At the time I wrote the “Grief Vampires Don’t Come Out Only at Night” article for Skeptical Inquirer, January 21, 2016, I wasn’t really thinking of making Tyler Henry a “project” but since the article came out and a few weeks have passed, it has morphed into something that others in past psychic operations have become involved in, and it looks like it will be something I will be working on for the foreseeable future. To keep it on the level of past psychic engagements, Operation Bumblebee and Operation Ice Cream Cone, this new installment will be called Operation Tater Tot. It’s only been a few weeks, but I have received some updates and a lot of support, as I feel like we are all on this journey together, I would like to report back. If you have not already read the first article, now would be a great time to do that.

As I stated, I had never heard of Henry and wrote the article at the same time I was learning who he was. Prior to Hollywood turning him into a psychic star, he was known by his real name, Tyler Koelewyn. Henry, I suppose, is his middle name.

A quick recap:

I was approached by a local woman who had read about the Monterey County SkeptiCamp we held January 2016; she watched a lot of TV and rarely used the Internet and wanted to know my thoughts about a very young man that the E! Network was promoting as the “real deal.” That man was twenty-year-old Tyler Henry, who came out of nowhere to have his own TV show called Hollywood Medium. I sat down to do some research not knowing what kind of show it was, after-all it is showing on an entertainment channel. I was not sure if this was a case of someone playing the part of a psychic, all for fun, or if this was someone who was playing it for real? As soon as he started talking about his ultimate goal of counseling parents whose children had committed suicide, I knew I was looking at a grief vampire in training.

I felt that we had a unique opportunity to educate beyond the skeptical community, but only if we acted quickly. My plan was to get the article published online before his TV show was aired. I wanted people learning about him for the first time, to find more than the fluff pieces that I was finding. Because he was unknown, he had no baggage, and only positive articles from a very aggressive Hollywood media publicity campaign. His handlers had him giving readings to celebrities on the E! Network: Kim Kardashian, Jamie Pressly, Bella Thorne, Tom Arnold, Margaret Cho, and more.

When doing research for the article I wrote for SI, I discovered that the deadline had moved up a couple days; he had already shot an interview with Dr. Phil, and according to Henry’s Facebook page, was going to be endorsed on the Dr. Phil Show. I knew I had to get my article out in time for that.

I was a bit worried that my article wouldn’t rank high enough in the Google rankings when people started searching for “Tyler Henry” or “Hollywood Medium.” So I asked several of the most prominent bloggers in our community to lend a hand, do their research, and publish online articles before the Dr. Phil show aired. After consulting with Tim Farley who helped with some ideas on how to force my SI article to higher Google rankings, I asked for other’s help. Everything worked like a charm. As busy as these people are, they still dropped what they were doing and came together to help. Hemant Metha writing on Friendly Atheist blog from Patheos responded first with his article.

Quickly followed by Sharon Hill from Doubtful News, Jerry Coyne from the Why Evolution is True blog, Steven Novella from Neurologica from the NCSS blog, and David Gorski from Respectful Insolence on Science Based Medicine blog. Next round was Caleb Lack, Great Plains Skeptic, writing from Skeptic Ink blog network and finally Stephen Propatier writing for Skeptoid.

So let’s just stop here for a minute. I managed to pull together some of the top bloggers in the skeptical community all united for one task, just to help push my Skeptical Inquirer article higher in the Google results and hope that people searching for Tyler Henry’s name on an Internet Search Engine would find more than fluff articles about him. We wanted to address the “What’s the Harm?” question right up front and explain to people that this is not harmless fun, it is not entertainment. It is Hollywood making a grief vampire that if left unchecked could become the next John Edward or Sylvia Browne, and we know how much trouble they have caused over the years.

Think about what we achieved. In this community filled with train-wreck drama every time you turn around, it’s great to see that at least there is a group of us that see the enemy, and it is not us. If nothing else happened, just the actions above were enough of a success to make the whole thing worthwhile.

I want to add that besides these bloggers there is a network of skeptics across the world that is working with me, that honed their chops during Operation Bumblebee and Operation Ice Cream Cone. So when Tyler Henry preemptively blocks me from his Twitter account (which he did, even though I had not sent him a Tweet, and which proved that he had looked me up obviously he had seen the SI article), I am still able to see all his posts. Some of our team are within his borders; we know how to behave like true believers. We are invisible, but no worries, Henry should have no problem using his psychic powers to find out who is friend or foe.

The goal was to get these articles out before the Dr. Phil endorsement on January 23. We knew that if we weren’t aware of Henry, neither will most of the audience. My goal was to get these articles out so that viewers would have something to read that wasn’t all fluff and Hollywood hype. And we succeeded with that task.

For a time we were able to see some odd results when checking what was coming up in Google searches. Hemant’s article was ranking pretty high, on page one of the search results for many hours. Currently the SI article is on page 3 of an Internet search.

When I wrote the SI article, I stated that Henry had 10,046 Facebook Likes and 7,130 Twitter followers. Those numbers were pre-Dr. Phil (which was before Henry’s TV show was released).

So after three shows have aired, what are the numbers? Facebook went from 10K to 49,307 and Twitter went from 7K to 31K followers.

That is a pretty big gain percent wise. But to put it in perspective, this is the person that E! Network is claiming is the “real deal” and they have given him two more shows. This is a TV personality, and he just came back from Australia where he was promoting the show along with a few of the other celebrities. Grief vampires John Edward and Chip Coffey have endorsed him. And he only has 50K Facebook likes and 30K twitter followers?

Here is more perspective. The SGU has 41K Twitter followers, Jerry Coyne has 27.2K, Skeptical Inquirer has 30K, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson has almost 5 million followers. Of course Tyler Henry is only twenty and sprang on the scene a few weeks ago. Time will tell; it will be interesting to track these changes over time.

Last, I wanted to show you this. I went back and forth on if I should or should not create a Wikipedia page for Tyler Henry and finally decided not to. What happened was that some editor that normally does not write on skeptical topics, and that I do not know, wrote the page.

I love this line he added: “He reportedly had his first psychic experience at the age of 10, when he woke and told his mother that his elderly grandmother, who had cancer, was about to die and that they should immediately leave to see her. The sensation was ‘almost like a memory that hadn’t happened yet.’ His grandmother’s death was confirmed a few minutes later with a telephone call.”

His elderly grandmother with cancer died and he knew it was going to happen... WOW that’s some psychic experience.

The really good news is that this Wikipedia article is trending on the first page of Google results, right under Tyler's twitter URL. We could not ask for better ranking. As the world wants to know more about Tyler Henry, they will learn all that is written by noteworthy people publishing from noteworthy sites. Fluff and Criticism, as it should be. After one month of being published, the Wikipedia page has received 51K views. So obviously it is being accessed.

It might be too early to gauge results yet. And while I sound a bit flippant that these numbers are pretty mild for someone who reportedly can communicate with the dead, and has his own TV show, he should not be taken lightly. His numbers are increasing pretty steadily after each show and while he is not even a tiny star, there is potential if left unchecked.

You might have seen that video of the Inside Edition takedown of psychic Laurie McQuary that has been all over Facebook the last few days. Everyone seems to be talking about it. Turns out it this sting was from 2011 but suddenly it is hot news. The Internet is a funny animal; something posted today might catch the eye of other news agencies, maybe even Inside Edition might take a look. They worked with Mark Edward on an investigation of Theresa Caputo in 2012 after all and might be interested in Tyler Henry as well.

Since the SI article came out, I have been receiving some very interesting correspondence. One man felt that I should sit down with Henry over coffee and see if he is the real deal or not. I explained that there was no way I would be able to fairly evaluate him over a cup of coffee. Even if I discovered clear evidence of cheating, that would mean little to believers. Henry could just claim that he planted that evidence in order to see what my reaction would be. Or he could say that he sometimes cheats in order to get a little “help” when he is having a bad day, or…or…or…or…and on and on with the excuses. What people need to understand is that it is NOT my responsibility to disprove Tyler Henry or any other psychic. The burden of proof lies in the person who is making the extraordinary claim to prove they have the ability they claim to have.

We in the skeptic community understand this. What needs to happen is that the rest of the world understand this. Why would someone ask to see some sort of evidence of qualifications from your heart surgeon, contractor, or mechanic, but these same people give a pass to someone who says they can communicate with the dead? I just don’t get it. Has the world always been this stupid? This is 2016; we have sent robots to Mars and have just discovered evidence of gravitational waves, and yet a percentage of the world still thinks that someone claiming to see dead grandma walking around the garden with her hat on is somehow evidence of life after death. They blindly trust the psychic, probably because they want to believe. It’s just that simple.

If psychic detectives are among us, then why do they never seem to solve crimes, or prevent them? They can hear someone playing with change (or is that keys) in their pocket, (does that mean anything to you?) but they can’t find one single missing child? Ali Lowitzer got off her school bus on April 26, 2010, in Texas and started walking the few blocks to her part-time job at the Burger Barn to pick up her check. Nothing has been seen or heard in almost six years. Why are Tyler’s fans not calling for him to tell this grieving family what happened to their daughter, and with specifics? Instead, they are sending him kisses and praising his readings with celebrities. Sierra LaMar went to her bus stop one morning on March 16, 2012, in California and has not been found, though every weekend volunteers search for her body. It’s been almost four years. If alive, she would be almost the same age Tyler is now, yet why isn’t he telling the police where to find the body instead of chatting with comedian Margaret Cho about the “energy” of Robin Williams? How disgusting is this situation?

And to answer the questions I receive most often, why do I persist in working to educate the public about these grief vampires, and what do I have against Tyler Henry?

Tyler Henry is one of many of this ilk; he has the potential to wiggle into the hearts of viewers “what a sweetheart he is, looks like an angel, what a gift he has” and while that is annoying to watch this battle, I harbor no ill-will against him personally. I think once the disclaimer contracts expire, Henry will be able to cash in on a tell-all book. But in the meantime if I don’t speak up and encourage the rest of the community to do so, then they win. While it seems like these grief vampires are popular and everywhere, the comments I read on articles outside his Facebook and Twitter pages give me hope that we are not as stupid as Hollywood thinks we are.

Just a reminder, do you remember Rosemary Altea? The British “fuzzy sweater” medium that is all over the media with filled stadium shows and years long waiting list to get thousand dollar personal readings? What you don’t remember her? The one that Penn & Teller on their Pilot Episode “Bullshit” hired mentalist Mark Edward to expose. After that aired, she continued on, appearing on Larry King Live with James Randi, until 2009 when her accountant embellished over $200,000. Pressure, exposure, and the media’s help can make a difference.

Yes, it is whack-a-mole in the world of the grief vampire. But I’m optimistic. Maybe I’m wrong and am wasting my time, but then again I wouldn’t know, I’m not psychic.

Saying Americans are obsessed with happiness is like saying there is air. The pursuit of happiness is one of the unalienable rights established in the Declaration of Independence, and in recent decades an enormous happiness industry has risen up to help you succeed in your personal pursuit. The demand for books on happiness seems to be insatiable. Recent titles include, Happier, Even Happier, Stumbling on Happiness, The Happiness Hypothesis, Authentic Happiness, and Flourish—and those are just the books written by famous academic psychologists.

Economists, too, have suggested that happiness is more important than previously believed, because money doesn’t always buy it. Back in the 1970s, economist Richard Easterlin reported data showing that many countries experiencing substantial increases in gross national product showed no accompanying change in overall levels of happiness. The “Easterlin paradox” has been challenged a number of times, but there is a growing consensus that, when measuring national development and progress, economic indicators, such as gross domestic product, should be supplemented by surveys of happiness and well-being.

Finally, positive psychology—a movement described as the “science of happiness and flourishing”—has grown rapidly in recent years, contributing to a burgeoning self-help movement. There are flocks of happiness authorities prepared to lecture you on the subject. Just type “happy” into the search field of the TED talk website and you will be rewarded with hours of upbeat presentations.

Grouches Live Just as Long

Many of the purveyors of happiness¹ point to research showing that happy people live longer, with the clear implication that, if you want to extend your life, you should go out and find more bliss. But a new large-scale study throws serious shade on that claim—at least for healthy middle-aged women. In December 2015, Bette Liu of the University of New South Wales, along with collaborators there and at Oxford University, published an article in The Lancet based on data from the “The Million Woman Study,” a prospective investigation of women in the United Kingdom. The authors eliminated participants who, at the beginning of the study, already had life-threatening illnesses, such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, or chronic obstructive airways disease, which left them with a starting group of 719,671 women who averaged fifty-nine years old at the beginning of the study.

Figure 1. The conventional view. Happiness has a direct causal effect on longevity.

When follow-up measures were taken—an average of 9.6 years later—four percent of the women (31,531) had died. Looking simply at the raw numbers, the results seemed to show the expected outcome: women who reported they were happy most or all of the time were more likely to be living ten years later. But after controlling for a number of other variables, such as age and the participant’s self-reported health at the beginning of the study, the effect of happiness disappeared. Women who were unhappy at the beginning of the study were no more likely to die than those who were happy.

The most important variable turned out to be self-reported health, and Lui and her coauthors analyzed its effect a number of different ways with consistent results. For example, when they separated out just the women who said they had fair or poor health at the beginning of the study, they found that happiness had no effect on their mortality. Similarly, looking just at the women who reported generally good health, there was no effect of happiness on survival. So Lui and her colleagues concluded that a woman’s health at the beginning of the study (as measured by her own assessment) was correlated both with her level of happiness and her survival ten years later. But happiness itself was not a causal variable.

Looking back at the previous studies, Lui and colleagues found further support for their findings:

Some, but not all, other prospective studies have reported that happiness or related subjective measures of wellbeing are associated with lower all-cause mortality….. where other investigators adjusted for self-rated health, any apparent excess mortality associated with unhappiness was attenuated or disappeared completely. (p. 880)

According to Lui and her collaborators, most previous researchers missed a confounding variable and, as a result, confused cause and effect. Happiness and longevity are correlated because people who don’t feel well are less happy and less likely to survive. But researchers who failed to measure participants’ self-reported health at the beginning of their studies missed this relationship.

Figure 2. The more likely causal relationship found by Lui et al. (2015). Health (self-reported) affected both happiness at the beginning of the study and predicted longevity at the end of the study.

This is just one study conducted on middle-aged women in the United Kingdom, and as a result, further research will be needed to confirm and extend these findings. But the investigation by Lui and her colleagues has several strengths: it was a prospective study, using a very large sample that produced clear results. If these findings hold up in future research, they would not entirely undercut the happiness industry. All else being equal, most people would still prefer to be happy rather than unhappy, and as a result, happiness self-help books will remain popular. But one common claim of the happiness gurus faces a serious challenge. Contrary to popular opinion, happiness may not prolong your life, and unhappiness may not shorten it.

If there is an upside to this episode, it is that you are free of the burden of being happy. If you are a contented grouch, for whom the pursuit of bliss has little appeal, this study offers some consolation. If the results are valid, you can be relieved of any concern that your failure to be happier is killing you.

Maybe Ignorance Really Is Bliss

As I reviewed this article, I came across another finding that gave me pause. In the description of their participants, Lui and her co-authors presented an extensive table of demographic variables that were correlated with happiness. Many of the outcomes were as you might expect. For example, having children was not related to happiness, but those who lived with a spouse or partner were happier than those who did not. People who drank were happier than those who didn’t, and smokers were less happy than nonsmokers. The relationship with hours of sleep was U-shaped, with those who got seven or eight hours being the happiest, and those getting either more or less being less happy. Not too many surprises there, but then my eye fell on the results for education.

Liu and her colleagues reported a strong association between education and happiness, but the direction of effect was the opposite of what I—perhaps naively—assumed it would be. The least educated women—those whose educational attainment was below the ordinary-level exam (O-levels)—were the happiest, and as education increased, happiness decreased. The lowest educational group was 38 percent more likely to be generally happy than those holding college and university degrees.

Intrigued by this finding, I went in search of more information to determine whether this was a fluke or a consistent outcome. I discovered that the effect of education on happiness is a somewhat under-researched question, but several studies done in developed countries have shown this negative relationship. For example, a 2010 Australian study² summed up the previous research this way:

It is surprising to discover, then, that more educated people should be no happier or even less happy than people with lower levels of education. Instances of such a negative correlation between educational attainment and subjective wellbeing have been observed in a number of developed countries, including Australia. (Dockery 2010, p. 9)

It is unclear what causes this negative relationship, but the results of the Australian study contradict the hypothesis that people who pursue college are simply less happy in general. The results, based on 3,518 men and women from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Youth, show that those who pursue higher education are “relatively happy at school and while attending university, and that it is in the years following completion of their university qualification that this relatively lower happiness sets in” (p. 41).

One theory suggests that planning for and attending college sets up a number of expectations about life after graduation and that, when those expectations are not met, people become discontent. Given the amount of effort and money that goes into getting a college education, it is easy to see how expectations might be elevated and then dashed.³ Another theory suggests that education encourages critical thinking, which in turn leads to higher levels of dissatisfaction with the government and the current state of the world.⁴ But, as the author of the Australian study put it, “there remains no convincing theoretical or empirical explanation” for the negative relationship between education and happiness.⁵

Like many scientific questions, this one is far from settled.⁶ Some studies have found either no relationship between happiness and education or a positive relationship. But the Australian study, the UK study of middle-age women, and several previous investigations have shown this negative relationship.

So if this is a genuine phenomenon, what should we do about it? Should we discourage people from going to college because they might be happier if they simply got a job? I think not. There are many other benefits to higher education, both for the individual and for society. If education makes you a tad grouchier, then so be it. The bliss of ignorance is not worth the ignorance.

Happiness Backlash

Taken together, the happiness/longevity data and happiness/education data point to a similar conclusion: joyfulness is a good thing—even a great thing—but it isn’t everything. Happiness may not save your life and you may have to give up some of it to get an education.

In 2009, Barbara Ehrenreich, a much admired curmudgeon, wrote Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. Having received a diagnosis of breast cancer, she was soon confronted with a disease culture that claimed “survival hinges on ‘attitude.’” She went on to criticize the shifting of responsibility for recovery onto patients, who are implored to fight back with positivity.

Ehrenreich was also very critical of Martin E.P. Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, and his book Authentic Happiness, which touted many health benefits of cheerfulness. Seligman fought back in his next book—with the rather audacious title Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being—calling her “Barbara (‘I Hate Hope’) Ehrenreich” and accusing her of cherry picking the data she reviewed, highlighting studies that failed to show the health benefits of optimism and happiness.⁷ The controversy goes on, but, with the arrival of the UK study by Lui and colleagues, an additional point can be assigned to the team of Ehrenreich and the grouches. At very least, it is safe to say the relationship of happiness to longevity has not been definitively established.

At the Window by Hans Heyerdahl

The Case for Melancholy

I will end by offering a few words of support for emotions other than happiness, joy, and optimism. Let us remember that much of the most beautiful music ever written is sad—sometimes desperately so—and yet we love listening to it. Much of the world’s best literature and art is similarly dark and compelling. There have been many defenses of melancholy written over the years, but the best I’ve come across lately is “The Case for Melancholy” written by Laren Stover in November 2015 for the Style section of the New York Times. It ends like this:

Should melancholy descend, you may as well welcome it, wear your finest lounging outfit; give it your finest fainting couch or chaise to lounge in, or that hammock stretched between two elm trees. Let it settle in.

You may as well enjoy it reclining with a pot of green thunder tea as you watch the rolled leaves unfurl their poetic fury as it steeps, as you listen to Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé” or Jean Françaix’s Concertino for Piano and Orchestra, 2a.

I propose there be melancholy perfumes, fashions, footwear (no running shoes under any circumstances), music (Lana Del Rey is the melancholy diva du jour, and Joni Mitchell and Billie Holiday still work), elixirs (no alcohol; look what happened to Edgar Allan Poe) and furniture ideally suited for indulging in or succumbing to the deeply tinted blue moods.

I want moonlight.

Notes

1. For example: Seligman, M.E. 2004. Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. Simon and Schuster; Diener, E., and R. Biswas-Diener. 2011. Happiness: Unlocking the mysteries of psychological wealth. John Wiley & Sons.
2. Dockery, A.M. 2010. Education and Happiness in the School-to-Work Transition. National Centre for Vocational Education Research Ltd. PO Box 8288, Stational Arcade, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia.
3. Clark, A.E., A. Kamesaka, and T. Tamura. 2015. Rising aspirations dampen satisfaction. Education Economics, 23(5), 515-531; Salinas-Jiménez, M.D.M., J. Artés, and J. Salinas-Jiménez. 2016. Educational mismatch and job aspirations: a subjective wellbeing analysis using quantile regression. International Journal of Manpower, 37(1).
4. Dockery 2010, p. 13.
5. Dockery 2010, p. 41.
6. For example, this state-level analysis finds a positive relationship between the percent of college graduates and the average subjective well-being of the state: Yakovlev, P., and S. Leguizamon. 2012. Ignorance is not bliss: On the role of education in subjective well-being. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 41(6), 806-815.

I spend a lot of time writing about media, complaining about media, and designing research projects on media. Meta-media lady, that’s me. Recently I got to put my money where my mouth is: Newsweek published my feature about the cancer doctor Stanislaw Burzynski, who’s facing potential license revocation based on charges that he and his clinic recklessly prescribed untested drug combinations, made numerous medical errors, passed off non-licensed practitioners as doctors, and much else besides. And I got a reminder of how hard it is to write about controversial health issues.

I want to be honest about this experience, partially in the hopes that this might further conversation about how best to practice science communication; also because I think transparency itself is a key feature of the science communication process. Productive dialogue always has to start with points of common agreement and with empathy. Just as we should acknowledge the points that we do agree with, so too should we be prepared to concede where our own arguments or reporting have fallen short within arguments that we find fallacious.

And so, here are the top five things I learned from this experience.

1. Traditional news formats aren’t the greatest for controversial science topics.

Going into the Burzynski project, I had a lot of science communication ambitions. I wanted to write a piece that would bridge divides—a piece that, though clear on the weight of scientific evidence, would show empathy toward the concerns of those who shun mainstream cancer treatment, and maybe open up a conversational space for those who aren’t completely polarized on these issues.

But on reflection, I don’t think a feature story in a mainstream, news-focused magazine is the best place to have this conversation. Think about some of the characteristics of traditional journalism stories versus what’s needed for good science communication:

This is a selective list of features, one that I composed by focusing on differences rather than similarities. It’s also very generalized—for example, there’s a lot of good reporting that tries to answer key questions for readers and likewise a lot of quality journalism that focuses on data (this is called, unsurprisingly, “data journalism”). And as I allude to above, sometimes science communicators need to borrow narrative and emotion-based methods from journalism, although I have some ethical concerns about that (a topic for another column, perhaps).

But to me, this summary highlights a lot of qualities common to traditional journalism that really can get in the way of good science communication—even when we start out with the best of intentions. And this hit me again and again while I wrote my piece.

Sitting down to do my job, I realized I couldn’t say much of what I wanted to say. I couldn’t say, for example, that the Burzynski case encapsulates the allures and dangers of an unchecked cultural myth, one that incorrectly classifies some treatments as “natural” and “good” and others as “chemical” and “bad.” That would have been editorializing. But I think it’s an important topic for the media to explore. So we should be finding ways to break the journalism mold a little bit and tell these stories the way they need to be told.

2. Sometimes the meat isn’t the meatiest part of the story.

I pitched this article as a story about Burzynski. “Sure, that’s obvious,” you might say, “What is the story here, if not Burzynski?”

But as I sat there struggling with my words, I realized that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. A story “about” Burzynski means the details are all pretty much about his case: what he’s been accused of, what the impact is, what his response is to the allegations. Such a story can shed only so much light, and it will alienate anyone who thinks well of Burzynski. The story I wanted to tell was what the Burzynski case means: how someone such as him earns patients’ trust and how our culture, the media, practices in the health professions, and light government regulation all work together to create a flawed public science epistemology, which in turn makes it a real struggle to avoid threats to our health. I couldn’t write that story, of course—that wasn’t my commission. And I’m not yet sure how or whether I can write that. Maybe it’s an opinion piece. Maybe it’s a book.

I thought my Burzynski story could at least begin to bridge some cultural and ideological divides, if I could frame it in a sympathetic way. My goal was to make clear the two very understandable and rational reasons why many people go to Burzynski: one, because the side-effects of chemotherapy can be horrible. And two, because in the face of certain death, any chance at life seems worth taking.

An early draft of my piece began:

“Sometimes, there is no alternative.

While modern medicine has vastly improved the survival rates for diseases like colorectal cancer and Hodgkin lymphoma, other cancers remain almost universally deadly. Between about 90 and 98 percent of pancreatic cancer patients don’t survive five years past diagnosis, depending on their country of residence. When facing a prognosis like that, many patients will understandably seek treatments that can offer hope, however slim. We prefer fighting to planning our own deaths.

But these are not the only cancer patients to face difficult choices. When a cancer is treatable, the treatment itself can be painful and debilitating. It’s often hard to stomach the idea that there's no alternative to chemotherapy, for example…”

That got cut, due to space concerns. I don’t blame my editor for that. News features are all about preserving the meat and cutting the fat. Juicy quotes from patients? Keep those. Details of alleged transgressions from FOIA documents? Definitely keep those. But to essentially extend a reassuring arm to cancer patients, to say, “I can’t begin to understand what you’re going through. I think it makes total sense that you’re thinking about going to Burzynski. But here are some facts you ought to know”?—well that’s not crucial to the “story,” as mainstream journalism conceives it. It also doesn’t fit well into our objectivity paradigm.

3. Journalism can get some aspects of science communication right.

While I felt in some ways hamstrung by decades-old conventions and the brief I had written, I also think my editors at Newsweek did a lot of things right. Perhaps most importantly, they didn’t get fooled by the lure of false objectivity.

My editors understood that not all truth claims are created equal, and that properly conducted science offers us harder, less disputable truths than intuition, whim, fashion, or emotion. For example, I reported that a comprehensive analysis of the peer-reviewed literature on antineoplastons (the drugs that Burzynski has dedicated his life to developing, testing and administering) found no evidence that these drugs are effective against cancer. Thankfully, Newsweek didn’t ask me to balance that against half-hearted science—against unpublished studies, against case studies, or worse, against anecdote.

4. The journalistic process is opaque.

Here is a case of industry “best practice” probably not being good enough. I tried at every stage of my process to be accurate, unbiased, and considerate of my sources. I think I pulled off a fair story—but looking back on it, I could have done a few things better.

The biggest reminder of the opacity of the feature-writing process came soon after publication, when I got a complaint from one of the Burzynski patients quoted in my story. Without getting too deep into the ins and outs of our discussion, she complained that I made a big error of omission by not reporting that Burzynski prescribed her large doses of sodium phenylbutyrate—the drug she credits with her recovery from breast cancer, and one that has never been shown effective against that condition. My rationale for not reporting this is pretty reasonable according to normal journalistic standards: she never told me she took it. I asked her what drugs Burzynski prescribed, first in a phone interview and later by email, and sodium phenylbutyrate never came up.

But is that good enough? People are prone to forgetting. When my doctor asks for my current medication list, I usually can’t remember all the dosages—and I’m only on three or four drugs. I didn’t want to inconvenience this patient or be nosy, and I knew the list of meds she had taken was long. But I should have pressed. I should have said: “Ask Burzynski if you need to. Please give me the full list.”

Why didn’t I? Because I figured that whatever really mattered to the story, she’d remember. (Not reasonable—she’s not laying eyes on my draft. How does she know what’s important?) Because I assumed my sending of an email was a signal to say, “Here is your chance to really think about it and get specific.” Because I assume that when a journalist asks a member of the public a question, the member of the public thinks, “I better get this right. If I don’t remember, and she doesn’t put it in her story, that’s on me.” These are assumptions journalists make all the time, like some kind of unspoken contract between journalist and source. They make it possible to do our job when we’re pressed to get on with it or be the next one pink-slipped. But they’re not right. You can’t have a contract that only one party is privy to.

5. No one has sued me.

I had to think pretty seriously about whether I was going to write about Burzynski, given the past legal threats against those who have criticized him. That history certainly did strengthen my resolve to double and triple fact-check every line in my story, and I gave Burzynski and his lawyers ample time to respond to every single allegation—an opportunity they declined. So I’m confident that there is no material basis on which he could sue. Still, a lack of material cause rarely dissuades someone who really is determined to file a libel suit, so when the story hit the web, I held my breath. Two weeks later, I’m happy to report that no nasty legal letters have appeared in my inbox.

I did, however, get an email from a former Burzynski patient—one who described my article as full of lies. She invited me to learn the facts by reading her book, which she offered to send me. I accepted, and I look forward to receiving it. After all, if we science communicators are not open to dialogue, then we may as well pack up our laptops and go home.

By Derek Nicoletto (Derek and Margaret Cho) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

There seems to be some speculation in the skeptic community that not all should be allowed to call themselves “skeptics.” I am not sure I’m comfortable with this idea. That implies that there is someone in charge, someone who has authority, that there is some kind of test that guides who is and who is not a skeptic. We are not a club that offers memberships that can be revoked if someone discovers you’re going to a chiropractor or hiring someone to Feng shui your garden. Recently Pope Francis called out Donald Trump for his reported intentions toward immigrants if he becomes president. The pope said something along the lines of “Trump is not a real Christian because….” To which Trump replied, “How dare he tell me what I am and am not, you do not know my heart.” I’m going to have to agree with Trump on this. Even the head of the Catholic Church, God’s supposed voice on Earth, does not get to label people’s beliefs. I have a very good friend who professes to be Christian. She is active in her church, has been known to help remove demons from her fellow believers, and speaks in tongues occasionally, but she also pirates movies and takes home office supplies. I can’t state that she is not a Christian because she steals, but I can call her out for her actions and point out her hypocrisy. That’s fair game.

One of my team members, Julie, thinks that maybe we need to remove the capital “S” on the word skeptic that some people like to use. I’ve been guilty of this myself at times, and possibly I need to rethink my behavior. Doing so makes us look elitist, as if we have superior knowledge and are becoming a clique. People already have enough trouble with the word skeptic; we really shouldn’t push the word into a title. Truly there are “celebrities” within our movement; some are better than others at speaking, writing, activism, and creativeness. But we are human, and we all have the potential to be wrong or to partake in magical thinking. I would hate to think that there existed a committee to judge actions and relinquish titles. What a nightmare that would be. People are appointed fellows of our organizations, and even then I expect the committee that decides who to appoint will have a conversation about appointees’ potential ability to embarrass the organization. Once a fellow, can they be un-fellowed? What would it take for that to happen?

I’ve also heard of others who are trying to say that skeptical activism should only be done by the few who have proved themselves worthy of being activists. Again, as if there were some club or association we were supposed to join. I contend that there are no rules; there is no one in charge of us. And I don’t remember voting for a leader. There are people I respect, and people who I would agree with sometimes and sometimes not. Activism is done by people who…well… do activism. If you have an issue with something that you think is problematic, then have the courtesy to contact that specific person privately and share your concerns. Possibly someone will learn something, and a new stronger union will be formed. If after a dialog about the activism you are still not supportive, then possibly go public with your concerns.

Sometimes it happens by accident. For example, Myles Power was attending a Psychic Sally Morgan show in Middlesburgh, United Kingdom, in 2014 when she made one of the biggest blunders in public in her life. Psychic Sally’s show consists of people turning in photos of people they want to get in touch with—you know, people who are now dead. Well Sally projected an image of one of these photos on the big screen and gave a reading for the woman in the photo, clearly stating that she was dead. When Sally did not get a positive reaction from the woman who had submitted the photo, Sally kept trying to make a hit. It turns out that the audience member was confused and submitted a photo of herself from years ago, and she was very much alive! All the statements Sally had made about her did not fit at all. The audience was all aflutter, and Sally was unable to recover the audience’s respect for the rest of the show. Myles Power is a blogger and has a popular YouTube channel. He was able to get the story of what happened out to his followers, and it went viral. Psychic Sally was so upset that the next time Power tried to attend her show, she had him thrown out. If Power was supposed to seek out approval from some elite skeptic group or person, then we probably would not have been able to giggle and glee over the grief vampire’s blunder.

This gets me to the issue at hand. It has recently been brought to my attention that comedian Margaret Cho will be onstage for the 2016 Reason Rally. Okay, that is nice. I’m sure she is really funny and is known as an atheist. But what I found odd was that she would be speaking at an event with people like James Randi, Eugenie Scott, Lawrence Krauss, and the SciBabe. I mean, those are all names that if we had skeptic ID cards, they would be the ones doing the issuing. Why would Cho—who is a 9-11 truther, a fan of anti-vaxers Jenny McCarthy and Rob Schneider, and also a promoter of psychics—be on stage at the Reason Rally? Probably because the organizers of the Reason Rally didn’t know about her nonskeptical beliefs and hired her because she is an atheist and famous and funny.

So now what? Should the Reason Rally uninvite her once they become aware that she isn’t exactly a good fit for a conference based on reason? Does this open the door to having Uri Geller addressing us from the next CSICON? Or Andrew Wakefield at the next Science-Based Medicine–sponsored event? Should we give these people a platform to further their anti-science nonsense and promote woo, as well as pay for their hotel and travel expenses?

I’m not sure I have the answer. I think it would be really interesting and probably would get butts in the seats. Most of the skeptics I know have insulated themselves on their social networks and rarely hear an outside opinion. Maybe audiences need a bit of a shakeup, challenging what they think is real. I understand that Geller is quite charming, and I think that seeing that firsthand would be really instructive. Calm down everyone, I really doubt we will see Geller attend anything run by CFI anytime soon, but it is something we might want to start thinking about.

Back to Cho. The biggest problem with having someone like her who is known for her comedy and not known for her support of the paranormal is that once she stands on that stage, she now represents us.

I want to pause there for a moment to let that sink in.

Who is this “us”?

“Us” is anyone who is challenging their beliefs. “Us” is anyone who calls himself a skeptic. They aren’t voted in, but they can participate, and they can be inside the tent—because there is no tent. There is just us. Human beings for better or for worst. Once we have addressed that, then we can move on.

We should be embracing anyone who is trying to understand and is willing to learn what is really going on when someone feels better after taking a homeopathic pill or gets acupuncture or ear-candling. What I hope happens with Cho is that she will sit for the rest of the lectures and listen. I hope that someone such as Randi or Eugenie Scott takes her aside and has a talk with her explaining that it is unlikely the spirit of Robin Williams contacted her when she sat for a sitting with grief vampire Tyler Henry on his Hollywood Medium show this last February. E! claims that Henry does not know who he is going to read beforehand and is unaware of who is who in the celebrity world. I would like to know how they knew that Henry did not know who Margaret Cho was unless they asked him if he knew who Margaret Cho is. Funny that she was “contacted” by fellow comedian Robin Williams and not someone else in history like maybe Florence Nightingale.

Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) has tried to embrace this attitude and has spent considerable time rewriting Wikipedia pages for people who have shown skepticism in some areas but may still endorse belief in the paranormal. The most recent example is UFO researcher Karl T. Pflock, who wrote the book Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. He spent years researching the Roswell incident and concluded that it was a weather balloon. Yet he continued to believe in alien spacecraft visiting Earth. Would he have been asked to represent us onstage at a Reason Rally? If there are sides, this man is strongly in each camp. To label him only a believer or only a skeptic would be untrue and disingenuous.

Of course the most common example given is that of Bill Maher, whose TV show is a delight to see when he is attacking religion or 9-11 Truthers, but skeptics cringe when he attacks evidence-based medicine. Martin Gardner, Paul Offit, and Steven Novella have been outspoken with their criticism of Maher over his views of vaccines. Oncologist David Gorski wrote that the Richard Dawkins Award given to Maher in 2009 was inappropriate. Still, Maher is heralded as a terrific voice in the world of reason. Maher even serves on the board for Project Reason.

Which gets me down to the crux of the matter. Being an atheist does not by default make you a skeptic. And the reverse is also true; being a skeptic does not make you an atheist. I have known many people who continue to believe in a deity, some in a Deist manner and others in a more personal god that interests himself in the world of humans. But these same people claim to be skeptics because in every other aspect they reject the paranormal.

In my own small world of local groups, the one I founded in 2007 and continue to run is Monterey County Skeptics. We have no litmus test for skepticism; everyone is welcome. We have alternative medicine practitioners, crystal healers, conspiracy theory believers, anti-vax supporters, and believers in psychics. If you move them off their specific area, they are in total agreement with what a scientific skeptic would advocate. We don’t challenge their specific paranormal belief. Instead, we try to talk about something we would agree on such as Bigfoot, religion, or North Korea. This is one of many things I learned from Brian Dunning, who advocates that you need to keep the doors open and conversation flowing. If you find something to agree on that is “kooky” then you can eventually (hopefully) help them to understand why their belief in their paranormal claim does not stand up to evidence either.

I myself believed in all kinds of unscientific things growing up. I was raised a Southern Baptist attending church several times a week. Though I struggled to believe in what I was being indoctrinated in, I still believed in Sasquatch (Bigfoot was what the uneducated called him) because my father believed and because I saw a movie about it. In my pre-teen years back in the 1970s, I believed that if the media said it was real then it was real, because otherwise why would they invest all that money into making a movie about it? I also believed in sun signs, because I had a copy of Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs book that I had practically memorized. I drew charts and analyzed all my friends. That lasted until I was about seventeen. Before you roll your eyes at my gullibility, remember that in that era we had really no place to find critical information about the paranormal. There was no Internet. TV in my world had two channels, was black and white, and only showed the programs that my father wanted to watch. Lawrence Welk and Hee Haw were not doing shows on the paranormal. The library was our only option, and books there were mainly pro-paranormal. Wikipedia would not be invented until 2001—imagine that.

I think of us all being on a journey—a journey on which some of us are ridding ourselves of the indoctrination done by our parents and society. Sometimes it takes a chance encounter with someone or something to shake us up a bit and get us to think about our pre-conceived beliefs. In my case, it was me stumbling across a magazine at the library. I wish I could remember which articles were in it, but I’m sure I was intrigued by the cover art. It was Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and it was probably in the very early 1980s. It was like a light bulb went off. It was like walking down a hallway and opening doors into subjects I didn’t know existed. Some topics made me say to myself, “People believe in that crazy thing?” and other topics made me say, “Wait, that isn’t real?”

And that is what I want for Margaret Cho and all the people like her—people who have challenged some aspects of their thinking and maybe need some help continuing down that hallway. Of course this is all just my opinion, and I’m sure the organizers of the Reason Rally have better things to do. But what I would love to see is a conversation with her beforehand and to see the conference through her eyes. Hopefully she will write about her experience. Maybe she can give us some insight on how best to educate.

What I’m trying to get across is that people such as Cho, Maher, and others who profess to be critical thinkers are free game when it comes to public discourse. When they lecture about the paranormal, then they can be asked to explain their support of the paranormal that most would say is not evidence based. I’m not cool with blacklisting; I prefer discussion. Peer-to-peer. Thinker-to-thinker. I want to understand how they are backing up their claims. If they give a reason that still invites more questions, then we need to ask them again, and that is where discussion comes in. It’s fair game to state that after looking at their reasons for holding their paranormal belief, I have a problem with that and state why. Then more discussion follows. If conference organizers want to look at this and decide that they think that they are not a good fit for the next conference, then that is their right.

Two of my team members, Cathy and Mike, feel that unless we have knowledge that Cho will use the stage to support psychics, or conspiracy theories, or anti-vaccination—and as long as she stays on topic with her anti-religion beliefs—then we have no cause for worry. I still think that this is a gray area and something we should really consider discussing.

I’m sorry to say that I can’t afford to attend the Reason Rally this year. I’m in California, and that is quite a trip for my son and me. There is no way there would be peace in my household if I went and he didn’t. We discovered termites when painting the house this winter, so there went the vacation money. Stirling and I will be watching the posts and photos, green with envy. Hopefully, I will find some great secondary scholarly sources that I can use to add to the Reason Rally Wikipedia page that I rewrote after the last rally. I want some terrific photos for the Wikipedia page, so get on it. I would love to stand side by side with so many other critical thinkers. Just know that I will be with you all in spirit.

By Allan warren (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

Ocurrió hace trece años. Barbra Streisand denunció en 2003 a Kenneth Adelman, fotógrafo y activista medioambiental, por publicar en Internet una vista aérea de su casa de Malibú (California). La foto formaba parte de una colección de 12.000 imágenes con las que Adelman quería documentar la erosión de la costa californiana. Cuando los abogados de la actriz reclamaron al activista una indemnización millonaria y la retirada de la foto, la imagen sólo se había descargado seis veces, incluidas dos por los representantes legales de Streisand. Durante el mes siguiente, la vieron más de 420.000 personas y la demanda fue noticia en medios de todo el mundo. La Justicia desestimó el caso, y la denuncia y sus consecuencias acabaron dando nombre al efecto Streisand, que ocurre cuando un intento de silenciar o minimizar una información consigue lo contrario. Es lo que le pasó a la multinacional homeopática Boiron hace unos días en España.

El 2 de marzo, la Universidad de Barcelona anunció la supresión de su máster en homeopatía, que ofrecía desde mediados de los años 90, porque “no hay una evidencia científica clara”. La decisión se tomó tras en un dictamen de la Facultad de Medicina de la institución académica, la imposibilidad de obtener la acreditación del título tanto de las autoridades autonómicas como de las centrales, y las quejas recibidas del profesorado y del alumnado. Lo llamativo no es que se eliminara el máster, sino que existiera, dado que nunca ha habido pruebas de que la homeopatía sea más que placebo. Durante los días siguientes, los medios de comunicación españoles se hicieron eco de la noticia, y los escépticos hablamos de ella en nuestros blogs, la prensa, la radio y la televisión.

La sorpresa llegó el 8 de marzo cuando Boiron, el principal fabricante de homeopatía del mundo, convocó para la mañana siguiente una rueda de prensa de su directora general, Valérie Poinsot, ante lo que la compañía consideraba “una campaña de comunicación sin precedente [que] ataca a la homeopatía en España”, “revela un desconocimiento profundo de la realidad de la homeopatía en España y en el mundo”, y “testimonia una falta de respeto a los millares de médicos y a los millones de españoles que han escogido las medicinas homeopáticas”. Cuando me enteré de la convocatoria, no podía creérmelo. ¿Habían tenido en cuenta en Boiron los efectos de una conferencia de prensa en la que sus responsables no iban a poder presentar ni una sola prueba a favor del uso de sus productos? Desde el primer momento, pensé que con un poco de suerte la multinacional homeopática haría el ridículo con luz y taquígrafos. Así fue.

#preguntaaBoiron

La rueda de prensa fue un despropósito. Poinsot admitió ante los periodistas que no sabe por qué funciona la homeopatía -si se lo hubiera preguntado a una escéptico, lo sabría: por el efecto placebo- y dijo que recurren a ella miles de personas y “los pacientes no necesitan la evidencia científica de un medicamento, sólo que funcione”. “Mucha gente critica la Nutella, pero a los niños les gusta”, añadió la alta ejecutiva de la firma francesa. También podía haber dicho: “¡Cien mil millones de moscas no pueden estar equivocadas, coma mierda!”. Mientras la directora general de Boiron hablaba ante partidarios y periodistas en una sala de un hotel madrileño, en el Twitter español la homeopatía era motivo de mofa bajo la etiqueta #preguntaaBoiron: “No entiendo ese desprecio generalizado hacia la homeopatía si nunca le ha hecho nada a nadie”; “La memoria del agua es selectiva? ¿Recuerda principios activos, pero no las heces que ha llevado? ¿Puede olvidar traumas?”; “Cuando un diabético con hiperglucemia se mea en la piscina, ¿está haciendo un [preparado] homeopático sin querer?”… Soy culpable de haber puesto a rodar esa bola, aunque no fue algo buscado.

Dado que no iba a poder asistir a la rueda de prensa de Madrid porque vivo en Bilbao, poco antes de la comparecencia de Poinsot se me ocurrió lanzar media docena de preguntas en Twitter con la etiqueta #preguntaaBoiron. No esperaba nada, pero no quería quedarme callado. Las consecuencias me desbordaron. Pronto hubo gente que empezó a demostrar su ingenio para reírse de la homeopatía mientras otros hacían preguntas serias. Desde media mañana, #preguntaaBoiron fue el segundo tema de conversación más popular de Twitter en España, sólo por detrás del descubrimiento del apoyo de los Reyes a un empresario procesado en un caso de corrupción. Por si el cachondeo fuera poco, el gestor de redes sociales de Boiron se dedicó a bloquear a todo el que le importunara, con lo que echó más gasolina al fuego.

“Ridículo de Boiron en su defensa de la homeopatía”, sentenciaba Redacción Médica poco después del encuentro de Poinsot con los periodistas. Añadía en otra información que la multinacional había tenido que hacer frente a una tormenta sin precedentes en Twitter. “#PreguntaABoiron, el hashtag guasón que aplastó la reputación del gigante de la homeopatía”, titulaba al día siguiente en el sitio PRNoticias, que destacaba que, “en pocos minutos, el hashtag se posicionaba entre los temas de mayor tendencia de nuestro país e inspiraba a más personas a poner a prueba su agudeza humorística. Sólo hoy (por el día siguiente), el hashtag alcanza las 531.525 impresiones”. Para mayor desgracia de Boiron, Juan José Rodríguez Sendín, presidente de la Organización Médica Colegial (OMC), el organismo que regula la profesión médica en España, decía esa misma tarde que la homeopatía no cuenta con “ningún tipo de evidencia científica” a su favor y pertenece “al mundo de las creencias”. El máximo responsable de los médicos españoles tildaba, además, de “disparate” la normativa europea que cataloga a los productos homeopáticos como medicamentos, pero, al mismo tiempo, les exime de demostrar su efectividad.

El poder de la gente

Excepto algún medio aislado, tras a la suspensión del máster de la Universidad de Barcelona, periódicos, radios y televisiones se mostraron en España muy críticos con la homeopatía, algo que no había pasado hasta ahora. La rueda de prensa de Boiron hizo que la oposición a esa práctica fuera a más y obligó a la OMC a posicionarse frente a ella, cuando lleva años evitando manifestarse abiertamente. Por mi parte, espero que esta demostración del efecto Streisand abra los ojos a muchos escépticos sobre el poder de las redes.

En la época anterior a Internet, Boiron habría ofrecido su rueda de prensa y la mayoría de los medios habrían dado por buenas sus afirmaciones. En el mejor de los casos, después los críticos habríamos escrito y llamado a los medios con los resultados previsibles: se publicaría alguna carta al director y poco más. Internet, considerado por muchos un gigantesco vertedero de desinformación, ha hecho en los últimos años que el mensaje escéptico suene más alto y llegue a más gente que nunca. Ya no nos pueden silenciar, y eso es algo que tenemos que aprovechar. Internet ha posibilitado, en el caso de la homeopatía, que médicos críticos con esa pseudoterapia sepan que no están solos y unan sus fuerzas en organizaciones como el Círculo Escéptico, que luchan contra la superchería y promocionan el pensamiento crítico.

La pequeña victoria que ha supuesto en España el descrédito sufrido por Boiron en las últimas semanas no ha de cegarnos. Queda mucho por hacer y tenemos enfrente a una multinacional con un negocio de cientos de millones de euros que va a defender con uñas y dientes. Cuando lleguen las derrotas, que llegarán, piensen que también las hubo en la lucha contra el tabaco. Por de pronto, además de echar a la homeopatía de las universidades españolas, hay que exigir a las organizaciones profesionales de médicos, farmacéuticos y enfermeras que no den cabida en su seno ni a ésta ni a ninguna otra pseudoterapia, y hay que poner en marcha iniciativas transnacionales para cambiar la directiva europea que regula el uso de la homeopatía para que se rija por criterios científicos y no se pliegue a intereses económicos, como ha denunciado el presidente de los médicos españoles.

Skepticism has lost one of its most influential and accomplished promoters. Anti-quackery activist William Tyler Jarvis died March 1 after suffering an embolic stroke of the cerebellum on January 19 while playing tennis. He was 80.

Bill Jarvis co-founded the now-defunct National Council Against Health Fraud, Inc. and two predecessor quack buster organizations that he led as president from 1977 until his retirement in 2000. Under his leadership, NCAHF became the nation’s primary clearinghouse for information about health frauds and quackery. He edited NCAHF Newsletter, archived online at ncahf.org, and a members-only newsletter called NCAHF Bulletin Board. By 2000, NCAHF had eleven state and local chapters and nine designated area network coordinators throughout the United States.

Bill emphasized that quackery (also called health fraud) is not merely the use of false and unproven medical procedures. The key is their deceptive promotion in the marketplace as “alternatives” or “complements” to standard medicine—whether the deception is deliberate or done without adequate knowledge or understanding. He called for recognizing quackery as a public health problem to be combatted with systematic epidemiologic investigation, legislation, law enforcement, education, and improving patient care.

He made clear that quackery would always be part of the human condition and that attempting to eliminate it is futile. His realistic goal was to greatly minimize the harmful impact of quackery on society.

His résumé noted that he had been “dubbed one of the antiquackery movement’s ‘Four Horsemen’ by organized quackery” (along with the late Victor Herbert, M.D., J.D.; the late John H. Renner, M.D., and Stephen Barrett, M.D.)

During Bill’s presidency, NCAHF was based at Loma Linda University where he was a professor of health promotion and education in the School of Public Health. He also had an appointment on the preventive medicine faculty in the School of Medicine and a secondary appointment in the School of Dentistry. He developed and taught “Dubious Dentistry,” a dental continuing education course that addressed scientific versus nonscientific health care, dubious dental practices, dental pseudonutrition, and the national scandal of quackery.

In addition to his numerous articles in journals, magazines, and newsletters (including some available at www.quackwatch.org), Bill was author of the patient information booklet Quackery and You (1983), co-author of the American Medical Association’s Reader’s Guide to Alternative Medicine (1983), co-editor of The Health Robbers: A Close Look at Quackery in America (1993), and a co-author of the sixth (1993) and seventh (2002) editions of the college textbook Consumer Health: A Guide to Intelligent Decisions.

His foreword to Chiropractic: The Victim’s Perspective (1995) by George Magner included this example of his valuable insights about quackery:

Chiropractic students learn conversational medicine. This enables them to speak as if they know about disease and healing processes and creates the illusion that they understand medical science. Chiropractic literature, however, indicates that many chiropractors don’t even understand the most basic concepts of disease etiology.

Bill made hundreds of conference presentations and keynote addresses on food faddism, chiropractic, holistic health, cancer quackery, and related topics. He was often quoted by journalists and made numerous radio and television appearances including Dinah Shore’s Dinah! program in 1978 and The Merv Griffin Show in 1983.

In 1988, Bill was elected a scientific consultant to CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry). He co-chaired CSICOP’s Paranormal Health Claims Subcommittee. In the Fall 1987 Skeptical Inquirer, one of the four “Medical Controversies” articles featured on the cover was his article “Chiropractic: A Skeptical View” in which he described chiropractic as “the most significant nonscientific health-care delivery system in the United States.”

In the 1980s, he was a member of the Faith Healing Investigation Project of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion of the Council for Secular Humanism. He was a charter member of the Council for Scientific Medicine, which launched the journal The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine in 1997 with “A Statement in Defense of Scientific Medicine.” (The late Paul Kurtz was publisher and the late Wallace Sampson, M.D. was editor of the now-defunct journal.)

Jarvis also served as a liaison member of the American Cancer Society’s National Committee on Questionable Methods of Cancer Management, as a consultant to the American Dental Association’s Council on Dental Research, on the California Attorney General’s Task Force on Health Fraud, on the Board of Advisors of the American Council on Science and Health, and on the editorial advisory boards of Skeptic and Shape magazines.

In 1978, he was one of only three North Americans brought to New Zealand to testify against the inclusion of chiropractors in the national health program. In 1982, the California Dietetic Association gave him its Meritorious Service Award for combating food faddism.

Bill received his B.S. in Health & Physical Education/Social Studies in 1961 from the University of Minnesota, Duluth where he was a running back on the football team. He got an M.A. in Health & Physical Education/Sociology in 1961 from Kent State University, which three decades later gave him its Distinguished Health Education Alumnus Award. In 1973, he received his Ph.D. in health education from the University of Oregon, where he learned about the psychology of deception and misperception from Professor Ray Hyman, a prominent promoter of critical inquiry and member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry’s Executive Council. His dissertation was an analysis of the effect of a programmed instruction course about chiropractic on prospective health education teachers.

Bill inspired me to make the study of quackery and other consumer health issues the focus of my career in health education and public health. I’ve lost an important mentor.

Bill Jarvis is survived by his devoted wife, Ada, of 53 years, who worked behind the scenes to keep NCAHF running; his two sons, Will (and Kerry) and Matt (and Amanda); sister Janet Lee Hanf; and two nephews.

What if you bought a can labeled “beef stew,” and when you got ready to enjoy a hearty dinner you found there was nothing in the can but water? What if you discovered fine print on the label that said “Contains no beef stew”? You would be upset. You might think that anyone would be upset and wouldn’t buy that product again. And you might think the government would chastise the manufacturer. In the grocery store, you might be right. But in the drug store, you would be wrong. That sort of thing happens every day, and no one seems to get very upset about it.

The active ingredient in aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid; each pill contains 325 mg. Did you ever wonder how many molecules that equals? Of course not; why would you? You could calculate it if you were a chemistry whiz, but you probably wouldn’t want to bother. Would you like to hazard a wild guess? A billion molecules per pill? A trillion? More? Much more? Yes, much more! The answer is there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of acetylsalicylic acid in each pill. One followed by 21 zeros. That’s a lot of molecules! But even that isn’t enough to stop your headache; you have to take two of those pills.

You wouldn’t want to buy aspirin that contained only 10,000 molecules per pill, and you certainly wouldn’t to buy aspirin that contained not one single molecule of acetylsalicylic acid. But people buy Oscillococcinum all the time. It’s a homeopathic remedy manufactured by the Boiron company. The front of the package says it is for treating flu-like symptoms: feeling run-down, headaches, body aches, chills, and fever. It’s on the shelves of your neighborhood drug store right along with the aspirin and the over-the-counter cold remedies. A package of six pills costs $15.49 at Walgreen’s; that’s $2.58 per dose. They sell a lot of it. It brings in $15 million a year in the United States and is one of the ten top-selling drugs in France. Believe it or not, the information on the back of the box reveals that it contains no active ingredient at all. Not a single molecule.

Oscillococcinum listed on Walgreens Website.

So why on Earth do people buy a medicine with no medicine in it? The back of the box clearly says “Active ingredient Anas barbariae, 200 CK HPUS.” I suspect most customers don’t bother to read that, and if they do, they don’t know what it means. I do, and I’ll tell you. Anas barbariae is the scientific name for the Muscovy duck. I know that they prepared Oscillococcinum by taking a bit of the liver and heart of this poor duck, pulverizing it, mixing it with water, and diluting it over and over until there was no duck left (except perhaps the quack). Then they dripped the resulting water onto sugar pills and let it evaporate. If you thought about it, duck offal would probably not be your first choice for treating flu symptoms, even if there were any molecules of duck left. “HPUS” stands for the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States; remedies listed in that book are exempt from the regulations that apply to prescription and FDA-approved over-the-counter drugs, and they do not have to demonstrate evidence of efficacy or safety. And “200 C” means that they made a dilution of one part of duck offal to 100 parts of water, then took one part of the diluted remedy and diluted it 1 to 100 again, and repeated the process 200 times. The “K” refers to the Korsakov method, which assumes that there will be approximately one drop left clinging to the walls of the vial after you empty it, so you just add another 99 drops of diluent to the same vial over and over. (That sounds to me like you’re washing the vial.) By the thirteenth dilution, there is only a 50/50 chance that one single molecule of duck remains. By the 200th dilution, you have a solution of one in 10 to the 400th power; for comparison, the number of atoms in the observable universe is 10 to the 80th power. By one estimate, if any active ingredient were left it would weigh less than the weight of a proton. When a Boiron scientist was asked if the product was safe, she said, “Of course it is safe. There’s nothing in it.”

You might wonder “Why duck liver?” It’s a long story, but basically a French doctor fooled himself into thinking he had discovered a new bacterium called Oscillococcus in the blood of flu victims during the 1918 flu epidemic, and he thought he saw the same imaginary bacteria in a specimen of Long Island duckling liver. He compounded one mistake with another, and with typically flawed homeopathic reasoning, he concluded that dilute duck liver ought to cure the flu. Why is Oscillococcinum made from Muscovy duck instead of Long Island duckling? Why the duck heart? I haven’t the foggiest idea, but it makes as much sense as anything else in homeopathy.

If you found out you had been paying $2.58 for a sugar pill, wouldn’t you feel foolish? Since you are reading a skeptical website, you probably know what homeopathy is and wouldn’t have bought Oscillococcinum. But others in the general public don’t have your critical thinking skills or your knowledge. They don’t know what homeopathy is, and they don’t want to know. They want something they can take to make them feel better. They want to believe it will work; they want hope, even if it is false hope. They don’t care what the scientific evidence says because “science doesn’t know everything”; they’re more impressed by anecdotes from the Internet and from their friends. If Aunt Betsy said “it worked for me” that’s good enough for them. If it’s on the shelves of the drug store, they assume it must work or the government would have removed it from the shelves. Wrong!

I had a good friend who was intelligent, well-educated, and skeptical about most things, but she never thought to question homeopathy. When I suggested a book about it, Homeopathy: How It Really Works by Jay Shelton, she refused to read it. She said, “I know it works for me, so we’ll just have to agree to disagree.” In other words, “Don’t try to confuse me with facts; my mind’s made up.” In at least one case, homeopathy didn’t work for her; she had to stop taking her homeopathic sleep remedy because she thought it was giving her side effects!

It’s strange how the human mind works. Customers who would scream bloody murder and call their lawyer if they opened a can of beef stew and found only water are not protesting when they learn that (if they bother to learn that) the medicine they bought contains no active ingredient. The FDA is looking into the possibility of changing the way homeopathic remedies are regulated. I would love it if they would require a label saying, “Contains no active ingredient. For entertainment purposes only.” But people would manage to ignore that statement the same way they ignore the FDA disclaimers on dietary supplements that say, “This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

To paraphrase Gertude Stein’s comment about Oakland, “The trouble with homeopathy is that when you get there, there isn't any there there.” Homeopathy has been called “the ultimate fake” and “delusions about dilutions.” Oliver Wendell Holmes thoroughly demolished homeopathy back in 1842 in his lecture and subsequent book “Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions.” It’s been 174 years, folks! Why are we such slow learners? At least since there’s nothing in the remedies, they’re not likely to cause harm except when people use them in place of effective conventional medical care. But that happens all too often; some of the resulting deaths have been reported on the What’s The Harm? website.

I’m reminded of Pete Seeger’s lyrics: “When will we ever learn?” Not any time soon, I’m afraid. But we might as well remain optimistic. As Greg Carr wisely said, “Choose optimism because the alternative is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Recently I came across one of television’s true crime programs that presented a provocative example from actual case files: A woman had been brutally murdered in her apartment. Her former boyfriend with whom she had recently had a vigorous altercation became the leading murder suspect. During the investigation, this man was “offered” a polygraph (lie detector) test in the attempt to establish his likely guilt or innocence. He agreed to be tested and was found to have “failed,” thus presumably indicating his likely guilt. Despite this result, the evidence presented at the trial was deemed insufficient for a guilty verdict, and he was acquitted. Convinced that the polygraph test was accurate, his local community made him a pariah; he was shunned and even threatened with bodily harm. Several months later, however, another man, the actual murderer, was apprehended and convicted. Thus at least for this first suspect, despite his ordeal, the story had a satisfactory ending, and the lie detector test itself proved inaccurate and misleading. This outcome leads to an obvious question: How often does “lie detection by machine” prove false?

Much of the American public seems to be convinced that the “lie detector” is valid, as indicated by its ubiquitous use in “whodunit” literature and on television crime, psychology, talk, and news shows. After all, faced with such an avalanche of widespread approbation, who could doubt the validity of such a test? Supporting this illusion is the fact that federal, state, and local police departments and law enforcement agencies across the United States are generally avid proponents of this method.

But let’s take a closer look at this subject. Questions about the accuracy of this test should be amenable to modern scientific methods. Interestingly, this challenge is strikingly similar to those we face regularly as medical researchers and practitioners when we evaluate various tests in the attempt to establish the presence or absence of many diseases. Through this lens, therefore, I can provide some insight on a method that is often uncritically analyzed.

The Procedure and Its History

The “lie detector” test has been used for nearly a century, and it employs a “polygraph,” which, during questioning, continuously records an examinee’s blood pressure, respiration, pulse rate, and skin resistance (an indirect measure of perspiration).

The usual format compares responses to “relevant” questions with those of “control” questions. The control questions are designed to control for the effect of the generally threatening nature of relevant questions. Control questions concern misdeeds that are similar to those being investigated, but refer to the subject’s past and are usually broad in scope; for example, “Have you ever betrayed anyone who trusted you?”

A person who is telling the truth is assumed to fear control questions more than relevant questions. This is because control questions are designed to arouse a subject’s concern about their past truthfulness, while relevant questions ask about a crime of which they are suspected. A pattern of greater physiological response to relevant questions than to control questions leads to a diagnosis of “deception.” Greater response to control questions leads to a judgment of no deception. If no difference is found between relevant and control questions, the test result is considered inconclusive.

In the effort to improve the test’s accuracy, alternative means of questioning have been suggested, such as the “guilty knowledge test” (Ruscio 2005). Rather than attempting to determine the truthfulness of an examinee’s responses to relevant items, this technique aims to expose “hot” responses to questions only a guilty individual could display. This is done with a series of multiple-choice questions, one of which contains the incriminating information. This type of interrogation is limited only to instances of specific wrongdoing, but it has not been sufficiently investigated and is quite likely to suffer from the same shortcomings as the conventional procedure.

The test records the activity of the sympathetic branch of the autonomic (involuntary) nervous system that influences heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and perspiration. Although this part of the nervous system is active at all times, it increases during excitement, rage, anxiety, fear, or fright, any of which could be caused by lying. But deception is a cognitive function that defies direct measurement. Indeed, throughout the entire history of medical science, there have been no scientific studies that have shown that the emotional response linked to lying could be measured. Moreover, reactions associated with lying and any other assumed emotional stresses can be quite variable. Some people may stay calm with a gun at their head. By contrast, others may respond excessively with heart thumping and sweaty palms at simply shaking someone’s hand. The polygraph examination itself often causes fear and anxiety, and if such responses are excessive in response to a given question, then one may be deemed to have failed that question by a polygraph examiner.

The Evidence

Because of this obvious biologic improbability in this era of evidence-based medical science, the premise of lie detection by polygraph has fallen under a cloud of skepticism, and it is justly considered pseudoscience by most of the scientific community (Iacono 2001).

The American Polygraph Association (APA), a professional organization for polygraph examiners, predictably has complete faith in the accuracy of the test. They have licensing procedures in twenty-eight states and their own trade journal, Polygraph, in which they report scientifically questionable studies and provide anecdotes of the accuracy of their trade. The majority of these members complete a six-week to six-month post–high school training course in the art of polygraphy. They are not required to have formal training in medicine, psychology, physiology, or behavior—the very disciplines on which the testing is based. The majority of their members cater to the legal system upon which their economic livelihood depends, thus creating the background for a clear conflict of interest.

As expected, polygraph examiners will usually confidently state that the exam is highly accurate, around 95 percent. This implies that if 100 guilty suspects are given a polygraph exam, ninety-five of them will be detected through the test, meaning that only five of these 100 will be a false negative and not be detected by this method. On the other hand, they will state that if you are telling the truth, you have almost a 100 percent chance of being cleared by the test (Reid and Inbau 1977).

However, to be acceptable to modern scientific standards, the two characteristics that must be established are the sensitivity and specificity of this test: Sensitivity is that percentage of positive test results when lying is known to exist. Specificity is the percentage of negative results in the absence of prevarication. Under both scenarios, to establish the test’s accuracy, the presence of both lying and honesty must be determined independently of the test procedure itself. True accuracy must also be derived from real-life conditions because, for obvious reasons, it cannot be derived from volunteers in laboratory settings that lack the emotional pressures of real suspicion. To accomplish this, a group without known prevarication is tested to assess the results. But absolute proof of honesty is evasive in such individuals, because even if lying is absent, the anxiety associated with the test may cause false positive test results, reducing test specificity, which is a major confounder.

But what about test results in those who are actually guilty? We have little knowledge of the frequency with which liars are judged to be truthful. Moreover, guilty subjects—and many others—can purposely control their reactions using what are called “countermeasures,” sufficient to confuse the results enough to produce a “false negative.” One outstanding example of a false negative was that of Aldrich Ames, who in 1995 had successfully passed five polygraphs during his long career in intelligence, and, despite this, he was subsequently arrested and convicted of spying. After Sandia National Labs Senior Scientist Alan P. Zelicoff published a strong commentary in Skeptical Inquirer calling polygraphs “a dangerous ruse” (Zelicoff 2001), Ames himself wrote a remarkable letter to the editor from federal prison confirming Zelicoff’s points, adding that polygraphs are indeed “junk science,” “a superstition,” and “a refuge from responsibility.” “Like handing fate to the stars, entrails on the rock, bureaucrats can abandon their duties and responsibilities to junk scientists and interrogators masquerading as technicians,” Ames wrote (Ames 2001). In 2003, another example was provided by Gary Ridgway, who eventually was found to be the Green River Killer, having murdered forty-nine women in the Seattle area. Ironically, Ridgway had passed a lie detector test in 1987, while another man—who was proved to be innocent—failed. Although such isolated examples are admittedly anecdotal, they raise suspicions that the test itself may be flawed and should be carefully scrutinized through critical scientific means that employ large numbers of tests, as described below.

The polygraph test was not subjected to modern scientific investigation until three decades ago (Saxe et. al 1983; Lykken 1981). Since then there have been several studies employing improved methodology. Despite the impossibility of achieving a completely satisfactory research design, these tests clearly refute the high accuracy previously claimed. These studies have appeared in reputable peer-reviewed journals (Horvath 1977). They generally report a sensitivity ranging around 76 percent. This means that out of 100 liars only seventy-six of them will be detected by the polygraph. But adding doubt about this apparent test sensitivity is the fact that establishing true “guilt” often cannot be dissociated from prior polygraph testing, which may have contributed to confessions and/or guilty verdicts in court, skewing the data toward a falsely high sensitivity value of the test. The testing examiner also may have prior suspicions about the honesty of the examinee, which can in turn cause bias in the test’s interpretation and further skew the data. The skill of the examiners also is associated with considerable variability of results, creating another major source of inaccuracy. Some smaller police departments with limited budgets may designate a police officer to be their department examiner instead of using an outside professional examiner. The designated testing officer may have little or no formal training, other than the limited training provided by the company selling the instrument to the police department. This can lead to situational bias based upon an officer’s predisposition to believe most suspects are generally guilty. As a result, the officer may categorize an inconclusive result as untruthful. If the testing officer is aware of the circumstances of the individual being tested, and the weight and extent of the evidence indicating the individual being tested is the likely perpetrator of the crime, unbiased testing is virtually impossible. Officers are also generally trained to ask questions using phrasing that may cause someone to answer in a manner that may appear to be an admission of guilt. This type of questioning format would be inappropriate in a polygraph examination. For these various reasons given above, establishing true sensitivity of this test is therefore unlikely ever to be achieved, but the estimations above are likely overstated.

Even more damning—but unsurprising—is that studies report an average specificity of 52 percent, meaning that out of 100 people who are not lying, only fifty-two will be identified as telling the truth while forty-eight of these honest individuals will be branded as liars. These odds are similar to a coin toss, which would have a specificity of 50 percent. Other studies (Brett et al. 1986; Kleinmuntz and Szucko 1984; Lykken 1981) have shown even lower specificity values, indicating that “positive” test results are virtually useless. In 2003, the National Academy of Sciences, after a comprehensive review issued a report, The Polygraph and Lie Detection (National Academy of Sciences 2003), stating that the majority of polygraph research was “unreliable, unscientific and biased” and concluding that fifty-seven of approximately eighty research studies—upon which the American Polygraph Association relies—were significantly flawed. It concluded that, although the test performed better than chance in catching lies—far from perfect—perhaps most important, the test produced too many false positives.

If anything, there is perhaps one minor advantage to subjecting suspected felons to such testing (Lykken 1981; Lykken 1991): 25 to 50 percent of examinees will, under the intense psychological pressure of the exam, confess to the misdeed at hand, having been persuaded that they have been proven dishonest by “scientific” means. It is usual for the polygraph examiners to interrogate the subjects whom they believe have “failed” the test. Examiners may state that there is no way now to deny the objective guilt demonstrated by this “impartial” scientific device, and that the only available option is to confess, which they often do. But, while perhaps effective, this in no way exonerates the test itself. Perhaps various forms of torture such as water boarding might be just as effective. And one might ask further how often this form of interrogation might lead innocent persons to falsely admit, out of fear or other threats, to some form of wrongdoing.

Justification for Continued Use?

For all these reasons, the continued use of polygraph lie detection has the potential to cause much harm to those many innocents who are falsely judged dishonest by its results. A single failure could conceivably ruin one’s life. Since 1923, polygraph evidence has not been admissible in federal court cases because the test was deemed to lack scientific validity. Sadly, however, it is still used widely by the court systems of many states. Moreover, suspects are frequently “offered” this test prior to criminal proceedings, but if, for any reason, they decline to be tested, this refusal alone may cause them to be presumed guilty. Conversely, if they consent to be tested, they are risking the commonly occurring false positive outcome, which in the view of many prosecutors and juries, supports a guilty verdict. Thus from the standpoint of the accused, he/she is caught in a catch 22 situation.

Even more regrettable is the attempted application of this test for pre-employment or security clearances. In this context, testing large groups with a low base rate of dishonesty will disclose a large number of false positive responses, as encompassed in the mathematical principles of Bayes theorem (Tavel 2012). Understanding these concepts, the American Medical Association’s Council on Scientific Affairs (1986) recommended that the polygraph not be used in pre-employment screening and security clearance, with which I fully concur.

Adding clear restrictions to this testing, The Federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act, passed in 1988, virtually outlawed using polygraphs in connection with employment. That law covers all private employers in interstate commerce, which includes almost every private company that uses a computer, the U.S. mail, or a telephone system to send messages to someone in another state.

Under the Act, it is illegal for all private companies to:

1. Require, request, suggest, or cause any employee or job applicant to submit to a lie detector test;
2. Use, accept, refer to, or inquire about the results of any lie detector test conducted on an employee or job applicant;
3. Dismiss, discipline, discriminate against, or even threaten to take action against any employee or job applicant who refuses to take a lie detector test.

Federal applicants and employees are also generally protected from lie detector tests by civil service rules. Despite all these apparent safeguards, they often must submit to a polygraph examination in the quest of a coveted security clearance for federal employment or to retain such a job. The Employee Polygraph Protection Act allows polygraph tests to be used in connection with jobs in security and handling drugs, or in investigating a specific theft or other suspected crimes.

As a result, these examinations continue to be used by federal agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency, where they are commonplace in decisions concerning employment. Applicants might expect them as a form of initial screening even before they start working at the agency. They may also be required to take follow-up polygraph tests from time to time. Prior to a likely job offer, the polygraph test is often the last remaining hurdle. Under these circumstances, the need to pass can be a very nervous event for anyone—especially those who have not been subjected to a polygraph before, and of course, as explained, this can easily trigger a false positive response, resulting in an unjustified rejection. Thus use of such a test for this purpose is very difficult to defend.

Given the fallacies of such testing, one would assume that enterprising individuals would provide instruction to subjects on how to pass such a test (through “countermeasures”), thus leading to the conclusion—rightly or wrongly—that one is being truthful. Moreover, the prior administration of certain drugs to block the sympathetic nervous system could also be expected to impair test accuracy. Actually, instruction on passing these tests is easily available on some Internet sites. Therefore it is difficult to understand why anyone providing personal instruction to this end would actually be prosecuted as if this were a felony. This is exactly what occurred recently (Taylor 2013) when an Indiana man was accused of “threatening national security” by teaching government job applicants and others how to pass lie-detector tests. He was sentenced to eight months in prison after federal agents had targeted him in an undercover sting. At the time of this writing, at least one additional case is pending on similar grounds. Although legal intricacies extend beyond this discussion, this issue appears to threaten First Amendment rights. Moreover, that such instruction is even possible exposes the flaws of a procedure largely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community. To exemplify this point further, let us present an intriguing—although farcical—analogy: Suppose we discovered that, through coaching, one could teach persons how to transfer firearms past metal detectors at air terminals without triggering alarms? Such a revelation would logically cause one of two reactions by the supervising authorities: 1) Eliminate such a flawed test in favor of one that is accurate; or 2) Attempt to silence those coaching this “deception” with threatened legal penalties, including incarceration. The obvious answer to this question—number one—requires little thought. But with regard to polygraph testing, this answer has thus far not been chosen by our authorities, for they have exercised the second option. The mere fact that authorities have chosen to suppress information of this type might, in itself, be considered as a tacit admission that such testing is fatally flawed.

Conclusions

In summarizing its many pitfalls, Iacono (2001) concluded in an article titled “Forensic Lie Detection: Procedures without Scientific Basis,” the following, which I paraphrase for clarity: Although this form of testing may be useful as an investigative aid and tool to induce confessions, it does not pass muster as a scientifically credible test. Its theory is based on naive, implausible assumptions about its accuracy. It is biased against innocent individuals and can be beaten simply by artificially augmenting responses to control questions. Although it is not possible to adequately assess the error rate of this test, both of these conclusions are supported by published research findings in the best social science journals.

Given such overwhelming evidence of inaccuracy as I have presented here, how can we, as a society, react to such a perversion of science? The logical solution is to completely abandon this method of testing. The most urgent necessity is the complete elimination of this testing in connection with employment. All remaining state and federal laws that allow use of the polygraph, in or outside of court settings, should be abandoned. Moreover, as long as it remains in use, there is simply no justification for prosecuting those who provide information about how to “pass” such a test.

Unfortunately, various state and national polygraph certifying and licensing organizations—whose livelihood depends upon their own continued existence—are well entrenched in our society. Their provision of services to most law enforcement agencies creates a symbiotic relationship that is difficult to overcome. Nevertheless, to eradicate this blight the scientific community, as well as others who understand these concepts, must educate the public and relentlessly urge the responsible authorities to discontinue the present unsatisfactory status quo.

References

• American Medical Association Council on Scientific Affairs. 1986. Polygraph. Journal of the American Medical Association 256: 1172–75.
• Ames, Aldrich. 2001. The polygraphs controversy (letter to the editor). Skeptical Inquirer 25(6): 72–73.
• Brett, A.S., M. Phillips, and J.F. Beary. 1986. Predictive power of the polygraph: Can the “lie detector” really detect liars? The Lancet. 1: 544–547.
• Horvath, F. 1977. The effect of selected variables on interpretation of polygraph records. Journal of Applied Psychology 62: 127–136.
• Iacono, W.G. 2001. Forensic “lie detection”: Procedures without scientific basis. Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice 1: 75–86.Kleinmuntz, B., and J. Szucko. 1984. A field study of the fallibility of polygraphic lie detection. Nature 308: 449–450.Lykken, D.T. 1981. A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector. McGraw-Hill, New York.
• ———. 1991. Why (some) Americans believe in the lie detector while others believe in the guilty knowledge test. Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science 26: 214–222.
• National Academy of Sciences. 2003. The Polygraph and Lie Detection, Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
• Reid, J.E., and F.E. Inbau. 1977. Truth and Deception: The Polygraph (“Lie Detector”) Technique. Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore.
• Ruscio, J. 2005. Exploring controversies in the art and science of polygraph testing. Skeptical Inquirer 29(1): 34–39.
• Saxe, L., D. Dougherty, and T. Crosse. 1983. Scientific validity of polygraph testing: A research review and evaluation. Conference: OTA-TM. U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment.
• Tavel, M.E. 2012. Snake Oil Is Alive and Well: The Clash between Myths and Reality. Reflections of a Physician. Chandler, AZ: Brighton Press, 51.
• Taylor, M. 2013. Indiana man gets 8 months for lie-detector fraud. Seattle Times (September 6).
• Zelicoff, Alan P. 2001. Polygraphs and the national labs: Dangerous ruse undermines national security. Skeptical Inquirer, (July/August). Online at http://www.csicop.org/si/show/polygraphs_and_the_national_labs_dangerous_ruse
  _undermines_national_securit/.

This year, Monterey County Skeptics challenged other skeptic groups to show off their inner nerd on March 14, better known as Pi Day.

Search online for the term and you will find Pi Day art projects, Pi Day T-shirts, Pi Day recipes, Pi Day decorations, Pi Day math games for kids, and more. According to Wikipedia, this pseudo-holiday was started by physicist Larry Shaw, who worked at the San Francisco Exploratorium, in 1988. It has been celebrated by math and science geeks since then.

It’s a commonly known fact that skeptics are nerds, so we might as well embrace it and use it to our advantage. Our goal for this year’s Pi Day was to lure Meetup members who rarely (or never) attend our monthly dinner to come out, hang out, and eat pie with the rest of us. I was hoping to show that we aren’t all curmudgeons, that we are actually fun people who happen to share an interest in the paranormal and critical thinking. I was also thinking that a function that focused on eating pie might be a great opportunity for members to bring their families.

Phil, one of our members, brought some bad pi jokes to the party. For example: What do you call a mathematical sailor? A pi-rate. Then there is this lovely pun: Who is the roundest knight at Sir Arthur’s table? Sir Cumference. He ate too much pie. Groan. I warned you they were bad.

Several other groups checked in on the Facebook event page. The Investigation Network group in Los Angeles meant to have a pie fight but just ended up eating the pie instead. And yummy looking pie it was.

Mark Hennessy-Barrett shared a photo of his coworkers eating pies in the break room at his workplace. He reminded me that it is Rounded Pi Day “Because 3.14159265359 to 4sf = 3.14.16” and he added, “the second decimal is cosmic.”

Michelle Franklin’s group all the way over in Darwin, Australia, celebrated along with us by holding a Meetup on the day. Apparently when you mention pie to an Australian, they think of meat pies rather than fruit pies. They weren’t sure why we were talking about what kind of ice cream to serve with our pies. In much of the world they can’t enjoy Pi Day because March 14, 2016, is 14 March 2016 to them. Not even close to being mathematically correct.

I feel very strongly that the best asset the skeptical community is its people. We need to locate them, motivate them, train them, and keep them involved. They are our future leaders, innovators, and more. And something as silly as celebrating Pi Day might just be the first step toward making this happen.

We had a full kitchen and dining room that night. Fourteen people eating and socializing was a great thing to see. Some of my group had rarely attended other Meetups, and some were meeting each other for the first time. One of our members, Julia, had been shipped out by the Army to Texas many months ago. She drove all the way out to California in time for our event, arriving only hours before. We also managed to recruit our new planetarium director Andrew to join us. Everyone was excited to meet him, and a few days later he put on a special show just for us talking about black holes and gravitational waves. That attracted ten of us.

So I’m going to call this a win. A total win for the skeptic community. And I encourage everyone reading this to pull out your calendar, circle March 14, 2017, and start planning. Like homeopathy, there really is nothing to it. Just find a place, pick a time, put out a Meetup, and make some coffee. You can hold it at a pie restaurant, workplace, or really anywhere. If you don’t have a local skeptic group, then this might be just the ticket to start one. Put out an announcement on social media or a sign at work. Heck, I’ll even announce it on my social network if you ask me to. What’s the worst that can happen? You end up sitting at a pie shop eating a piece of your favorite pie all alone. If so, please take a photo and send it my way. I’m planning on doing this every year. But maybe next time I won’t eat quite so much.

And remember: Why does no one talk to circles? Because there is no point. Sorry.

The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head Is Really Up To—Interview with Dean Burnett

Dr. Dean Burnett is a neuroscientist working as a tutor and lecturer based at Cardiff University’s Institute of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences. His Guardian science blog, Brain Flapping, has been viewed over thirteen million times in the last three years—and now he has a new book out called The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head Is Really Up To.

Unpredictable and entertaining, Burnett’s account gives us up-to-date research and the principles of neuroscience along the way. Looking at memory, intelligence, observation, social interaction, and personality, Burnett explains why memory is like a doting mother; tall people are more intelligent; criticism is more powerful than praise; and much more.

Kylie Sturgess: It’s an interesting start to the book—it has lots of apologies! Did the introduction really start at the beginning, or did you look over your body of work and look back on it and think, “Oh yes, I really have to apologize for everything now.”

Dean Burnett: No. I looked at them in chronological order, and in fact the introduction was the first thing I wrote. I know some people do write chapters and go back to the originals and reject their earlier stuff and that’s fine, but that’s not how I tend to do things. I haven’t written a book before, so I thought I’d stick to the logical structure.

I’m not the most confident in my writing in that—I think I can do it, just I’m not sure anyone else will like it. I feel like in advance I should apologize to anyone who doesn’t like it because they’ve spent money on it this time. When I’m doing blogs and things, obviously it’s just a few clicks of a search engine and that’s all you’ve lost. You can go a few minutes of your time perhaps and you can forget all about it, but when you’ve invested money in a book, I feel like I owe you something. If I let them down, then I feel like the first thing I should do is apologize!

Also I’m not the most self-aggrandizing of scientists. I’m aware that I’m a capable scientist, but I’m not one of these flashy lead researchers setting the field aflame and stuff. I am more a communicator and teacher. People who write books tend to be the big names—the big shots—and I’m not one of those. So someone [who] picks this up thinking I am—that I’m one of the leading minds in neuroscience—is going to be sorely disappointed.

Again, I feel like I should apologize for that! Various different things I feel needed an apology before they’d even happened. So that’s where that came from.

Sturgess: Did your blogging influence the book?

Burnett: More than influenced it, it came from it. In fact, I hadn’t had any plans to write the book. It’s one of those things of, “Maybe one day I’ll write a book,” and I hadn’t really gotten beyond that point in thinking, “I’ll need the time to write a book. I’ll need the interest of people to go and do it,” because I like writing. I really enjoy it, but I’m not so interested in things like “I have things that people need to hear!”

I don’t have one of those burning ambitions and desires. It’s something I just enjoy doing and seemed to have a bit of a knack for. I hadn’t planned to write a book because I thought, “Well, a blog, that’s what I’ll do.” Then this guy who said he was an agent got in touch and said “Well, who’s going to write the book?” I thought, “Do you think I could?” and it turns out he did. I assumed he was a scammer of some sort. “I can publish your book at just nine hundred dollars.”

I thought, “Yeah, that’s slick. You’re not a Nigerian banker this time, very good!” Though it turned out that he was legit, so he talked me through the process of suggesting a book—and I didn’t actually want to write a brain book. That’s something people tend to be surprised by because back from the earliest [point], I thought there were plenty of brain books out there.

The attitudes to these brain books I’ve read is always one of reverence and mystery and “Oh, it’s amazing. It’s powerful. It’s beyond our knowledge and we should fall down and worship at the feet of the brain!”—if that makes any sense because obviously the brain makes us do that. It’s kind of self-referential, and as someone who works with the brain, I don’t share that enthusiasm and this reverence for it because I know how ridiculous it can be.

I thought, “Well, I don’t like the brain. The brain’s quite rubbish in many ways.” Someone said, “Well, write about it then,” and I said, “I will,” and I did—and here we are with me talking about the book that I wrote on that angry challenge!

Sturgess: I was intrigued by many aspects of it. It seems the book is structured almost like a cook’s tour throughout the entire brain. I was intrigued by the many footnotes and the one about memory and the appetite study. It’s some intriguing research into people’s reaction to how much soup they get?

Burnett: See, I like stuff like that. I think that’s the sort of thing which people would appreciate science more with these quirky ingenious ways of studying things. When you see scientific media, it’s always the big flashy stuff. Images of distant galaxies. “We’ve mapped the universe. We’ve uncovered the reality of space,” and also in neuroscience it’s always the MRI machines or the huge bits of technology that gives us all these colorful blobs which mean things.

I do think there should be more room made for the smaller but the more ingenious and inspiringly crafty studies. For those who don’t know, it’s a study to see how memory affects appetite, so they fed people either three hundred millilitres or five hundred millilitres of soup. There was a very ingenious setup whereby the soup actually could be drained or refilled secretly in a tube that’s in the bottom of the bottle.

Some people who were told they had three hundred mils actually ended up eating five hundred, and those who were told they had five hundred actually ended up eating three hundred. The ones who thought they’d eaten more stayed full for longer…. The ones who thought they’d eaten less got hungrier faster even if they had eaten more. The memory was a much bigger drive of appetite than people realized.

I can imagine expert scientists, all PhDs, sat around this table trying to work up a plumbing system for soup in order to establish something about how the brain works! That’s the sort of thing that’s always more fascinating to me than the big, flashy, whiz-bang stuff.

Sturgess: I never expected a section on humor and the brain to include references to Nietzsche. He never really particularly stuck me as a funny fellow!

Burnett: I think I make that point too. Nietzsche, for all his wisdom, he couldn’t do a stand-up show. You go to an open-mic night and Nietzsche walks up and it’s going to be a tough sell!

Sturgess: I really enjoyed the comparison between the researcher Freud and the Wright Brothers. I thought that was a good comparison when people say, “Oh, why should we be continuing?” What are your thoughts?

Burnett: Yeah, it’s like the example that people in psychiatry and psychology still use Freud as the way things work. His ideas are just as accepted now as they were a hundred years ago. My perspective is they are interesting ideas, and they do have merit value, but like you said, the comparison is to the Wright Brothers and that they discovered how to achieve powered flight.

The principles they discovered are still used today, but we don’t use their airplane designs. They don’t say, “This is how an airplane should work.” We chose to do so, and it’s because we’ve moved on and discovered new things. There’s a place for Freud, but I don’t think like the others who are Freudian who think the ego, superego, and id are how the mind actually works.

There’s a lot more evidence out there now to say that’s not necessarily the case. There’re bits of that, but it’s not the whole story as some people seem to think it is.

Sturgess: I was also intrigued by the elements which attempted to figure out why some people are skeptics and some people are less skeptical of things. There was a study on the inferior temporal gyrus, of the brains of skeptics and believers and how we might respond to certain things. I hadn’t heard of that study before.

Burnett: I think there are a lot of studies more for sort of proof of principle rather than saying, “These studies show this and these studies show that.” Again, I like to see or show scientists trying to tackle these things which are so slippery and tenuous because again, I think I say in the actual text itself this study isn’t perfect by any means. Just a small sample size and also when you put someone in an MRI machine, you ask them to think of superstitious things, then that’s not necessarily a clear-cut example of someone being superstitious.

It’s a good way to show that we’ve all got to start somewhere. This is a good way to start looking at these sorts of things. Maybe people can build on this now and move it into more of the research and areas which are a bit more inclusive, but it does suggest that there is some difference in activity and behavior of the brains of people who are more—let’s be generous and say open-minded—and those that are a bit more skeptical.

Again, the results did again, it’s all open implication. They did sort of say that those who are not as skeptical are perhaps lacking in something in a certain, I’ve got to be as diplomatic as possible here because I don’t like to just go straight in and say, “You’re all idiots.” I don’t dare to!

Sturgess: In chapter seven when you’re talking about empathy, you write about how as long as we don’t do something stupid like put the most pampered people in charge of running the countries, we should be okay… but it seems we tend to do that anyway?

Burnett: It seems to be a sort of by-product of democracy meeting with capitalism in that you need money in order to achieve public office these days, and people with the most money are by and large the most pampered because a lot of studies have shown that empathy is possible between two people but that you’re far less likely or able to empathize with someone who is suffering or in an intense situation if you yourself are not in that situation or in a similarly unpleasant environment, so you don’t really care.

If you’re on a beach drinking delicious cocktails on your four week holiday, that’s a very nice sensation. You see someone walk past with a broken leg then you might think, “Poor thing,” but you won’t give up your holiday to go and help them. It’s a strange neurological quirk that we have that we tend to empathize more with people showing behaviors and sensations that we can relate to at the moment.

As a result, you get these people who have everything. People who haven’t really worked much in their lives or haven’t had to struggle or strive for anything or have never gone without, and they see these people who are on the bread lines, starving, and they’re not able to get ahead in life, and they don’t care because they feel like, “Well, I’ve managed it and so should they.”

They genuinely can’t rationalize a situation whereby these people might be in a situation which is not of their doing. They go, “Well, I’ve managed it, why don’t they manage it too? These people who aren’t working hard or aren’t earning money, it’s entirely their own fault. I don’t care about them,” and it becomes harder to do so.

Yes, it’s an unpleasant facet of how humans behave but one that seems to be quite stubborn and given how we modeled our society it’s not one that is without consequences.

Sturgess: Certainly I hope it’s kept in mind for people to do their research into political candidates next time they vote.

Burnett: Not that there are any particularly good ones at the moment, but there you go!

Sturgess: Overall, have people responded to the book? I thought, “This must have taken a tremendous amount of research….”

Burnett: I’ve only had good feedback so far, but with the caveat of these are the people who are willing to talk to me about it, so I don’t know. There might be a big section of society that actually despises it and burns every copy they can get their hands on.

Sturgess: They just look at the apologies at the beginning and say, “Well, at least he apologized!”

Burnett: As long as they’re paying for these copies and they do it, I’m okay either way. The book is entirely flammable for this reason!

Dean Burnett’s The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To is available in bookstores and online.

Canvass Americans’ opinions on global warming and you will find a cavernous divide. On one side, a generally well-meaning segment of the public heeds the latest scientific findings, views obstructionist policymakers’ inaction and intransigence with dismay, but occasionally muddles the facts. On the other side, a considerable swath of the electorate holds the unshakable conviction that thermometers have a pronounced liberal bias. Any attempt to address climate change, we are told, plays into the hands of an inexplicably vast and powerful network of conspiratorial climatologists. Lost somewhere in the mix is the science that should inform and largely settle the discussion.

Professor David Helfand hopes to change all that. Dr. Helfand, professor of astronomy at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age: Scientific Habits of Mind, aims to help nonscientists come to their own conclusions. He seeks to do so as any good scientist would: by offering a forthright presentation of the best available evidence. On a recent Monday evening on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Helfand delivered a two-hour tour de force before an auditorium packed with One Day University adult students. The event, titled “Climate Change: What We Know and What We Don’t Know” and moderated by New York Times science reporter Claudia Dreifus, delivered exactly what was promised.

Helfand has a passion for dispassionate analysis. Some political activists seek to goad the public into action on climate change by highlighting worst-case scenarios and downplaying uncertainties and gaps in understanding. Helfand believes this is a profound mistake. In his view, the scientific community’s best hope of convincing a confused and ill-informed public is through a precise, honest presentation of our best scientific evidence—limitations, uncertainties, warts and all. He eschews rhetorical carpet-bombing in favor of a clear, candid exposition of the relevant facts and evidence.

Helfand’s insistence on laying evidentiary foundations was on display from the outset. His presentation began not with a rallying cry to arrest the alarming rise in greenhouse gas emissions, but with a detailed discourse on the science of sunspots, the reflectivity of clouds and polar ice, and the precession of the Earth’s rotational axis. Dreifus occasionally seemed eager to draw Helfand toward an early statement of scientific conclusions and policy recommendations. Helfand held firm, preferring to lead the audience, methodically and relentlessly, through the facts and evidence it needed to reason its own way. Ice core and tree ring analysis, carbon isotopes and computer models were carefully offered for the audience’s consideration.

Equally important to Helfand is care and accuracy in stating the facts. He points out, for example, that science reporters do a massive disservice to the concerned public when they mistakenly assert that melting icebergs cause sea levels to rise. It is only the melting of ice on land, not of sea-bound ice, that contributes to this rise. Moreover, roughly half of the rise in sea levels is attributable not to melting ice, but to the expansion of the oceans’ volume as their waters warm. By muddling the facts and misstating the evidence, well-intentioned advocates lend climate change deniers a helping hand.

Helfand does not shrink from drawing firm conclusions where the evidence warrants them. We know, for instance, that the bulk of the rapid rise in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has come from fossil fuel burning; isotopic analysis rules out alternative emission sources touted by climate change deniers. But he cautiously avoids overstating the evidence and overstepping its bounds. For example, although we expect ocean levels to rise with the climate’s warming; uncertainties in our climate models make it difficult to predict precisely how far and how quickly they will do so. Feedback loops in the Earth’s climate make climate prediction a tricky business.

Helfand is equally clear, however, that uncertainties in climate modeling are no excuse for dawdling. We know for a fact that human-generated greenhouse gas emissions have rocketed, and that rising temperatures and rising emissions are linked, each feeding off the other. While the range of possible outcomes from climate change is wide, the most probable outcomes are unsettling, and there is a substantial risk of catastrophic change that would yield intolerable increases in human suffering. Even if climate change is nonprecipitous, dismaying dangers abound: the exhaustion of fresh water sources, increased spread of tropical diseases, ocean acidification, and a collapse in biodiversity are real concerns. Helfand likens action on climate change to the purchase of insurance against an identifiable risk. One would be foolish to build on a floodplain without purchasing flood insurance on the grounds that disaster might never come. Why regard it as any less foolish to play fast and loose with risks to the Earth’s climate?

To his great credit, Helfand recognizes that his preferred approach to communicating climate science might be suboptimal. His wife tells him his calm, measured reasoning is unlikely to persuade those most in need of convincing. For the interested and discerning citizen, however, Helfand offers all the information required to reach an informed and well-reasoned opinion. Let’s hope the general public is willing to listen.

The X-Files returns January 24 to Fox Television in a special six-episode revival of the popular series. Actors David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reprise their iconic roles as FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, investigating a collection of paranormal cases designated “X” for “unexplained.”

Premiering in 1993, The X-Files ran for eight seasons, averaging nearly twenty million viewers at the height of its popularity. The series ended in 2001 but was followed by two X-Files movies that grossed a combined $260 million worldwide. Over the years, the X-Files fan base has multiplied, spread by way of syndication on cable TV, video and DVD editions, streaming on Netflix, and spin-off comic books and video games.

Not surprisingly, there is intense anticipation for the re-launch. There are even rumors of a possible new TV series featuring a younger generation of characters and a third movie. But given its legacy and plotline, The X-Files revival is sure to generate concerns about the effects of the series on public perceptions of scientists, science, and the paranormal. Such concerns are not new.

Since as early as the 1970s, scientists and skeptics have criticized entertainment, television, and film portrayals for promoting negative stereotypes about scientists, featuring improbable or inaccurate scenarios and depictions, and contributing to anti-scientific beliefs.

When I worked for Skeptical Inquirer in the late 1990s, I was among the many pressing the case against The X-Files. “By thrusting his horror claws deep into the spine of American culture,” series creator Chris Carter was responsible for “historic levels of interest in conspiracies and the paranormal,” I warned (Nisbet 1998).

Yet as I left the magazine to go to graduate school, I began to conduct and write about research that painted a far more complex, shifting portrait of how science and scientists are portrayed by Hollywood, offering some surprising results on how such depictions shape viewer perceptions. The findings relative to paranormal beliefs are equally counterintuitive.

Mad, Bad, or Heroes?

Many arguments that Hollywood presents scientists and science in a consistently negative light tend to rely on outdated research, citing as evidence a study of portrayals from the mid-1980s led by communication researcher George Gerbner (1985). His study indicated that in comparison to other occupations, scientists featured in primetime television suffered a higher ratio of negative stereotypes and were more likely to be victims of violence.

Yet in a follow-up analysis, Gerbner and colleagues (1999) concluded that based on data collected during the mid-1990s, “there is no basis to claim that any kind of systematic negative portrayal of scientists exists. Changes have occurred in Hollywood since the time of our initial study, which found scientists to be typically evil, disturbed, sexually dysfunctional villains.... This is no longer the case.”

More recent analysis of TV content confirms and updates these findings. A study led by communication researcher Anthony Dudo (2010) indicates that between 2000 and 2008, more than eight out of ten scientist characters featured in primetime television were depicted in a strongly positive light.

Few studies have addressed directly how the image of scientists in entertainment media impact stereotypes about scientists. A study by psychologist Susan Losh (2010), however, does provide relevant correlational evidence to consider. As entertainment portrayals across years have shifted from more negative stereotypes to more positive portrayals, so have the stereotypes held by American adults.

In comparison to 1985, Americans in 2002 were far less likely to hold negative stereotypes about scientists and were much more likely to believe that a career in science was a desirable choice for their children or for themselves. A recent study by communication researcher John Besley (in press) extended the analysis to 2012, identifying a further decline in negative stereotypes and an improving public image of scientists.

Entertainment Television and Perceptions of Science

Studies I have conducted, along with those by several colleagues, have examined the direct connection between TV viewing and more generalized perceptions of science.

Analyzing survey data from the 2000s, heavier viewers of entertainment television held stronger reservations about the impact of science on society, but they were also more likely to score higher on belief in science as contributing to societal progress (Nisbet et al. 2002; Dudo et al. 2010).

These findings suggest that the effects of TV viewing reflect the dual imagery of science in entertainment. In this case, science is often depicted as mysterious, magical, or dangerous with both positive and negative consequences for society. Given this duality in narratives, not all entertainment programming has been found to have the same effects. Somewhat counterintuitively, heavier viewers of science fiction programs, controlling for a number of confounding factors, tend to be more positive in their views of biomedical research, agricultural biotechnology, and science more generally (Nisbet and Goidel 2007; Besley and Shanahan 2005).

The science-fiction audience is by nature strongly enthusiastic about science, meaning that their viewing habits may capture an underlying latent support for science. Repetitive viewing of science fiction simply strengthens this orientation, further cultivating an audience naturally receptive to new scientific innovations. A second possible factor is that by familiarizing viewers with the moral dimensions of scientific advances, science fiction may in fact defuse audiences’ intuitive anxieties and negative emotional reactions (see Nisbet and Dudo 2013).

TV Dramas, Reality TV, and Paranormal Beliefs

Other studies have examined directly the relationship between forms of entertainment media use and belief in the paranormal. Yet in these studies, when it comes to fostering extraordinary beliefs, one-sided news media depictions and reality TV programs appear to play a more influential role than dramatic series such as The X-Files.

In a survey study led by communication researcher Glenn Sparks, individuals who reported viewing a mixed diet of TV dramas such as The X-Files and reality programs such as Early Edition were more likely to profess belief in a range of paranormal claims. Yet these findings came with an important caveat: The relationship between TV viewing and belief was only significant among those viewers who reported prior personal experience with the paranormal.

The relationship between personal experience and TV viewing led Sparks and his coauthor to suggest that future research should examine the unique role of reality TV programs and pseudo-documentaries in cultivating paranormal beliefs. In contrast to dramas such as The X-Files, these programs might have a more pronounced impact on beliefs given their perceived grounding in “real life” events (Sparks and Miller 2001).

Building on this work, in a recent study of 500 undergraduate students, political scientist Paul Brewer (2013) asked about their paranormal beliefs, personal experience with the paranormal, and forms of media use. His results suggest that paranormal themed reality TV viewing is strongly related to belief in the paranormal, but no such connection was observed for viewing dramas such as The X-Files.

Interestingly, in contrast to Sparks’s findings, the effects for reality TV viewing were significant across all students, regardless of whether or not they reported a prior experience with the paranormal.

Conclusion

In a now-famous address to the American Association of the Advancement of Science, Jurassic Park creator Michael Crichton (1999) argued that in the entertainment media, “negative and distorted views of scientists and the scientific method are inevitable,” and that “worrying about it is a lot of hot air,” amounting to a form of ritual abuse among the scientific community. For Crichton, scientists could better deploy their time and resources by focusing on improving news media presentations, solid advice in light of today’s research findings.

Since the 1990s, portrayals of science and scientists in the TV dramas have been trending more positive, if not promotional. The effects of such presentations are more complex and less predictable than many scientists and skeptics assume, even in some cases cultivating a stronger belief in the promise of science and acceptance of specific scientific advances.

Research also suggests TV dramas such as The X-Files may have only a limited, and often difficult-to-discern, influence on beliefs in the paranormal. Instead, one-sided or falsely balanced news presentations in combination with the ubiquitous number of paranormal-themed reality TV programs and pseudo-documentaries may be a much greater cause for concern and therefore should be the primary focus of outreach efforts.

References

• Besley, J.C. in press. Predictors of perceptions of scientists comparing 2001 and 2012. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society.
• Besley, J.C., and J. Shanahan. 2005. Media attention and exposure in relation to support for agricultural biotechnology. Science Communication 26(4): 347–367.
• Brewer, P.R. 2013. The trappings of science: Media messages, scientific authority, and beliefs about paranormal investigators. Science Communication 35(3): 311–33.
• Crichton, M. 1999. Ritual abuse, hot air, and missed opportunities. Science 283(5407): 1461–1463.Dudo, A., D. Brossard, J. Shanahan, et al. 2010. Science on television in the 21st century: Recent trends in portrayals and their contributions to public attitudes toward science. Communication Research 38(6): 754–77.
• Gerbner, G., L. Gross, M. Morgan, et al. 1985. Science and Television; Research Report; Annenberg School for Communication: Philadelphia, PA.
• Gerbner, G., and B. Linson. 1999. Images of Scientists in Prime Time Television. U.S. Department of Commerce: Washington, DC.
• Losh, S.C. 2010. Stereotypes about scientists over time among US adults: 1983 and 2001. Public Understanding of Science 19(3): 372–82.
• Nisbet, Matthew C. 1998. The truth is out there, but infatuated “X-Files” fans simply don’t want to hear it. Buffalo News (August 5).
• Nisbet, M.C., and A. Dudo. 2013. Entertainment media portrayals and their effects on public understanding of science. In Donna J. Nelson, Kevin Grazier, Jaime Paglia et al. (Eds), Hollywood Chemistry. Philadelphia, PA: American Chemical Society.
• Nisbet, M.C., and R.K. Goidel. 2007. Understanding citizen perceptions of science controversy: Bridging the ethnographic–survey research divide. Public Understanding of Science 16(4): 421–40.
• Nisbet, M.C., D.A. Scheufele, J. Shanahan, et al. 2002. Knowledge, reservations, or promise? A media effects model for public perceptions of science and technology. Communication Research 29(5): 584–608.
• Sparks, G., and W. Miller. 2001. Investigating the relationship between exposure to television programs that depict paranormal phenomena and beliefs in the paranormal. Communication Monographs 68(1): 98–113.

Authors Susan Gerbic and Mark Edward.

I don’t know what you did on Easter Sunday but it had to be better than what we did. Mark Edward and I purchased season 1 episode three of Hollywood Medium from Amazon for $2.99. I hadn’t actually watched a whole Tyler Henry show all the way through before and we wanted to watch together. I’ve been interested in psychic mediums for years and Mark Edward has been more than involved; he worked as a psychic for many years and then wrote a book about it, Psychic Blues, exposing what goes on behind the scenes.

Operation Tater Tot is a project I and others are working on to educate television viewers about the alleged accuracy and endorsements from celebrities of Tyler Henry on the E! Network. E! is proclaiming him as the “real deal,” and his Twitter and Facebook feeds attract thousands of fans. I’m picturing jaw-dropping moments.

What we watched had no jaw-dropping moments; in fact no hits at all. I had assumed that Tyler Henry googled whomever he was going to read and found some key statements he could say he got from the dead. What we found was that it appears to be nothing more than lukewarm cold-reading, flattery and generalities all delivered with a charming smile and a warm personality. We were both disappointed. Not sure why we were surprised; it is so much easier and less likely to be caught in a sting this way.

Let’s break this down.

We watched readings in the homes of celebrities Jodie Sweetin, Julian Rose Reed, Ross Matthews, and comedian Margaret Cho.

First, all four of these people were believers. They all stated to being open to psychic mediums and were excited to participate. Also, keep in mind that these people if they are not getting paid, are getting publicity.

Second, on the show Tyler spent about five minutes reading each person. He may have been doing the reading for 30–90 minutes or more. We don’t know. When watching the show (or any psychic demo on television), remember these are the best clips.

Mark Edward is a mentalist, which is a branch of magic that appears to be possible using psychic powers. It is all about telling stories. Tyler Henry is not telling stories. He is playing it safe and throwing out the most basic of statements and seeing what sticks. Remember, the editors take out anything that does not get a reaction.

Here is the list. Put yourself in this same mindset. How many of these statements would relate to you if you really wanted to believe?

• A connection with a Michael
• A recovered alcoholic
• Dance
• Bambi
• Small dog
• Washington
• Older woman
• Aunt figure
• A mother figure who looked on you like a daughter
• Jewelry in a sock
• A fall—who is it who fell?
• Younger person that passed
• Writing a book
• Hobbit
• A father figure with a pain in the back
• A dream about someone who died
• Someone dying pulling something out of their mouth
• Fish: someone holding a living fish that is wiggling
• Name with a G—with two Gs

That’s it folks. The whole list of statements Tyler Henry gave in these four sittings, and every time the sitter filled in the details, reaching for whatever they could that would make sense of what Henry was saying. In the after interviews with each of these sitters, they stated that Henry had gotten specific hits. After re-watching, it was clear he did not.

Let’s look these readings over in detail.

With Ross Matthews, Henry said he saw a father figure. “Has your dad actually passed?” And then immediately, “Mom’s still here right?”

When Matthews father was dying in the hospital, Henry described someone missing around the bed, “who was missing?”

Henry stated, “Initially I’m referencing to ‘G’ actually ‘two Gs’” and then asks Matthews, “What’s your mother’s name?” Matthews stated that it starts with a “G” and his grandfather’s last name (not clear which grandfather) starts with a “G.” Henry and Matthews considered this a hit for his “two Gs” statement. I had to play this back a few times to realize that Henry did not say the “G” was the start of a name, but just a “G.”

Henry said that he was getting something about the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, and hairy feet. Matthews made the connection by saying that in seventh grade, he had played Baggins in a school play, but when asked afterward said, “I was in shock when he said I starred as Bilbo Baggins.”

Henry said the word “Bambi” and Matthews supplied that his father was a hunter who would not shoot deer because of the movie Bambi. Again in the after interview, he said “How did he (Henry) know Bambi? My dad would always say that. It’s weird he could do that, because he is dead on.”

Henry shared a memory with a fish “and I feel like I’m grabbing the fish with my hand and its squirming.” Matthews had just revealed that his father was a hunter, so a statement about someone fishing isn’t that big of a leap. Matthews told the camera afterward that Henry picked up on how he and his dad used to fish together.

Henry did bring up a Chihuahua, a small dog. Apparently, Matthews did own a Chihuahua; it’s not clear when that was. Keep in mind that all dogs are small at some point. Henry did not say that Matthews had or has a Chihuahua or the dog’s name, he only said “I need to bring up a Chihuahua, I’m looking at a little dog… The Chihuahua either barked randomly or did something weird, but there was some incident with the Chihuahua.” I kid you not; this is what Tyler Henry said to Matthews, the Chihuahua “did something.” In the after interview, Matthews said he was shocked that Tyler was able to communicate with his Chihuahua.

Matthews, who during this reading is cuddled up with his male partner on the couch across from Henry, was assured that now on the other side Matthews’s father “always knew his son was gay.” Matthews responded with “well he had eyes and ears.” In other words, Tyler had wrongly assumed that his father died before Matthews came out, but Matthews said that he was openly gay when his father was alive.

The previews for this specific episode showed a shocked Margaret Cho reacting to Henry telling her that Robin Williams had been in touch with him some weeks before and wanted to reach out and connect with her. The show did reveal a “video diary” with Henry talking four weeks prior about Robin Williams appearing to him and Margaret Cho. Henry told his video diary that maybe he will get to read for Cho someday if she is willing. What that viewer is missing is that we don’t know how long Henry’s video diary was, for instance if he goes on for an hour talking about other celebrities he wants to read for. We also do not know if the show’s producer viewed the video diary and said, “Hey let’s see if Cho is up for a reading; lets book her.”

Henry stated that when Cho opened her front door he knew exactly who she was.

The connection with Robin Williams was really weak; Henry made it sound as if Cho and Williams had a unique connection, were friends, and that Williams had been watching Cho preform when he was alive and now from beyond; he is really proud of her. But when Cho talked about her “friendship” with Williams, it is clear that they barely knew each other. She used to watch him preform when she was a kid. There was no connection other than a passing reference that she had been “bumped” to go on stage after Williams several times. Henry then added some statements about why Williams killed himself. Henry told his assistant later that night that at least, “Now we know why he killed himself.” Cho stated the “connection [Tyler had with Williams] was so authentic, that he really was connecting to Robin Williams. I could sense it from his heart and that was really healing for me to hear that.”

Henry stated that he could see an older woman—an aunt figure—do you have an aunt who passed? There is a connection to Washington then a pause. When Cho did not react, he eliminated one choice: “Not Washington DC” and left the other options open. She still did not react, so he asked how the aunt figure could fit into that. Cho went into detail about her aunt being in very bad health and how her aunt wanting to die in Korea, then how she died in a plane over Seattle. In the after interview, Cho said that Henry had seen her auntie, but that is not what Henry said, he saw an older woman—an aunt figure.

Henry asked if Cho might be thinking of writing a book. She said she has been writing a book. He said that there is going to be a two-month delay. Cho replied he was correct as there has been a two-month delay. She stated afterward that saying this comment was so “randomly accurate.” This book, according to Cho, had already been delayed two months, not going to be delayed two months.

Cho gave Henry some jewelry to hold. Henry held the jewelry and stated something about jewelry in a sock. This is one of those statements that sounds pretty specific and if it hits, it really looks impressive. Cho laughed and said that her family does put jewelry in socks and old coffee cans. In his statement, “That is so random; I’m literally seeing jewelry being put in a sock,” Henry confirmed his own sentiment.

Right off in this reading, Henry stated that an older woman is trying to get through. “She views you as a mother to a daughter. Who experienced a fall? Someone had a fall before they passed, she is showing me a fall.” Sweetin smiled and immediately claimed this person was her grandmother who had fallen a lot before she died.

For this next part, remember that Henry was working until recently in a rest home training to be a hospice nurse. Sweetin started to describe her grandmother dying in a hospital or facility of some kind. Henry said that there was something the woman wanted pulled out of her, not attached to her. He said that she was describing to him a motion that she wanted something pulled out. Sweetin said that was because the hospital was trying to feed her with a tube and her grandmother wanted the tube pulled out. Working in a rest home, it’s very likely Tyler Henry saw his share of people being upset that they had a catheter, IV, feeding tube, oxygen mask, and more and didn’t want them.

Henry asked if there were a recovering alcoholic in the family. When Sweetin reluctantly revealed it was herself, Henry told her that her grandmother was so proud of her for managing to stay off alcohol. So one minute Henry did not know that it is Sweetin and the next the grandmother is specifically talking to her granddaughter. Then Henry stated that he knows that Sweetin has dreamed of her grandmother since she died.

Henry said that there was a young person who had passed near Julian Reed. He then went on to say that this young person had a choice; they knew if they lived it would be a difficult life because of health issues, but the person chose death instead. It sounded more like a person who had been hooked up to life support or had been in an accident and could not cling to life any longer, possibly dying before help could arrive. During the time Henry was saying this, Reed had already claimed the person, nodding her head in agreement with tears in her eyes.

Reed asked Henry if he can “get the name” and Henry replied that “no, not a ton; what is interesting is that I often find that I connect to a name or a detail or a specific, but it is not always a name … it is often very strange.” Name, detail, or specific: that pretty much covers everything. Then he asked her if she has any questions for “this person.” She stated, “If I were to open up more and tell you who this person is, could you get more?” Tyler almost stumbled over himself saying “Yes, possibly.”

It was her little brother who had died at age three from a hospital infection. This does not sound like someone who was choosing to die or mature enough to decide that living his quality of life would have been a burden on others.

Then Henry almost off-handily told her to check to see if there is a Michael connection associated with her little brother. Reed sucked in her breath and said, “That’s his name… his name was Michael.” In the after interview, she said that Henry knew her brother’s name was Michael. He did not say that at all; he said that there was a connection to the name Michael.

Michael apparently wanted to mention someone with a history in dance: “a teacher or dancer or…” Reed supplied that he is referring to her mother. It’s odd that this three-year-old thinks of his mother as a dance teacher and not as his mother. If this sounds like an odd hit, keep in mind all Henry is throwing out is a reference to a person in dance, which can refer to someone dancing around the house, a cartoon character dancing, or any other connection. We also do not know what is in the house that Henry might have seen on his way to the couch where this reading is taking place. These are their homes; there can be many opportunities for “reading” the home. There might have been photographs, posters, magazines, and who knows what else he could have seen.

Reed told Henry that she had an older brother. “I want to talk about two kids. How many does he have currently?” Then he told her that there is a new baby on the way and Reed got so excited, clapped her hands, and Henry said that he is so excited for them also. We noticed that Henry did not state the sex of the baby that will be “relatively soon be arriving.” He kept calling it, “the baby.”

Finally with Julian Reed’s reading, Henry was presented with something that could easily soon be checked. Reed was really worried that the show she was currently on will not be picked up for another season. I paused the show and asked Mark Edward, “How would you get out of this one?” Mark said he would be very general and state that he sees something better coming soon in her future. So we continued watching and sure enough, Henry said pretty much the same thing; that he saw two changes happening soon and something in March, then something even better afterward.

Other things to notice that manipulates the TV viewer’s emotions are the music cues. There are defiantly cues to tell the viewer to get ready for some inspirational feel-good moments. The music changed again when it appears he got a hit.

I don’t fault these sitters for their emotion and miss-remembering. They do not have the luxury of viewing the show over, hitting pause, and listening to bits again and again as we did. They have just had their emotions manipulated, their lives reaffirmed, told everything will be great, and their loved ones are watching over their lives and families. Also, these readings are much longer than the five minutes presented for the TV viewer. Information comes at them very quickly and the questions Henry asks are inserted among the statements.

Another aspect of Henry’s style that is very common with mediums is how they reaffirm every piece of information that is given to them as if they knew it all along. He nods many times, smiles, and states, “yes, which makes sense” or “right that is what I’m hearing.” These kinds of statements can become overwhelming to the sitter. It is not just Henry and the sitter in that room. There is a lot of pressure to be charismatic and sell their personality to viewers; even for these Hollywood celebrities, there is a lot at stake.

Every one of these sitters stated afterward how much better they felt, how life-affirming their life choices are, and how relieved to know that life will be good. Henry never touched on bad news. No one ever seems to have a message from beyond that is negative or a warning of any kind. It was all love light and love.

So what did we learn from all this and why bother with an article in such detail about the readings? After watching just this one show, Mark and I learned that Tyler Henry does not have to bother knowing who he is reading far in advance. He only has to look around his surroundings and pick up clues. (He told Margaret Cho that her finances were in great shape. Well, just look around her home.) To say that the slightest shred of skepticism on the part of any of the sitters we watched was in short supply would be a gross understatement.

Henry is still at the beginning of his career. As he becomes more experienced, he will probably start telling more stories and less very general statements about Hobbits, Bambi, and older females who have a “G” somewhere in their name. In this sort of career, the leaps on the learning curve tend to be exponential rather than slight.

Mark tells me not to be surprised if we see Tyler Henry going out and hitting the road with stadium-sized shows before too long. As with fellow performers like John Edward and Theresa Caputo, arena shows are an excellent training ground for allowing newcomers such as Henry to sharpen his wits and learn the tools that come with experience on the road.

Why are we focusing so much energy on Operation Tater Tot? Henry has to start somewhere. He is still learning, but with his sweet smile and cloyingly warm personality, he has a lot of potential. Hollywood Medium just got a second season. He has thousands of fans and his Wikipedia page has already attracted 236,281 views since it was written only three months ago.

We cannot show that Henry is a fake. It is extremely difficult to prove a negative. Nor is it our responsibility to show he is making it all up. The show is making the extraordinary claim, not us.

We invite you to ask yourself what is more likely: That Tyler Henry has the power to reach beyond death and pick up impressions being shown to him by dead people like so many others out there in whack-a-mole psychic-land; or is he just cutting his baby teeth on another round of the boy-next door angle, using cold-reading and feeding his clients a steady stream of sweetly delivered fairy tales?

It is hard for those of us who feel bad for anyone left in tears to imagine why a person professing these abilities isn’t instead working with law enforcement to solve real crimes or finding missing persons. We can only surmise that his handlers and the people behind his show on E! think he’s just too busy visiting celebrities at their Palm Springs homes, asking them about small dogs, older people falling down, and father figures. Group hug everyone.

Peter Popoff says he’s a healer and a prophet of God. His former employee says he’s something quite different.

A sixty-eight-year old German American minister, Popoff’s biggest claim to fame is that in 1986, he was taken down by arch skeptic James Randi on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Randi, along with a private investigator, attended one of Popoff’s then-popular “faith healing” crusades, and discovered that Popoff’s prophetic messages from God were really just pieces of information picked up by his staff and whispered into Popoff’s earpiece by his wife, Elizabeth.

Fifteen months later, Popoff and his organization filed for bankruptcy and disappeared from public view.

Now, he’s back, and while his crusades continue, he has a new way of getting attendees. It starts with an infomercial.

Call his 800 number or visit his website, and you can receive his “miracle spring water,” free of charge.

But former employee Crystal Sanchez’s relationship with Popoff started with a different kind of call. A recruiter from the organization called Sanchez asking her to apply for a recently vacated position at Popoff’s organization, People United for Christ (PUFC). Sanchez had never heard of the outfit but was delighted at the thought of working at a nonprofit organization, having spent almost five years at a job she didn’t love. And the title sounded intriguing: “Donation Processor.”

Crystal Sanchez

Sanchez quickly interviewed and won the position. But what she would learn there would change her view of Reverend Popoff forever. According to Sanchez, Popoff sends his followers fake “miracle spring water,” bilks thousands of people (many grossly in debt) out of their money, and uses mass-produced “personalized messages from God” to do it.

I initially found Sanchez through her e-book, which she self-published on SmashWords, an e-book–making website. When I contacted her, she was stunned. She had been certain that the only people who read her book were her mother and cousin.

A week later, I met Sanchez in Rancho Cucamonga for dinner after her workday. Happy and smiling, the thirty-one-year-old brunette sat down with me at a pizza joint. She’s elated to be studying to be a psychiatric nurse. But only four years ago, she was entering Peter Popoff’s world.

That world is crazier than you could ever imagine.

When I logged onto Popoff’s site, I was pleased to learn that by drinking his free “miracle spring water,” I could persuade the heavenly forces to obliterate my financial debts. Having recently gotten my masters degree, I would be happy to have Jesus settle my student loans.

First came the spring water, in a plastic pouch, along with a lengthy letter asking me to drink the water and then put the plastic pouch by my bedside at night, praying for prosperity and healing. But keep the pouch, and Jesus would take back all my blessings. I was to return it right away, to Prophet Popoff, along with a $19 donation. “Seed money,” he calls it.

Popoff says his miracle water is from a Russian spring that has magical healing properties:

“This packet contains water from the spring in Southern Russia where the pastors and Christians were led by the Holy Spirit to drink during the horrible Chernobyl nuclear accident…. No one who drank from this spring died from nuclear contamination. No one who followed divine leading and direction suffered illness.”

But Sanchez says that that water comes from a much less miraculous source: Costco, the supermarket megastore. Popoff’s daughter went to Costco every week, says Sanchez, and returned with ordinary bottled water, which would be repackaged as “miracle spring water” and sent out along with a request for “a gift of love, faith and obedience to God” in the form a donation.

The letters I received were straightforward, asking me several times per letter for a tithing:

“I speak to you now as God’s messenger, as God’s prophet of prosperity… For yea, my daughter Carrie, do not repeat the mistakes of many and allow shortage or adversity to affect your generosity towards me, saith God. Do not think of the things you need…. For if you give, I will supply all your needs.”

My name appears about a dozen times in each letter. This stunt is an old one for Popoff. In 2008, a disenchanted follower went public after discovering that her “personal” letters from Popoff were identical to her sister’s, minus the names. And as far back as 1985, the Toronto Star reported that Popoff’s crew lamely attempted to keep the contents of the “personalized” letters secret:

“Keep this between you, Liz, and me. Some things are no one else’s business,” the 1985 letters reportedly read.

I pictured Popoff penning these letters on his computer, mass producing a message that would work on as many people as possible, as Barnum statements do. But Crystal laughed at the very image.

“Peter doesn’t write the letters!” she chuckled. “They start with the people in his immediate office. He may have 2 percent of the idea, but the others take it and run with it.”

To see whether the letters are indeed mass-produced, my boyfriend also signed up for Popoff’s mailing list. Among the things he wanted healed, Drew mentioned his cerebral palsy, which affects his right side. Naturally, Popoff’s crew latched onto Drew’s disability, promising to heal it if he would send in financial donations to Popoff’s organization. For some reason, Drew chose to save his money.

The letters he received bore a striking resemblance to my own, making the same promises and sending the same lame trinkets to “bless” him. Since Drew never donated to Popoff, he still has cerebral palsy. That’s the only reason.

Donations Pour In

But with many believers, the letters work. According to Sanchez, countless devotees send the letters back with the amount requested or more. While the occasional letter would be returned with a bag of dog shit (the sentiment being “what you give, you get back” I suppose), the vast majority were full of donations and notes desperately pleading for help and promising that the recipient had followed Popoff’s mysterious orders to a T.

Sanchez saw the letters daily, as they poured into her division in the mail room. Seventy employees worked in that division, she says. When the responses from donors came in, a twenty-person team opened them, entered new information into the system (Got cancer? Check. In debt? Check. Mother is dying? Check.), and then shredded the evidence. Popoff, she says, never even saw them.

“I was astonished at how much money I was actually counting,” says Sanchez in her e-book, The Truth About People United for Christ. “People were sending coins, dollars, twenties, even hundreds of dollars!”

And many, if not most, of those giving “seed money” were hurting for funds themselves. Debt, she says, is one of the top reasons people turn to Popoff for help.

“Most partners wrote that the money they were sending in was the last dollars or cents they had.”

In one day, Sanchez counted $30,000 in donations, just from the letters she personally opened. She had nineteen letter-opening colleagues, all going at about the same pace, and raking in an estimated $600,000 on a good day.

She recalls a time when Popoff’s letters urged readers to send in any gold they owned.

“People were sending in heirlooms,” she told me, shaking her head sadly. “You could tell they were very old.”

Sanchez alleges that People United for Christ made about $2.3 million from that one golden stunt. They used it to buy and furnish an entire new building, complete with throne-like offices for top employees, she says.

Trickery: The Family Business?

The gold scheme isn’t too surprising, given that Popoff’s former son-in-law, Jason Cardiff, once ran his own mail-in gold business, “Cash Your Gold Now.” During the gold drive Sanchez witnessed, Cardiff was still married to Popoff’s daughter, Amy. Since then, Cash Your Gold Now (which has a string of complaints on various consumer protection sites) has folded, and Cardiff has moved on to other ventures.

The once-pastor’s-son became CEO of Redwood Industries, a company that sells male enhancement pills. When I visited Redwood Industries (just a few miles from Popoff’s office) and asked them to substantiate their claim that their pill, Prolongz, “has been tested and proven to increase ejaculatory control and increase intercourse duration,” they promised to contact me with supporting information. I never heard back, and my follow-up calls and emails went unanswered.

Cardiff is also the cofounder of Runaway Products, whose prior ventures include e-cigarettes and a bag that supposedly removes moisture from electronics. Both products have positive Amazon reviews, but only by one person, a Lisa P., who suspiciously only reviews goods made by Runaway Products.

One might begin to suspect that Cardiff has become accustomed to misleading buyers. Despite many complaints about his businesses, Cardiff lives in an opulent home in Upland, California, pictured here.

Jason Cardiff appears to no longer be involved in Popoff’s business and is remarried to Eunjung Cardiff, who incidentally is no fan of people taking photos of her house, even from the public street. I don’t recommend it.

A Mystery in Texas

Today, the majority of Popoff’s productions appear to come from Access Media Group, a Dallas-based operation run in part by one Josh Sherrell, nephew of Popoff’s one-time right-hand man, Reeford Sherrell.

Access Media’s address is shared by The Movement Church of Dallas, a church that is not registered on the Texas Attorney General’s site for churches and charities.

Popoff is also associated with Word for the World Church in Dallas, Texas. Yet the last known address has been replaced by a pharmaceutical company.

This is one of the frustrating aspects of investigating a religious operation: churches are not required to submit taxes or even to register with the IRS. They are essentially the only organizations that have no government oversight. It is the flip side of religious liberty: for the right to worship as we please (and, likewise, for the right not to worship), we trade the right to government oversight of our pastors and prophets. Though some faith healers have been arrested for extortion, these stories are few and far between.

When I called Sherrell and asked to speak to Popoff, saying I had been receiving his letters for some time, Sherrell told me that Popoff would never be available to speak with me. Follow-up calls and emails to every known phone number and address for People United for Christ went unanswered.

So I showed up.

Nowhere, California

Tucked into a village of nondescript, tan, industrial buildings sits People United for Christ. It is the facility where Crystal Sanchez worked, and the place that sends out thousands of letters to congregants hungry for hope.

I parked down the road, out of sight, and walked the half-mile of two-lane highway to College Commerce Road. As I approached PUFC’s official headquarters, I second-guessed myself.

“Is this it?” I mumbled to myself. It looked more like a warehouse than a church. But as I neared the window, I could see the tiny gold lettering:

“People United for Christ. Reverend Peter Popoff.”

The doors and windows were tinted, and the door was locked, so I pressed the intercom buzzer. A tall, muscled man with an earpiece immediately met me at the door.

“Hi, I was wondering if I could see Mr. Popoff?” I said, my voice quivering.

“Uh, can you step outside for one second?” he asked, blocking the entryway.

I wanted to see how he would treat me if he thought I was just a follower, someone who believed deeply in Popoff’s message and needed help. But as soon as I mentioned the letters Popoff had sent me, the guard’s eyes glazed over and he looked off into the distance, telling me Popoff was out of town and his return date was unknown.

He suggested I call Popoff’s “hotline,” closing the door quickly in my face. When I got home, I called the hotline. There was no answer, but an outgoing voicemail asked me to leave a message. I did, and received no response.

Knowing now that a regular donor and follower had no chance of actually speaking to the “prophet” who is taking her money and promising personal prayers, I contacted the organization, this time identifying myself as a reporter, and asking for comment on the accusations leveled against Popoff by his former employee. Shockingly, there came no response.

Backup

At this point, I had tried every method possible of contacting Popoff short of standing outside his house and waiting for him to wake up. So I called my photographer friend, Alan, and asked for his advice.

He suggested we stand outside his house and wait for him to wake up.

Popoff lives in the gated town of Bradbury, below the Angeles Forest hills of Southern California, about half an hour from Popoff’s Upland office. The entire city is only 1.9 square miles and has its own full-time staff. It is a city of mansions. Popoff’s house has an estimated worth of $7 million. As we approached, the first thing we saw was a fifteen-foot wall of fountains.

“Oh, Brother,” I said. It was 6:00 am, and neither of us was in the mood for fifteen-foot fountains in the middle of California’s worst drought since the invention of the teddy bear.

Being the smaller and less threatening of the two of us, I approached the guard gate.

“Hi! How do I go in to see a resident?” I asked.

“Who are you?”

“…Carrie.”

“Well, we can’t just let you in.”

“Oh, OK. Well, I wanted to visit Peter Popoff,” I began. An emotional curtain fell over the guard’s eyes.

“You can’t. Not without his invitation called down here,” he said, turning his head down in the international symbol for “Go away.”

“OK,” I said, in my cheeriest 6 am voice, “Thanks!”

“Mmm,” he said.

Alan and I rounded the corner and sat on the retaining wall separating Bradbury from the rest of society. We watched the cars pour in and out. It was a dichotomous mix of luxury cars and pickups driven by contractors with ladders hanging out the back. The very wealthy and very working class go in and out of Bradbury with very little in between.

After an hour of sitting on the retaining wall and nodding politely at BMWs, we headed back to the Upland office for one final attempt at getting a meeting with Popoff, the people’s pastor.

I had been following all of the instructions in his letters (except sending in money, but let’s not split hairs). I had been sleeping with silver wristbands under my pillow, planting paper seeds in dirt, and all manner of other symbolic gestures demanded by Popoff’s letters. Yet my student debt remained the same, and Drew’s cerebral palsy showed no sign of going away.

Back to Nowhere

As Alan and I pulled onto College Commerce Way one final time, Alan laughed.

“This is the church?” he asked.

I approached the building and rang the buzzer. This time, they let me in. A young woman sat behind a counter, glass separating her from the lobby.

“How can I help you?” she asked.

“Hi,” I said, “How can I see Reverend Popoff?”

She paused, startled, and looked at me as if I had asked her a trick question.

“Reverend Popoff?” she asked.

“Uh huh.”

“What is it regarding?”

I explained that he and I had been exchanging letters. I had been by before, I said, and no one had gotten back to me.

She stumbled for a notepad, “Um, why don’t you write down your name and number,” she said, shoving the pad under the glass partition. I wrote down my name, phone number, and email address. I would later follow up to every email address and phone number listed for the organization, to no avail.

“Do you know when he’s generally in?” I asked the woman at the front desk.

“I do not,” she said, “I personally don’t ever see him…. But, I’m gonna give this [note] to his personal prayer team, and someone will get back to you,” she said, pleading with her eyes for me to go. Of course, I knew better than to expect a return phone call, but there was nothing left to do. Pastor Popoff had successfully made himself unreachable to the very people he claimed to help.

Alan and I, grumpy and defiant, walked up and down the quiet street, taking photos. The same security guard I had met at the last visit approached and told us it was a private street.

Photo by Alan Mittelstaedt.

“That’s strange,” I said. “The street sign doesn’t say so.”

He glared at me in silence then spat, “If you go on the property, I will have to call the police.”

“Well, I’m not on it, so stop calling me over,” I said. Then he disappeared behind a tinted glass door. As we waited for any sign of Popoff, a woman darted through the parking lot and into the building, glancing at us as she went. For two hours, no one else entered, and no one else left.

Eventually, tired of watching scared staffers poke their heads through the blinds at us, Alan and I drove home.

When Visitors Come to Pastor Popoff

Once a follower begins receiving Popoff’s letters, as I did, there is no end. Each letter asks for more and more money (the most I was asked for was $250). Virtually all of the letters contain symbolic gifts from Popoff, from his “miracle spring water” to “gold bracelets” that are actually strands of gold-colored plastic ribbon. Clearly, many of his followers find these gifts and letters compelling, such as this woman who cries as she reads his letters. At the time of the video, she was awaiting spiritual healing for endometriosis and HPV.

I contacted her and asked how she has progressed. She claims that her daughter has returned to her and that she is cured of both illnesses. She also says she is now “working with” Popoff. She said they were good friends but had never actually met. She never responded to an interview request for this article.

Sanchez witnessed an even worse example of Popoff’s alleged manipulation: one of the recipients of his letters arrived at the office to see him personally. Since becoming his follower and giving to the ministry, she had lost all of her money, belongings, and even her family, who were exhausted and destitute after her obsession with Popoff had come to an apex. The pastor refused to see her.

That follower is not the only one to lose money and dignity from following Popoff’s orders. Court filings made by another woman show she attempted to sue Popoff for being a “quack prophet.” She stated that the reverend extracted $5,000 from her for “blessings,” which she says ruined her and forced her husband to leave her, making her homeless. Court decisions confirm that she “[appeared] to be indigent.”

The woman went on to sue George W. Bush and the U.S. government (separate lawsuits) for allegedly monitoring her, and she said that Popoff predicted that the government would spy on her, thereby causing it to come true. How many of her delusions were sparked by Popoff’s letters will never be known, but one thing is clear: Popoff’s donation requests were met by a mentally ill, indigent woman, who believed his every word.

The lawsuits were dismissed.

Why Crystal Spoke Up

The day Sanchez broke was the day she got the phone call.

“You can only go so long,” she said, “What really got me was the suicide call.”

A young man in a suicidal panic had left a voicemail message the night before. He asked Popoff to call him back. Sanchez immediately ran the message to Popoff’s daughter, Amy, who refused to return the call. Looking back on the incident, Crystal reflected that she would never know whether the boy was alive.

That was the beginning of the end for Sanchez. Soon after, she had quit and was writing an e-book about her experience.

“It’s time someone made him shake in his boots a little bit,” she told me in a calm, steady voice.

Her mother was the one who gave her the idea to write it, and Crystal knew the experience would be cathartic. Plus, perhaps it would get the word out to people being duped by, in her mind, a con man.

“I know what it is to be down on your luck, and you’re looking for that one person to come and save you. That’s where these people are. And here comes this ‘prophet,’ who is gonna heal you, and you give him everything. And then he’s a fraud? It’s unacceptable.”

Although Sanchez was asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement as she quit, she refused. PUFC declined to even offer her a financial incentive, and she had already decided to tell her story anyway. She can’t understand why no one else has spoken out, perhaps underestimating her own bravery.

She originally wrote the book under a pseudonym then later chose to use her real name.

“I didn’t want to be known at first, and then I was like, ‘If they really wanted to do anything to me, they know everything about me….’ They know my social, they know where I live, they know everything. So, no need to hide any more.”

Since Sanchez released her book, no one from PUFC has contacted her about it. In fact, until I contacted Crystal, she assumed her inside story had been lost in the ether of the Internet.

“Years went by and it went nowhere,” she said. “If just one person would read the story and get what he really is, that would be enough for me.”

But some people will never be persuaded.

“Sometimes it’s mind boggling,” she said. “I really do believe that some of [the employees] that have been there for years … believe he’s a prophet. They talked like it was a cult. And they know what goes on! It’s like they’re brainwashed.”

She leaned in and looked me in the eyes.

“It’s really insane,” she said, nodding emphatically. “These people are insane.”

A Culture of Fear

As for the climate around the office, secrecy and isolation ruled. Employees were discouraged from talking to one another or forming friendships. A no–cell-phone policy was strictly enforced; when Crystal snuck her phone into the bathroom to make a quick private text, she was pulled aside and reprimanded immediately, causing her to question whether cameras were placed even in the bathroom stalls.

The isolation became nearly unbearable. Crystal was able to make a single friend, a doorman, with whom she commiserated (not the same doorman discussed earlier in this story). But everyone else, she says, was either there for a job alone or completely committed to Popoff’s ruse.

Crusades for Christ

Popoff’s infomercials show him “healing” congregants from around the world with his anointing touch. Yet his events stay hidden from view, never advertised publicly. Most of his commercials, says Sanchez, were recorded years ago. A record of some of them may be found at Josh Sherrell’s Vimeo page. Or at least, they can for now, until he realizes the account also hosts commercials for Popoff’s former son-in-law’s defunct products, an association Popoff seems to have buried.

Sanchez explains that Popoff’s crew sends out invitations to all of the letter-writers in a particular metropolitan area, so he knows that everyone who attends will already be primed for “healing.” No one without an invitation is allowed in.

On the broadcasts, audience members join Popoff at the front of the hall to sing Jesus’s praises and tell stories of financial resurrection.

“I owed $17,000 and you said I would get a cheque on the 30^th, and I got a cheque for exactly $17,000 on exactly that day!”

This story, with various dates and figures, is repeated ad nauseam throughout each event. Sanchez suspects that the stories are real but that checks are sent out to a few congregants in each town to keep the testimonies rolling in. If she’s right, what the lucky winners do not realize is that all that money came from the others in the audience; a cruel, forced lottery.

Of course, actors and stooges are also possibilities. It is worth noting that as congregants share their “off the cuff” testimonies, Elizabeth Popoff can often be seen mouthing along with them.

According to Sanchez, the Popoff family flies to every crusade in their private jet and typically books hotel rooms that cost about $1,000 a night. Yet, all of these crusades are paid for by People United for Christ and the desperate people who give to the charity. Popoff’s Canadian sister charity was shut down after an audit found suspicious payments and determined that Popoff was putting the public in danger by encouraging them to seek his healing for blindness, AIDS, and more instead of getting real medical treatment.

What’s Next

“I don’t really know if Peter ever was, or is, a religious man,” Crystal told me, sighing to herself. I guffawed at the very idea.

“Oh! You think he might not be religious at all?” I said, surprised. I had imagined he somehow justified his actions in his own mind, but Crystal’s explanation made more sense. After all, he is a faith healer, constantly throwing people’s wheelchairs and crutches into the air after he “heals” them, but Crystal says he has a secret.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t think he believes it too much if he walks around with 100 pills in his bag.”

As we left our dinner table and hugged goodbye, I asked Crystal, for about the fifteenth time, what made her do it. What gave her the strength and courage to take on this legendary liar? Why was she the one, among hundreds of employees, to speak out?

“I know I’m far from perfect,” she said. “But when I screw up, I try not to take anyone down with me.”

Popoff, on the other hand, may have taken down a whole flock.

Special thanks to those who contributed to this report: Alan Mittelstaedt, Spencer Marks, Claire Knowlton, Ross and Cara Blocher, Jarrett Kaufman, Mara Campos, and Nick Erber.

So-called “ghost lights” are reported at various sites worldwide, the term being applied to luminous phenomena that, many claim, defy explanation. However, Rosemary Ellen Guiley in her The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits (2000, 156), cautions: “Many reports of ghost lights can be explained naturally, such as car headlights or phosphorescences known as ignis fatuus” (literally “foolish fire,” e.g., combustion of marsh gas).¹

Among the most famous ghost lights are the Marfa Lights, after a town in Texas, reported first by a settler in 1883 (Lindee 1992; Guiley 2000, 156); the Hornet or Ozark Spooklight, south of Joplin, Missouri; and the Brown Mountain Lights, near Morganton, North Carolina, reported since 1913 (Guiley 2000, 156–157; Corliss 1995, 71–72).

There are also ghost lights at sea—for example the Bay Chaleur Fireship, seen off the coast of New Brunswick, Canada, and attributed to the phenomenon of St. Elmo’s fire (Corliss 1995, 72–73).² In 1999 at Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, I investigated the Teazer Light, another reputed phantom ship in flames. Although the rare light did not appear to me during a vigil, my research turned up an instance when the phenomenon proved to have been the moon, just coming over the horizon and being viewed through a bank of fog (Nickell 2001, 188–189).

Here is my report on the Brown Mountain mystery, based on lengthy research and two visits my wife, Diana, and I made to Brown Mountain in 2014 (the first, however, becoming a fiasco when the area was shrouded in fog!). (See figure 1.)

Figure 1. The author at Brown Mountain, NC (the plateau-like ridge to the right).
(Author’s photo by Diana Harris.)

Evolution of the Lights

In investigating the Brown Mountain Lights, I discovered that the phenomena—plural—have evolved over time, along with explanations for it. I consider that there are three main historic periods or phases:

1. Before 1913: Myths and Superstitions. A number of legends are associated with Brown Mountain. A sign at the Brown Mountain overlook (on highway 181, at mile marker 20, north of Morganton) claims that “For hundreds of years, people have seen mysterious lights floating above Brown Mountain.” Although no historical record is cited or, indeed, appears to exist, the text nevertheless asserts: “According to Cherokee legend, in 1200 the Cherokee fought a great battle near Brown Mountain against the Catawba Indians and many warriors died. The lights are said to be the spirits of Cherokee maidens who search in vain for their loved ones.” The sign’s text continues:

A more recent legend says the lights are caused by the spirit of a heartbroken woman searching the mountain at night by torch light looking for her fiancé who failed to come for her on their wedding day. Another legend tells the story of a young mother-to-be, murdered by her wicked husband. The lights materialized to help neighbors find the young woman’s body, and still appear today reminding evildoers that their crimes will be revealed.

This latter tale is elaborated into an entire chapter in Dixie Spirits (Coleman 2011, 173–179), a book with many laughable errors and a complete absence of references. (However, see Walser 1980, 44–45, for earlier sources.) Somehow the author—ghost ballyhooer Christopher K. Coleman—has discovered a wealth of detail about “Belinda” and “Jim” (as he calls the supposed ghosts). Not only are no sources cited, but elsewhere in his book (2011, 280) he actually disparages such “scholarly trappings”—just what could help us decide whether he was relating folklore or mostly writing fakelore.

Still another legend of the Brown Mountain Lights was told to me by a young man visiting the overlook. Supposedly, an old slave had become lost and wandered with a lantern, trying to find his way back to his master’s home but failing, a pursuit that he now perpetually continues as a ghost. This is a variant (as folklorists say) of a legend related by Joshua P. Warren (2014, 8):

Brown Mountain was named after a plantation owner who lived in the area in the 1800s. He was kind to his slaves. One night he ventured onto the mountain to hunt. When he did not return, one of his slaves took a lantern and scoured the ridge for him. He, too, was never seen again. Today you can still see the “faithful old slave’s” lantern burning as his spirit still searches for his lost master.

As I note, however, this tale is, in turn, quite similar to a narrative from West Virginia about the Cole Mountain Light (near Moorefield), attributed to the mid-1800s. An important difference is that the hunter at Cole Mountain was not a man named Brown but a landowner named Charles Jones (Musick 1977, 65–67, 184). It is evident that the legend of the slave searching with a lantern is what folklorists term a migratory legend—one known in widely different locales but able to become attached to particular places, whereupon “they are said to be localized, or local legends” (Brunvand 1978, 106). Finally, the Brown Mountain Lights have been claimed by some mountain folk as a form of divine warning (Norman and Scott 1995, 266–267).

2. 1913–1960: Records and Theories. The first known reference to the lights in print was in the September 13, 1913, Charlotte Daily Observer.³ In 1913 a U.S. Geological Survey geologist concluded the lights were those of locomotives, while a U.S. Weather Bureau report of 1919 explained the phenomenon as an electrical discharge compared to South America’s “Andes Light,” although the writer had not actually visited the site.

A serious investigation was carried out in 1922 by geologist George Rogers Mansfield (1922, 18), who spent two weeks in the area. His report concluded that the lights were “clearly not of unusual nature or origin” consisting of automobile headlights (about 47 percent), locomotive headlights (33 percent), and stationary lights and brush fires (10 percent each). While others have postulated swamp gas, luminous electrical discharge, mirages, and still other possibilities (Warren 2014, 11, 20), Mansfield discredits such phenomena.

Mansfield perhaps too quickly dismissed the suggestion that some lights were mirages. Yet he called attention to the unstable atmospheric conditions in the basin-like area that is almost surrounded by mountains. With dense air comes an increase in refractiveness (the bending of light waves). Fine particles like dust and mist can obscure and scatter the refracted light, as well as impart to it the yellowish and reddish tints that are often reported. Therefore the light is especially active during a clearing spell following a rain, as many observers have noted. When the mist becomes quite dense, the light is obscured. The effect of the variations in atmospheric density is to sometimes increase and at other times diminish the lights’ intensity. Thus a light may suddenly appear then effectively disappear, as frequently observed (Mansfield 1922, 7–15). In his conclusions Mansfield (1922, 16) reasoned:

As the basin and its atmospheric conditions antedate the earliest settlement of the region, it is possible that even among the first settlers some favorably situated light may have attracted attention by seeming to flare and then diminish or go out. As the country became more thickly settled the number of chances for such observations would increase. Before the advent of electric lights, however, it is doubtful whether such observations could have been sufficiently numerous to cause much comment, though some persons may have noted and remarked upon them.

3. After 1960: UFOs and Other Paranormalities. Although legends mostly interpret the Brown Mountain Lights as ghosts, since about 1960 tales of UFOs, alien contact, and “interdimensional beings” have proliferated there, as well as of “little people, fairies and such” (Warren 2014, 8). For example, a local man named Ralph Lael claimed to be in telepathic communication with the lights, which he said directed him to a secret crystal-filled cave. From there, he said, alien humanoids from a planet called Pewam took him on space trips as they advised him how to save Earth. Lael operated the Outer Space Rock Shop Museum, where he exhibited an “alien mummy.” A grainy photo shows it looking for all the world like a carnival sideshow fake. However, since Lael died, the whereabouts of the “creature” have become unknown (Warren 2014, 5, 15).

In 1990, a book by “Commander X” identified Brown Mountain as one of several other “underground alien bases” (Warren 2014, 15). Thus Brown Mountain is counted among such extraterrestrial conspiracies as the MJ-12 crashed-saucer reports, animal mutilations, Men in Black, and claims of secret bases on the moon.

Meanwhile, the lights’ early folkloric identity as ghost lights resurfaced as part of the ghosthunting craze of modern times. Thus amateur enthusiasts are drawn to the mountain as to an old house, graveyard, or other “haunted” site.

We see not only that the Brown Mountain Lights have evolved but that they have done so as cultural beliefs and expectations changed. It appears that as the lights were adapted first to the isolated local lore, they later began to be influenced by various encroachments—migrating folktales, visits by outside scientists and others—and finally they attracted fringe notions from America’s burgeoning UFO and ghost-hunting mythologies.

Investigating on Site

Various sites offer views of Brown Mountain, which is a flat-topped or “plateaulike” formation with a maximum elevation of approximately 2,600 feet. However, we chose the overlook on highway 181, which is described as “by far the best spot to see Brown Mountain” (Warren 2014, 18). (Again, see figure 1.)

Following a picnic dinner at the site in the early evening, I was sitting in the car when I saw an extremely bright flash on the mountainside. Startled, I got out and immediately realized that I had seen a firefly! I was later amused to learn that “some have even attributed the lights to giant fireflies” (Warren 2014, 16) or, more reasonably, on rare instances, to fireflies flying near a person “yet appearing unduly large because his eyes were focused on the distant hillside” (Mansfield 1922, 6).

As dark set in, I interacted with several people there, mostly from a family who looked for the lights with me. We saw, in addition to airplanes, lights that we attributed to automobiles and to Morganton town lights, as well as to a distant tower’s red flashing light. Ghost light promoters will be quick to say that we did not see the “true” Brown Mountain Lights, but which are they?

The lights are reported in widely varying descriptions. One source (Loven et al. 1908) encountered a light “like a toy fire balloon, a distant ball . . . much smaller than the full moon, much larger than any star and very red.” Another (Perry 1919) stated he saw a “glowing ball of light, slightly yellow and lasting half a minute.” Again, a witness (Gregory n.d.) described a light “like a ball of incandescent gas, in which a seething motion could be observed.” Still another (Harris 1921) reported “a pale white light, as one seen through a ground glass globe,” having a halo around it.

At least those describe single, orb-like lights, despite the different colors. These are ever-changing; states Warren (2014, 2–3): “The lights frequently begin as a red glow, flaring into white. They can also appear as orange, blue, green or yellow.” A light can last from six seconds to over a minute, “especially when floating into the air over the ridge.” Also, rather unpredictably: “One orb can divide into several, the smaller ones eventually combining to form a large one again. They might seem to ‘ooze’ around the trees and drift over the ridge; dwindle and fade away, or simply wink and vanish.”

Yet again, according to a pair of writers who acknowledge that “Descriptions vary from one observer to another” (Norman and Scott 1995, 266): “A minister described the light as cone-shaped and larger than a star. When two more arose, he, and his sons who were with him, watched through field glasses. The lights rose high in the sky and terminated.”

Moreover, the lights are reported in a still more bewildering variety, for example as “red and white shooting lights” (Hauck 1996, 311), “the fey array of lights dancing before the slopes of Brown Mountain,” and “like flaming balls shooting from a roman candle,” as well as “multi-colored orbs of light [that] appear to rise higher and higher in the air, sometimes darting about, sometimes zooming straight up the slopes” (Coleman 2011, 173). As well, they are “sometimes moving so fast and in such numbers that it is impossible to count them all. Some lights fade away as they rise; others, however, expand as they ascend and then burst in mid-air like silent fireworks” (Coleman 2011, 173–174).

Mystery Still Solved

Apparently unaware or unconvinced of the powerful effect of the atmosphere on lights, one proponent of the mystery insists that “the paranormal lights . . . often move in strange ways and can change color before your eyes, unlike the stationary lights from normal sources, or car lights that always move on the same route” (Warren 2014, 18). It is easy to be mystified. Experts in the causes of nocturnal light UFOs know this well. Allan Hendry (1979, 26) notes that not only color change but motion effects can be created by atmospheric refraction, turning, for example, a celestial light into a flying saucer, and something as simple as a cloud can cause “dramatic ‘disappearance’ acts.”

In 1977, a visiting team of scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory aimed a distant arc light to a point west of Brown Mountain where observers waited. The blue-white beam appeared as an “orange-red orb apparently hovering several degrees above Brown Mountain’s crest.” The scientists concluded that most of the sightings were indeed refractions of lights in the distance (Clark 1993, 55). This supports Mansfield’s observations and deductions of 1922.

Several more recent researchers have also spent time studying the lights, only to conclude that they were produced by campfires, vehicle headlights, airplanes, and distant town lights. One researcher called attention to a few reports that could describe the rare phenomenon of ball lighting (Washburn 2012). Moreover, the lights are not limited to Brown Mountain but in fact have been reported throughout the entire area (Warren 2014, 2).

Proponents of the “mystery” are quick to challenge the scientific explanations. But as Rosemary Ellen Guiley (2000, 156) acknowledges, “Ghost lights have a power to fascinate, and some individuals who see them do not want the mystique spoiled by an explanation.” Neither do writers selling mystery. Whenever one explanation is offered, they describe other eyewitness reports (or alleged reports, since often no sources are given) that supposedly rule out that cause. They suggest, therefore, that no scientific explanation solves the “mystery” of Brown Mountain (Coleman 2011, 176; Floyd 1993, 57–58). We should refuse to fall for such tricks. The evidence is clear: There is no single explanation because there is no single phenomenon. Just as we know that not all UFOs are weather balloons, not all Brown Mountain lights have a single cause.

Certainly, automobiles, trains, and other mundane sources have been responsible for most of the lights. The response of locals, relying on folklore—that the phenomena occurred long before there were such vehicles—is based on “exceedingly slight” evidence (Clark 1993, 55). More recently have come various potential light sources, such as off-road vehicles (ORV) and campers that “are commonly mistaken for paranormal illuminations”—an ORV park having been installed in the mid-1980s (Warren 2014, 7, 14).

As with UFOs, some lights will remain unidentified—not because they are inherently mysterious but because they are just eyewitness reports or snapshots with so many variable factors. But to claim that something unknown (negative evidence) is therefore paranormal is to engage in the logical fallacy of arguing from ignorance: drawing a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. Consider this the next time Brown Mountain “researchers” engage in their mystifications.

Notes

1. Such ghostly phenomena, often witnessed as dancing lights, are known variously as will-o’-the-wisp, jack-o’-lantern, etc. (Haining 1993, 126).
2. St. Elmo’s fire is a luminous electrical discharge, sometimes seen during stormy weather at prominent points of a ship or airplane.
3. A claim by the careless Coleman (2011, 174) that in 1771 William Gerard de Brahm, then British colonial surveyor general of the South District of North America, was “the first white man to view the lights” is untrue. He was simply trying to explain some loud noises in the mountains as spontaneous igniting of “nitrous vapors” (Warren 2014, 4).

References

• Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1978. The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction, 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
• Clark, Jerome. 1993. Unexplained! Detroit, Michigan: Visible Ink Press.
• Coleman, Christopher K. 2011. Dixie Spirits: True Tales of the Strange & Supernatural in the South, 2nd ed. New York: Fall River Press.
• Corliss, William R. 1995. Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena. New York: Gramercy Books.
• Floyd, E. Randall. 1993. Ghost Lights and Other Encounters with the Unknown. Little Rock, AR: August House.
• Gregory, Rev. C.E. N.d. Cited in Mansfield 1922, 7.
• Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2000. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, 2nd ed. New York: Checkmark Books.
• Haining, Peter. 1993. A Dictionary of Ghosts. New York: Dorset Press.
• Harris, Col. Wade H. 1921. Letter Cited in Mansfield 1922, 7.
• Hauck, Dennis William. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York: Penguin Books.
• Hendry, Allan. 1979. The UFO Handbook. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co.
• Loven, Anderson, et al. 1908. Cited in Mansfield 1922, 4.
• Lindee, Herbert. 1992. Ghost lights of Texas. Skeptical Inquirer 16(4)(Summer): 400–406.
• Mansfield, George Rogers. 1922. Origin of the Brown Mountain Light in North Carolina. Reprinted as circular 646, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, 1971.Musick, Ruth Ann. 1977. Coffin Hollow and Other Ghost Tales. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• Nickell, Joe. 2001. Real Life X-Files. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• Norman, Michael, and Beth Scott. 1995. Historic Haunted America. New York: Tom Doherty Associates.
• Perry, Prof. W.G. 1919. Cited in Mansfield 1922, 7.
• Walser, Richard. 1980. North Carolina Legends. Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History.
• Warren, Joshua P. 2014. Brown Mountain Lights: A Viewing Guide. Available at shadowboxent.brinkster.net/bml%20viewing%20guide_9-16-13.pdf; accessed October 3, 2014.
• Washburn, Mark. 2012. Lights still enchanting mystery. Charlotte Observer (November 4).

Ty Bollinger’s documentary series “The Truth About Cancer” demonizes conventional oncology and promotes alternative cancer treatments. I recently wrote an article for Science-Based Medicine pointing out how very untruthful it is. I showed that it used unreliable sources and was full of lies, distortions, omissions, false claims, myths, fallacies, and frankly dangerous misinformation.

The “Truth About Cancer” series has been not only well received but hyped by critics of conventional medicine and advocates of alternative medicine. Some of them were angry about what I wrote. Instead of commenting in the comments section of the SBM blog, some of the angriest people prefer to attack me via email where others can’t see and debunk their criticisms. Some of the emails I get are doozies. I’ll quote this prize example in its entirely for your delectation. I won’t identify the writer; I want to spare him the embarrassment.

You are a joke of an MD. The military must have done a real job on you mentally after the article i read about the natural cures documentary series. This is all true

• The only thing that doctors are taught in medical school is how to prescribe drugs.
• Professors are being paid by drug companies.
• The Flexner Report, which reformed medical education in America, was a plot by Rockefeller and Carnegie to create a medical monopoly and eliminate all competition so they could sell more drugs.
• “Anything coming from nature is excluded.”
• The medical profession is a lap dog of the pharmaceutical industry.
• Conventional medical has a monopoly on treatment: they make sure that insurance doesn’t cover CAM.
• The number one goal of health care is to make money.
• Saying they are making progress in any disease is only a propaganda war.
• Business thrives on the continuation of existing diseases.
• By 2020 more than half of cancers will be medically induced by drugs or radiation.
• Nobody dies from the cancer, they die from consequences of the treatment.
• Surgery spills cancer cells, radiation enhances them.
• “It’s against the law in California for oncologists to recommend integrative.”

get off your prescription drugs and wake up.

toodaloo quack

If there were any errors in what I wrote, he could have politely pointed them out and provided evidence, preferably in the form of citations of scientific studies. Instead, he cut and pasted a bullet list from my article. I had listed these false claims from the documentaries after explaining that they were claims that could easily be refuted by a little research or even common sense. He said these claims were all true, but he didn’t provide a shred of evidence that any of them were true. Can he possibly imagine that his simply saying they are true would be enough to outweigh everything else I know? Sure, I’m going to throw science, evidence, and common sense out the window and just believe some stranger who writes an email! He didn’t address any of the rest of my article and didn’t provide any evidence in support of anything in the documentaries. Then he proceeded to insult me and call me names.

Is there any evidence that would prove those claims true? I don’t think so. A moment’s reflection is enough to refute most of them. The others are easily refuted by a little Googling.

• “How to prescribe drugs” is obviously not the only thing taught in medical schools. Medical school lasts four long years and covers everything from anatomy and physiology to biochemistry and genetics; there is only one course on pharmacology.
• Professors are not paid by drug companies; they get a salary from the medical school. Some professors may get additional income from ties with drug companies, but they are in the minority. And drug companies don’t determine the curriculum.
• The Flexner report was commissioned by the AMA in an effort to improve standards of medical education in the United States and make it more science-based, more rigorous, and more effective. There was no “conspiracy.”
• How can you say conventional medicine excludes “anything coming from nature” when half of all prescription drugs were developed from plants?
• The medical profession is hardly the “lap dog” of the pharmaceutical industry. Where did that idea even come from? If that were true, why would doctors identify post-marketing problems with drugs and get them taken off the market? Why would doctors stop prescribing drugs that were found to be ineffective? Wouldn’t they just slavishly prescribe whatever their overlords told them to prescribe? Just one disconfirming example: look at the decrease in prescribing hormone replacement for menopausal women after studies showed it did more harm than good. If doctors were lapdogs, the studies would not have been done and the prescription rate would not have dropped.
• Insurance does cover various forms of CAM, including acupuncture, chiropractic, and visits to so-called “integrative medicine” doctors. Doctors are not the ones who determine what is covered. Coverage is driven more by patient demand and business interests than by scientific rigor.
• The number one goal of health care is not to make money; it is to provide health care. Alternative medicine is not free; it might just as well be argued that their number one goal is to make money.
• It is impossible to deny that progress is being made in the treatment of cancer. The cancer death rate has dropped 20 percent since the early 1990s. Today, two out of three patients live at least five years after a cancer diagnosis, compared to one out of two in the early 1970s. Some cancers can be permanently cured with today’s conventional treatments, especially childhood cancers. Progress is slow but steady. And there has been no comparable progress in alternative cancer treatments.
• It is hard to believe that anyone would be so evil as to want diseases like cancer to persist. Doctors and pharmaceutical employees get cancer too, and have family members who get cancer. If there were any effective alternative cancer cures, they would be quick to adopt them.
• “By 2020 more than half of cancers will be medically induced by drugs or radiation.” Nonsense! They just made that up.
• “Nobody dies from cancer they die from consequences of the treatment.” WHAAAT??!! How could anyone believe that? Read a history book! Look at Egyptian mummies. Cancer kills. Ty Bollinger is advocating cancer treatments (alternative ones) precisely because he knows people die from untreated cancer. Conventional treatments have side effects, but there is plenty of evidence that treatment helps most patients. Drugs have to prove that they work before they can be marketed. If chemotherapy drugs killed more patients than they helped, they could never have been approved by the FDA.
• “Surgery spills cancer cells”? No, well-conducted operations are no more likely to produce metastases than the squeezing or jostling from common activities. “Radiation enhances them”? No, exactly the opposite: radiation destroys cancer cells.
• There are plenty of integrative oncologists in California, as anyone can easily verify with a couple of mouse clicks. There’s no law against it. Where on Earth did they get that idea?

I actually find it flattering when someone attacks me so stupidly. It means what I wrote was so accurate that they were unable to find anything they could legitimately criticize. Personal insults are the last resort of the intellectually bankrupt.

Why do people believe claims like these? Ignorance, gullibility, lack of science education, susceptibility to testimonials, and peer pressure might explain belief in some of these claims. But some of these claims are so obviously false that it takes willful obtuseness and disregard of reality to believe them. Perhaps they have emulated the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and have practiced believing six impossible things before breakfast.

The sad thing is that people who believe the misinformation in Bollinger’s “Truth About Cancer” series will be persuaded to forgo lifesaving cancer treatment in favor of false hopes. The alternative practitioners he interviews are taking advantage of suffering patients at their most vulnerable, when they are ready to believe anyone who promises a cure, no matter how nonsensical the treatment. This is a serious concern: people will die. Bollinger and his cohorts will have blood on their hands.

In the beginning of an hour-long performance titled “Psychic Reading for Fun and Prophet” at 2012’s Dragon*Con in Atlanta, I decided to try something different. Performing an hour of “cold readings” can be extremely taxing. As a so-called “psychic,” you can’t repeat the same readings over and over or fall back on old lines and platitudes. You have to seem fresh and appear to be picking up rapid-fire thoughts on a very personal basis. It has to look spontaneous.

This is akin to watching a comedian who appears to be totally off the cuff when he or she starts in with lines like, “So …where are you from?” and other casual remarks. They seem unscripted the first time you hear them. After you watch a pro work a few nights, it soon becomes obvious he or she delivered these same lines dozens of times. Your mind tricked you into thinking it was a special joke or one-off observation just for you. A psychic or medium has the same bag of shtick and at times must work really hard not to repeat or sound over-rehearsed when they take the stage.

In this case it was a packed house of over 300 people. I danced through several “visions,” accurately telling different people I was sorry they had recently lost their pet dog, how another had recently had some difficulty with her brown car, and a few other bits and pieces. I was doing really quite well and decided to make a leap and just throw something out.

I stopped for a stage beat or two, gripped my temples in both hands in a display of intense concentration, and said to the crowd: “I’m picking up a strange image. I’m not sure, but I’m going to go ahead with what I’m seeing. After all, that’s my job. I’m seeing a clown, yes. A man dressed as a clown. He’s standing in a grave yard and he’s putting flowers on the graves.”

Then I delivered the time-honored traditional question to the audience that I hear every time I watch the latest flavor-of-the-month psychic work a large room: “…Does that mean anything to anyone?” Not expecting any response, but still ready to deal with what I thought at the time would be a very slim chance of any hit, I waited.

It’s always good business to throw in two or three ridiculous bits like this. When a psychic is wrong, it makes it more believable. The audience reasons (wrongly) that if what they have heard was a trick, then like a magician, the performer would have been dead-on right. But since they were wrong and got no response, it must be something real. Why else would he or she say that?

This is a beautiful dodge that allows a canny charlatan to say just about anything—which was where I was going. I didn’t really care. This was not like, “I’m seeing someone’s husband. Did someone’s husband pass to the other side from lung cancer here tonight?” After which any psychic worth his or her salt would expect to see dozens of up-raised tear-filled eyes. The “psychic” only has to scan the crowd briefly and pick a miserable soul that looks well-off and desperate enough to book an expensive reading with them later and go in for the kill. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. I also added. “…And I see the name Stanley.” I had no particular reason to choose Stanley over any other name; it just popped into my head. In mentalism and in spiritualist circles, this is called the scattershot approach.

Lo and behold, a woman in the middle of the room stood up! I looked out over the crowd to make sure it wasn’t one of my friends or someone playing a prank on me, but no, there was a total stranger standing up looking quite terrified. She screamed out, “There’s no way you could have known that! There was an old man in my hometown who used to dress-up in a clown costume and put flowers on the graves in the town cemetery. My name is Cindy but for some reason that guy always called me Stanley! How the hell did you know that?” I had even described his long clown shoes.

I was momentarily stunned. In the character of a medium, it’s always best to remain unruffled and calm as if to say, “…Of course I knew that,” but I was a tad bemused myself. I had yet to tell anyone I was faking the whole show, and this little interlude was going to make the explanation more complicated. On the one hand, this is the sort of “hit” a mentalist or psychic prays for (if you will excuse the expression.) On the other hand, in the minds of the audience, it was overwhelmingly against the odds for this to be written off as mere coincidence. It was a dead-on hit—and two hits in one reading! I thought for a minute. Maybe Cindy’s a nut and just going along with me for a lark, but it would have been indelicate for me to say so under the conditions I found myself in.

So let’s back-up a minute. A few weeks prior to going to Dragon*Con, I had watched a cheapo Italian horror film called The Iron Rose (1973). In it, a young couple takes a stroll through a large cemetery. As darkness falls, they realize they can’t find their way out, and soon their fears begin to overtake them. In an early scene we see a quick shot of a clown putting flowers on a grave. For whatever reason, this image stuck in my mind. Mentalists and psychics are often treasure troves of meaningless trivial images and quotes they pull from their minds like magicians pull rabbit’s out of hats. That’s all it was, just a random shot in the dark.

So how did this happen? Perhaps more importantly, What did I do with this?

It is important to be reminded of a few things before going forward. This was at Dragon*Con, not a skeptic convention. Most of the attendees are already prone to fantasy and the world of Dr. Who, Hobbits, and Star Wars. Although this particular lecture was featured in the “Skeptic Track” room of the convention, the mere suggestion of something psychic going on drew a huge audience of all kinds of seekers of strange things from all over the convention. Dragon*Con generally attracts over 60,000 people. It is not a stretch to consider that a very large percentage was probably expecting miracles to happen. In such a rarefied atmosphere, the law of large numbers (LLN) comes into play. This ploy assures the larger the audience, the more likely a “psychic entertainer” is to get a “hit” or more than a few people to respond to just about anything he or she says.

This brings us to another rule of thumb any medium takes full advantage of when working a room. Unlike standard magic tricks where the audience would in some cases like nothing better than to see the performer screw something up (leading ultimately to a popular branch of magic, that being the comedic kind), the spectator will actually root for the performer to make something happen or be correct in their vision. As in psychic readings, they want the performer to succeed and in most cases will do anything they can to help out. People need to believe. They may not necessarily need to believe a rabbit comes out of a hat, but when it comes to death and the hereafter, an audience of believers will consistently make connections of the most bizarre and ridiculous kind. If you don’t believe me, watch an episode of “Hollywood Medium” or “Long Island Medium.” Hence, my “clown in a graveyard” option. I tossed out a wild curve into a wide net and caught a live one. It was a long shot I anticipated would only get a laugh. As they say—and if you will again excuse the expression—shit happens. This time it did.

I had to soldier on with the show and continue as if nothing out of the usual had happened. At the fifty-minute mark in the show I started into the “reveal” part of the show when I ask the audience, “You really didn’t think I was talking to your dead relatives did you?” and begin telling how it’s all done in the psychic market. I swiftly segued into the tricks of the trade phase of my performance, explaining how I had spoken with several people in line before the show, asking them who or what they might want to reach in the spirit world. When these same individuals were called upon after I got my psychic swoon on, of course the rest of the audience had no idea I had already gotten everything I needed to weave a convincing vision for everybody else. Not too perfect mind you and always a little off pays the bills. This same person still gets a nice warm fuzzy reading and is generally happy with what I say, so it’s a win/win for everybody. This is called “pre-show” in the spook racket and has always been one of my favorite ruses to exploit. Nobody seems to even consider that a “psychic” or “medium” would be acting and using information they already knew; they take it on faith that everything they hear is coming from some divine source.

As I’m talking about this, I could see that the woman from the graveyard was still standing and shaking her head in disbelief. She didn’t see how that fit with her reading. I then had to stop and tell her about LLN and the cogent fact she was conveniently neglecting to fathom. If I had looked straight at her and singled her out of the crowd of 300 and then delivered the clown in a graveyard line directly to her, that’s a whole lot different than saying, “Does that mean anything to anyone?” or “Does that make sense to anyone?” Watch and listen carefully to the medium next time, and you will see how easily this works.

If psychics were real, they wouldn’t need to ask even a single question. They would just know. Period. End of story. Yet if we listen to any of the latest crop of psychic mediums in a live situation and not in edited television formats, that’s all they do. Its non-stop question after question after question. Medium Rebecca Rosen recently clocked in at a question every twenty-four seconds after her written transcript was carefully reviewed. Nobody ever bothers to do that. It’s too much thinking and not considered “healing” or entertainment.

As in what frequently happens in these kinds of demonstrations, the show is rarely over when I leave the stage. True to form, Cindy the graveyard lady immediately came up to the group of people who were chatting with me after the lights went down.

She still looked dazed and unsteady and insisted again there was “No way in the world” I could have known about that guy in the clown suit and further, how did I know her nickname? She also admitted she felt sick to her stomach after I had uttered my vision. There was no assuaging her. For a few minutes it seemed my explanation had fallen on deaf ears. But who could blame her? The odds were pretty staggering. If you aren’t careful, after a few of these experiences you can end up believing in your own bullshit.

Mentalists who have worked large audiences know this feeling of a no-win after a successful performance. You can tell a curious spectator it’s all tricks and unfortunate as it may seem, the more you try to convince them you are a complete charlatan, many times they think you are covering up for your mysterious “gift” by trying to talk them back down to earth. It’s frustrating and sometimes no amount of logic or common sense will prevail. In this case my entire show and everything I did in it was fully revealed, explained, and taken apart piece by piece and yet Cindy still had a very hard time letting go of her belief system. I had made her feel special and different than all the rest of the standard readings I had given that night. Hard facts such as this make it even harder to break the news to a believer. After several tense minutes and some reinforcement from a few of the other skeptics in the room, I was finally able to convince her that truly, there was no way in the world I could have known about her clown friend. Of course, the irony is Cindy was sadly disappointed in hearing this.

Over the years, the “no way” comment has grown to be one of my favorite expressions of wonderment. I hear it often. So often, in fact, I have frequently found it necessary to stop and remind the person uttering it that in this complicated cyber world, where anything and everything about us is floating around in one information system or another, I can say confidently that without any supernatural powers whatsoever, beware. Because in an awful lot of cases … yes, there is.

But that’s another story.

The Foundation for Thought and Ethics, the non-profit which once published the internationally controversial textbook Of Pandas and People, has quietly closed its doors. The financially-struggling organization was completely dissolved some time in early 2016, and its titles have been absorbed by the notorious Intelligent Design group, The Discovery Institute.

Don’t weep yet for the death of Creationist textbooks; you can still order them in bulk through the Discovery Institute website. But the death of the Foundation signals something somewhat reassuring in American education: Intelligent Design textbook publishing doesn’t pay. In fact, last year, the organization declared a loss of almost $14,000 on merchandise alone, and almost $34,000 in total, according to their last IRS filings.

The Foundation for Thought and Ethics first caught the public’s eye in 2004, when one of its books became the centerpiece of a federal court case. The Dover Area School District, which comprises six public schools, had just required that biology curricula cover so-called “intelligent design”:

“Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin's theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design. Note: Origins of Life is not taught.”¹

The Supreme Court had already ruled that it was unconstitutional to teach creationism in the classroom, so this new theory of “intelligent design” would be its replacement. Of Pandas and People was to be the “supplemental textbook” which would be taught alongside evolution. The federal judge ruled that Intelligent Design "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents,” and so could not be taught in a public science classroom.² Pandas immediately went out of print, but became a notorious symbol of the invasion of pseudoscience in education.

As we approach Pandas’ thirtieth birthday (the first edition was published in 1989), and with the loss of its mother organization, here are a few facts you might not know about the 161-page book, and its theories, that caused all that fuss a decade ago.

10. The very first paragraph in Panda is a quote from Carl Sagan.

Sagan, who openly doubted the existence of God, nevertheless wrote such elegant prose about the nature of the universe, that even the creationists had to co-opt it. “As long as there have been human beings,” he wrote, “we have posed the deep and fundamental questions… on the origins of consciousness; life on our planet; the beginnings of the Earth; the formation of the Sun; the possibility of intelligent beings somewhere up there in the depths of the sky; as well as, the grandest inquiry of all - on the advent, nature and ultimate destiny of the universe.”

The excerpt, however, cuts off just before Sagan makes his point:

“For all but the last instant of human history these issues have been the exclusive province of philosophers and poets, shamans and theologians. The diverse and mutually contradictory answers offered demonstrate that few of the proposed solutions have been correct.”³

This isn’t the only time Pandas exploits ambiguous statements from famous biologists. At one point, the authors claim that Stephen Jay Gould said that the “neo-Darwinian synthesis” was “effectively dead, despite its persistence in textbook orthodoxy.”

Of course, Gould was not questioning whether evolution happened, but whether a particular school of evolutionary thought was accurate. He later clarified that he had spoken too strongly.⁴

9. One of the most prominent figures promoting “Intelligent Design” during Panda’s fame is an AIDS denialist.

Philip Johnson, who was recognized as the “father of the IDM” (Intelligent Design Movement) at the Dover trial, does not believe that HIV causes AIDS. Johnson, a retired lawyer who was never a scientist, claims that “AIDS careerists” have falsified data to make the AIDS crisis seem worse than it is, and that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.

Lest there be any doubt, it is a scientific certainty that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes AIDS. Clearly, where scientific certainties are concerned, Mr. Johnson has a terrible batting average. Johnson’s book, Darwin on Trial is “suggested reading” in Pandas, and Johnson remains an advisor to the ID think tank, The Discovery Institute.⁵

8. Critical parts of the case presented in Pandas are no longer accurate.

“We often get the impression from newspaper articles and even some textbooks that scientists have come close to ‘creating life’ in a laboratory. Yet compounds synthesized in the laboratory fail to exhibit the special sequences or the three-dimensional structure necessary for biological functioning.”⁶

There’s a tricky thing about science. If you base your theory on gaps in scientific knowledge, your theory will only last until science closes those gaps. Which is exactly what happened in 2010, when a team of geneticists in the UK successfully synthesized life. Specifically, they synthesized the genome of a yeast that when inserted into a cell, was biologically functional. In other words, within six years, Pandas was proven wrong.

So much for that argument.

Another example of this tenuous (and ultimately outdated) thinking is the authors’ assertion that “Darwinists” can’t explain why blood clots.

“How do Darwinists explain the origin of the blood clotting system? They don’t, at least not in any detailed, step-by-step fashion.”⁷

I now introduce you to a 2009 paper presented at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology titled, “Step-by-step evolution of vertebrate blood coagulation.”

Basing your argument on gaps in reasoning is clearly a losing battle, and this same sort of argumentation continues throughout the book, ad nauseum.

7. Pandas suggests that giraffe necks developed in the craziest way possible.

The poor giraffe must be so sick of always being dragged into intelligent design debates. Any third grader will tell you that giraffes have long necks so they can eat out of tall foliage (sex selection may also play a role). But Davis and Kenyon offer an alternative explanation for why giraffes have long necks.

“The standard explanation for the giraffe’s long neck is the advantage it gives the animal when competing for food with shorter-necked varieties.”

So far, so good.

“That may be true, but the fact is that the giraffe also bends its head down to the ground to eat grass and drink water. Given the giraffe’s long legs, its neck may just as well be required to reach the ground as the trees.”

Let me get this straight. The prevailing theory, of course, is that giraffes who could eat the harder-to-reach food from tall trees were more likely to survive and pass on their genes. Long legs and long necks would, presumably, both be advantageous, so evolution would favor them. But these authors are suggesting that an intelligent creator gave the giraffes long legs for no reason at all, and then had to compensate by giving them long necks so that they wouldn’t die of thirst. An intelligent design, indeed.

6. Pandas asserts that small and large dogs can’t breed together.

In an effort to try to make the entire distinction of “species” look silly, the Pandas authors question its biological basis. Most scientists define a species as a group whose members can mate and produce fertile offspring, but according to Pandas, that would mean that Great Danes and Chihuahuas aren’t the same species, because their size prevents them from mating:

“The range that prevents interbreeding among the dogs is a range of size. The breeds at the extreme ends of the size range cannot interbreed with each other.”

Of course they can. It’s not recommended, especially if the female is smaller, but Chihuahuas and Great Danes have successfully mated and their offspring are waiting to waste your afternoon on Pinterest.

5. The authors claim that genetic mutations are extremely rare and nearly always harmful, so they can’t possibly cause evolution.

“Studies show one mutant gene in 10 to 100 gametes… Most [mutations] are harmful. In fact, only one in 1,000 is not harmful.”

Actually, most mutations are neutral, but even those that are harmful don’t weaken evolution’s explanatory power. After all, evolution doesn’t just rely on survival; it also relies on the death of the “unfit.” The roughly one in ten mutations that helps one individual survive is the one that wins the evolutionary race.

4. The illustrator of Pandas dared the world to find a footed-fish… which we later found.

Unsurprisingly, Pandas makes the completely wrong assertion that there are no “transitional forms” — that is, fossils which document the transition from one species to another. It even goes on to predict that “it seems unlikely that future research will fill” supposed gaps in the fossil record.⁸

Little could be further from the truth. There are so many transitional fossils, they have their own Wikipedia page. But even Tiktaalik, the fish who could have been the sitting model for the “Darwin fish” hasn’t convinced Creationists. In fact, the Pandas authors practically begged him into existence when they offered this drawing of a fish and amphibian. What could possibly be the intermediate form between these two?

3. They advocate an old Earth.

To their credit, and contrary to other Creationists, the authors of Pandas acknowledge that the Earth is much more than 6,000 years old. They even acknowledge that fossils of modern humans date “as far back as 70,000 to 110,000 years ago” (current research puts our origins closer to 200,000 years ago, but Pandas was first published in 1989, so we’ll give them a pass there).

Today, four out of 10 Americans believe that God created Earth less than 10,000 years ago. With almost half of us so clearly ignorant of the science, it’s a bit surprising that Pandas takes the Old-Earth Creationist view. Hey, they got something right! Cherish this moment, because it won’t happen again.

2. If you think about it, what is a hand?

This is really one of their arguments. Since a dog’s paw and a human’s hand are so different, how can we possibly say that we came from the same ancestor? We can’t. QED.

1. Pandas says that we are genetically similar to other animals because God wants us to eat them.

One argument for evolution is that our DNA so closely resembles the DNA of other living things. In other words, the animals who are closest to us on our evolutionary tree have the most similar DNA. But Davis and Kenyon argue that evolution has nothing to do with it.

“If the molecular building blocks used by predators were different from those of their prey, how could they utilize their food?”⁹

They go on to say that if the molecules weren’t similar, the predator would have to break down the molecules and build them back up into usable food, and “this process would require a great deal of energy. As a result, food chains would be cut short, affecting the entire world of living organisms.”¹⁰

Of course, one must wonder why an intelligent designer would be able to create the entire world, and every living creature on it, but not know how to turn anything He wanted into lunch. By arguing that the Designer must design both prey and predator similarly, they are relegating their Creator to the fallible, natural world. He ceases to be all-powerful, and becomes powerless to nature. That’s fine if you think the Designer is an extra terrestrial, but a bit sticky if you think He is, say, the God of the Bible.

After reading 161 pages of this out-of-print nightmare, I can only declare that I am glad it went extinct. Rest in peace, Foundation for Thought and Ethics. We hardly knew ye.

Notes

1. Kitzmiller v Dover, Case No. 04cv2688, 2005, complaint. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/cases/kitzmiller.pdf
2. Kitzmiller v Dover, Case No. 04cv2688, 2005, finding. https://www.bu.edu/lawlibrary/PDFs/research/portals/probonofiles/kitzmiller.pdf
3. Sagan, Carl. Broca’s Brain, 1979. p. xi.
4. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. 2002.
5. Pandas, p. 89
6. Davis, et al. Of Pandas and People, 2nd Edition. 1993. p. 6.
7. Pandas, p. 145.
8. Pandas, p. 96
9. Pandas, p. 137
10. Pandas, p. 138

What century are we living in? It may sound ridiculous, strange, weird, but a program in Parapsychology, “Angelology” and Demonology has been held (or presumably it will be held) in Santos Lugares, near Buenos Aires City since March 2016. It is supposed to be the first program that integrates parapsychology with “Exorcistic” disciplines (?). Reminder: we are not in the 14th century.

As everybody can read in the publicity ad, the program is taught by “the most recognized exorcist in the Argentine Republic” (sic): “Bishop and Doctor” Manuel Adolfo Acuña, who is supposedly qualified to recognize and discern “psychical, parasychological and spiritual phenomena”, with a special talent to judge “malignant interventions”. He claims to be an “Exorcist assistant” (Things aren't clear yet: sometimes he's a Doctor, sometimes he's an assistant).

Furthermore, Acuña claims to be a Lutheran Bishop, but he is not recognized as such by the Official Lutheran Church in Argentina.

“Bishop-Doctor” Father Manuel Adolfo Acuña.

I have personally debated with him in several TV shows, where he has talked about religion, paranormal phenomena and other issues, using pseudoscientific jargon. He claims to be an authority on UFOs, ghosts, exorcism, paranormal powers, subliminal perception, etc. I think he knows everything in the whole world! Believe it or not, he's being consulted by several “serious” journalists on TV, radio and all media.

It's also important to point out that this program “does not require previous studies”, which means that anybody can attend the classes, no matter what their educational background is. But he offers a degree, let's say a diploma, which is not official. I presume he doesn't want to have problems with the law, especially being involved in illegal medical practices, as it is regarded in article 208 of our Penal Code.

Acuña also offers a degree supported by the “School for the Personal Integral Development – Center for the Psychic-Spiritual Training”. Again, not official. The ad says that this degree is also endorsed by the International Academy of Theology and the Santa Sofía's Seminar, and that is supported by The Anthropological Center for Cultural Expressions of Rosario, Santa Fe province, Argentina! A lot of support from a lot of institutes, centers, academies... It sounds very weird.

The length of the program is “approximately” 3 years. What does “approximately” mean? I would like to know... Maybe evil is something not as easy to throw out as you think...

Not surprisingly, there is an intermediate degree: “Exorcistic Disciplines Consultant”, supported by the “First Exorcism and Liberation School of the Argentine Republic”.

The final degree incorporates the “professional” who attends the program to the “First International Brotherhood of Ecumenical Exorcists”. Very weird, isn't it?

I have sent an e-mail to Pablo Avelutto, Minister of Culture of Argentina telling him about my concern regarding this crazy and potentially dangerous “major”. To date, I have had no reply. I wrote to him that in the 21^st Century, a course or major on this subject is unacceptable, not because of the subject, but because of the practice: there will be hundreds of “exorcists” trying to chase the devil out of hundreds of individuals. And we know about stories of people killed during an exorcism ritual.

Imagine hundreds of people being “exorcized” by these “professionals”, spreading superstition and magical thinking, and perhaps causing damage to innocent people who abandon scientific medical treatments because they think their illness is caused by evil possession.

The scientific community should be alerted, and should be reacting to this dangerous nonsense. Until now, scientists have remained silent. It certainly is a big mistake.

Carrera de Exorcismo en Argentina

¿En qué siglo vivimos? Puede parecer ridículo, extraño, raro, pero una carrera de Parapsicología, Angelología y Demonología se está dictando en Santos Lugares, cerca de Buenos Aires, desde marzo de este año (2016). Se supone que es la primera carrera que integra la parapsicología con disciplinas “exorcísticas”. Recordatorio: no estamos en el Siglo XIV.

Como todo el mundo puede ver en la publicidad, la carrera es enseñada por “el más reconocido exorcista de la República Argentina” (sic): “El Obispo y Doctor” Manuel Adolfo Acuña, famoso por sus ridículas apariciones en la TV local. Acuña está supuestamente calificado para reconocer y discernir entre “fenómenos parapsicológicos y espirituales”, con orientación especial para juzgar “intervenciones malignas”. Afirma ser un “Asistente Exorcista”, lo cual introduce cierta confusión: a veces es “Doctor” y otras es “Asistente”.

Además, Acuña jura ser un obispo luterano, aunque no está reconocido por la Iglesia Luterana Oficial de la Argentina.

“El Obispo y Doctor” Padre Manuel Adolfo Acuña.

Personalmente he debatido con él en varios programas de televisión, donde hablaba de religión, fenómenos paranormales y otros temas, usando la característica jerga pseudocientífica. Dice ser una autoridad en OVNIs, fantasmas, exorcismos, poderes paranormales, percepción subliminal, etc. ¡Creo que sabe acerca de todo lo que existe en el universo entero! Y lo más increíble es que es convocado por periodistas supuestamente “serios” en radio y TV para difundir sus disparates. No sé si los medios le creen, pero se ve que por lo menos lo quieren mostrar en pantalla.

También es preciso destacar que esta carrera “no requiere estudios previos”, lo cual significa que cualquier mortal puede asistir a las clases, no importa qué títulos tenga, ni si los tiene. Pero Acuña ofrece un título, digamos un diploma, que no es oficial. Presumo que no quiere tener problemas con la ley, especialmente con el ejercicio ilegal de la medicina.

Como si todo esto fuera poco, Acuña ofrece además un título avalado por la “Escuela para el Desarrollo Personal Integral” – Centro para el Entrenamiento Psicoespiritual”. Tampoco es oficial. El aviso dice que el título está reconocido por la Academia Internacional de Teología y el Seminario Santa Sofía, y avalado por El Centro Antropológico de Expresiones Culturales de Rosario, provincia de Santa Fe. Un montón de institutos, centros, academias apoyando esta locura. Suena muy raro.

La carrera dura aproximadamente 3 años. ¿Qué significa “aproximadamente”? Me gustaría saberlo… Tal vez el demonio sea algo no tan fácil de expulsar…

Existe un título intermedio: “Consultor sobre Disciplinas Exorcísticas”, avalado por la “Primera Escuela de Exorcismo y Liberación de la República Argentina”. El título final incorpora al alumno automáticamente a la “Primera Hermandad Internacional Ecuménica de Exorcistas”. No ahorran extrañas palabras para ponerle nombres a sus instituciones.

He enviado un e-mail a Pablo Avelutto, Ministro de Cultura de la Nación, advirtiéndole sobre mi preocupación sobre esta propuesta demente y potencialmente peligrosa. Hasta la fecha, no obtuve respuesta. Le escribí diciéndole que en el Siglo XXI, un curso o carrera sobre estas disciplinas es inaceptable, no por la materia en sí, sino por la puesta en práctica de rituales exorcistas. Imagínense a cientos de “exorcistas” tratando de expulsar demonios de cientos de individuos, amparados en un diploma. Sabemos de historias de gente que ha muerto durante un ritual de exorcismo.

Se abre otra puerta para la expansión de la locura masiva, con la probabilidad de que gente inocente abandone tratamientos médicos válidos porque creen que su enfermedad está causada por la posesión diabólica.

La comunidad científica debería estar enterada, y debería reaccionar a este peligroso sinsentido. Hasta ahora, los científicos permanecen en silencio, lo cual es un grave error.

The honorary doctorate being awarded by Goldsmiths is deeply meaningful at this particular time in my life.

It gives me a chance to talk with you about my work on illusions of memory—or the memories that people sometimes have of seeing things or doing things that they never saw or did.

When I began my life work on illusions of memory, I had no idea it would one day prove to be such a socially relevant and politically explosive topic. Of course, couples and siblings quarrel endlessly about whose memory of past events is right—that is the amusing and infuriating Rashomon aspect of every family’s life. But who could foresee, in the late twentieth century, “recovered memory therapy” or that people would come to believe with all their hearts that they remembered being abducted by aliens or Satanic cults? Who knew that by the first decade of the twenty-first century we would find hundreds of individuals in prison who were innocent—proven innocent by DNA analysis—and the major cause for their wrongful convictions was faulty human memory?

And so, as my research on memory evolved, its findings became ever more applicable in the service of justice.

To briefly summarize, in that research I and my collaborators showed that you could alter people’s memories for crimes, accidents, and other events that they had recently witnessed. You could pretty easily make someone believe that a car was going faster than it really was or that the bad guy had curly hair instead of straight hair. Later we would show that you could plant entire events into the minds of ordinary healthy people, letting them believe that they had experiences that they never ever had—even experiences that would have been pretty traumatic had they actually happened.

So you can see how these findings might be applicable in the service of justice. They help us understand how improper handling of eyewitness testimony can lead to false memories and the conviction of innocent people. They help us understand how suggestive or coercive therapy can lead people to develop memories of being abused in a Satanic cult, accusations that can cause untold misery for innocent people and their families.

At the same time, this research became emotionally controversial and the focus of terrible hostility among those who could not accept its findings or its implications for the real world.In my case, disgruntled people have written countless threatening letters. They have tried generating letter-writing campaigns to the chair of my former academic department, the president of the university, and even the governor of the state to get me fired from my academic job. They have threatened violence at places where I’ve been asked to speak, prompting universities on several occasions to provide armed and unarmed guards to accompany me during those speeches. People spread defamatory insults in their own writings, in newspaper columns, and, of course, on the Internet. One person even sued me in court when I published an article questioning the veracity of a psychiatrist’s case study of a young woman’s recovered memories of maternal sexual abuse. That litigation dragged on for almost five years before it ended.

Through these experiences, I’ve learned firsthand that science is never dispassionate, at least not if you are studying anything that has political, emotional, or financial implications for people’s lives: child testimony, sex, the unreliability of projective tests such as the Rorschach, or, in my case, illusions of memory. I could have chosen to study memory in the sea slug—hardly anyone would get exercised about that. But I chose to study human memory, eyewitness testimony, false memories, confabulation in adults and children, and harmful therapeutic methods. And big trouble came my way.

But I’m proud of the work I’ve been able to accomplish as a psychological scientist and proud of the people I’ve had a chance to help along the way. I’ve learned to accept the hassles as the price that all scientists pay for doing research that matters or that threatens deeply held beliefs.

And this brings me back to Goldsmiths—where we are today: I am especially grateful for the honorary doctorate from Goldsmiths—where a number of superb academics are doing research that threatens deeply held beliefs, and also matters to people. That is why this honor holds such extra-special, extra-poignant, meaning for me.