Wedding bands typically feature a particular metal such as gold, silver, platinum, or in some cases, titanium. There is no scientific reason to believe that the substance of the metal (e.g., the titanium) has any direct influence on a person’s physical health or emotional well-being. Now, imagine dissolving that same metal in water so the resulting microscopic-sized particles could be infused into an item that could be worn or kept in close proximity. Would the resulting item provide a health benefit where the solid mass could not?
That is the essence of the claim made by Phiten Corporation (Phiten), a Japanese company that distributes products worldwide. Phiten offered the following summary on the English version of its corporate webpage (see www.phiten.com):


All Phiten products incorporate a novel form of technology that involves metals broken down into microscopic particles dispersed in water. This process underlines [sic] the technologies of a variety of unique materials we possess. By utilizing the property of each material to a maximum extent, we are able to realize customers’ potentials in a variety of extents that leads to restore normal relaxation status of customers. This is the technology that supports more comfortable daily life.


These “Aqua Metals” include titanium, silver, platinum, palladium, and gold. They are incorporated into several products such as necklaces, bracelets, tape, lotions, athletic supports, garments, sleeping goods, and “relaxation equipment.” Phiten also offers a “Phiten Room” where microscopic-particle titanium (MPT) can be permeated into wall surfaces to enhance relaxation.


Those who are not familiar with Phiten might be surprised at the popularity of its products. The Phiten webpage currently offers a robust list of global contacts that, at present, includes locations in Europe, Asia, Australia, North America, and South America. The United States subsidiary, Phiten USA (www.phitenUSA.com), notes that there are over 130 Phiten retail locations in Japan and that Phiten started officially in Southern California in 1998. The Phiten USA timeline also refers to several well-known athletes who have served as Phiten representatives (including Jennie Finch, Carmelo Anthony, Josh Hamilton, and Hideki Matsuyama). Phiten was a corporate partner of University of Hawaii Athletics for several years and has had formal relationships with Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the National Hockey League (NHL). Phiten recently developed a baseball cleat with New Balance, a well-known athletic apparel company. Phiten’s products usually incorporate MPT, which is sometimes called “Aqua Titan” or “Aqua-Titanium.” Phiten’s titanium-treated necklaces seem to be particularly popular in baseball.

Claims and Evidence Surrounding MPT


We were interested in the claim that MPT, even when located externally to a person, can influence emotional well-being (e.g., wearing an MPT-infused necklace). The presence of MPT could influence well-being through a placebo effect, and MPT, when infused in a tape or garment, could exert some influence simply by keeping people warmer (see Rowlands et al. 2014). However, Phiten has clearly cultivated the notion that being in the presence of MPT can directly improve emotional well-being through some mysterious process. Consider Phiten’s description regarding its necklaces and bracelets:


Simply by wearing these products, your body can feel relaxed and refreshed. Our necklaces are an indispensable item for relieving stress and fatigue in our modern lives... . In all aspects of life—from everyday activities to athletics—our products can help maximize your potential energy and strength. This is why so many top athletes use Phiten products. (http://www.phiten.com/english/products/index.html)


Support for the theory that externally located MPT influences emotional well-being can be linked to two sources. The first is people who claim that MPT-treated products provide this benefit; if at least some of the reviews on Amazon.com are to be trusted, many people believe that Phiten necklaces alleviate pain or influence emotional well-being. The second source of support comes from a small number of publications promoting the potential health benefits of MPT. The Aoi et al. (2012) examination into the influence of MPT-treated surroundings provides the clearest implication that the external presence of MPT somehow influences emotional well-being. Aoi et al. randomly assigned office workers to sleep for five nights in quarters where the walls and floors were or were not infused with MPT. According to Aoi et al., their results “suggest that sleeping in a room containing titanium lowers physiological and psychological stress” (2012, p. 13).


There are several reasons to be skeptical of this type of claim. One cause for concern is that research supporting the potential benefits of MPT is typically funded by Phiten, has an author who lists Phiten as the institutional affiliation, or both. The only exception was one article where the authors declared that there was no conflict of interest. This type of collaboration is not by itself improper, but it is possible that this corporate-research synergy could generate collectively biased results. Phiten-supported researchers might be less aggressive in publishing unflattering results, possibly creating a “file drawer problem.” They might also knowingly or unknowingly overlook potential problems in their research methodologies. At the very least, it seems fair to suggest that the scientific community will have difficulty embracing the purported benefits of MPT without support from researchers who are clearly independent from Phiten.


Another concern is that Phiten’s promotion of MPT and other Aqua Metals simply sounds like pseudoscience. The term pseudoscience can be used unfairly, so let us offer specific examples. First, support for Phiten’s products is largely anecdotal (Shermer 2002). Second, there is no clear mechanism to explain how one variable influences another (see Thagard 1993), and even Phiten-funded researchers report that the mechanism between MPT and improved health “remains unclear” (Aoi et al. 2012, p. 17). Third, the variety of purported benefits associated with MPT might resemble pseudoscience in terms of sounding extraordinary (e.g., Hines 2003). Even the single implication that MPT can diminish the ever-present problem of stress would likely be the psychological discovery of the decade. Fourth, the theory that externally located MPT provides benefits appears to be constructed so that it can only be confirmed (e.g., Hansson 2013). This seems evident in the small necklace packaging disclaimer that states, “Not all users will experience the intended benefits of Phiten products, and individuals must try it for themselves to see whether it works for them.” This disclaimer suggests that positive results can be attributed to the necklaces while negative results cannot. Fifth, MPT appears similar to other externally worn accessories with health-related claims that science generally deems as pseudoscientific: crystals, copper bracelets, and magnetic bracelets.

Figure 1. Two cadets wearing the necklaces used in the experiment. It is impossible to tell which one is sporting the Phiten necklace.

Classroom Experiment: Phiten Necklaces versus All-Purpose Clothesline


We examined the potential influence of Phiten necklaces in a United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) classroom experiment. We needed an experiment with two groups to create a subsequent demonstration of inferential statistics for pedagogical purposes. Our deeper motive was to support the USAFA Officer Development mission by reinforcing the intertwined values of empiricism and scientific reasoning. Military professionals should value empiricism to prevent the military from investing in products and services that do not provide any real benefit. Military professionals should also learn to supplement intuition, when possible, with well-reasoned evidence. This is seen perhaps most dramatically among pilots. When the experience of in-cockpit flight disrupts the vestibular system, pilots can experience a psychologically powerful motivation to navigate based on their dysfunctional perception, possibly resulting in fatal impact. Pilots are therefore trained to rely on decades of accumulated evidence demonstrating that they should at these moments “trust their instruments” and navigate in a manner that feels tremendously dangerous. This interplay between intuition and science also occurs in other areas. Officers can manage in ways that feel correct but stand in contrast to empirically supported theories. Officers presumably benefit from considering evidenced-based theories regarding effective peace support or wartime operations to facilitate their own situation-based judgment. Our impression was that cadets value empiricism and scientific reasoning as textbook definitions but overlook these values in everyday application. We therefore designed a classroom experiment that would allow cadets to experience an examination into a seemingly outlandish claim rather than just read about it.


We asked cadets who were in the second semester of a year-long course sequence about statistics and research methods in the behavioral sciences to participate. These cadets were typically in their third year at the USAFA. Cadets were not required to participate, and a small percentage of cadets declined participating. Forty-eight USAFA cadets (thirty-three female, fifteen male) chose to participate.


An instructor (Foster) told participating and non-participating cadets that we wanted to examine products that reportedly improve personal well-being. He explained that the research involved wearing necklaces that were covered in tape to conceal their nature. Cadets were asked to wear the necklaces until the next class meeting, which occurred forty-eight hours later. Cadets were instructed, for safety purposes, not to wear their respective necklaces when sleeping but to instead wrap them around a wrist, put them under a pillow, or place them next to their person. The instructor also acknowledged that some of them might need to remove the necklaces temporarily (e.g., for athletic practices or showering) and, if this were the case, to document when this was necessary. Finally, the instructor encouraged cadets to participate fully and seriously in order to support the scientific process and overall learning experience.


Cadets were then presented sequentially with a large bin from which they could remove a tape-covered necklace. The bin contained a mixed assortment of two different necklaces. Half of the included necklaces were Phiten’s Classic Titanium Necklaces (in orange or burnt orange) purchased using the Phiten USA webpage (Phiten Condition). The other necklaces were segments of Everbilt’s 3/16 Inch All-Purpose Clothesline in White (Clothesline Condition) purchased from The Home Depot. We chose the clothesline because it closely approximated the size and weight of the Phiten necklaces. We removed the clasps from the Phiten necklaces to create straight twenty-six-inch segments. We cut the pieces of clothesline to be the same length. We then wrapped all necklaces in masking tape and connected the ends by wrapping that portion of the necklace with white Duct Tape (see Figure 1 where one cadet is wearing a Phiten necklace and the other a “Clothesline” necklace). It is quite unlikely that any cadet would attempt to identify a necklace due to concerns about honor and simply being busy. The uncommon white duct tape was nonetheless used as an additional safeguard to discourage any cadet who might be tempted to remove it to identify his or her necklace. Finally, it is important to note that we judged the necklaces to be exceptionally similar in appearance and feel, and we are certain that they created an effective double-blind study—the cadets did not know what kind of necklace they were wearing, and the class instructors could not tell either. Some cadets might have suspected that there was more than one kind of necklace, but we doubt they were overly concerned in this regard.


Cadets completed a survey at the next class meeting, which created an experimental trial of approximately forty-eight hours. The survey began with three questions: Do you feel relaxed? Do you feel angry? Do you feel energetic? We used these three dependent variables based on the claims associated with necklaces and bracelets on the Phiten webpage as well as the results provided by Aoi et al. (2012). Each item was followed by a scale ranging from 1 (No) to 9 (Yes). The survey also solicited which class section cadets were in (there were three sections), their sex, and whether they knew what type of necklace they were wearing (none reported knowing). Finally, the survey asked cadets to document any time that they had removed the necklaces other than when showering or when sleeping (at which time it should have been next to their person). We revealed the nature of the experiment and a corresponding laboratory assignment after the survey responses were collected.1

Results


Cadets in the Phiten Condition reported feeling trivially less Relaxed (M=5.62, SD=2.02) than did cadets in the Clothesline Condition (M=5.67; SD=1.99). Cadets in the Phiten Condition reported feeling less Angry (M=2.12; SD=1.42) than did cadets in the Clothesline Condition (M=2.71; SD=1.88). Cadets in the Phiten Condition reported feeling less Energetic (M=4.96; SD=2.05) than did cadets in the Clothesline Condition (M=5.46; SD=1.59). We conducted independent samples t tests comparing the Phiten Condition and the Clothesline Condition for each dependent variable. None of the three results revealed differences between the conditions that would be deemed as statistically significant at the standard expected in the behavioral sciences (i.e., all three tests had corresponding probability values greater than 0.05). To be additionally mindful, we identified three subsets of participating cadets based on their survey responses: (a) three cadets who wrote that they had been ill during the trial (one in the Phiten Condition); (b) one cadet who forgot to wear the necklace on the final morning and therefore completed the survey without it (Clothesline Condition); and (c) six other cadets who appeared to have spent more than eight hours without wearing their necklace or having it next to them while sleeping (one in the Phiten Condition). We repeated the comparisons between the Phiten and Clothesline Conditions after omitting all possible combinations of these three subjects. The obtained results again did not reveal any statistically significant differences between conditions.

Implications


The results of our classroom-based experiment do not by themselves fundamentally disprove the notion that externally located MPT puzzlingly promotes emotional well-being. Failing to detect a relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable does not mean the relationship does not exist; it just means the researcher was unable to detect it. After all, USAFA cadets, like all people, experience situational factors that could influence their levels of relaxation, anger, and energy (e.g., academic responsibilities, required or voluntary exercise, interpersonal concerns, sleep deprivation, and so forth). This type of random error is omnipresent in research with human participants, so it does not invalidate our research. Nevertheless, in the spirit of good science, we do need to acknowledge that if MPT necklaces were to influence emotional well-being, it is possible that these extraneous influences could have hidden that effect.


Those who believe in the power of externally located MPT might examine the tangible differences between our experiment and the Aoi et al. (2012) experiment. The MPT-treated surroundings surely contained greater amounts of MPT, but our necklaces were presumably in closer proximity to the participants’ bodies. We assume that MPT proponents would agree that proximity must matter; otherwise MPT-treated necklaces would exhibit their alleged benefits whether worn or remaining unpurchased in a distribution center. The Aoi et al. trial occurred over five days, but the treatment was suspended during the day. Our trial lasted only two days but the treatment was generally continuous. The Aoi et al. experiment used twenty-four participants, whereas our experiment had forty-eight. Finally, Phiten adherents might be tempted to argue that we reduced the MPT effect by covering the necklaces with tape. If so, we do not understand why masking tape and a little duct tape would reduce an effect that in the case of the Aoi et al. experiment somehow passes through rubber (or flooring material), air, and the exterior of the human body. In sum, we believe that our classroom experiment provided a legitimate conceptual replication of the research provided by Aoi et al.


This leads to a nagging question. Why would Aoi et al. (2012) obtain significant findings when we failed to do so? The Aoi et al. results might appear legitimate on the surface, but they can also be explained in another way. Aoi et al. point to improvements that were significant in the Titanium Condition but not in the Placebo Condition. This is improper because two effects can be similar even though one effect crosses the threshold of statistical significance whereas the other effect falls short of doing so. When the Aoi et al. results are examined with this in mind, one can see that there is no compelling evidence that participants in the Titanium Condition exhibited emotional well-being improvements above and beyond those in the Placebo Condition from the beginning to the end of the experiment.

Figure 2. Coauthor Craig Foster and Security Service Field’s head groundskeeper taking soil samples from the field to test the amount of titanium occurring naturally in the soil.


One final issue involves the amount of titanium that exists naturally. We are reluctant to develop this point because we do not believe that externally located titanium in any form exerts an influence on well-being. We nevertheless looked for titanium in four “field” samples obtained from Security Service Field in Colorado Springs, home of the Colorado Springs Sky Sox Triple A baseball team. We pulled samples from (a) the warning track, (b) the soil (with a little grass) in centerfield, (c) the infield mix approximately where the second baseman would stand, and (d) the pitcher’s mound (see Figure 2). The head groundskeeper explained that each of these samples would have a fundamentally different composition. We conducted a variety of steps to dissolve our four field samples. We then analyzed the resulting solutions for titanium using an inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer. We used these processes to estimate the mass weight percent of the titanium for each sample (i.e., elemental titanium mass/total mass). The estimated titanium mass weight percents were as follows: Centerfield = .000652%; Warning Track = .000242%; Pitcher’s Mound = .0000907%; Second Base = .0000694%. (A detailed technical report is available upon request.) We asked Phiten for the mass weight percent of titanium in their necklaces, but they politely responded that it was a corporate secret.


The results demonstrate a remarkable irony. It seems that many baseball players are purchasing Phiten necklaces to receive the purported benefits of MPT when they are routinely performing, presumably unbeknownst to them, on playing fields that contain titanium. Titanium might be perceived as rare because it is costly and associated with highly technological products. Titanium is actually the ninth most-abundant element on the planet (Donachie Jr. 2000), making the Earth, conceptually speaking, a titanic ball of titanium. Titanium is so common in soil that researchers can examine titanium in animal feces to estimate soil ingestion. This procedure was used, for example, by researchers examining mule deer soil ingestion near Denver, Colorado (Arthur III and Alldredge 1979). This suggests that if titanium were to exert positive influences on emotional well-being as Phiten claims, it might be possible to gain those benefits by sleeping next to a sufficiently large bag of Colorado deer poop.


Phiten fans could argue that the titanium in soil or deer feces is different than the MPT provided in a Phiten necklace. We do not know what percentage of titanium in our field samples existed as elemental titanium (Ti), if any, or in a different form such as titanium dioxide (TiO2). Also, titanium, in any form, might not resemble the nanoscopic-sized particles Phiten claims go into their necklaces. Such arguments raise more puzzling questions: Why would titanium dioxide work differently than titanium? Why do the titanium particles need to be nanoscopic? From our viewpoint, these questions, such as potential questions about proximity and the covering of necklaces with masking tape, are puzzling because the relationship between externally located MPT and well-being is theoretically vacuous and the evidence supporting this extraordinary claim remains unconvincing. The most straightforward answer, based on the existing evidence, is that titanium in any form, when located externally to the human body, does not exert any direct influence on personal well-being outside of more sensible explanations (e.g., a placebo effect).

Conclusion


Science and technology thrive on new ideas, and seemingly radical theories occasionally end up appearing to be true. We therefore do not take issue with peculiar claims. Our concern is that such claims should be supported by strong scientific evidence before consumers purchase corresponding products and journal editors publish corresponding research. A willingness to accept poorly substantiated claims can cause consumers to waste resources and scientists to waste valuable time. In this case, the externally located MPT theory is inconsistent with the known laws of physical science, the common natural presence of titanium, and now, the results associated with a classroom experiment that removed the potential placebo effect associated with Phiten necklaces.


The claims surrounding MPT are at least, for the most part, benign. An MLB player taking a chance on a $20 necklace is not likely to cause any harm. Besides, the placebo effect might cause the necklaces to “work” due to their psychological power rather than their magical power. The obvious problem is that this type of pseudoscience can be genuinely harmful in other contexts. For many individuals, $20 is a considerable sum, and Phiten offers a variety of products that are far more expensive. Individuals frequently invest in similarly dubious products or services, such as faith healing or clairvoyance, which can cause physical, emotional, or financial challenges. Thus, our classroom experiment should reinforce lessons that are broader than MPT. We hope that our cadets and others learn to be effective in detecting scientifically questionable claims, and they evaluate such claims with a healthy consideration for the existing evidence.

Acknowledgments


We thank the Warfighter Effectiveness Research Center (WERC), which is affiliated with the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the United States Air Force Academy, for their support.

Notes


The survey also included an open-ended item that provided cadets the option of writing a testimonial about how the necklaces made them feel. This item followed the three dependent variables. This item did not reveal any themes that were inconsistent with the quantitative results. Thus, we only used this item to help identify participants who reported having an illness during the experimental trial.


References

• 
Aoi, W., T. Kamata, Y. Ishiura, et al. 2012. Titanium-treated surroundings attenuate psychological stress associated with autonomic nerve regulation in office workers with daily emotional stress. Physiology & Behavior 108: 13–18.
• 
 Arthur III, W.J., and A.W. Alldredge. 1979. Soil ingestion by mule deer in Northcentral Colorado. Journal of Range Management 32(1): 67–71.
• Donachie Jr., M.J. 2000. Titanium: A Technical Guide (2nd Edition). Materials Park, OH: ASM International.
• 
Hansson, S.O. 2013. Defining pseudoscience and science. In M. Pigliucci and M. Boudry (Eds.), Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. University of Chicago Press (pp. 61–77).
• 
Hines, T. 2003. Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (2nd Edition). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Shermer, M. 2002. Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (Revised and Expanded). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin.
• 
Rowlands, D., S. Shultz, T. Ogawa, et al. 2014. The effects of uniquely-processed titanium on biological systems: Implications for human health and performance. Journal of Functional Biomaterials 5(1): 1–14.
• 
Thagard, P. 1993. Computational Philosophy of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force Academy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Virtually all known human cultures possess beliefs in the paranormal. This may at first seem maladaptive—how could belief in the unreal be sufficiently advantageous that it would have survived the rigors of human evolution in the all-too-real world of past ages?


Such beliefs may have yielded evolutionary advantages. Although the interaction of culture and human evolution is complex, it is certainly possible that shared paranormal beliefs within any given culture, such as shared veneration of ancestral spirits or god-kings, might have yielded a coalescent group loyalty that would be useful, physically and politically, in dealings with other competing cultures. This might very well have resulted in a selective bias toward dissociative processes, leading to success in those cultures that indulge in such beliefs.


But even if this is the case, a significant psychological question arises—one especially true for the modern world, in which access to scientific information is effectively unparalleled historically—How are such beliefs maintained in the minds of individuals, within any given culture? Why do individual people harbor bizarre beliefs?

Experimental Psychology 
and the Paranormal


Previous laboratory research has demonstrated the importance of psychological characteristics that predispose individuals to paranormal thinking. In earlier research (Sharps et al. 2006; 2010), we showed that subclinical levels of depression were important for belief in ghosts and extraterrestrial aliens. This is presumably because the depressed would prefer to be in an environment where things might be better; and things might be better in the afterlife represented by ghosts, or perhaps on another, nicer planet where extraterrestrials might live.


Subclinical tendencies toward attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) predisposed people to belief in extraterrestrial aliens and cryptids such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. Why? Aliens and monsters are cool, and finding them in the woods and bodies of water takes us away from the mundane reality that those with ADHD tendencies frequently find excruciatingly dull.


However, in these studies, the most important of the characteristics predisposing us to paranormal thinking was dissociation. Not only did subclinical levels of dissociation predispose people to beliefs in everything paranormal (whether UFOs, aliens, cryptids, or ghosts), but it also predisposed them to see these things. In a study in which we used Internet pictures of “paranormal” creatures and objects (Sharps 2012), the dissociated tended to see them as real. Where everybody else saw a teenager in a Halloween gorilla suit with extra monkey hair, those with subclinical dissociation saw Bigfoot. Odd lights in the sky (a helicopter with a broken landing light, for example) readily became UFOs for the dissociated. In short, those with subclinical dissociation tended to see the prosaic as real evidence of the paranormal.


It is crucial to emphasize the word subclinical. People with dissociative characteristics are emphatically not “crazy.” All human beings experience some levels of dissociation in their everyday life without clinical significance. But those with more of these tendencies tend to see their world in vastly more paranormal terms. They not only believe in these things; they see them in stimuli that other people would immediately perceive as nonparanormal in nature.


Subclinical dissociation was also important in the 2012 Mayan “end of the world” fiasco, in which an ancient Mayan god was (depending on which interpretation you believed) literally expected to surf ashore on a raft of very old (but presumably waterproof) sacred snakes and establish a New Order of peace and so forth.


Not terribly likely, right?


We were privileged to publish two articles in the Skeptical Inquirer (Sharps et al. 2013; 2014) concerning the psychological factors that made it possible for modern human beings to believe in this type of baseless nonsense. We found that disturbingly high numbers of university students held very incoherent, but very positive, beliefs in the “Mayan end of the world.” Almost half of our research respondents thought it might happen; 10 percent were effectively certain that it was going to happen, and 10 percent thought it was still inevitable even after it didn’t happen. When one considers the requisite physical details (Mayan god, waterproof snakes, etc.), one rather wonders what these students, exposed on a daily basis to modern science, were majoring in. Yet they bought it, and the number one factor producing this deeply bizarre set of beliefs was subclinical dissociation.


What Exactly Is Dissociation?

Unfortunately, the term dissociation has many uses and definitions. In our usage, we emphatically do not refer to psychiatric concepts of dissociative identity disorder, or to a psychotic level of dissociation. We refer to subclinical dissociative tendencies, of the sort probably experienced from time to time by most people. Those with subclinical dissociative tendencies see prosaic reality as potentially fraught with supernatural meaning. For the dissociated, the facades of buildings, seen in everyday context on the street, might hide vast conspiracies or alien autopsies or Bigfoot.


This type of dissociation may lead to a diminished critical assessment of reality; as discussed in earlier Skeptical Inquirer articles (Sharps 2012; Sharps et al. 2013; 2014), there may be anomalous perceptions of individual experience. The world may appear to be “not quite real or ... diffuse” (Cardena 1997, 400). This is emphatically not “mental illness.” However, the disconnection with immediate physical reality that occurs with subclinical dissociation might incline many normal people to view highly improbable things with more credulity (see DePrince and Freyd 1999; also Sharps et al. 2013; 2014).


Compulsory education does not cure this sort of thing. College students frequently engage in superstitious or “lucky” behaviors when approaching examinations and tests in their classes, especially when the consequences are perceived as particularly important (Rudski and Edwards 2007). Almost half of our college students (Sharps et al. 2013; 2014) thought that the Mayan apocalypse might happen, and 10 percent were sure that it would.


So, we know that dissociation contributes to paranormal beliefs and perceptions. But how pervasive is it? What types of paranormal thinking and perception are associated with dissociative tendencies?


This was the focus of our present study, which used standardized instruments to address the question.

Experimental Framework


Forty-one male respondents (mean age 19.37 years, SD = 1.73) and sixty-three female respondents (mean age 19.21 years, SD = 1.37) participated in this study. These respondents completed the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES; Carlson and Putnam 1986). This is a standard instrument for the assessment of dissociative tendencies, used previously in a number of our experiments, including those published in the Skeptical Inquirer (e.g., Sharps 2012; Sharps et al. 2013; 2014). The DES deals with empirically verified everyday experiences that relate strongly to dissociation, the focus of the current research.


The respondents also completed the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale (RPBS; Tobacyk 2004). This scale addresses paranormal beliefs of various types, addressing beliefs in such areas as the soul, magic, and cryptids. This standardized instrument addresses, on an empirical basis, many of the paranormal beliefs current in Western culture.


Finally, respondents completed the standard Duke University Religion Index (e.g., Koenig and Bussing 2010), which deals with religious behaviors related to the supernatural (e.g., church attendance).


The items of the RPBS were sorted according to their subject areas. The twenty-six items of this scale were sorted into the following indices: beliefs in Religiosity, Magic, Luck, Future Prediction, Cryptids (i.e., the Loch Ness monster), Fate of the Soul, and Supernatural Powers. The overall score on the RPBS, and the score of each respondent on each of these beliefs, was computed and compared with scores on the DES, and then on the Duke Index, by means of linear regression. The results were
quite revealing.

Results


The relationship of overall scores on the RPBS to dissociation in this non-diagnosed, normal population was significant (linear regression), R2 = .171, F(1,101) = 21.70, p < .001, β = .423. Especially interesting is the fact that all factors identified as paranormal were significantly (p < .05) related to dissociation as measured by the DES. In other words, tendencies toward subclinical dissociation, in this normal, non-diagnosed population, were strongly related to all forms of paranormal beliefs.


In terms of relationship to subclinical dissociation, Religiosity was most strongly related by beliefs in heaven and hell (β = .281). Magic was most strongly endorsed by beliefs in witchcraft (β = .167), although beliefs in specific cases of witchcraft was another matter; see below. Luck was most strongly endorsed by a fear of black cats (β = .268). Future Prediction was most strongly endorsed by a belief in astrology (β = .270). (Belief in cryptids, for this scale, dealt only with the Abominable Snowman and the Loch Ness monster; Bigfoot and his allies were conspicuously absent from this instrument). Nessie was strongly endorsed, β = .420, while the Snowman was not. We address this important dichotomy below.


Fate of the Soul was most strongly supported by belief in the possibility of communication with the dead (β = .185), with belief in reincarnation a close second (β = .164). Belief in astral projection fell a distant third, β = .064. Finally, psychic powers were endorsed most strongly in mental “object moving,” β = .224, although psychokinesis, effectively a synonym, was endorsed less strongly (β = .109; see below).


Two additional items of the RPBS tested DES scores against modern scientific perspectives. The first, a belief that “mind reading cannot occur,” was nonsignificant against dissociative tendencies. However, the second, that there may be life on other planets, was endorsed more strongly and significantly by the dissociated, β = .231.


Interestingly, no significant relationship was found between dissociation and the scales of the Duke University Religion Index, which at first appears to conflict with the significant relationship of the DES to the Religiosity scale of the RPBS; but wait.

Discussion


Dissociation, as measured in this subclinical population by the DES, was significantly associated with every index of paranormal thinking measured. Those with dissociative tendencies were more likely to believe in heaven/hell, witchcraft, the danger of black cats, astrology, the Loch Ness monster, communication with the dead, reincarnation, and psychic powers.


However, belief in the Abominable Snowman, specific instances of witchcraft, and psychokinesis were not as strongly related to dissociative tendencies. Why not?

Gestalt and Feature-Intensive Processes


Previously (Sharps 2003; 2010; Sharps et al. 2013; Sharps and Nunes 2002), we presented a continuum in human information processing, in what is called the Gestalt/Feature-Intensive Processing theory. This continuum ranges from feature-intensive processing, in which the specific details of a concept are given specific consideration in depth, to gestalt processing, in which a given concept is considered without detailed analysis, with relatively uncritical acceptance of the given idea as a whole.


We suggest here a relationship between dissociative tendencies and gestalt processing, the relatively uncritical, detail-free consideration of given phenomena. In 2012, enormous attention was given to the Maya prophecies in media and in other sources. This, according to the availability heuristic of Tversky and Kahneman (1973), made these prophecies relatively salient to the entire population. These prophecies were relatively available, to everybody, in various media sources and were therefore immediately salient for people thinking about these issues.


However, for most people, there would have been some feature-intensive consideration of these prophecies; feature-intensive analysis tells us that ancient societies, such as the Mayans, lacked modern scientific understanding, and so their prophecies might not be right. Also, a serious, feature-intensive consideration of an ancient Mayan god surfing ashore on a raft of long-suffering, six-hundred-year-old waterproof snakes becomes immediately ridiculous.


However, those exhibiting subclinical levels of dissociation, with consequent gestalt processing tendencies, would not engage in the necessary feature-intensive thinking; they would not think about the time involved, or the snakes, and would thereby credulously entertain the Mayan “prophecies.” In our previous research (Sharps et al. 2013; 2014), that’s exactly what they did. The ludicrous, feature-intensive details would be lost in favor of a gestalt, an idea something like “the god will return.” This gestalt processing would necessarily result in a consequent strength of belief in a god-ridden “New Age,” without the bothersome concerns engendered by feature-intensive, scientific, appropriately skeptical analysis.


These considerations are underscored by the exceptions to this pattern we noted earlier. More dissociated individuals believed in the Loch Ness monster than in the Abominable Snowman. Why?


The Snowman is little seen today in televised and Internet accounts, taking a decided backseat to Bigfoot and his cronies. The Abominable Snowman is historically an earlier concept, less “available” to modern thinking in Tversky and Kahneman’s terms. Thinking about this older concept would require more feature-intensive concepts to consider, more in-depth thinking about a relatively unfamiliar idea.


The Loch Ness monster, on the other hand, is seen in TV “documentaries” all the time. Even with its historical provenance, it is therefore a modern concept, relatively “available” in Tversky and Kahneman’s terms, more amenable to modern thinkers, and hence more readily processed in gestalt, feature-free terms. Therefore, the dissociated tend to endorse Nessie relatively freely. The Snowman takes more work, more feature-intensive analysis, and is therefore less readily endorsed.


We saw the same effect with astrology and astral projection. Astrology is a still-current, relatively available concept, requiring little feature-intensive analysis. Astral projection, a concept whose televised and Internet popularity has waned, would require more feature-intensive analysis, and would require less detail-free gestalt consideration for easy acceptance.


The same effect applies to “object moving” and “psychokinesis.” Mental object moving requires no analysis at a feature-intensive level; it is eponymous. “Psychokinesis,” although effectively a synonym for “mental object moving,” is an earlier, currently less available concept, which requires additional thought, activating feature-intensive processing. Thus, mental “object moving” was endorsed with its automatized, eponymously gestalt characteristics, whereas the more feature-intensive, but synonymous, concept of psychokinesis was not.


Finally, the same phenomenon was observed in the endorsement of “witchcraft” as a general, gestalt phenomenon, but in the absence of statistically significant endorsement of specific instances of witchcraft, which would require more feature-intensive thinking. The general phenomenon was endorsed; the specific instances were not.


From all of these instances, the pattern is clear: when broad, noncritical gestalt processes are involved, the dissociated tend more toward paranormal beliefs. When analytical, skeptical, feature-intensive processes are required, paranormal beliefs recede, at least to some degree.

What about the Duke Religion Index?


No significant relationships were found between dissociative tendencies and the scales of the Duke Index. Is this an exception to the considerations discussed above?


The answer is no, although this situation opens important avenues for future research. The Duke scales predominantly assess religious activities, not beliefs. This index addresses tendencies to engage in church attendance and related activities rather than specific ideas about theological phenomena.


Church attendance and such are precisely the activities that would have allowed one to adhere to local standards in the vastly more religious ancient world. Whether you believe or not, these activities allow you to insert yourself more firmly into a religious community, a crucial factor in the tribal societies of the ancient world.


Human evolution has fostered the tendency to fit into society. Ancient societies, those in existence through the majority of human evolutionary time, tended to hold specific sets of beliefs. If you demonstrated your beliefs accordingly, you were accepted; if not, you were ostracized, frequently with fatal consequences.


The potential adaptive significance, the evolutionary advantage, is obvious. In any given ancient society, as long as you demonstrated your beliefs, regardless of internal cognitive processes, you were an acceptable member of the society. If you did not do so, you were ostracized or killed.


Thus, we see a potentially important dichotomy between actual gestalt and feature-intensive beliefs, and a demonstration of the importance of apparent conformation to these beliefs in socially acceptable venues. Those who engaged in the appropriate religious rituals were most likely to succeed in most of the societies that preceded the modern era. Those who did not were ostracized or killed. This was true regardless of the internal cognitive processes of thinking or belief.


Therefore, religious activities, as opposed to beliefs and as measured by the Duke Index, would not be expected to be influenced, substantially or significantly, by subclinical dissociative tendencies. The more successful, less dissociative individuals would historically be suggested to have engaged in religious activities to the same degree as everybody else, and we would anticipate this tendency to have continued into the modern world. However, the beliefs involved would be more likely to be endorsed by the dissociated; that is exactly what was demonstrated by the present results.


In summary, our present results indicate:

1. Subclinical dissociative tendencies predispose people to paranormal beliefs.
2. Those paranormal systems that require only gestalt cognition are more likely to result in the endorsement of such beliefs, as opposed to those that require more intense, feature-intensive thinking, which do not.
3. These dynamics are more likely to be observed in the realm of paranormal or religious thinking rather than in the realm of locally approved activities (e.g., church attendance).


The best way to counter such paranormal beliefs is to make use of educational interventions that involve feature-intensive analysis and thinking. Potential believers in paranormal phenomena are most likely to question these erroneous beliefs if provided with solid, feature-intensive educational environments in which they must confront such supposed phenomena as extraterrestrial aliens, cryptids, and ghosts in very specific terms.

Summary


Our latest research shows that those who exhibit subclinical tendencies toward paranormal beliefs also tend toward subclinical dissociation. These tendencies may best be countered by detail-specific, feature-intensive, scientific education. Hopefully, these considerations may inform education at the primary, secondary, and collegiate levels to reduce paranormal beliefs in favor of scientifically legitimate thinking needed to develop realistic science and technology.

References

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Cardena, E. 1997. Dissociative disorders: Phantoms of the self. In S.M. Turner and M. Hersen, eds., Adult Psychopathology and Diagnosis, third edition, 400. New York: Wiley.
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Carlson, E.B., and F.W. Putnam. 1986. Development, reliability, and validity of a dissociation scale. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders 174: 727–735.
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DePrince, A.P., and J.F. Freyd. 1999. Dissociative tendencies, attention, and memory. Psychological Science 10(5): 449–452.
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Koenig, H.G., and A. Bussing. 2010. The Duke University Religion Index: A five-item measure for use in epidemiological studies. Religions 1(1): 78–85.
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Rudski, J.M., and A. Edwards. 2007. Malinowski goes to college: Factors influencing students’ use of ritual and superstition. Journal of General Psychology 134: 389–403.
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Sharps, M.J. 2003. Aging, Representation, and Thought: Gestalt and Feature-Intensive Processing. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction.
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———. 2010. Processing Under Pressure: Stress, Memory, and Decision-Making in Law Enforcement. Flushing, NY: Looseleaf Law.
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———. 2012. Eyewitness to the paranormal: The experimental psychology of the “unexplained.” Skeptical Inquirer 36(4): 39–45.
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Sharps, M.J., S.W. Liao, and M.R. Herrera. 2013. It’s the end of the world, and they don’t feel fine: The psychology of December 21, 2012. Skeptical Inquirer 37(1): 34–39.
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———. 2014. Remembrance of apocalypse past. Skeptical Inquirer 38(6): 54–58.
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Sharps, M.J., J. Matthews, and J. Asten. 2006. Cognition, affect, and beliefs in paranormal phenomena: Gestalt/feature intensive processing theory and tendencies toward ADHD, depression, and dissociation. Journal of Psychology 140(6): 579–590.
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Sharps, M.J., E. Newborg, S. Van Arsdall, et al. 2010. Paranormal encounters as eyewitness phenomena: Psychological determinants of atypical perceptual interpretations. Current Psychology 29(4): 320–327.
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Sharps, M.J., and M.A. Nunes. 2002. Gestalt and feature-intensive processing: Toward a unified theory of human information processing. Current Psychology 21(1): 68–84.
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Tobacyk, J.J. 2004. A revised paranormal belief scale. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 23(1): 94–98.
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Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. 1973. Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology 5(2): 207–232.

Much of what is called “the paranormal” today has intrigued mankind since the most ancient times. The term refers to those things that are supposedly beyond the normal range of science and human experience—ghosts, strange lights in the sky, psychic phenomena, and the like. It includes the supernatural but also things such as monsters that—if they exist—might be quite natural.


With the advent of modern spiritualism in 1848, launched by the Fox Sisters’ hoaxed messages from the ghost of a murdered peddler (Nickell 2004, 31–32), the paranormal began to proliferate and to attract advocacy groups such as the British Society for Psychical Research. Founded in London in 1882, it was concerned with alleged psychic phenomena and the supposed survival of consciousness following bodily death (Guiley 2000, 304).

The paranormal grew increasingly throughout the twentieth century with various “new” (either substantially new or newly refocused-on) topics being expanded by individual gurus and groups of enthusiasts, and many cross-correspondences developing (say, between UFOs and Bigfoot). This article is a discussion of the “creation” of the paranormal by a series of major figures, each of whom took a concept—some fantasy, myth, or speculation—and transformed it into “reality” (Keel 2001b). (I have, of course, excluded a long list of topics—from astrology to zombies—whose origins are ancient.)

Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained

In the early twentieth century, Charles Fort (1874–1932) began the work that led one biographer to call him the “Prophet of the Unexplained” (Knight 1970). Having come into an inheritance that permitted him to engage in armchair endeavors, Fort spent his last twenty-six years scouring old periodicals for reports of alleged occurrences that science was supposedly unable to explain: UFOs (before there was such a term), archaeological oddities, mystery creatures, ghosts, rains of fish, and other anomalies—what would come to be called “fortean phenomena.” Fort was not himself an investigator, and his anecdotal evidence left much to be desired (Nickell 2004, 335–337).


Nevertheless, Fort was a major innovator. In an excellent biography of him, Jim Steinmeyer (2008, xv) states, “What Fort invented was our modern view of the paranormal.” Others had pointed out strange occurrences and asked why they happened, but Charles Fort championed their significance and accused science of being too conventional to care. Many of today’s paranormal claims can be traced to Fort’s writings.

Supposed communication with spirits of the dead is at least as old as the Biblical “Witch of Endor” who, at the behest of King Saul, allegedly conjured up the ghost of Samuel (I Samuel 28). From the first century ce came a prototypical chain-rattling ghost at a house in Athens investigated by one Athenodorus who allegedly observed the specter and laid it to rest (Nickell 2012a, 17–18). This is an early example of what folklorists call a “legend trip”: a visit to a site to test a legend there (Brunvand 1996, 437–440). As spiritualism developed in the mid-nineteenth century, photography was soon adopted to make “spirit photos”—first faked by William Mumler in Boston in 1862 (Nickell 2012a, 298–300).

Harry Price: The Original Ghost Hunter


The instigator of today’s ghost-hunting craze was England’s Harry Price (1881–1948), who was among the first to use “modern technology” to detect spirits of the dead and for that purpose famously had a “ghost-hunting” kit (see Price 1936, photo facing p. 32). He employed such devices as a camera with infrared filter and film (for photographing in the dark), “an electronic signaling instrument” (for detecting an object’s movement from anywhere in a house), and “a sensitive transmitting thermograph” (to measure temperature variations). Along with a notebook, flashlight, and other utility items, he included a flask of brandy in case anyone fainted (Price 1940, 107).


Having married an heiress, Price could indulge his interests in psychical research beginning in the 1920s. Although he was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, the organization’s skepticism of much physical phenomena led him to found his own lab. He combined the use of gadgetry with mediums and séances but was never able to prove the reality of ghosts. Worse, he remains suspected of trickery in some of his own investigations, including that of the Borley Rectory, the subject of his The Most Haunted House in England (1940). Although he posed as a scientist, Price was a school dropout whose use of scientific methods was an act, and he sought only to prove his ideas—not rigorously test them (Morris 2006, xv; Guiley 2000, 299; Nickell 2012a, 261–263).


Nevertheless, Price was followed by huckster Hans Holzer (1920–2009), who cranked out books about his visits to supposedly haunted houses with psychics in tow—in one instance earning him a scathing assessment from the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. More recently, television’s Ghost Hunters and their countless imitators have taken mystery mongering to new lows. Besides the dubious legends and pseudoscience, it appears they are often merely detecting themselves (Nickell 2012a, 263–264, 275–280).

Raymond A. Palmer: The Man Who 'Invented' UFOs

Whether or not the label is “exaggerated,” as UFO historian Jerome Clark (1998, 2: 695) finds, many knowledgeable persons regard Ray Palmer as “the man who invented flying saucers” (Keel 2001a, 536). Certainly, the idea of airships was a much earlier one stemming from science-fiction writers, such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Expectations aroused by science fiction no doubt helped spark the “Airship Wave”—the aerial-phenomena hysteria that plagued the United States between November 1896 and May 1897, preceding the modern wave of reports that began half a century later. After World War I, Charles Fort, the previously mentioned “Prophet of the Unexplained,” included unidentified objects in the sky among his discussions of mysterious phenomena, earning him the further appellation “the world’s first UFOlogist” (Clark 1992, 21–23), by suggesting the objects indicated visits from space aliens.


Enter Raymond A. Palmer (1910–1977). Although a childhood accident left him a hunchback of short stature, Palmer’s runaway imagination and audacity—including his unrelenting self-promotion—made him “something of a giant,” says Clark (1998, 2: 695). Obsessed with science fiction, Palmer created in 1933 the Jules Verne Prize Club. In 1938, he became editor of the first science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories (founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1926), its wild action tales prompting critics to label it “space opera.” He was cofounder of Fate in 1948 and publisher of other magazines, including Other Worlds, which evolved into Flying Saucers, during the 1950s. He also published other writers’ books on flying saucers, so-called “contactees” (those supposedly chosen to receive the wisdom of the “Space Brothers”), and other topics (Clark 1998, 2: 694–696; see also the biography of Palmer [Nadis 2013]).


Today largely forgotten, Palmer played a huge role in UFOlogy. He filled Amazing Stories with tales and articles hyping the “Shaver Mystery.” Based on one Richard S. Shaver, this featured a race of freakish creatures called “Deros” who lived in the hollow Earth. Palmer bought reams of material from Shaver, rewrote it, and added stories he penned himself under various pseudonyms. Responses poured in from readers who told of seeing strange objects in the sky and encountering alien beings (Keel 2001b). On the back cover of Amazing Stories’ August 1946 issue were depicted flying discs that, less than a year later, would launch the era of “flying saucers” (Clark 1998, 2: 695; Nickell 2014). On June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine objects in a five-mile-long formation moving like “a saucer skipped across water”—probably a phenomenon called “mountain-top mirages” (McGaha and Nickell 2014).


In any case, Ray Palmer latched onto the “flying saucer” witness. About a month after Arnold’s sighting, Palmer hired him to investigate another saucer case in Washington State, though unfortunately the credulous Arnold was taken in by what is now known as the Maury Island Hoax (Sachs 1980, 191–192; Clark 1998, 2: 612–614). When the premier issue of Palmer’s Fate magazine first appeared in the spring of 1948, its cover story was by Kenneth Arnold, and it gained national attention. In 1952, Arnold wrote, with Palmer, a book titled The Coming of the Saucers. By then UFOs—that is, meteors, stars and planets, balloons, various aircraft, and other mundane phenomena, sometimes seen under unusual conditions such as temperature inversions—were beginning to become “real” presumed extraterrestrial craft. While Jerome Clark (1998, 2: 695) insists, “The UFO phenomenon is the creation not of one man but of tens of thousands of UFO sightings,” this is rather like observing that the Wright Brothers did not create the aircraft industry. To the extent that one man “invented” UFOs—that is, more than any other single person transformed them from fiction to seeming reality—that man was Raymond A. Palmer. Once in 1965, my late friend James W. Moseley (himself a saucer satirist) asked Palmer what he thought about flying saucers. Palmer answered, “What would you say if I told you the whole thing was a joke?” (Sachs 1980, 238).

Dr. J.B. Rhine: The 'Discoverer' of ESP

The term extrasensory perception (ESP) refers to the alleged ability to acquire information by means other than through the known senses, and it would include telepathy (mind reading), clairvoyance (remote viewing), precognition (future knowledge), and retrocognition (paranormal knowledge of past events). Together with psychokinesis (PK, mind over matter), it constitutes what parapsychologists refer to as “psi” to describe two seemingly closely related phenomena. In fact, however, “psi” has never been proven, and, despite extensive research over many decades, there is still a lack of both scientific evidence and theory for its existence (Alcock 1996).


Although there were ancient seers and psychics, the modern interests in such phenomena paralleled rapid developments in science (such as the discoveries of X-rays and radio waves) and scientific reasoning (such as Darwin’s theory of evolution). Interest was also stimulated by the mid-nineteenth century spiritualist craze. When, in 1882, in London, a small band of scientists and spiritualists founded the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), unfortunately, their credulity, even outright gullibility, did not serve them well—and some members such as Harry Price, the ghost hunter, found the society too skeptical (Alcock 1996; Nickell 2012a, 21–22, 195–199, 261).


Despite the SPR’s work, it fell to a botanist, Dr. J.B. Rhine (1895–1980), to attempt to establish psi as a scientific reality. He and his wife, Louisa, wished to establish that the soul existed and hoped to use psychical research (soon called “parapsychology”) to link religion and science. Unfortunately, in 1929, the credulous Rhines were taken in by a “mind-reading” horse named Lady Wonder. Lady appeared to be telepathic, nudging levers to activate alphabet cards and spell out answers to queries, but she was in fact responding to subtle cues from her trainer (Nickell 2004, 279–280).


Nevertheless, Rhine’s parapsychology laboratory at Duke University—founded in 1940—pioneered in ESP research. His card tests—involving a subject’s guessing the sequence of symbols on a special deck of cards—seemed to begin to offer proof of a phenomenon for which he had coined the term Extra-Sensory Perception (as the title of a monograph in 1934). However, the tests were plagued with criticisms that subjects were allowed to handle the cards, that cheating was possible and not adequately guarded against, that the statistical analyses were flawed, and so on. Moreover, when Rhine tightened the controls, the scores went down. Rhine died having never convinced mainstream science that either ESP or psychokinesis was real (Alcock 1996; Hansel 1966).


Even so, Rhine became the most famous parapsychologist in America, his name almost synonymous with ESP. He dominated the field until his death, and even then left an indelible mark on it.

Bernard Heuvelmans: 'Father of Cryptozoology'



The term cryptozoology—the study of unknown or “hidden” creatures (i.e., cryptids)—has been found in use as early as 1941 (Loxton and Prothero 2013, 16). It applies to such purported creatures as sea serpents, the Loch Ness monster, the Yeti, Bigfoot (each discussed here in turn), and many others.


Although sea serpents are reported from ancient times, it was British hydrographer and author Rupert T. Gould (1890–1948) who presented them seriously to readers, beginning in 1930 with his book The Case for the Sea-Serpent. (This was followed by Bernard Heuvelmans’s In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents in 1968.) Gould went on to also promote river and lake creatures in articles, radio broadcasts, and his 1934 book, The Loch Ness Monster and Others (Keel 2001b). Such creatures typically prove to be the misidentification of known creatures (such as otters swimming in a line), or other mundane phenomena, or hoaxes (Nickell 1995, 238–243; 2013a).


Another cryptozoologist was Ivan T. Sanderson (1911–1973), whose important writings on the subject included There Could Be Dinosaurs (1948) and Investigating the Unexplained: A Compendium of Disquieting Mysteries of the Natural World (1972). His 1961 Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life helped turn the Yeti into supposed evidence for Bigfoot. For example, a footprint many believed to be that of a Himalayan Yeti (but more likely an animal track altered and enlarged by melting snow) helped set the stage for the appearance of giant footprints in 1958 at Bluff Creek in northern California, leading to the creature being dubbed “Bigfoot.” In 2002, the tracks were revealed as a hoax by Ray Wallace (Nickell 2011, 68).


In 1967, Bigfoot enthusiast Roger Patterson set out to film the creature at Bluff Creek and returned with footage showing what was more recently revealed as Patterson acquaintance Bob Heironimus wearing a gorilla suit bought from costumer Phil Morris and modified (Nickell 2011, 68–72). Meanwhile, books on the man-beast had begun to proliferate, including Patterson’s Do Abominable Snowmen of American Really Exist? (1966) and John Green’s Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us (1978). Many Bigfoot sightings are attributable to what I call the “Bigfoot Bear”—that is, any bear standing upright and even walking on its hind legs—such lookalikes typically being found in bear country and engaging in bearlike activity (Nickell 2013b).

The "Minnesota Iceman" hoax — supposedly a Sasquatch of a Neanderthal man frozen in ice.


Despite all these paranormal claims, the man usually designated the “Father of Cryptozoology” is Bernard Heuvelmans (1916–2001) (Coleman and Clark 1999, 161). Another claimant for the title would be his friend, the previously mentioned Ivan T. Sanderson; both were taken in by the “Minnesota Iceman” hoax—supposedly a Sasquatch or a Neanderthal man frozen in ice but actually the work of a Disneyland model maker (Nickell 2011, 87–90). However, it was actually Heuvelmans who did the most to create the field of cryptozoology, first with his serious 1955 book, Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées (republished in English, On the Track of Unknown Animals, 1958, 1962), then with his many additional books, his founding a Center for Cryptozoology in 1975 and being elected first president of the International Society of Cryptozoology at its founding in 1982 (Coleman and Clark 1999, 105–108).

Vincent H. Gaddis: The Bermuda Triangulator


The concept of an area of the Atlantic where ships and planes mysteriously disappear can be traced to a Miami Associated Press (AP) writer, E(dward) V(an) W(inkle) Jones. His article appeared in the Miami Herald, September 17, 1950, and was accompanied by an AP map showing Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico partially connected by dashed lines approximating a triangle. Jones (1950) vaguely referred to a “misty limbo of the lost.” Two years later, writing in Fate magazine, George X. Sands (1952) expanded Jones’s article (without citing him or other sources), and added the word triangle and a heavy dose of mystification.


Others also began to get onto the little bandwagon started by E.V.W. Jones, and soon there was a caravan. The flying saucer hucksters fell in behind (e.g., Morris Jessup with The Case for the UFO, 1955, and Donald Keyhoe with The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, 1957), as did writers of the “strange” genre (including Frank Edwards with Stranger Than Science, 1959) and others.


It remained for Vincent Gaddis (1913–1997)—a writer who once made up “filler” stories for Raymond Palmer as “a matter of livelihood” (Gaddis 1991, 16–17)—to get out in front and lead the burgeoning effort. His article in the February 1964 Argosy landed on major American newsstands and gave the mystery area a definitive name and ominous tone: “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.” Gaddis followed a year later with a book on sea mysteries, Invisible Horizons (1965), in which a chapter gave an alternate, even more ominous name for the area, “The Triangle of Death.” Many joined Gaddis with books of their own. John Wallace Spencer’s 1969 self-published book borrowed its title from E.V.W. Jones but pretended otherwise, referring to an area “that I call the ‘Limbo of the Lost.’” (Spencer loaded his auto with books that he then promoted on talk shows, until Bantam Books transformed the work into a bestselling paperback in 1973 [Kusche 1996, 104].)

Map of the “Bermuda Triangle” and some other such alleged regions. (Map by Joe Nickell)


In fact there was no clear “triangle,” and writers proposed greatly varying sizes and even different shapes, including a rough square called “The Hoodoo Sea” and another very large configuration, “Devil’s Trapezium” (Nickell 2007, 5). Worse, reports authority Lawrence David Kusche (1996, 102), “Many of the losses that are credited to the Bermuda Triangle actually occurred nowhere near it, but near Ireland, Newfoundland, in the Pacific Ocean!” Ivan Sanderson took things further into the ridiculous, discovering there to be not just one jinx area but a dozen, his article for the pulp Saga (October 1972) being titled “The 12 Devil’s Graveyards Around the World.” (Reprinted in Ebon 1975.) Some were over land, Sanderson opined, and he called their shapes “Lozanges” (Sanderson 1975, 15–25). Much of the information on which these “Vile Vortices” were based was false or imaginary (Kusche 1996, 114). Still other writers followed, notably Richard Winer with his The Devil’s Triangle and Charles Berlitz with his The Bermuda Triangle—both bestsellers published in 1974.


Meanwhile, the impressive investigation by Kusche—The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved (1975)—used original records and detective work to take the mystery from the mystery mongers. Kusche provided prosaic explanations—severe weather, human error, and equipment failure among them—to case after misrepresented case. For example, the 1963 “disappearance” of the S.S. Marine Sulphur Queen was instead an accident caused by structural weakening due to the removal of bulkheads to accommodate vats containing tons of molten sulfur; wreckage was found, including the name board reading “ARINE SULPH” between its shattered ends (Kusche 1975, 206–216). Still, of course, the claims continued. (I have myself responded to some of them, including for an episode of National Geographic Television’s Is It Real? [2006; see also Nickell 2007]. Kusche revisited the subject in his recent Skeptical Inquirer cover article on the fortieth anniversary of his book, calling the “mystery” of the Bermuda Triangle “one of the most widespread frauds that has ever been perpetrated” (Kusche 2015, 36).

Erich Von Däniken: Charioteer of the Gods

The modern ancient-astronauts craze was sparked in 1968 with the publication of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods?—a book that consistently underestimates the abilities of ancient peoples and assigns many of their impressive works to visiting extraterrestrials. Von Däniken (b. 1935) wrote several other books capitalizing on the worldwide success of his first—works that scholars and scientists label pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology—and other writers followed suit.


Von Däniken did not invent the idea of ancient astronauts; it has its beginnings as far back as the nineteenth century. Also, in 1919, Charles Fort speculated in his Book of the Damned about archaeological indications for early extraterrestrial visitation. Such speculation was also common to pre–von Däniken saucer writers such as Morris K. Jessup (Clark 1998, 1: 75–86).


Nevertheless, von Däniken did create modern worldwide interest in the notion in his books. Again and again, however, he misrepresents the archaeological facts. For example, he suggests that the Egyptians could not have built the pyramids, that they lacked the means of quarrying the stones, transporting them (having neither rope nor wood for rollers), or lifting them in place (von Däniken 1971, 74–80). In fact, the quarries are still extant (one of them being the hollow area in which the Sphinx stands); the “nonexistent” rope is displayed in quantities in museums; the Egyptians left a drawing showing how they transported a colossal statue of many times greater weight than any pyramid stone using rope and a wooden sledge; and traces still exist of the great earthen ramps (progressively lengthened as necessary to lessen the steepness) that were used to raise the stones (Nickell 1995, 187–188).


Von Däniken again overstates the difficulty of making the famous Nazca lines and giant ground drawings that are etched across thirty miles of Peruvian desert. Lines and figures, he opines, could have been “built according to instructions from an aircraft” (von Däniken 1971, 17). In fact, using sticks and knotted cord, I twice recreated Nazca geoglyphs: the giant condor (in 1982 on a Kentucky landfill) and the great spider (in 2006 on a California ranch for filming by National Geographic Television). No flying saucer was required to make the figures, whose lines are believed to be used for ritual processions (Nickell 1983; 2012b, 121–125; Aveni 2000, 212–222).


As to the “chariots” in the title of von Däniken’s first book, they refer to the fiery spaceships he imagines had landed anciently, witnessed by awed primitives. He sees the large drawings as “signals” and the longer and wider lines as “landing strips” (von Däniken 1971, 17; 1972, 105). However, Maria Reiche, the German-born mathematician who mapped and studied the markings, had a ready rejoinder. Noting that the earth there is quite soft, she quipped, “I’m afraid the spacemen would have gotten stuck” (quoted in McIntyre 1975, 718).

Doug Bower and Dave Chorley: Crop Circle Makers



As early as 1978, mysterious, swirled patterns began to appear in southern English fields—most often in wheat and other cereal crops, or “corn” as the British say. They inspired countless articles and a spate of books, no fewer than three in 1989. Circles-mystery enthusiasts were now called “cereologists” (after Ceres, the Roman goddess of vegetation), and “circlemania” was in full bloom (Nickell with Fischer 1992, 177–178).


The phenomenon was essentially new. An attempt to link it with a circle that had appeared in a field of oats in Hertfordshire in 1678—then attributed to witchcraft—fails because that circle was cut, not bent down in a swirled pattern. Although reports of such circles have surfaced in modern times, such as those of reeds in Australia in 1966 and a burned circle of grass in Connecticut in 1970, few had the flattened swirl feature and few were well documented at the time. All were supposedly suggestive of flying-saucer landing spots, such as circles shown in tall grass in a Swiss village by a man claiming to be regularly visited by extraterrestrials (Nickell with Fischer 1992, 183–184).


As investigation showed, several factors pointed to hoaxing as the most likely explanation: Suspiciously, crop circles were more prevalent in southern England, had proliferated as media reports increased, were becoming more complex each season, and exhibited a “shyness” effect (that is, the mechanism avoided being seen in operation). Then two retired artists—Doug Bower and Dave Chorley—confessed they had pioneered in the making of the patterns using planks and cord. They proved their ability by fooling cereologist Pat Delgado, who had declared a pattern they had produced for a British tabloid to be genuine. Soon, others came forward to admit that they too had made circles, helping it become a copycat phenomenon (Nickell with Fischer 1992, 177–210).


“Doug and Dave,” as they became known, were not only the originators of the modern phenomenon, they kept at it and were responsible for many of the giant grain-field patterns made over the years. Although they wrote no articles or books, they demonstrated their circle-making technique for television crews—for example, for ABC-TV’s Good Morning America (September 10, 1991)—and their proclaimed hoax gained worldwide publicity.


Those who did write the articles and books—and who therefore certainly helped promote the mystery of the phenomenon—were much less the “creators” of crop circles than they were its victims. Among them were Terence Meaden (author of The Circles Effect and Its Mystery, 1989), who had postulated that the crop circles were due to wind vortexes, but, as he kept modifying his theories to fit the evidence on the ground, the patterns continuously changed to keep one step ahead. Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews (authors of Circular Evidence, 1989, and other books) were major promoters, but they were fooled by Doug and Dave and their imitators, and, as other hoaxes were revealed, they were left foolishly holding their dowsing rods. Many other circles promoters were likewise fooled, but there were die-hards such as Eltjo H. Haselhoff, PhD (2001), who were undaunted by “self-proclaimed” hoaxers and soldiered on, as the circles became ever more elaborate, morphing into mathematical formations, pictograms, and even rectilinear designs that seemed a spoof of the very term “crop circles.”


One wonders what these several “creators of the paranormal” would today think of what they had wrought. No doubt most felt their cause important. Some were credulous but principled (Bernard Heuvelmans and J.B. Rhine); some were out to make a buck (Harry Price, Vincent Gaddis, and Erich von Däniken); and still others wished to stir things up and enjoy the fray (Charles Fort, Raymond Palmer, and Doug Bower and Dave Chorley). Perhaps each was rewarded in his own way. Despite some side benefits (our learning more about such things as waking dreams, misperceptions, the will to believe, etc.) the paranormal has proved largely a chimera—that fire-breathing, lion-headed, goat-bodied, serpent-tailed monster of ancient mythology. Nevertheless, it still lurks at the common boundary of superstition and science, endlessly chasing its scorched tail.

References

• Alcock, James E. 1996. Extrasensory perception. In Stein 1996, 241–254.
• Aveni, Anthony F. 2000. Nasca: Eighth Wonder of the World? London: British Museum Press.
• Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1996. American Folklore: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland.
• Clark, Jerome. 1992. UFO Encounters. Lincolnwood, Illinois: Publications International.
• ———. 1998. The UFO Encyclopedia, in two vols. Detroit, MI: Omnigraphics.
• Coleman, Loren, and Jerome Clark. 1999. Cryptozoology A to Z. New York: Fireside.
• Ebon, Martin. 1975. The Riddle of the Bermuda Triangle. Scarborough, Ontario, Canada: The New American Library of Canada.
• Gaddis, Vincent. 1965. Invisible Horizons: True Mysteries of the Sea. New York: Chilton Books.
• ———. 1991. Interview by Mark Chorvinsky. Strange Magazine 7 (April): 14–18, 54–55.
• Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2000. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. New York: Checkmark Books.
• Hansel, C.E.M. 1966. ESP: A Scientific Evaluation. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
• Haselhoff, Eltjo H. 2001. The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles. Berkeley, CA: Frog, Ltd.
• Is It Real? “Bermuda Triangle.” 2006. National Geographic Channel, aired September 25.
• Jones, E.V.W. 1950. Sea’s puzzles still baffle men in pushbutton age. Miami Herald (September 17): 6F.
• Keel, John A. 2001a. The man who invented flying saucers. Fortean Times 41 (Winter): 52–57.
• ———. 2001b. The Shaver mystery. In Story 2001, 536–546.
• Knight, Damon. 1970. Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
• Kusche, Lawrence David. 1975. The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved. New York: Warner Books.
• ———. 1996. The Bermuda Triangle. In Stein 1996.
• ———. 2015. The Bermuda Triangle mystery delusion: Looking back after forty years. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 39(6) (November/December): 28–37.
• Loxton, Daniel, and Donald R. Prothero. 2013. Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids. New York: Columbia University Press.
• McGaha, James, and Joe Nickell. 2014. Mount Rainier: “Saucer magnet.” SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 38(3) (May/June): 34–39.
• McIntyre, Loren. 1975. Mystery of the ancient Nazca Lines. National Geographic (May).
• Morris, Richard. 2006. Harry Price: The Psychic Detective. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton.
• Nadis, Fred. 2013. The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.
• Nickell, Joe. 1983. The Nazca drawings revisited. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 7(3) (Spring): 36–44.
• ———. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• ———. 2004. The Mystery Chronicles. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 2007. The Bermuda Triangle and the ‘Hutchinson Effect.’ Skeptical Briefs (September): 5–7.
• ———. 2011. Tracking the Man-Beasts. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• ———. 2012a. The Science of Ghosts. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• ———. 2012b. CSI Paranormal. Amherst, NY: Inquiry Press.
• ———. 2013a. Scotland mysteries—part 1: The silly Ness monster. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 37(2) (March/ April): 20–22.
• ———. 2013b. Bigfoot lookalikes. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 37(5) (September/October): 12–15.
• ———. 2014. Era of the flying saucers. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 38(6) (November/December): 16–18.
• Nickell, Joe, with John F. Fischer. 1992. Mysterious Realms. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Price, Harry. 1936. Confessions of a Ghost Hunter. London: Putnam.
• ———. 1940. The Most Haunted House in England: Ten Years’ Investigation of Borley Rectory. London: Longmans Green.
• Sachs, Margaret. 1980. The UFO Encyclopedia. New York: Perigee Books.
• Sanderson, Ivan. 1975. World-wide seas of mystery. In Ebon 1975.
• Sands, George X. 1952. Sea mystery at our back door. Fate (October): 11–17.
• Stein, Gordon, ed. 1996. The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Steinmeyer, Jim. 2008. Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.
• Story, Ronald D., ed. 2001. The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters. New York: New American Library.
• Von Däniken, Erich. 1971. Chariots of the Gods? New York: Bantam.
• ———. 1972. Gods from Outer Space. New York: Bantam.

Heartfield, John. Appeasement. 1936. Photomontage. (c) 1972 Carl Hanser Verlag, Munchen.

You know that riddle about killing baby Hitler? The one where you’re asked if you would go back and kill an infant Adolf, knowing that he would one day be a mass murderer? I wish I could go back and kill vegetarian Hitler, because he’s been ruining conversations for decades.

It goes like this:

“Being a vegetarian doesn’t make you morally superior! Even Hitler was a vegetarian!”

I happen to be a vegetarian (and not a Nazi), so I get to hear this little diddy about once every two months. Often I’ve said nothing about my diet at all; I pick up a piece of Tofurky, and out spills the rage of someone at the dinner table, who feels judged even while my mouth is too full of soy meat to be making moral proclamations. But even my meat-eating friends (the ones without so much inner turmoil, I suppose) blink in absolute astonishment. Why are we talking about Hitler at Thanksgiving? Why are these thoughts even connected to our dinner? Is our friend having a stroke? And wait, hang on, did Hitler eat meat?

So, let’s settle this: Was Hitler a vegetarian?

First of all, no.

If being a vegetarian means abstaining from meat without fail, then no. Don’t trust me, and don’t trust animal rights brochures. Trust the chef who fed him: “I learned this recipe when I worked as a chef, before World War II, in one of the large hotels in Hamburg, Germany,” writes Dione Lucas in her 1964 classic, Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook. “I do not mean to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab [pigeon], but you might be interested to know that it was a great favorite with Mr. Hitler, who dined at the hotel often.” Lest we think she meant a different Mr. Hitler, she adds, “Let us not hold that against a fine recipe, though.”

I picked up a used copy of the cookbook (for a humble $4) to verify the quote, which has found its way into defensive vegetarian literature near and far. It is, indeed, legitimate. And one has to wonder why anyone would claim that Hitler, of all people, loved their cooking, unless he did. Other biographers have him eating sausages and liver on the regular, and some (such as historian Robert Payne) believe Hitler’s reputation as a vegetarian was a shrewd propaganda campaign to make him appear an ascetic.

But in 2013, that all fell apart. A 95-year-old German woman named Margot Woelk gave an interview to the Telegraph that year, claiming that she had been one of Hitler’s official food-testers. Horrifyingly, she was required to try each of his meals herself before serving it. If she died of poison, as the plan went, he wouldn’t have dinner that night.

“It was all vegetarian, the most delicious fresh things, from asparagus to peppers and peas, served with rice and salads,” she told the Telegraph. “It was all arranged on one plate, just as it was served to him. There was no meat and I do not remember any fish.”

Indeed, Nazi Germany put in place a number of animal protection laws, including famously banning vivisection, so this all makes sense. Even so, biographers such as Payne claim that Hitler was not devoted to the lifestyle, choosing to feast on meats when he so chose. But as Hal Herzog, PhD, points out in Psychology Today, that’s not so different from most Americans who call themselves vegetarian but give themselves the wiggle room to succumb to human temptation without giving up on their ideals (and their “vegetarian” moniker) altogether.

So, was Hitler a vegetarian? Sort of, off and on. He certainly advocated a vegetarian diet and lifestyle at certain points, but he by no means maintained the diet consistently. And when trusting people at their word, the last person you might want to trust is, well, Hitler.

Which brings us to the most important question: Why are we still talking about Hitler at the dinner table?

Humans are capable of grand and tragic displays of cognitive dissonance. Where Hitler may have ironically seen common ground between humans and animals, but failed to find compassion for his fellow human beings, many of us are guilty of the reverse.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether Hitler was a vegetarian. But, if you really want to know, he wasn’t a very good one.

Extrasensory Perception: Support, Skepticism, and Science. Edwin C. May and Sonali Bhatt Marwaha, editors. Praeger, Santa Barbara, CA, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4408-3287-1. Two volumes. 829 pp. $131.00.

Extrasensory Perception is divided into two volumes, the first titled History, Controversy, and Research and the second Theories of Psi. It is introduced by Professor James Fallon, who describes himself as a “basic sciences hard-boiled neuroscientist” who generally considers psi (psychic power) to be little more than wishful thinking. However, he is so impressed by what he refers to as the sophistication demonstrated in this work—in terms of experimental design, statistical analysis, protection against fraud, and so forth—that he plans to make it required reading for his first-year graduate students. Such a positive endorsement by a self-described skeptic—combined with the work’s subtitle, Support, Skepticism, and Science—raises expectations of a rigorous and dispassionate examination of the evidence for extrasensory perception (ESP) and of the major methodological criticisms that it has engendered.

And therein lies the disappointment. While ESP proponents will no doubt be delighted by the parade of apparent data and theory in support of psi, skeptical criticism of parapsychological research is given short shrift indeed. Given that the first volume is titled History, Controversy, and Research, one might expect to find a detailed discussion and possible rebuttal of the many careful methodological criticisms leveled at ESP research by Ray Hyman, Susan Blackmore, David Marks, Richard Wiseman, and others, including me. However, of the fourteen chapters in this first volume, only three present a critical perspective, while the second volume virtually ignores criticism altogether. While those three chapters are well-presented and make valuable contributions in their own right, none focuses on the many specific methodological shortcomings that plague such research. In the first of them, philosopher Richard Corry concludes that while there is nothing impossible about ESP, “evidence for ESP must meet a high standard, a standard that it does not seem to have reached.” He goes on to offer a thoughtful analysis of the difficulties involved in interpreting parapsychological data, but he does not address in any detail why he believes that such a standard has not been met. Next, a chapter by psychologist Christopher French provides worthy insights into how people with similar backgrounds in science can differ so much in terms of their acceptance or rejection of supposed evidence for psi. He also discusses how cognitive biases and neuroscience can best explain many ostensibly paranormal experiences.

In the last of the three skeptical chapters, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and colleagues argue that there has been an unintended benefit from parapsychological research and the criticism it has engendered: “The substantial credit for the current ‘crisis of confidence’ goes to psi researchers. It is their work that has helped convince other researchers that the academic system is broken, for if our standard scientific methods allow one to prove the impossible, then those methods are surely up for revision.” In my mind, this gives too much (albeit negative) credit to psi research; in fact, the concern has come largely from within science itself. Wagenmakers and colleagues go on to provide valuable criticisms of the statistical evaluation of psi data and suggest some ways to improve psi research. However, as in the preceding two chapters, particular methodological problems in psi research are not the focus.

If one were to judge by the remaining chapters, one would hardly think that there has been any responsible criticism of parapsychological research at all. This is made loud and clear in J.W. McMoneagle’s chapter on remote viewing, which opens with a quick dismissal of “much critique and hostile skepticism about the validity of precognition.” He then goes on to describe an apparently remarkable remote-viewing success that provided critical military intelligence. Lance Storm and Adam Rotman provide an overview of parapsychological research in Australia and Asia, without any acknowledgement of methodological criticisms of parapsychological research. Loyd Auerbach, Dominic Parker, and Sheila Smith survey parapsychological research in the United States. In this case, rather than addressing the serious methodological criticisms made by a number of critics, including me, of Daryl Bem’s research methodology as described in his publication in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, these authors argue that such criticism displays bias “not only against the very idea of publishing such research in mainstream journals but against the concepts being researched.” Bem’s research was methodologically unsound, and it is unfortunate that rather than addressing the criticisms of it, the authors simply reject them out of hand.

Dean Radin describes studies of presentiment (a supposedly unconscious form of precognition in which physiological activity—“pre-feeling”—occurs with regard to an unpredictable future event) and refers to numerous replications of presentiment studies. He concludes that “it is the repeatability that gives us confidence that the effect is genuine” (emphasis in the original). However, he wisely cautions that methodological loopholes in such research might yet be found and that “the potential for other biases to be lurking is ever present.” Of course, to the critic, it is not repeatability per se that is the important criterion but repeatability by neutral scientists. This is because design flaws and errors in interpretation are also likely to be repeated when replications are carried out by the same experimenters or by researchers who share their conviction that psi is real.

Yet parapsychologists argue that a neutral scientist, lacking in the belief that psi exists, may never be able to demonstrate psi, and so replicability in that sense may be unattainable. This is because of the so-called psi experimenter effect, which explains away failures to replicate through reinterpreting such failures as indirect evidence for psi. Tressoldi and Duggan, in their chapter focused primarily on psi research in Europe, argue that there is “clear and strong evidence for the role of experimenter belief in manifesting psi. . . . It asks the question whether the experimenter or the subject is using his or her precognitive ability to derive the response. Either way, it still indicates the existence of precognition!” A similar attempt to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse is presented in the chapter written by statistician Jessica Utts:

The whole situation is complicated by the possibility of experimenter effects enhanced by psi abilities. It may be impossible to conduct a true replication unless two experimenters have identical beliefs and desires about the outcome. This realization may be the greatest legacy that psi research can contribute to the scientific enterprise. If true, it will require a major rethinking of the scientific method and the value of replication in science.

So, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. According to these writers, a failure to replicate a psi experiment not only does not weaken the evidence but may actually provide further evidence for psi, as a manifestation of the experimenter effect! This is certainly a win-win proposition. As incredible as this will appear to scientists outside parapsychology, Utts nonetheless argues that science may have to discard replication—one of its most important safeguards against error and self-delusion—in order to acknowledge and accommodate the psi experimenter effect.

Overall, there is a significant failure in this volume to acknowledge and deal with the many methodological criticisms that have been leveled at parapsychological research. The three “skeptical” chapters aside, methodological criticism is at times reviled, but generally it is just ignored. So much for the “skepticism” part of Support, Skepticism, and Science.

Volume 2, Theories of Psi, is dedicated to explaining psi phenomena by harnessing concepts from modern physics. Skepticism is not addressed to any significant degree. Chapter titles such as “Physics beyond Causality,” “Remembrance of Things Future: A Case for Retrocausation and Precog­nition,” and “Consciousness-Induced Restoration of Time Sym­metry” provide a good idea of what the reader will find here. Yet these efforts are premature: one need first to establish that the phenomena undergoing theoretical analysis actually exist before trying to fit them into theory. For the scientific community at large, such establishment has yet to occur.

Overall, despite the subtitles of “History, Controversy, and Research” and “Support, Skepticism, and Sci­ence,” neither controversy nor skepticism is given their due in this work. It is in large part a celebration of parapsychology by parapsychologists, a celebration freed from the shadow of methodological criticism. Left unaware of such criticism, it is not altogether surprising that Professor Fallon was favorably impressed. However, for responsible critics of parapsychology, there is little in this work that will enlighten them.

In the lead up to the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, global news attention has focused on the impact of the Zika virus in the country, including efforts to halt the spread of the mosquito-borne virus across Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions.

People who contract Zika are unlikely to experience symptoms. Those who do develop signs of infection experience a few days of body aches, rash, and fever, though in some cases there are more severe neurological and autoimmune effects. For many experts, this makes the Zika virus a potentially less serious public health problem than the lethal mosquito-transmitted pandemics of malaria and dengue.

Yet it is the special risk to infants that has galvanized worldwide attention. Among pregnant women, contracting Zika increases the risk of birth defects, including microcephaly, in which an infant’s head and brain do not fully develop. In Brazil, there have been more than 5,000 confirmed cases of microcephaly associated with Zika.

Summertime temperatures are likely to bring to the United States the first non–travel-related cases of Zika. The mosquito species that is the primary carrier of the virus ranges across the South and Southwest and stretches into states including Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, New Jersey, and parts of New York. But outbreaks in the United States are likely to be limited compared to other countries. Better housing, window screens, and air conditioning are far more common than in poorer countries, and the states that are most likely to be affected have substantial experience in preventing and containing such diseases.

Still, the public opinion dynamics surrounding the past pandemics of swine flu and Ebola suggest that worry among Americans is likely to escalate, intensifying across summer months and into the fall. Concern will be driven not only by saturation news coverage of the Olympics and a possible outbreak in the United States but also by a highly polarized presidential election campaign.

Doubts about a Swine Flu Vaccine

In spring 2009, the first cases of swine flu were reported in Mexico with other cases soon identified in the United States and around the world. By June 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the swine flu outbreak was the first worldwide pandemic in forty years. When, several months later, an emergency vaccine was made available to the American public, whether or not an individual said they planned to be vaccinated depended strongly on their partisan outlook and their trust in government.

At the outset of the pandemic, surveys indicated that swine flu had quickly come to dominate Americans’ attention, as 82 percent of Americans said they were following the story, making the pandemic one of the most followed news stories of the year. At the time, it was also the most followed story about infectious disease in history, topping SARS, West Nile Virus, and mad cow disease, though swine flu would soon be eclipsed in 2014 by Ebola virus (see Figure 1) (Pew 2009a).

The amount of public attention to swine flu during spring 2009 was not surprising given that a third of total news coverage across media outlets focused on the virus. No other issue came close. Even the still-faltering economy captured only 10 percent of total news coverage. Later that year in October, public attention spiked again as news coverage focused on the public availability of a vaccine (Pew 2009a; 2009b). But efforts to offer the vaccine to the public soon became politically controversial, as misleading claims about safety spread by way of talk radio and social media, leading many Americans to say they would forego vaccinations (Steinhauer 2009).

In the context of these false claims, there were strong differences in public perceptions. Half of Republicans said news reports were overstating swine flu’s danger, compared to 35 percent of Democrats (Pew 2009a). More troubling, only 41 percent of Republicans said they would get vaccinated, compared to 60 percent of Democrats (Pew 2009a). Further analysis showed that trust in government was ultimately the key driver of decisions to be vaccinated. In contrast to their Democratic counterparts, Republicans were less likely to believe that the Obama administration could handle the swine flu problem, and as a consequence, were less likely to say that they were willing to take the vaccine (Mesch and Schwirian 2015).

The Ebola Outbreak and Election Politics

In December 2013, the first Ebola epidemic in history broke out in West Africa. By mid-2014, the epidemic had dramatically intensified. From July 2014 to October 2014, monthly reported cases in Guinea and Sierra Leone increased from 500 in each country to a peak of nearly 3,000. By January 2016, when the WHO declared the epidemic officially over, there had been more than 28,000 reported cases in West Africa and 11,300 confirmed deaths.

In the United States, there were a total of four confirmed Ebola cases and one related death. Yet by early October 2014, despite little to no risk of contracting the disease, 32 percent of the U.S. public said they were very or somewhat worried about Ebola. Two weeks later, as media attention to the epidemic intensified, worry had spread to 41 percent of the public. At the start of the month, Americans regardless of partisan identity expressed similar levels of worry. But two weeks later, worry among self-identified Republicans had grown from 33 percent to 49 percent. In comparison, worry among self-identified Democrats had shifted more modestly from 30 percent to 36 percent (see Figure 2) (Pew 2014).

In mid-October 2014, at the peak of concern, a review of polls shows that about half of the public (45 percent) said they were either very or somewhat worried that they or their family would become sick with Ebola. Fears of infection subsequently declined as no other U.S. cases were reported. Still, by November 2014, Americans ranked Ebola as the third most urgent health problem facing the country, just below cost and access to health care and ahead of cancer and heart disease (which combined to account for nearly half of all U.S. deaths annually; see SteelFisher et al. 2015).

A review of polling evidence suggests several key factors that led to a public fear over Ebola that was substantially out of proportion to the actual nature of the threat.

First, surveys indicate that false beliefs about Ebola were widespread. For example, Ebola is not airborne and is not contagious until someone shows symptoms. Yet 85 percent of Americans believed that if sneezed or coughed on by a symptomatic individual, a person is either very likely or somewhat likely to get Ebola (SteelFisher et al. 2015).

A second factor was the saturation nature of news coverage particularly on network TV and cable news. By one tally, CNN, NBC, and CBS aired nearly 1,000 evening news segments about Ebola between mid-October and early November. The personalization of coverage around the two American nurses and one doctor who were infected with Ebola at the expense of more contextual, thematic coverage likely helped intensify public concern (SteelFisher et al. 2015). Cable news and talk radio also framed the U.S. government’s response to Ebola in strongly political and partisan terms, making it easy for Republicans and others who disliked the Obama administration to discount reassurances from health officials that there was little need to worry.

Like in the case of swine flu, a third related factor was public confidence in the government. Although 57 percent of the public said they had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the government to prevent an Ebola outbreak, there were predictably strong partisan differences in opinion. By mid-October, 67 percent of Democrats said they had confidence in the government compared to only 41 percent of Republicans who said the same (Pew 2014; SteelFisher et al. 2015).

Preparing for the Zika Controversy

As of spring 2016, similar public opinion dynamics to swine flu and Ebola were already observable in the case of Zika. Public attention quickly spiked in reaction to news of the threat. Nearly 60 percent of Americans in February 2016 said they were following news about Zika either very closely or fairly closely (DiJulio et al. 2016).

At the same time, public knowledge was low. Though nine out of ten Americans knew that the virus spread by mosquitoes, 40 percent did not know the virus could be sexually transmitted, and 31 percent incorrectly believed that the virus could be transmitted through coughing and sneezing (Joseph 2016). By March 2016, 68 percent said they were familiar with news reports of the issue and 50 percent said that the issue concerned them. Much of this concern, however, was likely rooted in false beliefs, as 42 percent thought incorrectly that it was likely someone would die from Zika if infected, and that the mosquito that carries the disease could be found in every state (Annenberg 2016).

As news coverage of Zika increases leading up to the Olympics and as the first cases are reported in the United States, the presidential election campaign is likely to intensify political conflict over Federal funding for prevention and possible limits on immigration. In this context, false claims and misinformation are likely to rapidly spread, and partisan messaging is likely to be strong. It would not be surprising, then, for Democrats and Republicans to start to split in their perceptions of the threat, in their trust in the response of government agencies, and in their support for different types of policy actions.

In this new era of partisan pandemics, public health officials need to expand their investment in localized and regional communication strategies that can effectively reach the public below the level of national political debate. This includes building relationships with local media and opinion leaders, and the capacity to rapidly respond to misinformation. The expert community should also continue to cultivate strong relationships with leaders across the political spectrum, including respected nonpartisan voices such as military and faith-based leaders who can affirm expert consensus on the nature of the risks and what is needed in response (see SteelFisher et al. 2015).

References

• Annenberg Public Policy Center. 2016. More Than 4 in 10 Mistakenly Think Zika Is Fatal, Symptoms Are Noticeable. Available online at http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/more-than-4-in-10-mistakenly-think-zika-is-fatal-and-symptoms-are-noticeable/.
• DiJulio, B., J. Firth, A. Kirzinger, et al. 2016. Kaiser Health Tracking Poll: February 2016. Washington, DC: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Available online at http://kff.org/global-health-policy/poll-finding/kaiser-health-tracking-poll-february-2016/.
• Joseph, A. 2016. 1 in 3 Americans think you can catch Zika from a sneeze. STAT News (March 29). Available online at https://www.statnews.com/2016/03/29/zika-poll/.
• Mesch, G.S., and K.P. Schwirian. 2015. Social and political determinants of vaccine hesitancy: Lessons learned from the H1N1 pandemic of 2009–2010. American Journal of Infection Control 43(11): 1161–1165.
• Pew Research Center. 2009a. Local TV A Top Source for Swine Flu News. Available online at http://www.people-press.org/2009/05/06/local-tv-a-top-source-for-swine-flu-news/.
• ———. 2009b. Growing Interest in Swine Flu, Many See Press Overstating its Danger. Available online at http://www.people-press.org/2009/10/15/growing-interest-in-swine-flu-many-see-press-overstating-its-danger/.
• ———. 2014. Most Are Confident in Government’s Ability to Prevent Major Ebola Outbreak in U.S. Available online at http://www.people-press.org/2014/10/06/most-are-confident-in-governments-ability-to-prevent-major-ebola-outbreak-in-u-s/.
• SteelFisher, G.K., R.J. Blendon, and N. Lasala-Blanco. 2015. Ebola in the United States—Public reactions and implications. New Eng­land Journal of Medicine 373(9): 789–791.
• Steinhauer, J. 2009. Swine flu shots revive a debate. New York Times (October 16): A1. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/health/16vaccine.html.

One of the best-known UFO sightings in recent years—the so-called “Phoenix Lights”—took place on the evening of March 13, 1997. They were very widely seen largely because that was one of the best nights to see the bright naked-eye Comet Hale-Bopp, and large numbers of people went outdoors to observe it. They were surprised to see something else in the sky. (There were later, unrelated Phoenix Lights events as well; see, for example, “The Mysterious Phoenix Lights,” SI, July/August 2008.)

The Phoenix Lights episode actually consists of two unrelated incidents, although both were the result of activities of the same organization: Operation Snowbird, a pilot training program operated in the winter by the Air National Guard out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. In the first incident, something described as a large “flying triangle” was sighted during the eight o’clock hour. Five A-10 jets from Operation Snowbird had flown from Tucson to Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas several days earlier, and because this was the final night of the operation, they were now returning. The A-10 jets were flying under VFR (visual flight rules), so there was no need for them to check in with airports along the route. They were following the main air corridor for air traffic traveling that route, the “highway in the sky.” (Why a UFO would follow U.S. air traffic corridors is a mystery.) Because they were flying in formation mode, they did not have on their familiar blinking collision lights but instead their formation lights, which look like landing lights (in any case, Federal Aviation Administration rules concerning private and commercial aircraft lights, flight altitudes, etc., do not apply to military aircraft). The A-10s flew over the Phoenix area and flew on to Tucson, landing at Davis-Monthan about 8:45 pm. Some witnesses claim that it was a single huge solid object, but the sole video existing of the objects shows them moving with respect to each other, and hence were separate objects.

In the second incident, starting around 10:00 pm that same evening, hundreds if not thousands of people in the Phoenix area witnessed a row of brilliant lights hovering in the sky, or slowly falling. Many photographs and videos were taken, making this perhaps the most widely witnessed UFO event in history. This was a flare drop practiced by different A-10 jets from the Maryland Air National Guard, also operating out of Davis-Monthan from Operation Snowbird. And since this was the last night of the operation, they seem to have had a lot of flares that needed dropping. On my Bad UFOs Blog, I have written a detailed analysis of each incident.

The “flare drop” explanation is less controversial than that for the “flying triangle,” but even the former is often challenged. Dr. Lynne D. Kitei, for one, isn’t having any of this “flare drop” business. On her website ThePhoenixLights.net (which claims to promote “Evolution to a New Consciousness,” whatever that means), she claims she was watching the Phoenix Lights two years before everyone else, and that her research proves “we are not alone.” By some complicated analysis, she claims to have proven that the objects photographed could not have been flares, although I haven’t run across anyone who understands what she’s saying. I heard her speak at the 2012 International UFO Congress near Phoenix, and some of her photos of UFOs appeared to me to be lights on the ground. Giving up her medical practice to become a full-time promoter of the story, “Dr. Lynne” (as she is sometimes called) has made a documentary film, The Phoenix Lights, and has often appeared on Coast to Coast AM, the well-known late-night paranormal and conspiracy-fest hosted by George Noory, to tell her version of the story. Each year in March around the anniversary of the incident (“We’re coming up on the twentieth anniversary next year!” she excitedly told me at this year’s UFO Congress), she hosts an event in an auditorium in Phoenix in which videos are shown, and witnesses new and old relate their stories. Dr. Lynne is a sweet lady who is unfailingly cheerful and polite, even if you disagree with her (or don’t understand what she’s saying). She has accumulated additional sighting reports from additional witnesses, including accounts of a giant UFO a mile wide hovering over Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport.

But now the Phoenix Lights are growing to even more gigantic proportions, if that is possible. A new motion picture, The Phoenix Incident, was being promoted in a big way at this year’s UFO Congress, with a large desk in the vendors’ area proclaiming “The Truth is Coming” and handing out cheesy little boomerangs labeled with the film title. According to the movie’s promotional material:

The Phoenix Incident is a fictionalized heart-pounding thriller based on this real-life event. Written and directed by gaming talent director Keith Arem (Call of Duty, Titan­fall) and starring Troy Baker (famed gaming actor) this one-night event uses whistleblower testimony, recovered military footage and eyewitness accounts to create a sci-fi thriller that examines the US military’s alleged engagement of alien spacecrafts.

The movie received its premiere public showing at the UFO Congress at the close of the Friday session. It’s mostly shaky, dark “found footage,” supposedly left behind by four guys who were eaten by aliens. The plot: As Comet Hale-Bopp passes Earth, it is followed by a companion object, a UFO, which falls to Earth and lands in Arizona. Out pour scary aliens, looking somewhat like the creatures in Alien, who start to eat people. Somehow the military covers it all up. The irony is this: while everyone was inside watching the premiere of this silly movie, the Air National Guard was busy dropping flares again over the Barry Goldwater range. And we didn’t see them.

Until now, the Phoenix Lights were simply that: they were just lights in the sky, skeptics and proponents could agree. But this movie, by mixing actual photos and video of the lights and actual witnesses’ accounts with dramatic fictional elements, has succeeded in muddying the waters. In the movie, four men disappear in the desert, becoming lunch for sinister-looking aliens, while the footage they supposedly left behind becomes the basis for this mockumentary. The military somehow knows all about these aliens and apparently drives them off. Operation Snowbird appears in the film—not as the pilot-training program it is but instead as a sinister coverup agency that is sent out to disseminate confusion and falsehood whenever aliens pop up. Relaxing outdoors at the UFO Congress the evening after the showing of this film, I heard a certain know-it-all discussing it and telling the people who had gathered around him, “Our planes engaged the Triangle!” In other words, he claimed that U.S. Air Force jets fought off a gigantic alien triangular craft nineteen years ago.

The claims of a “companion object” following Comet Hale-Bopp were made by an amateur astronomer who claimed to have a photo of it. The claim was promoted on the Coast to Coast AM all-night, all-high-weirdness radio show, then hosted by Art Bell, and set off a sensation lasting two months. The photo shows nothing more than a misidentified star, but this was enough to trigger thirty-nine members of the Heavens Gate UFO cult, led by Marshall Applewhite, to take their own lives on March 26, 1997, so they could “rise up” and join the object supposedly following the comet.

Jacques Vallee, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who sits on the board of a half-dozen such firms, wants you to send him money. Vallee, a leading UFO author for over fifty years, is crowdsourcing funds for 500 copies of the new (and hopefully revised) “collector’s limited edition” of the 2009 book he coauthored with Chris Aubeck, Wonders in the Sky. The book deals with unexplained reports of things reportedly seen in the sky before the modern UFO era, going all the way back to ancient Rome and Greece. Vallee says that he will present the book, with its “facsimile commemorative coin” and “artistic beauty and scientific merit,” “to science” to show that UFO sightings have been around for a long time and should be taken seriously. I don’t think “science” will ever get to see this purportedly marvelous book, with only 500 copies of it ever to be printed, and all of them presumably in the hands of people who have contributed $220 to the effort. This fundraising scarcely seems necessary since the $110,000 this effort is hoped to bring in ought to be small change to someone like Vallee.

And that part about the “scientific merit” is also pretty dubious. Blogger Jason Colavito, who has been studying the claims in Wonders in the Sky, calls it a “demonstrably false and generally quite unreliable anthology of badly translated and frequently fictitious documents recording premodern UFO sightings. . . . [Vallee] wasn’t able to sell more than 150 of the 500 future copies of Wonders in the Sky he put up for sale late last year”.

Since that was written, Vallee and Aubeck have sold two more; there are now only 348 copies remaining for subscription. For the specifics of Cola­vito’s criticisms, see http://goo.gl/X1VrfN. Researcher Martin Kottmeyer noted that alleged sightings of “Neith,” a supposed moon of Venus, were cited nine times in the book as unknowns. However:

Neith had been debunked in Nature magazine back in 1887. The Nature author looked into 33 observations/claims that Venus had a satellite. All but one had a good solution along the lines of either the positions of known stars or suspicions of optical ghosts and artifacts of the telescope lenses in use. The final one was guessed to be a minor asteroid passing near Earth.

As for Vallee’s coauthor Chris Aubeck, he recently posted this to a Facebook discussion of apparent errors in the book:

Over the last eight years my interest in UFOs has changed so that I approach the subject as an observer/folklorist/historian/archivist of the evolution of ufology itself, not to defend individual cases. I am deeply involved in plotting the historical roots and development of UFO mythology, so whether anomalous phenomena have acted as stimuli or not isn’t as relevant to me as it was in 2009.

This statement sounds like Aubeck backtracking and washing his hands of Vallee’s claim that this material represents a Challenge to Science (an inside joke; that’s the title of one of Vallee’s early books). Kottmeyer has also shown that the “primary source” consulted for Vallee and Aubeck’s description of a sighting of anomalous objects by the famous French astronomer Charles Messier (entry # 358) was not any contemporary eighteenth-century source but Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned. The description of the incident in Vallee and Aubeck differs from that in actual primary sources but matches Fort’s fanciful description of it. So much for a book boldly heralded by its authors as “a breakthrough in UFO research”!

In other news, UFOlogist Richard Dolan recently declared his belief in chemtrail conspiracies. On March 30, he wrote on his Facebook page:

All day long, I have been watching the aircraft stream across Rochester’s skies. Most of them have been leaving behind trails that do not go away, simply spreading across the sky. For those who do not pay attention, these look like ordinary clouds that have come in. But most of this is not natural. . . . I believe that geo-engineering is real. When I grew up in the 1970s, this type of nonsense did not occur. And I lived just outside New York City, watching major airline traffic every day go over my house. Such artificial clouds never existed back then. This phenomenon is real.

UFO buffs sometimes describe Dolan as “cautious” and “thoughtful,” even though he has long been promoting loopy stuff such as the “secret space program.” Last year, he took a big hit from his participation in promoting the “Roswell slides” (see this column, September/October, 2015). I don’t think we’ll be hearing that kind of talk about Dolan any longer.

An American embodiment of the Robin Hood legend, notorious outlaw Jesse James, with his older brother Frank, rode boldly into U.S. history in the wake of the Civil War, during which the two had trained for a career of daring bank and train holdups. Born in Missouri, they nevertheless had many connections to Kentucky, and it was these the editor of The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Kleber 1992) asked me to investigate—with special attention to the 1868 robbery of the bank at Russellville to determine if it was actually perpetrated by the James gang. I completed that assignment (Nickell 1992), as well as a longer, historical-journal article (Nickell 1993a), and produced other related writings (Nickell 1993b; 1999). The following is a summary that also looks into Jesse James ghost-lore and other legends.

Background

The James boys, Frank (1843–1915) and Jesse (1847–1882), were born and reared in Missouri, the sons of Robert Sallee James (1818–1850) and Zerelda Cole James (1825–1911). Beginning in 1839, Robert attended the Baptist institution Georgetown College (where I once taught and examined the original records).

Zerelda’s grandfather, Richard Cole, 
Jr., operated a stagecoach inn near Midway, Kentucky. I visited it and the home of Zerelda’s guardian, Judge James Lindsay, where the couple was married on December 28, 1841. They then moved to Missouri. Following the births of Frank and Jesse, they had one more child, Susan Lavinia, born in 1849 (Nickell 1993a, 218–220). After Robert S. James died during the California gold rush, his widow remarried but was soon widowed again, and finally, in 1856, she wed Dr. Reuben Samuel, by whom she had four more children.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Frank James joined a Confederate guerilla band, and his fifteen-year-old kid brother did likewise two years later. Jesse thus embarked on a course of outlawry that would end only with his violent death in 1882.

Figure 1. The Long Bank in Russellville, Kentucky, was robbed in 1868. Was it by the Jesse James Gang as legend holds? (Photograph by Joe Nickell.)

The James Gang

After the war, the so-called James Gang—largely a postwar band of former Quantrill’s Raiders, originally led by Cole Younger—was held responsible for numerous robberies in several states. These included, in Kentucky, a pair of stagecoaches near Mammoth Cave and banks in Columbia and Russellville (Nickell 1993a; Beamis and Pullen n.d., 10–19, 45, 56–60).

The Long Bank (owned by Nimrod Long) in Russellville (Figure 1) was the scene of a “daring” robbery on the afternoon of Friday, March 20, 1868. Days before, a man using the apparent alias of “Thomas Coleman” attempted to sell a $500 bond, but it was suspected of being counterfeit. On the Wednesday before the robbery, he tried again with a $100 treasury note, which was also declined. He was accompanied by a man who appeared to be observing the layout of the bank. Finally, on March 20, “Coleman” and two others arrived at the bank from different directions, hitched their horses, and walked inside. While they attempted to cash a $50 counterfeit note, two other riders came up and waited outside.

The robbery began when Coleman drew his gun, but owner Long sprang toward a rear door, receiving a bullet-grazed scalp in return. (A bullet hole was left in the bank’s wall where I examined it during my visit to the historic building.) Nevertheless, Long escaped and ran to the street where the two sentries were now firing their Spencer repeating rifles at anyone who approached. The three robbers ran outside carrying saddlebags filled with greenbacks and silver and gold coins. The band then fled out of town and, although citizens soon pursued them, vanished in the woods (Nickell 1993a, 222–224). Were the bank robbers indeed the James Gang?

To answer this question, I approached it from several angles. One strategy was to assess the perpetrators’ modus operandi (or M.O., “method of operation” [Nickell and Fischer 1999]) for which I had had special training (Nickell 2008). I also used additional clues, such as aliases, descriptions, and other factors. It is necessary, however, first to recognize that the group—at this time really the Younger-James gang—was a loosely constituted band whose membership could vary from robbery to robbery.

In fact, both of the James brothers had an alibi for the Russellville robbery: they were holed up in Chaplin, Nelson County, Kentucky, recovering from gunshot wounds. But the modus operandi of the crime was exactly that used and developed by the Younger Gang: “genteelly dressed” men arriving in town posing as cattle buyers or the like, then converging on the bank, with half going inside and the rest keeping guard with Spencer rifles—the two groups able to communicate with each other through a man inside the doorway. The desperadoes then fled on fast horses, splitting up to take preplanned routes, and disappeared. The 1872 Columbia bank robbery, for example, followed the same M.O., and the robbers escaped into Nelson County, a known James sanctuary (Nickell 1993a, 225–232).

Despite the alibi of the James brothers, Louisville detective D.G. Bligh, who investigated the case, believed they were nevertheless involved. Moreover, two of the actual robbers were identified: One, having a “defect in one eye,” was George Shepherd, a Chaplin resident and compatriot of the James brothers; so was the other, George’s cousin Oliver Shepherd, who had been away from home at the time of the robbery and who signaled his guilt by resisting arrest. Oliver was shot to death, and George was sent to prison for his role. The alias used by the leader of the band, “Thomas Coleman” (as given in the legal indictment against the five holdup men, probably having been taken from a hotel register), almost surely identifies Thomas Coleman “Cole” Younger (1844–1916), the original leader of the “James Gang” (Nickell 1993a, 228–232; “Russellville” 1868; Settle 1977, 30–44).

Riding into Legend

Although only five men robbed the bank in Russellville, popular writers would extend the number to eight or even a dozen and spur them into town at a gallop with guns blazing. Soon, the legend grew that the robbery was that of the James brothers.

Jesse’s cowardly murder by Bob Ford in 1882 helped make him the focus of later legends. Pistols, often with his name carved thereon, proliferated. So did photographs “said to be” of the outlaws or their family members (Nickell 1994, 78). Among other artifacts, there are no fewer than three gold watches alleged to have fallen from dead Jesse’s pocket.

In the legends, the James Gang’s adventures multiplied. For example, Jesse was said to have robbed a bank in West Virginia in 1875 (more on this presently). Again, he has been seriously credited with another Kentucky heist—that of a Muhlenberg County coal mine office—although Jesse, his wife “Zee,” and their two children were in Kansas City at that time, while Frank was in Texas (Nickell 1993a, 231, 236).

The James brothers’ alleged hideouts were also ubiquitous. Said one writer, there were a reputed “thousand places where Frank James and Jesse James had been seen and it wasn’t only Kentucky; it extended all the way to Florida, New York” (qtd. in Watson 1971, 75).

The Impostors

As artifacts and tales about Jesse James proliferated, so did the persons who—following his death on April 3, 1882—claimed to be the real, escaped-from-death outlaw, some seventeen by one count (Nickell 1993b).

Jesse had been living as “Thomas Howard” with his wife and children in St. Joseph, Missouri. On that fateful day, young Bob Ford and his brother Charles—new members of the James Gang—were at the home. Bob Ford intended to kill Jesse for the reward money offered by Missouri Governor Crittenden, so when the unarmed notorious outlaw and respectable family man stepped up on a chair to dust a picture, Ford quickly drew his pistol and shot Jesse in the back of the head, killing him instantly. The act inspired a ditty: “. . . Oh, the dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard! And they laid Jesse James in his grave.”

Almost immediately, however, came doubt that the dead man really was Jesse James. This was despite a positive identification by a coroner’s jury—relying on people with personal knowledge of his features and on distinctive identifying wounds (including a pair of scars on his right chest and a missing left middle fingertip). Scarcely had a year passed when a Missouri farmer claimed he had seen Jesse James. Other sightings followed, not unlike those of Elvis Presley in more recent times. Eventually, men claiming to be the “real” Jesse came forward (Nickell 1993a, 234–235). As American folklorist Richard M. Dorson (1959, 243) observed: “In the tradition of the Returning Hero, who reappears after his alleged death to defend his people in time of crisis, ancient warriors have announced that Jesse James lives in their emaciated frames.”

The last—and best known—Jesse James claimant was one J. Frank Dalton. I recall him on a television program when I was a boy. I have an old book that was used to promote Dalton’s claim—first made on May 19, 1948—that he was James; the book (Hall and Whitten 1948) was published in that year. According to Dalton—then said to be nearly 101 years old—the man killed as Jesse was Charley Bigelow, a former member of the James Gang. Jesse’s wife acted her part in the conspiracy, the book says, crying out, “They have killed my husband.”

Figure 2. The author at the site of Jesse James’s grave in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Kearney, Missouri, where his remains were exhumed in 1995. (Author’s photo.)

Investigating ‘Jesse’

This is all fantasy and conspiracy nonsense of course, aimed at the credulous. I compared some of Dalton’s “memories” (as related by the authors of his story in 1948) and found them absurd. For example, except for the date of the Russellville bank robbery, he gets almost nothing else correct, referring to the town as “Russell” and describing what had been a carefully planned act as a wild raid: “A group of mounted men, armed with revolvers and bowie knives, dashed through the streets of Russell, shouting and yelling. They rode up to the front of the bank and two lines of men were placed across the street to keep anyone from interfering.” Then the James brothers went inside the bank, where Frank trained his pistol on the cashier while Jesse “took the money from the safe” (Hall and Whitten 1948, 19).

Other evidence discredits Dalton. Whereas writers cite his “damaged fingertip” (“J. Frank Dalton” 2015) and specifically the “mutilated tip on the left hand index finger” (Taylor 2014) as supposed proof that he was Jesse James—in fact, as we have already seen—the actual digit in question was Jesse’s left middle finger, and its tip was missing (Settle 1977, 117–118). Then there is the handwriting. Forensic document examiner Duane Dillon determined that Dalton’s writing characteristics were distinctly different from James’s (Starrs 2005, 185).

As a historical document consultant (see Nickell 2009) and author of textbooks on handwriting (Nickell 1990; 1996), I independently compared Dalton’s “Jesse James” signature (on the cover of the 1948 book by Hall and Whitten) with known signatures of James (Hamilton 1979, 89, 91).

In contrast to the real Jesse’s “Jesse W James” and “JWJames,” Dalton omits the middle initial, writes the first name above the last, fails to connect the first J with the following e and the second J with the following a, uses an entirely different form for the three s characters, adds an uncharacteristic final stroke to the last s, and more. The real James did not pen the words “Jesse James” written by J. Frank Dalton.

I also ran down two stories of old men in my hometown area who thought they had encountered Jesse James in 1875, about the time he supposedly robbed a West Virginia bank (mentioned earlier); one was in Morgan and the other in Elliot County, Kentucky. In 1950, the latter (then in his nineties) reportedly visited J. Frank Dalton in Missouri and declared, “He is Jesse James” (Nickell 1999). Dalton died the following year. His death left for many the question: Who is buried in Jesse James’s grave?

Identifying Jesse James

That question has since been answered by James E. Starrs, a professor of law and forensic science at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He headed the James identification project. (He and I were fellow speakers in 1998 at a forensic conference in Nova Scotia where we swapped investigative stories over lunch.) In July 1995, the project exhumed the remains from the grave in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Kearney, Missouri (having in 1902 been transferred there from Jesse’s initial burial in his mother’s front yard). (See Figure 2.)

The skeletal remains yielded evidence consistent with being those of Jesse James. For example, an anthropological analysis showed the remains to fit his known profile as to sex, age, height, and racial typing. A spent bullet was found amid fragments of the right ribs where Jesse was known to have carried an unremoved bullet. The skull—carefully reconstructed—yielded evidence of a single entrance wound behind the site of the right ear. Found later were traces of the lead from a bullet’s passage on a fragment of an occipital bone. Many of the teeth had gold fillings and evidence of tobacco chewing (nicotine staining and corrosive influence)—both expected from known facts of the outlaw’s life (Starrs 2005, 181–185).

The definitive evidence came from mitochondrial DNA (mt DNA), i.e., genetic material passed from mother to child. A DNA specimen from one of the teeth matched that from blood samples taken from Robert Jackson and Mark Nichols, the two known descendants of Jesse’s sister Susan. The remains thus proved to be those of Jesse Woodson James (1847–1882) with a significant degree of scientific certainty. The sequence of base pairs in the DNA matching was “so singular” that it was reportedly “the first time it was encountered in the entire mt DNA database for the Northern European population” (Starrs 2005, 185–186).

Ubiquitous Ghost

In death, the legendary Jesse James attracts mystery mongers—including buried-treasure enthusiasts and ghost hunters—like a magnet. Often the two topics are combined.

A large component of the lost-treasure genre consists of proliferating yarns about lost mines and outlaws’ buried loot, including the alleged troves of the James Gang. As it became fashionable to identify places where Frank and Jesse had allegedly had a meal or hidden from pursuers, numerous caves were supplied with suitable “legends.” Said one writer, “There was hardly a cave they hadn’t hidden in” (qtd. in Watson 1971, 75). Buried treasure (real or hoaxed) was sometimes used to promote caves as commercial attractions. (For example, see Hauck 1996, 340.)

The same problems with lost-treasure tales are also true of haunting yarns—so many of them also beginning with the ubiquitous “It is said that.” I have spent quality time in places allegedly haunted by the ghost of Jesse James. For example, as a board member I attended a meeting of the Historical Confederation of Kentucky at the old Talbolt tavern in Bardstown in 1993 that was, however, uneventful as to ghost activity. A display in the inn’s upstairs foyer warned guests that they might experience ghostly phenomena (Holland 2008, 195), thus using the power of suggestion to set them up for a “haunting” experience.

Reportedly, there were various banging noises, common to the setting of old buildings and the effects of temperature changes on timbers and stairs; the sounds of people talking and laughing, possibly real people at the bar or nearby; the chiming of a bell eleven times at 4:00 am, likely a clock needing resetting; and a dream of a man being hanged, perhaps the effects of alcohol, and the “eerie” atmosphere, together with the historical backdrop.

I have also toured the old James farm where Jesse’s original gravesite still reposes in the front yard. (From there, his mother sold pebbles to souvenir hunters for a quarter each, replenishing them as necessary from a nearby creek [Settle 1977, 166].) The entire farm is haunted, according to sources citing the usual anonymous experiencers. The sounds of “low voices” and “restless horses” that were allegedly heard by a single staff member (possibly due to imagination or to sounds carried on the wind) were claimed in another source, exaggeratedly, to be from multiple reports (Taylor 2000; cf. “Missouri Legends” 2015). Supposedly, lights “have been seen” inside the farmhouse at night, one source claiming they are “moving” (Taylor 2000) and another that they go “on and off” (“Haunted” 2013); a common explanation for many such ghostly house lights is reflections on the window glass from various external sources (Nickell 1995, 50–51).

With ghost tales of Jesse James—as with buried-treasure and other legends of the notorious outlaw—we must remember the old skeptical maxim: Before trying to explain something, first be sure that it really occurred.

References

• Beamis, Joan M., and William E. Pullen. N.d. [ca. 1970]. Background of a Bandit: The Ancestry of Jesse James, 2nd Ed. N.p.: privately printed.
• Dorson, Richard M. 1959. American Folklore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Hall, Frank O., and Lindsey H. Whitten. 1948. Jesse James Rides Again. Lawton, OK: LaHoma Publishing Co.
• Hamilton, Charles. 1979. The Signature of America. New York: Harper & Row.
• Hauck, Dennis William. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York: Penguin Books.“Haunted Jesse James Farm.” 2013. Available online at http://seeksghosts.blogspot.com/2013/08/haunted-jesse-james-farm.html; accessed August 28, 2015.
• Holland, Jeffrey Scott. 2008. Weird Kentucky. Toronto: Sterling Publishing.
• “J. Frank Dalton.” 2015. Available online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Frank_Dalton; accessed August 28, 2015.
• Kleber, John E. 1992. The Kentucky Encyclopedia. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.
• “Missouri Legends.” 2015. Available online at http://www.Legendsofamerica.com/mo-
hauntedjamesfarm.html; accessed August 28, 2015.
• Nickell, Joe. 1990. Pen, Ink & Evidence. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 1992. James, Frank and Jesse. In Kleber 1992, 462.
• ———. 1993a. Tracking Jesse James in Kentucky. The Filson Club History Quarterly 67(2) (April): 217–239. (See this source for additional references.)
• ———. 1993b. Outlaw impostors. In Stein 1993, 112–113.
• ———. 1994. Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• ———. 1996. Detecting Forgery. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• ———. 1999. Jesse James in Morgan, in two parts. Licking Valley Courier (West Liberty, Ky.) (July 22 and August 12).
• ———. 2008. Forensic Trainee. Available online at http://www.joenickell.com/ForensicTrainee/forensictrainee/.html; accessed August 31, 2015.
• ———. 2009. Historical Document Consultant. Available online at http://joenickell.com/HistoricalDocs/historicaldocs1.html; accessed August 31, 2015.
• Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1999. Crime Science: Methods of Forensic Detection. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
• “The Russellville Bank Robbery—Capture of the Gang.” 1868. Louisville Daily Courier (March 23).
• Settle, William A., Jr. 1977. Jessie James Was His Name: Or, Fact and Fiction Concerning the Careers of the Notorious James Brothers of Missouri. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 18–33.
• Starrs, James E., with Katherine Ramsland. 2005. A Voice for the Dead: A Forensic Investigator’s Pursuit of the Truth in the Grave. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
• Taylor, Troy. 2000. Haunted Missouri: Haunts of Jesse James. Available online at http://www.prairieghosts.com/jessejames.html; accessed August 28, 2015.
• ———. 2014. The man who would be Jesse James. Available online at http://troytaylorbooks.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-man-who-would-be-jesse-james.html; accessed August 28, 2015.
• Watson, Thomas Shelby. 1971. The Silent Riders. Louisville, KY: Beechmont Press.

One of the “traditions” that occurred at TAM every year was the In-Memoriam segment highlighting those who had died during the previous year; notable skeptics and what were termed “cultural competitors” (those who were opponents of skepticism or noteworthy) were remembered for their deeds in a short presentation shown during the conference.

The 2016 version of CSICon followed with a similar In-Memoriam segment; deceased CSI Fellows, Editorial Board members, and Scientific and Technical Consultants were shown in this year’s segment. Tim Farley took the lead on this year’s creation; I assisted with research as did Jim Lippard.

Here is the list of those honored in the presentation:

“Much of my work has been about what we see, what we don’t see, and what we think we see,” says Ellen Levy, artist and cocreator of the “Some Provocations from Skeptical Inquirers” art exhibit in New York City. Decades ago, when Levy’s zoology degree got her a microbiology job to fund her art, the now debunked cellular feature dubbed the “mesosome” was still widely accepted as real. Mesosomes were observed as folds in the plasma membranes of bacteria and thought to serve a function in cell replication. In the late 1970s, mesosomes were revealed to be artifacts of how cells were prepared for microscopy—specifically the chemical fixation process—when researchers realized they did not appear in cells that hadn’t been fixed.

“Migrations”

“People could get the same results over and over again, but it didn’t really mean anything,” Levy says. Levy sprinkles some other bygone concepts such as “phlogiston” and the “luminiferous aether” into her animation “Anomalies and Artifacts.” They are depicted alongside genuine cell organelles, but not to lend legitimacy to those discarded missteps.

“You see the attempt to distinguish signal and noise, and how difficult it is,” Levy says.

Patricia Olynyk, the exhibit’s 
other cocreator and director of the Graduate School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis, says her father giving microscopes as gifts is largely responsible for her “acute interest in science.” It’s been part of her profession, too. The School of Art and Design position she accepted at the University of Michigan in 1999 quickly became a joint appointment with the college’s Life Sciences Institute, one of the first such overlaps in the country. Olynyk’s “The Mutable Archive” tackles the topic of physiognomy, as addressed in the November/December 2012 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

“The physiognomists were trying to ascribe personality traits to skull shapes,” Olynyk says, “so they were using craniometers to measure the micro- and macrofeatures of the face, and based on the relative disproportion of that, [to] ascribe a personality type.” Olynyk is fascinated that despite physiognomy being soundly disproved, “there’s still a scientific desire to image personality,” whether through fMRI or a Geodesic Sensor Net, which measures the brain’s electrical activity.

The numbered circles in “Sce­nario Thinking,” which features the cover of the November/December 2012 Skeptical Inquirer (and two other SI covers as well) correspond to the individual electrodes of the Geodesic Sensor Net. Olynyk says she and Levy chose the other two covers in the piece for contrast.

“We thought the mapping of the brain, with the monsters and aliens, with the celebrity scientists was really a kind of kooky and wonderful balance,” Olynyk says. “Of course, the aesthetic of the work is paramount.”

"Jellyrods2"

Art and science have a complex relationship. On the positive side, artists can be inspired by what philosopher Wilfrid Sellars calls the scientific “image” of the world, while scientists investigate the artistic experience from the points of view of evolutionary biology and neurobiology. On the negative side, artists may fail to actually grasp the science behind the flashy images or the catchy phrases, while scientists may talk as if art and aesthetics actually reduce solely to elements of Darwinian fitness and patterns of excitation of neurons.

It was therefore with a bit of trepidation that I went to the opening of a new exhibit at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College (part of the City University of New York), titled “Some Provocations from Skeptical Inquirers: Painted Prints, Photographs, and Videos by Ellen K. Levy and Patricia Olynyk.” Before going, I did my homework and read the catalog, penned by Charissa N. Terranova, associate professor of aesthetic studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, that accompanies the exhibit. I wanted to know what I was about to see and asked to comment on.

Terranova begins her introduction to the Levy-Olynyk exhibit in an interesting fashion by comparing art, skepticism, and faith, and suggesting that “Skepticism and art, simply put, are an active means to knowledge, while belief is a declaration of what one claims to know. Art is like skepticism in that one uses art to understand the world by relations.” I never quite thought of it that way; of course one could argue that if skepticism and art are both in the business of knowledge, then “knowledge” may mean different things in those two contexts. But I can definitely get behind the idea that both skepticism and art are ways for human beings to explore and understand, which still makes for a sharp contrast with faith, conceived as a declaration of what someone thinks he knows.

In terms of the actual art exhibited at Baruch, Terranova maintains that “Levy and Olynyk use scientific ideas, archives, and scientifically proven outcomes as the material to make art that helps make sense of the world past and present.” This could be seen most obviously in Olynyk’s “Isomorphic Extension I + II” and in the nineteen panels of her “The Mutable Archive.” The first one deals with the transformation of human anatomy into prosthetic form by presenting floating images of artificial legs of different genders. Terranova’s notes explain: “Viewers experience an interrupted, dismembered sense of the uncanny valley, the space of revulsion and fear one enters when confronted by a lifelike robotic or cyborg version of the human.” The second piece is a collaborative project in which the artist went through some memorial cards accompanying the skull collection put together by Josef Hyrtl, a nineteenth-century Viennese anatomist. Olynyk commissioned a number of artists, scientists, and philosophers (and, ahem, a “spiritual medium”) to fill out the (very large) blanks about the lives of the people filed in Hyrtl’s cards. Here is Terranova again: “These series of notations within Olynyk’s cluster of nineteen subjects reminds us of the slippages in recording histories. That those subjects who occupied a higher position in society were afforded more elaborate documentation that did not simply reduce them to a ‘scaphocephalus’ or ‘Japan Yedo’ reminds us that the taxonomic system that binds them together is anything but value neutral.”

“Scenario Thinking” features three Skeptical Inquirer covers.

Levy and Olynyk have collaborated on some of the pieces, particularly the one that has a very direct connection to Skeptical Inquirer. In their “Scenario Thinking,” the two artists deployed a data visualization technique to display the patterns of articles published in SI over a period of twenty years. The piece presents the viewer with a series of large spheres, each including small circumferences that represent one year’s worth of publication. Inside each yearly circumference there are six smaller spheres, one per individual issue, in turn referring to two to six articles. The articles are then coded by topic (rationalism, green; the paranormal, yellow; mind/brain and memory, orange; and so forth). The whole thing ends up looking like an annotated version of the solar system. Here is the curator’s comment: “The planetary orbs of Scenario Thinking are at once macrocosmic and micro-cosmic, of the universe and cosmological while also instrumental in measuring the activity of the individual on the ground plane. As though a living being, the universe respires and pulsates in the form of flickering information.”

Whether you find that sort of commentary enlightening or not (and quite aside from the unfortunate choice of the spiritual medium mentioned above), the art itself is interesting, although some pieces in the exhibit are admittedly somewhat more loosely inspired by skepticism or science than others. The question of the relationship between art and science remains fascinating and open, and walking through the works of Ellen Levy and Patricia Olynyk while talking to both art lovers and skeptics who had come to see them was an enjoyable excuse to ponder it further.

When we get sick we naturally want to understand what is happening to us. Our first question is: What is it? We want to put a name to our suffering by establishing a diagnosis. Then we ask: “Why is this happening to me?” “What caused it?” “Could I have done something to prevent it?”

For many illnesses, there are no good answers to those questions. “Chance” or “bad luck” are not good enough explanations to satisfy most people. We want a definitive answer; we want to understand what caused the illness. When science has no explanation, people are tempted to make one up. When scientifically ignorant people speculate about the causes of disease, it can lead to bizarre false conclusions and to blaming the victim.

A prime example is a blog post by Sarah Wilson who contends that female self-hatred is the real cause of autoimmune disease. You might immediately wonder how female self-hatred could cause autoimmune disease in men. Apparently men can hate themselves too, but women do it better.

Wilson has an autoimmune disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and has tried to treat herself from many angles: “gluten, cosmetic toxins, and, of course, sugar.” But once all these angles are ironed out, to her mind everything points to anxiety, or “a profound, visceral, itchy dis-ease with myself.” She claims to recognize an autoimmune personality type: they have an intensity, a desire to impress, an air of not being good enough.

She watched a TEDx talk by Dr. Habib Sadeghi and was impressed by his concept of health as requiring nurturing soil and of illness as caused by depleted soil like the Dust Bowl featured in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath; Sadeghi attributed his testicular cancer to faulty thinking and a lack of self-nurturing. I watched the same talk and was impressed that it was nothing but a load of enthusiastic hyped-up New Age, mind-over-matter, feel-good hooey.

Wilson believes that if we don’t self-nourish, we end up living in a spiritual Dust Bowl of self-judgment, hopelessness, and cynicism. She believes that self-hatred is the biggest impediment to self-cradling, especially in women. It emerges from thinking we’re not adhering to the ideals set out for women by society. She leaps to the conclusion (without any evidence) that this self-hatred causes autoimmune disease, which, boiled down, is the body attacking itself. She believes the solution is self-love, although she admits that she doesn’t exactly know what that means.

Her blog post has garnered 294 comments. I didn’t take the time to read them all, but what I read seemed to fall mainly into two categories: those who praise her insight and those who think she is wrong and that her ideas amount to blaming the victim. Here are some examples:

“Consider all the people you have hurt with this pointless and cruel article.”

“you need to investigate the science behind your outrageous claims because what you are saying is, at the heart of it, damaging and hurtful!”

“As a partner of someone with chronic illness, this is an extremely offensive article…you are blaming women for their own pain.”

“I was born with Rheumatoid Arthritis…how is it possible that my self-hatred began as an embryo?” Another commenter explained that “You messed up your dna in a former life and that of your offspring. Might sound cruel but it sometimes takes many lifetimes to realize it.” And yet another commenter added that “Our DNA changes from the time we are born to the time we die based on our thoughts (scientifically proven). If your ancestors had self-hatred thoughts that became ways of thinking, it can be passed down the bloodline.”

Another commenter cited a book that promises to reverse and heal autoimmune disease with the Paleo diet. Another said a spiritual healer had helped her clear her womb of past issues relating to pleasing others, limiting beliefs around how a woman should be.

The idea that we can take control of our destiny and can prevent or cure illness with our thoughts alone is a seductive one. Wouldn’t that be nice? I wish it were true.

Idle speculation by uninformed persons is useless and often counterproductive. Wilson’s ideas are imaginative but they are not supported by any shred of scientific evidence. The causes of autoimmune diseases are not well understood, but there is no reason to think that they could be caused by self-hatred. There is no credible scientific evidence that thoughts and emotions can cause any physical disease. The only nugget of truth here is that a positive attitude can help patients adhere to their medical treatment regimen, encourage them to stick to a healthy diet and lifestyle, and it can make them feel better although it does nothing to change the course of the disease.

The danger here is that women may feel guilty because they have not been able to live up to the standards of self-love, and they may feel responsible for their disease. There is also a danger that some patients might reject effective medical treatment and think they can heal themselves through self-nurturing.

Hashimoto’s is eminently treatable. One wonders why she felt the need to experiment with things like eliminating sugar and gluten, things that are not known to have any effect on the disease. If you have an autoimmune disease, you are far better off following the advice of a science-based medical doctor than listening to the uninformed ramblings of a blogger who knows nothing about science.

No, self-hatred does not cause autoimmune disease. It just makes people miserable.

Science denial has significant consequences. AIDS denial caused over 300,000 deaths in South Africa. Vaccination denial has allowed preventable diseases to make a comeback. Climate science denial helped delay sorely needed mitigation policies, committing us to direr climate impacts for decades to come.

Skepticism (by which I mean an evidence-based approach) is the antidote to denial. But skepticism doesn’t just apply to how we practice our science. It must also apply to how we communicate our science. There is a wealth of psychological research into the phenomena of denial and how to neutralize the influence of misinformation. To ignore this evidence when countering science denial and pseudoscience is, ironically, not a skeptical approach.

So what is an evidence-based response to science denial? To illustrate, allow me to use an example from my own area of research: the scientific consensus on climate change. The psychological principles emerging from this topic have implications that can be applied to many areas of science.

Scientific Consensus on Climate Change

What percentage of publishing climate scientists accepts human-caused global warming? This isn’t just an academic question; the answer has real-world consequences. On complicated scientific matters such as climate change, the average layperson uses expert opinion as a mental shortcut or heuristic. Psychologists have identified perceived consensus as a “gateway belief” influencing their views on climate change and, most importantly, their level of support for climate action.

A number of studies have quantified the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming. A 2009 survey of Earth scientists found that among publishing climate scientists, 97.4 percent agreed that humans are significantly raising global temperature (Doran and Zimmerman 2009). A 2010 analysis of public statements about climate change found that among the scientists who had published peer-reviewed climate research, 97 to 98 percent agreed with the consensus position (Anderegg et al. 2010). I was part of a team that analyzed published climate research, finding 97.1 percent consensus among papers stating a position on human-caused global warming (Cook et al. 2013). In 2015, a survey of University scientists found 96.7 percent consensus among scientists conducting research about climate change (Carlton et al. 2015).

For what is arguably the definitive work on the scientific consensus on climate change, I was privileged to coauthor a study with scientists who authored six of the other major consensus studies published over the last decade or so (Cook et al. 2016). In synthesizing all the published research on the level of scientific agreement on climate change, we found a number of studies, adopting a range of independent methodologies, consistently finding around 97 percent consensus among publishing climate scientists on human-caused global warming.

So, study after study confirms an overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. But what does the average person think about the consensus? A Yale survey of Americans found that on average, people think that 67 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. That already sounds disturbingly low, but it’s even worse when you consider that only 12 percent of Americans are aware that the consensus is over 90 percent. There is a gaping chasm between public perception of consensus and the actual 97 percent consensus.

How do we explain this “consensus gap”? One contributor is misinformation. An analysis of opinion pieces about climate change by conservative columnists found that their most common argument was “there is no scientific consensus” (Elsasser and Dunlap 2012). Long before social scientists had identified perceived consensus as a gateway belief, opponents of climate action had pinpointed consensus as a key target of attack. A 2002 memo by Frank Luntz recommended that Republican politicians cast doubt on the scientific consensus in order to win the public debate on climate change.

Politicians follow this advice to this day. Former presidential hopeful Senator Ted Cruz argues that there is no consensus on climate change, claiming that the 97 percent consensus is based on “one bogus study.” He ignores, of course, that the 97 percent consensus is in fact based on a multitude of independent studies.

Criticism of the 97 Percent Consensus from the Opposite Direction

Interestingly, the 97 percent consensus has also been criticized from the opposite direction. In an earlier issue of Skeptical Inquirer (Powell 2015) as well as a recent paper in Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society (Powell 2016), James Lawrence Powell argued that the 97 percent consensus was too low and is actually 99.9 percent.

Ironically, Powell’s approach was similar to Senator Cruz’s, dismissing the wide range of surveys and analyses all arriving at the same 97 percent consensus.

How does Powell reach a different result than the many studies into consensus? He assumes that any paper that doesn’t explicitly reject the consensus in its abstract must therefore endorse the consensus. On the one hand, he has a point. As we discuss in our own paper, Naomi Oreskes predicted in 2007 that as a consensus strengthens, we should see fewer people bother to explicitly mention the consensus position in their paper’s abstract (Oreskes 2007). This pattern was exactly what we observed in our own data.

However, our data also demonstrated that there are instances where Powell’s assumption is false. There were a small number of papers that stated no position on human-caused global warming in their abstract, but also minimized or rejected the human contribution to global warming in the full paper. We can’t assume that because a paper doesn’t express a position on the consensus in its abstract, then the authors must endorse the consensus.

Ultimately, it’s worth taking a step back and considering that this particular dispute is between a 97 percent or 99.9 percent consensus, while the vast majority of people don’t even realize the consensus is over 90 percent. Both Powell and the many studies into consensus all find an overwhelming scientific agreement among climate scientists on human-caused global warming. This is the key message that the public needs to hear.

The Bull in a Teashop

Given the crucial role of perceived consensus as a gateway belief, it should come as no surprise that opponents of climate action have expended so much effort manufacturing doubt about the level of scientific agreement among climate scientists. But how do we respond to such misinformation campaigns? The answer lies in psychological research.

The psychology of consensus has been a topic of growing interest to researchers in recent years. Some of their research findings have significant implications, not just for climate change but also for science communicators in many different disciplines.

Mountains of research have been conducted into how to effectively communicate the realities of climate change. This is important work, and it is imperative that scientists heed this research when educating the public about science. But for too long, a deadly Achilles heel for science communicators has been overlooked.

Misinformation can undo the good work of science communication. In one study, Aaron McCright and his colleagues (2015) tested various climate messages, finding that the messages were effective in raising acceptance of climate change. They then tested the same messages accompanied by misinformation that cast doubt on climate change. The misinformation cancelled out some of the positive influence of the accurate scientific information. This result is echoed by upcoming research from Yale University (van der Linden et al. 2016), which tested the effect of communicating the 97 percent consensus as well as misinformation about the consensus. The researchers found that the two conflicting messages cancelled each other out, with no net effect. The misinformation completely neutralized the 97 percent consensus message.

This research has grave implications for all science communicators. Even if we painstakingly craft the perfect piece of empirically tested, market-researched science communication, all our good work can be undone by misinformation. Science denial is the bull in our teashop of delicately understood scientific concepts. So long as science denial persists in generating misinformation, it will undermine public understanding of climate change and erode public support of climate action.

The corrosive influence of misinformation is more relevant than ever, in light of new research by U.K. scientists who analyzed tens of thousands of publications on climate change by conservative think tanks (Boussalis and Coan 2016). They found that over the last decade, science denial has been on the increase. Science denialists are doubling down on their science denial. The researchers posed the question: “Is the era of climate denial over?” The answer emerging from their data is sadly “no.” Climate science denial has no intention of fading quietly into the night.

Stopping the Spread of Science Denial

Can we wrap our science in cotton wool as we send it out into the big, myth-infested world? The answer is yes, we can safeguard our science by applying a branch of psychological research known as inoculation theory (McGuire and Papageorgis 1961).

Inoculation theory borrows the metaphor of inoculation but applies it to knowledge. We develop resistance against a virus when we’re exposed to a weak form of the virus through vaccination. In the same way, we can develop resistance against misinformation by exposing people to a weak form of the misinformation.

By “weak form” of misinformation, I mean the misinformation accompanied with an explanation of the techniques it uses to distort the science. What fallacy does the myth use? Does it cherry-pick the data? Does it rely on fake experts? Does it use a logical fallacy such as jumping to conclusions or red herrings?Inoculation theory suggests that communicators should couple science information with inoculating messages. When you communicate a scientific concept, you should also explain the techniques or fallacies that might be used to distort that science. When people subsequently encounter the myth, they’ve acquired the critical thinking skills to discern how that myth attempts to distort the science and mislead them. The bull has lost its horns.

While my research has focused on inoculating people against misinformation about climate change, the principles of inoculation theory apply generally to any form of misinformation. If you’re trying to communicate the benefits of vaccination, explain the science of evolution, or debunk some pseudoscience, adopting the approach of inoculation theory is an effective, evidence-based way to convey both the science and neutralize misinformation that casts doubt on the science.

References

• Anderegg, W.R.L., J.W. Prall, J. Harold, et al. 2010. Expert credibility in climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107: 12107–12109.
• Boussalis, C., and T.G. Coan. 2016. Text-mining the signals of climate change doubt. Global Environmental Change 36: 89–100.
• Carlton, J.S., R. Perry-Hill, M. Huber, et al. 2015. The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists. Environmental Research Letters 10(9): 094025.
• Cook, J., D. Nuccitelli, S.A. Green, et al. 2013. Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters 8(2): 024024+.
• Cook, J., N. Oreskes, P.T. Doran, et al. 2016. Consensus on consensus: A synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming. Environmental Research Letters 11(4): 048002.
• Doran, P.T., and M.K. Zimmerman. 2009. Examining the scientific consensus on climate change. Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union 90(3): 22–23.
• Elsasser, S.W., and R.E. Dunlap. 2012. Leading voices in the denier choir: Conservative columnists’ dismissal of global warming and denigration of climate science. American Behavioral Scientist 57: 754–776.
• McCright, A.M., M. Charters, K. Dentzman, et al. 2015. Examining the effectiveness of climate change frames in the face of a climate change denial counter-frame. Topics in Cognitive Science doi: 10.1111/tops.12171.
• McGuire, W.J., and D. Papageorgis. 1961. The relative efficacy of various types of prior belief-defense in producing immunity against persuasion. Public Opinion Quarterly 26: 24–34.
• Oreskes, N. 2007. The scientific consensus on climate change: How do we know we’re not wrong? In Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Powell, J. 2015. The consensus on anthropogenic global warming. Skeptical Inquirer 39(6): 42–45. Available online at http://www.csicop.
org/si/show/the_consensus_on_anthropogenic_global_warming.
• ———. 2016. Climate scientists virtually unanimous: Anthropogenic global warming is true. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 1–4.
• Van der Linden, S.L., A.A. Leiserowitz, S.A. Rosenthal, et al. 2016, in revision. Inoculating the public against misinformation about climate change.

The original article in Skeptical Inquirer Winter 1986–87 had a relaxed cover picture by artist Ron Chironna and this introduction by Editor Kendrick Frazier: “We begin publication in this issue of Geoffrey Dean’s two-part ‘Does Astrology Need to Be True?’ a comprehensive investigation of the claims of serious astrology as defined by ‘serious’ astrologers. Although we are striving for shorter articles, so that we can cover a wider range of interests, we publish this lengthy inquiry because of its special significance. As one of our reviewers of Dean’s manuscript wrote, ‘It is without doubt the best article on astrology I have ever seen.’”

Other than its length, the original article had three claims on your rapt attention. It was the result of much recycling among colleagues and noted skeptics, including Susan Blackmore, Ray Hyman, Ivan Kelly, Andrew Neher, and Marcello Truzzi, whose critical comments kept it on the rails. It ignored the nonsense of sun sign astrology and focused on the real thing as used in consulting rooms, on why people believe in it (because it seems to work), and on the results of tests (astrology stops working when cognitive artifacts such as confirmation bias are controlled). And finally it asked, not is astrology true, but does it need to be true? A change that in one hit ended a centuries-old shouting match over claims of truth. The answer was no.

The real thing was not hard to find. In Western countries, it was the subject of roughly 100 periodicals and 1,000 books in print and was practiced or studied by roughly one person in 10,000. (The proportion today has been affected by astrology on the Internet but is probably not much different.) My conclusion in the original article was:

In the last ten years various studies have addressed astrology (the real thing, not popular nonsense) on the astrologer’s terms. The results of these studies are in agreement, and their implications are clear: Astrology does not need to be true in order to work, and contrary to the claims of astrologers authentic birth charts are not essential. What matters is that astrology is believed to be true, and that authentic birth charts are believed to be essential.

Business as Usual

Astrologers replied in their usual way to criticism, dismissing it as biased and ignorant. Their repeated claim—that their daily experience confirms their fundamental premise as above so below—is still heard from the rooftops. They still misinterpret cognitive artifacts in a chart reading as evidence of links with the heavens. And they still explain away all failures by the same old excuses, such as stars incline and do not compel; another factor is interfering (there is always another factor), and astrologers are not infallible. Astrology is thus made nonfalsifiable, whereupon belief and paying clients follow automatically. It then gets worse.

Unwelcome evidence is dismissed because, they say, research is biased; astrology is too nuanced to be testable by science, and (the ultimate clincher) research funding is nonexistent. Yet astrologers insist that looking at birth charts will convince us that astrology works. Just try it and our eyes will be opened at last! But they cannot have it both ways. Astrology cannot simultaneously be difficult to test and yet easy to prove. Their response to this contradiction is usually a scornful silence.

Nevertheless, the past thirty years have seen big advances in research design, the availability of data, and the use of computers to break the calculation barrier. At one time, astrologers using logarithms could take many hours to calculate a comprehensive birth chart; a home computer can do the same for dozens of charts while you cough.

The result has been hundreds of controlled tests of astrology by both believers and critics. Most studies are little-known; so for forty years, my colleagues and I have been visiting astrology collections and searching academic databases for every useful study ever made. We have published the results in Tests of Astrology: A Critical Review of Hundreds of Studies (Dean et al. 2016). Some of the notable studies we found are outlined below. They show how skeptical inquiry has advanced on astrological claims during the last thirty years.

Every astrological consultation involves feedback (as shown above) to help the astrologer pick chart factors that fit the situation. But how accu­rate are their meanings? The late Dr. Andrew Patterson lectured in engineering at the University of Witwatersrand. His interest in astrology began in the 1960s, and for many years he was a teacher and invigilator in South Africa for the U.K. Faculty of Astrological Studies. His scientific background resulted in that rarest of combinations—a fine critical sense plus an encyclopedic grasp of astrology—which he applies below to the challenge of learning astrology. As you read his account (abridged from 1991), remember he is a teacher of astrology, not a debunking skeptic.

Typical journey from birth chart on left to consultation on right, where the astrologer is famously saying to her client, Adolf Hitler, “With Libra rising you could find great satisfaction in your own home decorating business—or then again you may prefer to invade Poland.”

Astrology is more difficult to learn than anyone realizes. Probably we have all had much the same experience. You meet astrology via a friend and become hooked. You start studying. But after a while you grow uneasy. It is not clear how Sun in Leo (must shine) differs from Moon in Leo (needs to shine). When asked to describe Saturn (restriction) in 8th house (death) you are not sure where to start. All you can say about a hard aspect is that it represents a challenge, whereas an easy aspect is, well, easy. As for a quincunx, you struggle just to pronounce it.

To clear up your confusion, you buy every recommended book. But they just make your confusion worse. Consider the interpretations given in those books. They are either all the same so they blur into one another as with Leo above. Or they are all different, thus Sun square Saturn varies from “a life of hardship” to “loss of father.” Or they are all useless, being either amazingly general or amazingly specific, thus Mars in Libra varies from “lack of committment” to “passion for sword-dancing.” Or they are all evasive as in “Neptune dissolves,” which conveys nothing while pretending to convey everything.

Patterson concludes by pointing out that truth in astrology is tested by how well it matches the symbolism. Anything that passes this test is seen as true, not because it is actually true but because it could be true. Being able to say that the truth (whatever it is) is consistent with the symbolism is not terribly useful. Which is why astrology is so hard to learn (Patterson 1991).

Which Zodiac to Use?

Western astrologers use the tropical zodiac tied to the seasons, while Eastern astrologers use the sidereal zodiac tied to the stars. Around 200 ad, the two zodiacs coincided, but today precession has put sidereal signs almost one sign ahead of tropical signs. So have their meanings changed?

British astrologer J.E. Sunley spent ten years comparing meanings between tropical sign X and sidereal sign X as given in astrology books. In principle, their meanings should be mostly different, but he found they were mostly similar—which is consistent with signs having no meaning at all except in the minds of astrologers. It explains why tens of thousands of Western tropical astrologers can agree that in their experience Scorpio is intense, while hundreds of thousands of Eastern sidereal astrologers can look at much the same piece of sky—which they call Libra—and agree that in their experience it is not intense but relaxed. So much for experience.

But if relative sign meanings are okay, as in Leos get on well with Sagittarians, what is there to worry about?

Sun Signs for Lonely Hearts

Sun sign compatibility was explored by Manchester University’s David Voas (2007) using data gathered for the 2001 census in England and Wales. Traditionally, favorable angles between any two sun signs are said to be the conjunction 0º (Leo and Leo), sextile 60º (Leo and Libra), and the legendary trine 120º (Leo and Sagittarius). Despite possible conflict with other factors in the two charts (among sun sign astrologers this is the default explanation for awkward findings), if the claim is true then it should show up in a large enough sample: ten million marriages, for example.

Voas notes that completion errors are problematic. Census forms are typically completed by one member of the household, who for some reason may enter their own birthday for that of their spouse. Others may enter January 1 or July 1 if an exact birthday is unknown, which is some­times the case in old people’s homes and for people born overseas. If dates of birth are illegible or missing (about 0.5 percent of all responses), the census office enters the day as the first of the month and assigns the months in rotation. Voas carefully removed all such artifacts but was unable to find evidence for useful sun sign effects.

Astrology predicts compatibility for the angles in red. Most are positive, but none are useful or statistically significant and all are explained by knowledge of sun signs biasing the outcome, as explained in the next section.

Thanks to his enormous sample, Voas’s test was the most sensitive test of sun signs ever made. But none of the 144 possible sun sign pairings differed significantly from chance alone. In terms of predicting compatibility, sun signs absolutely did not work. You will not find this result in astrology books.

Experience 1, Science 0

British astrologer and former journalist Dennis Elwell (1930–2014) was noted for his eloquence. In an article in the Astrological Journal (1991), he restated the faith of astrologers in their experience as follows: “Like many others, I persevere with astrology because experience has shown that by and large its basic assumptions are correct. . . . If some piece of research proves a dead end, I do not question the authenticity of my experience, I question the competence of the research, or its underlying assumptions.”

He held that failures to verify astrological claims were caused by the wrong approach because the right approach always worked. One of his favorite examples was how the birth chart for the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, showed strong links with the Statue of Liberty. Thus the statue is big (Jupiter), made of copper (Venus), has a female form (Venus), and appears in the birth chart as Venus conjunct Jupiter exact within 3º. And so on through dozens of events and associated people. It was “the kind of evidence that astrologers recognise and respect,” and it convinced Elwell (as claimed in his 1987 book Cosmic Loom: The New Science of Astrology, which contains no science despite its title) that “science will eventually be obliged to embrace the astrological if it is to unify its picture of the universe.” So please test astrology by case studies, not by statistical studies of groups.

Okay, let’s do it. Suppose we’ve been told that the above chart has its Sun conjunct Uranus, whose meaning “very frequently indicative of great talent” could hardly be more apt—is astrology already discernible? Indeed, the statue is an innovative (Uranus) national monument resting on Sun-ruled granite and lit by electricity (Uranus). It is 151 feet high (equals 1º Leo, which sign is ruled by the Sun) on an eleven-pointed island (obviously the eleventh sign Aquarius, ruled by Uranus). Everywhere we look we find the predicted Sun-Uranus links. Yes, it’s amazing!

Since this is “the kind of evidence that astrologers recognise and respect,” we now have good reason to believe in astrology—except the chart has no actual Sun-Uranus conjunction (Uranus is 40º from the Sun, not 0º or any other aspect within traditional limits). Elwell’s respected evidence is no evidence at all.

The correlation between sun sign and extroversion scores is usually weakly positive and was once hailed as proof of astrology. But it disappears (red crosses) if subjects don’t know sun sign meanings or are tested against their moon sign (which few people are aware of). So the effect is in fact an artifact of sun sign knowledge.

Sun Signs and Self-image

Odd-numbered signs from Aries onward are said to be extroverted. The rest are said to be introverted. Ask Sagittarians (odd-numbered and said to be sociable and outgoing) a question related to extroversion (such as “Do you like parties?”), and knowledge of astrology might tip their answer in favor of yes rather than no. In fact, this answer-tipping can be detected if people know their sun sign but not if they don’t. When taken together with opinion polls, the results suggest that one in three people believes sufficiently in sun signs to measurably shift their self-image in the believed direction—of which a tiny fraction may believe sufficiently to bias their choice of partner as in the previous section.

Astrologers Put to the Test

Charles Carter, the leading British astrologer of the 1930s, was noted for exceptional clarity of expression. Here is an example from his book The Principles of Astrology (1925, 14): “Practical experiment will soon convince the most sceptical that the bodies of the solar system indicate, if they do not actually produce, changes in: (1) Our minds. (2) Our feelings and emotions. (3) Our physical bodies. (4) Our external … affairs and relationships with the world at large.”

Thirty years ago, such claims began to be tested by jumbling up birth charts with things such as their owner’s case histories and personality traits. Could astrologers match them correctly? The outcome was maybe yes but mostly no. Since then, more tests have been made that bring the total to sixty-nine, and new ways have been developed to analyze the results. For example, the correlation between a reading and reality can be plotted against sample size to clarify what is happening. The plots in Figure 1 show how it works.

Figure 1. Samples from uncorrelated data (r = 0.00) have sampling errors that produce non- zero correlations (r ≠ 0.00) especially for small samples (common in astrology). Right: If astrol- ogers could accurately match birth charts to their owners then the black dots would peak on the right. But they peak close to r = 0.0, or zero accuracy, and are skewed to the right indicating the presence of publication bias against nega- tive results, hence the slightly positive mean (r = 0.029). Here and in Figure 2, all means are weighted by sample size. Discarding tests with small sample sizes or less familiar criteria makes no difference.

The studies in Figure 1 are too numerous and too consistent with hundreds of other studies to be easily dismissed. Also, their subsequent meta-analysis shows that the differences between results are entirely explained by sampling errors, which leaves nothing for astrology and astrologers to explain; to paraphrase Pierre-Simon Laplace, we have no need of such hypotheses. But for completeness, we should still look at some of those other studies as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Tests of agreement when reading the same chart avoid all problems of judging accuracy, such as errors in birth time. The agree- ment should be high because astrologers tend to read the same books, but it is only weakly positive (r = 0.098) and is nowhere near the 0.8 generally required for tests applied to individu- als (as astrology is). What is astrology worth if astrologers cannot even agree on what a chart means? Right: Clients given several chart read- ings cannot pick their own reading unless it contains cues (as required by the experimental design), such as the name of their sun sign, in which case they do quite well.

The power and sensitivity of our tests so far are beyond anything the ancients could have dreamed of. But astrologers airily dismiss the results because, as one put it, “We have enough cumulative experience to know that it [astrology] works, whether the computer studies and the scientists agree with us or not” (Alexander 1983, xii).

Claims Tested on 3,290 People

For his PhD in psychology, German astrologer and psychotherapist Peter Niehenke (1984) circulated copies of a 425-item questionnaire for testing astrological claims. It was advertised in two newspapers and a New Age magazine and by notices at Freiburg University. He duly received 3,498 responses (requiring more than 110 reams of paper), of which 3,290 provided usable birth data, of which 62 percent were from birth certificates. The questions had been tested in a pilot study to make sure they were free of problems. Each was relevant to a given factor (planet, sign, house, or aspect) to see if the subjects identified with that factor regardless of whether it was actually in their birth chart. Thus Sun-Saturn aspects were explored by questions involving their supposed meanings such as dis­appointment, misfortune, pessimism, and guilt feelings.

Overall, no result was consistently in support of astrology. For example, subjects with four Saturn aspects (said to indicate heavy responsibility and depression) felt no more de­pressed than those with no Saturn aspects and showed no correlation with depression scores. Subjects with good trines to Jupiter (said to indi­cate optimism and good fortune) felt no sunnier than those with none. As­pects between aggressive Mars and the Sun, Moon, or Ascendant showed no correlation with aggressiveness scores. Responses to the question “I am unlucky in love: yes/no?” showed no correlation with aspects to Venus from Jupiter or Saturn, or with the house position of Saturn, all of which are said to be highly relevant. In the end, Niehenke decided there was more to astrology than being true or false: “a world in which astrology exists is surely a more enjoyable world than one without it. The need that as­trology be a reality is much stronger than all the rational demonstrations against it” (1984, 15).

300,000 Chart Factors

In 1996, U.S. database engineer Mark McDonough wrote software to store and deliver the 30,000 birth data in AstroDataBank, the world’s second largest collection of timed birth data. After several years of work, he could automatically analyze any subset of data for 300,000 chart factors (that’s not a misprint; the large number is due to fashionable ideas such as asteroids and planetary nodes) taken individually or in combination and identify which factors differed the most from controls. But when applied to actual birth data grouped by, say, occupation or events, the results if positive (which was not often) failed to replicate. There was no evidence that astrological claims were valid: nothing actually worked. He asked for an explanation, but nobody had a clue. So he abandoned astrology to follow other interests.

Wrong Charts Make No Difference

Do astrologers get right answers from wrong charts? If they do, then their fundemental premise as above so below is disconfirmed. The idea might seem difficult to test—what astrologer wants to read wrong charts?—but it happens purely by accident and is surprisingly common. The astrologer gives a reading that satisfies the client but the wrong chart has been used. It makes no difference how wrong it is—by hours, days, or years—the chart still works. Astrologers recognize this but see it as some occult property of astrology that puts it beyond human understanding. Skeptics may disagree.

The Gauquelins in 1981

Les Gauquelins et leur Héroïsme

The most heroic studies in astrology were made by French psychologists Michel Gauquelin (1928–1991) and his wife Françoise (1929–2007). They used statistical testing and large samples mostly from the nineteenth century. Their results for traditional astrology (signs, aspects, transits) were consistently negative. Nothing worked. Therefore they were surprised to obtain positive results for what was later called the Mars effect (and, later still, planetary effects because the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn were also involved): the tendency for eminent professionals to be born when the planet matching their occupation (such as Mars for sports champions, Jupiter for actors) had just risen or culminated. Planetary effects were new in that, unlike previous factors, they were critically dependent on the hour of birth.

Statistically, the effects were often very significant, which to astrologers meant strength. But their effect sizes, which for over thirty years nobody bothered to calculate, averaged a tiny r = 0.04 ignoring direction. So the effects were actually weak and were significant only because large samples were tested (typically more than 1,000). Indeed, the effects were so weak that if applied to 100 clients, on average only two would get readings more accurate than tossing a coin—and even then only if they were among the one in 20,000 who were eminent. Yet the effects replicated and were not explainable by faulty procedures (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Effect sizes for the fifty-nine known studies based on computer-calculated data spread over five planets—Moon 12 percent, Venus 4 percent, Mars 38 percent, Jupiter 25 percent, Saturn 21 percent. Some results have negative effect sizes (e.g., Saturn for painters), so they do not cancel out positive effect sizes. What matters is the proportion of effect sizes that lie outside the 50 percent confidence limits. If significantly more than 50 percent, as is the case here, then planetary effects seem to be real.

Ironically, planetary effects created baffling puzzles even for astrology. Why only five planets? Why no effect for the sun or for signs and aspects? Why occupation and not personality? Why contrary to all expectations are planetary effects larger for less-precise birth times? And why are there such strange effects in the first place?

For forty years, nobody had a clue. Astrologers predictably saw the effect as proof of the higher realities in which astrology is said to operate. But after eight years of work, I uncovered a new artifact capable of explaining all the puzzles—namely the misreporting of birth times to match the pop astrology of the day (Dean 2002). The level of misreporting was very small, but then again so were the planetary effect sizes—and as opportunities for misreporting disappeared, so did planetary effects. Nobody knows if planetary effects still apply today, but that’s only because privacy laws make new data hard to find. In any case, planetary effects are far too weak to be of practical use to astrologers.

But might consolation be found in Indian astrology, claimed by Indian astrologers to be vastly better than anything available in the West?

Last of the Astro Mohicans: Gauquelin planetary effects were the last of the astrological areas that had seemed promising in the 1970s and which still remained when my original SI article was published in 1986. The indicated end year is when the prom- ise was lost due to the discovery of artifacts—poor control of chemistry (Kolisko), biased samples (Jung), inappropriate tests (Nelson), social arti- facts (Gauquelin), astronomical artifacts (Bradley), sampling errors (Addey and Clark), unavailable data (Jonas), and sun sign knowledge (Mayo-Eysenck).

An Indian Test of Indian Astrology

Indian astrology is hugely different from Western astrology. It is more complex, uses the sidereal zodiac, and fortune-telling is the norm. The scientific revolution that eroded astrology in seventeenth century Europe did not happen in India, so it has had a free run ever since. Today it is firmly entrenched at all levels of Indian society. But no controlled test had been made in India until the one by Jayant Narlikar and colleagues at the Inter-University Centre for Astron­omy and Astrophysics in Pune (Narlikar 2013).

They gave each of twenty-seven volunteering Indian astrologers (mean experience fourteen years) a different set of forty timed charts each, and a team of astrologers 200 timed charts (a larger number than in any Western test), to see if they could tell bright children from mentally retarded children. This is a commonly accepted claim in India, but neither group outperformed tossing a coin.

Nightmare on Time-Twin Street

“Time twins” are people born close enough in time and geography to have similar birth charts. At a given moment, the birth chart supposedly indicates trait X, the next moment it is trait Y, and so on. So time twins should be more alike in X than expected by chance, which makes them the definitive test of astrology, since all confounding reading artifacts are avoided.

In a city of one million people, more than 2 percent will have a time twin born within one minute, about the same proportion as people with an ordinary twin, and about 20 percent will have a time twin born within ten minutes. The numbers increase very rapidly with time dif­ference and city size. Indeed, the number of time twins in Western history is so enormous (hundreds of millions) that many similarities in personality and events will occur by chance alone. So the handful of cases routinely cited by astrologers cannot hope to be convincing.

Distribution of 5,591 NCDS births in Southeast England during March 3–9, 1958 with the expected peak in the Greater London area.

The systematic testing of time twins was explored by Ivan Kelly and me (2003) using cohorts from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) of 16,000 children born in the United Kingdom during March 3–9, 1958. To minimize variations in birth place, we analyzed only those born in Greater London. Birth times for 92 percent of cases were reported to the nearest five minutes, and the rest to the nearest minute. For each person, we selected a total of 110 variables measured at ages eleven, sixteen, and twenty-three that were said to be shown in the birth chart such as ability, accident proneness, behavior, occupation, personality, and physical data such as height, weight, vision, and hearing. Data collection had required whole armies of researchers well beyond anything astrologers could achieve. For the purposes of testing astrology, this database was a dream come true.

But for astrology itself the results were a nightmare: support for astrological claims was nowhere in sight. For example, Saturn sets every day momentarily exactly on the horizon, a position traditionally held to greatly boost its strength. At that time in London on March 6, 1958, it was also square the Moon within 0.1º, which is also held to boost its strength. It was not just a strong Saturn event; it was also the strongest Saturn event for the entire week. Saturn is held to indicate restriction and limitation, so its effect should show up as a dip in measures of ability. But it did not (see Figure 4).

Figure 4.

A Strong Saturn Fails to 
Show Saturn Effects

Ability scores (a composite of fifteen tests such as intelligence, reading, and mathematics) plotted against time of birth for 2,193 births (Figure 4) shows no discernible effect from the Saturn event, no daily rhythm that might coincide with rising or culminating planets as in Gauquelin’s planetary effects, and no clear difference from the same data when the birth times are randomized (lower plot). The white lines are forty-one-point moving averages (forty-one points is about three hours). None of the other 110 variables fared any better when analyzed by a battery of tests. But can we be sure that the test is really appropriate? It may be that ability is too broad a measure to show Saturn effects, in which case we need something such as extroversion that is more definitely linked to Saturn (caution, reserve). Perhaps Saturn effects are too focused to be discernible during seven days, in which case we need a smaller time frame. All as in the next test (see Figure 5).

Figure 5.

No Saturn Effect on Extroversion

Astrology predicts a drop in extroversion scores (here based on ratings on thirteen relevant scales such as impulsive–cautious) below the mean during the Saturn event (black dots in Figure 5). But if anything they increase, albeit not significantly (p by a t-test is 0.22). The extroversion scores show no tendency to group together. Enlarging the Saturn event window makes no difference, so the time twin similarities predicted by astrology are not detectable.

Could Lack of Resources Be the Problem?

At this point, the last hope for astrology’s factual validity seems to disappear, but there are still straws to clutch at. Astrologers claim that with enough funding, research facilities, and right-minded researchers, astrology would soon regain its rightful place as queen of modern worldviews. This belief has been put to the test in each of more than a dozen PhD theses that have involved tests of astrology.

It did not work for Niehenke’s PhD thesis. So let’s look at the PhD thesis of Pat Harris, a British astrologer whose website offers you a £30 ($45) Astro Fashion Profile based on sun signs. Earlier, during twenty years of professional practice, one of her clients had conceived via IVF (in vitro fertilization) under astrological conditions that were absent during seven failed attempts. This seemed to suggest that astrology could improve the IVF success rate—an idea she explores in her thesis (Harris 2005).

Later in an article in the Journal of Sex­uality, Reproduction & Menopause (2008), Harris claimed that “attempts to conceive during [astrologically] optimal times have an increased likelihood of success,” even though an editorial note advised that her results were not statistically significant. The May 2009 issue contained a letter from Jacky Boivin, professor of health psychology at Cardiff University, who noted that Harris’s two samples of twenty-seven and twenty-eight women were too small to escape sampling artifacts (for which about 400 would be needed), thus her claim “is completely unwarranted.”

Unusually, her thesis was under an embargo (normally granted only if it contains commercially sensitive material) that for five years prevented its release. In due course, I found it to contain no birth data, no proper controls, no expectancies, no details that would allow an independent check, and success rates inflated in much the same way as predicting dryness in arid areas—exactly the sort of errors and omissions that in my day would get your thesis rejected. What was her university thinking?

Like Niehenke, Harris did not let her results influence her belief in astrology. And here we encounter astrology’s dark side—on another website she now offers for £90 ($135) the best astrological dates for achieving conception plus a £148 ($220) telephone analysis of your birth chart to optimize fertility. In her 2009 letter, Professor Boivin had commented that Harris’s paper “should not have been published because it falls short of the scientific standards adopted to create the evidence base for interventions in fertility. . . . People with fertility problems are willing to try anything to achieve pregnancy, and giving them false hopes is yet another way of taking advantage of this vulnerability.”

This of course calls into serious question the scientific and ethical standards of Harris’s actions. So let’s try one more time with the PhD thesis of Keith Burke (2012), a former U.S. astrologer who went further than most by cofounding a for-profit institute for teaching New Age topics. He taught astrology classes and held workshops through the institute, wrote astrology articles and a textbook, and lectured at national conferences. Verily the definitive right-minded researcher!

He had noted that the Moon is generally held to be as important as the Sun but had received little attention by researchers. There was also a clear similarity between the Moon’s meaning in each of the four astrological elements and four of the Big Five personality dimensions. So this became the subject of his PhD thesis at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, an accredited clinical training graduate school in California that was even better suited to astrology than a pure research school. According to astrologers, the results ought to support astrology. But the effect sizes for 192 subjects with timed births, mean age forty-nine, were not only at chance level, but three were in the wrong direction (see table below).

The funding, research facilities, and right-mindedness (to say nothing of a promising hypothesis) had been to no avail. Unlike Niehenke and Harris, Burke had already stopped reading charts for clients, a decision helped by his concerns about people looking not for counseling but for major life answers that a chart cannot give. He is now a clinical psychologist and a professor of behavioral sciences, and he does not use astrology in his profession or personal life (Burke 2015).

The case for and against astrology can now be briefly stated. Since thirty years ago, the case against has become stronger. The case for remains unchanged.

Cases for and against Astrology

Astrology is among the most enduring of human beliefs and has undisputed historical importance. A warm and sympathetic astrologer can provide wisdom and therapy by conversation with great commitment that in today’s society can be hard to find. To many people, astrology is a wonderful thing: a complex and beautiful construct that draws their attention to the heavens, making them feel they are an important part of the universe. However, to their discredit, astrologers fail to recognize astrology’s many problems. They refuse to accept that experience can be unreliable; they brush aside negative evidence; and they dismiss critics as close-minded by definition. As a result, astrologers are promoting both an illusion and a deceit. They are astrology’s own worst enemies. Ultimately, the issue is a personal one—whether factual truth is to be more important than personal meaning. Skeptics will no doubt have thoughtful responses to that one. Answer to the Title QuestionThe tests outlined here lead to the same answer as do hundreds of other tests. They confirm that nothing in a birth chart is sufficiently true to support the meanings claimed by astrologers. Their books, classes, and conferences are not built on evidence but on opinions based on opinions based on opinions, thus perpetuating the seeing of faces in clouds. Millennia have not wearied them.

So the answer to the thirty-year-old question in the title remains the same. No, astrology does not need to be true in order to seem to work. It is simply a time-honored cover for artifacts that better explain the outcomes. Astrologers have had ample opportunity to prove otherwise by controlled tests but have not done so, a failure most easily explained by their being unable to do so. As a consequence, astrologers should not be surprised if they find themselves disqualified from positions of credibility in Western society.

Nevertheless, depending on who we are, we can still see astrology as beautiful, spiritual, helpful, controlling, lucrative, great fun, or simply stupid. But one final question.

How to React?

French social scientist Laurent Puech (2003, 267), in a book-length study of the pretensions of astrology, suggests that the best reaction to astrology lies in the provision of reliable information and critical tools:Whether we like it or not, astrology and recourse to astrologers is here to stay. I think they will never disappear because they fill a need. They will be simply more or less important according to the times. How to react? . . . [It is] not a question of censuring astrology but of helping people to find reliable information about it, and also to find the minimum critical tools for evaluating it.

The problem for astrologers who wish to promote their invalid views of astrology is how to stop people from finding out the truth, even though some may see astrology as having more to it than being true or false. n

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Susan Blackmore, Wout Heukelom, Ivan Kelly, Arthur Mather, David Nias, and Rudolf Smit for helpful comments—for most of them a heroic repeat of their help with the original article of thirty years ago.

References

• Alexander, R. 1983. The Astrology of Choice. New York, NY: Weiser.
• Burke, K. 2012. Big Five Personality Traits and Astrology: The Relationship between the Moon Variable and the NEO PI-R [Big Five personality inventory]. PhD thesis, Pacifica Graduate Institute, California.
• ———. 2015. Personal communication with the author.
• Carter, C. 1925. The Principles of Astrology. London: Theosophical Publishing House.
• Dean, G. 2002. Is the Mars effect a social effect? Skeptical Inquirer 26(3) (May/June): 33–38.
• Dean, G., and I.W. Kelly. 2003. Is astrology relevant to consciousness and psi? Journal of Consciousness Studies 10(6, 7): 175–198.
• Dean, G., A. Mather, D. Nias, et al. 2016. Tests of Astrology: A Critical Review of Hundreds of Studies. Amsterdam: AinO Publications. For details, visit http://www.astrology-and-science.com.
• Elwell, D. 1987. Cosmic Loom: The New Science of Astrology. London: Unwin Hyman
.
• ———. 1991. Can astrology win through? Astrological Journal 33(1): 49–50.
• Harris, P. 2005. Applications of Astrology to Health Psychology. PhD thesis, School of Social Sciences, University of Southampton.
• ———. 2008. Managing fertility treatments and stress with astrology. Journal of Reproduction, Sexuality, and Menopause 6(3): 43–44.
• Narlikar, J.V. 2013. An Indian test of Indian astrology. Skeptical Inquirer 37(2) (March/April): 45–49.
• Niehenke, P. 1984. The validity of astrological aspects: An empirical inquiry. Astro-Psycho­logical Problems 2(3): 10–15.
• ———.1987. Kritische Astrologie, 194. Freiburg: Aurum.
• Patterson, A. 1991. Why astrology is so hard to learn. Considerations 6(3), 5–13.
• Puech, L. 2003. Astrologie: Derrière les mots [Astrol­ogy: Behind the Words]. Sophia Antipolis: Éditions book-e-book.
• Voas, D. 2007. Ten Million Marriages: A Test of Astrological Love Signs. https://astrologia
experimental.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/voas astrology.pdf. A version without tables is available in Skeptical Inquirer 32(2): 52–55, Ten million marriages: An astrological detective story.

I was driving on the freeway in Los Angeles, and the car in front of me had a bumper sticker on it that said “Chemtrails Kill.” Now, I love to laugh at the chemtrail people anyway, but this one had me almost pulling over to catch a breath, because the vehicle was not actually a car but a giant, Suburban-type SUV. The irony of this one is just way too thick to ignore. You are driving around in an eighteen-passenger, four-gallon-to-the-mile, urban assault vehicle on a road with a million other cars, worried about condensation happening at thirty-five thousand feet! Watch out: water vapor at one part per zillion is falling all around us! And let’s not pretend that “Chemtrails” are anything but that—water vapor accurately known as contrails. Contrails have existed since the invention of the jet engine. We know definitively what causes them. There is less secret involved here than why your windshield has that “mysterious” water on it every morning. We know more about the formation of contrails than we do about where that one sock goes when we do the laundry. The science behind contrails is more understood than the science behind what makes those One Direction kids so damn adorable.

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

Regardless of those facts, we have still all probably run into at least one person who is convinced there is a government conspiracy at hand, though depending on who you talk to, you will get a completely different response as to what is trying to be accomplished via said conspiracy. I have heard everything from “controlling the weather” to “controlling our minds.” Controlling the weather always strikes me as odd since these conspiracy people almost always fall into one of two categories: 1) The Alex Jones climate change deniers or 2) People who rail against “Big Oil” and big business groups for their contribution to greenhouse gas production and their climate change denial. So, let me see if I understand this. . . . We can change the climate for the better, by using chemtrails, but for some unknown reason we choose not to, or the climate is changing, we are responsible, it is bad, but it is due to a magic additive in the airplane fuel not the reason 98 percent of climate scientists claim and therefore we should not worry about greenhouse gasses? Since this argument pretty much takes care of itself, I will address the most common chemtrail conspiracy I hear: mind control!

Every other “dude-bro” throwing this claim at me while hacky-sacking in the parking lot says this: “They are dumping a mind control agent into the jet fuel, so that it falls down and poisons our ground water in an attempt at mass mind control.” So let’s pretend for a second that this is the plan and pretend that something dropped in vapor form from thirty-five thousand feet would make it to the ground in any significant quantity to be able to do anything. I am supposed to believe that the government is doing this? The U.S. Government? You mean the same government that can barely deliver my neighbor’s mail to me on time? The same government that allowed the city of Flint, Michigan’s, water to have more lead in it than 50 Cent? There is so much lead in the Flint water, Superman couldn’t see through a glass of it! They let that slip through the cracks, yet somehow they were able to get hundreds of thousands of people, some making barely above minimum wage, airline workers, scientists, truck drivers, low level government clerks and every major airline in the world, to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of this magical mystery substance, in the hopes that enough of it would actually make it to the ground to poison the water—that they themselves and all their friends and family drink—in an attempt at mass mind control? And apparently judging by all the chemtrail “experts” I’ve met, the only way to ward off this extremely potent, mind control chemical is to live in your mom’s basement and work part time at Whole Foods! My response is usually retorted with, “See, they gotcha already! You and the rest of the sheeple can believe what you want, but I’m telling you, they’re dumping that stuff in our ground water to keep us all pacified.” This is the moment he takes a monster bong hit, blows out the smoke, and says, “That’s why I don’t drink water anymore.”

Every year, thousands of Australians are suffering and dying prematurely because of alternative cancer treatments, according to a special investigation by Dr. Paul Willis, director of The Royal Institution of Australia.

The video (part of a series) is called No Alternative To Cancer, on the Australia Science TV site.

The report details the distressingly high number of cancer sufferers who choose to forego conventional treatment altogether in search of an alternative cure.

Kylie Sturgess spoke to Dr. Paul Willis of RiAus.

Dr. Paul Willis: I actually got into this story because my partner is a breast cancer researcher, and she lamented to me at the beginning of the year that she’d been along to one of her frequent surgical meetings, where they talk to surgeons so that they can get more material to be able to continue their research.

One of the surgeons at that meeting was almost in tears that a woman had presented with an inoperable breast cancer that she’d actually been diagnosed with eighteen months earlier, and she’d taken no conventional treatment for it. Instead, she’d been pursuing various alternative treatments that obviously had not worked. That caused me to go and have a look at how big the problem is.

The first hurdle I came to was that there are actually no records kept. If you have a diagnosis of cancer, that does have to be registered. If you go through a conventional treatment, they keep a record of what you have, what doses you have, how often you have them, how long you have them for, and they do follow up studies to find out how you’re faring six months, a year, or two, five, even ten years after you’ve had your treatment—so there’s a lot of record keeping if you go down the conventional route. If you don’t go down the conventional route, then you just drop out of the system.

Essentially, we don’t know what happens to about 4–5 percent of cancer diagnoses that do not go through with conventional treatments. What we were able to piece together is that most of them are probably taking alternative therapies. We could find no evidence that any of those alternative therapies actually work and cure or treat the cancer.

When we did a little bit of statistics around the fact that this year we will see 130,466 new diagnoses of cancer in Australia, when you start to do the statistics of 4 percent dropout rate and the failure of those particular dropout rates, you’re talking about something the scale of the national road toll. At least 5,000 people are suffering unnecessarily, because they’re not getting appropriate treatment for their cancer, and, of those, we can expect about a thousand a year are dying prematurely because they are not getting appropriate treatment.

Kylie Sturgess: Some people might be concerned about the differences between complementary and alternative medicine for cancer treatments. What is the difference? How do you know?

Willis: This was something that all of the clinicians and cancer researchers that I spoke to, they all wanted to make it quite clear that there is a difference between complimentary therapies, which are nonevidence-based therapies that are taken alongside conventional therapies. They actually encourage that. They recognize that the journey through chemotherapy or radiation therapy or surgery is horrendous. Anything you can do that makes you feel better, do it.

The only proviso they have in those cases of complimentary therapies is make sure your doctor knows what you’re doing, just in case there’s any conflict with the treatments that they’re giving you.

When you talk about alternative therapies, where someone forgoes conventional therapy in favor of a nonevidence-based approach to dealing with that cancer, that’s where the danger lies, because not only can we not find any alternative therapy that can actually do what they say it can do, but that delay in actually getting proper treatment for your cancer can mean the difference between life and death. If they get the cancer early and they can treat it conventionally early, your prognosis is much better than if it’s allowed to progress to higher and higher degrees.

Sturgess: I’ve seen warnings about alternative cancer treatments online. There’s been cases in the media such as Steve Jobs, who is mentioned in the video, where people have died from not being treated conventionally. Do you think it’s enough to change opinions or is the tidal wave of people promoting or believing in alternative medicine too large, do you think?

Willis: One of the surprising things for me when I was putting this story together is when I actually asked all of the clinicians and the surgeons and the researchers involved in this area, my final question in every interview was: “Okay. Here’s a magic wand. You can change one thing in this whole equation. What are you going to do?”

I expected them, to a person, to say “Okay. We need to ban X, Y, and Z therapies.” They all, to a person, said “We don’t want to see anything banned. What we want is for the alternative practitioners to come to us with their data. What are they doing? How successful is it? How many failures do they have?”

If they have that level of information, then, in future, they will be able to present to cancer patients an educated perspective of what lies in store for them if they do take these alternative therapies. At the moment, they can make outrageous claims and get away with it.

There are cases in the medical literature of people who have gone down the alternative route, and they have been promised cures or treatments from shark cartilage or apricot kernels—all sorts of bizarre things—to crystal healings, meditation—you name it—coffee enemas. These people in these papers show up back in the medical environment with a greatly advanced cancer which conventional therapy can’t do anything about.

If we just had that level of education as to how good or otherwise these alternative therapies are and if we had some data instead of anecdotes that we could present to cancer patients and say “"This is what will happen if you go down that path,” I think that is going to be the way forward.

Sturgess: I think that’s my concluding question: What now for stakeholders? It seems that now people have to start stepping up and seeing what we can do to find out what is really going on.

Willis: Yes, another thing, and I didn’t really go into it in the story, is that if you go through conventional therapies and they muck it up, you can actually sue them out of existence. The apparatus is all there. The regulations are there to ensure that what they do is efficacious, that they can do what they say, and that they explicitly explain, from the outset, what they want to do and what the outcome should be.

If you’re an alternative practitioner, you don’t have to do that. There is no regulation, so you can make all the promises in the world, and, when it all goes wrong, you just wash your hands of it. You can just turn it over to the conventional guys and say “Well, I’ve done my best. It’s over to you.” That lack of regulation, that lack of oversight as to the whole proposition of alternative cures for cancer, is probably at the heart of this whole issue.

Sturgess: Do you think this will be part of a series? Because I’ve seen online reactions to this video, and there was a lot of “Yes. Finally, someone’s pointing out the facts about what’s going on.” Do you think that this will be something that will continue to have legs, that we might see even more coverage?

Willis: I’d certainly like to be doing a follow up on this particular subject, maybe in a year’s time, and see what’s happened, but this particular story is a new line of programs on Australia’s Science Channel, which we’re calling “Special Investigations.” Because we are a media player, we are a media operator, but we have the distinction of an editorial policy that is based around the paradigms of science, not just normal reporting, it allows us to do stories in a different way from everybody else in the media.

If we take this, for example, this particular story, I have had some people come back to me, two people, in fact, saying “Where are the alternative practitioners in this? This story lacks balance.” I point out that, well, I actually did approach a couple of alternative practitioners who claimed that they could cure cancer and invited them to be part of the program, but, because of our editorial policy, they would have to come along with the data to back up their claims. At that point, they all balked and said they wouldn’t come on.

We are not bound by the principles of balance that you see in mainstream media, which operates by editorial policies that are framed around political and social discussions. We are of the Science Channel. We only present stuff that has an evidence base and is the consilience of the scientific research on any particular subject, and so, yes, this is the first of a series of Special Investigations. We’re working on one at the moment, which will be coming out later this year, looking at science denial, which is a phenomenon that’s writ large across society at the moment. Actually, I’m having quite a bit of fun with that!

In my Spring 2016 Skeptical Briefs column, I briefly covered the fascinating discovery of gravitational waves. For this column, I had the opportunity to talk about the discovery with Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University (ASU) and author of A Universe from Nothing.

Felipe Nogueira: Can you briefly explain gravitational waves and general relativity?

Lawrence Krauss: General relativity is a theory of space and time. Einstein showed that matter affects the properties of space and time around it; space curves, expands, and contracts because of matter. A massive body affects the space around itself and, when it moves, the massive body produces a disturbance of the space that can propagate out, like a ripple when you throw a stone in the water. In 1916, Einstein showed that such disturbance would propagate out and would be a wave, a gravitational wave. Just like electromagnetic waves happen when you jiggle a charge, a gravitational wave is a disturbance of space. That means the properties of space change when a gravitational wave goes by. If there were gravitational waves in this room right now, the distance between my hands would be smaller, but my length would be longer; then, instants later, this changes: my length would contract and the distance between my hands would be longer, and so on. Einstein thought that gravitational waves would never be observed. He also retracted gravitational waves later in 1937, when he tried to solve the equations of gravitational waves and came up with an answer that didn’t make sense. He submitted the paper to Physical Review, and it was rejected. He got upset, since he had never been peer-reviewed before. He said that he had sent the paper to be published, not to be reviewed. But it served him well, because before he could submit it elsewhere, he and someone else realized the mistake in the paper, and the final published version is correct. Thus, for a brief time, Einstein thought gravitational waves didn’t exist.

Nogueira: Einstein also changed his mind about the cosmological constant, didn’t he?

Krauss: He introduced the cosmological constant, because he thought the universe was static and he thought the cosmological constant would make the universe static. In fact, he was wrong on both grounds. The universe is not static, and because of that Einstein said it was a big blunder to have the cosmological constant included. But it was a big blunder anyway, because a cosmological constant does not result in a static universe. It generally results in a universe we live in now, which is exponentially expanding.

Nogueira: About five years ago we discovered the Higgs boson. It was a major discovery, as is the discovery of gravitational waves. I have the impression that there was more excitement with this current discovery than with Higgs boson. Is this impression correct?

Krauss: I think it got more advance notice, and I am partly responsible for that. But everything related to Einstein somehow captures the public imagination. Einstein predicted gravitational waves 100 years ago, and Higgs predicted the Higgs’ particle fifty years ago. The real difference is that the discovery of the Higgs boson is a major discovery of something very important in the Standard Model, but it doesn’t guarantee that there will be more discoveries or that it will open up new windows beyond that. The discovery of gravitational waves was something like the telescope was just turned on: it was the first time that we had a machine that could do this, and we’re pretty certain that we will be able to use this over the next century as a probe of the universe. It’s quite possible the machine that discovered the Higgs reveals to us more, but it’s no guarantee. In contrast, knowing that we have gravitational waves, it tells us that we will be able to see a lot more about the universe than we saw before.

Nogueira: What kind of ideas might be tested using gravitational waves?

Krauss: We never measured general relativity in a strong regime near an event horizon, where space is highly curved. We never measured strong gravity; gravity has always been weak. With these results, it looks like general relativity applies in those domains. So, we can extrapolate it to domains where space is curved and rolling like a boiling sea, and not as gentle ripples. This will be a good test of general relativity. As we probe the physics close to the event horizon, we’ll learn the nature of black holes. And who knows what else we’ll learn? Every time we opened up a new window in the universe, we were surprised. So, I’ll be surprised if we are not surprised.

Nogueira: A story circulated in a Brazilian newspaper saying that this discovery would make time travel possible in 100 years. Time travel was also addressed by Kip Thorne at LIGO’s press conference. What can you tell us about it?

Krauss: It has nothing to do with time travel. It means that we can explore general relativity in a regime where gravity is very strong and fields are very massive. But it doesn’t tell us that we will be able to do time travel in any way; who said that doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Kip Thorne was in an event called Einstein Legacy at ASU, which can be seen online.¹ Thorne made it clear he doesn’t think time travel is possible, even though he spent time writing papers to see if it was possible.

Nogueira: Regarding the non-scientist population, how can this discovery have an impact or be relevant for them?

Krauss: These two black holes collided in a second, and they emitted an energy equivalent to three times the mass of the Sun. This is more than the energy emitted by all the stars in the visible universe during that moment. Those kinds of things can amaze you. As I say, it tells us a little bit of what we came from and where we are going; it enhances our place in the universe. So, from a cultural perspective, it’s part of the beauty of being human. It’s not going to produce a better toaster, but the technology used on the experiment could be used on other things.

Nogueira: How was the LIGO experiment done?

Krauss: The experiment is amazing. In order to detect gravitational waves, there are two arms perpendicular from each other in a detector. If a gravitational wave comes by, one arm will be shorter and the other will be longer alternatively. To measure the length, a laser beam is emitted and travels until it reaches the end of the arm, then it bounces back. This is done in both arms. If one arm is shorter, the laser will take less time to travel it than in the other arm. That sounds easy, but they have to design a detector that can measure the difference in length between two four-kilometer-long tunnels by a distance of one ten-thousandth the size of a proton. It’s so small; the quantum mechanical vibrations of the atoms in the mirror they used are much bigger than that. It’s like measuring the distance between here and the nearest star within the accuracy of the width of a human hair. It’s an amazing bit of ingenuity, perseverance, and technology; it’s really beautiful!

Nogueira: Is this the last prediction to be discovered regarding general relativity? Even if it is, we know it’s not the final answer. Why is that the case?

Krauss: Gravitational waves were the last aspect of general relativity that needed to be tested directly; it’s completely right. And so is quantum mechanics; it has been tested so much that it’s a fundamental theory. But we know that quantum mechanics and gravity don’t work together. In very small scales, where quantum mechanics ideas are important and gravity is strong, the two don’t go together; we know something has to give.

Nogueira: What would be the next most exciting discovery in physics in your opinion?

Krauss: The waves that have been seen are interesting, but for me the much more interesting waves are from the earliest moments of the big bang during inflation. We thought we had discovered it in the last year. We can look for their signature in cosmic background radiation coming from the big bang. If we can detect their signature, we will be able to probe the physics of the very early universe—the nature of quantum gravity itself. LIGO’s detector is not sensitive to those waves from the big bang, but we might build big detectors in space that could be sensitive. I’ve written a paper with Nobel Prize winner Franck Wilczek showing that if you can measure gravitational waves from the big bang, they will prove gravitational waves is a quantum theory.

Nogueira: I know you have an upcoming popular science book. What can you tell us about it?

Krauss: It’s called The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far (Atria Books, Simon and Schuster) and will come out probably in March 2017. It’s the story about the greatest intellectual journey humanity has ever taken, all the way from Plato to the Higgs. My last book discussed the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and this new one addresses the question “Why are we here?” The new book was built up from a lecture with the same title, which is also available online,² but of course there is a lot more in the book than in the lecture. The book also talks about the future based on what we know with the discovery of the Higgs. •

Notes

1. Einstein’s Legacy, Celebrating 100 Years of 
General Relativity: An Origins Project Panel. Available 
online at https://origins.asu.edu/panel-einsteins-legacy-100-years-general-relativity.
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYWH34v2TnM

The Lalaurie House—once the New Orleans residence of the now-
infamous Delphine Lalaurie (or LaLaurie) and her third husband, Louis—has become synonymous with horror. There, lurid stories of torture and death in 1834 combine with later tales of macabre spirits, rendering it one of the mostspine-tingling sites in the Vieux Carré (or “Old Square”), more commonly known today as the French Quarter. (I was able to begin investigating the case in October 2011, while in New Orleans to speak at a Committee for Skeptical Inquiry conference.)

The elegance of the Lalaurie House in New Orleans’ French Quarter belies its reputation as a chamber of horrors. (Sketch by Joe Nickell)

Horror Revealed

The story begins with the elegant masonry townhouse catching fire on the morning of April 10, 1834. The fire brigade extinguished the flames with difficulty but not before discovering, in a locked attic room whose door they forced open, a veritable torture chamber, a dark room where almost unimaginable human abuse reportedly transpired. According to one source (Klein 1996, 8–9):

The slaves were both male and female. Some were fastened to the walls with cruel chains. Others were restrained on makeshift operating tables. Still others were confined in metal cages hardly large enough for an average size dog. Laying helter-skelter were human body parts and pails containing organs and severed heads. Haphazardly arranged on the shelves which hung from the back wall were scientific specimen jars holding grizzly souvenirs appropriated from the hapless wretches who were sold into slavery to serve the rich and elegant Lalauries.

The stout firemen fled in disgust to summon the municipal police. The police arrived with doctors and ambulances from Charity Hospital. Most of the wretched slaves were dead. Those that still clung to life were scarcely recognizable as human beings. One hapless Negress was reduced to a writhing trunk. Her limbs had been amputated and the majority of flesh had been surgically pared from her skull. Another woman, confined in a small cage, had virtually every bone in her body broken and reset at obscene angles. She appeared to be more crab-like than human. Hanging from a gore splattered wall was what was left of a large Negro male. He had been castrated in a fashion which seemed to suggest he had been the victim of a crude sex change experiment. Others had parts of their jaws and facial features so mutilated that they resembled gargoyles. The dead were fortunate for their torments had been silenced by the cold embrace of death.

The Lalauries fled before an angry mob arrived to ransack the horror house, and their subsequent fate remains uncertain. Apparently, Madame Lalaurie died in Paris on December 7, 1849 (“Delphine LaLaurie” 2014).

Other sources give very similar accounts of the affair with added details (Ramsland 2013, 73; deLavigne 1946); these were said to be part of physician Louis Lalaurie’s “cruel medical experiments” (Smith 2010, 27).

Horror Elaborated

Unfortunately, the Lalaurie catalog of horrors is mostly a litany of imaginings. The earliest accounts (which I obtained and studied) beginning with a New Orleans newspaper that was published on the day of the fire (“From the Courier” 1834) give a different picture, albeit horrible enough.

The fire had broken out in the kitchen, and as the flames progressed, and neighbors informed authorities that the upper floor contained “a prison.” “Mr.” (not Doctor) Lalaurie was asked to remove the slaves to safety. When he failed to respond, the doors were broken open. A woman over sixty had to be carried out while six badly scarred men emerged, “loaded with chains.” One “had a large hole in his head; his body from head to foot was covered with scars and filled with worms!!!”

The next day The Bee reported: “Seven slaves, more or less horribly mutilated, were seen suspended by the neck with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other.” The slaves were reported to have been confined by “the woman Lalaurie,” the paper stated, “for several months . . . to prolong their sufferings, and to make them taste all that the most refined cruelty could inflict . . .” (“The Conflagration . . .” 1834). So while the slaves were indeed much abused, the medical “experiments” conducted by “Dr.” Lalaurie were imagined by writers over time. Ironically, The Bee stated the mistreatment was “too incredible” to describe, so it would be left “rather to the reader’s imagination to picture what it was.” In a book published just four years later, “M[onsieur] Lalaurie” was described as “many years younger than his lady, and had nothing to do with the management of her property so that he has been in no degree mixed up with her affairs and disgraces” (Martineau 1838, 263–264).

According to that writer, of nine mistreated slaves:

The skeletons of two were afterward found poked into the ground; the other seven could scarcely be recognized as human. Their faces had the wildness of famine, and their bones were coming through the skin. They were chained and tied in constrained postures, some on their knees, some with their hands above their heads. They had iron collars with spikes which kept their heads in one position. The cowhide, stiff with blood hung against the wall; and there was a stepladder on which this fiend stood while flogging her victims, in order to lay on the lashes with more effect. (Martineau 1838, 265–266)

Gradually the story became elaborated through folklore, and, after 1945, by fakelore, as details began to be conjured up by popular writers. For example, Jeane deLavigne in her Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans (1946) imagined:

Male slaves, stark naked, chained to the wall, their eyes gouged out, their fingernails pulled off by the roots; others had their joints skinned and festering, great holes in their buttocks where the flesh had been sliced away, their ears hanging by shreds, their lips sewn together . . . intestines were pulled out and knotted around naked waists. There were holes in skulls, where a rough stick had been inserted to stir the brains.

Not surprisingly, she failed to directly cite sources, and the primary sources she did list failed to support the incredible claims (“Delphine LaLaurie” 2014).

Other myths abound, for example that the house standing today at 1140 Royal Street was built in 1780 and that the subsequent King of France, Louis Philippe, as well as the Marquis de Lafayette, slept there. In fact, while Louis Philippe visited New Orleans in 1798 and Lafayette in 1825, the Lalaurie House was not erected until 1832.

The noted New Orleans expert, Stanley Clisby Arthur (1880–1963), wrote (1936, 96) that the central story of slave abuse “has grown in ferocity through its countless retellings and the probabilities are that even the original story . . . was a gross exaggeration. It now appears that the mistress of this home was the first victim of yellow journalism in this country and that she was far from being the ‘fiend’ tradition has labeled, or should we say, libeled her.” Be that as it may, Arthur is even more explicitly skeptical of the ghost tales that sprouted from the story.

Spirits Appear

For years, the Lalaurie House stood abandoned, the “strange sight of its gaping windows and empty walls, in the midst of a busy street” rendering it a spooky place (Martineau 1838, 267). Tales began to grow that it was a “midnight rendezvous for ghosts,” complete with clanking chains (Arthur 1936, 96, 98). It eventually became known locally as “the Haunted House.” (I have in my collection an old New Orleans postcard view of the mansion with that title. Although it is undated, I would attribute the card to the early twentieth century, before 1907, based on printing and format.) Cries and screams were said to be heard, emanating from within, and the superstitious crossed the street to avoid its supposedly ghostly horrors (Smith 2010, 28; Arthur 1936, 96).

As Arthur (1936, 98) noted, “The principal ‘ghost’ is, according to the most frequently quoted tale, that of a little girl slave who, to escape the whip of her mistress, climbed to the roof and jumped to her death into the courtyard below.” (This story—but not the ghost portion—first appeared in Mar­tineau [1838, 264–265].) Arthur continued, “Another tale, equally untrue, was that the mistress of the mansion buried all her victims in the courtyard well.”

Victor C. Klein in his New Orleans Ghosts (1996, 11) attributes the end of a long silent period of ghost activity at the house to an 1890s influx of Italian immigrants who used it as a tenement. “Almost as soon as the hardy Italians had taken up residence then did a whole new generation of hauntings appear,” reported Klein. This suggested that—if that characterization is correct—the percipients may have been superstitious and susceptible to suggestion from the lurid ghost folk tales. A longshoreman who came home late from work one evening allegedly encountered on the dark stairs the specter of a slave bound with chains, who then instantly vanished.

Assuming the story is true, it relates what is called an apparitional experience. Dissociative states—such as daydreaming or (as in this instance) sleeplessness—can produce ghost sightings. The spectral image wells up from the subconscious and becomes superimposed onto the visual scene (Nickell 2012, 345). One must wonder, if ghosts consist of “life energy” as many paranormalists imagine, how is it that such inanimate objects as slave chains and manacles appear? The answer is that they are seen in apparitions (just as they are in dreams) because they are necessary to the “apparitional drama” (Tyrell 1953, 83–115).

Over time, the house had become, in turn, a girls’ school, a music conservatory, and a crowded tenement. Before going on to become a furniture store, apartment building, and again a private residence, it was a “Haunted Saloon.” Its owner proved to be “a fount of ‘ghost stories’” (Klein 1996, 11), perhaps intending to boost business.

One night in the 1970s, reports Smith (2010, 29), a tenant, who had an apartment at the rear, was “awakened from a deep sleep” to be “confronted by a man who stood above him looking down.” At the time, he believed he was dreaming, but, when he saw the next morning that a table had been moved, he concluded he had seen a ghost. The case is easily explained. The dreamlike occurrence was obviously what is called “a waking dream”—an experience that occurs between being fully asleep and fully awake and has features of both. As to the table, it may have been moved (earlier or later) by a family member or housekeeper (the account does not say the percipient saw the table being moved).

According to Hauck’s Haunted Places: The National Directory (1996, 192), “strange sounds were also heard: an invisible chain being dragged down the staircase; the pitiful cries of the slave girl near the cherub fountain in the courtyard; and tortured screams coming from the attic.” Note that the chain, visible in the earlier-mentioned apparition, is now “invisible.” Of course, auditory hallucinations may occur under the same circumstances as apparitions, but such brief, colorful incidents as Hauck relates sound like the story elements (or motifs) of folklore—nothing approaching firsthand accounts.

On Site

On October 27, 2011, I visited the Lalaurie mansion, although I had been told it was privately owned and not open to the public. When I got there, I found it was even closed for renovation. I searched around the house, finding a side door open, and slipped inside but was soon stopped by workmen. However, for the price of a few of my wooden-
Nickell business cards—presented in a brief sleight-of-hand show—I was admitted and allowed to look around. No ghosts appeared, but I was told how a caretaker once played a prank on a ghost-tour group that stopped outside. He secretly broadcast through the speaker-box located by the doorbell a muffled “Get out! Get out!”—thus, he said while laughing at the results, spooking the group.

Perhaps such antics will inspire a new generation of ghost hunters, modeled after guide Kalila Katherina Smith of Haunted History Tours and author of New Orleans Ghosts, Voodoo and Vampires (2010). Judging from her book and a nighttime tour I had with her, it appears such ghost-hunting raconteurs need very little evidence—perhaps only a thrice-told anecdote or a bit of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo—in order to spin their fantastic tales.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga for research assistance, and I also appreciate the professional assistance of the New Orleans Public Library in providing copies of early newspaper articles.

References

• Arthur, Stanley Clisby. 1936. Old New Orleans. N.p.: Harmanson Publisher; revised and reprinted as Walking Tours of Old New Orleans (ed. by Susan Cole Doré), Gretna, LA: Pelican, 96–99.
• “Authentic Particulars.” 1834. The Bee. April 12, p.2, c.1. (lower).
• “The Conflagration. . . .” 1834. The Bee. April 11, p.2, c.1. (See also “The Popular fury” 1834; “Authentic Particulars,” 1834.)
• DeLavigne, Jeanne. 1946. Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans. New York: Rinehart; quoted in “Delphine LaLaurie” 2014.
• “Delphine LaLaurie.” 2014. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_LaLaurie; accessed July 21, 2014.
• “From the Courier of Yesterday.” 1834. Reprinted Louisiana Advertiser, April 11, 1834, p.2, c.1.
• Hauck, Dennis William. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York: Penguin Books.
• Klein, Victor C. 1996. New Orleans Ghosts. Metairie, LA: Lycanthrope Press, 7–12.
• Martineau, Harriet. 1838. Retrospect of Western Travel, in two vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, vol. 1: 263–267.
• Nickell, Joe. 2012. The Science of Ghosts: Searching for Spirits of the Dead. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• “The Popular Fury. . . .” 1834. The Bee, April 12, p.2, c.1.
• Ramsland, Katherine. 2013. The Human Predator. New York: Berkley Books.
• Smith, Kalila Katherina. 2010. New Orleans Ghosts, Voodoo and Vampires: Journey into Darkness. New Orleans, LA: De Simonin Publications.
• Tyrell, G.N.M. 1953. Apparitions. Rev. ed. London: Gerald Duckworth.

What century are we living in? It might sound ridiculous, strange, and weird, but a career in parapsychology, “angelology,” and demonology has been practiced at Santos Lugares, near Buenos Aires, since March 2016. It is supposed to be the first career that integrates parapsychology with“exorcistic” (?) disciplines. Reminder: we are not in the fourteenth century.

“Bishop-Doctor” Father Manuel Adolfo Acuña.

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

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

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

It’s also remarkable that this career “does 
not require previous studies,” which means that everybody can attend the classes, no 
matter what titles they’ve previously achieved. 
But he offers a title, let’s say a diploma, which is not official. I presume he doesn’t want to have problems with the law, especially with the illegal practice of medicine, which is considered in article 208 of the Argentina Penal Code.

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

The length of the career is “approximately” three years. What does it mean by “approximately”? I would like to know. Maybe evil is something not as easy to throw out as you’d think.

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

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

I have sent an email to Pablo Avelutto, Minister of Culture of Argentina, telling him about my concern with this crazy and potentially dangerous “career.” To the present date, I have received no reply. I wrote him that in the twenty-first century, a course or career on this subject in unacceptable, not because of the subject but because of the practice: there will be hundreds of “exorcists” trying to chase the evil out of hundreds of individuals. And we know about stories of people killed during an exorcism ritual.

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

The scientific community should be alerted, and it should be reacting to this dangerous nonsense. Until now, scientists remain in silence. It certainly is a big mistake.

In the Spring 2016 issue of the Skeptical Briefs, Sharon Hill brought you the first part of her Guide to Ghost Hunting Guidebooks. Here is another installment. — The Editors

Ultimate Ghost Tech, Vince Wilson, 2012

This book was also published with more or less the same content as another one of Wilson’s books, Ultimate Ghost Hunter. Wilson informed me that he did not care for the term ghost hunter and has recently pulled that book from publication. Different title or not, the book follows the typical ghost hunter guidebook. In one of the forewords (one is correctly spelled “foreword,” the other “forword”), Wilson is described as the “foremost expert in the technological aspects of paranormal investigation.”

In the other foreword, a rather well-respected parapsychologist reveals the blatant truth about ghost hunting technology: “Let’s face it: ghost hunters love their tech—even if they don’t know how to use it or to assess the data from it in light of the reported phenomena.” Indeed, I agree with that.

The rest of this book is an example of sounding science-like but falling short of representing anything like scientific investigation. Wilson focuses on technology, of course. An earlier book, Ghost Science—which I saw as a must-read since I am deeply interested in ghosts and science—was atrocious. It was sloppy, formatted terribly, and at the very least, desperately needed an editor who could spell and eliminate awful turns of phrase. That book begins with the premise, “One of the main purposes of this book is to show that, not only do ghosts exist but also that the laws that govern reality allow them.” Neither that book nor this one will demonstrate that stated purpose to anyone who understands how science actually works. Wilson’s array of books is essentially self-published. But according to Wilson, he has progressed past that first book, yet he still stands by the work he did in this one. I cringed at many aspects of Ultimate Ghost Tech and how readers will be misinformed by much of its content.

Examples:

• Wilson states “random energy particles may hold the essence of consciousness...” There is no basis for such speculation. Shall we talk homeopathy?
• “Ghosts will be proven to exist one day and so will psychics...” What is the basis of this claim? What will that effort entail? Why, after 100 years of trying by actual professionals, will things change now with amateur researchers?
• He uses several phrases that are painful to read, such as “just another theory” (where “theory” is used to mean a “guess” instead of the scientific meaning of an evidence-supported overarching model of explanation), “science is absolute” (What does that even mean?), “sorry about the math” (if you have to apologize for the language of science, you should not be reading or writing such a book), and “blah blah blah” (I cannot think of any excuse to write that).
• He refers to “stuffy scientists” and takes a disparaging tone toward skeptics. In Ghost Science, he called skepticism a quasi-religion.

Several statements rankle me as revealing a disturbingly superficial and inflated attitude of ghost hunting hobbyists. He says Ghostbusters (the movie) changed paranormal research with its lingo and gadgets: “Paranormal research just became really cool overnight.” He suggests science is a way to pump up your credibility—not real science but faking it—saying you should answer questions from people with science-like words to sound “professional and cool” and a little “nerdy.” People are too embarrassed to ask what you mean.

Not me. I ask. And science-pretenders skirt the uncomfortable questions.

Wilson relates all the ubiquitous (and wrong) assumptions about ghosts starting with the belief that they exist (thus scuttling any unbiased investigation of what might really be happening to people). The paradigm of today’s ghost investigation is reflected: changes in the environment can be related to ghost behavior and hauntings; technology can provide objective evidence—more and different data—than just human experience. For example, he suggests (through an explanation of energy transfer) that a cold spot could be created from an entity moving through dimensions. This type of rhetoric (apparent in nearly all ghost hunting guides) gives hope but very flimsy justification to other ghost hunters that they will discover something scientifically incredible: “You can be an amateur parapsychologist and usher in a new era of paranormal research. Wow! That’s pretty deep for me!” (p. 160).

Cringe-worthy and specious.

Wilson, like many of these guide writers, seems well-meaning but also willing to learn new things, expand his horizons, and is fairly literate in science ideas—just enough to sound knowledgeable to people who aren’t scientists, which is most of the population. He is not a scientist but a science enthusiast. It’s a widespread trend for ghost hunters to quote scientific buzzwords and name-drop famous scientists. They attempt to apply very complex physics concepts and theories, such as quantum mechanics and Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” to inappropriate situations. There are no scientific sources cited or referenced and explained. There are basically no sources for the various claims or even the quotes. The recommended reading list contains references that repeat these unverified speculative claims and include pop science sources such as The Handy Science Answer Book. This is just not acceptable if you claim to be doing science.

Wilson understands that TV ghost hunters are playing a role and that many paranormal investigators are “fooled by an intense need to believe.” Hoaxes are rampant. So, there is a kernel of truth in much of what he writes. However, that is trumped by his own faith that equipment can detect anomalous energy of some sort. The processes he suggests leave out critical considerations about confounding factors and alternative explanations. Wilson has lectured as a ghost tech expert in the past. He suggests giving workshops to teach people about this topic is a good way to fundraise for your group. I find this playing pretend professor/scientist to be profoundly distasteful.

I accept that Wilson will be unhappy with my take on his publications as an unfortunate consequence. But if anyone attempts to make such extraordinary claims that are so off the mark, unjustified, and can misinform society, you open yourself to such harsh criticism. I will call you on bullshit and hope you will consider ceasing its propagation.

How to Hunt Ghosts, Joshua P. Warren, 2003

This volume was produced by an affiliate of Simon and Schuster publishing, so the basic elements of a book—grammar, punctuation, spelling, and formatting—is superior to small or self-published efforts. But I can’t say we get better quality in the content. The same unsupported model, built on speculative paranormal assumptions, is applied.

The first words “Ghosts are real” show us this is not about investigation but about finding proof to support a preexisting conclusion. These opening words oddly contrast with the last words of the book, “Never pretend to know all the answers. All the answers are not known.” In between, we get a mish-mash of silly claims and scientific misrepresentation. Warren’s résumé does not include science. He writes fiction and worked in filmmaking. Like many who appear on TV shows as talking heads, he touts these appearances to bolster his credibility. It works for those who get their facts from TV, I imagine.

Warren wins the prize for the most science-like name-dropping in a ghost hunting guide—Descartes, Newton, Einstein, Sagan—none of whom had anything positive to say about spirits. Nonscientist Warren says, “Let me tell you what static electricity is...” No, thanks. I’d rather get my science information from some place other than in a book about entities that have not been demonstrated to exist. If we are to take these ghost hunters seriously, they should explain why physicists aren’t writing books about the paranormal but nonscientists are.

Here are some illustrations of the ideas presented:

• Spiritual manifestations are hidden from us. Our technology is not good enough. There is scientific evidence that ghostly manifestations are real, he says. Warren provides no hint of why physicists can detect subatomic particles and the tiniest releases of energy but our technology is not adequate to identify ghosts. What scientific evidence is he talking about? It’s not cited or mentioned in any journals, as is standard with scientific protocol.
• Mainstream science is bad because they need to limit their work to activity of a certain category. “Most scientists are busy enough researching the activity they already know about.” This reveals a core ignorance of how knowledge can progress and is a self-evidently dumb claim. From the early days of the scientific endeavor, knowledge became specialized by necessity. To say science is flawed because of this is like saying medicine is bad because too many doctors specialize in distinct areas of health or surgery. Specialization is advantageous for advancing deep knowledge. Astronomers aren’t collecting and evaluating the same data as biologists or sociologists.
• If a person dies young, especially violently, “it is likely that a ghost will remain.”
• Ghosts wrap themselves in ions in order to interact physically. If this is correct, he adds, we can use this to predict and manipulate the phenomena. There is a kernel of science in there, but the assumption that ghosts exists, utilize ions, and interact physically are all grand assumptions.
• “Virtually any location can prove to be haunted.” You should experiment to decide if the Ouija board, automatic writing, pendulums, etc., work for you.
• Warps are areas were the laws of physics seem to be distorted. These may create natural portals. “Warps exemplify the most complicated issues facing science today.” They can be filled with “hundreds or thousands” of entities. Warren gives the Bermuda Triangle, a myth that was exploded decades ago as sensationalized fiction, as example of a warp. Take note that Warren runs a “Bermuda Triangle Research” site in Puerto Rico.
• There is a “correlation between ghost manifestations and standing (acoustical) waves”—it may make the ghost appear. This is in contrast to the well-known research of Vic Tandy who demonstrated that an inadvertently created standing wave was responsible for behavior of materials (metal fencing foil) and possibly the fluid in our eyeballs that could lead to ghost-like reports. Unless I’m missing something (there are no citations to check), Warren has this concept completely backward.

We’re way out on the fringe here. Such incredible claims should have equally incredible documentation provided. Nope. Nothing. It’s practically lying.

Warren knows some science basics—that’s clear—but like many other ghost researchers, he applies them wildly incorrectly. There is an overuse of the term energy without a reasonable definition provided. Warren claims that there is energy of attraction, energy that comes out of our eyes when we look at someone. He says we have auras around us. Dowsing rods that you can make yourself can detect energy fields. His research group (of which he is founder and president) is called the League of Energy Materialization and Unexplained Phenomenon Research (LEMUR). I first heard of Warren through his investigation of the ghost light phenomenon. He also thinks this is energy produced by the Earth. On the whole, this is one of his lesser outrageous ideas, since such lights are actually documented in several places around the world, but the methods of amateur research are unlikely to produce any results of value. The answer to what causes ghost lights is certainly complex and multivariate.

Warren refers to many fictional movies for examples—he is, after all, a fiction novelist. I question at what level ghost hunters can distinguish scientific facts from pure fictional license. And their lack of attention to examination of very normal, reasonable explanations, providing foundationless claims instead that might as well be fiction, dooms them to failure in any effort to advance worthwhile conclusions about ghost experiences. It also leaves them wide-open targets for derision by scientists working in legitimate research endeavors. Warren exhibits paranormal pretentiousness. Since he’s moved into the realm of hawking “wishing machines” and lucky charms, he’s lost all credibility. Scientific? Credible? Not in any senses of the words.