“But I like being around people, a lot….”

I was sitting in my boyfriend’s parents’ guest room, contorting my face into a frown, on the phone with a woman who promised to tell me my personality type.

“But introverts speak a certain way,” she said, “and you speak that way.”

“What way?” I asked.

“Well, you think before you respond.”

“I was taught to do that in media training. I’m not sure it comes naturally to me.”

“Even so.”

I had thought this session would go very differently. After spending $150 on an online Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator, I expected the “Myers Briggs expert” to walk me through my results and explain what each letter of my “ENFP” result meant. But instead, she had spent the last forty minutes trying to convince me that even though I had scored extremely highly in the extrovert category, I was actually an introvert.

“When you go into a conference, are you excited? Or after three days, are you exhausted?”

“Well, when I think of conferences, I think of being in windowless rooms for ten hours a day….”

“Still, does it sound tiring?”

“Yes.”

“See?!”

“No.”

The Myers Briggs Type Indicator uses a list of ninety-three questions to analyze the taker’s personality along four axes: extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. My results indicated that I was an extroverted, intuitive, feeling perceiver. But Clara (not her real name) didn’t believe it.

“I think you scored so high because it’s your defense mechanism.”

“Extroversion?”

“Yes.”

Clara explained that being a journalist indicated an introverted personality. If I were extroverted, she explained, I would never get my writing done. I would sit down at my computer, get up, restlessly pace, and not be able to finish, without the external stimuli of coworkers and teammates.

“Well, it is often like that,” I said. “The actual writing part of writing is the hardest part. But as a journalist, you talk to people a lot. And actually, a lot of my work is on the radio, where I interact with people all the time.”

“Hmm,” she pondered, skeptically. “Are you loyal?”

“I actually think I might be less loyal than other people.”

“Hmm.”

I didn’t know what loyalty had to do with anything, but I felt her cognitive dissonance clanging against my answers. She had decided that as a writer, I couldn’t possibly be an extrovert, and nothing was going to convince her otherwise.

“Let me describe an extrovert to you,” she continued. Her definition was the typical one: extroverts get their energy from being around others. They enjoy holding parties. They want to hear from their friends unexpectedly. They enjoy performing.

“Yes, I am all of those things,” I replied, becoming more annoyed that we had spent so much time on the first of four measures, and the one on which I had gotten the clearest result. On an extroversion scale of 0-30, I had scored a 25.

Clara exasperatedly accepted my answer “for now” and continued on to the other values. I was an intuitive rather than a sensor, she explained. Sensors take in data and facts from the world around them, analyzing as they go. Intuitives look for deeper meanings and associations. They care about theories and frameworks, more than the details that make up the big picture. Unlike the colloquial definition of “intuitive,” this didn’t mean I was prone to making gut decisions instead of looking at the evidence (which would make me a poor journalist indeed), but that I looked for the big picture and then worked backward, rather than stacking up facts to build a conclusion. This seemed accurate enough.

As a feeler, Clara said, I appreciate people deeply, listen to their feelings readily, have strong interpersonal values and sympathy for others. Thinkers, on the other hand, value logic, reason, and objectivity above these mushy ideals.

“I certainly think I do both of those,” I said, “I think it’s sort of the job of the thoughtful person to balance their feelings with their rationality, right?”

“Yes,” Clara said, “but everyone does one more than the other.”

I began to wonder how valuable this insight was. Sure, each person is going to come down a little stronger on one side or the other in any binary decision, but if a person’s results are close to the center line (as mine were), what was the value of overemphasizing her place on one side of it?

Finally, we got to my fourth dimension: judging and perceiving. I was a perceiver, Clara told me. Flexible, spontaneous, undaunted by surprise, and open to change. Rather than appreciating schedules and routines, I thrived in an atmosphere of change and dynamic action. I wasn’t a natural list-maker, calendar-user, or organizer, unless I had learned to be one. This much is certainly accurate. I have learned to make lists and keep calendars only because I will forget everything if I don’t, but nothing comes less naturally to me than keeping a routine. The P of my ENFP, I felt, was my strongest hit.

As Clara wrapped my results into one, she returned to the problem of my alleged extroversion.

“I just really don’t see you as an ENFP,” she said. “And this is why I can’t just use Myers Briggs. I really need to use the Enneagram too. May I?”

The enneagram is another personality testing system with a more New Age bent. It consists of nine personality types, rather than sixteen, and an intricate system in which the types “grow toward” or “devolve toward” other types. Clara diagnosed me as a Type 7: The Enthusiast. Since The Enthusiast was so outwardly-oriented, friendly, and optimistic, she said, I falsely thought I was an extrovert, but I am not.

“See, the 7 is oriented toward people and so is the extrovert,” she explained, “so it’s confusing you.”

Boy, was it.

No longer eager to stay on the phone for more analysis, I accepted her strange conclusion about my personality: that I am an enthusiastic introvert who loves to be around people but only sort of pretends to like them.

“Whatever,” I thought, “I’ll just read the materials about my type.”

For my $150 fee, I had been given not only this generous ninety-minute session with an expert, but also a book called Looking at Type: The Fundamentals. The book went into depth on each type, describing how each of the four orientations interacts to make sixteen distinct types.

I opened to ENFP and INFP and compared. Although I found some elements of the INFP familiar (“may feel a strong need to contribute something of importance to the world”), several descriptions didn’t fit me at all (“Their deep need and desire for harmony can sometimes show as a concern with keeping peace, and with maturity”). The ENFP felt like a much stronger hit, with statements like “ENFPs are typically intolerant of routine, and they need variety in their work,” and “ENFPs are typically quite independent and tend not to be great upholders of tradition. In fact, it is natural for them to push boundaries and redefine rules.”

I mentally compared the system to astrology, wherein people are grouped into twelve personality types based solely on the day (and sometimes the hour) they were born. Astrology only seems to work by virtue of the Forer Effect, also known as the Barnum Effect, whereby statements are worded just generally enough to apply to almost everyone, but just specifically enough to feel insightful. Statements such as, “You can throw yourself into a project with gusto, but sometimes you feel tired and withdrawn and can’t be motivated” or “You don’t always live up to your potential,” are typical Forer statements. They slyly go both ways, confirming and disconfirming at the same time. But Myers-Briggs, to its credit, picked a lane.

As I compared my results to others in the booklet, I found little in common with most other types. The INTJ, for example, is called “quietly innovative,” and may “neglect to attend to feeling and relationship issues, and forget to express appreciation or empathy when these are needed.” Such statements are as foreign to me as “You are made of cake.”

Still, where astrology’s weakness is in being so general as to be useless, Myers-Briggs’ weakness may be being so rigid as to pigeonhole. Various practitioners warn not to be too restrictive in one’s use of the system, but in practice this is exactly what happens. The tests are used to evaluate job applicants, adjudicate disputes, and better understand teammates. In some ways, these may be useful, but the more institutional the system becomes, the more potential it has to cause systemic hurt.

After I had reviewed my results, I texted my friend and podcast cohost, Ross Blocher. Ross had taken the same test and had his own phone consultation with another MBTI expert, and we were both going to report on our findings on our show. Ross had been pegged as an ESTP, though he was close to the middle on both middle aspects, the S and T.

I opened my book to ESTP and began reading. Ross and I have known each other for almost six years, and worked closely together for five of those six. Of all the people in my life, Ross is one of the friends I know best, and I believe I understand both his strengths and weaknesses (weakness #1: Does not like avocado).

As I paged through the description for ESTP, I wrinkled my nose and scratched up the margin. “No!” “ROSS?!” “Not at all,” I was scribbling. After being impressed with my own results, my marginal faith in the system was coming crashing down within a few paragraphs of Ross’s. Nothing fit! This was the nail in the coffin for the Myers-Briggs, and I picked up the phone to tell Ross as much, when I glance at the top.

I had been reading the wrong description. This one was for ENTJ, not ESTP.

I flipped to ESTP. It sounded perfectly like Ross. There were a few exceptions, but for the most part, it described him in ways that were insightful and helped me rethink arguments we had had and ways we are different. As far as confirmation bias goes, it had been working against Myers-Briggs, and Myers-Briggs had won. I was impressed.

But is impressive enough to make it useful? After all, everything in the Myers-Briggs is self-reported. The results are not an objective look at a person’s behavior, but a rehashing of how the test-taker sees herself. All I can really say of Ross’s results is that I agree with Ross’s assessment of himself. And, no surprise here: I agree with my own assessment of myself, restated to me in new words.

The Myers-Briggs has always suffered from these limitations. Developed by a mother-daughter team (neither of whom had a psychology degree) nearly a century ago, the inventory was based on the insights of Carl Jung, who believed everyone thinks and behaves along three axes: extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, and thinking/feeling. Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers added the judging/perceiving axis and used their new inventory to better understand the people in their lives.

As for scientific validation, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is not a scientific test. The ninety-three–question “inventory” (administrators prefer not to call it a test) ranges from the straightforward (“When you go somewhere for the day, would you rather plan what you will do and when, or just go?”) to the bizarrely vague (“Which word appeals to you more: create or make?”). As a result, the test’s repeatability leaves much to be desired. As psychology reporter Annie Murphy Paul writes in the singular book, The Cult of Personality,

“One investigation (conducted by Indicator proponents, no less) found that the percentage of people who achieved the same four-part type across two administrations was only 47 percent. In other words, more than half of those who took the Myers-Briggs were given a different type when they took the same questionnaire a short time later.”

Few scientific tests have such low repeatability, and a pregnancy test that was only right half the time would be considered worse than useless (though, to be fair, a pregnancy test has only two potential results). Murphy goes on,

“One of the most thorough appraisals of the Myers-Briggs… notes that a variety of studies have found that 24 to 61 percent of test takers receive the same Myers-Briggs type when reexamined at intervals ranging from five weeks to six years. That means, of course, that 39 to 76 percent are assigned a different type.”¹

I am one of the lucky 24 to 61 percent; my type has stayed the same since I first took the Myers-Briggs in twelfth grade, now fourteen years ago. I have taken the test a few times (usually for free, and without the guidance of an “expert”) since then, especially as 1990s questionnaire madness was at its peak, and recall only once getting a different result, off by one letter (I was in a very thinking, rather than feeling, mood that day). For those who do get different results years later, so be it. Many of us wouldn’t want to know our teenage selves, for example. But for those who got a different result at five weeks, they would be reasonable to question the efficacy and utility of the test. And the many MBTI proponents who argue that your personality type, like IQ, never changes have a problem.

As this ENFP closed her personality materials, it was easy to see that the Myers-Briggs was handier than I anticipated, but it was useful in the way a profound book or thoughtful poem might give me insight into a person or situation. The most serviceable thing the MBTI gave me was a new way to understand the people I love—the ones who have different ways of viewing the world than I do. In simple terms, it’s an art not a science. But unfortunately, it is often presented as a science, and job applicants, employees, and cast-off lovers are worse off for it.

So go ahead: Take the MBTI. But don’t hire, fire, or love anyone on the basis of their results.

And for God’s sake, if someone tells you they’re an extrovert, believe them.

1 Paul, Annie Murphy. 2004. The Cult of Personality. New York: Simon & Schuster.

How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth. By David Clarke. Aurum Press, Ltd., London, 2015. 312 pp. $28.99.

One of the most profound observations ever made about UFOs was that of the late British Fortean author Hilary Evans in his essay “A Twentieth Century Myth”: “No anomalous phenomenon has generated so rich an anomaly-cluster as the flying saucer. Kenneth Arnold’s straightforward, uncomplicated sighting” was gradually embedded in “a sprawling aggregate of associated happenings”—cattle mutilations, crop circles, black helicopters, Men in Black, saucer crashes and saucer bases, contactees, abductees, etc.—“constituting a wonderfully rich and elaborate mythology unmatched in the world’s folklore.”

This is, I’m sure, what Clarke means when he says that UFOs “Conquered the World,” and in this book he sets out to understand why. Clarke explains this using another quote from Evans: “Hilary Evans said that most of us have never known a time when there was no such thing as a UFO. ‘Yet there was such a time,’ he wrote. ‘UFOs are a creation of our time, and when their time came, they were born.’”

Clarke teaches journalism and media law at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom and writes a monthly column for Fortean Times magazine. (British Forteans, for whatever reason, tend to be much more skeptical than their American counterparts.) And unlike some writers who dabble in folklore and UFOs, Clarke understands that when stories parallel folklore, it suggests they are fiction not truth. “Folklorists categorize invented or false stories as examples of what they call ‘ostension,’ whereby people either spontaneously or deliberately create new stories and events that reproduce existing lore and legends.” He presents a detailed argument showing how pre-1947 science-fiction stories already contained most of the significant themes later turning up as “actual” UFO claims:

Ockham’s razor suggests that aliens are not monsters from the Id, or expressions of a collective unconscious, let alone travellers from another world. They are products of our imagination and the science fiction that has been clogging our brains for more than a century.

The book begins largely autobiographically, describing Clarke’s own infatuation with UFOs as a youth growing up in the 1970s. As a teenager he began investigating local UFO sightings and saw problems in the narratives that others overlooked. “During the encounters that followed my doubts grew and my naïve faith was challenged to the breaking point.” He was surprised to find that UFOlogists, including some well-known ones, instead of welcoming prosaic explanations for sightings, resisted them. One supposed UFO witness told Clarke, when presented with a logical explanation, “Look, you can’t take this sighting away from me!”

Clarke launches into an overview history of UFOs, not surprisingly concentrating on the British perspective. Much of this information is not available elsewhere for readers in the United States. He shows how observers at the famous UFO “hotspot” at Warminster were easily fooled by simple hoax balloons launched from a nearby hill and how when this was revealed in a BBC television program the UFO spotters refused to accept the explanation.

When the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) began releasing some UFO-related documents in 1998, Clarke was among the first to pore over them. He was surprised to find how little substance they contained. When the United Kingdom passed a freedom of information act in 2005, Clarke began requesting UFO-related documents from the Ministry of Defence. In 2007, the MOD began a mass-release of records from its UFO desk.

The time I had invested researching the older files and my contacts with the UFO desk staff made me the obvious curator for the collection. It was quite a turnaround. After a decade acting as a poacher I suddenly found myself playing the role of a gamekeeper. From 2008 I began working with the staff at Kew to prepare ten separate tranches of documents for release. A total of 227 files and more than 52,000 pages were eventually scanned and uploaded to the National Archives web site where they can be downloaded by anyone.

This has, perhaps inevitably, brought Clarke into a long-standing feud with Nick Pope, who has made a twenty-year career as a big-name UFOlogist out of having worked on the MOD UFO desk for three years during the early 1990s. But believers in UFO conspiracies refused to accept that there are no secret, bombshell UFO files hidden away. “The UFO Truthers, as I now call them, refuse to believe anything unless it has first been denied.”

Clarke gives us an interesting history of British UFO contactees, especially George King, who claimed to be in contact with a space god called Master Aetherius. Noting that seventeen years after his death King had been deified as a “cosmic avatar” by the leader of the church he founded, Clarke remarked, “I could not see why those who claim that flying saucers bring messages from the gods should be regarded as any less genuinely held, or unbelievable, than the tenets of any other religion.” He then presents a discussion of UFOs in the context of religion, finding many similarities.

I spotted a few minor errors, most probably owing to the still-significant gulf between American and British UFOlogy (for example, he places the media frenzy over fabulist Bob Lazar’s Area 51 claims in Los Angeles instead of Las Vegas)—and I will overlook his comment that CSICOP/CSI is a “notorious sceptical organization.”

Clarke, like most British Forteans, opts for the “psychosocial hypothesis” (PSH) to explain UFOs and most other Fortean phenomena. He illustrates it with a quote from the British journalist Bryan Appleyard saying that the PSH explains UFOs as “products of our minds: projections of our anxieties or aspirations, culturally determined fantasies or hallucinations or new religions in the process of emerging from the ashes of the old.” Clarke contrasts this with “debunking of the type associated with Richard Dawkins,” because the PSH sees the social phenomenon of UFOs “as interesting and worthy of serious study.” I don’t recall any UFO skeptic suggesting that they are not.

Given that the PSH sees UFOs as “fantasies or hallucinations” that are “products of our minds,” the difference between the two approaches (PSH and “debunking”) would seem to be largely semantic. The PSH seems to amount to a polite and respectful way of saying “it’s all in your mind,” suggesting that there are good reasons for that being the case.

However, none of this detracts significantly from the importance of the book; it is the best book on UFOs to appear in a long time, and I encourage everyone interested in the subject to read it.

I went to see my dental hygienist today, and the conversation went this way:

• Hygienist – “I love your hat, Susan.”
• Susan – “Thank you! I got it on my trip to Australia. I bought it at the Tasmanian Zoo. It’s a Tasmanian devil.”
• Hygienist – “Wow! What a vacation!”
• Susan – “Well it wasn't actually a vacation—I went to lecture and ended up touring all over Australia and even Hong Kong.”
• Hygienist – “What? What do you lecture on? Photography?”
• Susan – “No.  I teach people how to edit Wikipedia, focusing on scientific content.”
• Hygienist – “I've never heard of people doing that. Do you work for Wikipedia?”
• Susan – “No, I'm just a regular person. A volunteer.”
• Hygienist – “Who would pay for you to teach people then? And why?”
• Susan – “I was asked to lecture by the skeptic community. Skeptics are really interested in education, and they know that Wikipedia is one of the top hits when people are looking for information about a subject. They think that it is really important that people get really good information so that they can make better decisions. Skeptics are really into that kind of thing; skepticism is really consumer activism. If someone or something is making a claim, we feel that they should be able to back up that claim with evidence. Otherwise how do you actually know if something works? I have a team of people from all over the world that edits Wikipedia in many different languages. We focus on claims of the paranormal, science, and spokespeople in the science and skeptic world. That's why they asked me to talk.”

After she got over looking stunned, the conversation turned to my flossing habits. While she was poking around, I got to thinking about my month-long adventure and how strange it must sound to people outside our community.

I was asked by Ross Balch, the president of the Brisbane Skeptics and host of the Skeptically Challenged podcast, to be a speaker for the October Australian Skeptic Convention. After I pinched myself and asked my boss for several weeks off work, I decided that I would ask around the other Australian skeptic groups to see if I could turn it into a Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) tour. Organizing that turned out to be quite a chore and a true learning experience for me. After weeks of emails everything was arranged. GSoW patron Aubrey Ayash kindly funded everything not covered by the various skeptic groups hosting me. The following is a summary of my trip. It’s truly a Herculean task to try to reduce this experience to a readable article, but I’ll try.

All of the GSoW lectures were designed to be adaptable to the audience, and they followed the same format:

• What is the GSoW project?
• Why is it important to edit Wikipedia?
• How is GSoW working to improve exposure of our skeptical spokespeople, organizations, publications, and so on?

Each lecture used different examples that I felt were relevant to that specific group. I'm aware that simply talking about Wikipedia editing can be quite technical and go over a lot of people's heads. I tried to keep it light, informal, and interactive. My goal was to improve exposure of the GSoW project and to inspire skeptics to become involved in crowd-sourced projects. I did this by explaining how small acts of activism, when acting with others, can make a large impact. I also hoped to make contacts for future projects and maybe recruit a few new members to GSoW.

My first lecture was for the Mordi Skeptics, located in the seaside town of Mordialloc. We talked about facilitated communication and homeopathy. The next day, I spoke to the Victoria Skeptics in Melbourne, where we focused on the Burzynski clinic and the Bell witch. I then travelled over to Launceston, Tasmania, where I did two workshops. They were completely hands on where we, as a group, rewrote a Wikipedia page for a local historical home that had been investigated by a local ghost group.

Canberra, the capital of Australia, was my next location for another lecture where the topic was the Joe Nickell Wikipedia page. (I knew that Nickell was going to be lecturing to them a couple weeks later). After Canberra I travelled to Sydney where I was the speaker for a Skeptics in the Pub event, this time talking about my adventures with psychic grief vampires during the Operation Bumblebee project. A few days after, we had a three-hour workshop where about twenty people made their first edits on Wikipedia, improving many articles.

My final destination in Australia was the actual National Convention that I had been asked to attend, in Brisbane (more on that in a minute). After the conference I went to speak to the Hong Kong and Dongguan skeptic groups in China. While there I talked about my journey through cancer treatment using medical science only, as well as other stories.

Photo by Susan Gerbic

I have to tell you that this was an amazing experience for me, one that I will never forget. These groups (other than the Sydney Skeptics) are all pretty small; between eight and thirty people might have attended my lectures. Small groups, though, are more intimate. Those that did attend asked great questions, and left feeling that they knew a lot more about what is happening in the skeptic world. Many people told me that they had no idea that ordinary people such as themselves could actually edit Wikipedia. They thought that it was for some specially trained squad of tech-types and not for “regular people.” We explored topics that they found interesting and looked at view stats and at the pages that most people don't realize exist. David Young, leader of the Hong Kong Skeptics, explained that most of the members of his group are unable to attend skeptic conferences, so money is better spent to bring speakers in to meet the group.

Photo by Susan Gerbic

I found that all of the Australian groups are loosely affiliated with each other, and the main hub is the Australian Skeptics Inc. group located in Sydney. Australian Skeptics Inc. produce The Skeptic magazine, the second oldest English-language skeptic journal in the world. In time for the conference, GSoW editor Michelle Franklin rewrote the Wikipedia page for the Australian Skeptics, removing the clutter and making it easier to read. The previous Wikipedia page looked like somebody had just dumped miscellaneous information relating to skepticism and Australia onto the page.  The Australian Skeptics were formed in 1980 when James Randi, the key investigator for CSICOP, was sponsored by Australian Dick Smith to come and lecture to the groups.  The first National Convention was held in Sydney in 1985 and has since traveled between the various cities.

Photo by Mal Vicker (used with permission)

The Australian National Convention, held in October 2015, began with a free SkeptiCamp at a bar in the center of Brisbane. I'm told that this was the 100th Camp worldwide. If you haven't yet attended one of these, you need to find a way to get to one. They are usually a day event with twenty-minute lectures by mostly local skeptics as the speakers. This year’s event had the following speakers:

• Tim Harding - “Some Origins of Western Quackery”
• Chris Guest - “The Bioinformatics of Creation”
• Dave Hawkes - “The Trojan Horse of Pseudoscience”
• Maureen Chuck - “Homeopathy Nonplussed”
• Nick Andrew - “Thinking Bad Redux”
• James Fodor - “Philosophy of Science – What Skeptics Need to Know”
• Richard Saunders - “Confessions from the Million Dollar Challenge”
• Angie Feazel Mattke – “Alternative Medicine: Placebo or Panacea?”  

At the end of SkeptiCamp, Ross Balch recorded a panel discussion for the Skeptically Challenged podcast.

Photo by Mal Vicker (used with permission)

The main event was at the Queensland University of Technology next to the beautiful Brisbane Botanic Gardens. The emcees for the event were Jake Farr-Wharton and Chrys Stevenson, who were quite entertaining with many wardrobe changes and skits in between each lecture.

I was unable to attend several of the lectures, but hopefully video of them will be released. I missed:

• “Decision-making: Why it Always Seems Rational, Even When it’s Not “ by Peter Ellerton
• “The Greatest and Bestest Certifiably Non-Fad Diet... Ever!” by Jake Farr-Wharton
• “A Skeptic’s Guide to Thinking Like a Journalist” by Signe Cane  
• “Science’s Answer to Science Denial“ by John Cook
• “Skeptics Positive Psychology” by James C. Coyne
• “Theory of Mind: Emotion Expression and Deception Detection” by Holly Warland
• “Science Education - Research, Policy and Politics” by Theo Clark

Photo by Mal Vicker (used with permission)

Finally, and sadly, I missed the lecture by Nobel Laureate physicist Brian Schmidt who is so awesome that he doesn’t even need a lecture title.

Microbiologist Mel Thomson's lecture “Professional Quack-Busting Just got Personal” dealt with her recent diagnosis with tumefactive multiple sclerosis and her interactions with people who sell snake-oil and quack services. Thomson used expensive designer shoes as a unit of measure throughout the presentation, which was quite refreshing.

Ketan Joshi started out his lecture by getting my full attention. He asked where I was sitting in the audience and then proceeded to describe how his potential Wikipedia disambiguation page could be written. That was a really nice touch. Joshi works for a renewable energy company and used his expertise in solar and wind power to explain something called wind turbine syndrome. Wow … just Wow!

I had met YouTuber and podcaster Myles Power a few days before the conference, as we had both arrived early in Brisbane. I had been looking forward to meeting Myles as we have a lot in common, and I wanted to trade stories about our run-ins with grief vampires. We finally did find some time to sit down and share stories, and he gave me some great advice about how best to use Facebook and YouTube to your advantage. I had been looking forward to his lecture “AIDS Denialism... Yep That's a Thing” because I knew almost nothing about the folks who deny that AIDS exists. I was also fascinated to learn the story of how AIDS denialists almost managed to remove his YouTube videos and ban him from producing more, just by filing a DMCA request. What a roller-coaster story.

Photo by Mal Vicker (used with permission)

Paranormal investigator Joe Nickell and I have met many times. The stories that he tells are so entertaining and fascinating, I would be happy to just listen to him for hours. Nickell's lecture “Adventures in Skepticism” detailed several of his investigations, including the Shroud of Turin, billet-reading and, finally, the Nazca Lines. Nickell tells the story of how, with the help of family members, he “drew” the heron geoglyph using only simple tools. Years later, National Geographic asked him to draw the spider, which he did as a part of their TV series.

The Nazca Lines came up again during Lynne Kelly's lecture, “Memory Places: Adding Rational Intellect to Stonehenge.” Kelly presented us with her research with stone-circles such as Stonehenge, and other places from all over the world. Personally, I was spellbound and when she stated that she was trying to get through her lecture and stay on time, I thought “Go ahead. Take all the time you need. I'll stay and listen.” She tied all of these sites together, including the Nazca Lines, and proclaimed that the creators used the landscape as a mnemonic tool. Before people had a way to write things down, people needed to know their history and important facts such as when to plant crops. By using ritual walking paths as a memory aid, they were able to pass on very complicated stories to later generations.

Cassandra Perryman's lecture “Marijuana: Saint or Sinner?” asked and answered a lot of common misconceptions about marijuana. There was a lot of information included in her talk, proving, at least to me, that the question, “Is there more benefit or harm in marijuana?” does not have a simple answer. Perryman was also the principal convention organizer.

President of the Brisbane Skeptics, and the person responsible for asking me to come to the conference, Ross Balch presented “Mysterious Malaise: The Case of the Missing Microbes.” He gave us two case studies dealing with illnesses that have malaise conditions where it was thought that microbes were the problem. After examining both, the microbes were nowhere to be found. He also talked about the detrimental role that advocacy groups can have on research by misdirecting focus on treatments already known to be ineffective.

I'm proud to say that I've known Eugenie Scott for years. She is one of the main organizers of SkeptiCal, which I wrote about in the January/February 2016 Skeptical Inquirer issue.  Dr. Scott's Australian convention lecture was quite straightforward, “Kitzmiler v Dover at 10 years: Lessons Learned,” which was a review of this very important American court case. She stated that although we still see people try to impose creationism in schools, the newest challenge is climate change denialism.

One of the great things about attending these conferences is that it often brings you in contact with your heroes, and you can actually meet and talk with them. This is something that you don’t have the ability to do when you consume content through the Internet. I had been hearing about Loretta Marron for years on the Skeptic Zone podcast and was thrilled that she was a speaker. As with Lynne Kelly, mentioned above and now added to my hero list, she has done amazing things with her life. Marron has been awarded the Order of Australia and has won “The Australian Skeptic of the Year” award three times. Her lecture “Crazy and Cruel Cancer ‘Cures’” was a big hit with the audience, as well as with me as we are both members of the “lived through breast cancer club.” As the title explains, she discussed the crazy cures that plague the medical world preying on the desperate and the uninformed.

My own lecture featured a plea to the skeptic community to stop eating its own through drama blogging and to keep the focus on the real “enemies,” those who feed on the population taking money without providing the services promised. I also stated that the biggest problem in the skeptical world today isn’t laws, money, education, religion, or parenting. In my opinion, our biggest problem is finding and retaining good people. We need to find, train, and motivate those people who are going to lead, invent, motivate, educate, inspire, and help us to change the world for the better. I know that these people are out there, but they might not yet be aware that we are looking for them. In my lecture I showcased the work GSoW has done to improve Wikipedia pages that are Australian focused, including a complete rewrite of the Australian Skeptic Wikipedia page by my editor Michelle Franklin. Please see our GSoW blog for a complete listing of work completed.

Photo by Mal Vicker (used with permission)

The conference had two panel discussions. One, answering questions about how to parent skeptically, included Alison Gaylard, Dave Hawkes, Eran Segev, Jake Farr-Wharton and Jo Alabaster.  Questions such as “What to do when your child wants to play with children from anti-vax homes?” and the big question: “How do you deal with the Santa story?” The other panel discussion was about challenges in skepticism, hosted by Ross Balch and featuring Signe Cane, Myles Power, Eran Segev, and me. We answered questions such as “Does skepticism have an image problem?” and questions about the demographics and factionalization in the skeptic community.

Photo by Mal Vicker (used with permission)

The Gala dinner on Saturday night was quite a treat as it showcased some of the best that Australia had to offer the community last year:

• The Australian skeptic and humanist community raised AUD 24,000 for one of our own, Jode Matthews. Her family has experienced several health setbacks in a short period of time and needed some financial help to pay for a non-subsidized drug that boosts the effectiveness of Jode’s chemo treatment.
• Two bottles of wine from Brian Schmidt’s winery “Maipenrai” were donated and auctioned during the conference. Donations went to the Rotary Internationals End Polio Now Fund, which receives two dollars for every dollar donated from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The two bottles of wine raised an amount that will buy 20,000 doses of polio vaccine.
• Every year the Australian Skeptics “honor” the “perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of paranormal or pseudo-scientific piffle” with the Bent Spoon Award. This has been awarded since 1982 and is made from gopher wood supposedly from Noah’s Ark and topped with a spoon bent by using supernatural powers and rumored to have been used at the Last Supper. The 2015 Bent Spoon was awarded to Australian chef and TV personality “Paleo Pete” Evans, for his support of pseudomedicine and his anti-fluoridation stance.
• The Thornett Award is presented each year to a person who has made a significant contribution to educating the public on issues of science and reason. For 2015 the award went to Greg and Catherine Hughes, who started the “Light for Riley” campaign. In March 2015 their infant son Riley died from pertussis (whooping cough), and his parents have been working since then to bring awareness to fighting vaccine-preventable diseases. They were unable to attend and accept the Thornett Award at the conference since they were busy handing out information explaining the importance of vaccinations at a baby product trade show.

This GSoW tour was really inspiring for me personally. I was able to meet and spend quality time with several of my Australian editors: Greg Neilson, Monica Quijano and Svetlana Bavykina. We recruited several new trainees to the project and gathered more photos and citations for future projects. Since then, we have created Wikipedia pages for the Launceston Skeptics, Loretta Marron (in English and Russian), as well as a page for Lynne Kelly. I was able to update many Australian museums’ Wikipedia pages as I traveled through the country. There is also a need to update several pages on local history.

I was well cared for by the people in our community, with someone picking me up at each stop and making sure that I was never lost or lonely. People were very generous with their time, taking me to see Tasmanian Devils and kangaroos, visiting museums or just hanging out over a cheeseburger. What amazing people. I encourage everyone to not just visit a place but use social media to find our community. Skeptic groups in areas all over the world have Meetup.com and Facebook pages; reach out to them and make your own mini-tour. I’m sure that they are as interested in meeting you as you are in meeting them. As with most conferences, you think that you are attending for the lectures, but you always return because of the people.

Videos and photos from the conference can be found at susangerbic.com.

Just in case you’re interested, the Australian National Skeptic Convention for 2016 will be held in Melbourne, November 26-27, 2016.

The world of Welcome to Night Vale is surreal and haunting—and it’s the setting of one of the most popular independent podcasts in the world. Set in a mysterious desert town, it’s a cross between Twin Peaks, Area 51, and even a touch of Monty Python. The community radio station host, Cecil Palmer (voiced by actor Cecil Baldwin), relates out-of-the-ordinary events as the everyday experiences of its inhabitants.

While many skeptics may deride conspiracy theories and the paranormal, you cannot deny the creative inspiration such claims provide to shows like Welcome to Night Vale. Joseph Fink, the cocreator of the show, has been touring the world with the Night Vale team, doing live shows and promoting the new Night Vale novel, with a forthcoming tour of Australia in 2016 (where he may have the opportunity to find out more about the Talmud Shud mystery…).

Joseph Fink: I’ve been working with my cowriter, Jeffrey Cranor, for about six years, now. We wrote a play together—did it in the East Village in New York City, which is where, you know, you do plays. I enjoyed working with Jeffrey; I wanted to keep working with him. Both of us really like storytelling—just single person, simple storytelling.

It’s something that’s fairly common here in New York, because there’s a lot of theater, but no one has any money because they’re doing theater in New York City! There’s a lot of, like, “I don’t have money for props, I don’t have money for costumes. I’m just going to stand here, and I’m going to tell you a story!”

That can be really fascinating, and so I really wanted to try and capture that—so I created this idea of community radio from a small town, where every conspiracy theory was true. It’s allowed us to use that single storyteller narration with not a lot of additions.

I brought in some people who are in a theater company I work with quite a bit, called the New York Neo-Futurists, so Cecil Baldwin has been a member of the Neo-Futurists for a while, and I asked him to perform it.

Kylie Sturgess: Do you actually ever do community radio yourself, or have any of the members of the team?

Fink: No, Night Vale is not something that came that much out of radio. It really did come more out of the idea of single person storytelling. There’s a lot of popular radio that people sort of just kind of assume Jeffrey and I have listened to—and in fact, we’ve never heard any!

I’ve not listed to most of the old radio serials; I’ve never heard Prairie Home Companion. I did do, I think, about a week at my college radio station just to kind of see what that was like, and it was okay.

Sturgess: You’re not much of a fan of radio drama, but you’re a fan of podcasts. What got you into saying, “Okay, this needs to be podcasted”?

Fink: I was more wanting to do a podcast before the idea came along… the idea of doing a podcast came before the idea of Night Vale. I really love podcasts; I think there’s just a lot of freedom there. Podcasting is still a really young form, and so there’s still this ability to do things that no one’s ever done with it. Which is not something that’s really available to you in a lot of other forms.

It’s also—it’s the low barrier of entry. We started Night Vale with a sixty dollar USB mic that I already had and a free audio editing software I downloaded, five dollars a month for hosting. That’s still how we make it.

The USB microphone broke, and we updated it with a hundred dollar USB microphone, but it’s still, it’s just, you don’t need that much in order to make a podcast that can exist on the same level as every other podcast!

Sturgess: Welcome to Night Vale is set in a community radio station from a weird desert town where every conspiracy theory is true. Have you always been interested in conspiracy theories?

Fink: Yeah, I’ve always loved conspiracy theories. I don’t really believe them, but I just think they’re fascinating stories. I love them on a storytelling level, on sort of a, a way they act sort of like a religious mythology. They explain why the world is the way it is. As a kid, I would get books of conspiracy theories out of the library, and now I browse through all the weird Wikipedia pages on conspiracy, and out-of-place artefacts and stuff. A lot of that ends up in the show.

Sturgess: What about the audience response, however? Some people might be believers in these kinds of conspiracies; some might be skeptical. How do they respond?

Fink: I think the point of Night Vale is not whether or not the conspiracy theories are true. I just think that’s something that, you know, we use it as a basis, so it’s more about, just, I think it’s more about just dealing with how weird and dangerous life is.

Life in Night Vale is very dangerous, very hard to understand, but so is real life. I think a lot of people can really relate, and really, I think, find some comfort in this idea of a town where life is dangerous and hard to understand, but people just get on with their lives and get on with their days and go about their business anyway.

Sturgess: The show has stayed as a podcast; it isn’t licensed for radio broadcast. What led to this decision?

Fink: Really, there’s just never been a reason to. It’s available all over the world in podcast form, and people seem to want to watch it on YouTube, for some reason, so it’s also available there if you want to stare at our logo while you listen to it. It’s just, you know, there’s not really a reason .... We get requests all the time from radio stations, “We’d like to play your show,” and it just doesn’t, to us, it seems like, “Well, make something of your own.” We just don’t have any reason to put it on the radio when it exists as podcasts. That’s kind of in the podcasting world.

Sturgess: The Welcome to Night Vale book is out, and I thought it was pretty accessible to new readers, for people who weren’t into podcasting. I was able to give them the book and they got into it. There’s also scenes in it that are familiar, characters that are familiar, for regular listeners of the show. How did you achieve the balance in creating the book Welcome to Night Vale?

Fink: It’s a balance we’re very conscious of. It’s the same balance that we have—you know, we’ve written four different live scripts—and it’s the same sort of thing we do with the live shows that we tour. We want super fans that have listened to every episode three times to really get something out of it. At the same time, we want people who are coming to the show, who don’t even know that we’re a podcast, they know nothing about us, we want them to be able to follow the show and enjoy it. That’s something we’ve been doing with the live show for a while.

We did the same thing with the book, which is, you know, yes, if you’re a super fan I think you’ll find stuff in the book that other readers wouldn’t, but we really did write it to be something you can pick up just because, because the cover is interesting to you, or maybe you’ve heard something about it, and then be able to just completely follow the characters and have a satisfying experience without ever needing to know anything about the podcast at all.

Sturgess: You mentioned the live scripts. What’s it like taking a podcast to the stage?

Fink: It’s a lot of fun! It’s something we’ve been doing for a couple of years now. We’ve done a little over a hundred and sixty live shows in eleven different countries. Since we’re stopping off in New Zealand first this tour, Australia will actually be our thirteenth country that we’ve toured into.

Sturgess: Wow, that’s impressive!

Fink: Yeah, we’ve done it all over. The live shows have really developed into their own thing that kind of is this parallel but separate from the podcast. They’re these full shows of live theater, in a way. As you said, we all kind of have theater experience, so it was pretty easy to develop it into a live show. Cecil, our narrator, is a trained stage actor.

The shows are done radio theater style, in that it’s just microphones and actors holding scripts, and then our musician playing the background music live. There’re no sets or costumes or anything, but Cecil in front of an audience, with just a microphone, has this ability to really move an audience and kind of control them. He has this really great way of interacting with an audience; it’s a lot of fun to watch.

The Australia tour will be with Dessa Darling, who is a Minneapolis-based rapper. Dessa is somebody we’ve toured with a few times. This will actually, I believe, be her first time performing in Australia. She is easily the coolest person I know, and also just one of the most extraordinary live performers I’ve ever seen.

We’ve toured with her, and when you tour, eventually you get a sense of the show, and so you’re just kind of sitting backstage chatting, and you don’t necessarily watch the whole thing. When Dessa was performing with us, everyone in the cast would stand in the wings and watch her perform, because every night she would do something different. There’re very few musicians I’ve seen who can work with a crowd the way that Dessa works with a crowd, so I’m very excited to be bringing her as our musical guest.

We’re doing almost every major city in Australia in about six days, so .... It’s mostly do a show, fly to the next city in the morning, and do the show that evening.

It’s often the case on tour, people are often like, “Oh, you’re in Paris, you should do this,” or “Oh, as long as you’re in Chicago, you should do this…” but we come in the afternoon of the show, do the sound check, do the show, and the next morning we’re out. We rarely see anything of the city except for our hotel room and the theater!

That said, I know that most of us on the tour are planning to arrive either early or stay late after the tour and take a little vacation around Australia, because it’s a bit far from New York! My wife and I are coming, I think, ten days before the tour starts and doing a little vacation.

Sturgess: Will you be checking out any of the local conspiracy theories while you’re here, or do you think you have enough of them already inspiring you?

Fink: Night Vale is a very particularly American show in that we deal with this very American set of conspiracies. In a lot of ways, kind of, we are unaware of what the conspiracy language of the world looks like in different countries. I think I’d be very fascinated to learn about Australian conspiracies.

The only Australian conspiracy I can think of, and it’s a fascinating one, that I know about, is that guy that was found dead on a beach in, I want to say, the forties? A body was found on the beach, with no apparent cause of death, and no one could identify who the person was. They weren’t decomposed at all, they were perfectly recognizable, it’s just their fingerprints didn’t come up.

I’m forgetting all the details. It’s a very mysterious case. The only thing he had on him was a ripped out final page from this epic poem from somewhere in the Middle East.... That’s the only Australian conspiracy theory I’m aware of.

Sturgess: I’m going to have to go check it out, and hopefully they didn’t turn out to be a community radio host….

On May 16, 2013, President Obama tweeted that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” The President is one of countless people who have come to believe that there is a “97% consensus” on anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Since it is inconceivable that any climate scientist today could have no opinion on the subject, if 97 percent accept AGW it follows that 3 percent reject it. To those outside of science, 3 percent may seem an insignificant percentage. However, we scientists know that a small minority has often turned out to be right, otherwise there would have been no scientific revolutions. In the 1950s, for example, the percentage of American geologists who accepted continental drift was likely less than 3 percent. Yet they were right.

If there were a 3 percent minority on AGW it would matter, but there is not. The “97% consensus” is false. The percentage of publishing climate scientists who accept AGW is at least 99.9 percent and may verge on unanimity.

How, then, has nearly everyone from President Obama on down come to buy the claim of a 97 percent consensus? The figure comes from a 2013 article in Environmental Research Letters by Cook et al. titled “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature.” They reported that “Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming” (emphasis added). The 97 percent figure went viral and, not surprisingly, the qualifying phrase “expressing a position”—the fine print, if you will—got dropped. But those three words expose the false assumption inherent in the Cook et al. methodology.

Cook et al. used the Web of Science science-citation research site to review the titles and abstracts of peer-reviewed articles from 1991–2011 with the keywords “global climate change” and “global warming.” They classified the articles into seven categories from “(1) Explicit endorsement with quantification” to “(7) Explicit rejection with quantification.” In the middle was “(4) No position.”

The sine qua non of the Cook et al. method is the assumption that publishing scientists who accept a theory will say so—they will “endorse” it in the title or abstract. To count an article as part of the consensus, Cook et al. required that it “address or mention the cause of global warming.” Of the 11,944 articles that came up in their search, 7,970—two thirds—did not. Cook et al. classified those articles as taking no position and thus ruled them out of the consensus.

Do we need to know any more to realize that there is something wrong with the Cook et al. method? The consensus is what the majority accept; you cannot rule out a two-thirds majority and still derive the consensus.

Moreover, is it true that scientists routinely endorse the ruling paradigm of their discipline? To find out, I used the Web of Science to review articles in three fields: plate tectonics, the origin of lunar craters, and evolution.

Of 500 recent articles on “plate tectonics,” none in my opinion endorsed the theory directly or explicitly. Nor did a single article reject plate tectonics. This statement was about as close to an endorsement as any came: “Plate tectonics, which shapes the surface of the Earth, is the result of solid-state convection in Earth’s mantle over billions of years.”

What of lunar craters? As recently as 1964, nearly every scientist who had studied the moon believed that its craters were volcanic. Then in July of that year, the first successful Ranger mission returned thousands of photographs showing that the moon exhibits craters ranging in size from the colossal to the microscopic. Except for a few senior holdouts, scientists quickly embraced the meteorite impact theory. A Web of Science search for “lunar craters” today turns up 185 articles stretching back to 1920 (including an overlooked 1921 article by Alfred Wegener that showed convincingly that the craters are due to meteorite impact). I reviewed the abstracts of the most recent 100 articles, which go back to 1997. As with plate tectonics, none explicitly endorsed meteorite impact, nor did any reject it. The closest any came to an endorsement may be this sentence: “It is known that most of the craters on the surface of the Moon were created by the collision of minor bodies of the Solar System.”

Do biologists writing about evolution routinely endorse Darwin’s theory? I reviewed the abstracts of articles in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology from 2000 through 2014. Of 303 articles, 261 had abstracts. Not surprisingly, none of the 261 rejected the modern evolutionary synthesis; neither did any endorse it. The closest any came may have been this statement: “A long line of biologists have followed [Darwin] in seeing, in the concept of ‘descent with modification,’ a framework naturally able to incorporate both adaptation and constraint.”

Are the sentences quoted in the three preceding paragraphs endorsements or simple statements of fact?

To calculate their 97.1 percent result, the Cook et al. study divided the number of abstracts that they said endorsed AGW (3,896, including 2,909 “implicit” endorsements) by the total that expressed a position (4,014, which included the rejecting articles.) Would the method work for plate tectonics, the origin of lunar craters, and evolution? Since none of the authors of the articles I reviewed in those fields reject the theory in question and only a handful, if that, could be said to directly endorse it, the Cook et al. method would wind up classifying the vast majority as taking no position and omit them from the calculation. We would be left dividing a tiny number of perceived implicit endorsements, a highly subjective measure, by the same tiny number and wind up with 100 percent, after having ruled out nearly all the scientific literature. We might be left dividing zero by zero.

Remember that to count an article as endorsing, the Cook et al. study required that it “address or mention the cause of global warming.” Climate scientists refer to this as attribution. Some climate articles are about attribution but many are not. Consider these two examples.

In 1993, James Hansen and his colleagues published an article in Research & Exploration titled “How Sensitive Is the World’s Climate?” The purpose of the research was to “estimate climate sensitivity from observed climate change.” In other words, not only did Hansen et al. accept AGW, they were gauging how strong it is, reporting a temperature rise of 3 ± 1°C for doubled CO². The abstract included this sentence: “Observed global warming of approximately 0.5°C in the past 140 years is consistent with anthropogenic greenhouse gases being the dominant climate-forcing in that period.” The sentence is evidently why Cook et al. classified this article in category 1: “explicit endorsement with quantification.”

Hansen et al.’s 1992 article “Potential Climate Impact of Mount Pinatubo Eruption” considered the effect of aerosols on global climate, successfully predicting that the injection of sulfur aerosols during the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption would temporarily lower global temperature. However, in this article Hansen and colleagues were researching the role of a natural event—volcanic eruptions—rather than the human contribution to global warming. Because of that their abstract did not “endorse the consensus position that humans are causing global warming,” as Cook et al. required. The Cook et al. study classified Hansen et al.’s 1992 article as taking no position and ruled it out of the consensus calculation.

James Hansen also had articles in the three endorsing categories and thus is represented in four. But Hansen does not have four different opinions about AGW—he has only one opinion, and we know very well what it is. His articles may use different language according to what he and his colleagues happen to be writing about, i.e., they may seem to “endorse” AGW or not, but these are distinctions without a difference. The Cook et al. classification is not about Hansen’s core belief but about the subject of his articles.

Hansen had a total of six articles in Cook et al.’s “no position” category. A number of other prominent climate scientists show up there as well. These include (with the number of articles): R. Bradley (3), K. Briffa (2), E. Cook (5), M. Hughes (2), P. Jones (3), T. Karl (5), M. Mann (2), M. Oppenheimer (3), B. Santer (2), G. Schmidt (3), the late S. Schneider (3), S. Solomon (5), K. Trenberth (7), and T. Wigley (3). Cook et al. ruled them all out of the consensus calculation. Most of these authors, like Hansen, also have articles in one or more of the three endorsing categories. Again, we see that the Cook et al. method is about language and the subject of articles rather than whether their authors accept AGW.

If scientists do not endorse the ruling paradigm, can we still quantify the extent of a scientific consensus? Yes, we can.

The articles that turned up in the Cook et al. search were not drawn at random but appeared because they answered the search topics “global warming” or “global climate change.” The authors in the Cook et al. database were writing about AGW. Would they have written about a theory that they believe is false yet never say so?

We can get a further clue using the research category classification that Cook et al. provided. Of the 7,970 “no position” articles, 56.8 percent were on the impacts of global warming, 18.4 percent on mitigation, 17.1 percent on measurements and modeling methods, and 7.7 percent on paleoclimatology. Would authors write about those aspects of global warming if they believed that AGW is false yet never say so? What would be the point?

We know from the history of science that the most important advances come when stubborn facts overthrow the ruling paradigm. This is how scientific reputations are made. It is why we remember Alfred Wegener and not his opponents. A scientist who has evidence that AGW is false will be eager to say so and to present that evidence. Who among us would not love to be that scientist!

Putting all this together, I argue that we can judge the extent of the consensus by the number of articles that explicitly reject AGW. Cook et al. found seventy-eight, 0.7 percent, that did so. From that one can infer that the authors of 99.3 percent of the articles in the Cook et al. database accept AGW. This would be the average over the twenty years of their survey. More recently, the percentage of acceptance has grown even higher.

I used the Web of Science to review the titles and abstracts of peer-reviewed articles from 2013 and 2014, adding the search topic “climate change” to “global climate change” and “global warming.” Of 24,210 abstracts, only five—one in 4,842 or 0.021 percent—in my judgment explicitly rejected AGW. Two of the articles had the same author, so four authors of 69,406 rejected AGW. That is one in 17,352, or 0.0058 percent.

This result would allow the claim that 99.99 percent of scientists publishing today accept AGW. To be conservative, I prefer to say above 99.9 percent.

Excluding self-citations, only one of the five rejecting articles has been cited and that article only once.

Remember that the 99.9 percent figure does not represent what we usually mean by consensus: agreement of opinion. Rather it is derived from the peer-reviewed literature and thus reflects the evidence therein. It tells us that there is virtually no publishable evidence against AGW. That is why scientists accept the theory.

The consensus on anthropogenic global warming is not 97 percent. Instead, publishing scientists are close to unanimous that “global warming is real, man-made, and dangerous,” as President Obama put it.

Notes

I have a paper under review in Environmental Research Letters in which I critique the Cook et al. paper. See jamespowell.org and please leave comments in the forum.

The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom. By Michael Shermer. Henry Holt and Company, 2015. ISBN 9780805096910. 541 pp. Hardcover, $32.00.

Religion has often positioned itself as the originator (and for some the sole provider) of morality. In The Moral Arc, Michael Shermer argues that “most of the moral development of the past several centuries has been the result of secular not religious forces” and that it is science and reason that bend the moral arc toward justice, truth, and freedom. For the few who don’t know Michael Shermer, he is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the writer of a number of successful books, including Why People Believe Weird Things. For those wondering what the moral arc is, the book’s first section, “The Moral Arc Explained,” covers it. In brief, the moral arc is a metaphor Shermer borrowed from a nineteenth-century abolitionist preacher named Theodore Parker that “symbolizes what may be the most important and least appreciated trend in human history—moral progress.”


What has been driving moral progress is explained by another metaphor: the expanding moral sphere. Shermer prefers the three-dimensional sphere over the original expanding circle first used in 1869. (We may think of ourselves as morally progressive, but Irish historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky, who first used the expanding circle metaphor, wrote about including animals in our moral circle almost 150 years ago.) Why is our moral sphere expanding? Shermer ascribes that to “our expanding intelligence and abstract reasoning ability,” which gives us the ability to change our point of view and to see and feel the perspectives of others: other races, other sexes, other sexual orientations, and other species.

The exchange of perspectives gives rise to the application of the moral arc, the results of which is the subject of the book’s second section. Here Shermer gives a thorough account of the abolition of slavery, the rise of women’s rights, the progress of the gay rights movement, and the current state of animal rights. A lot of research went into this section (each chapter’s endnotes contain more than fifty references) and the quality of the narrative matches the quantity of the data, giving ample opportunity to exchange perspectives and maybe expand one’s own moral sphere. It may sound odd to describe chapters that discuss so much tragedy, pain, and suffering as enjoyable, but they are. This may be because they are stories of triumph, at least for three of the four subjects. The chapter on animal rights may have you rethinking that steak dinner and questioning the justifiability of animal testing.

“In a book on moral progress, it is necessary to address its obvious antithesis—moral regress—and identify which pathways lead to evil, to mitigate them.” This is the topic of the third and final section, where Shermer considers the psychology of immorality using the “arguably no more poignant example than that of the Nazis.” Shermer seeks to understand how an otherwise “intelligent, learned, highly cultured people” could commit such atrocities. This investigation leads to questions of moral culpability. In a deterministic world, can you hold people accountable for their actions? Throughout the book Shermer argues for the importance of continuous thinking over categorical thinking, spectrums not pairs. In this instance he suggests that we think about “degrees of freedom,” a scale with insects on one end having very little freedom and humans on the other possessing the most. Even within our species there is a range where some people—“psychopaths, the brain-damaged, the severely depressed, or the chemically addicted—have fewer degrees of freedom.” With this understanding the question turns to what do to with this knowledge and how to apply it in our justice systems. Is the goal of our justice system to mete out punishment or lower recidivism? What works best? A retributive, punishment-based justice system or a restorative one? Shermer demonstrates with studies and explains through anecdotes how restorative justice, where the perpetrator “apologizes for the crime; attempts to set to rights the situation; and, ideally, initiates or restores good relations with the victim,” can work.

Shermer describes The Moral Arc as a “protopian work,” a phrase meant to distinguish it from the unrealistic ideal of utopia, a static place where everything is perfect. Protopia is about making steady and continuous incremental improvement, to “try to make the world a slightly better place tomorrow than yesterday.” Shermer is optimistic; after reading The Moral Arc you may be too.

Forty years have passed since my book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved was published in 1975. The most important chapter is “Flight 19,” the account of the five Navy Avenger torpedo bombers and a Martin Mariner PBM that disappeared on December 5, 1945. Flight 19 was on an overwater navigation-training flight from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to the Bahamas and back. The Mariner was searching for the Avengers after they got lost.

The disappearance of Flight 19 is the most famous, dramatic, complicated, and relevant incident in the part of the Atlantic Ocean off the southeastern coast of the United States that, twenty years later, would become known as the mysterious Bermuda Triangle. The original mystery story of Flight 19, as it was told for decades by those who did little or no research in authoritative sources, when compared to the true and accurate account—based on my research that included the official Navy report of the disaster, the personal records of flight leader Charles C. Taylor, the ninety-two personal interviews that I conducted, and my flight of the route—is a microcosm of how the mystery/delusion of the entire Bermuda Triangle story came about, and how I came to realize that the Bermuda Triangle is one of the biggest frauds/delusions that has ever been perpetrated. 
Flight 19 is such a significant part of the Triangle story that, if the planes had safely returned to base, the concept of the Bermuda Triangle would never have been created. We would never have heard of the Bermuda Triangle, and all the articles, books, documentaries, movies, and websites about it would never have been created.

The loss of the Avengers (Figure 1) and the search plane was a legitimate, confusing, national front-page mystery at the time it occurred. Years later, magazines and newspapers began to publicize it and other supposed mysteries in the area. UFOs were a new, popular, and exciting topic in the 1950s. Best-selling books such as Flying Saucers on the Attack, The Case for the UFO, The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, Strange Mysteries of Time and Space, Stranger Than Science, and others speculated that Flight 19 had been captured by aliens from outer space.

Figure 1. A Navy Avenger torpedo bomber. The pilot is Willard Stoll, one of the last men to talk with instructor-pilot Lt. Charles C. Taylor before Taylor left on ill-fated Flight 19 on December 5, 1945. Author Larry Kusche interviewed Stoll in his Michigan home. Stoll, the leader of Flight 18, heard Taylor on the radio when he was in the northern Bahamas. He told Kusche that Taylor “couldn't have been too far away at the time.”

Early in the popular 1977 Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Avengers suddenly appeared in the Mojave Desert. Near the end, the aviators, who had not aged, walked out of a huge UFO.

The part of the Atlantic Ocean where Flight 19 disappeared became popular when it was given a clever, catchy name by Vincent H. Gaddis in his February 1964 article “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle” in Argosy, a popular men’s pulp adventure and modest girlie magazine. A shortened version appeared in the July/August 1964 Flying Saucer Review.


The Argosy article, with several additions, then became Chapter 13, “The Triangle of Death,” in Gaddis’s 1965 book Invisible Horizons; True Mysteries of the Sea. In what is a rarity among those who would later add to “the mystery,” Gaddis listed the sources of information he used in the book:

Various newspaper articles.
The Books of Charles Fort.

Sea’s Puzzles Still Baffle Men in Pushbutton Age. E.V.W. Jones, Associated Press, Sept. 16, 1950, was the first to mention the region as a place of mysterious disappearances.

Sea Mystery at Our Back Door, George X. Sand, Fate Magazine, Oct. 1952, expanded on the Jones article.

The 1950s UFO bestsellers previously listed.



The Mystery of the Lost Patrol, Allan W. Eckert, American Legion Magazine, April 1962, which included fictionalized, dramatized messages that would be attributed to Flight 19 by many of the later mysteryans. [Mysteryans is my shortcut word for those who contributed to the creation of the mystery.]

Gaddis wrote:

Draw a line from Florida to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third line back to Florida through the Bahamas. Within this roughly triangular area, known as the “Bermuda Triangle,” most of the total vanishments have occurred. Others have happened in adjacent areas to the north and east in the Atlantic, south in the Caribbean, and west in the Gulf of Mexico.

Gaddis did not define how far the “adjacent areas” extended, while adding, “This relatively limited area is the scene of disappearances that total far beyond the laws of chance.” He gave no information as to what were the laws of chance, but it sounded scientific, as if the matter had been thoroughly studied. Map 1 (based on my research) shows the intended routes or known locations of some of the mysteries in the “adjacent areas.” Many of the other alleged “mysteries” did occur in or closer 






to the Triangle, but the details of their losses were often inaccurate. 


Map 1. Many of the “mysteries” attributed to the Triangle did not occur in or near it, as shown. Virtually all “mysteries” had solutions, or had no proof that they even occured, when diligently researched and honestly reported. The numbers are chapters in the Solved book.

Gaddis’s writings started the tsunami of Bermuda Triangle magazine and tabloid articles, books, documentaries, movies, and the popular belief in unknown forces off the coast of the United States. His account of Flight 19 was largely based on the fictional quotations in the American Legion magazine article.

Many of the later mysteryans accepted Gaddis’s version and then embellished it with their own speculations rather than doing original research. Some added another alleged mystery or two.

My source of information about Flight 19 in Chapter 22 of The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved was the official Navy report: “Board of Investigation into five missing TBM airplanes and one PBM airplane, convened by Naval Air Advanced Training Command, NAS Jacksonville, Florida, 7 December 1945, and related correspondence.” No one who had declared the loss of Flight 19 to be paranormal or UFO-related used the official Navy report.

When I first heard of the Bermuda Triangle in the early 1970s, I realized it was quickly gaining in popularity. There were several reasons for my interest. 
First, it was an obviously unique and intriguing topic. Ships, planes, boats, and people were said to be disappearing off the coast of the United States! There were no survivors, no wreckage, no SOS, no clues. I had always wanted to write a book, but because I was entering a new profession and had a young family, there had never been a topic that so captured my interest that I was willing to embark on what would obviously be a huge research project.
Second, I was an experienced pilot. By my early twenties I was a commercial pilot, flight instructor, instrument pilot, instrument flight instructor, advanced ground instructor, and flight engineer. I had logged several thousand flying hours, including more than four thousand takeoffs and landings, much of it as an instructor.

Third, my second master’s degree was in library science. Back then I was working in the Reference Department at Arizona State University’s Hayden Library, where we were barraged by student requests for information about the Bermuda Triangle for the term papers they had to write. Librarians know how to do research, which in the 1970s was far more difficult than it is with the technologies that exist today.

We could not find much about the Triangle, so I placed an ad in several library journals and soon received a large collection of magazine and newspaper articles, which I made available to the students. In retrospect, those students and many others across the country were a significant factor in the early growth of the Triangle story. Just as much false information today is spread by the Internet and social media, back then we knew that everything we found was not necessarily accurate. Today I still get letters and emails from students who are writing papers, only now they also have my information to use.

It might not seem likely, but pilots and librarians have an important common attribute. They absolutely hate to make a mistake, to be wrong. A librarian’s primary job is to help people find the information they seek, which can often be complex and difficult. The inability to find accurate information is failure at the job and embarrassing.

If a pilot makes a mistake, he and others can end up dead. I had known a few people who died in flying accidents: A top-notch crop duster pilot for whom I was a loader while in high school. Two friends who learned to fly the same time as I did crashed on a small dirt runway on a sloping hillside that I often used. One of my high-school flying students died when his father crashed his plane. I remain adamant about not making “misteaks” (a small tweak of humor here).

After deciding in the early 1970s to write a book about the Triangle, my research consisted of locating the earliest accounts of the mystery incidents in legitimate sources rather than accepting the previous writers’ versions and speculations. Searching for the mystery incidents was time-consuming, but many were listed in The New York Times and London Times indexes. I located the articles on microfilm and had them printed. I also received information from Lloyd’s of London, the Navy, and the U.S. Coast Guard by U.S. mail. Most of the older incidents had no such thing as an official report.

My experience as a pilot was invaluable when analyzing many of the “mysteries.” One case that was reported in a best-selling Triangle mystery book showed the writer’s lack of flying knowledge. His story was that a plane flying in the Bahamas had lost the use of its hydraulic system, so the landing gear could not be lowered, but “the plane seemed to be landing as if buoyed up by a cushion of air.” Every pilot I tell this story to laughs. Any student pilot with just a few flying hours knows what the “mysterious force” is. Ground effect is the increased lift and decreased aerodynamic drag that a wing generates when it is close to the ground or water. It can cause an aircraft to float far along the runway at a slowly deceasing airspeed before it finally settles in.

Another issue that confuses mysteryans is the difference between true north and magnetic north. When I was flying in Arizona in the 1960s, the difference was 12.5 degrees, and we had to adjust for it when navigating cross country. It changes minutely over the years as Earth’s magnetic pole slowly moves. The difference is now 10.6 degrees. Mysteryans claim it is a problem in the Triangle because the difference there is near zero and that can confuse navigators, causing them to get disoriented and disappear. Actually, navigation is simplified because adjusting for zero is quite easy. Duh.

My research showed that the mysteryans rarely mentioned anything that conflicted with their “mystery,” especially hurricanes and other severe weather. A well-known suicide that explained an abandoned boat found closer to the Azores than to Bermuda was ignored. See incident 46 on Map 1. Many “mystery” locations were thousands of miles away from reality. There was no credible evidence to support the oft repeated tales of only a canary being found on board, or of still-warm meals on the table of an abandoned ship.

In The Disappearance of Flight 19, published in 1980, I delved further into that case. After a lengthy search using the most advanced research methods of the time (library reference material, the U.S. mail, and long-distance phone calls), I located the (now deceased) sister and brother-in-law of Charles Carroll Taylor, the instructor pilot of Flight 19. I stayed at their home in Corpus Christi, Texas, several times in the late 1970s as they introduced me to local people who told me what they knew about Taylor. They visited my Arizona home, loved my swimming pool, and became friends with my family, especially my late father. We visited the Grand Canyon. They loaned me a large collection of reports, papers, letters, photos, and other correspondence that Taylor’s late mother and aunt had gathered.
An article in the Corpus Christi Caller included Taylor’s picture and an interview: “Lt. Charles C. Taylor is visiting his mother after 28 month’s service aboard a carrier in the South Pacific… He will report to the East Coast for reassignment.” I located and interviewed ninety-two people who had known Taylor. Childhood friends. Navy buddies and other personnel who were somehow involved in the events of December 5. The radioman and gunner who had flown with him off the carrier Hancock during the Pacific war. They told me he was an excellent pilot and the perfect southern gentleman who was proud to be a U.S. Navy pilot.

Lt. Charles Taylor was the instructor pilot of Flight 19, the five Avenger torpedo bombers from Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station that disappeared on December 5, 1945.

Another part of my research was to visit the Confederate Air Force in Harlingen, Texas, on April 3, 1978. (The name was changed to Commemorative Air Force in 2002.) I examined their huge single-engine Avenger torpedo bomber on the ground, then (as a passenger) headed out over the Gulf of Mexico for a loud, exciting, and informative ride.

Two days later I rented a Cessna in Fort Lauderdale (I was still an active pilot back then) and flew the intended route of Flight 19 to the Bahamas, landing for fuel at Walker’s Cay, the chain’s northernmost island. I then flew back across the Gulf Stream and the Everglades to Key West, Florida, refueled a second time, then flew along the Florida Keys on the way back to Fort Lauderdale.

The reason for my seven-hour flight was to see what Charles Taylor had seen on his flight and what he should have seen. Although the training group he was in charge of took off from Fort Lauderdale at 2:10 in the afternoon and headed east toward the Bahamas, an hour and a half later he radioed that he was sure he was in the Florida Keys, which are southwest of Fort Lauderdale, virtually in the opposite direction they had flown. Map 1 shows the Bahamas, east of Florida, and the Florida Keys, west of southern Florida.

“I don’t know where we are,” Taylor was heard to say on the radio. “We must have got lost after that last turn. I’m sure I’m in the [Florida] Keys and I don’t know how to get to Fort Lauderdale.”

Map 2. Flight 19's 5:50 pm position fix was a circle of 100-mile radius, several hundred miles north of where Flight 19 should have turned west toward Fort Lauderdale.

He said “both my compasses are out.” Taylor did not know where he was, which direction he was flying, or which way to go. He mistakenly identified himself as MT-28, which meant “Miami torpedo bomber.” That revealed that, mentally, he was flying out of Miami; those flights were performed in the Florida Keys, not the Bahamas. His correct ID, FT-28, Fort Lauderdale torpedo bomber, was eventually learned.

Dead reckoning navigation, which Flight 19’s students were practicing, does not use landmarks. It was used when flying over the ocean, out of sight of land. They fly in specific directions, according to their compass heading, for a specific length of time, based on the estimated wind direction and speed. Progress is marked on an erasable plotting board (see Figure 2). Taylor had extensive dead reckoning experience during his time in the Pacific war.

Figure 2. Plotting board used by pilots when flying over water in the 1940s. They mark their estimated course based on the estimated air speed and the estimated wind. A whole lot of estimating goes on when out of sight of land. (Photos courtesy of Larry Kusche.)

Prior to flying combat in the Pacific, Taylor had been based in Miami for a year, flying patrol over the Florida Keys and the Gulf of Mexico, watching for German U-boats. After his combat time in the Pacific, he was again based in Miami as an instructor. According to the information sent to me by the National Personnel Records Center, Taylor was “detached” to Fort Lauderdale on November 20, 1945, where the training flights went east to the Bahamas. Taylor reported for duty at Fort Lauderdale the next day, along with hundreds of other officers, student pilots, and enlisted airmen. He was flying again by December 1, but it is not known if he flew the Bahamas route before December 5. My conclusion, based on all my sources of information, is that this was his first time.

On December 5, when Taylor called, he was confused because there are parts of the smaller islands of the northern Bahamas (where he actually was) that do look like some of the islands in the Florida Keys. I saw both areas on my flight to the Bahamas and the Keys three decades after Taylor’s fatal flight. The official Navy report states that Taylor “allowed himself to be led to believe he was in a position in which he could not possibly have been.” Captain William O. Burch, commanding officer of the Naval Air Station, told Taylor’s mother and aunt he thought Taylor had confused the string of cays north of the Bahamas with the keys south of Florida.

Some of the writers and websites report that Taylor was confused because his compasses failed, and that is what caused Flight 19 to get lost and eventually disappear. That story, which has largely been accepted, has only added to the mystery. What kind of mysterious force, the mysteryans ask, would cause compasses to fail? What other disappearances has this strange force caused? After all, compasses, whether mechanical or fluid–filled, are known to be extremely trustworthy. Distrusting a compass could be a response for a pilot when the landmarks he sees do not tally with his compasses, especially after he has made some turns. A former Avenger instructor pilot told me how easy it was for him to deliberately disorient a pilot just by doing a few turns to see how quickly he could reorient himself. When I was a flight instructor, I discussed with my students the issue of absolutely trusting the compass before I signed for them to take their solo cross-country flights. 
Shortly after takeoff from Fort Lauderdale, the planes of Flight 19 were to perform low-level bombing practice runs at Hen and Chickens Shoals, fifty-six miles east of the Naval Station. That would involve turns and altitude changes, which can also be disconcerting, especially at diving speeds and higher g forces.

Believing he was in the Florida Keys where he had previously spent many months flying, Taylor refused to head west, as pilots had been instructed to do if they were lost or confused in the Bahamas. If he had actually been in the Keys, as he mistakenly thought, flying west would have taken them into the huge Gulf of Mexico. He insisted on heading north because he was certain he was south of Florida. One of the stark truths of flying (and hiking) is that the longer a person stays lost, the more confused and the more lost he becomes, which is even worse if night is approaching. (At least a hiker can stop moving to try to get reoriented.)
Flight 19 continued to fly north from the Bahamas, despite at least one of the pilots saying they should fly west. But Taylor’s order had to be obeyed; he was the commanding officer.

Port Everglades Air Sea Rescue Unit 7 heard several messages between Taylor and the other pilots concerning their estimated position, their compasses, and which direction they should go. As best they could tell, no other plane ever assumed the lead.

Navy personnel had no idea where Flight 19 was until 5:50 pm, a half hour after sunset, nearly four hours after takeoff. An approximate position fix based on some of their radio calls was calculated. Flight 19 was somewhere in a huge area, 200 to 400 miles north of the Bahamas and sixty to 260 miles northeast of Cape Canaveral! (See Map 2.)

By that time, it had turned dark and stormier over the Atlantic. Fuel was running down and a strong wind was blowing out to sea. Turbulence, storm clouds, and the setting sun made it even more desperate. The only chance they had to survive was to immediately turn west.

But none of the Navy stations could contact the flight to let them know where they were and what to do. Radio contact had faded as the planes moved farther away and the sun had set. The atmosphere changes at night, drastically affecting radio reception: static and background noise increases, as does interference from commercial radio stations, especially the powerful music coming from Cuba. No one sent “blind” broadcasts, hoping that someone in the flight would hear it. The storm worsened after darkness fell; they surely were flying on instruments in turbulent air.

An old cliché is that flying is 99 percent boredom and 1 percent stark raving terror. I never did feel the boredom part during my flying career, but on a flight in northern Arizona in 1964 I had a scary hour-long experience in a Piper Comanche, concerned about if I would manage to survive. I was over a mountainous area at 17,500 feet (the plane carried no oxygen), trying at full throttle and full cabin heat to outclimb or outrace the dark thunderhead clouds that were rapidly developing below me as far as I could see. I was in serious trouble, but my anxiety and fear surely were nothing compared to what the men of Flight 19 must have felt, knowing they were doomed to go down in the cold, raging ocean in the darkness, with no chance of survival. I survived by spotting a small break between the huge clouds, diving between them, hoping the break would not close, hoping I would not crash into a peak, and then, miraculously, seeing an abandoned strip on a hillside and making a safe landing. I spent the night at a nearby ranch. I played a lot of pool.

On December 6, 1945, the day after Flight 19’s disastrous flight, more than 200 planes and seventeen ships from Florida and the Bahamas went out by dawn, braving high winds and heavy seas. Some small boats and their crews were rescued, but no trace, no one from of Flight 19 could be found.

The Martin Mariner search plane that became a part of the mystery was seen (from a search ship) to explode in the air on the night of December 5 at 7:50. Mariners were called “flying gas tanks” because they carried almost 2,000 gallons of fuel. The next morning the ocean was so rough that not a trace of the plane or its crew could be found, even though they knew where it had come down. One officer I interviewed said that fumes were occasionally present inside the plane, and that he, while on duty in Greece, had seen a Mariner explode in the air.

Taylor’s flying skills and combat experience surely were extensive and heroic during the war, but I did interview two men who were with Taylor other times when he ditched. 
The first was his gunner, who told me “Taylor lost his bearings” on June 14, 1944, near Trinidad. They ran out of gas, could not get the raft out before the plane sank, and their depth charges blew up beneath them, but they were quickly rescued. 
The other ditch was January 30, 1945. After losing radio contact, Taylor couldn’t find Guam. He climbed so they could find him on radar. Almost out of gas, he ditched in a rough sea. He and his passenger spent a wet, cold, turbulent night in a raft and were saved late the next day. Photo 19 in the Flight 19 book shows Taylor in the raft, being rescued by the USS Bailey. 
December 5, 1945, was the third time he got lost.
All these years after the publication of both books, I still get the question: “How did you solve the Bermuda Triangle mysteries?” The question I rarely get, which shows a more analytical mind, is: “Did the alleged disappearances actually occur the way the mystery writers said they did?” The answer is no, they did not.

Map 1 shows the Triangle, a thousand miles on a side. While the mysteryans claim it is small and limited, roughly half of the so-called unsolved mysteries occurred far from the Triangle; thousands of miles away in some cases. The numbers on Map 1 are the chapters in The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved. “Research” by the mysteryans was so poor that one ship that had been dismasted and lying on its side (obviously a storm victim) in the Pacific Ocean was included as a Triangle mystery.

Some occurred closer to Newfoundland and the route of the Titanic than to Bermuda. Many of the “mysterious losses” occurred because of storms, even hurricanes that the mysteryans did not mention.
Today, the Bermuda Triangle is not the hot topic it was forty years ago, but it still gets plenty of interest. The numbers vary considerably, but as I write this, a Google search returns 3,650,000 entries for it; Flight 19 shows 285,000,000; my name shows 11,000. Some of the websites I perused show much of the same old stuff: accepting the mystery stories, then listing various “theories” such as death rays from Atlantis, a drawing of a UFO over Columbus’s ship, and so on. Some of the sites do present good information; many refer to my two books.

The concept of mysterious disappearances has become part of the language. In baseball, a batted ball that cannot be caught is said to have gone into the Bermuda Triangle. It is where money that disappeared in the stock market went, and where anyone is who is lost is said to be. The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March 2014 in the Indian Ocean has been mentioned as a Bermuda Triangle–type situation, as expected.

The word solved in my title elicited comments from some who apparently believe that a solution had to involve UFO captures, death rays, or some other mystery solution. My solution is that the Bermuda Triangle is a fraud, a delusion, and that reality is far more interesting than the phony stories.

Someone wrote that I was a debunker, that my purpose was to snitch on those who I claim got it wrong. That comment is also devoid of reality. When I began my research, I had no idea how true or untrue the mystery stories were. Early on, I hoped to find that the mysteries were true, because I knew the first hardcover book on the market would be a huge bestseller. I wanted mine to be the first! Then reality reared its head. Good, honest research, which takes much more time than cobbling together “mysteries” that previous writers have created, revealed that virtually every incident had been distorted to make it look mysterious. Thus, I did not get the pleasure of having the first hardcover book to be published.

At the end of The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved, I stated that the Triangle was a “manufactured” mystery. That was a polite way to say it was a fraud. The “mystery” of the Bermuda Triangle is one of the most widespread frauds that has ever been perpetrated. It was based on poor research and distorted, untrue, inaccurate information that was uncritically copied, embellished, and sensationalized.
Does it matter if people believe that forces “beyond the laws of science as we now know them” are capturing ships, boats, planes, and people, and that scientists, the Coast Guard, Navy, Lloyd’s of London, and other experts are said to be baffled by it all? If those alleged unknown forces in the Triangle are only light entertainment for the masses, does it matter that some people believe in them? So what if they believe in UFO captures, psychic powers, astrology, ancient astronauts, and ads to lose thirty pounds by the end of the month? What is the harm in it? Few of us will ever be affected by whether there are unknown forces in the Triangle or anywhere else.

Actually, there is an issue of greater importance than whether “paranormal forces” are at work anywhere. In this age of information explosion and social media, it is worrisome that so many people believe so many things without requiring any supporting evidence, that they employ little skepticism, have such a lack of curiosity, and such a bias toward what they want to be true, that they ignore what is true.
Once false information becomes “common knowledge,” no matter how thoroughly it might be shown to be false, the false version will continue to be believed by some, either because they remain uninformed about the correct information or because they refuse to accept any information that is contrary to the beliefs they hold.

The need for skepticism, for paying close attention to detail, is of critical importance in everyday life. A healthy dose of skepticism might have saved billions of dollars from disappearing during the dot com debacle in the early 2000s and the financial meltdown in 2008. It would have kept millions of dollars from vanishing during the more recent Ponzi schemes.

Skepticism and critical thinking are important in politics when voters let their emotions rule rather than becoming informed on the positions of the candidates. It is important in issues of health, such as the vaccination/autism controversy, which is resulting in diseases that were virtually wiped out to start coming back. It is important in the discussion of the use of genetically modified food and the global warming situation.

Skepticism. Critical thinking. Honesty.

Endorsements of Kusche’s 
Decisive Investigation

Editor’s note: Prominent scientists, skeptics, naval experts, and historians endorsed Larry Kusche’s 1975 book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved. Here are some of those comments:

• Carl Sagan, Astronomer: Your book is a welcome alternative to the standard credulous and uncritical works on the subject.

• Isaac Asimov, Scientist, Author: Reading it was like drinking a glass of sparkling spring water after being offered nothing but mud.
• T. M. Dinan, Lloyd’s of London: This book is essential reading, for here the mystery is solved.

• Admiral O.W. Siler, Commanding Officer, U.S. Coast Guard: Your position is wholeheartedly endorsed by the Coast Guard.

• Walter Sullivan, Science Editor, New York Times: Thank goodness there are a few rational human beings dealing with this subject.

• Martin Gardner, Scientific American: Kusche’s research is impeccable, his arguments unanswerable. His solution will convince everybody except those simple-minded believers who refuse to listen to anyone except the hucksters of irrationality. . . . I agree with him totally.

• James Randi: Congratulations on the quite excellent job you’ve done to bring some rationality to the very aggravating Bermuda Triangle “mystery.”

• Philip J. Klass, Author of UFOs Explained: The book should resolve all doubts.
• J. Allen Hynek, Director of the Center for UFO Studies: Head and shoulders above what else has been written. It is bound to clarify matters for all people who think.

• Samuel Eliot Morison, naval historian: Anyone who has been bemused by the Bermuda Triangle literature, which mostly belongs in the categories of myth and fable, should read Mr. Kusche’s book. You will find there an objective estimate of all the alleged mysteries of the alleged triangle, and learn that most of them can easily be explained by natural causes.

Implications of New Research on Horizontal Gene Transfer

Humans have been modifying the genomes of plants and animals for millennia with techniques ranging from cross-breeding to irradiation. But these methods and their products do not seem to raise the same level of public outcry as transgenesis, which is the ability to directly move genes between organisms without sexual reproduction. An explanation for the unequal opposition to such genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is the idea that transgenesis is more “unnatural” (Pivetti 2007). Splicing genes from a flounder into a tomato (Hightower et al. 1991) or from a bacterium into rice (Tang et al. 2015) is seen as posing unspecified risks beyond those of conventional breeding because, while plant and even some animal hybrids exist in nature (Zhang et al. 2014), cross-kingdom
hybrids do not. Surveys suggest the more “dissimilar” the organisms whose genes are being shared (Dragojlovic and Einsiedel 2013), and the more artificial the methods used to move the genes (Kronberger et al. 2014), the more unnatural the food will appear and the more reluctant consumers will be to eat it, especially if one of the organisms is an animal (Frewer et al. 2013).

Some of this fear is supported by concepts taught in secondary school– and college-level biology textbooks (Zeigler 2011; Alberts et al. 2013). Among animals, cross-species breeding is taught to generally fail or produce infertile hybrids such as mules; among plants, it only works for closely related organisms (Morris et al. 2013). Horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the natural movement of genes from one organism to another without sexual reproduction (sound familiar?), is taught as being “rare among eukaryotes [animals, plants, fungi, and protists] but common among bacteria” (Alberts et al. 2013). When HGT between domains of life is taught, it is often limited to the ancient, one-time transfers of mitochondrial and chloroplast genes from bacteria to eukaryotes (Reece et al. 2012; Morris et al. 2013). Even when HGT among eukaryotes is noted, the emphasis is still on unicellular organisms (Fitzpatrick 2012). The assumption is that the evolution of separate, distinct sex cells in multicellular life posed unambiguous restrictions on HGT (Doolittle 2000). Both laypersons and many scientists thus believe that the sharing of genes over large phylogenetic distances, especially between animals, is rare or even impossible and that HGT is purely in the domain of unicellular life. Since genetic engineering is artificial HGT between two organisms of seemingly any evolutionary distance, it is accordingly seen as an unnatural violation of these laws: the creation of something that could not arise naturally even in theory.

Yet what if these basic premises are wrong? Analyses of the ever-rising number of published genomes and transcriptomes for multicellular life have revealed unexpected numbers of functional genes whose sudden appearance in a clade (a group of organisms assumed to share a common ancestor) suggests they jumped across great phylogenetic distances rather than evolving from a common ancestor: in other words, HGT. Each new genome can be a source and/or recipient of new genes, meaning the accuracy and power of HGT searches improves with each new sequenced organism (Paganini et al. 2012; Boto 2014). This growing body of research suggests horizontal gene transfer across domains is far more common than previously thought, including in metazoans (Dunning Hotopp 2011; Syvanen 2012; Schönknecht et al. 2014), where HGT’s prevalence in vertebrates and invertebrates does not differ significantly (Crisp et al. 2015). The suggestion is that HGTs may be ubiquitous rather than uncommon in all forms of life, even animals.

Yes, animals includes us: you, me, and the heads of Monsanto and Greenpeace alike. A study published this March conservatively estimated that primates have on average thirty-two foreign genes per species (there are thirty-nine in humans), with maximum estimates up to 109 in primates and 145 in humans from sources including plants, fungi, protists, bacteria, archaea, and even viruses (Crisp et al. 2015). These jumped genes may even have shaped our own evolution: the ABO-blood group system in humans is hypothesized to have been acquired horizontally (Brew et al. 2010), along with some fat mass and obesity-associated proteins found only in humans and algae (Robbens et al. 2008). Within our DNA are genes we did not inherit but that were acquired laterally from organisms across vast distances of evolutionary space. We are transgenic organisms—and everything else might be too.

Thus the idea still taught in textbooks—that HGTs almost never happen in multicellular life—is a misconception. HGTs’ perceived higher prevalence in microbes may have been an artifact of the greater number of sequenced microbial genomes: an error that is rapidly being corrected (Keeling and Palmer 2008; Boto 2014). Acceptance among scientists that cross-domain and animal HGT is a natural process “both ancient and ongoing” (Crisp et al. 2015) will not only broaden studies into the field, but it also conveniently erodes the foundation of the argumentum ad naturum against GMOs.

Consider Bt crops, in which an insecticidal gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis is inserted into plant genomes (Vaeck et al. 1987); or golden rice, which contains bacterial (Erwinia uredovoia) and daffodil genes for beta-carotene (Tang et al. 2015). Consider also the first GMO sold for human consumption, the Flavr Savr tomato, created by inserting a duplicate but antisense copy of the tomato’s own polygalacturonase enzyme (technically making it cisgenesis not transgenesis) into the genome to improve shelf life (Bruening and Lyons 2000). These varieties have been extensively and successfully tested for safety (Potrykus 2012; Helassa et al. 2013; Naranjo 2014), yet their in vitro origin still repels would-be consumers (Knight 2009), with Flavr Savr eventually declared a commercial failure (Bruening and Lyons 2000). We now know, however, that the HGTs responsible for these lab-created strains could just as easily have occurred in nature. B. thuringensis is a widespread microbe found on plant leaf surfaces (de Maagd 2015). Given the association of symbioses with HGT events (Dunning Hotopp et al. 2007), B. thuringiensis genes could theoretically have transferred into a plant on their own given enough time and opportunities. One of the first discovered animal HGTs was of a carotenoid biosynthesis gene transferred from fungi to pea aphids (Moran and Jarvik 2010), a similar HGT in terms of gene family and phylogenetic distance to the ones involved in golden rice (Tang et al. 2015). Finally, while Flavr Savr’s production involved only one species, natural HGTs of polygalacturonases were recently documented between highly dissimilar organisms, such as transfer from fungi to beetles (Kirsch et al. 2014) and proteobacteria to stick insects (Shelomi et al. 2014). In other words, while the techniques that created the aforementioned GMOs were artificial, fully natural versions of these mechanisms exist, and transgenic events covering similar genes over similar or greater evolutionary distances have already happened. The trait transfers induced in many GM crops could theoretically arise without any human intervention at all.

One important caveat is that natural HGT events in eukaryotes mostly still involve microbes or at least fungi. HGT between two animals is rare (for now) and requires organisms be in close contact with each other. An example is the transfer of insect genes to bats either from respective parasite-host or prey-predator interactions (Tang et al. 2015). Thus, even though the evolutionary distance involved need no longer be seen as a problem, an arctic flounder to tomato HGT in nature remains highly unlikely given the ecological distance between the two (Hightower et al. 1991). This does not change the basic facts about GMO safety, though it will surely be a point anti-GMO activists seize upon.

When seen as HGTs, GMOs recover much of the “naturalness” denied to them by their opponents, and a key (though by no means sole or largest) motivator to anti-GMO fear is weakened. Experimental evidence suggests increasing public knowledge of biological facts reduces the role of subjective perceptions of naturalness in public approval of GMOs, changing the discussion toward one about quantitative risk and benefit assessments (Mielby et al. 2012), at which point one can bring up the large and ever expanding body of evidence for GMO safety (Snell et al. 2012; Klümper and Qaim 2014; Nicolia et al. 2014). Thus education about the incredible sources of genetic variation in the natural world, such as the naturalness of HGTs among plants and animals and even humans, may greatly reduce the “unnatural” appearance of transgenesis and improve public acceptance of GM crops . . . though improving awareness among biologists of the ubiquity of HGTs is a necessary first step.

References

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The day after the Monterey County SkepiCamp event this January, I received a phone call from a local woman named Sue. Apparently she had read about our skeptics group in one of the local newspapers and had learned about my personal interest in psychics, or as I like to call them: grief vampires. Sue wanted to let me know that channel E! started advertising a new TV show featuring a young psychic named Tyler Henry. She explained that he had recently moved to Hollywood from a small town in order to be among the celebrities. It seems that E! has really been pushing Henry’s program by showing him performing psychic readings for the regular celebrities that they cover. Although I had never heard of this person, Sue assured me that E! presents him as the “real deal,” and is marketing him as such. Sue appeared to be skeptical of these claims, but she was not confident in her Internet research skills, so she asked me to investigate for her.

Of course I agreed, because I was really curious as to how I could have missed hearing that we now have evidence of the afterlife. I know what you’re thinking (and no, I’m not psychic…). This is Hollywood we are talking about, and it’s E! after all, not usually known for its impartial coverage of scientific breakthroughs. Isn’t there an assumed disclaimer, when you see a psychic on E!, that it is all for entertainment purposes only? He communicates with the dead, wink wink, nudge nudge. And of course it is very possible that this is exactly what is going on. Psychic entertainment is called “mentalism.” When it is performed by an actor openly playing a part, or in a venue that is clearly for fun and isn’t deceiving its patrons, then I’m all for it. It’s a terrific skill, and like any well practiced magician’s performance, it is very entertaining.

But before we give Henry and E! the benefit of the doubt, let’s do some investigating. I know nothing about this person, so for me it seems like a perfect case study on which to hone my skills in evaluating such claims. Keep in mind, however, that while I’ve been involved in the skeptic movement for many years and have worked on many anti-psychic investigations, I would still love to find evidence that we can communicate with deceased family members. This would be one of the most astounding, awesome, fantastic discoveries ever. I can’t imagine anything more outstanding. Not even finding evidence of life on other planets would compare to finding out for sure that we live on after death and can communicate with the living. Maybe E! is on to something. Maybe I missed the press release and the Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Henry for breaking the natural laws of the known universe. Possibly the smoke from the burning of all the textbooks that now need to be rewritten has polluted the atmosphere to the point that I forgot when this discovery was announced.

I apologize for coming across as closed-minded and mean-spirited. While my hopes for this kind of evidence have been dashed so many times before, and I do not actually think there is any truth to the claims, I do continue to hope and to maintain that possibility that one day I might see something that will convince me I was wrong. But that is a high bench mark to reach. The fact is that any believable and convincing evidence that communication with the dead actually happens is necessarily going to have to be pretty darn incredible. But the only way to be sure, as scientific skeptics, is to investigate. So let’s get started.

Where is the most obvious place to start? Google “Tyler Henry.” But the trick is to start without the word psychic. See if you can find anything about a career before this one. Maybe he has a past where he was a mentalist or an actor playing a psychic character. Let’s see what we turn up: as it turns out, a lot of photos and a link to Benjamin Tyler Henry who lived from 1821–1898 and was the inventor of the Henry rifle. Is this a possible ancestor of our young psychic? I don’t know, but it’s fascinating what you dig up when you start to look around.

The first URL is to an article from Out magazine titled “Gay Hollywood Medium Tyler Henry Opens up about his Psychic Abilities,” and it shows a photo of him reading for musician Boy George. The caption above this article does say that it is in the “Entertainment/TV” section of Out. According to the article, Henry’s earliest experience was when he “just knew” that this grandmother who was ill with cancer was going to die. He told his mother that they needed to say goodbye, but then moments later they got a call saying she had died. Well I don’t know about you, but if this really happened in this way and I was ten years old with no understanding of confirmation bias or general probability, I’m sure I would be thinking something was odd. Later in his young life, another psychic told him that when he was nineteen he would have his own TV show and write books. He was training to be a hospice nurse and now—voila!—he has his own TV show. He thinks of himself as a skeptic (good job, Tyler) and understands that not everyone believes in his “gift,” which is okay with him as everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. He says he does not Google people before readings looking for information to pretend came from the spirit world. He only gives information that no one but the family could know: inside jokes or sentimental stories, never anything general (this seems like it would be easy to test).

Okay, I’m looking at his photo now, and he is young and quite handsome, very photogenic. He looks like the kind of sweet kid that bags your groceries at the store and that you hope will go on to do great things in life. Mentalist Mark Edward, an expert on psychics, thinks that we are seeing a new wave of “psychic next door” types. He calls them the “fuzzy sweater” psychics. Medium Maureen Handcock is often photographed wearing a beautiful blue shirt that matches her beautiful blue eyes, sitting on her porch steps with a border collie at her side and a white picket fence in the foreground. Even John Edward and James Von Praagh are faithfully photographed trying to appear warm and friendly, just like someone’s favorite uncle. Chip Coffey’s trademark fuzzy scarf is always worn on stage, and often auctioned off at his shows with proceeds going to animal rights organizations. And of course don’t forget The Long Island Medium, Theresa Caputo, whose reality show invited viewers into her life, introduced everyone to her family, and showed us how difficult it is to be just a regular gal trying to get her hair done and suddenly some dead person starts talking to her. “Aaaaargh!” Henry seems to fit this new psychic model quite well.

Reading more, I stop and hold my breath. Here it is. The part that makes it clear whether he is a psychic entertainer who is up-front about his act or just another grief vampire. Henry tells the interviewer his goal for the future. It is to work with parents who have lost their children to suicide. I can feel my blood pressure increasing and the hackles on the back of my neck starting to rise. He isn’t just a grief vampire; he is aspiring to be one of the most despicable types of grief vampires, tying for first place with those who work as psychic detectives. These are the people who prey on families when they are the most desperate and vulnerable. I’m appalled that he thinks this is something to aspire to. Something to be proud of!

The next URL hit that Google brought up was to his Twitter account with 7,130 followers, then to his website. Hmm, I wonder why his Wikipedia page is not in the top hits? The next links are to E! online, Entertainment Weekly, Heavy.com, and The Daily Mail where I learn that Khloe Kardashian was given a reading and she got to talk to her father, Robert Kardashian. Henry was getting the smell of a man’s tie, and Khloe connected right away by saying that she had kept some of her father’s clothes and they still smelled like him. WOW! </sarcastic font>. The next link Google gave me was to Henry’s Facebook account with 10,046 likes. I scrolled through many, many posts, and most were just him offering people free readings and plugging the show, which is due to air at the end of January. There were a lot of “Bless You, Tyler” comments from Henry’s fans, for the amazingly positive readings they have all received.

I looked all over his website and Facebook page for a “for entertainment purposes only” statement but I could not find one. I did find a photo of Henry with a very charming smile holding a wiggly curly-haired sheep dog with his tongue hanging out (the dog’s tongue that is, not Henry’s). The website is very sparse, giving the same information that we learned earlier and providing a phone number so we can arrange a personal reading from him.

Just to be fair, let me take a few more minutes to see if possibly there is some notable journalistic site that could have more information….

Okay, I’m back. I checked all the news sites I could think of that would have picked up a story as groundbreaking as the discovery of evidence of life after death. I checked, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, FOX, USA Today and even Scientific American. Their headlines were about Obama, gun laws, politics, and trapped miners. (Remember the Sago Miners was one of Sylvia Browne’s biggest blunders. I remember the good ol’ days of live radio.) I used the search function on each site hoping that maybe they had done something in the past about Henry. The result was the same every time: zilch, nothing, nada, zip, zero. A search on Wikipedia only gives me the results of Benjamin Tyler Henry.

A few years ago, Mark Edward and I came up with an idea to head-off an up-and-coming psychic star. The idea was to sniff around gathering all we could find about someone who had the potential to make it big in the immediate future and start their own TV show. We would hang onto that information, follow their career, and release it once the rest of the world had started to really Google their name. We called this Project Honeybadger. We weren’t looking to release gossip but instead tangible, verifiable facts that the public could sink their teeth into. We were working on one specific individual for several months, gathering information from people who had worked with her and from the people she had given readings to. The trailer for her show made it seem as if she had just wandered into a building and suddenly started receiving messages. But we uncovered the truth. We found at least one of her known friends appearing on camera, posing as a stranger. We sat on this information for months, but her show was not picked up, and she has since faded back into doing group readings at a local hotel. We couldn’t get interest in this project from our community. It obviously was quite time consuming, and I still think it is a great idea to have something ready for publication, to be proactive, not reactive.

With Tyler Henry we were taken by surprise. He already has a show; he is already on his way to becoming a star. We have become complacent and dropped the ball.

What now? Should this new grief vampire be ignored? Should we turn our backs on the knowledge that one more “fuzzy sweater” medium is being added to the hundreds that already exist. Will the skeptic community sit by and just watch this happen? The show is being aired on a clearly entertainment channel, so should we even care? He states that his goal in life is to someday work with parents who have children that committed suicide. Is he going to corrupt these parents’ memories of their lost children for his own self-promotion and profit? Or is he sincerely convinced of his “powers,” truly believing he will be helping these parents? But he has not reached this goal yet. Is this a “buyers beware” situation where the victims are responsible for doing their own background checks? My new friend Sue didn’t think she had the skills necessary.

I’m not sure that I have answers to these questions. These people come and go fame-wise. His flame might be bright for the moment, but it could quickly fade into obscurity, or it could ignite a fire that will burn the memories and interrupt and corrupt the grieving process for parents who go to him in desperation and loss. I know that I now have a lot more to tell Sue when I call her tomorrow. I’ll thank her for inspiring this investigation, and I’ll have a good long think. What can we do about it?

Everyone loves a mystery. Solve one in science, and accolades are forthcoming. Not so, however, in the realm of the paranormal, where evidence, logic, and theories are often stood on their heads. Whereas forensic scientists, say, begin with the evidence and let it lead to the most likely solution to a mystery, “parascientists” typically begin with the desired answer and work backward to the evidence, employing confirmation bias: They look for that which seems to confirm their prior-held belief and seek to discredit whatever—or whoever—would argue against it.

For example, in the paranormal field of cryptozoology (a term coined by Ivan T. Sanderson to describe the study of “hidden” or unverified animals [Heuvelmans 1968, 508]), proponents of Bigfoot offer a large quantity of evidence. Unfortunately, it is of very poor quality: eyewitness reports, footprint casts, hair samples—just what is attributable to misperception or deception. It is all questionable evidence because, hoaxes aside, neither a live Bigfoot nor a carcass nor even a DNA specimen is available for scientific study.

The same situation holds true for other claims. They include psychic phenomena; ghosts, poltergeists, and demons; flying saucers and aliens; cryptids, such as the Loch Ness monster; spontaneous human combustion; faith healing and weeping statues; the Devil’s Triangle; and so on and on. Mainstream science has not verified as genuinely paranormal any of these objects, entities, or occurrences.

Arguing from Mysteries

Parascientists usually take a different tack. For them, investigation is not a quest to explain a mystery (what they deride as “trying to explain it away”) but rather to collect mysteries about whatever paranormalities they believe in, by which they hope to convince others there must be “something to it.” In short, they are not detectives but mystery mongers.

For them, the mystery is essentially an end point rather than a beginning. If it is not readily explained, they do not blame a lack of evidence; instead they suppose thereby that something has been established: “We don’t know what caused oil to appear on the statue; therefore, it must be a sign from God.” But this is a type of logical fallacy known as argumentum ad ignorantiam, an argument from ignorance—that is, drawing a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. One cannot say “We don’t know” and then assert that therefore we do know.

And yet that very faulty reasoning is behind most paranormal claims: “We can’t explain what caused a; therefore, it’s likely b,” where a is a hairy-monster sighting or hovering light or an unexpected medical cure, and b is presumed to be, respectively, a Bigfoot, or flying saucer, or miracle. Actually it might instead be, again respectively, an upright-standing bear, Venus seen through layers of atmosphere, or the result of prior medical treatment.

Negative Evidence

As psychologist Ray Hyman (1996, 23) observed of one paranormal field: “The history of parapsychology is replete with ‘successful’ experiments that subsequently could not be replicated.” Pointing out that so-called remote viewing and other supposed forms of ESP were defined negatively—that is, as an effect remaining after other normal explanations had supposedly been eliminated—Hyman noted that a mere glitch in the experimental data could thus be counted as evidence for psychic phenomena. “What is needed, of course,” he said wisely, “is a positive theory of psychic functioning that enables us to tell when psi is present and when it is absent” (emphasis in original). He added, “As far as I can tell, every other discipline that claims to be a science deals with phenomena whose presence or absence can clearly be decided.”

This requirement—this need—for positive rather than negative evidence is ignored or dismissed by the mystery mongers. In the titles of their books and TV documentaries, they trot out such words as unsolved, unexplained, unknown—presenting not mysteries to be investigated and solved but supposedly eternal enigmas that prove (by arguing from ignorance) the existence of the paranormal.

Consider, for example, the claims of miraculous healings at Lourdes, the French healing shrine. Claims there are derived not positively but from those cases that are held to be “medically inexplicable”—a classic argument from ignorance. (In 2008, however, the International Medical Committee of Lourdes announced that the physicians’ panel would no longer be in the “miracle” business, thereafter only indicating whether a case is “remarkable.” They will not be inferring a miracle from “medically inexplicable” [Nickell 2013, 183–185].)

Elsewhere, in “miracle” and other paranormal claims, the appeal to negative evidence remains all too common. For example:

• Grant Wilson, who partnered with Jason Hawes in TV’s Ghost Hunters, says their approach to ghost hunting was to “end up with only those things you can’t explain away” (Hawes and Wilson 2007, 6).
• Larry Arnold (1995, 463), in his book Ablaze! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion, states unabashedly: “I am the first to admit that SHC [spontaneous human combustion] defies common sense and smacks of the unknowable. I don’t have all the answers to it; I may have none of the answers. And certainly, I don’t have all the pieces to this jigsaw of enigmas.” Nevertheless, he concludes, “What I can say with confidence is this: Spontaneous (as well as preternatural) human combustibility happens, though it has remained hidden.”
• Crop circle advocates have suggested various “theories” to explain the supposedly inexplicable patterns in English grain fields (despite extensive evidence of hoaxing [Nickell 2004, 115–122]). Ken Rogers of the Unexplained Society opines, “The circles are indeed the result of a UFO landing to probe the crops. There is no other explanation . . .” (qtd. in Randles and Fuller 1990, 16).

Unidentified Flying Objects

Perhaps nowhere is negative evidence sought and promoted more avidly than by UFOlogists, whose very subject of study begins with the word unidentified. Prominent among such collectors was Charles Fort (1874–1932). Sometimes considered the “first” UFOlogist (Clark 1998, I: 420), Fort was an armchair purveyor of strange mysteries. Having come into an inheritance that allowed him to indulge his hobby, he spent his last twenty-six years scouring old periodicals for reports of unusual occurrences—including anomalous aerial phenomena—that he taunted “orthodox” scientists to explain (Fort 1941). Not only was his evidence anecdotal and his approach non-investigative, but his “documentation was not always completely accurate” (Gross 2001, 204).

Nevertheless, Fort is the darling of many UFOlogists and other collectors of phenomena that supposedly “defy natural explanation,” what they term “Fortean phenomena” or “Forteana,” named after him (Guiley 2001, 212–213; Gross 2001, 203–205; Clark 1998, 420–425).

One of history’s top UFOlogists was astronomer J. Allen Hynek (1910–1986), once a consultant and self-claimed “debunker” on the U.S. Air Force’s UFO-investigating Project Blue Book. Hynek (1977, 7–9, 17) became impressed that, at first, 23 percent of UFOs he studied remained “unknowns” and—going on to found the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS)—he embraced the negative evidence:

The transformation from skeptic to—no, not believer because that has certain “theological” connotations—a scientist who felt he was on the track of an interesting phenomenon was gradual, but by the late ’60’s it was complete. Today I would not spend one additional moment on the subject of UFOs if I didn’t seriously feel that the UFO phenomenon is real and that efforts to investigate and understand it, and eventually to solve it, could have a profound effect—perhaps even be the springboard to a revolution in man’s view of himself and his place in the universe.

Hynek nevertheless grew cautious about the extraterrestrial hypothesis, noting that it “runs up against a very big difficulty, namely, that we are seeing too many UFOs. The earth is only a spot of dust in the Universe. Why should it be honored with so many visits?” Instead, he said, “I am more inclined to think in terms of something metaterrestrial, a sort of parallel reality,” positing “that UFOs are related to certain psychic phenomena” (qtd. in Story 2001, 252). Thus he tried to “explain” one unknown by invoking another!

Today, UFOlogists such as Peter B. Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), believe that the great number of unidentifieds indicate at least something momentous is behind them. Given “impressive quantities of principally eyewitness data,” says Davenport, while most eyewitness descriptions are of poor quality, “many of the high-quality sighting reports involve certain objective aspects, which, to an open-minded bystander, are quite impressive.” He adds, “Strong evidence suggests that we are dealing with a phenomenon that is being caused by palpable solid objects whose characteristics are not of human design, and whose behavior is suggestive of intelligent control” (qtd. in Story 2001, 150). He is, of course, hinting at extraterrestrials—albeit coyly—while the “objects” remain unidentified.

Another who cites the unexplained nature of UFOs is Richard Hall, a UFO advocate associated with such groups as MUFON and CUFOS. He emphasizes, “Among the hundreds of so-called ‘UFO reports’ each year, a sizeable fraction of those clearly observed by reputable witnesses remain unexplained—and difficult to explain in conventional terms.” He believes that “Collectively, these cases constitute a genuine scientific mystery, badly in need of well-supported, systematic investigation.” Again he says, “The circumstantial—and sometimes physical—evidence indicates that something real is going on for which no satisfactory explanation currently exists.”

Hall believes that mistaken observations of terrestrial objects as well as “hoaxes/imagination” are to be rejected as explanations because both are “inapplicable to the hard-core unexplained cases.” He prefers instead the possibility of “so-called ‘nuts and bolts’ visitors from elsewhere” (qtd. in Story 2001, 239).

Even vacillating UFOlogist/folklorist Thomas E. Bullard (2010, 311) suggests—at least tentatively:

Investigators of current and historical UFO reports have sifted out cases with sufficient credible evidence to qualify as defensible. These cases suggest that the character of UFO narratives depends in some part on the character of UFO events, and those events owe their character to a source independent of UFO mythology. . . . Even allowing for human fallibility and self-deception, a genuine mystery seems to be left over.

Bullard is clearly relying on the process-of-elimination method that is the basis of negative evidence.

Then there is Stanton T. Friedman, who promotes the notion of extraterrestrial visitation with bluster, smoke screens, and ballyhoo. He rationalizes, “I learned early on that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence for absence.” True enough, but then he is still left with absence of evidence. Friedman, a onetime self-described “itinerant nuclear physicist” was fooled by the amateurishly forged “MJ-12 documents” that purported to prove the U.S. government had retrieved a crashed saucer and its humanoid occupants—proof, Friedman believes, that positive evidence has been covered up by a high-level conspiracy (Friedman 1996, 8, 13, 209–219; Nickell with Fischer 1992, 81–105).

Conclusion

The problem with all such grandiose extrapolation from the data is that it lacks positive evidence. No actual flying saucer or extraterrestrial pilot has ever been captured—notwithstanding hoaxes, folktales, and conspiracy claims. There are only eyewitness reports, photos, ground traces, and the like—all of something unidentified.

But don’t all those unidentifieds count for something? Well, quantity is not quality. As extensive evidence shows, cases once touted as unexplained were only that; they were not unexplainable, and, as a matter of fact, many of them have since succumbed to investigation. Not one proved to be anything other than a natural or manmade phenomenon—not such classic cases, for example, as Roswell, Rendlesham Forest, Flatwoods, Kecksburg, Exeter, Phoenix, and Stephenville (Nickell and McGaha 2012; McGaha and Nickell 2011, 2015). Some cases may never be explained because of original eyewitness error, falsified evidence, lack of essential information, or other flaws. For similar reasons some murders remain unsolved, yet we do not consider those cases evidence of a homicide gremlin.

Nothing said so far means we should not continue to investigate unexplained phenomena, including UFOs. After all, onetime skepticism of fiery stones falling from the skies ultimately gave way to proof of meteorites. Science has nothing to fear from the examination of UFO reports, which, to date, have not been useless after all: We have learned much about illusions and misperceptions and fantasy, about personality traits, about rare phenomena such as ball lightning, about the propensity of immature persons to perpetrate hoaxes (skeptics included!), and much more. But investigation must go beyond just collecting negative evidence. It must represent a real attempt to solve—that is, to explain—a mystery.

References

• Arnold, Larry E. 1995. Ablaze! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion. New York: M. Evans and Co.
• Bullard, Thomas E. 2010. The Myth and Mystery of UFOs. Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas.
• Clark, Jerome. 1998. The UFO Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (in two volumes). Detroit, MI: Omnigraphics.
• Fort, Charles. 1941. The Complete Books of Charles Fort. Reprinted New York: Dover, 1974.
Friedman, Stanton T. 1996. Top Secret/Magic. New York: Marlowe & Co.
• Gross, Loren E. 2001. In Story 2001, 203–205.
• Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2001. Encyclopedia of the Strange, Mystical, & Unexplained. New York: Grammercy Books.
• Hawes, Jason, and Grant Wilson. 2007. Ghost Hunting. New York: Pocket Books.
• Heuvelmans, Bernard. 1968. In the Wake of the Sea Serpents; trans. Richard Garnett. New York: Hill and Wang.
• Hyman, Ray. 1996. Evaluation of the military’s twenty-year program on psychic spying. Skeptical Inquirer 20(2)(March/April): 21–26.
• Hynek, J. Allen. 1977. The UFO Report. Reprinted New York: Barnes & Noble, 1997.
• McGaha, James, and Joe Nickell. 2011. Exeter incident solved! Skeptical Inquirer 34(6)(November/December): 16–19.
• ———. 2015. Alien lights? At Phoenix, Stephenville, elsewhere: A postmortem. Skeptical Inquirer 39(2)(March/April): 50–53.
Nickell, Joe. 2004. The Mystery Chronicles. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 2013. The Science of Miracles. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.
• Nickell, Joe, with John F. Fischer. 1992. Mysterious Realms: Probing Paranormal, Historical, and Forensic Enigmas. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• Nickell, Joe, and James McGaha. 2012. The Roswellian syndrome. Skeptical Inquirer 36(3)(May/June): 30–36.
• Randles, Jenny, and Paul Fuller. 1990. Crop Circles: A Mystery Solved. London: Robert Hale.
Story, Ronald. 2001. The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters. New York: New American Library.

Primum non nocere is a Latin phrase meaning “first do no harm.” It is commonly attributed to Hippocrates, but if he ever said any such thing, he certainly didn’t say it in Latin. He lived in ancient Greece from 430 BC to 370 BC and presumably spoke Greek. The phrase, in English and in Latin, may have actually originated with Thomas Sydenham in the seventeenth century.

Not causing harm, nonmaleficence, is one of the four basic principles of medical ethics. The others are beneficence, autonomy, and justice. Beneficence means acting in the best interests of the patient. Autonomy means the patient has the right to refuse or choose their treatment. Justice means exercising fairness and equality when deciding who gets what treatment.

Alternative medicine proponents and other critics of conventional medicine like to point out the harms done by mainstream medicine: side effects of drugs, complications of surgery, iatrogenic deaths (deaths caused by medical treatment), etc. They accuse doctors of violating the “do no harm” principle.

They seem to think that “do no harm” means “never use any treatment that might cause harm.” That’s just silly. It is ridiculous to look at the harms of medical treatments without looking at the benefits. Anti-vaccine activists jump on every testimonial of an adverse event after vaccination, even if there is no evidence that it happened more often to people who got the vaccine than to those who didn’t. They don’t even try to put possible harms into perspective with the proven effects, the numbers of lives saved, and illnesses prevented. Doctors always consider the risk/benefit ratio of treatments; they don’t prescribe a treatment unless they are convinced that the benefit outweighs the risk. Alternative medicine may be less likely to harm, but it’s also much less likely to help. Water (as in homeopathic remedies) is safer than any drug, but what good is “safe” if it isn’t effective?

What if we avoided any conventional medical treatment that could harm? We wouldn’t dare prescribe drugs, because any drug that has effects also has side effects. We wouldn’t be able to do any kind of surgery, because cutting into the skin constitutes harm. We wouldn’t be able to take an x-ray because we know radiation can harm.

Nonmaleficence says don’t harm the patient; beneficence says help the patient. There’s a trade-off, since almost every treatment carries some small degree of risk. Not treating may do more harm than treating. A C-section carries a small risk of serious complications and even death, but not doing a C-section may condemn both baby and mother to death.

The “first do no harm” principle is very important when deciding whether to do a screening test. False positive results can lead to unnecessary worry, expense, and further unnecessary testing, sometimes even invasive testing like biopsies or exploratory surgery with all their associated harms, even possible death. There are established principles for deciding whether a screening test should be offered to the general public:

1. The natural history of the disease should be reasonably well understood.
2. The burden of suffering from the disease must be high enough to justify screening.
3. The screening test must be reasonably sensitive and specific.
4. The disease must be treatable.
5. Treatment given earlier in the course of the disease must produce a better outcome than treatment given late in the course of the disease.
6. Patients will comply with the offered testing and treatment.
7. Resources to run the program must be available.
8. The costs of the program must justify the benefits.

The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) makes recommendations for screening tests based on the best available evidence. They currently recommend the following tests not be done, on the basis that the evidence shows they do more harm than good:

• Screening with resting or exercise electrocardiography (EKG) for the prediction of coronary heart disease (CHD) events in asymptomatic adults at low risk for such events.
• Using combined estrogen and progestin to prevent chronic conditions in postmenopausal women.
• Using estrogen to prevent chronic conditions in postmenopausal women who have had a hysterectomy.
• Screening for ovarian cancer.
• Screening for prostate cancer with a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test

As an example of their reasoning, the evidence shows that PSA screening only reduces the rate of prostate cancer deaths by a small percentage, and it doesn’t decrease the all-cause death rate. At the same time, it picks up a large number of small, non-aggressive, localized prostate cancers that would never have spread or caused any symptoms. Without screening, those patients would have lived a normal life span and would never have known they had prostate cancer; they would have died with a prostate cancer but not because of prostate cancer. With screening, those patients end up undergoing unnecessary surgery that carries a risk of death and other serious complications; after surgery, a high percentage of those patients are left impotent and incontinent for the rest of their lives. PSA testing remains very useful in helping to diagnose patients who have signs or symptoms and for screening patients who are at high risk of developing prostate cancer; but if it is used as a screening test for the population as a whole, it does more harm than good.

No screening test is perfect; they all have false positives and false negatives. The risk of a false positive test result increases as the prevalence in the population being screened decreases. If the disease is rare, a positive test result is far more likely to be wrong than right. The principle of autonomy demands that patients be informed about the risks and benefits of every screening test and make their own decision.

“First do no harm” doesn’t mean doctors should avoid any treatment that might cause harm. It means they should try to make sure their treatments are likely to do more good than harm. And that is exactly what every good doctor does. There’s a handy Latin phrase for that, too: Salus agroti suprema lex, the well-being of the patient is the most important law.

What has been called “one of the most extraordinary outbreaks of poltergeist phenomena” of the twentieth century began with an English schoolboy, aged eleven and a half years, Matthew Manning (Harrison 1994, 9).

Like many other disturbances labeled poltergeist (from poltern “noisy” and geist “spirit”), the events began with rapping sounds, objects thrown about, heavy furniture moved, objects disappearing (but sometimes reappearing in other rooms), and so on. The activities not only centered around Matthew and his home at Queen’s House, Linton, Cambridge, but they followed him to boarding school. Many of today’s paranormal believers suggest the phenomenon, once attributed to the devil, is caused by psychokinetic (“mind-over-matter”) energy from pubescent children with repressed hostilities (Guiley 2000, 293–295). However, proper investigation typically shows the effects are simply due to the mischief of clever children. I have therefore termed the phenomenon the poltergeist-faking syndrome (Nickell 2012, 325–331; Bartholomew and Nickell 2015, 129, 136–137).

The phenomena at Queen’s House that began in February 1967 soon waned but then were renewed more violently beginning at Easter 1971 and continuing through the summer. On July 31 a new phenomenon appeared and continued for a week. The effect, shown in photographs (Harrison 1994, 70–72) is remarkable.

Figure 1. Matthew Manning's bedroom walls were covered with over 600 historical “signatures.”

Signatures on the Walls

Covering the walls of Matthew’s bedroom—from floor to ceiling—appeared over six hundred signatures of deceased persons, most bearing dates spanning six centuries (Figure 1). By August 6, they had largely ceased, but there were occasional later additions. Among the writings were seven “poetic aphorisms” that were signed “Robert Webbe.” A significant number of the dated signatures are those of Webbe family members—former tenants of the house—or others connected to it in some way, including persons who resided in the vicinity or in nearby villages. Admits Harrison (1994, 10), however, “It would be impossibly difficult and time-consuming to try to identify them all.”

The writings were supposedly produced by “discarnate entities” using pencils that were left lying on a table. These writings were never seen being done—unlike Matthew’s later automatic writings and drawings (to be discussed presently) that were frequently observed as he produced them (Beloff 1994, 5). In my experience, a spiritualistic phenomenon that appears shy about being witnessed is most likely faked. And the idea that a ghost—which necessarily lacks a brain—could grip a pencil, let alone engage in writing, is ludicrous.

Dr. Vernon Harrison—described as a handwriting expert and professional photographer—took photos of the wall writings before they were painted over, and then studied them. Although he found problems here and there, he convinced himself that the writings “were examples of direct writing by some entity or entities,” but he was careful to add, “I do not insist on it” (Harrison 1994, 39). John Beloff of the Society for Psychical Research (which published Harrison’s lengthy report) thought the behavior that deliberate hoaxing would have required “is so bizarre that the case would at least force us to question our assumptions regarding the limits of human perversity” (1994, 5–6).

Matthew would have been the obvious, and perhaps only, suspect for hoaxing. Since the signatures that covered the bedroom walls like graffiti came as part of a “poltergeist” outbreak, the prankster may have been looking for attention. In fact, we learn:

Matthew had been working on local history as part of a school project, so some of the names must have been familiar to him. “Webbe” said that he had noticed his good work and decided to help him by providing him with “half a thousand” names of his “friends, allies and family.” (Harrison 1994, 10)

Handwriting Examination

I was determined to make my own examination of the photographed wall writings. (I have had training in forensic writing examination [Handwriting 2008], authored textbooks in the field [Nickell 1990; 1996; 1999; 2009], and worked on many famous cases. These include the alleged diary of Jack the Ripper, the manuscript of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the purported original of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and the identification card of Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk.) I studied the wall writings at length.

Unfortunately, the “spirit” scripts have the characteristics of having been slowly drawn rather than naturally written. They exhibit unnatural evenness in pressure, reveal tremor from hesitancy, show occasional kinked lines betraying uncertainty of movement, and demonstrate blunt beginning and ending strokes. (See Nickell 1996, 65–72.) These are traits associated with imitative writings, such as forgeries, yet these are not the most serious faults.

Most of the “signatures” cannot really be called that because—as in the case of “Robert Webbe”—there are no known examples of either signature or handwriting for comparison (Harrison 1994, 11). The same is true of most of the other writings. Thus, if Matthew Manning, say, were secretly making them, he would not have to reproduce an actual signature, but merely write in a variety of amateurishly created styles—rather like a mimic speaking different made-up voices.

A signature purporting to be that of a well-known historical figure, “Oliver Cromwell 1643” (Harrison 1994, 76), not only fails to have any resemblance to genuine signatures of Cromwell (cf. Rawlins 1978, 24, 25, 55), but it even has some wrong (non-Cromwellian) letter forms. Moreover, it is in the same hand as that of some of the other bogus scripts—mostly variations of the hand of “Robert Webbe,” as Harrison admits (1994, 16, 19), some of them “ornamented.”

Then there is the evidence that the individual who actually wrote the scripts failed to understand the handwriting of the periods in question. Thus, even though he offers writings dated in the sixteenth century for example, he shows no knowledge of the common English Secretary Hand that evolved in the late fifteenth century and continued well into the seventeenth (Nickell 1990, 122–124, 202–203). Apart from the handwriting per se, there are anachronisms, such as “Robert Webbe’s” use of ye (for the article the) that had become effectively obsolete long before Webbe’s death in 1736. Harrison (1994, 11) admits the use may have been intended to give, spuriously, a ye olde antique air to the writing, and I am convinced that that is so. Another example is a copy of an excerpt from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscript. The copyist did not even understand the letter forms, let alone comprehend what the text said. (See Harrison 1994, 26, 86.)

Automatic Writings

Soon, Matthew Manning had discovered that he could produce “automatic” writing. In this activity, spirits allegedly guide the hand of the “entranced” medium to produce writings, drawings, or other expressions. If not deliberately faked, such activities are attributed to persons producing the effects while in a dissociative state. (Dissociation is the unconscious process in which a group of mental activities are separated from the main stream of consciousness and so function as a separate unit.) (Nickell 2012, 204–205, 347; Mühl 1963)

Figure 2. Genuine signature of psychical researcher Frederick W.H. Myers (top) is shown with Matthew Manning's automatically written one, which is obviously bogus.

As with the “signatures,” there are serious problems with the “automatic” writings of Manning. In the case of a message purportedly from psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901), not only does the script bear no resemblance to Myers’s handwriting, even lacking his nineteenth-century features (like the lower-case “p” with tall ascender), but the “F” of the signature is even the wrong form (printed rather than cursive). Indeed, all of the “Myers” text is very similar to the print-writing of Manning himself. Moreover (trumping the rationalization that Manning’s hand was asserting itself while being guided), what should have been “Frederic W. H. Myers” is actually rendered as “Frederick Myers.” (Figure 2; see Harrison 1994, 33–34, 91–93.)

There are similar problems with other writings. Bertrand Russell, the atheist philosopher, supposedly writes in acknowledgment that, indeed, one does not die at death. Spiritualists such as Manning are always trying to posthumously convert nonbelievers, but this shrewd attempt fails because, once again, the writing is spurious: for example, the signature includes the wrong forms of the letters B and r. (See Harrison 1994, 89; cf. Rawlins 1978, 198.)

Again, the writing of “Millicent Webbe” is bogus. Although there is no known specimen for comparison, it has a welter of internal inconsistencies, such as multiple variants of pseudo-antique forms. Also, it is signed once with its three letters e in Roman form, and again with one Roman and two Greek forms (Harrison 1994, 28, 87).

Automatic Drawings

In producing both automatic writings and drawings, Matthew Manning follows in the footsteps of others with multiple automatism skills, notably Rosemary Brown. She first claimed to receive dictations of writing from spirits of the dead (such as Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, and George Bernard Shaw), then, prompted by an injury to pass time at her piano, began to receive compositions from noted composers such as Bach, Chopin, Mozart, and Rachmaninoff. Brown gave more than 400 public performances of her “channeled” music. While some saw her as indeed exhibiting the various composers’ styles, others more critical regarded her as only a mimic (Guiley 2000, 27).

Manning’s automatic drawings appeared to be works by Aubrey Beardsley, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso—among others. Purportedly, the spirits of the great artists would visit Manning while he was in a trance. He told the San Francisco Examiner that an expert from Sotheby’s in London had said a “Picasso” he had done looked so much like an original that Sotheby’s would have authenticated it had they not been informed it was a “Manning.” However, noted psychical investigator James Randi wrote to Sotheby’s, receiving the reply that the claim was “absolutely not true.” The official stated that the drawings allegedly done by “spirits of various artists” were all produced by a single hand, and while clever, were obviously forgeries of known works (Gordon 1987, 101).

Consider one example of alleged Manning automatism that Harrison (1994, 43) terms “the pièce de résistance.” It is ostensibly a decorative pen-and-ink work by master Art Nouveau illustrator Beardsley (1872–1898), although “received” through Matthew Manning. In fact, the drawing is a composite of two forgeries of Beardsley from a published book of the artist’s works! (Harrison 1994, 44). But even this evidence does not dissuade the credulous Harrison.

Overall Assessment

Matthew Manning began as the focus of “poltergeist” activity that morphed into the phenomenon of spirit inscriptions appearing all over his bedroom walls that in turn led to his becoming an automatic writer and drawer. He has also claimed to be a psychokinetic metal bender—though his efforts cannot be distinguished from magic tricks (Booth 1986, 57). And he has claimed to apport objects (i.e., cause them to magically appear), communicate telepathically, astrally project himself into the past, and predict the future (Guiley 2000, 27). By the 1990s, he was also calling himself a healer (Harrison 1994, 8). In fact, he has many of the traits associated with a fantasy-prone personality (Nickell 2012, 347–348).

Manning’s purported psychic abilities were tested in 1972 for a proposed BBC broadcast. Researchers asked him to provide information—using automatic writing—about a set of small objects as well as information about the authors of some letters (each in a sealed envelope). The information Manning provided was essentially erroneous, and the planned broadcast was canceled. Later it was observed that all but one of the eight extant automatic messages had been written “clearly in variations of one hand” (that of “Robert Webbe”). The other began in an obviously disguised hand that slowly evolved into a semblance of the others, revealing that the writer was unable to keep up the disguise (Harrison 1994, 24–25).

Manning was also tested by physicist John Taylor (1980, 83) and colleague Eduardo Balanovski as to his abilities in remote viewing (the alleged power of seeing things at a distance by clairvoyance or out-of-body travel). The researchers judged the results to be “completely unsuccessful.”

In brief, the evidence does not show Matthew Manning—self-proclaimed wonderworker and jack-of-all-trades occultist—to have the paranormal powers he professes. But he keeps trying to convince us otherwise.

References

• Bartholomew, Robert E., and Joe Nickell. 2015. American Hauntings: The True Stories behind Hollywood’s Scariest Movies—from The Exorcist to The Conjuring. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
• Beloff, John. 1994. Editor’s Preface, Harrison 1994, 5–6.
Booth, John. 1986. Psychic Paradoxes. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Booth, John. 1986. Psychic Paradoxes. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Gordon, Henry. 1987. Extrasensory Deception. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2000. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, second ed. New York: Checkmark Books.
• Handwriting expert. 2008. Online at http://www.joenickell.com/HandwritingExpert/handwritingexpert1.html; March 24; accessed June 8, 2015.
• Harrison, Vernon. 1994. The signatures on the walls of Queen’s House, Linton, Cambridgeshire, and some of the automatic scripts and drawings of Matthew Manning. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 58(218)(July): 1–104.
• Mühl, Anita M. 1963. Automatic Writing, second ed. New York: Helix Press.
• Nickell, Joe. 1990. Pen, Ink, and Evidence. Reprinted New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 2003.
• ———. 1996. Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 1999. Crime Science: Methods of Forensic Detection. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 2009. Real or Fake: Studies in Authentication. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 2012. The Science of Ghosts: Searching for Spirits of the Dead. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Rawlins, Ray. 1978. The Stein and Day Book of World Autographs. New York: Stein and Day.
• Taylor, John. 1980. Science and the Supernatural. New York: Dutton.

The arguments go like this: “If Archaeopteryx is classified as a bird, then it isn’t a dinosaur, and you can’t say that birds came from dinosaurs.” Or, “Since Tiktaalik is classified as a fish, it can’t be the missing link between fish and amphibians.” Those of us with training in biology sigh, because this is a horrible misunderstanding of how classification works.

Taxonomy—Classification and Naming Species

One of the first things I teach in any of my paleontology classes is that taxonomy underpins nearly every subdiscipline of paleontology. I then go on to explain that taxonomy is also very subjective and, at times, even seemingly arbitrary.

So then, what is Taxonomy?

Taxonomy is the study of naming or classifying organisms. It is the proper use of scientific names. Taxonomy is why every scientist on Earth, regardless of his or her native tongue, knows that the name Homo sapiens refers to humans.

Thus, taxonomy is important, as it ensures that everyone uses the same name for the same species of organism, despite what word they might use in their local language. In principle anyway.

Taxonomy becomes a challenge where you have distinct species that can interbreed (for example, dogs, wolves, and coyotes). Are they one species or many? Such questions spur discussion at scientific meetings, and biologists work hard to come up with a better definition of the concept of species.

In the case of fossils, we cannot observe behaviors, breeding compatibilities, or distinctions between the forms of males and females of the same species—all of which we know can help us distinguish different species in living organisms. All we have are shapes and sizes of skeletons and occasionally some remains of soft tissues. As paleontologists, we have to decide what differences are sufficient to make two species distinct.

This process is subjective, dependent upon the experience, expertise, and general preference of the paleontologist. One paleontologist may see three different species from two different families, and another may think that they’re all members of the same species with a lot of variability in form. Or that some are male and others are female. Or that some represent juveniles and others adults.

Nevertheless, taxonomy is fundamentally important in paleontology. When paleontologists name new species, they must follow very strict rules to ensure that their new species is valid or acceptable by the rest of the paleontological community. A group of scientists—not just paleontologists but also zoologists—have formed the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), to ensure that when new species of animals are named it is with good reason. If you’ve ever read a technical paper that names a new species, you’ll notice that it very carefully describes the new species and distinguishes the new species from similar species.

Even with this process, paleontologists may yet argue whether two species are really different or not. For example, the debate about Triceratops and Torosaurus: Some paleontologists think that Triceratops is just a young Torosaurus. Others argue that they are definitely different species.

The fundamental question is does it matter?

The answer is yes!

Even though we might not agree about the details of one species or another, by carefully naming species, we as paleontologists can always be confident that we’re talking about the same organisms by using the scientific names of animals that were named following the rules put forth by the ICZN. In later research, scientists can specify what they mean when they are talking about a particular species. They can specify if they consider Triceratops and Torosaurus the same, or if they believe that they are just closely related species.

Once this is clearly laid out, paleontologists can approach the real questions they want to explore.

Phylogeny—Relationships among Species

Much of paleontology focuses on the evolutionary relationships among fossils and modern species. Fundamentally, we want to know where we came from. This is phylogeny.

In some ways, taxonomy reflects phylogeny. All the mammals are in one group (Class Mammalia) because they’re all related. We put all the birds together (Class Aves). Bigger groups, such as the Class Mammalia, are divided into smaller groups, the Family Equidae (which includes horses, donkeys, and zebras) or Family Canidae, the Dogs (includes wolves, foxes, and our pet dogs). All the members of such taxonomic groups are (presumably) closely related. (This is not always the case, however, and is a worthy topic for later posts.)

The only taxonomic division that has a clear definition is that of species, which as noted above can only be applied to a new animal when certain rules, laid out by the ICZN, are followed. All the other taxonomic groupings, so-called “higher taxa” such as Family, Order, and Class, are considerably more subjective. They exist for convenience to help us keep our thinking on organisms organized, but they have little basis in the reality of the relationships among living things. There’s no defined number of species that need to be grouped to make a Family, nor is there any specified amount of difference needed to place species in different families or classes.

The fossil record provides abundant evidence of where smaller groups (like Family) came from within the larger groups (like Order), but the ancestors of the smaller groups often aren’t terribly similar to the more modern members of the group. For example, horses came from animals that were not particularly horse-like, so how do we classify them? The vast majority of paleontological research shows that birds came from a group of dinosaurs that weren’t birds at all, though they do have many features in common. How do we classify these?

Classifying such organisms into higher categories is difficult. But the classification (the taxonomy), aside from species, does not affect the actual relationships (the phylogeny), because taxonomy and phylogeny are not the same thing. For example, it doesn’t matter if Archaeopteryx is classified as a bird or a dinosaur. What matters is that Archaeopteryx as a species is clearly defined and distinct from other dinosaurs and other birds. Then we can start to understand how it is that birds and dinosaurs are hardly different in some ways but utterly different in others.

Taxonomy is important insofar as the species must be clearly defined. The ICZN does a good job of making sure this is the case, though it can get very complex. For modern organisms, species can be defined by behavioral or reproductive patterns that are seldom preserved in the fossil record. In paleontology, we rely entirely on the shape and size of fossils to distinguish species. Nevertheless, provided a species is defined carefully, it is useful for the study of phylogenetic relationships.

Phylogeny is dependent on species—whether modern or fossil—being clearly defined so we can explore the similarities and differences among species and work out evolutionary relationships. This is done typically through cladistic analysis, which is essentially a mathematical means of exploring similarity between species, assuming that those more similar are likely to be more closely related (but this is an oversimplification and is a topic of another post).

To even begin to discuss phylogeny, we must understand taxonomy, particularly the concept of species. Thus, taxonomy underpins all study of the evolutionary relationships among organisms.

The problem with global warming is that most of the really bad stuff will happen to other people in the future. True, some of those people might be our children or grandchildren, but they are other people nonetheless. Furthermore, some of the worst effects will be felt by people in developing countries in other regions of the world.

It is difficult enough to get people to cut back on French fries, floss their teeth, or stop smoking—all of which have more direct effects on their lives—and much harder still to convince people to take immediate action for the benefit of other people in the murky future. Despite the fact that many of us think curtailing global warming and preserving life on Earth are worthy goals.

Recently, the editors of Perspectives in Psychological Science put out a call for scientists to write articles aimed at important contemporary problems. The articles were to be written in the form of a “Memo to the President,” in which they would summarize the best behavioral science solutions for these problems and propose example policies that might follow from these “best practices.” Sander van der Linden of Princeton University, Edward Maibach of George Mason University, and Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale University took on the thorny task of getting people moving on climate change.¹ In particular, the authors identified five best practices for promoting public engagement with this important issue.

1. Make it Real.

Recent research suggests that one of the best ways to increase people’s sense of urgency about climate change is to appeal to experiences rather than just charts and statistics. A 2014 study by van der Linden showed that people who had experienced extreme weather events also thought the risks of climate change were greater. The implications of this and similar studies are that, in addition to other approaches, environmental campaigns should emphasize the increasing intensity of extreme weather events, such as the California drought and recent hurricanes.

According to current psychological theory, our decision making involves both an intuitive, experiential processing system and a rational, deliberative system. In the case of climate change, appeals to reason alone are not as effective as those that highlight direct experience.

Hurricane Sandy October 25, 2012. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

2. Use the Herd.

Humans are social animals, and we are constantly checking out what others are doing. The behavior of other people informs us about what is normal and provides a model for our own actions. Unfortunately, when it comes to the general public’s attitude about climate change, the norm is not as useful as it should be: only about half of Americans consider it a serious problem. So, until that statistic improves, it might be better to emphasize international polls showing strong majorities concerned about global warming. For example, a twenty-one-country BBC poll found that 79 percent of respondents believed that climate change was caused by human activity.

Similarly, the scientific consensus on global warming is very high, with several peer-reviewed studies showing 97 percent or more of scientists saying that global warming is real and very likely due to human activity.

Social norms also can be effective when it comes to individual action to save the planet. As van der Linden and colleagues point out, “When people are informed about the average energy consumption of their neighbors, they tend to adjust their own use to conform to the group norm” (p. 760). As a result, policies promoting energy conservation as normal pro-social behavior are likely to produce positive effects.

3. Make it More Immediate.

People and events far away have less impact on us than things nearby, so efforts that point out local and regional effects of climate change will be more influential than those aimed at distant places and times. For example, people who live in coastal areas are often impressed by maps showing the projected effects of global warming on sea level changes in their areas. In addition, it should be pointed out that, although the most dramatic effects of global warming will be seen in the future, sea-level changes are already underway, affecting local flooding and storm surges.

Projected effect of a 4º C increase in average temperatures on lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Source: sealevel.climatecentral.org.

We have a natural psychological tendency to distance ourselves from any potential threat. When it comes to taking action to prevent climate change, this kind of distancing can be combatted by identifying local, achievable targets for emissions reductions. It is often said that all politics are local, and, similarly, the most powerful forces on our behavior are near at hand. If we hope to motivate people to action, we cannot overlook the potential for local influence and change.

4. Frame it Differently.

When it comes to paying for climate change, we face a sticky problem. One of the most important findings of behavioral economics is that people hate paying. Not only do they hate paying, but they hate paying even more than they like receiving money. Avoiding a possible loss of $100 is far more important to most people than the possibility of gaining $100. Worse yet, in the case of global warming, the paying comes now, and most of the benefits come much later—probably after we’re dead. As a result, there is a great reluctance to pay more for cleaner energy. Many people want to help the environment, but the pain of immediate financial loss is a substantial hurdle.

Fortunately, in addition to identifying the problem, behavioral economics provides a solution. In most cases, people think of payments as an immediate subtraction from their current wealth. But research on employee savings plans has shown that when contributions to Individual Retirement Plans are framed as reductions in future raises—rather than losses—people find it much easier to save. Employees are more willing to commit a portion of their next cost-of-living increase to retirement savings than to put money away now.

Figure 1. A 25 percent reduction in emissions framed as a $1,200 per person loss. (From Hurlstone et al. 2014)

In a recent study published in PLoS ONE, a group of Australian researchers tested framing effects on the willingness of people to contribute financially to diminished emissions in the future.²

One group of participants was shown Figure 1, which presented the cost of a 25 percent reduction in emissions as a $1,200 per person loss in 2020. A second group was shown Figure 2, which framed the cost of lower emissions as a reduction in future gains. Figure 2 made it clear that incomes would continue to grow relative to current levels, but that reducing emissions would produce smaller future gains.

Figure 2. A 25 percent emissions cut framed as reduction in future gains. The graphic makes it clear that incomes will continue to rise, with or without investments in emission cuts. (From Hurlstone et al. 2014)

Both Figure 1 and 2 said the same thing. Both presented of the cost of emissions reductions in the future. But, consistent with the principle of loss aversion, participants who saw Figure 2—the reduce income gains frame—expressed a greater willingness to invest in emissions reduction than those who saw Figure 1—the loss frame.

Framing effects like this one and other principles from the new field of behavioral economics have great potential to help us nudge people in the direction of environmental action.

5. Make it a Feel Good Thing.

A serious problem with incentive-based conservation programs is that conservation tends to drop off when the incentives are discontinued. Figure 3 shows the results of a “Do-It-in-the-Dark” energy conservation competition conducted at Princeton University in 2014.³ The data show that, although the competition produced a substantial decrease in energy consumption, once the competition ended, consumption quickly returned to previous levels.

Figure 3. Energy usage before, during, and after a conservation competition at Princeton University in 2014. (Source: van der Linden, 2015)

Recent research suggests that campaigns employing extrinsic rewards, such as monetary incentives or contests, are less effective than those emphasizing the intrinsic benefits of environmental action. It turns out that—like many forms of altruistic behavior—doing something good for the environment creates a warm glow.

In a recent experiment conducted by Dutch researchers, participants were randomly assigned to different feedback groups. One group was told they had a smaller environmental footprint than their peers (i.e., they used less energy). Another group was told they had a larger environmental footprint. The group that was led to believe they were environmentally virtuous reported the room they were sitting in felt significantly warmer than participants who were told the opposite. The actual room temperature was the same for both groups (68º F), but those who thought they were helping the environment said that the room felt warmer.

Another recent study conducted at a gas station in the United States found that, when offered coupons for a free tire pressure check, drivers who saw an appeal stressing the environmental benefits of tire inflation were significantly more likely to take coupons than those who saw appeals stressing either fuel economy or safety.

In general, these studies suggest that highlighting the intrinsic, feel-good rewards of saving the planet is a more productive and sustainable strategy than using external rewards.

Scientifically-minded people often think that logic and evidence ought to be enough. We rail at those who employ sophistry, bogus arguments, and emotion to support their claims. We assume that simply showing people the data will convince them to do the right thing.

But life is rarely that simple. People have conflicting motivations, biases, and varying degrees of faith in science. What seems abundantly clear to one person may need to be presented in a very different way to another. Fortunately, psychological science provides some guidance on the best ways to move people to action. None of the methods outlined by van der Linden, Maibach, and Leiserowitz involve lying or the use of logical fallacies to convince people. The evidence is still the evidence. But whenever you argue for climate change or any other good cause, you make a number of decisions about how to present the material, how to reward the people who follow your lead, and how to encourage other people to join your effort. Planning future environmental campaigns with these best practices in mind should help make them more effective.

Notes

1. van der Linden, S., E. Maibach, and A. Leiserowitz. 2015. Improving Public Engagement with Climate Change Five “Best Practice” Insights From Psychological Science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(6), 758-763.
2. Hurlstone, M.J., S. Lewandowsky, B.R. Newell, and B. Sewell. 2014. The Effect of Framing and Normative Messages in Building Support for Climate Policies. PLoS ONE 9(12): e114335. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0114335.
3. van der Linden, S. 2015). Intrinsic motivation and pro-environmental behaviour. Nature Climate Change, 5(7), 612-613.

Column Update

Recently, I was contacted by Charles Drum, PhD, Director of the Institute on Disability (IOD) at the University of New Hampshire. He read my May 2015 Skeptical Inquirer column, which mentioned that the institute was a supporter of the discredited therapy, facilitated communication (FC), and he wanted me to know that after lengthy discussion, the institute had decided in December of 2015 to sever itself from FC. Here is the IOD’s official statement:

Historically, the IOD has engaged in research and training activities related to FC. These activities were never a substantial part of our work and have waned considerably in recent years. The IOD is no longer providing resources or pursuing activities related to FC.

I am grateful to Charles Drum for letting me know about this change in policy at IOD and happy to help spread the word that the institute is no longer promoting this pseudoscientific therapy.

“Charlie, can we play?”
This simple question—and two pencils put on a cross drawn on a piece of paper—should allow you to evoke the spirit of a child or even a demon.

This is the latest web craze known as the “Charlie Charlie Challenge,” perhaps dating back to an ancient Mexican tradition, an experience that intrigues kids and scares adults. Through a sort of séance, some claim people can ask questions to some unseen entity that should be able to reply.

It works like this: On a sheet of paper you draw a cross and in the four quadrants thus formed you write the words Yes and No. You then put a pencil on the sheet, corresponding to one arm of the cross, and a second pencil you put perpendicularly onto the first. Then you ask if the spirit is present, and when the top pencil moves on Yes, you can start asking questions. If it moves to No, just try again later.

On social media, you can find videos of people fleeing in terror as soon as the pencil starts moving, or kids who burst out laughing when the question “Will I be rejected?” has the pencil moving to No.

There are those who take this game quite seriously. In Jamaica, the Ministry of Education has issued a ban against students playing the game, as has the Fiji Ministry of Education. In Italy, the head teacher of a middle school in Ceres, in the province of Verona, has forbidden the game in class to avoid upsetting sensitive students. There are even those who worry that the game could unleash real supernatural phenomena.

The Catholic writer Annalisa Colzi is convinced: “Well, the play Charlie has this purpose: to enslave the souls through the evocation of demons,” she explains on her blog. “What happens to those who play this game? Many unpleasant surprises that get worse over time.” And the president of the GRIS (Group of Socio-Religious Research and Information), Father François Dermine, an exorcist, agrees: “I know a lady who after dabbling in spiritualism began to hear voices who told her to kill and many other negative things that made her head explode. She started a series of exorcism sessions, but it was not easy to free her; it took years of pain and insomnia.” These rumors and fears of negative consequences have no confirmation in reality beyond individual psychological problems.

The idea of ​​a power allowing people to summon spirits extemporaneously—and without the intervention of a medium who needs to fall into a trance—is anything but new. During the late 1800s, the Ouija board was all the rage. It was a rectangular wood plate on which the letters of the alphabet were drawn, plus the words Yes and No. Its name derived from the word “Yes” in French and German.

An indicator or planchette was placed on the board, and on it the participants placed a finger. After a while, the indicator started to move, moving to several letters that formed, in sequence, words in response to questions put to the spirit. A more recent version of the Ouija sees the use of a board of paper on which the alphabet letters are handwritten and, instead of the indicator, an upturned glass or a coin are used. Participants rest a finger on the back of the glass and it starts moving, indicating different letters. The Ouija board was later patented as a board game by Parker Brothers and can be easily be found in toy stores.

The explanation for such phenomena has been well known since the nineteenth century when physicist Michael Faraday, studying the phenomenon of moving tables during séances, discovered that it was not the spirits that moved them but the people who were sitting around it resting their fingers on the table surface. They did not do so voluntarily, of course, but by involuntary muscular movements.

In such cases, participants form words in response to the questions asked, pushing the indicator without noticing. However, should they lift their fingers from the indicator, the “spirits” suddenly stop communicating. In other words, when the mind is absorbed in concentration, the muscles obey the will of the operator without him or her noticing. This reaction is now known as the ideomotor effect.

This mechanism, however, does not explain the Charlie Charlie Challenge, since nobody here touches the pencils. What happens, and how did this phenomenon start? First, it should be noted that it does not have ancient Mexican origins but is something much more recent. Some have speculated it may be a viral marketing gimmick designed to promote a horror movie just coming out at the time, The Gallows, but even if the film’s producers had tried to take advantage of such free advertising, the game did not originate with them.

The origin seems rather a balancing act with pencils called “Jugando Charly Charlie” posted on YouTube in 2014, or a variation of a few years back. However, it seems that it was a sensational television report aired last April on television in the Dominican Republic that triggered a worldwide interest in the game.

For Caitlyn Dewey of the Washington Post, the game is the perfect example of a viral fad crossing cultures: “Charlie makes a killer case study in virality and how things move in and out of languages and cultures online. You’ll notice, for instance, a lot of players and reporters talking about the game as if it were new, when it’s actually—and more interestingly, I think—an old game that has just recently crossed the language divide.”

But can two pencils really unleash supernatural forces? Of course not. The movement is due to the unstable equilibrium in the two pencils. Indeed, it is almost impossible to keep the top pencil still once it is set above the other one. Any air current, caused by a movement, a breeze, or even only by breath, is enough to trigger the rotation. Just try it.

But a question remains: Are these seemingly supernatural games bad for our kids? “There’s a real social bonding aspect to this whole phenomenon,” says Stuart Vyse, a psychologist at Connecticut College, was quoted as saying on the website Vox. “It’s almost a developmental passage for some kids, to deal with things that are scary.”

However, there are no scientific studies yet about what effects playing games like the Charlie Charlie Challenge may have on the psyche or behavior of kids. Says Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at Nottingham Trent University in England, in an article for The Independent:

As both a psychologist and a father of three adolescents, I have yet to see any evidence that the playing of such games does any psychological harm although it’s not an activity that I would actively encourage either. As a teenager and as a university student I playfully engaged in séances and at one party used a Ouija board and it never did me any harm. Some may even argue that such activities are “character building.” However, there may be children and adolescents of a more sensitive disposition where such games might have a more long-lasting negative detrimental effect.

I have noticed while perusing the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times that some contemporary chiropractors continue to find inspiration from Bartlett Joshua (B.J.) Palmer (1882–1961). B.J. was the most influential developer and promoter of chiropractic as a business opportunity and ostensibly as a healing profession. He was famous for his salesmanship and the many epigrams he shared in order to inspire Palmer College of Chiropractic students. One of his most famous epigrams was: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.”

In his Los Angeles Times column on September 14, 2014, David Lazarus wrote about chiropractors “who run newspaper ads with bold claims about breakthrough treatments for diabetes and other chronic illnesses” featuring “invitations to free dinners that are actually sales pitches.” Lazarus quoted Robert Puleo, executive officer of the California Board of Chiropractic Examiners about the ads: “It reeks of snake oil. There are some chiropractors out there who want to make a buck any way they can.” And: “The chiropractor holding such seminars tries to sign people up for months of office visits that can cost thousands of dollars.”

Last February, I wrote an article about free dinner seminars and mailed promotional materials advertised in the Times to promote a chiropractor's non-validated treatment protocol for peripheral neuropathy. The chain of clinics promoting the protocol does indeed try to convince people to sign contracts for ongoing treatment, charging individual patients thousands of dollars.

Last summer, a half-page color advertisement promoting upcoming “free dinner seminars” at various locations in eastern Los Angeles County and Orange County appeared at least nine Sundays in the main section of the Los Angeles Times. The first and largest printed word in the ads was “ARTHRITIS.”

Each ad also included: a list of symptoms of arthritis; the phrase “New, non-surgical drug free treatment to relieve the pain in your joints;” dates, times, and restaurants for four to six seminars, mostly in Los Angeles County with a few in Inland Empire and Orange County; a paragraph mentioning that there are over 100 types of arthritis with osteoarthritis being the most common type; and this text:

• Could this be the answer to your pain?
• How was your quality of life before your pain started?
  What were you able to do that you are limited in doing now?
• It can be that way again.
• If you have any of the symptoms mentioned above, or you’ve been diagnosed with Arthritis [sic] this can be your solution. With our new-state-of-art technology almost everyone with Arthritis [sic] is a candidate for our care.
• If you or a loved one is suffering from these symptoms a new safe, easy and FDA cleared treatment that requires NO surgeries can relieve your pain and help restore normal life.

At the bottom of the ads in large print was a phone number followed by the name i-Spine. Under i-Spine in smaller print was the rest of the name: “Health Center.” Below that in even smaller print, was: “BY AL-SELHI CHIROPRACTIC.”

I suspect that many people who have called the phone number at the bottom of the ads didn’t notice that a chiropractic clinic is promoting the dinner seminars. A similar ad appeared in the Orange County Register on January 3, 2016.

I called an advertising consultant for the Times and was told it would cost $15,750 for a half-page color ad in the Sunday main section for all regions where the print edition of the paper is published, but I could get a better deal per ad if I ran the ad six times. I don’t know whether i-Spine Health Center eventually shifted to advertising at lower cost to only regions including and near i-Spine’s Glendora location. I would not have seen such ads where I receive the Sunday paper.

From what I saw, it’s clear that i-Spine Health Center has needed to generate significant business just to cover advertising expenses and the sales presentation expenses of dinner seminars. I expected that the sales presentations of dinner seminars would lead patients toward signing contracts for ongoing treatment in order for the promotional investments to pay off. I wondered how and what the i-Spine Health Center’s “new-state-of-art technology” could be.

So I called the phone number provided in the advertisements and reserved a seat at a dinner seminar in Burbank. I wound up as one of seventeen dinner guests at that seminar. All except about three of the dinner guests seemed older than me and most seemed much older than my fifty-eight years. I think I stood out among the dinner guests by not being noticeably infirm.

Before the seminar began, I took out my camera phone and held it up to take a picture of the screen set up at one side of the seminar dining room. The screen displayed a title slide image for the upcoming presentation. Dr. Al-Sehi entered the room and saw what I was doing. He asked me not to take any photos. I obliged and then I wrote in my notebook what appeared on the title slide:

• I-Spine Health Center
• ADVANCED
  ARTHRITIS
  TREATMENT
  
• DR FADI AL-SELHI, D.C.^*
• RANCHO CUCAMONGA, CA [apparently the clinic’s former location]

A few minutes later Dr. Al-Sehi began the seminar. I took notes. While reviewing them afterwards, I saw the seminar as consisting of four phases: (1) building trust, (2) medicine bashing, (3) Dr. Al-Selhi’s alternative, and (4) recommending consultations.

Phase 1: Building Trust

Dr. Al-Selhi introduced himself. He mentioned that he’s married and has a young son. He discussed his educational background, which is mentioned on his biography page at his clinic’s website:

Dr. Al-Selhi obtained his Doctorate of Chiropractic Degree [sic] from Cleveland Chiropractic College, Los Angeles [which closed in 2011]. Prior to obtaining his chiropractic degree, he graduated from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, with a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology.

He also mentioned at the seminar that he had enrolled in the master’s in gerontology program at University of La Verne (California). Apparently, he didn’t finish the program.

I thought he presented himself as sincere and caring during his introduction and throughout the seminar. I imagine that some dinner guests might be much more impressed with his educational background than I was. Nevertheless, I thought Dr. Al-Selhi succeeded in connecting with his audience and used an effective propaganda device described by social psychologist Anthony Pratkanis in the July/August 1995 issue of Skeptical Inquirer: manufacture source credibility and sincerity.

Phase 2: Medicine Bashing

Medicine bashing is a well-established tradition within chiropractic. B.J. Palmer’s popular epigrams include:

• Medicine is the study of disease and what causes a man to die. Chiropractic is the study of health and what causes a man to live.

And also:

• Medicine is about disease and what makes people die. Chiropractic is about life and what makes people live.

After introducing himself, Dr. Al-Selhi shifted to a discussion of the inefficiency and poor quality of the U.S. health system. He referred to a report from the Commonwealth Fund that ranked the U.S. health system last among eleven countries. He didn’t mention that the report called for greater investment in primary care (not care from chiropractors), identified insurance administration as a main source of inefficiency (not deficiencies of modern medical practice), and noted that the United States actually ranks high in two of four measures of quality: effective care and patient centered care.

Dr. Al-Selhi suggested that a problem in the field of medicine is that it tries to provide a pill for everything. He mentioned that ibuprofen (active ingredient in Motrin and Advil) causes kidney damage in diabetics (which is a real risk with regular use). He talked about acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol and known as paracetamol in the UK) as a treatment for the pain of osteoarthritis—the most common type of arthritis—and recognition that excessive doses of acetaminophen can cause potentially fatal liver damage.

As noted by Harriet Hall, MD, the potential for benefit and harm from acetaminophen in osteoarthritis treatment have been much discussed and debated in recent years, and medical doctors encourage patients to try alternatives to pill-taking such as distraction, comfort measures, exercise, and massage.

Dr. Al-Selhi conceded that pills for hypertension are okay, but then asked rhetorically: “Are pain medications addressing the cause or are they masking pain?” He later asked: “Are any drugs addressing the cause of the problem?”

He said that referrals for pain management lead to more pills that don’t address the cause. He highlighted problems of cortisone shots that wear off. He talked about knee replacement surgeries not addressing the cause. He said that 75 percent of low back-pain surgeries fail (without citing a source).

He mocked doctors who say things like:

• “This is a normal part of aging.”
• “You’re just going to have to live with this.”
• “Sorry, nothing can be done at this point.”

He presented a famous quotation that goes something like: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results” and made the common factual error of misattributing it to Einstein. I guess that misattributing pithy quotations to Einstein enhances rather than undermines the bottom line effectiveness of sales presentations.

Chiropractors often present themselves as addressing the underlying cause or causes of health problems while suggesting that medical doctors only treat symptoms. B.J. Palmer said:

• There is no effect without a cause. Chiropractors adjust causes. Others treat effects.

So what did Al-Selhi reveal to be the cause that supposedly eludes medical doctors? Nothing but inflammation. This assertion was especially puzzling since his talk emphasized osteoarthritis, which, may involve various degrees of inflammation of joint linings, but is not significantly caused by inflammation. According to MedlinePlus:

Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis and is associated with the aging process. Osteoarthritis is a chronic disease causing the deterioration of the cartilage within a joint.

For most people, the cause of osteoarthritis is unknown, but metabolic, genetic, chemical, and mechanical factors play a role in its development.

Phase 3: Dr. Al-Selhi’s Alternative

Dr. Al-Selhi claimed to be able to address inflammation with laser energy to increase circulation, thereby drawing water, oxygen, and nutrients to the damaged area. I wrote in my notes that he claimed that Nexus therapy providing a red light at 980 nanometer (nm) wavelength [actually within the infrared range] is used to penetrate nine inches deep to accelerate cellular reproduction and growth. [Nine inches?] He talked about accelerating angiogenesis (development of new blood vessels), causing vasodilation, and increasing the diameter of blood vessels. He showed a figure of a joint with and without laser therapy that he said indicated more blood vessels with the laser therapy.

He said the treatment is FDA cleared, as stated in his Los Angeles Times ad, and proven to relieve arthritis pain. He said that drugs are approved by FDA, but equipment is cleared. Actually, some types of medical devices are also approved by FDA, but manufacturers can get what is called a 510(k) clearance for marketing by demonstrating that the device to be marketed is at least as safe and effective, that is substantially equivalent, to a legally marketed in the United States.

The 510(k) clearance summary for Nexus devices that “deliver an invisible laser light beam in the infrared spectrum at wavelengths of 805 and 980 nm” indicate that the devices are substantially equivalent to other infrared therapeutic lamps currently in commercial distribution. The summary includes these indications for use:

• The Nexus XPulse IR Lamp Systems are intended to emit energy in the visible and infrared spectrum to provide topical heating for the purpose of elevating tissue temperature for the temporary relief of minor muscle and joint pain and stiffness, minor arthritis pain, or muscle spasm; the temporary increase in local blood circulation; and/or the temporary relaxation of muscle.

Providing temporary relief or physiological changes seems more like treating effects than some cause that chiropractors claim they, unlike medical doctors, can address.

Dr. Al-Selhi said there have been over 6,000 published papers on laser therapy. But he didn’t say how many of them actually support laser therapy as an arthritis treatment and, in particular, osteoarthritis, the form of arthritis he emphasized in his seminar.

Arthritis Research UK had this to say about low-intensity laser therapy for osteoarthritis in Spring 2008:

It appears safe enough. However, the clinical trials in osteoarthritis to date haven’t been very encouraging. In fact, a meta-analysis (where the results of all the trials are pooled together) showed only mild benefit for pain and no benefit for stiffness or function. How does it work? Well, it probably doesn’t, but users of this treatment say that the light penetrates and interacts with the deeper tissues of the body.

According to the health insurer Aetna, treatment of osteoarthritis with low-level infrared light is experimental and investigational because evidence regarding its effectiveness is insufficient. Cigna has a similar medical coverage policy statement for low-level laser therapy. Insurers don’t cover treatments that are experimental or investigational rather than validated as safe and effective.

Also according to Aetna:

Recent well-designed, controlled studies have found no benefit from low-energy lasers in relieving pain in rheumatoid arthritis or other musculoskeletal conditions. Furthermore, although positive effects were found in some earlier studies, it was not clear that the pain relief achieved was large enough to have either clinical significance or to replace conventional therapies.

Phase 4: Recommending Consultations

Dr. Al-Selhi recommended that people with arthritis arrange for consultations with him. He explained that the first consultation would involve paperwork (of an unspecified nature), taking a health history, an exam, and x-rays (if not taken within the last six months). The second consultation would involve the report of findings. He described that consultation as a “family affair” so family members can understand what you’re going through.

An inquiring mind might wonder why the report of findings could not be given as part of the first consultation. A busy medical practice can still manage to provide a report of findings at the end of a single visit following the taking of the health history, the exam, and x-rays.

Dr. Al-Selhi didn’t say why a second consultation was required for the report of findings, but having patients come back for a report of findings is consistent with teachings of practice-building courses promoted to chiropractors to teach them how to increase their income through marketing techniques, efficient office management, rehearsed selling strategies, and billing practices. In Chiropractic: The Victim’s Perspective (Prometheus Books, 1995), George Magner wrote:

The ICA [International Chiropractors Association] Practice Manual states that the goal of the second visit (report of findings) is to convert the new patient into a “chiropractic patient.” [p. 73]

Magner quoted Frank J. King, Jr., a chiropractor who is also a naturopath and founder/director of the homeopathic products company King Bio Pharmaceuticals who, in an article in The Chiropractic Journal, likened initial patient contacts as a courtship:

The examination can be compared to the engagement, and the report of findings to the wedding or final ceremonial. If the correct emphasis is placed on a thorough history and the appropriate examination and lab tests, then the report of findings simply falls into place like a smooth wedding ceremony. All the tension of the doctor and the patient is eliminated, and there is no need to attempt a “sales job” on the patient.

Magner also quoted Mitchell W. Hanczaryk, D.C., a promoter of practice building, as advising chiropractors to:

…get patients committed to a next appointment time. Either the next day, week, month, or whatever they need…. The only active patients you have are the ones with an appointment in the book. If you allow a patient to leave the clinic without an appointment, you are cheating them and killing them.

It is likely easier to get patients to come back for the report of findings following the first appointment than it is to immediately get them to contract for repeated visits. In the aforementioned Skeptical Inquirer article, Professor Pratkanis discussed the foot-in-the-door persuasion technique in which the persuader starts with a small request, which sets a rationalization trap that facilitates commitment to a subsequent larger request.

Samuel Homola, D.C., a retired chiropractor and outspoken critic of cultism in chiropractic whose writings have appeared in Skeptical Inquirer had this to say about the report of findings as a “family affair”:

There is no legitimate reason why a spouse should be present for “report of findings” or a discussion of “cost-effective treatment plans.” Such an approach is usually a sales pitch used to indoctrinate both husband and wife into accepting enrollment in a long-term treatment plan.

Dr. Al-Selhi said the price for the two consultations was $249, but it would cost seminar attendees $79 for the two consultations. His pitch reminded me of a similar approach to marking down prices routinely taken in television infomercial pitches. I was amused when he then advised dinner guests, rather gratuitously, not to come for the consultations if they came to the seminar just for the free dinner.

Neither the consultations nor any laser treatment are covered by insurance. Thus, during the seminar, Dr. Al-Selhi raised this rhetorical question:

• What has your health insurance covered that works so great?

The fallacious implication, of course, was that paying out-of-pocket is likely to be worth a try.

After the seminar, it was dinnertime. Dr. Al-Selhi came to talk individually with each of his guests including me. He asked me if I came just for the free dinner. I thought he might be wary of me from the very beginning of the seminar. I wondered if he suspected that I was investigating him in some official or unofficial capacity.

I responded truthfully that I had surgery on my right knee in 2002 for a torn meniscus, that my knee sometimes bothers me after I play basketball, and that, as he pointed out during the seminar, arthritis can develop years after meniscus surgery. I was a bit surprised that, after all his talk about treating the cause of arthritis with his laser, he recommended that I see a physical therapist to strengthen my knee rather than seek an initial consultation from him. I believe that was a sound recommendation (and one that would be covered by my insurance). However, other guests were encouraged to make appointments for consultations.

Dr. Al-Selhi announced during dinner that he had to leave early for an appointment. When he left, two of his clinic staff who were with him stayed on through dessert. I spoke to one of them who explained that the consultation could be marked down more than Dr. Al-Selhi had announced. “We can get you in next week for $29.00,” she said.

I asked the other staff member how many visits is typical for the laser treatment. Her answer was twenty-four. I also asked how much it would cost. Her response was that Dr. Al-Selhi sets that price.

Some Final Thoughts

Many people with arthritis are likely to be persuaded by various social influence techniques included in sales pitches for non-evidence-based treatments.

In a national survey conducted in 1986 by Louis Harris and Associates for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 18 percent of persons with arthritis said they almost always had a significant amount of pain and 22 percent said their conditions caused significant pain frequently [p. 202]. Thirty-seven percent of persons with arthritis strongly or somewhat disagreed and 8 percent were unsure in response to the statement: “most arthritis treatments you read about are not believable” [p. 187].Thirty-four percent strongly or somewhat agreed with: “I am willing to try anything that might help my condition even if it sounds silly” [p. 203].

I’m not aware of any more recent relevant data. It would surprise me if people with arthritis have become appreciably less inclined to gamble their money on aberrant treatments.

Many of Dr. Al-Selhi’s patients are likely to be satisfied customers even if his treatments are no more effective than sham laser treatment or low-tech warming treatments. As with many chronic diseases, major forms of arthritis are subject to spontaneously flaring up and subsiding over varying periods of time. When a treatment is given right before a period of spontaneous relief, patients may overlook the natural course of the disease and erroneously conclude that treatment was effective.

When people invest significant amounts of time and money in an endeavor (perhaps such as committing in advance to a long-term treatment plan with a chiropractor), they tend to attribute greater value than is objectively warranted to the outcomes they receive. Psychologists attribute this phenomenon to mechanisms such as effort justification or psychological contrast effects.

While the effectiveness of low-level laser treatment of arthritis conditions has not been conclusively demonstrated, I don’t rule out the possibility that it can provide some degree of symptomatic relief for some patients under some circumstances. But even that falls far short of the hype in the ads for the seminars and the cause-treating hype I heard at the seminar. And that doesn’t mean the treatment is worth whatever patients are asked to pay out of pocket.

I suspect that many patients who commit to a series of ongoing laser treatments for arthritis are likely to experience buyer’s remorse. Consumer advocate Stephen Barrett, MD advises consumers not to pay or contract in advance for chiropractic visits at what gets represented as a “discount” price.

I looked up Dr. Al-Selhi in the database of the California Board of Chiropractic Examiners and found that there have been no disciplinary actions against him—not even the kind of minor actions that the Board has taken against other chiropractors for misleading advertising.

I encourage dissatisfied patients of chiropractors to complain to their state’s chiropractic examining board if they believe they were misled by advertising claims by chiropractors or regret signing a contract in advance of chiropractic visits. I’m not sure how much of a difference submitting complaints about advertising claims can make. However, as B.J. Palmer liked to say: “It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness.”

* What is it that leads many chiropractors to redundantly write “Dr.” before their names when they also include an abbreviation of their Doctor of Chiropractic after their names? The only time I can recall seeing such a construction from a non-chiropractor with a doctoral degree was in the credits of The Cosby Show, which listed “Dr. William H. Cosby, Jr. Ed.D.” There are reasons for doubt about the rigor of Dr. Cosby’s doctoral training.

It’s an experience that may not appeal to everyone—a seven-day cruise at sea, with the aim of “taking back power from corrupt and greedy institutions, attain true self-authority, and realize our genuine Self behind the masks … discovering the truth, taking command of our lives, and attaining genuine inner realization” —with every odd belief you can think of listed as entertainment:

GMOs, Monsanto, bee colony collapse, ecology, global warming, climate change, fracking, HIV, autism, Big Pharma, medical suppression, vaccinations, fluoridation,… electoral fraud, identity chips, 2nd amendment, and so much more.

But Colin McRoberts didn’t let that deter him—in fact, he started a fundraiser to attend and was soon on The ConspiraSea Cruise, blogging his experiences and delving into lectures and talks to find out for himself: Why do people believe weird things?

His blog post series is featured at Violent Metaphors blog, and he spoke to me for the Token Skeptic podcast, not long after the event concluded.

Colin McRoberts: I am an attorney by training, although I’m not practicing law anymore. A few years ago, probably five or six years ago now, I met my wife. As part of following her for her research—she’s a scientist and has to move around the country—I left the practice of law for a consulting practice. It was much more flexible in terms of where I could live, and I found that I enjoyed that work a lot more.

These days I consult in the field of communications and negotiation, which primarily means I help my clients negotiate better deals in the commercial world. Purchasing, selling, that sort of thing. We do a lot of travel, so right now I’m speaking to you from lovely sunny Copenhagen—which actually is lovely if not actually sunny!

Kylie Sturgess: How did you get involved in reporting on conspiracy? That seems a little bit different from what you might expect to do in the course of your everyday work.

McRoberts: It’s actually different from what I expected to do when I showed up on the boat. When I first changed jobs I wound up having a ton of free time and caught myself just playing a lot of video games and realized that I needed to do something more intellectual to keep my brain active. I started writing a book.

Originally it was a book about Creationism and I plugged away at that for a few months before I realized that I was having a hard time writing it because I didn’t care very much because nobody cares very much because Creationism is pretty much a dead issue. There are still Creationists. There will always be Creationists, but they have not as much influence as they used to and it’s not as significant an issue as it used to be.

I expanded the scope of the book from just Creationism to irrational ideas generally. I’m still trying to find a better term than irrationality because that’s such a pejorative term, but generally it’s anything that is out of the mainstream that people know or should know is probably false and is promoted as true.

In the course of writing this book I’ve had a lot of chances to interview people who adopt these ideas. I used to live in Austin, Texas, and we had the chance to talk to a lot of the Alex Jones crew out there. I’ve interviewed Kent Hovind, who is the Creationist and tax protester preacher, but I thought that this was, when I heard about the cruise, a great opportunity not so much to listen to the speeches and the presentations, but the talk to the people who were there learning about these ideas and to find out, Why do you believe this? What’s credible to you? How do you make this determination?

My initial plan was just to go, listen, and use it as background research for the book. Tickets were pretty expensive, so we decided to crowd fund it. As part of the crowd funding I thought: you know, I’m not giving people anything; I’m not sending them memorabilia from the boat. They’re not getting a pre-released copy of the book. So, I wanted to do something to make it worth people’s time to donate: Why don’t I just blog about it from the boat so at least they get some insight into what a cruise like this is like? Because the one question I kept getting from people was, What’s it going to be like? Who’s going to be there? What are you going to hear? What are they going to talk about?

I figured at first I would just write nightly updates: this is who was there, this is who talked, this is what it’s like on the boat. Obviously it got more involved than that! Partly through getting to know some of the actual reporters on board; we wound up doing something that looked a little bit more like real journalism than just this kind of daily update.

Sturgess: Now the blog itself is ViolentMetaphors.com…That’s not actually your blog? You’re writing on somebody else’s site?

McRoberts: Yes, my wife’s site. She’s a professor at the University of Kansas. Most of the blog is about anthropological issues, but she has a real interest in science communication, and so there’s a significant chunk of articles that are about vaccine advocacy and anti-vaccine advocacy and sort of general pseudoscience issues in one field or another.

Sturgess: When I was reading the blog posts I discovered that you are one of several other people onboard, a number of reporters, not just bloggers as well. What was it like networking with this mixture of people?

McRoberts: It was a surprise actually. I think I was halfway through the cruise when one of the organizers mentioned to me over dinner that there were other reporters onboard. I had already pegged one of them, Anna from Jezebel, who I had realized was a reporter just because she was writing with a very stereotypical tiny reporter’s notepad in a couple of the sessions, whereas although a lot were taking notes, they were more on legal pads. She had a reporter’s steno-pad.

Then there was also a team from Popular Mechanics onboard. I didn’t realize they were there. When somebody said Popular Mechanics I thought it must be a misunderstanding because why would they be following a ConspiraSea cruise, which I think was also confusing for a lot of the presenters and to some of the guests of the cruise. It turned out they have an interest in pseudoscience and science advocacy generally, and so they had helped put a freelancer onboard, a team of reporter and a photographer.

The three of them and I became friends and talked a lot after sessions and compared notes. It became very, very educational for me to watch real professional journalists approach a difficult subject like this. They were fantastic professionals, very calm, very even-handed—even in the face of some fairly unusual pushback from the subjects.

Sturgess: I’ll ask you about the pushback in a second, but were there particular elements that you were keen on finding out more about while you were on this tour?

McRoberts: Yeah, there were two in particular. The obvious one was anti-vaccine advocacy, which I’ve written about in the past from the perspective of a communications professional. How do you convince vaccine-hesitant parents to vaccinate? How do you relieve their fears? Why are those fears credible to people in the absence of any real scientific evidence to support them?

Then also because I’m a lawyer, and that’s why I mentioned it, the pseudo-legal stuff is incredibly interesting to me. It’s something that a lot of people don’t think about and don’t realize is an issue because it’s so behind the scenes and so technical in a lot of cases. I knew there would be people onboard who would be doing things like teaching people creative ways to supposedly avoid paying taxes or to pay off their credit-card debts—none of which work and all of which eventually end up in either legal trouble, generally, or even prison time.

I was very interested to see how that advocacy works. How are they pitching their ideas to people knowing that they fail, and they always fail? A big question I had was: Do the people teaching this stuff really believe that it works, or do they just teach it for a quick buck and then go home and live their lives?

As I think we’ll talk about later on, it turns out that they do believe it, which was surprising to me, in that both the major teachers onboard are now in legal trouble for doing the kinds of things they teach.

Sturgess: Did you have certain expectations about how a skeptical person or even just someone who would be questioning what’s being said onboard would be treated?

McRoberts: My expectation going in was based on a lot of these conversations I’d had, for example, with the Alex Jones crowd in Austin, which is that for the most part people are really happy to talk about their ideas. What I’ve experienced in the past is multiple people saying you must be an agent of some kind. You must be with the FBI. You must be with—no one’s ever really said CIA, but they’ve implied it—and yet still wanting to talk about their ideas and explain themselves.

Because for the most part people like to talk about what they believe as I’m sure you’ve experienced doing a podcast. It’s the same for everybody at both sides of the table. Being a skeptic I didn’t think would be any trouble at all. I think it would be tougher to be a believer who asks the occasional skeptical question than it would be to just be an outright skeptic. Because as long as you show up and you’re an outright skeptic, they can file you away and say, “Well, he’s a skeptic, so his questions don’t really matter as much as they would if they were coming from inside our group and inside our community.”

Which is one reason I think we saw no skeptical questions asked at all at any point in the conference by anybody who wasn’t a self-professed skeptic.

Sturgess: Really?

McRoberts: Even the most absurd ridiculous things. One guy told his audience the Vatican has just released enough money to pay off everybody’s mortgages and you should expect that to happen by sometime in February. Nonsense. Nobody questioned it. Nobody said a word. Just completely landed without a ripple in the audience.

Sturgess: No one lifted up their hand and said, “What? Including the Protestants like myself?” Or, “Hey, I’m Jewish. Do I count?” No one even did something like that?

McRoberts: Yeah, or even “How do you know?,” which is the question I would love to hear people asking more often and was never asked, never. I didn’t expect to hear it asked. It would be pretty unusual for people inside the community to ask those kinds of questions and create that kind of stress, whereas as a skeptic you can ask that kind of thing and nobody minds very much. It was actually pretty easy for us to be skeptics in the community.

It was a pretty open and welcoming group for the most part, especially among the attendees. We had a couple of tense moments when people were upset that I was blogging, but they were more upset that we were blogging about the cruise than that we were skeptics.

The only real pushback on ideas I ever got were people asking, “Well, you’re not going to vaccinate your kids, are you?” Really expecting me to say no, because it’s scary and just shocked to hear somebody say, “Of course I’m going to vaccinate my kids. I want my kids to be healthy and happy and strong and safe when we eventually have them and you do that by vaccinating.” I think they were really kind of unhappy to hear that, but in the sense that it bucked their expectations, not in the sense that they were hostile to it.

Sturgess: Your blog posts on the ConspiraSea Cruise have been split up into different days, and people can find them on the ViolentMetaphors.com website. I enjoyed reading the blog posts—including the nautical jokes you’d be glad to hear!

Most of the time I’d click over to a new page and I’d say to myself, “Oh great, he’s not blogging from a lifeboat. They haven’t thrown him overboard yet. That’s good. He’s all right!” What were some of the highlights and the lowlights of the event? Could you give us a quick brush over for those who haven’t checked out the site?

McRoberts: Yeah, the highlights for me were the personal conversations I got to have with people. We had a chance to talk with just random attendees, people who were there to listen to the conference over dinner. I haven’t actually written about those because I particularly want to protect the privacy of the people who I had those personal conversations with.

I’ve written a little bit about general themes that came out of those conversations. I’ll be writing later tonight about one particular set of conversations I had with a person who I won’t identify in any way to protect their anonymity, but those were extremely valuable to me in helping understand where people come from.

For example, one of the common questions I asked people was, What would change your mind? What evidence would you need to see before you believed that vaccines, they’re safe or that GMOs aren’t poison or that this guy cannot get you out of paying your taxes? I expected those to be sort of proforma questions. I though the answer was pretty obvious, that people would say, “Well, if I saw good evidence that would change my mind, but I haven’t seen good evidence.”

In fact every single person I asked that question of said either explicitly or implicitly nothing would change their minds. Nothing. They almost all said well, I’ve done my research. I have an open mind and because I have an open mind, having seen the research now I’m right. Now I know that GMOs are a big conspiracy. Now I know that vaccines are poison. Now at this point, nothing would change my mind.

It was a highlight for me to hear that come out of people’s mouths because if someone had told me, and people did say this is the kind of thing conspiracy theorists will tell you, I wouldn’t have believed them. I would think this just isn’t how people operate. Of course they’re going to say they have an open mind and they would change their mind if they saw good evidence. It was very valuable to me to learn that in fact there are people who will say nothing will change my mind.

Now I don’t imagine that’s everybody who’s on the boat, but it was everybody that I talked to, including a couple of the presenters. The lowlights on the other hand were those very, very rare instances of hostility and even outright aggression towards me or towards the reporters onboard. I should say it was mostly towards the reporters onboard, not so much to me.

I don’t know why that is. It may be that I’m not a professional journalist. It may be that I’m a guy. It may be that I’m over six feet tall and people were just less comfortable being hostile towards me, but I think I definitely had a better experience in that sense than they did.

Sturgess: I guess that answers my questions about attitudes of the presenters and the attendees towards the journalists. Were the attendees generally welcoming towards the journalists?

McRoberts: A little bit less so than the presenters. My experience was that the presenters were a little more cautious towards me because I was more of a self-professed skeptic, whereas the attendees were very happy to have lots of conversations with me about their ideas because I was just there to listen and not to argue with them.

I think that the reporters had a little bit of the opposite experience. I think the presenters were largely there to raise the public profile, to do some speaking, to sell books, DVDs, whatever, and were relatively happy for the most part to have the press available. Whereas the attendees felt a little bit uncomfortable at the concept of scrutiny. They didn’t like there being somebody present watching them with this air of officialdom.

It’s speculation on my part, but I think it’s pretty consistent with what we saw—which is people in the audience being very uncomfortable with photographs being taken or somebody taking notes for publication. Whereas the presenters for the most part were very happy with it until they started kicking us out of a couple of sessions because they didn’t want that kind of scrutiny on what they were doing, which I think is a tremendous irony of conspiracy theorists trying to operate in the dark without the visibility of the press.

Sturgess: Yeah, you mentioned that on your blog, the caption for one of the photos. It’s all meant to be about transparency and understanding how the world really works, but not that much transparency.

McRoberts: Yeah, and in fact as I was boarding a plane for Denmark I got an email from the cruise organizers passing along information, a request from Leonard Horowitz and Sherry Cane, they were two of the speakers onboard. They operate as a pair, requesting with sort of a legal bent to it that we remove all pictures of them and mentions of their name from the blog.

It’s hard to tell exactly whether they meant it as a demand or as a polite request, but since they referenced the fact that they didn’t sign a release specific to me, I think it’s pretty fair to interpret it as a demand. It’s a completely legitimate demand. I don’t need a release to publish their names or to put up photographs for news value, but like I say in the blog, we’re bloggers and nobody foots our legal bills. So for the time being and especially because I’m working overseas and don’t have time to deal with it, I’ve taken the pictures down or obscured them and put up a notice explaining why we’ve done it. When I go back and have a chance to really look at it I’ll probably put them back up because I think it is really a legitimate request.

Sturgess: What were the most attended sessions? I know that there would have been certain ones that were of keen interest to you. You mentioned in detail ones about legal matters and monetary systems and tax systems in America. I was quite surprised to see Andrew Wakefield pop up. I thought oh, he’s still around? What was it like in terms of popularity and people attending sessions?

McRoberts: Well, Wakefield definitely drove the most attendance as far as I could tell. Anything that seemed like it would be entertaining tended to drive more attendees, which I think is an indication of how much of the interest in the ConspiraSea cruise even among the attendees was this will be a good time. We’ll talk about some interesting stuff, and none of it really matters at the end of the day.

I think a movie got screened. That drew a lot of attendees. People talked about crop circles, things like that. I didn’t make those sessions, but I think that drew a lot of attendees because they were interesting, fun sessions. Then the biggest ones by far in my experience were the joint sessions in which Andy Wakefield showed up with a guy named Jeffrey Smith who is sort of the Andy Wakefield of GMOs and other figures.

For example one panel he showed up with Sherri Tenpenny who is an osteopath who opposes vaccination. That’s the picture you saw that was obscured on my blog. They got up with the Horowitz, the Cane pair, and the guy named Nick Begich who was a conspiracy theorist, I think, active a few years ago for the most part, who was concerned about a machine called HARRP in Alaska that does some atmosphere research.

I should say just in case I don’t get a chance to later, Nick Begich really impressed me. I was surprised to show up at a conference like that and walk away with such a high impression of one of the presenters, one of the conspiracy theorists. In a joint session with Andy Wakefield and Jeffrey Smith and Horowitz and Cane in which everybody else was pushing fear and paranoia and distrust and poison, you’re being poisoned by vaccines or GMOs or by sound frequency, all of these really scary ideas, Nick Begich stood up and said, “You really don’t need to be afraid. Don’t worry about it. Just be an activist. Get involved in things you care about. Learn a lot about the things you care about. As for solutions, let’s have more scientists in the regulatory process and make sure they’re generalists as much as possible.”

I think he was pretty popular with the audience because it was an upbeat message. With me in particular, I was really impressed that he would push back against that climate of conspiracy and fear as hard as he did. It was very impressive to me to hear him do that.

Sturgess: Do you think in the end that you got the answers that you sought?

McRoberts: Oh, that is a really tough question. Yes and no. Some of them I got some really useful answers. For example, finding out what would change your mind and really being surprised to hear so many people say so confidently “nothing.” In fact, one nurse I talked to was explaining why she was very anti-vaccine, thinking about becoming a homeopath and explicitly in exactly that word said, “Nothing. Nothing would change my mind.”

Astonished to hear that but very useful in terms of understanding this mindset. The other answers that I didn’t get so much of—I would have loved to have asked more people “Why do you think this is credible?” I didn’t get a chance to do that as much as I wanted to. For example, when the guy got up and said, “The Vatican is about to pay off your mortgage,” I would have loved to have polled the audience and said, “Okay, first of all, who believes that?”

I think probably fairly few hands would have gone up because I think most people are very selective about the things they were hearing. They could reject the really out there stuff and then pick up on the stuff they wanted to believe and say that’s credible. I didn’t want to ask the people who believed it why do you believe it? Why is this person credible? What makes this person believable when he says something that’s so outside your experience and the experience of experts in this field?

I don’t know the answer to that. I suspect a lot of it is that the people who showed up were covered with credibility by virtue of being onstage with people that the attendees did find credible like Andy Wakefield, which is kind of a shame. I think the conference organizers gave them some credibility by giving them this podium to stand in front of and the appearance of someone who is actually an expert by talking them up as somebody who knows what they’re talking about.

Especially in the case of these pseudo-legal guys whose advice is so immediately dangerous, I think that’s a real shame. While I think the crew overall was very well organized, logistics were great, the people who actually handled the births and the bunks, did a great job and I want this to happen again. I think there should be a cruise like this all the time so people can talk about their ideas. I do think that was a real shame and a real failure on the part of the organizers to put up people who are as far as I can tell both under indictment before the boat started and hold them up as experts in legal matters without telling anybody, “Hey, by the way you might want to be careful. These guys are under indictment.” Of course the speakers didn’t say that.

Sturgess: I don’t want to be a spoiler for the blog post that you’re writing now that the cruise is over, but what happened after? You left the boat; what happened next?

McRoberts: Yeah, oh my gosh. On a personal level I left the boat with the reporters because as I said we’d kind of, the people onboard who weren’t conspiracy theorists, bonded a little bit. We went to a lovely little restaurant, I think a Hungarian place, and ate pastries and talked about the cruise and tried to explain to one of the reporter’s friends who’d showed up to give everyone a ride what had happened and just berated this poor woman with stories about the week.

She loved it, but it was probably a weird experience for her too. We left in an Uber—a giant, black, unmarked SUV—all the reporters and me leaving together in a big car, which I’m sure was not good for our credibility! The conspiracy theorists, we didn’t realize that until we were on the road. Then we missed—and I cannot forgive myself for missing this, although there’s no way we could have known it was going to happen—one of the pseudo-legal speakers, a guy named Shawn David Morton who I had challenged a couple of times just because I couldn’t take any more the stuff he was telling people, was arrested as he got off the boat by IRS criminal enforcement agents.

For people who aren’t familiar with American law enforcement, those are federal charges related to tax crimes. The IRS has its own branch of federal police essentially who conducted the arrest. I have no idea where they did it or if it was as soon as he got off the boat, but there’s a customs checkpoint and I assumed it happened right there.

In theory, I could have been there to see it if I had gone through customs at exactly the right time, but I didn’t. We missed it. I didn’t hear about it until the news came out a couple of days later; I think searching for his name it popped up. He was arrested and out on bail I think by the time I heard. He is up for—according to the news reports I’ve read—a maximum of 600 years in federal charges. His wife has about the same indictment. Together combined they’re facing over a millennium in prison. They won’t get that much, but they are very serious crimes.

Sturgess: Wow.

McRoberts: I should say I am a lawyer. I want to add for the records, it’s an indictment. It’s alleged. He hasn’t been convicted of anything as far as I know. I think the trial is scheduled right now for some time in March. Hopefully I can be there, but realistically probably not.

Sturgess: Gosh.

McRoberts: Yeah. It’s really surprising for me again, how much of this stuff people believe. At one point in one of his lectures he put a, what he called a Supreme Court case up on the screen and said, “This is a Supreme Court case you probably haven’t heard about. It came out in September. It establishes that federal courts don’t have jurisdiction over any of the cases they’re hearing, civil, criminal. It’s all a shame. It’s all a conspiracy against you.”

Sturgess: Okay, I’m in Australia and even I know that’s not right!

McRoberts: Right! The first thing I thought was wait, Supreme Court cases don’t come out in September. That’s not right. Then secondly, yeah, obviously nobody has come out and said the courts are a conspiracy. That would have been mainstream news. I took a look at it and what it was, I think, a WordPress blog called SupremeCourtCase on WordPress.com—that is some guy’s ranting about his own case that Morton apparently confused for a real Supreme Court case and used that as evidence.

His speech to the cruise or the cruise audience was about why you shouldn’t believe lawyers because they’re part of this conspiracy, and I thought well, this is just rank incompetence. This is somebody who’s not taking the five minutes it would take to read the case and know how the Supreme Court works. He doesn’t really believe this.

Then just earlier this afternoon I was reading some of the indictment materials and the papers and the docket sheet in his criminal case and he cited it to the court in the criminal case. He relied again on this blog as a Supreme Court case establishing that there’s no jurisdiction.

Which suggests to me he really believes it, which is astonishing to me because I cannot understand how somebody could spend five minutes reading this stuff and believe that it’s right. He believed it enough to stake his future on it, which is a constant surprise to me in these cases. The thing I’m still kind of investigating is where that mindset comes from. I can only imagine the howls of laughter in the prosecutor’s office when they got that document in and saw the kind of case he was trying to rely on was a blog. Just bizarre.

Sturgess: Now that you’ve found your land legs, would this be something that you’d recommend for other people to try doing? Go on a ConspiraSea cruise of their own?

McRoberts: Enthusiastically. They did say they want to have this again in the future. It will probably be a couple of years because the organizers primarily do New Age spiritual cruises. I think this was an experiment for them. I think they were a little alarmed at how it came out in terms of the PR and in terms of the ... I think probably if they’re smart they were very alarmed to hear that their legal speakers are under indictment and they’re going to be very careful about that in the future.

I hope they do it again and I hope people, especially skeptics, go as long as they go with the right frame of mind, which is to ask questions. Not to argue, not to try and convince people they’re wrong. Because I think that’s what’s really lacking even among people whose primary goal is to talk people out of being conspiracy theorists; you have to understand their mindset. You have to follow where they’re coming from, really understand what it is they want, what they believe, why they believe it. It requires having a lot of conversations that are more listening than talking with people who are conspiracy theorists.

The problem for skeptics is it’s hard to find those people except online, and online is the worst possible way to have those conversations because it’s so impersonal, it devolves into arguments so quickly, especially things like Twitter where you’re really focused into just these narrow argument points and you don’t have time for that longer, more slow relationship building conversation.

If you’re a skeptic and you want to talk to people about conspiracy theories and talk them out of being conspiracy theorists, you’ve got to find them. You’ve got to talk to them. You’ve got to know who they are and where they’re coming from, and that really requires a personal face to face conversation. The idea of a “conspiracy cruise” is great because it makes that easy and it makes it fun. It’s a really super way to get that experience, but it doesn’t have to be a ConspiraSea cruise.

Find a bookstore in town, that sort of thing, like Brave Books in Austin is where I started off having a lot of these interviews. That’s a great way to meet people who have these ideas and face them, talk to them, hear what they have to say without being pushed by the medium into this argumentative mindset.

Sturgess: I like the overall message at the end of the blog in terms of it’s not us and them—it’s just us.

McRoberts: Yeah. I was afraid I had pushed that a little too hard rhetorically, but I think it’s a really important point to make because that was the main message of the cruise, in a lot of ways it’s us versus them and them is Big Pharma or them is Monsanto or them is the government doing the chem trail spraying. I think the one thing that would relieve a lot of fears on the part of the conspiracy theorists is to talk to a skeptic and realize this guy is like us. This guy has the same concerns we do. This guy wants kids to be healthy just like we do.

What I found is that a lot of the really most virulent anti-vaccine protesters, for example, don’t believe that. They believe that people who are pro-vaccine really truly want to hurt children. It’s an absurd thing to believe, but it makes it so much easier to believe the conspiracy if you put yourself in that mindset.

Wakefield got into that mindset a little bit when he started talking about Brian Deer, the reporter who exposed him, taking pleasure in the suffering of children; I thought, that’s probably not true. I’ve never met Brian Deer, but I can’t imagine that could be true. It really makes it easier to believe you’re the victim of a giant conspiracy if you paint the other side in these monstrous demonic terms.

That’s the other benefit of having these face to face conversations. This is what we tell people when they ask, “How can I convince my sister to vaccinate her kids?” The first thing you’ve got to do is have that conversation and just show up; make it clear what you believe. Be honest and sincere about why you’re having the conversation and don’t try to argue.

The most important thing you can do is to say hi, this is my name. This is why I’m here. I care about you, care about your kids. I vaccinate and here’s why because it takes away from that.... It de-builds the wall, tears it down a little bit that people want to build between themselves and “them.” Because they want to believe the other side is evil and it’s time to deconstruct that as much as possible.

Mucha gente cree que la Tierra ha recibido visitas de extraterrestres. ¿Es posible? Para empezar, no hablemos de avistamientos de platillos volantes ni de cosas parecidas, sino de dónde vivimos, desde cuándo y de cómo somos. Es decir, del espacio, el tiempo y nosotros.

La Tierra es un pequeño planeta que órbita alrededor de una estrella bastante corriente, aunque para nosotros sea especial: el Sol. El Sol es una de las entre 100.000 y 400.000 millones de estrellas de la Vía Láctea, nuestra galaxia. Pero es que los astrónomos calculan que, a su vez, puede haber entre 100.000 y 200.000 millones de galaxias. En el caso más prudente, que en nuestra galaxia haya sólo 100.000 millones de estrellas, tocaríamos a más de 13 estrellas por humano vivo y, si hay sólo 100.000 millones de galaxias, a ¡más de 13 galaxias por humano vivo!

Así que espacio hay de sobra para que surja la vida por ahí. A fin de cuentas, aquí estamos nosotros, ¿no?

Vayamos con el tiempo.

El Universo –lo saben los físicos gracias a observaciones del telescopio espacial Hubble– nació hace unos 13.700 millones de años. Es muy difícil que nos hagamos una idea de cuánto tiempo es eso, así que recurramos al calendario cósmico, de Carl Sagan. Reduzcamos toda la historia del Universo a un año: en el primer segundo del 1 de enero sucedió el Big Bang, la explosión con la que empezó todo, y ahora estaríamos en el último segundo del 31 de diciembre. Bueno, pues, en ese calendario el Sol y la Tierra no se formaron hasta el 1 de septiembre, los dinosaurios se extinguieron por un asteroidazo el 28 de noviembre, después de 5 días de reinado, a primera hora de la tarde del 31 de diciembre aparecieron los homínidos en África y toda la Historia –desde las tablillas de arcilla sumerias hasta Internet– ha sucedido en los últimos 4 segundos. Da vértigo, ¿verdad?

Ahora, parémonos a pensar.

Hay muchas estrellas alrededor de las que puede haber planetas como la Tierra en los que puede haber surgido la vida y hasta haberse desarrollado especies inteligentes. Pero las distancias que separan esas estrellas son inmensas. Tanto que se miden en años luz. Un año luz equivale a la distancia que recorre la luz en un año a una velocidad de 300.000 kilómetros por segundo. La Luna está a poco más de un segundo luz y el Sol, a 8 minutos luz, pero la estrella más cercana está a 4 años luz y el centro de la Vía Láctea –nosotros vivimos en las afueras–, a unos 28.000 años luz. La luz que ahora vemos del centro de la galaxia salió de allí cuando se extinguieron los neandertales. Nuestra nave más rápida, la Voyager 1, despegó en 1977 y todavía no ha salido del Sistema Solar, de nuestro patio trasero.

Así pues, el primer reto para unos extraterrestres sería salvar esas inmensas distancias viajando, como poco, a la velocidad de la luz. Muy rápidamente para nosotros; lento a escala cósmica. El hiperespacio de Star Wars, la propulsión de curvatura de Star trek y los agujeros de gusano de Babylon 5 para viajar en un abrir y cerrar de ojos entre estrellas son cosas de la ciencia ficción. Alguien dirá que hace no tanto tiempo también era un reto para nosotros volar y ahora es algo cotidiano. Pero no nos olvidemos del tiempo.

¿Qué probabilidades hay de que supuestos visitantes de otros mundos lleguen a la Tierra justo ahora? Y entiendan el ahora como los últimos 200.000 años, para abarcar toda la vida de nuestra especie, Homo sapiens. Es más probable que los alienígenas visitaran nuestro mundo en tiempos de los dinosaurios, que, a fin de cuentas vivieron 5 días cósmicos y no unas horas, o cuando el planeta era un yermo sin vida. Buzz Aldrin, el segundo hombre que pisó la Luna, cree que “es más probable que seres extraterrestres hayan visitado la Tierra hace millones de años o la visiten en un futuro lejano a que lo hagan ahora”. Dice que “sería demasiada coincidencia”. Yo estoy de acuerdo con él.

El Otro somos nosotros

Los extraterrestres de la ciencia ficción suelen ser humanos por una razón muy simple: si no, es muy difícil que sus andanzas nos interesen. Llevar al Otro al espacio y presentarlo con orejas puntiagudas, piel verde o más pelo que el Bigfoot es un recurso dramático, y los aficionados lo entendemos como tal. Pero una cosa es disfrutar con una novela o un episodio de una serie de televisión y otra admitir en el mundo real que los seres de otros planetas que nos visiten sean siempre humanoides, como han defendido los ufólogos desde los años 50.

Las clasificaciones de los tripulantes de los ovnis que publicaban hace décadas las revistas de ufología, incluidas las más serias, son visualmente una delicia y una demostración de ingenuidad supina. Hay enanos y gigantes, seres bellos y horrendos, melenudos y sin un pelo, con dos ojos y cíclopes, de apariencia juvenil y anciana, protegidos con escafandra o a cara descubierta. Parecen diferentes, pero no lo son. Todos, absolutamente todos, son humanoides. Tienen una cabeza -con ojos, nariz, oídos y boca-, dos brazos -con sus manos y sus dedos-, dos piernas... Y en algunos casos hasta han llegado a copular con los humanos.

Nadie se paraba a pensar entonces dentro de la ufología en que nosotros somos el producto de un proceso evolutivo, que estamos aquí por casualidad, y que en otro planeta la evolución habrá seguido caminos muy diferentes. Por no hablar de que nuestro mundo ha sido para los ufólogos una especie de Benidorm cósmico, con alienígenas de todos los tipos posibles viniendo de visita. Si la vida inteligente fuera algo raro, sería ilógica tanta variedad de visitantes en un mismo lugar. Si la vida inteligente fuera algo común, nada tendría la Tierra de especial para llamar la atención de tanto explorador cósmico.

La mejor prueba de que los visitantes de otros planetas son, como las hadas y los dioses, habitantes de nuestros sueños es su humanidad.

Vaccination is arguably the greatest accomplishment of modern medicine; vaccines have saved millions from death and disability, and smallpox has been eradicated forever. But vaccines are not without their critics. Since Jenner first experimented with cowpox, there have been people who have rejected vaccinations for various reasons, usually appallingly wrong-headed ones.

A strong anti-vaccine movement continues to thrive today. Some people reject all vaccines for religious or ideological reasons; some complain (against all evidence) that we give “too many too soon”; some have specific objections to specific vaccines. Every objection the anti-vaxxers have come up with has been soundly debunked, but not everyone has heard the debunking or accepted it.

Perhaps the hardest vaccine to explain is the hepatitis B vaccine that is routinely given to newborns within twenty-four hours of birth (followed by two more doses one and six months later). Hepatitis B is a sexually transmitted disease. A newborn can’t even climb into the next crib, much less fornicate with its occupant. Newborn babies don’t have sex, and they’re not likely to have sex for many years to come. So at first glance it seems positively idiotic to vaccinate them at birth. It may seem only logical to assume it must be some nefarious conspiracy to enrich doctors and vaccine manufacturers. You could stop there and condemn the practice, or you could wait to hear what Paul Harvey called “the rest of the story.”

Hepatitis B is sexually transmitted through vaginal, anal, or oral sex. It can also be transmitted by shared needles: drug injection, body piercing, or tattooing. It can be directly transmitted to a newborn by an infected mother. And it can be transmitted by personal items contaminated with blood or bodily fluids (razors, toothbrushes, nail clippers, etc.).

OK, so babies don’t have sex, abuse drugs, or share razors. And mothers can be tested for the virus; if they don’t have it, there is no risk of them transmitting it to their babies. So are there any valid reasons to vaccinate newborns?

Yes, there are very compelling reasons. For one thing, testing mothers is not foolproof. False negative test results are possible. But the most likely source of hepatitis B infection for children is not their mother, but the other children and adults they will encounter as they grow up—any of whom might be infected without knowing it. Children learn to share in preschool. They share their toys; they share their colds; and they share their bodily fluids. The hepatitis B virus can survive outside the body for seven days. Theoretically, an infected person could inadvertently contaminate a doorknob or a toy with saliva, and a child could touch the object and transfer the virus into his own body by touching a skin lesion or putting his fingers in his mouth. Exposure doesn’t have to be by direct injection or through breaks in the skin; mucosal exposure is enough.

The disease itself is subclinical (no symptoms) in up to 70 percent of cases. In children and immunocompromised adults it is typically asymptomatic. In 30–50 percent of adults it causes an acute illness with jaundice, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain, lasting several weeks. There is no specific treatment for the disease. Most healthy adults who become infected will recover completely with no lasting consequences, but a few will die from acute liver failure. Up to 5 percent of infected adults will develop chronic infection. And 20–30 percent of those who are chronically infected will develop cirrhosis and/or liver cancer, and many of them will die. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 780,000 people die every year due to complications of hepatitis B infection.

Here’s the really bad news: chronic infection is far more likely to develop in children than in adults. A whopping 80–90 percent of children infected before the age of one, and 30–50 percent of those infected before the age of six, will develop a chronic infection. This puts them at risk of liver failure and liver cancer later in life.

The complete series of three doses of vaccine is more than 95 percent effective in preventing infection; the protection lasts at least twenty years and is probably lifelong. Over a billion doses of vaccine have been given, so we can be reassured that it has an excellent safety record. It causes only mild problems: soreness at the injection site in 25 percent and a transient fever in 7 percent of recipients. There is a less than one in a million risk of a serious allergic reaction, and no other serious adverse effects have been reported. The World Health Organization strongly recommends it be given at birth, and 183 of its member states currently vaccinate infants. Vaccination has reduced the rate of chronic infection in children in some countries from 15 percent to less than 1 percent. Since Taiwan introduced universal vaccination, the incidence of liver cancer in children has dropped dramatically, as have deaths from liver cancer.

Now that you’ve heard “the rest of the story,” I think it will be obvious to you why we give newborns the hepatitis B vaccine. Newborns don’t have sex, but they are uniquely vulnerable to a preventable disease that can cause liver failure and cancer. The younger the child, the more vulnerable; the earlier the vaccine is given, the better they are protected. It has been proven effective and safe, and doctors and scientists around the world agree that giving it on the first day of life is the best insurance against future illness and death from liver cancer. Now that you understand why they recommend it, maybe you can explain to your vaccine-wary friends that however silly it may seem, giving a vaccine for an STD at birth really is the right thing to do.

Think about it: we have a vaccine that can prevent cancer! (Actually we have two; the other is the HPV vaccine.) It would be a real shame to deny that protection to a child because of misunderstandings, misinformation, ideology, or fear-mongering.

For further information, see the WHO website and the CDC website.

This article is adapted from an earlier version that has appeared on our website.

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