Sometimes we become so embroiled in our own affairs that we forget there are skeptic and humanist allies all over the world and things to see that underscore our causes. And so I was reminded on a recent trip to Cape Town, South Africa via London, England.

Sea Point Contact, Cape Town

Most routing to Cape Town from Los Angeles passes through Europe, in our case London Heathrow. Heathrow isn’t a bad place to spend a nine-hour layover between two eleven-hour flights, but my wife and I decided to take the tube to the British Library to see an exhibition on the Magna Carta.

They had a couple of the surviving copies of the 1215 ce document that sought to end the conflict between King John and his barons, who apparently were tired of being randomly taxed and randomly tossed into jail if they tried to dodge the taxes. The original Magna Carta (it was rewritten over the centuries) introduced some early due-process ideas to a society that was used to the church and the monarchy calling the shots. Weeks after the Magna Carta was signed, Pope Innocent III got wind that rule of law superseded holy authority, and he promptly annulled the document.

London Fire Memorial with Richard Wiseman

Between family obligations and getting interviewed by The Times in Cape Town, we were fortunate enough to have dinner with a great group of skeptics. Jacques Rousseau and his wife, Signe, (both of the University of Cape Town); Bryan; Kelly; and Clint all gathered at the Waterfront in Cape Town for some delightful conversation, food, and drink. South Africa has its share of nutty beliefs, and it’s gratifying to know there are folks down there who are armed with good evidence and willing to speak up.

Blocks from where we stayed in Cape Town at a place called the Sea Point Contact, Charles Darwin arrived on the HMS Beagle in 1836. This is a spot where two different ages of rocks meet and give clues as to the great age of the Earth. Darwin wrote about this in the Origin of Species in 1859.

In front of Down House

The Darwin theme would continue in London (on the way home) as we embarked on a pilgrimage to Down House, Charles and Emma Darwin’s home for some forty years. Pilgrimages shouldn’t be too easy, and we (now joined by our friend, South African author Henrietta Rose-Innes) fought wind, rain, and Sunday bus and train schedules to walk the final half mile to the place where groundbreaking science was put to page. Not content to coast on family money and domestic life, Darwin turned his home and grounds into laboratories and places of contemplation. It fed my skeptical soul to walk where he walked, see what he saw, and be where he was. All those in love with science should make their way to Down House if they can.

The trip ended with a lovely visit with our friend Richard Wiseman, the distinguished parapsychologist and author. We traipsed through the Clink museum, which gave a taste of old-time jail conditions, climbed the London Fire (1666) Monument to a spectacular view, and joined another renowned colleague, Chris French and his wife, Anne, for a delicious Italian meal in Soho.

I have to say it warms the world up a bit to see good people great distances from where you live. The planet seems a bit more manageable somehow.

For its fourth season, the popular television show Monster Fish, on the cable channel National Geographic Wild, asked for my opinion of an old photograph depicting a humongous catfish—one estimated to weigh between 500 and 800 pounds. Was the photo authentic? I flew to Chattanooga to give my opinion for a segment of the episode “Giant Catfish” that aired July 5, 2013. Here is a more detailed presentation.

A Fish Tale

There are different versions—folklore at work—regarding the origins of both the giant fish and the old photo. Some say the picture is genuine, while others insist that it is not.

For example, some accounts hold that the fish was caught in the Tennessee River at the Cerro Gordo community in Hardin County, Tennessee, in 1914. Some say it was landed by the late Joe B. Pitts, the proprietor of Harbour-Pitts Company’s general store, while others insist it was actually taken by Green Bailey, a local fisherman who caught it on a trotline. Another story holds that the giant fish was captured after it was trapped in shallow water during a dry spell; one local historian thinks the picture may date from the 1940s; and so on (Wilson 2003; Cagle 2010).

Photo Analysis

Figure 1. Questioned photograph: real or fake?

A copy of the original photograph (Figure 1) bears (in the upper right corner) a handwritten notation, “Cerro Gordo, Ta[ken?] by Green Bailey / Apr 6th / 1914” and (in the lower left) the initials “E. F. P.,” presumably those of the photographer. That the script is white is consistent with its having been directly penned, probably with india ink, on the photographic negative, a common practice. (See examples in Nickell 2005, 64, 125.)

Immediately one notices that the photo’s ratio of width to height is like that of a picture postcard rather than a standard photograph. Common in the period indicated were what are known to deltiologists (postcard collectors) as “real photo” postcards: black-and-white photos that were not printed on a press but were actually developed onto photographic cardstock having a preprinted postcard back.¹ By 1902, Kodak was selling such prepared cards (Nicholson 1994, 178). Real photos were often made by local or itinerant photographers and so were typically one-of-a-kind or limited-edition prints (although some were commercially made and tended to have typeface captions rather than handwritten ones). Real photos were especially common during the “golden age” of picture postcards, 1898–1918 (Nickell 2003, 105–107; Nickell 2005, 41–43, 56; Willoughby 1992, 68–77; Nicholson 1994, 3, 13, 178).

Looking at the photo image itself, it is quite typical of the postcard genre known as “exaggerations” (Range 1980, 62–63)—a genre now recognized in folklore scholarship as a form of American folk expression representing a “visual twist on the tall tale” (Axelrod and Oster 2000, 184–185). I have a collection of these: examples include a man being attacked by a monster jackrabbit, a workman hauling a single huge bunch of grapes in a wheelbarrow, two great cabbages (or again two titanic oranges) filling a train’s flatcar, a tractor pulling one gargantuan potato, and so on and on. (See Figures 2 and 3.)

Figure 2. “Real photo” postcard of “exaggeration” genre (made by photo montage technique), 1908. (Author’s collection)

Figure 3. Another “real photo” card shows one that did not get away, 1910. (Author’s collection)

But fish are perhaps the most common, no doubt because, as one folklorist observes, “Verbal lore concerning fabulous catches represents a whole category of exaggerated narrative, highly formulaic and entertaining in content, with skeptical reaction from the audience an expected part of the performance” (Brady 1996). To this verbal lore is added the pictorial variety: photos or artworks that often turn into jokelore—funny instances of the one that didn’t get away.

Now, such photographs are typically made by photomontage techniques. The term montage (French for “mounting”) loosely describes any means of making one picture from two or more—as by background projection, collage or “cut montage,” sandwiching (of negatives), and other techniques (Nickell 2005, 120–127). The figure of the man standing atop the wagon and staring at the giant catfish does have a “different” look than other elements in the photo—it is a bit out of focus, for example—and could seem to indicate photomontaging. It could, that is, if there were not additional evidence pointing to authenticity.

Genuine Photo…

As I told the star of Monster Fish, fish biologist Zeb Hogan, the photograph is actually genuine and unretouched. But that doesn’t mean the giant catfish is the real McCoy: the scene the genuine photo depicts has been faked!

Joe Brownlow Pitts of Savannah, Tennessee, speaks with authority: “My daddy had a little wagon that looked like a log wagon. He put the fish—which weighed, I recall, about 85 lbs.—on it. Then my Uncle Frank [Elisha Franklin Pitts (1890–1953)], who was good at photography, cut out a cardboard man that was being used in a clothing advertisement and stuck it on the wagon, along with the fish. He took the picture” (qtd. in “Giant Catfish” 2007). Another source (Cagle 2010) explains that “the wagon, perhaps a quarter or less than the size of a standard wagon, was a freight wagon used to move goods in tight quarters, such as the basement of the Harbour-Pitts Company Store and was pulled by workers, not horses.”

The cutout figure—known to cameramen of the period as a “photographic statuette” (a photo mounted on a rigid base, such as cardboard or plywood, and cut with an appropriate tool such as a mat knife or jigsaw [Fraprie and Woodbury 1896, 90–96])—was, as mentioned, reportedly made from an advertisement. However, another source (Wilson 2003) cites hearsay evidence that the man in the picture was one Warren McConnell. It is possible that photographer Frank Pitts posed him and took his photograph rather than using an advertising figure.² But what is important is that Jay Barker, president of Tennessee’s National Catfish Derby, reportedly had “a copy of another photo of the same man and fish taken from a different angle”—in which “the man is posed exactly the same as he is in the other photo” (Wilson 2003). This would appear to corroborate the use of a “photographic statuette” in staging the scene.

As to the catfish itself, it may well have been caught by Green Bailey “who worked as a gin-man [cotton-gin operator] for Habour-Pitts Company.” He reportedly caught it on a trotline (which would not have been strong enough to hold a 500–800 pound fish!³). Then he “took his catch to the gin where it could be weighed on a cotton scale” (Cagle 2010). Sources say a former bookkeeper for the Pitts store, Rilla Callens, who actually had passed the photo down to her son, agreed Bailey had caught the fish; so did Green Bailey’s sister (Wilson 2003).

Re-Creation

The evidence fully explains the picture as I conclude, and so does photo expert Tom Flynn, a CFI photographer and videographer I consulted, who has expertise in special effects. Tom suggests the staged scene was photographed with a view camera, using a wide aperture and slow-speed film. That the background, especially, is out of focus is consistent with a small object being photographed close up. This effect is often seen when miniature objects are photographed with the intention of making them look larger.

It remained to do a recreation, and for that I flew to Chattanooga. A small wagon was found (on eBay, as I recall), Zeb brought a sizeable catfish in a cooler, and the National Geographic Museum shop provided the excellent cutout picture of Zeb, much smaller than life size. As with the original Frank Pitts photo, the fact that one assumes the wagon and figure are of usual size creates an illusion in which the catfish appears to be huge indeed (Figure 4): larger than life—in fact much, much larger.

Figure 4. Re-creation of the process used for the photo in Figure 1. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

Acknowledgments

In addition to individuals cited in the text, I am grateful to National Geographic’s Drew Pulley and Bailey Frankel, and to CFI’s Libraries Director Tim Binga and librarian Lisa Nolan, as well as to Tom Flynn, and to Ed Beck, my assistant at the time of this investigation.

Notes

1. Although the image in Figure 1 is halftone-screened, the half-toning extends even over damaged areas, showing that it results from copying at some later time (either by a photocopier that screens or from a printed reproduction of the card).

2. Frank Pitts may not have had the capability of making such a big enlargement.

3. I have some experience with trotlines, having often accompanied my late grandfather, Charlie Turner, as he removed catfish from his.

References

Axelrod, Alan, and Harry Oster. 2000. The Penguin Dictionary of American Folklore. New York: Penguin Reference.

Brady, Erika. 1996. Fishing (sport), in Brunvand 1996, 274–275.

Brunvand, Jan Harold, ed. 1996. American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing.

Cagle, David. 2010. Statement and copy of original photo from Hardin County, Tennessee, Historical Society, August; provided by National Geographic Television.

Fraprie, Frank R., and Walter E. Woodbury. 1896. Photographic Amusements, 10th ed. Boston: American Photographic Publishing Co., 1931.

Giant Catfish—Some of the World’s Biggest Catfish. 2007. Online at http://www.oodora.com/life-stories/funny-finds/giant-catfish.html; accessed August 30, 2013.

Nicholson, Susan Brown. 1994. The Encyclopedia of Antique Postcards. Radnor, PA: Wallace-Homestead.

Nickell, Joe. 2003. Pen, Ink, and Evidence: A Study of Writing and Writing Materials for the Penman, Collector, and Document Detective. New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press.

———. 2005. Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Range, Thomas E. 1980. The Book of Postcard Collecting. New York: Dutton.

Willoughby, Martin. 1992. A History of Postcards. Secaucus, N.J.: The Wellfleet Press.

Wilson, Taylor. 2003. Something’s fishy in Hardin County. ESPNOutdoors.com (November 11); accessed July 6, 2012.

Skepticism is at the heart of the scientific method. Genuine skeptics don’t come to conclusions until they’ve considered the full body of evidence. That’s why it took many years for the scientific community to accept that the Earth is warming due to human greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists were skeptical until the evidence became overwhelming.

In contrast, people who deny well-established science come to conclusions first, and then reject any evidence that conflicts with their beliefs. Denial and skepticism are polar opposites.

The main driver of climate science denial is political ideology. People averse to the solutions to climate change that involve regulation of polluting industries are more likely to deny there’s a problem that needs solving. Ideology decides the conclusion, and then any conflicting evidence is rejected.

However, deniers also wrap themselves in the trappings of science, in order to masquerade as scientific skeptics. So how do you tell the difference between genuine skepticism and denial? Are there any tell-tale characteristics of science denial?

A scientific paper by Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee identifies five characteristics of science denial, whether it is rejection of human evolution, the link between smoking and cancer or human-caused global warming. The five characteristics of science denial are fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry picking, and conspiracy theories.

Psychological research tells us that understanding and exposing the techniques of denial is the key to stopping science denial. I’ll come back to that shortly, but first let’s look at each characteristic in more detail.

Fake experts, who appear qualified but don’t have the relevant expertise, are used to create the impression of an ongoing scientific debate. A well-known example of this strategy is the Global Warming Petition Project. This is a petition featuring over 31,000 scientists or science graduates who don’t believe humans are disrupting climate. However, 99.9% of the petition’s signatories aren’t climate scientists. This is an example of fake experts in bulk.

Logical fallacies are logically false arguments leading to invalid conclusions. For example, the most common climate myth uses a faulty leap of logic known as jumping to conclusions. This myth is that “climate has changed naturally in the past, so humans can’t be causing global warming now.” This is equivalent to arguing that people have died from natural causes in the past, so smoking cigarettes can’t be causing deaths now.

Impossible expectations demand unrealistic standards of proof before acting on the science. One version of this argument is that if we don’t know everything about our climate, then we know nothing. But this ignores aspects of climate science where we have a high level of understanding—such as the human role in causing global warming.

Cherry picking focuses on specific pieces of data, often out of context, while excluding any data that conflicts with the desired conclusion. How do you tell when someone is cherry picking? When their conclusion from a small piece of data conflicts with the conclusion supported by the full body of evidence. For example, when we look at the whole climate system, we see that since 1998, our planet has built up heat at a rate of over four atomic bombs per second. And yet climate deniers argue that global warming stopped in 1998. How can they argue global warming has stopped when the planet is building up so much heat? By cherry picking the data and ignoring the big picture.

Conspiracy theories are inevitable when someone disagrees with an overwhelming scientific consensus. How else does someone explain why all the world’s experts and scientific organizations disagree with them? Their only explanation is that all the experts must be conspiring to falsify or exaggerate the science. In addition, to a conspiracy theorist, any evidence disproving the conspiracy is seen as further confirmation of the conspiracy. When nine separate investigations into the private emails of climate scientists exonerated the scientists, climate deniers accused the investigators of being part of the conspiracy.

The five characteristics of science denial are abundantly on display by those calling themselves “climate skeptics.” This inaccurate label misleads people into thinking that denialist behavior—such as cherry picking, fallacies, and conspiracy theories—is appropriate conduct for genuine skeptics.

In a previous article, Skeptical Inquirer asked that journalists stop using the word skeptic to describe deniers. Given the importance of the media in informing the public, this is a crucial step. An equally important step is that scientists and critical thinkers need to claim back the word skepticism. They need to repudiate and expose the techniques of denial that are employed by denialists who claim the label “skeptic.”

Psychological research provides the key to stopping science denial. The answer is not just more science. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the scientific research tells us that the key to stopping science denial is to expose people to weak forms of science denial.

Does this approach sound familiar? This finding comes from a strand of psychological research known as inoculation theory. It borrows from the concept of vaccination, where you convey resistance to a virus by exposing people to a weak form of the virus. Similarly, the most effective way to reduce the influence of denial is to expose people to a weak form of denial. You achieve this by explaining the denialist techniques used to distort the science.

We apply this approach in a free online course by The University of Queensland, Making Sense of Climate Science Denial. We examine the psychology of denial and outline the techniques and fallacies of science denial. Then we put the psychology into practice by debunking fifty of the most common climate myths. Not only will people come away with a deeper understanding of climate change, they’ll also be able to identify the techniques used to distort the science and the most effective ways to respond to misinformation.

Our course includes interviews with some of the world’s leading scientists, including Naomi Oreskes, Richard Alley, Eugenie Scott, and Sir David Attenborough. The following video has scientists explaining the difference between genuine skepticism and science denial.

Climate science denial has tainted the good name of skepticism. Scientists need to take back skepticism. We achieve this by combining science communication with explanations of the techniques employed to distort that science. In this way, skepticism can again become associated with evidence-based critical thinking rather than the rejection of science.

When a great magazine like National Geographic speaks, the world naturally listens. We were especially glad this is so when—for its March 2015 cover article, “The War on Science”—it cited such attacks as those on climate change, evolution, vaccinations, and genetically altered food, as well as the moon landing. “Thanks, National Geographic,” we said (2015) in our magazine, Skeptical Inquirer.

And yet science—and truth—have since come under attack by an online article that bears the imprimatur of National Geographic. Written by Frank Viviano, the article “Why Shroud of Turin’s Secrets Continue to Elude Science” (2015) is so misleading, so replete with falsehoods, so lacking in basic facts about the notorious “shroud” that it is an affront to the proud name of National Geographic.

It is also a glaring example of how not to approach a controversy. Just as one would not get information about the curvature of the Earth from the Flat Earth Society alone, one should not primarily get “facts” about the Turin cloth from The Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) and other partisans. STURP’s leaders served on the executive council of the Holy Shroud Guild, which is devoted to the “cause” of the reputed relic. Viviano tells us in glowing terms of the “scientific disciplines” covered by STURP, without being aware that it lacked experts in art and forensic chemistry. We shall see presently why this matters, but let’s first look at the shameful portions of the shroud’s history that Viviano shamelessly omits.

Relic or Fraud?

Figure 1. Negative photograph of a rubbing image done by the author using an iron oxide pigment.

When the cloth first appeared in Lirey, France, in the middle of the fourteenth century, its owner could not, or would not, explain how he had acquired the most holy relic in Christendom. In 1389 a bishop reported to Pope Clement VII that it had been used in a faith-healing scam in which persons were hired to feign illness, then, when the cloth was revealed to them, to pretend to have been healed, “so that money might cunningly be wrung” from unsuspecting pilgrims. “Eventually,” he said, after “diligent inquiry and examination,” the “fraud” was uncovered. The cloth had been “cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who painted it” (D’Arcis 1389).

This sordid origin of the supposedly sacred relic is corroborated by much other evidence. According to Jewish burial practices, Jesus’ body would have been washed and covered with burial spices, and the body wound in multiple cloths of plain linen. In contrast, the Shroud of Turin depicts an unwashed “body” without any myrrh and aloes, is a single cloth woven in herringbone pattern (a medieval but not first-century weave), and shows an anachronistic under-and-over draping style.

Moreover, there is no history of this cloth (there have been some forty True Shrouds) prior to its appearance in Lirey, and the image’s elongated forms are those of French gothic art of that period. Iconographic elements also date the image to the middle ages. The radiocarbon date, obtained by three laboratories, was 1260–1390 ce, consistent with the ca. 1355 hoax and forger’s confession. This is what is called corroborative evidence, and there is more.

Blood or Paint?

A secret commission appointed in 1969 to study the shroud examined the “blood” stains, which are suspiciously picturelike and still red. Internationally known forensic serologists reported that the red substance failed all microscopical, chemical, biological, and instrumental tests for blood. Instead, there were reddish granules that would not even dissolve in reagents that dissolve blood.

STURP’s own tape-lifted surface samples were examined by renowned forensic microanalyst Walter C. McCrone. He discovered red ocher pigment making up the image (but not the background, so it was not contamination) and identified the “blood” as tempera paint containing red ocher and vermillion with traces of rose madder—pigments used by medieval artists to depict blood (McCrone 1996; Nickell 2013, 122–124). For his efforts, McCrone was held to a secrecy agreement while statements were made to the press that there was no evidence of artistry. Subsequent claims that the tempera “blood” was genuine have ranged from the incompetent to the disingenuous (Nickell 1998, 143–144, 156–158).

One claim held that there was human DNA in a shroud “blood” sample although the archbishop of Turin and the Vatican refused to authenticate the samples or accept any research carried out on them. Nevertheless, shroud advocates claimed there was human blood on the shroud, while the scientist at the DNA lab, Victor Tryon, told Time magazine that he could not say how old the DNA was or that it came from blood. “Everyone who has ever touched the shroud or cried over the shroud,” he said, “has left a potential DNA signal there.” Tryon resigned from a post-STURP shroud project due to what he disparaged as “zealotry in science” (Van Biema 1998, 61).

It must be remembered that the burden of proof regarding a question of authenticity is on the claimant—not on anyone else to prove a negative. Viviano (2015) seems unaware of this, stating “the sum result is a standoff with researchers unable to dismiss the shroud entirely as a forgery, or prove that it is authentic.”

Imprint, “Photo,” or Portrait?

Viviano has been lured by shroud partisans into thinking that if an exact replica cannot be made then somehow this proves the shroud could be genuine after all. Actually, of course, no artifact—not for instance the hoaxed Cardiff Giant stone figure of 1869—can be precisely duplicated. Shroud partisans claim—or hint strongly—that if the shroud cannot be exactly recreated it suggests a supernatural origin. This is nothing less than the logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance. One cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. Yet it is the way “miracle” claims are typically made, in a shrewd attempt to have dogma seem to trump science.

In fact, it is the shroud’s advocates who lack any viable hypothesis for the image formation—although Viviano only cites the notion of some believers that the image was produced by a “divine light,” a miraculous burst of energy at the moment of Jesus’ resurrection. Miracles cannot be demonstrated. We can also rule out simple contact imprinting (which would have caused wraparound distortions) and “vaporography” (since the postulated vapors do not travel in straight lines and so produce blurred images). Researchers have proposed some far-fetched—and unsuccessful—techniques including scorching by hot reliefs and the notion that photography might have been invented in the middle ages (Nickell 1998, 78–140; 2015).

Skeptics have offered several demonstrable methods of producing shroudlike images (see Figure 1), although believers have hastily dismissed these—often on wrong grounds (such as the image areas being too sharply defined when, of course, the replications have not been subjected to 6–7 centuries of handling). More recently, Luigi Garlaschelli, professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia, used hypotheses I advanced in my Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (Nickell 1998) to produce a full-size replica of the shroud with the properties of the original. (For example, Garlaschelli’s reproduction has sparse red-ocher pigment confined to the tops of the threads, accompanied by cellulose degradation.) (Nickell 2013, 130–131)

Conclusions

Scholarship and science have proven the Turin “shroud” a fake, from its incompatibility with first century burial cloths and procedures, its lack of historical record, and a bishop’s report that the forger had confessed, to the suspicious-looking “blood” that is really tempera paint, pigments making up the body image, and the radiocarbon dating that confirms the cloth originated at the time of its documented appearance in the fourteenth century—when it was fraudulently claimed to the be Holy Shroud of Christ. Such evidence against any secular object would be considered clear proof of inauthenticity.

Frank Viviano’s article is a disservice to science and unworthy to appear under the respected name National Geographic.

References

D’Arcis, Pierre. 1389. Memorandum to the Avignon Pope, Clement VII, translated from Latin by Rev. Herbert Thurston, reprinted in Wilson 1979, 266–272. (Portions quoted in Nickell 2013, 120–121.)

McCrone, Walter C. 1996. Judgment Day for the Turin Shroud. Chicago: Microscope.

Nickell, Joe. 1998. Inquest on the Shroud of Turin: Latest Scientific Findings. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 2013. The Science of Miracles. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 2015. “CNN’s ‘Finding Jesus’: Disingenuous Look at Turin ‘Shroud.’” March 6. Online at http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/cnns_finding_jesus_disingenuous_look_at_turin_shroud.

“Thanks, National Geographic.” 2015. Skeptical Inquirer 39.3 (May/June), 9.

Van Biema, David. 1998. “Science and the Shroud.” Time, April 20, 53–61.

Viviano, Frank. 2015. “Why Shroud of Turin’s Secrets Continue to Elude Science.” Online at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/150417-shroud-turin-relics-jesus-catholic-church-religion-science/; accessed April 21, 2015.

Wilson, Ian. 1979. The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ? Rev. ed. Garden City, New York: Image Books.

It might seem odd to choose a hotel full of skeptics to be the subject of a test of psychic ability, but then again, who’s to say that skeptics themselves aren’t endowed with such talent—one perhaps they would themselves be loath to acknowledge?

So we at the Independent Investigations Group chose a large skeptics conference, the 2014 The Amazing Meeting (TAM) in Las Vegas, Nevada, to see what sort of predictive skills, if any, the crowd of visiting doubters possessed.

The Test

At our display table (that we shared with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) sat a simple wheel of chance—a spinning disc that was divided into sixteen equal pie slices.

Photos of well-known “psychic mediums” (Sylvia Browne, Teresa Caputo, John Edward, and James Van Praagh) populated the sixteen slices of the wheel four times each, and each always on the same color (John Edward is always pink, Sylvia is always yellow, etc.). We pre-tested the wheel to make sure it was true (it was), and solicited random passers-by to try their luck at guessing which “psychic” would land under the wheel’s pointer. The incentive to participate was that one could win a 100 Grand candy bar if he or she guessed the correct name.

We scored exactly 200 spins of the wheel, which is a little fortunate because it makes analyzing the results a bit easier to understand. We encouraged people to give it a “good spin,” i.e., to make the wheel rotate at least once or twice around to better ensure the randomness of the results.

The Results

Let’s start with what probability predicts. Since there were essentially four equally-likely results for each spin, over the course of 200 spins we expected each result (name/color) to come up or “hit” somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty times. (Fifty is one-fourth, or 25 percent of 200.) While 200 is not a huge number of trials, it was sufficient for our tongue-in-cheek experiment. (In this sort of test that uses probability as a baseline for determining if results are exceptional, the more trials the better. The mathematical concept of the “law of large numbers” says that getting three or four right in ten trials on our wheel is much more likely—or easier—than getting 300 or 400 right out of 1000 trials. Short term streaks and statistical imbalance tend to even out over greater numbers of trials.)

So how did the skeptics do?

The skeptics at the 2014 TAM got forty-seven correct out of the 200 attempts, or very close to the fifty that probability says they should have gotten. That number is so close to random chance that we say that there is no “effect”—positive or negative—present. The skeptics at the conference are neither exceptionally good at or poor at predicting which “psychics” would come up next on the wheel.

There were a few other fun statistics that did come up.

Sylvia Browne (on the yellow slices) was the most popular guess (sixty chose her) of the skeptics. Was it because Sylvia had passed over to the “other side” less than a year before the experiment? Is yellow more popular a color? (We didn’t ask.) James Van Praagh was least popular at forty guesses.

The John Edward slices actually came up the most times—fifty-seven—and Van Praagh came up the least at forty-four, but the fewer number Van Praagh guesses didn’t line-up with the spin results in any significant way, so the success rate remained unremarkable.

The longest “hit” streak was five people in a row, which would have been exceptional (one in 1024) if players predicted correctly in only five attempts instead of during 200 attempts. The longest miss streak was twenty-one in a row.

Conclusion

Amazingly, skeptics did no better than chance at guessing which of four alleged “psychics” would come up on the wheel of chance. Another way to look at that is that they did no worse than chance either.

Can we conclude, therefore, that the old psychic refrain that “skeptics’ negative energy ruins psychic ability” has been debunked?

We think so.

During Sylvia Browne’s decades-long career offering psychic readings and doing television appearances, she made numerous claims about working with law enforcement to solve crimes. In an age before the Internet, fact-checking by television and newspapers was more labor intensive. It was difficult to find sources to support or deny many of her claims. While several articles in the Skeptical Inquirer have cast doubt on her psychic abilities, Browne defended herself by citing her “work” on cases and giving the media endorsements from seemingly respectable law enforcement members, such as former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Ted Gunderson. Recently obtained FBI files shatter her insinuation that she had a relationship with federal law enforcement and show that the only interest the agency had in Browne was investigating her for fraud.

Records about a person in possession of an investigating government agency, such as the FBI, are available with the person’s permission or if they are deceased. In all likelihood, Browne would not have consented to the release of her FBI file given her refusal to allow Robert Lancaster, of StopSylvia.com, to post a transcript online that her own office sent him in 2007 (Lancaster 2007a). In her haste to refute claims from an ex-husband about an alleged lack of higher education credits, Browne’s office sent Lancaster her St. Teresa’s College (now Avila University) transcripts. The transcripts, according to Lancaster, did show Browne’s ex-husband was incorrect about how long she attended college. Yet unfortunately for Browne, that transcript also demonstrated that she did not complete college and proved her often-made claim about having a higher education degree was false. Given Browne’s reluctance to make records her office sent to a critic publicly available, she probably would not have been willing to allow the release of her law enforcement records. Following her 2013 death, anyone can now obtain the government files concerning Browne.

I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI asking for documents about Browne, using her date of birth under her previous legal last name of “Brown” and her later addition of “e” to the name. I asked for all files as well as “any details about her alleged psychic abilities, help on missing person cases, any investigations or information, and alleged help to Ted Gunderson.” Previously John Greenewald’s The Black Vault, an online collection of government documents, discussed obtaining Browne’s FBI files on a federal investigation and details from the FBI memoranda (Greenewald 2014). Greenewald’s website did not make it clear whether it posted all the FBI’s files or exactly what was requested from the agency. Therefore, I decided to request all the files about Browne. I also asked for anything about her alleged missing persons work and any information about her and Gunderson. The FBI, after asking for documentation that Browne was deceased, sent me two electronic files on a CD-ROM. The first file totals nineteen pages; the second had thirty-three pages that relate to a criminal investigation. A review of pages shows that Greenewald’s release of documents, totaling fifty-two pages, was the FBI’s entire Browne collection.

One of the FBI’s documents on Sylvia Browne.

Psychic Detective Work

Prior to her death, Browne repeatedly claimed to have worked with law enforcement to solve criminal cases. While there is no doubt Browne commented on criminal cases during her television appearances and directly to family members of the missing and deceased, her work with law enforcement is less frequent and more dubious. For example, in her November 2004 appearance on The Montel Williams Show, Browne said: “I remember when I was working on the Bundy case. . . .” Outside of this off-hand comment, there is no evidence to affirm that Browne worked on a “Bundy” case—much less the case of serial killer Ted Bundy, whose capture was not connected to any psychic. Nevertheless, Browne did work with local police on occasion. In 1997, for example, Browne charged the Thibodaux Police Department $400 for a psychic reading on a murder case, but when the murderer was finally caught a decade later Browne’s “work” did not contribute to solving or convicting the killer (Shaffer 2013). In 2007, CNN’s Anderson Cooper investigated Browne in the aftermath of her false prediction that Shawn Hornbeck was deceased. Cooper told his audience:

We spoke to Ted Gunderson, who’s a retired senior special agent in charge of the FBI in Los Angeles. He’s worked with Sylvia Browne, and he says—he says he’s worked with her quite a bit. And he said this about her. He says, quote, “I’ve worked with numerous psychics in the past and very few are really on target, but Sylvia Browne is probably one of the most accurate psychics in the country.” (Cooper 2007)

Cooper then asked his guest James Randi about Gunderson’s statement, “Now, that’s from a former senior FBI official. Are you saying he’s wrong?” Randi, who was not aware of Gunderson or the conditions under which he worked with Browne, replied in part, “He has to judge these things much more carefully.” Gunderson, who died in 2011, was indeed an FBI agent (Associated Press 2011). Yet he earned most of his public fame during his retirement by promoting numerous conspiracy theories, including “child slave labor for underground alien-controlled facilities” (Gunderson 2007; Lancaster 2007b). However, there is no documentation released by the FBI to support the claim that Browne conducted any psychic readings for the FBI, either directly or indirectly. Moreover, Gunderson’s name appears nowhere in her FBI file, and the topics in the FBI release do not discuss working with the FBI. Thus, there is no evidence from the records that Browne was involved with the agency. Assuming Browne worked with Gunderson, it appears to have occurred after he retired from the FBI and when he was investigating aliens, “Satanic” child abductions, and numerous other conspiracies.

Browne also claimed to have given the FBI testimony in March 1993 about the terrorist attack a month earlier on the World Trade Center (Cooper 2007). Like the previous assertion, there is no FBI record to support this; World Trade Center is never mentioned in the files. To ensure that was the case, I filed another Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI asking specifically “for any documents or video” the agency has about Browne’s “interviews with the FBI regarding the 1993 World Trade Center attack.” The FBI response was: “We conducted a search of the Central Records System. We were unable to identify main file records responsive to the FOIA.” If the FBI did interview Browne about the terrorist attack, there is no record of it in the FBI’s central database. If such an interview occurred then, it happened the month she pled to a securities crime in a California court and after the FBI investigated her for federal crimes.

Criminal Charges and Investigations

Browne made a good living by conducting private readings, doing public lectures, and selling books, which earned millions of dollars each year at its peak. Critics dogged her career, pointing out false predictions and even highlighting her March 8, 1993, no contest plea against the State of California for “selling securities without a permit,” which earned her one year probation and an order to pay restitution (Romano 1993). What Browne’s FBI file lacks in information about her psychic work it makes up for in details about criminal investigations. The newly obtained FBI documents, which describe Browne as “a self proclaimed psychic,” show that the FBI closely investigated Browne and her organization, the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research, in the 1980s for “violations of federal law in applying for loans from federally insured financial institutions” in the amount of $1,253,933 and caused businesses “sustained losses” (FBI Document 29-109854-1 1988).

The documents show that the FBI examined Browne’s agreements with several banks as well as her 1984, 1985, and 1986 tax returns. In particular, the government was interested in Browne and an unknown person using “fraudulent documents, including income tax returns and financial statements to enhance her net worth in making these loan applications” (FBI Document 29A-SF-10056 1989). Browne then used the “loan proceeds to support an extravagant lifestyle.” The FBI also had Browne’s signatures on the documents examined to confirm it was her handwriting. In May 1991, the FBI, in a highly redacted document, stated: “Investigation in this matter has determined that [redacted] did prepare fraudulent documents, enhancing the financial statements and tax returns of SYLVIA BROWN and [redacted] which documents were then utilized by BROWN in obtaining loans from federally insured institutions” (capitals in original; FBI Document 29-109854-4 1991). Under a heading “bank fraud and embezzlement,” the FBI reported that the “Internal Revenue Service . . . also has investigated BROWN, including her tax exempt organization known as the Nirvana Foundation.” Ultimately, the U.S. Attorney declined to prosecute the FBI’s case due to “insufficient evidence to indicate criminal intent on the part of BROWN” and the FBI stopped investigating.

Most of the remaining FBI files are copies of Browne’s loan applications that include financial details and correspondence from Browne about the loans on Nirvana Foundation letterhead. These documents reveal what she claimed was her income before her bestselling books and weekly appearances on The Montel Williams Show during the 1990s. One Pacific Valley Bank document Browne signed in 1984 listed her total assets at $3,159,500; another document for California 1st Bank signed by her in 1986 listed $4,215,000. In terms of personal income, Browne signed a notarized document that her individual income tax return in 1983 stated her net income was $93,474 and her individual income tax return in 1982 had her net income at $105,553. One must keep in mind that Browne, as the FBI described her, in the 1980s obtained “a small amount of notoriety from her psychic claims.” It was after her 1993 no contest plea that she became an international psychic star.

Sylvia Browne died in November 2013, but her organization continues to live on with adherent supporters. Despite numerous media outlets citing her poor accuracy rate and mentioning that she inaccurately predicted the age at which she would die, her funeral saw mourners who praised Browne. One woman claimed she paid Browne $30 in 1974, who, in turn, described a house she would buy (Kurhie 2013). Even without Browne, the business continues promoting her books and selling memberships for her “Inner Circle.” Chris Dufresne, her son, continues offering psychic services and using SylviaBrowne.com to promote his psychic readings by telling supporters to contact the “Sylvia Browne Corporation” for reservations (“Psychic Readings” 2014). When people see that Browne built a support base, earned millions of dollars, and regularly appeared as a psychic on television, the details of her numerous failed predictions and various criminal investigations should encourage skepticism whenever someone else claims to be a psychic or medium. For those who will believe without objective evidence, it won’t. Yet, for those who care about details and facts, it will.

References

Associated Press. 2011. Former Memphis FBI chief Gunderson dies. U-T San Diego (August 19). Online at http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2011/Aug/19/former-memphis-fbi-chief-gunderson-dies/.

Cooper, Anderson. 2007. Islam divided; psychic reality check; battle under the border. CNN (January 30). Online at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0701/30/acd.01.html.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Documents. 1988–1991. “Sylvia Browne Files,” Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Greenewald, John. 2014. Sylvia Browne’s FBI file highlights bank fraud and embezzlement. OpEdNews.com (April 21). Online at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Sylvia-Browne--s-FBI-File-by-John-Greenewald-Fraud_Fraud_Psychic_Psychic-140421-543.html.

Gunderson, Ted. 2007. Biography. TedGunderson.com. Online at https://web.archive.org/web/20070206113717/http://www.tedgunderson.com/Biography.htm.

Kurhie, Eric. 2013. Psychic Sylvia Browne’s funeral: Teary mourners, a lavender casket. San Jose Mercury News (November 25). Online at http://www.mercurynews.com/celebrities/ci_24600808/san-jose-celebrity-psychic-sylvia-browne-remembered-rising.

Lancaster, Robert. 2007a. A Sylvia Browne college transcript. StopSylvia.com. Online at http://www.stopsylvia.com/articles/sylviabrownetranscript.shtml.

———. 2007b. AC360: Sylvia Browne’s best evidence? StopSylvia.com. Online at http://www.stopsylvia.com/articles/ac360_brownesbestevidence.shtml.

“Psychic Readings.” 2014. SylviaBrowne.com. Online at http://readings.sylviabrowne.com/.

Romano, Bill. 1993. Spiritualist, ex-husband plead no contest in securities case. San Jose Mercury News (March 9).

Shaffer, Ryan. 2013. The psychic defective revisited: Years later, Sylvia Browne’s accuracy remains dismal. Skeptical Inquirer 37(4) (September/October): 30–34. Online at http://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_psychic_defective_revisited_years_later_sylvia_brownes_accuracy_remains.

Where do conspiracy beliefs come from? Recent behavioral research suggests that they do not reflect pathology or lazy thinking but may instead come from normal, rational minds.

As part of its educational mission, the Skeptical Inquirer regularly publishes critical investigations into conspiracy theories—claims that organizations of powerful, self-serving entities manipulate world events for their own benefit behind the scenes, away from the prying eyes of the public. Readers of this magazine are familiar with the common properties of conspiracy theories: their selective sifting of evidence (McHoskey 1995), their habit of growing more complicated and improbable over time to incorporate additional actors and events (Keeley 1999), their astonishing tendency to assimilate disconfirming evidence as further evidence in favor of the theory (Kramer and Gavrieli 2005), and their poisonous influence on discourse about public institutions and policies (Swami 2012). It is of little wonder that the skeptical community’s attempts at education are leavened with hostility. Much of our language, often in so many words, conveys the belief that conspiracy theories are the product of anti-intellectual and even psychologically disordered minds.

This palpable frustration is an understandable reaction to failing in the skeptical mission. And fail we have, at least in educating the populace not to believe in conspiracy theories. In the nearly four decades of this publication, belief in conspiracy theories (which I will term “conspiracy ideation”) shows no signs of abating, let alone disappearing. Conspiracy theories remain a staple of American popular culture (Kelley-Romano 2008) and are readily found in cultures across the globe (Sunstein and Vermeule 2009; Swami and Coles 2010). To compound skeptics’ frustration, they tend to coexist with paranormal beliefs (Drinkwater et al. 2012; Swami et al. 2011), especially New Age beliefs (Newheiser et al. 2011). And one well-known research finding is that conspiracy theories, like other deeply held beliefs, are strongly resistant to disconfirmation (McHoskey 1995; Nyhan and Reifler 2010; Sunstein and Vermeule 2009).

One irony of this state of affairs is that the skeptical community has engaged the discussion of conspiracies while missing a significant arrow in its quiver: a scientific understanding of the psychological underpinnings of conspiracy ideation. Until recently, there has been little behavioral research into the structure of conspiracy ideation, the people who adopt conspiratorial beliefs, and the circumstances under which they adopt them. This omission is puzzling because conspiracy theories exist not on the fringe but in the mainstream, enough so to be regarded as cognitively normal. As such they invite careful study of why they easily take root in the human mind (Bost and Prunier 2013; Drinkwater et al. 2012; Swami and Coles 2010). Fortunately, the number of peer-reviewed empirical publications on the topic has increased rapidly in only the last five years. As the literature has matured, our theoretical understanding of the origins of conspiracy ideation has begun to sharpen.

Perhaps the most consistent finding is that people are relatively consistent in their conspiracy ideation; if they believe one conspiracy theory, they tend to have other conspiratorial beliefs (e.g. Swami et al. 2011). This pattern holds if the second belief is a real-life conspiracy theory (Swami and Furnham 2012), a general belief that conspiracies regulate human events (Steiger et al. 2013), a fictitious conspiracy story (Swami et al. 2011), or a view of oneself as a victim of conspiracies in one’s own life (Butler et al. 1995). Interestingly, conspiracy ideation also can bridge contradictory theories; Wood and colleagues (Wood et al. 2012) observed that participants who endorsed the belief that Princess Diana had been murdered also tended to endorse the claim that she had faked her death. Researchers have taken these findings to confirm one of the first clearly articulated theories of conspiracy ideation: Goertzel’s (1994) concept of a monological belief system, in which conspiracy ideation is a world­view—rather than a collection of discrete beliefs—in which multiple conspiracy theories reinforce each other. Although researchers have found that certain conspiracy theories are bound to a particular social/political context and not predictive of general conspiracy ideation (Swami 2012), the literature is converging on the conclusion that in the main, conspiracy ideation reflects a generalized way of thinking about the world (Brotherton et al. 2013; Wood et al. 2012).

The next question, therefore, is how this mode of thought arises. The research agenda so far has strongly emphasized the pursuit of the “conspiracy theorist”—the person with a constellation of traits that predisposes him or her to conspiracy ideation. To what extent can we draw a sharp distinction between the psychological profiles of the conspiracy believer and the conspiracy skeptic? The research on this question has been, to put it mildly, mixed. First, a surprise: conspiracy ideation does not appear to reflect an inability or disinclination to think critically. For instance, conspiracy ideation has not been linked to lower levels of education (Bogart and Thorburn 2006; Clark et al. 2008; Parsons et al. 1999; Simmons and Parsons 2005). In fact, in certain cases education may enhance conspiracy ideation; those educated about documented race-based conspiracies, such as the infamous Tuskeegee syphilis study, are more likely to endorse race-based conspiracy theories in which the United States government is alleged to be targeting the African-American population (Nelson et al. 2010). Further, conspiracy ideation is not correlated with “need for cognition”—a reliable measure of the inclination to engage in complex critical thinking (Abakalina-Papp et al. 1999). Neither is it associated with “need for cognitive closure,” a trait characterized by oversimplification of complex issues and biased assimilation of evidence (Leman and Cinnirella 2013).

What about personality? An examination of the Big Five dimensions (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), which together capture the primary vectors of human personality, has been only marginally revealing. Swami and colleagues (Swami et al. 2010; Swami et al. 2011; Swami and Furnham 2012) have observed that conspiracy ideation is associated with lower levels of agreeableness (a trait that captures one’s ability to get along with others and accept them as good-faith actors), but this association has not always been replicated (Furnham 2013). Negative associations between conspiracy ideation and other dimensions, such as neuroticism and openness to experience, have been reported (Furnham 2013; Swami et al. 2013), but overall the correlations between conspiracy ideation and Big Five traits tend to be small and/or unstable (Brotherton et al. 2013).

Demographic variables present a mixed bag. Conspiratorial worldviews are not generally related to either age or sex (e.g., Parsons et al. 1999; Simmons and Parsons 2005). Racial and political affiliation also are not associated with general conspiratorial ideation, but do appear to predict belief in particular conspiracies to which one’s group may be vulnerable (e.g. Abakalina-Paap et al. 1999)—an important pattern to which we will return later. For example, African Americans, much more so than whites, endorse conspiracy theories in which African Americans are the targets—such as the claim that the United States government created the HIV virus to exterminate the black population (e.g. Bogart and Thorburn 2003).

Although numerous researchers have argued that psychopathology is insufficient to account for the prevalence of conspiracy theories (Kramer and Gavrieli 2005; Steiger et al. 2013; Swami and Coles 2010; Uscinski et al. 2011), others have forcefully argued for a conceptual relation between conspiratorial ideation and the distortions of reality characteristic of paranoia (Zonis and Joseph 1994). Researchers have consistently found that conspiracy ideation is associated with low levels of trust (Abakalina-Papp et al. 1999; Goertzel 1994) and even subclinical paranoia (Darwin et al. 2011; Grzesiak-Feldman and Ejsmont 2008). Research also has probed whether conspiracy ideation is related to schizotypy, a personality disorder characterized in part by lower-grade, dispositional suspicion of the type found in some forms of schizophrenia. Using a scale called the O-LIFE (Mason et al. 1995), which measures four discrete dimensions of schizotypy, Swami and colleagues (Swami et al. 2013) observed that conspiracy ideation is associated with higher scores on the Unusual Experiences Scale, which measures suspicion as well as other perceptual and cognitive distortions. It appears therefore that conspiracy ideation is reliably related to suspicion. Because suspicion requires selective attention to another’s motive, these findings connect with the observation that acceptance of fictional conspiracy stories increases when the story highlights the potential motive of the alleged conspirator, even when the documented evidence of a conspiracy is poor (Bost and Prunier 2013). Importantly, the connection between suspicion and conspiracy ideation does not in itself imply that the suspicion is pathological. Numerous authors have argued that a degree of suspicion is an adaptive trait in humans, who rely on it to promote equity in the transactions inherent to social living (for one such argument, see Vohs et al. 2007). Attention to others’ motives, although characteristic of paranoia (Darwin et al. 2011), is therefore an ingredient in everyday social interaction (e.g., Cosmides and Tooby 1992). Seen in this light, conspiracy ideation represents not an irrational departure from reality but perhaps rather an intensified focus on information that all humans regularly rely on in social cognition. In other words, some conspiracy ideation may be grounded in the rules of human cognition, which employ a dose of suspicion as a protective mechanism. This notion is broadly consistent with Sunstein and Vermeule’s (2009, 208) suggestion that conspiracy theories require that all events be seen as the product of some actor’s intention.

The extent to which the suspicion of a conspiracy believer is primary (that is, ingrained as its own personality trait) or instead derives from other cognitions or circumstances is unclear. One of the earliest and most interesting findings in the literature is that those who believe in conspiracies demonstrate higher levels of powerlessness and alienation from institutions (Goertzel 1994; Abakalina-Paap et al. 1999; Swami et al. 2010). These findings suggest that conspiracy theorists perceive themselves as vulnerable to exploitation—a circumstance that would call for heightened suspicion. Kramer and Gavrieli (2005) have argued that threat perception—really, hypervigilance to threat—is central to conspiracy ideation. If true, this notion may explain a pattern discussed earlier: that even those who are not predisposed to conspiracy ideation may nonetheless accept a conspiracy theory if the alleged target is their racial, social, or political affiliation. Again, this framework ascribes a type of rationality to the conspiratorial mindset, grounding it in the defensive posture of someone with a heightened sensitivity to potential threat.

Recent findings confirm the basic idea that threat perception and/or perceived vulnerability contribute to conspiracy ideation. In one particularly important study, Whitson and Galinsky (2008) conducted a series of experiments manipulating the extent to which participants perceived control over their worlds—for instance, by having them recall different types of autobiographical memories in which they were more or less in control of events, or by describing the stock market as either random (i.e., unpredictable or out of control) or stable, or by having them engage in a novel cognitive task in which the feedback to participants was either meaningful (suggesting that the participant had control over the outcome) or random. Across the experiments, participants whose sense of control had been undermined consistently tended to over-perceive patterns in subsequent stimuli by making illusory correlations, seeing visual images in random dots, and—notably—perceiving a greater likelihood of conspiracy behind a fictitious event. The authors argued that these false alarms reflect not oversimplification of the available data but a sophisticated exercise in pattern perception. These findings lend some empirical support to a proposal articulated by Michael Shermer: that conspiracy theories are a byproduct of an innate human tendency to seek patterns in the environment, preferring false alarms to misses (Shermer 2011; for elaboration on this point, see Kramer and Gavrieli 2005). Whitson and Galinsky (2008) refine this perspective by defining some of the conditions in which enhanced pattern-seeking may be invoked—specifically the experience of a threat to one’s sense of control over events in one’s life.

What types of perceived threats appear related to conspiracy beliefs, and where do these perceptions come from? Grzesiak-Feldman (2007; 2013) has studied the relationships among dispositional anxiety (“trait”), anxiety in the moment (“state” anxiety), and beliefs in specific conspiracies, yielding inconsistent findings. It appears that the arousal of simple anxiousness is insufficient to evoke conspiratorial ideation, and that the perceived threat must instead have a particular flavor. In some cases the threat is more general and dispositional. Newheiser et al. (2011) observed that existential threat—anxiety related to one’s mortality—was a predictor of belief in the Da Vinci Code conspiracy. For others, the threat appears to be more specific and experiential: Bogart and Thorburn (2006) noted that African-American men, who report more experiences with discrimination than African-American women, also report greater belief in conspiracy theories related to the medical establishment, which plays a prominent role in claims that the HIV virus was created to eradicate the African-American population. For still others, the threat may be political: Uscinski and colleagues’ (2011) inventory of letters to the New York Times found that conspiracy allegations tracked with the movement of political parties in and out of power, with minority-party affiliates primarily responsible for propagating government-related conspiracy theories. Sometimes the threat emerges from a specific event. Rothschild et al. (2012) found that when participants read about environmental destruction caused by unknown forces, they attributed the blame to a scapegoat—an entity with the means and desire to subvert others’ well-being for its own gain. Blaming the scapegoat restored participants’ feelings of control. Importantly, participants given a chance to affirm their feelings of personal control were less likely to blame the scapegoat.

Taken together with Whitson and Galinsky’s (2008) findings, this pattern of results suggests that a lack of control over one’s fate—a sense of being vulnerable to outside forces—tends to heighten vigilance, increasing the tendency to look for patterns and for someone to blame; such is the raw material of conspiracy theories. Increasingly, therefore, those who study conspiracy ideation have been forgoing references to pathology, substituting instead the language of cognitive adaptation. There is a long tradition in the cognitive sciences of seeing “errors” in reasoning as reflections of the normal operation of our goal-oriented information processing systems, and perhaps we can think of conspiracy theories this way as well. As Kramer and Gavrieli (2005, 248) put it, “. . . Conspiracy theories can be construed as complex forms of social cognition that are the end product of an intendedly adaptive sensemaking or coping process.” Given that humans possess the cognitive apparatus required to avoid exploitation (Cosmides and Tooby 1992), it seems reasonable—though not theoretically definitive at present—to consider that conspiracy ideation could be a natural byproduct of such a system, triggered by cues such as perceived vulnerability, or the perception that the alleged conspirator has a motive to engage in subterfuge (Bost et al. 2010; Bost and Prunier 2013; Sunstein and Vermeule 2009).

This article began with the suggestion that we have had little success in beating back conspiracy theories in part because we have failed to study sufficiently the psychological processes underpinning such beliefs. Though a full discussion of the topic is beyond the scope of this article, researchers continue to argue that conspiratorial ideation has harmful effects on both public discourse and personal behavior (e.g., Jolly 2013) and is therefore worth fighting. What hope does the recent surge in research offer? One suggestion implicit in the literature is that we may have to live with some level of conspiracy ideation as a byproduct of the cognitive architecture that comes with communal living. A person without the capacity for suspicion is a target for exploitation, and the necessary kernel of suspicion that exists in all of us might well become turbocharged under the proper circumstances.

And here is where the research has begun to make significant strides: in shifting the conversation ever so slightly from the image of foil-hat-wearing, conspiracy-believing “other people” to a more forgiving conception of conspiracy ideation arising in normal people exposed to the proper triggers—for example, circumstances that evoke feelings of vulnerability. With research having failed so far to draw a bright line between the forensic profiles of conspiracy believers and nonbelievers, searching for additional triggers may be a fruitful avenue for further investigation. Those of us in this young field should also push forward in refining the operational definition of “conspiracy ideation.” Researchers have crafted many different surveys to measure conspiracy beliefs, most of them with uncertain psychometric properties (Brotherton et al. 2013). Agreement on properly validated measurements will ultimately help the research community determine which of the current findings merit our confidence over the long term. In the meantime, the skeptical community may find reason to be less frustrated with conspiracy believers. The research findings so far have done much to humanize them.

References

Abakalina-Paap, Marina, Walter G. Stephan, Traci Craig, et al. 1999. Beliefs in conspiracies. Political Psychology 20(3): 637–647.

Bogart, Laura M., and Sheryl Thorburn. 2003. Exploring the relationship of conspiracy beliefs about HIV/AIDS to sexual behaviors and attitudes among African-American adults. Journal of the National Medical Association 95(11): 1057–1065.

———. 2006. Relationship of African Americans’ sociodemograhic characteristics to belief in conspiracies about HIV/AIDS and birth control. Journal of the National Medical Association 98(7): 1144–1150.

Bost, Preston R., and Stephen G. Prunier. 2013. Rationality in conspiracy beliefs: The role of perceived motive. Psychological Reports: Sociocultural Issues in Psychology 113(1): 118–128.

Bost, Preston R., Stephen G. Prunier, and Allen J. Piper. 2010. Relations of familiarity with reasoning strategies in conspiracy beliefs. Psychological Reports 107(2): 593–602.

Brotherton, Robert, Christopher C. French, and Alan D. Pickering. 2013. Measuring belief in conspiracy theories: The generic conspiracist beliefs scale. Frontiers in Psychology 4: 279.

Butler, Lisa D., Cheryl Koopman, and Philip G. Zimbardo. 1995. The psychological impact of viewing the film “JFK”: Emotions, beliefs, and political behavioral intentions. Political Psychology 16(2): 237–257.

Clark, April, Jennifer K. Mayben, Christine Hartman, et al. 2008. Conspiracy believers about HIV infection are common but not associated with delayed diagnosis or adherence to care. AIDS Patient Care and STDs 22(9): 753–759.

Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby. 1992. Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, edited by L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, 163–228. New York: Oxford University Press.

Darwin, Hannah, Nick Neave, and Joni Holmes. 2011. Belief in conspiracy theories: The role of paranormal beliefs, paranoid ideation and schizotypy. Personality and Individual Differences 50: 1289–1293.

Drinkwater, Ken, Neil Dagnall, and Andrew Parker. 2012. Reality testing, conspiracy theories, and paranormal beliefs. Journal of Parapsychology 76(1): 57–77.

Furnham, Adrian. 2013. Commercial conspiracy theories: A pilot study. Frontiers in Psychology 4:379.

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Grzesiak-Feldman, Monika. 2007. Conspiracy thinking and state-trait anxiety in young Polish adults. Psychological Reports 100(1): 199–202.

———. 2013. The effect of high-anxiety situations on conspiracy thinking. Current Psychology 32(1): 100–118.

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Leman, Patrick J., and Marco Cinnirella. 2013. Beliefs in conspiracy theories and the need for cognitive closure. Frontiers in Psychology 4:378.

Mason, Oliver, Gordon Claridge, and Mike Jack­son. 1995. New scales for the assessment of schizotypy. Personality and Individual Differences 18: 7–13.

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Nelson, Jessica C., Glenn Adams, Nyla R. Branscombe, et al. 2010. The role of historical knowledge in perception of race-based conspiracies. Race and Social Problems 2(2): 69–80.

Newheiser, Anna-Kaisa, Miguel Farias, and Nicole Tausch. 2011. The functional nature of conspiracy beliefs: Examining the underpinnings of belief in the Da Vinci Code conspiracy. Personality and Individual Differences 51: 1007–1011.

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Parsons, Sharon, William Simmons, Frankie Shinhoster, et al. 1999. A test of the grapevine: An empirical examination of conspiracy theories among African Americans. Sociological Spectrum 19: 201–222.

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Rationalists have found the ubiquity and persistence of belief in the supernatural hard to satisfactorily explain. Recent psychological research uncovering a universal, innate, adaptive tendency toward purpose-based intuitions in explaining the world may have largely resolved the question.

Much of the literature and discussion among the skeptical, agnostic, humanist, and rationalist communities is concerned with what people believe, the evidence supporting or refuting these beliefs, and the consequences of these positions. This is a perennial endeavor, and it will continue as long as variety and change occur in people’s beliefs.

However, an issue addressed almost as much—why so many people believe “weird” or unsubstantiated things—presents a different sort of question. It has an empirical, scientific, psychological answer that, when substantially formulated, should require no more than occasional tinkering or elaboration as research and knowledge on human cognitive function gradually progresses.

Numerous surveys have shown us that the most widespread, persistent category of such beliefs is in supernatural beings—in gods, ghosts, and suchlike. A sufficient explanation for this phenomenon is critical for several reasons. It is necessary to counter the “So many believe, therefore there must be something in it” argument. It can guide us strategically in our quest to enable more people to hold beliefs that are evidence-based and are therefore more likely to correspond to the realities that the Enlightenment and the scientific process have revealed to us.

Many explanations for other weird beliefs, usually in the form of cognitive errors, have been formulated. But continuing speculation over why intelligent, educated, stable, happy people are drawn in overwhelming majorities in most countries to unsubstantiated, arbitrary, paradigm-shattering beliefs in supernatural agents indicates that a further form of powerful, almost universal, cognitive error remains to be identified.

Fortunately, recent psychological research uncovering a universal human tendency toward “promiscuous teleological intuitions”—strong purpose- based intuitions (Kelemen et al. 2012)—has brought us to the point of a substantial explanation for widespread belief in supernatural agents despite a paucity of evidence for them, such that we may now be able to move on from speculation about multiple casual factors and intuitive suggestions about subsequent tentative responses to assertive policy development and coordinated social action.

Scientific and Philosophical Arguments Rarely Work

Some will argue that the answer to the question “Why do people believe in gods?” is a straightforward one. “It’s due to the evidence,” they say. This answer is adequate for questions such as “Why do people believe in the Sun?” or “Why do people believe the Sun is powered by a fusion process?” because the relevant evidence has been assembled and a consensus of opinion/belief has formed. But it cannot explain the ubiquitous belief in gods across almost every culture on Earth because no consensus has developed supporting belief in any of them even after several thousand years of research and debate.

This is starkly illustrated by the existence of a substantial, intelligent, educated atheist/agnostic community, and by the hundreds of mutually contradictory opinions about the gods believed in (i.e., religions). The evidence for any supernatural beings is clearly inadequate to explain the widespread and profound belief in so many particular ones. Scientific and philosophical argument has, it seems, convinced no one and changed very few minds on the matter.

Why People Believe Other Weird Things

Similar questions are asked about people believing in other evidence-sparse phenomena such as alternative medicine, diagnostic auras, flying saucers, Yeti, and so on.

A common denominator among these examples is a lack of understanding of what constitutes real evidence. In theory at least, if a believer were to be presented with sufficient evidence one way or the other and had been educated to understand what counts as real evidence and why, then they could be persuaded not to bother with, let alone rely on, their homeopathic cancer cure or the latest pyramid scheme. Most explanations for the above beliefs involve cognitive errors such as confirmation bias, pareidolia, frequency illusion, illusory correlation, availability heuristic, bandwagon effect, and so on. The scientific method was largely developed to help us counter these universal human tendencies toward making errors in our thinking.

However, as has been described, when it comes to religious beliefs, scientific and philosophical arguments rarely work. People do not stumble into a misguided belief in a god through deductive error. They seek out, assume, or create de novo for themselves such a belief. It seems to be Homo sapiens’ default position.

The most similar nontheistic widespread beliefs would be in the many conspiracy theories attracting the interest of up to half of our population (Oliver and Wood 2012). These also involve an attraction to evidence-sparse assumptions about powerful purposeful agents behind what the rest of us assume is more likely to be the naive, messy behaviors of very ordinary people.

There Must Be a Cognitive Urge or Instinct

So it is not enough to propose to a god-believer or a goblin-believer, “You don’t have enough evidence, so you are probably wrong.” They “just know” they are right; there is no clinching evidence against their beliefs, and most other people share a similar intuition. These features, they feel, place the onus on the skeptic (no matter how unfair to William of Occam this may seem) to explain how the intuitions of so many intelligent people can be so consistently wrong in roughly the same direction.

If logic and evidence do not explain the near-universal belief in some higher power, then it must be in the nature of human beings to want to believe in it. There must be some drive or urge or innate cognitive tendency toward such belief. Almost every culture ever studied has included a—often dominant—metaphysical element despite a lack of any substantial evidence. Hence, the question “Why do people believe in gods?” is a psychological one about drives, instincts, or cognitive tendencies, which can therefore be answered psychologically and scientifically.

Past Psychological Explanations

Several explanations for this psychological phenomenon have been proposed over the years. But the question still arises and is addressed in books, articles, and at every skeptical conference I have attended. Clearly, the explanations tendered to date have not been comprehensive, explanatory, satisfying, or instructive enough for a working consensus to form on this issue, allowing us to thus move on using what we now better understand.

Listed below are a few of the many interesting, perhaps useful—but incomplete—explanations for ubiquitous god-belief that have been hypothesized in the past.

The Fear of Death

The price of consciousness is an awareness of one’s own inevitable death. The emotion of fear has motivated the behavioral avoidance of death in all higher organisms. In humans, therefore, this fear is instinctive, and people have a massive incentive to self-delude and to assume (despite a dearth of evidence) that an afterlife awaits. This carries the bonus of promising a reunion with deceased loved ones.

However, this explanation for ubiquitous beliefs in gods, angels, leprechauns, and suchlike is not sufficient. It does not explain hundreds of common extraneous features beyond the promise of an afterlife that are found in religions around the world, such as notions of angels and demons, sin and ritual, hell and sacrifice, goblins and ghouls, prayers for help, and rules to live by in this life. It only explains why many people choose to assume some form of consciousness after death. A creator god or a judgment day god or an interactive benevolent god is not necessary for this.

Further, religious people still seem to fear and mourn death just as much as atheists do. As a sop to this fear, the afterlife assumption does not really work very well, except perhaps to motivate suicide bombers. So the fear of death explains only a tiny fraction of people’s supernatural beliefs.

Desire to Control People

Friedrich Nietzsche, though an atheist, approved of religion as a means for the elite minority of humanity (the “supermen”) to control the gullible unimportant majority. Religions have clearly been used in this way throughout history, both as a means of internal state social control and as rhetoric to justify and excuse wars actually instigated by motives of power, wealth, or land acquisition.

But ruling elites would be unlikely to successfully delude the masses, and maintain the delusion for centuries, with a narrative that did not come naturally to the people. The people must, at root, want to see the emperor’s new clothes. The desire to control can explain the construction of religions but not their eager adoption. For example, Socrates proposed that the strata of society be justified by disseminating to its ordinary citizens the “myth of the metals” in which it is contended that we are all born with gold, silver, bronze, or iron mixed in our souls. Only the first of these can make us fit to rule.

This “noble lie” did not take off anywhere near as well as the tale that some of us are God’s chosen and some are unworthy infidels. The “divine right”of kings to rule grew from this—more popular—noble lie. What is the critical difference between these alternate narratives, explaining their contrasting popularities? Could it be that bronze in your soul is only a cause of your mediocrity, whereas God’s allocation is done to a purpose? I will revisit this critical difference.

Direct Religious Experience

Some people have chosen to interpret their mystical experiences, drug-induced hallucinations, hyperventilation symptoms, psychotic episodes, hypoglycemic effects, near-death experiences, or dreams as direct evidence of a spiritual world and of a god. However, this path to faith is a minority route. It does not explain god-belief’s ubiquity. Many more people believe in God than have seen him.

Nor is it an inevitable deduction from such phenomena. Neurological and psychological explanations have been developed for all these experiences. We must still explain why so many people prefer to blunt Occam’s razor by assuming that elaborate fantastical supernatural events are occurring—rather than concerning but ultimately mundane ones.

An Evolutionary Advantage

Several theorists, such as psychologist Jesse Bering (2012) in The Belief Instinct, have claimed that a tendency to believe in a higher being that oversees and punishes us has the evolutionary advantage of making people more cooperative, conformist, patient, and restrained and that societies with such individuals and with a religious culture will more likely thrive or at least survive.

However, this hypothesis has been hotly debated. It better describes the processes of cultural natural selection and evolution among the memes of competing societies than the processes of biological natural selection among the genes of competing individuals. There are clearer examples of cooperative societies flourishing than of submissive individuals procreating profusely. Genghis Khan is a stark illustration of a highly nonconformist, uncooperative, impatient, and unrestrained individual whose multitudinous progeny subsequently dominated an entire gene pool.

Furthermore, we are not trying to understand a ubiquitous belief in a certain god (a meme). We are trying to understand a cognitive trait, skill, or tendency (influenced by a gene). Having been uncertain to date what this tendency is, we cannot assume it is overall desirable and evolutionarily advantageous. Is it gullibility, religiosity, suggestibility, conscientiousness or “consciencefulness,” superstitiousness, or submissiveness? Which of these confer survival advantage for the individual and why? The evolutionary advantage hypothesis for god-belief is as yet incomplete.

The Brain’s “God Spot”

A related line of explanation has arisen since the proliferation of fairly precise functional brain-scan studies using fMRI, SPECT, PET, and other technologies. Claims have been made (e.g., d’Mayberry 2014) that when people are experiencing “transcendence”—meditating or praying—that certain regions of the average brain (people’s brain maps do vary) light up.

This very promising technology has unfortunately been taken, especially in the mass media, as a new source of explanation for a raft of familiar mental phenomena. For example, when alcoholics have a drink, certain brain regions react. The public and even some scientists have concluded from these findings that problems such as alcoholism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or depression are somehow more “real” now that we have found a neurological site or correlate. The logic here is bizarre. Has any scientist ever asserted, or even imagined, that there is no neurological substrate or correlate to all mental activity? And the fact that brain bit X fires up explains nothing. Nor does it, yet, tell us what to do about any of these problems beyond what we have discovered to be useful at a psychological level fifty years ago (Satel and Lilienfeld 2013). So if there is a God spot, why is there a God spot and what exactly does it do?

A Need for Meaning

The meaning of a person’s life is a cognitive concept. It only exists if viewed or held by a conscious entity, just as purpose only exists if there is a “purposer.”

The meaning or purpose in an individual’s life can be derived internally or externally. Common internally derived sources of purpose (developed or appreciated by the person him- or herself) include achievement, procreation, “happiness,” or contribution to mankind or to fellow travelers.

But this source appears to be insufficient for many people. Externally imposed purposes abound, such as God’s grand plan, avoiding Hell, pleasing God, fear of God, seeking sainthood, etc. These are relatively simplistic and immature motivations for doing good or striving hard, just as they provide simplistic, stifling, and immature explanations for natural phenomena. A child may be satisfied when asking “Why should I behave?” to be told “Because I say so” or “Because it’s good” or “Because God says so.” But an adult may need a more sophisticated explanation in terms of effect on others or on society’s cohesive functioning. In the same way a reference to Thor when explaining lightning is a simplistic and stifling response. It stunts further inquiry but has satisfied a surprising number of otherwise intelligent people throughout history.

So the apparent human desire for meaning or purpose does in part explain the almost universal phenomenon of god-belief. But the question remains: Why are so many people focused upon externally derived over internally derived purpose? Similarly, humans clearly thirst for knowledge and explanation. But why do so many leap to “because God made it so” explanations for natural phenomena? As Tim Minchin asked in his beat poem and short film Storm:

Isn’t this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex,
Wonderful unfathomable
Natural world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap man-made myths and monsters?

Promiscuous Teleological Intuition

The work of psychologist Deborah Kelemen and her research colleagues may enable us to now fill the explanatory gaps I have described. Drawing on her own and others’ research programs, Kelemen, director of the Child Cognition Laboratory at Boston University, has found that children around the world “evidence a general bias to treat objects and behaviors as existing for a purpose” (Kelemen 2004, 295). There is now overwhelming evidence that children are innately prone to “promiscuous teleological intuitions,” preferring teleological, purpose-based rather than physical-causal explanations of living and nonliving natural objects (Kelemen et al. 2013).

For example, young children do not see raining as merely what a cloud does but as what it is “made for.” If asked why prehistoric rocks are pointy, children will greatly prefer “so that animals could scratch on them when they got itchy” over “bits of stuff piled up for a long time.”

Early parenting or explaining makes little difference to this strong tendency. It appears to be modifiable only from around ten years of age. For example, the children of both religious fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist parents, when asked why a certain animal exists, favor “God made it” or “a person made it” over “it evolved” or “it appeared.” This tendency declines only after eleven years of age and only in the children of non-fundamentalist parents.

Much research supporting and developing this hypothesis has been undertaken. From infancy, humans are excellent “agency detectors,” sensitive to others’ mental states. Even twelve-month-olds will follow the gaze direction of symbolic faces. Children’s complex imaginary companions, like supernatural agents, occur cross-culturally (Taylor 1999).

Kelemen’s explanatory hypothesis is that this generalized default view, that entities are intentionally caused by someone for a purpose, is a side effect of a socially intelligent mind that privileges intentional explanations.

It is not difficult to posit the evolutionary advantages of such “attribution of agency” among infants and children. An infant’s entire world comprises an intentional agent—its parent. The sooner and more thoroughly an infant can develop a “theory of mind” and respond accordingly, the better for it. It must attach. The parent must bond. It must anticipate and manipulate its world on the assumption of purposeful agency occurring all around it. An absence of such is starkly illustrated by the autistic child, to whom its parents are just another set of shapes in its visual field. No attachment occurs, and in less affluent, protected, aware times than we have now, such children rarely survived. They could not control their (almost entirely interpersonal) environment and starved, ate poison, or just wandered away.

The tendency to attribution of agency extends beyond the world of man-made artifacts to the natural world. Children intuitively identify people as the designing agent of artifacts and God as the designing agent of nature (Kelemen 2004, 299). “All known folk religions involve nonnatural agents and intentional causation—the substrate of intuitive theism” (Kelemen 2004, 297).

Reasoning about all aspects of nature in non-teleological physical-reductionist terms is a relatively recent development in the history of human thought (Kelemen 1999a), and contemporary adults are still surprisingly bad at it. For example, evolution is generally misconstrued as a quasi-intentional needs-responsive designing force (Kelemen 2004). But our brains did not evolve “to enable consciousness.” Our brains evolved, and consciousness resulted. No purpose, just causes.

Aristotle distinguished “efficient” causes (the antecedent sources of objects and events) from “final” causes (the ends, goals, functions, or purposes of objects or events). Unfortunately, his focus was on the latter. He applied teleological explanations to all living and nonliving natural phenomena. For example, leaves exist on a plant to provide shade, and water exists on Earth to sustain life (Kelemen et al. 2013, 1074). Since the Renaissance, physical scientists have overtly rejected teleological explanation in search of physical-causal, “efficient” explanations. However, under psychological stress even physical scientists will tend to revert to default teleological explanations such as endorsement of “trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe” (Kelemen et al. 2013). So promiscuous teleological explanation is almost universal among children but is also a developmentally persistent cognitive default position. For example, the tendency returns in strength if a person develops Alzheimer’s disease later in life (Lombrozo et al. 2007).

Kelemen et al. (2013) concluded that the teleological tendency is robust, resilient, developmentally enduring, arises early, and becomes masked with cognitive maturity and education but is not replaced. Hence religious belief is cognitively natural and culturally resilient. “Notions of purpose are central underpinnings of the world’s religions” (Kelemen et al. 2013, 1081).

The rise and persistence of the intelligent design argument for God in the wake of the demolition of creationism’s simplistic claims is an illustration of this resilience (Kelemen and Rosset 2009). Children naturally see lions, mountains, and icebergs as “made for something” (Kelemen 1999b), irrespective of parental explanations (Kelemen et al. 2005) or ambient cultural religiosity (Kelemen 2003). Later in life they will still tend to assume that “Mother Nature” or “Gaia” is a goal-directed, self-preserving organism (Kelemen and Rosset 2009)—another “attribution of agency.” “As evidenced by many religions, artifact design represents a powerful analogical base that children and adults use to understand the natural world” (Kelemen et al. 2012, 440).

“Promiscuous teleological intuition” and excessive “attribution of agency” do not explain all indiscriminate, non-skeptical, or paranormal beliefs. Other cognitive errors, such as confirmation bias, must be invoked to understand why so many think that acupuncture will cure migraine or that a plesiosaur lurks in Loch Ness.

However, a tendency toward conspiracism may be explained in exactly the same way as ubiquitous god-belief. The dictum “If it’s a choice between a conspiracy and a cock-up . . .” contrasts purposeful, powerful, inferred, possibly malevolent agency with natural, caused-but-not-directed, “random” events controlled by only the laws of nature and mathematics. Some people clearly have a strong cognitive trait tendency to assume conscious purposeful agents are behind most events in society. If not God or Satan, then powerful people.

If the similarity is meaningful, we would expect that people with a strong cognitive bias toward promiscuous teleological intuition would also tend toward both god-belief and conspiracism. This is exactly what we find. For example, Oliver and Wood (2012) found that a supernatural belief scale strongly predicted support for conspiracism. Both correlated with a measure of magical thinking. To illustrate, they found an extremely high correlation between conspiracism and belief that “We are currently living in End Times as foretold by Biblical Prophecy.”

The bizarre and surprising observation that, even in the face of profound advances in the scientific physical-reductionist understanding of nature, most of humanity insists on clinging to evidence-sparse, redundant, arbitrary notions of gods, demons, goblins, nature spirits, or the recent vacuous fallback “feeling” that “there just must be something there,” has not been adequately explained until now. This has left psychologists unsatisfied, allowed theists to argue that the cross-cultural profusion of metaphysical belief is evidence that there must be something to it, and atheists and agnostics with some uncertainty as to how to correct this widespread “dangerous delusion.”

A recently developed, well-supported explanatory hypothesis suggests that the ubiquity of human belief in supernatural agents in the face of a paucity of evidence derives from an innate cognitive tendency to attribute agency to all active entities in the world and to therefore assume purposive motivations within those entities, and indeed to the world itself. This tendency is highly adaptive for infants and young children and will therefore be favored in evolutionary terms.

That it is innate is supported by its universality among children and its cross-cultural dominance among adults. Kelemen (2004) has described a scientific education as suppressing rather than replacing teleological explanatory tendencies, citing the finding that scientifically uneducated Romanian Gypsy adults have promiscuous teleological intuitions much like scientifically naïve British and American elementary school children (Casler and Kelemen 2008).

However, such findings do not imply a dramatically new solution. We have long known that education can make people less superstitious and less religious. Less educated and politically knowledgeable people exhibit higher levels of conspiracism (Oliver and Wood 2012). Interestingly, Kelemen et al.’s (2013) physical scientists (who became more teleological under pressure) performed no better than equivalently schooled humanities scholars, and both held their line better than undergraduates. So a specialized scientific training and knowledge base is not necessary. Any further education seems to help one outgrow teleological promiscuity.

There is no perfect negative correlation between intelligence and teleological delusion. Great minds have applied themselves to the arbitrary theological intricacies of the gods’ purposes for us. The ability to see past or see through our unjustified attributions of agency and purpose in the world may have more to do with imagination (Bakker 2013) once an alternative physical-causal worldview has been introduced, by education, as a sufficient explanatory option. The question “What if…?” has led to more insights than has brute intellectual power.

The question “What if the world is really big and round and there is no absolute ‘up’ and ‘down’?” overtook the flat-Earth theory. “What if the world is not 6,000 years old but is billions of years old?” has nearly supplanted creationism. “What if I am my brain? How would it look to me?” has dented the need for a soul or immaterial mind to explain consciousness (Bakker 2013). So the best cures for teleological delusion are those we already know of: A high level of education; encouragement to think independently, flexibly, and with insatiable curiosity; and having an input as soon as people are capable of abstract conceptual thought.

The major contribution of this new evidence-based conceptualization of the problem is that we now know more clearly what we are fighting. Promiscuous teleological intuition is powerful, innate, and adaptive for the young. But it is not adaptive for the adolescent or adult leaving the human environment of the family hut for the natural world of the forest, where food does not present in the hands of intentional beings but on the branches of naturally occurring trees. Similarly, humanity may now use its growing knowledge and insight to escape its dependent teleological worldview in favor of a more mature one.

Ironically, the motto thus reinforced may be a biblically sourced one:

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” (1 Corinthians 13:11)

References

Bakker, Gary M. 2013. God: A Psychological Assessment. Boca Raton, FL: Universal-Publishers.

Bering, J. 2012. The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Casler, K., and D. Kelemen. 2008. Developmental continuity in teleo-functional explanation: Reasoning about nature among Romanian Romani adults. Journal of Cognition and Development 9: 340–362.

d’Mayberry, D. 2014. The psychology of faith: The human quest for meaning. The Australian Atheist 43(1): 15–18.

Kelemen, D. 1999a. Beliefs about purpose: On the origins of teleological thought. In M. Corballis and S. Lea (Eds.), The Descent of Mind: Psychological Perspectives on Hominid Evolution (pp. 278–294). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

———. 1999b. The scope of teleological thinking in preschool children. Cognition 70: 241–272.

———. 2003. British and American children’s preferences for teleo-functional explanations of the natural world. Cognition 88: 201–221.

———. 2004. Are children “intuitive theists”? Reasoning about purpose and design in nature. Psychological Science 15(5): 295–301.

Kelemen, D., M. Callanan, K. Casler, et al. 2005. Why things happen: Teleological explanation in parent-child conversations. Developmental Psychology 41: 251–164.

Kelemen, D., and E. Rosset. 2009. The human function compunction: Teleological explanation in adults. Cognition 111: 138–143.

Kelemen, D., J. Rottman, and R. Seston. 2013. Professional physical scientists display tenacious teleological tendencies: Purpose-based reasoning as a cognitive default. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 142(4): 1074–1083.

Kelemen, D., R. Seston, and L. Saint Georges. 2012. The designing mind: Children’s reasoning about intended function and artifact structure. Journal of Cognition and Development 13(4): 439–453.

Lombrozo, T., D. Kelemen, and D. Zaitchik. 2007. Inferring design: Evidence of a preference for teleological explanations in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Psychological Science 18(11): 999–1006.

Oliver, J.E., and T.J. Wood. 2012. Conspiracy theories, magical thinking, and the paranoid style(s) of mass opinion. University of Chicago Department of Political Science Working Paper Series. Online at http://political-science.uchicago.edu/faculty-workingpapers/.

Satel, S.L., and S.O. Lilienfeld. 2013. Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience. New York: Basic Civitas Books.

Taylor, M. 1999. Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them. New York: Oxford University Press.

New Mexicans for Science and Reason (NMSR) has been proudly on its own for twenty-five years. But it had its origin in a national and even international movement to help spread science-based skepticism around the country and the world.

In the 1980s, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), founded with considerable fanfare in 1976, began an aggressive campaign to help create local and regional skeptic groups in the United States (as well as in other countries).

As editor of CSICOP’s journal the Skeptical Inquirer and a member of the CSICOP Executive Council, as well as an Albuquerque resident since 1977, I felt New Mexico needed a skeptics group to help promote good science and critical thinking. New Mexico has a proud scientific and engineering tradition, with a number of first-class scientists and engineers. It also was the locus of a lot of New Age and pseudoscientific hooey.

The first groundwork was laid in 1987. I had learned about John Geohegan, a local engineer and humanist, and had my eye on him as a potential leader of such a group. On December 2, 1987, I wrote to our headquarters in Buffalo, New York, asking them to send a letter and handbook to John, who “has expressed interest in helping me/us start a local group in the Albuquerque area.” I said, “I feel an increasing need and interest for a New Mexico group. But I have little time to organize one myself. Nevertheless, I would want to form a distinguished advisory board of scientists and scholars. Most I already have in mind. My idea is I would play a co-chairman or some such role.”

On December 8, 1987, CSICOP headquarters mailed a letter to John. “We have been given your name by Ken Frazier as being interested in starting a local group in the Albuquerque area. We appreciate your enthusiasm and enclose a manual for groups for you to read. “

John responded in friendly fashion but said “my decision is not to start a group now.” He gave a number of reasons, but ended, “I’m going to bide my time. . . . I’m still here and interested so don’t cross me out of your memory bank.” (John Geohegan to Mark Plummer, CSICOP, January 29, 1988.)

Two years elapsed before that fledgling effort came to fruition.

But then it happened. On February 8, 1990, Barry Karr, then the new Executive Director of CSICOP, a position he still happily holds today, sent out a letter on CSICOP letterhead to every Skeptical Inquirer subscriber in most of New Mexico. I think all subscribers from at least Socorro in the south through the Albuquerque area and to Santa Fe and Los Alamos in the north got it.

The letter noted that the Skeptical Inquirer had been published for fourteen years and “has a healthy circulation through the U.S.A.” It said that over the past eight years local organizations with aims similar to CSICOP had been established, and CSICOP would like to see the formation of a “properly constituted group” in New Mexico that would “be committed to the scientific method. . . . We would appreciate your thoughts as to how we can encourage the formation of a new local group in New Mexico.” It asked for help identifying key scientists or journalists and key university faculty members to whom CSICOP could send information packages.

The letter concluded: “If you would like to help start a new New Mexico Skeptics group please complete the form on the other side. You may suggest other ways we can expand in your state. We would greatly appreciate your thoughts and suggestions.”

I have copies of thirty-seven of those surveys returned to our Buffalo headquarters, all filled out by hand. Many respondents volunteered to become actively involved. Some of the people who returned surveys are still active today, such as M.B. (Mark) Boslough, Gerald Shelton, Ted Cloak, and Rick Buss. A number of responses came from Santa Fe, including Joe Szimhart (an expert on cults who now works in Pennsylvania); Sam Balleen, the owner of the La Fonda Hotel and a self-described “physics groupie”; and writer/historian John Pen La Farge.

The next step was an organizing meeting. I arranged for the meeting hall at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History on May 16, 1990. CSICOP paid the $40 rental fee. I still have that receipt and rental agreement.

In April 1990, CSICOP headquarters sent out an attractive one-page flyer inviting to the meeting all those who responded to the survey, as well as other SI subscribers.

“Come Witness the Birth of a New Group: The New Mexico Skeptics, May 16, 1990, 7:00 p.m., New Mexico Museum of Natural History, Multipurpose Room 3-4, Albuquerque,” the one-page flyer began. “Meet: Ken Frazier, editor of the Skeptical Inquirer, and fellow skeptics from around the state. This will be an organizational meeting to determine officers, membership dues, newsletter participants, and the constitution for your group.”

I have a brief hand-written note I made to bring to that meeting, with three main agenda questions:

• Do We Want a Local Group?
• What Should It Do?
• What Are the Major Local Issues?

Later that night I typed up a two-page memo about that meeting. Here are some of my recollections and my comments at the time:

It was a very good meeting; I officiated (along with my wife, Ruth). Twenty-eight people filled the meeting room to capacity. One of them, I was pleased to see, was John Geohegan.

I began by telling them that New Mexico was tied for second among all the fifty states in Skeptical Inquirer subscribers per capita. (California was first; New Mexico, Colorado, Washington, and Massachusetts tied for second.)

They expressed enthusiastic support for a local group. They engaged in lively discussion of possible goals, programs, and policies.

“The group,” I wrote, “will work to critically evaluate local paranormal and fringe-science claims and promote science education, scientific inquiry, and clear and creative thinking.”

That was a big first step. The next big step in the meeting, and a giant relief for me, was when John Geohegan kindly agreed to serve as chairman. Whew! Thank you, John! He was then head of the New Mexico humanist society, but his term was ending in the fall. I had told the attendees I could not head the group (in addition to editing SI I worked full time at Sandia Labs) but would actively participate and provide help, advice, and support. I gave John a sample of a generic constitution and bylaws CSICOP had in its kit for local groups and a copy of one local group’s actual bylaws.

A newsletter was deemed extremely important, and John Smallwood, head of a strong contingent who came from Santa Fe, said he would see to that task. (John had written to me the previous year, in January 1989, saying, “Some of us in Santa Fe would very much like to meet with you to explore the possibility of a local group of skeptics.” Pen La Farge, became editor of our new group’s first newsletter, The Enchanted Skeptic.)

Dues were not decided upon until the next meeting, but participants in that first meeting each gave a dollar to Ted Cloak to ensure there would be postage to mail a notification about the next. It was decided to meet once a month, on the second Wednesday of the month. Someone (I think John) suggested the UNM Law School, where the local humanists met at and which did not charge a rental fee, as a possible alternative to the Museum. (That suggestion was soon adopted.)

Don Abbott, a retired engineer from Santa Fe and one of the participants in the meeting, wrote a very complimentary letter of reflections to me the very next day: “Until last night’s meeting each one of us subscribers must have felt—in John Donne’s phrase—‘an island unto himself’ so it has been encouraging to find that there are like-minded others ‘out there.’”

As for the name of the group, well, that wasn’t decided until the next meeting, on July 11, 1990. I had a strong idea that I wanted “science” in the name but I wanted to hear others’ ideas. My notes of that meeting include some interesting suggestions for names:
New Mexicans for Scientific Thinking in Everyday Life
Group for Scientific Inquiry
Society of New Mexico Skeptics
Enchanted Skeptics
(Dis)Enchanted Skeptics
New Mexico Seekers of the Truth
New Mexicans for Everyday Reason
Scientific Inquirers for Reality

I strongly urged that our name say what we are for, not what we are against. I don’t recall how much discussion it took, but without too much debate my suggestion of New Mexicans for Science and Reason was voted on and approved.

We have been known by that name ever since. I think it has served us well.

Yea! We had a name, a chairman (John Geohegan; I was vice-chairman for the first year or so), a secretary (Ted Cloak), a treasurer (John J. Miller), a newsletter (The Enchanted Skeptic, succeeded a few years later by the monthly NMSR Reports, now it its twenty-first volume), and soon corporate status as a 501(3C) nonprofit organization. We were off to the skeptical races.

* * * *

From that very beginning NMSR has been in excellent hands. John ran all the meetings after that for some years. Sometime in the early 1990s a young physicist/mathematician and amateur magician named Dave Thomas started showing up and impressing us with his knowledge, interest, and skills. By 1995, Dave was NMSR’s Vice-President and editor of NMSR Reports. Eventually, by their mutual agreement, Dave became president (remaining editor) and John became second in command. (I happily stepped down from any further official role.) Early on, Nancy Shelton became the treasurer, and she has remained in that post all these years.

I am so proud of NMSR. I am pleased to think that I had something to do with its founding, but its wonderful success over this past quarter century has been due totally to the dedication and hard work of John, Dave, Nancy, and the many, many loyal members who come to all the meetings and take part in lively discussions.

I have many times remarked to my skeptical colleagues around the country (and around the world) that I consider NMSR to be one of the best and most dynamic local skeptic groups. It meets every month; it has interesting, authoritative speakers; it has avoided the political in-fighting that has doomed many groups; it is run efficiently and economically; and it has been a consistent, strong presence.

It certainly is one of the most scientifically oriented skeptic groups in the United States. Many, if not most, of the speakers at meetings are scientists or academics reporting on their scientific work and insights. But where their scientific field is misunderstood or distorted by the public toward paranormal or pseudoscientific agendas, those same speakers used their expertise to clearly enunciate the differences between good science and bad science.

I am proud of my long association with NMSR. I am so pleased to congratulate it on its twenty-fifth anniversary. I so much admire all of you who have made it work so well all these years. I look forward with pleasure and anticipation to NMSR’s continued strong role in the promotion of science and the exposure of pseudoscience for years and years to come.

Many readers will remember facilitated communication (FC). Back in the early 1990s, a new treatment came rushing onto the scene making promises that were enormously attractive to parents of children with autism. Proponents of FC claimed that many people diagnosed with autism were actually suffering from a physical rather than a cognitive disability. Trapped inside their faulty bodies were high functioning—and in some cases exceptionally intelligent—people. All that was required to free the person inside was to create a communication pathway.

That pathway turned out to be someone else’s guiding hand. Equipped with a keyboard and a facilitator who supported and steadied the communicator’s hand, children and adults who had never spoken a word began to type out full sentences and, in some cases, poetry and novels. Many psychologists and special education professionals were so taken with the results that they began to question their basic understanding of autism. The media quickly seized on the phenomena, reporting heartwarming stories of recovery from the prison of disability. Word spread rapidly, creating a strong demand for training, facilitators, and keyboards.

[1]

Then things turned ugly. Some of the messages typed out by communicators included serious accusations of child sexual abuse. Judges ordered parents removed from their homes, and children were placed in protective care—all based on the testimony of previously mute children and adults with autism who were now using FC. Suddenly it became very important to determine who was doing the typing—the person with autism or the typically functioning facilitator. Shockingly, the question of authorship had never been examined. Parents and practitioners were genuinely convinced FC worked, but no one had bothered to perform the necessary tests to show who was responsible for the messages being typed out. The promise of this mode of communication was so attractive and the results so welcome that FC had been adopted by parents and schools all over the country without anyone bothering to put it to the test. Now that serious criminal charges were being made through FC, scientific tests were urgently needed.

Once tests were conducted, the results could not have been clearer. In simple picture identification studies where communicators and facilitators were sometimes shown the same object and sometimes shown different objects, answers were only correct when the facilitator and the communicator saw the same thing. All the evidence pointed to facilitators controlling the typing.

One important study was done at the O.D. Heck Developmental Center in Schenectady, New York. The center had adopted FC and was using it with many of its students with autism and other developmental disorders. After devising a double-blind test, the staff found that in hundreds of trials where a correct response was possible, not a single correct response was observed. The results for FC were crushingly negative, despite the fact that students worked under the most favorable conditions when they and their facilitators were comfortable and ready to be tested.

Suddenly the tide shifted. A series of peer-reviewed studies began to appear in the mid-1990s, all showing the same thing. Facilitators unknowingly controlled the FC typing in an Ouija board-like phenomenon. It was the ideomotor effect all over again. Defendants in the child abuse cases were found not guilty based on the unreliability of the testimony against them, and many professional organizations issued policy statements indicating that FC was not supported by evidence and should not be used. The FC drama was covered in Skeptical Inquirer, and a very influential PBS Frontline program “Prisoners of Silence” documented the rise and fall of FC. “Prisoners of Silence” quickly became a standard component of many introductory psychology classes, as a dramatic example of the importance of critical thinking and the power of science to answer important questions.

The Zombie Fad

That should have been that. If ever a treatment was unequivocally discredited, FC was it. Most scientifically-minded practitioners assumed that FC had been completely vanquished. Nothing could be further from the truth. An important article published in Evidence Based Communication Assessment and Intervention in February makes clear that FC never died. It was simply repackaged to make it easier to promote after the debacle of the 1990s.^[2]

The authors of the article, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Julia Marshall, James T. Todd, and Howard C. Shane, give a detailed account of what happened to FC after its rise and (apparent) fall in the 1990s. Summarizing the results of several surveys of parents and professionals they find:

… FC use remains widespread in many quarters, with a range of current use post 2000 ranging from 1.6% to 9.8% of children with autism. The findings of Price (2013) further suggest that many students who specialize in communication disorders believe FC to be effective for autism.^[3]

What? How did this happen?

Lilienfeld and his colleagues show that, while those convinced by the data moved on to other therapies, the proponents of FC never gave up. Douglas Biklen of Syracuse University is the most prominent supporter of FC in the United States. His Facilitated Communication Institute at Syracuse has been renamed Institute on Communication and Inclusion, and in 2012 it received a $500,000 John B. Hussman Foundation grant to support FC research, training, and dissemination.^[4] The University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability has been a loyal supporter of FC since the 1990s, and regularly sponsors meetings of an FC “skill builders” group.

A Fad by Any Other Name

As suggested by the removal of the phrase facilitated communication from title of the Syracuse institute, FC’s survival was helped by renaming and repackaging an old product. FC is now commonly called “supported typing” or “progressive kinesthetic feedback,” and a new variation on FC called “rapid prompting” or “informative pointing” is gaining in popularity.

Saved By Typing is an organization that promotes facilitated communication through this YouTube channel, a Facebook page, and a website.

The Media Campaign

Films. In addition, FC has been promoted through a remarkably well orchestrated media campaign designed around individual success stories. In 2004, CNN produced and aired a documentary entitled Autism is a World. Douglas Biklen was a co-producer of the film, which featured the life of Sue Rubin, a woman with autism who, with the aid of a facilitator, attended Whittier College.^[5] Unfortunately, Rubin is never shown using a keyboard independently. She types with a facilitator guiding her arm, or she types while a facilitator holds the keyboard floating in the air—making it impossible to rule out facilitator influence. Although she is never shown typing on her own and all of her dialogue is narrated by the actress Julianna Margulies, Rubin was given the writing credit for Autism is a World, which was nominated for an Academy Award in the short documentary category.

Biklen followed the success of Autism is a World with a feature-length movie Wretches and Jabberers in 2011. This film focused on two star communicators, rather than just one—Larry Bissonnette, an artist and advocate, and Tracy Thresher, an advocate—both diagnosed with autism. The film received many positive reviews from credulous writers, but a more skeptical review can be found here. Bissonette and Thresher, accompanied by their facilitators, have been touring with the film in the years since its release. Most recently they were at Princeton University in March. At these public appearances, the men typically sit at a table on stage with their facilitators at their sides typing on computers that are connected to projection systems. Once a sentence or a short paragraph has been typed, the computer speaks the words through a sound system. The YouTube video below shows a question and answer session at Chapman University in November of 2011. The film has been edited to eliminate much of the typing time, but in those moments when the men can be seen typing, it is clear that their facilitators are prompting them by touching an arm or shoulder as they type.

Books. Inspirational books describing people who have overcome autism have been popular since the condition was first identified, and despite the attacks of the 1990s, books praising FC have kept coming. In 2005, Biklen wrote Autism and the Myth of the Person Alone, published by New York University Press. The book was based on the contributions of people with autism who purportedly typed their own sections of the book. Both Sue Rubin and Larry Bissonette are credited with chapters.

A more typical example of an inspirational story is the 2011 book I'm So Glad You Found Me in Here by Matthew and Nancy Hobson, which recounts Matthew’s success with FC. According the book’s Facebook page, Matt graduated from Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis in May of 2011 with a degree in general studies. Nonetheless, photos of Matt and his mother, as well as this video, show her using the classic full hand-over-hand FC technique, and despite typing with a single finger (non-touch typing), Matt does not always appear to be looking at the keys—a strong indicator that he is not the true author of the words attributed to him.

Academic Support & More Sexual Abuse Allegations

FC continues to have the authority of Syracuse and the University of New Hampshire behind it, but Lilienfeld and colleagues point out that FC has also begun to receive favorable mentions in several academic books and journals. They report that “two dozen articles and chapters that endorse FC as a valid intervention have appeared in academic outlets since 2005, at least 15 of them peer-reviewed.”^[6] One of the most aggressively worded of these is an article by Anna Stubblefield published in the peer-reviewed journal, Disabilities Studies Quarterly. It equates opposition to FC with hate speech. By that definition, the article you are reading now is an example of hate speech.

But Stubblefield’s interest in the subject is not just academic. She is a Rutgers University philosophy professor (now reportedly suspended without pay) who is facing criminal and civil charges that she sexually assaulted a 33-year-old man with cerebral palsy.^[7] For several years Stubblefield communicated with the man, known as D.J., using FC, and, according to his family, took D.J. to conferences where she acted as facilitator for presentations that he gave. She is currently charged with having repeatedly sexually assaulted D.J. in 2011. In a tragic twist on the sexual abuse allegations of the 1990s, at center of the case against Stubblefield is the simple question: Given that D.J. communicated with her using FC—and Stubblefield was his facilitator—did he actually give consent? The case is scheduled to go to trial later this year.

New Waves of Unreason

Most often when skeptics encounter everyday examples of claptrap, the causes are clear. Those who believe in ghosts, alien visitation, the evil eye, or the presumed perils of genetically modified foods have been socialized to these ideas, and they are either ignorant or dismissive of evidence, logic, and reason. But for some kinds of claptrap, more than the ordinary forces are at play. FC is a fad that should have died out a long time ago, and its resurrection seems to have been very deliberately orchestrated. At least three movements appear to help explain FCs persistence.

First, is a very effective advertising campaign on the part of its original proponents—Douglas Biklen being the most prominent among them. Biklen’s academic reputation could not have been helped by the FC episode, giving him more than sufficient reason to fight back. At the very least, after the revelations of the 1990s, the word “controversial” was forever attached to news reports about FC. Having lost the scientific battle, Biklen and other FC proponents largely sidestepped the academic challenge in favor of an appeal directly to parents and family members—those most hungry for good news. Using a slightly repackaged product and the modern medium of film, Biklen has created an evocative myth of recovery from isolation. It is a nice story, and we can hardly blame many for wanting to believe it. But the evidence—or lack of it—suggests that Biklen’s documentaries portray fictional stories rather than real ones.

Second, FC’s comeback seems to be fueled in part by a political movement within disabilities studies. In Autism the Myth of the Person Alone, Biklen advocates for a respect-based approach that grants everyone the presumption of competence. Fair enough. Presuming competence—at least as a starting point—seems reasonable. But eventually competence needs to be demonstrated. Presuming competence is not the same as preempting it. We do not honor people by creating a mask for them to wear.

In the process of labelling criticisms of FC as hate speech, Stubblefield dismisses the idea of intelligence as a social construct inextricably bound to language. According to her, it is unfair to use standard measures of intelligence to describe FC users—or anyone for that matter. She seems to argue the paradoxical position that, if we assume (or presume) a person has a physical disability that thwarts all cognitive testing methods, denying access to FC is both a form of oppression and a suppression of freedom of speech, despite the lack of evidence that FC is speech.

Third, FC seems to have benefited from a rising interest in qualitative rather than quantitative methods of research. A recent article by Donald N. Cardinal and Mary A. Falvey in the journal Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities heralds FC as a “successful means for people to learn to communicate effectively and independently” (abstract). But the article also acknowledges a wide gap between the results of quantitative research employing controls and the collection of numerical data and qualitative research based on narrative accounts and case studies. Both kinds of research have merit, and both often find their way into peer reviewed journals. But claims of causal relationships—such as, for example, the claim that D.J. is responsible for the typing that gave consent to his sexual activity—can only be discovered using techniques most often associated with quantitative research. Qualitative studies usually do not include control groups, random assignment, independent and dependent variables—all of the features associated with scientific inquiry.

According to Cardinal and Falvey, qualitative studies in support of FC now outnumber the earlier quantitative studies that failed to validate its effectiveness. If true, the explanation may be that the quantitative researchers took no for an answer. After several attempts, the results were clear, and they moved on to study more valuable therapies. In contrast, the true believers turned away from hard tests of cause and effect and found solace in the methods of qualitative research.

If a pill for autism could be found, all of this pseudoscience would disappear. But there is no pill. Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), the most validated and effective treatment for autism, is onerous to administer, and, although it benefits all who receive it, ABA is not a cure. Studies show that fewer than half of children who receive ABA achieve typical age-appropriate educational levels. As long as there is no pill for autism, parents longing for a quick and more complete solution to their child’s condition will always find the promise of FC and other pseudoscientific therapies strongly appealing.

The narrative that Lilienfeld and colleagues lay out is extremely troubling. Under normal circumstances, it is difficult enough to fight the tide of pseudoscience and irrationality, but these are not normal circumstances. Here we have the strong pull of parental hopes combined with professional interests and cultural politics. And the stakes are extremely high. Advocates for FC suggest that critics are guilty of discrimination and the suppression of free speech, but without evidence that FC works, its advocates are engaged in a much more pernicious enterprise. In the interest of producing fake college graduates, they have substituted their own speech for that of the person with autism. Rather than honoring these individuals, they have erased them. Worst of all, while chasing a fantasy, the purveyors of FC have wasted years of valuable time that could have been spent on more effective educational and treatment methods. If there is a bright side to all this, it is that Lilienfeld, Marshall, Todd, and Shane have done great service by showing us how much work we have yet to do.

On April 27, 2014, two former popes—John XXIII (Angelo Roncalli, 1881–1963) and John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla, 1920–2005)—were made saints of the Roman Catholic Church. As such, they are believed to have acquired the supernatural power of intercession with God—that is, they may be prayed to in hopes of receiving some blessing, such as a cure for an illness. But how are saints created?

Making Saints

In the Christian tradition, a saint is someone with exceptional holiness. Before the end of the first century, those martyred for their faith (martys is Greek for “witness”) were likely to be canonized. Over time, not only martyrs but missionaries of the faith, bishops of great zeal, Christian rulers, founders of religious orders, and others were raised to sainthood. Their tombs became pilgrimage sites, their relics believed to be imbued with magical power. (In this light the church has conserved a vial of John Paul II’s blood and a piece of the skin of John XXIII.)

Three elements that came to identify a saint by the fifth century and that would eventually become codified in the canonization process were reputation (particularly as a martyr), legends (telling of exemplary virtue), and miracles (allegedly worked by the saint, especially posthumously) (Woodward 1990, 50–86). There came to be saints who exhibited, supposedly supernaturally, the wounds of Christ (St. Francis of Assisi, ca. 1181–1226, being the first of many), or who allegedly demonstrated such other remarkable powers as the ability to fly (Joseph of Copertino, 1603–1663) (Coulson 1960, 187–188, 276–277). When testimonials were needed to establish miracles for beatification (the first step in the process) or for canonization purposes, the faithful were happy to give them. For example, when the Church wished to certify that Hyacinth (“the Apostle of Poland,” 1185–1257) had indeed walked on the water of the river Vistula, no fewer than 408 persons attested that they were able—centuries later—to see the intended saint’s footprints still remaining on the water (Nickell 2014)!

John Paul II canonized numerous saints and beatified over 1,300 people—more than had all of his predecessors taken together. In 2008, following complaints that the congregation for the causes of saints was becoming a “saint factory,” the Vatican instituted stricter procedures.

Healing Miracles

Today, two miracles are required for canonization (down from three—ironically by order of Pope John Paul II himself). The current preference is for healing miracles—no doubt in part because they are easier to obtain and less likely to involve magic tricks. (For instance, Padre Pìo’s most famous “miracle”—exhibiting the stigmata, for which there is much evidence of trickery—was ignored, in favor of two alleged healings: one for beatification, the other for final canonization [Nickell 2013, 335–340].)

The major criterion for a healing to be classified as a miracle is that, in addition to being instantaneous and permanent, it be “medically inexplicable.” This is an attempt to use negative evidence. Claimants are therefore engaging in a logical fallacy called argumentum ad ignorantiam “an argument from ignorance.” That is, one cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge: “We don’t know why her symptoms went away; therefore, it was a miracle.”

In fact, such cases do have alternate explanations: some illnesses (such as multiple sclerosis) are known to show spontaneous remission. Other “cures” may be attributable to misdiagnosis, psychosomatic conditions, prior medical treatment, the body’s own healing power, and other effects. Some illnesses and their cures may be faked, for a variety of reasons (Nickell 2013, 175–222). It was thus two requisite “medically inexplicable” cures that qualified to make Pope John Paul II a saint. Only one was required for Pope John XXIII, a second being waived (as discussed later). Here we look at each in turn, beginning with John Paul.

Parkinson’s ‘Miracle’

For years before he was diagnosed in 2001, Pope John Paul II had been observed with symptoms of apparent Parkinson’s disease. By 1996, he was unable to walk without the aid of a stick, and he could not control the tremors of his left hand. Media speculation prompted the Vatican to admit that the pope suffered from an “extrapyramidal neurological disorder”—referring to the family of degenerative nervous disorders to which Parkinson’s belongs, without actually using the term itself (“Poperazzi problems” 1996; “Vatican” 2006).

With added knee and hip debilities, the ailing pope visited Lourdes, the French healing shrine, in August 2004. Far from being healed, he struggled through Mass, gasping and trembling. In a rare reference to his own condition, he assured other ill pilgrims that he shared their suffering. Poignant as was that statement, it nevertheless underscored the fact that the claimed healing powers of Lourdes—and of various other shrines he visited, prayers he made, and holy relics he kissed—were ineffective, even for the head of the church that promotes claims of such miracles. He died the following year.

If the proverb “Physician heal thyself” (Luke 4:23) should seem to apply, to the embarrassment of the Church and the pope’s legacy, one can therefore appreciate the irony of a case that seems to vanquish the problem. That is the supposedly instantaneous and permanent cure—from Parkinson’s itself, no less—bestowed on a French nun after she prayed to the late pontiff.

If this sounds too good to be true, it may well be. The nun—who first wished to remain anonymous—was Sister Marie Simon-Pierre Normand, who worked at a hospital in Paris. Beginning in 2001, she and the pope would share a series of remarkable coincidences (if such they were) that would ultimately seem revealing:

Onset. In June 2001, no doubt well aware of speculation that the pope’s tremors indicated Parkinson’s, she was herself diagnosed with the disease. Subsequently, she said, “It was difficult for me to watch John Paul II on television.” Engaging in magical thinking, she added, “However, I felt very close to him in prayer and knew he could understand what I was going through.”

Location. She states that “The disease had affected the whole left side of my body, creating great difficulties for me as I am left-handed.” The location was noteworthy, since, as we have seen, the pope had been observed by 1996 with an uncontrollable tremor in his left hand.

Development. “After three years,” she says (the pope’s diagnosis being acknowledged by the Vatican in 2003) she experienced “an aggravation of the symptoms.”

Worsening Condition. Strikingly, beginning on April 2, 2005—the very day of the pope’s death—her condition “began to worsen” and continued to do so “week by week.”

“Miracle.” Finally, after Pope Benedict XVI initiated the cause to beatify John Paul, and all the nun’s sisters throughout France and Africa began to pray for her to be cured by the late pontiff’s intercession, she suddenly experienced a remission of her symptoms during the night of June 23, 2005, the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Thereupon she stopped taking her medicines (Sister Marie 2011; Pope John Paul II 2014). As she would later tell a reporter, “I am cured, but it is up to the church to say whether it was a miracle or not” (qtd. in Pope John Paul II 2014).

As these continuous parallels suggest, Sister Marie’s reputed Parkinson’s disease seems to have been eerily responsive to John Paul’s. Could it have been a copycat phenomenon? I am not suggesting malingering, but rather conversion disorder (previously called hysteria). This is a neurotic reaction wherein a person’s anxiety is converted unconsciously into any of a great variety of symptoms, including blindness, deafness, muteness, vertigo, paralysis (sometimes affecting only one side of the body), motor symptoms such as tics and tremors, and many, many others. Conversion symptoms may stem from an immature personality, may bring the patient certain benefits such as attention or sympathy, and may be eliminated by suggestion or narcosis (Goldenson 1970, 260–263). I have personally investigated an outbreak of several cases of twitching illness that were diagnosed as conversion disorder (Nickell 2012).

Now, true Parkinson’s disease is a brain disorder that usually afflicts the elderly, being most prevalent among those aged seventy-five to eighty-five (Taber’s 2001, 1519). Its common symptoms include tremors, slow movement, stiffness, cramped handwriting, and other signs. However, it can be difficult to accurately diagnose because there are other conditions with similar symptoms, according to the National Parkinson Foundation (“About Parkinson’s” 2006).

As reported by The Guardian (citing a Polish newspaper), three years after Sister Marie claimed to have been miraculously healed she had relapsed. The paper stated “that the 49-year-old nun had become sick again with the same illness” (Hooper 2010). One of the doctors investigating her case was of the opinion that she had not actually suffered from Parkinson’s, observing that a similar nervous disease could go into remission. Whatever the actual facts of the matter, the nun’s “miracle” claim was ultimately accepted, and in January 2011 Pope John Paul II was beatified. Only one more miracle was required for sainthood.

Aneurysm ‘Miracle’

The second miracle attributed to John Paul’s intercession was also somewhat suspicious in its manifestation: It took place on May 1, 2011, “just after” the actual rite of beatification for the late pope (Pope John Paul II 2014).

The patient was a Costa Rican woman named Floribeth Mora Diaz, who was reportedly healed of a “cerebral fusiform aneurysm.” That is an abnormal, localized dilation of a blood vessel in the brain; fusiform refers to the blood vessel walls dilating approximately equally all around, forming a symmetrically tubular swelling (Taber’s 2001).

Reportedly, in April 2011 Diaz walked into a San Jose hospital complaining of headaches. A neurosurgeon diagnosed an aneurysm, which he felt was inoperable. He sent her home to rest and to take medication for pain. In short order, however, she was healed, according to her doctors. She attributed the “miracle” to her gaze having fallen upon a photograph of John Paul in a newspaper. Later she would say she heard the image speak to her, “Stand up. Don’t be afraid.” She has since abandoned both law studies and work for her family’s security company in order to devote herself exclusively to being the symbol of faith she has become (“Woman allegedly healed” 2014).

While the Associated Press wrote of “the symptoms that she felt brought her to the brink of death three years ago” (“Woman allegedly healed” 2014), Diaz may have had an exaggerated view of her own prognosis at the time. In fact, a cerebral fusiform aneurysm, like she supposedly had, does not usually rupture (“Intracranial aneurysm” 2014). And because high blood pressure is associated with cerebral aneurysms, reducing it (and other associative factors such as smoking, drinking, and using cocaine) may well be therapeutic.

Diaz states that she ignores those who doubt her alleged healing. “Everyone can think what they want,” she told an Associated Press reporter. “What I know is that I am healthy.” Given the paucity of information released about Diaz’s diagnosis, it may be that the “inexplicable” nature of her alleged aneurysm is due to a lack of conclusive evidence for it in the first place. In any event, the argument from medical inexplicability is an “argument from ignorance,” pure and simple.

Stomach ‘Miracle’

A single “miracle” is attributed to Pope John Paul XXIII. A second miracle—usually required for canonization—was waived by Pope Francis, on the basis of John’s having called the historic Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which dramatically changed the church. As with the miracles attributed to John Paul II, the reputed miracle—which occurred in 1966 after an Italian nun suffered unexplained stomach hemorrhages—seemed suspiciously ironic: Pope John had himself died of stomach cancer, despite the church’s healing shrines, relics, and other touted mechanisms.

The nun, Sister Caterina Capitani, was hospitalized and underwent a five-hour operation to remove most of her tumor-studded stomach, along with her pancreas and spleen. Over several days she began to recover but noticed that a fistula (an abnormal opening) had developed on her abdomen, allowing gastric fluid, blood, and a little orange juice she had sipped, to flow out. Later she covered the area with a relic—a piece of the sheet upon which Pope John XXIII had died. Still later, she awakened to a vision of the dead pontiff and found herself healed. She ate ravenously and subsequently returned to a normal life (Allegri 2014).

In fact, Mrs. Capitani, who died in 2010 at age sixty-eight, obviously benefitted from several successful surgeries. It was not a miracle by the deceased Pope John XXIII that removed her stomach tumors; it was medical science. As to the alleged fistula, it may have been nonexistent, a mistaken claim to explain stomach contents that appeared on her abdomen but that may have simply resulted from “a serious crisis of vomiting.” Capitani had a “very high fever” and may have misperceived the situation. She is the source of the second-hand claim, attributed to an unnamed doctor and apparently not otherwise documented (Allegri 2014). Alternately, if it actually existed, the wound had eleven days to heal naturally. Her experience of seeing Pope John standing beside her bed and speaking to her is consistent with a waking dream (which occurs between being fully asleep and awake). As she herself admitted, “I wondered whether it had been a dream” (Allegri 2014).

Conclusions

As these examples demonstrate, there is invariably more to miracle claims than first meets the eye. What is truly objectionable are miraculists’ attempts to trump modern medical science—not only by downplaying science’s role in cures but by choosing remarkable cases so as to emphasize their supposedly “medically inexplicable” nature. No matter how well-intentioned, by attempting to assert superiority over science with supernatural claims and the illogic of arguing from ignorance, one succeeds only in promoting superstition.

References

About Parkinson Disease. 2006. Online at http://www.parkinson.org/site/pp.aspx?c=9dJFJLPwB&b=71125&printmode=1; accessed January 31, 2006.

Allegri, Renzo. 2014. An uncontested miracle. Online at http://www.saintanthonyofpadua.net/messagero/pagina_stampa.asp?R=&ID=80; accessed April 30, 2014.

Coulson, John, ed. 1960. The Saints: A Concise Biographical Dictionary. New York: Hawthorn Books.

Goldenson, Robert M. 1970. The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, vol. 1. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Hooper, John. 2010. Pope’s sainthood setback after “miracle cure” nun reported to be ill again. Online at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/05/nun-cured-pope-parkinsons-ill; accessed April 30, 2014.

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Nickell, Joe. 2012. Neurologic illness or hysteria? A mysterious twitching outbreak. Skeptical Inquirer 36(4) (July/August): 30–33.

———. 2013. The Science of Miracles. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 2014. St. Hyacinth’s miracles. Online at http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/st._hyacinths_miracles/; April 18.

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Woodward, Kenneth L. 1990. Making Saints. New York: Simon & Schuster.

James Randi is the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Formerly a professional stage magician (“The Amazing Randi”), he began to use his considerable experience in illusions and deceptions when studying the techniques, strategies, and tricks used by charlatans who pretend to have real supernatural powers.

An eighty-six-year-old skeptic, secular humanist, and atheist, Randi has investigated paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims for much of his career, including on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and the television program Penn & Teller: Bullshit! He is a founding fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (formerly CSICOP) and was a longtime member of the original CSICOP Executive Council.

In 2012, documentary filmmakers Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom began work on An Honest Liar, a profile of the life of The Amazing Randi, as he embarks on a series of public crusades to expose America’s beloved psychics, mentalists, preachers, and faith healers with religious fervor. Along the way, the film shows how easily our perceptions can be fooled by magicians and con artists—and even documentaries. The film toured Australia in December. He was interviewed by csicop.org “Curiouser and Curiouser” columnist Kylie Sturgess. The interview is also available at http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/behind_the_magic_interview_with_james_randi/.

Kylie Sturgess: You’ve led a very fascinating life—one that has resulted in a new documentary, called An Honest Liar. For those unfamiliar with your career, when did you first start as a magician?

James Randi: I started as a liar as a very, very tiny child, I can tell you that! It’s hard to say . . . it’s hard to say. I was one of those child prodigy things, and I didn’t go to much of what we call in this country “grade school,” the lower grades of school, because I was falling asleep all the time.

I was ahead of the class, and there’s no great distinction. It’s just that the educational system in Toronto, Canada—where I was born and almost raised—didn’t have any limitations on whether or not I really had to go to school, because they figured I was getting a better education going to the museums and libraries that I inhabited as a small child.

I have a peculiar character. I’m different from most folks, and I rather treasure that fact, as well. Being a skeptic yourself, I guess you’re looked upon that way by your peers as well?

Sturgess: Well, we get all sorts of fascinating people in skepticism! What led you to start an entire foundation for skeptics?

www.anhonestliar.com

Randi: I am a magician, you see, that’s my profession. I have made my living up until a few years ago as a magician and did very well at it and got a bit of a reputation. I found that I was being asked questions by my audiences after a show; I would hope they would be more or less impressed with what I did as an entertainer! But they would come to me with questions like, “This gentleman was on television the other day, and he did this, that, and the other thing. But he said that that it was real, what he did.”

It showed me that people were actually falling for fakers out there; people who were lying to them and telling them that they had supernatural powers. They were giving a lot of money to these people. That does happen of course—as you know, all over the world people were giving lots of money to people who’d say that they have psychic or magical or prophetic or whatever powers. They can tell the future, or they can heal the sick by just looking at them or touching them, or whatever.

www.anhonestliar.com

I found that there was a major racket going on there, a swindle. I determined that when I retired—and I did retire at the age of sixty—I decided that it would be time for me to go into the business of . . . not debunking; I don’t go do it as a debunker because I don’t like that term. If I were a debunker that would mean that I’d go into an investigation with the idea, “This is not true and I’m going to prove that it’s not true.”

I can’t always prove that it’s not true, but I challenge them and offer a $1 million prize as well, to any of them who can prove that they are the real thing. You’d be surprised though. I’m looking out of my window here in Plantation, Florida, and the street is right out there. I don’t see any line up of people who are trying to collect the $1 million prize.

Wouldn’t you think that’s strange, because there are thousands of them all across the world who say they have these mystical powers. Where are they? They should be lined up outside with a number in their hand, like a lottery of some kind, just waiting to get in and show me what they’ve got! But there’s no lineup outside!

Sturgess: What have been some highlights of your career?

Randi: Every day! My life is all highlights, I think!

One of the most recent delights is the film, An Honest Liar, which you mentioned. It’s being met with critical and popular acclaim all across the world. I am very, very pleased to know that and to witness it, and have people come to me saying, “Maybe it has changed my mind.” That’s always a good point when you see somebody saying, “Maybe I have changed my mind.”

www.anhonestliar.com

It doesn’t happen every time, not by any means. But there are enough people out there who’d say that what I’ve shown them has changed their mind in some way or made them think a little more about some aspect of their lives and how they run it. Maybe it saves them a lot of money in the long run, too.

Sturgess: That’s always a good thing! What was your response when you were first approached by the producers, Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein, to do the documentary?

Randi: First of all, I said I might be interested. I’d have to know more. They came to visit me here in Plantation, Florida. They sat down and they made a very good case for their bona fides. After all, both had produced films that were very highly successful documentary films.

When I saw the product that they had turned out, I thought to myself, “These are the guys. These are the guys that I think I can trust with my life story,” and I said, “So, let’s go.” That was like three years ago, and we’ve done very well.

Sturgess: It’s a fascinating movie with lots of footage from the past. Were you surprised even by your own history and what was uncovered for the film?

Randi: In some cases yes, but for a long time now I’ve had a small collection of some stuff that was made. There were some 8mm black and white films made of me when I was only eighteen years of age, doing silly things in the streets of Toronto as a magician. Oh yes, that film comes back to haunt you eventually!

As a matter of fact, with a thing like YouTube—YouTube is in some cases pretty scary—because I don’t think I really do anything in my life that it doesn’t appear on YouTube within twenty minutes and circulated around the world.

If you go to my site, that’s the James Randi Educational Foundation site on YouTube, you’ll find all kinds of wonderful old films that I could hardly believe that somebody still had. My history is there. If you live long enough, your history will be there too, Kylie!

Sturgess: Me and my cat on YouTube! I’m not sure if that’s as historically important as you performing on fantastic TV shows and helping people understand what’s going on in the world of skepticism. It’s a bit different. . . !

The documentary delves into your personal life, and of course there are many challenges that anyone would face if their own personal life was investigated. Did it make it challenging to go on with the documentary at times?

Randi: Yeah, there was a moment there when the security of my partner Devi (José Alvarez) was in some question or such, and you’ll see a confrontation there with the producers of the film. But that didn’t last more than a day.

I had to just sleep on it, and the next day I called him and said, “Go right ahead, warts and all.” You know the expression, “warts and all”? Oliver Cromwell, I believe, was supposed to have said that. I didn’t know him. I’m not that old!

Sturgess: Finally, there’s been lots of changes and developments and conflict in atheism and skepticism over the years. What do you hope for the future of organized skepticism?

Randi: I would hope that it’s going to continue to go the way that it has. The movement is very active within Australia, as I’m sure you know, and around the world. As I say, I’ve been to China and Japan and various other places like that. I find that it’s really active all the way around the world. The mail I get every day—via Skype and other means of course—is always very encouraging.

It’s very encouraging that skepticism has found its place in the world, and it’s having a very active effect, I think, on most people. Particularly young people; it’s very important to get people—as we all know, and always have known—get them while they’re young, and if you can talk some sense into them at that point and get them scared correctly, then they will start to think skeptically. They will think rationally, and they will be happier off for it, I believe.

Sturgess: What do you think is an important overall message that you hope people will get from the documentary An Honest Liar?

Randi: Before you accept it, remember that saying, “Maybe it’s too good to be true.” Think about it carefully, and look up research. You’ve got the Internet in front of you, what a wonderful weapon to have. I mean, this is something you can flourish anywhere at all that you can find an electric plug to fire up your computer with.

You can find information about things that at one time was very difficult to lay your hands on easily unless you went to a huge library and spent a lot of time clambering up and down ladders in the book stacks. Now it’s so easily available to you—but you’ve got to be careful—at the same time some of that information is not information that you should be using, or that you could use, usefully.

It can be incorrect; there are people out there who are trying to take advantage of your ignorance and your lack of perception. Be very, very careful of that; you’re living in a jungle!

Sturgess: Do you think even skepticism and skeptics themselves should be questioned?

Randi: Oh, yes, of course. We need to know their bona fides as well. You have to check on them . . . but, when you’ve got people like Dick Smith and Phil Adams as good friends in another country or around the other side of the world, you could be very, very proud that you know these folks. When I was asked if I would go to Australia to cross the country and drag that film along with me, I accepted with great enthusiasm.

Sturgess: For your own future, after this fantastic travel across Australia, what do you hope to do next?

Randi: Oh, I’ve got an awful lot ahead of me. I’m just finishing up my eleventh book. It’s going to turn into two volumes, because it would probably be my swan song, as they say. But at the same time, I’ve got another one that’s hanging on my consciousness here that I may do as well. But I’ll let you know.

To begin, I want to take you back to just over forty years ago, the year 1974. (For readers barely born then, I apologize; I need to give some historical perspective about organized skepticism, but bear with me, we’ll soon forge ahead.)

The world back then was awash in unexamined paranormalism. Astrology was in high vogue, and “What’s your sign?” passed for a mainstream conversation starter. Psychics reigned everywhere. Some well-publicized parapsychological experiments had convinced many of the reality of psychic powers (psi). Uri Geller was bending cutlery and fooling even some prominent physicists into thinking he was doing it by the sheer power of his mind. Flying saucers and UFOs were penetrating our skies. Ships and airplanes were seemingly disappearing daily into the Bermuda Triangle. Erich von Däniken was writing bestselling books about ancient astronauts and the almost-racist notion that ancient edifices of the Americas were built not by the skill and hard work of the people who lived there but by aliens.

But a scientific response to all this nonsense was beginning to brew. In February 1974, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at its annual meeting in San Francisco, held a most extraordinary symposium called to examine the claims of Immanuel Velikovsky and give him the scientific hearing he had long demanded. Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision book had gone through seventy-two printings since 1950 and garnered both the wrath of scientists and the science-snubbing approval of some prominent literati.

Five hundred people filled the auditorium that day. I sat in the front row while the seventy-seven-year-old Velikovsky, his silver hair and demeanor lending him an almost biblical air, and the passionate young astronomer Carl Sagan, already famous at age thirty-nine, squared off against each other. Two amazingly charismatic figures in collision. It was electrifying. I was one of the science writers who ran over to Sagan afterward and persuaded him to loan his fifty-six-page manuscript to us temporarily so we could take it to the AAAS Press Room for photocopying so we could all have copies. As I recall, it was double-spaced and filled with scores of changes Carl had made, right up to delivery, in his own hand.

Sagan’s ten-part dissection that day of Velikovsky’s arguments is still being debated. It continues to stimulate strong philosophical interest. But I deeply admired Sagan’s willingness and determination to take on the ideas of one of the era’s most influential and intelligent pseudoscientists—and to read Velikovsky’s books carefully and to write such an extended critique and present it in such a public forum. Until then few scientists were willing to do such things. To my mind this was one of the seminal moments in establishing a new tradition of scientists and scientific-minded scholars publicly committing time and effort to examining—not ignoring—extraordinary claims of a pseudoscientific, fringe-scientific, or paranormal nature.

Later that same year came Philip J. Klass’s book UFOs Explained, patiently and thoroughly examining some of the most prominent UFO and flying saucer claims.

The next year things really got into high gear. Larry Kusche published The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved, still today regarded (correctly in my view) as one of the classic debunking books of all time. (Debunking is the end result; Kusche hates to be characterized as a debunker; he just wanted to find out the truth, and he did.) That same year James (“The Amazing”) Randi published his book The Magic of Uri Geller, the first exposé of Geller’s methods and tricks.

And then in the September/October 1975 issue of The Humanist, at the behest of its editor, the S.U.N.Y Buffalo professor of philosophy Paul Kurtz, came “Objections to Astrology,” a statement straightforwardly cautioning the public “against the unquestioning acceptance of the predictions and advice given privately and publicly by astrologers.” The two-page statement was written by the noted University of Arizona astronomer Bark J. Bok with the help of science writer Lawrence Jerome and Kurtz. It was signed by 192 leading scientists (including nineteen Nobel Prize winners) and accompanied by two supporting articles, including Bok’s “A Critical Look at Astrology.” Such was the public appeal of astrology at that time that this fairly mild statement of objections ignited a firestorm of publicity and controversy.

Something big was happening. The scientific examination of widely accepted claims that to scientists were at best, misguided, and at worst, totally bogus, was now a major news story and a part of the new cultural debate.

In the meantime, James Randi, psychologist Ray Hyman, and Martin Gardner—a hero already to many for his classic book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science—were discussing among themselves some kind of organization that could address such claims. But they had no experience in creating organizations.

Enter Paul Kurtz. Kurtz’s experience with the “Objections to Astrology” statement had impressed on him the need for scientific and scholarly examinations of paranormal and fringe-science claims of wide popular appeal. Kurtz was concerned about this uncritical acceptance and the lack of scholarly rebuttal. And he was an organizational genius.

Paul, Lee Nisbet (who had recently gotten his PhD in philosophy), and sociologist Marcello Truzzi organized and publicized an unusual conference at the brand new suburban Amherst campus of S.U.N.Y. Buffalo. It was titled “The New Irrationalisms: Antiscience and Pseudoscience.” Held May 1, 1976, it brought together the leading lights of scientific skepticism of the time to air their scientific viewpoints about all the bizarre claims then in the wind.

Like the AAAS Velikovsky symposium, it was electric. And it was here that the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) was founded. The news media widely covered the event (including the New York Times, Science magazine, Time, and my own cover article in Science News). Kurtz, Randi, Gardner, Hyman, and Truzzi were on the original CSICOP Executive Council. So were Phil Klass and Nisbet. Sagan was one of the founding fellows. So was Isaac Asimov. So were a number of other famous scientists and scholars (including, by my count, eight professors of philosophy in addition to Kurtz and Nisbet). Truzzi was the first editor of CSICOP’s journal, initially called The Zetetic. I succeeded him the next year, and in 1978 we renamed it the Skeptical Inquirer. I’ve told the fuller story of this beginning of the modern-day skeptical movement many times so I won’t say much more here.

There was one earlier organization I should mention—Belgium’s Comité Para. It was formed in 1949 and has been in existence ever since.

(My invited 8,400-word history of the first two decades of CSICOP, published in The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal [G. Stein, ed., Prometheus Books, 1996], is now online on our committee’s website at www.csicop.org/about/csicop. And yes, I know that there is a long record of skeptical activity preceding the 1970s. If you think I’m taking a long perspective, then I recommend reading our skeptic colleague Daniel Loxton’s detailed online article “Why Is There a Skeptical Movement? Part One: Two Millennia of Paranormal Skepticism,” 2013, at www.skeptic.com.)

But for the English-speaking world, CSICOP was the first well-organized and broadly constituted organization to examine paranormal and fringe-science claims from a scientific viewpoint—and to serve as a forum for scholarly discussion of all the relevant academic, social, and educational issues surrounding them.

The idea quickly spread. Skepticism was in the air. CSICOP helped found or inspire local and regional skeptics groups in the U.S. around the same ideas and principles. The Bay Area Skeptics were the first, but soon there were dozens of others. Inspired by CSICOP, they were independent and autonomous and excellently situated to deal with local and regional issues.

But Kurtz was an internationalist, and he actively encouraged forming similar groups in countries worldwide. He had a lively mind, tremendous energy, strong intellectual credentials, academic position, a global vision, and the bearing and instincts of a diplomat—combined (almost incongruously for an academic) with the skills of a first-class promoter. All this made for an effective and inspiring figure who easily gathered scientists, scholars, investigators, and supporters from all parts of the world to help fight the proliferation of pseudoscience and unreason.

Somewhere along the way back then, in 1980, the Australian Skeptics got started when Dick Smith brought Randi to Australia to test claims of water diviners. Starting with our Winter 1980–81 issue of SI, we began listing “Australia” among the “sections” of the Committee. The contacts were Mark Plummer . . . and Dick Smith. I also notice that the group’s fine magazine, The Skeptic, which I read with great interest every issue, has just completed Volume 34. (Mark Plummer later moved to the United States and became executive director of CSICOP from 1987–1989. He was succeeded by Barry Karr, in that position ever since.) Since then the Australian Skeptics have been carrying out the fight on that continent. They have been one of the world’s strongest national skeptic groups.

The United Kingdom’s magazine The Skeptic came along a bit later (it is now in Volume 26). Together these three major English-language journals of scientific skepticism have combined to bring informed critical inquiry to audiences in all hemispheres. Add to them all the other journals and other countries, such as Germany’s Skeptiker and the Netherland’s Skepter, and the developed world, anyway, is well covered.

Now I zoom ahead. We continued, as Kurtz wrote after our first five years, “to encourage the spirit of scientific inquiry and to cultivate the skeptical attitude and the quest for evidence and reason” (Paul Kurtz, “From the Chairman,” SI, Spring 1981, 2–4).

We have now concluded our thirty-eighth year. Our January/February 2015 issue began Volume 39 . . . then it’s on to 40. Over that time we have done our best to keep aglow the light of reason and rationality and to cultivate scientific thinking in the wider public. We have critically examined thousands of individual claims and assertions and published the results for the world to see. We have explored virtually every issue important to skeptics. We have encouraged greater skepticism in the news media and served them as a source of reliable scientific information. We have done our best to make others aware of the dangers to democracy posed by confusions between reality and fantasy, sense and nonsense, and real science and its pretenders and adversaries.

It has never been easy. We have had our epic battles and setbacks. But we always persevered. We intend to continue to do so. We have always had the involvement and support of the world’s scientific and academic communities. Scientists and scholars—and tireless writers and investigators—contribute their energy, expertise, and scholarship to critically examine claims and explore all the social, political, scientific, philosophical, and educational issues surrounding them. Good-spirited people everywhere crave responsibly, scientifically evaluated information and perspective. We scientific skeptics, no matter where we labor, in cooperation with researchers in dozens of academic fields, help provide that.

In 1995, SI gave up its digest-sized format for a more traditional magazine format and increased its frequency from quarterly to bimonthly. This has allowed us to be more timely and topical and to publish more editorial material. Another big change came in 2006. We shortened our name from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, keeping our first three initials, CSI. That old twenty-syllable name just didn’t work anymore in this age of TV and radio sound bites. Also many of us were increasingly uncomfortable with having the word “paranormal” in our name, even if it was clear we were examining the “paranormal.” We also broadened our mission statement to “investigation of controversial or extraordinary claims” (see the January/February 2007 SI).

For our first sixteen years, CSICOP was the only such national group in the United States. In 1992 came Michael Shermer’s Skeptics Society and its new quarterly magazine, Skeptic. This enterprise, too, had its roots in CSICOP’s outreach activities, getting its start from solicitations to SI’s Southern California mailing list to what was then a regional Los Angeles–based group. Since then there have been two major skeptic magazines in the U.S. (not counting the many newsletters by local groups). As for the U.K., we have always been closely associated with its magazine The Skeptic, publishing it out of Amherst for several years until just this past year when we handed it back over to the U.K. Skeptics. However, we still do the layout and design work.

Over our first thirty years, CSICOP held major conferences about every year and a half, usually near a major university and in conjunction with relevant academic departments such as physics, psychology, and philosophy. These tended to be very substantive conferences, close to academic in tone but (given our subject matter) dealing with far more controversial and emotional (and interesting!) topics. They were great fun as well. They gave science-minded skeptics from all over a chance to get together. Then for a time starting in about 2005, and for reasons hard to explain, that tradition went into a seven-year hiatus. James Randi’s JREF (James Randi Educational Foundation) began filling that gap with a new series of popular conferences, TAM, held in Las Vegas.

We resumed our conferences in October 2011 with CSICon 1 in New Orleans and CSICon 2 in Nashville in October 2012. In 2013, our conference was a joint “Summit” conference in Tacoma, Washington, with our supporting organization, the Center for Inquiry, and our sister organization, the Council for Secular Humanism. Our next will also be a joint conference, at our founding location, Amherst, New York, June 11–14, 2015.

Paul Kurtz founded all these organizations. He built the Center for Inquiry’s headquarters building, across the street from the University at Buffalo, where most of CSI’s and CSH’s activities are located. (Some of us have always worked elsewhere; in this Internet age having everyone at one central location is no longer essential.)

For about five years, from 2007 to 2011, the combined organization went through an agonizing period, as we transitioned to new leadership. We had a single charismatic founder we all loved and respected, but he couldn’t go on forever. Paul was in his eighties then. For some years the boards of the three organizations had worked with him to try to come up with a succession plan. We all knew replacing such a remarkable visionary was nearly impossible. We tried various ideas but none got far. I am on those boards. I can tell you the whole process was extraordinarily painful for everyone involved.

Now, I am pleased to say, things have stabilized again. In fact they have been stable for a few years now. Ronald A. Lindsay is the president and CEO of the combined organization(s). He is a strong defender of secularism and scientific skepticism. He has been a calm and steady force. Like Paul, Ron has a PhD in philosophy, but he also has a law degree, increasingly relevant in these times. His book The Necessity of Secularism was published in December (see New and Notable, page 59). The CFI Board, chaired by Eddie Tabash, a civil liberties lawyer deeply dedicated to our causes, has also taken a much more active role to ensure the longtime vitality of the organization. Barry Karr, who has thirty years of service with us and is strongly dedicated to the skeptic mission, remains CSI’s executive director. And as a brain trust, we have the CSI Executive Council (its newest members are physicians Harriet Hall and Steve Novella) and about a hundred prominent fellows, elected for their distinguished contributions to science and skepticism. And, I am glad to say, we are a much more diverse organization than when we started. For a long time now many outstanding women scientific skeptics have been deeply involved.

(One more thing: As announced in this issue’s cover wrap, effective January 8, 2015, CSI and CSH have formally become programs within the Center for Inquiry. No significant effects on the Skeptical Inquirer or CSI’s activities are expected.)

Paul Kurtz, the extraordinarily gifted and pragmatic philosopher who created the world’s leading organizations for scientific skepticism and secular humanism, died October 20, 2012, two months short of his eighty-seventh birthday. He was my mentor and my friend. I was privileged to be an invited speaker at a memorial service the Kurtz family put on at the University at Buffalo December 1, 2012. There were so many tributes that they went on the entire day.

The need for informed scientific skepticism has never waned. But the circumstances in which we now operate have greatly changed. The Internet has led to the proliferation of pseudoscientific claims . . . but also to an opportunity to reach wider audiences, quickly, with good science and informed rebuttals. An example is Skeptical Inquirer’s Facebook page. I don’t run it (Barry Karr does), so I feel free to praise it unreservedly. It is a wonderful, lively way to keep up with daily developments not just in scientific skepticism but in science as well.

What once was a fairly homogeneous and organized set of skeptical activities has now become a much more diverse, prolific, and fragmented situation. Young people and women can easily enter and create their own niches, and that is good for everyone. Many disparate groups have sprung up. Some have no connection with each other or any sense of the history of this movement. Countless investigators and skeptics of all stripes now have their own blogs and online columns. Whole new forums have been created, such as the popular Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast by the extraordinary Steven Novella and his brothers. Not to mention our own organization’s popular podcast of in-depth interviews, Point of Inquiry.

It is getting harder and harder to keep up. But for the most part all this is a healthy proliferation of skepticism. Opinion is always easy, but facts and evidence, historical and cultural perspective, and a mature, scientific viewpoint are still most needed. That requires considerable discipline and work. In SI we’ve always tried to live up to high standards of inquiry—state things carefully, let the facts speak for themselves, provide thorough documentation, avoid personal attacks, etc. At CSI and in SI, we are at least a semi-scholarly journal and we also do professional scientific journalism—strongly investigative, hard-nosed to be sure, but still professional. In this age of personal blogs and posts, it sometimes seems that these kinds of standards have gone out the window. I think they remain important. And most good scientific skeptics do try to adhere to them. (If you want to pursue this more, there is still no better guide than Ray Hyman’s classic “Proper Criticism,” on our website at http://www.csicop.org/si/show/proper_criticism/.) In my remaining space I want to touch briefly on some other issues:

Specific claims vs. broader issues: Good scientific skepticism needs to deal with the entire spectrum. The nitty-gritty, down-in-the-trenches investigations into popular mysteries are an essential core; scholarly examinations of how we think and how we believe and how our preconceptions and beliefs affect our perceptions and acceptance of new information are another key component; still broader overviews bringing historical or philosophical perspective to the quest are another. I think good skepticism requires working at all these levels. I see no contradictions among them or any need to consider one less important. Some skeptics are more comfortable focusing mostly on one of these arenas. Scientific skepticism is a big tent and works best when it embraces contributions from many different perspectives.

Popular vs. scholarly: Same comment. SI has always spanned the entire spectrum, from popular claims to all those serious issues where pseudoscientific beliefs mislead and even greatly endanger the public and affect education and the place of science in society. We treat them all. Science vs. religion: All skeptic organizations have their own policies for dealing with matters of religion (or not). Ours in SI has always been to emphasize areas where religious doctrine makes empirical, testable claims and where scientific study and scholarship can bring new insights and perspective. This may seem a limitation, but these are surprisingly rich fields. Our occasional science and religion special issues always prompt a huge, and largely positive, reader response. One more point: What we scientific skeptics have in common with our colleagues who identify more as humanists or atheists is an intense distaste for dogma. Dogma is the real enemy of reason. Climate science: We’ve been involved in this topic, in which an important area of science has been under persistent attack, since 2007. Some skeptics may consider it not to be our fight. But I see it as little different from defending the teaching of evolutionary science from attacks by the religious right. In this case, the most vociferous attacks come for a variety of other ideological reasons, but the distortions and even denials of science are part of a pattern we’ve seen in many other areas. I think they require skeptics’ attention.

I also note that the temporary leveling off of annual average mean surface temperatures that contrarians misleadingly call a pause in global warming (the oceans are definitely warming) may not be in evidence much longer. According to NASA, NOAA, and the Japan Meteorological Agency, September 2014 was the warmest September worldwide since records began in 1880, and the period October 2013 through September 2014 was the hottest twelve-month period ever in that same climate record. In the meantime, the oceans are warming. The summer of 2014 saw the highest global mean sea surface temperatures since systematic measuring started.) (See “Five Things to Know about 2014 Global Temperatures,” NOAA’s climate.gov., Oct. 24, 2014, and “Warmest Oceans Ever Recorded,” University of Hawaii release, Nov. 14, 2014.)

In January, NASA and NOAA confirmed that 2014 was indeed the warmest year on record.

Good science is, as always, how we gain greater understanding.

I have written several times previously (most recently in the November/December 2013 SI) about the higher values of skepticism. I end on that note. What we are ultimately defending here are a variety of liberties essential to enlightened societies and functional democracies: freedom of inquiry and expression at all levels; science as the most reliable guide to truth about the natural world; a love of learning and questioning; respect for human rights and dignity; the right to learn, and to study, and to investigate unfettered by any authoritarian interference; free and open discussion of all issues; and the idea that hard-won new knowledge—while it always raises new issues and problems—is essential for continuing human progress.

Good scientific skepticism ultimately contributes to all these goals. I am proud to be part of that effort. You should be too.

The skeptical community has lost a shining star. On May 25, 2015, Wallace Sampson, MD, died in California at the age of eighty-five from complications of heart surgery; he had been in the hospital since February. He is survived by his wife of fifty-nine years, five sons, and nine grandchildren.

Wally was an oncologist and professor emeritus at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He started looking into false medical claims after he saw patients resorting to the bogus cancer cure Laetrile. He soon became an expert in dissecting false claims both in conventional medicine and in unconventional practices such as acupuncture and homeopathy. An indefatigable crusader for science and reason, he seemed to be everywhere. He wrote for medical journals and popular publications, appeared on television and on podcasts, testified in court, taught a course on alternative medicine at Stanford that emphasized its unscientific aspects, spoke at conferences, and was often quoted in the media.

He was one of the founders of the National Committee Against Health Fraud, the Science-Based Medicine blog, and the Institute for Science in Medicine. He was also a member of many other scientific and skeptical organizations such as the Friends of Science in Medicine. He was a fellow of CSICOP, contributed articles to Skeptical Inquirer, and was part of the Second CSICOP delegation to China that investigated traditional medicine and pseudoscience in that country. He founded and edited The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine under the auspices of the Center for Inquiry. He was on the faculty of the CSI’s Skeptic’s Toolbox workshop in Eugene, Oregon, from 1998 to 2008.

I never really got to know Wally that well, but he changed my life forever. I didn’t meet him until I was in my late fifties, when I attended the 2002 Skeptic’s Toolbox. At the time, I knew next to nothing about alternative medicine or about how to critique a scientific study. As part of his presentation, Wally showed a video of the Scientific American Frontiers episode on chiropractic in which Alan Alda said that chiropractic neck manipulation was associated with a significant percentage of strokes. I questioned that, and when I got home I did my own research and determined that the claim was true. In the process, I stumbled upon a lot of other things about chiropractic that intrigued me enough to make me read everything I could find on it, both pro and con. One thing led to another. You might say chiropractic was my gateway drug to critiquing alternative medicine, and it might never have happened if Wally hadn’t sparked my interest.

When I came across a really stupid pseudoscientific study that was being used to promote the bogus product “Vitamin O,” I felt comfortable enough with Wally to complain to him about it via email. He replied, “You know, no-one takes studies like that seriously enough to critique them. Why don’t you write up a formal critique and we’ll publish it in The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine.” I protested that I wouldn’t know how to do that, but he insisted, saying he was confident that I could do it and he would help with editing. He persuaded me. I chafed at the constraints of writing formally for a scientific journal, so I wrote another, irreverent version of my findings and submitted it to the Skeptical Inquirer as “Oxygen Is Good, Even When It’s Not There.”

And so my career as a writer was launched. As I continued to write, Wally continued to provide encouragement, praise, and support. His emails validated my work and motivated me to keep going. Over the years, a pattern developed. At the Toolbox or in an email, Wally would say something that would strike me as questionable or overly pessimistic. I would investigate and would invariably find that he was accurate and that the problem was even worse than he said. I developed a high respect for his judgment.

When Wally retired from the Toolbox in 2008, I was chosen to replace him. I could never hope to fill his shoes, but by then I had some shoes of my own.

I wish I could have gotten to know him better. He was kind, gentle, grandfatherly, professorial, approachable, modest, and a true gentleman. My daughter attended the Toolbox with me when she was a teenager, and she was quite fond of Wally. When we chanced to see him being interviewed on television, she would say, “Look, there’s Grandpa Wally!”

Wallace Sampson was my mentor. He was responsible for launching my writing career and for making me who I am today. He is gone, but his work in science and skepticism will never be forgotten. Thank you, Wally. Requiescat in pace.

Investigations show that famous nighttime “alien light” sightings were all due to objects in the sky, but not the extraterrestrial spacecraft UFO enthusiasts imagined.

At around 8:30 on the night of March 13, 1997, residents of the greater Phoenix, Arizona, area, who were outside enjoying the pleasant weather and perhaps hoping to see the comet Hale-Bopp, witnessed something unexpected: a chevron (V-shaped) formation of lights that were “Like nothing they had ever seen before” (Kean 2010, 247). Adding to the mystery was a second set of brilliant lights, in the sky south of Phoenix around 10 on the same night (Davenport 2001; Kean 2010, 25).

Fortunately, there were countless eyewitnesses—and unfortunately, there were countless eyewitnesses! UFOlogist Peter B. Davenport (2001), who heads the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) in Seattle, Washington, sums up the matter, while himself confusing the two different events:

Witnesses were reporting such markedly different objects and events that night that it was difficult for investigators to understand what was taking place. Some witnesses reported five lights, others seven, or even more. Some reported that the lights were distinctly orange or red, whereas others reported distinctly white or yellow lights. Many reported the lights were moving across the sky at seemingly high speed, whereas others reported they moved at a slow (angular) velocity, or they even hovered for several minutes.

However, although admitting the widely differing descriptions, writer Leslie Kean insists (regarding the first event) that “one overriding characteristic prevailed: the craft was massive; it was a solid object, not merely lights; and it often appeared to be very low in the sky, blocking out the stars behind it.” Indeed, many said “it was the size of multiple football fields and up to a mile long” (Kean 2010, 247, 248)—an exceedingly large size, perhaps especially for an extraterrestrial craft.

Here, we investigate these two occurrences that have become known collectively as the “Phoenix lights.”

Phoenix Lightshow I

UFO buffs were thrilled by the case, with its numerous eyewitnesses and video evidence (although there were many more witnesses and videos for the second event). Davenport was quoted in a big USA Today story (Price 1997) that propelled the case nationally: “The incident over Arizona was the most dramatic I’ve seen. . . . What we have here is the real thing. They are here.” If that seemed premature, not every skeptic knew immediately what to make of the case. Joe Nickell was queried by a morning radio show in Arizona, whose host asked him what the lights were. He replied that he expected they would soon be identified but thought it unlikely to have been extraterrestrials. Why, he asked, would aliens come to Earth, on an apparently secret mission, displaying all those bright lights? Early on, however, James McGaha regarded the Phoenix phenomena as familiar indeed. As we shall see, having been a U.S. Air Force special operations pilot, he knew a lot about aerial chevron formations and about dazzlingly brilliant lights!

As it happens, analysis of the apparently sole amateur video of the formation is instructive. Even with enhancement, nothing can be seen to join the lights. Indeed, their pattern changes over even a few seconds’ time: “The lights clearly move in relation to each other, proving that the lights represent five separate objects, rather than a solid body” (Ortega 1998). In other words, eyewitnesses who interpreted the lights as representing a single massive craft were simply connecting the dots. Reports of stars being blocked out by the perceived craft were probably due to the closer bright lights that outlined a triangular area and made it difficult to see less-bright objects within—an optical principle used for stage magic effects known as “black art” (Hopkins 1898, 64–68).

That evidence is supported by amateur astronomer Mitch Stanley, who observed the lights with his large Dobsonian telescope. Its ten-inch mirror gathers some 1,500 times the amount of light as that of the human eye, and its eyepiece magnifies an image sixty times—putting him, in effect, that many times closer to the lights than viewers on the ground. Stanley could see that the lights were, in a word, “planes.” He saw that each light was actually a pair, one each on each plane’s squarish wings (Ortega 1998).

Given the chevron formation, the planes seemed most likely to be military, and the squarish wing shape—in contrast to the swept, triangular type—suggested either A-10s or possibly T-37 fighter-trainers. But if that were so, why did the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson assert that it had no airplanes flying at that time? And why did the Phoenix airport fail to pick up the aircraft on radar?

The first answer is that when Davis-Monthan later rechecked, they discovered that a squadron from the Maryland Air National Guard had flown in for winter training exercises. According to Lt. Keith Shepherd (1997), the public information officer at Davis-Monthan, a squadron of A-10 fighter-bombers had arrived from the Baltimore-based 175th Fighter Wing.¹ As to being invisible to radar, in this type of flight only the lead airplane would be expected to have an active transponder (whose signals are what the air controllers’ radar reads), and it may well have been turned off along with certain other navigation lights. The formation of five aircraft was seen flying along a standard flight route from Nellis AFB (Las Vegas) to Davis–Monthan (Tucson) and crossing over Phoenix about 8:30 p.m. In any event the flight leader would not be expected to communicate with air traffic control under visual flight rules, and a formation of planes would not have been regarded as noteworthy in any case (Ortega 1997; 1998).

Phoenix Lightshow II

As an exercise—and this is what constituted the second phase of the Phoenix lights mystery (the two often being confused, as we have seen)—the Maryland Squadron performed a practice release of LUU-2A/B ground-illumination flares dangling from parachutes. These burn at 1.8 million candlepower, and at a distance of 150 miles still appear brighter than Venus at its brightest. They last about four minutes.² The drop took place over a gunnery range southwest of the city. After the event became a media UFO mystery, James McGaha spoke with Capt. Edward Jones, the flight leader, and confirmed details of the flare-drop scenario. As Jones explained, before the planes left the nine remaining flares were released—not at the usual low altitude but at about 15,000 feet, making them visible to people in Phoenix.

A still image of three of the flares taken from home video of the ‘Phoenix Lights’ event March 13, 1997. (CBS5AZ.com)

Although videotapes of the event show the lights behaving just like flares, UFO buff Jim Dilettoso says otherwise. Dilettoso claims his spectral analysis demonstrates they are unlike any known light produced by humans. However, in doing so he claims to do what cannot be done: A camcorder’s representation of a point source of light (focused onto an electronic chip and ultimately converted into an analog signal recorded on videotape) is unsuitable for spectral analysis. “Trying to do spectral analysis on the image produced by a camcorder,” observes one critic, “would be like testing a portrait of Abraham Lincoln for his DNA” (Ortega 1998).

The Discovery Channel, which had aired Dilettoso’s pseudoscientific claims, later commissioned another scientific test of the flare hypothesis by Leonid Rudin of Cognitech, an image-processing firm in Pasadena. Rudin matched a witness’s videotape with a daytime shot from the same location, showing the distant Sierra Estrella mountain range. As a result, the lights were shown to have been above the range and then to go out—after they drifted behind the mountaintops—just like distant flares. His work was confirmed by another independent analyst (Ortega 1998).

Some UFO proponents have conceded that these later lights have been explained. Kean (2010, 250), for example, accepts that one evidential video “has been subjected to detailed analysis by at least two qualified professionals, and both determined that the brilliant lights shown hanging in a row over the mountain range and then dropping out of sight, were, in fact flares”—drifting at the same place and time the video was made. However, Kean still clings to the earlier Phoenix event—the Chevron formation—as representing a genuine UFO mystery.

Another lifelong UFO enthusiast, folklorist Thomas E. Bullard (2014, 8), has begun to wonder if UFOlogists are “on a fool’s errand,” stating unequivocally that “Faith in the Phoenix Lights UFO has little basis in fact.”

Phoenix Redux

In retrospect, Fife Symington—governor of Arizona, 1991–1997—says that the state had been “on the brink of hysteria” following the 1997 events, which he once lampooned³ (Kean 2010, 256). He now calls for “the United States government to cease perpetuating the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-earth, conventional terms.” Utterly confusing the causes of Phoenix Lights events I and II, Symington (2010) huffs that “flares do not fly in formation.”

Almost exactly three years after the original Phoenix Lights flap, during March 2000 military officials decided to avoid a replay of that near-hysteria when they planned another series of nighttime flare-drop training exercises. Called Operation Snowbird, it involved Air Guard craft (jets and helicopters) from New York, Michigan, and California. These exercises were preceded by a tactical media alert, prompting The Arizona Republic to announce jokingly, “Look to the sky, conspiracy buffs: See the spheres of light floating eerily in the night sky. It’s the return of the fabled ‘Phoenix Lights’” (Walker 2000).

As the tenth anniversary of the Phoenix Lights approached, one news source announced “case solved” after “more strange lights appeared in the sky over Phoenix” during the preceding night (February 6, 2007). Accompanied by a photo, the CBN News article stated: “They were definitely flares dropped by a plane. It looks as though the case of the strange lights may finally be solved” (“Arizona” 2007).

Nevertheless, in 2008 came another “Lights over Phoenix” case, but this was only a pale imitation of the original. As reported by USA Today (“Lights” 2008), four bright-red lights hovered over the city on the evening of Monday, April 21. Numerous residents, as well as a Phoenix police-helicopter pilot and air traffic controllers, saw the lights—some describing them as red, while others reported them as white. Most agreed they flickered. They were visible for almost fifteen minutes, changing configurations during that time.

It was soon revealed as a hoax. Calling it “just a nocturnal prank,” a USA Today reporter spoke with the culprit who asked not to be identified. The man explained that he simply obtained four helium-filled balloons, from which he dangled road flares using fishing line. He then lit the first flare and let it ascend, followed—at one-minute intervals—by each of the others. That the lights seemed to move around, the man thought, was because a passing jet had created air turbulence (“Lights” 2008); however, ordinary winds would account for the movement.

Of course, such a confession could be false, but in this instance the man’s neighbor, Lino Mailo, actually saw him launch the devices. Mailo said, “I could’ve put this whole thing to rest.” The affair was short-lived, anyway, although residents who saw the mystery lights did recall the original “Phoenix Lights” case of 1997 (“Lights” 2008).

Of course not all such cases were limited to the Phoenix area. One 2007 display of lights “not of this world” (as an eyewitness described the phenomenon) came from Arkansas, where A-10 jets from Fort Chaffee had released the special battleground-illumination flares (Kovacs 2007). Another, much more prominent case, occurred in central Texas.

Stephenville Lights

Stephenville, Texas, is a town about a hundred miles southwest of Dallas. There, on January 8, 2008, between 6:15 and 7:30 in the evening, some forty eyewitnesses reported strange, extremely bright lights—at first moving slowly, then more quickly, some estimating a speed of 3,000 miles per hour (of course without information about distance or plane size, such estimates are worthless). The UFOs were pursued by what seemed to be military aircraft. Recalling the Phoenix Lights of yesteryear, some witnesses described the Stephenville lights as forming a single, mysterious object a mile long. When a public affairs officer for Carswell Field stated that that Naval Air station had no jets operating in the vicinity, flying-saucer theorists were off and running (Frazier 2009).

On July 4, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) issued a seventy-six-page report on the Stephenville incident, consisting largely of an analysis of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) “raw” radar returns, supplemented by eight eyewitness statements. The MUFON report contended that the FAA radar had tracked a giant object 524 feet or more long, traveling near the “Western White House” (the ranch of then-president George W. Bush), fifty miles southeast of Stephenville.

Meanwhile, James McGaha had begun to investigate the Stephenville case. He recognized that the airspace where the lights were observed was identical to Brownwood Military Operating Areas (MOAs) that begin just ten miles southwest of the Texas town. Encompassing 3,200 square miles, these MOAs are areas of restricted airspace where military aviation training is carried out.

As he told the Skeptical Inquirer, McGaha (2009) contacted the FAA, and was informed that, on January 8, four F-16 jets from the 457th Fighter Squadron had in fact entered the MOA at 6:15 and another four at 6:26—the groups departing at 6:54 and 6:58 respectively. McGaha then contacted the public affairs office of the 301st Fighter Wing to ask if they had erred in denying that their aircraft were in the MOA on the evening in question. They subsequently called him back to admit their mistake, and on January 23 issued a public press release that F-16s were actually flying in the Brownwood MOA on the evening of January 8.

McGaha explains that the F-16s had been engaged in training maneuvers, dropping counter-measure flares, used to confuse heat-seeking missiles—a fact confirmed by much additional independent evidence. For example, the pilot of a military helicopter who was flying that night had seen the lights. Himself a retired U.S. Army pilot, he stated, “I saw multiple military aircraft, with some dropping flares, in the area of the Brownwood 1 MOA.” In fact, some of the MUFON witnesses had described “very bright lights similar to the intensity of burning magnesium,” even stating that they actually saw flares being dropped from aircraft! Moreover, while conducting air-to-air combat exercises, in order to get quick acceleration pilots inject fuel into the engine exhaust (a procedure called “going to afterburner”). This results in a great burst of flame, visible from a distance.

As to the MUFON radar analysis, McGaha (2009) found it to represent “cherry picking” of data. The UFOlogists had selected just 187 points on which their claims were based “out of 2.5 million points of noise and scatter to make a [radar] track moving forty-nine mph for over one hour,” adding, “This analysis is absurd!” He concluded:

The untrained witnesses/observers were seeing nothing more than F-16s and flares. Stephenville is nothing more than connecting “lights in the sky” to form a very large mysterious object, an object that many that night thought was from another world. But nothing otherworldly happened around Stephenville on January 8, 2008.

And that also sums up the many similar cases we have looked at here as well.

Notes

1. There were several planes, but not all were flying in one formation, nor did all participate in the second event, described in the next section.

2. These should not be confused with a very different type of flare that is released to thwart heat-seeking missiles, although Shepherd (1997) did confuse the two.

3. Gov. Symington staged a press conference with a costumed “alien,” but James McGaha predicted (Erickson 1997) that the “joke” would backfire, that it would spark claims of a government cover-up, which it did.

References

Arizona UFO strange lights case solved. 2007. CBN News, February 7. Online at http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/100677.aspx?option=print; accessed February 8, 2007.

Bullard, Thomas E. 2014. Is the anomalist on a fool’s errand? Paranthropology 5(1) (January): 4–31.

Davenport, Peter B. 2001. Phoenix (Arizona) lights. In Story 2001, 426–428.

Erickson, Jim. 1997. Episode will lead to stories of cover-up, skeptic says. Arizona Daily Star (June 20).

Frazier, Kendrick. 2009. The Stephenville Lights: What actually happened. Skeptical Inquirer. 33(1) (January/February): 56–57. Based on information provided by James McGaha.

Hopkins, Albert A. 1898. Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects, and Trick Photography. Reprint: New York: Dover Publications, 1976.

Kean, Leslie. 2010. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. New York: Harmony Books.

Kovacs, Joe. 2007. Lights ‘not of this world’ mystery finally solved, Jan. 24. Online at http://www.wnd.com/2007/01/39860/; accessed January 26, 2007.

Lights over Phoenix a UFO hoax. 2008. USA Today (April 25). Online at http://www.cultnews.org/group/1208-the-ufo-believers/21199-lights-over-phoenix-a-ufo-hoax.html; accessed March 6, 2014.

McGaha, James. 2009. Quoted in Frazier 2009.

Nintzel, Jim, and Julian Grajewski. 1997. Case closed? Tucson Weekly, July 24–30.

Ortega, Tony. 1997. The great UFO cover-up. New Times (June 26–July 2): 8.

———. 1998. The hack and the quack. Phoenix New Times. Online at http://www.phoenix-newtimes.com/1998/-03-05/news/the_hack_and_the_quack/; accessed March 5, 2014.

Price, Richard. 1997. Arizonians say the truth about UFOs is out there. USA Today (June 18).

Shepherd, Lt. Keith. 1997. Quoted in Nintzel and Grajewski 1997.

Story, Ronald D. ed. 2001. The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters. New York: New American Library.

Symington, Fife. 2010. Setting the record straight. Guest chapter in Kean 2010, 262–264.

Walker, Dave. 2000. Sky lights to be flares, not UFOs, Guard says. The Arizona Republic (March 7). Online at http://www.azcentral.com/news/0307ufo.shtml; accessed March 7, 2000.

Among those who believe the Bible is the word of God, those with more formal education are less likely to believe in human evolution than those with less education.

Democrats and Republicans differ in their beliefs that humans contribute to global warming. According to a Pew poll conducted in 2008, only 28 percent of Republicans, compared to 58 percent of Democrats, believe humans contribute to global warming (Pew Research Center 2008; Mooney 2012). Also noteworthy, this gap between Democrats and Republicans is smaller among non-college graduates than among college graduates. Among non-college graduates, 31 percent of Republicans, compared to 52 percent of Democrats, believe humans contribute to global warming, which is a difference of 21 percentage points. But among college graduates, only 19 percent of Republicans, compared to 75 percent of Democrats, believe humans contribute to global warming, which is a difference of 56 percentage points.

If you examine these numbers carefully, you will notice something else interesting about the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Among Democrats, education is positively related to the belief that humans contribute to global warming. That is, 52 percent of non-college educated Democrats believe humans contribute to global warming, and that percentage climbs to 75 among college-educated Democrats. The more education Democrats have, the more they tend to believe humans contribute to global warming.

In contrast, the relationship between education and the belief that humans contribute to global warming is negative among Republicans. Among non-college educated Republicans, 31 percent believe humans contribute to global warming, and that percentage declines to 19 percent among Republicans with a college education. Assuming the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are correct that humans contribute to global warming, the beliefs of Republicans deviate more from the scientific evidence with more education.

A similar result, where the beliefs of those who have more education deviate further from scientific consensus than do the beliefs of those who have less education, arises among those who believe the Bible is the word of God. We call this the “Bible-believers” effect.

The Bible-Believers Effect

Those who believe the Bible is the word of God (“Bible believers”) and those who don’t believe the Bible is the word of God (“Bible nonbelievers”) differ in their beliefs that humans evolved from earlier species of animals. Based on data from 2006 to 2012 in the General Social Survey (which is a nationally representative sample of American adults), 23 percent of those who believe the Bible is the word of God believe in human evolution, compared to 66 percent of those who don’t believe the Bible is the word of God.¹ This gap in beliefs about human evolution increases with education: the gap is smaller for those with less education than for those with more education. For example, of those with less than a high school education, 31 percent of Bible believers and 56 percent of Bible nonbelievers believe in human evolution, which is a difference of 25 percentage points. But among those with graduate degrees, 10 percent of Bible believers and 79 percent of Bible nonbelievers believe in human evolution, which is a difference of 69 percentage points.

Figure 1 reveals the Bible-believer effect in greater detail. The top (solid) line in Figure 1 plots the percentage of Bible nonbelievers, at each level of educational attainment, who believe in human evolution. The bottom (dashed) line in Figure 1 plots the percentage of Bible believers, at each level of educational attainment, who believe in human evolution. As Figure 1 shows, education is positively related to belief in human evolution among Bible nonbelievers. That is, 56 percent of Bible nonbelievers without a high school education believe in human evolution, and that percentage climbs to 61, 68, 72, and 79 percent among Bible nonbelievers whose highest level of educational attainment is a high school degree, a junior college degree, a bachelor’s degree, and a graduate degree, respectively. The more education Bible nonbelievers have, the more they tend to believe in human evolution. In contrast, the relationship between education and belief in human evolution among Bible believers is the reverse. That is, among Bible believers, the relationship between education and belief in human evolution is negative. Among Bible believers with less than a high school education, 31 percent believe in human evolution, and that percentage declines to 23, 18, 21, and 10 percent of Bible believers whose highest level of educational attainment is a high school degree, a junior college degree, a bachelor’s degree, and a graduate degree, respectively. In other words, Bible believers’ views about human evolution deviate more from the scientific evidence with more education.

The Bible-believers effect also arises when the belief the universe began with a huge explosion (the big bang) is substituted for the belief in human evolution. Belief in the big bang increases with education among Bible nonbelievers but decreases with education among Bible believers.

Figure 1: Percent of Bible nonbelievers and Bible believers who believe in human evolution for each level of educational attainment.

What Accounts for the Bible-Believers Effect?

The General Social Survey (GSS) data reveal several factors that are not the cause of the Bible-believers effect. The Bible-believers effect is not due to a relative lack of scientific literacy, in general, among highly educated Bible believers. For example, highly educated Bible believers are more likely than less highly educated Bible believers to know basic scientific facts concerning such things as viruses, radioactivity, and genetics. Highly educated Bible believers only repudiate highly selected scientific facts such as those concerning human evolution and the big bang theory.

The Bible-believers effect is also not due to a relative lack of appreciation of the scientific method by highly educated Bible believers. That is, highly educated Bible believers are more likely, than less highly educated Bible believers, to understand the scientific method.

The Bible-believers effect is also not due to a relative deficit among highly educated Bible believers in general reasoning skills. Highly educated Bible believers have better general reasoning skills than less highly educated Bible believers. Nor are highly educated Bible believers more likely to accept pseudoscientific beliefs, such as astrology, than less highly educated bible believers. For example, 48 percent of Bible believers who have less than a high school education believe astrology is not at all scientific, compared to 61, 68, 79 and 83 percent of those whose highest level of educational attainment is a high school degree, a junior college education, a bachelor’s degree, and a graduate degree, respectively. Such a pattern of results would not arise if highly educated Bible believers were generally less skeptical than less highly educated Bible believers.

So the Bible-believers effect is not due to a relative deficit in general knowledge of scientific facts or the scientific method, cognitive skills, or pseudoscientific skepticism among highly educated Bible believers. But although these potential causes of the Bible-believers effect can be convincingly eliminated, what is the cause is less clear. Several potential explanations for the Bible-believers effect are plausible.

Strength of Religious Beliefs: The Bible-believers effect may be a consequence of the strength of religious beliefs and practices because highly educated Bible believers have stronger core religious beliefs and practices than do less highly educated Bible believers. For example, the GSS data set reveals that highly educated Bible believers pray more, attend religious services more, and report stronger religious affiliations than do less highly educated Bible believers. It is not clear why education is positively related to religious commitment among Bible believers, but given this relationship, it could account for the Bible-believers effect. The stronger a person’s commitment to religion (i.e., the more strongly the person holds core religious beliefs and the more frequently the person engages in religious practices) the more likely the person is to deny scientific facts (such as human evolution and the big bang theory) that conflict with the person’s strongly held religious beliefs (cf. Kahan et al. 2012).

Counterarguments: Mooney (2012) proposed a potential explanation for why highly educated Republicans are less likely to believe humans contribute to global warming than are less highly educated Republicans. Translated from that context to the context of Bible believers and human evolution, Mooney’s explanation is the following. Compared to less well educated Bible believers, more highly educated Bible believers better understand arguments used to deny human evolution and are, therefore, better able to justify their beliefs in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary. We are all susceptible to confirmation biases and the selective interpretation of evidence. For example, we tend to be less critical of evidence that supports our views and, conversely, more motivated than is justified to identify flaws in evidence that opposes our views (Lord et al. 1979). The cognitive skills needed to perform such self-serving assessments likely improve with education. That is, the more years of education a person has, the more skilled that person is in defending his or her beliefs when they are challenged.

Need for Consistency: Compared to the less well educated, those who are more highly educated may have a greater need for consistency in their beliefs (and a better understanding that belief in the Bible as the word of God is inconsistent with belief in human evolution). If they have a greater need for consistency of beliefs, those who are better educated would be more self-motivated than those who are less highly educated to reject human evolution and therefore more motivated (and not just better able) to employ self-serving assessments of evidence.

Over Confidence: Perhaps education breeds confidence in a person’s opinions regardless of their relationship to fact; if so, the more a person believes he or she knows the answers, the less likely that person is to be persuaded by conflicting evidence.

Implications

According to the GSS data, only slightly more than half of American adults (52 percent) believe in human evolution. Who among the 48 percent of evolution deniers is most open to changing their minds? We might hope those who are highly educated are (a) less committed to false beliefs, (b) more intellectually capable of understanding evidence that conflicts with their beliefs, and (c) more persuaded by rational argument than are those who are less highly educated, and hence more open to changing their beliefs.

But if any of the preceding hypotheses about the cause of the Bible-believers effect is correct, the Bible believers who are most open to changing their beliefs about human evolution are those who are least, rather than most, highly educated. Whether the Bible-believers effect arises because years of education and strength of religious convictions are correlated, because the highly educated are best at making counterarguments, because the highly educated have the greatest need for consistency, or because the highly educated are most overconfident, highly educated Bible believers would be less likely to change their mistaken views about human evolution than less highly educated Bible believers. In other words, if any of the preceding explanations of the Bible-believers effect is correct, highly educated Bible believers not only deny human evolution more but are also more committed to denying human evolution than are less highly educated Bible believers.

An implication is that the argument for human evolution may be a particularly hard sell among highly educated Bible believers. In addition, a debate about human evolution that presents both sides of the argument may be counterproductive among Bible believers regardless of educational level. In particular, a debate that includes the argument that the Bible conflicts with human evolution and that highlights counterarguments to human evolution, might serve more to entrench mistaken beliefs than to weaken them among Bible believers of all educational levels (Lord et al. 1979). That is, a debate that presents both sides of the argument for human evolution could heighten awareness of how core beliefs about the Bible conflict with belief in human evolution and present both counterarguments to and evidence against human evolution, and thereby enhance the motivation and ability to defend one’s mistaken beliefs regardless of educational level. This is just one of many reasons skeptics might object to presenting either creationism or intelligent design alongside evolution in the science curriculum of public schools.

Conclusions

Education tends to be positively correlated with knowledge. The greater a person’s level of formal education, the greater is his or her knowledge and acceptance of scientific facts, in general. But among Republicans, education is negatively correlated with the belief that humans contribute to global warming. Republicans who are most highly educated are those who most often deny humans’ role in global warming, which is contrary to scientific consensus. In addition, education is negatively correlated with belief in human evolution, among those who believe the Bible is the word of God. Of those who believe the Bible is the word of God, the most highly educated are most likely to deny human evolution, which is contrary to scientific consensus. These results suggest that rational, evidence-based arguments in support of scientific facts may be less effective in correcting the false beliefs of the highly educated than in correcting the false beliefs of the less highly educated, when those facts conflict with core conservative values.

Note

1. The results are fr­om a sample of 4,084 respondents. Subsequent results are also fr­om the General Social Survey.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Kendrick Frazier, George Potts, Rob Roberts, and Doug Russell for their helpful comments.

References

Kahan, D.M., E. Peters, M. Wittlin, et al. 2012. The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nature Climate Change 2: 732–735.

Lord, C., L. Ross, and M. Lepper. 1979. Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37: 2098–2109.

Mooney, C. 2012. The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality. New York: Wiley.

Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. 2008. A deeper partisan divide over global warming. Washington, D.C. Online at http://www.people-press.org/2008/05/08/a-deeper-partisan-divide-over-global-warming/.

Not since Jesse James, had a bank robber attained such a Robin Hood image. Although there were other “public enemies” of the Depression Era—such as “Pretty Boy Floyd” and “Baby Face” Nelson—John Dillinger had daring and style to spare. But so did a tenacious G-man named Melvin Purvis (Figure 1), an agent so effective and so adored by the public and press that his boss, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover, seethed with jealousy. Hoover—well, I’m getting ahead of a most frightening story in the annals of crime fighting, and I don’t mean the tale of Dillinger’s ghost.

Dillinger

Figure 1. Melvin Purvis, autographed photo to close friend James McLeod, courtesy of McLeod’s daughter Florrie Ervin; copy photo by Joe Nickell.

The biography of John Herbert Dillinger (1903–1934) begins with an endearing story of him at age three, dragging a chair to the side of his mother’s coffin, climbing up, and trying to shake her awake. It is tempered by the account of a moonshine-intoxicated punk of twenty-one, who teamed up with a more seasoned thug and attempted to rob an elderly grocer of his weekend receipts. As they beat the struggling old man, Dillinger’s revolver went off and the pair fled, the accomplice driving off and leaving young Dillinger to fend for himself. Although both were soon arrested, the latter was sentenced to just two years, while Dillinger drew a prison term of ten to twenty years. Freed in 1933, after nine years, he was rearrested while still on parole as the leader of a new band of bank robbers (Girardin 1994, 10–32).

After some of his old prison buddies escaped, they raided the jail in Lima, Ohio, where Dillinger had been lodged, freeing him but accidentally killing the sheriff in the process. Over the next few months the gang committed a series of bold bank heists, although probably not the more than thirty credited to them. Then, in January 1934, police in Tucson, Arizona, arrested Dillinger and most of his gang. Sent to an “escape-proof” jail in Indiana, he was soon escaping—using a pistol he suddenly brandished. Legend says it was a dummy that Dillinger carved from wood and blackened with shoe polish, while a conspiracy theory holds that a bribed judge smuggled in a real pistol (Girardin 1994, 32–108; Toland 1963). (A popular photo of a smiling Dillinger holding a machine gun in his left hand shows him also clasping the little dummy pistol in his right. The photo was made outside his father’s house following the outlaw’s escape. The picture graces the cover of Girardin’s Dillinger: The Untold Story [1994].)

Dillinger assembled another gang, this time including the infamous George “Baby Face” Nelson. Two robberies later, the FBI got the drop on Dillinger in St. Paul, but he escaped with only a gunshot to the leg as his girlfriend, Evelyn “Billie” Frechette, stepped on the gas and sped them to safety. Dillinger had another close call one night a month later in the infamous affair at Wisconsin’s Little Bohemia Lodge. FBI agents led by Melvin Purvis approached the lodge but were forced to dive for cover from machine-gun fire. Three non-gangsters, who jumped in a car and failed to stop when ordered to, were shot by Purvis’s men, one fatally; Dillinger, Nelson, and others escaped (Girardin 1994, 113–156; Purvis 1936, 21).

Dillinger underwent plastic surgery to alter his appearance and damage his fingerprints. Neither attempt was very successful. Billie having been arrested, Dillinger had taken up with a waitress who shared an apartment with a Romanian woman, Ana Cumpanas, a brothel owner known as Anna Sage. She recognized Dillinger and tipped off police who passed her on to Melvin Purvis. Sage later informed Purvis that Dillinger was to take her and his girlfriend to a movie, and that she could be identified by her attire. She would become forever known as “the woman in red,” although she actually wore an orange skirt and white blouse that night. John Dillinger was soon dead in a hail of gunfire outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater (Girardin 1994, 169–173, 217–230).

Melvin Purvis

Dillinger’s nemesis was the FBI’s Melvin Purvis (1903–1960) who became a special agent in 1927 and soon headed investigative offices in Cincinnati, Washington, Oklahoma City, and Birmingham before taking charge of the Bureau’s most high-profile office in Chicago in 1932. In just eight years he captured more FBI-designated public enemies than any agent in the history of the FBI (“Melvin Purvis” 2014).

Standing just five feet nine inches and weighing only 140 pounds, Purvis appeared an unlikely hero, and the newspapers sometimes called him “Little Mel.” They also dubbed him “Nervous Purvis”—especially after he admitted that the cigar shook in his mouth that fateful night when he lit it to signal agents that he had identified Dillinger. Purvis would later write, with the candor of a man of integrity:

The romantic newspaper writers have, on occasion, pictured me in their deathless prose as a combination of Wild Bill Hickok, Nick Carter and Frank Merriwell. Nothing could be farther from the truth; I am not a gun fighter; I am not a wily sleuth; and I am not a Fearless Frank. To tell the truth, I was thoroughly frightened every time it fell to my lot to carry a gun on a foray of any kind.

There were men who served with me who never knew the emotion of fear. They belonged to the glory company of history, those joyous daredevils who, from time immemorial, have been vainly waiting for a commander to order a charge on the gateways of hell. I admire them, but my nervous system is not built that way. I never led a raid without apprehension, and only the knowledge that there was a job there to do kept me functioning in the death-haunted sectors where bullets were flying.

Purvis added, “A sense of responsibility is often an effective substitute for courage” (1936, 246–247).

So, as he and other agents moved in on Dillinger on the sidewalk outside the theater, Purvis would later admit, “I was very nervous; it must have been a squeaky voice that called out, ‘Stick ’em up Johnny, we have you surrounded.’” Dillinger drew his automatic pistol, but it never fired. Public Enemy Number One was shot by Purvis’s men and lay dying. “Later after leaving this scene,” Purvis wrote, “I tried to button up my coat and found both buttons gone. Apparently I had grabbed for my gun without thinking, and I am frank to say that I do not know how it came into my hand” (Purvis 1936, 275–277).

Purvis’s self-effacement notwithstanding, he gained tremendous notoriety for his lead role in bringing down John Dillinger, and—three months later—Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, killed in an Ohio farm field. J. Edgar Hoover steamed at the attention given Purvis. He wanted his brave agents to remain faceless so he would get credit for their achievements. So it was that Hoover maneuvered behind the scenes to keep Purvis from the next target, George “Baby Face” Nelson (real name Lester Gillis). When Nelson shot agent Sam Cowley (after Nelson turned a car chase into a trap), a scheming Hoover ordered Purvis to stay at the hospital with Cowley while urgently scrambling less experienced agents to pursue Nelson. When, as Cowley lay dying, Purvis vowed to a Chicago American reporter that he would get Nelson, Hoover had had enough (Purvis 2005, 259–260).

Hoover

John Edgar Hoover (1895–1972), the man who would become “the nation’s top cop,” had parlayed his Master of Laws degree into a job with the Department of Justice in 1917. Thus escaping the draft, he pursued draft evaders, suspected German partisans, and communists on the home front. A biographer (Hack 2004, 54) observed, “The fledging civil servant had developed an unpopular habit of ridiculing those who dared to disagree with his interpretation of the law, dismissing them with a flutter of the hand as if clearing the air of annoying cobwebs.” It was a sign of things to come.

Working twelve-hour days every day of the week, Hoover received promotions for his industry. He lobbied for, and obtained, the job of assistant chief of the Bureau of Investigation, and, in 1924, became director, charged by Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone with implementing a laundry list of ethical reforms. After minor name changes it became, in 1935, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Meanwhile, Hoover sought to improve efficiency and obtain laws permitting agents to make arrests and carry guns, as well as making the slaying of a special agent a federal offense. And he allowed Charles Appel—an accountant as well as a document examiner—to found the Bureau’s now-famous crime laboratory, beginning with a borrowed microscope (Gentry 1991, 124–148).

In 1927, a handsome young lawyer named Clyde Tolson caught Hoover’s eye, and in just two years he would become in rapid succession an agent, a staff supervisor, special agent in charge of the Buffalo office, and finally assistant director! Thus began a friendship—others say a romantic liaison—that lasted until Hoover’s death. Neither married, and the two dined together, spent weekends together, took vacations together, albeit while keeping separate residences; Hoover lived with his mother until her death in 1938. Hoover’s sexual orientation has been made an issue due to his public crusade against homosexuals—his professed contempt of them being second only to his hatred of Communists. Hoover refused to allow gays into the FBI, subverted their positions elsewhere, and sometimes blackmailed them into becoming informants (Hack 2004, 281–282; Gentry 1991, 90, 307–310, 412–413).

Hoover also took an interest in another young lawyer, the dashing Melvin Purvis to whom the Bureau director wrote (April 3, 1934), “. . . get Dillinger for me and the world is yours” (Summers 1993, 70). Things soured with the shootout-turned-fiasco at Bohemia Lodge, and Hoover sent agent Sam Cowley to assist. When Purvis did succeed against Public Enemy Number One, Hoover briefly feted Purvis and Cowley in Washington, privately praising Purvis for “almost unimaginable daring” (Summers 1993, 72). Unfortunately the press kept referring to Purvis—not Hoover—as “The Man Who Got Dillinger,” and when Purvis also brought down Pretty Boy Floyd and became a media sensation, Hoover’s jealous anger finally boiled over.

Hoover secretly demoted Purvis—one of the greatest G-men of all time—and began to load him with demeaning assignments and to rewrite history, omitting Purvis’s name from the Dillinger saga. An early example of Hoover’s spite came following Purvis’s telegraphed resignation in 1935, when he accepted a lucrative offer from Post Toasties cereal. Comic strips featured Purvis’s exploits and promoted the Melvin Purvis Junior G-Man Club, which offered—in exchange for cereal box tops—such items as a fingerprint kit, code wheel, invisible ink and developer, and a Secret Operator’s Manual, plus Junior G-Man badges as well as Secret Operator badges for girls as well as boys. Although this was wonderful promotion for the FBI, Hoover nevertheless tried to find a pretext for challenging the little toy badges. He had to content himself with getting Post Toasties to remove any mention of the FBI in their Junior G-Man promotion (Purvis 2005, 283–284, 295).

While pretending to be friendly with Purvis, Hoover in fact launched an unrelenting sneak crusade against him, sabotaging Purvis’s career opportunities whenever possible, spreading rumors, and encouraging agents to look for anything negative about this principled American hero. Although successful in blocking his appointment as a federal judge, undermining Hollywood offers, and the like, Hoover was unable to thwart Purvis’s appointment to the Military Intelligence Division during World War II. Purvis instigated surveillance of Martin Bormann, helped organize a War Crimes Office, investigated the report of Hitler’s death, and assisted with the Nuremburg trials. Unfortunately, Colonel Purvis’s service records were destroyed in a fire, so crucial details are lacking, but he served with distinction (Purvis 2005, 260–313).

Months after Purvis had resigned from the FBI, Hoover had been humiliated at a senate subcommittee hearing on appropriations when a senator pressed him on whether America’s top cop had ever made an arrest. Hoover was forced to reply—four times—that he never had, that he was a desk-bound administrator. He probably never in his life wished more for credentials like Purvis’s. The very next morning Hoover ordered his agents to notify him immediately when targeted gangster Alvin Karpis was about to be arrested. Three weeks later, Hoover arranged to be on scene, kept safely out of harm while brave agents pulled in front of Karpis’s car and arrested him with drawn guns. But in the official version, it was Hoover who lunged at Karpis and grabbed him before he could reach his weapon. (Actually Karpis’s two rifles were in the trunk.) “Karpis Captured in New Orleans by Hoover Himself,” headlined the New York Times. Years later, in an autobiography, Karpis would make fun of these lies (Gentry 1991, 182–195).

The Death of Melvin Purvis

Hoover’s decades-long jealous vendetta no doubt contributed to Purvis’s suicide on February 29, 1960, and even then—as we shall see—Hoover would add insult to injury.

The sound of a gunshot brought Purvis’s wife, Roseanne, running upstairs from the kitchen. He had shot himself with a gun from his impressive collection—ironically the pistol of a gangster, Gus Winkler—the bullet entering beneath the jaw and exiting at the top of the head. It then hit the plaster ceiling, ricocheted into a bedroom opposite Purvis’s own, and, by then spent, fell on the floor (Coroner’s Inquest 1960, 30–32).

In 2004, I spent most of a week in Florence, South Carolina, where Melvin Purvis—after resigning from the FBI—had raised a family and died. From March 27 to 31, I visited his former home, talked with people who had known him, made a pilgrimage to his grave, and conducted research at both the county library and courthouse—being permitted at the coroner’s office to make a supervised examination of the file on Purvis’s death. I obtained a copy of the Coroner’s Inquest report (1960), and I held in my hand the bullet that killed the great G-man.

I met only one person who thought Purvis had been murdered, even though his son Alston writes (Purvis 2005, 337), “Despite the evidence to the contrary, some are convinced that my father was murdered and I have been urged to demand that an investigation into the death be opened.” I had a lengthy talk with murder-theorist Charles Ducker, resident of the former Purvis home. He was a child when he knew Purvis (being only ten when the shooting occurred) and so, he quipped, regarding Purvis’s stature, “He always looked big to me.” Ducker (2004) insisted the death was no suicide, believing instead that someone deliberately shot Purvis, someone who knew him well enough to get close to him. He told me in conspiratorial fashion that the alleged death bullet was suspiciously pristine, that it “doesn’t have a mark on it” even though the home’s plaster-over-lath ceiling was extremely hard. However, like the questioned “super bullet” in the JFK-assassination case (Posner 1993, 335–336), the Purvis bullet has two features to which I can attest: It is copper-jacketed, making it resistant to the damage that would accrue to a soft lead bullet, and it was indeed deformed, flattened on one side. Moreover, using an illuminated Coddington magnifier, I noted traces of what appeared to be plaster on the bullet’s tip.

Speculations that Purvis was murdered are completely unfounded. Mrs. Purvis reached the scene—at the top of the steps—within moments. Neither she nor her maid saw or heard anything suspicious. Nor did the investigation reveal any trace of an intruder, any report of a stranger in the neighborhood, or anything else that suggested foul play. Purvis’s physician, Dr. Walter R. Mead, arrived within minutes, followed by another doctor and then the coroner; none found anything other than evidence of a self-inflicted wound, and that became the official verdict (Coroner’s Inquest 1960). The coroner who allowed me access to the file, M.G. Matthews (2004), told me he thought the presence of both Mrs. Purvis and a maid in the kitchen was very good evidence against the intruder theory and that therefore homicide was unlikely.

Still questions are raised. Why did the victim shoot himself under the jaw—a supposedly unheard of site (Allen 1960, 14; Purvis 2005, 339)? In fact it has been chosen in a significant number of instances (DiMaio 1998, 363), and, indeed in this case it proved effective. The site seems much less likely for a homicide. Speculations that the gun may have been in Purvis’s left hand—he was right-handed—are misleading (Purvis 2005, 2). According to the Coroner’s Inquest report (1960, 2–3, 9, 48), the deceased—dressed in pajamas, housecoat, and slippers—was lying in a “crumpled” position, “slightly on his right side” with the pistol on the floor “to his back.” Since these are positions into which the body and gun fell (the latter even possibly rebounding), a left-handed grip is not indicated. Anyway, it seems possible that Purvis held the weapon in some manner in his left hand (the bullet entered the left-of-center portion of the jaw), and then pushed against the trigger with his right thumb. This could explain why, although there were powder burns showing “that the shot was close” (Coroner’s Inquest 1960, 15), the wound did not appear to have been a contact one (Purvis 2005, 339); the thumb pushing on the trigger could have pushed the weapon away slightly at the same time. He could even have been seated on the floor—to help steady the gun—as possibly suggested by a butted-out cigarette there to the right of the body (Coroner’s Inquest 1960, 12, 51). This hypothesis would seem to account for all the known evidence; there are other credible scenarios as well, though I do not think that homicide is one of them.

But could the death have been accidental? Those hypothesizing that possibility suggest different scenarios. One, that Purvis was attempting to extract a round jammed in the .45 automatic (“Melvin Purvis” 2014), is pure speculation—an obvious rationalization to deflect the label of suicide, which many regard as a stigma. (More on this presently.) Moreover, such carelessness on the part of a gun expert like Purvis would be unlikely, and the powder burns under the jaw showed he was not looking down the barrel at the moment the pistol fired.

Another notion is that, intending to clean the firearm, Purvis may have attempted to pull the rope that would lower stairs to the attic where his gun-cleaning equipment was stored, and, in the process, put his weight on a previously injured foot, whereupon “He stumbled and fell and the gun, which he did not know was loaded, pressed against his throat and went off” (Ducker 2005). This complex scenario fails the test of Occam’s razor, the principle that, of competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions is most likely correct.

The preferred hypothesis is therefore that Melvin Purvis committed suicide, a possibility that becomes a probability when the elements relative to a psychological autopsy are considered, providing corroborative evidence. Dr. Mead testified at the inquest, having talked with Purvis the night before:

Mr. Purvis was very much depressed, had been so for several days, I might say even weeks before then, but he had returned from Washington some eight or nine days before this and had seen me several times during that period. On each occasion he was very much depressed because of his inability to sleep, because of some constant pain that he was having in his back, his feeling that he was not gaining his strength. He was very much worried about the work that he was doing in Washington [investigating graft in the federal manpower system], that he didn't see how he could get well enough to carry on, and he expressed many times the feeling of futility of trying to go ahead with so many circumstances against him.

When asked if Purvis mentioned the possibility of suicide, Dr. Mead replied:

By indirection only, I would say, he mentioned it one time—I can’t recall whether it was the night before or sometime during the previous week but he had been unusually hopeless in his outlook and he said “I just don’t see any way out of this at all” and then quickly he said, “But I am not thinking of the same thing you are.”

(Coroner’s Inquest 1960, 6–7)

There, at least obliquely, was Purvis mentioning the idea of suicide, while at that time seeming to reject it. Certainly he was depressed and expressing such futility as to be consistent with subsequent suicide. In very recent weeks—“about the latter part of January”—his attorney said, Purvis had asked to have his will revised (Willcox 1960), another indication that he was thinking of death. Yet another highly suggestive fact was that— only the day before his death—Melvin Purvis asked his son Alston where the Winkler automatic was. (Alston had used it for target practice at the Police Pistol Range.) Purvis claimed he was “planning on giving it away” (Purvis 1960, 25–26). And in the middle of that very night, helping his frail, sick father get to and from the bathroom, Alston “breathed the odor of alcohol and morphine” (Purvis 2005, 327).

I do not see Purvis’s suicide as a stigma at all. Ambrose Bierce wrote: “Suicide is always courageous. We call it courage in a soldier merely to face death—say to lead a forlorn hope—although he has a chance of life and a certainty of ‘glory.’ But the suicide does more than face death; he incurs it, and with a certainty, not of glory, but of reproach. If that is not courage we must reform our vocabulary” (Bierce 1909–12).

Melvin Purvis was a courageous man. His epitaph is carved in stone: “Saepe Timui Sed Numquam Cucurri” (“Always Afraid, Never Run”). His son Alston (whom I have talked with) says:

And when my son asks me, as I know he will, if my father was a hero, I will have an answer for him. I will tell him my father led men into battle, that he risked his life more than once. I will tell him my father believed in duty, honor, dignity. I will tell him he never boasted or bragged about the things he did. I will say, “Yes, my father was a hero.”

(Purvis 2005, 342)

Mrs. Doris Rogers (later Doris Lockerman, 1910–2011) had worked for Purvis in Birmingham and came to Chicago at his request to manage the office. There were no female special agents then (not since an “experiment” with two in the 1920s), but she was involved in behind-the-scenes FBI activity during the gangster era. On one occasion she was asked to identify the wanted criminal Verne Miller, who happened to have once been sheriff in her native county in South Dakota. She sat on a high stool in a nearby apartment in such a way that she could peer out without being seen. Another time she remonstrated with Purvis for his agents’ harsh treatment of a woman suspect, and Purvis simply asked, “What should I do?” As to J. Edgar Hoover and his treatment of Purvis, her anger never ceased (Gentry 1991, 133; Purvis 2005, 344).

She summed up Hoover’s vendetta against the great G-man: “It is the story of a man whose littleness and meanness and smallness led him to destroy another man. It is a calumny of the worst order, and there is no way to recall it without raging against it” (Lockerman 2005). After Purvis’s funeral, his widow gathered her three sons and sent a terse telegram to Hoover: “We are honored that you ignored Melvin’s death. Your jealousy hurt him very much but until the end I think he loved you.” Hoover did not respond (Purvis 2005, 329).

Dillinger's Ghost?

Some conspiracy theorists maintain that it was not Dillinger who died near the Biograph Theater. Rumors circulated after his death that the FBI shot down the wrong man. They cite discrepancies in the description of Dillinger versus the autopsy that “point to Dillinger’s permanent escape and disappearance” (Nash 1978, 394). Some have postulated that the FBI had actually killed a small-time hoodlum by the name of Jimmy Lawrence “and was covering up its tracks” (Ogden 2009, 117).

This is a familiar conspiracy claim. Supposedly, the “wrong” person likewise was killed instead of such “escaped” outlaws as John Wilkes Booth, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid (Nickell 1993). Even Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, was not in Oswald’s grave, according to one ludicrous book. (See my forensic refutation, “Assassin or Look-alike,” Nickell 2009, 143–154.)

In fact, Dillinger’s body was identified by his own father—once he had looked past the minor plastic surgery—and he had his son’s coffin covered with three feet of concrete to keep the curious from digging it up (Ogden 2009, 117). A death photo leaves little doubt the corpse was indeed Dillinger’s, and fingerprints left no doubt at all: The tiny scars that obliterated his prints’ major pattern features (called “cores” and “deltas”) did not prevent comparison, and the postmortem prints unquestionably match those of Dillinger on his FBI wanted poster. As to “Jimmy Lawrence” that was simply the alias Dillinger was using at the time of his death (Kurland 1994, 101–108; Girardin 1994, 220; Gentry 1991, 173).

Now that we know “Dillinger” was indeed Dillinger, we need not be mistaken as to just whose ghost allegedly visits Dillinger’s death site. According to ghost raconteur Tom Ogden (2009, 117): “Within months of Dillinger’s death, people began to report seeing a misty male form floating down the alley where he died. Sometimes it would pull a gun before it fell to the ground and faded away.” In other words, the alleged ghostly drama simply repeated the drama people had read about.

But did these paranormal reenactments actually occur? Ogden is contradicted by another writer, Ursula Bielski (1998, 134), who insists: “In light of the mania following Dillinger's death, it seems almost unbelievable that no unusual phenomena were reported at the shooting site in the immediate months and years that followed. In fact, it was not until the 1970s that passersby on north Lincoln Avenue began to spot a bluish figure running down the alley, stumbling, falling, and disappearing.” Hauck (1996, 154), repeats claims that Dillinger’s ghost “has been seen racing down the alley.”

In fact, however, the reported ghostly reenactments are no such thing, since Dillinger never ran and was never in the alley. For these facts we turn to the first-hand account of his death by Melvin Purvis, leader of the team of G-men who brought down John Dillinger.

As Purvis wrote in his American Agent (1936, 275–276), “I was about three feet to the left of him,” when agents closed in on Dillinger.

I had to give the signal to close in then because I had seen the woman at his right [his current girlfriend] tug at his shirt in a furtive sort of way as if to warn him that all was not well. I had seen him reach for his right-hand pocket and give it a slight jerk as if in an effort to draw a gun. When I called out to him he drew his .380 automatic pistol, but he never fired it. He dropped to the ground; he had been shot.

Purvis continued, making clear that Dillinger never ran or even entered the alley:

He had made a long stride toward the entrance to an alley at the end of which were some of our men. I am glad he didn’t get into the alley, as there might have been a cross fire, although we had planned to avoid this as in all cases. Dillinger fell with his head in the alley and his feet on the sidewalk. In his right hand was his gun, and as he fell the elbow hit first, causing a sort of bounce. When his hand bounced up I took the gun from it. Turning him over, we immediately determined that he had no other weapons. We spoke to him, but he couldn't speak. An ambulance was called.

So the alleyway ghost is a figment, obviously based on misreports of Dillinger’s slaying. Besides, “In recent years . . . paranormal tales of that alleyway have lapsed . . .” (Bielski 1998, 134). Let us hope that Dillinger’s imagined ghost now rests in peace.

References

Allen, Dr. Edwin. 1960. In Coroner’s Inquest 1960, 10–16.

Bielski, Ursula. 1998. Chicago Haunts: Ghostlore of the Windy City. Chicago: Lake Claremont Press.

Bierce, Ambrose. 1909–12. “On Taking Oneself Off,” in The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (12 vols.); reprint New York: Guardian, 1966, 338–344.

Coroner’s Inquest: The State of South Carolina vs. The Dead Body of Melvin Purvis. 1960. Inquest held April 13. (Table of contents, p. a; report, pp. 1–57.)

DiMaio, Vincent, J.M. 1998. Gunshot Wounds. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Ducker, Bill. 2005. Quoted in Purvis 2005. 339–340.

Ducker, Charles. 2004. Conversation with Joe Nickell, March 28.

Gentry, Curt. 1991. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Girardin, G. Russell, with William J. Helmer. 1994. Dillinger: The Untold Story. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hack, Richard. 2004. Puppetmaster: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. Beverly Hills, CA: New Millennium Press.

Hauck, Dennis William. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York: Penguin Books.

Kurland, Michael. 1994. A Gallery of Rogues. New York: Prentice Hall.

Lockerman, Doris. 2005. Quoted in Purvis 2005, 344.

Matthews, M.G. 2004. Discussion with Joe Nickell, March 29.

“Melvin Purvis.” 2014. Online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Purvis; accessed Feb. 11, 2014.

Nash, Jay Robert. 1978. Among the Missing: An Anecdotal History of Missing Persons from 1800 to the Present. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Nickell, Joe. 1993. “Outlaw Impostors,” in Stein 1993, 112–113.

———. 2009. Real or Fake. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Ogden, Tom. 2009. Haunted Theaters: Playhouse Phantoms, Opera House Horrors, and Backstage Banshees. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press.

Posner, Gerald. 1993. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. New York: Random House.

Purvis, Alston. 1960. Testimony in Coroner’s Inquest 1960, 24–27.

Purvis, Alston, with Alex Tresniowski. 2005. The Vendetta: Special Agent Melvin Purvis, John Dillinger, and Hoover’s FBI in the Age of Gangsters. New York: Public Affairs.

Purvis, Melvin. 1936. American Agent. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co.

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

Summers, Anthony. 1993. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Toland, John. 1963. The Dillinger Days. New York: Random House; cited in Kurland 1994, 105–106.

Wilcox, Hugh L. 1960. Testimony at Coroner's Inquest 1960.

As skeptics, we value ideas that are grounded in science over those that come from somewhere else. We believe that the methods of science, when conscientiously applied, produce the best available information. In pursuit of our goals, we often focus on the latest wave of pseudoscience or superstition. Some new bit of claptrap pops up, and we sharpen our scientific swords and mount the attack.

Going on the offensive is what we do best, but it is also important to have a strong defense. If we are going to be successful, we must do everything we can to make sure there are no kinks in our own armor. For science to stand as a shining alternative to the unending waves of irrationality, its reputation must be strong.

Unfortunately, science’s reputation has taken a bewildering number of blows in recent years. The challenges have come in the form of unscrupulous researchers, unreliable results, and sloppy publication practices.

The Nature of the Problem(s)

Fraud

Some of the most recent blows to the image of science are cases of apparent—and in one case quite openly perpetrated—fraud.

LaCour and Green (2014) In December of 2014, political scientists Michael LaCour and Donald Green published an article in the prestigious journal Science showing that, when canvassed about the topic of gay marriage, voters showed a strong and lasting shift in the favorable direction if the canvassers disclosed that they were gay. But the article was recently retracted because LaCour made false statements about the funding of the study and the payment of survey respondents. In addition, LaCour appears to have lied on his résumé, fabricated the data in at least one of the studies in the Science paper, and possibly fabricated data for another published study.¹ Donald Green, the senior co-author on the Science article requested that the paper be retracted, but LaCour has posted a twenty-two-page defense of the paper on his personal website and has not joined Green in supporting the retraction. As of this moment, LaCour appears to stand by his research and has defended himself on Twitter. However, speaking through an attorney, he admitted to making false representations about the study’s funding.

The Infamous Chocolate Study In what was designed to be a deliberate and instructive hoax, science journalist John Bohannon teamed up with two documentary filmmakers and other collaborators to conduct a real but flawed study to determine whether eating chocolate in combination with a low carbohydrate diet would promote weight loss. By designing the study in such a way that statistically significant (but practically irrelevant) results would almost certainly be obtained, they discovered that—lo and behold—chocolate in combination with a low carbohydrate diet produced improved weight loss and lower cholesterol. Despite its many flaws, the study was accepted by several journals and eventually appeared in the International Archives of Medicine. Given the sensational topic and appealing results, the study was quickly picked up by news outlets all over the world.²

Daily Star (UK) coverage of the bogus chocolate study.

The history of fraudulent scientific research is long and storied. The United States Office of Research Integrity investigates many cases each year and lists the names of researchers found guilty of misconduct. Furthermore, if you follow the Retraction Watch blog you will learn that journals retract articles far more often than most people would suspect. As I write this, Retraction Watch is reporting that the Journal of Immunology is retracting a 2006 study because multiple illustrations in the article were falsified.

It is difficult to say whether there is more or less research fraud than there was in the past, but it is likely that in today’s world more of the research fraud that exists will be reported in the news media.

#repligate

Scientific research is supposed to be repeatable. When researchers demonstrate some new effect or phenomenon, it should not be a one-off event. As a result, when they publish their findings, investigators include detailed descriptions of the methodology they used so that other researchers in different laboratories can try to get the same results. Things that cannot be reproduced are immediately suspect.

Unfortunately, journals much prefer to publish shiny new things rather than attempts to replicate older findings, and publication in journals is the main vehicle for success as an academic scientist. So, as a matter of fact, replications of previous studies are quite rare. As a result, many sensational studies are assumed to be fact and are widely cited, but they may or may not be reproducible. In the field of social psychology, the #repligate problem has recently come to a head. Some very widely cited studies have been brought into question by failures to replicate. In particular, research on priming effects—subtle cues that go unnoticed but still influence behavior—have come under criticism.

Priming effects are often quite stunning (e.g., hand-washing improves your moral judgment of other people), but this area of psychology has been plagued with examples of research fraud and findings that have not been reproduced. In 2012, a controversy erupted surrounding a famous article co-authored by Yale University professor John Bargh. In the original study, one group of college students unscrambled sentences that included words that were stereotypical of the elderly (e.g., wrinkle, Florida) and another group unscrambled sentences without these words. Later, the participants in the elderly prime group walked significantly slower down a hallway as they exited the laboratory than those in the other group. Pretty cool!

In January of 2012, a group of researchers from Belgium published an attempt to replicate these findings in the online journal PLOS One. Using more stringent procedures and a larger sample of participants, the Belgium group found no priming effect except when the experimenters conducting the study knew about the expected finding. This and other priming controversies inspired Princeton University psychologist Daniel Kahneman to write an open letter expressing his belief that the field of priming, “is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research.” He urged that the problem be tackled head on with a collaborative effort to replicate findings.

Just this spring a published failure to replicate the “power pose” effect—which suggests that striking a dominant posture affects hormone levels and risk-taking behavior—raised questions about research by Amy Cuddy that is the basis of her TED talk—currently the second most popular TED talk of all with over 26 million views.

Lest you think the problem is restricted to “softer” social science research, a recent study in the journal PLOS Biology found that half of all pre-clinical biological sciences studies are irreproducible and that $28 billion in research funds are wasted each year. Furthermore, few of the faulty papers listed on the Retraction Watch blog are from the social sciences.

How (or Why) Does this Happen?

The kind of sloppy and fraudulent research that we see demonstrated in these cases probably has many sources. Here are just a few:

1. Personal and Professional Motives. Scientists have always been under pressure to “publish or perish.” Getting tenure and achieving academic success depends upon producing high quality peer-reviewed articles. But the media explosion of recent decades has changed the nature of science, adding new layers of motivation for the ambitious scientist.

In the past, no matter where they worked, scientists toiled in relative obscurity, publishing their findings in journals that rarely came to the attention of the general public. Today the landscape is quite different. In my own field of psychology, it is now quite common for researchers from the most highly regarded universities to write bestselling books, appear as talking heads on television, have thousands of Twitter followers, give TED talks that are watched by millions of people, and command substantial speaker’s fees.

The sciences, once an area that was relatively immune from the pull of celebrity, now has an expanding pantheon of rock stars who sometimes appear to be doing more writing for popular audiences than for professional ones. Almost all research universities now have active public relations departments that put out press releases when potentially newsworthy studies are published. Here is an excerpt from a recent university press release I came across:

From a university press release announcing the publication of a faculty research study.

Before the recent debacle, LaCour and Green’s article in Science was covered by media outlets throughout the world, was used as template for the “Yes” campaign in the recent Irish gay marriage referendum, and helped to land LaCour a job at Princeton University. Now that the article has been retracted, the Princeton job is in doubt—but it is easy to see how researchers might cut corners in an effort to achieve prestigious jobs and personal fame.

2. Social or Political Motives Affecting Peer Review. Reputable scientific journals only publish articles that have been reviewed by other qualified scientists. Despite Science’s prestigious reputation, the LaCour case is one where peer review may not have been as rigorous as it should have been. If the reviewers were supporters of gay marriage, they would be quite happy with LaCour and Green’s findings. Unfortunately, reviewer biases can easily produce sloppy evaluations of studies that support a pet theory or are particularly sensational.

3. Peer Review is Volunteer Labor Reviewing manuscripts that have been submitted for publication in journals is a very time-consuming task, and almost all of this work is done on a volunteer basis. For the working scientist or academic, there is very little benefit to taking on this kind of work. It is a professional service done for free, and the quality of reviews varies widely. Under this kind of a publication system, bad research will sometimes sneak through.

4. P-hacking. In many fields—including most of the social sciences—you can only get your research published if you find statistically significant results. P-hacking is a time-honored but dubious process of tweaking your data until you find something that is significant at the hallowed p < .05 (5 chances out of a 100) probability level. P-hacking is what created the Infamous Chocolate Study results, and in today’s world it is much easier to do than it used to be. Computer analysis of data makes it possible to reanalyze data in many different ways and then choose the version you like best. Also, in today’s world of online surveying methods social science researchers can obtain large numbers of participants quickly and inexpensively. Larger samples mean that even very small effects—effects that have little or no practical value—can achieve statistical significance and find their way into print. Thankfully, p-hacking continues to be identified as a serious problem and remains an important concern of the research community.

5. An Epidemic of Fake Journals. All of the above are problems faced by reputable scientific journals, but suddenly there are a number of fake journals whose sole reason to exist is to make money. A new trend in science is the advent of “open access” journals that are freely available to readers online. Instead of charging for subscriptions, these journals often support themselves through fees—sometimes substantial fees—paid by authors who submit their articles for publication.

Some open access journals are of good quality—PLOS One and PLOS Biology are both open access journals—but others are little more than money-making scams. In an earlier sting operation for Science magazine, John Bohannon, the journalist/author of The Infamous Chocolate Study, submitted copies of a bogus and deeply flawed research report supposedly describing a new anti-cancer drug to 304 open-access journals. The paper should have been summarily rejected by any reputable journal—and it was rejected by many. But over half (!) of the 304 submissions were accepted—most often without any evidence that they had been peer reviewed at all. Unfortunately, these journals have authoritative sounding names and—as the chocolate study episode suggests—the news media and the general public are ill-equipped to determine which journals are trustworthy and which are bogus.

The Good News

So the answer to the question is yes. Science has a problem, and it is one that has new and troubling dimensions. But there is also some good news.

David Can Still Slay Goliath.

Thankfully, recent history shows that one very important principle of science still holds: evidence is more important than the researcher’s professional or social status. A lowly graduate student can still take down a tenured professor. In 2013, Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old University of Massachusetts graduate student, tried to replicate the findings of two Harvard economists for a class project and discovered a number of errors in their analysis. Herndon and colleagues went on to publish a scathing take-down of the study. The original paper had been used by Paul Ryan and other conservative politicians to justify painful austerity programs, but a smart graduate student was able discredit it.

Michael LaCour was a graduate student at UCLA when he published the gay canvassing study but his co-author, Donald Green, was a tenured full professor at Columbia University. Again in this case, it was a graduate student, David Brookman of the University of California at Berkeley, who posed the questions that ultimately led to the Science retraction. Brookman was initially very admiring of LaCour’s work but ran into difficulties when he attempted to replicate it.

The gods sometimes have clay feat, and mere mortals can topple them.

Post-publication Peer Review

As we have seen, peer review has its weaknesses. But today, publication of an article is not the end of the line. In the past, researchers were asked to retain the raw data of their studies for a few years in case someone asked to see it, but not all researchers followed this guideline. Today, some journals are requiring that researchers make the raw data from their studies available electronically at the time of publication, so that anyone can download the data and re-analyze it. Today, when research becomes widely available on the Internet, it frequently receives intense scrutiny after publication, and if errors are found, they can be corrected or—when warranted—the paper can be retracted. So, in the future, flawed studies that get through the publication process will often be caught after they have been published. This is what the Retraction Watch project is all about.

Fraud is Still a Solitary Enterprise

There are systematic problems that plague science. P-hacking, for example, is a widespread problem that affects many researchers, consciously or unconsciously. In contrast, deliberate fraud appears to be specific to particular individuals. Random unscrupulous scientists are likely to emerge from time to time, and many of their names are listed on the Office of Research Integrity website. It is important to identify and pursue these Bernie Madoffs of the science community, but once they and their crimes are identified, they tend to be seen as individual culprits who are not representative of the field as a whole.

Furthermore, it is heartening to see that scientists who engage in fraud are often reported by those closest to them. Years ago, the faked data of University of Pittsburgh psychologist Stephen Breuning was first brought to light by his collaborator and colleague Robert Sprague.³ In the Michael LaCour case, it was his coauthor, David Green, who—after learning that LaCour had deleted the raw data—requested that Science retract their paper.⁴ Green may be faulted for not having kept a closer eye on his young collaborator before the misconduct was revealed, but once the problem came to his attention, he acted swiftly and honorably.

So, yes. Science has a problem. It has some of the same old problems of maintaining research integrity, as well as some new problems created by the contemporary media explosion and the use of computers and the Internet in research. But there also seems to be a heightened level of scrutiny of scientific research that will—in the long rung—keep us strong. Science is going through a period of adjustment to a new research environment, but I see no evidence that things are going off the rails. Just as we always have, skeptics will need to help the credulous weed out the reliable from the unreliable sources of information, but we can still rely on the scientific alternative to be strong and getting stronger.

In the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alleged cures for “female weakness” were among the nostrums marketed by quacks. Apparently these were sold with the realization that women represented a lucrative special market. Among the most successful of such marketers was a Buffalo physician who became known as “The Prince of Quacks” (Hirsch 2004).

Nostrums for Females

The popular female nostrums included “Wine of Cardui”—a preparation sold as the “Woman’s Tonic”—that contained 20 percent alcohol. Other, similarly constituted nostrums were “Gerstle’s Female Panacea” (20 percent alcohol) and “Andrews’ Wine of Life Root or Female Regulator” (14 percent).

As well, the La Franco Medical Company of Philadelphia sold “Female Pills No. 2”; Margaret M. Livingston, MD, of Chicago offered a variety of products, including “Dr. Livingston’s Medicinal Tampons”; and the Phen-ix Chemical Company sold “Stargrass Compound—Nature’s tonic for women,” among other products. The American Medical Association regarded all of these as quackery (Cramp 1921, II: 160–182).

One of the most famous merchants of quack medicine for women was Lydia E. Pinkham (1819–1893) who marketed “Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.” Among its outrageous claims was that it was “A Sure Cure” for “Falling of the Womb” (Prolapsus uteri) and, indeed, “All Female Weaknesses,” including irregular menstruation and even labor pains. In fact the product contained only a minor amount of vegetable extracts in water but was 18 percent alcohol (Cramp 1921, II: 160–163).

Pierce and ‘Weak Women’

The man who became one of the greatest sellers of nostrums in America was Buffalo’s Ray Vaughn Pierce (1840–1914).

Pierce parlayed an off-beat medical degree into a quackery empire that included an Invalids’ Hotel. His World’s Dispensary Medical Association endlessly dispensed Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery and a host of other elixirs, copies of his medical tome (The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser [1888]), and a profusion of advertising giveaways. (See the Nickell Collection of Dr. R.V. Pierce Medical Artifacts, part of the New York state digital repository initiative, posted by CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga.¹)

Of course, Pierce had something special for women—or rather “Weak Women.” Now, he was not saying women were weak per se, indeed enlisting Anna “Annie” Edson Taylor, the first daredevil to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, for some ads.² Rather, when strong women became weak through illnesses suffered by women, the good doctor had just the remedy—one second only to his tonic, Golden Medical Discovery, as a cure-all.

Pierce’s Favorite Prescription

Dr. Pierce offered women a product that—like his other concoctions—was in keeping with the “eclectic” school of medicine from which he graduated. This advocated replacing “noxious medicines” with “more effective agents, derived exclusively from the vegetable kingdom” (Pierce 1888, 294–295)—in a word, botanicals (drugs from herbs, bark, etc.). He called his medicine for females “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription.”

In his book, Pierce (1888, 342, 346, 355) described his preparation as “a tonic nervine” that both “quiets nervous irritation” and “strengthens the enfeebled nervous system, restoring it to healthful vigor.” Moreover, “In all diseases involving the female reproductive organs, with which there is usually associated an irritable condition of the nervous system, it is unsurpassed as a remedy.” In addition, it was “a uterine and general tonic of great excellence,” as well as “an efficient remedy in cases requiring a medicine to regulate the menstrual function.” Finally, Pierce claimed expansively, “In all cases of debility, the Favorite Prescription tranquilizes the nerves, tones up the organs and increases their vigor, and strengthens the system.”

Figure 1. Bottle of “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription.” (Author’s collection; see www.nyheritage.org.)

The label of a bottle in my collection reads in full: “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription For the Relief of The Many Weaknesses and Complaints Peculiar to Females, Manufactured at the Chemical Laboratory of World’s Dispensary Medical Association, Buffalo, N.Y. Contains 8¹/₂ Ozs. Trade-Mark Registered in U.S. Pat. Office, Dec. 11^th, 1908. Mdse. 59.” No ingredients are listed. (See Figure 1.)

However, a notebook in possession of Dr. Pierce’s grandson names the ingredients of some Pierce products, including Favorite Prescription for which it lists berberis, valerian, blue cohosh, black cohosh, and viburnum (Hirsch 2004, 15). These are still found in herbal guides, recommended for some of the same conditions that Dr. Pierce named. For example, viburnum (black haw root) is reportedly an antispasmodic, used for “threatened miscarriage,” while valerian root is found in some over-the-counter sleep aids, and black cohosh is a relaxant said to relieve menstrual cramps (Balch 2002, 138–139; Naturopathic 1995, 91, 92, 124). Whatever value the ingredients might have if properly prescribed, does not argue for the wisdom of dumping them together and urging them on persons whom the physician has not seen, who may in fact be harmed by the product.

Pierce was accused of worse. Collier’s called him a “quack,” and Ladies Home Journal went even farther—too far as it turned out. The Journal article, penned by its celebrated editor Edward Bok, alleged that Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription contained not only alcohol but also opium and digitalis. In fact it contained none of these, as laboratory tests soon showed. The Journal issued a retraction and apologized. However, Dr. Pierce felt entitled to more and, in agreement, a court awarded him $16,000 in a libel judgment. Pierce also sued Collier’s, but—after examining the varied definitions of the word quack—the court rejected Pierce’s claim (Hirsch 2004, 14).

Pierce’s Legacy

In his heyday, Dr. R.V. Pierce was, notes one historical writer, “Buffalo’s most famous doctor,” one “whose name and bearded countenance were familiar to people all over the world” (Hirsch 2004, 10). Today, however, the same writer observes of Pierce: “He’s disappeared into the mist. Nobody’s really ever heard of him” (Hirsch 2009).

Figure 2. Commercial sign for Dr. Pierce’s nostrum “For Weak Women” (1918 or later). (Author’s collection)

Of course, historians, skeptics, and collectors, among others, learn about Dr. Pierce, and his legacy remains sizeable. In collecting Dr. Pierce items, I am fortunate to live in the area where he flourished, where such artifacts may be especially findable. Looking just at Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription, I have been able to purchase several specific collectibles as I’ve made my way to antique shops and centers, mostly within a one-hundred-mile radius (again, see Figure 1). Also, dealers who know of my interest sometimes inform me of a newly discovered rare item. For example, Peter Jablonski, president of the Greater Buffalo Bottle Collectors Association (GBBCA—of which I am a member), obtained for me the Pierce sign—addressed to “Weak Women”—shown in Figure 2.

While returning from an investigation in LeRoy, New York (Nickell 2012), along Route 5, I passed an old barn with faint advertising lettering. I made a U-turn and parked at the site, where I took photographs (see Figure 3) of what clearly reads, “FAVORITE PRESCRIPTION.” Given the location and the fact that the words were a trademark of Dr. Pierce, it is clear that this was one of several Pierce barn signs across the United States (“Looking” 2012), and now—so far as we can yet determine—the only remaining one known in New York state.

Figure 3. Western New York barn featuring a rare, faded advertisement for “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription” discovered by the author.

I had wondered why the “DR. PIERCE’S” portion was no longer legible. On a return visit, when my wife Diana used her GPS to obtain location coordinates,³ I met the property owner. He told me that a shed had once been built onto the end of the barn, where the legible lettering now is, which obviously protected it from the many years of weathering that the other portion was subjected to.

Such discoveries give hope that other “time capsules” will yield their treasures, giving us insights into medical science’s past that can help us plot a more informed future course.

Acknowledgments

I appreciate the help of the CFI Libraries staff—notably Tim Binga, director, who has done extensive work on my Pierce collection, and Lisa Nolan, former librarian—as well as my wife Diana Harris.

Notes

1. Online at www.nyheritage.org. Many new items await posting.

2. This is strongly suggested by some rare photos in the possession of my friend, photo expert and collector Rob McElroy, showing a woman accompanied by a barrel, believed to be Annie Taylor, holding a Pierce sign (Neville 2012).

3. The coordinates are N 42° 59.875 and W 78° 17.308.

References

Balch, Phyllis. 2002. Prescription for Herbal Healing. New York: Avery.

Cramp, Arthur J. 1921. Nostrums and Quackery (in 3 vols.), Vol. II. Chicago: American Medical Association.

Hirsch, Dick. 2004. The emperor of elixir. Western New York Heritage, Spring: 10–16.

———. 2009. Quoted in Rey 2009.

Looking at Dr. Pierce’s Barn Advertising. 2012. Online at www.peachridgegrass.com/2012/12/looking-atdr-pierces-barn-advertising/; accessed August 22, 2013.

Naturopathic Handbook of Herbal Formulas. 1995. Ayer, Massachusetts: Herbal Research Publications.

Neville, A. 2012. Legend of the Falls. . . . The Buffalo News (July 7).

Nickell, Joe. 2012. Neurological Illness or Hysteria? Skeptical Inquirer 36(4) (July/August): 30–33.

Pierce, R.V. 1888. The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser, 17^th ed. Buffalo, NY: World Dispensary Printing Office.

Rey, Jay. 2009. D’Youville College building site has peculiar past. Buffalo News (February).

In 2014, I wrote a piece about the classic Fortean phenomenon of mysterious objects falling from the sky. Here’s an excerpt:

For millennia, people have reported a rare and strange phenomenon: a sudden rain of frogs—or fish or worms—from the sky. You may be minding your own business walking in a park on a blustery day when a small frog hits you on the top of the head. As you peer down at the stunned animal, another one comes down, and another and another all around you, in a surreal rain of frogs in various states of trauma.

The most likely explanation for how small frogs get up into the sky in the first place is meteorological: a whirlwind, tornado, or other natural phenomenon. Charles Fort admitted that this is a possibility but offered several reasons why he doubted that’s the true or complete explanation: “It is so easy to say that small frogs that have fallen from the sky had been scooped up by a whirlwind . . . but [this explanation offers] no regard for mud, debris from the bottom of a pond, floating vegetation, loose things from the shores—but a precise picking out of the frogs only. . . . Also, a pond going up would be quite as interesting as frogs coming down. Whirlwinds we read of over and over—but where and what whirlwind? It seems to me that anybody who had lost a pond would be heard from.” For example, Fort argued, one published report of “a fall of small frogs near Birmingham, England, June 30, 1892, is attributed to a specific whirlwind—but not a word as to any special pond that had contributed.”

What about the reasons that Fort and others cite for why a whirlwind is not a good explanation? Frogs and fish do not of course live in the sky, nor do they suddenly and mysteriously appear there; in fact they share a common habitat: ponds and streams. It’s certain that they gained altitude in a natural, not supernatural, way.

That there are very few eyewitness accounts of frogs and fish being sucked up into the sky during a tornado, whirlwind, or storm is hardly mysterious or unexplainable. Anytime winds are powerful enough to suck up fish, frogs, leaves, dirt and detritus, they are powerful enough to be of concern to potential eyewitnesses. In other words, people who would be close enough to a whirlwind or tornado to see the flying amphibians would be more concerned for their own safety (and that of others) to pay much attention to whether or not some frogs are among the stuff being picked up and flown around at high speeds. These storms are loud, windy, chaotic, and hardly ideal for accurate eyewitness reporting.

The same applies to Fort’s apparent surprise that, following frog falls, farmers or others don’t come forward to identify which specific pond the frogs came from. How would anyone know? Whirlwinds and tornadoes may move quickly and over many miles, destroying and lifting myriad debris in its wake. Unless a farmer took an inventory of all the little frogs in a pond both before and after a storm, there’s no way anyone would know exactly where they came from, nor would it be noteworthy.

After my article was posted at LiveScience.com, famed Fortean writer Loren Coleman challenged my explanation in the comments, asking on April 14, “How does a tornado explain the finding of a single species in some falls of frogs? Surely, the aerodynamics of the lift might sort for weight, but not for species and genus.”

Coleman’s critique is interesting, and worthy of a brief analysis. The first thing to note, of course, is that per the skeptical dictum of Hyman’s Categorical Imperative, before we try to explain something we should be sure that there is indeed something to explain. In this case Coleman has asserted, without any supporting evidence or documentation, that some falls of frogs contain only “a single species.” If that is not true—it is a mistake, for example, or mere rumor or legend—then we need not spend considerable time trying to explain how that could happen.

But the claim does not seem unlikely or unreasonable, and I’m perfectly willing to concede that it’s at least possible that in an unspecified number of frog falls (Two? Ten? Fifty?) only one species of frogs was found. Of course I’d like to know who did the investigations (A scientist? A farmer? A little boy who said he only saw one kind of frog, whose observation was taken at face value?), what their methods were (How big an area did the person survey to determine how many species of frogs were found? A few feet? A few yards? A mile? If it was a forested or urban area, did he or she search treetops and rooftops for smaller frogs that might have been trapped up there and not made it to the ground, or did they only count the frogs nearby?) and also how the determination of single-species frog dispensing was made (Different species of frogs may look alike, or have similar colors, or be unidentifiable because of injury from falling from a great height; did the person reporting the data have the frogs collected, catalogued, and identified by a biologist to conclusively determine that only one species fell?); and so on.

I would argue that the evidence for single-species frog falls—however plausible—is far from definitive because of a dearth of information about how the data was collected. Rumors and third-hand information are routinely cited in the Fortean literature as self-evident truth and established fact. These questions aside, Coleman treats this as a mysterious and unexplainable fact that could discredit the theory that a whirlwind or tornado caused the frog falls.

Except, of course, there’s an obvious and simple explanation. As I noted, “The most likely answer is that the ponds and rivers that were the source of the frogs only had one species in them to begin with. Unless we know that the waters over which those tornados and whirlwinds travel have multiple species of frogs in them, there doesn’t seem to be much mystery to the fact that only one species may sometimes be found picked up in them.” It’s entirely plausible that a whirlwind or tornado (especially one confined to a localized area of a few miles) might cross over only one river, stream, or lake during its time and pick up only one species of frog.

Furthermore, Coleman’s comment that “the aerodynamics of the lift might sort for weight, but not for species and genus” is a non sequitur, since of course weight is a function of genus and species. Some species of frogs (just like some species of cats or any other animal) are larger and heavier than other species. I am not an expert on frogs and do not claim to be, but it seems that Coleman’s statement would be valid if all genus and species of frogs in a given location had equal mass and weight, and were therefore equally likely to be picked up by a passing whirlwind or tornado, all else being equal. If that were true then it might spawn the idea that the tornado mysteriously and inexplicably “sorted” the frogs by species instead of weight or size. But of course that’s not the case.

Furthermore, there may be considerable variation in weight even within a genus and species of frog. Some frogs of the same species may weigh less than other frogs of the same species for any number of reasons including age, gender, disease, the amount of food available, etc. I appreciate debate and discussion of Fortean ideas as much as the next person, and I’m happy to put my theories to the test. There may be other explanations for frog falls, but the claims and arguments put forth by Fort, Coleman, and others to discredit whirlwinds and tornadoes as a source of the frogs simply don’t hold water.