Despite the many social and economic forces that play a role in the current plague of addiction, drug use is considered a choice—a bad life decision with predictable outcomes. In contrast, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is an infectious disease. HIV/AIDS can spread by the use of contaminated syringes, but it can also spread by engaging in other, perfectly legal activities. The possibility of HIV being passed on to morally innocent people appears to have finally captured the attention of state government.

Scott County, Indiana, is a harbinger of problems faced in many other places, and if moral and political philosophies continue to stand in the way of evidence-based procedures, then the rising tide of death and infection will continue. Let us hope that Governor Pence’s actions will lead to a more general recognition that people struggling with addiction are worthy of our concern and that needle exchanges and other effective programs should be promoted in an effort to help them.