Joe Nickell continues his investigation of Scottish enigmas—based in part on his excursion following the 2012 skeptics QED conference in England, with intrepid skeptical investigator Hayley Stevens and her father Andy, who is a photographer and professional guide. Part I (SI March/April 2013) tracked “The Silly Ness Monster” from lore to shore. Part II investigates the hauntings of Sterling Castle and the Royal airfield at Montrose, as well as the strange case of “A Fairy-Taught Witch.”

Green Ghost of Stirling Castle

Atop a great volcanic crag that is believed to have been fortified since ancient times, Stirling Castle was rebuilt again and again. Its first mention is in the eleventh-century Life of St. Monenna. From 1296, it was often occupied by the English, but then it returned to Scottish control after a six-month siege in 1342. Much of the castle as seen today was created by James IV as a magnificent residence and setting for his royal court (Yeoman 2011, 36–48). (See Figure 1.)

Various colorful legends of the castle survive. In the fifteenth century, an English chronicler named William of Worcester identified the site as the home of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table—a myth repeated by subsequent writers. A more down-to-earth (quite literally) story tells of an Italian-born alchemist, John Damiano, who in 1507 attempted to impress his patron, the king, by engaging in man-powered flight from the castle walls! Unfortunately, his strapped-on wings failed the brave birdman, who plummeted to earth yet survived by landing in the royal rubbish heap (Yeoman 2011, 38, 48–49). Today’s popular Stirling Castle legend is that of a ghostly lady in green.

The Green Lady is generally ac­knowledged to be “Stirling’s most famous ghost” (“Scottish” 2012). “Some say” (reports Kinnaird 2009, 38) “she was a poor lass, driven to despair—separated from her love, trapped, starving within the castle walls during King Edward’s siege of that great fortress.” Yet another version posits that “the Green Lady was the daughter of a governor of the castle who was betrothed to an officer garrisoned there.” Supposedly, “The poor man was accidentally killed by the girl’s father and she in despair and anguish is said to have thrown herself from the battlements to her death on the rocks 250 feet below” (“Stirling” 2012).

Others tell a very different tale. They claim the Green Lady was a maidservant to Mary Queen of Scots. According to a popular legend, she saved the queen after her four-poster bed’s curtains caught fire. Versions of the tale disagree as to the maidservant’s fate at this point, one having her somehow dying in making the rescue (“Scottish” 2012), while another says the door was broken open “and anxious arms strained to carry them both to safety” (Kinnaird 2009, 38). Yet another source, however, observes of the rescue that “history has failed to record whether or not she perished as she did so” (Love 1995, 22). Attempting to harmonize the discrepancy, Kinnaird (2009, 39) ventures, “of the girl little is known, though it is feared that she quickly perished from the wounds she received that fateful night.” (Remove the word feared from the preceding and it is easy to see how speculation could be transformed to alleged fact in the retelling of a tale.)

Lack of historical record has not prevented still more elaborate versions of the tale from proliferating. For instance, the maidservant is sometimes alleged to have been alerted to the fire by a dream of the queen being in danger; on being rescued, the queen purportedly “recalled a prophecy that her life would be endangered by a fire whilst she was at Stirling Castle” (“Stirling” 2012)—although no source is given. Folklorists call differing versions of folktales “variants”; they are evidence of the folkloric process at work.

Apparently by extension from this legendary event, the apparition is said to be “most commonly encountered before some major disaster” (Love 1995, 22). This is a folk motif (or narrative element)—Ghost warns the living—that is common to the folklore of England and Scotland (Thompson 1955, 2:435).

Further evidence of the Green Lady’s folkloric origins comes from the fact that “Scotland seems to be the home of the green-colored ghost, in particular the ‘Green Lady.’” Indeed, while “Accounts of blue, white, and grey ghosts are noted throughout the world,” those of the green variety are few, even in neighboring England, according to Dane Love. She devotes the entire first chapter of her Scottish Ghosts to these numerous apparitions, stating, “Tales of the Green Ladies haunting ancient castles are told the length of the country, from Dumfriesshire’s Comlongon Castle in the south to the Castle of Mey on the northern extremity of the mainland” (Love 1995, 17).

In his cultural history of ghosts, R.C. Finucane (1984) demonstrates that as people’s expectations concerning the dead change with time and place, so do their perceived specters. The profound iconographic peculiarity of green as the dominant color of Scottish ghosts is telling: it suggests that a supernatural basis is unlikely and is instead quite attributable to Scottish lore.

Figure 1. Scotland’s ancient Stirling Castle, crowning a massive volcanic crag, is allegedly haunted by “The Green Lady.” (Photo by Joe Nickell)

None of this is to suggest that people have never “seen” the Green Lady—or at least a “misty green figure” such as described by a cook in the officers’ mess (an army garrison was located at the castle). But the condition under which the phantom was perceived—while the percipient was engaged in routine activity (“Stirling” 2012)—is revealing, since apparitional experiences are often linked to such periods of reverie. In this dissociative state, the subconscious may yield up a spectral image that thus seems momentarily superimposed on the visual scene (Nickell 2012, 345).

Haunted Airfield

Known as “the phantoms of Montrose,” ghosts allegedly haunt the Royal Air Force (RAF) airfield at Montrose, Scotland. A variety of phenomena have been attributed to them, especially to one pilot who perished on a solo flight at Montrose on May 27, 1913.

The pilot was Lieutenant Desmond L. Arthur, an Irishman, whose biplane plummeted after a wing broke off. By 1916, sightings of the phantom aircraft and a ghost presumed to be that of Lt. Arthur haunted the RAF station. Unfortunately, popular stories of “the haunted airfield” (Cohen 1984; Caidin 1996) are long on sensationalism and mystery but short on evidence and documentation. Much of what is alleged seems attributable to the dynamics of folklore, the power of suggestion, and misperceptions of various types. For instance, a 1916 sighting of a ghostly figure in flight gear occurred just after a sleeping flight instructor “came awake with a start” (Caidin 1996, 35). Under such conditions, the likely explanation for the apparition is a common type of hallucination: known as a “waking dream,” it occurs in the twilight between being fully asleep and fully awake (Nickell 1995, 290; Nickell 2012, 353–354).

Supposedly, the ghost of Lt. Arthur flew on each airman’s first solo night flight at Montrose. Often, those making such flights felt a distinct tap on the shoulder, and some even claimed the ghost remarked, “O.K., son, I’ll take control.”

I heard this tale from former RAF Sgt. Pilot Clay Bird, an acquaintance of mine in Toronto, Canada, in the mid-1970s. Bird related to me his own spooky experience at Montrose. It was February 1942, and he was then making his first solo night flight. He was of course apprehensive—ghost or no. Flying a single engine two-seat trainer, he prepared for landing by sliding back the “hood” or canopy. (This was standard procedure so that in the event of a crash, rescue would be speedier. When an instructor occupied the rear seat, he slid his hood forward, the two sections then overlapping over a central, stationary section. The cockpit would thus be open front and rear. On solo flights, however, only the front section would be pushed back.)

Sgt. Bird began to concentrate on the approach. Suddenly he felt—really felt—a tap, tap, tap! The taps were then repeated, “as if he [the ghost] were getting impatient,” Bird remarked.

Understandably unnerved, he turned and actually saw the “ghost”: It was part of the adjusting strap! An eight-inch section of harness, extending from the point of buckling, was flapping in the breeze and hitting against his shoulder!

“I don’t scare easily,” Bird said, “but I’ll tell you I didn’t fly again that night!”

A Fairy-Taught Witch

In my travels in Scotland, I picked up a book, Scottish Witches, which devotes several pages to Isobel Gowdie. Of the witch hunts of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, when untold numbers from Scottish towns were burned at the stake, Gowdie’s case stands out, both for the voluntary nature of her confession (made in four parts over a six-week period in 1662) and for the rich amount of information it offered (Seafield 2009, 116–22). (For the complete text, see Wilby 2011, 37–52.)

Gowdie, of Auldearn, detailed how she and a dozen other witches had flown to sabbats riding on rushes and corn straws (charming them into flight with an invocation of the Devil). Gowdie also went on rides to fairyland and claimed that she had been taught much of her witchcraft by fairies (Guiley 1989, 142).

She and other witches, Gowdie stated, raised storms by reciting incantations while beating a wet rag on a rock. In confession number two (recorded in an antique English script called Secretary Hand, penned by a notary) she explains:

Quhen we rease the wind we tak a rag of cloth and weitis it in water and we tak a beetle and knokis the rage on a stone, and we say thryse ower I knok this ragg upon this stone, to raise the wind in the divellis name, it sall not lye untill I please again (damaged—words missing) we wold lay the wind, we dry the ragg and say (thryse ower) we lay the wind in the divellis nam (damaged—words missing) ryse q[uhi]ll we or I lyk (word crossed out) to rease it again, And if the wind will not lye instantlie (damaged—words missing) wee call upon o[u]r spiritis and say to him thieffe thieffe conjure the wind and caws it to (damaged—words missing) we haw no power of rain bot ve will rease the wind q[uhe]n ve please, he maid us believ (damaged—words missing) th[e]r wes no god besyd him . . .

(Quoted in Wilby 2011, 43).

In addition, Gowdie said, the witches hexed children (by inflicting injuries on clay dolls), damaged a farmer’s crops (by unearthing an unchristened child’s corpse and burying it in the farmer’s manure heap), and so on (Guiley 1989, 142). When they became bored, the witches metamorphosed into animals. (For example, to turn into a cat, Gowdie recited three times: “I shall go into a cat, / With sorrow and sign and a black shot / And I shall go in the Devil’s name / Ay while I come home again” [Cawthorne 2006, 129–30].)

Sexual activity was central to the witches’ coven. At the sabbats Gowdie claimed to have intercourse with the well-endowed Devil and with various demons. She even copulated with one demon lover while she lay in her own bed, she maintained, with her husband asleep beside her (Wilson 1971, 419). The basic elements of Gowdie’s account were supported by another witch, Janet Braidhead. Together they implicated more than thirty others in their confessions. There is no existing record of any of these people’s fate, but it is widely assumed that Gowdie and Braidhead, at least, were put to death (Seafield 2009, 117).

Now researchers have wondered how to explain Gowdie’s claims. Mon­tague Summers, a believer in true magic, thought her account “substantially true” and only lamented being unable to identify the leader of the coven! (Robbins 1959, 232). Some­what similarly, skeptic Owen Rachleff (1971, 105–117) suggested that the Devil was actually the coven leader in costume, complete with “cloven-shaped boots,” that drugs induced the “flying” sensation, and so on. At the other end of the spectrum, some have suggested that Gowdie may simply have lapsed into madness (Seafield 2009, 120), what Walter Scott (1857, 281–2) termed “some peculiar species of lunacy.”

I think these views, however, represent the same false dichotomy—a choice between believing the experiences true (or at least staged) or thinking the claimant is mad—that is often posed in the matter of alien abductions. As we now know, most self-claimed abductees are sane and normal but have traits indicative of fantasy-proneness, coupled with magical thinking and common hallucinations (Nickell 2007, 251–58).

The magical thinking engaged in by Gowdie and others is ubiquitous. It can be no coincidence that the hexes and spells practiced by the “witches” were simply those common to Scottish lore. (Hitting a wet rag against a stone to conjure up a storm is only one example of sympathetic magic. The voodoo-like use of dolls as substitutes for people is another.) That witches like Gowdie believed them effectual is hardly proof that they were actually so. Instead, it suggests they counted (or reinterpreted) any seeming successes, while rationalizing away any failures. This is the effect of what is called confirmation bias.

As to Gowdie’s demonic sex encounters, these may have been only fantasies stemming from sexual repression: Gowdie was apparently the bored, childless wife of a boorish farmer (Cavendish 1970, 1143). Indeed, her description of sex with a demon in her own bed sounds like earlier reports of visits by incubi (medieval demons who came at night to copulate with women). Today we understand that the incubus is a product of the imagination, akin to such other night visitors as ghosts, angels, vampires, and aliens who appear in “waking dreams.” As discussed earlier, these are simple hallucinations that occur in the interface between sleep and wakefulness and seem particularly vivid and realistic (Nickell 2007, 254–55).

Similarly, the witches’ reports of “flying” may have been due to out-of-body experiences (OBEs). Also called astral travel, this phenomenon of seemingly leaving the body and floating or flying is another hallucinatory type of experience (Nickell 2007, 254). Often one “seems to be able to travel to, and perceive, distant locations on Earth or in nonworldly realms” (Guiley 1991, 419)—hence, no doubt, Gowdie’s trip to fairyland. (OBEs are still often reported, with one-fourth of Western adults believing they have had such an experience. It can occur when one is awake or sleeping and under certain conditions, such as stress [Guiley 1991, 420].)

Significantly, magical thinking, waking dreams, and out-of-body ex­peri­ences are all associated with the fantasy-prone personality, as Wilson and Barber (1983) make clear in their classic study. So is the tendency to have imaginary companions, such as an invisible friend, guardian angel, alien communicant, or the like; Gowdie said each of the witches “has a Spirit to wait upon us, when we please to call upon him” (qtd. in Cavendish 1970, 1144).

No one in Gowdie’s time knew what to make of her reported experiences—apparently including her. Even today many people still engage in magical thinking and believing in supernatural powers, including witchcraft. Fortunately, others of us look instead to science and reason, seeking to learn about the real, natural world in which we actually live.

References

Caidin, Martin. 1996. Ghosts of the Air: True Stories of Aerial Hauntings. Lakeville, MN: Galde Press, 25–39. 2006.

Cavendish, Richard, ed. 1970. Man, Myth & Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural, Volume 9. New York: Marshal Cavendish Corp.

Cawthorne, Nigel. 2006. Witches: History of a Persecution. Edison, NJ: Chartwell Books.

Cohen, Daniel. 1984. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts. New York: Dorset Press, 111–13.

Finucane, R.C. 1984. Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 1989. The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft. New York: Facts on File.

———. 1991. Encyclopedia of the Strange, Mys­tical, & Unexplained. New York: Gramercy Books.

Kinnaird, David. 2009. Tales of the Stirling Ghost Walk. Online at: www.stirlingghostwalk.com; accessed September 4, 2012.

Love, Dane. 1995. Scottish Ghosts. New York: Barnes & Noble, 17–38.

Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities. Amherst, NY: Pro­me­theus Books.

———. 2007. Adventures in Paranormal Investi­gation. Lexington: University Press of Ken­tucky.

———. 2012. The Science of Ghosts: Searching for Spirits of the Dead. Amherst, NY: Prome­theus Books.

Rachleff, Owen S. 1971. The Occult Conceit: A New Look at Astrology, Witchcraft & Sorcery. Chicago: Cowles.

Robbins, Rossell Hope. 1959. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. New York: Bonanza Books.

Scott, Walter. 1857. Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 2nd ed. London: William Tegg & Co.

Scottish Castle Ghosts. 2012. Online at: http://scotlandwelcomesyou.com/scottish-castle-ghosts/; accessed September 4, 2012.

Seafield, Lily. 2009. Scottish Witches. New La­mark, Scotland: Waverly Books.

Stirling Castle. 2012. Online at: http://www.visitdunkeld.com/stirling-castle.htm; accessed September 4, 2012.

Thompson, Stith. 1955. Motif-Index of Folk Literature. Rev. ed., 6 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Wilby, Emma. 2011. The Visions of Isobel Gowdie. Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press.

Wilson, Cheryl C., and Theodore X. Barber. 1983. The fantasy-prone personality: Impli­cations for understanding imagery, hypnosis, and parapsychological phenomena. In Imagery, Current Theory, Research and Application, ed. Anees A. Sheikh, 340–90. New York: Wiley.

Wilson, Colin. 1971. The Occult: A History. New York: Random House.

Yeoman, Peter. 2011. Stirling Castle (official souvenir guide). N.P.: Historic Scotland.

When the police began the booking process the handcuffed man blamed everything on a mosquito. The bloodsucker landed on his arm and he went berserk. The obvious change in gravity changed an otherwise calm man into a lunatic. Once every month—though sometimes twice a month—the police have it even worse. No cop wants to walk his or her beat at night when a full moon really has the power to change the populace.

Morning Full Moon by Tim Fields

Our moon has about as much gravitational effect on the body of any one person as a mosquito sitting on someone’s arm. If the amount of gravity the moon commands really did affect rates of crime, suicide, homicide, depression, and accidents, any swarm of the pests would be a flying disaster waiting to happen. The same gravitational truth exists for anything larger than the tiny insects. The laptop or monitor or smartphone that you are reading this on right now has more gravitational influence on you than our moon. Hold any of these too close to you and you might go on a rampage if the assumptions of “lunacy” were true.

If the moon itself, and not its gravity, was the instigator of madness, the famous Apollo landing missions should have worried about than just rocket trajectory and weight restrictions. Neil Armstrong would have made a giant leap towards insanity.

The mysterious power of the moon—if it did influence the violent crimes that mental health professionals and police officers dread each month—would increase the number of homicides around the time it shines brightest. But does it? I usually like to continue down hypothetical tangents in this column, but we actually have data that can answer this particular question. (Frankly, the presumptions of the full moon effect are so bizarre—grave misunderstandings about gravity and tides, for example—that I think it is too abstract to even think of a world where these presumptions were true.)

In 2012, the city of Chicago recorded 512 first-degree murders. Using the only public database with daily updates that I could find, I took each case and plotted it on a graph showing the date and number of homicides on each recorded date. If the moon truly could create a madness all its own, we would expect a visualization of these crimes to look something like this—a full moon atop each rise in homicide:

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Each of the moons in the graphic is placed on or near the highest incidences of homicide across the months. A real full-moon effect should predict these positions to coincide with the actual full moon dates of 2012. But when we place the full moons in accordance with the dates they actually occurred, we see this:

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On most of the dates of the full moon, there were no recorded homicides. This is small-scale analysis, but it goes against exactly what should happen over a year of violent crime in a major American city if the full moon had some effect. Remember, the moon is always full; it is just lit differently throughout the month.

Confirmation bias may keep it alive, but at larger scales like national studies and smaller scales like homicides in Chicago last year, the “full-moon effect” is reduced to the absurd.

Other Reductio ad Absurdum Columns

• When All of Us Are Nostradamus
• Blame the Victim, But Get a Bentley
• The Life of Death
• The Miracle of Molecular Medicine
• Magnet People: How Do They Work?

I’m in the noisiest lobby of all time. It’s practically barren, with two chairs, a coffee table slathered in business cards, and a tiny window to the receptionist. When I wave hello at her, she seems startled.

“Oh! Yes! Hi!”

“Do I need an appointment?”

“No.”

“Okay, great. I’d like an exam.”

I’ve never smoked pot. At all. The concept of voluntarily breathing smoke always seemed like a bad idea. It was never around me much anyway. In high school, I spent all my nights rehearsing plays. There was no time for drugs or parties. In college, my friends were drinkers when they had parties at all. But here I am, asking for a prescription to buy marijuana for medical purposes. I’m well aware that plenty of people take advantage of California’s medical marijuana law for recreational use, so I’m worried I’ll be grilled about my symptoms. That’s already proving unfounded.

She asks for my ID, and compliments my name in her thick Russian accent. The sound of zooming ambulances blasts through the open door. She pauses. When the ambulances stop, she resumes. This is obviously a common distraction.

“You want your medical marijuana card?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Okay, you want the one with the photo or without?”

“With, I guess.”

“$60.”

“Oh... don’t I have to see the doctor?”

“Yes, but you pay now.”

“Oh... okay.”

I give her $60 in cash and sit down with a questionnaire. It asks me for my basic medical history and the complaint that brings me here.

“Chronic migraines.”

The receptionist interrupts me to take my photo for the card.

“Wait, I don’t have to see the doctor first?”

“Naw.”

“Oh.”

I give her an awkward smile from my side of the bullet-proof glass. She snaps a picture of me. She tells me I look better with my glasses off, so we take another.

“Much prettier,” she says. “Like Cameron Diaz.”

The medical forms tell me repeatedly, in bold, that I MUST PROVIDE CURRENT GENERAL PRACTITIONER’S CHARTS. I tell the receptionist I don’t have these. She nods and says it doesn’t matter.

She leads me to the back through a wide, dirty, unsettlingly empty hallway. I want to know what’s in the dark alcoves we pass, but she leads me into a tiny cubicle containing a blonde man.

“That’s the doctor,” she says, pointing right at his nose. It’s awkward.

“Yes, I see,” I say, and she leaves.

“I’m Doctor Edson,” he says¹, smiling and shaking my hand.

He looks a lot like a doctor from a soap opera: chiseled jaw and yellow-blonde hair. You’d definitely think his name was Keith, which it isn’t. Dr. Keith is going to decide if I can get a prescription for medical marijuana under California’s Proposition 215, the California Compassionate Care Act. According to Prop 215, anyone with a malady that is commonly eased by cannabis, and a prescription, may “possess and cultivate” the drug. I would just like to possess. I’ve been struggling with migraines for a year now, since I worked for (and eventually left) the BossFromHell®. Migraines are one of the most common qualifiers for medical cannabis, so here I am.

“Hi,” I say, “You need some art in here.”

“Yeah, it’s not my place. I would spruce up the decor if I could.”

He’s friendly and attentive. I’ll learn later, when I look his name up at home, that he is a plastic surgeon who does this work on the side. He has a particular interest in how marijuana helps cancer patients. He has also filed for bankruptcy and has an extensive website devoted to his acting credits, which are mostly a string of gay pornography films.

Dr. Edson looks at my chart and asks me about my headaches. He’s filling out another sheet as he listens to my symptoms. My migraines are fairly typical: Mostly on one side, sometimes behind my eyes. They make me vomit, and sometimes they affect my vision.

“Well, those certainly sound like migraines,” says Dr. Edson. “And marijuana helps?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve never used it.”

He stares at me.

“Oh!” he says, “Ever?”

“Never.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine.”

He nods slowly, like someone accepting the news that the camp they went to when they were six has just burned down. You know, that nod.

“Well,” he says, “Let’s give it a go.”

He writes me a prescription and describes the different methods people use to ingest marijuana: vaporizing, smoking, eating. I still can’t stomach the thought of intentionally inhaling fumes, so I say vaporizing and eating are for me.

“I hope it works for you, Carrie,” he says, “Anything’s worth a try, right?”

The woman behind the counter doesn’t notice me as I leave. She’s eating pound cake.

---

The next day, I pick up my medicine. The dispensary is in a strip mall. The windows are pitch black, and I can’t even tell if the place is open. I walk in timidly, looking like a little girl who has to sell chocolates outside a strip club to pay for her mom’s chemo. I half expect the woman behind the counter to snap gum and say “What’s your name, honey?” while appraising my thighs. But she flashes a bright smile and welcomes me. We are in a tiny alcove secured by barred windows and bullet-proof glass. There’s a second door, but I have to be buzzed into that one; it’s like a nightclub, but with patient stoners. Like a Los Angeles nightclub.

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” I explain, “but my doctor advised me to get a vaporizer. For my headaches.”

“Oh! Headaches! Okay... Gosh, I don’t know anything about vaporizing. I am experimenting with edibles. You just eat a brownie and go to sleep!”

I nod slowly, the way you nod when you find out the camp you went to when you were six has just burned down. There’s a long pause, then she remembers what I asked.

“Oh, right, so... The bartender can tell you more inside.”

“Bartender?” I ask. She buzzes me in.

All of the other patients are sitting in a waiting room, staring at a fish tank. All four are men. It reeks of weed. A sign on the wall says “CELL PHONES ABSOLUTELY PROHIBITED.” One of the patients tells me to grab a form and fill it out. The fellow next to me must spy something in me: the smell of washed clothing, perhaps?

“First time?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“You’ll be all right.”

This seems not at all reassuring, since no one has ever felt the need to tell me I will be all right in a pharmacy before, but I nod as if it’s helpful.

“Believe me, it’s quick,” he says. I am 90 percent sure I’m about to receive assisted suicide.

The whole place feels vaguely naughty and drenched in 4/20 culture. Nothing about it seems like a pharmacy, save that I have to present a prescription to even get in. There’s loud music, pictures of marijuana leaves everywhere, and posters that surely look better under a black light. This isn’t the best atmosphere if the medical marijuana movement wants to gain credibility.

The bartender gestures me in. He looks like he should be named Jeth, but he’s not. Bartender Jeth looks me up and down. I’m acting pretty confident, the way I imagine someone acts who has smoked marijuana before. Apparently I associate this with a lot of large gestures, because I immediately become an Italian chef in a sitcom.

“I need to get some oil for my vaporizer,” I say, wildly gesturing in front of my face.

“First time?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Great, we’ll take care of you,” he says.

And I believe him.

This article is one in a series of two. Read more in the next Hot Drinks.

¹ But he didn’t.

Resurrection

In January 2000, a subspecies of wild mountain goat called the Pyrenean ibex became extinct. Its last living member was crushed to death by a fallen tree, and that was the end of the species forever. Officially and totally extinct.

But no. In a major scientific event in 2003 that even most educated Westerners don’t know about, the species was brought back to life by a team of Spanish and French scientists. A skin scraping from the last surviving mountain goat’s ear was stored in liquid nitrogen. The nucleus of one of the cells was transferred into an egg of a domestic goat and implanted into a domestic goat surrogate mother. A Pyrenean ibex mountain goat—previously extinct—was brought back to life and born five months later. Although the baby goat did not live long, it was the first animal in history to be resurrected from extinction.

Cloning, in a sense, brings an organism back from the dead. Dolly the sheep is well known, but less well known is that more than twenty types of animals have been successfully cloned at this point, including cat, dog, horse, pig, rabbit, water buffalo, and monkey.

The Ten Plagues

Smallpox. Diphtheria. Rheumatic fever. Bubonic plague. Polio. Measles. Scurvy. Tuberculosis. Death from childbirth. Infant mortality.

I recommend that the recitation of the Ten Plagues during Passover seders be changed to this new list, as a truer modern example of natural horrors and what we can be thankful to scientific human progress for eliminating or abating.

Once a destroyer of millions, altering events in history, these ten afflictions have plagued humans throughout our past—until recently. In developed countries, these conditions are rarely seen anymore. Not eliminated, certainly, but not the curse of years past. Why? Because of immunizations, antibiotics, nutrition, and public health measures. Of course, many of these afflictions still kill in developing countries and among certain populations. So the battle is not yet won. But we can still give thanks for progress and continue the fight, with evidence-based tactics rather than superstition.

Transubstantiation

The substance of bacteria and algae are being changed, through synthetic biology, into the substance of medications, fibers, plastics, and renewable biofuels. This transubstantiation occurs by technologically engineering genes so that microbes produce new metabolites that then can be used, either directly or indirectly, to produce new products that benefit humankind. An engineered species of yeast can now produce artemisinin, an anti-malarial medication, and several companies are now using engineered microorganisms to produce 100 percent microbe-derived renewable fuel.

Parting of the Sea (of Stars)

We’ve known for decades that the universe is expanding. But we now know that the rate of the expansion is accelerating! There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, many with over a hundred billion stars each, and all of these galaxies are not only expanding farther and farther away from one another, but the rate of the expansion is getting faster and faster. After the initial discovery of the acceleration, made by independent re­searchers analyzing the red shifts of distant supernova in 1998, this great “parting of the sea of galaxies” was corroborated by multiple other sources, including measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation, large-scale cosmic structure, and properties of galaxy clusters. The source of this acceleration, known as dark energy, is largely a mystery at this point.

* * *

What a privilege to be living through a time of such miracles. These are not literal miracles, of course, in the sense of divine intervention, and so miracles is not the correct word. The “miracles” of science and technology are more appropriately and clearly described as wonders—a result of human imagination and curiosity linked to a naturalistic method of knowing and learning about our naturalistic world. The amazing results have changed our lives and our understanding of who we are. And its findings are backed by evidence and reproducibility.

“I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day,” wrote Douglas Adams. The fruits of such modern wonders provide un­imagin­able power to ease misery, advance knowledge, and allow for the flourishing of human potential. It’s called science. It’s called critical thinking. Its power and potential blessings—if used wisely—are unparalleled.

When I get my first bag of marijuana home, I have no idea what to do with it. Unlike most medicine, cannabis doesn’t come in a “dosage” so much as in “servings.” I have opted not to smoke the stuff, so I walk into my boyfriend’s apartment with two beads of THC wax and an assortment of “edibles”: a chocolate bar, a cup of vegan ice cream, a peanut butter cup, and a piece of pound cake. Given the rumors of munchies and the insanely fatty things marijuana is available in, it seems impossible that people with low or healthy BMIs are more likely to use marijuana. But in fact, marijuana users not only have healthier BMIs but also better blood sugar levels, despite consuming more calories overall. I stare at the chocolate bar and wonder if it’s going to somehow trim off the seven pounds I’ve been trying to lose for a year (and by “trying to lose,” I mean running the quarter mile to my local Los Burritos).

“Will you watch me take this?” I ask my boyfriend, “I’ve never done it, so I am afraid I’m going to get paranoid or something.”

“Yeah, good idea,” says Milo¹, “But you’re going to use it now? Do you have a headache?”

“I want to be used to it the first time I have to take it for that,” I explain, “And besides, it’s supposed to be preventative too.”

Milo agrees this is a good idea, and turns on Kitchen Nightmares to comfort me as I ease into delinquency. Professional angerball and chef Gordon Ramsay is yelling at two plump twins about the failing Italian restaurant they own as I heat up my THC oil and pour it into my TriStick vaporizer. The “vape” looks like a nice pocket pen, with a pink shell and a glass compartment on the end, which contains a warming rod and eight wicks to facilitate heating the wax and creating smoky vapors. When I finally get the wax in, I press the heating button and take a puff. It’s easy! It’s so easy, I can’t believe I’ve never smoked before. I’m puffing away like a pro: five, six, seven times, blowing the smoke out in dense clouds of badass. I am going to have fancy parties where I dress up like Audrey Hepburn and vaporize my marijuana and talk about Truman Capote’s best short stories. This is going to be life-changing, and I am already feeling the effect of—

“Babe, you’re not inhaling,” Milo interrupts.

“What?” I say, incredulous.

“You’re not inhaling the fumes. You’re just keeping them in your mouth.”

“Yes, I am inhaling! How would you know?”

“Because that’s way too much smoke, and it’s all coming out of your mouth too fast.”

He’s right. What I thought was expert vaping was actually amateur cigar smoking. I haven’t been filling my lungs at all. I try to tell my lungs to open up and accept the fumes of burning herbs, but they are too smart for me and refuse. After several minutes of projecting my frustration on Milo, I finally inhale my first puff. It requires me sucking on the vaporizer, opening my mouth, and then taking a big gulp of air. It’s like swallowing pool water.

“Jesus Christ, my lungs!” I cough, throwing the TriStick at Milo.

“You’ve just experienced what every eighteen year old experiences when they smoke the first time,” he says.

“Not every eighteen year old,” I say.

---

Twenty minutes later, I emerge refreshed and ready to read a book and go to sleep. Except it’s not twenty minutes later, it’s sixteen hours later; time has become a hypothetical concept that can be opted in or out of, and I’ve done nothing. I haven’t eaten, cleaned my kitchen, worked, or gone to the party my coworker promised she would hold on the condition that I attended. I’ve been in Nowhereland, hovering between Milo’s couch, bed, and toilet, pondering the unprecedented shape of the human hand. Oh my god, I’m a stoner.

I hadn’t meant to get high. I had only wanted to learn how to vaporize, and how much, but the combination of the vaporized THC and a tablespoon of vegan ice cream had been way too much for my system. Milo spots me sobering up.

“What a productive weekend!”

“Shut up.”

---

Over time, I learn to take small, brief drags on my vaporizer—enough to benefit from the analgesic properties without having any effect on my mental state. My headaches are decreasing in severity by a lot and, other than when I catch a bug, decreasing in frequency as well. The THC also works wonders on the migraine-induced nausea.

I decide to take one more go at edibles. Every treat I got at the last place was so dense with marijuana, the servings made no sense.

“This brownie is eight to ten servings.”

“So, I eat a tenth of a brownie?”

“Maybe not the first time. Maybe half that.”

Perhaps another place would have more reasonable offerings, which I could better dose. I try the Greenhouse, which is conveniently placed between Milo’s and my apartments. I stop by on the way to his house, still nervous about partaking without a chaperon. They buzz me into another dark building with warnings that if I use a cell phone, I will go straight to Hell. Unlike the other dispensary, this one has sparse walls and actually feels like a business office, despite the obvious smell. The woman at the counter takes my information and leads me to the back, where I wait to be called to the medicine counter in yet another room. Again, I am the only woman.

When they call me back, a gregarious young man is thrilled to see me.

“Heeeeey! First time!”

“Yes, hi, I’m Carrie.”

“Great! I’m Jeff!” he might have said. He definitely looked like a Jeff.

Jeff shows me the assortment of options. There are plenty of jars of straight-up pot, and he immediately runs down descriptions of each, using words like “mellow,” “active,” and “just awesome.”

“I actually don’t smoke,” I explain, “I am learning to use a vaporizer for my migraines. And I thought I’d try some edibles, too.” He leads me to the fridge, which is full of cakes of every kind, and I choose a vegan pound cake. He says that, this being my first time, the pound cake is on the house. Then we get to talking about Jeff’s favorite chewable candies, each about a bite’s worth, at the steep price of $12.

“This one is like WHOOOOOA! And this one is like, mellow, you know? And this one is, like, no head, right? But this one is all ZOOOONK!”

I try to picture a proper pharmacist describing their medicines this way. “This morphine is all WHOOOOOOOA and this Prozac is like YEAH!”

I explain that I am not going for a psychological effect, but just to prevent my headaches. It’s very clear that no one has ever said this to him.

“Oh! Uh, hm. Okay. Well, you could vaporize, I guess, then. We only carry one oil for that. It’s $40.”

“That’ll be fine. By the way, how many servings is that little chewy candy?”

“Oh, four to ten.”

---

About a month later, I am able to use my vaporizer regularly, significantly decreasing my migraines, though not eliminating run-of-the-mill headaches. I guess I can always thank last year’s BossFromHell® for giving me those.

On summer afternoons, I like to walk around our neighborhood with Milo and puff on my vaporizer once or twice while we walk to the grocery store for popcorn and Jello. Audrey Hepburn probably wouldn’t be seen wandering through New York City with a TriStick, but Milo no longer compares me to eighteen-year-olds, which is a step in the right direction. Neither of us notices any changes in my mental state when I use my medicine, either. On one of those summer walks, we pass by the inexplicably-titled Thai restaurant, Crunchy Pig Team, and Milo points out the even-less-explicable addition of a King Kong picture on their sign.

“Look what it says underneath,” he says, pointing at Mr. Kong.

Beside enormous red letters reading “Crunchy Pig Team” and underneath the picture of King Kong, it says “King Kong.”

I burst out laughing. I have never seen anything so funny in my life. Milo gives me an odd look.

“It’s not that funny,” he says.

He takes my hand and we go get popcorn.

This article is second in a series of two. Read the first article here.

1. Whose name isn’t Milo.

Recently, the claim that the phrase “conspiracy theory” was popularized in the 1960s by the CIA to discredit those who dared to question the Warren Commission has been popping up in the conspiracy-o-sphere. From the original PsyOp, so the story goes, the application of the phrase spread to encompass all sorts of nefarious doings, and now people reflexively think that all conspiracy theorists are crazy. The first version that I heard, in fact, was the claim that the term was actually invented in the 1960s, and that grabbed my attention. Really? Never appeared before the 1960s?

An infuriating feature of conspiracy theory is its propensity to take the standard of evidence that skeptics value so highly and turn it on its head: extraordinary claims no longer require extraordinary evidence; rather an extraordinary lack of evidence is thought to validate the extraordinariness of the conspiracy. It is thinking just gone wrong. Worse still, disconfirming evidence becomes evidence in favor of the conspiracy. I strongly suspect that the “the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ was invented by the CIA” gambit is a fairly radical extension of this tendency, that the mere fact that so many people recognize that conspiracy theorizing is a futile and intellectually unproductive exercise is only more proof to the conspiracy theorists that they are really onto something.

As evidence of this deliberate manipulation of language, theorists offer up a 1967 document released in 1976 via a FOIA request, Dispatch 1035-960. In short, the CIA document outlines arguments that field operatives can use to counter conspiracy theorizing abroad and advises where those arguments might have the largest effect. The document was released to the New York Times, but conspiracy theorists’ seizure of this notion, that what they do has been deliberately stigmatized by nefarious outside agents rather than by the internal flaws of their arguments, ignores both linguistic and historical reality in order to flatter their delusions.

While the notion that the phrase “conspiracy theory” was weaponized has been around since at least 1997, it recently received a boost by the Lance deHaven-Smith’s 2013 Conspiracy Theory in America, published by the University of Texas Press. So, with this stamp of apparent academic legitimacy (I have my own opinion about that, and this is not the venue to elaborate), conspiracy theorists have begun citing this work as an authority.

Take for example the recent article by Kevin Barrett, “New studies: ‘Conspiracy theorists’ sane; government dupes crazy, hostile,” which was republished at Before It’s News as “CIA Invention of the Phrase, ‘Conspiracy Theory’ to Block Questions on JFK’s Assassination, is ‘One of the Most Successful Propaganda Initiatives of All Time.’” Barrett’s arguments were well and truly destroyed by the rogues on the July 27 Skeptics Guide to the Universe, so I will not rehash the staggering lapses in critical thinking they employ. But Barrett also leans very hard on deHaven-Smith’s work:

Both of these findings are amplified in the new book Conspiracy Theory in America by political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith, published earlier this year by the University of Texas Press. Professor deHaven-Smith explains why people don’t like being called “conspiracy theorists”: The term was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination! “The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.” [emphasis added]

Well, we have a claim of fact about the origins of the term “conspiracy theorist.” This is certainly something we can check up on. I will not ascribe this claim to deHaven-Smith. I don’t recall him making the claim that it was invented by the CIA, only that it was deliberately deployed by the CIA.

A quick search of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) finds that the phrase had been used in May 1964:

New Statesman 1 May 694/2 Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed by the absence of a dogmatic introduction.

This is two years before Dispatch 1035-960 appeared. If you go to the magazine, you will find that this sentence appears in an unsigned editorial, “Separateness,” about the London Magazine’s recent transition from being an exclusively literary publication to a more interdisciplinary review of the arts.

So, no. The CIA did not invent the word “conspiracy theorist.” But this made me wonder how far back I could push the use of a term like “conspiracy theory.” Using the OED to date vocabulary is a dodgy proposition. The oldest example you are likely to find in an OED definition is unlikely to be the first time the word was used. It might not even be the first time that the word was written down. It just happens to be the oldest example that the dictionary’s lexicographers have found. Nonetheless, we’ll use the OED as a starting point and just be confident that the word has to be at least as old as the first example found there.

The earliest appearance of “conspiracy theory’ in the OED goes as far back as 1909 to an article from the American Historical Review:

Amer. Hist. Rev. 14 836 The claim that Atchison was the originator of the repeal may be termed a recrudescence of the conspiracy theory first asserted by Colonel John A. Parker of Virginia in 1880.

This sentence appears in Allen Johnson’s review of P. Ormon Ray’s The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise: Its Origin and Authorship. The sentence that follows it makes quite clear that the phrase is being used in the modern sense: “No new manuscript material has been found to support the theory, but the available bits of evidence have been collated carefully in this volume” (836).

While the OED is generally considered to be a standard reference work, you can actually push the date back even farther using a more recently developed tool, Google Books. Conspiracy theory is by far the older term. In 1889, a theosophical journal called The Path dismissed the 1885 exposure of Helena Blavatsky by the Society for Psychical Research, in which it was discovered that Blavatsky relied on an elaborate system of informants for her “psychic” insights, as a “conspiracy theory.” In 1881, the phrase appears in Rhodes’ Journal of Banking: “As evidence of a conspiracy this showing is pitiful, and in any view, the charge is ridiculous, as no conspiracy theory is needed to account for the facts.” It seems that finance has always been dogged by conspiracy theories.

An even older reference to “conspiracy theory” can be found in the medical literature of 1870, during a public debate about the growth of asylums and the treatment of inmates in the UK. At issue were bruises and broken ribs that patients acquired in the asylums; were these the result of accidental self-injury, perhaps a byproduct of methods of restraint, or were these punitive measures or even preventive measures meant to force compliance? It’s not clear what the result of that debate was, but according to research by Ian A. Burney, it pitted the Lancet against The Journal of Mental Science. Novelist and prison/asylum reform activist Charles Reade wrote to the editors of the Pall Mall Gazette about the methods of control used in asylums in January 1870, which he came upon researching a novel about private asylums, Hard Cash. Reade claimed his evidence was a “[...] higher class of evidence than the official inquirers permit themselves to hear. They rely too much on medical attendants and other servants of an asylum, whose interest it is to veil ugly truths and sprinkle hells with rose-water.” (19) This evidence was the testimony of former patients and former keepers:

The ex-keepers were all agreed in this—that the keepers know how to break a patient’s bones without bruising the skin; and the doctors have been duped again and again by them. To put it in my own words, the bent knees, big bluntish bones, and clothed, can be applied with terrible force, yet not leave their mark upon the skin of the victim. The refractory patient is thrown down and the keeper walks up and down him on his knees, and even jumps on his body, knees downwards, until he is completely cowed. Should a bone or two be broken in this process, it does not much matter to the keeper: a lunatic complaining of internal injury is not listen to. (19)

The Journal of Mental Science, replied to these allegations the following month:

It must, I think, be admitted that the difficulties have been real, or surely they would not have evoked such an extreme hypothesis as that advanced in the Pall Mall Gazette, by a well-known novelist—an hypothesis which seems to involve every element of the sensational novel. (139)

In a comparison of Reade’s hypothesis to another one, the journal remarked:

The theory of Dr. Sankey as to the manner in which these injuries to the chest occurred in asylums deserved our careful attention. It was at least more plausible that [sic] the conspiracy theory of Mr. Charles Reade [...]. (141)

This use of conspiracy theory, I think, is recognizable with our contemporary understanding.

What is clear is that “conspiracy theory” has always been a disparaging term. While proponents of alternative knowledge are correct in asserting that it is possible to unfairly discredit someone by calling them a “conspiracy theorist,” they must also remember that just because you are called a conspiracy theorist doesn’t mean you aren’t one.

The famous “Mansi photo” of the Lake Champlain monster has been held up for decades as strong proof for cryptozoology—the so-called best evidence for the existence of a hidden animal. Yet, newly uncovered documents reveal troubling questions about the photo and the circumstances surrounding it.

Introduction

On Tuesday afternoon, July 5, 1977, Sandra Mansi of Bristol, Connecticut, knelt on the shores of Lake Champlain somewhere between St. Albans, Vermont, and the Canadian border, and snapped what is widely touted as the best lake monster photograph ever taken. In Lake Monster Mysteries: Exploring the World’s Most Elusive Creatures, their scholarly study of lake monster traditions, Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell observe that “the Mansi photo stands alone as the most credible and important photographic evidence of the existence of lake monsters” because its authenticity “is held in such high regard by so many writers and researchers” (Radford and Nickell 2006, 43). It has become the Holy Grail of Lake Monsterdom, and a steady stream of journalists has made the pilgrimage to Vermont to hear Sandra Mansi recount the tale of what she reported seeing that day.

Two other famous lake monster photographs that once held similar positions have not stood the test of time. On April 19, 1934, British sur­geon Robert Wilson reportedly captured an image of the Loch Ness Monster. Nicknamed “the Surgeon’s photo,” the picture fell into disrepute in 1994 when shortly before his death, Christian Spurling reportedly confessed his involvement in the hoax by fitting a toy submarine with a sea serpent’s head and neck fashioned from wood putty in an effort to fool the Daily Mail (Radford and Nickell 2006). After snapping his famous photo, Wilson himself later claimed that he did not believe in Nessie, and his youngest son openly admitted that the photo was a fraud (Binns 1984, 96–97). Ironically, prior to its exposure, several scientists had concluded that there were strong similarities between Wilson’s image and the Mansi photo, suggesting that “Champ” and “Nessie” may be similar species. Richard J. Green­­well, an optical science professor at the University of Arizona, remarked in 1981 that the ratio between the head and neck “was very much the same in both animals,” (Bartholomew 1981) and naturalist Charles Johnson concurred (Johnson 1980, 1).

During the 1970s, Eric Frank Searle snapped a series of well-publicized photos of Nessie. The pictures created a media buzz, exciting lake monster enthusiasts and connoisseurs of the un­­­­explained, and elevated the native of Middlesex, England, to celebrity status. His photos were later exposed as fakes by future BBC journalist Nicholas Witchell in his 1975 book The Loch Ness Story. Searle died in Lancashire, England, in 2005 after living the rest of his life in obscurity (Tullis 2005).

The Power of a Photo

This year will mark the thirty-second anniversary of the Mansi photo’s public release in the New York Times on June 30, 1981, which triggered a short-lived media feeding frenzy, allowing Champ to bask in the world media spotlight (Wilfred 1981). While the hoopla soon died down, the Mansi photo remains a staple of photographic evidence in numerous books on cryptozoology, a relatively new field devoted to the scientific study of “hidden animals” that was founded in 1975 by Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans.

The photo’s stature cannot be under­­estimated and was credited, in part, with helping to build the political momentum necessary for an international Champ Conference at Shelburne, Vermont, on August 29, 1981. Among the participants who were attracted to the meeting: Roy Mackal, professor of biology at the University of Chicago, and Roy Zug, a zoologist from the Smithsonian Institution. Champ’s public profile was further enhanced the next year by the passage of two bills protecting it from harm by both the New York and Vermont State legislatures. These resolutions were useless as practical documents but essentially served as free publicity. Radford and Nickell (2006, 45) attribute publicity surrounding the photo for the Champ renaissance of the early 1980s and note that when Radford visited the Champ sighting board in Port Henry, New York, in 2004, nearly half of the 132 sightings were dated 1981 or ’82. They credit the Mansi photo with singlehandedly triggering a bandwagon effect “whereby widely publicized sightings lead to other reports independent of an actual creature’s presence or absence.”

New Questions

Soon after the photo’s existence first came to light in the fall of 1979, the first red flags appeared. The original photo was sent to Philip Reines, a nautical expert at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, with the hope that he could authenticate it. Reines soon learned that the two most crucial elements in verifying the photo were missing. Sandra Mansi said that she had thrown away the negative, and that she could not locate where she snapped the photo. Images purportedly taken of monsters are notoriously blurry and vague; here was a spectacular image in full color, but without the negative or location it was impossible to determine with any degree of certainty what was in the photo. Possessing the negative would allow the image to be magnified to see greater detail, while knowing the location could reveal important clues such as the object’s size and distance, and whether the photo was even taken on Lake Champlain. When Reines could not authenticate the photo, Sandra and Anthony Mansi were soon insisting through their lawyer that the photo be returned, which he reluctantly did.

In researching my new book The Untold Story of Champ, I uncovered two important pieces of information that had previously been withheld from the public that cast doubt over the authenticity of the photo. This information was known to Joe Zarzynski when he wrote his book Champ: Beyond the Legend (1984), yet despite presenting a detailed analysis of the Mansi photo in it and affirming its likely authenticity, this information was left out.

The Missing Negative

Sandra Mansi has always maintained publicly that she threw away the negative. This would have been a very unusual practice for the period because during the era of pre-digital cameras, most people kept their negatives in case they needed duplicates or the original was destroyed. This is especially baffling given that she took a picture of what she believed to be a prehistoric creature in the lake, arguably one of the most important zoological photographs of the twentieth century. But kept hidden from the public was a letter written in August 1980 by Vermont’s official naturalist Charles Johnson who expressed concern after talking to the Mansis in person. He wrote that there “was a discrepancy over what happened to the negative: Mrs. Mansi said they threw it away, something they did with all the negatives of pictures they took; Mr. Mansi, talking to me alone, said they buried it (or burned it . . .) since their experience had been somewhat fearful” (Johnson 1980, 1).

Besides contradicting Sandra Mansi’s account, if the picture was so distressing as to necessitate burning or burying the negative, why even keep the photo pinned on a bulletin board in the kitchen, where it would likely be seen on a daily basis? In 1981, two journalists interviewed Sandra Mansi separately and were told the same story: that after the image came back from Fotomat, it was either tacked or pinned to the kitchen bulletin board (Kermani 1981; Smith 1981). That same year Sandra Mansi told journalist Jeff Wright that in the two and a half years before they showed the photo to Reines: “Our children would bring their friends in and show them” the photo (Wright 1981, 5). Yet in 1992, when interviewed by John Lenger from the Glens Falls, New York, Post-Star, Sandra Mansi said that as soon as it came back from developing, she “hid the photo in an album behind another photo. And it stayed there for years” (Lenger 1992). In 2003, she told Ben Radford a similar story: That the photo had been hidden in an album (Radford and Nickell, 2006, 45).

So, did Sandra Mansi hide the photo in an album and keep it a family secret for years, or was it tacked to the kitchen bulletin board where her kids were showing it off to their friends? The original photo looks quite different from the image that the public sees; it is sharper and has scratch marks and is yellowing around the edges. Several years ago Ben Radford flew to Westport, Connecticut, and met with Mansi’s attorney where he was allowed to closely examine the original. While Sandra Mansi’s recollection of these events may have faded or changed with time, contrary to popular belief her story is certainly not consistent over time.

The Missing Location

Joe Zarzynski, who knew the Mansis intimately, was not overly concerned—at least publicly—over their inability to find the location of their famous photo just a few years after they had taken it. He later wrote: “They were a little bit disoriented. But to their credit, things had changed. What was once a field was now condos and houses. Dirt roads had been paved . . . and there’d been a general facelift” (Citro and Christensen 1994, 108). It is a stretch of the imagination to contend that remote St. Albans, Vermont, had changed dramatically between 1977 and 1980, or that this had any bearing on the inability of the couple to locate the spot. While the lake has 587 miles of shoreline, the Mansis said they took the photo somewhere between St. Albans and the Canadian border—a length of only twenty miles. There is only so much shoreline and so many back roads in that relatively small area. Reines and Zarzynski scoured the shoreline by boat without success. It is difficult to imagine that just two and a half years later the spot could not be located, given that four people were involved. It was not as if Sandy was unfamiliar with the region, having spent part of her early life in the area; her parents lived in Brattleboro and her relatives had a camp near St. Albans. One would think that at least one of the four would be able to recall a nearby landmark—a distinct house, mountain, or sign that would allow them to narrow their search area. Her two children, Heidi-Jo and Larry, were aged eleven and twelve respectively. When they drove off, she said they got the kids something to eat. If they could recall where and how long it took to drive there, one would think they could further reduce the search area. Even with the publicity surrounding the publication of the photo in the New York Times, no one has stepped forward to say they could recognize the stretch of shoreline where the picture was supposedly snapped.

In addition to these red flags, Zar­zynski withheld another key piece of information from public scrutiny. Despite knowing the importance of finding the location as a means to verify their story, Sandra and Anthony Mansi were remarkably lax in finding it. During early July 1980, at the prompting of Zarzynski, the Mansis spent ten days vacationing in the region and were to spend part of the time trying to identify the site. It was one of the reasons for their trip. Finally, here was an opportunity to validate their photo. Then on July 17, a crestfallen Zarzynski sent Reines a remarkable letter: “For your knowledge . . . the Mansis did not look for the site. They waited until the last couple of days of their vacation to look and according to them bad weather set in. I guess they could not leave the island. . . . I think it was very poor planning on their part.” Was this really poor planning or did the Mansis know something they weren’t telling? During the final three days of their trip, local weather records reveal that the conditions were fine and zero precipitation fell.

Revisionist Cryptozoology

What should we make of these new revelations? While the photo may be genuine—that is, of some real unknown object in the lake, whether floating log, lake monster, or something else—and the Mansis truthful, if this is the “best” lake monster photo ever taken, it leaves much to be desired. As for Joe Zarzynski, he can be best described as having been blinded by his desire to believe in Champ to the point where, when he wrote his “definitive” history on the creature, Champ: Beyond the Legend (1984), he edited it to reflect what he hoped it would be rather than the reality. His actions bring to mind the adage: “Why let the facts get in the way of a good story.” In this regard he is in good company, for as one glances at an outline of the lake, its glacial symmetry is reminiscent of a Rorschach inkblot test that psychiatrists sometimes use to help their patients describe what they are thinking. As residents and tourists peer onto the vast lake, they typically see what they want to see. If, as most scientists assert, Champ is a creation of the human mind, we may do well to heed the words of Walter Lippmann: “For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond” (Lippmann [1922] 2007, 19).

Postscript

In the course of composing this article, Ben Radford provided an audio interview that he and Joe Nickell conducted with Sandra Mansi in 2002. In it she appears to let slip that she knows the location of the sighting but does not want it revealed.

Ben Radford: “I know that one of the questions that always comes up [about the photo] was where exactly it was [taken], but there’s no answer. So, you’ve looked?”

Sandra Mansi (shaking her head): “I have no clue . . .”

Joe Nickell: “We know it was somewhere near—”

Sandra Mansi: “I know it’s up . . . [pause] Well, I don’t want it—I don’t want it to get out where it was . . . because of the idiots, you know? . . . I knew once it got out, once the photograph got out there. . . . I was so darn afraid that some idiot with a gun would go out there and shoot at something in the lake . . .”

For over three decades, in every published interview, Sandra Mansi has steadfastly maintained that she does not know the location—with this one exception where she appears to let her guard down. Is this yet one more example where she has changed her story? If she feared that harm may come to what she believed to be Champ, why not say so and refuse to give out the location on moral grounds, instead of engaging in an elaborate deception, knowing that researchers were spending valuable time and resources conducting searches for the spot, some of which even included the Mansis on them. If she was genuinely concerned for the welfare of Champ, why publicly release the photo in the first place—for money no less—knowing its appearance would draw attention to the lake? In 1979, she even signed a pact with a coworker to serve as a publicity agent for the photo. The man—Roy Kappeler—said that Sandra was obsessed with profiting from the photo, noting: “She would come to work and say things like, ‘Are you ready to get rich kid?’” (Koepper, 1981, 1).

Sandra Mansi could help to resolve many of the questions surrounding the photo if she were to reveal its location, which could be given discretely to a select group of researchers. According to Ben Radford, finding the exact spot where the photo was taken would still reap enormous benefits and help to remove the cloud of suspicion that hangs over the photo, including whether it was even taken on Lake Champlain. More precise data could be gained on the object’s size, distance, how far out of the water it was, and so on, and if there are sandbars nearby.The field experiments conducted by Radford and Nickell (2006) estimate that the object in the photo is some seven feet long, with the ‘neck’ roughly three feet above the waterline, making a floating log or tree stump a likely candidate. Here is an opportunity to assess these estimates.

At first glance, when one hears the story of Sandra Mansi, it appears to be a straightforward event involving a vacationer snapping a photo of something extraordinary. But like so many accounts in cryptozoology, when one delves below the surface and wades through the facts, the saga grows more convoluted with time. Even if Champ is someday proven to exist, the human saga surrounding it is likely to tell us more about us as a species than about a possible new species in the lake.

References

Bartholomew, Paul. 1981. Audio recording of a seminar presentation by Richard Greenwell at the “Does Champ Exist?” conference in Shelburne, Vermont, August 29.

Binns, Ronald. 1984. The Loch Ness Mystery Solved. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.

Citro, Joseph A., and Bonnie Christensen. 1994. Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls & Unsolved Mysteries. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Johnson, Charles W. 1980. Letter to Joe Zarzynski dated August 22.

Kermani, Ronald. 1981. In search of Champ. Times-Union (Albany, NY), July 5, 1, A8.

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The contrails of a four-engined jet, over London, England by Arpingstone

The largest fleet of aircraft the world has ever seen was created to poison it. Millions of planes criss-cross the skies, dumbing down the populace with secret and powerful chemical agents. Every time you board a plane, you can’t look out a window without seeing one of these jet-powered poisoners. There is always danger overhead when chemtrails really do cover the sky.

If the chemtrail conspiracy were true, millions of pilots would be needed to crop dust the American population. A typical crop duster might use seven ounces of agent diluted in seven gallons of water to cover one acre of land. Chemtrail “people dusters” would use a similar concentration to cover the entire United States, just to be safe. For 2.38 billion acres of land, the pilots would then need—for just one week of spraying—120 billion gallons of these cryptic chemicals. That’s around the same volume as is transported in all the world’s oil tankers in one year. And such an incredible amount of agent would need an incredible number of planes. Considering that a large air freighter like a Boeing 747 can carry around 250,000 pounds of cargo, at the very least, the government would need to schedule four million 747 flights to spread their chemicals each week—eighteen times more flights per day than in the entire US.

Unless a plane could make multiple runs per day, a true chemtrail conspiracy would need 2,700 times as many 747s as have ever been constructed.

An infrastructure large enough to cover the country in chemicals would make the skies look like Coruscant. Pilots—not the millions in on the scheme—never pick up on the increased traffic. It’s a mystery to them that they never report, and they never scan the communication channels to find out what is going on. They don’t question that they have to wait an hour while half a dozen unmarked planes make their descents. A world with a chemtrail conspiracy means the most skilled vehicle operators on the planet have no idea who is operating the other vehicles or why. Ever.

Property values across the country plummet, as the most populated areas are inundated with airplane traffic and the associated noise. The government thought about putting the planes higher up in the atmosphere, but the higher they go, the more agent they would need—and that only leads to more planes, pilots, and secrecy. At this point the government might not even need a secret, stupefying chemical—if hundreds of millions of Americans never catch on to the millions of passenger-less planes overhead everyday, who needs to spend all that money on devious research and development?

The incognito infrastructure needed to conceal the chemtrail conspiracy would dwarf any other governmental agency. Millions of people—pilots, engineers, chemists, data analysts, and boots-on-the-ground hazmat teams—would need top-secret clearance for information that could never get out. If a chemtrail conspiracy were true, chances are you would run into a few involved in the cover up everyday. An effort to keep millions of mouths silent—to keep any information from pilots or participants out of the media—makes the NSA look like child’s play.

A chemtrail conspiracy comes with collateral damage. Many mechanics that work on crop dusters around the world are routinely, acutely poisoned by the chemicals the pilots seek to spread. If any significant percentage of the legion of mechanics needed to keep the chemtrail fleet flying had the same risk, literally millions of workers would come home poisoned. Spouses and significant others rush them to hospitals across the US, and the cause of this nation-wide plague never raises any eyebrows. No doctors file reports or do studies on the mysterious poisonings, no journalists ever get wind of something awry, and no police officers think a serial contaminator is on the loose. Even though every American would have a consistent chemical profile from any blood test, no one is the wiser. Every single piece of paperwork finds its proper place, deep in a file drawer of some bureaucrat keeping the lid on the chemtrail conspiracy.

Unless the air was visibly thick with the government’s chemicals, everyone would have varying degrees of exposure to the aerosolized agent. The dose makes the poison, so one neighbor might be slightly more mind-controlled than another. Like a case of mass hysteria, family and friends and strangers begin to change. People notice the spread. One day at the office Bob is asking questions about the right to privacy and the next day he has a Rumsfeld bumper sticker. Thankfully, the conspiracy is so tightly woven that it is all played off as some unidentified epidemic. Would you like a Bush ’04 button?

Instead of having the world’s largest workforce constantly spraying chemicals above the clouds, this is simply a case of misidentified physics. The differences in temperature and pressure between plane engines, wingtips, and the surrounding air coax water to condense into trails that routinely spread out into cloud-like sheets. If these trails really were part of a conspiracy, it would require more planes than the world has on hand, more workers than could ever keep a secret, and more ignorance than can even be afforded to the American people. Can we reduce the chemtrail conspiracy to the absurd?

Wikipedia has become the default initial source of research for many students, teachers and the general public who want answers. It's important and becoming more important daily. Editing Wikipedia is a passion for the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia team. We strive to make sure things are truthful and accurate. It's a love to educate with facts.

I recently spoke at the Center for Inquiry's student leadership conference. I must say I was most impressed with CFI's commitment to training future leaders in the secular and skeptic movements. The quality of these new leaders was impressive. A participant at the conference even joined the GSoW team on the spot!

During the Q&A portion of the program, I was asked if we ever worked on the history of secularism. My answer was a resounding “YES!" We have, and continue to work on historical pages. Our editors are very diverse and I never tell our editors what they can or can't work on; this keeps us well rounded.

I'd like to showcase three pages we have worked on which have been improved tremendously that concern our history. Make sure you look at the Before and After links to see the over-all changes.

The first one is the Ruth Hurmence Green page. She wrote the 1979 book “The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible,” as well as several popular essays. She is also best known for the phrase “There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.”

Our editor Frederick Green (no relation) rescued it from the nasty stub page that it was. It had no citations and no photo. I'm surprised it hadn't been deleted as it was quite an embarrassment. He restructured the basic biographical information into the much more conventional format and added a photograph, citations, and subsections. Fred did a beautiful job with this page. I'm very proud to have him on our team.

Ruth Hurmence Green's Wikipedia page: Before | After

The second article I came across accidentally when working with Tom Flynn on a completely different issue. He mentioned to me how sad it was that the Robert Ingersoll Birthplace Museum Wikipedia page was in rotten shape. I don't think he actually thought I would take on the project, but I fell for it after looking at its poor Eeyore-like existence.

Editing this page was a work of love for me. I learned a lot about Robert Ingersoll and the history of upstate New York. This wasn't exactly difficult to rewrite, as Tom already had all the citations and photos sitting in his computer. This page as I said, gets little attention, under 200 views each month. I have a few more things I want to do with this page, but I'm saving it for a training exercise for a new editor (who might just be you).

The Robert Ingersoll Birthplace Museum's Wikipedia page: Before | After

My last example is courtesy of Lei Pinter. Lei is another all-star on the GSoW project. In fact, she was the first person to join, which officially made us into a team. Lei decided that she wanted to take on the Vashti McCollum Wikipedia page rewrite. There was a lot of content on the page before Lei became involved. But the writing was badly done—it was disjointed and incoherent. The whole page needed updating and sprucing up. Lei did a lot of research on this rewrite but could not secure a photo. Tom Flynn even contacted a descendent of McCollum's, sadly we are still looking, possibly someone reading this can help us out.

Vashti McCollum's Wikipedia page: Before | After

In closing, I'd like to tell you about a woman who came up and introduced herself to me at that CFI conference I mentioned earlier. Apparently, she had been following the GSoW project. Her name is Lauren Becker, and she is the director of marketing and promotions for CFI. She said that when she saw the rewrite I did on the Ingersoll Birthplace Museum she almost cried. It meant a lot to her that we were not forgetting our history. Lauren presented me with the book “Women Without Superstition,” which is the collected writings of Women Freethinkers from the last 200 years, edited by Annie Laurie Gaylor. Lauren, rewriting Wikipedia is mostly a thankless job, I'm glad I talked to you that day as it made me remember how important this project is. Thank you!

As you can imagine, this is just a very small part of what needs to be done. We badly need your help, if you would like to become involved in the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project, visit our blog and write to us at GSoWteam@gmail.com. We train and mentor. One more thing: the one action you can do each day to keep pseudoscience at bay is to follow Skeptic Action on Twitter, Facebook and/or Google+.

What causes the startling, unbidden perception of something that seems very real but has no material existence outside of our own minds? The “poet-laureate of medicine,” Oliver Sacks, takes us through the looking glass and into the fascinating world of hallucinations. Oliver Sacks, MD, is a physician, best-selling author, and professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. He is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007), and The Mind’s Eye (2010). His book Awakenings (1973) inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Sacks is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His newest book is Hallucinations (2012).

Indre Viskontas, a PhD neuroscientist and a Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Fellow, interviewed Sacks for our Center for Inquiry’s Point of Inquiry podcast.

You have a new book out called Hallucinations, and some of our readers may have already come across an excerpt in the New Yorker called “Altered States,” in which you describe some of your own experiences with hallucinogenic drugs. But before we delve into that topic, please tell us what is it that distinguishes a hallucination from other fantastical mental experiences, such as waking dreams or imagination?

Well, hallucinations can occur in full consciousness, unlike dreams, and they are projected externally and appear to have a real and objective reality, unlike imagined objects and people. They are similar to percepts (objects of perception) except they are, as it were, forced percepts in which there’s nothing there to perceive. It’s as if the perceiving parts of the brain have been forcefully activated internally.

I was initially struck by the beginning of your book, where you talk about people who have hallucinations because one of their senses has an absence of stimulation. For example, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, where people who are blind experience visual hallucinations. Tell us a little more about what’s going on there.

First, a lot of my work is done in an old-age home. I see a lot of people who have impaired vision or hearing even though they are intellectually quite intact. And a good proportion—I can’t say exactly but I would think close to a fifth of these people—develop hallucinations in the mode in which they are defective. So the blind and partially blind get purely visual hallucinations. Deaf people get auditory hallucinations, most commonly musical rather than verbal. People who’ve lost their sense of smell can get smell hallucinations.

One might say that people who have lost a limb get limb hallucinations. But I’m not quite sure whether phantom limbs belong in the same category with the others.

I open the book with a description of a patient whom I’ve been following for many years, who became very dear to me, and I was very sad when she died a few weeks ago, just short of her hundredth birthday. She was a remarkable old lady, strong and clear minded.

The nursing home phoned me saying she was apparently hallucinating and they didn’t know what was going on. When I went to see her, she was puzzled. She said, “I’ve been blind for five years. I see nothing. Why am I seeing things now?” I asked, “What sort of things?” She described scenes with animals, with people looking at her, with falling snow and a snow plow. Very vivid visual vignettes, maybe two or three minutes long, and then there would be another one.

I asked if they were like dreams, and she said, “No, they’re like film clips or maybe like going to the theater.” Interestingly, she could never recognize the people or places she hallucinated. And she felt that when they did their thing it was autonomously without any relation to her or to her own thoughts or feelings. This is rather characteristic of hallucinations in Charles Bonnet syndrome. Other hallucinations sometimes are charged with affects (emotions) or the sense of familiarity. But not the Charles Bonnet ones.

You mention that in the case of these visual hallucinations, they were of unfamiliar things. Whereas, I think you also mention that when people have musical hallucinations they are generally of familiar melodies or tunes or music they have heard before. Is that fair to say?

Yes, it’s a very striking difference. I’ve wondered whether it’s because music is an already constructed thing, whether one takes in whole pieces of music as opposed to visual things which may not be completed, unless of course, one is hallucinating a painting or photograph. It’s very much that what one sees has to be constructed like imagining an image. Whereas the musical ones are very much more like memories.

Do you know of any research in which people have looked at what’s going on in the brain during these hallucinations? Say, for example, in the visual hallucinations, there’s some other part of the brain that’s also active that’s doing the imagining or creating the scene.

Yes, well, there have been some very beautiful studies that have become possible with the advent of functional brain imaging, fMRI, and more recent forms of imaging, tensor imaging, that shows the white matter. If people were hallucinating faces, there tended to be abnormal activity in the so-called fusiform face area in the back of the right hemisphere in the inferotemporal cortex. If, on the other hand, they were hallucinating words or pseudo-words or letters, lexical hallucinations, then the visual word form area in the left hemisphere would be activated. And it looked very much that those systems of the brain involved in perceptual recognition generated hallucinations of that sort if they were being autonomously stimulated or released.

I think the studies of musical hallucinations have not sorted things out quite in this way because people hear [complete] pieces of music. What we find is a very widespread activation of all those parts of the brain, including cerebellum, basal ganglia, premotor cortex, and so forth that are activated when one listens to real music.

In these patients who are experiencing hallucinations in the absence of stimulation, and in particular, those healthy people you described who, after three days in a sensory deprivation chamber, began to hallucinate, it almost seems as though the hallucinations are a comfort rather than something they fear. Did you find that patients over time would learn to control either the content or the expression of their hallucinations?

Usually no control, or very little control, was obtained. But there tended to be accommodation. Once people with Charles Bonnet are reassured that there is no psychiatric or neurological calamity and they’re not on anything hallucinogenic, they may then become quite accepting of the hallucinations. I quote one man who imagined his eyes saying, “We know blindness is no fun so we have concocted this small syndrome as a sort of coda to your sighted life. It’s not much, but it’s the best we can do.” I’m slightly misquoting him, but that’s essentially what he imagined his eyes saying. Charles Bonnet’s grandfather who, as it were, was the original subject, would often compare his hallucinations to spectacles in a theater, and would sometimes like to go in a dark room in the afternoon for a hallucinatory matinee.

I was struck along the same lines by a description of a patient you wrote about. Her name was Gertie C. I believe she was a Parkinsonian patient. Could you tell our readers her story?

Gertie was a patient who had had the sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, and a post-encephalitic syndrome which immobilized her for decades before she was put on L-dopa. She had all sorts of hallucinations, as do other patients on L-dopa. But it also become clear, when she got to know me and trust me (and I followed her for ten years or more) that she had had hallucinations long before she was put on L-dopa, mostly of a rather pastoral sort. She imagined lying in a meadow or floating in water. When she was put on L-dopa, her hallucinations became more social and more erotic, and apparently she got these quite under control so that she did not hallucinate until the evening. When it was time for her to hallucinate at 8:00 PM, she would say to her visitors, firmly but courteously, that she was expecting a gentleman visitor from out of town, and perhaps they could come another day. Her gentleman visitor, an apparition, would come through the window and brought her much comfort, both social and sexual. But she really seemed to have control of this. It never spread out of control, and it had this sort of humor that was engaging.

But she was an old hand at hallucinating. It may be that some schizophrenic patients—she was not schizophrenic—may also get on comfortable terms in this sort of way with their hallucinations. Incidentally, I mentioned in my book another patient who had Parkinson’s disease (not post-encephalitic), and he was also prone to hallucinating visitors. But they never followed him out of the apartment. They were confined to his apartment, and he could get away from them, if he wished, by going outside.

About a year ago I cohosted a television show on the Oprah Winfrey Network, in which I had the opportunity to investigate claims of miracles across the U.S. Several of the episodes included people who reported having had visions of a religious sense. They would be very offended if I intimated at all that they might have been hallucinating. Is there a difference, at least in the medical field, between what people think of as a religious vision and a hallucination?

Well, there is certainly a difference in character. People are often rather quiet about ordinary hallucinations. But with religious experiences, they may become almost evangelical. There’s a book in front of me at this moment which has been much talked about and is on the cover of Newsweek. It’s called Proof of Heaven and subtitled, “A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife,” by a man called Eben Alexander.

He had a nasty bacterial meningitis. He was in a coma for several days. But when he came to, he described an enormously complex so-called near-death experience. These experiences are often rather stereotyped in quality. People may feel they’re in a dark corridor and moving towards some bright light. Feelings of bliss envelop them as they are drawn towards the light. They sense, in a way, that the light is the boundary between life and death. And they would then come back or “float back.” In Musicophilia, I described such a sequence with a subject, another surgeon as it happened, who had been struck by lightning.

And he had this sort of blissful moment and then he said, “Slam! I was back.” He was back because someone was doing CPR on his heart and his heart started beating again twenty or thirty seconds afterwards. So, his whole cosmic journey only occupied a matter of seconds. Dr. Alexander feels that his cortex was out of action while he was having his visions and therefore it must have been direct supernatural intervention. I think such a claim can’t be sustained and indeed, a few seconds of altered consciousness as one emerges from coma would be enough to give him such a state.

People in these states may insist on their reality and feel their lives are transformed. And, as you say, may get angry if one says it was a hallucination. Of course, hallucinations, being brain events in the absence of any sort of objective world around one, can’t be evidence of anything, much less proof of anything. Certainly the being in heaven hallucination may feel real at the time, but in retrospect, I think many people will almost regretfully say, well, it was a hallucination. It seemed intensely real but it can’t be.

But other people may stick with the feeling that they have been vouchsafed a glimpse of the afterlife or, indeed, they have had quite a long sojourn there. One knows that what one had imagined was not reality. But if it leaks into hallucination, it may [seem to] be. I don’t think hallucinations are evidence of reality any more than imaginings are.

I was struck by how you describe almost a continuum of belief in one’s own hallucinations. You have people who, for example, on one extreme, have Anton’s Syndrome in which they have damage to the occipital lobe and they’re blind cortically. But they deny their impairment—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. On the other extreme, you have people who immediately know that their hallucinations aren’t real and they’re skeptical of them. What is the difference between these two sets of people?

Anton’s Syndrome, which I only touch on briefly, does involve all sorts of misconnections from reality testing. But with complex temporal lobe hallucinations, which during surgery can be induced by stimulating the temporal lobe cortex in the right place, can produce what Dr. Penfield, a pioneering neurosurgeon, called “experiential hallucinations,” which seem intensely real. Although there may be a sort of doubling of consciousness, so the patient can say, “I know I am in Dr. Penfield’s operating room, but I am also at the corner of 25th and First Avenue in South Bend, Indiana.”

They might feel an intense sense of similarity in their investing somehow the present. I think one has to think in terms of various levels. These Charles Bonnet hallucinations are relatively low down in the ventral visual pathway. But by the time one comes to these temporal lobe hallucinations, one is finding co-activation of the amygdala and the hippocampal systems. This then may invest them, certainly, with a strong sense of emotion and familiarity. Also, to some extent, of [a sense of] reality.

You also describe—in the temporal lobe epilepsy patients—ecstatic hallucinations.

These so-called “ecstatic” hallucinations have been described for many years in the medical literature, and in the general literature. You have only to read Dostoyevsky’s descriptions of his own seizures—descriptions he also splits among many of his characters. He would suddenly be arrested and cry, “God exists! God exists!” He would feel that he was in heaven and that everything was unified and made sense. It could sometimes be followed by convulsions, but he said for five seconds of this state he would give his whole life.

In these ecstatic hallucinations, there is a sudden transport of joy and also a sense of being transported to heaven or into communication with God. These seem intensely real to people and very pleasurable. There was an interesting study a few years ago when there was an attempt to treat some patients with ecstatic seizures. A lot of them refused to take medication, and some of them even found ways of inducing their own seizures.

If a seizure is pleasant, usually there is spiking in the right temporal lobe at the same time as people are having their divine vision. They may be a bit out of touch with the sort of daily reality around them. But lives are being transformed by this.

One of my favorite case histories, which I quote in my book, is of a bus conductor in London who, as he was punching the tickets, suddenly felt that he was in heaven and told this to all of his passengers. He remained in a very elated state for three days. It sounds as if he was in an almost postictal mania. Then he continued on a more moderate level, deeply religious, until he had another bunch of seizures three years later—and he said that cleared his mind. Now he no longer believes in God and angels, in Christ, in an afterlife, or in heaven. Interestingly, the second conversion to atheism carried the same elated and revelatory quality as the first one to religion.

I want to ask you about a personal experience of mine. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a full-blown hallucination, at least to my knowledge. But you might remember from the conversation we once had at dinner that I am a grapheme-color synesthete. For our readers who are unfamiliar with the term, it means that I see letters and numbers in color. Is this a hallucination?

No, I think that seeing letters and numbers in color or seeing music in color is really a constant physiological happening between two areas of the cortex, a letter-reading one and a color-constructing one. I think this sort of thing, which you can probably verify from your own experience, comes at an early age, and doesn’t change. I suppose one might call it an illusion, in that one sensation is invested with the qualities of another sensation. This can take very complex forms. There’s one professional musician who could taste different pitches—she tuned her violin by taste.

That’s amazing. For me it just feels so natural, yet I know, intellectually, that the appearance of the color doesn’t happen until my brain has somehow understood the symbolic meaning of a letter, for example.

That’s interesting. And if you’re given a sort of a nonsense string of letters, that doesn’t light up at all?

Well, the letters do. But it’s not until—say if I see two intersecting lines, it’s not until my brain decides whether it’s a T or an L that I see the color. If letters are occluded and I don’t know what the letter is, there is no color. It feels instantaneous to me that the color comes on in line with the meaning of the letter. In that way, I wondered if there wasn’t a part of my brain that is overlaying a hallucination. But I can see your point that it’s more of an illusion because it’s unchanging and it’s always present.

Probably if you spoke to another letter-synesthete, you would find that he or she had different colors from you.

Yes, in fact, I’ve been working with an illustrator on a graphic novel. Her name is M.G. Lord. She’s also a synesthete, and we have very heated arguments about what colors the letters should be.

Nabokov discovered when he was a child that he was a synesthete. But he complained to his mother that the letters in the alphabet set were of the wrong color. She agreed with him. But when she said the colors they were to her, the two of them disagreed. In general, synesthetes don’t agree. This is especially striking for musical synesthetes. Liszt and Rimsky-Korsakov both thought [their musical synesthesia] was something absolute. But when they met they found that they saw very different colors and couldn’t agree about anything.

I’d like to wrap up the interview with a more personal note from your own experiences. I was very much struck by one experience you described in which you had taken a hallucinogenic drug and you were waiting for a hallucination to appear. And then nothing happened. Can you describe that experience?

Yes, well, I was living then down on Venice Beach in the early 1960s, and there were a lot of drugs around. And people said to me, if you really want something striking take artane. Artane is a belladonna-like drug which is used in treating Parkinson’s. And they said just take twenty, you’ll still be in partial control. Anyhow, I took these tablets. At first I noticed nothing. I had a rather dry mouth, difficulty accommodating, my pupils were dilated. Nothing else. Then I heard a car door slam and footsteps, and I thought it was my friends Jim and Kathy. They often visited me on Sunday. I shouted “Come in!” and we chatted. I was in the kitchen.

There was a swinging door between the kitchen and the sitting room. I said, “How do you like your eggs done?” And we chatted in the four or five minutes while I prepared their ham and eggs. Then I walked out with the breakfast on a tray and . . . there was no one there. I was so shocked I almost dropped the tray. It hadn’t occurred to me for a moment that all this was hallucinated, at least that their part of the conversation was hallucinated. I thought I’d better watch myself. But this was followed by some even stranger things, including having a conversation with a spider. I think the spider was real enough; there weren’t any visual elements.

But then the spider said, “Hello.” And for some reason it didn’t surprise me any more than Alice was surprised by the White Rabbit. I said, “Hello yourself.” And we had a conversation. Actually, an abstract conversation about some points in analytic philosophy. Many years later, I mentioned this to a friend of mine, an entomologist, the philosophical spider with a voice like Bertrand Russell. He nodded his head and said, “Yes, I know the species.”

What is amazing is that you were expecting it. You were waiting for a hallucination.

Yes. Although I didn’t think it would take that form. I thought it would be all sorts of dramatic visual misperceptions and hallucinations as one may get with LSD or mescaline and those drugs. But this time it was purely auditory, and oddly humdrum although at the same time deeply absurd. I wonder what one would have thought had they seen me talking learnedly to a spider.

Algunos ufólogos llevan décadas acusándonos a los escépticos de estar pagados por los servicios de inteligencia para ocultar la realidad sobre el fenómeno ovni. Como otros colegas antes y ahora, he exigido en innumerables ocasiones a esos individuos que demuestren lo que dicen o que se callen. Bastaría con que enseñaran un recibo o una orden de pago. No lo han hecho -ni lo harán- nunca; pero siguen -y seguirán- con la cantinela. La realidad lleva, por el contrario, años devolviéndoles sus acusaciones como si fueran un bumerán. La última vez ha sido hace unos días, con la publicación por la CIA del estudio titulado The Central Intelligence Agency and overhead reconnaissance (La Agencia Central de Inteligencia y el reconocimiento aéreo. 1992).

Los historiadores militares Gregory W. Pedlow y Donald E. Welzenbach exponen en ese trabajo la génesis y el desarrollo de los programas de los aviones espía U-2 y Oxcart, y hunden otro clavo más en el ataúd del credo ufológico conspiranoico establecido por Donald Keyhoe en 1950. Hace sesenta años, Keyhoe, expiloto de la Marina estadounidense y uno de los primeros ufólogos, propuso en su libro The flying saucers are real (Los platillos volantes son reales) que esos objetos que habían empezado a verse en el cielo procedían de otros mundos y que el Gobierno de su país lo sabía y ocultaba a la población. Así nació la idea del encubrimiento ufológico que, paradójicamente, tan útil ha sido a algunos Gobiernos para esconder otras cosas.

"Los vuelos del U-2 y del Oxcart fueron responsables de más de la mitad de todos los avistamientos de ovnis de finales de los años 50 y los años 60", indican Pedlow y Welzenbach en The Central Intelligence Agency and overhead reconnaissance. Es algo que ya se había adelantado en 1997 en el trabajo titulado CIA’s role in the study of ufos, 1947-90, obra del historiador Gerald K. Haines. Pero el nuevo informe describe cómo funcionó durante décadas el auténtico encubrimiento y lo útiles que fueron los platillos volantes, a pesar de no existir, para los intereses militares.

Pedlow y Welzenbach cuentan cómo "las pruebas de alta altitud del U-2 pronto dieron lugar a un inesperado efecto colateral: un enorme aumento en los informes de objetos volantes no identificados" y lo que se hacía cuando llegaba por carta una denuncia de ese tipo en las oficinas del Proyecto Libro Azul. "Los investigadores de Libro Azul recibían regularmente llamadas de personal de la Agencia en Washington para comparar los informes de ovnis con los registros de vuelo del U-2. Esto permitió a los investigadores descartar la mayoría de los informes de ovnis, aunque no podían revelar a los autores de las cartas la verdadera causa de los avistamientos de ovnis". Me imagino a los responsables de los programas U-2, Oxcart y posteriores como a los protagonistas de la viñeta de Andrés Diplotti que ilustra estas líneas: escuchando o leyendo a los ufólogos en los medios de comunicación y dando las gracias por su inestimable colaboración.

La perfecta cortina de humo

El estudio recién desclasificado es una historia del Área 51, la base del lago Groom (Nevada) que los ufólogos han convertido en el epicentro de la conspiración, con platillos volantes estrellados, cadáveres extraterrestres y el desarrollo de tecnología basada en la de los platillos volantes. Confirma lo que ya sabíamos gracias a testimonios de trabajadores de las instalaciones: que fueron creadas en mitad de la nada para acoger las pruebas de las aeronaves estadounidenses más sofisticadas "de una manera segura y secreta". Hace cuatro años, un comandante del complejo, un radarista, un piloto de pruebas de la CIA, un ingeniero de proyectos especiales y un encargado del suministro de combustible explicaron, en Los Angeles Times, que en la base del lago Groom practicaron la ingeniería inversa; pero no de naves extraterrestres -como han asegurado durante años ciertos ufólogos-, sino de ingenios militares soviéticos.

Todo esto es algo de lo que algunos hablamos desde los años 80: la creencia en los ovnis ha sido la perfecta cortina de humo para ocultar proyectos secretos de todo tipo y, supongo que también, violaciones del espacio aéreo propio. Los soviéticos, por ejemplo, prefirieron que se hablara del ovni medusa de Petrozavodsk, visto sobre la ciudad de ese nombre a primera hora del 20 de septiembre de 1977, antes que admitir la existencia del cosmódromo secreto de Plesetsk y el lanzamiento de satélites espía. En España, el avistamiento ovni más espectacular, el de Canarias del 5 de marzo de 1979, se debió al lanzamiento de un misil Poseidón desde un submarino estadounidense en aguas próximas. Aunque esa posibilidad -sin poder precisar si el sumergible era soviético o estadounidense- fue apuntada desde el principio por algunos ufólogos españoles, otros han mantenido el velo extraterrestre sobre un suceso que presenciaron decenas de miles de personas.

Los platillos volantes fueron, al principio, motivo de lógica preocupación para las autoridades militares estadounidenses, temerosas de que las visiones estuvieran causadas por aeronaves soviéticas. En plena Guerra Fría, en el verano de 1947, nadie hablaba de seres de otros mundos. Eso vino mucho después. Y, cuando llegaron los extraterrestres, los militares de medio mundo -y, en especial, de EE UU y la URSS- supieron aprovecharse de ellos.

Paradojas de la vida, quienes han acusado machaconamente a los escépticos de cobrar de los servicios de inteligencia para ocultar la verdad sobre los ovnis, han sido los mejores colaboradores de esas agencias. Obsesionados por sus platillos volantes y sus alienígenas cabezones, los ufólogos han achacado a éstos observaciones de lo que en realidad eran armas de última tecnología… terrestre. Han jugado un papel clave en la conspiración, aunque no el que ellos creían. Mientras soñaban con intentar sacar a la luz su verdad, enterraban la verdad bajo montañas de fantasía. Han sido los tontos útiles del Área 51.

A few months back, a British anomaly investigation organization announced the possible death of UFOlogy. They admitted that failure to provide proof that UFOs were extraterrestrial craft and a decline in the number of UFO reports suggests that aliens do not exist after all. Was this the end of “UFOlogy”—the study of UFOs? “No way! It's alive and well here,” said the U.S. UFOlogists. So it is. But what is the real status of the study of UFOs?

The UFO research field is having a bit of a crisis these days. Reports come in by the hundreds. There are not enough people to investigate them. Yet, decades of UFO research by private and military organizations have resulted in disappointment for those who surely thought there was something out there to reveal. Many of the historic figures of UFOlogy are aging or have passed away. Who is doing the work now? And what exactly are they doing?

The major organization remaining in the U.S. for investigating UFO sightings is MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. MUFON is not in good shape. Their stated mission is to conduct scientific investigation of UFO reports for the benefit of mankind. But there is dispute about their ability to actually do that. The current version of MUFON, according to those observing the situation, is focused on everything except proper UFO investigation and is nowhere near scientific. Membership in the organization has fallen off and some local MUFON groups are disgruntled. Leadership upheavals over the past few years may have been distracting and overall, they are experiencing a serious case of mission creep.

MUFON consists of chapters covering each state across the country who operate somewhat independently with members paying dues to the main headquarters. They promote a scientific method. But do they actually accomplish that goal? Recent commentators say no, they do not. The focus in local MUFON chapters meetings these days is decidedly unscientific with talks on alien abduction, conspiracy theories, human-ET hybrids, hypnotic regression, and repressed memories. That's a wide range of pseudoscience in one place. It's dragging down the credibility of the entire subject as well as missing the point of improving actual UFO investigations.

A comprehensive two-part piece recently appeared online describing the changing of the guard at MUFON that is installing its fourth director since 2009. The UFO Trail blog critiques the current status the field and takes note of the rising voices in the community, some of whom wish to elevate the investigations and methods out of the realm of pseudoscience. Author of The UFO Trail, Jack Brewer, is critical of the current methodology, characterized it as “sham inquiry”—a label I used to describe amateur paranormal investigation and one he thought also applied in this case.

The newly named director of MUFON, Jan Harzon, states that UFOlogy is a science and intends to put a scientific face back on UFO investigations. Their latest symposium, held in Las Vegas this past July had the theme “Science, UFOs, and the Search for ET.” The conference featured presentations from several science professionals (current and former) but did not provide any blockbuster information or do much to promote science.

"We hope to bridge the gap between science and UFOlogy," said Jan Harzan, state director of network's Orange County bureau. "They're one in the same." - Las Vegas Sun (19 July 2013).

Many skeptical critics would dispute the claim that UFOlogy is a science but that depends on how you wish to define “science.” A general definition such as a “systematically collected body of knowledge” is not very descriptive of a subject area that contains a lot of data but few constructive hypotheses to provide a framework. The UFO sighting data is mostly witness reports and much of it is of questionable veracity or too old to be of much value any longer. The National UFO Reporting Center has a database of reported sightings but I haven’t found any compelling reports about flaps or trends to make sense of the data. It could be that I’m not reading cutting-edge UFO research but if there really was a good report that solidly concluded that there was a pattern and subsequent explanation for UFO flaps, I would be interested. I would hope I’d have heard of it, at least from those who have a more in-depth knowledge. But, as with claims of proof of psychics or hauntings, we only have popular, often biased reports about particular events from individuals that have a belief to promote. Those case studies in addition to being problematic in their accuracy (since it’s hard to confirm many of the events via witnesses), are not robust enough to aid in explaining the phenomenon.

The discussion coming from a small group of today's modern UFO researchers suggests that UFOlogy is on the wrong track these days. With a focus on abductions, conspiracies, and exopolitics/disclosure, the core of the field is no longer about investigating and identifying what people are reporting to have seen in the sky.

Antonio Paris runs the API Aerial Phenomenon Investigation Team, which has a somewhat different focus than MUFON. He wishes to return to the “nuts and bolts” idea of UFO investigation and get away from the conspiracy and fringe topics that so often dominate the symposiums and local MUFON talks.

I asked Antonio what sorts of tools his organization uses to do investigations. He noted that Internet sites can help identify some of the man-made objects like aircraft and satellite. MUFON also mentions these tools on their sites along with astronomical sites to identify bright celestial objects that are sometimes confusing to people viewing them on the ground. Paris is also familiar with the shape of many military aircraft and says he can typically identify them in association with military bases nearby. API has tackled about 300 or so cases but does not pursue those that look like jokes, hoaxes, or give them nothing to go on. There is no lack of UFO reports. An initial screening to determine viable cases is necessary to remove those cases not worthy of investigation or they would be overwhelmed.

MUFON trains their investigators through a manual and an exam. Paris noted to me that the test requires no specialized skills and many people could potentially pass it without even looking at the manual. The certification as a field investigator is a worthwhile effort by MUFON to standardize their methods and provide a framework for consistency of methods but it's only internal to MUFON. When each MUFON chapter operates pretty much on its own, inconsistency and regional differences creep in. Paris told me he is frustrated by the lack of sharing of information both internally and externally of MUFON noting that an object of interest can fly over a wide area. Coordination of reports that may be of the same object would be a worthwhile effort. Science is dependent on sharing information either through collaboration or peer review of findings. UFOlogy appears weak in that area having no established journal or even an online location for filing results.

Even more fundamental to UFOlogy than answering “Is it a science?” is “Can it ever be scientific?”

UFOs are uniquely difficult to investigate for several reasons. The observation is fleeting. It may not repeat. It is difficult to reproduce. If it remains airborne, it leaves no physical evidence behind, only the story of the witness. The observation is often made in the dark under conditions in which it is difficult (or impossible) to accurately judge size and distance.

The options for making a UFO into an IFO (identified) are many and various. Along with the typical reports (satellites, aircraft, flares and planets), we have more man-made things in the air now than ever: experimental balloons and aircraft, weather balloons, Chinese lanterns, drones, dirigibles, toys and deliberate hoaxes. Even people can become UFOs.

Can UFOs be scientifically investigated?

If by “scientific” we mean methodical, objective observations in consideration of natural laws, logic and reason, then, yes. I think UFO investigation can be scientific but the sea change that is needed would be pretty huge for the field and I don’t know if they can pull it off. As with paranormal investigators, UFO researchers tend to lean towards the believer side. That’s what keeps them passionate. But it's also their undoing. A bias towards belief in a mystery or in alien craft is the first giant misstep in UFOlogy. The first step for a rejuvenated field to gain credibility is to drop the default belief that ETs are visiting earth and back up to the very basic question, “What, if anything, did this witness see?” Begin looking for real world answers instead of “proof” to support a belief in alien life.

I found a great example of one such sound UFO investigation. Andrew Hansford recently gave an excellent talk at the 2013 Amazing Meeting about how he examined a UFO case from Marblehead, MA. You can see his report here. He was able to glean the best answer and make a solid conclusion from rather few bits of initial information. He used the tools available to him to seek a down-to-earth explanation.

I asked CFI fellow and Skeptical Inquirer UFO columnist Robert Sheaffer his thoughts about scientific investigation of UFOs. It's a bit tricky. Many have assumed it's possible, he says, but it turns out to be more difficult than it seems. Sheaffer has documented the several times “rapid response” teams have been attempted by UFO organizations. It was hoped that by gathering “reliable witness reports,” and implementing a “rapid response team” to capture the UFO with professional filming techniques, better evidence could be put forth for the claim that something worth paying attention to was really occurring.

Rapid response teams turned out to be disappointing, says Sheaffer. Antonio Paris was part of one such team, the “STAR Team” for MUFON. Millionaire Robert Bigelow funded the project. “MUFON has been somewhat tight-lipped about the results,” Sheaffer tells me, “but they are generally conceded to be hugely disappointing.” It did not give them the results they hoped for.

Sheafffer has written about other “rapid response” efforts prior to the STAR Team in his Psychic Vibrations column of July/Aug, 2009 of Skeptical Inquirer. In 1967, J. Allen Hynek proposed and later implemented a national toll-free UFO Hotline. Experienced screeners manned the lines twenty-four hours a day. They contacted local police and/or other investigators who would rush to the scene. Hynek expected this method would yield excellent evidence. Even with the cooperation of the FBI, years later, it did not produce the expected results.

The National UFO Reporting Center, run by Peter Davenport, has had a telephone hotline since 1974.

In 1977, the French government created an agency called GEPAN to investigation UFO reports. After producing nothing convincing, official UFO investigations in France ended in 2004. The British UFO desk was closed in 2009 despite a surge of sighting reports. Nothing was distillable from the reports.

In the late 1990s, the Los Vigilantes of Mexico City was organized to respond to a flap of UFO sightings in the area. Cameras were at the ready to respond to UFO reports on short notice. Sheaffer says, as far as he was aware, they never obtained anything of significance.

MUFON still gets hundreds of cases a month and there is considerable backlog of investigations. That’s a hefty work load for volunteers. There is a need to sort the wheat from the utter chaff but there still are valid means to find out what people probably saw in the sky. Most reports will have a satisfying answer if diligently investigated. But that may not happen or the eyewitness may not accept it.

Paris’s API group is in contact with the new leadership at MUFON and is encouraged that a more sound approach to the field is on the horizon. This may be a new dawn for UFOlogy as the old guard dies away and the new, more centered, serious thinkers take over. UFOlogy is undergoing a transformation once again.

For now, UFOlogy attempts to sound sciencey, but it is not nearly up to the standards to be called “science.” Can it be science? Only with a wholesale change in assumptions and approach. Drop the fascination with conspiracies and abductions—go back to nuts and bolts.

Sharon will be participating in UFOCon14 in Baltimore, Maryland in 2014.

In light of recent debates in our pages about certain political aspects of skepticism, we invited this commentary from a libertarian and skeptic.—Editor

What do you do when your heart says one thing and the data says another? When science conflicts with values, which wins the battle for your soul? Which, for that matter, gets your vote?

Skeptics have a particular challenge with science and moral values, because for us science is a moral value. Critical thinking, honest engagement with the evidence, understanding the world as it is, avoiding self-deception, intellectual integrity, these all have moral stature in our lives. We are denied the simple consolations of “science is just a tool,” “ethical living is more important than empirical facts,” and other outlets of the less critically minded.

These conflicts affect skeptics of all political stripes. Liberal skeptics, for example, may feel some tension between the science of evolutionary psychology and gender differences. How society should respond to the scientific basis for gender difference is a policy question, not a scientific one, but liberals might legitimately worry about how the evolutionary basis for gender differences could be used to hamper their goal of a more egalitarian society.

In this magazine, this conflict has most recently manifested itself with conservative and libertarian skeptics on the issue of global warming. (See, for example, Frazier [2013] and Mooney [2012].) As a longtime libertarian, skeptic, and occasional contributor, I’ve felt this conflict personally. I accept the scientific consensus that the Earth is warming and that human activity is a significant contributor to it, because, frankly, in light of the evidence, what else can I do? But I understand the upset of readers who were bothered by the Mooney article, most of whom I assume are conservatives or libertarians. We have, I think, two principal concerns.

First, accepting anthropogenic global warming means we will have to accept a larger role for government than we have traditionally been comfortable with. Following Haidt’s (2012) terminology, libertarians and conservatives tend to value the moral dimension of liberty more than liberals, who tend to emphasize fairness and proportionality. As the primary institution for establishing the latter at the expense of the former, we take a dim view of government, believing it should be used only for certain narrowly defined functions required to secure the rights of its citizens.

Libertarians understand economics, externalities, and market failure perfectly well. However, we also understand that all institutions are subject to failure, including government. In fact, we believe as skeptics that the evidence shows that even though politics and governmental approach to problems do not work particularly well, they nonetheless expand far beyond their original intent, making things worse and far more difficult to repair. We wish to break that cycle.

Thus we worry, I think with good cause, that any approaches to combat global warming will not be restricted to affecting global climate but will be used to advance a political agenda that we oppose.

After all, what actions could not be justified in the name of saving the planet? Is it really so beyond the pale to think that global efforts to address anthropogenic global warming are at risk to be hijacked by others with a much more expansive agenda? Is the profound emotional response we get from believing we are saving humanity at risk for affecting our rational judgment?

As a skeptic, I would argue the risk is quite real. This doesn’t mean we should reject the science, any more than liberals who aspire to gender equality should reject evolutionary psychology. It simply means that we will have to work for our respective political goals within the context of what the science says to try and prevent “agenda overreach.”

This would be easier for conservative and libertarian skeptics to do, I think, if we felt more welcome in the skeptical community. When it comes to politics, I like to think of libertarians as consistent skeptics. We want to know how everything actually works in practice, not how it is merely supposed to work or assumed to work. This includes government.

This is in principle an empirical question. While it is one best suited to the social sciences and therefore not easily settled via controlled experiments, it remains an appropriate one for skeptics to ask and explore.

And yet, while I and others have tried for years to introduce this perspective into the skeptical movement (see, for example, my 1997 article in SI), we have met extraordinary resistance, due to implicit articles of faith within the skeptical movement we would like to respectfully challenge. In all these cases, we don’t dispute the science, but we think there is room for a broader debate on policy.

For example, is more government funding for science always a good thing? Equivalently, must cuts in government funding of science always be opposed?

What are the rights of psychics and fortunetellers? Are we as skeptics at risk for violating them when we take certain policy positions?

As of this writing, CSI has a petition submitted to the FDA to regulate homeopathic medicine similar to other drugs. Should skeptics be so sure this is a good idea?

These are just some policy questions on which libertarian and conservative skeptics have different views from their liberal colleagues. Were our views proportionally represented in skeptical writings, on skeptical websites, and at skeptical conferences, I suspect the discussion on policy issues would be more civil, more dispassionate, and healthier for the skeptical movement as a whole.

Perhaps my perception is inaccurate. Perhaps libertarian and conservative skeptical voices would be welcomed if they spoke out more, wrote more, and contributed more to the skeptic community. Or perhaps we make up a smaller fraction of the skeptical movement than my anecdotal experience suggests.¹

I do not know for sure. It would be interesting to find good data, or perhaps to conduct a rigorous poll that attempts to understand better how skeptics describe themselves politically. Perhaps libertarian and conservative skeptics could be encouraged to take a more proactive role in the skeptical movement, and we could see what happens. In that context, I’d respectfully ask my liberal colleagues to be a little more receptive to the ideas of their non-liberal comrades in arms.

We are all bound to run into situations where science conflicts with our values. When that happens, the best we can do is accept the science, state our values explicitly, and work to achieve the world we want. If you’re worried about how the science might be used, work to make sure it’s not used that way. If you’re concerned about science being used to promote an agenda you oppose, show the evidence and state why you oppose it.

Finally, all skeptics should realize that the political power of science, even when used in ways that threaten our own personal values, is a sign of humanity’s progress. It used to be that societies made decisions impacting thousands of lives by casting lots, appealing to revelation, killing animals and examining their entrails, killing humans to appease imaginary beings, and innumerable other appeals to superstition and ignorance. While we continue to fight these same forces in the modern world, it would be both unduly pessimistic and intellectually dishonest to deny the hard-won credibility that science now has.

That ought to be a source of satisfaction to us all.

Note

1. At the 2007 Amazing Meeting (TAM 5), one panelist asked libertarians in the audience to self-identify. By my estimate, between 20 and 25 percent of the conference attendees raised their hands.

For Further Reading:

Fagin, Barry. 1997. Skepticism and politics. Skeptical Inquirer 21(3): 40–43. See also Skepticamp 2011 presentation, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJhSKOfcz9c.

Frazier, Kendrick. 2013. Can we have civilized conversations about touchy science policy issues? Skeptical Inquirer 37(1): 4, 25.

Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon Books.

Mooney, Chris. 2012. Why the GOP distrusts science. Skeptical Inquirer 36(4): 8–11. (Letters in reaction, SI, January/February 2013, 37(1): 64–65.)

“Petition Seeks Review of Homeopathic Drugs.” 2011. On CSI website at http://www.csicop.org/news/press_releases/show/petition_seeks_fda_review_of_homeopathic_drugs.

The Skeptical Libertarian: http://www.skepticallibertarian.com/.

On November 24, DNA Diagnostics, a veterinary laboratory headed by Dr. Melba S. Ketchum, issued a press release¹ that rocked the cryptozoological world:

A team of scientists can verify that their 5-year long DNA study, currently under peer-review, confirms the existence of a novel hominin hybrid species, commonly called “Bigfoot” or “Sasquatch,” living in North America. Researchers’ extensive DNA sequencing suggests that the legendary Sasquatch is a human relative that arose approximately 15,000 years ago as a hybrid cross of modern Homo sapiens with an unknown primate species.

The study was said to include sequences of twenty whole mitochondrial genomes. “Next generation sequencing” was used to obtain three whole nuclear genomes from “purported Sasquatch samples.” The mitochondrial DNA was identical to modern Homo sapiens, but the nuclear DNA was described as “a novel, unknown hominin related to Homo sapiens and other primate species.” Thus, the researchers concluded from this DNA data that not only does the North American Sasquatch exist but that it is a hybrid species, “the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens.”

This announcement enthralled the press but annoyed many cryptozoology and science observers because it came with no published paper and no data, only a long and shady history of partnerships, projects, and promises. Ketchum promised the paper would soon follow. When it finally did appear, nearly three months later, it was less than impressive, made no sense evolutionarily, and sparked new controversies about her personal responsibility, the ethics of publishing, and what was going on behind the scenes with this project.

Science by press release is an unprofessional form and often is a bust upon peer review. (The classic example is cold fusion.) Melba Ketchum asked the public directly to buy into an extraordinary claim: that she has categorized Bigfoot DNA and understands its origin, proposing not one but two unknowns—Sasquatch and an unknown ancestor of Sasquatch. What evidence is there that this is true? We have only her word on the samples and just one paper that, as we will see, has had a difficult history, but there are no corresponding, converging lines of evidence. No other reliable physical evidence, traces, fossil record, historic record, or an undisputed clear picture or video of a Sasquatch exists. Moreover, environmental factors have not been shown to reasonably support the existence of a number of large primates reproducing in the wild often reportedly visiting human-inhabited areas. Even besides these obvious hurdles to acceptance, we have many reasons to be suspicious.

The Ketchum DNA project spans more than five years. Drama, propelled by occasional leaks that fueled speculation and hype, played out on the Internet via social media and blogs. Many inside Bigfootery had been following Dr. Ketchum’s progress closely for more than a year prior to the official announcement. Hints of the findings were long discussed in Internet forums and on websites. It is extremely difficult to parse what is factual and what is unfounded, and sometimes ludicrous, speculation. I have attempted to chronicle the story with the help of those who have been watching it more closely than I and, on occasion, Dr. Ketchum herself has spoken on it. Here I document the chronology and claims as best as I can, but many of the sources are secondhand. You can make up anything on the Internet and obviously some people do. However, rumor and wild speculation are a major part of this story primarily because the public was not given solid information but rather an intriguing tale.

Questions and disputes about the plausibility of Ketchum’s results and the origins of Sasquatch/Bigfoot created a schism in cryptozoological circles. The focus of the dispute is often on Ketchum herself, who has control of the entire project.

Who is Melba Ketchum? She is a veterinarian who graduated from Texas A&M veterinary school. She did not complete a PhD.² While not an academic, she runs her own genetics lab and has been a coauthor on several published papers but never a lead author.³ With such a complicated and extraordinary claim as the discovery of Bigfoot DNA, her lack of experience in the specialized field of primate genetics hurt her credibility with the members of the scientific community who have actually expressed an interest in this project. She notes that she does have experience in forensics because she worked on DNA evidence from crime scenes, which was vital in assuring these study samples were not contaminated.⁴ There remains the murky area regarding the origin and history of the purported Sasquatch samples, the validity of her data, and how one can so definitively conclude “Bigfoot” from this one study prior to review by the scientific community. I found that these big ideas about Bigfoot precluded the data. Many other red flags obscure the view as well.

Back to the Beginning

The Ketchum story begins in 2008 when her lab was picked to analyze a suspected Bigfoot/yeti hair from Bhutan collected as part of Josh Gates’s adventure show, Destination Truth, which airs on the Dis­covery Channel in the U.S. Ketchum ap­peared twice on the show, in 2009 and 2010 (Season 3 numbers 9 and 12), as a forensic analyst. She then became one of the “go to” people for those who had collected DNA samples that they thought might be from a Bigfoot.⁵

Over the next few years, Ketchum re­ceived many additional samples and funding from various sources to conduct more analyses of these samples (mostly hair, but also blood, saliva and tissue) through her own lab, DNA Diagnostics, and other laboratories.⁶

Uneasiness about the project might start with Ketchum’s business dealings. She was affiliated with various corporations registered in the state of Texas, including one called Science Alive, LLC. This partnership in­cluded Robert Schmalzbach (better known as “Java Bob” who was previously an officer under Tom Biscardi’s group Search­ing for Bigfoot) and Richard Stubstad, an engineer who became interested in Bigfoot DNA and was a funder of Ketchum’s work. According to Stubstad, some sort of dispute occurred in the fall of 2010 as lawyers eventually managed to cut Schmalzbach and Stubstad out of this corporation venture leaving Ketchum with entire control of any media from publicizing Bigfoot DNA findings.⁷

This was not the first or last of legal dealings where Ketchum was involved. Ketchum had been sued and lost a claim for patent infringement that required her lab to stop using certain tests.⁸ In addition, the lab itself was not in good standing with the public, having an “F” rating by the Better Business Bureau due to complaints for delivering results,⁹ a possible problem with the state of Texas regarding payment of franchise taxes, and some lost client contracts.¹⁰

Ketchum responded to these issues by admitting she was naive regarding the people involved in Bigfootery, some of whom she described as turning out to be unethical. She did not know of their reputations but wanted them removed from the study to protect its integrity.⁴ This naiveté continued even after the paper hit the mainstream.

Ketchum has been associated with several other individuals and projects throughout the years of Bigfoot DNA collection and analysis, including the following: the Olympic Project—a group of researchers studying habitat and attempting to obtain trailcam photos of Bigfoot¹¹; Tom Biscardi of Searching for Bigfoot, Inc., involved with the infamous 2008 Georgia “Bigfoot in a freezer” hoax, who collected DNA samples for her project7; Wally Hersom, a generous contributor to several Bigfoot research projects, who funded at least some of Ketchum’s work¹²; Adrian Erickson of Sasquatch – The Quest, who stated he has high quality pictures and video of the creatures¹³; and David Paulides of North American Bigfoot Survey, who is a Ketchum supporter. Paulides, an ex-police officer and author of books about missing persons and the “tribe” of Bigfoot¹⁴ has been particularly outspoken about Ketchum, placing the responsibility of the scientific study of Bigfoot DNA all on her, saying each of the samples used had its own specific story. Ketchum alone had all the data, he says,⁵ and deserves the praise.

Nondisclosure agreements were signed among participants of the projects so that information would not be leaked prior to the reveal. But it was anyway. The sources of these samples supposedly included a toenail obtained by Biscardi from Larry Johnson,¹⁵ blood from a smashed PVC pipe, and flesh from the remains of a Bigfoot body (see sidebar, “Sierra Kills”).¹⁶ But it is not clear that all the samples were collected properly. They also may have been exposed to contamination or to degradation.

With the Destination Truth samples of 2008 apparently the primer for her interest in the subject, in August of 2010, Dr. Ketchum disclosed on the Coast to Coast AM radio program that she had a scientific paper in the works.¹⁷ The forthcoming paper provided an excuse for her to avoid discussing the results at the time. However, in the fall of 2010, Ketchum was doing additional interviews about her work.¹⁸ Ideas about Bigfoot being a type of human were already formed by other Bigfoot researchers. A copyright filing in her name dated September of 2010 described a media project related to “a new tribe of living humans.” The theme of a book or video was to be “Sasquatch as a modern human with some genetic mutations accounting for their physical appearance.”¹⁹ This copyright notice foreshadowed the results of her DNA study stating that the project would describe “complete Sasquatch mitochondrial genome sequence and nuclear DNA variations.” Ketchum later brushed aside the notice saying it never came to fruition.²⁰ But, this idea also corresponded to hypotheses proposed by David Paulides in his book Tribal Bigfoot published in 2009.

Bigfoot Community Feeds Hype and Grows Impatient

News about Ketchum and the various Bigfoot projects was fed by rumors, speculation, and opinions that appeared unsourced on the Internet. The social media aspect, especially personal web log sites and the Facebook network have provided a near-steady stream of both clear and dubious information. Melba herself became active on her own Facebook fan page in 2009 providing information directly to the public. In June 2012, the public page went away and only the private “friend” page existed. Several Bigfoot-themed blogs dutifully reproduced any news she posted on Face­book verbatim. She occasionally did address questions about the study on her page but often referred questions to her publicist, Sally Ramey, who possibly also posted updates to this page. Therefore, it was not clear who was actually supplying the content for the Facebook page.

In late 2011, Ketchum provided an up­date on Facebook that the results were complete and the paper was being submitted for publication. She told her followers to be patient—good science takes time. Citing the famous skeptical mantra, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,” she added, “This is what we are doing.”²¹ She appeared confident that her data would stand up to scrutiny. However, Ketchum herself avoided opportunities of appearing in public. She was a no-show at two conferences in which she was scheduled to speak about Bigfoot DNA—a Bigfoot conference in Honobia, Oklahoma, in October 2011 and the Richland, Washington, Bigfoot conference in May 2012. For the latter, she completed a “DNA 101” presentation via Skype computer connection. Those ob­servers in attendance reported their disappointment to interested Bigfoot bloggers. The community of Bigfooters expressed their concern that she was avoiding questioning by not appearing in public and completely controlling the discussion while everyone waited, hopeful for concrete results. However, Ketchum has alleged that she chose not to attend because there was a threat against her person at one of these events.⁴

Every week, a diligent few searched the embargoed papers awaiting publication. There were many false alarms. A prolific blogger named Robert Lindsay was a major informant who published inside information and leaks from the various Bigfoot projects and activities for several years. Through­out 2012, he sparked interest on multiple occasions that the Ketchum paper would be published very soon.²² It wasn’t. There were rumors that the paper had been submitted to the prestigious journal Nature but had been sent back due to lack of qualified authors or a testable hypothesis.²³ In February 2012, Ketchum implored her followers to have patience saying, “Our data is amazing and beautiful and all cutting edge.” She also noted she was creating a website for nonscientists to be able to access the paper and understand what it meant. This was seen to be in the works in December 2012 on the DNA Diagnostics website.²⁴

Ketchum continued the “hurry up and wait” status by suggesting that revisions were requested for the paper, but it was never made clear if it was actually accepted anywhere for publication. She bragged that the paper had “double digit coauthors, many with PhDs and some University heads of departments.”^4,25 In July, she assured followers that the bases were covered and “It will be worth the wait.” Throughout 2012, her supporters in the Bigfoot community grew frustrated by the secrecy and delays. Confidence in the Ketchum Project and in Melba herself eroded. The red flags noted by commentators included rumors of infighting among the project members, the fractioning of the original group of participants, the ever moving release date for the data, and concerns about the sample origins and the ability of the results to withstand scrutiny of the scientific community.²⁶ To be clear, many scientific papers do take months of waiting and back and forth exchanges to revise the manuscript prior to publication. So this frustration by spectators was un­founded and should, in fairness, not have been attributed to Ketchum creating delays.

Ketchum threw many observers for a loop when she disclosed that she had actually seen the creatures herself and described them as “peaceful and gentle.”²⁷ In April of 2012, she made public a photo she said she took with her mobile phone of an array of sticks in the forest with a suggestion that it was made by the creatures.²⁸ This “blurry sticks” picture incited nasty comments on forums and blogs by a discouraged audience who bemoaned this unprofessional behavior. Ketchum claimed to have additional evidence to support the claim that a family of five “playful” Sasquatch repeatedly visited a site, known as a “habituation” site, but she did not reveal the location or further details. Her comments stated that her personal experiences were not meant to convince the nonbelievers; the DNA study would do that.

Meanwhile, a parallel Bigfoot DNA project was launched by Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics, University of Oxford, and Dr. Michel Sartori, directeur Musee de Zoologie, Switzerland. This Oxford project invited submission of indeterminate DNA samples “as part of a larger enquiry into the genetic relationship between our own species Homo sapiens and other hominids.”

According to the published schedule for this project, samples were to be collected from May to September of 2012, analyzed from September through November, with a paper to be prepared for publication before the end of 2012. Because the peer review process does indeed take months and perhaps up to a year, we should not expect to see these results published until possibly well into 2013.²⁹ Dr. Sykes obtained a copy of Ketchum’s paper to analyze and told me through personal communication that he has no comment on it (as of the time of this piece going to press) nor any updates on his own project to share. That is a different tactic from the parade of social leaks Ketchum provided.

Dr. Jeff Meldrum, of Idaho State Uni­versity, a well-known academic involved in Bigfoot research, has also steered clear of the Ketchum project and, instead, backs the Sykes study, perhaps even by submitting a sample toward it.³⁰ Meldrum was also critical in semi-public (through released email exchanges) of the Ketchum “science by press release” approach.³¹ It surely did not help Ketchum’s reputation that she was associated with Igor Burtsev, a Russian Yeti researcher. In the recent past, Meldrum expressed an­noyance with the approach of Burtsev and other Russian “scientists” eager about the study of Bigfoot in their native lands.³²

When fall 2012 came and no paper had yet appeared, things started to turn sour for the Ketchum camp. In September, Ketchum’s public relations person Sally Ramey was gone.³³ She was replaced with Robin Lynne Peffer, a woman who claimed a family of Bigfoot (whom she refers to as “Forest People”) lived on her land in Michigan. She is known in the Bigfoot community for her widely publicized comment that the Bigfoots like blueberry bagels.³⁴ Peffer, however, does not appear to have any experience in either science or in public relations. It is not clear why or how Peffer was named as the Ketchum spokesperson.

Observers noted in October that Ketchum’s lab building in Timpson, Texas, was closed and up for lease. The phone had been disconnected.³⁵ One blogger followed up and discovered a back story of Ketchum’s missing payments and her neglect of the business itself.¹⁰ The business, nevertheless, still exists but at a different mailing address.

Results Are Exposed

Ketchum’s key to gaining acceptance for her Bigfoot DNA claims was to publish in a respected peer-reviewed scientific journal. But the plan went awry. The complicated mix of people, secrecy, delays, and promises boiled over in late November when news of the study was “outed” by Igor Burtsev. The self-appointed head of the Russia-based International Center of Hominology, Burtsev issued this “Urgent” announcement on his Facebook page on November 23: “The DNA analysis of the Bigfoot/Sasquatch specimen conducted by Dr. Melba Ketchum the head of DNA Diagnostics, Timpson, TX, USA has been over!” He stated that the team of Amer­ican scientists led by Ketchum analyzed 109 purported samples of the creatures.³⁶

Ketchum sounded somewhat dismayed when responding to the leak saying, “It is unfortunate that the partial summary of our data was released in this manner, however, I will be making a formal response in the next few days. Even though Igor Burtsev released this, it was not Dr. Burtsev’s fault.”³⁶ She later admitted that possibly misunderstandings due to language and his eagerness was why the nondisclosure agreement was breached. At this point, she felt that the study must be addressed instead of ignoring the leak that might cause further damage if left unattended.⁴

After the official announcement of the results in November, Ketchum appeared in a few media interviews. In one, she mentioned that the paper of the study would be accompanied by high-definition video footage of the creatures.³⁷ The origin of this video is the Erickson Project. On his website, Erickson mentions the video and the many samples they collected that were analyzed for DNA³⁸ (included in the cache of Ketchum samples). Back in February of 2012, Ketchum had thanked Erickson for funding support for DNA testing.³⁹ None of the footage has been released except for one still shot of a hairy, indeterminate shape on the forest floor and hearsay that the images were either wonderful or not convincing. The Erickson project website went down for a while in November 2011⁴⁰ when it was rumored that Erickson had run out of money for it. It resurfaced in 2012.

A few scientists have spoken out, showing enthusiasm and interest in the Ketchum results.⁴¹ Others were scathing in their criticism against her and the entire concept of the study.⁴² To fuel further ridicule, the “unknown novel” DNA was publicized as “angel DNA” by blogger Lindsay.⁴³ A few press outlets included this mention in their pieces. Dr. Ketchum denies ever using such a label.⁴⁴

David Paulides, the Director of the North American Bigfoot Search (NABS) once again threw support behind the results and Ketchum, saying, “Dr. Ketchum originally found the combination to unlock Bigfoot DNA and utilized top scientists in various fields to validate her results. The results were independently verified with the group silently sitting on these findings for months, as the results were validated a third and fourth time.”⁴⁵ If true, that may explain the delays exhibited through 2010–2011. Paulides had more commentary to add regarding the DNA. In the press,⁴⁶ he is quoted as saying that “It falls in the realm of human.” Experts in the field of human DNA studies may wonder why they weren’t consulted for her publication.

The worldwide media coverage over the press release from Ketchum on November 24 had not quite died down when, on December 6, Igor Burtsev was spilling more news on Facebook, saying the paper was rejected by the U.S. journals, but is now under review in a Russian journal.⁴⁷ Burtsev issued a scathing rebuke of what he considers the closed-minded American science establishment and their rejection of Bigfoot, noting that the creature’s existence is accepted by the public—as if scientific truth is somehow based on popular vote.

Response from the Ketchum camp was incoherent with Robin Lynne remarking, contrary to Burtsev, that the paper was still under review and “extremely scientific.”⁴⁸ Again, we are left wondering what role Burtsev was playing in this drama.

There may be some truth in the allegation that reputable science journals would not touch the study due to its association with Bigfoot. Because there is no type specimen or any corroborating credible physical evidence, there is no justification for mentioning a creature known only from folklore in the study. Scientifically, all the results could say is that the DNA is “unidentified.”

The Paper Appears

On February 12, 2013, Ketchum commented on social media outlets “Buckle up!” and the next day, the paper appeared along with a new press release.⁴⁹

The study, “Novel North American Homi­­­nins, Next Generation Sequencing of Three Whole Genomes and Associated Studies,” which analyzed DNA from a total of 111 high-quality samples submitted from across the continent, appeared in the inaugural issue of DeNovo: Journal of Science (http://www.denovojournal.com) of Febru­ary 13. The coauthors were: Ketchum, P.W. Wojtkiewicz, A.B. Watts, D.W. Spence, A.K. Holzenburg, D.G. Toler, T.M. Prychitko, F. Zhang, S. Bollinger, R. Shoulders, and R. Smith.

The paper describes the conclusion stated earlier in the November pre-paper press release, that both the mitochondrial and nuclear DNA were sequenced. The mitochondrial DNA, inherited from the maternal side, was human. But the nuclear DNA was not. This consisted of a “structural mosaic” of “human and novel non-human DNA.”

Upon attempting to access the paper the morning it appeared, I encountered the next huge misstep by Ketchum. The journal, DeNovo, is a brand-new online outlet that consists of one issue with only this one paper. The website is clunky and amateurishly designed with stock “sciencey” photos of animals and test tubes. A strangely placed “buy now” button was in the center yet on one page, the words “DeNovo – Open Access” floats in a blank box. For a moment, I did think the paper was freely available. Not so. Clicking on the buy now button, I was taken to a checkout page that charged $30 for access. Backing out of the site to look for other reactions, I noticed that several Bigfoot bloggers had already obtained complimentary copies or they had managed to download the paper for free care of a site glitch. I requested, through email to the address in the press release, a complimentary press copy as well. This inquiry went unanswered. I was provided two review versions of the paper later in the day via other means.

Regarding the origins of DeNovo, Ketchum said on the day of the paper re­lease that an unnamed journal had accepted the paper after peer review was completed, but their lawyers advised them not to publish due to the disreputable topic. Instead of continuing to shop the paper to other sources, she decided to acquire the rights to this unnamed journal,⁵⁰ suspected to be the Journal of Ad­vanced Multi­disciplinary Exploration in Zoology. Looking into the history of that journal, investigators found it was registered under Ketchum’s name on January 9, 2013. This led to serious ethical questions about self-publishing.⁵⁰ The DeNovo website was created on Febru­ary 4, 2013, just nine days prior to the release of the paper. Ketchum claims to have documentation of the prior reviews and from the acquisition of the new journal. These, and any information on which journals previously rejected the paper, have not yet been released.

In the announcement of the paper,⁵¹ Ketchum mentioned two associated websites: the Sasquatch Genome Project and the Global Sasquatch Foundation. Both were produced with what appeared to be very basic web tools and hosted on low-volume servers. Both sites failed the first day possibly due to traffic. Prior to their inaccessibility, I captured some information published on them. On the Sasquatch Genome Project page, Ketchum denied she self-published and took a dig at the scientific community. “We encountered the worst scientific bias in the peer review process in recent history,” she said, calling it the “Galileo Effect” and suggesting she was treated unfairly. Ketchum’s explanation for publishing in DeNovo was that she was eager to get the data out there and not have to deal with further rejections, hinting that all the previous reviewers were less than decent or open-minded seemingly because they rejected her work.⁵⁰

On the Global Sasquatch Foundation site, this statement appeared: “Due to the efforts of our founder Dr. Melba Ketchum it has been proven that Sasquatch are a human hybrid. Here at G.S.F. we have made it a priority to protect these indigenous people from being hunted, harassed, or even killed.” One could assert that this statement was premature considering the scientific community had not assessed her conclusion. Regardless, she had extreme confidence in her results. The Foundation site also included pictures of stick structures supposedly constructed by the creatures and a photo of a matted horse’s mane, an example of what Ketchum has alleged is Sasquatch “braids” in the horse’s mane.⁵⁰

As for the paper itself, it was incomprehensible to those without specialized training in genomics or forensics. It began with the premise that Sasquatch exists and this study helps to confirm that. Two days later, Ketchum announced through social media that (unnamed) “top level scientists” volunteered to assess her data. A few days after, a statement appeared on the DeNovo website from David H. Swenson, a biochemist, who said he reviewed the manuscript and agrees with the conclusions. This statement, as well as Ketchum’s own statements and those of her spokesperson were also riddled with grammatical and typographical errors.⁵²

The few experienced geneticists who viewed the paper reported a dismal opinion of it noting it made little sense.⁵³ The DNA sequences did indeed contain matches to human chromosome 11, a lot of undetermined DNA, and some that, in part, matched to other animals. Thus, the whole sequences do not resemble any known animal and are contradictory with evolutionary biology. In a curious sidenote, the term de novo is used in bioinformatics to designate the absence of a reference genome. Next generation sequencing (NGS) technology was used in this study to read the whole genome, a process that used to be far more time and labor-intensive. There are problems with NGS de novo protocols that can lead to poor data quality. We do not know if the results were properly evaluated prior to concluding that the genome data could be used and if the interpretation of the results is reasonable. These factors will likely come into play during the expert external reviews of the paper.

Some critics have stated that the DNA may have been contaminated. Ketchum assures everyone that she fully accounted for contamination issues and dismisses this allegation, citing her own the lab’s experience with handling forensic crime samples. The samples have not been made available to others so there is currently no way for anyone to run a retest to compare results. There appear to be multiple places where the data quality could have been compromised, regardless of how confident Ketchum is in her results.

The Circus That Followed

Accompanying the official version of the paper was Erickson’s video, which supposedly showed a sleeping Sasquatch. The short clip, made public a day later, showed a brown, furry mass sleeping on a woodland floor. The Erickson project claimed that DNA was obtained from this individual, named Matilda, which was analyzed as part of the Ketchum study providing a link to a real creature. The promised high-definition video evidence was not made available. Within a week, researcher Bill Munns claimed that he had acquired still shots of Matilda whereby the face strongly resembled Chewbacca, a tall, hairy Bigfoot-esque creature from the Star Wars movies.⁵⁴ If that wasn’t enough to increase the derision for Ketchum’s work, what may be the most humiliating find came from careful readers on a skeptical forum.⁵⁵ Three of the references cited in the Ketchum paper as prior published research on the creatures were discovered to be questionable in validity. One was an openly-stated April Fools prank that concluded the Yeti was actually an ungulate (hoofed mammal) and that its resemblance to apes was due to convergent evolution. When confronted with this information, Ketchum denied responsibility, saying she was told to include “all” references by one reviewer. She did not concede that she knew they weren’t reputable scientific works.

So what does Ketchum have? Is it human DNA with an undocumented variation? Is it animal samples contaminated with human DNA or vice versa? Is it a concocted hoax? Or is it actual unique DNA that may point to the existence of an unknown hominin (or two)? In a revealing interview on Coast to Coast AM she told the public she is not after glory, would rather avoid the publicity, and has turned down (others’) money-making offers. She admitted that she wouldn’t tackle this project if given another chance due to the trouble it created for her. She admits she was not privy to the culture of Sasquatchery that exists where many players try to either one-up or discredit the other person.

She is solidly convinced that she has enough data to unquestionably make the case for the existence of Bigfoot even without a type specimen. In the Coast to Coast AM conversation, she likened them to “special forces soldiers” who cannot be seen unless they want to be. She has completely accepted that they exist across North America and wishes them to be protected as a tribe of people.^4,50 Her research continues.

In the presentation of this potentially earth-shaking discovery, Dr. Ketchum lost every shred of scientific credibility through her short-circuiting genetic experts and the process of peer review. Instead, she at­tempted to appeal to the popular Bigfoot enthusiast crowd as their savior who has the goods. Even that backfired. She continues to make excuses instead of admitting her errors and poor judgment. She censors those who point out these serious problems or ask questions about them, and she has not exhibited cooperation with geneticists who are experts in human DNA. The people supporting her are not usually helpful to her cause. Her disclosures about her own personal sightings and obvious missteps in the process have done much to sabotage her own credibility. It’s not a pleasant picture.

For now, the Ketchum chapter in the saga of Bigfoot remains unresolved. There is one thing we can be certain of: this is not the end of the story of Bigfoot. The legend will live on in the hearts of those who believe.

Notes

1. http://www.dnadiagnostics.com/press.html

2. http://bigfootzoologist.blogspot.com/2012/12/is-melba-ketchum-real-doctor.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBd21lf2

3. http://doubtfulnews.com/2012/12/dna-experts-view-of-the-ketchum-bigfoot-dna-claim/

4. Coast to Coast AM radio show interview with George Knapp, aired December 23, 2012.

5. http://www.nabigfootsearch.com/bigfootblog.html #109

6. http://www.nabigfootsearch.com/bigfootblog.html #181

7. http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/bigfoot-news-november-17-2011/ ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6D5AqB92s

8. http://www.optigen.com/opt9_imppatlawx831.html

9. http://www.bbb.org/east-texas/business-reviews/laboratories-medical/dna-diagnostics-in-timpson-tx-24003140

10. http://seesdifferent.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/texas-dna-specialist-writes-that-sasquatch-is-a-modern-human-being/ ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBcy1NGx

11. http://www.olympicproject.com/id15.html

12. http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-most-powerful-man-in-bigfoot-made.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6D5BSZeX1

13. http://www.mapleridgenews.com/news/127560548.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6D5C6Ec3n

14. http://www.amazon.com/David-Paulides/e/B002ALI9AA/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

15. http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/toenail/

16. http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2012/11/for-reporters-here-is-list-of-samples.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6D5CP4g1L and http://www.mapleridgenews.com/news/127905518.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6D5CH9hZW

17. http://www.nabigfootsearch.com/bigfootblog.html #99

18. http://www.bigfootbuzz.net/dr-melba-ketchum-interview-october-31-2010/ ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBd6s6nk

19. http://is.gd/6WrhXK

20. http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2012/01/breaking-dr-melba-ketchum-makes.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBd9AUhf

21. http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2011/11/dr-melba-ketchum-hang-in-there-we-have.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6ClcfjIFt

22. http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2012/08/21/bigfoot-news-august-21-2012/ ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBdBkPsW

23. http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/bigfoot-news-january-2-2012/ ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBdIqPvO

24. http://dnadiagnostics.com/sgp/ ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6D5Fp29n4

25. http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2012/04/dr-melba-ketchum-assures-followers-that.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBdSv1RC

26. http://www.bigfootlunchclub.com/2012/02/sasquatch-science-peer-review-worth.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBdVSo15

27. http://www.cryptomundo.com/bigfoot-report/melba-ketchum-bigfoot-witness/

28. http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2012/04/dr-melba-ketchum-shares-photo-of-sticks.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6D6n69bkV

29. https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/academic/GBFs-v/OLCHP ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6CldL18zf

30. http://www.bigfootlunchclub.com/2012/05/dr-jeff-meldrum-conducts-parallel.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBdckpy2

31. http://www.cryptomundo.com/bigfoot-report/meldrum-ketchum-bigfoot-dna-study/

32. http://doubtfulnews.com/2011/10/american-bigfoot-scientists-and-researchers-felt-hoodwinked-by-russian-yeti-event/

33. http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2012/09/dr-melba-ketchum-cuts-ties-with.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6D6nfbLud

34. http://news.discovery.com/human/bigfoot-sightings-michigan-russia-111013.html

35. http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2012/10/breaking-melba-ketchums-dna-diagnostics.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBdfgVRO

36. http://www.bigfootlunchclub.com/2012/11/david-paulides-releases-bigfoot-dna.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBe4dWpx

37. http://myfox8.com/2012/12/01/texas-researcher-claims-to-have-dna-proving-that-bigfoot-is-real/ ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6Clemetw5

38. http://www.sasquatchthequest.com/about.html

39. http://www.cryptomundo.com/bigfoot-report/sasquatch-dna-project-update-4/

40. http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2011/11/erickson-project-website-taken-down.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBeLHwCT

41. http://www.bigfootlunchclub.com/2012/11/first-bigfoot-dna-peer-review-results.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBenoNEr

42. http://doubtfulnews.com/2012/12/dna-experts-view-of-the-ketchum-bigfoot-dna-claim/

43. http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2012/11/24/bigfoot-news-thanksgiving-edition-2012/ ; Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBeq52Hd

44. http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2012/11/melba-ketchum-we-have-not-said-that-it.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBevUDfn

45. http://www.nabigfootsearch.com/bigfootblog.html #181

46. http://www.yakimaherald.com/news/yhr/tuesday/557851-8/sasquatch-does-dna-say-its-human ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBeyBeU1

47. http://doubtfulnews.com/2012/12/where-is-the-ketchum-bigfoot-dna-study-reviewed-rejected-or-russia/ ; also available at http://wp.me/p21oZP-4Cs

48. http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2012/12/ketchums-publicist-speaks-out-regarding.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6DBfNAGPu

49. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/2/prweb10311693.htm ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6Eo1gw6tc

50. http://doubtfulnews.com/2013/02/ketchum-bigfoot-dna-paper-released-problems-with-questionable-publication/

51. http://historum.com/blogs/ghostexorcist/1380-melba-ketchum-s-bigfoot-dna-study-questionable-ethics-creating-journal.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6EpDVrQZT

52. http://www.denovojournal.com/#!special-issue/crrc ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6Er76700d

53. http://doubtfulnews.com/2013/02/breaking-bio-on-the-ketchum-sasquatch-sequences/

54. http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2013/02/bill-munns-is-this-matilda.html ; archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/6Er7VOdpI

55. http://doubtfulnews.com/2013/02/ketchum-uses-april-fools-paper-as-reference/

How Being in Love Made My Skin Look Great

There are pictures of me in a chair shaped like a hand. They were taken at an occult bookstore, which I had visited on a story. I wanted to know what kinds of claims tarot readers make to their customers: what would happen in the next few months, what is unique about my personality, what career I should pursue, and who I should love—all based on some cards with pictures of flautists and Satan.

In the pictures, I am bright and glowing. In half of them, I am alone, in the chair shaped like a hand. In the other half, I am with my co-conspirator and friend, Ross, who is there to get his fortune told, too. In all of them, I am grinning from ear to ear. My skin is clear and radiant.

Those are the first pictures I know of that were taken right after I fell in love. Minutes later, I would walk to the back of the store, and get a reading that was exceptionally almost true. The astrologer would tell me I was a good writer and communicator, that I was a little too analytical sometimes, and that I was in love with a person who was wonderful for me. She would also tell me that I seemed distant from my brother. I don’t have a brother.

As we left the store, Ross took pictures of me, grinning and pointing at the sign for the shop. I confess, I think I felt a little glee that the psychic stranger inside had given me her approval of the new object of my affection, whom she’d never met. It was much easier to forget that she swore I worked as a hostess in a Mexican restaurant (miss), when she also said I was in love with the perfect person for me (hit, obviously).

I was in the “limerence” stage of love; a term coined by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov¹. Think you might be in limerence? The key symptoms are euphoria, intensely focused attention on the one you love, craving for emotional union with the beloved, and increased energy. It was sort of like the feeling I got when I was a child and I would go to Denny’s, and throw back a cup of cream into my mouth (something my mom would want me to tell you she never approved of). My brain would melt into tiny spheres of golden light, and nothing would be wrong with the world for a split-second. Ah, cream of the gods. Denny’s cream. Love is a lot like a shot of Denny’s cream.

So I started to wonder what was behind this biological and psychological experience of love. Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist for the Einstein College of Medicine, says love is not an emotion, but “a motivation....The other person becomes a goal in life.” Her evidence is all in your head: brain scans of people in early love show areas that are associated with reward systems lighting up; the same systems that drive us to eat when we are hungry, drink when we are thirsty, and take a gulp of air when we get stuck under a boogie board. When we fall in love, the other person becomes not just part of our basic enjoyment of life but, at least on a biological level, part of our basic survival, too.² Anthropologist Helen Fisher goes so far as to say that brain scans could serve as a sort of lie detector, proving that your spouse still loves you after twenty-five years (and plenty of her subjects do).³ I asked neuroscientist Indre Viskontas, who is affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco, what she thought of the lie detector theory.

“There's a lot of individual variability in brain function and morphology, so you can't look at one individual's scan and deduce something as complex as love. The measurements are correlational—and they don't necessarily work backwards,” Viskontas cautioned.

But without some kind of consistent yardstick, it would seem impossible to answer questions I really want answered, like whether certain people have a deeper capacity for love.

“It would seem so, from their behavior, but I can't experience what someone else feels, so who knows?” Viskontas says, throwing water on my certainty that I would be the best ever at that love-brain-sensor-cum-Lite Brite.

So, love is more an impulse in my brain than an emotion in my heart. But what about that inhuman glow? Other than having a baby in my belly (and I don’t! Thanks, Ludwig Haberlandt!), what could cause that steady Tropicana-orange-juice radiance? Well, according to scientists at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, the release of Oxytocin and other hormones during love and sex make the skin look younger and more elastic—so much so, that people who make a lot of whoopee tend to look five to seven years younger than the rest of us...er, rest of you.⁴ Or maybe looking six years younger could simply be the key to lots of sex, instead of vice versa (but don’t forget, the number one porn search term in North Carolina, Illinois, and Delaware is “MILF”).⁵

As time went on, my affection for my beloved only grew, which I guess is how you know you’re a grown-up. Grown-ups love each other more every time one of them leaves a piece of cake out and ants come into the house and ruin everything, because they learn something humanizing about their partners, or about themselves, or about ants. Grown-ups turn love into a growing experience, and they become better people for it, which makes them more lovable, et cetera, et cetera, and then you die. This experience of pouring all that affection into another person (or other persons) is thought to be universal. When the anthropologists William R. Jankowiak and Edward F. Fischer surveyed 166 societies, 147 had evidence of romantic love (the other nineteen didn’t have counter-evidence, but the data was unavailable).⁶

Chances are that if you are reading this, you too have experienced the joy of love, and the worst of love. By the time you reach college age, chances are about 95% that you will have been rejected by someone you passionately loved.⁷ Since the withdrawal symptoms associated with romantic rejection are pretty close to those for cocaine withdrawal,⁸ even the mention of rejection may call up the worst memories of your life (when I was nineteen, I literally tried to learn American Sign Language to impress an ex-boyfriend whose previous girlfriend knew how to sign. I was a mess.)

But if you’re reading this, alone, with a box of wine in one hand and a box of human-grade organic dog treats in the other, take heart: even if you never find anyone, chances are that at least you’ll die younger and be in misery for a shorter time.⁹ But even more likely, you’ll find someone again, and do this whole dance again, and sit in a chair that’s shaped like a hand, and take pictures, and the world will be your oyster.

And when that happens, your skin will look so good.

There are many myths and misconceptions found in every culture around the world. Some are more fanciful and colorful than others. There are stories concerning life’s more serious issues and of course there are those that are humorous. Every once in a while I come across a particular notion that is surprisingly foreign to my personal understanding of Native American beliefs. But, for the most part, it is the myths and legends that get sensationalized by popular culture that are most prevalent in my own experience. One such example came to my attention from a comment left on the blog Newspaper Rock, which inquired into what I thought about the following situation involving one of the worst droughts in decades, some comments from Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, and the subject of the “rain dance.” The article that initially brought my attention to this topic was actually written in response to another story by Lisa Miller, “Praying for Rain: Atheists Show How Petty and Small-Minded They’ve Become,” featured in the Washington Post. The situation stems from a White House briefing where Vilsack alerted people to the possibility of price gouging as a result of the drought. He would go on to make the following statements that not only reveal the desperation from the severity of the situation, but also the general misconception of what the rain dance is and what it represents, “I get on my knees every day and I’m saying an extra prayer right now. If I had a rain prayer or rain dance, I would do it” (Knox 2012). As I began to look into the situation, it became apparent that it stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of Native American religion.

Miller is the former senior writer at the Wall Street Journal, senior editor at News­week, and she oversees the coverage of religion by writing the regular column, “Belief Watch.” In her article, Miller responds with the following statement, “These days, it seems, atheists are petty and small-minded ideologues who regard every expression of public religiosity as a personal affront—not to mention a possible violation of the First Amendment and a sign of rampant idiocy among their fellow citizens” (Miller 2012). She would then go on to state that, “. . . such atheist hysteria reached a peak when Tom Flynn, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, publicly overreacted to remarks made at a news conference by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack” (Miller 2012). It seemed that while much of the attention focused in on the constitutionality of Vilsack’s comments, there were no concerns or thoughts about how the rain dance and Native American beliefs were being portrayed. Miller makes the claim in her article that, “Rain prayers are especially potent among desert dwellers; in the arid South­west, native Americans have for thousands of years made prayers, song and dances for rain, and they continue to do so today” (Miller 2012). This may be true, but it does not support the way Tom Vilsack used the term. While there are rituals and ceremonies dedicated to “welcoming” and “celebrating” the rain, this does not imply that the dances themselves bring, or cause, the rain.

In the Newspaper Rock blog post “Athe­ists Criticize Rain-Dance Wish,” Rob Schmidt makes the remark, “I’ve never heard of the ‘Rain Magic Song.’ I doubt the 21 Pueblo tribes in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas have that or any other rain related song or dance in common” (Schmidt 2012). He then goes on to reference and bring in another blogger to this discussion, Johnny P. Flynn, a Potawatomi Indian and faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University–Purdue Uni­versity Indianapolis. Flynn deals with these types of topics quite often and denies that any tribe dances to cause rain. Religion Dispatches features the special guest blog post from Flynn, “I Know Why a Rain Dance Won’t End The Drought,” where he makes the following personal statement, “As an American Indian all my life I have been cursed with the myth of the ‘Indian rain dance.’ I am here to say there is no such thing. Not in my Potawatomi tribe or in any other tribe across the Americas” (Flynn 2012). He goes on to tell a story from his own family about the ritual of splitting a tree with an axe to redirect, or split, an incoming storm. Flynn states that, “Every summer the Hopi hold late summer dances—but not to bring the rain. Like the ax in the tree, the rain is coming or not regardless of the ax or the dance. The dances are held to welcome the rain” (Flynn 2012).

This seems to correlate with the findings from texts that documented such dances.

For instance, the collection titled Amer­ican Indian Dances: Steps, Rhythms, Costumes, and Interpretation mentions the importance of rain to the agriculture and Puebloan people living in this part of the United States:

The Indians of the arid Southwest were dependent upon corn for their main supply of food. In the spring they planted their corn in hills or small bunches and dependent upon rain to come and make it grow. They realized how important rain was to their survival so they danced to inform the kachinas or gods that the corn was planted and needed the life-giving rain. (Squires and McLean 1970)

However, it is clear from Vilsack’s and Miller’s statements that these dances are not going to be fully understood until some context is provided.

The book The Hopi Snake Dance is compiled with collected letters from David Herbert Lawrence describing one of these dances. As people in the United States began traveling more into the southwest, stories of strange dances with snakes began gathering attention. Lawrence writes in the book’s foreword that, “Surprisingly the first published description of the Snake Dance did not appear until 1879 when William Mateer’s account was published in a New York newspaper, The Long Islander” (Lawrence [1885–1930] 1980). It begins with his earliest re­port as it initially appeared in the December 1924 issue of Theater Arts Monthly. In this account, he provides a background that helps explain much of the fascination surrounding one of these dances.

From 1880 to 1920, the Hopi Snake and Antelope ceremony, popularly known as the Snake dance, was far and away the most widely depicted Southwest Native Amer­ican ritual. Usually performed in August to ensure abundant rainfall for the corn crops, it was only one ritual in the round of ceremonies that Hopi’s enacted throughout the year, but because it involved the handling of live snakes, it was the ceremony most often described by non-Indian observers. (Lawrence [1885–1930] 1980)

The Hopi tribes of American Indian people are located in the northeastern region of Arizona. It is their belief that things like the sun, rain, sunshine, and thunder are alive, just not as anthropomorphic beings. While they are said to be alive and manifest through activity, they are not considered to be personal gods. Lawrence uses the term “animistic” to differentiate the Native American religion of spirits, from the other religions describing a single spirit. He gives one explanation to some of the meanings behind the term animism and the Snake Dance:

. . . in the religion of aboriginal America, there is no Father, and no Maker. There is a great source of life: say the Sun of existence: to which you can no more pray than you can pray to Electricity. And emerging from this Sun are the great potencies, the invisible influences which make shine and warmth and rain. From these great interrelated potencies of the rain and heat and thunder emerge the seeds of life itself, corn, and creatures like snakes. (Lawrence [1885–1930] 1980)

Lawrence also goes on to define these “potencies” mentioned and provides more detail into the religious perspective of the Hopi in the following excerpt,

The Potencies are not Gods. They are Dragons. The Sun of Creation itself is a dragon most terrible, vast, and most powerful, yet even so, less in being than we. The only gods on earth are men. For gods, like man, do not exist beforehand. They are created and evolved gradually, with aeons of effort, out of the fire and smelting of life. They are the highest thing created, smelted between the furnaces of the Life-Sun, and beaten on the anvil of the rain, with hammers of thunder and bellows of rushing wind. The cosmos is a great furnace, a dragon’s den, where the heroes and demi-gods, men, forge themselves into being. It is a vast and violent matrix, where souls form like diamonds in earth, under extreme pressure. (Lawrence [1885–1930] 1980)

According to the preface of the book Indian Dances of North America: Their Importance to Indian Life, Reginald and Gladys Laubin were given their own Indian names after being adopted by the “fighting nephew” of Sitting Bull named Chief One Bull. They recorded the events featured in the volume from their own personal observations and experiences living with Native American people. The foreword was provided by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and Sioux-Mohawk tribal member Louis R. Bruce. The Laubins’ work provides a perspective that rarely gets reflected or documented in the recording of these religious ceremonies. Not only does the book depict the mechanics of the dancing, but it also includes the parts of American Indian life that often do not get mentioned or simply go unnoticed. One of the dances covered in their text is the Hopi Snake Dance. Similar to the time from D.H. Lawrence’s account, the Laubins state in their work that, “Ethnographers began publishing accounts of the Snake dance in both the popular press and museum monographs in the 1880’s.” But, they also make the argument that,

The beginnings of the Snake Dance doubtless trace back to the snake cults of Mexico and Central America. It is certain that many Pueblo tribes had similar dances at one time. The Spaniards apparently never saw the Snake Dance, or they surely would have reported it. But rumors about it began to be heard in the middle 1800’s, usually to be classed as tall tales of the early visitors to the Hopi country. (Laubin and Laubin 1989)

It would become clear to the Laubins that the outsiders’ perspective had quickly overshadowed any relevance the dances had to the Hopis worldview. They also describe this clash between perspectives another way, “The Snake dance—the event itself as well as the burgeoning representations of it—became a spectacle that defined and displayed the cultural differences between the ‘primitive’ Hopis and the ‘civilized’ Amer­icans” (Laubin and Laubin 1989).

As word about the dance spread throughout the country, even people such as President Theodore Roosevelt began to catch wind of the mythical ceremony. The Laubins’ depiction states that,

The ceremony also became a major tourist attraction; thousands of people, including many celebrities and luminaries, de­scended on the Hopi mesas every year, and detailed accounts of the ritual appeared in travel narratives, guidebooks, and railroad promotional pamphlets. (Laubin and Laubin 1989)

All of this attention quickly brought up the prospect of capitalizing on the dance. The Laubins’ documentation would show some of the concerns that they also shared from the sudden growth of popularity.

The Hopis seemed good candidates for civilization. They were “peaceful”, lived in houses, practiced agriculture, and crafted objects of beauty and utility. However, the process of civilizing the Hopis apparently would involve the “loss” of their culture. As they became more civilized, more like white Americans, they would give up their Hopi ways. Ethnographers, therefore, went to the Hopi mesas to salvage what they could of Hopi culture before it disappeared, and they believed their data would help show how the Hopis could be incorporated into the nation. (Laubin and Laubin 1989)

Eventually, the tribes that held these ceremonies felt the public was taking advantage of the privilege and took it away from them. The concerns of the Hopi people get mentioned in the following from the Laubins’ book:

Caught in a flurry of ethnographic, artistic, literary, and touristic interest in the Snake dance, Hopis quickly discovered the proliferation of representations was just as threatening to their cultural practices as government schools, land allotment, and missionaries. By the early 1920s they had forbidden sketching and taking photographs of the ceremony, and eventually they closed it to outsiders altogether. (Laubin and Laubin 1989)

Perhaps closing the ceremony off from the public contributed to the survival of this cultural aspect from the Hopi people on reservations today.

Even though many of these misconceptions surrounding the Snake Dance are still alive, not all is lost because some of the legends behind them are still around as well, such as the tale of the Hopi Boy and the Sun. Like some other southwestern tribes, the Hopi people believe they originated in the Underworld and that snakes are actually their relatives. There is a version of a tale that surrounds a poor Hopi boy living with his grandmother who goes on a journey to discover his father, which people believe has changed over time and through many retellings over the generations due to certain aspects found within the story that were thought to be foreign to the Pueblo people until after the Spaniards arrived. This Hopi account of the sun was recorded and related by a Zuni elder in 1920. Along the young boy’s journey, he comes across many colorful characters that show up embodied as some form of nature such as the sun, corn, wheat, birds, and rattlesnakes. Early on in the story, the Hopi boy gets into quite a predicament after getting trapped inside a box that he had built to travel downstream and meets a rattle-snake girl: “So the girl broke the door, and when the Hopi boy came out, she took him to her house. Inside he saw many people—young and old, men and women—and they were all rattlesnakes” (Boas [1920] 1984). Later in the story, the boy learns that the sun is his father and they go off into another world making it safe for the people living there under attack from other marauding groups. At the end of their journey making the world safe for the people, the Hopi boy and rattlesnake girl make their return home. Along the way, rattlesnake girl asks to make a stop by her house.

They entered the house, and she told her relatives that the Hopi boy was her husband. Then they resumed their journey. That evening they arrived in the Hopi village. The boy made straight for his grandmother’s house, but an old chief said, “Look at the handsome man going into that poor home!” he invited the boy into his own house, but the boy replied, “No, I’m going here.” The war chief said, “We don’t want you in that dirty house.”

“The house is mine,” the boy replied, “so tell your people to clean it up. When all of you treated me badly, I went up to the sun and he helped me.”

On the following evening the boy appeared before a village council and told all that had happened to him. “You must teach people how to act rightly. The sun says that you should forbid all bad actions.” The people accepted his words, and everyone worked hard at cleaning his house. In return the boy gave peaches, melons, and wafer bread to the poor. Every evening after sunset the women would come with their dishes, and he would offer them venison stew and peaches. He said to the chief, “I teach the people the right way to live. Even if you are my enemy, I must show you how to behave well.”

Twin children, a boy and a girl, were born to his wife. They had the shape of rattlesnakes, but they were also humans. (Boas [1920] 1984)

It seems Rob Schmidt might have provided the most reasonable and accurate depictions by simply posing the following questions, “Are these actions to beckon a particular rainstorm? To ask the gods to continue to deliver rain as they have in the past? To welcome the rain? Or . . .? These purposes are similar, but they aren’t quite the same thing” (Schmidt 2012). What does seem to correlate with the evidence and provides the most likely explanation for the significance of the rain dance comes from Reginald and Gladys Laubin’s accounts when they state, “The idea of dancing for power, to signify unity of purpose, to establish harmony with all creation, is not strange to Indians all over the country” (Laubin and Laubin 1989). Perhaps, in the end it was D.H. Lawrence who provided the most insight into the underlying aspects to this fundamental misunderstanding while recording his own experience of personally witnessing the Hopi Snake Dance: “We say they look wild. But they have the remoteness of their religion, their animistic vision, in their eyes, they can’t see as we see. And they cannot accept us. They stare at us as the coyotes stare at us: the gulf of mutual negation between us” (Boas [1920] 1984).

References

Boas, Franz. (1920) 1984. The Hopi Boy and the Sun. In American Indian Myths and Legends, selected and edited by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, (New York: Pantheon):145–150.

Flynn, Johnny P. 2012. I know why a rain dance won’t end the drought (blog post). Religion Dispatches (July 22). Online at http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/guest_bloggers/6206/i_know_why_a_rain_dance_won%27t_end_the_drought/.

Knox, Oliver. 2012. Ag Sec Vilsack wishes for ‘rain prayer’ to combat painful drought. Yahoo! News (July 18). Online at http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/ag-sec-vilsack-wishes-rain-prayer-combat-painful-191255266.html.

Laubin, Reginald, and Gladys Laubin. 1989. Indian Dances of North America: Their Importance to Indian Life (Civilization of the American Indian Series). University of Oklahoma Press: 418–423.

Law­­rence, David H. (1885–1930) 1980. The Hopi Snake Dance. Peccary Press.

Miller, Lisa. 2012. Praying for rain: Atheists show how petty and small-minded they’ve become. Washington Post (July 26). Online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/praying-for-rain-atheist-critics-show-how-petty-and-small-minded-theyve-become/2012/07/26/gJQAB9BeBX_story.html.

Schmidt, Rob. 2012. Atheist criticize rain-dance wish (blog post). Newspaper Rock (July 26). Online at http://newspaperrock.bluecorncomics.com/2012/07/atheists-criticize-rain-dance-wish.html.

Squires, John L., and Robert E. McLean. 1970. Amer­ican Indian Dances: Steps, Rhythms, Costumes, and Inter­pretation. New York: The Ronald Press Company.

A birthday horoscope by Morag Riddell

You are not special, the stars and planets decided that at your birth. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake, as Tyler Durden might say. In fact, all your complexities and quirks, your desires and passions, everything you have done or will do fits neatly into what looks like a twelve-slice pie chart laden with calligraphy. A snowflake you are not if astrology were true.

Despite what your mother may have told you, if astrology were true there would be at least hundreds of thousands of people who share in your uniqueness. Indeed, if astrologers could determine your personality and future from your hour and date of birth, there would be 8,760 different combinations available. With 7.1 billion people on the planet this means around 810,000 people would each receive your exact horoscope, your wisdom from the wandering planets above, your future. Human psychology may be broken up into general personality traits, but astrology breaks up human life into less possible variations than the combinations of a 2x2x2 Rubik’s Cube.

If astrology were true, society would fracture. Over time we would learn what days of the year gave rise to what kinds of people. Like parents who want their children to become professional hockey players, mothers would calculate conception and birthing times in order to give their son or daughter a particular star sign. Pharmaceutical companies would make a killing developing the drugs that allowed mothers to delay and control births more effectively. Being born into a specific astrological sign would create grand social rifts. Different schools would spring up as they did for different religions in twentieth century Ireland. Potential mates would need not only good looks but also descendants who shared the same sign. Libras and Aries would be the modern Capulets and Montagues.

Studies would be undertaken to establish the psychology determined by stars and planets. The zodiac would replace Myers Briggs. Modern descriptions of psychopathy would include “being a Gemini” as a defining symptom. The Diagnostic and Statistics Manual cites Mercury as much as it does brain chemistry in a world where astrology is true.

Political parties would also incorporate star signs. Candidates run on the basis of how compatible they are with Cancers and Leos—perhaps key demographics. The Speaker of the House would need to be in the astrological 10^th House. And when faraway stars eventually shift enough to change star signs, revolutions follow. A new type of human would enter the mix every few centuries. The status quo would be forever challenged by the whims of gravity.

As we look to the stars, we inevitably imagine traveling to other worlds. That would be a mistake if astrology were true. Colonists making a home for themselves on some far away planet would have a completely different astrological profile—their constellations would be entirely different, as would the surrounding planets. Panic ensues with no horoscopes to guide them. Babies born there would then have personalities yet unseen on Earth. Inhabiting a potential Goldilocks planet like Kepler-62e would quickly produce new kinds of lovers, fighters, and psychopaths.

Back on Earth, the stars and planets in the sky would affect each and every baby born via gravity, meaning that delivery rooms would need to be as pristine as microchip labs if astrology were true. Even a fly landing on the mother’s stomach before birth would affect her more than the gravity of Saturn.

Forget the news, horoscopes are gospel when astrology is true. Dwindling science sections of newspapers are outright discontinued as the future-divining astrologers devour column space. Don’t worry about who you might meet or where your life is going, that is up to the wobble and wanderings of Mars, they say. And after any day’s reading, good or bad, our solar system will eventually replay that particular planetary configuration like a cosmic vinyl record. Your future is simplified. Every so often the planets will conspire to bring about the same set of outcomes from the infinitely possible ones. Hope you saved your horoscope from a few years back, you are going to receive (another) interesting business proposal once those planets realign.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Expect to be bored.

But instead of having a limited number of human personalities and determined destinies, psychological effects can explain exactly why horoscopes are so appealing (and seem spot-on) and analyses of horoscopes themselves reveal no distinct advice among twelve supposedly separate groups. With no force in the known universe able to link the motion of planets and stars to human births, personalities, or lives, can we reduce astrology to the absurd?

It awards the Nobel Prizes in science and proudly portrays not a political figure but one of its most eminent scientists, botanist Carl von Linné (1707–1778), better known to the world as Linnaeus, the father of biological nomenclature, on its ubiquitous 100-kronor note (about $16). So it is hardly surprising that Sweden is the home of a large and vibrant skeptics group and was the able host of the 2013 European Skeptics Congress (ESC), August 23–25, in Stockholm.

The fifteenth in the series of biennial congresses created by the European Council of Skeptical Organizations (but first in Scandinavia), ESC 2013 featured speakers from ten countries and plenty of time for socializing and networking. Martin Rundkvist and P.J. Råsmark of the Swedish Skeptics officiated and kept things running smoothly.

Most all the usual academic topics were covered, but there were also magicians and even Sweden’s first astronaut, PhD physicist and CERN Fellow Christer Fuglesang of the European Space Agency, a veteran of two space missions to the International Space Station (including five spacewalks totaling nearly thirty-two hours), in 2006 and 2009. He proudly noted he has been a member of the Swedish Skeptics almost from their beginning, in the early 1980s. In his lively presentation of phenomenal photos of Earth from space he included one of himself wearing an “Always Be Skeptical” T-shirt while peering down at Earth from the International Space Station.

Physician and statistician Hans Rosling (Karolinska Institute) and his son Ala Rosling jolted attendees’ preconceptions from the start with their “fact-based worldview with animated data.” Founders of the Gapminder Foundation, which develops the Trendalyzer software system for visualization of statistics, they took the audience through rapid-fire animated displays of world demographic trends. Much of what we think we know about world population trends is wrong, they told us, and then demonstrated, first using an instant electronic feedback system to take the audiences’ answers to a series of questions and compare them with reality.

Today half of the world’s population is in Asia and Africa, but by the year 2100 that figure will leap to 80 percent. “CEOs know this better than academics,” said Hans, a bow to the practical value of modern demographic knowledge.

A dramatic new reality has set in. Whereas couples used to have on average six children of whom four died, the new balance is now two kids per couple, with most of them surviving. This dramatic decline in babies born per woman is true of all religions and regions. Europe just started doing it earlier. As a result world population will continue rising but not at the steep rate predicted three or four decades ago.

And so it went.

Dr. Christine de Jong (The Netherlands), Michael "Marsh" Marshall (U.K.), Kendrick Frazier (U.S.), Shane Greenup (Australia), and moderator and conference chairman Martin Rundkvist (Sweden) at panel on journalism and critical thinking at 15th European Skeptics Congress, Stockholm. Photo credit: Olle Kjellin.

Max Maven, the mentalist and illusionist, gave both a lecture where he praised some deception (“art is a beautiful deception”) and later a two-hour evening performance. Even our audience of skeptics found ourselves repeatedly mystified (but with no implication of paranormality), a good lesson for everyone.

Kristine Hjustad (Norway), a medical student and PhD candidate (and also a performer of theatrical magic), performed knot-tying and other illusions to demonstrate how we are fooled and how we interpret our perceptions, add meaning to them, and simplify them, usually without realizing it. “Our brain is in control. It decides.”

Magician Tom Stone (Sweden) continued that theme. He showed and then patiently explained some of the psychological and perceptual principles behind creating some illusions. “So now you won’t be fooled,” he added wryly. He then performed them again, and fooled everyone again.

Neuroscientist Beatrice Mautino of Italy’s CICAP skeptics group emphasized the value of solving mysteries to learn science (and vice versa). She said skeptical investigation can kill three birds at once when it not only solves a mystery but explains some scientific facts (like the physics of firewalking) . . . and then goes on to tell something about how science works. Hands-on activities are especially productive. CICAP takes people out to make their own crop circles (they start with thirty-meter-diameter circles) or test “the blood of San Januarius” or lie on a bed of nails. As for assertions about an Apollo landing hoax, she and her colleagues go through the evidence for that, and then ask people to investigate and test the claims themselves. This seems to be an effective strategy.

Shane Greenup (Australia) reinforced that theme. Instead of telling people they are wrong, he urges leading them to question the belief using the Internet to find the right information. And that right information could come via his Rbutr.com software. You install Rbutr in your browser and it finds rebuttals to extraordinary claims. Skeptics can establish a link from any web page making a claim to the rebuttals of their choice.

As journalistic organizations cut costs and staff, they do less real reporting. Michael “Marsh” Marshall (United Kingdom), who writes about the role of PR in modern media, warned against a spreading practice he calls “churnalism”—printing press releases as news. A particularly popular new practice is publishing what are essentially advertisements hidden as “research” based on online polls. Companies sponsor simple online polls, paying people to fill out what he calls “B.S.” surveys filled with dodgy and leading questions and all calculated to lead to some favorable view about the particular business—say preferences about travel or fashion. He has a “fourth paragraph rule”—if a company name appears around the fourth paragraph, there is a strong chance it paid for the article. London’s tabloid Daily Mail, the biggest newspaper in Britain, is notorious for this, he said. It runs these paid surveys in almost every issue. “They’ll put out anything to get attention.”

Psychologist Tomasz Witkowski (Poland), familiar to our readers from several recent pieces in SI, gave a nuanced talk addressing the question of whether the social sciences are what Richard Feynman called a “cargo cult science.” Witkowski has his criticisms of social science—too much of it deals with unimportant topics, and its surveys often use students and other biased samples. But he ultimately came down in defense of the social sciences, which he said have great hidden potential. One example is the research that showed that adding a third brake light on the rear of vehicles would drastically reduce accidents and injuries, or that emergency vehicles should be painted lime green to be most easily seen—practices, along with many advances in passenger airline safety, that have now been widely adopted and save lives.

Dr. Catherine de Jong (Netherlands), an anesthesiologist, addiction researcher, and president of the Dutch Society Against Quackery, described pseudoscientific addiction treatments that contradict treatments based on science. These questionable treatments include the Prometa protocol , disulfiram injections, and Ibocaine. The latter is described as “a naturally occurring psychoactive substance found in plants in West Africa,” implying that since it is natural it is safe. Ibocaine use carries a high risk of heart arrythmias and death, and it has been forbidden in the USA. Some of these addictions treatments claim FDA approval (but any approvals are not for addiction treatment) or “almost 100 percent success” or offer a dubious hypothesis about the working mechanism. Good science, better cooperation among health authorities, and investigative journalism all can help get rid of such pseudoscientific treatments.

Anna Bäsén gave many examples of such investigative journalism. A medical reporter for a leading Swedish daily newspaper, she specializes in undercover health journalism, going undercover to nursing homes or alternative medical practitioners (such as a health coach who claimed you can cure deadly viruses with positive thinking) or psychics (she got a cold reading of “one of my not-real dead relatives”) and then simply reporting what they say. Undercover medical journalism shouldn’t be used recklessly, Bäsén says, but “I also get upset when people get ripped off.” Her published exposés have put some of these people out of business.

Science teacher Dénis Caroti (France) described teaching about intellectual self-delusion in France (where the word ”zetetics” rather than “skepticism” is used to avoid the negative connotations of the latter). He touted physicist and CSI Fellow Henri Broch’s Laboratory of Zetetics at the University of Nice, Sophia, where critical thinking is an official skill to be acquired by students.

On the final morning, Chris French (United Kingdom) gave a survey of anomalistic psychology (also the title of his forthcoming book), Hayley Stevens (United Kingdom) described some of her experiences as a skeptical ghost hunter, and I ended the conference with a talk on “Why We Do This: The Higher Values of Skeptical Inquiry” (to be published in the November/December 2013 Skeptical Inquirer).

There was more, a lot more, but you get the idea. For three days in Stockholm science and skepticism were the central theme of stimulating intellectual discussion and exchange. Young skeptics were everywhere and lent vigor and freshness. And until there is a Nobel Prize in science-based skepticism or a distinguished skeptic makes it onto some nation’s currency, that will just have to do.

It might have been when Ross threw up on my living room floor that I second-guessed our plan. We were going to down a few shots, wait an hour for it to kick in, and then record our podcast, tipsy, and answer some questions about the show in general, before testing a hangover remedy the next morning, also on-air. Little did we know that our far-too-smart listeners would send in questions like:

“Is it hotter in Quebec than it is in the summer?”

“If a train is going 50 miles an hour and a cat is going 30 miles an hour, then aren’t I a vegetarian?”

“What’s 6,041 x 320? You may show your work.”

We struggled through the math, and answered the others the way a child might talk to someone they find during hide-and-seek.

“Ohhhh, you think you got us, but you DIDN’T! That doesn’t make SENSE!”

When the next day rolled around, we would be getting up early to try Blowfish Hangover Remedy, a new over-the-counter medicine alleged to lessen a hangover and “get you back on your feet in minutes.”¹ The claim could have safety and even legal implications: Hangovers can impair a person’s driving abilities, even hours after they have stopped drinking.² But now, still almost eight hours from the proposed wake-up time, Ross was on all fours, staring at his own vomit, and apologizing.

“Really, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Look how CLEAR my vomit is! I’m so sorry,” he mumbled as he tried to mop up the clear fluid that had spewed out of him suddenly, mid-sentence. Since Ross had been on a juice cleanse for two days and then drunk three rum-and-cokes, two glasses of champagne, and a beer in about 45 minutes, the upchuck was actually about the least-disgusting that vomit can get. On the show that night, my guest and I gently coaxed Ross back onto the couch, to think about what he’d done for science.

“You know,” I said gently, “I only drank a couple drinks, and I’m still loopy. You don’t have to drink that much...”

“Yeah, but I’m a quarter Irish. I can hold it,” said Ross, before running to the toilet.

---

The next morning, at 7:30 am, we stumbled to our microphones, respectively racked ear-to-ear with pain (me), and feeling sort-of unpleasant (inexplicably, Ross). We filled our glasses with water. Dropping the fizzy tabs in the water made a satisfying sizzling sound. Surely, all our sins would be absolved by this: the sound of medicine working.

We each downed two tablets, the recommended dosage. Ross, having had a lot more to drink (he’s part-Irish, you know) considered taking extra, but the recommended dosage seemed advisable. We flipped the box over to see how much of each active ingredient was going into our systems.

Aspirin    500 mg    Pain reliever

Caffeine    60 mg    Alertness aid/Pain reliever aid³

Yes, the magic cure-all flying off the shelves was a simple mixture of two age-old hangover remedies: some cheap aspirin, and a cup of coffee. All that for about two dollars a dosage. More than a coffee at my local 7/11.

But, according to Blowfish’s supporters, the magic tablets are worth it. At the drug store, the day before, I had asked a gentleman stocking the shelves whether he knew of any hangover remedies in the store, especially the storied Blowfish.

“Oh, I know exactly the one you mean!” Erich said, “But we don’t have it. We had to special order it for this guy last week. He said it’s really, really good! Hey, let me check in the back to make sure.”

He ran off, seeming eager to look it over with me so we could decide together: Yep, that looks like it’d cure a hangover, all right!

When he came back empty-handed, he apologized.

“You can special order it for next week.”

“No, I need it for tonight.”

“Oh yeah, I getcha,” he said, winking. I wanted to tell him that I don’t just do this sort of thing. No, no, I’m a proper journalist who does experiments, like getting drunk and doing math. But, in a bit of a hurry, I instead scanned the shelves one more time, and there it caught my eye: the tiny blue box with the telltale air-bubble design.

“Oh, there it is!” I said, grabbing a box.

“Let me see!” said Erich. Together, we read over the ingredients.

“It’s just caffeine and aspirin,” I said.

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, the guy said it’s really, really good. Maybe it’s special aspirin.”

---

The next morning, sitting at our microphones, the fizzy tablets seeping into our blood streams, we struggled to coherently describe our experience. As a chronic headache sufferer, I was either the best or the worst test subject for Blowfish’s efficacy. I found myself in somewhat less pain, but still fighting to feel like an ordinary human being. But as the minutes wore on, the headaches wore off. The grogginess turned to jitters, and my vision went from unfocused-haze to slightly anxious attention. Aspirin and caffeine had worked their wonders, to the surprise of no one.

We discussed the trade-off of paying so much for two of the oldest medicines going. “I guess you could argue that the special secret you’re paying for here is the formula—how much caffeine, and how much aspirin,” I offered.

One of the great things about doing a show with highly intelligent listeners is that they are constantly correcting you, lovingly, like a mother who tells you that you cleaned your room really well, except for the pile of clothes that you thought was a “woodless bureau” artistic statement, and she thinks is more like “a mess.” This time, it took about a day. Once the show was released, a listener wrote in about the remedy she’d been taking for years: BC Powder. BC, she said, was nearly exactly the same, and for a fraction of the price. I checked the ingredients.

Aspirin    845 mg    Pain reliever/Fever reducer

Caffeine    65 mg    Pain reliever Aid⁴

BC Powder had more aspirin and more caffeine in a single dosage. Twenty-four dosages were contained in a single box. And one box was just shy of five dollars. About 90% off from the Blowfish remedy. But perhaps they were just biting off Blowfish’s sweeping success with America’s drunks? A quick reading of “The BC Story” on their homepage (with some pictures of two dashing boys destined to be either pharmacists or very scary cult leaders) suggests that BC is the much older sibling. Blowfish was released in September, 2011⁵; BC Powder was formulated in 1906.⁶

---

When Ross and I packed up our microphones and went about our days, he was already ready to go to work but I was still feeling pretty run down, even though I had had a fraction of the alcohol he had consumed. After my experiment with Blowfish, I went back to my usual hangover prevention routine: not drinking. But if I ever have to help out a hung over friend, I’m going to recommend BC Powder. No, wait, scratch that...I’m going to bring them my Blowfish Hangover Remedy. I have extra.

You can hear more about Ross and Carrie’s adventure with Blowfish (and hear them try to complete a simple math problem) at ohnopodcast.com or on iTunes under Oh No, Ross and Carrie!

Cassandra Vanzant calls herself an “extraterrestrial communicator,” among other things. I appeared with her on CBS’s Anderson, hosted by journalist Anderson Cooper. (The show aired on April 24, 2012.) Vanzant claims to be in communication with alien intelligences whose messages she allegedly receives telepathically and then “translates.” She informed Anderson that he, too, had a star family, the “Lamarians” living in “the fourth dimension.” (See Nickell 2012.)

New Age Contactee

Vanzant’s claims are legion. At one time or another (sometimes under the pseudonym “Cheryl Hill”) she has acted as a tarot-card reader and instructor, ghost hunter, spiritualist medium, angel communicant, ordained minister (nondenominational), professional psychic (although she failed to foresee a serious car accident in which she was a passenger), and of course, telepathic “Master Alien Communicator” (“About the author” 2012; “About me” 2012; Vanzant 2012a).

When an amused Anderson Cooper asked his TV audience how many believed Vanzant’s claimed ability to communicate with aliens, a single person raised her hand. The audience was right to be skeptical. Ms. Vanzant is only the most recent embodiment of the contactee, a person who purports to be in repeated communication with extraterrestrials.

Contactees emerged in the early 1950s, following an influx of flying saucer reports. The Space Brothers were supposedly making themselves known to a select group of chosen persons (who thus function rather like the prophets in religions of yore) to spread their supposedly advanced wisdom to mere Earthlings. The contactees tended to be mystical folk of a type we would today call New Agers, embracing Eastern “mystery” religions, notably Hinduism, as well as Western Messianic traditions (Story 2001, 134). Today, contactees have been largely supplanted by abductees who themselves now also frequently serve as alleged cosmic messengers (Nickell 2007, 255–56).

Fantasizing

Revealingly, like many other claimed extraterrestrial communicants (Nickell 2007, 251–58), Ms. Vanzant has several of the traits associated with a fantasy-prone personality. Such a person is sane and normal but with an unusual ability to fantasize, according to a pioneering study by Wilson and Barber (1983).

For example, Vanzant has ostensible imaginary friends (“Artoli” and “Mada­scrat”), claims to receive special messages from higher beings (not only extraterrestrials but also angels and spirit guides), purports to have psychic powers and fortunetelling abilities, reports having had an out-of-body/near-death experience (NDE), and so on, as well as appearing to generally have a rich fantasy life (Vanzant 2012a; see also her website, http://www.starfamilymessages.com).

Describing her near-death experience Van­zant (2012a) recalls floating up to the hospital roof and onward, “toward the stars.” She soon entered a “green tunnel,” then found herself “surrounded by angels, extraterrestrials, and spirit guides,” each of whom gave her a message. The experience, she says, “started my quest.” (The NDE—although only a hallucination produced by an altered brain state—is often life-transforming for the experiencer [Blackmore 1996].)

The ET Tongue

Vanzant (2012a) purportedly “channels” her clients’ star families, first speaking to them in the “ET language” (“Twinkle” 2012). This is basically a form of glossolalia or “speaking in tongues,” like that mentioned in the Bible as “an unknown tongue” and “the tongues of . . . angels” (1 Corinthians 13:1; 14:2–9). It is practiced by Pentecostals and others. Linguistic studies show that glossolalia is typically “psychobabble”—nonsense syllables used as pseudolanguage (Nickell 1993, 103–109). In this respect, Vanzant seems to be following in the footsteps of psychic-medium Helene Smith who, in 1894, claimed to have visited the planet Mars in a trance, describing flora and fauna, houses, cars, and other artifacts of civilization, even supposedly bringing back the Martian language—although it proved syntactically to be like French (Baker and Nickell 1992, 199).

In any event, after speaking in the supposed ET family tongue, Vanzant (2012a) then provides “translations.” Here is one of her purportedly channeled “Star Family Messages”—this one “From the Counsel [sic] for Arbitrary Enlightenment”:

We of the Counsel wish to come to you to speak of the pertinent subjects that are randomly designed to complicate the matters of enlightenment or ascension on this Earth plane. Know that we are here to help you discover and put to rest the speculations of what is this and what is that, and when will this occur and when will that occur. Seek not that which you have heard or read about from others, for everyone on this earthly plane has their [sic] own truths. When you see the illusion of what is being perpetrated against the whole of the human race, then you will see clearer that which is the clearest of all—this truth is you and in you [and so on]. (“Twinkle” 2012)

Analysis

I studied Vanzant’s “translations,” finding them to be rife with New Age clichés. In the passage just quoted, examples are “on this earthly plane” and the reference to people having “their own truths.” Further on in the message, we find such additional familiar expressions as “the truth shall set you free” (a biblical quotation!), “your inner-wisdom,” “existed on a different plane,” “a parallel dimension,” “God, in His infinite wisdom,” “a higher realm,” “the Other World,” etc. (“Twinkle” 2012). Not surprisingly, Van­zant herself also talks like this, referring to “the energy we all came from,” “we’re all connected,” “on the right path,” “using me as a channel,” and so on (Vanzant 2012a). The ET texts seem indistinguishable from her own New Age speech.¹

Her meetings with those seeking star-family messages seem like a cross between a prayer session (she asks subjects to close their eyes), a séance (she supposedly channels an invisible, otherworldly entity), and a fortuneteller’s reading (she offers suggestions and expectations for the future). In short, they are just what one would expect from a fantasizer with Vanzant’s background.

Interestingly, given that the star family messages are all in “the same language,” I find it suspicious that opening passages of messages addressed to two different people—both translated as “We come to you . . .”—are composed of entirely different sound sequences.² Of course, this is just what we would expect if Vanzant were indeed only producing psychobabble. (She politely declined my request to provide both a written text and translation of the same “message” [Vanzant 2012b].) In light of the evidence, skepticism of Vanzant’s claims is warranted.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Ed Beck, who did considerable online research for this article and helped in various other ways.

Notes

1. Of course the “messages” are sometimes in a heightened form compared to her ordinary speech, just as Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” has a more elevated diction than his routine letters.

2. See Vanzant 2012a (backstage clips from Anderson).

References

About the Author. 2012. Ad for Cassandra Vanzant’s 2012: Coming Out of the Coma. Online at www.amazon.com/2012-Coming-Channeled-Extraterrestrial-Beings/dp/1466416084; accessed May 18, 2012.

About Me—Cheryl Hill. 2012. Online at www.helium.com/users/339567; accessed May 18, 2012.

Baker, Robert A., and Joe Nickell. 1992. Missing Pieces: How to Investigate Ghosts, UFOs, Psychics, & Other Mysteries. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Blackmore, Susan. 1996. Near-Death Experiences, in Stein 1996, 425–440.

I Was Abducted by Aliens. 2012. Anderson show episode, CBS, aired April 24 (includes on-air statements, other taped portions, online clips, personal communications, etc.).

Nickell, Joe. 1993. Looking for a Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions & Healing Cures. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 2007. Adventures in Paranormal Investigation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

———. 2012. States of mind: Some perceived ET encounters. Skeptical Inquirer 36(6) (November/December): 12–15.

Stein, Gordon, ed. 1996. The Encyclopedia of the Para­normal. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

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

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star—A Channeled Message by Cassandra Vanzant. 2012. Online at http://lightworkersworld.com/2012/03/twinkle-twinkle-little-star-a-channeled-message-by-Cassandra-Vanzant/; accessed May 15, 2012.

Vanzant, Cassandra. 2012a. In “I Was Abducted” 2012.

———. 2012b. Personal communication, May 22.

Wilson, Sheryl C., and Theodore X. Barber. 1983. The Fantasy-Prone Personality. In A.A. Sheikh, ed., Imagery: Current Theory, Research and Application. New York: John Wiley & Sons.