The Horse That Won’t Go Away: Clever Hans, Facilitated Communication, and the Need for Clear Thinking. By Thomas E. Heinzen, Scott O. Lilienfeld, and Susan A. Nolan. Worth Publishers, New York, 2014. ISBN 13: 978-1-4641-4574-2. 136 pp. Paperback, $29.95. Kindle edition: ISBN 10: 1-4641-4574-1, $16.99.

It’s a cliché to say that good things come in small packages but in the case of this book (a mere 5.5 by 7.2 inches), the cliché is true. The 136 pages contain only three chapters. But these chapters tell a story that is historically fascinating and of great importance. The first is a retelling of the case of Clever Hans, the German horse that convinced not only the general public but many, almost all in fact, professors of psychology and horsemen that he had the intelligence of a young boy. Hans, you see, could answer questions put to him. Now, we’re not dealing with a Mr. Ed here. Hans didn’t speak. He tapped out his answers. You asked him what the square root of twenty-five was, and he tapped five times. The authors go into detail about Hans’s “abilities” and the people he fooled. Readers with an interest in the history of psychology will especially enjoy the rare original photos of Hans and his owner, Herr von Osten, in action.

A clever graduate student, Oskar Pfungst, discovered the explanation for Hans’s seemingly intellectual abilities. Von Osten was, unconsciously, signaling Hans when to stop tapping his hoof. So, in the example above, when asked a question like the square root of twenty-five, Hans would start slowly tapping. When he got to the “correct” answer, von Osten, or any other inquisitor, would look up or make some other small and unnoticed movement that would cue Hans to stop tapping. Pfungst revealed this by doing experiments in which Hans was unable to observe his questioner. In this situation, his responses were meaningless.

At first, von Osten accepted the fact that Hans was merely picking up subtle cues that caused him to stop tapping. But that didn’t last for more than a day or two. Perhaps not surprisingly, von Osten promptly stopped any further experiments that might challenge his belief in the horse’s intelligence. This is, the authors point out, a case of “naive realism” in which seeing something results in a specific belief about its causes without any attempt to examine whether or not the presumed cause is actually causal. In other words, “seeing is believing.”

Of course, this tale has been told many times before. But here it is told for a unique purpose. Chapter 2 is titled “Clever Hands: The Facilitated Communication Story.” This chapter highlights the similarities between the naive realism that led von Osten to believe that Hans was intelligent and the naive realism that led (and, sadly, still leads) practitioners of facilitated communication (FC) to believe that their students are really communicating. When doubts started to be raised about the validity of FC, experiments were conducted in which a facilitated child and a facilitator were shown different objects and the child was to type out the name of the object he or she, not the facilitator, saw. In dozens of published experiments in every case, every single one, the child always typed out the name of the thing the facilitator saw that the child could not see. The reaction from the FC camp was to charge that these failures were due to having to facilitate under stressful and unusual conditions. However, many of these studies were run by the same people who had previously facilitated with the children. And, according to FC proponents, children had no problems facilitating in front of large audiences of strangers at FC conferences. The chapter also covers the horror that FC brought—the false claims of sexual abuse of children being facilitated. The claims arose in the head of the facilitator, not the children.

If you thought that FC was a thing of the past, you’d be very wrong. The latter part of chapter 2 documents its return like one of those horror movie monsters that just won’t stay dead. The use of the technique, although rebranded as “supported typing” or “rapid prompting,” is “still prevalent in disability service and educational settings” (J. Chen and K. Nankervis, “Stolen Voices: Facilitated Communication Is an Abuse of Human Rights,” Evidence Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 2015, in press). Douglas Biklen, who introduced FC to the United States, was promoted to the position of Dean of the School of Education at Syracuse University by University President Cantor, a psychologist who has an autistic child. He was even honored with a UNESCO award for his work with the disabled. Scott Lilienfeld, one of the authors of the book under review, has written an important paper on the return of FC: “Persistence of Fad Interventions in the Face of Negative Scientific Evi­dence: Facilitated Communication for Autism as a Case Example” in the journal Evidence Based Communication Assessment and Intervention (2015, in press; see “Facilitated Communication Has Returned from the Dead,” May/June 2015 SI). Recognizing the importance of this paper, the journal’s publisher, Routledge, has made the paper freely available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17489539.2014.976332#.VNosKLvlJjQ.

The fact that the educational disabilities community is deaf to the scientific reality that FC is not only invalid but robs disabled individuals of their basic human rights by making the words and thoughts of others appear to be theirs and preventing them from expressing themselves as best they can (Chen and Nakervis, cited above) is extremely disturbing.

Chapter 3, “The Clever Hans Effect in Everyday Life,” shows how naive realism has spawned belief in several phenomena where such belief can have negative consequences. Most surprising to me was the finding that drug- and explosive-sniffing dogs do very poorly in actual tests where their handlers don’t know where the target materials are or are thought to be. Although the authors agree that more research is needed, the fact that such dogs will “alert” when there’s nothing there is troubling. One study the authors describe showed that out of 10,000 alerts, there was a 74 percent false alarm rate. Naive realism is also responsible for the incorrect beliefs that intervention programs such as Scared Straight and DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) work when the data show clearly that they don’t. The consequences of such false beliefs are not trivial. The last two mentioned programs have huge annual costs and may even have effects opposite of those claimed, thus doing more harm than simply doing nothing.

The vastly exaggerated worry about “stranger danger”—the fear that our children are in serious danger almost all the time from strangers waiting to abduct them—is another example of the pernicious effects of naive realism discussed in chapter 3. In reality, stranger abductions are extremely, extremely rare. For example, in 1999 115 children were taken by strangers. But since there were 72 million kids in the United States that year, the chance of such an event happening is 0.00000159 percent. In contrast, in the same year 4,564 children died in automobile accidents. So the risk of such a death is almost forty times greater. But that risk attracts far less panic than stranger danger.

There has been much discussion over the last few years in the skeptical community about what direction skeptical activity should take in the future. Should it continue to debunk the old standards like UFOs, ESP, Bigfoot, and astrology, or move on to other topics? In my view, continued attention to the “old” topics will always be needed. But the book under review here shows how skepticism can have truly beneficial effects that go beyond the more fringe “old” topics. Speaking out loudly and strongly against quack treatments like facilitated communication that do real harm to thousands of people would seem to me to be an important goal for skepticism in the future. The Horse that Won’t Go Away is an excellent step in this direction.

It’s common to say that a book should be “required reading.” In my case, this won’t be just a cliché since I will be assigning this book in every psychology course I teach from now on. It is very well written. It is never boring or pedantic. It contains much excellent material for class discussion and written projects.

Mysterious rectangular rubber-like blocks, with the enigmatic word TJIPETIR engraved into them, have been washing up for the past few years on the beaches of northern Europe. Over a century old, it has been suggested that the blocks could have come from the site of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic. But reality usually has a way of turning up stranger than fiction.

Credit: Courtesy of Tom Quinn Williams/Tjipetir Mystery Facebook page.

This is a mystery that for a long time has left anyone finding such blocks puzzled, whether they were located in France, Spain, or Germany. What are these strange rubber-like tablets? And what does the word TJIPETIR mean?

One morning in 2012, a British woman, Tracey Williams, took her dog for a walk around her property on a beach in Newquay, Cornwall, and found a black block just washed ashore by the sea. It reminded her of a chopping board, but it had that inexplicable word engraved at the center. She decided to take it home with her as a strange souvenir from the sea.

Things took a different turn when, a few weeks later, Williams found another block on another beach alongside bales of rubber. “Finding one was interesting,” said Williams, “but finding two was rather odd.” The coincidence piqued her curiosity, and the woman started to investigate the nature and origin of the mysterious blocks.

The first thing she realized was that the blocks were not technically rubber but instead gutta-percha, the gum of a tree found in Malaysia used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to insulate telegraph cables on the seabed and to make golf balls, teddy bear noses, picture frames, and many other things.

Williams was not new to unusual discoveries on the beach. “We used to have beach combing expeditions,” she said, “and we’d always have treasure hunts,” Williams told Public Radio International (PRI). Several years ago, Williams began to find pieces of LEGO on the beaches of South Devon. Not having access to the Internet at the time, she failed to understand their origin. Then, in 2010, she moved to Cornwall and was amazed to discover similar LEGOs showing up on the shore there.

Thanks to an Internet search, she found that several years earlier a Japanese ship had come across very rough seas and had spilled some of its cargo made of LEGO bricks. So she set up a Facebook page titled “Lego Lost at Sea” and started to receive reports from other people who had found similar bricks, and was thus able to create a map of how the LEGO wrecks had distributed themselves along the coast.

With the two blocks of TJIPETIR, Williams decided to follow the same road. She created another Facebook page devoted to the new mystery and wondered if others had found similar boards. The answers started to arrive quickly. Others had found the TJIPETIR blocks on other coasts of Britain, but also in France, Holland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Often the blocks included bales and rolls of rubber. “The TJIPETIR story really did intrigue me. I have been fascinated,” she said. “And it has taken over my life slightly in recent years,” Williams told PRI.

It was at this point that some began to speculate that the gutta-percha could have come from the Titanic. The French newspaper Le Figaro did an investigation and discovered that the ship’s manifest showed that the Titanic had indeed been carrying gutta-percha and bales of rubber. “I’m not saying that these blocks come from the Titanic,” François Galgani, a researcher for IFREMER, the French company that had contributed to the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic in 1986, said at the time, “but there is nothing allowing us to discard this possibility.”

The idea began to take shape. Since gutta-percha blocks disintegrate soon after being exposed to light, their antiquity suggested that they had remained hidden for a long time, for example inside the bowels of a ship. The Titanic, which has been lying on the ocean floor for 103 years now, is falling apart, and the dissolution of a wall might have caused the blocks to resurface. “It was like a big jigsaw with lots of pieces missing,” said Williams, who was also fascinated by the Titanic hypothesis. However, the turning point came in the summer of 2013, moving the lost transatlantic vessel out of the way for good.

The Real Wreck 
of the Titanic


The sinking of the Titanic, which took place in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912, was considered at the time the greatest maritime disaster in history. Of the 2,200 people on board only 700 were saved. In the weeks after the sinking, the ships that crossed the Titanic’s route found dozens of frozen bodies still floating, clinging to the wreckage of the ship or lifesavers. Some of those objects—panels, pillars, lifeboats, and other artifacts—were recovered and soon became collector items. Then in 1986 when the ship wreck was located on the ocean floor, operations began almost immediately, more or less authorized, for the recovery of objects. A French company, the IFREMER, brought to light more than 1,800 artifacts, including a porthole, a couple of taps, a crane, pans, dishes, and more. To date, 5,500 objects—including a section of the hull twenty-six meters long and weighing seventeen tons—have been recovered. However, many people, such as the wreck’s discoverer, Robert Ballard, believe that the ocean floor should have been preserved as a museum.

Williams was approached by two people who wanted to remain anonymous but offered an explanation for the blocks: They were released during a salvage operation on the wreck of a Japanese ship, the Miyazaki Maru, a passenger ship that was sunk during World War I.

In May 1917, the ship was 150 miles from the Isles of Scilly, southwest of England. German submarine U-88, captained by Walther Schwieger, who was one of Germany’s most successful U-boat aces, hit the Miyazaki Maru with a torpedo. Only two years earlier, the same Schwieger had sunk the RMS Lusitania, a liner bound for Liverpool, causing the death of 1,100 people, including more than 100 Americans, an episode that is thought to have hastened America’s entry into the war.

When Miyazaki Maru sank, it took with it eight victims and a cargo that included blocks of gutta-percha. A salvage operation in 2008 probably released the rubber blocks, which started to float on the waters of the Atlantic. Even Alison Kentuck, the British government’s Receiver of the Wreck—the official who administers wreck and salvage laws within U.K. territorial waters—also said it is most likely the blocks are indeed cargo from that ship.

"When we are made aware of wreckage we conduct research to find the owner,” she said.

We look at the age of the items, where they could have come from, and examine any markings. Our findings with these particular items pointed towards that particular wreck. So although we have not confirmed it, the Miyazaki Maru is our favored possibility as the source of the washed-up blocks.

However, according to oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who specializes in tracking flotsam, the TJIPETIR blocks may have been washing up on beaches for centuries. Ebbesmeyer told the BBC:

Based on the findings so far, they are clearly being fed into the hemispheric ocean circulation. It only takes 25 years for flotsam to go around the world, and they’ve probably been around long enough to go around the world three times. They’re still in good condition after all these years, which is unusual. They’re probably one of the great pieces of flotsam that people may be finding 100 years from now.


Several people also reported finding TJIPETIR blocks back in 2008, before the current salvage operation is thought to have begun on the Miyazaki Maru. One person has come forward to say he found a block more than thirty years ago and used it as a chopping board to gut fish on his fishing boat.

But what does that mysterious inscription, TJIPETIR, mean? This turns out to be the name of a rubber plantation in West Java, Indonesia, which operated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The gutta-percha was a rubber-like substance that was in fact found in the Malay Peninsula and in Malaysia, and it was used before the invention of plastic.

"The important thing is, for me, that the story’s only just beginning,” concluded Tracey Williams to PRI. “We might know the name of the ship, but there are the stories of everybody on board that ship, and what happened to it. And I want to find out.”

Here is the full text of invited testimony by the Center for Inquiry at the April 20, 2015, hearing of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on “Homeopathic Product Regulation: Evaluating the FDA’s Regulatory Framework After a Quarter-Century.” The testimony was delivered by Michael De Dora, director of CFI’s Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C. (See also News and Comment, p. 6.)


Testifier: Michael De Dora

I speak today as director of public policy for the Center for Inquiry (CFI), an educational and advocacy organization that promotes reason and scientific integrity in public affairs. My testimony, however, is not only on behalf of our organization, its employees, and its members, but also on behalf of dozens of doctors and scientists associated with CFI and its affiliate program, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, with whom we work on these matters. Neither I nor the Center for Inquiry has any financial interests relevant to this meeting.

We applaud the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for holding this important hearing. Given the tremendous growth in the sale of homeopathic products in recent decades, a reassessment of the FDA’s regulation of these products is clearly warranted. Our goal is to briefly review the scientific evidence that shows homeopathy is an ineffective method to treat illnesses; illustrate the harm caused by reliance on homeopathy instead of actual medicine; and propose actions the FDA should take to hold homeopathic products to the same standards as non-homeopathic drugs in order to fulfill its mandate to protect the American public.

I. The Empirical Evidence

We could spend hours discussing the extensive, decades-long scientific examination of homeopathy, but suffice to say the empirical evidence against homeopathy is overwhelming: aside from a placebo effect, homeopathic products have no effect in treating illnesses.

Consider the most recent findings, released last month by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). This group conducted a meta-study thoroughly assessing more than 1,800 papers on homeopathy, 225 of which met the criteria for inclusion. It concluded that:

"There are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective.”¹

Proponents of homeopathy will suggest that there are studies which show homeopathy is effective. It is true you can find studies that suggest homeopathy has brought about a positive result. Yet these studies have found only a placebo effect, and significantly do not and cannot explain if and how homeopathy has treated the illness. Further, these studies must be seen within the broader context of hundreds of studies that have found homeopathy ineffective.

Of course, this all makes sense: by its own definition, homeopathy cannot work. Its centuries-old pseudoscientific principles sit at complete odds with our modern understanding of biology, chemistry, and physics—the bodies of accepted scientific knowledge that form the basis of modern medicine.

Again, we need not spend much time on this, as the federal government is well aware of the scientific evidence against homeopathy. As the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine states on its website:

"There is little evidence to support homeopathy as an effective treatment for any specific condition.”²

Further, the FDA itself has recognized that homeopathy is not effective through its various consumer warnings about the health risks of relying on homeopathic products to treat medical conditions. This includes the FDA’s March 19, 2015, warning against using homeopathic products that claim to treat asthma, an often life-threatening condition.³

II. The Harm Caused by Homeopathy

Despite substantial empirical evidence to the contrary, companies persist in marketing ineffective homeopathic products as drugs that can effectively treat illnesses, and consumers continue to spend upwards of billions of dollars each year believing that they will be helped—and worse, that even if these products might not be effective, they are at least not harmful. This should deeply concern the agency charged with protecting public health, especially as the problem is in part caused by said agency’s failure to regulate homeopathic products.

Despite what many consumers believe, homeopathic products can directly cause harm. Sadly, children often bear the brunt of this harm. For instance, in its 2012 report, the American Association of Poison Control Center noted that there were a whopping 10,311 reported cases of poison exposure related to “homeopathic agents,” with 8,788 of those reported cases attributed to children five years of age or younger. Of the 10,311 reported cases, 697 required treatment in a health care facility.⁴

Still, perhaps the greatest harm caused by homeopathy is not necessarily caused by the products themselves—which, when properly prepared, rarely contain anything other than water and inactive ingredients such as sugars and binding agents—but by the fact that people often rely on homeopathic products to the exclusion of proven scientific remedies. As the Australian NHMRC study states:

"People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness.”¹


The website What’s the Harm details many such cases.⁵ I will highlight just a few.

• Lucille Craven of New Hampshire was diagnosed in 1997 with a small, pea-sized carcinomatous breast tumor. Although her doctor recommended mastectomy and lymphectomy, Lucille treated her cancer with homeopathy. She died less than thirty-six months later.⁶

• Diane Picha of Wisconsin was diagnosed in late 1998 with lung cancer. After successful surgery to remove her tumor, her cancer grew back. Picha visited a homeopathic clinic, where she was advised to halt further medical treatments. She died in April 2000.⁷

• Katie Ross of Nevada was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis; doctors recommended she have her colon removed. Her mother instead pursued homeopathic treatments. Katie dwindled from ninety to fifty pounds and nearly died when her colon perforated, but survived when her mother finally approved surgery at the doctor’s pleading.⁸

• Isabella Denley of Melbourne, Australia, was an epileptic toddler prescribed anti-convulsant medication by her neurologist. Her parents, however, treated her with exclusively homeopathic products. She died at just thirteen months old.⁹

These examples clearly illustrate the public’s lack of knowledge regarding homeopathy, the danger of homeopathic products, and thus the need for the FDA to take an active approach in promoting accurate knowledge on homeopathy.

III. Proposed Regulations

Proponents of homeopathy often argue that homeopathic products should be available because individuals have the right to freedom of choice. We fully support the right to freedom of choice. However, we also believe that true freedom of choice is impossible unless one is fully informed on the choices. In fact, this is one of the fundamental principles justifying FDA regulation: the public needs the guidance of an expert agency when it comes to buying drugs.

Accordingly, we propose the FDA announce and implement strict guidelines that require all homeopathic products meet the same standards as non-homeopathic drugs. In particular, we suggest the FDA take three steps:

• Testing for homeopathic products. As the FDA recognizes, the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act does not exempt homeopathic products from meeting the same standards of safety and efficacy as non-homeopathic drugs. Nor does this Act prevent the FDA from enforcing these standards. In order to protect public health, we urge the FDA to mandate that all homeopathic products on the market pass safety and efficacy tests equivalent to those required of non-homeopathic drugs on the market.

• Labeling for homeopathic products. Labeling on homeopathic products needs to improve; this is especially true if the FDA does not require they be tested for safety and efficacy, as this would allow dangerous homeopathic products to remain on the market without warning, marketed to a public that is unaware homeopathic products are different in kind from non-homeopathic drugs. Currently many homeopathic products boast that they are regulated by the FDA without explaining they are not subject to testing. This is seriously misleading. We therefore urge the FDA to ensure that all homeopathic products prominently state two things:

  1. The product’s claimed active ingredients in plain English, and;

  2. That the product has not been evaluated by the FDA for either safety or effectiveness.

• Regular consumer warnings. We have been encouraged by the FDA’s recent announcements warning consumers that homeopathic products will not treat their illnesses. Given the lack of public knowledge on homeopathy, we urge the FDA to make such announcements on a regular basis, especially, but not only, during times of illness outbreaks and public health crises.

In summary, homeopathy is unsupported by scientific evidence, ineffective in treating illness, and, when relied upon instead of actual medicine, dangerous and even deadly. To ensure the protection of the American public, the FDA should rely on its well-established regulatory system to require homeopathic products to meet the same standards as non-homeopathic drugs, or at the least mandate labeling for homeopathic products which states: the product’s claimed active ingredients in plain English; and that the product has not been evaluated by the FDA for safety or effectiveness. The American public deserves as much from the agency tasked with protecting them.

Thank you.

Notes

1. "NHMRC releases statement and advice on homeopathy.” NHMRC. March 11, 2015. Online at http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/media/releases/2015/nhmrc-releases-statement-and-advice-homeopathy.

2. "Homeopathy: An Introduction.” NCCIH. Online at https://nccih.nih.gov/health/homeopathy.

3. "Over-the-Counter Asthma Products Labeled as Homeopathic: FDA Statement - Consumer Warning About Potential Health Risks.” FDA. March 19, 2015. Online at http://www.fda.gov/Safety/MedWatch/SafetyInformation/SafetyAlertsfor​HumanMedicalProducts/ucm439014.htm; also see: http://www.fda.gov/Safety/MedWatch/SafetyInformation/SafetyAlertsfor​HumanMedicalProducts/ucm230764.htm.

4. "2012 Annual Report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers’ National Poison Data System.” AAPCC. Online at https://aapcc.s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs/annual_reports/2012_NPDS_Annual_​Report.pdf.

5. What’s the Harm. Online at http://whatstheharm.net/homeopathy.html.

6. "My Wife’s Death from Cancer.” Quackwatch. February 27, 2002. Online at http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Victims/craven.html.

7. "Woman files suit against homeopathic business.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 
June 15, 2001. Online at https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1683&dat=20010615&id=GsAaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XjAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6844,​4774757&hl=en.

8. "Doctors back Ohrenschall on treatment” Las Vegas Sun. February 12, 1998. Online at http://lasvegassun.com/news/1998/feb/12/doctors-back-ohrenschall-on-treatment/.

9. "Inquest told parents ‘rejected advice.’” The Age. November 26, 2003. Online at http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/11/25/1069522605256.html.

Some accusations levied against advertising are undeserved. But then, some are deserved, though perhaps not in ways you may have heard or assumed. Meanwhile, not a few bad apples engage in a heinous advertising tactic that goes largely unnoticed.

Quelle surprise. In yet another poll, 36 percent of respondents rated the “honesty and ethical standards” of advertising people “low/very low.”¹ It’s a wonder Gallup bothers asking anymore. I’d take umbrage at the public’s dim view of my profession were it not for one sticking point. Namely, that it isn’t entirely unwarranted.

But it isn’t entirely warranted, either, and it seems to me that if you’re going to dislike what I do for a living, you may as well dislike it from an informed perspective. Space and lethargy do not permit addressing every abuse laid to advertising’s charge, so I shall deal with three that I hear most often: that advertising controls behavior; short of controlling, that advertising manipulates by unfair means; and that advertising lies at the root of many a societal ill.
Then I shall wrap up with a look at an advertising abuse that I think could do with more outcry than it receives.

Claim: Advertising Controls Behavior

In 1957, marketing researcher James Vicary held reporters rapt with results from an advertising experiment. Every five seconds for one-3000th of a second, Vicary had flashed “Hungry? Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola” onscreen during showings of the movie Picnic. The flash was too brief for the conscious mind to register, but not for the subconscious. Over a six-week trial, Coke sales rose 18.1 percent. Popcorn sales rose 57.7 percent. So great was public outrage that hardly anyone noticed when, five years later, Vicary admitted to having made the whole thing up (Subliminal advertising 2003).

Conveniently published the same year Vicary held his press conference, Vance Packard’s bestseller The Hidden Persuaders ⁽¹⁹⁵⁷⁾ fanned the flame. Often deferring to Vicary’s alleged expertise, the book served up terrifying gems like this:

Housewives consistently report that one of the most pleasurable tasks of the home is making a cake . . . James Vicary made a study of cake symbolism and came up with the conclusion that “baking a cake traditionally is acting out the birth of a child” so that when a woman bakes a cake for her family she is symbolically presenting the family with a new baby, an idea she likes very much.

Or this:

Mr. Vicary set up his cameras and started following the ladies as they entered the store. The results were startling, even to him. . . . The ladies fell into what Mr. Vicary calls a hypnoidal trance, a light kind of trance that, he explains, is the first stage of hypnosis . . . the main cause of the trance is that the supermarket is packed with products that in former years would have been items that only kings and queens could afford, and here in this fairyland they were available.

Those damnable advertisers! Women who thought they were buying cake mixes were but sating an innate baby lust while lost in a hypnoidal² trance.

Such nonsense hasn’t gone away. The 2004 PBS documentary The Persuaders shows child-psychiatrist-
turned-marketing-consultant Clotaire Rapaille advising a French company to sell cheese in America in resealable plastic pouches. The idea was not new. Rapaille could have advised his client, “Do what U.S. cheese marketers do, duh.” Instead he produced a convoluted metaphor perhaps worthier of his hefty consulting fee:

. . . in America the cheese is dead, which means is pasteurized, which means legally dead and scientifically dead … plastic is a body bag . . . the fridge is the morgue; that’s where you put the dead bodies . . . in France the cheese is alive . . . you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. . . . (Rapaille 2003)

Those damnable cheese marketers! Just as 1950s women could not resist birthing cakes, modern Americans cannot resist snacking on well-preserved corpses.

Journalism professor Wilson Bryan Key rekindled subliminal advertising fears in the 1970s. Key claimed that sexual images hidden in photos of everything from ice cubes to fried clams made consumers buy against their will (Key 1974; 1980).

No less than advertising industry icon David Ogilvy jumped on the mind-control bandwagon in 1983:

I once myself came near to doing something so diabolical that I hesitate to confess it even now, 30 years later. Suspecting that hypnotism might be an element in successful advertising, I engaged a professional hypnotist to make a commercial. When I saw it in the projection room, it was so powerful that I had visions of millions of suggestible consumers getting up from their armchairs and rushing like zombies through the traffic on their way to buy the product at the nearest store. Had I invented the ultimate advertisement? I burned it, and never told my client how close I had come to landing him in a national scandal. (Ogilvy 1983)

Evidence for hypnotism as a means of mind control is as lacking (Randi 2007) as evidence for Ogilvy’s tale. He gave no account of testing the commercial’s zombification power, only of being a horrified focus group of one. We cannot test the commercial for ourselves, because he allegedly put a match to the only copy. No writer, director, actor, lighting technician, editor, or even the hypnotist ever came forth. No raw footage or script ever surfaced. This anecdote smells of self-promotion à la Vicary.^3,4

If you wonder why an industry in the business of creating positive images would promote myths harmful to its own, consider that advertising agencies needn’t appeal to consumers. Worse things could happen to an ad agency than for a client to believe it has magic powers. Yet if advertising really had such power, the best minds in the advertising business would not have produced market failures like the following, which I swear I’m not making up: Colgate frozen dinners, Bic disposable underwear, Cosmopolitan magazine yogurt, McDonald’s clothing, Ben-Gay aspirin, Smith & Wesson bicycles, Life Saver’s soda, Frito-Lay lemonade, Harley-Davidson eau de toilette, New Coke, and even the popular Taco Bell Chihuahua.⁵

Despite ample debunking and no evidence of effectiveness,⁶ subliminal advertising allegations persist.⁷ The reality is that if advertisers can control minds, they hide it well.

Laboratories, Sex, and Other Delights

Some mind-control scares come out of laboratories. Subjects view ads, commercials, or web pages while hidden devices track their eye movements,⁸ an fMRI looks for brain areas to light up, or a machine measures their galvanic responses. Should eyes fixate or move, brain areas light up, pupils dilate, or skin temperatures change, the lab’s PR department sends out a press release.

But there is a problem in leaping from “had an effect in a lab” to “made you buy in a marketplace.” Early in my career, I took over advertising for a company that marketed to the trucking industry. My predecessor had adorned ads with half-dressed women. I persuaded the company to let me substitute photos of trucks, combined with straight talk about the product. I suspect my predecessor’s campaign would have produced more dilation, fixation, galvanic responses, and brain light-ups than mine. But in the real world, truckers quit hanging our ads on garage walls. Oh, and sales quadrupled.

The case is anecdotal, but its basis is not. I happened to know that the legendary John Caples, who built his career on controlled advertising tests, had written this:

Before the widespread use of readership surveys, some ad men believed that the way to stop a male reader was to show a picture of bathing beauty. Apparently this technique may create desire for the girl, but it does not seem to create desire for the product being advertised. . . . One interesting observation that has come out of readership surveys is that men tend to look at ads containing pictures of men and that women tend to look at ads containing pictures of women. . . . A man figures that an ad containing a picture of a man is likely to be an ad for a man’s product and that an ad containing a picture of a woman is likely to be for a woman’s product. (Caples 1932)

The point is not to address whether sex sells,⁹ but to illustrate that a laboratory response is a far cry from an actual purchase.

A 2011 study gained some attention among skeptics (Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe 2011). Priyali Rajagopal from Southern Methodist University and Nicole Votolato Montgomery from College of William and Mary found that advertising could convince people they had sampled popcorn that in fact they had not (Rajagopal and Votolato Montgomery 2011). If creating a false memory constitutes mind control, then there you have it. But note that the study did not demonstrate that the false memory made anyone buy anything. Given the poor track record of other laboratory findings in the real world, I have my doubts. It is easier to induce a response in a lab than to make someone rise from a chair and head to a store.

One reason laboratory tests tend not to prove predictive is that people do not experience advertising in a lab the way they do at home. In a lab, participants know they are being observed, which affects behavior. Moreover, they focus on the commercial or ad they are shown. At home, no one is observing them, and commercials and ads compete for attention with bathroom trips, phone calls, texting, tweeting, Minecraft, magazines, in-person conversation, muted sound, Facebook, scratching, channel surfing, web surfing, napping—you name it. Nor do families gather at the tube. The same household may have multiple TVs tuned to different stations or streaming commercial-free content.

With no evidence to support the alleged power of subliminal or hypnotic advertising, and no evidence suggesting that laboratory tests are predictive, you may think that charges of mind-controlling advertising look somewhat like garden-variety conspiracy theories. You may be on to something.

Claim: Advertising Manipulates Behavior

Use manipulate if you like, but I think a more apt term is influence. Advertising pleads guilty. This is not a little circular, since to influence is pretty much the point of advertising. But of course the real question is whether advertising goes about said task unfairly.

Let’s start with the basic way advertising can influence. If you need new tires and see a tire dealer’s flyer, you might visit that dealer. If you dropped your smart phone in the toilet, an ad for a waterproof phone might win your attention. If you’re allergic to your eyeliner, an ad for a hypoallergenic one might attract you. I hope you’ll agree that influence of that sort is benign, possibly even useful. But then, those are products you might want. Advertising that influences you to buy products that you don’t want is quite another matter. Isn’t it a given that slicker, smoother, glitzier, better designed, more entertaining, and more memorable advertising can lodge itself in your mind so you’ll reach for the advertised brand, want it or not, without knowing why? Why else would advertising agencies boast of work that is creative, original, memorable, and likable? Why else would clients keep spending big money on slick, creative ads?

Beware assuming that advertising people make rational decisions. Advertisers tend to deem a campaign successful if it “tested well” in a focus group, was recalled by a respectable percentage of a target market, won awards, or coincided with a sales increase. That focus groups are not predictive, remembered campaigns fail and not-remembered ones succeed, awards have no bearing, and “correlation does not mean causation” should make sense to most skeptics, but it does not to many an advertiser.

An exception is direct response advertising, a subset that concerns itself less with brand recognition and more with measured actions. More than a century of controlled direct response tests have revealed consistencies in marketplace behaviors. Want more people to click a link? Spell out, “click here to. . . .”¹⁰ Want to increase readership? Avoid light type on a dark background (Bodian 1995). Want more people to open your snail mail? Use an unusual envelope (Rosenspan 2011). Want more people to call a number on the TV? Avoid Prime Time (Eicoff 1982). Want more people to take action? Offer a freebie for a limited time.¹¹ Direct response advertising has thousands of such “rules.”

Do not be misled. Like spelling out “click here,” most direct response rules do not so much win buyers as avoid losing them. And “more people” typically refers to incremental gains. It is not unusual for a direct response advertiser to celebrate when 1 percent of a target market takes a desired action. Boasts of “doubling sales” can mean going from “99 percent didn’t buy” to “98 percent didn’t buy.” Response rates of 2, 3, or more percent are not unheard-of, but every uptick waxes increasingly aspirational.¹² This is a poor showing indeed for a would-be manipulator.

Equally telling is that direct marketers achieve their greatest gains by fine-tuning reaching the right audience and offering the right gift incentive. Fine-tuning creative work, the alleged stuff of manipulation, receives lowest priority. Many direct marketers hold that creative work accounts for only 20 percent of results.¹³

If you worry about the extent of direct response knowledge, take heart. Brand advertising, which is most advertising you see, tends to disdain and ignore it. Why would make an article in its own right.

Advertising seeks to persuade. Direct response advertising does its best to play to proclivities. But neither can subvert will.^14,15 None of this should surprise skeptics, who would likely scoff at a stage hypnotist making similar claims of mind control and manipulation.

Claim: Advertising Contributes to 
Social Ills

There is an abundance of inoffensive advertising, but good apples do not preclude the existence of bad. One would be hard-pressed to name a societal ill that advertising hasn’t promoted, piggybacked on, or tacitly endorsed. Circa 1907, a logo for Bluthenthal & Bickart’s Alligator Bait whiskey featured a naked African American child tromping through a bayou. In 1957, Clairol began promoting hair coloring products with “Does she or doesn’t she?” In 1965, “Mrs. Olson” began prescribing Folgers Coffee to women as a cure for the complaining husband. In 1967, Fritos introduced the Frito Bandito, an animated Mexican thief voiced by Mel Blanc whose mission in life was to steal your corn cheeps. In 2007, commercials for Haggar Clothing Company featured a pair of white, male, middle-aged spokesbrutes reveling in intolerance, bullying, vandalism, personal violence, and sexual harassment. In a 2008 TV commercial aired in the United Kingdom, Mr. T fired Snickers bars at a speed-walker to make him run “like a real man,” closing with the tagline, “Get some nuts.” Just last year, DC Metro created posters suggesting that women would rather talk about shoes than think. Not to be overlooked are ads promoting products that harm the environment, threaten health, foster unwise debt, play upon greed, and more.

These are all valid charges, leaving the advertising in question no place to hide. But here’s a disturbing reminder: Greed, racism, sexism, cruel stereotypes, and other forms of marginalizing existed long before the first ad was penned. Advertising picks up, capitalizes on, and spreads ills, but it rarely authors them. When consciousness rises, advertising eventually follows.¹⁶ This is in no way a defense. When advertising perpetuates and, worse, promotes social ills, it deserves to be called on the carpet. But there is value in remembering that purging advertising of social ills begins with purging society of them.

As it is naive to pretend that advertising causes no harm, it is equally naive to pretend that it does no good. Advertising helps build and strengthen economies. If you have a job, it is thanks to people handing over dollars to your company, which is thanks to someone who persuaded them to do so, whether through an online banner, Twitter or Facebook mention, billboard, radio spot, brochure, magazine ad, or word-of-mouth. Mass advertising enables mass production, which lowers costs so that products can be made affordable and available where they wouldn’t otherwise. Trade, of which advertising and marketing are an integral part, helps keep nations from warring with one another (Pinker 2011). And, though I cannot speak for you, I am grateful that advertising has sometimes pushed what was once considered needless, like toothbrushes, daily bathing, and deodorant.

I would love to believe that intrinsic morality would prevent most advertising people from manipulating or controlling minds were such possible. Having seen many a lofty ideal dispatched where dollars were involved, I know better. So perhaps the most persuasive debunking of unfair persuasion techniques is that most practitioners do not bother with them. Equally telling is that, unlike consumer publications, advertising trade journals and how-to books do not bother with them, either.

Not That You Asked, but Here Is What I Dislike in Advertising

Crowing about nonexistent abuses may blind us to an abuse that is real and pervasive. I refer to a tactic that I consider immoral and at times dangerous. It is often overlooked, perhaps because it lacks sensationalistic appeal. It is called lying. I wish to draw attention to three kinds: two of them legal, one not.

Puffery is an exaggerated boast presumably understood not to be taken seriously. Surely few consumers believe that Keebler employs elves, Red Bull enables flight, and women cannot resist a man drenched in Axe. You may differ, but I find puffery of that sort arguably harmless. Yet when Kellogg’s puffed in the 1960s that Apple Jacks cereal “keeps the bullies away,” I wonder how many kids consumed a bowl and went looking for trouble. And I disagree with a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that allowed as puffery Papa John’s Pizza’s line, “better ingredients, better pizza,”17 especially since the company’s website (www.papajohns.com/about/) calls the cagily incomplete comparative a “brand promise.”

The other legally permissible lie is the weasel, and I have no tolerance for it. A weasel is technically true but designed to mislead. Fad diets weasel when they trumpet miracles disclaimed in tiny type as “not typical.” So do multi-level companies that imply but do not explicitly claim that distributors are a few weeks from untold riches. So do natural and organic products that capitalize on the appeal to nature fallacy. So do so-called alternative medicines, whose large type claim treatment and prevention while the small type offers the legally prescribed weasels: “These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA” and “This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”¹⁸

Last on the list is out-and-out lying. There is nothing legal about it. How do no-goodniks get away with it? Some operate from a country that provides sanctuary. Some rightly expect regulatory bodies to be slow to action.¹⁹ Some keep operations local, knowing that the Federal Trade Commission pursues only interstate cases. Some hide their identity and close shop or move before the law catches up. Some count on projected profits to be greater than projected fines.²⁰

Wink or not at harmless puffery, but do not sit still for over-the-line puffery, weaseling, and out-and-out lying. Withhold your business. Warn friends. Blog. Send the offending advertiser angry mail. Write editors. Write legislatures. Make a public stink.

Fair being fair, I’d also suggest rewarding honest advertisers with your business and public praise.

There is nothing an illicit advertiser would like better than to keep on bilking people under our noses while we tilt at mind-control windmills. Let’s not.

Notes

1. Car salespeople and members of Congress fared worse. See http://www.gallup.com/poll/159035/congress-retains-low-honesty-rating.aspx.

2. Vicary had no more compunction about making up words like hypnoidal than about making up marketing tests.

3. Did Ogilvy know better? Maybe not. He championed scientifically tested advertising, but he also resorted to graphology when evaluating job applicants.

4. Ogilvy On Advertising and Ogilvy’s prior book, Confessions of An Advertising Man, were advertising feats in their own right, at once best sellers and book-length advertisements for his agency. The occasional tall tale notwithstanding, both contain a good deal of sound advice for anyone who wants to create advertising.

5. I attended a presentation by Taco Bell’s advertising head, who detailed how sales plummeted even as awareness and popularity of the Chihuahua soared. Sales recovered after Taco Bell retired the doggy and returned to close-ups of food.

6. Including by Skeptical Inquirer. See Pratkanis, Anthony R., The Cargo-Cult Science of Subliminal Persuasion, Volume 16(3), Spring 1992, and Moore, Timothy E. Subliminal Perception: Facts and Fallacies, Volume 16(3), Spring 1992.

7. Google it if you don’t believe me.

8. This is old news with new toys. When I was a college student, we studied how eyes scanned printed pages. Most American readers look first at the upper left quadrant of a page, scan to the right, zig to the lower left, and then scan right again. Our professor told us to keep that in mind when designing a page. I thought, We need a test to tell us that Americans read left-to-right and top-to-bottom?


9. Usually, sex sells only when sex is relevant, such as a perfume ad using sensuous images and situations.

10. That is, as of this writing. What works online has been known to change overnight.


    11. Industry standard. I have validated it with my own testing over a range of products, prices, and markets. Clients are often surprised to learn that the power of the free incentive offer, far from preying on the less sophisticated, tends to increase with the education and income level of the target market.

11. The response rate to expect varies by product. Sometimes one-half of 1 percent is asking a lot. On rare occasions, 10 percent or more may be attainable. The desired action also matters. Responses tend to be higher when the market is asked not to buy but only to inquire.

12. Direct response advertisers call this “The Law of 40 40 20.” As far as I have been able to determine, the percentages come from thin air, but the importance of targeting and incentives over creative work is well established. My own testing has borne this out as well.

13. Else, Skeptical Inquirer would have a lot more subscribers. All I know so far is that Version B of this past year’s mailer won more subscribers than Version A. If I cancel A and continue with B, is that unfair manipulation?

14. Let’s not get into the Dennett-Harris debate on free will here.

15. Albeit sluggishly, grudgingly, and sometimes kicking and screaming. Even today I must remind art directors setting up photo shoots that not everyone is middle class and white, and writers that not every shopper is “she.” Some resent it. Tough. I’m their boss.

16. Pizza Hut brought the suit. http://smallbusiness.chron.co/difference-between-false-advertising-puffery-66945.html.

17. Senator Orrin Hatch, who represents my home state of Utah, is largely responsible for that. Don’t look at me. Every six years, I vote for his opponent.

18. Competitors bring false advertising actions more often than regulatory bodies do.

19. The makers of Airborne survived combined fines of $53 million, and Kevin Trudeau’s books continue selling, earning him royalties while he serves prison time.

References

• Bodian, Nat G. 1995. Direct Marketing Rules of Thumb. New York: McGraw Hill.

• Caples, John. 1932. Tested Advertising Methods. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.


• Eicoff, Alvin. 1982. Or Your Money Back. New York: Crown.


• Key, Wilson Bryan. 1974. Subliminal Seduction: Are You Being Sexually Aroused By This Picture? Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.


• ———. 1980. The Clam-Plate Orgy: And Other Subliminals the Media Use to Manipulate Your Behavior. New York: Signet.


• Ogilvy, David. 1983. Ogilvy On Advertising. New York: Crown Publishers.


• Packard, Vance. 1957. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: David McKay Company.

• Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Penguin.


• Randi, James. 2007. Hypnotism/hypnosis. An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. Online at https://web.archive.org/web/20130514085208/, http://www.randi.org/encyclopedia/hypnotism_hypnosis.html.


• Rajagopal, Priyali, and Nicole Votolato Montgomery. 2011. I imagine, I experience, I like: The false experience effect. Journal of Consumer Research 38(3)(October): 578–594.


• Rapaille, Clotaire. 2003. Interview with Frontline. Online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/interviews/rapaille.html.


• Rosenspan, Alan. 2011. Envelope testing (blog post). Improve Your Response with Alan Rosenspan. Online at http://improveresponse.blogspot.com/2011/03/envelope-testing.html.

• Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. 2011. Podcast#307. Online at http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/307.


• Subliminal advertising. 2003. Ad Age Encyclo­pedia. Online at http://adage.com/article/adage-encyclopedia/subliminal-advertising/98895/.

Lunar eclipse October 8 2014 California Alfredo Garcia Jr mideclipse" by Tomruen - [1] [2]. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Commons.

1. What Is Happening?

On Sunday evening Sept. 27, a total eclipse of the Moon will be visible from throughout the U.S. (and North and South America.) In a lunar eclipse, the full Moon & the Sun are exactly opposite each other in our sky, and the Earth gets between them. This means the Earth’s shadow falls on the full Moon, darkening it. It’s a nicely democratic event; no special equipment is needed to see it (provided it’s not cloudy or foggy.) Plus it happens early in the evening; kids can watch & still be awake for school next day.

2. When Will the Eclipse Happen?

As Earth’s shadow slowly moves across the Moon, we first see only part of the Moon darkening (partial eclipse). When our shadow completely covers the Moon, we see a total eclipse. The best time to start watching is about a 20 minutes before total eclipse begins, when much of the Moon is already darkened.

• NOTE: On the west coast, the eclipse will start low in the Eastern sky, so make sure your observing location has an unobstructed view toward the Eastern horizon.

3. What is Visible During a Lunar Eclipse?

As the shadow of the Earth covers the Moon, note that our natural satellite doesn’t become completely dark. Some sunlight bent through the Earth’s atmosphere still reaches the shadowed Moon and gives it a dull brown or reddish glow. The exact color of the glow and its darkness depend in part on the “sooty-ness” of our atmosphere – how recently volcanoes have gone off and how much cloud cover, storm activity, and human pollution there is around the globe.

Once the Moon is totally eclipsed, the stars in the sky should become more easy to see. What makes this eclipse a little bit unusual is that, by coincidence, it is happening just one hour after the Moon has reached the closest point in its monthly orbit around the Earth. So the Moon will look a bit larger in the sky than usual. (The media will be calling it a “supermoon,” but the effect is pretty subtle for the average person.)

4. Is it Safe to Watch, and How do I Watch?

Since the Moon is safe to look at, and eclipses make the Moon darker, there’s no danger in watching the eclipse with your eyes or a telescope. (The dangerous eclipse is the solar one, where it is the Sun that gets covered.) And lunar eclipses don’t require you to go to a dark location. Bring binoculars to see the Moon larger, but just your eyes are fine. Since the total eclipse will last for an hour and 12 minutes, be sure to take someone along with whom you like to spend time in the dark!

5. What Can I Tell My Kids (or Kid Brother or Sister)?

Suggest that they take a careful look at the shadow of the Earth as it moves across the bright face of the Moon. What shape is it? The round shape of the Earth's shadow suggested to the ancient Greeks, more than 2000 years ago, that the Earth’s shape must be round too. Eclipse after eclipse, they saw that the Earth cast a round shadow, and deduced that we lived on a round planet (long before we had pictures of it from space.)

Science is personified by a handful of articulate, media-savvy scientists who stimulate new thinking, 
drive scientific controversies, enhance public understanding, mobilize social movements, 
and shape policy. To millions, these scientific celebrities are the public face of science.

Charles Darwin was a master of public relations. While The Origin of Species swept through nineteenth-century culture, shattering the prevailing religious orthodoxy about the dawn of human life, Darwin cultivated his popular image. He distributed mass-produced photographs, signed autographs, collected songs and poems about himself, responded to his voluminous mail with pre-printed cards, refused most interviews, and avoided speaking before crowds where questions might catch him off-guard. He met author George Eliot and received an inscribed copy of Das Kapital from Karl Marx.

The theory of evolution by natural selection he outlined in his 1859 book coursed through Victorian society, spreading far beyond learned journals and professional societies. The general public could buy a low-cost edition of The Origin of Species. Magazines spread his image and ideas through popular culture, sometimes in strange ways. Caricaturists and cartoonists, for example, drew Darwin’s head—with its distinctive long beard and large dome of his skull—on the body of an ape. Darwin became public property. “Deep down,” wrote historian of science Janet Browne, “Darwin’s sons and daughters were forced to accept that he was not just their father. He belonged to everybody.” In his time, he was a scientific celebrity.

The great naturalist showed that fame, lasting fame, is never just the inevitable consequence of great achievement, even one as seismic as The Origin of Species. The world must hear about the achievement.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of the twentieth century’s most iconic scientist—physicist Albert Einstein. He personified science in mass culture, and he became a global symbol for the mind’s phenomenal power. He exploded into popular consciousness in 1919 after his general theory of relativity, which was nothing less than a new way of viewing the physics of the universe, was confirmed by two independent experiments during a solar eclipse. Afterward, Einstein received significant journalistic attention—“Revolution in Science. New Theory of the Universe,” reported The Times—but he vaulted to global celebrity two years later when he visited the United States to raise money and public awareness for Zionist causes.

The two-month visit in 1921 sparked a frenzy of public and media interest. The New York Times described a “man in a faded grey rain coat and a flopping black felt hat that nearly concealed the grey hair that straggled over his ears . . . But underneath his shaggy locks was a scientific mind whose deductions have staggered the ablest intellects of Europe.” The New York Evening Post described Einstein’s Berlin home, and detailed his love of Dostoyevsky, his working methods—lost in intense concentration in his room alone for three or four days—and his fondness for cigars. The American press, wrote scholar Marshall Missner, was “the instrument that made Einstein into a celebrity.”

On the back of his coverage, as relativity matched the mood of uncertainty that followed the savagery of World War I, Einstein became a global star. The London Palladium asked him to put on his own show. Girls in Geneva mobbed him. One tried to cut off a lock of his hair. Telescopes and towers were named in his honor, as were children and cigars. When he and his wife, Elsa, attended the 1931 premiere of City Lights, photographers snapped their picture on the red carpet alongside the film’s star, Charlie Chaplin. Abraham Pais, one of Einstein’s former colleagues and a historian of science, later wrote: “Einstein, creator of some of the best science of all time, is himself a creation of the media in so far as he is and remains a public figure.”

Since Einstein penetrated deep into popular culture in the early twentieth century, the mass media expanded dramatically. At the end of the century, the media were a center of public life and had enormous power. For most adults, the media were the source of most ideas and information about science and issues affected by science. In their myriad forms, the media disseminated information, shaped public opinion, conveyed ideas about how the world works, how the world can be experienced, how society is organized, and what issues matter for citizens and how these topics come to be viewed and understood in broad culture.

The media also focused overwhelmingly on individuals, leading to our pervasive celebrity culture where fame has become the most powerful way of understanding ideas in a complex world. Within this culture, a new type of scientist came out of the lab and into the limelight—the celebrity scientist.

These scientific stars gripped the public imagination, using their vast influence to stimulate new thinking, drive scientific controversies, enhance public understanding, mobilize social movements, and shape policy. In celebrity culture, they spoke for science in public. But more than that, their fame gave them power within science. Their stardom affected the inner workings of science, shaping the discovery of new knowledge about our natural world. Because of their profound ability to influence public life and professional research, the celebrity scientists constitute a new scientific elite.

FRED HOYLE AND CARL SAGAN: 
MASS MEDIA STARS

Fred Hoyle and Carl Sagan.

In 1950, British astronomer Fred Hoyle became an emblematic figure in this new media age of science. That year, he delivered a series of BBC radio lectures on “The Nature of the Universe” that were so successful that listeners voted him Britain’s most popular broadcaster. In his soft Yorkshire accent, he clearly explained cosmology and evoked familiar domestic scenes to make complex science part of listeners’ everyday worlds. Even professional physicists stopped work and tuned in. The lectures were subsequently printed as The Nature of the Universe, which sold 77,000 copies in just six months, making it an early scientific best seller. 
Hoyle’s rise to stardom occured right at the beginning of a period historian of science Jon Agar called “the long sixties.” This era spanned roughly 1955 to 1975, and it featured a dramatic clash of ideas that transformed politics, divided society, and overhauled scientific life so radically that scholars called it a second scientific revolution, after the first in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that gave birth to the modern scientific enterprise.

Beginning in 1970, the amount of science reported in the media exploded. In the United States, the 1970s and 1980s saw the creation of science sections in dozens of newspapers across the country, the launch of multiple glossy popular science magazines, and the inauguration of a new weekly television series—Nova—devoted to science. Popular science books reached a significant point in the mid-1970s. Before then, there were rarely more than ten science titles on the New York Times best seller list each year. But afterward, there were rarely fewer than ten science titles each year. The situation in Britain was similar. Science flowed through popular culture.

Jacob Boronowski, The Ascent of Man

Television allowed scientists to speak to vast numbers of citizens. The BBC series The Ascent of Man told a science-based story of human history. Broadcast in Britain and the United States in the early 1970s, it was hosted by mathematician and intellectual Jacob Bronowski, who had written and spoken about science to wide audiences in magazines and on television long before the show granted him international prominence. During the same decade, across the Atlantic, a planetary scientist was proving himself an engaging media presence, a scientist who would became his era’s best-known public scientist: Carl Sagan.

Sagan symbolized an era when the television age met the space age. He was a planetary scientist at a time when space became a proxy battleground for rival Cold War superpowers. He was telegenic at a point where it was clear that television favored personalities, like him, who were articulate, attractive, eloquent, and enthusiastic. He was already well known at the end of the 1970s as a Pulitzer Prize–winning popular science writer who regularly explained astronomy to the hundreds of thousands of nightly viewers of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Carl Sagan often appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

But when he unveiled the universe to half a billion viewers in the 1980 television series Cosmos, he was propelled to unprecedented global fame. Viewers in sixty nations followed the planetary scientist on his thirteen-part personal odyssey through eons of cosmological and human history. His spin-off book of the series, Cosmos, spent more than seventy weeks on The New York Times best seller list and earned him more than a million dollars in royalties. Time in 1980 featured Sagan on its cover and called him a “Showman of Science,” “the prince of popularizers,” “the nation’s scientific mentor to the masses,” and “America’s most effective salesman of science.”

A biographer of Sagan noted that the producer of Cosmos, Adrian Malone, vowed to “make Carl a star.” And indeed the show led to a surge in media and public attention to Sagan. Journalists reported on his personal life, writing about his trademark turtlenecks and his distinctive orange Porsche 914 with its license plate, PHOBOS, one of the moons of Mars. He had to cope with the women who appeared at studios demanding to see him, convinced he spoke directly to them through their television screens. He sometimes sat facing the wall in restaurants to avoid the stream of autograph hunters and well-wishers.

His celebrity brought lucrative rewards. As his biographers noted, the $2 million he received for Contact, his 1985 novel about the scientific search for extraterrestrial life, was, at the time, the largest advance ever given by a publisher for a work not yet in manuscript form. It also brought him influence, granting him a public platform for his anti-nuclear advocacy, as he warned political leaders about the devastation that would occur in the radiation-soaked darkness of a global nuclear winter. Students who watched Cosmos wanted to become scientists. No modern scientist had yet achieved such reach, renown, and reputation.

But his fame damaged Sagan’s standing in the scientific world. Harvard denied his bid for tenure, a lifetime appointment that a university awards to accomplished scholars. The nation’s most prestigious scientific society, the National Academy of Sciences, rejected the possibility of his becoming a member. A number of influential peers dismissed him as a mere popularizer and not a real scientist, someone who spent too much time on The Tonight Show and too little time engaged in the painstaking grind of observing the planets.

He came to starkly illustrate a feature of modern scientific fame, a feature that Michael Shermer later called the “Sagan Effect”: the perception among researchers that the level of a scientist’s public fame is in direct opposition to the quality of their research work. Popular scientists, in effect, were not seen as strong scientists. Before his media career, however, Sagan established a sound reputation as a researcher, known for his path-breaking work that showed Venus was boiling hot and violent windstorms raged across the surface of Mars. He accumulated 500 total career publications—an astonishing rate of productivity that averaged one published academic paper each month. The Sagan Effect, for Sagan, was false.

Not that Sagan was the only scientist to spot the media’s enhanced power. He was one of several scientists in U.S. public life in the sixties and seventies who saw the media as a way to influence public and political attitudes toward science. Rae Goodell wrote about these figures—such as anthropologist Margaret Mead, biologist Paul Ehrlich, and chemist Linus Pauling—in her 1977 book The Visible Scientists. She described how they broke with conventional ways to shape science policy. They bypassed the traditional ways that experts gave behind-the-scenes advice to policymakers. They went directly to the public instead, using the mass media to put science on the public agenda and therefore shape citizen attitudes and, as a result, affect science policy. They showed that the individual scientist working in a cutting-edge area of science, once they were sufficiently articulate, controversial, and distinctive, could attract and hold the media spotlight.

These visible scientists ruptured the conventional ways researchers earned scientific and public attention. As described by a founding father of the sociology of science, Robert K. Merton, an individual scientist’s reputation was traditionally established exclusively within science. A scientist gained recognition only after their published research was validated by their peers. The more and better their research, the more their reputation grew and the greater their status in science became. The ultimate accolade was the Nobel Prize, the public symbol of scientific excellence, a public award bestowed on those researchers deemed to have produced the world’s best science. But Sagan and other visible scientists had a reputation that was in part created outside science. As well as scientific credentials, what also mattered was how he or she communicated, how engaging they were, how their science tied to public issues, and how interesting they were as personalities.

A NEW CELEBRITY CULTURE

As media personalities, the visible scientists were early actors in what has become a pervasive celebrity culture. Today the media concentrate on personalities, representing complex events and issues through the prism of personalities. As cultural historian Leo Braudy noted in his history of fame, The Frenzy of Renown, in our celebrity culture “human faces are plastered on every idea and event” and “complex phenomena wear the reduced features of emblematic individuals.” Critics and commentators have lamented this shift in culture, viewing the media’s obsession with celebrity as the triumph of the trivial, the elevation of the inane, the proof of a debased and dumbed-down culture.

But there is a more positive view of fame, one that sees great power and importance that celebrities hold in our media-saturated public life. For Braudy, fame “sits at the crossroads of the familiar and the unprecedented, where personal psychology, social context, and historical tradition meet.” Celebrities have power because they vividly represent ideas, issues, and ideologies, allowing people to visualize and make sense of abstract concepts. As the author David Foster Wallace wrote about sports stars, “Great athletes are profundity in motion. They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable.”

Scholars of communication and popular culture, moreover, have defined celebrity in a technical sense. Celebrity is a phenomenon formed as a result of three interconnected processes. The first process can be seen when someone is portrayed in media coverage as a distinctive individual whose public and private lives merge. (When Sagan died, The Australian said he had the good luck to have “a compelling presence” and “good looks.”)

The second is when a person becomes a cultural commodity, used to sell his or her own work, but also potentially as a way to advertise other cultural products. (The New York Times said Cosmos focused so intensely on its charismatic host that the show could have been subtitled: “The Selling of Carl Sagan.”)

The third—and most complex but arguably central—process concerns the way the person comes to represent and embody ideas, ideologies, and processes. Sagan embodied for many the idea of the scientist, the heroic seeker after truth who sought to overthrow ignorance and superstition with rationality, showing how science was, in his words, a candle in a demon-haunted world. (When he died, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution said: “For the common man, his was the face of science.”)

THE NEW CELEBRITY SCIENTISTS

By the time Sagan passed away in 1996, scientists were described in the media using the language of celebrity. In 1997, Vogue magazine said serious science had become glamorous, and Current Biology said scientists were portrayed as “stylish and even sexy.” The Independent later argued that the turn of the twenty-first century saw science dominated by its “media superstars.” In this cultural atmosphere, where celebrity became cultural currency, a small handful of North American and British scientists came to dominate public discussion of science, publishing best-selling titles, receiving six-figure advances for books about esoteric topics like quantum physics, producing science documentaries, contributing to late night talk shows, appearing in glossy magazines, being photographed by celebrity photographers, and lobbying parliaments. Among the star scientists who emerged in this period were:

STEPHEN HAWKING
The cosmologist became the world’s best-known contemporary scientific celebrity after the success of A Brief History of Time, first published in 1988, brought cosmology to millions of readers worldwide. But his subsequent public career has been marked by a succession of private revelations, recycled versions of his best-selling popular book, and often-caustic public evaluations of his scientific reputation.

RICHARD DAWKINS
Called "Mr. Public Science himself," "Professor Evolution," and "Professor Science," the evolutionist and writer fashioned his fame over his decades-long public career as strident advocate of evolution, combative defender of science, and relentless critic of religion.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
The director of the Harden Planetarium in New York became the contemporary heir to Carl Sagan and is the United States's unofficial chief public spokesman for science and space science, shaping public attitudes, science policy, and the future of his field.

STEPHEN J GOULD
The late paleontologist, who one critic described as a "learned Harvard professor and baseball-loving everyman," enthused millions about evolution, battled creationism, and tried to reconcile science and religion.

These selected scientists exploited and managed their fame in different ways. Dawkins used his fame to move far from the laboratory and become the head of a new social movement of atheists. Pinker and Gould managed the difficult task of being famous public intellectuals and prolific university-based researchers. Greenfield embraced fame and its advantages for raising the public profile and reputations of scientists. Lovelock reluctantly embraced stardom after he was shut out of mainstream science. Greene uses his fame as a passport to move seamlessly between the worlds of science and entertainment, while Tyson shows the power of a public scientist, one who has not got a strong record of scientific research, to influence public understanding, scientific debate, and public policy.

Together they are emblems of a new era of science, one embedded in the dynamics of the media, the demands of celebrity culture, and the vicissitudes of public life. They vividly embody the new era of the celebrity scientist.

STEVEN PINKER
Once described as "famously rock'n'roll with his long, curly hair and his cowboy boots," the Harvard cognitive scientist explained the biological roots of language and argued controversially that biology plays a major role in molding not just human behavior but human society and culture.

BRIAN GREENE
The physicist is the public face of string theory, the novel branch of physics that captured the turn-of-the-century scientific and public imaginations, and the scientist who can move seamlessly between speaking at academic conferences and starring in The Big Bang Theory, without losing his scientific status.

SUSAN GREENFIELD
The former Oxford professor of pharmacology and member of the U.K. House of Lords demonstrates the contentious portrayal of female scientists - she has been called a "mini-skirted media celebrity" - and the ability of famous scientists to raise and discuss uncertain science-based social problems, such as the claimed harmful effects that screen technologies have on children.

JAMES LOVELOCK
Called the "intellectual guru of the environmental movement," the independent scientist worked for decades in two isolated English farmhouses, and showed with his controversial Gaia theory of the living earth that a popular science book can not only influence science but can also spark an entire belief system and come to powerfully symbolize the current climate crisis.

Someone is always trying to tell us what to eat. It’s like religions: they can’t all be right, and they might all be wrong. One of the most pervasive food myths is the idea of “superfoods,” the belief that certain foods are particularly good for us.

Obviously some foods have more of certain nutrients than others, but the idea of “superfoods” is just silly. No food is a perfect source of all nutrients. Yes, spirulina (blue-green algae) has an impressive array of nutrients; but spinach has even more.

In the past, eggs and milk have been touted as “perfect foods.” Eggs are low in calories and are a good source of high-quality protein and a whole list of other nutrients, but they contain no fiber or vitamin C. Breast milk is the perfect food for newborn infants, but it becomes inadequate in later infancy. It is lacking in iron, zinc, manganese, and vitamins A, C, D, and E. Breastfed babies need supplemental iron to prevent anemia. Milk is certainly not the perfect food for adults, especially those with lactose intolerance!

Gayelord Hauser claimed that five wonder foods would add years to life: skim milk, brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, yogurt, and blackstrap molasses. Cider vinegar has been promoted as a cure-all that keeps the body in balance, thins the blood, and aids digestion. Wheat grass is said to cleanse the body, neutralize toxins, slow the aging process, prevent cancer, and supplement body enzymes with plant enzymes. I’ve never tried it, but it looks putrid and I’ve been told it tastes even worse than it looks. “Anti-inflammatory” foods like kelp, blueberries, shiitake mushrooms, and wild Alaska salmon supposedly counteract heart disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. The scientific evidence doesn’t support any of those claims.

Açaí has been hyped as the number one superfood in the world. The claims: weight loss, increased energy, better digestion, improved sleep, enhanced mental health, stronger immune system, healthier skin, youthful appearance, detoxification benefits, improved circulation, and healthier heart. The evidence: zero. In fact, its antioxidant content is less than that of strawberries and grapes.

Açaí is only one of the many tropical and exotic fruits that are marketed as “superfruits.” Others include baobab, maqui, mangosteen, goji, sea buckthorn, jujube, cupuacus, pitayas, pomegranates, guava, dragonfruit, kiwi, lychee berries, and yumberries. At frequent intervals, yet another entrepreneur identifies yet another unfamiliar tropical fruit that can be imported and sold to gullible health nuts at exorbitant prices. I wonder what the next fad will be.

It’s not just tropical fruits. Common fruits have also been designated as superfruits, including blueberries, blackberries, figs, cantaloupe, cherries, plums, strawberries, tomatoes, avocados, pumpkin and pumpkin seeds, pineapple, and many more.

It started with superfruits but went on to include other superfoods. Here are three published lists of superfoods:

One

• Beans
• Blueberries
• Broccoli
• Oats
• Oranges
• Pumpkin
• Salmon
• Soy
• Spinach
• Tea (green or black)
• Tomatoes
• Turkey
• Walnuts
• Yogurt

Two

• Açaí
• The Garlic family
• Barley
• Beans/lentils
• Buckwheat
• Green foods
• Hot peppers
• Nuts/seeds
• Sprouts
• Yogurt/Kefir

Three

• Beans
• Pine nuts
• Fennel tea
• Crimini mushrooms
• Apples
• Avocados
• Raspberry ketone
• Chili peppers
• Vinegar
• Cinnamon
• Chia seeds
• Green tea
• Pumpkin/squash seeds
• Red lentils
• Watermelon

The third list is from the infamous Dr. Oz. Notice that there is very little overlap between these lists, and the only item that’s on all three lists is beans. All these foods are good sources of various nutrients, but there’s nothing special about them. Oranges are famous as a source of vitamin C, but a cup of chopped red bell pepper contains nearly three times as much vitamin C as a medium orange.

You may have noticed that most of the claims of health benefits for foods are rather vague. Unless a product has been approved by the FDA as a medicine, it is prohibited by law from making claims that it can cure, treat, or prevent any disease. One company falsely advertised that its elderberry juice could cure, treat, or prevent various disease conditions including AIDS, diabetes, and the flu. Its products were seized by the FDA.

Superfood lists disagree with each other and can include as many as 200 foods. If these were all superfoods, almost all foods would be superfoods, making the concept meaningless. So many healthy foods are left off the lists that you could eat a healthy diet while avoiding everything on the lists. Believe it or not, raw meat contains every essential nutrient, even vitamin C, which is destroyed when meat is cooked. For obvious reasons, I wouldn’t recommend a raw meat diet.

There’s no advantage to eating special, expensive, or exotic foods high in certain nutrients if you can easily get the same nutrients from other foods that are cheaper and easier to find. If you are eating a varied diet with an emphasis on plant foods, you are probably already getting all the nutrients you need, and there is no advantage to ingesting more. Excess amounts beyond what the body can use will just be excreted. Superfoods are silly, but Mom was right: eat your vegetables!

A skeptic sees no light at the end of the tunnel when she falls into a six-week coma and nearly dies.

We often see and hear dramatic accounts of near-death experiences (NDEs) in books, in films, and on television. But where are the stories from skeptics who “returned” but not from The Other Side? After all, NDEs are generally accepted as a neurological phenomenon. Well, most people who have NDEs actually die. Among the survivors, many are severely brain-damaged. Of those who do recover, most are believers. As for the skeptical ones, how many of them are writers? Not many, probably, but I am one.

“It’s the profound brain damage again,” has become a running joke whenever I say something stupid, a fairly common occurrence long before the strokes that caused my coma. This wouldn’t be very funny if I weren’t fully conscious now—excluding mornings. I’m writing this article not long after the first anniversary of my awakening. My boyfriend calls it Coma Day, and he’s never forgotten the date. I’ve never forgotten that first conscious moment.

I thought I was suffering through a miserably sleepless night, a recurring theme in what I call my coma-dream. Every time I finally managed to drop off, something would wake me up again. Whenever doctors shined lights in my eyes looking for signs of consciousness, I would grumpily ask them to leave me alone so I could get back to sleep . . . in the coma-dream. My lack of response in the real world only added to their conviction that my brain was, as they said, profoundly damaged. My mother, boyfriend, and his mother, who had visited daily, noticed signs of my increasing awareness, but their observations were disregarded by the doctors.

When I finally awoke, I thought, “Goddammit, I just fell back asleep.” That’s when my mother told me I had actually been sleeping for six weeks, on the brink of death. I was shocked. “Seriously?” I mouthed. I had a tracheostomy, so I couldn’t speak—a fate worse than death for me.

However, the doctors’ conclusions weren’t groundless. My MRI showed that I had suffered a series of strokes on both sides of my brain when my blood pressure plummeted from septic shock. The sepsis was triggered by Legionnaires’ disease, a rare form of severe pneumonia discovered when it sickened attendees at a Legionnaires’ convention.

In the waning days of a vacation in Sicily with my boyfriend, Keith, I came down with what we thought was nothing more than a nasty chest cold. We joked about my case of “Mussolini’s Revenge,” but it was far more serious than that. A few days after we returned home, he rushed me to the emergency room. I was so delirious that when he asked why I hadn’t turned on the air conditioning, I said, “I like the heat.” It was 105° that day, and I hate the heat.

Most of the victims at the Legionnaires’ convention were elderly. I caught the disease because my immune system was weakened by prednisone, which I was taking for an obscure autoimmune disease called dermatomyositis. It’s uncommon enough that I’ve often seen the dermatomyositis Wikipedia page on the computer screen when seeing a new specialist. And, yes, it is disturbing that medical professionals are using a questionable information source popular with schoolchildren.

Though the doctors continued to dismiss suggestions of my improving wakefulness, much of what was going on around me was filtering into my coma-dream. I wasn’t aware that I was in a vegetative state, but I knew I had a “trach,” a term I had previously heard only in medical dramas. Encouraged by an imaginary doctor, I blew large bubbles out of my nose—as if I’d been snorting bubblegum—when I had a sinus infection from my feeding tube. The constant thrumming was the machinery keeping me alive.

Near death isn’t required for a near-death experience. They can be triggered by severe illness and even fainting (from lack of oxygen to the brain). Though my coma-dream shared many similarities with typical NDEs, my experience was different because I’m a skeptic. The reason I didn’t see dead relatives is I don’t believe in life after death. Likewise, I didn’t see Jesus’s rainbow-hued horse because I’m Jewish and not a four-year-old imagining Jesus with a gay Little Pony. I did, however, dream of ice cream. Indeed, while my life didn’t flash before my eyes, childhood elements figured prominently in the revolving segments of the coma-dream. On my Brain TV, some shows were repeats, while others had advancing plots like soap operas. I had a lot of time to kill.

One serial featured a low Big Wheel–like kid’s tricycle that churned ice cream in a cart attached to the back as it was peddled. Actually, burning the calories you’re about to consume isn’t such a bad idea. Sometimes when I peddled this ice cream–making Big Wheel, I was an anthropomorphic polar bear cub. While I saw no religious figures, I imagined miniaturized zoo animals right out of a 1950s sci-fi film. They were having a tea party, like poker-playing dogs except with tiny china cups. You can see why I call this a coma-dream. These surreal images may be akin to the spirits believers see in their NDEs.

After the awakening, I felt like Dorothy waking up in bed after her journey down the Yellow Brick Road. So many of the things in the coma-dream suddenly made sense—except for the cub-powered ice cream Big Wheel and toy-sized elephant. The pachyderm held the teapot with its trunk.

Oh, that’s the reason snippets of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of my favorite books, kept wafting into unrelated storylines. My boyfriend had read to me from the book, while my mother had played the original BBC radio series. I don’t believe the incursions always occurred when I heard them, though. My mother also used her e-reader to play some recent David Attenborough nature documentaries, including one on Charles Darwin. (As a former future-paleontologist, evolution has long been a special interest of mine.) Sometimes sections would repeat. I thought I was rewinding the program because my mind wandered (something I do frequently). My Brain TV had a DVR.

Author Stephanie Savage while in her six-week coma.

Ah, so that’s why they kept asking me to stop biting the hose delivering Hi-C to my mouth as if from a beer hat. They weren’t risking cavities by giving me a sugary fruit-flavored drink; they were preventing them by cleaning my mouth with a citrus-flavored swab. If I had stopped biting the swab, I wouldn’t have had so much plaque on my teeth, the reason I was running my tongue over my teeth in both the coma-dream and in reality. I couldn’t understand how my teeth could’ve gotten that coated overnight. But then, the tooth-licking was one of the signs of recovering awareness that gave my loved ones hope, even if the doctors wouldn’t acknowledge it as such.

And my new boyfriend in the dream, the one who looked and sounded exactly like Keith in every way except his beard, actually was Keith, who had grown a full beard while I was in the coma. I wondered why his glasses had been repaired with the same kludge Keith devised in Sicily—with the sticky part of a clear Band-Aid. What a weird coincidence. Since this was a form of dream, that wasn’t a tipoff, even when I slipped and called him Keith.

But for most people in a vegetative state, they’re more likely to hear prayers and the Bible than Hitchhiker’s Guide. That must affect what they visualize in their NDEs. Indeed, the content of NDEs varies among cultures. I was raised without religion, but the disembodied voices I heard were not unlike spirit voices. My brain didn’t supply images of the afterlife because I believe life after death is a fantasy. Resistance to being awakened is similar to reluctance to return from The Other Side. Using Occam’s razor, which is more likely to be true?

If I had been a New Ager, seeing myself being turned over to prevent bedsores would’ve seemed like an out-of-body experience (OBE). But how many times have I watched myself from outside my body in an ordinary dream? Oh, wait—some people believe those are OBEs too. I once dreamed that a lion put its paw on my hand, only to wake up with my cat’s paw on my hand. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out. There’s nothing supernatural about that; it’s just sensory information mixed with imagination. Besides, my eyes were sometimes open, so my perceptions weren’t always imaginary. That’s how I knew Keith had grown a full beard.

According to the Merck Manual:

A vegetative state is absence of responsiveness and awareness due to overwhelming dysfunction of the cerebral hemispheres, with sufficient sparing of the diencephalon and brain stem to preserve autonomic and motor reflexes and sleep-wake cycles. Patients may have complex reflexes, including eye movements, yawning, and involuntary movements to noxious stimuli, but show no awareness of self or environment. (Maiese 2014)

Yet, there is growing empirical evidence of covert cognition in people who have been in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for years. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which determines brain activity by displaying blood-flow patterns, researchers from Cambridge University, including pioneering researcher Dr. Adrian Owen, were able to communicate with five patients with consciousness disorders by asking them to imagine one of two activities (Owen et al. 2006). In the motor task, they were instructed to imagine playing tennis. In the spatial task, they were asked to navigate familiar locations. The images lit up different brain regions. Four patients were able to answer yes or no questions with this technique (Monti et al. 2010). One answered five of six correctly. His “do not resuscitate” order was rescinded. The results were repeatable and corresponded closely to those of the healthy controls.

Kate Bainbridge, the first vegetative person Dr. Owen tested with positron emission tomography (PET), eventually recovered her mental faculties. “I was unresponsive and looked hopeless,” she later told him in a note, “but the scan showed people I was in there. It was like magic, it found me.” Today, she’s angry at the doctors who ignored her discomfort because they assumed she wasn’t feeling anything. The reason I was dreaming about ice cream—another serialized dream also involved ice cream—is probably because I was left uncovered in a frigid room.

Now at Canada’s Western University, Dr. Owen and his team recently conducted an fMRI study in which a man who had been vegetative for sixteen years responded with nearly identical brain patterns as the study’s healthy controls while watching “Bang! You’re Dead,” an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Naci et al. 2014). This indicated that he was following the suspenseful plot. Regarding the subject, Jeff Tremblay, Dr. Naci said, “For the first time, we show that a patient with unknown levels of consciousness can monitor and analyze information from their environment, in the same way as healthy individuals. We already know that up to one in five of these patients are misdiagnosed as being unconscious and this new technique may reveal that that number is even higher.” Since the Hitchcock experiment, they have tested patients using Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and The Lion’s Cage, which, according to Dr. Naci, have shown similar results.

If Mr. Tremblay is watching his own Brain TV, is he now seeing images of a little boy with a gun? Are the subjects of the Chaplin study imagining themselves caught in the cogs of a giant machine? Perhaps someday, through fMRI or emerging treatments, they will be able to tell us. When that day comes, what are the odds that they will report seeing the afterlife after all those years? You’d think their dead relatives would eventually return to the light so they can find something better to do.

Though many of these patients are misdiagnosed, without proper screening it’s impossible to know which ones. In my case, the minute the doctors saw the stroke damage they assumed I was beyond hope. The Glasgow Coma Scale wasn’t even performed, and it’s just a low-tech behavioral checklist. I was in a state-of-the-art hospital; imagine a patient in a less advanced facility.

My neurologist told me that the reasons I’ve recovered so well are that I was younger than the average stroke victim and most of my brain damage was in the watershed areas. Watershed areas lie between two major arteries. By the time blood reaches these sections, there’s less oxygen in it. It’s a bit like a wetland fed by two trickling tributaries. Together, they provide just enough water, but when the flow diminishes, the land between the tributaries dries up. As she explained, watershed areas don’t generally control vital functions. They die more quickly than more important regions, but they also spring back faster after damage has occurred. Ain’t evolution grand?

The “string of pearls” pattern of my watershed-area stroke damage should’ve been obvious to the neurologists examining my MRI. I can’t say why they didn’t add that evidence to my relative youth when predicting my chance of recovery. They did perform an electroencephalogram (EEG), which showed, not surprisingly, that I still had brain activity. Again, I don’t know why that didn’t figure into their evaluation. Perhaps they didn’t consider the mounting evidence that there is more awareness in the comatose and nearly—but not most sincerely—dead than previously realized.

Regarding the tennis study, “In the Blink of the Mind’s Eye” states, “This technology does more than open up the possibility of communicating with people thought to be unconscious and unreachable. It also suggests that neuroimaging must eventually be integrated into the clinical assessment of many patients who are vegetative or minimally conscious. This is a dramatic finding and a potential game-changer for clinical practice” (Finns and Schiff 2010). If that happens, there will be fewer seemingly miraculous recoveries because they won’t be such a surprise.

The perceptions of stricken brains are hardly inexplicable if awareness is more like a dimmer than an on/off switch. Moreover, NDEs can’t be proof of mind/brain separation if the brains of those experiencing them are still active. Covert cognition fills many blanks.

My OBEs felt like imagined perspective shifts, but the sensation of floating outside your body can be electrically stimulated in the brain (Blanke and Arzy 2005). Furthermore, REM intrusion, which causes blended dream states like lucid dreaming, may be responsible for the fantastical qualities of NDEs (Nelson et al. 2006). “I see it [the NDE] as an activation of certain brain regions that are also active during the dream state,” said Nelson. The study adds, “Under circumstances of peril, an NDE is more likely in those with previous REM intrusion.” I sometimes lucid dream spontaneously, as I did in the coma-dream. The hallucinations James Randi has reported seeing while awakening from surgery were probably due to REM intrusion.

While I was comatose, Keith told me about his future plans for us, most of which I remembered when I awoke. He would start telling them again, and I would say, basically, “Been there; heard that,” albeit through his doppel­ganger. Yet, at the same time Keith was telling me these things, the doctors were advising him to give up hope that I would ever fully recover. Indeed, they said rehabilitation of any sort would be futile, despite the fact that every time I experienced a new stimulus my wakefulness improved. I can’t help wondering if medically supervised stimulation might have helped me emerge from the PVS sooner—as happened with Kate Bainbridge after she was “found.” It would’ve certainly shortened my recovery. Instead, I was written off as a basket case after the MRI, which, ironically, may have jumpstarted my awareness like a dead car battery. It’s the earliest event that appeared in the coma-dream, and after the stress of the scan, I displayed new hints of arousal.

Today, I have no signs of cognitive impairment, nor have I since that first conscious moment. How embarrassing for the doctors who wrote me off. Indeed, I don’t believe I was even in a coma when I regained consciousness. The comatose don’t have sleep-wake cycles, which is why their eyes remain closed. So, I was vegetative, but not under the restrictive Merck Manual definition. Ms. Bainbridge wasn’t misdiagnosed; she fit the criteria for PVS. It’s the term that needs revision.

I used to feel sorry for people clinging to the desperate hope that their vegetative loved ones would recover. I still feel sorry for them, but their hope no longer seems so hopeless to me. I worry that life-and-death decisions are being made based on inadequate testing and incomplete knowledge. Ms. Bainbridge and others who were in the same situation have expressed similar concerns. Nurses gently suggested to my mother that my quality of life was poor, which she took as a hint that I should eventually be taken off life support.

Vegetables rarely write articles, however. My recovery is still ongoing—I was so deconditioned after the long period of complete inactivity I could barely lift my head—but my quality of life is excellent. In fact, I feel an increased sense of purpose and self-confidence. Though I don’t believe my recovery was a gift from God, I do view my second chance as a gift.

And speaking of gifts, last Christmas, Keith and I walked into the ICU with a gift basket to thank the medical personnel who saved my life. Some of them didn’t recognize me upright. On the basket, we taped a collage of pictures taken during our strength-building walks. Many of the ICU workers cried; some said my recovery was a miracle. But it was no act of God that saved my life—it was science. Massive doses of antibiotics scrubbed the Legionella from my system like an antivirus program (or should I say antibacterial program?), halting my septic shock. A respirator and dialysis bought my failing organs time, and they gradually came back online. And, after six weeks, my brain finally rebooted. The human body is a marvelously evolved machine, even though, with my bad back, I often wonder if bipedalism was such a good idea.

The doctors and nurses taking care of me were responsible for giving me this second chance, and for that I’m obviously grateful. But maybe we should be giving more respect to the amazing resilience of the human brain and be more humble about the limits of our knowledge about it. And while we’re at it, let’s not underestimate the boundless powers of imagination, where polar bear cubs churn ice cream with Big Wheels and where flying somewhere over the rainbow doesn’t require an out-of-body experience.

References

Blanke, Olaf, and Shahar Arzy. 2005. The out-of-body experience: Disturbed self-processing at the temporo-parietal junction. Neuroscientist 11(1): 16–24.

Finns, Joseph J., and Nicolas D. Schiff. 2010. In the blink of the mind’s eye. Hastings Center Report 40(3): 21–23.

Maiese, Kenneth. 2014. Vegetative state and minimally conscious state. Merck Manual Professional Version. Online at http://www.merckmanuals.com/​professional/​neurologic-disorders/​coma-and-impaired-consciousness/vegetative-state-and-minimally-conscious-state.

Monti, Martin M., Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse, Martin R. Coleman, et al. 2010. Willful modulation of brain activity in disorders of consciousness. New England Journal of Medicine 362: 579–589.

Naci, Lorina, Rhondri Cusack, Mimma Anello, et al. 2014. A common neural code for similar conscious experiences in different individuals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111(39): 14277–14282.

Nelson, Kevin R., Michelle Mattingly, Sherman A. Lee, et al. 2006. Does the arousal system contribute to near death experience? Neurology 66(7): 1003–1009.

Owen, Adrian M., Martin R. Coleman, M. Boly, et al. 2006. Detecting awareness in the vegetative state. Science 313(5792): 1402.

In the November/December 2014 Skeptical Inquirer, Sharon Hill (in her article “Bigfoot DNA Data Disappoints and Reveals Surprise”) reported on the results of a study by Bryan Sykes, of the firm Oxford Ancestors Ltd., and four others, which was published in 2014 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Sykes et al. 2014). The study consisted of DNA analysis of thirty hair samples that the authors had been told were thought to be from “anomalous primates,” that is, from Bigfoot, Yeti, and the like. The authors concluded that all but two of these samples came from known domestic and wild animals and from one human.'

The two exceptions were represented to the authors as being from the Himalayas and from Yetis. Sykes and company claimed that these samples were genetically identical, at least in the very short mitochondrial DNA sequence they analyzed, with the sequence from a 40,000-year-old Polar Bear. This convinced them that the Himalayan samples must have come from a type of bear unknown to science, although they admitted that the genetic makeup of Himalayan bears of known species was undocumented. One of these samples was said to have come from an animal shot by a hunter very familiar with the Brown Bear. This hunter had supposedly claimed that the behavior of this animal was very different from that of ordinary Brown Bears. If this hunter was so familiar with Brown Bears, though, it seems odd that he would not realize that the animal he’d shot was a bear of some sort and not a Yeti. Sykes et al. do not explain this hunter’s confusion in this regard. They suggested that this supposed unknown type of bear might have been, at least in part, responsible for the Yeti legends, “especially if, as reported by the hunter […], they behave more aggressively towards humans than known indigenous bear species.” In various statements to the media, Sykes emphasized that he intended to mount an expedition to the Himalayas in search of the newly minted cryptid and to write a book about his investigations in cryptozoology.

When we became aware of Sykes et al.’s conclusions, we were immediately skeptical because—for all they or anyone else knew—the ordinary Brown Bears of the Himalayas might, on occasion, or regularly, have the same very short DNA sequence as at least some Polar Bears, past and/or present. The two are, after all, each other’s closest relatives. We also thought it strange that Sykes et al. had not acquired samples of museum specimens of Himalayan Brown Bears and sequenced their DNA—a task that could be easily accomplished—to see if any of them might match those that they attributed to an “anomalous” bear. We also wondered why going to the trouble of mounting an expedition to the Himalayas was contemplated when such museum specimens are readily available for analysis. In addition, the scope of their analysis seemed insufficient.

Then Ceiridwen Edwards and Ross Barnett (2014) published a paper in which they stated that the supposed cryptid samples were old samples that might have undergone degradation, thus causing them to be misidentified. They also pointed out that these samples matched a specimen of a present-day Polar Bear, not a fossilized one, as Sykes et al. had claimed. Then Sykes and two of his colleagues (Melton et al. 2014) vouched for the non-degradation of their samples and reaffirmed the supposed need to get a sample or samples from the Himalayas, seemingly trusting their two old, supposedly cryptid samples but still not trusting museum-derived samples, some of which might be younger. It may be that Sykes’s partiality for mounting an expedition is related to perceived newsworthiness and associated book and TV series opportunities.

The analyses that we then conducted and published showed that the relevant DNA sequence of Brown Bears is sufficiently variable that it overlaps with that of Polar Bears and so they cannot be told apart on that basis (Gutiérrez and Pine 2015). Thus there is no reason to believe that Sykes et al.’s two samples came from anything but ordinary Brown Bears.

The press for the most part misinterpreted our research, often stating that we had shown that Yetis were just bears, among other errors. Sykes has been quoted as saying that we had just used “statistics” in our analysis, as if statistics were not an acceptable pathway to scientific conclusions, and, further, that he has disdain for genetics research that heavily involves mathematics (the modern field of bioinformatics). He has also suggested that we, as “desk-bound molecular taxonomists” should be “getting off [our] butt” and doing fieldwork. Those familiar with our careers, of course, know of our extensive field experience, which has even taken one of us (Pine) to the Himalayas, where Sykes’s Yeti-bear cryptid is supposed to live.

The second author of the Sykes et al. paper was Rhettman A. Mullis Jr., president and chairman of the board of the Bigfootology organization. This organization’s “creed” affirms the existence of Bigfoot. It also, less formally, affirms the existence of Yetis, which it says are related animals. Its website lists Sykes as the organization’s official United Kingdom Representative and Team Geneticist, and the “top geneticist in the world.” Mullis states he was with Sykes when “[…] an experience […] caused [Sykes] to lose his objectivity for a while and [he] went from skeptic to believer [in Bigfoot].” Mullis says that he promised not to discuss the nature of this experience, so that Sykes could reveal it in his then forthcoming book (The Nature of the Beast: The First Scientific Evidence on the Survival of Apemen into Modern Times). Sykes also claims to have a mysterious hair sample from Bhutan, which he cannot identify at all, although it seems to us that it should be easily identifiable through DNA analysis at least to biological family. But perhaps he has now managed to identify it in time for this to have enlivened his book. According to Mullis, another TV series is also in the works, featuring DNA analyses of presumptive Bigfoot tissues. As team geneticist, Sykes will presumably be involved in this series. All things considered, Sykes, named “Cryptozoologist of the Year 2013” according to the blog CryptoZooNews, seems to be gaining more and more prominence and respect among cryptozoologists. However, certain of his pronouncements seem highly dubious to his fellow scientists; he has reached some embarrassingly incorrect conclusions, and a number of his statements as to his credentials are thought to be misleading. As a result of this, he has lately come under criticism in the press, various blogs, and social networks. His hypothesis that Zana, a woman who had entered cryptozoological lore as a potential “ape-person” of some sort, was a survivor of a hitherto unknown early hominid migration out of Africa is an example of a dubious hypothesis; his genetic sequencing of the Mesolithic “Cheddar Man” has been questioned; and his now-refuted identification of a Floridian as a descendant of Genghis Khan is an example of a demonstrably false conclusion, while his representing of himself as a current professor at Oxford and a member of a (nonexistent) research institute is regarded as misleading.

The latest development is that, as of this writing, Sykes’s book has just now been published, although it is not yet available, either in print or electronically, outside of the United Kingdom. In the publisher’s current online teaser (www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1444791257/ref=rdr_ext_tmb) about this work, one can see that one of the chapters is titled “The Snow Bear,” presumably Sykes’s name for the Himalayan cryptid that he and his coauthors created. In an excerpt, including the entire first chapter, we learn of the experience that, according to Mullis, turned Sykes into a “believer” of sorts in Bigfoot. The late Donald Wallace, according to Sykes, engaged in work on a family of Bigfoot in the Cascade Mountains and got to know one named the “Big Guy.” This individual supposedly resides in a cavity under a very large fir tree and is so depicted in a drawing at the beginning of the chapter. Sykes and Mullis were led to the site by Wallace’s daughter, Lori Simmons. Sykes could discover no entry to the supposed cavity but, when Simmons stamped on the ground, eventually six knocks were heard, perceived by Sykes to have come from under the tree and said by Simmons to be the preferred method of communication by this Bigfoot, which she states has amorous intentions toward her. (Claims of knocking communication are common in Bigfoot lore and reports. Knocking was also often involved in séances during the heyday of Spiritualism, probably for the same reasons.) Sykes says that he found the whole experience to be profoundly disturbing and a true mystery.

In the lead-in to Chapter 2, Sykes repeats a portion of the account by Slavomir Rawicz of his supposedly watching Yetis for two hours during Rawicz’s supposed four-thousand-mile trek across Asia after escape from a Soviet prison camp, and as described in his ghostwritten book The Long Walk. Sykes treats this journey as history, at least up to where his text in the teaser leaves off, although the consensus is that Rawicz’s story is a hoax. A later chapter is titled “Zana.”

References

Edwards, C.J., and R. Barnett. 2014. Himalayan ‘yeti’ DNA: Polar bear or DNA degradation? A comment on ‘Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to Yeti’ by Sykes et al. (2014). Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282: 20141712. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2014.1712.

Gutiérrez, Eliécer E., and Ronald H. Pine. 2015. No need to replace an “anomalous” primate (Primates) with an “anomalous” bear (Carnivora, Ursidae). ZooKeys 487: 141–154. doi: 10. 3897/zookeys.487.9176. Online at http://zookeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=4885.

Melton, Terry W., Michel Sartori, and Bryan C. Sykes. 2014. Response to Edward [sic] and Barnett. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282: 20142434. doi: 10. 1098/rspb.2014.2434.

Sykes, Bryan C., Rhettman A. Mullis, Christopher Hagenmuller, et al. 2014. Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281: 20140161. doi: 10. 1098/rspb.2014.0161. Online at http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1789/20140161.full.pdf+html.

The recent boom in podcasts and podcasting may seem a little bemusing to those who have been in the practice for some time. But there’s one thing that established podcasters seem to share with newcomers to the practice—a supportive and encouraging attitude, especially when it comes to the disseminating of science, reason, and plain awesome news about discoveries.

The Naked Scientist podcast is no exception. They’re a media-savvy group of physicians and researchers from Cambridge University who use radio, live lectures, and the Internet to strip science down to its bare essentials and promote it to the general public. They’ve been around since the early 2000s—making them one of the very first podcasts.

I interviewed one of the long-running hosts, Cambridge University consultant virologist Dr. Chris Smith, during Australia’s National Science week—in a small study room in the West Australian State Library, where they were banned for making just one too many explosions during a live show a few years back.

Dr. Chris Smith: We come every year now to Australia and spend between three and four weeks doing events relevant to National Science Week, and relevant to local people, and the idea is to try to increase the emphasis of science in local communities, so they can understand why it’s interesting, why it’s fun, and then hopefully apply to study science.

When we first came to do National Science Week with Murdoch University, the first event we ever did in Perth was here in the WA State Library, and we told them what we had in mind. They said they’d never seen the lecture theatre here so full, because it was. There were people literally standing in the aisles.

They were slightly disenchanted with some of my experiments, and they said that it was great to see so many people, but please don’t come and do that here again! It’s not often I get banned from a library—and as a Cambridge University academic, which I am in my other life, it’s quite an unusual accolade to be banned from a State Library!

Kylie Sturgess: I was very impressed and I remember attending the show! How did the podcast get started? It’s not usual for an academic to start getting into a field such as podcasting. In fact, the notion of being an academic and a science outreach broadcaster, and so forth, it sometimes seems like it’s a bit of a contradiction.

Smith: Actually, we were one of the first podcasts to ever exist. In fact, we were podcasting before podcasting existed, so we helped invent that whole thing.

How that came about was that I was a medical student, and in the middle of my medical degree I did a PhD, and in the middle of my medical degree PhD I then thought, “Well, why don't I start a radio show?” —as you do! There wasn't much on the radio about science at the time, but we ended up on a small scale commercial, but rather a community-focused radio station. It didn’t have a huge audience, and it was a live show each week.

We thought, “It’s a bit of a shame to put so much effort into a one hour program that then if you don't actually live in the area where you can hear the program, or you don’t happen to be listening to the radio at the time it’s on you’re going to miss it.” The Internet was just beginning to get powerful enough at that time. It was the year 2000, and so it was at a time when the internet was sufficiently powerful to carry a reasonable amount of data, and so we started streaming these programs, because we had got some technology together at the University of Cambridge where it would be possible to do that.

Then we thought—“Well, if people aren't able to access the Internet to stream a live program, why don’t we just make it available for people to download it? To take away.” We did that, and also made it subscribable, and this is really what became, more broadly, podcasting.

Overnight the audience went up by orders of magnitude all over the world, and so that told me all I needed to know about the importance of the new technology, which was going to be the Internet.

Sturgess: What’s behind the name?

Smith: That was really shameless self-promotion!

The thing is that I realized early on that you got to do this in a collaborative way because the whole world of science communication is largely structured around individual freelancers, and it’s very difficult for people to work collaboratively as a group, share their experiences, share their expertise, and grow as a group, because it’s all done on a sort of an individual’s named brand, if you like. I thought, “Well, if we have an umbrella term we can all work under, which also does what it says on the tin.”

It makes people laugh and then think a bit. Clearly this is a science program, but it’s a science program where there are no barriers and it’s about having fun. It makes people chuckle but there’s a serious message in there. I thought that would work, and more importantly the domain names were available on the Internet, so we bought all those and got it started. Initially, about eighty percent of the web visitors were for the word naked, but luckily that has now changed!

Sturgess: What are some of the factors that make the show a success? When I talk about science shows, it always seems to be up there in iTunes, even after all of these years—and you’ve even done research into your audience and what impact the show has had. What have you discovered about it?

Smith: The success is because we’ve got a great team of people. If it was just me it wouldn’t be anywhere!

You have to have a fantastic team of people, because out of a fantastic team of people comes all the ideas, all the expertise, and the diversity. Because having a range of content means that you can satisfy a range of different interests, because people don’t want a monotonous diet served up in one particular way or cooked a particular way. They want a varied diet with cuisine from all over the world. It’s the same with science, and that’s what we try and deliver: a range of topics representative of the full scientific spectrum.

I think part of the success is that it’s got a really good team of people on it who bring all their individual skills to it. Secondly, it’s a bloody good program. There’s no two ways about it. I enjoy listening to it. We set very high standards, and we’re striving to be the best science program that the world has, and we’re one of them.

Sturgess: Are there unsinkable rubber ducks that just keep on cropping up that you think, “Oh, dear Lord. Can I just say it once, get it out there, and that's done with it”?

Smith: The audience churns, of course, and we’ve done a lot of research on our audience. More than two and a half thousand people have filled in surveys and told us about themselves, and we know where they live, where they work, what their interests are. We also know what fraction of them stick with the program and what fraction don’t, and because there’s such a diversity of offerings on the Internet and it’s costing people nothing to subscribe and unsubscribe—so you do get a churn, and that may be up to half your audience in a year may turn over. This means that, actually, it’s a good thing and a bad thing.

On the one hand you have to ask yourself, “Well, why is half the audience who were subscribing now not subscribing? Why have they been replaced with new people?” On the other hand it’s quite good, because that means that if you do keep the same content going around in circles, or you revisit something you’ve got a chance to revisit it better for the people who had it before, but for the first time for the people that never had it before.

Sturgess: We’re currently in the middle of Australia’s National Science Festival, and it seems as if it’s an increasingly popular phenomenon—science festivals, science tours like Professor Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the like. What do you think are the pros and the cons of this?

Smith: To get lots of people together in one place is a geographical problem, and when the event finishes the education and the engagement finishes. One has to always have in mind you’ve got to have a legacy here, and the benefit of what we do on The Naked Scientists is that when the program finishes being live the content lives on as a legacy content, which people can continue to subscribe to and derive benefit from.

I think you’ve always got to be careful with events like this one that galvanize interest while they’re happening, but as soon as they stop happening there’s got to be back up there to keep the interest you’ve drummed up alive, because if you don’t do that then you’ve just got to keep doing this year, after year, after year, and while that’s good at the time, it doesn’t then get people motivated and active, and create momentum.

It’s all very good while it’s happening but the aim of doing this is to nurture talent, isn’t it? We want to attract young people. We want to stimulate young minds, and we want to make people into the scientists of tomorrow. If we don’t offer them the capacity to become the scientists of tomorrow, having galvanized their interest with this, we may as well not bother. It’s really important to have your mind on, “Well, what am I trying to achieve with an event like this?” Get people interested. Get them fired up. Get them stimulated, but then offer them something to follow it on with.

Sturgess: What's the future of The Naked Scientists?

Smith: It's going pretty well at the moment, because we’re now the only example of a science show originating from a university, which is network level radio in multiple countries. We’re making about five or six shows or radio contributions a week now, and the audience of the podcast has gone beyond fifty million downloads worldwide.

On that trajectory there’s a lot of unconquered territory still to go, so we’ll carry on in that regard, and the other thing is that we want to invent a business model for ourselves that is more sustainable, because at the moment we’re largely surviving, running, operating on grants and other sorts of soft money, and that’s been very successful so far.

We’ve built a very powerful brand, and we’ve built a very big audience, but at the end of the day you’re always worrying about, “Well, where do I raise the next heap of cash from to keep the staff employed?” What I would like to achieve in the next four or five years is solid cash flow by doing things like, perhaps, inserting advertising into our website, advertising into our podcasts, and so on—so that we then know where our next meal is coming from.

A documentary about Scientology is now distributed worldwide, after successfully screening on HBO in the USA. Written and directed by Academy Award® winner Alex Gibney and based on the book by Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief profiles eight former members of the Church of Scientology-whose most prominent adherents include A-list Hollywood celebrities.

It was one of the most talked about films at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and highlights the Church’s origins, from its roots in the mind of founder L. Ron Hubbard to its rise in popularity in Hollywood and beyond.

For this interview, I spoke to journalist Tony Ortega about the importance of the documentary–and also about his new book, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely, which is about the author Paula Cooper and her 1971 book, The Scandal of Scientology.

Tony Ortega: I’m a journalist and I’d always heard about Scientology. I grew up in Los Angeles. I stumbled across a story in 1995 that involved Scientology. One story led to another. You build a set of sources. I had this never‑ending desire to keep learning about this fascinating field.

Here, twenty years later, I’m still writing about it. I’m probably the only journalist in the world that writes about Scientology every single day at my own website, TonyOrtega.org. It’s a breaking news story. Scientology is going through one of the most interesting periods of its history right now. I feel like I have a front row seat!

Kylie Sturgess: You certainly do! We’re talking about Alex Gibney’s film, “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.” He’s done other award winning films: “Mea Maxima Culpa,” which examined child sexual abuse in the Catholic church, and “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which looked at American military and intelligence services. He’s no stranger to the gritty confrontation of reality. What can we expect upon going into this film?

Ortega: I tell, that’s why I’m so honored that I’m included in this one. This is probably the best documentary maker in the world today. When I heard that he was working on something in Scientology, I was thrilled. Then he actually asked me to come in for an interview.

I’m really happy that I was able to help him out. This is really his film and Lawrence Wright’s film. They use me to talk about some specific issues like Scientology’s tax exempt status and the role of Tom Cruise in the church. I was really glad I got to be a part of it.

I think what viewers should expect is a hard hitting film that leaves them with two questions. First, why does the Church of Scientology still enjoy tax exempt status today despite all of its controversies? Second, when is Tom Cruise going to say something? This film hits him very hard. I was actually pretty surprised when I saw it for the first time.

Sturgess: How would you best define Scientology?

Ortega: Scientology is a self‑help organization that, at a beginning level, uses some basic psychological techniques that help people become more confident. Their problem is that they promise the moon. They promise superhuman powers if you stick with it and spend a lot of money.

The fact that it has some celebrities involved, I think, gives it a lot more visibility than it would normally have.

It’s actually a small group. There’re probably only about 40,000 Scientologists in the world but it gets the publicity like it had the millions that it claims to have.

Sturgess: This documentary, you’ve already mentioned how it looks at Tom Cruise. It also looks at people like John Travolta. I found the story of Sara Goldberg and her children particularly emotional. What do you think are some of the main highlights of this film which people should be aware of?

Ortega: I’m glad to hear you feel that way because I want people to get past the celebrity aspect. Tom Cruise and John Travolta do play an important part in this film but I’m glad that you saw that what this film really wants to get at are the experiences of really intelligent, compassionate people who get involved and then find themselves capable of really horrendous acts in the name of Scientology, one of which is the ways families are ripped apart.

Sara Goldberg’s facing an impossible choice. The church essentially asked her to make a choice between her son and her daughter. Why would any church want to do something like that? But that’s Scientology.

For me, what made the film so powerful was the way Alex was able to put together this narrative to show how intelligent people fall into this thing, what they’re capable of, and what happens after they leave. That arc, I think, should really impress people about the power to harm that Scientology has.

Sturgess: Why does it go on? Why have we got this incredible history, which the film looks at? I was quite astounded at some of the aspects of L. Ron Hubbard’s life and how they managed to get that much detail. It was astounding in the book by Lawrence Wright, “Going Clear,” and then Alex Gibney’s work. What do you think has been some of the main factors that has enabled Scientology to survive?

Ortega: Scientology, this is not a group that sits back to find out what its fate is going to be. This is a group that’s very active in perpetuating itself. They have a lot of money. They spend it on high priced attorneys. They’re active in pursuing their goals.

In some ways, in the United States in particular, they have found a way to really bedevil our court system. They’ve got our court system coming and going. They work actively to make sure that their former members can’t speak out, that the government really has nothing to look into.

If you’re wondering how do they survive, it’s less a matter of whether they’re popular or not and more what efforts they go to in order to keep themselves secretive and also protected.

Sturgess: It’s a lengthy documentary. You’re one of many people who are interviewed in this film, many coming from different kinds of backgrounds. What can you tell us about the number of people who were chosen to be involved and what they went through to ask to be included and say, “Yes”?

Ortega: I think Larry and Alex were really smart to choose eight important people. The most important people that are being interviewed are the eight former Scientologists. They’re chosen not just for their experiences but also the time they cover.

You have Hannah Whitfield, who was actually on the ship with L. Ron Hubbard, helping him run Scientology in the 1970s when it was run from the sea. You have Spanky Taylor in the mid-seventies who helped bring in John Travolta and provide that celebrity angle.

Then you have Mike Rinder and Marty Rathbun who really helped run Scientology in the 1990s. Then you have Sara Goldberg, who just a couple of years ago left Scientology, went through that terrible split in her family.

I think the point of that is Alex wants you to see that Scientology doesn’t change. It’s still doing the same things today that it was doing in the 1950s and 1960s. I think he was very smart in choosing those eight people. There are a few others of us in the film, like myself and Kim Masters and Lawrence Wright as journalists, but the heart of the film are those eight people talking about their experiences.

Sturgess: Scientology is under increased scrutiny. It’s been critically examined. Often it’s being laughed at. It’s become a punch‑line in popular media, like South Park. There’re public rallies. Now we’ve got “Going Clear,” this documentary after Lawrence Wright’s book. What do you think of the future of Scientology?

Ortega: Scientology’s very good at surviving scandals. The Australian press in particular has been really good at exposing Scientology, much better than the American press.

Sturgess: That’s intriguing because that’s where it’s all happening, over there in America. Yet, it’s outside that it’s getting attention.

Ortega: Hubbard really wanted to have a strong presence in Australia. He came to Melbourne in the early 1950s. He really wanted it to grow. The press there, your press, I think, is more aggressive than ours. And so, I’ve been really impressed with some of the work that’s been done over there

The thing about “Going Clear” is that it reaches an entirely different kind of audience. It reaches so many people who normally wouldn’t give this a thought and makes them wonder, “How does an organization like this get away with so much today?”

I think that that momentum has really allowed Alex Gibney to get some important people thinking about what should be done. “Going Clear” clearly changes the game. I’ve been astounded at the response. I think once you see it you’ll understand why it’s having such an effect.

It’s not just the information, because a lot of that information has been out previously. It’s the way Alex tells this tale. It’s spine chilling. I think it’s having a great effect.

Sturgess: Alex Gibney has already had this film released over in the USA. It was on wide release on HBO television where it made a tremendous impact. I notice people are still talking about it. It’s come over here as a documentary that we can see in the theatres. I believe that there’s been trouble showing it in the UK. I’m not sure.

Ortega: There has been so far...Sky Network was scheduled to show it in the United Kingdom. Only because there have been some changes to the libel laws over there. They found out that in one place where Sky broadcasts, Northern Ireland, has not adapted that new law. Because Sky could not cut Northern Ireland out of their broadcast they couldn’t broadcast it anywhere.

I hear that that’s still being worked out and that the film will be broadcast in the United Kingdom. Scientology has earned its reputation as one of the most litigious organizations on Earth. In England in particular, it’s more difficult to put on a show like this. I think it will get shown eventually.

Sturgess: We have a new building that’s going to be created by Scientology here in my hometown. Should we be concerned? Should we be all going to see this documentary to learn more?

Ortega: I think people should see the documentary to see the total picture, but that particular project is really bewildering, because at the last Australian census only about 2,000 people identified themselves as Scientologists in the entire country. Yet, David Miscavige has announced that he’s opening a new Advanced Org.

He’s taking over those acoustic labs in North Sydney, I think it is. This is a $30 or $40 million project. Even in their own environmental impact statement they admitted that it would only serve about seventy or eighty people. It’s another one of these projects that’s purely for show.

David Miscavige opens these new buildings because he gets the press to say, “Oh, look. The church is expanding.” There’s absolutely no need for this building. He’s only doing it for the publicity. It’s just strange.

The same thing here in America. He’s opened a lot of new buildings and they’re completely empty. It’s more about a show than serving actual people.

Sturgess: You have a book out, as well, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely. Can you tell us about that?

Ortega: Yeah. One of the people who first exposed Scientology and its controversies was a New York woman named Paulette Cooper. She came out with a book in 1971 called The Scandal of Scientology.

Her story is legendary among all of us that cover the field. I felt that it was probably worth an entire book. I worked with her for two years. In the spy documents, they refer to her only as “Miss Lovely.” I used that for the title.

We’ve been on a book tour recently. Paulette’s been coming with me. We’ve been telling her story to people. It’s really been popular. It’s, again, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely.

Sturgess: In your opinion, what can people expect to come out with after they’ve seen this documentary?

Ortega: What I always hear from people is that they might have heard something about Scientology. They might have seen a story but they see this film and they’re shocked. They’re amazed to see the entire picture of Scientology because the story is largely told by insiders. Not just people that were in Scientology but people like Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder who helped run Scientology and know its most innermost secrets.

Alex Gibney weaves that together in a mesmerizing tale. I think people leave it angry. Angry that this has been going on for so long and that Scientology spends so much money on PR and litigation, that they’ve been able to get away with things for a long time.

I think people will enjoy it. I think they’ll be shocked. I’m looking forward to the response from Australia.

Sturgess: People can go to your website if they want a guide to the film or even more detail, can’t they?

Ortega: I have interviews with each of the people that’s in the film at my website, TonyOrtega.org. It’s also called “The Underground Bunker.” We have something new on the website every day about Scientology. We’re covering numerous lawsuits that are happening. We’re keeping an eye on this new building in Australia.

Like I said, you have some terrific journalists there who cover Scientology. We’re always featuring them. There’s a book about Scientology in Australia coming out by journalist Steve Cannae that I’m looking forward to.

There’s a lot going on. I hope people, after they watch the film, come to the website. It’s got a terrific community of folks who talk about Scientology that are very knowledgeable. We’d love to have them join us.

Welcome to the Season of Conspiracy Theories

The 2016 Presidential campaign is well underway, and perhaps because fear mongering is such a popular political strategy (see Donald Trump on immigration), conspiracy theories are back in season. Coincidently, several new studies have emerged to shed more light on why people endorse conspiracy theories.

In this column I’ll review some of the latest conspiracies and summarize what the new studies have to say. I begin with conspiracies of the 2016 campaign, go on to other recent conspiracies, and then look at the research.

Campaign 2016 Conspiracies

Republican Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

1. Obama Citizenship and Religion

In a remarkable turn of events, Donald Trump, the most famous birther of all time, is now the leading Republican candidate to succeed the man he believes was born in Kenya. It appears that Trump is still a birther, because reporters and talk show hosts have given him many chances to clarify his position. Rather than taking the opportunity to reverse his stance, Trump has simply refused to answer questions on this topic. “I don’t talk about it anymore,” he told Stephen Colbert.

2. The Town Hall Question about Muslims was a Liberal Plant

Recently, Donald Trump did not challenge a town hall questioner in Rochester, New Hampshire who said:

“We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”^[1]

This was widely seen as an embarrassing moment for the Trump campaign, but before long, conservative sources were speculating that the questioner was a liberal plant whose job it was to make the Republican candidate look bad.

3. Donald Trump is a Liberal Plant

The mysterious town hall questioner is not the only alleged liberal plant in the campaign. Another recent theory held that Donald Trump himself, who has made donations to the Clinton Foundation, to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and to a number of other Democratic candidates, is himself a Democratic Party plant. This theory was further fueled by speculation that former President Bill Clinton urged Donald Trump to run for office. Trump quickly denied the story.

4. Vaccinations and Autism

In the second Republican debate, Donald Trump supported the claim that vaccines cause autism, and rather than advocating a reduction in vaccinations or an outright ban, he staked out the less radical position of a delayed schedule of vaccinations. Interestingly, in the same debate, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson made a rather strong defense of vaccines but ended up at the same place as Trump, suggesting that too many shots are given too soon. Rand Paul (also a physician) said he supports parental choice, as does Carly Fiorina.

In the version told by liberals, the full anti-vaccination narrative is usually a conspiracy tale of the federal government and the research community under the control of profit-hungry pharmaceutical companies. So far Republican candidates—who are generally supporters of big business—have not picked up this part of the story. Instead, they have focused on freedom of choice. Unfortunately, individual freedom applied to vaccinations comes at the expense of public health.

The Google Trends graph below suggests that the Presidential campaign has encouraged Internet searches about vaccines and autism. There is a spike of searches in September that may have been stimulated by the discussion at the second Republican debate.

Figure 1. A Google Trends graph showing the relative number of searches for the phrase “vaccines autism.” Unfortunately, the overall trend seems to be gradually upward. The large spike in searches coincides with Republican presidential candidate’s Chris Christie’s comment in February 2015 that the government needs to strike a balance between public health and parental choice.² The smaller increase in searches at the end of the series may have been caused by the mention of vaccines in the second Republican Debate on September 16, 2015.

5. Evolution is the Work of the Devil

Ben Carson is a creationist who believes that evolution was an idea promoted by the devil (“the adversary”). This statement suggests that (a) Carson believes that the devil is a real thing and (b) he believes the devil influenced Darwin—and presumably those who have followed him—to promote the false view that God did not recreate Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. We can only hope that, once his ideas become more well-known, his popularity will fall.

Other Recent Conspiracies

6. The California Drought is a Government Plot

Unless you live in California, you may be unaware that, according to a growing movement, the state’s crippling drought has been caused by a secret government climate-engineering program. In an effort to combat global warming, the government has been secretly airdropping heavy metal particles high in the atmosphere to block some of the sun’s rays.^[3] This line of reasoning also includes the suggestion that the airdrops discourage rain. Such a plot may sound farfetched, but a group led by former solar panel contractor, Dane Wigington, drew over 1,000 people to a recent meeting. The video below is a report on the controversy by the Sacramento CBS News affiliate.

7. The Jade Helm 15 Military Training Exercises Conspiracy

According the New York Times, right-wing bloggers claimed that Jade Helm, an eight-week Pentagon training exercise, was “part of a secret plan to impose martial law, take away people’s guns, arrest political undesirables, launch an Obama-led hostile takeover of red-state Texas, or do some combination thereof.” Texas’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott, bowing to conspiracy fears, ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor the exercises, which in turn made Abbott the object of satire from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. The Washington Post video below gives a flavor of the controversy.

As might be expected, the exercises concluded quietly in September without a government takeover of Texas or any other state, but those who believe in the conspiracy probably attribute that outcome to Governor Abbott’s get-tough approach.

Photo from Flickr.

8. September 11 was an Inside Job

Every anniversary of September 11 is marked by increased activity of “911 truth” groups, and 2015 was no different. This year the group Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth) published a new fifty-page booklet called “Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7.” The group also released a film entitled “Firefighters, Architects & Engineers,” which premiered in Manhattan on the evening of September 11. To further mark the anniversary, AE911Truth posted a message critical of the New York Times coverage of 9/11 on a billboard across from the New York Times building.^[4] It is clear this conspiracy theory—now over a decade old—will not die soon.

Figure 2. Google Trends graph of searches for the phrase “911 truth.” The trend has been downward over the last six years, but there is an annual increase in searches in September.

9. All Mass Shootings are Hoaxes

As I was finishing this column, America suffered its latest mass shooting, this time at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, where nine people were killed and nine others wounded. Among the stories that emerged from this incident was the news that John Hanlin, the Sheriff whose department was investigating the tragedy, was himself a strong pro-gun advocate and, apparently, a conspiracy theorist. Until it was removed the day after the Umpqua tragedy, Hanlin’s personal Facebook page featured a link to a YouTube video presenting the view that the U.S. federal government orchestrated the Sandy Hook tragedy. Hanlin has subsequently denied being a Sandy Hook “truther.”

More important than Sheriff Hanlin’s individual beliefs is the larger pattern of conspiratorial thinking surrounding mass shootings. There are now many conspiracy theorists active on YouTube who respond rapidly to each new shooting in an effort to prove it was a hoax or a “False Flag” operation in which the true culprits adopt another identity for strategic purposes. As I wrote this, three days after the tragedy, searching YouTube with the phrase “Oregon shooting hoax” brought up at least half a dozen videos that had already been posted asserting that the Umpqua tragedy was staged by actors and had never really happened. One of these Oregon hoax videos already had over 70,000 views, and another video by the same YouTuber managed to blend Sheriff Hanlin’s pro-gun views into a conspiracy about the Umpqua Community College shooting. Everything is fodder for a good theory, and the truth is out there if you just take a look.

Screenshot of one of many YouTube videos claiming the Oregon shooting was a hoax.

Of course, Umpqua Community College was not an isolated incident. According to this YouTube subculture, virtually every highly publicized shooting in America has been a hoax conducted by the federal government for the purpose of “taking away our guns.”

The Latest Conspiracy Theory Research

Before going on much further, I should acknowledge that conspiracies sometimes do happen. The most plausible explanation for the attacks of September 11, 2001 involves a conspiracy of over twenty people and the hijacking of four airplanes at approximately the same time on the same day. Much earlier in history, Julius Caesar was assassinated by a conspiratorial plot (“Et tu, Brute?”).

But the principle of parsimony—that a simple explanation is better than a more elaborate one—is an important test for anyone evaluating claims of conspiracies. For example, the 911 Truth community has concentrated its efforts on debunking the “official” explanation. The most common Truther theory is that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job,” devised and undertaken by the administration of President George W. Bush to create a justification for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This alternative theory—which is never described in detail—overlooks many facts in evidence and fails the test of parsimony. The “inside job” scenario would have required many more actors and moving pieces than the standard account. Truthers have yet to offer a more parsimonious alternative explanation of the events.

Contemporary conspiracy theorists also manage to avoid following the causal chain of their own theories. The controlled demolition conspiracy theory of the attacks of September 11, 2001 assumes that many explosives were obtained and placed in the buildings and that arrangements were made for the airplanes to crash into the World Trade Center. Yet no paper trail of this account has been discovered and none of the many people required to carry it out has ever been identified or come forward. There is no Edward Snowden of 9/11. It seems unlikely such a conspiracy would remain so carefully guarded under such intense scrutiny, but conspiracy theorists enjoy the privileged position of being able to use innuendo to attack the standard account, without the need to spell out a full scenario.

Randomness and Conspiracy Belief

Meanwhile in the real world of science, there has been some interesting new work on conspiracy belief. One of the commonly stated explanations for belief in conspiracies is a propensity to believe, “Nothing happens by accident.” Conspiracy believers see a pattern where there is no pattern, so it stands to reason that, when confronted with a random sequence of coin flips, conspiracy-prone individuals would be more likely to see some manner of order in the haze of randomness. Furthermore, other research has shown that people who believe in the paranormal have difficulty recognizing or producing random patterns. Finally, people who hold paranormal beliefs are also more likely to endorse conspiracies. So by triangulation it stands to reason that conspiracy believers would see patterns in random processes, too.

This was exactly the thinking that led three European researchers to conduct a study called “Nothing Happens by Accident, Or Does It?” published in Psychological Science in September.^[5] However, as often happens in research, the authors’ hypothesis was not supported. The investigators examined whether the ability to detect truly random sequences was related to belief in larger general conspiracies (e.g., “The government is involved in the murder of innocent citizens and/or well-known public figures, and keeps this a secret”), as well as belief in more specific conspiracies, such as those associated with President Kennedy’s assassination and the attacks of 9/11.

In something of a surprise, three different experiments failed to find a connection between the ability to correctly perceive randomness and belief in conspiracies. The authors speculate that a tendency to see patterns rather than randomness may be an outcome of conspiracy belief, rather than a cause. I think it is also possible that the random coin-flip test the authors chose may be too abstract to be connected to this kind of belief system. It may be that, once you have a fixed belief, confirmation bias sets in with respect to anything remotely connected to the belief. But your view of abstract sequences of ones and zeros may be unaffected.

Uncertain Emotions Encourage Conspiracy Belief

Conspiracy theories are often said to be fueled by fear, but a recent study by Jennifer Whitson, Adam Galinsky, and Aaron Kay in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed that the direction of the emotion—positive versus negative—is less important than whether the emotion stimulates feelings of uncertainty. The authors hypothesized that emotions such as hope and fear are of opposite directions, but both involve some uncertainty about the future. In contrast, anger and happiness are in the present and, therefore, more certain. They further hypothesized that uncertain emotions—regardless of whether they are positive or negative—would stimulate greater belief in conspiracies.

To test this idea, the researchers first assigned people to different groups and asked them to remember a time when they had experienced a positive or negative emotion that was either certain (e.g., anger/happiness) or uncertain (e.g., fear/hope). Then they asked the participants about a scenario in which an employee who was up for a promotion might have been sabotaged by a coworker. People who were primed to feel an uncertain emotion—regardless of whether it was positive or negative—were more likely to believe the employee was a victim of conspiracy. So, uncertain emotions promote conspiratorial thinking. This outcome makes sense because conspiracy theories provide certainty—a false certainty in many cases—but when life is unsettled, a false certainty is good enough for some people. The interesting part is discovering that even positive emotions can promote conspiracy thinking if they also produce a feeling of uncertainty.

It Doesn’t Help to Call it a Conspiracy Theory

A recent study by Michael Wood of the University of Winchester showed that labeling an idea a “conspiracy theory” does not deter people from endorsing it.^[2] In two different online survey studies, Wood found that participants were just as likely to say they endorsed a theory if it was labeled a “conspiracy theory” as when it was simply described as an “idea.” Contrary to what we might predict, calling something a conspiracy theory is not sufficiently disparaging to dissuade people from endorsing it.

Conclusion

In this the month of Halloween goblins, it may seem like we are entering a new season thick with frightening conspiracy theories, but in fact, conspiracies are always in season. Unfortunately, the Internet has been a great boon to the advancement of this kind of story-making. If there is a bright side to the current situation, it is that research on conspiratorial thinking is also on the rise, so we can look forward to having a better understanding of how people come to believe these wacky schemes. In the meantime, I predict that the 2016 Presidential race and other current events will continue to bring us a steady stream of elaborate and diabolical theories about how the world works.

Notes

1. http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2015/09/18/trump-obama-muslim-question-live-erin.cnn

2. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/chris-christie-urges-balance-vaccination-choice

3. http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2015/09/22/growing-number-believe-californias-drought-is-a-government-conspiracy/

4. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/architects--engineers-for-911-truth-marks-september-11th-anniversary-with-booklet-and-film-releases-takes-aim-at-new-york-times-with-billboard-300141089.html

5. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/09/19/0956797615598740.abstract

6. Wood, M. J. 2015. Some Dare Call It Conspiracy: Labeling Something a Conspiracy Theory Does Not Reduce Belief in It. Political Psychology.

Ten distinguished scientists, scholars, educators, and investigators from five countries have been elected fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), copublisher of the Skeptical Inquirer. CSI (formerly CSICOP) is one of the world’s leading organizations for the promotion of scientific thinking and the critical examination of extraordinary claims from a scientific point of view.

Fellows of CSI are selected for their “distinguished contributions to science and skepticism.” They are nominated and elected by CSI’s twelve-member Executive Council.

In addition, CSI named four new Scientific and Technical Consultants.

The new fellows join a list of notable CSI fellows that includes astronomers Neil de Grasse Tyson and Jill Tarter; biologists Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson; Nobel laureate physicists or chemists Leon Lederman, Murray Gell-Mann, Steven Weinberg, and Sir Harry Kroto; philosophers Daniel C. Dennett, Susan Haack, and Mario Bunge; anthropologist Eugenie C. Scott; psychologists James Alcock, Ray Hyman, Steven Pinker, and Richard Wiseman; magician/author James Randi; science educator and television host Bill Nye; Cosmos creator/writer Ann Druyan; plus many prominent physicians and medical scientists who critique questionable medical claims.

The full list of fellows is on the inside cover of each issue of SI and on the organization’s website at csicop.org/about/csi_fellows_and_staff/.

Past fellows now in CSI’s Pantheon of Skeptics (http://www.csicop.org/about/the_pantheon_of_skeptics/) include Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Martin Gardner, Nobel laureates Francis Crick and Glenn T. Seaborg, Stephen Jay Gould, B.F. Skinner, and philosopher and CSICOP founder Paul Kurtz.

The Committee’s newly elected fellows are:

John Cook is the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, Australia. He created and maintains the Skeptical Science website, one of the top online sources of information about climate science and climate denialism, and is coauthor of Climate Change Denial (2011) and the 2013 college textbook Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis. He also was lead author of the paper “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature,” awarded the best paper published in Environmental Research Letters in 2013. He has a B.S. in physics and is currently completing a PhD in cognitive psychology, researching how people think about climate change. He and colleague Stephan Lewandowsky (also a newly elected CSI fellow) wrote “The Debunking Handbook,” a guide about the problems of, and best strategies for, debunking anti-science myths.

Krista Federspiel of Vienna, Austria, is a medical journalist and author with a PhD in folklore. She worked as a freelance journalist and editor in several Austrian and German magazines and newspapers. She also became known as a radio and television presenter. She is a member of the Science Council of the Society for the Scientific Investigation of Para Sciences (GWUP, the German skeptics group) and regularly publishes articles in their magazine Skeptiker. She is cofounder and an active member of the Society for Critical Thinking, the Vienna Regional Group of GWUP. Her focus is on social and women’s issues, consumer protection, medicine, and psychotherapy. Federspiel has become well known as a critic of alternative medical procedures. She is author, coauthor, or editor of a number of books in these fields.

Julia Galef is president and cofounder of the Center for Applied Rationality, a nonprofit think tank that trains people to be more rational. She is a writer, podcaster, and public speaker on rationality, science, and the philosophy of science, often explaining common confusions and popular misconceptions about rationality. She serves on the board of directors of the New York City Skeptics and hosts their official podcast, Rationally Speaking, which she has done since its inception in 2010, sharing the show with cohost and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci until 2015. Galef has a degree in statistics and did graduate work in economics before shifting to her present career advocating for science and rationality.

Stephan Lewandowsky is a psychologist whose recent research has focused on the public’s understanding and misunderstanding of science and why people often embrace beliefs at odds with the scientific evidence. He is a cognitive psychologist in the School of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, where he is also part of the university’s Cabot Institute. Until 2013, he was at the University of Western Australia. He has published a number of notable studies examining people’s beliefs in misinformation, including one of the best-known studies of public opinion about climate change, advancing the literature on what has come to be known as “motivated reasoning.” He has also studied the relationship between believing conspiracy theories and rejection of various forms of science. He is the first digital content editor for the Psychonomic Society, running its blog at http://www.
psychonomic.org/featured-content.

Daniel Loxton is editor of the Junior Skeptic section in Skeptic magazine (U.S.), and a Canadian writer and artist. He is lead author (with Donald Prothero, also named a fellow) of the 2013 book Abominable Science!, a scientific look at cryptozoology heralded as one of the best books about the origins of myths about Yeti, Nessie, and other famous cryptids. His book Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be won the $10,000 Lane Anderson Award, Canada’s top national award specific to children’s science writing. His book Pterosaur Trouble won the $5,000 Bolen Books Children’s Book Prize at the Victoria Book Awards. Loxton has also become a kind of unofficial historian of the modern skeptical movement, with online papers such as “Why Is There a Skeptical Movement?” (2014) exploring the roots, founding principles, and purposes of scientific skepticism.

Paul Offit, MD, is Professor of Pediatrics and Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He is also a professor of pediatrics and vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Offit is co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, credited with saving hundreds of lives every day. He is a leading proponent for childhood immunizations and a prominent advocate for science-based approaches to medicine. His 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets catalyzed a backlash against the anti-vaccination movement in the United States. His three latest books have extended the range of his critiques even further: Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All (2011), Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine (2013), and, most recently, Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine (2015).

Naomi Oreskes, a geologist turned historian of science, is a professor in the Departments of the History of Science and Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She moved to Harvard in 2013 after fifteen years as Professor of History of Science and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her research has focused on understanding scientific consensus and dissent. Her 1999 book The Rejection of Continental Drift, her coedited volume Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth, and other scholarly works established her as a first-rate historian of science. In 2004, her short paper in Science “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” became widely cited and brought her to her detailed study of climate denialism chronicled in her 2010 book Merchants of Doubt (with Erik M. Conway), which documented how a small group of contrarian scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. It has been widely praised (and also attacked). That book in turn inspired this year’s feature-length documentary movie of the same title. Her most recent book (also with Erik Conway) is The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (Columbia University Press, 2014).

James L. Powell is a geochemist, author, and retired university and museum executive. He is executive director of the National Physical Science Consortium. He received his PhD in geochemistry from MIT, taught at Oberlin College, and served as its acting president. He has also been president of Franklin and Marshall College, Reed College, the Franklin Institute, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. He also served twelve years on the National Science Board. In 1998 he wrote Night Comes to the Cretaceous about dinosaur extinction and the modern transformation of geology. His 2012 book The Inquisition of Climate Change is a comprehensive examination of the climate denial movement. His 2015 book Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences: From Heresy to Truth describes how four key scientific discoveries (deep time, continental drift, meteorite impacts, and global warming) were all initially rejected, but then accepted by science, confirming science’s self-correcting nature. Asteroid 1987 SH7 is named for Powell.

Donald R. Prothero is a paleontologist and geologist associated with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and a prolific writer and author. He received his PhD in the geological sciences from Columbia University. His scientific specialty has been mammalian paleontology. He became involved with the skeptical movement in the early 1980s defending evolution and later serving on the editorial board of The Skeptics Society. His trade books include Evolution (2007), Catastrophes! (2011), Reality Check: How Climate Deniers Threaten Our Future (2013), Abominable Science! (with Daniel Loxton, also a newly elected CSI fellow), and The Story of Life in 25 Fossils (2015). He’s also written six geology textbooks, including Evolution of the Earth, in its sixth edition. Recent awards include the Shea Award (2013) for writing in geoscience and the Gregory Award (2015) for service to vertebrate paleontology.

Stuart Vyse is a psychologist and the former Joanne Toor Cummings ’50 Professor of Psychology at Connecticut College, where he was praised as an engaging teacher. His research specialty is irrational behavior. His book Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition was winner of the William James Book Award of the American Psychological Association. It is an account of the science behind our most irrational beliefs. Oxford University Press published an updated edition in 2014, with Vyse adding new research on jinxes, paranormal belief, and luck, and making a renewed call for scientific thinking and the naturalistic explanation of the world. Late last year, Vyse began writing a regular column, “Behavior & Belief,” for the Skeptical Inquirer website, csicop.org. Some notable recent entries include “Neuro-Pseudoscience,” “Has Science a Problem?,” “Facilitated Communication: The Fad That Will Not Die,” and “Anti-Science Trends at Mid-Decade.”

The Committee’s newly elected Scientific and Technical Consultants are:

Susan Gerbic, founder and leader of the Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) project, skeptic activist, photographer

Gabor Hrasko, chairman of European Council of Skeptical Organizations (ECSO), president of Hungarian Skeptics

John R. Mashey, computer scientist/executive (Bell Labs, then Silicon Valley), analyst of climate-change denial, contributor to DeSmogBlog and Skeptical Science, Portola Valley, CA

Good science requires good data, and to get valid results scientists must consider all of the evidence. If a researcher chooses to exclude some of the information available in an experiment, for example, he or she should offer a rationale for doing so. When researchers present to the public or their peers data that only supports their conclusions, that’s called bad science (at best) or outright fraud (at worst).

Agenda-driven pseudoscience, in contrast to good science, often involves cherry-picking and careful selection of evidence. This happens, for example, when a psychic offers a client a list of a dozen impressive predictions but carefully omits hundreds of spectacular failures. Any psychic who makes enough predictions (especially ones of a general nature) will be correct some of the time by simple random chance. What’s needed when examining the evidence for psychic powers is the entire data set—all the predictions made, whether they turned out to be right, wrong, somewhere in the middle, or inconclusive—and establishing a success ratio. If the selection criteria are valid and the rate is significantly above random chance, then it may indeed be evidence for psychic powers.

I was reminded of this recently when I saw a new book by Skeptiko podcast host Alex Tsakiris with the bold and red-flag-raising title Why Science Is Wrong...About Almost Everything. In it he devotes a whole chapter to a case I researched as part of a challenge to explain the best case he could find for psychic detectives, one he’d seen on television. I expected Alex to continue to be wrong about the case, but I didn’t expect him to tout it as a victory in his book.

The case involved a psychic named Nancy Weber and her claims that she helped catch a serial killer named James Koedatich by giving police officers Jim Moore and Bill Hughes biographical details about the killer long before he was caught—details that Weber claims, and Tsakiris believes, turned out to be amazingly accurate. Koedatich killed a woman named Aimee Hoffman (at which time Weber entered the case) and later another woman.

Tsakiris writes that “the investigation was quite extensive. It spanned months of work and included multiple transcribed interviews with all the key players. The conclusion was self-evident—the police detectives repeatedly corroborated psychic detective Nancy Weber’s amazing account.... Amazingly, Radford still denies this fact” (p. 90). It’s easy to mislead people through selective quotation and cherry picking evidence; even the most reasonable and sensible person can seem like an unreasonable fool if you simply omit contrary information and present one side of the story.

A Bit of Skepticism

When the project began I was somewhat surprised that Tsakiris assumed that “reality” television shows such as Psychic Detectives were factually accurate (despite ads touting the show as “Not just based on a true story. It is a true story”). Having written several books about the mass media, having debunked many “based on a true story” claims made in sensational TV shows and films, and having participated on dozens of television shows, I began the case with a healthy skepticism about the truth of “reality” TV shows. Television show writers, producers, and editors routinely twist and manufacture “facts” to make a more sensational story; the goal is entertainment, not truth. I had assumed that Tsakiris was media savvy enough to realize that not everything on television is true, but I later realized that I was mistaken. That he would offer a half-hour TV show on Koedatich as a “best case” for psychic detectives that he would personally vouch for was even more surprising to me.

No one, including Tsakiris, Weber, Moore, or Hughes, offered any evidence whatsoever supporting their claims. The police officers’ notes are long gone and there are no other records of what Nancy Weber claims she told police. Not a single piece of paper was offered by Tsakiris or anyone else as evidence in this case. This “amazing” case rests entirely on the contradictory memories of three people from a third of a century ago, yet Tsakiris boldly offers it as an example of Why Science Is Wrong.

The case is far too complex to discuss in any detail here, and my in-depth research can be found in my book Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries and in Skeptical Inquirer. However I can summarize my findings, and I encourage interested readers to seek the original sources to decide for themselves where the truth lies.

In contrast to Tsakiris’s claim that “the police detectives repeatedly corroborated psychic detective Nancy Weber’s amazing account,” a close review of their statements reveals that they contradicted virtually every specific claim Weber made about what she told them regarding Koedatich. I consulted transcripts from both the Psychic Investigators TV show and the Skeptiko podcasts, and I interviewed all the principals at least once. As I reviewed the information from Sgt. Bill Hughes and Capt. Jim Moore, it became clear that their accounts differ dramatically from those of the psychic. For example:

1. Weber claims she specified that Koedatich, Aimee Hoffman’s killer, had served prison time in Florida: “He came up from Florida where he had been imprisoned for murder.” Moore agreed with Weber; Sgt. Hughes originally disputed this claim, and later changed his mind.
2. Weber claims that she specified of the killer that “his last name… begins with a K.” Both Moore and Hughes dispute her claim.
3. Weber claims that she specified that the killer’s “last name… ends in an ‘ish’[or –ich].” Neither Hughes nor Moore confirm that Weber gave them this information.
4. Weber claims that she specified that Hoffman’s killer was of Polish descent, and that “his last name is Polish.” Both Moore and Hughes dispute her claim.
5. Weber claims that she specified that “the man who did this, his first name is James.” Moore agrees with Weber, but Sgt. Hughes stated, “She didn’t have complete names for us… I do not remember the first name at all.”

Although Tsakiris strains to revise the police officers’ testimony to his liking, even Nancy Weber herself acknowledged that Moore and Hughes did not corroborate key points of her story. The psychic’s explanation is that the officers—whose memory Tsakiris repeatedly defends, since his entire case rests on it—simply didn’t remember what she told them: “Yes, [Sgt. Hughes] does not recall it but... it does not mean I did not say it.”

Sgt. Hughes admitted that “No information she gave led to his arrest...the case was solved by good police work.” I was also surprised that Tsakiris—despite his touted investigative thoroughness researching this case—repeatedly (and somewhat disrespectfully) managed to misspell both of the names of Koedatich’s victims.

Who’s telling the truth, me or Alex? This isn’t a matter of subjective interpretation; the transcripts are available for anyone to review, and I have posted excerpts of the audio online so people can hear for themselves what the police said (http://benjaminradford.com/investigations/psychic-detective-interviews/).

In his chapter on the case Tsakiris chooses to not only hide the fact that the police contradicted most of Weber’s statements, but he also does not reveal to his readers that in my research I found Koedatich in the phone book using only information that Weber claimed to have given Moore and Hughes at the time. If Tsakiris is correct and Weber is telling the truth, it is baffling that despite the police having so many specific, accurate, identifying details about Koedatich—including his first name, the first and last parts of his last name, his ethnicity, criminal record (including where he served time and for what crime) and his hometown—they were somehow unable to find and arrest him before he killed again. If I could do it with the information Weber claims she gave the police, why couldn’t Moore and Hughes? Neither Weber nor Tsakiris have offered an explanation for the apparent incompetence of their star witnesses.

Tsakiris also neglects to tell his readers that I discovered Nancy Weber falsely claimed to have psychically known unpublished details about Aimee Hoffman’s murder when in fact those details had been reported on the front page of the local newspaper and in the New York Times the day after Hoffman’s body was found. This is irrefutable evidence that Weber either lied about or badly misremembered key details of the case. Tsakiris and Weber have been unable or unwilling to explain this serious lapse in her credibility.

I don’t mind legitimate criticism of my research, but Tsakiris is so far off the mark in this case that, as I noted in my book, his insistence “that the police and the psychic were saying the same thing...reminded me of a person in a swimming pool treading water while insisting he is not wet.”

The Brave Mavericky of Alex Tsakiris

Several prominent Forteans have commented on the book. Jerome Clark has a long and distinguished history of interesting research into the paranormal—his early apparent endorsement of the Cottingley Fairies hoax photograph notwithstanding—and I’ve quoted from his three-volume series Strange and Unusual Happenings several times. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, well known for his claims about psi phenomena, including psychic dogs, contributed to the book.

In his foreword to the book Sheldrake noted that “When Alex started his enquiries, he expected that the leaders of organized skepticism would have strong and persuasive arguments, but he soon found they did not... a strong ideological commitment forces them to deny all evidence that does not fit into their worldview.” Out of the thirteen chapters in the book, Sheldrake then singled out my case as an example of Tsakiris’s keen investigative skills: “I particularly enjoy the way Alex followed his enquiries wherever they led, including working with skeptic Ben Radford on an enquiry into information from psychics that helped solve crimes. When Ben questioned some of the evidence, Alex called the detectives who had been handling the cases, so that he and Ben could together clear the point up by speaking to them directly” (p. xi). Sheldrake goes on to marvel at Tsakiris’s “investigative skills, and his bravery and commitment to truth.”

Jerome Clark reviewed the book in Fortean Times magazine. Of Tsakiris’s podcast—which Clark misspells as “Skeptico”— he states that “the skeptics who appear on his show are wont to complain of being ‘sandbagged’. Translated, that means they found themselves up against an interviewer who had done his homework.” Clark notes that among the big-name skeptics whose sloppy scholarship and ideological blinkers have been exposed by the wily Tsakiris is “the prominent debunker who goes to comic lengths to salvage a ‘skeptical’ claim in the face of assertions from informants (in this case law-enforcement officers) whose patience he tries as he seeks to revise their testimony to his liking.” With mixture of bemusement and mild surprise I realized that he was referring to me.

I take no particular pleasure when friends—or even those I disagree with—fall for hoaxes or repeat demonstrable misinformation. I make an effort not to endorse dubious or false claims; before I reference something in an article or book I make an effort to verify its accuracy. That’s one reason why, for example, I rarely share news stories on social media unless I either have researched it myself or have taken at least some due diligence steps to affirm to my satisfaction that the claims or information contained therein are accurate.

Sure, there’s a touch of schadenfreude when Dr. Phil, Uri Geller, or Deepak Chopra mistakenly quotes a satirical news source as legitimate or repeats as true a long-discredited saw such as that people only use 10 percent of their brains. But for the most part I ignore it and if anything feel a bit of pity. Seeing others promote verifiably dubious information made by others is awkward because it reflects badly not only on the person making the claim but those who implicitly or explicitly endorsed it; it tarnishes their own reputations and reveals them as someone who got suckered.

I feel badly for Sheldrake and Clark because sooner or later at least some of the people who read their comments will—out of curiosity or a desire to seek out original sources and not merely accept Tsakiris’s selective portrayal of the research—find my published work on this case and see that this pair have been misled into endorsing a one-sided and intellectually dishonest take on that investigation by a person they exalted as fair-minded and committed to truth.

I was more bemused than annoyed by Tsakiris’s chapter (and Sheldrake and Clark’s explicit endorsements of it) because for those who wish to do a bit of research and consult easily available resources to verify the facts, the harm is to their reputations, not mine. Sheldrake and Clark will be the ones who, years from now, may be asked in an interview or at a book signing, talk, or other public event how they could have endorsed such a manifestly biased book chapter. Had they not done any research? How do they explain Tsakiris’s decision to omit the voluminous examples in which the detectives refuted Weber’s claims, and even that the psychic had been caught claiming information she read in a newspaper as having come through psychic abilities?

I haven’t spoken with either Rupert Sheldrake or Jerome Clark about the matter, but given that we’ve been on more or less opposite sides of the fence on many Fortean subjects for going on two decades, it seems certain that they have long ago painted me as a stubborn, closed-minded skeptic who refuses to look at evidence. When Tsakiris offered an example supporting that assumption, they were quite happy to assume it was true and highlight it as a clear example of my position.

Because of cognitive biases including anchoring bias and confirmation bias, when people give us information that fits our preconceived notions and worldview, we often accept it uncritically. Those who tell us things that challenge our assumptions tend to be subjected to extra scrutiny or dismissed outright. As Sheldrake himself states on page 87 of the book, “I think there’s a tendency for people to see what they want to believe, to believe what they want to believe, to only notice evidence that fits their dogmatic point of view or their belief system. He himself is a perfect example of that.” (Here Sheldrake mistakenly refers to psychologist Richard Wiseman instead of Alex Tsakiris.)

There’s irony in the daisy chain echo chamber of misinformation: this case began when Alex Tsakiris assumed, with little or no research or verification, that the Psychic Detectives TV show he saw was an accurate account of Nancy Weber’s psychic claims. Six years later, Sheldrake and Clark assumed, with little or no research or verification, that Alex Tsakiris’s book chapter on the case (essentially little more than interview transcriptions) was an accurate account of Weber’s claims and the resulting investigation. The accusations against me by these three of sloppy scholarship and investigative ineptitude resulting from an ideological blindness to contrary evidence is especially rich.

The conspiracy-minded among Skeptiko’s listeners may wonder if Tsakiris is not actually an undercover hardcore skeptic seeking to discredit people such as Sheldrake and Clark by publishing false information to see which prominent critics endorse it without having done any research, and then exposing the deception and embarrassing them into admitting they were gullible and should have checked their facts. This double-agent scenario occurred to me, but Occam’s razor suggests it’s unlikely. It seems more likely that Tsakiris genuinely does not understand why his “best case” for psychic detectives is a spectacular failure by any reasonable standard of evidence. Perhaps he should revisit his online boards where even many of his supporters voiced their concerns over his total reliance on the accuracy of decades-old contradictory memories.

Despite his self-professed expertise, Tsakiris clearly has a very poor grasp of such fundamentals as burden of proof and scientific methodologies. I did not read the other twelve chapters of the book so I don’t know whether or not Alex is equally selective and dishonest in his characterizations of those subjects, but I expect so.

Tsakiris casts himself as a maverick groundbreaker daring to ask tough questions of pompous skeptics and puncturing the pretensions of science. He is instead following a well-trod path using a tried and true formula: Speak quickly, act confidently, attack critics, and refuse to acknowledge even obvious errors in your evidence and arguments. That’s not how science works, but it will help you fool some of the people some of the time. Science may indeed be wrong some of the time—its self-correcting mechanism is perhaps its greatest strength—but it’s Alex Tsakiris who is wrong in this case. His “best case” for psychic detectives is in fact astonishingly weak, and if that is one of his marquee examples of how Science Is Wrong, then science is in far better shape than anyone dared imagine.

Tu Youyou, a Chinese researcher, was awarded half of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her discovery of artemisininin, a malaria drug. This has been touted as a victory for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and herbalism. It is anything but.

Treatment of malaria had become problematic; there were a number of effective medications, but the parasites had developed resistance to most of them. The addition of a new drug, artemisininin, to the therapeutic armamentarium was a godsend. It has been responsible for saving thousands of lives. But there is a risk of recurrence when artemisininin is used alone, and resistance is also developing to artemisininin. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends it not be used alone, but only in combination therapy; there are several fixed-dose combinations on the market. Artemisininin only works for treatment, not for prevention.

Tu was part of a team commissioned by Chairman Mao to search for a malaria cure. They screened more than 2,000 Chinese herbal preparations and identified 640 with “possible” antimalarial activities. Progress was slow. Tu had hopes for an extract of sweet wormwood, Artemisia annua, or qinghao, but the test results were inconsistent. It had been traditionally used to treat fever, not malaria; it was prepared by soaking the herb in water and boiling it. She scoured the ancient texts and found a single reference for alleviating malaria symptoms by immersing the herb in two liters of water, wringing out the juice, and drinking it all. This suggested to her that maybe heat destroyed the active ingredient. Did she really need that suggestion? Or did she just do what any good chemist might have thought of on her own? She may have just used the old text to help justify trying something she would have tried anyway. In 1971, she devised a cold extraction method that worked.

She did some initial safety testing using herself and colleagues as guinea pigs, but the Cultural Revolution was in full swing, and there were “no practical ways to perform clinical trials of new drugs.” When the WHO learned of it, they approached the Chinese government for samples of the plant and details of the extraction process, but China refused to collaborate. There was an inordinately long delay before it became available for widespread use. By 1973, Tu had developed a chemically modified preparation, dihydroartemisininin, that worked ten times as well. Synthetic preparations are now available, and one process uses a genetically modified yeast organism to produce a precursor which is then separated out and chemically converted. So patients who take artemisininin are absolutely not taking a traditional herbal medicine.

When the Nobel Prize was announced, headlines proclaimed: “Traditional Chinese medicine finally won its Nobel Prize” (http://qz.com/517202/how-traditional-chinese-medicine-finally-won-its-nobel-prize/) but the Nobel Committee emphasized that it was not giving the award to traditional Chinese medicine but to a scientist who, inspired by it, went on to use sophisticated research methods to find a new therapy for malaria (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/science/william-c-campbell-satoshi-omura-youyou-tu-nobel-prize-physiology-medicine.html?_r=0).

In an ironic development, some TCM practitioners protested that the prize disrespected their cultural heritage. Tradition dictates using formulas of ten to twenty herbs or minerals that a practitioner adjusts weekly after a consultation with a patient. TCM almost never uses individual plants or minerals. It relies on diagnoses based solely on the doctor’s questions, observations, and pulse reading. The way Tu used science was seen as a betrayal of TCM (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/world/asia/nobel-renews-debate-on-chinese-medicine.html?_r=2).

That seems to be a minority opinion. China has 1.1 million doctors of Western medicine vs. 186,947 traditional practitioners. It has 23,095 hospitals, only 2,889 of which specialize in Chinese medicine. Modern China prides itself on its science. The main users of TCM today are the elderly and the poor. I don’t have the figures for mainland China, but in Taiwan only 6 percent of the population uses acupuncture, probably less than in California.

To my mind, this story epitomizes the failure of TCM. Out of many thousands of herbs, only artemisinin and perhaps a couple of others have ever been proven useful and adopted for widespread use in the modern world. In the forty long years since Tu’s discovery, she has failed to find any other useful herbs.

What Tu did was no different from what Big Pharma does. About half of our prescription drugs come from plants. They might start with anecdotal evidence from herbalists or Amazon tribes or anywhere else, or they might just test a huge number of plants in a fishing expedition. If initial testing suggests that a plant might be useful, they try to extract the active ingredient. Then they often try to tweak the active ingredient to create a version that is more effective and/or safer. There is a systematic series of tests from preclinical trials in vitro or in animals through testing on healthy volunteers to testing on small, then larger groups of patients.

Picking an herb to test from ancient Chinese texts is nothing but a crapshoot. The chances of any given herb passing the tests is vanishingly small. If the ancient Chinese “knew” that artemisinin was effective, they certainly didn’t do anything to validate it or to spread the word. And they were probably equally certain about a huge number of other herbs that were actually ineffective.

By one account, Tu “managed to marry the knowledge of Chinese traditional medicine with the rigors of modern medicine.” That’s so wrong! TCM didn’t have any reliable knowledge about treating malaria, and Tu just happened to make a lucky guess based on her speculation about one ancient text that differed from the rest. TCM is overwhelmingly wrong and misguided. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but it would be foolish to try to use it to tell the time.

Herbal medicines are drugs, essentially adulterated drugs. Every drug must be tested for efficacy and safety using the same standards. Tu knew this. She was a scientist to the core. She has made a valuable contribution to modern medicine and world health. We owe her a debt of gratitude for saving the lives of thousands of malaria patients. Giving any credit to TCM just undermines and belittles her accomplishment.

A baby screams nonstop for five hours. Her daycare attendant, crazed with frustration and fatigue, shakes the baby, trying to shock her into silence. The next day, the infant dies of brain damage. Months later, the caregiver is sent to prison for twenty years, to screams of victory from the grieving family. But none of it is true. The baby was never shaken, the injuries to her brain were from an unrelated illness, and the caregiver remains in prison, unjustly convicted of a crime she didn’t commit.

Or that’s the story the makers of the film The Syndrome believe. Investigative reporter Susan Goldsmith and her cousin Meryl Goldsmith (the film’s director) weave a tale of many families who have been torn apart by wrongful accusations and imprisonment. Shaken baby syndrome, they say, doesn’t exist.

I caught The Syndrome at the Cinema at the Edge festival in Santa Monica, California, this spring. It has since been making the rounds to art-house cinemas across the country. At last count, it has been featured at twelve festivals.

The Syndrome is nothing if not brave. It goes up against the established science with a fervor and certainty that it’s difficult not to admire. The filmmakers clearly believe in what they are doing and, given the massive medical field they are up against, they haven’t got much to gain. Even as I went in skeptical of their premise, I was impressed by their dedication to their cause. Only a handful of people showed up to the screening, yet the filmmakers were on hand to passionately answer questions, from the blunt and critical (mine) to the glowingly supportive (everyone else’s).

For the most part, medical professionals agree that Shaken Baby Syndrome, now commonly referred to as “abusive head trauma,” exists. The American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the National Institute of Health, the Center for Disease Control, and the American Academy of Pediatrics all agree that the syndrome exists and is a wide societal problem. As the AAP puts it:

The existence of AHT in infants and young children is a settled scientific fact. The scientific support for the diagnosis of AHT comes from over 40 years of research in a broad array of clinical and basic science disciplines, including pediatrics, neurosciences, ophthalmology, orthopaedics, radiology, pathology, epidemiology, and biomechanics.

But, as the film is quick to point out, established science can be wrong, and scientists can be misled. It is up to us, then, to determine what counter-evidence would constitute a true challenge to the medical field’s expertise on the issue. In other words, is there something so suspicious about Abusive Head Trauma, that we should question its very existence, and our doctors’ expertise about it?

There are seemingly reasonable medical experts and journalists who question the diagnosis. In March of this year, The Washington Post printed an overview of the controversy surrounding it, summing up:

The challenges have come from doctors and scientists worldwide, including a forensic neuropathologist in Illinois, an ophthalmologist in Colorado, a radiologist in Pennsylvania, a physicist in Idaho, a forensic pathologist in North Carolina, a neurosurgeon in the District and several doctors in Britain, Sweden, Hong Kong and Argentina.

Although they are outnumbered by the doctors who support the science, those who challenge it are gathering strength.

So, what does The Syndrome offer to that dialogue? For the most part, it relies on individual stories of allegedly false convictions. The stories are truly heartbreaking, and assuming even one of them is true, it reveals at the very least a problem in properly diagnosing Traumatic Head Injury, and perhaps a propensity to jump to that conclusion first. As Dean Tong, a certified forensics consultant who has worked on Shaken Baby cases told me via email, “Oftentimes the same hospital staff [that diagnoses Shaken Baby Syndrome] will not look for alternative hypotheses and explanations for what’s going on with the child.” Ryan Steinbeigle of the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome counters that while wrongful convictions are always possible, “I don’t think wrongful convictions in any way reflect the soundness of the science supporting the diagnosis of SBS/AHT or of physicians’ ability to distinguish injuries due to abusive or non-abusive causes.”

The Goldsmiths disagree. At the close of the film, Susan Goldsmith mentioned two studies that I would hear about in many of my interviews for this article. Those studies are thought to be the SBS-skeptics’ silver bullet. The first is a 1987 study published in the Journal of Neurosurgery, in which the researchers tested exactly how strong a person would have to shake a baby to induce the injuries associated with Traumatic Head Injury. They built infant dummies with different types of neck structures, explaining, “the mechanical properties [of an infant’s head and neck] have not been studied, [so] three models were built.” This alone might raise eyebrows, since the models were based largely on guesswork. Then various volunteers shook the models, activating a motion and impact sensor that determined whether a person could shake hard enough to injury a baby’s brain (and still not break her neck). They concluded, “Based on these observations, we believe that shaking alone does not produce the shaken baby syndrome.” In 2011, new infant autopsies showed that in fact, this is partly true: neck injuries probably play a lot larger of a role in deaths from shaking, but that doesn’t lessen the reality of the diagnosis, because some neck injuries in babies are hard to spot, including severing the delicate nerves to the head. The second study often cited by SBS skeptics is a 2005 study showing that shaking would break the child’s neck before it would damage her brain. The study was roundly discredited when the calculations were shown to be significantly flawed.

The Syndrome also calls into question the experts who have brought Shaken Baby Syndrome to the public consciousness: Dr. David Chadwick, Dr. Robert Reece, and Dr. Carol Jenny. The filmmakers call the doctors’ credibility into question when they point out that the very same doctors were behind the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, in which children were seemingly implanted with false memories and testimonies of being ritually abused (typically sexually abused) by preschool teachers, parents, and other adults. I contacted the doctors and asked each how we can trust their expertise after their prior support for accusations of Satanic Ritual Abuse. And they all responded the same: “What support?”

Dr. Jenny says she has never written or spoken in support of such allegations. In fact, she points out she is currently working on the defense side of an entity being sued for alleged ritual abuse. Dr. Chadwick likewise denies ever supporting the diagnosis, and pointed out that during his tenure as the director of Center for Child Protection at the Children’s Hospital in San Diego, no children were diagnosed as Satanic abuse victims, and that the diagnosis was not even recognized by his outfit. Reece, mystified by the claim, wrote me, “I can’t remember ever being involved in a case of satanic ritual abuse and have never written about it. How the makers of the video came to this conclusion is a mystery to me.” The filmmakers declined to provide me with proof of their claims regarding the doctors promoting Satanic Panic, despite several attempts.

The Goldsmiths also claim that all three doctors refused to provide interviews for the film, as did the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, which was “threatening to sue” the filmmakers and any festivals showing the film. Center reps, as well as each doctor, deny ever being contacted. The filmmakers could only provide one email to document their claim: a single email from one of the doctors, declining an interview for a vaguely-described “video” on Shaken Baby Syndrome. As for the purported lawsuit threat, the only letter the Center sent to festivals showing The Syndrome asked them to reconsider the screening, or “to work with our agency to provide accurate medical and public health information during your festival to communicate the medical realities of SBS/AHT.” The filmmakers have not responded to requests for comment on this issue.

With the world’s renewed interest in Shaken Baby Syndrome and potentially false accusations, an even-handed documentary examining the syndrome, its symptoms, its limitations, and its potential for misdiagnosis would be welcome. But this is not that movie. In an attempt to discredit the science, and the researchers who promote it, the filmmakers manage to discredit themselves, and the investigatory work they took years to undertake.

So you might have heard about this awesome website called Wikipedia. It’s the sixth most viewed website worldwide. It is where most people find out information about the weird in the world. I’m going to explain a Wikipedia editing technique that I call Backwards Editing and how you can help out without joining my Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) project.

Essentially backwards editing means taking an existing citation that you have run across in a noteworthy source, and then adding it to a current Wikipedia article. You may never have heard of the Wikipedia page you are about to edit, which makes this a lot more interesting. This is usually the opposite way a traditional Wikipedia editor would work. Normally an editor will start with a Wikipedia page and look for citations that can be used on it. Backwards editing appeals to editors with limited time. This style of editing can be used to improve the exposure of publications like Skeptical Inquirer as well. If the Wikipedia edit is well written, the reader will be curious and want to continue reading about the topic, follow the citation, and learn about our people and publications. I call this preaching beyond the choir.

This is what it comes down to and the reason for this article, we have an enormous amount of content in journals, books, lectures, and such, all accessible, and most are citable by Wikipedia standards. They need to be found and used to educate. Getting the scientific skepticism message beyond our choir should be everyone’s goal. Looking at this globally, only a very small percent of the potential readers of SI are even aware of its existence. Every month at my local skeptic meet-up we get a new member who states “I didn’t know that there was a community or podcasts or magazines. I had no idea it was a ‘thing’ until the other day when I found out by accident.” I know that seems hard to believe, but everyone started somewhere, and the majority of people reading this right now probably found SI through a friend or found a mention of it somewhere, often by chance. It is even very possible you discovered SI while reading an article on Wikipedia. We need to do a better job getting our publications, our podcasts, and our spokespeople mentioned in places that people are visiting and hopefully curious to learn more. Wikipedia is the perfect venue; we just need to make sure the edit exists.

We skeptics like examples, so let me throw out a few for you.

Research Fellow for Skeptical Inquirer, Ben Radford’s book Mysterious New Mexico is a terrific example of a great source for backwards editing. The chapters are complete investigations into the weird of New Mexico. The chapters are well cited with sources. Each chapter can be summed up and used as a citation for a Wikipedia page. Taking the first chapter of this book, ”Phantom Performances at the Haunted KiMo Theater,” I am able to read it through a few times taking notes of the more relevant conclusions and quotes, and then add them to the Wikipedia page for the KiMo Theater. Of course you would need to read through the Wikipedia page to make sure that the information you are about to add is relevant and improves the page. In this case the current Wikipedia page had only three sentences mentioning the hauntings. Using the research by Radford (and co-investigator Mike Smith), I am able to expand the haunting section of the article. I am able to mention several of the more popular stories and how the investigation was able to break down each account and end with this, “Radford concludes that the ghost story is ‘overactive imaginations, factual errors... standard ghost lore... misguided ghost-busters.. [with the] story ... [being] told and retold ... each iteration adding or omitting details without anyone bothering to check the facts’” I am also able to explain how the real-life family of this “ghost” have been “haunted” all these years with stories of their little brother eating donuts and disrupting the performances. They are not amused.

Browsing through my stacks of SI magazine, I found a sweet little article about a mysterious meteoroid that was reported to have landed in 2009 in an area called Chalk Mountain in Texas. I read over the SI article that was written by Manfred Cuntz and published in 2012; it is engagingly written and about a topic I know very little about as I’ve never heard of Chalk Mountain. I searched Wikipedia first to see if there is a page that exists for a Chalk Mountain meteoroid and found nothing. I did find a page for the place Chalk Mountain, Texas. Very little was on the page, only a few paragraphs, a map, and an info box with all the general demographics that normally exists. No mention of the meteoroid was on the Wikipedia page.

What I do know is that I have a noteworthy citation in front of me. Skeptical Inquirer is considered one of the many reliable sources that Wikipedia editors are allowed to use. So here is a great citation that should be shared with others outside the skeptic community. The next part of deciding how to word the citation is really the time-consuming part. After you have done this a few times, it really isn’t something that should take more than thirty minutes to write. Knowing where to insert it on the article is usually obvious, and adding the citation is easily done with a template that lives on the Wikipedia edit screen. Now visitors to the Chalk Mountain, Texas, Wikipedia page are treated with a lot more than what the zip code and climate is. To know what that is, I won’t give it away here, you will just have to read the Wikipedia page yourself.

Not always will a backwards edit fit cleanly into a Wikipedia article, it is a matter of opinion in some cases, and if you are unsure it is possible to discuss the edit first on the page’s Talk Page. That is a tab on the top left side of every Wikipedia page. This is where editors discuss with each other how to best create the page. But in the case of the less-viewed pages like the KiMo Theatre and the Chalk Mountain Wikipedia pages, if I left a message on the talk page, it might be weeks or years before someone noticed and responded. One tenant of Wikipedia is to “Be Bold.” Make the edit; if you do something wrong it can easily be removed or revised. This is not a print encyclopedia after all.

One more example: This one is a little more obvious and personally a bit of fun for me. I read an SI article on a flight and really enjoyed it. The author John Champion had written in his article that there existed a lot of information about The Queen Mary in books and the Wikipedia page was a great place to look at as well. That statement warmed my editing heart, as I’m sure you can imagine. When looking for another backwards edit, I remembered this one. It is called “The Queen Mary is Not Haunted (But I Can Understand Why You Think She Is).”

Reading through the Wikipedia page for The Queen Mary, down at the bottom of the page I noticed a section called “Rumors of hauntings.” There were already three paragraphs about the supposed spooky occurrences that are reported on the ship. Champion had done a great job in my opinion of making the argument that the real history of the ship is much more interesting than supposed ghost sightings. For the owners to promote ghost tours is an insult to the real people who built and sailed the ship. It was a simple matter to add the SI article to The Queen Mary’s Wikipedia page, with the citation that links back to SI for those interested in learning more.

This style of editing is really just a matter of browsing through notable magazines, podcasts, books, and journals, and then finding a way to add them correctly to an existing Wikipedia page. If you can manage to do as the examples above and insert skepticism onto a page that would normally have no ties to the world of the weird, then even better.

Skeptical Inquirer has a potential of hundreds of Wikipedia edits in each issue. It just requires someone to add them in. Of course this might be overwhelming for most people, the GSoW project teaches this skill during training. We coach and mentor all the way through, and no edits are made live until they have been checked and approved by more senior editors. But you don’t really need GSoW to make these kinds of edits. I learned to do this completely on my own and with some trial and error so can most people.

I know there is a small segment of our community that thinks only certain people with the right criteria and expertize should be venturing into anything that looks like activism. I disagree; new voices, new ideas, and energy is what we need. There is no guard; there is no approval needed to become an activist. The one who speaks of activism is the one speaking. If you are waiting for someone to tell you it’s time to venture out and do those activities that you think might get more critical thinking into areas that need more critical thinking, then I wave my magic fairy wand over you right now to do it. Learn from your mistakes and improve what you are doing. Seek out wise people; take opinions but don’t let your feet become clay and find yourself doing nothing.

Editing Wikipedia is only one of many avenues you can do to educate beyond the choir. This is just my preferred choice of activism. Daniel Loxton and Tim Farley advocated that Wikipedia was where we needed to concentrate our efforts. It is a very effective way of doing so, but it is not the only way. If you are thinking that you would like to join a team of like-minded people who love research and citations and like to spend time in front of their computer keyboards and consider it fun, then please go to our YouTube channel and listen to a few of the interviews I’ve done with my editors. They will tell you what to expect in training and afterward. They will tell you in their own words why they feel passionate about this project. If after listening to them you are still interested, please write to us at GsoWteam@gmail.com.

Figure 1. The Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Poland, is the subject of many pious legends.

One of the most famous of true icons (traditional religious panel paintings) is the so-called Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Poland (Figure 1). Its notoriety was boosted when, following his election to the papacy, the “Polish Pope” John Paul II prayed before it on a visit in 1979. For an international History Channel series, Miracles Decoded, I was asked to look into the icon’s origins. I found that it has an intriguingly legendary history, an iconography that repays study, and a reputation for many miracles.

Folkloric Origins

According to legend, the panel for the dark-skinned Madonna and Child came from a table that had been made by Jesus himself while apprenticing to his carpenter father, Joseph. After Jesus’s crucifixion, his mother allegedly took the table with her when she went to live in the home of a disciple, St. John. Upon the top of this, according to fanciful tradition, St. Luke himself painted her portrait. It was subsequently discovered by Helena, the mother of Roman emperor Constantine the Great (274–337 ce), among a remarkable group of treasures on a trip to Jerusalem—or so it is said in pious tales (Aradi 1954, 62; Mullen 1998, 135).

The locations of the reputed treasures were allegedly revealed to the then almost eighty-year-old Helena by divine visions. She is said to have uncovered nothing less than the Holy Sepulchre and found that it not only contained the True Cross of Jesus but that it was an incredible storeroom of Christian artifacts. In addition to the Titulus Crucis—the Cross’s headboard (on which was inscribed, in three languages, “This is the King of the Jews” [Luke 23:38])—the disciples had thought to include the crosses of the “two thieves” crucified with Jesus (Mark 15–27). As well, there were nails from the crucifixion, the crown of thorns (Matthew 27:29), the chalice known as the Holy Grail, and more (Nickell 2007, 57, 77–95, 102). There, or elsewhere, she supposedly found the table-top portrait.

In other words, no one had any idea where such bogus items actually came from. The claimed Titulus, for example, has been radiocarbon-dated not to the first century but to 980–1146 ce, fully consistent with the actual time (1144–1145 ce) it had been acquired by a church in Rome. As to the True Cross, fragments were distributed as relics so frequently, noted Protestant John Calvin (1543, 67), that there were enough for “a whole ship’s cargo.” A supernatural explanation was provided by St. Paulinus of Nola (353–431 ce), who claimed that no matter how many pieces were removed, the cross never diminished in size! (See Cruz 1984, 39.) One piece has been radiocarbon-dated to 1018–1155 ce (Finding Jesus 2015).

Nevertheless, continues the Black Madonna saga, Helena returned with the picture to Constantinople, where it remained in a church until the eighth century. Then, threatened by war, it was carried for safekeeping to (curiously enough) Eastern Poland. In 1382 the Tartars invaded but failed to discover the Holy Virgin’s portrait because “a mysterious cloud enveloped the chapel.” Later, a local prince “was ordered in a dream by an angel to take the picture to an insignificant, obscure village named Czestochowa” (Aradi 1954, 63).

A contradictory legend tells how the icon was being transported for safekeeping when it was stored overnight in Czestochowa’s monastery of Jasna Gora. On the following morning, when the image was returned to the wagon, the horses refused to move—a miraculous sign, it was thought, that it should remain there (Mullen 1998, 135–136). In yet another tale, the balking horses are those of invading Hussites who in 1430 were attempting to take the icon as plunder. When the horses unaccountably stopped at the village limits, however, and no amount of beating could get them to move, the Black Madonna was abandoned (Aradi 1954, 63). Such variants (differing versions of a narrative), together with common motifs (story elements), are indicative of the folkloric process at work.

In the latter tale, the Hussites were so riled that they angrily grabbed up the icon, which had already been pierced by an arrow in the Madonna’s throat during the siege, and cast it on the ground, where it broke into three pieces. Moreover, one of the thieves struck the image with his sword, inflicting two gashes. As he started to strike a third time, he fell down and writhed in agony until his death (Cruz 1993, 400). It must have been embarrassing to the faithful that the icon—reputed to protect all of Poland (Aradi 1954, 63–66)—could not even protect itself. It could, however, inspire a tale about how it nevertheless exacted retribution.

A further magical tale relates that after the Holy Picture was abandoned by the Hussites and found covered in dirt and blood, the monks wanted to clean it. However, all the wells were dry from putting out the fires set by the invaders’ torches. Therefore, “It was at this time that a miraculous fountain sprung up, a spring that has since healed thousands and thousands of sick and has supplied water to millions of pilgrims” (Aradi 1954, 63; for a discussion of “miracle” healings see Nickell 2013, 175–222).

As we shall see presently, there were many black Madonna icons that were claimed to be the original. According to Scheer (2002, 1421–1422), “All share a common set of recurring motifs.” These include “the refusal of an image to leave a certain spot,” “the resistance to or revenge taken for damage or ‘wounding,’” and others. She adds: “Only one motif can be said to come up relatively often in connection with black madonnas: that of the prestigious artist—in most cases, St. Luke the Evangelist.”

Iconography

There are as many as perhaps a few hundred black Madonnas in Europe. In addition to small statues (commonly about thirty inches tall and mostly of polychromed wood), they consist of icons either imported from Byzantium (which Constantine renamed Constantinople) or rendered in Byzantine style. This style was influential across Europe for a millennium, and in icon painting it continued until the seventeenth century, traces of it surviving in paintings by El Greco (ca. 1545–1614). Byzantine-style icons were produced in quantity in Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Scheer 2002, 1413–1416; Levy 1962, 25).

Now, distinctly Christian images had begun to appear about 200 ce. By the beginning of the fifth century there had developed “a cult of portraits of saints, including the Virgin,” in different parts of the Christian Empire (Grabar 1968, 7–30, 84). Apparently the earliest icon of Mary reputedly painted by Luke was a large circular portrait of her head only. Its circular shape is unusual, and it may have indeed been painted on a table top or a semblance thereof. A tradition holds that in the first half of the fifth century it was discovered—not by Helena but (in this variant tale) by Eudokia (wife of Byzantine emperor Theodosius II) and sent by her from Palestine to Constantinople. There it was fitted into a great rectangular full-length picture of Mary holding the infant Christ. It was reportedly this composite that became known as the Hodegetria (“She who shows the Way”)—a representation of the Theotokos (“Mother of God”). In this type, the Holy Mother holds the Christ Child while gesturing to him as the salvation of humankind (Guarducci 1991; Grabar 1968, 84; Hodegetria 2014). As we shall see, this portrait set—now presumed lost (Hodegetria 2014)—probably had dark-complexioned figures. It was doubtless the prototype of subsequent Hodegetria-type “black” Madonnas.

The Black Madonna of Czestochowa is a late evolutionary example of this type.1 According to anthropologists Leonard W. Moss and Stephan C. Cappannari (1953, 320), it is “distinctly thirteenth to fourteenth century Byzantine in form.” Various additional sources agree that it is of “Byzantine origin,” that its “Byzantine style is obvious,” and so on (Leonard-Stuart and Hagar 1912; Duricy 2013). However, Pasierb (1989, 6) cautions that “In fact even today neither stylistic nor iconographic analyses are of much help.” That is because the icon was repainted in 1434.2 Pasierb insists that therefore it is only possible to say that it was a prototype of the fifth-century one in Constantinople and therefore “it could have been made some time between the 6th and 14th centuries."

Nevertheless, there are indications that the repainting was faithful to the original (Pasierb 1989, 6), and the image does actually contain a number of iconographic clues relating to its dating. Even as a work of imagination, it is anachronistic for the first century. For example, the infant Jesus holds in his left hand a codex (a bound book, as opposed to the earlier scroll), said to be a book of gospels. But there could be no such texts until, decades after Jesus’s crucifixion, they were separately written and eventually collected. That did not take place until the late second or even third century ce (Bible 1960; Price 2003, 40), long after the deaths of the supposed painter and his portrait subject.

One motif is of particular interest. The Madonna’s blue garment is studded with gold fleurs-de-lis, the lily being symbolic of the Trinity as well as of the Virgin (Webber 1938, 178). The combination of colors and motif also echo the royal French coat of arms—d’azur, semé de fleurs de lis d’or (“blue, interspersed with gold lilies”)—which was not officially adopted until the twelfth century (Black Madonna 2014; Hall 1979, 124; Fleur-de-lis 1960). From this, it has been suggested that the icon was probably produced at the Jasna Gora monks’ founding monastery in Hungary, during the reign of the Anjou dynasty, 1308–1386 (Black Madonna 2014). That time period is supported by the fact that the monastery was established in Czestochowa about 1382 (Leonard-Stuart and Hagar 1912), and the icon arrived there “most probably on 31 August 1384” (Pasierb 1989, 6). I would emphasize that the icon has no provenance before that time.

Art scholar Ernst Scheyer (2013) studied the image and concluded that “the present image was restored in the nineteenth century and painted somewhat darker than previously.” This brings us to the persistent question: Why is the Madonna of Czestochowa black? Some have claimed the picture darkened over time—either from the smoke of “innumerable candles” or the age-darkening of pigments used for the skin color (Beissel 1909)—or from the flames and smoke of a burning chapel (Broschart 1961). (In the case of one similar icon restored in 1799, the “thoroughly black” faces of mother and child were attributed to the smoke of centuries after examination of the paint flakes revealed underlying light flesh tones. In his restoration, the artist chose to repaint the faces black because that was what churchgoers expected [Scheer 2002, 1435].)

An alternate view is that many of the numerous black Madonnas (icons and statues) were intentionally created black (i.e., dark-skinned). That is in fact true of certain Madonnas whose features and skin color match that of the native population—for example, various “Negroid madonnas” in Africa (Moss and Cappannari 1953, 319) and the dark-skinned Image of Guadalupe in Mexico (alleged to have appeared miraculously but in fact painted by an Aztec artist [Nickell 1988, 103–117; 2013, 31–34]). Moss and Cappannari (1953, 324) go further, suggesting that “The black madonnas are Christian borrowings from earlier pagan art forms which depicted Ceres, Demeter, or Isis as black in the color characteristic of those goddesses of the earth.”


It may also be true that a dark complexion was simply thought appropriate for a Jewish woman, as one Dominican scholar insisted in the sixteenth century (de Barletta 1571). Also, as early as the sixth century appeared allegedly miraculous self-portraits of Jesus (termed acheiropoietos or “not made with hands”) that were actually painted (Nickell 2007, 69), and these were likewise dark-complexioned presumably for the same reason (Scheer 2002, 1425, n. 36).

Conclusions

The Black Madonna of Czestochowa is a traditional, Hodegetria icon, of a type that evolved from its probable prototype in fifth-century Constantinople. The claim that it was painted by Luke on a table-top made by Jesus in his father’s carpentry shop derives from that prototype—and, of course, is nothing more than pious legend. The image was apparently rendered with original dark flesh tones (there being no evidence that the “black” coloration resulted later from smoke, fires, or the discoloration of age). It is probably of fourteenth-century manufacture, consistent with the lack of provenance before 1384 when the icon appeared at the Jasna Gora monastery.

As to the claims of miracle healings and protection, the sad fact is that it was unable to heal or protect itself—despite the best efforts of further pious legend-making. It does stand as a testament to the faith of its countless devotees.

It remains for the Black Madonna of Czestochowa to be radiocarbon dated. A tiny sample of wood could be taken from the edge,3 specially cleaned to remove contaminants, and then subjected to the carbon-dating process—just as was done for the Titulus Crucis and piece of the True Cross (albeit with the devastating result of disproving their authenticity). The icon’s custodians should commission this test or admit, by their refusal, that their faith in its authenticity is weak.

Notes

1. The wood panel measures (without the frame) about 13” wide by 19” high and is nearly 1/2” thick (Cruz 1993, 401).
2. When the Black Madonna was repainted in 1434, two pen slashes were made to the right cheek to commemorate the previous vandalism (Black Madonna 2014).
3. The back of the panel is illustrated with scenes from its legendary history, rendered in 1682 (Pasierb 1989, 210).

References

• Aradi, Zsolt. 1954. Shrines to Our Lady Around the World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young.
• Beissel, Stephan. 1909; cited in Scheer 2002, 1418.
• Bible. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1960. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.
• Black Madonna of Czestochowa. 2014. Online at http://en.wikipedia.org/Black_Madonna_of_Czestochowa; accessed January 15, 2014.
• Broschart, Charles B. 1961. Call Her Blessed; cited in Duricy 2013.
• Calvin, John. 1543. Traite des Reliques; reprinted in English as Treatise on Relics (transl. by Count Valerian Krasinski), Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2009 (with an introduction by Joe Nickell).
• Cruz, Joan Carroll. 1984. Relics. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor.
• 1993. Miraculous Images of Our Lady. Charlotte, North Carolina: Tan Books.
• de Barletta, Gabriel. 1571. Cited in Scheer 2002, 1425.
• Duricy, Michael. 2013. Black Madonnas: Our Lady of Czestochowa. Online at http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/meditations/olczest.html; accessed January 2, 2014.
• Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery. 2015. CNN documentary, episode “The True Cross” aired March 29.
• Fleur-de-lis. 1960. Encyclopedia Britannica. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.
• Grabar, André. 1968. Christian Iconography: A Study of Origins. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
• Guarducci, Margherita. 1991. The Primacy of the Church of Rome. San Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 93–101.
• Hall, James. 1979. Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row.
• Hodegetria. 2014. Online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodegetria; accessed January 20, 2014.
• Levy, Mervyn, ed. 1962. The Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. New York: Graphic Society.
• Leonard-Stuart, Charles, and George J. Hagar. 1912. Everybody’s Cyclopedia. New York: Syndicate Publishing Co., vol. 2, n.p. (s.v. “Czenstochau” [sic]).
• Moss, Leonard W., and Stephen C. Cappannari. 1953. The black Madonna: An example of culture borrowing. The Scientific Monthly, June, 319–324.
• Mullen, Peter. 1998. Shrines of Our Lady. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Nickell, Joe. 1988. Secrets of the Supernatural. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.
• 2007. Relics of the Christ. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• 2013. The Science of Miracles. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.
• Pasierb, Janusz S. 1989. The Shrine of the Black Madonna at Czestochowa, 3rd ed. Warsaw: Interpress Publishers.
• Price, Robert M. 2003. The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.
• Scheer, Monique. 2002. From majesty to mystery: Change in meanings of black Madonnas from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The American Historical Review, col. 107, no. 5 (December), 1412–1440.
• Scheyer, Ernst. 2013. Quoted in Duricy 2013.
• Webber, F.R. 1938. Church Symbolism. Cleveland, Ohio: J.H. Jansen.

Q:

Have you heard about this recent case of a young boy who says he lived a past life as a Marine? What do you make of it?

A:

In November 2014, news stories circulated about a four-year-old Virginia boy who was claimed to have had a past life as a Marine killed in 1983. The claim was prompted by his parents and—somewhat disturbingly—profiled on a new reality TV show called Ghost Inside My Child. The boy, Andrew Lucas, made comments to his mother suggesting (to her) that he’d lived in a past life and died in a fire many years earlier.

Many people believe in reincarnation, from Shirley MacLaine to the Dalai Lama, but there is no scientific evidence for past lives. Usually alleged memories of past lives emerge during psychotherapy or hypnosis when people are encouraged to fantasize about other lives they may have led (often of famous or important people such as Cleopatra or Caesar). Despite many books claiming to offer solid scientific evidence for past lives (such as Old Souls by Tom Shroder; Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss; Reincarnation and Your Past-Life Memories by Gloria Chadwick, and so on), the evidence is largely anecdotal and falls far short of the mark.

Skeptical research and investigation by authors such as Paul Edwards (in his book Reincarnation: A Critical Example) handily debunk most of the “best cases” offered by proponents such as Ian Stevenson and Brian Weiss. Reincarnation remains scientifically unproven largely because those who claim to have had past lives are unable to give historically accurate, provable details from other eras. Other times people glean information from films and television shows and unconsciously incorporate them into their memories in a process psychologists call confabulation.

Bridey Murphy

The most celebrated case of a person claiming to have lived a past life is that of Bridey Murphy. Murphy was a nineteenth-century Irishwoman who Colorado woman Virginia Tighe claimed to have been in a previous life. Tighe’s amazing claim came about in 1952 during a session with amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein. Under hypnosis—and through an Irish accent—Tighe related memories of her previous existence in the early 1800s in Cork, Ireland, including being born on December 20, 1789, her life and marriage, and death in 1864. At first glance, Tighe’s story seemed very compelling. She had never been to Ireland and presumably could not have known many of the details she remembered except by having lived them a century earlier. Bernstein wrote a best-selling book about the case, and Bridey Murphy became a worldwide sensation.
The story of Bridey Murphy began to collapse when investigative journalists went to Ireland to verify Tighe’s story. While a few general statements were proven true, the researchers found virtually no evidence for the vast majority of Tighe’s “memories.” There were no records of a Bridey Murphy who had been born or died on those dates; the people Tighe said she encountered as Bridey Murphy, including Murphy’s husband, never existed. And so on.

It seems that Bernstein and his publishers, in their rush to exploit the case for fame and profit, had neglected to check Bridey Murphy’s account against the historical facts. It was later revealed that as a young child Tighe had spent time with an Irish immigrant neighbor (not coincidentally named Bridie Murphy), from whom she likely picked up a few details about Ireland, along with an exposure to an Irish accent. Few people believe Tighe purposely faked the story; more likely, she simply (and unconsciously) created it using her imagination and scraps of early memories. Decades of psychological research has demonstrated that people under hypnosis can create realistic, detailed, first-person accounts of events they never experienced. The person comes to believe their own fantastic fictions, often under the encouragement of misguided therapists. The same psychological process helps explain many “eyewitness” alien abduction stories.

Andrew Lucas, the four-year-old boy who claimed to have a past life as a marine killed in 1983.

Andrew Lucas and Val Lewis

In the case of Andrew Lucas, his parents believe he has factually reported the death of “U.S. Marine Sgt. Val Lewis [who] died in a bombing explosion October 23, 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon. Yet 4-year-old Andrew, who lives in Virginia Beach, remembers it as his death. ‘He just starts crying hysterically and I say “What’s wrong Andrew?” and he says, “Why did you let me die in that fire?” says Michele Lucas, Andrew’s mother. . . . Michele says he is saying things and recalling memories that no one his age should know” (Ciara 2014).
How could Andrew be remembering things that never happened to him? The most likely explanation is that he isn’t remembering anything unusual at all. There are several red flags suggesting that Andrew’s “memories” are not evidence of a past life but instead misunderstood or over-interpreted comments. When Andrew asked his mother, “Why did you let me die in the fire?” she interpreted it as a question coming not from her four-year-old son but instead from Sgt. Lewis. Yet Sgt. Lewis was a twenty-eight-year-old Marine, so why would he be asking Michele Lucas (who he’d never met and who wasn’t there at the time of his death) why she “let” him die in a bombing? Andrew is clearly speaking as a young boy to his mother, not as an adult military officer.

Andrew also mentioned an address on Main Street in Sumter, Georgia. The Lucases were unable to find anything confirming their son’s information and reached out to the producers of the TV show about ghost-haunted children. They then found several possible “matches” for Andrew’s information, including Sgt. Lewis.

The origin of this story isn’t hard to decipher when you examine the many clear examples of flawed investigation techniques used by Andrew’s parents and the producers. For example, at one point Andrew is shown large photographs of six soldiers who served with Sgt. Val Lewis and died in the same bombing. His mother then asks Andrew, “Were these your friends?” Andrew nods and says yes. “Which one was your friend? Which one were you friends with a lot?” his mother asks. The four-year-old replies, “I was friends with them, a lot—all of them.” (It may be significant that Andrew parrots back the same phrase his mother uses in her question to him, “a lot,” suggesting that he is taking cues from her.)

Andrew also notes that the photos of the people he was shown are dead. He may have been tipped off by his mother’s use of the past tense when referring to them (“were they your friends?”) but at any rate this information, even if it were truly coming from the ghost of Sgt. Lewis, raises other questions, such as how Lewis could know that all the other Marines caught in the same blast had also died. After all, just because he was killed doesn’t mean that others nearby might not have survived their injuries. Unless before his death Lewis somehow confirmed that all the other soldiers were dead before succumbing to his own wounds, this information makes no sense.

Andrew’s parents seem to take this as a sort of confirmation or validation of his story, but as any police detective can attest, that is exactly the wrong way to investigate whether or not a person recognizes photos presented to them. What they should have done is show him a dozen or more photos of various people, some associated with Sgt. Lewis and some not, and asked Andrew, “Do you recognize any of these people?” Better yet, ask Andrew to give the first and last names of his six friends—something Sgt. Lewis would certainly know but the boy would not (unless he’d been coached). There are countless other questions and simple tests that would help determine whether or not the consciousness of a dead Marine inhabits Andrew’s mind and body, including presenting the boy with an (unloaded) standard military-issue M16 rifle and asking him how to dismantle and reassemble it.

This is a perfect example of why experienced, skeptical researchers are needed to validate claims such as this. Parents and TV show producers may (or may not) have the child’s best interest at heart, but just as nonscientific ghost hunters who use pseudoscientific equipment and poor investigation techniques find bogus “evidence” of ghosts (see, for example, Radford 2010, 113), poor researchers can find bogus “evidence” of past lives.

It’s not clear exactly why the Lucases or the TV show settled on Sgt. Val Lewis as the most likely source for Andrew’s “memories.” Even if the boy were truly experiencing someone else’s burning death from a past life, surely there are many thousands of people who might fit the bill or have some connection to an address on Main Street. According to the Huffington Post, “How [Michele Lucas] made that connection is a bit of a mini-debate between the participants, according to reporter Barbara Ciara, who interviewed the Lucas family for WTKR-TV. It’s not clear whether the show’s producers came up with the whole story for Andrew. ‘The publicists told me that the family discovered the connection through their own research, but the mom, Michele, told me that the producers came up with it,’ she told HuffPost” (Moye 2014).

Whatever the source, it’s unlikely that this is a hoax or that anyone is trying to fool anyone else. Instead it seems like a mystery created by a series of misunderstandings and faulty investigation. In this case, it seems likely that Andrew’s offhanded comments were taken literally and encouraged by his parents and the TV producers. Though it’s fodder for reality TV shows, there may be psychological repercussions for the child, who’s being told by his parents and other authority figures that the ghost of a dead stranger is in his body and mind—a scary idea for someone of any age.

References

• Chadwick, Gloria. 1988. Reincarnation and Your Past-Life Memories. New York: Gramercy.
• Ciara, Barbara. 2014. Scared mother: ‘Is there a ghost inside my child?’ WTKR News (November 7). Online at http://wtkr.com/2014/11/07/scared-mother-is-there-a-ghost-inside-my-child/.
• Edwards, Paul. 1996. Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.
• Moye, David. 2014. Michele Lucas believes her 4-year-old-son is a reincarnated Marine. The Huffington Post (November 13). Online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/13/michele-lewis-reincarnation_n_6140052.html?1415905459.
• Radford, Benjamin. 2010. Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries. Corrales, New Mexico: Rhombus Books.
• Shroder, Tom. 1999. Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Weiss, Brian. 1988. Many Lives, Many Masters. New York: Simon & Schuster.

This past June, the Guerrilla Skep​ticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) project celebrated its fourth anniversary. The project has been a great success. Wikipedia is the default source of information for hundreds of millions of people around the world. Over the years, I’ve heard many myths and misconceptions about editing Wikipedia.
At almost every Q&A, I hear the story of someone who attempted to edit Wikipedia and “they” deleted their edits. I’ve heard how people tried to edit the evolution page, the homeopathy page, and the astrology page, and every time they could not get the content to stick. Often I hear that they were suspended or banned from editing Wikipedia. Often they tell the story as if it is evidence of a conspiracy by the paranormal community to control content on Wikipedia.

I’ve heard many stories of how they wrote an amazing Wikipedia article for a subject and then it was deleted for no good reason or was marked as not being noteworthy and “they” didn’t even bother to look for sources. I’m told “of course the person was noteworthy; they are an author or have a ton of followers on YouTube, it must be the anti-skeptics who are deleting the pages.” One video I’ve had drawn to my attention was from a TEDx talk where the speaker was talking about the bias on Wikipedia. She recounted the story of a man who tried to correct information on his own Wikipedia page and was told he was not allowed to do that. When the lecturer stated that Wikipedia did not consider the man to be an expert on himself, she got a nice laugh from the audience and lots of agreement that there must be a conspiracy.

So allow me to set the record straight. First off, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that is trying to be the repository of all knowledge; it is not Tumbler or Reddit or some other social network. Wikipedia has rules. Some of them are open to interpretation a bit, but for the most part the rules are discussed within the community of editors and usually enforced evenly.

There is no “they” on Wikipedia, only a “we.” There are a few admins and senior editors who usually have the last word on an issue, but more often rules are enforced by consensus. The idea of a conspiracy of people who edit with an agenda (pro-skeptic or otherwise) is just unwarranted.

We hear a lot about editors having a bias. Most people who edit Wikipedia are interested in specific topics: butterfly enthusiasts, for example, edit pages about butterflies. It’s just human nature to want to work on pages that interest you. There is nothing wrong with that, but a problem arises when someone comes to Wikipedia with the idea that they are going to work on one specific page to the exclusion of all others. These are known as “single-purpose editors,” and I see it a lot on controversial pages. These people are not trying to improve Wikipedia content as a whole; they are typically trying to push one specific agenda.

Furthermore, you do not own a Wikipedia page; even if you spent weeks researching every detail for fairness and accuracy, once you publish the page and it’s live, it’s fair game. Anyone can make edits. Large changes should be discussed on the talk page first, but you have no recourse once it is determined that changes should be made.

Let’s next break down the story I mentioned earlier, about the man who tried to edit his own Wikipedia page and was told he was not allowed to make the changes. What most people do not realize is that even if your name is on the title of the page, it is not your page. It is a page about you, but you are very biased and should not make changes. If there is a problem with factual information, you can make a comment on the “talk page” asking for the change to be made and giving strong reasons along with a citation to substantiate the change. Wikipedia editors don’t run background checks on other editors. How do they know that you are who you say you are? It’s easy to make a username, and just as easy to pretend you are someone you are not.

Controversial pages such as astronomy, scientology, evolution, and homeopathy are not pages for a beginner editor. You should first learn the rules, make edits on less controversial pages, and prove to other editors that you are trying to improve Wikipedia in general not just a specific page. The changes you are trying to make might be legitimate changes, but if you barge in with an aggressive attitude, then yes, people are going to be a little worried about your changes. If you have something important to add or change on a controversial page, then go to the “talk page” that exists behind every entry and start a discussion. Better yet, read through past discussions, as it’s likely that your suggestion has already been discussed and a consensus has been agreed on.

We see trolls and well-meaning editors vandalize Wikipedia all the time. Changing a psychic’s page to say “alleged” is considered vandalism. Adding South Park’s epithet “The Biggest Douche in the Galaxy” to John Edward’s page is also vandalism. The South Park show referring to Edward is already mentioned on the Wikipedia page about him, so it does not need to be added again.

One woman who had just attended the Reason Rally contacted me several years ago. From the hotel room the next day she had attempted to edit the brand new Reason Rally Wikipedia page. What people don’t realize is that editors rarely use primary sources. Instead we rely on notable secondary sources. Since it had only been one day, the only noteworthy secondary sources to come out were from Christian reporters writing in Christian news outlets. Of course their coverage was biased by their point of view. They reported on how they were being harassed by the atheists, the importance of their involvement handing out free water, and how mean-spirited the signs were the atheists were carrying. She was so incensed that she stormed in and made accusations and deleted content without discussion. She was banned, and probably rightly so. I did look at the page and was able to calmly clean it up. By that time, more neutral secondary sources had been published in noteworthy places, which made it much easier to fix.

Recently, another person approached me wondering why he was having so much trouble adding content to a page he was working on. I started looking at the history of the page and found that “IdoWhatIWant” was working on only one specific page and nowhere else on Wikipedia. (Not only can you see every edit made on a specific page, you can also see every edit that username has ever made.) It turns out that he was getting some push-back from other editors. We had a long chat; I suggested a few changes to his editing patterns and how to talk to other editors. He laughed and said it had not occurred to him that he had looked like the aggressor and was editing like a troll. He has since written me again saying that he had taken my advice and had finished the page calmly.

The rules apply equally to the paranormal and the skeptic communities. This is not a game or a joke. Wikipedia is too important for people not to take seriously. First learn to edit and start on non-confrontational pages. Improve pages by fixing grammar and spelling. Work on many topics, which shows the editing community that you are there to help. Create a username that does not show your bias: handles like “Chopra-
isaidiot” and “TeamRandi” shout to the world that you are a skeptic and are needlessly confrontational.

Wikipedia is the sixth-most viewed website in the world. It is the closest thing we have to a repository of all knowledge. In my opinion, it is extremely important to make sure that content concerning scientific skepticism is accurate and well-cited. When people are looking for reliable answers to their questions about paranormal topics or are trying to determine the competency of a specific person, it is most likely they will turn to Wikipedia. It is our responsibility to make sure the answers they are getting are the closest we can get to being accurate. This is the goal of the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project. You do not have to join our team to improve Wikipedia content; anyone can edit. Instructions on how to do so are all over the Internet. If you like working on projects with other like-minded people and would like hands-on training, GSoW might be the best solution for you. Write to us at GSoWteam@gmail.com.