Crystal Healing by Caroline on Flickr with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License

She hesitated when the priest asked, “Do you take this man…” in anticipation of the ring. Its size would symbolize more than her future marital status; it would create happiness. She said the words: “I do.” She saw her imminent husband move the ring from its small folding box towards her finger—it was enormous. Reflexively, she sighed with relief. When crystals really do generate happiness, health, and well-being, diamonds are everyone’s best friend.

If crystals really did have some power to heal the body and the mind, studies of married couples would always be missing something intangible. Like how studies of intelligence systematically miss some unnamed component, every analysis linking socioeconomic status or psychological disposition to the state of a marriage would be off—those diamonds are forever after all. Social and mental factors explain much, but in tandem with the vibrating power in couples’ rings the whole picture would be clear as, well, you know.

Along with love and marriage, crystals with actual power would bring death and destruction. Once our scientists started identifying the gemstones of the best “frequency,” prices for them would increase around the world. Conflict-ridden areas already stressed by the diamond trade would be pushed a bit further as prices rise. The gemstones would make their way into stores around the world, and their cuts and qualities would soon denote different properties. Jewelers try their hand at crafting the perfectly cut “healing stone.” Others reject this molecular sculpting and push for more “organic” stones. Quartz paperweights could be worth a fortune.

Crystals are everywhere. Simply put, they are solids with atoms, ions, or molecules ordered in a consistent pattern in three-dimensional space. There’s a good chance that there are even crystals inside the screen you read this on. Liquid-crystal displays, surely in the homes of millions of people, take advantage of crystalline properties as well. If crystals really did output energy to get one’s qi in check, sitting too close to the TV screen would no longer be a mother’s worry, but rather a requirement.

The ubiquity of crystalline structures in nature means that geology itself is the largest gem shop. Why spend money on chakra amulets and glittering key chains when a whole strata beneath your feet likely has enough crystal power preserved within it to last a lifetime of vibrational readjustments. Grab a trowel and some Birkenstocks and get digging! And if crystals really could cure, this cave in Mexico would be flooded with sickly patients like a faith-healing megachurch. However, assuming a decent distribution of crystals throughout the Earth’s surface, it would be next to impossible to determine which crystal was soothing which aura and when (as any shaman worth his or her salt would know).

If crystals helped and healed through “vibrations” and “frequencies,” sitting in front of a radio would be the next best thing to a doctor’s visit. There is nothing particularly unique about a frequency. It is a process that repeats over time—like the revolutions of a CD in a stereo or the pulses of pressure waves in air. Any geologist or physicist could identify the crystals that did put out a frequency almost immediately…and then the black market of frequency healing would spring forth. The calming effect of quartz would be patented and licensed by large corporations, costing the average consumer, while back-alley drifters would offer a quick fix of hertz played from a small speaker to get anyone’s qi going on the cheap.

Of course, gems and crystals do not produce sound or vibrate noticeably in hand, so it would be very important to find the frequency that works for you. If humans did have a resonant frequency that could be tapped into, there would feasibly be some rate at which we could be vibrated to the point of shattering like a wine glass in front of the proverbial opera singer. To think of the New Age shaman who would first have to hit you over the head with a tuning fork in order to recommended the proper stone…

It would be odd to see dump trucks pulling up behind hospitals to deposit the latest load of gemstones, but that would be the norm if crystals really had healing properties. Word would spread quickly throughout the medical community. Miracle cancer cures are suppressed by Big Pharma, of course, but there would be simply too many rocks to send back to the quarry to keep a crystal cure under wraps. Doctors would prescribe sulfur to absorb the negative energies of their patients. Nurses would go from ward to ward adjusting the placement of rocks on abdomens and foreheads. The next Nobel Prize in medicine would go to the lucky researcher who published the establishing paper, “On the Healing Properties of Crystalline Minerals.” Grant money would flood in from the government. Mines the world over would be dug to aid in the battle against what ails us. Pharmacies would sell less potent versions of the healing stones discovered by doctors. People on the street and in their homes would ask each other over dinner: “Crystals can heal the human body, haven’t you heard, have you been living under a rock?” For your health’s sake, I hope so.

But instead of having the answer to all our maladies stuck in stone beneath our feet, crystals, while something to look at and study, have no biological or physical mechanisms through which they could affect human health. Perhaps a glittering diamond would make you happy, and therefore alleviate stress or give you calm, but it certainly does not tap into a yet undiscovered “human frequency” like someone searching for a radio station. Nothing about the natural world suggests that a certain arrangement of a mineral’s atoms will do anything for the human body other than please the eye. Can we reduce crystal healing to the absurd?

First, it was found in Danish waters. And then France. Then in New Jersey. A fish, normally found in the Amazon, was scaring the pants ON fishermen around the world. Why be scared of a pacu? Teeth and what it was rumored to eat.

From Openwaterpedia.

It has teeth resembling humans'. It is often associated with its horrifying family relation, the piranha. The pacu is the common name given to several species of omnivorous freshwater fish of South America. They are frequently sold for aquariums. When they get too large or unwanted, they are illegally released into the local waters. They were also big news this past summer.

Here is an example of how the story was covered, from The Independent (UK):

“Testicle-eating fish, the Pacu, found in Paris with fears it could be coming to the UK”

“It is a fish that could give the great white shark competition as the most terror-inspiring creature of the deep. With the appearance of the piranha, but with teeth that look uncannily human, the pacu usually dines on a feast of insects, decaying plants and fruit that fall into the waters of the Amazon. But it has become more known for reportedly dining on another food: men’s testicles.” [Source]

Sensationalism, pure and simple. Competes with a great white shark for terror? HARDLY. It's only twelve inches (or so) long! It's related to the piranha but it doesn't devour people. It doesn't even eat meat regularly. The photo used in this article appears to be a sheepshead (fish), not pacu. So much for fact checking.

Maybe it was just a good story, but I suspect it was the image of a toothy mouth and the idea that the animal goes for the crotch that caused the media to take the bait on this story. When I covered it for Doubtful News, it sounded fishy. In short order I found there was no evidence for the claims that pacu were anything to fear. Disturbingly, I found that certain scientists who were sought out for information by journalists promoted unnecessary fear by being a bit cheeky.

When a specimen of this fish was found in Danish waters, it was disturbing to wildlife officials because it should not be there. It is a tropical fish. The threat of an out-of-place find of a nonnative species is an interesting bit of news, but the story got huge press in August 2013 on the basis of problematic quotes from a professor, Peter Rask Moller, who warned people about the fish:

"All we suggested was that swimmers keep their pants on until we know if there are more of these fish out in our brackish waters," Peter Rask Møller, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, said in an email to the Los Angeles Times. [Source]

The professor thought it was funny to suggest the fish was a danger to human males by mistaking their organs for its normal food of (tree) nuts. “The story about the ‘nuts’ was never meant to be the headline. But it certainly got people’s attention,” Moller told CNN. “I’m sorry if it has caused you any trouble. It was a bit of a joke, but I still will keep my swimsuits tied up, and I will never swim in an aquarium with these fishes.”

Fish expert Henrik Carl called the fish a “ball cutter” and told a Swedish paper earlier in August:

“The pacu is not normally dangerous to people but it has quite a serious bite. There have been incidents in other countries, such as Papua New Guinea where some men have had their testicles bitten off. “They bite because they’re hungry, and testicles sit nicely in their mouth.” [Source]

I cannot find a verified incident of this actually happening. Where did he get it from? He may have heard it from Jeremy Wade of the TV show River Monsters who also promoted the pacu water hazard:

Wade told the Daily Mail: "I had heard of a couple of fishermen in Papua New Guinea who had been castrated by something in the water. The bleeding was so severe that they died. The locals told me that this thing was like a human in the water, biting at the testicles of fishermen. They didn't know what it was. [Source]

In response to the August fish frenzy, Wade, commendably, gave a much more sane interview for Esquire where he reiterated this story. Wade made several salient points about why this was not something to fret over. My lights, he did a better job than the other quoted fish experts. Perhaps because it is in the water facing these threats in real life:

Whenever we do a shoot we do a risk assessment. “What’s all the terrible things that can happen? What’s the worst-case scenario?” But then in another column it’s, “but what is the likelihood of this happening?” Yes, there is a chance that someone’s little Benjamin there could get bitten by one of these things, but the likelihood is minimal I think. If you want piece of mind just cover yourself up and I think you’ll be all right. [Source]

From Wikimedia Commons.

The pacu Wikipedia page has information on a child being bitten on the finger by an aquarium-kept pacu but no other reports of human incidents. Their scary teeth can deliver a nasty crushing bite because they are equipped to eat hard foods like tree nuts. It was irresponsible for these professors, who the media looks to for expertise and facts, to extrapolate that the fish could be a threat to human parts. Other fish in lakes and rivers have teeth and occasionally chomp on people, too. Should we get all nervous about them too?

Sheepshead are fish that are native to the U.S. with a very scary dentition, even worse than pacus but we don't seem to get too worked up about that. As noted above, some photos of pacu mouths appear to be sheepshead instead.

It is also worth considering how often men actually swim naked in these well-populated areas? It's POSSIBLE that those natives who regularly fish in the pacu's Amazon environment may have had a few incidents (as I said, there is no readily available documentation of it), but that is completely different that the situation of the pacu found in non-native waters. They are tropical fish, and while fairly adaptable it seems, they will die in post-summer cooling or freezing waters. Only one specimen was reported in each of these places, not several. Nor is there any reason to believe many of them were in the waters. It is unlikely that they can reproduce because the northern water conditions are not conducive to mating.

The previous unsubstantiated rumormongering provided a foundation to spread the nonsense stories about this fish again. When a specimen was caught in New Jersey, the same ludicrous legend was attached.

Man Hooks Testicle-Chomping Fish, Piranha’s Cousin, in NJ Lake from NBC Philadelphia:

“A fisherman at a New Jersey lake got a surprise when he hooked an exotic fish that’s been rumored to feast on testicles.” [Source]

Really, people! The N.J. fish was only 10 inches long. Ooh, scary. Don't put it down your pants and you should be okay. The pacu has been found in loads of other states and non-native locations. It's rather common to find it where it isn't supposed to be.

There are serious things to worry about. A pacu invasion is NOT one of them. Rotten tomatoes are metaphorically to be pitched at the media who ran with the sensationalism. Finally, a note to scientists: don't assume the journalist will get your humor. Be aware of things you say, because many people will swallow it hook, line, and sinker.

Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine. By Paul Offit, MD.
Harper Collins, New York, 2013.
ISBN: 978-0-06-222296-1.
336 pp. Hardcover, $26.99.

Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania, codeveloped a rotavirus vaccine that has saved hundreds of lives. His previous books Autism’s False Prophets and Deadly Choices examined the misinformation spread by the anti-vaccine movement following Andrew Wakefield’s infamous vaccine/autism study. Now he turns his attention to the field of alternative medicine with a new book, Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine.

He explains why alternative therapies are popular: mainstream doctors are perceived as uncaring and dictatorial, offering unnatural remedies with intolerable side effects, while alternative healers provide natural remedies, comfort, and individual attention. But he warns that “natural” remedies mustn’t be given a free pass. Unless we hold all therapies to the same high standard of scientific proof, we risk being hoodwinked by healers who believe in magic.

Being a scientist, Offit’s approach was to review studies of various alternative treatments to see what worked. He found that most of them didn’t, and when they did work, it was how they worked that was surprising.

Offit is a wonderful storyteller who makes his message come alive. Each chapter is a story that grabs the reader’s interest and holds it. In the introduction, he tells us that when seven-year-old Joey Hofbauer was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he had a 95 percent probability of cure with radiation and chemotherapy. His parents rejected the oncologist’s recommendations, and with the collusion of the courts they put him under the care of a psychiatrist who gave him Laetrile, coffee enemas, a “witch doctor’s diet,” and a mixture of other nonsensical treatments. Joey died riddled with cancer, and yet the psychiatrist went on to treat other patients the same way.

One chapter features Dr. Oz, de­­scrib­ing some of the believers in magic featured on his show. Another chapter tells the story of Linus Pauling’s unfortunate infatuation with vitamin C. Another tells how diet supplement industry lobbyists and colluding politicians neutered the FDA by passing the Diet Supplement Health and Education Act, allowing the marketing of products without any prior testing for safety or efficacy. He eviscerates Suzanne Somers for her anti-aging regimen and Jenny McCarthy for her crusade against vaccines. He reveals how a nonexistent disease, Chronic Lyme Disease, was invented and popularized and how the myth continues to harm patients. He builds on Steve Jobs’s flirtation with alternative treatments for his pancreatic cancer to cover the larger story of bogus cancer cures, from shark cartilage to Krebiozen to Gerson therapy. A separate chapter is devoted to Stanislaw Burzynski, the “anti-neoplaston” cancer doctor who charges patients exorbitantly to be subjects in experiments that never seem to get published and who claims huge success rates that have never been confirmed when independent reviewers have looked at his cases. And then there’s Rashid Buttar, who mistreated thousands of autistic children and cancer patients with useless (and potentially harmful) chelation therapy; and all the medical board did was order him to provide a consent form advising patients that his treatments were unproven.

Offit explains why alternative medicine is so seductive and how patients and doctors can be misled by the placebo effect and can misinterpret the meaning of their observations. Instead of railing against alternative medicine as a whole, he thinks some of it has a certain value as “placebo medicine.” He draws a line where alternative medicine crosses over into quackery:

• Recommending against conventional therapies that are helpful. (He mentions Andrew Weil, Joe Mercola, chiropractors, Deepak Chopra, and others as guilty of that sin.)

• Promoting potentially harmful therapies without adequate warning.

• Draining patients’ bank accounts.

• Promoting magical thinking. It isn’t harmless, and it encourages scientific illiteracy.

The subject is one I know a lot about, so I didn’t expect any surprises. Nevertheless, he surprised me with back stories and intriguing details I had not known. I knew Suzanne Somers used bioidentical hormones, but I didn’t know about all of the forty-seven other remedies she uses, or that she rubs glutathione into the skin over her liver to stimulate it. His explanation of the political machinations behind the FDA and diet supplement laws is the best I have read. He gives a wealth of interesting information while providing incisive insights into why patients and doctors do what they do.

Those who are put off by the hostility of other authors toward alternative medicine may be receptive to Offit’s approach, since he thinks there is a place for alternative medicine (if only as placebo medicine). The book is well worth reading, whether you know a little or a lot about alternative medicine and whether you believe in magic or not.

UFO by Val Astraverkhau on Flickr Creative Commons

Early this year, on a brisk but clear morning in Chelyabinsk, Russia, a chunk of rock half the diameter of the ill-fated Hindenburg entered the atmosphere and exploded. With a velocity of over Mach 60, the meteor carried with it more energy than some nuclear bombs. Luckily, only a small part of this energy was transferred to the residents of Chelyabinsk below. Still, the ensuing kinetic tsunami damaged over 7,000 buildings and injured over 1,000 people. It was the biggest object to enter our skies in over a hundred years—literally a once-in-a-lifetime event. Thanks to today’s technology, and the interesting ubiquity of Russian dashboard cameras, thousands saw it and science confirmed it.

***

Late night on a dirt road, a man in a pickup truck flips on his high beams. The road is uneven and shaky, insects on errant paths ping off the headlights, stars flicker in the sky. But one star doesn’t flicker quite right. The man brings his truck to a slow crawl, to stop his bumping and bobbing. An object moves at an unnatural speed towards him. It stops above him emitting an eerie glow. In a flash, it disappears into the dark of space faster than he can blink. He just had an encounter with an alien—a once-in-a-lifetime event. No one else saw it.

***

In the middle of summer last year, our planetary neighbor Venus passed in front of the Sun. This cosmic walk lasted but eight hours, obscure to anyone without eye protection. This too was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Even the lucky future centenarians among us probably won’t live to see the next transit. Thousands, maybe millions saw it and science confirmed it.

***

Shadowed by the growing stalks of his crops, a restless farmer wakes to a disturbing sight. In the middle of his field, a geometric and cryptic pattern has flattened a good percentage of his livelihood. He will go to the paper to report an alien visitation that neither he nor anyone else actually saw, and no one could confirm.

***

We project our own hopes and fears, questions and answers, onto the cosmos. With eyes always on the skies, whatever comes through has profundity. Ages ago, these sights were the objects of prophecy and myth. Some still are. Thanks to modern science, many of space’s mysteries are known to be eclipses or comets or meteors or solar flares. We are the watchers. Events are scribbled in personal journals and official histories, spoken between friends and now shared on the Internet. In fact, today is the best time in our short history to glimpse and identify the mysterious tendrils that reach into our home from space. It’s the best time to verify who is watching the watchers.

If aliens really did visit Earth, we would quickly confirm their presence with the most distributed evidence in the history of human sharing. “Viral” wouldn’t even begin to describe it. That evidence wouldn’t languish in the cabinet of some military bureaucrat. It would mark the person or government that changed the world.

According to the National UFO reporting center, there are hundreds or even thousands of UFO sightings around the world each year. It reports over 6,600 sightings just in the last ten months. That’s around twenty-two sightings per day—the same as if 1 percent of all daily domestic flights in the US were UFOs. If aliens really were visiting us, such a number of sightings would provide ample evidence to confirm their existence—enough evidence to rule out a planet, lens flare, or plane. As in Chelyabinsk, video cameras mounted on dashboards, recessed in phones, and lining our streets would capture these rather common events for analysis. YouTube and other file sharing sites would be inundated with less than blurry and definitely not “shopped” examples of alien visitors. Scientists would descend on the locales—as they did in Russia—retracing flight paths, calculating velocities, and estimating masses (all from YouTube videos!). When millions of people each day have the opportunity to use the miniaturized computers in their pockets to capture events much more common than giant meteors, you wouldn’t have to “want to believe” any more.

If we really have made contact with an extraterrestrial species, those who have would quickly shake off the “wingnut” stereotypes lobbed against them. They would literally be some of our best and brightest.

Speaking with aliens ain’t easy. The chances that human technology is on par with a species that has been around long enough to overcome the perils of interstellar travel are effectively zero. Aliens won’t speak any of our languages, know any of our scientists or icons, and they probably wont see, gesture, or speak in any recognizable way. The incredibly clever individuals who have made contact would be able to speak in a way any scientifically advanced species may recognize—the language of relativity, evolution, and mathematics. Universally known constants like the speed of light and the charge of an electron would be known by heart. They would be able to converse like Einstein or theorize like Pythagoras.

A government conspiracy to cover up alien visits wouldn’t be. Any government that acknowledged (and took credit for) first contact would likely become the most important institution in human history—the official ambassador to space. That institution would serve as our spokesperson, and be the one who would have to demonstrate the value, in its entirety, of humanity. The summation of our knowledge and our art and our morality would be conveyed through this body. If the aliens are a part of a larger contingent of space-faring species (perhaps a kind of federation…), then the government who had the actual evidence and acknowledged first contact could define the most pivotal moment since our split from ape ancestors. It would fall on them to demonstrate our worth, to pass the test of cosmic awareness, and, if our worst fears are founded, to defend us from an extra-terrestrial foe. Either way, there would be few reasons why a person or government would not want the singular power to define history as pre- and post-contact.

But instead of verifying the most important evidence humanity could ever get, we see blurry (and doctored) photos and videos, listen to disparate anecdotes and lucid dreams, and never receive anything nearly as clear as the evidence Chelyabinsk witnessed. When a once-in-a-hundred-years object comes through the atmosphere above Russia and lingers for only a few seconds before disappearing, within hours scientists have trajectories and velocities. With a handful of UFO sightings every day, we get nothing. No unexpected interference in transmissions, TV broadcasts, radio signals, or Wi-Fi strengths. No physical sign of entry or exit. No contact with anyone who could do something about it. Of course, an advanced race of aliens may go about us as unnoticed watchers—it is possible. Maybe they have some Prime Directive they must follow. But the evidence to say that we are watching them back is just not there. It’s almost statistically impossible that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe (or other universes), but at the same time, given the evidence we do not have, evidence that could confirm a meteor strike or enemy aircraft in our airspace or an alien craft, the idea that aliens constantly visit us can be reduced to the absurd.

Ross and I are in a coffee shop, on a miserably uncomfortable bench that may have once been a church pew, surrounded by conspiracy theorists who are yelling at us.

“Do you want your employer to know you have cancer? Or AIDS? Or AIDS?!” yells Abel, the leader of the group, his forehead bulging. Ross has asked him about digital surveillance. His question barely relates to AIDS, but we’re getting used to this kind of thing. Ross says he wouldn’t want his employer to know if he had AIDS.

We’ve been going to these “9/11 Truther” meetings for a couple of months now. The Truther movement emerged shortly after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. Truthers hold that the United States government planned and executed the attacks to create a false justification for the war in Iraq. Here in Los Angeles, there are two prominent Truther groups seemingly in competition. We have been attending the biggest and most active one. About twenty-five people attend each meeting. Each one is four to five hours long and mostly consists of Abel showing us YouTube videos and steamrolling conversations. Say, for instance, responding to a question about surveillance with rantings about employer/employee AIDS relations.

Another issue on Abel’s agenda: his recent tweets to Tom Hanks. He calls his tweets “twitters.”

“I twittered at Tom Hanks,” Abel says, “and asked him why he isn’t calling out Hollywood for covering up 9/11. Now his eight hundred thousand followers will all see my message!”

The room breaks into applause. Several people tell him he did a good job. A small voice from the back asks, “What’s Twitter?”

When I get home, I check Tom Hanks’s Twitter profile. He has seven million followers. I wonder whom Abel actually “twittered.”

***

After spending about a dozen hours with these people and watching the three 9/11 documentaries they have given us as homework, Ross and I still have questions about the September 11th conspiracy stories. The Truthers try their best to field our questions, but their answers sound exasperated. They can’t believe this isn’t obvious to everyone. And they’ve grown tired of showing 9/11 videos, so the “9/11 Truth” meetings are conspicuously absent of 9/11 truth.

“There’s only so many times you can watch Building 7 fall,” says Abel. Ross and I agree that that’s a good point.

Building 7, a part of the World Trade Center complex that collapsed along with the Twin Towers during the attacks, is key to the Truthers’ argument that the tragedy was orchestrated by the U.S. government. The DVDs they gave us for homework were full of Building 7. They say Building 7 collapsed exactly how you’d expect a building to collapse if someone blew it up. To them, this is evidence that the government deliberately manufactured a “false flag” event to lead us into war. The DVDs are full of barely related details and wild assumptions. We try to broach a couple of them during the meeting.

“The videos mentioned that the World Trade Center was built to withstand a plane crash, but wasn’t it also built in the 1970s, before these kinds of planes even existed?” I ask, a bit weakly. “Wouldn’t that be part of the government’s explanation?”

“RIGHT!” shouts a fifty-year-old woman across the room, throwing her hands in the air, “They built it to withstand a strike from the strongest airliner at the time!” She seems to have missed the point, but she’s very pleased with herself. She throws her hands in the air, as if to say, “Nothing could be more obvious!” It becomes clear that this group has grown so accustomed to incredulity that scoffing is their default. Counterpoints fly past unnoticed.

***

Two hours later, the room has dissolved into a shouting spree that I cannot follow to save my life (which, at this point, I’m not sure I want to save). Abel is on a long diatribe about Hillary Clinton: “The Democratic party is dusting off old Hillary’s vagina and waxing it and polishing it up so you can vote for her because she’s a woman. And we all know how well it worked when they did that for the black guy!”

There’s a murmur in the crowd. Everyone mutters something quietly to him- or herself, ranging from “that’s right!” to “well, I don’t know about that...”

The man next to Ross and me, who is sporting cargo shorts and no shirt, shakes his dreadlocks at us. “They’re just MURDERERS. In a CEMETERY!” he says.

I give him a tiny smile, hopeful that this will end our interaction. Ross visibly pretends not to hear.

I raise my hand again. “I’m sorry. Can I bring this back to 9/11 for a second? I’m new to this, so maybe I’m missing something, but if so few people have even heard of Building 7, why did the government destroy it? Couldn’t they have achieved the same ends by just destroying the Twin Towers?”

Abel releases an annoyed sigh. Building 7, he says, was full of secret documents. September 11th planning documents, in fact. His voice slows and his eyes narrow on me. It’s the twelfth hour they’ve spent with us, but they seem to have just noticed us, like a smell creeping through a closed door.

“What’s your background, anyway? What do YOU think happened on September 11th?” asks Abel.

All eyes turn to us. We’ve been found out.

***

It shouldn’t have been such a surprise we weren’t sold on the theory that 9/11 was an inside job. The previous month, we had introduced ourselves by saying we really didn’t know much about the Truther movement or about the alternative 9/11 theories.

“We’re just here to learn,” we said.

“Great! We love young people!” Abel responded.

The rest of the room dutifully clapped for our youth. When we left that meeting, Abel told us to bring “other people, approximately your age and shape” to the next meeting. We didn’t. None of our friends wanted to spend four hours watching YouTube videos about government surveillance. The next time we arrived, Abel barely recognized us.

***

Now Abel is challenging us, asking what we believe. Ross and I have always had a plan for this. If asked why we are there, tell the truth. If they ask us how we feel, tell them how we feel. If they ask us why we are here in a pointed way that implies “are you reporters?”, admit it. But in this moment, it becomes clear that this plan isn’t clear at all. How do you know when someone is asking you if you’re a reporter unless they ask if you’re a reporter? I stammer.

“Um, well, I just wanted to know more. I really don’t know much about September 11th other than the official story...”

“And what do you think now?” asks a man a couple of seats away from me. He has a stern look on his face. If I don’t answer correctly, he’s not going to like me, which is not an option. It’s very important that everyone I’ve ever met likes me.

“Um, well, I would still like to know more. I’m not entirely persuaded...”

“What about you?” he says to Ross, angrily now. “Do you think the government did it?”

“Well, I’ll admit, I’m not entirely sure,” says Ross.

I don’t look at Ross. I am certain that looking at him will somehow prove that we are in cahoots, but staring straight ahead, at the wall, will prove us independent agents. Everyone else studies Ross.

“I would need to hear more evidence,” he says.

“Well...” says Abel, “it’s okay if you haven’t made up your minds.”

I breathe a sigh of relief. Everyone slowly turns back toward the front of the room, shrugging as if to say “If you don’t want to know the truth, fine.” But the dreadlocked man next to Ross is still staring us down. You’re not welcome here, he says with his eyes. I go to buy a sandwich.

***

When I return with a bagel and vegetables, the group has just begun screening a video of Vladimir Putin. It is a very long speech he recently gave, with subtitles. Abel makes sure to tell us that he doesn’t like everything about Putin, but he likes this. Most of the group is dutifully watching. A few are lying down on benches along the back wall where they can’t possibly read the subtitles. One is snoring. Time passes so slowly here. I look at my watch. 2:29. I look at my watch again twenty minutes later. 2:34. I go out for some air.

***

Outside, I kick around some rocks and leaves and call my friend Chris. I get his voicemail.

“Hey, I’m at a 9/11 Truther meeting and it’s SO long, and we’re watching a video of Vladimir Putin, and they are yelling at Ross about AIDS. Call me back.”

On my way back in, someone stops me.

“What’s that?” he says, pointing at the curtain that divides the Truther meeting space and the rest of the coffee house.

“Oh, it’s a 9/11 Truther meeting. Like, questioning the official story of September 11th,” I say.

“Oh,” he says, taking in my outfit and studying my face. “I see.”

It is twenty minutes later. They are still watching the Putin video.

***

When the video is finally over, Abel turns the lights back on just as someone rushes in from the outside.

“Look!” he says, “Outside! The billboard is here!”

Everyone runs out the door, where we find a mobile billboard being towed down the street. “Did you know a third tower fell on 9/11?” it asks.

Ross and I eagerly climb aboard the truck and ask for a group picture. Only a few people join us. The others stand on the sidewalk.

“That’s all I need,” says one, “to be seen next to that.”

An hour later, we go home. We never go back.

Can people move or alter physical objects simply by using a hidden power of the mind called psychokinesis? I have encountered many claims of such powers in the course of my work (since 1969) as a paranormal investigator. And I have pretended to have such ability myself—both as a professional stage magician and mentalist (a magician specializing in apparent psychic feats). In the fall of 2012, I attended a workshop that enabled me to investigate the latest popular expression of psychokinetic metal bending.

Psychokinesis

The term psychokinesis (formerly telekinesis), or PK, derives from the Greek words for “mind” and “motion.” Together with extrasensory perception (ESP), it constitutes what parapsychologists refer to as “psi” to describe the two seemingly closely related phenomena. However, the existence of psi has never been proven and, indeed, according to a sympathetic source: “Despite decades of research, psi continues to elude physical and quasi-physical theories of how it functions; it operates outside the bounds of time and space” (Guiley 1991, 468).

PK describes the alleged power of mind over matter, including such “micro-PK” acts as subtly influencing how thrown dice will land, or “macro-PK” feats like levitating a table or producing so-called “poltergeist” effects (actually, typically the tricks of children¹). Psychokinetic metal bending is another alleged macro-PK phenomenon.

Geller the PK Marvel

Figure 1. Uri Geller seemed able to bend keys and cutlery with his thoughts. (Drawing by Joe Nickell)

It appears that the first major performer of apparent PK metal bending (PK-MB) was Israeli-born former fashion model and nightclub magician, Uri Geller (b. 1946) (Figure 1). Claiming to be guided by super beings from a distant planet, Geller appeared to read minds, bend keys and cutlery with PK, see while blindfolded, and perform other feats—all of which skilled magicians easily duplicate. (I, for example, have driven a car while blindfolded [Nickell with Fischer 1992, 77].) He typically refused to perform when magicians were observing but, nevertheless, was occasionally caught cheating.

Renowned American magician and psychic investigator James “The Amazing” Randi once observed Geller up close. Posing as an editor when Geller performed in the offices of Time magazine, Randi saw the simple tricks behind Geller’s wonderworking. For example, while Geller pretended to cover his eyes as a secretary made a simple drawing, he actually peeked, thus enabling him to appear to read her mind and reproduce the drawing. Again, while supposedly bending a key “by concentration,” Geller had instead bent it against a table when he thought he was unobserved. (For more on Geller’s methods, see Randi 1982.)

More Benders

Geller was soon imitated by other “psychics” who discovered that they, too, could bend keys and spoons. One was Judy Knowles, who impressed London physics professor and parapsychologist John Hasted with her apparent ability. Hasted invited James Randi to observe tests of Knowles in a lab at Bath. Randi arrived with colleagues and his checkbook, offering Ms. Knowles $10,000 if she successfully passed the test, which was designed by Harry Collins of the University of Bath. Collins had tested other spoon benders, but none had been successful, and some children had been caught cheating.

Briefly, the test involved Knowles holding the spoon in a single hand rested on a table before a two-way mirror. Observers, equipped with a video camera, were on the opposite, see-through side of the mirror. A candle was used to blacken the bowl of the test spoon so that, if one attempted to cheat—using the thumb to press against the bowl and so cause bending—the attempt would be revealed by the resulting smudging. Knowles tried unsuccessfully to bend the spoon using PK, but after nearly two hours, she quit the test. Randi and colleagues concluded Knowles had been unsuccessful, while Hasted and associates called the results “inconclusive” (Randi 1978, 36–39).

In the early 1980s, two young Americans, Steve Shaw and Mike Edwards, convinced parapsychologists at a psychical research laboratory in St. Louis, Missouri, that they could use their PK powers to move objects and bend metal under test conditions. In 1983, however, the duo revealed that they had perpetrated a hoax—now known as Project Alpha. Having worked secretly with James Randi, they demonstrated that credulous scientists could be fooled like anyone else (Shaw 1996, 617–18; Randi 1995, 253–54). Shaw has gone on to become the internationally acclaimed mentalist Banachek.

As a colleague and friend of Bana­chek, I have seen his metal-bending effects firsthand many times, especially at one of his workshops for fellow magicians and mentalists (Amherst, New York, June 16, 2009). His remarkable fork bend, whereby the tine of the fork is seen to visibly bend without being touched, is superior to any of Uri Geller’s effects—according to no less an authority than the late skeptic and magician Martin Gardner (Shaw 1996, 615).

Evolutionary Phenomenon

Figure 2. Ron Nagy teaches well-attended workshops in “PK” spoon bending at Lily Dale spiritualist village. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

PK metal bending has evolved over time. As we have seen, performers ap­peared to bend metal by simply looking at it or stroking it lightly. Some­times they even allegedly bent metal remotely. The performer might suggest, for instance, that people’s keys have mysteriously bent in their pockets or purses. In fact keys may become accidentally bent in various ways (as by the key being used in haste so that the partially inserted key is turned in the lock prematurely). Such an already bent key may go unnoticed until the performer calls attention to it (Shaw 1996, 619).

Major claimants of PK-MB were —in addition to Uri Geller—Jean-Pierre Girard (France), Masuaki Riyota (Japan), and Stephen North (England), as well as another Israeli, Ronni Marcus. (In 1994, Unsolved Mysteries asked me to observe Marcus’s act at a conference. However, a producer subsequently called to say that the conference organizers had refused to allow me to participate, and the TV show therefore withdrew its interest. I attended anyway, undercover, but Marcus was a no-show amid revelations he had been caught cheating in California and had returned to Israel [Randi 1994].)

Soon, honest magicians and mentalists got into the act, demonstrating that very convincing PK-MB effects could be produced by trickery. The inescapable inference was that perhaps the “real” effects were accomplished by tricks also. Among various shared secrets, some were sold through magic supply houses, including Mark Walker’s book Key Bending (which also gave secrets to bending cutlery) (Abbott’s 1987, 337). Top-flight demonstrators of the magic art of pseudo PK-MB are James Randi and Banachek.

Later, laypeople began to try their hand, quite literally. Beginning in the 1980s, at metal-bending parties and workshops attendees began surprising themselves with their newfound PK-MB abilities. They typically bent spoons with their hands while insisting they did not exert sufficient force to cause the extent of bending achieved. What was going on?

Hands-On

Figure 3. Cutlery was bent by the author at a Lily Dale workshop. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

On the evening of August 23, 2012, my wife, Diana, and I showed up at a workshop in Lily Dale, a tiny village in Western New York that represents the world’s largest spiritualist community. The session was conducted by Ron Nagy, curator of the Lily Dale Museum and an old friend (Figure 2). In the spirit of openness he had invited me to attend, and we mutually agreed not to be adversarial. That is, he would not “out” me as a notorious skeptic, and I would not be troublesome.

The ad for the workshop defined psychokinesis as “the movement of objects without physical contact,” then went on to promise:

This workshop will explain the basic mind over matter aspects of bending metal objects and also explain how the mind and body can react together and cause harmonious health conditions. This workshop is intended to be fun and also provide experiences previously believed to be impossible that should reduce some of the artificial limits we have placed in our lives. It may seem remarkable that with very little training one might be able to accomplish this extraordinary proof that belief in spirit and mind over matter is more powerful than certain realities. (“Spoon Bending” 2012)

For the next two hours, we held spoons (and occasionally forks) in our hands as we implored them to respond to our thoughts. To free our minds, Ron had us—acting in unison—jump in the air and turn around twice, while thinking the metal was bending. Sure enough, for all but one or two of the thirty or so participants, we achieved bending. I had especially good results. (See Figure 3.) Some participants seemed quite mystified.

Revelation

However, I could see early on that a positive attitude was helpful: Being confident that the spoon would easily bend helped overcome the negative first impression that the metal was resistant. Such is the power of positive thinking.

What I think really happens in such situations is that one simply exerts sufficient strength to cause the bending (I was even able to put spiral twists into the handle—again see Figure 3) while being somewhat distracted from the process. An ability to dissociate (to separate a mental activity from the main stream of consciousness) seems a definite asset, because the bending relies heavily on the ideomotor effect (the psychological phenomenon in which, unconsciously, one moves his or her hand sufficiently to affect dowsing rods, Ouija-board planchettes, and the like [Nickell 2012, 348–49]).

PK-MB partygoers have inadvertently described the very processes I have explained. One wrote, “. . . we needed to create an atmosphere of excitement and emotional arousal.” The party host, an engineer named Jack Houck, “encouraged us to be noisy and excited.” The writer added, “The only thing I noticed is that spoon bending seemed to require a focused attention. You had to try to get it to bend, and then you had to forget about it. Maybe talk to someone else while you rubbed the spoon. . . . If you kept watching the spoon, worrying over it, it was less likely to bend” (“Spoon Bending” 2013).

The ad for our workshop defined PK as occurring “without physical contact”; this means that PK was not demonstrated by the participants, since they had held the cutlery in both hands in the very way one would in order to deliberately bend it. But this workshop did not involve trickery. The only deception that seemed involved was self-deception.

Acknowledgments

CFI Librarian Lisa Nolan helped with the research on PK parties and Library Director Tim Binga provided other assistance.

Note

For a discussion, see Nickell 2012, 325–31, 333–41.

References

Abbott’s Catalog 23. 1987. Colon, Michigan: Abbott’s Magic Manufacturing Co.

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 1991. Encyclopedia of the Strange, Mystical & Unexplained. New York: Gramercy Books.

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

Nickell, Joe, with John F. Fischer. 1992. Mysterious Realms: Probing Paranormal, Historical, and Forensic Enigmas. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Randi, James. 1978. Special report: Tests and investigations of three psychics. Skeptical Inquirer 2(2) (Spring/Summer): 25–26.

———. 1982. The Truth About Uri Geller. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 1994. Ronnie at Berkeley. Online at www.mindspring.com/~anson/randi-hotline/1994/0010.html; accessed April 26, 2013.

———. 1995. The Supernatural A-Z. London: Brockhampton Press.

Shaw, Steve. 1996. In Stein 1996, 613–19.

Spoon Bending. 2012. Ad for workshop, Lily Dale Assembly 2012 Program: Legacy of Love, 47.

Spoon Bending. 2013. Online at http://www.uri-geller.com/mct27.htm; accessed February 12, 2013.

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

The RMS Queen Mary, a ship of enormous historical import, has been transformed into a roadside attraction whose owners profit off the allure of “ghosts.” Her glorious factual history has been brushed aside in a bid to pander to eager ghost-hunting tourists who aren’t thinking critically about the claims.

“For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

—Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World

I’ve had a fascination with classic ocean liners for most of my life. In particular, I have had a sincere awe for the RMS Queen Mary (QM) since I first stayed on board in the early 1980s—well after her retirement in 1967 and subsequent conversion into a hotel. She is a thing of beauty—a near-perfect expression of the industrial design aesthetics of the era (conceived in 1929, launched in 1934, maiden voyage in 1936). To say that we don’t make them like we used to is an insulting understatement.

Queen Mary ship swimming pool in the 1930s, “ground zero” for supposed paranormal activity. (Mirrorpix/Newscom)

Anytime in the last few years that I have even mentioned the Queen Mary, the immediate reaction from people within earshot is, “Ooh! I’ve heard that she’s really haunted!” My first reaction is a kind of amusement: how could one even tell the difference between something being really haunted as opposed to fakely haunted? My next reaction is usually a sigh of, “Here we go again,” and my final reaction more recently has been a kind of offense taken on behalf of the ship. I suppose that since an entire generation has passed since the Queen Mary was in service, the popular understanding of her has morphed into something a little weird and otherworldly rather than something that was a practical means of (elegant) travel. I write this article to express my own dismay but also to try to piece together why the QM has this persistent aura as the “haunted ship” and to make a plea to emphasize the real history of the ship as part of her future.

What Is a Haunting?

Photo: John Champion

I suppose the first thing to do is to make a concise case for the problem of claiming that anything is “haunted.” No, I do not believe in ghosts, and at the same time a truly skeptical position must concede that this is not an outright rejection of the possibility that ghosts might exist, only that they haven’t been discovered yet. The problem is that there is no agreement among ghost believers as to what they actually are. If I had to aggregate just from popular ghost-hunting stories, I could paint a picture that ghosts are: sound-producing, light-producing, simultaneously corporeal and noncorporeal representations of “energy” (Electric? Chemical? Nuclear? Magnetic?) that can manipulate elec­tronic devices, temperature, and phys­ical bodies—except for when they don’t. There are so many definitions and assumed qualities of ghosts that it is impossible to come up with a working definition. In science, I would call that a “hypothesis.” Once there is a hypothesis or a working model explaining the properties of ghosts, then one could go about controlled experimentation. No one is at that stage though—be­cause, again, ghosts have no known properties. So, no, the things that are claimed as “evidence” of ghosts (orbs in photos, mysterious sounds on a tape, a creaky door) can’t hold up as scientific evidence until a working hypothesis is established.

Furthermore, of course, anecdotes are not evidence. An anecdote is a personal story of a personal experience. It’s not a reliable way to make a judgment about the validity of a claim. Our minds are subject to bias, misunderstanding, mis­interpretation, and conflation. The more anecdotes that accumulate don’t lead to the credence that the claim is true; it’s simply more “noise.” Personal experience is usually the absolute worst way to make a judgment about the veracity of any claim.

So that’s a little taste of why I don’t buy it when people make the “ghost” claim, but there are far better sources to brush up on your scientific understanding, such as Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things, and 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True by Guy P. Harrison. While you’re at it, check out Brian Dunning’s excellent (and short!) dismantling of ghost claims in “Do Ghosts Exist?” on his blog at www.skepticblog.org/2012/08/30/do-ghosts-exist. There’s much more that can be said here, but I want to get back to the Queen Mary.

History

Photo: John Champion

The Queen Mary was one of the crowning achievements of the art and industry of shipbuilding. She was created and sailed in an era after the Edwardian opulence of ships like the Titanic and Lusitania and just before the jet age had arrived. She’s a blend of old hand-craftsmanship with the speed and technology of modern industrial achievement. To put it in twenty-first-century terms, she was a marvel of art and design in the way that the space shuttle amazed onlookers thirty years ago or the 787 Dreamliner and Airbus 380 do today. She held the speed record for crossing the Atlantic for nearly two decades and carried more troops at a single time than any other vessel during World War II.

After an exceptional service history (and with the speed and economy of air travel relegating ocean travel to vacation cruising), the QM was set for retirement in Long Beach as a hotel/conference center/tourist attraction. Since 1967, tourists have visited her in dry dock and gotten a small taste of what travel was like when the “Queens” ruled the seas.

Retirement, sadly, would be anything but peaceful. As soon as she pulled into port for the last time, the Queen Mary was subjected to numerous “renovations” and conversions that would forever mar her interior. Entire sections have been gutted, rooms and artifacts lost to history, artwork destroyed, and other blunders of huge proportion. The ship’s operations and ownership have changed hands numerous times in the years since, and she has struggled economically. In many respects, the experience has been “dumbed down” with subpar restaurants (with some notable exceptions), chintzy events, and history taking a backseat to exploitative tours—the most prominent and most egregious of which is the “ghost” tour.

In the early 2000s, the “Ghosts and Legends Tour” was installed. It makes use of some very interesting (and otherwise off limits) spaces of the ship. Fantastical tales of the paranormal are woven into the ship’s actual history and presented with a theatrical flair and some low-rent special effects. Tourists see the magnificent first-class pool area but not in any state resembling its days at sea. This version is fading, cracking and filled with fog. The real-life accident with the Curacao—in which 239 sailors perished—is played out for maudlin drama in a former mail hold that plays the part of the “bow.”

The Problem with the ‘Haunting’

Photo: John Champion

On any night at the Queen Mary, groups of tourists who are interested can also take a guided tour from a “paranormal” expert guide. They bump around wav­ing electronics of dubious utility in the air hoping for some “evidence” of an apparition. They can explore otherwise off limits sections of the ship and really take their time exploring while asking each other, “Did you hear something?”

If you’re more interested in learning the true history of the ship, your options are a bit more limited. There is a “behind the scenes tour” (which seems to be confused at various times with the “Golden Age” tour and others) as well as a self-guided audio tour, which is in desperate need of renovation itself. Depending on the guide you have for the “behind the scenes” tour, you may have a dramatic interpretation of events on board or a rote telling of facts and figures. Much of this can be gleaned by a read of any Queen Mary books or the Wikipedia page about her.

So let’s think about this. The Queen Mary is actively promoted as a “haunted” attraction (and I’m sure they are making a decent amount of money from that), but a serious, concerted effort to preserve her factual history is somehow pushed to the wayside. At best, it’s an annoyance to those of us who want to understand and appreciate this vessel from her service and the stories of the people on board. At worst (and this is what is happening more often than not) the “haunting” is such a priority that it leads to actual damage of those historic areas, preventing further and future preservation. One historian points out that on this massive vessel only about six public rooms remain intact (though without much of their original art or furnishings). Others were ripped out entirely, reconfigured or converted for other vaguely defined uses.

The First Class Pool is “ground zero” for the alleged paranormal activity so many ghost enthusiasts are seeking. (The Second Class Pool has been utterly destroyed in one of the many “conversion” episodes.) At the time, the pool was a stunning room at sea with gleaming tiles and art deco style. Today, the ghost tour trades on the pool’s decrepitude, profiting off of the “creepy” allure of cracked tiles, warped floors, and broken fixtures. What is the incentive to restore this magnificent space to its original condition when a quick buck can be made off of ghost tours? When the pool finally falls through (the lower supports have been removed), maybe that will just add to the narrative for the cynical exploitation of the space.

But I Get It...

Photo: John Champion

I can’t get enough of the Queen Mary. I’ll stay on board at every opportunity and sign up for any tour, event, or promotion they have. Unlike so many other historic relics, the Queen Mary feels very much alive, not like a stuffy museum piece that can only be experienced at a distance. It is im­­mersive, impressive, and totally consuming. This, to me, is why we can’t get enough of those ghost stories and why people are utterly convinced that their own experiences (anecdotes based on misinterpretation, strongly held predisposition, and the excitement of fantasy) are proof positive of the supernatural.

The Queen Mary was built to be in motion. She feels like she is in motion even when she is standing perfectly still in dry dock. The extreme shear of the decks (the curve that is apparent in the longest stretches of corridor) plays with your normal perception of space. We’re not accustomed these days to being inside structures with such tight compartments, such detail in wood and metal constructed with an artistic eye but, underneath, all machine. Its power—even with the engines now long dormant—is palpable through the deck plating. Every rivet, every section of carpet, every porthole was witness to the widest variety of intensely human experience. From the builders who put her together to the crew who stayed with her in extreme circumstances to the celebrating passengers, every square centimeter has been a part of a pageant of history. One can’t help but stand in a room onboard and immediately conjure up the images of the hundreds of thousands who occupied the same space years, decades before. She makes great noises, even sitting still, as the metal skin holding her together expands and contracts and pieces jostle around after seventy-five-plus years of settling. We don’t get that in our daily experience in the interactions we have with architecture. We don’t stop to think about who came before us when walking into a conventional building lit up by fluorescent glare.

I really get it. When I’m on board, my imagination is firing at full steam. If I’m quiet, I can’t help but hear what the ship must have been like when operating on the Atlantic. If I look closely enough, I can see the throngs of people who populated her decks during decades of heroic crossings.

I draw a line, though. It’s a priority for me to draw a sharp distinction between fact and fantasy. I want to honor the people who built and sailed on this magnificent vessel by remembering who they really were and what they really did. There are plenty of stories there to entertain and educate. I don’t want to taint that memory by confusing their actual lives with a creepy “ghost” story traded for the value of a ticket to a roadside tourist attraction.

I’m disappointed to think that the Queen Mary presents an either/or proposition. Through mismanagement and the chase after a quick buck, the fantasy-prone among us have won out with the tourist attraction to the demise of historic preservation. Ghost stories are fine when they are presented as such. The confusion of science and history with fiction, though, gets us further and further away from the ability to relish in and truly explore our own recent history.

Ross and I scurry into the Raëlian Happiness Academy four days late. The whole thing is supposed to last six days, but we will only be there two. They are the most important two—the final meditations and the baptism, which occurs on the last day.

We wander into a room and are quickly greeted by a tall man in a cowboy hat who rushes to the front of a packed room to tell us that “No, this isn’t where to register, and where to register is, um…Where to register is somewhere that way.” He points away from the room, urgently. We get the distinct feeling that we’ve walked in on something. Everyone’s smiling awkwardly, like kids who were just playing doctor but have been caught in the moment with their trousers up, so mustn’t spoil their luck. We’re ushered out.

When the appointed registrar comes back in the room, he greets us with a pitiful shake of the head. “Oh no, you really missed all the good stuff,” he says. Ross and I look at each other. The “good stuff” is pretty famous, though we will all not refer to it directly for the next couple of days. The good stuff, according to Raëlian infidels, is not so much what you might call a “seminar” as what you might call “an orgy.” Stories abound of people getting naked in the seminars, massaging their genitals until they come, while onlookers try to pretend they aren’t onlooking. The “good stuff” allegedly means dressing up as the opposite sex (not the opposite sex from the one you were born with, which would be too banal a request, but opposite the one you go by in your everyday life, so for the trans-folks, it’s back to the identity you spent most of your life sloughing off, I suppose)—dressing up as the opposite sex and having a dance. Yes, a dance, the prom kind. Rumor has it these dances typically lead to everyone, save the minors, sleeping around. When Ross and I ask about the dances in our meetings, they all gaze at each other secretively and longingly. There were many times when I wanted to ask, “Should I leave you alone?”

We had missed the good stuff, but he checked us in, anyway. It was extremely cheap. As first-timers, the cost was under $100 each. And we got coupons to trade in for books, like “Message from the Designers,” “Sensual Meditation,” “Yes to Human Cloning,” the straightforwardly-titled “The Book Which Tells the Truth,” the slightly more pointed “Extraterrestrials Took Me to their Planet” and the downright explicit, “The Message Given to Me by Extraterrestrials.” Oh yes, this is a UFO cult. Did I not mention that?

Raëlism is the religion founded by a former racecar driver named Claude Verilhon. He goes by Raël, a sort of nickname. He says he was hiking on a mountaintop in France one day, when all of a sudden extraterrestrials plopped down in front of him, took him on their ship, and told him the secret of the human race: that we were made by aliens. As Raël’s followers grew, the extraterrestrials continued meeting with and talking to him, getting ever more pointed in their requests and how they might benefit Raël himself: At first the message was something like “Love people and it’s all gravy.” Over time, it turned into something more like “Love people, and it’s all gravy, but especially love Raël, who is the special one chosen by God to tell you all what to do, and for all the young women to have sex with.”

With our coupons in tow, we go into the heart of the seminar, which is being held in the center of the hotel. It is a huge room full of mattresses and people. People everywhere! Not in their ordinary positions: standing, seated, or prone. Diagonal people! Upside down people! People on one leg! People kissing! People hugging! People fondling! A diagonal person lying on top of a horizontal one! It’s a maze of human limbs, and navigating them means saying “I’m sorry” every time I take a step. My hands are up by my chest in the international symbol for “Whoops! Did I just step on your face?” Finally, we sit down and look up at a stage full of people singing and dancing to a song whose only lyrics appear to be “Be happy if you want to” over and over. They bounce around, a vacant look in their eyes, and swish their perfectly toned bottoms around. Over the course of the weekend, we will see them give a presentation on the UFO embassy they are building for when our alien overlords return to Earth, lead meditations, talk about restoring clitorises of women who have been mutilated, and parade around topless (women and men) in honor of Go Topless Day. But none of that matters yet, because above all the action is the Raëlian symbol, and it stares down at us with unyielding defiance. It’s gold and glittery and printed on a thick sheet of card stock. It is a Star of David, and inside, a swastika.

The swastika, you see, has been a symbol of peace and good luck around the world, until it was stolen by those darn Nazis, who turned it into something else altogether. And here it was again, meaning peace, harmony, and free love: all the things the aliens taught the Raëlians. And even though we’ve known that the swastika is their thing for quite some time, something brings the symbolism sharply into focus, when it’s there on the wall behind the religious leader still talking about clitoris rejuvenation.

“Reclaim the swastika,” says a brochure on the floor in front of me.

“You know,” I think, “sometimes it’s best to just let some things go.”

Read more about the Raëlians in the next Poppycock.

Acclaimed Harvard psychologist and best-selling author Steven Pinker was interviewed by Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney in a rare live edition of Point of Inquiry, the flagship podcast of our Center for Inquiry. This special episode was recorded before a live audience as part of the 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Pinker, a longtime Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Fellow, is the author of eight books, including How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Language Instinct, and most recently The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. The interview focuses on the premise of his latest book: that we now live in the least violent and most peaceful period of human history, particularly surprising in light of tragic recent events in Newtown, Connecticut, and Boston. Here is the majority of that interview.

Indre Viskontas: What inspired you to write a book about violence?

It’s a natural topic for anyone interested in human nature. The question, “Is our species innately violent and war-loving, or innately peaceful and cooperative?” goes back literally hundreds of years, maybe thousands. So it naturally falls under the category of psychology.

In my case, it began with my books How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate where I advocated the idea that there is such a thing as human nature—some parts of which can be rather nasty [See Pinker, “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 2003]. We have urges like revenge and dominance that can erupt in violence. I had to anticipate an objection I knew would come: If we do have these tendencies, does that mean that we also have to have a fatalistic attitude toward war, peace, and violence? The worry is: if violence is in the genes—if we’re killer apes and we have homicidal DNA—then there’s nothing you can do about it.

But this is a non sequitur. The answer is no, we don’t have to be fatalistic. For one thing, human nature is a complicated system. Even if we do have urges that can result in violence, we also have systems that can inhibit our urges toward violence. Whether we behave violently depends on which part of human nature prevails, and this balance can change with the circumstances.

In any case, there can’t be a theoretical debate over whether we’re doomed to a constant rate of violence, because when you open up the history books you find that rates of violence change. I gave a few examples of cases that I knew of at the time (this was in the 1990s), of how rates of violence had come down. For example, from the Middle Ages to the present, at least in England, there has been a thirty-five-fold decrease in the rate of homicide. Or if you look at the kind of life that our ancestors presumably lived—a foraging lifestyle, without a government and police force—the rates of death in tribal warfare were really, really high—higher than even in the twentieth century with our world wars.

I made these observations, and I noted that there can be no a priori debate about whether rates of violence can change. History tells us that they can change. A few years later, John Brockman, my literary agent and the proprietor of Edge.org, asked 150 scientists, philosophers, and writers for a couple of paragraphs on the question, “What are you optimistic about?” I tweaked those relevant sections of previous work and posted them online.

Then I got a slew of correspondence from experts on violence who said, “You really understated the case. There are many other cases where there have been dramatic declines in violence.” These were from scattered scholarly communities that had nothing to do with each other. For example, scholars in international relations who study war and peace said things like, “Gee, you know, it used to be that countries in Europe would start two new wars a year for 500 years. As of 1945, that went to zero.” Military historians have just been astonished at the fact that war between developed countries has pretty much ceased to exist.

Other scholars said, “It’s not just England where the homicide rate plunged since the Middle Ages. It’s also Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia.” Others said, “It’s not just war between rich countries that has declined. If you look at statistics on war worldwide, since 1990, they have been going down, down, down; fewer people are killed in war than ever before.”

Finally, one of my colleagues in the psychology department said, “Well, you could have added that rates of child abuse, approval of spanking, domestic violence—all of them are down.” I realized that no one knew about all of these facts and they’re pretty important.

The arithmetic trend of violence, positive or negative, is a basic fact. Everyone thinks it’s gone up. But in fact, it’s gone down. It also posed two delicious challenges to a psychologist. One is to understand why has there been so much violence in the past; the other is to understand why it has come down. These are the two psychological questions that got me going.

Chris Mooney: You paint the past as a world characterized by brutal violence. What is the causal reason for some kind of change?

There are a number of reasons, in part, because there are a number of causes of violence. Neurobiologists and neuroethologists have long known that there’s no single thing called “aggression”; there are multiple systems in the brain that make organisms, including Homo sapiens, aggressive. So you’d expect there to be multiple causes that would drive them down.

I think the first and foremost is government—Hobbes’s Theory of the Leviathan. A state with a monopoly on violence can penalize incentives for aggression and exploitation by imposing penalties that cancel out the anticipated gain. If you are likely to be thrown in jail after robbing a liquor store, then you think twice about doing it. That circumstance makes everyone more peaceful, because not only are you disincentivized from committing aggressive acts, but you know that your enemies are too.

It has a reverberating effect: you no longer have to maintain a belligerent macho stance to deter your enemies, because the government is doing it for you. You no longer have to pursue vengeance after the fact at all costs, because again, you can outsource that to the government. So, explanation number one would be the Leviathan. We see that the remaining zones of violence in the world are also zones of anarchy.

Mooney: But that’s assuming everyone’s being rational: that they are calculating costs and benefits to some extent. But isn’t violence largely emotional?

Yes, that’s right, although the rational incentives and the emotional reactions can play off each other. If you live in a society where there is a rule of law for long enough, it changes your emotions. You become less likely to react with rage if someone gives you the finger or calls you a nasty name. You don’t challenge them to a knife fight; you walk away. In the book, I talk about the interplay between these rational calculations and what you do and don’t do intuitively.

photo credit: Henry Leutwyler

Viskontas: One thing I love about your book is how you couch a lot of these issues within the prisoner’s dilemma framework. Describe how we might apply it to issues such as gun control. There is a vocal set of people saying, “I need a gun because everybody else has a gun; so don’t take away my right to have a gun.” But this then leads to more guns and potentially more violence.

In the book, I allude to a version of the prisoner’s dilemma—I call it the “pacifist’s dilemma.” It has the same structure but with different labels in the cells. I use it as a way of answering the somewhat mysterious question of why multiple historical forces all seem to be pushing rates of violence down.

Chris asked, “What are some of the causes?” and I explained one of them. Among the others are trade and commerce, which, in terms of game theory, has people playing more positive-sum games and few zero- or negative-sum games. If you have networks of trade and exchange, it becomes cheaper to buy stuff than to steal it; and other people become more valuable to you alive than dead. If you have a rise of commerce and trade, the incentives change and people get less violent.

A third cause is the expanding circle of sympathy. As we consume more fiction, history, and journalism, and engage in more person-to-person contact, it becomes a little harder to dehumanize other people. They expand your sense of empathy and decrease your taste for cruelty.

I think the empowerment of women has been a factor. Societies and eras in which women have more rights, and more of a voice, tend to have less macho violence. And reason and science have played a role; as people intellectualize the human condition, they look at violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a game to be won.

I list these different reasons that violence has gone down. It’s not a reductionistic, simplistic theory. But why have different forces all pushed in the same direction? Is there some kind of mysterious arc that bends toward justice?

The answer is no. There’s a more mundane explanation—and now we get to the pacifist’s dilemma—which is that violence is, in an objective sense, a really bad thing. It’s a nuisance; it’s a plague; it’s a pestilence. Because even though it’s always tempting to an aggressor to exploit a victim, it’s far more damaging to the victim than it is beneficial to the aggressor.

Now over the long run, since aggressors can become victims and vice-versa—empires rise and fall—objectively everyone would be better off if everyone could forswear violence. It really is a better way to live than to blow things up and destroy flesh, and life, and suffer all the other nasty consequences of war. The dilemma is: How do you get the other guy to renounce violence at the same time as you do? This is where the game-theoretic calculation comes in. If I beat my swords into plowshares, and the other guy keeps his as swords, I could find myself at the wrong end of a rather unpleasant confrontation. So how do we both be sure to beat our swords into plowshares at the same time?

That is the human dilemma. It’s like disease or hunger. It’s a part of the human condition that sucks. Fortunately, we are smart, we can gradually, in bits and pieces, try to improve our condition. One of the ways that we do it is to try to incentivize everyone to forswear violence at the same time. The common denominator between these pacifying forces, I suggest, is that they all jigger with the payoffs in the matrix and turn the pacifist’s dilemma into more of a rational actor circumstance in which we all opt for the mutual nonviolence cell.

Mooney: Why does the U.S. seem to be such a violent place compared to other countries?

By a number of criteria, the United States is more violent than other Western democracies. Our rate of homicide is two to five times higher than that of other Western democracies. We start more wars, and thirty-three of the fifty states have capital punishment, which has been abolished everywhere else. The answer, I think, goes back to settlement patterns in American history.

The United States isn’t a country; it’s at least two countries. The rates of violence in the northern and coastal states are still higher than those of Europe, but not as high as those in the West and South. It’s also the blue states that have abolished capital punishment and which tend to be more dovish in foreign policy.

So in part, this is a question about the American South and West. The simplest answer is that they lived in a condition of anarchy until fairly recently, historically speaking. The cliché, “The closing of the American frontier,” refers to an event that took place as recently as in the 1890s.

Often in anarchic societies, you see a culture of honor developing. You have to avenge any insult, regardless of the cost to you, and adopt a belligerent stance, because it’s your only protection. This stance got embedded into southern and western American culture, whereas the Europeans were beaten into submission by their autocratic kings many centuries ago.

Viskontas: How do we get the South or the areas in which there are the most guns to melt their assault rifles and turn them into iPads?

I don’t have an easy answer to that question, because as you point out, the guns are out there. The gun lobby, having created the situation now says, “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it and so let’s make it even worse by having even more people get guns to defend themselves against all those people with guns.”

Viskontas: I’m no expert on the statistics behind gun use and gun violence in the U.S., but I’ve noted that there are different ways of looking at these statistics. For example, if you look at the number of gun owners in the U.S. versus, say, Canada, the numbers are pretty equivalent. But the number of guns per owner, well, there’s a huge difference.

That’s an important point that’s absolutely correct. Moreover, consistent with your statistic is that the number of households with guns in the United States has gone down, even though the number of guns has gone up. There are a smaller and smaller number of people who own bigger and bigger arsenals.

Viskontas: This makes me nervous because, of course, our weapons are getting more sophisticated. So even if the overall number of violent people in the population declines, it takes fewer and fewer to inflict more and more damage as we saw in some of these recent mass shootings. How do we fight that growth and these outliers of people who are particularly violent?

I think guns themselves probably aren’t the main place to look for an answer; although of course there are many common-sense gun control measures that any sane person would agree should be implemented. But the U.S.-Europe difference is not just a difference in the availability of guns. If you subtract out all the gun homicides in the United States and you just look at the homicides committed with, say ropes, candlesticks, and daggers, we still kill people at a higher rate.

I don’t want to endorse anything that the NRA says, but there is some truth to the idea that it really is people who kill people rather than guns that kill people. That’s why I think the psychology and sociology of violence is more important than just the weaponry.

In talking about rampage shooters, there’s not much you can do; but to be honest, as far as violence goes, it’s not that much of a problem in the seemingly callous sense of raw numbers. The Sandy Hook shooter killed, what, twenty-six people altogether? But every day in the United States, more than forty people get killed. After all that round-the-clock coverage of Sandy Hook, the cable news networks didn’t say, “Oh, and by the way, we’ve had another Sandy Hook and-a-half today,” and then on Thursday, “We’ve had another Sandy Hook and-a-half today again,” and every single day since then.

Two categories of violence are peculiar in that they generate a massive amount of publicity, discussion, and concern while inflicting relatively little damage. One is rampage shootings, and the other is terrorism. The worst terrorist attack in history, the September 11, 2001, attacks, killed 3,000 people; and in the United States every year, 16,000 people are killed in homicides.

It’s not a coincidence. Why do people blow themselves up? Why do people shoot up a school and then shoot themselves? Well, it’s the only guaranteed way to get the world’s attention.

As Adam Lankford, who just wrote a book on suicide terrorism, points out, let’s say you wanted to become famous nationwide, even worldwide, what could you do to guarantee it? Make a great scientific discovery? Forget that. Compete on American Idol? Uh-uh. There is only one guaranteed way to become famous, and that is to kill a lot of innocent people.

We’ve set up that incentive structure. It’s hard to know how to reverse it.

Viskontas: Is that an argument for the media not covering these mass shootings or these sorts of large events? Or people not paying for the coverage?

I think it is an argument for making news coverage and policy discussion more in line with those statistics—both the round-the-clock coverage of rampage shootings, and the response to terrorism. Our society was turned upside-down, and we started two foreign wars as a response to terrorism.

Mooney: Why do more rights for women mean less aggression in society?

There are several motives for violence, and in some there’s not much of a sex difference. If you’re the head of state, you’re defending your country’s interests among other hostile states. Any woman running a country is going to act in the interests of that country, including waging war when that’s the rational thing to do. That’s the category of “violence as a means to an end”; I don’t expect a sex difference.

But when it comes to stupid, macho violence—knife fights over a parking space, road rage, fights over a pool table, wars over national honor where nothing is at stake except national honor, campaigns of bloodthirsty conquests, and insane wars of aggression—that’s more of a guy thing.

In non-state societies, anthropologists have documented a correlation between competition between societies and the state of women’s rights. Societies that are more egalitarian tend to be less warlike. It’s hard to know what’s cause and effect, but there is a correlation.

The societies that control women, control their reproduction by selling them off as brides, by protecting their chastity, by forcing them to become round-the-clock baby factories tend to have more violence.

Also, in societies where women have more autonomy, the first place they exercise that autonomy is their own sexuality, their own reproduction. In places with women’s rights, women have fewer babies, they have them later, and as a result, those places are less likely to have youth bulges, which are a risk factor for violence.

Another thing that goes along with women’s empowerment is that societies are less likely to murder female newborns or abort female fetuses. If you’ve got lots of babies coming out, and lots of them are boys—well, that leads to trouble down the line. You get youth bulges of unemployed, unattached young men; and that means trouble. Societies where women control their reproduction are societies that have fewer of these youth bulges.

Viskontas: Are there exceptions to the decline in violence, for example, in countries in Africa? And do those cases help explain the decrease?

There are exceptions. It’s not a monotonic [stable, neither increasing nor decreasing] nor uniform worldwide phenomenon. One example is the huge increase in violent crime in the United States and most other Western countries starting in the 1960s. Another is the heyday of genocidal totalitarian regimes in the middle decades of the twentieth century—the glory days of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. A third is the rise in civil wars following decolonization in much of the developing world. And even though rates of war in Africa have gone way down over the last couple of decades, many sub-Saharan African countries still have high rates of homicide.

This is not some mysterious force that just brought violence down monotonically everywhere. But at least some of these exceptions are exceptions that prove the rules. In general, when you have anarchy, you have high rates of violence, so if you precipitously remove government, you end up with violent chaos. In Iraq, just toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime and not putting an effective government in its place opened the ground for a lot of internal violence. Likewise, when the often oppressive, but at least minimally competent colonial governments gave way to utterly incompetent kleptocracies and tribal favoritist regimes, you ended up with a lot of violence in countries in the developing world.

Mooney: What do you think about Jared Diamond’s characterization of tribal societies as in a state of perpetual warfare?

Perpetual warfare is a bit of an exaggeration, but the observation that the rates of death and warfare are very high is correct. I have a chapter in the book where I go over every quantitative estimate I could find from the ethnographic literature, and also from the archaeological literature, on rates of violence in non-state societies. They span a range; not all of the societies are at war all the time; some are more violent than others. But if you look at the average, it’s very high. So Diamond is right. And Napoleon Chagnon, another person who’s been attacked for making such claims, also has the numbers on his side.

Viskontas: Some of the social media we engage in so much now—say, Twitter—put a personality onto people from around the world. I connect with people on Facebook who are in Africa whom I would never have a personal relationship with, but on Facebook, I see pictures of their kids and pictures of their life. And on Twitter, I hear their witty, pithy remarks. Do you think that some of these social media technologies might be pacifying in the end?

I suspect over the long-term they might be, because similar things have happened in the past. One of the puzzles I take up in the book is why in the second half of the eighteenth century, the world made a quantum leap in humanity. That was the era in which countries stopped disemboweling people for criticizing the king and stopped having public executions. The first movements to abolish slavery got traction, debtors’ prisons were abolished, and they stopped burning heretics at the stake. Blood sports like dog fighting were abolished. You had the first articulate statements of women’s rights, of children’s rights, of gay rights, all in the eighteenth century. Our own prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in the eighth amendment to the Constitution occurred smack-dab in the middle of this process.

So what happened in the second half of the eighteenth century? Why did the world wake up and suddenly realize, “Hey, you know, there might be something a wee bit wrong with slavery after all, even though we’ve been doing it for thousands of years”?

The most plausible candidate is that the second half of the eighteenth century saw the rise of affordable printed media and the rise of literacy. If you look at what happened before that era—you can’t do experiments, so you do the next best thing and you at least try to identify some exogenous, putative cause that occurs prior in time to the punitive effect—the only one that I was able to find is a massive increase in technologies of cosmopolitanism.

You had national and international post offices— the email and Twitter of the time. You had a huge increase in the economic efficiency of publishing books and pamphlets; you had an expansion of the press. It was cheaper to travel from city to city. These cosmopolitan forces back then, I think, led to increasing humanitarian sensibilities.

There was a second wave of that in the 1950s with the rise of television and electronic media. The Vietnam War was the first war to be brought into people’s living rooms in real time; and it was the first war that had a substantial antiwar movement as it was progressing—which I suspect was not a coincidence.

A Navy neurologist’s credulous venture into acupuncture advocacy serves as a useful case study. Here are twelve mistakes he made rambling down the garden path of self-delusion.

He posted a three-part article on “The Power of Acupuncture” (Hopkins 2011–2012) on Navy Medicine Live, the official blog of Navy and Marine Corps Health Care. It is a prime example of how even the most intelligent, educated person can ramble step by step down the garden path into self-delusion. Dr. Hopkins’s story can serve as a useful lesson to all of us.

Background

Acupuncture has been increasingly accepted in military circles. The Air Force is teaching its doctors “battlefield acupuncture” (Gorski 2008) based on the faulty evidence of one Air Force doctor, Col. Richard Niemtzow. The Army is using it to treat PTSD. The Navy offers it too.

Hopkins says that after forty years of practicing neurology, “It was only natural to begin thinking about something else.” (Why? Boredom? And why pick acupuncture?) When he got an email from his Specialty Leader announcing the opportunity for Navy doctors to learn how to do acupuncture, he submitted his application that same day. He was undoubtedly impressed that this training was being offered by the Navy, lending it the imprimatur of authority. His prior impression of acupuncture was that it was a “mysterious tool” that seemed to work, and instead of asking the critical questions, he said he was looking for “a fundamental scientific understanding of acupuncture” and asking to see the supporting research and data.

Mistake #1: Prior prejudice. It sounds like he already had a favorable opinion of acupuncture and was predisposed to accept it.

Mistake #2: Confirmation bias. He was looking only for confirmation rather than also looking for any disconfirming research. He wanted to understand how it worked; he was not asking whether it worked.

He says his intellect was actively engaged by the teacher, a “charismatic master acupuncturist,” who laid a neurophysiologic foundation for how acupuncture works.

Mistake #3: Getting information from a biased source. A master acupuncturist is hardly likely to present a balanced picture of the evidence for and against the source of his livelihood. In calling the teacher “charismatic,” he might have suspected that he could be influenced by that charisma to accept things he would not have accepted as readily from a dry, objective presentation of scientific evidence about acupuncture’s validity.

Hopkins was told about local physiologic changes in tissues stimulated by needles. He was not told that non-needle “acupuncture” (with electrical stimulation through intact skin or with simple touching with toothpicks) had been shown equally effective, even when acupuncture points were avoided. He was told that needles caused reversal of tissue acidosis. (This is a claim I don’t remember hearing before, and I think it is based on a couple of Chinese studies on animals. Even if true, its clinical relevance would be questionable.) He was told about the “gate control” hypothesis but was not told that after half a century of investigation it has not been accepted as the explanation for acupuncture’s effects. He was told about brain MRI findings and endorphin release but was not told that those same findings can be elicited by placebo pills. I see them as evidence of the mechanism for acupuncture’s placebo effects; he interprets them as evidence that acupuncture “resets normal controls within the autonomic nervous system and maintains CNS homeostasis,” though it’s not clear what that even means; it sounds to me like typical alternative medicine pseudoscientific doublespeak.

Mistake #4: Cherry-picking the literature. The charismatic master acupuncturist snowed Hopkins with every shred of data that might possibly support a physiologic mechanism for acupuncture, even providing “an extensive reference library.” Did he include the studies showing that it doesn’t matter where you put the needles? Did he list the high-quality trials showing that sham acupuncture works just as well? Did he list all the negative systematic reviews or Edzard Ernst’s recent systematic review of systematic reviews (Ernst et al. 2011) of acupuncture for pain? It is obvious that he cherry-picked the literature to support his claims. This is easy to do: plenty of low-quality studies of acupuncture have been published.

In Part Two of his article, Hopkins actually asks if the clinical effects might be due to placebo. He wonders how we would know, since there is “no honest way” to do a properly controlled double-blind study. His teacher says it is better to go by the functional outcome rather than by patient reports of pain levels. So far, so good. But then Hopkins throws science out the window and never mentions placebo again. He actually writes, “There is nothing like personal experience to convince one of an effect. It is a bit like not requiring a double blind placebo controlled cross-over study to establish that an open parachute is more effective than a closed one.”

This sounds like it was written by someone ignorant of science and logic rather than by a neurologist. His analogy is a clichéd fallacy: We don’t accept the effectiveness of parachutes because we have had personal experience jumping out of planes. I think he meant to say that not every claim requires proof by placebo-controlled trials, which is true but irrelevant here. We don’t need to do controlled trials to find out if it is effective to stop hemorrhages or set broken bones, but we do require controlled trials to find out if acupuncture works. It’s true that personal experience is the best way to convince someone there is an effect, but it’s useless for determining whether there really is an effect. To correct his statement: There is nothing like solid scientific evidence to convince a scientist who knows better than to accept personal experience as evidence.

Mistake #5: Not understanding why science is necessary. It’s hard to believe that was written by someone who has gone through medical school and residency training. It’s a sad indictment of our educational system.

The instructor asks for volunteers and Hopkins offers himself as a guinea pig. The instructor treats him for his Raynaud’s disease, telling him he believes it is due to prior cervical injury. As a neurologist, Hopkins should know that the term “Raynaud’s disease” refers only to idiopathic cases and if the condition is secondary to some instigating factor, it is called “Raynaud’s syndrome.” Also, while repetitive trauma from vibrating tools like jackhammers and prior injuries to the hands or feet have been recognized as causes of Raynaud’s, “cervical injury” has not. There are studies showing that acupuncture is more effective for Raynaud’s than drugs or than no treatment, but they are not convincing because they didn’t use placebo control groups. After the treatment, Hopkins’s symptoms resolved, and he became a believer.

Mistake #6: Relying on his personal experience. True believers ask us to “try it yourself” and they say, “I saw it with my own eyes.” We have ample evidence that seeing something with our own eyes is often misleading, and that trying something for yourself can interfere with your ability to objectively assess the evidence.

Mistake #7: The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Hopkins as­sumes that because his symptoms improved after the treatment, they improved because of the treatment. He doesn’t consider that there might be alternative explanations or confounding factors. (For example, emotional stress is a known trigger for Raynaud’s symptoms.)

His classmates were treated for various conditions including nerve abnormalities and bladder inflammation, and they all “benefited.” He calls acupuncture a “safe and inexpensive tool that has been time-tested for several thousand years.”

Mistake #8: Relying on the personal experience of others. Testimonials abound for even the quackiest of quack treatments. No matter how many anecdotes we manage to accumulate, the plural of anecdote is not data; that’s why we do science.

Mistake #9: The ancient wisdom fallacy. Hopkins is completely wrong about acupuncture being several thousand years old (Kavoussi 2010), and even if it were that old, length of use is no indication of truth. Astrology has been around for longer than acupuncture; does he think its validity has been proven because it has been “time-tested”? Bloodletting to balance imaginary bodily humors was “time-tested” for many centuries, but it turned out to do more harm than good.

Hopkins devotes Part Three of his article to recounting how he has implemented acupuncture in his practice. He has given over one thousand acupuncture treatments for everything from headaches to prostatitis. (One wonders why a neurologist would be treating prostatitis.) He claims a 90 percent success rate with many spectacular responses, and even uses the word “miracle.” He admits that some patients don’t respond, saying it is “never clear why.” (I think I can guess why!) He reports improvements in control of diabetes and hypertension, less need for medication, better sleep, etc. He concludes that “It is now evident to me that there truly is a great benefit to acupuncture.” He says it is safe (although the Ernst study [2011] documented rare but serious adverse effects including death). He says there are no contraindications, but numerous lists of contraindications can be found on the Internet both on acupuncture websites and on mainstream medical websites. He says the only time he would not use it was if the patient didn’t want it. He recommends that anyone caring for patients should consider adding this tool to his or her kit.

Mistake #10: Relying on uncontrolled observations. His patients improved, but how many of them would have improved without any treatment or with a credible placebo that offered some of the nonspecific treatment effects of acupuncture?

Mistake #11: Proselytizing on the basis of his own uncontrolled observations. Now that Hopkins has convinced himself, he wants to persuade others by simple assertions and by the same kind of unreliable “evidence” that convinced him in the first place.

Mistake #12: Not doing his own research. Hopkins might have checked PubMed and found a neat new study (White et al. 2012) confirming previous evidence that acupuncture is no more effective than placebo. It showed that patients were more likely to improve if they believed in acupuncture and believed they got the real thing rather than a placebo, regardless of which one they actually got. He might have read what Yale neurologist and CSI Fellow Steven Novella (2007) wrote after independently researching the literature on acupuncture for himself [see also Novella’s column, “What Is Acupuncture?” Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 2011]. He might have read the many negative systematic reviews, such as the one (Madsen et al. 2009) showing that a “small analgesic effect of acupuncture was found, which seems to lack clinical relevance and cannot be clearly distinguished from bias” or the systematic review of systematic reviews by Edzard Ernst and others (2011) showing “numerous contradictions and caveats.” He might have read the many skeptical articles on science blogs. He might have read The Skeptic’s Dictionary entry on acupuncture. He might have consulted Quackwatch’s affiliate Acupuncture Watch. Even just reading the acupuncture article on Wikipedia might have raised some doubts in his mind.

At this point, even if he were willing to look at the great mass of disconfirming evidence, he would probably not be capable of judging it objectively. Once someone has become a true believer on the basis of personal experience there is rarely any hope, especially when belief is reinforced by social support and grateful patient feedback. Let’s hope he doesn’t go on to seek training from a charismatic homeopath or a reiki master.

I can understand why many doctors are less skeptical than they should be about most of the alternative medicine information they encounter: they are used to having predigested, accurate scientific information presented to them by experts. They were (sadly) not taught to question what their teachers said in medical school and residency. They were taught about evidence-based medicine, but they were not taught to take prior probability into account: they are willing to accept the results of controlled studies even when they are incompatible with the rest of scientific knowledge. They rely on published information in medical journals, but they may not realize that half of the studies they read are wrong (Ioannidis 2005). Even if they are good at critically evaluating scientific medical information, they may not be used to critically analyzing information from the realm of alternative medicine. They may not have learned to recognize the common logical fallacies and the pitfalls.

The One Big Mistake: Not Following the SkepDoc’s Rule of Thumb. My rule, which applies to critical thinking in every sphere: before accepting any claim, find out who disagrees with it and why. Once you fully understand the arguments on both sides, only then are you qualified to judge whether the claim is credible (and it will usually be glaringly obvious which side makes more sense). What if a jury listened to the prosecution but not to the defense?

When examined as a whole, the available evidence fits the hypothesis that acupuncture is an elaborate placebo system. Using placebos on patients is unethical. As a retired Air Force colonel and as a physician, I am saddened to see acupuncture infiltrate the military health care system. And I am saddened to see how Dr. Hopkins’s faulty thinking led him astray.

Our brains evolved for success in survival as hunter-gatherers on the plains of Africa, not for a modern world of science and computers. We prefer stories to statistics, personal anecdotes to scientific studies. System 1 thinking (fast, emotional, and intuitive) is the default mode; it comes more naturally to us and requires much less effort than System 2 thinking (slow, deliberative, and logical). Not everyone reads the Skeptical Inquirer. Not everyone can overcome the natural tendencies of our flawed brains. Not everyone wants to try. But those who do can learn from Dr. Hopkins’s bad example.

Note

This is adapted from an article originally posted on the Science-Based Medicine blog under a different title (Hall 2012).

References

Ernst, Edzard, Mysong Soo Lee, and Tae-Young Choi. 2011. Acupuncture: Does it alleviate pain and are there serious risks? A review of reviews. Pain 152(4): 755–64.

Gorski, David. 2008. Battlefield acupuncture? (blog entry). Science-Based Medicine (December 15). Available at http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/acupuncture-invades-the-military/.

Hall, Harriet. 2012. Acupuncture, the Navy, and faulty thinking (blog entry). Science-Based Medicine (January 10). Available at http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/acupuncture-the-navy-and-faulty-thinking/.

Hopkins, Elwood. 2011–2012. The power of acupuncture (blog entry in three parts). Navy Medicine Live (December 22, December 29, and January 5). Available at http://navymedicine.navylive.dodlive.mil/archives/1550; http://navymedicine.navylive.dodlive.mil/archives/1577; http://navymedicine.navylive.dodlive.mil/archives/1604.

Ioannidis, J.P.A. 2005. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine 2(8):e124. Available at http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124.

Kavoussi, Ben. 2010. Acupuncture and history: The “ancient” therapy that’s been around for several decades (blog entry). Science-Based Medicine (October 18). Available at http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/acupuncture-and-history-the-ancient-therapy-thats-been-around-for-several-decades/.

Madsen, M.V., P.C. Götzsche, and A. Hrób­jartsson. 2009. Acupuncture treatment for pain: Systematic review of randomized clinical trials with acupuncture, placebo acupuncture, and no acupuncture groups. British Medical Journal 338:a3115. Available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2769056/.

Novella, Steven. 2007. Does acupuncture work or not? (blog entry) Neurologica (September 25). Available at http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/does-acupuncture-work-or-not/.

White, P., F.L. Bishop, C. Scott, et al. 2012. Practice, practitioner, or placebo? A multifactorial, mixed-methods randomized controlled trial of acupuncture. Pain 153(2): 455–62.

There is a small, elite group of skeptics who know their Bigfootery. That’s right, the Bigfoot skeptics.

Scoff if you will, but skeptical advocacy through talking about Bigfoot and other cryptozoological creatures is an important job. Those who joke about Bigfoot and how we are wasting our time researching and discussing it must have missed the Internet and popular TV shows lately. Bigfoot is booming.

Thanks to pop culture making this a hot topic, the public finds it more acceptable—people are talking about it, it has its own TV shows, there must be something to it.

Bigfoot is arguably one of the more plausible cryptids out there. While he tends to behave a bit supernaturally at times (can’t catch the bugger in real life or even on camera), a hairy hominoid is not an impossibility—just REALLY unlikely.

I thought it was time to update what has happened in the Bigfoot drum circles in the past year since Melba Ketchum released her astoundingly disappointing and inept study of Bigfoot DNA. You can read the chronology here. It’s quite a story, interesting for reason far beyond that of genetics and a new species (a claim which is not justified based on this one highly questionable set of tests).

Ketchum’s credibility faded fast upon the reveal, even though she kept promoting more and more ridiculous events, like the “Matilda, the Sleeping Bigfoot” press conference. If the Ketchum team had sought assistance and advice from knowledgeable scientists, they would have been told in no uncertain terms this is the absolute worst way to appear trustworthy. Science should not be done by press conference, especially if your Bigfoot looks an awful lot like a Wookie (from Star Wars).

I have digressed. Back to the science of Bigfoot. Yes, there is some, it can be done.

All eyes and hopes in the Bigfoot world turned to Dr. Bryan Sykes of Oxford University in the U.K. who was well underway with the Oxford Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project. Sykes accepted samples of what was suspected to be an unknown hominid from around the world. Using his special technique to remove contamination and analyze the inner core of a single hair, he has reached results that have garnered far more weight that the Ketchum results.

Why? Because he had credibility to begin with. Sykes is genuinely interested in the answer, not hung up on a pre-existing conclusion. He has not been deceptive, or continually feeding us a whiney train of gripes about how the world is out to get him. There were no conspiracies mongered in this case. There were tests and there were results. It was objective science.

Granted, the Sykes results were documented by Channel 4 in the U.K. Host Mark Evans trekked to the Himalayas, the Pacific Northwest and Russia to tell the story of these international Bigfoot creatures and examine the background to the Sykes samples. It is not conventional to have a TV program come out before a paper to announce the findings but camera crews do occasionally follow scientists around to document their important projects. I fully expect the paper will be forthcoming but that takes time.

The results have been highly interesting but not outlandish. There appears to be a twist on the tale of the Yeti as several threads of evidence, including two DNA results, point to a hybrid bear as a source of at least some Yeti reports. All the samples from North America, unfortunately, turned out to be not from Sasquatch. These results were STILL important because they generated questions about the Bigfoot hunters who were certain that they WERE from Sasquatch. The results from Russia revealed that a local legend of a wild woman (possibly an Almas, another hairy hominid type) is worth investigating further because she had an unexpected, albeit human, genetic origin.

I was able to watch the Channel 4 three-part series and was extremely pleased at the quality. The American version edited for National Geographic channel was not quite so compelling due to cuts and voiceovers. Compared to cryptozoological-themed content from this side of the Atlantic, Evans’s ITV series was smart, measured, fair and dramatic. Excellent stuff.

Except…

The Bigfooters didn’t like it. It dashed their hopes for vindication. They had confidence, it seems, that this prestigious project would finally provide them with the definitive results of an unknown creature. Indeed it did, the Russian and Himalayan results were an unexpected surprise, just not a Bigfoot.

The contrast between the science fans and the science coattail riders is obvious. Sykes’s results do tell us something of great value. When sound science was applied to the Bigfoot question, the answer was supportive of the null hypothesis—there is no Bigfoot out there. Much else is also supportive of the null hypothesis which is why the Bigfoot Skeptics are not completely dismissive, but doubtful that an unknown hairy hominid exists. We will remain so until SOMETHING is worthy of our attention, that's the process of skepticism.

Casts, sound recordings, photos and endless anecdotes will not be enough. A claim that an unknown primate is out there in the North American back woods (or our backyards, as claimed in some accounts) is extraordinary. That requires robust evidence, no less than a DNA sample that makes evolutionary sense and/or a substantial piece of the body.

The response from the Bigfoot camp to the Sykes results was curious but not surprising, I suppose. When faced with the fact that they have not come up with satisfying “proof,” they resolve to try harder. They stood fast in the opinion that the Yeti may still exist. Just because some reports could be bears, they say, it does not mean they all are. True, but weak. It surely is a setback. Existing evidence they use does not strongly support another mystery animal. The same excuse was used for the Russian results—it did not dampen the enthusiasm that a Yeren exists in China or that the Almasty was still hiding in remote areas of Asia. The enthusiastic Yeti researchers who have been promoting Yeti habitat in Kemorovo, Siberia, were crushed. In an example of cognitive dissonance, they will not accept that their beloved Yeti stories were only folklore or a mistaken identification. I expect they will continue to promote their life's work until they die.

The sample submitters from North America took the negative results exceptionally hard, but bounced back saying they KNOW the Bigfoot/Sasquatch exists. They will continue their obviously belief-based quest until they get their Holy Grail. The reactions of some Russian and North American contributors showed that they only wish to hear verification of their beliefs, not the true answer to what is out there. That these people associate themselves with doing science is distasteful and wrong. They undertake sham inquiry, not scientific inquiry.

As I said, there is value in any project and there was great collateral importance in this one. Over the past year, many Bigfoot aficionados learned something about genetics, evolution and DNA testing. They mostly rejected Ketchum's poor excuse for science even though it DID show them what they hoped (but not entirely), and they walked away disappointed from sound science that didn’t give them what they hoped. I believe this was an exercise in how science does and doesn’t work.

This scientific attention to the Bigfoot question was a great opportunity to talk to Bigfooters about the scientific process by using a subject they are emotionally invested in. Even I learned a lot about the methods and procedures, as well as getting an inside scoop from two of the scientists involved. It was a valuable experience all around.

In a pro-Bigfoot Facebook group, one member cogently pointed out that they need to stop “squatchin’” and start RESEARCHING. Amateurs can use a sound scientific process but that means they must give up the hooting and howling, the wood knocking, the blobsquatches, and the scare-yourself-silly camp outs that make zero progress towards the answer to the question, “What, if anything, are people experiencing when they say they have encountered Bigfoot?” In order to make that shift from sham investigation to genuine inquiry, they will need help from Bigfoot skeptics.

This article will appear in a future issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

One of the world’s most popular alleged psychics and spiritual mediums in history, Sylvia Browne, died on November 20, 2013 at age 77 (although she predicted on CNN that she would live to age 88). She suffered a heart attack in 2011 and reportedly had multiple strokes as well. These afflictions could explain why some very recent scheduled appearances were cancelled for “health reasons.” She claimed to also communicate with the dead and she engaged in health readings, which I consider dangerous and, essentially, practicing medicine without a license. She was fortunate the California medical board didn’t elect to pursue this.

Primarily due to a simple concept called subjective validation, she was able to convince much of the unsuspecting public of her self-proclaimed powers—resulting in authoring or co-authoring 45 books, building a multi-million dollar psychic empire. It is unclear how much of the books were her own words—especially after Joe Nickell convincingly illustrated how some of her writings eerily resembled his previously published work.

Larry King and Montel Williams promoted her more than any other media sources.

Although she made a fortune and was likely laughing all the way to the bank (for example, one of her non-profit 990 forms indicates a single operation brought in $417,051), her reputation was controversial, primarily due to her career-long record of inaccurate predictions and readings—which was mostly revealed by James Randi, Robert Lancaster, Benjamin Radford, Ryan Shaffer, and me (there were a few others as well). Lancaster’s superb website, StopSylviaBrowne.com—as well as Randi’s—represented almost daily efforts to keep the public apprised regarding the truth about Sylvia Browne. She endured justified criticism after repeatedly agreeing to be tested by the James Randi Educational Foundation for her alleged ability—yet never doing so. Sylvia avoided the test because she claimed Randi didn’t have the one million dollar prize, as advertised. Thereafter, I went on CNN’s Larry King Live and showed indisputable visual evidence of the $1,000,000 (an account statement from the independent investment firm, Goldman Sachs)—an embarrassing moment for Sylvia on live, international television. To my knowledge, this was her last guest appearance on the show—previously averaging about three appearances per year.

Because she dodged Randi’s test (in which she even agreed on CNN to the specific protocol), I decided to test her without her knowing it. A few days after Sylvia made several predictions on the Montel Williams Show for the entire upcoming year of 2005, I asked my niece’s fourth grade class, individually, to predict on the same measures. Data analyses indicated that the fourth-graders were, collectively, 25% more accurate than Sylvia was—and these children were literally guessing on many items they knew nothing about (like world affairs, natural disasters, and politics). This was the real Sylvia Browne.

In 1992, Sylvia and her ex-husband Kenzil Dalzell Brown were indicted on several charges of investment fraud and grand larceny. Following her felony conviction and divorce, she added the letter “e” to the end of her last name to understandably present a new persona to the public in light of her record of disgrace. This was the real Sylvia Browne.

Even though her staunch believers remained supportive, criticism of Sylvia continued when many of her highest profile predictions were not only proven wrong, but some were perceived as downright heartless. On the Montel Williams show in 2003, she told grieving parents that their missing 11-year old son, Shawn Hornbeck, was dead—even though he was found alive and well in 2007. In 2004—also on Montel—she wrongly told the mother of Cleveland kidnapping victim Amanda Berry “She’s not alive, honey.” Amanda’s mother died two years later, so she never was able to find out her daughter was really alive. Could Sylvia’s prediction have accelerated the death of Amanda’s mother? Regarding the West Virginia coal miner tragedy in 2006, on live radio she predicted they survived—when only minutes later they were confirmed dead. This was the real Sylvia Browne.

Less benign, in 2005 she incorrectly told me on CNN that Osama bin Laden was dead. She also predicted aliens would visit Earth in 2010 and “teach us how to use anti-gravity devices…” Further, via articles in Skeptical Inquirer, Ryan Shaffer points out in “Psychic Defective” (2010) as well as “Psychic Defective Revisited” (2013) that Sylvia wasn’t accurate on a single prediction regarding criminal cases. She demonstrated little or no remorse for exploiting the bereaved. This was the real Sylvia Browne.

These and other failures resulted in the ultimate decline of the empire. Eventually, Sylvia put her San Jose office up for sale. This—including three office moves in as many years—is an indicator of how her star had been fading as a result of her psychic inaccuracies and public disappointment. Robert Lancaster received an email in November from an apparent Browne family friend indicating that Sylvia’s son was even selling some of her assets in light of her health problems. Further, station KMOV (St. Louis) reported in 2010 that Linda Rossi, longtime business manager for Sylvia, revealed the Browne corporations’ annual 3 million dollar revenue had dwindled below 50%.

The first of her four husbands was Gary Dufresne, who shed light on how Sylvia’s career began. He tells of a story in which the two of them were hosting a party where she began experimenting with Tarot card readings to some of the invitees. In the kitchen, Dufresne asked Sylvia how she could tell people such unsubstantiated things. He reportedly told her, “You know it's not true, and some of these people actually are probably going to believe that." To avoid using vulgarity, he paraphrased Sylvia’s response: "Screw 'em. Anybody who believes this stuff oughtta [sic] be taken." This was the real Sylvia Browne.

All this is justification for a fee of $860 per 20 minute telephone reading from Sylvia, right? I’d like to be able to say that the job of psychic critics will now become easier, but this game is a bit like baseball—when one batter is out, another one steps up to the plate. Perhaps her son—alleged psychic Chris Dufresne? Granddaughter Angelia? Stay tuned.

Rest in peace, Sylvia.

An update of our “Psychic Defective” analysis examines developments in eleven cases Sylvia Browne made predictions about, explores a new reading, and scrutinizes her other failed predictions about the papacy and American politics.

Sylvia Browne continues to offer $850 phone readings, sell books, deliver public lectures, and head her own church as she remains one of the most famous psychics in the United States. My 2010 coauthored article, “Psychic Defective: Sylvia Browne’s History of Failure,” compiled every publicly available prediction Browne made on missing person and death cases, totaling 115 readings, and concluded Sylvia Browne was mostly correct zero times, mostly wrong in twenty-five cases, and had ninety unknown outcomes (Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 2010). In the last three years there have been developments in the cases of Amanda Berry, Nicholle Coppler, Jerry Cushey, Alexandra Ducsay, Dustin Ivey, Hunter Horgan, Amanda Lankey, Christopher Mader, Dena McCluskey, Michelle O’Keefe, and Pat Viola that were listed as having unknown outcomes.

Illustration by Neil Davies

This article updates the previous analysis with a new reading, bringing the total to 116 cases, and investigates changes in those eleven cases with previously unknown conclusions by showing Browne mostly wrong in eight, with three remaining in the unknown category. The result? The evidence demonstrates Browne still has never been mostly correct in a single case, thirty-three cases have mostly incorrect predictions, and eighty-three cases have unverified outcomes. The article also looks at the human toll Browne’s predictions have had and other notable predictions that can be finally evaluated.

On April 21, 2003, Amanda Berry went missing a day before her seventeenth birthday. Louwana Miller, Berry’s mother, was desperate to find her daughter and believed Browne was the key to solving the disappearance. In 2004, Miller was flown to The Montel Williams Show where Browne told the grief stricken mother that “she’s not alive,” mentioned “water” as a location where Berry was, and said she was dead because “your daughter was not the type that would not have called you” (Radford 2013). Besides claiming that a potential person of interest was “sort of Cuban-looking, short kind of stocky build, heavyset,” she said he was “maybe 21, something like that, 21, 22.” When Miller asked if she would ever see her daughter, Browne told the bereaved mother, “yeah, in heaven, on the other side.”

The impact of Miller’s appearance with Browne on Montel was crushing for a mother who held out hope her daughter would be found alive. In a detailed interview with Miller by Stephen Hudak, the mother said she believed Browne “98 percent” (Hudak 2004). When Miller died of heart failure in 2006, reporter Regina Brett explained how hard Miller worked at drawing attention to the case and looking for her daughter “before that psychic did her in” (Brett 2006). According to that article, Browne was more specific than what was aired on television, telling Miller that Amanda “died on her birthday,” “she didn’t suffer,” and “that her black hooded jacket was in a dumpster with DNA on it.”

Browne’s prediction was wrong. On May 6, 2013, Berry fled after being held in torturous conditions for ten years, and police called Berry a hero for her escape that led law enforcement to her kidnapper and two other abducted girls, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight. DeJesus had been missing since 2004 and Knight was kidnapped in 2000. In the chilling phone call to police, Berry identified herself as Amanda Berry, missing for ten years and identified her captor as Ariel Castro, a fifty-two-year-old man. In a statement posted on Browne’s website, a message says Sherry Cole, Amanda Berry’s cousin, “reached out to Sylvia this morning to let her know that she supports her, loves her, knows Sylvia never claims to be 100 percent right, but wanted to let her know that she was accurate in her description of the perpetrators at the time” (“Sylvia’s Statement on Amanda Berry” 2013). That Castro, born in Puerto Rico, is “Cuban-looking” is debatable for several reasons, including the fact that being Cuban is a nationality that includes a broad category of people who have ancestors from Africa, Europe, or both. Thus, in the broadest sense many people, not just Latin Americans, could fit that description. Browne was wrong about the kidnapper’s age; she claimed in 2004 that the person involved was about twenty-one or twenty-two, but Castro is currently fifty-two, making her claim off by two decades, as he was in his early forties at the time. Her description was also that the suspect was “short,” but an online booking photograph shows he is about sixty-five inches (AP Photo 2013), which is only slightly smaller than the most recent U.S. government data that lists an average height of 67.1 inches for Hispanic males between forty and fifty-nine and 69.5 inches of all males between fifty and fifty-nine (United States Department of Health and Human Services 2010). Castro may have a “stocky build,” but he does not appear to be “heavyset.” The website statement also referred to Browne’s description of the “perpetrators,” despite police announcing Castro “ran the show and he acted alone” (Dolan et al. 2013). This reading is moved into the wrong category of the “Psychic Defective” list.

In 2004 Browne told the mother of Amanda Berry that “she’s not alive.” Amanda and two other women escaped captivity on May 6, 2013. (Photo: Dan Callister, PacificCoastNews/Newscom)

Browne remains relatively quiet on Berry’s rescue aside from saying her “heart goes out to Amanda Berry,” but in 2012 Browne’s website posted a video of her 2002 Montel appearance about Nicholle Coppler. In citing the case as a “validation,” Browne wrote she accurately told the mother that Nicholle Coppler “was no longer alive and could be located in or under the house and that the person who killed her was also involved with both young boys and girls” (“Webcast Previews” 2012). When Coppler went missing in 1999, she ran away from home and met an older man, Glen Fryer. Police suspected Fryer was involved in the disappearance early on, and in August 2001 they not only found Coppler’s identification at his house but also her hair and photos. He was arrested for rape and child pornography after police retrieved videos and photos of him raping underage girls, including a girl who was murdered in Kentucky in 2000. Fryer, who was a suspect in his wife’s murder as well, agreed to a plea deal, but on February 18, 2002, he committed suicide before telling detectives what he did to Coppler.

Nine months after the guilty plea and suspect’s death in 2002, Nicholle’s mother, Krista Coppler, appeared with Browne in November 2002 on Montel where she told Krista the obvious outcome that Coppler is deceased. The mother asked, “Do you know where she’s at?” and Browne replied, “She’s right near his house.” Krista then asked Browne, “Is she in his basement?” and Browne responded vaguely with “yeah, in the house or under the house.” According to Lima News in 2012, “police found her skeleton after the house was demolished and while the foundation was being dug out” (Sowinski 2012). Out of the entire reading Browne was correct on the most likely scenario given Fryer’s guilty plea, suicide, connection to two previous murders, and the evidence: Coppler was deceased. Her other predictions about Coppler being “under” the house, “near” the house, that she was “smothered,” that Fryer transported girls “across state lines,” that she did not leave the house, that people named Kevin and Billy were involved, three males were involved, or that she was killed out of fear for reporting Fryer’s crimes are either wrong or unsubstantiated. For example, Coppler’s remains cannot be “near” or “under” the house while also being “in” the house.

In total, Browne’s “validated” statements for the Coppler reading were one or, at best, two out of ten predictions (counting the body buried next to the foundation as either “in” or “under” the house as per Browne’s website claim). Accepting the body as being “in” the house makes Browne’s two other statements about the remains resting “near” or “under” the house incorrect. Therefore in this reading with ten claims, Browne has a 10 percent or, at best, 20 percent accuracy, while 20 percent of her statements were wrong and the remaining 60 percent of her statements, including cause of death and possible accomplices, are unknown. Due to a lack of evidence that could either confirm or deny Browne’s other six statements, this reading remains in the unknown outcome category. This case is also a revealing look at how Browne operates. In the transcript, it was Krista’s statements about Fryer’s basement that prompted Browne to focus on the home’s interior. Furthermore, nearly ten years lapsed between the reading and finding her remains; law enforcement found the deceased and Browne played no role in police locating the body.

Browne was also proved wrong in her predictions about the August 1992 murder of Hunter Horgan, a priest at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Louisiana. In 1997, Browne was paid $400 by local police for the reading in which she claimed, “The priest was killed by a ‘young mulatto’ homosexual who was enraged by Hunter’s rejection of his advances” (McMillan 1997). The psychic said, “Someone was in love with the minister and he [the minister] wasn’t predisposed to be in love with a man” and the “priest was trying to help him” (McMillan 1997). While Browne said she expected the perpetrator “to get caught,” she claimed that “somebody with the street name of ‘King’ directed gang people to do it,” but when asked for a name she declined, saying, “she is concerned about the ethics of doing so” (McMillan 1997).

Booking photo of Ariel Castro shows that Browne was wrong about the person of interest being “short” and “maybe 21 years old.” On July 26, 2013, Castro pleaded guilty in the imprisonment and rapes of Amanda Berry and two other women who escaped in May. (Photo: Cuyahoga County Jail/ZUMA Press/Newscom)

In 2007, the investigation was reignited in what turned out to be a highly unusual case that Browne failed to predict. After re-interviewing two men, police accused Derrick Odomes, an African American who lived across from the church cemetery, of robbing and murdering Horgan and obtained DNA and fingerprints from Odomes that linked him to the crime. As it turned out, Horgan was robbed. Both his wallet and car were stolen, and police found his pants pockets were “turned inside out” (Monroe 2011). The trial was slow to move forward because Odomes’s lawyer argued he should be tried as juvenile, because Odomes was fourteen in August 1992 and therefore legally a juvenile. In August 2011, Odomes, at age thirty-three was found guilty for the murder he committed as a fourteen year old. The judge sentenced Odomes to incarceration until he was twenty-one, but since he was over that age he did not serve any time and faces life in prison for other charges (Nolan 2011). As for Browne’s predictions on the murder, a gang was not involved, multiple people did not commit the crime, no “homosexual advances” were motivating factors, there was no evidence Odomes loved Horgan, no mentions about Odomes being “mulatto,” and no person named “King” was involved. Browne’s prediction is placed in the wrong category, since most of her claims were not supported by fact or they indeed contradicted what was presented at trial.

In 2003, Browne gave a reading to Sonya Helmantoler on Montel about the 2001 disappearance of her brother Jerry Cushey Jr. A transcript of the reading could not be located, but a journalist at the time wrote: “Browne said Cushey had been struck on the head and choked and his body dumped,” pointing to “how hard it is to find a body in water” (Smydo 2003). Another journalist wrote that “Browne told Helmantoler on The Montel Williams Show that Jerry was killed because he saw something he shouldn’t” (Brubaker 2006). In 2010, Ronald Curran and Christopher Myers, Cushey’s roommate, were charged with the shooting death of Cushey and hiding his body over a drug debt Cushey owed. In 2011, Myers pled guilty and Curran pled guilty in 2012 (Buckley 2012). Myers took police to the two locations where they buried Cushey’s body in wooded areas (Buckley 2010). Browne’s statements about the reason, manner of death, and location of the body were false. This was a mostly wrong prediction and has been moved to that category.

On October 11, 2006, Browne did a reading about the death of Alexandra Ducsay for Linda, her mother, and said her daughter’s murderer is “sort of like” the “Zodiac Killer.” Browne gave a name, but it was censored by The Montel Williams Show, claiming he “got in and followed her in” and it was linked to “four” other women who were found and told the mother to search for rapists in the area. In September 2012, Matthew Pugh, Alexandra’s former boyfriend, was charged with murder and burglary after a small piece of tape led police to him (Juliano and Cleary 2012). Pugh is only accused of one murder, but as he is awaiting trial this case will remain in the unknown category.

In contrast, Browne gave more detail in her October 26, 2005, reading on Montel for Tamara Ivey, mother of deceased Dustin Ivey, by saying a teenage boy and a “dark-haired young” female were involved. Said Browne, “I think it’s going to be solved really soon” and “a sexual predator” was the suspect who used “a rock.” Tamara replied, “They told me that it wasn’t sexual.” In 2006, Richard Joshua Collier, Dustin’s brother and Tamara’s son, was charged with Dustin’s murder. Police claimed the two got into an argument and Collier killed his brother. He was found not guilty at trial (Stoner 2007). If the police and the prosecutor’s charges are correct and Browne was right about the case being solved “soon,” then all other details in Browne’s reading were false. Conversely, if the charges were wrong then Browne’s timeline as well as the nature of his death were incorrect. Browne’s verifiable statements in either instance were mostly incorrect, which puts this reading in the wrong category.

On February 8, 2006, Amanda Lankey’s 2004 murder was featured on Montel, where Browne spoke with her mother, Victoria Foster. Browne asked, “Do you know anybody by the name of [censored]” to which the mother said yes. Browne claimed, “There was also a female involved with the first initial of ‘C,’” and Browne said Amanda was killed in a “car,” specifically a blue Honda Civic. Browne said Amanda met the person on the Internet. In 2004, Cecil Wallis Sr. was immediately named a person of interest in the murder because Lankey was last seen alive at his house and her body was found not far from that location. In 2011, Wallis Sr. committed suicide before trial in an unrelated rape case involving teen girls at the same home between 1998 and 2002 (Tunison 2011). Assuming Cecil Wallis Sr. was behind the murder, there is no evidence a female with a “C” was “involved,” and Browne was wrong about how the person met Lankey. Cecil Wallis Sr. was not charged with Lankey’s murder, and without more evidence or a trial there are too many unknowns. Thus, this case remains in the unknown category.

Sylvia Browne’s November 30, 2005, reading for Samantha Mader, mother of Christopher Mader, had a much clearer outcome. Browne gave the mother a name, which was again censored, and claimed Christopher’s murder stemmed from the killer not liking “the food” at the bar he worked at, then later the killer “saw him passing by, and shot him.” Browne also told the mother to start looking “where he ate breakfast.” Matthew Correll and Shawn Myers were charged with the murder, and Correll was found guilty and Myers pled guilty in 2012 (Newman 2012). The two had attempted to rob Mader. Browne’s predictions were not true about how many people were involved, the reason for the murder, or how the crime happened. This case has been put in the wrong category.

On February 26, 2003, Browne made predictions for Dena McCluskey’s stepmother Donna, asking the stepmother, “Who is David?” and Donna responded, “David doesn’t ring a bell at all.” Browne then said, “She’s in like a basement thing” locally and “the reason I brought up David is because David, with an ‘L,’ last name ‘L,’ like something like [censored] or something, knows about this.” In 2007, the police found Dena McCluskey’s body “in a secluded area of Tuolumne County” and arrested Russell Todd Jones for her murder (Ahumadara 2007). In 2011, Jones was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the killing of Dena McCluskey, Jones’s roommate (Ahumadara 2011). He admitted to burying her body in a shallow grave near property owned by his parents after burning her body. Browne’s predictions were false. There was no David involved, or an “L” last name, she was wrong about the body’s location and a “basement” and failed to mention that the person involved was her daughter’s roommate. This reading is moved into the wrong category.

In October 2000, Browne sat down with Patricia O’Keefe, the mother of Michelle O’Keefe, who was murdered in February 2000. A transcript could not be located, but according to news reports Browne said the killer was “a blue-eyed, dark-skinned white man named Lee or Leon, who fled the scene on a shuttle bus” (Botonis 2000b). She further obfuscated, saying the murderer is “very dark-complected and could be mistaken as being black” and “he had a blue uniform with a pocket and a badge or something over it” (Botonis 2000b). Browne then claimed O’Keefe’s murder was part of a series of murders at that location and that the gun used in the murder could be found “in a large green metal trash can next to an elevator or door” that had not been emptied since the murder eight months before. In response to the taping, police announced they were following the tips Browne offered not because they believed her, but “you don’t reject any information,” as “a person could say they’re a psychic and really be trying to give you information either firsthand or from another source” (Botonis 2000a).

In late 2009, Raymond Lee Jennings was found guilty after three trials for Michelle O’Keefe’s February 2000 murder and was later sentenced to forty years. Long before Browne’s October 2000 reading, on April 4, 2000, Jennings was told by police he was the suspect in the murder (Brown 2012). Jennings, a security guard at the school where O’Keefe was killed, was the sole witness and told conflicting accounts of what happened (Fausset and Blankstein 2001). For example, he told investigators about when he first saw O’Keefe, which contradicted his earlier statements and physical evidence (Fausset and Blankstein 2001). While Browne was wrong about the suspect being named Leon, she was correct about one of his names being Lee. Browne’s website celebrated this fact by promoting a Dateline episode showing Browne saying it was “white man named Lee or Leon, who fled the scene on a shuttle bus,” which had no further analysis or clips from the show (“The Girl With The Blue Mustang” 2010). It is important to note that Raymond Lee Jennings was named as the suspect less than two months after the murder and six months before Browne’s involvement. This case received national attention before Browne’s reading, and O’Keefe’s murder was even featured on America’s Most Wanted in the summer of 2000. No physical evidence, such as a gun, was discovered despite Browne’s claims and police following up on her statements. She was correct about the name Lee, being white, and eye color, which could have been surmised by anyone who followed the case knowing that Jennings had been the suspect since April. Browne was wrong about the Leon name, his being “dark-skinned,” “very dark-complected,” “could be mistaken as being black,” and he did not “flee,” as he stayed at the scene and did not take “a shuttle bus.” Furthermore, Browne’s claims about where the gun was were false, and O’Keefe’s death was not part of a series of other murders. While one might expect a security guard to have a blue uniform and a badge, this was not the case. According to the Dateline episode, his uniform consisted of black pants, a black jacket, and a brown shirt. The shirt had the company’s red logo with a pattern of a badge on the sleeves and chest, but it was not a badge, and Browne’s claim that it had “something over it” is unclear. So while she was correct on three statements that police already knew months before, Browne was wrong on at least ten claims. This reading is moved into the mostly wrong category.

Similarly, on February 11, 2004, Browne conducted a reading for Jim Viola, whose wife Pat Viola went missing from Bogota, New Jersey, in 2001. The psychic said she “had a major seizure,” was then given a ride by a grocery truck driver, and the husband needed to look in Akron, Ohio (Mahabir 2004). In September 2012, authorities announced they had Pat Viola’s body since July 27, 2002, when they found it washed ashore on a Rockaway beach in New York. DNA tests of the bones were taken in 2006 and new samples from 2011 led to the identification (Baustista and Superville 2012). Pat Viola was dead at the time of Browne’s reading so she could not have been alive in Ohio since her remains were in New York. This reading is moved to the mostly wrong category.

Browne’s dismal record has not dissuaded people from asking her questions about criminal cases. In 2011, she was asked by Angela Spinks, in front of an Albuquerque, New Mexico, audience, who killed Lloyd, Dixie, and Steven Ortiz, her parents and brother, with a pickaxe on Father’s Day. According to journalist Nico Roesler, Browne told Spinks the murderer was Jesse Rios, her brother-in-law (Roesler 2012). The police had previously questioned Rios and his wife Cherie Ortiz-Rios, who found the bodies and lived on the property (Roesler 2012). An official with the New Mexico state police “told the family to disregard Browne’s answer because the show was rigged and that it was a stunt” (Roesler 2012). The murders remain unsolved, and it is unclear what, if any, information Browne knew about the triple homicide from the media. Adding this case to the list of Browne readings with unknown outcomes to the “Psychic Defective” article brings the total to 116 cases total with eighty-three unknown outcomes.

These readings are not Browne’s only miserable predictions in recent years. Browne predicted in Prophecy (2005): “After Pope John Paul II passes, there will be only one more elected pope” and wrote “he will be succeeded by what is essentially a triumvirate of popes” (Browne and Harrison 2005). In 2013, Pope Benedict XVI resigned, the first in nearly 600 years, and Pope Francis was elected, becoming the first pope from the Americas. Browne’s predictions about the Pope were wrong, and she failed to predict these rare moments in the papacy. In End of Days (2008) Browne made predictions such as: “Many of the dramatic advancements in our space travel will be the direct result of what we’ve learned from them, from the manned Mars exploration in 2012” (Browne and Harrison 2008). There was no 2012 mission to Mars. In 2011, Browne predicted Mitt Romney would defeat Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, only to reverse herself in late September 2012 when Romney was trailing in polls and received negative press for his private comments made to donors (Skomal 2011).

If one focuses only on the missing person cases, Browne’s prediction about Amanda Berry was not even the first time Browne told a mother her child was dead when the missing child was later found alive. In 2003, Browne told the parents of Shawn Hornbeck he was dead, but he was found alive in 2007. After her failed prediction received media attention, Browne released a statement to CNN’s Anderson Cooper saying: “She cannot possibly be 100 percent correct in each and every one of her predictions. She has, during a career of over 50 years, helped literally tens of thousands of people” (“Psychic Told Parents That Son Was Dead” 2007). The question is, if Browne cannot be 100 percent accurate then just how accurate is she? The Ortiz reading has been added to the metric, while Browne was wrong in the cases of Amanda Berry, Jerry Cushey, Dustin Ivey, Hunter Horgan, Christopher Mader, Dena McCluskey, Michelle O’Keefe, and Pat Viola. The Nicholle Coppler, Alexandra Ducsay and Amanda Lankey cases remain on the unknown list. Following these recent updates to the “Psychic Defective” article, Browne has never been mostly accurate out of 116 readings, with thirty-three cases mostly wrong and eighty-three unverified predictions.

References

AP Photo. 2013. “APTOPIX Missing Women Found,” Associated Press, May 9. Online at http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/APTOPIX-Missing-Women-Found/891ca35dadfc49e1bf0814337bea66b1/8/0.

Ahumadara, Rosalio. 2011. Raley-McCluskey family surprised by manslaughter conviction. Modesto Bee (July 19). Online at http://www.modbee.com/2011/07/19/1781423/modesto-man-guilty-of-manslaughter.html.

———. 2007. Search for Raley-McCluskey ends at the grave. Modesto Bee (November 3). Online at http://www.modbee.com/2007/11/03/110866/search-for-raley-mccluskey-ends.html.

Baustista, Justo, and Denisa R. Superville. 2012. Remains identified as those of Bogota woman who vanished 11 years ago. The Record (Sep­tember 12). Online at http://www.northjersey.com/bogota/Remains_found_on_Queens_beach_a_decade_ago_identified_as_those_of_missing_Bogota_woman.html.

Botonis, Greg. 2000a. Psychic’s comments investigated. Daily News (October 24).

Botonis, Greg. 2000b. O’Keefe’s killer ‘seen’ by psychic. Daily News (November 3).

Brett, Regina. 2006. On her heart: Missing Mandy. Plain Dealer (March 5).

Brown, Errol. 2012. Ray Jennings: Wrongfully convicted in the murder of Michelle O’Keefe. JusticeForRay.com. Online at http://justiceforray.webs.com/thecase.htm.

Browne, Sylvia, and Lindsay Harrison. 2008. End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies About the End of the World. New York: Dutton, p. 243.

———. 2005. Prophecy: What the Future Holds For You. New York: Dutton, pp. 145–46.

Brubaker, Brandy. 2006. Family pleads for information on Pa. man missing for 5 years. Tribune Business News (October 12).

Buckley, Chris. 2010. Murder victim buried in two locations, police say. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (August 19).

———. 2012. Curran guilty in slay case. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (April 13).

Dolan, Matthew, Joe Barrett, Tamer El-Ghobashy, and Kris Maher. 2013. Charges filed in abduction of Ohio women. Wall Street Journal (May 9). Online at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324059704578470750534634028.html.

Fausset, Richard, and Andrew Blankstein. 2001. Parents’ lawsuit broadened in hunt for killer. Los Angeles Times (November 26). Online at http://articles.latimes.com/2001/nov/26/local/me-8340.

Hudak, Stephen. 2004. Psychic leaves mom ‘98 percent’ sure missing daughter is dead. Plain Dealer (November 18).

Juliano, Frank, and Tom Cleary. 2012. Milford cops make arrest in Alexandra Ducsay’s killing. Connecticut Post (September 6). Online at http://www.ctpost.com/policereports/article/Milford-cops-make-arrest-in-Alexandra-Ducsay-s-3841775.php.

Mahabir, Karen. 2004. A psychic on the case: Husband of missing Bogota woman asks for help. The Record (February 10).

McMillan, John. 1997. Psychic gives police clues into priest’s 1992 slaying. The Advocate (September 14).

Monroe, Nate. 2011. Odomes guilty in priest slaying. Houma Courier (August 25).

Newman, Jeff. 2012. Mader’s murderer gets life, no parole. Southern Maryland News (August 11). Online at http://www.somdnews.com/article/20120822/NEWS/708229586/1055/mader-s-murderer-gets-life-no-parole&template=southernMaryland.

Nolan, Bruce. 2011. Murder case finally closed in killing of Hunter Horgan III, Episcopal priest. The Times-Picayune (September 23).

Psychic told parents that son was dead. 2007. CNN (January 19). Online at http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2007/01/psychic-told-parents-that-son-was-dead.html.

Radford, Benjamin. 2013. Psychic defective: Sylvia Browne blunders again. Skeptical Inquirer 37(3) (July/August).

Roesler, Nico. 2012. One year later, suspicions linger in El Rancho pickax killings. The New Mexican (June 16). Online at http://www.sfnewmexican.com/local%20news/Suspicions-linger-in-pickax-killings.

Shaffer, Ryan, and Agatha Jadwiszczok. 2010. Psychic defective: Sylvia Browne’s history of failure. Skeptical Inquirer (34)(2) (March/April). Online at http://www.csicop.org/si/show/psychic_defective_sylvia_brownes_history_of_failure/.

Skomal, Lenore. 2011. Me and Sylvia Browne: 2012 predictions. Erie Times-News (October 17). Online at http://www.goerieblogs.com/news/writersblock/2011/10/my-and-sylvia-browne-2012-predictions/.

Sylvia’s statement on Amanda Berry. 2013. SylviaBrowne.com. Online at http://www.sylviabrowne.com/g/Sylvias-Statement-on-Amanda-Berry/189.html.

Smydo, Joe. 2003. What happened to Jerry?: Missing man’s family searches for clues in this world and the next. Post-Gazette (July 6). Online at http://old.post-gazette.com/neigh_washington/20030706wacoverwash3p3.asp.

Sowinski, Greg. 2012. Bones identified as missing teen Nicholle Coppler. Lima News (February 20). Online at http://www.limaohio.com/obituaries/article_7f5167c4-412f-5759-81ad-be91a93f7fc8.html.

Stoner, Andrew. 2007. Notorious 92: Indiana’s Most Heinous Murders in All 92 Counties (Bloomington: Rooftop Publishing), p. 473.

The girl with the blue mustang. 2010. SylviaBrowne.com. Online at http://www.sylviabrowne.com/b/The-Girl-With-The-Blue-Mustang/731679257300427117.html.

Tunison, John. 2011. Cecil Wallis Sr., ‘person of interest’ in Amanda Lankey killing, found dead. MLive.com (November 10). Online at http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/11/cecil_wallis_sr_person_of_inte.html.

United States Department of Health and Human Services. 2010. Anthropometric reference data for children and adults: United States, 2007–2010. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Online at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_11/sr11_252.pdf.

Webcast previews: A validation on a prediction made 11 years ago. 2012. SylviaBrowne.com (March). Online at http://www.sylviabrowne.com/p/All-Articles/A-validation-on-a-prediction-made-11-years-ago/30195.html.

On February 15, 2013, the million inhabitants of the central Russian city of Chelyabinsk experienced a half-megaton explosion from a disintegrating space rock. What happened, and how did the people of Chelyabinsk react?

Shortly after sunrise on February 15, a projectile entered the atmosphere over the Ural Mountains travelling at more than eighteen kilometers per second. It was about twenty meters (sixty feet) in diameter, or half the diameter of the famous Tunguska impact of 1908, which flattened a thousand square miles of Siberian forest. The rocky projectile, which came from the asteroid belt, left a trail of smoky condensation across the sky as it vaporized in the atmosphere. Its terminal explosion, at an altitude of twenty-three kilometers, released energy equivalent to a couple dozen Hiroshima-sized atom bombs. When it exploded, the bolide (a very bright meteor that explodes in the atmosphere) was for a few seconds brighter than the sun. About two minutes later the shock wave reached the ground in Chelyabinsk, breaking windows and injuring about 1,500 people from flying glass and other debris.

There was no advance warning of this asteroid strike. With a diameter of twenty meters (twenty meters is the best current estimate of the diameter, based on the mass that would produce the ~0.5 MT energy of the bolide), the Chelyabinsk impactor was smaller than most asteroids that have been detected by the telescopes of the NASA Spaceguard Survey, which focuses on finding asteroids of about one hundred meters or larger. Furthermore, since it approached Earth from very near the direction of the sun, it could not have been seen by a ground-based optical telescope of any size. It therefore struck without warning, although the atmospheric explosion was measured by down-looking surveillance satellites. The Chelyabinsk bolide had about a tenth of the energy, and exploded more than twice as high, as Tunguska. The blast energy was directed more sideways that downward. These factors resulted, thankfully, in much less damage on the ground.

The explosion also produced a shower of stony meteorites, of a type common among the asteroids (ordinary chondrite). These meteorites, distributed over an impact region more than one hundred kilometers long, were easily collected by local people because most fell on snow, leaving obvious little “entry wounds.”

Perhaps most surprising is what did not happen: There was no panic reaction that this was a nuclear attack. As far back as 1981, geologist Gene Shoemaker and others had warned that an unexpected cosmic impact might be misinterpreted as an attack and trigger a nuclear exchange. This fear has hovered over all subsequent studies of the impact hazard. Perhaps it was a legitimate concern during the Cold War, and maybe this is still a danger if a cosmic impact took place over the disputed territory of nuclear-armed antagonists such as India and Pakistan. Chelyabinsk is near the heart of the Soviet defense industry, surrounded by facilities that design and build nuclear weapons and rocket delivery systems. Those with long memories may remember that this area was the target of the 1960 U-2 flight of Gary Powers that was shot down by a Soviet missile. Yet apparently neither the Russian military nor the public associated the event of February 15 with a nuclear attack. For this we can all breathe easier.

Nikulin Vyacheslav Itar-Tass Photos/Newscom

The people of Chelyabinsk initially did not know what hit their city. Videos show that the brilliant light passing across the sky was ignored by most people, with traffic flow unaffected. We would have expected drivers to pull to the side of the road and get out to look at the trail of the bolide stretching across the sky, but this is not what the videos show. When the shock wave hit it was unexpected. Many people were injured because they went to the windows to see what was happening. In at least one case a teacher initially told her students to “duck and cover,” the old Cold War–drill. They hid under their desks, but when nothing happened they got up and went to the window just in time for the shock wave. Photos of the damage showed that in many office and apartment buildings, only a few windows were blown out, while most remained intact. Many of the videos of the fireball posted on the Internet were taken from automatic auto dashboard cameras, or dashcams, installed by drivers in Russia to defend against insurance fraud or police corruption in case of an accident.

The response from the scientific community was quick. Scientists have been studying the impact hazard for two decades, and they are well connected by the Internet. In addition, many residents of Chelyabinsk began posting YouTube videos within an hour after the event. Within a few hours, the cause of the explosion was identified as the stratospheric disintegration of an incoming rocky object. The initial Russian news reports speculated that the asteroid was only a few meters in diameter and the energy was only a few tens of kilotons. However, the data from a worldwide network of atmospheric pressure sensors and seismic stations quickly established the energy of the explosion as between 300 and 500 kilotons. The response from the U.S. orbital monitoring system was also remarkably fast. Three days after the event they released the exact time and location, with measurements of the bolide track and its altitude (about 23 km) and velocity (more than 18 km/s) at peak brightness.

Fortunately, there seem to have been few suggestions that this was an unnatural event such as a UFO, or the product of some secret weapons system. Such stories continue to circulate about Tunguska, even a century after it happened. For a couple of days there were claims that the object was a comet rather than an asteroid. In part these came from the misunderstanding that the white trail left by the impactor was made of water droplets analogous to an airplane contrail, rather than ablation from the rocky object. Also, for the past century many Russian scientists have persisted in claiming that the Tunguska impactor was a comet, even after most other scientists abandoned that idea in favor of a rocky asteroid.

A curious aspect is the fact that February 15 was also the date of the closest passage by Earth of a 30–40 meter asteroid called 2012 DA14. It flew just 28,000 km above the Earth’s surface. This remarkable coincidence seemed to call for an explanation, and many press stories suggested that the two objects were traveling together in space or were somehow related. The question of whether a “coincidence” is the result of truly correlated events or just chance is a familiar theme to skeptics.

Coauthor Mark Boslough (at right), visiting the lab of Prof. Viktor Grokhovsky at Ural Federal University in central Russia, displays one of the largest recovered pieces of the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion. Boslough, a noted impact physics expert from Sandia National Laboratories (and a CSI Fellow), flew to Chelyabinsk shortly after the bolide explosion and participated in a PBS NOVA documentary, “Meteor Strike,” about the historic event. It aired March 27, 2013, less than six weeks after the blast. Photo courtesy of Mark Boslough. Left photo, a resident cleans up some of the damage from the explosion. (KRT/Newscom)

Nature has provided us with several lines of evidence that the two events were not related. Immediately following the event, meteor expert Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario checked radar meteor data to see if the Earth had experienced unusual meteor activity due to passage through a stream of debris associated with either 2012 DA14 or the Chelyabinsk bolide, and found none. Richard Binzel of MIT, who studies physical characteristics of asteroids, noted that the spectrum of 2012 DA14 implies a composition of the asteroid radically different from the composition of the recovered meteorites from the Chelyabinsk event. William Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, an expert on the evolution of asteroid orbits, noted that 2012 DA14’s orbit is probably the result of numerous close encounters with Earth and other inner planets, whereas the orbit of the Chelyabinsk asteroid was a relatively “fresh” transfer orbit from the main belt. Last and perhaps most compelling, the direction of arrival of the two objects was radically different. 2012 DA14 approached Earth from an extremely southerly direction, and it would be impossible for another object in a similar orbit to hit Earth in the far northern hemisphere over Russia. The Chelyabinsk asteroid approached from the east.

Humans are hardwired to see patterns and causal relationships, and when we witness such an unlikely coincidence it can be hard to accept it as such. Within a few hours of the Russian event, there was speculation on Facebook that NASA was at fault, that 2012 DA14 had undiscovered companions, and that as the Earth rotated we could expect more impacts in Europe. To NASA’s credit, this speculation was immediately countered in a February 15 early-morning press conference, in which Planetary Science Director Jim Green stated unequivocally that there was no connection. Unfortunately, the usual suspects are now accusing NASA of a cover-up. Blogs dedicated to bashing climate researchers and scientists who don’t accept neocatastrophism now have another pseudoscientific conspiracy theory to promote.

We are left to ask just how unlikely is the coincidence of the two events happening on the same day? Is the improbability of that coincidence sufficient to overwhelm the strong observational evidence that they are unrelated? As is often the case in assessing the chances of such coincidences, the estimate of probability depends to a great degree on how one frames the question. One can imagine three ways the question might be asked: (1) What is the chance that these two events would occur on a specific day, say Valentine’s Day or some other specific “predicted” day, like the peak of a known meteor shower? (2) What is the chance that two such events would occur within a day of one another, on whatever day one or the other chanced to occur? (3) What is the chance that on the same day that one of these events occurred, say the Chelyabinsk bolide, another uncommon and newsworthy event also happened? Each of these probabilities can be estimated, and the numbers are radically different.

Note: This graphic is from another source and contains several relatively minor inaccuracies, but we nevertheless felt it useful. —Editor View large size >

The flyby of an asteroid like 2012 DA14 has about the same probability as the Chelyabinsk impact to within our uncertainties, which are at least a factor of two. An impact somewhere on Earth of an object the size of the Chelyabinsk projectile, like the pass of an asteroid of the size and at the distance of 2012 DA14, happens about once every century on average, or about once in 40,000 days, to one significant digit. If you start by selecting a specific date, like February 15, 2013 (case 1 above), the chances of both events happening are extraordinarily small, one chance in 40,000 squared, or about one in a billion. But a more realistic question to ask is, as in case 2 above, given that one of the events, say the Chelyabinsk event, did happen, what is the chance of the other event, the 2012 DA14 flyby, occurring on the same day? The answer to that is, of course, just the chance of the other event on any given day, or 1 in 40,000.

Even this estimate is highly “framed” by the specifics of the particular events. Suppose we asked what are the odds of a fifty meter diameter asteroid passing within 30,000 km of the Earth the same day, or of a 20 meter diameter asteroid passing within 15,000 km? The answers would be “Who cares? They didn’t.” By sizing a “box” specifically to just include the events in question, we radically affect the apparent coincidence of the events.

As a final example, consider case 3 above. Given one of the events, again take Chelyabinsk, we can ask, “What is the chance of another newsworthy event of a kind that might plausibly be related, occurring on the same day?” An event “that might plausibly be related” could include another actual impact, or the close fly-by of the Earth by another small asteroid, or perhaps a major earthquake. Looking ten or fifteen years into the past or future, there have been a number of real or imagined events. There was a very large bolide over Indonesia in 2009, a large meteorite that notoriously failed to break up and actually hit the ground whole in Peru in 2007, and the asteroid 2008 TC3, that was discovered in space before it hit the Earth in October 2008. Although the 2012 DA14 close flyby is claimed to be roughly a once-per-century event, the much larger asteroid (99942) Apophis will make a similarly close flyby in only sixteen years, in 2029. Still other asteroids flew by that failed to make headlines because they were discovered only after their close flybys, but presumably would have raised a question of correlation if they had occurred on the same day as another event. In the same time frame, we have experienced two of the most destructive earthquakes in history (Indian Ocean in 2004 and Japan in 2011).

Thus some newsworthy event, such as an actual atmospheric entry, a close asteroid flyby, or a major earthquake, occurs every few years, say about once in a thousand days. So the answer to case 3 appears to be about one chance in a thousand that a second event, of a kind that could raise a question of correlation, might occur within a day of the event in question.

The probability of the coincidence of the two events can range from one in a billion to one in a thousand, depending on how we frame the question. It is noteworthy that no reasonable analysis suggests that such a coincidence is “expected”; even one in a thousand is a rare event. But on any given day, one can make an advance list of many thousands of possible events, each of which has a one-in-a-thousand chance of happening. With that many chances, it is virtually certain that some of them will occur. So raising the question of correlation is not frivolous, but the odds are not so rare as to seek extreme explanations rather than conclude that it was no more than a curious coincidence.

In the words of Richard Feynman, “We are matter with curiosity.” But how can that curiosity be sated?

When it comes to curiosity, The Incomplete Map of the Cosmic Genome is here to help—as a different kind of guide to modern thoughts on why we are as we are and why the Universe is as it is.

What started as an idea for a documentary is now an app by writer and comedian Robin Ince and writer and director Trent Burton, and involves a growing number of leading scientists, writers, and performers from around the world, expressing their love of how far the human imagination combined with scientific thinking can get us.

Designed to be easily approachable and understandable to people who may not have picked up a science book since they left school, The Incomplete Map of the Cosmic Genome aims to cover all sciences and be updated every month with new ideas, people, theories, explanations, and videos of science’s most recent endeavors.

It’s like an interactive magazine-documentary-television show all in one. Whether it is Richard Dawkins taking a good fifteen minutes to explain the selfish gene theory or Helen Czerski detailing the importance of bubbles, it will be an entertaining resource, but also an inspiration to dig further into these topics. And TIMOTCG makes the digging easier with plenty of external links to more articles, papers, and videos right inside the app.

Kylie: Firstly, how did the two of you meet and how did this project start?

Robin: We met because Trent used to go to a comedy night I did called “The Book Club.” I believe this is correct. Then needed someone to do commentary on…What the hell did I do? What was that called?

Trent: It was a documentary I directed about mathematicians and statisticians who had left their jobs to go play online poker because they basically worked out a system that they could make millions off online poker. Robin narrated that.

Robin: We were doing a bizarre documentary and I do very little narration—we basically sat in a room for a day in West London and I had to read this script with an incredible number of words, just an incredible amount of speech. One of those things where they go, “We’ve only got five seconds. Can you say this—and make sure that within that you include that line about Euclidian geometry of card playing?”

You go, “OK.” And so, it was basically watching a man stumble over words for an entire day.

Trent: Very hard from memory!

Robin: Yes, it was one of those booths filled with the white heat of unpleasant advertising money that was required to make this. Am I allowed to say that or will you work with them again?

Trent: No, no. It’s OK!

Kylie: I kind of spotted that Trent’s got an Australian accent like me…

Trent: I do. It won’t leave me!

Robin: Is it still good? One of the things that I like is my sister lives in Australia and she’s lived there for twenty years. She lives there in Tasmania. Of course she is too English to be Australian and now when she returns here she is too Australian to be accepted by English society. You don’t seem to have lost any of your accent, Trent. You seem to very much still represent the alpha male of Australia!

Trent: Yes, I secretly watch my AFL in a quiet corner!

Kylie: So, there you were getting involved in science documentaries—how did it lead to an app?

Robin: Originally it was going to be a documentary. We had this idea based around one of the shows that I was doing at the time last year, a stand up show called “Happiness Through Science.”

I thought, “Why don’t we make a documentary where there’s so much talk about the idea, even now, where science is this cold, clinical thing where people gather facts and they have a different kind of mind to all other human beings.”

Having met so many people doing things like the radio show, “Infinite Monkey Cage,” and various live events, knowing the enthusiasm of scientists and their passions and also the idiocies that all other human beings have, as well—I wanted to make a documentary which showed the excitement of scientific ideas and of rationalists, that in no way does it remove the poetry and the excitement of self-conscious existence in the universe.

We tried to get the documentary shown anyway. British TV companies, they normally need a level of celebrity and that kind of stuff and we didn’t really want to make it like that.

That’s when Trent came up with the idea. He said, “Young people love apps.” I don’t. I can’t even look at the app that we’ve made because I don’t have the technology so I have really no idea what’s on there but it’s lovely, this kind of Schrodinger’s App that exists in my mind. And that was it! There were so many ideas that once you sit down with a scientist and they start talking about whether it is bubbles or bonobos or big bang or whatever, you don’t want to turn it into a sound-bite thing.

To the scientists, I said, “Don’t feel you have to answer this as if you’re doing a TV documentary and you have to get everything in forty-five seconds. We want to have you talking to us as lengthily as you wish,” which is sometimes an error because it turns out some people…Well, when it gets to the second hour when they’re talking about their particular favourite particle that they might have discovered while working at the LHC, we realize some editing is required!

Trent: When you ask Ben Goldacre to talk about antivaxers at length he does. He really does!

Robin: I think Ben was one of them because when I first worked with Ben Goldacre and I first put him on stage and said, “Don’t worry too much about time.” He went on stage at 11:00 pm, which is late to be talking about epidemiology anyway with an audience that have been drinking!

But when it hit midnight that was the point where I had to try and work out some gesture which was meant to say, “Wrap up,” which I think he maybe thought meant, “Talk faster, but continually, at length.”

Kylie: Brilliant. Obviously, documentary making is a background that Trent has. What about the science element? What led you to think, “OK, let’s start heading more into the science and the apps, in that regard?”

Trent: Me, well I did science at university originally, at Edith Cowan University in Perth; I was there for a few years and then went to Murdoch to do art, which was a much more lucrative industry, obviously!

Kylie: Yeah, having majored originally in philosophy I know what you mean!

Trent: And then I’ve just sort of spent the last six or so years somehow merging the two.

Robin: You did philosophy? What is the problem with philosophy versus science? We were talking about this with AC Grayling recently, most of which don’t think we use on the app because it was officially off camera. There was an article that I wrote with Brian Cox at the end of last year. We had an enormous number of philosophers of science and then we attempted to argue with philosophers but that takes a long period of time due to the number of definitions required per sentence.

Kylie: I think that I have to send you a new book by Massimo Pigliucci because he, for me, is the great example of a bridge between philosophy and science! Back to the app however—how about the opening quote from Cosmic Genome app: “The boundaries of our ignorance increase daily.” How does the app address that specifically?

Robin: One of the things I quite enjoy is the fact that because it’s called the “Incomplete Map of the Cosmic Genome,” which is mainly another one of my stupid titles like, “Infinite Monkey Cage.” It’s not meant to really mean too much but we’re really getting people going, “Should I wait until it’s complete?”

I go, “No, no, no. The idea is that it will always be incomplete!” Human knowledge, the idea that we will eventually get to the end... “Oh, I think we know everything now” seems wastefully preposterous!

I think with the current human condition, we’re beyond a few thousand years before we get to the end of all knowledge. We’re trying to just put out as many ideas as possible—first of all, so people don’t feel threatened by some of the big ideas of physics, of biology, of chemistry, biochemistry, et cetera and inspire them to want to know more and realising you don’t have to just pick up a science book and if it’s difficult go, “Oh, I can’t do that,” and give up. When they finish a book and they think, “I’ve just read a book on quantum physics and I still don’t understand it all. That’s too much effort.”

One of the things behind the app is the idea there are lots of wonderful ideas and you don’t have to know the answers to find that ideas can still illuminate your world. You don’t have to get to the end to go, “Now I see some form of light!” The light is there all the way as you continue to just make that journey of trying to know more. That’s why it’s littered with scientists and science enthusiasts talking about their favourite ideas.

The ideas that I’ve offered, of course they haven’t come to a conclusion. One of those things that I talk about a lot in my new show which is we’re not looking at ideas being right. We’re looking at coming up with things that are the least wrong. This is the least wrong answer we have now. Hopefully in another 10 years, in another 100 years, in another 1,000 years we will have an answer that is less wrong than that.

That’s part of what it is. With all of these different people talking, we are building up a body of knowledge that is hopefully less wrong than it was a decade ago.

Trent: That’s what’s nice about being an app, as well, rather than it just being a documentary that sits there. We can update it in February—“Remember that thing we said back in June? We’re less wrong now. This is what we think now!” We can continually keep self-correcting!

Robin: For example, there’s an example that I’ve got in my show, which involves an idea of singularity and black holes. And, of course, people are all, “Oh you do know that...”

I go “Yes, yes, yes—I can’t update all the jokes to the show constantly with the changing scientific knowledge. But yes, I have taken that on board but unfortunately by using that piece of scientific evidence, the punch line doesn’t work as well. So we’re relying on January’s scientific knowledge to get to a better punch line!”

Trent: We interviewed a couple of guys recently who have a new book coming out called...I think it’s called “The Big Questions in Science.” One of the questions Robin asks them, which was, “When you finished writing it are you worried that by the time it’s published and people buy it you might actually have some of the things wrong?”

I think their answer was, “No, we tried to pick things that will at least be right until the publish date and then after that you’re on your own.”

Robin: Yeah, and then they can update it for the paperback edition. That’s why with science, I think that’s something that more people need to know is that there is a constantly changing body of knowledge, sometimes very minor changes, sometimes major changes.

Kylie: I love the excitement of it. For example, I was teaching ethics earlier this year and the very morning I was going to talk about ethics and genetics a mouse had been cloned from a drop of blood and I was able to run into class and say, “You will not believe it, guys. Guess what happened this morning? Isn’t this awesome? Debate. Go.”

It was brilliant. I guess I was a little bit worried when I saw the app. I thought, “Oh, is it a quote of the day from a scientist?” But it’s not. There’s book clubs and everything in here. You’ve got so many options of what you can do with the information.

Robin: That’s what we want it to be because we’ve had a lot of people asking about why it’s not on more formats, why it’s not Android yet. There are many, many different reasons. People say, “Can’t you just make a simpler version?”

We don’t want to make a simpler version. Already we’re using the periodic table for the front page where you can bounce around scientist and science enthusiasts there and we already know that will be filled by the end of the year so we’ve now had to think, “What’s part two of a piece of design?” Which means you actually enjoy the experience of playing with it.

Kylie: Oh, I’ve got good news. They’ve just added a new one to the periodic table so just keep on going as they add more elements.

Trent: I saw that yesterday, so we get an extra one before we have to design something new.

Robin: I’m going to ring AC Grayling now and tell him we can fit him in, after all! We didn’t want it to be sound bytes. Some people look to the trailer and think “Is that all it is?”

I go, “No, the reason it’s called a trailer is that that’s not the full thing. It’s not just Richard Dawkins saying, ‘I think The Selfish Gene is a fabulous and exciting idea. The end.’ It’s Richard Dawkins talking for 15 minutes about the idea of The Selfish Gene. What inspired him to write the book and the science that is behind it.”

That’s, again, something that I think television can’t do as much and a lot of other forms can’t do. It’s a bit like podcasts versus radio. Podcasts allow you to have a much longer form of dialog. It doesn’t have to be chopped up where you go, “Yeah, that’s sounds like the end of a sentence. We can end it here.”

Trent: What’s nice about that long form, as well, it goes back to what you were saying earlier, is that just by sticking the camera there and letting people talk, it humanizes these people in white coats. The more you see them thinking, you see them making mistakes and changing their mind, and then you see the enthusiasm as they remember something else that that’s reminded them of.

Rather than having to go, “We didn’t like that version. Can you do another one that fits in this bracket, while you’re looking at that thing for TV?” It’s just nice to let people talk like humans talk, and in the transcripts, we’ve made sure that we put in some of those stutters, and some of the trying to remember what people are saying.

Robin: For most of the participants, the first thing is they just lean, and go, “What exactly is this?” As if we know. We don’t as yet!

Trent: There was a magazine the other day that said the app was “Chaotic, yet hugely engaging,” which I took as a brilliant compliment. That’s essentially what we’re doing.

Robin: I want people to, in that same way that, when I’m reading a book, I finish very few books. I get to a point where I read about someone, or something, or some idea, and I think, “Oh, I want to know about that now.” You play a mental “tag” game all of the time. I think that’s what the app can do, which is you’re constantly playing “tag.”

You might get to the end of a bit of an interview with Steve Jones, or at some point, and go, “Hang on, you just talked about...Oh. There’s a person Helen Czerski, she talks about that idea. I’m going to have a quick look at that.” You might stop halfway through an interview, to suddenly leap to another scientist.

Kylie: That’s exactly what I ended up doing!

Robin: Good, that’s exactly the right thing!

Trent: It works!

Robin: I think with the next edition, we’re at, what? Fifty-six or fifty-seven people?

Trent: A bit less. Fifty-two I think...

Robin: That “tag” game gets better and better. As I said, by the end of the year we’re certainly up to 120.

Kylie: You mentioned demographics. What is the target demographic? Apart from people like myself, who has the shortest attention span, they’re really keen on science, and like to hop all over the place with my brand new iPad.

Trent: Humans.

Robin: It’s exactly that thing, where we didn’t put much thought into it, apart from...The stand-up shows that I do, I think, all I need from an audience is that they have some level of interest.

That they’re interested in the world, and they don’t just want rehashed ideas of, “Hey, you know when you’re drunk, don’t you do this?” “I do! I do! Thank you for telling me! Yes, that was a reminder! I do that.”

All we require is a certain level of open-mindedness and interest. You certainly don’t have to be a scientist in any way.

Trent: Also, it leads you on to stuff that you may not know about: Chris Addison talking about “Ascent of Man” is a good example. I imagine a lot of people who know Chris Addison will have never have heard of that TV series. They watch that, and they might go back and watch one of the greatest science series there’s ever been, essentially.

Robin: You always end up, the way you say “Ascent of Man” sounds like it’s some kind of perfume that Bronowski made. I smell corduroy, Sagan, Bronowski! It’s in the air!

Trent: It’s a new documentary I’m working on. You have to narrate later. It’s very evocative.

Robin: The pheromones of litmus paper!

Kylie: You already said over fifty people have been involved in this. What are some of your goals, in terms of participants?

Robin: We’ve actually got about ninety in the can!

Trent: Yeah, we filmed close to a hundred people already, they’re just not all in the app yet.

Kylie: Are people offering themselves up to be interviewed?

Robin: Yes, it’s a nice thing that we’re seeing, which is as people...In fact, from the people who’ve been involved, and from scientists who’ve seen it, it has been universally positive.

Hopefully, as I said, what we’re trying to create is some enormous archive of people’s ideas, but also the people themselves.

Someone said they saw a clip of the Dawkins piece that goes up soon, and they went, “Oh, he doesn’t talk about religion at all!” No—because Richard Dawkins is someone who’s written very beautiful books about science. For some people this seems to be a surprise, because of course, in the media, he’s predominantly now known as that atheist who gets angry every now and again.

That’s the other thing, is that we want to show the real personality behind these people. That’s to me one of the most important things behind this, is the humanity behind the endeavor of understanding the universe.

These people are not people with, as I said before, brains that are so different that they just sit there and they take in the numbers, and they go, “Good, I’ve got the numbers that are required to give us the answer.”

That’s not what Richard Feynman was like. That is not what most of the people that we particularly admire are like. They are people who really are very excitable individuals.

Trent: It’s also a nice opportunity to get people, obviously like Brian Cox, and Richard Dawkins and them are on the TV as it is, but there’s lots of people that have incredible research that just don’t have a platform where they can get out and say “This is what I’m doing. Isn’t this amazing?” Being able to give those people somewhere they can actually say, “I now live in Antarctica, and hunt for neutrinos beneath icebergs,” which is someone we’ve got coming up in a couple of months. It’s great to be able to hear those stories.

Robin: It’s that excitement. I remember the first time that I started to actually really understand some idea of what a neutrino was. When you first hear about it, as a non-scientist like me, you go, “What do you mean neutrinos are passing through our body all the time? That doesn’t make any sense at all!”

Then you keep reading and reading, and then you go, “Now I get it!” I’m beginning to get that idea, in the same way as when you first start to get the idea of what happens when particles collide, and what they’re trying to understand—and it’s just a really exciting story.

Check out the new updates on the official site at http://cosmicgenome.com and follow developments on Twitter at https://twitter.com/cosmicgenome.

Leonardo da Vinci not only epitomizes genius and creativity, but he is also one of the most sought-after sources of mysteries, both real and invented. Probably the most famous example of this is The Da Vinci Code’s many legends linked to this inventor, but there are many other examples, as we shall see.

Leonardo the Heretic

According to some authors of historical fiction, Leonardo was a heretic. Evidence of this is supposedly hidden in his painting The Last Supper, where it is said that the Master himself expressed his belief that Christ was married to Mary Magdalene. The woman is to be identified with the Apostle showing feminine traits and sitting to the right of Jesus. Further evidence in support of the genius’s heresy would be the lack of the chalice with the wine on the table, symbol of the Eucharist, and the presence of a disembodied hand holding a menacing knife.

What are the facts? In reality, for The Last Supper, the magnificent mural painting adorning the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milano, Italy, Leonardo took his inspiration from the Gospel of John, where there is no mention either of the chalice with the wine or of the Eucharist. In addition, the hand with the knife belongs to Peter (as demonstrated by the preparatory drawings by Leonardo preserved at the Windsor Royal Library) and refers to an episode in the Gospel, where Peter cuts the ear of the servant of the High Priest. Finally, the delicate appearance of John belongs to the iconography of the time, where the younger apostle, Jesus’s favorite, was always represented as a teenager with long hair and gentle features.

Leonardo and his Virgin of the Rocks painting.

Esoteric Symbols Everywhere

Although maybe not a heretic, and certainly not a devout Catholic, it is possible that Leonardo may have been in contact with ideas that, at his time, were considered heretical, such as neo-Platonic and Gnostic ones. The latter, for example, included belief in Sophia, the mother goddess who created the world, which Leonardo might have wanted to represent with Leda, a lost painting. In some remaining copies of the painting, the great mother is seen as a “cosmic egg,” from which other eggs give rise to humans. The Gnostics also believed that there were two forms of Jesus, one carnal, who died on the cross, and one that was only spirit. Another famous painting by Leonardo, the Virgin of the Rocks, shows two children similar to one another: perhaps the one commonly referred to as John the Baptist was actually Jesus’s double and his identity was disguised in order to get it accepted by the religious clients. Unlikely, but no one can tell for sure today.

Another question then concerns Leonardo’s propensity to often portray St. John the Baptist. Some people wondered if this attachment to the saint did not conceal something else, maybe the adherence to the cult of St. John, the same one held by the Knights of the Order of Malta. However, these are assumptions that art historians are still questioning.

Was Leonardo a Member of the Priory of Sion?

The entire Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (note the absurdity of calling the Master not by his name, Leonardo, but by the name of the town where he was born, Vinci, apparently believing it to be his surname) revolves around the mysterious and ancient sect of the “Priory of Sion,” keeper of secrets and founded by the ever-present order of the Templars. It is said that among its members there were luminaries such as Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and of course Leonardo. In reality, the sect was invented out of whole cloth by Frenchman Pierre Plantard in 1956. Plantard took the name “Priory of Sion” from a hill above Annemasse, where he planned to install a retreat house. As for the list of the “initiated,” Plantard copied it from the list of alleged “Imperators,” that is, the supreme heads, of the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, founded in 1915 in the United States by another creator of fantasies, Harvey Spencer Lewis, with whom Plantard was in contact. Anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic, and a member of the French right, Plantard orchestrated this plot in order to create a historical line, likely to prove his own descent from the Merovingian as an heir to a dynasty lost in the mists of history, giving him wide room to maneuver and a huge advantage over many orders of competing Grand Masters and maybe leading him to a leading political role. It didn’t work.

Leonardo Author of the Shroud of Turin?

According to Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, the Shroud of Turin was the work of Leonardo. Writer Victoria Hazel interprets a passage in the Codex Atlanticus as a “confession” on the part of its author: “When I painted Domene God an infant, you put me in prison: now, if I do him big, you will make me worse things.” Not only that, according to Lillian Schwartz, the face of the Shroud fits with the self-portrait of Leonardo and would therefore be an experiment in pre-photographic techniques devised by the genius of Vinci.

In fact, the historical sources (the first written reference to the Shroud is a memorial in 1389), as well as the scientific radiocarbon dating, show that the Shroud was prepared in a period of time included between 1260 and 1390. It is therefore likely to be a work of art, but very unlikely that it was painted by Leonardo, since it was already around at least for a century before he was born.

Mirror Writing

Leonardo possessed an unusual mirror writing technique; that is, he wrote going from right to left and often started to write on the last sheet, and then reached the first. This peculiarity has often been interpreted as an attempt put in place by Leonardo to keep his work secret and incomprehensible to most people. Those who considered him a heretic had even come to call it the “writings of the devil” because of this characteristic. In fact, it was his spontaneous way of writing. Neurologists have shown that his was a habit acquired in childhood, natural for lefties that were not corrected, as Leonardo was. He wrote also with “normal” calligraphy, but with less ease and especially in demonstrative occasions, such as for some topographic maps. Not surprisingly, Leonardo did dictate to others his letters of introduction.

Who Is Actually the Mona Lisa?

The identity of the woman depicted in the most famous portrait in the world has long been debated. Some authors have suggested, citing evidence not always credible, that the woman was a Sforza, perhaps Catherine, or her mother, Caterina Buti del Vacca, or even her half-sister Bianca. In addition, there are those who think that the Mona Lisa is nothing less than a self-portrait of Leonardo, as shown by a superposition of the two faces to the computer. In fact, it is quite certain that the woman portrayed is Lisa Gherardini, that is, “Monna” (short for “Madonna” or as we would say today “Lady”). Lisa, wife of Francesco del Giocondo (hence “Gioconda,” as the painting is also called). Rather more difficult to exactly establish, however, is the location in the background. The bridge on the right is reminiscent of one in Buriano, near Arezzo, but it is more likely that this is an idealized landscape dreamed up by Leonardo.

The Lost Remains of Leonardo

Finally, one last mystery: What happened to the remains of Leonardo? His tomb no longer exists and no one knows where his bones lie now. At his death he was buried in the Church of Saint-Florentin in Amboise, France. But in 1802, due to the erosion of time and revolutionary vandalism, the ruins of the chapel were destroyed, and the gravestones and tombstones were used to restore the castle. Children used to play with the abandoned bones, so a gardener picked them up and buried them. In 1863, the poet Arsène Houssaye discovered an intact skeleton, with a bent arm and a very broad skull. Not far from that spot he also unearthed fragments of a slab half deleted with the following readable letters: EO DUS VINC. It is perhaps Latin for Leonardus Vincius? These bones ended up in the castle of Amboise, where they still are and where it is stated that they “supposedly” belong to Leonardo.

But, like many other questions sur­rounding the incredible life of the Renaissance marvel, this one will probably remain forever unanswered as well.

Although Sasquatch—after 1958 generally called Bigfoot—is most associated with the Pacific North­west (a region loosely ranging from northern California to Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and southern Alaska), sightings are reported throughout the United States and Canada (Bord and Bord 2006). Many of these turn out to be hoaxes—notably Roger Patterson’s filming of “Bigsuit” in 1967. (He used a gorilla suit purchased from costume-seller Phil Morris, converted it to Bigfoot by modifying the face and adding pendulous breasts, and enlisted a man named Bob Heironimus to wear the suit [Long 2004; Nickell 2011, 68–73].) Many other Bigfoot sightings are no doubt misperceptions resulting from expectation and excitement (Nickell 2011, 94–96).

But misperceptions of what? Over my years as a skeptical cryptozoologist, I have looked for real, natural lookalikes to explain various reported “monsters.” For example, the round-faced, gliding, “Flatwoods Monster” of 1952 with its “terrible claws” seemed almost certainly to be a barn owl, just as “Mothman” of 1966, with its large, shining red eyes, could be identified as a barred owl (Nickell 2011, 159–66, 175–81). Again the legendary “giant eel” of Lake Crescent, Newfoundland, was probably inspired by otters swimming in a line (who are also known to be mistaken for some lake and sea monsters) (Nickell 2007; 2012a). Given these and other examples of monster lookalikes—I think of my work in this regard as that of a paranatural naturalist—we may ask: Are there animals that might be mistaken for Bigfoot?

A Candidate

As it happens, there is one especially good candidate for many sightings of Bigfoot—even for some of the non-hoaxed imprints of his big feet. The earliest record of potential Sasquatch footprints comes from an explorer named David Thompson, who while crossing the Rockies at what is today Jasper, Alberta, came upon a strange track in the snow. Measuring eight by fourteen inches, it had four toes with short claw marks, a deeply impressed ball of the foot, and an indistinct heel imprint (Green 1978, 35–37; Hunter with Dahinden 1993, 16–17).

The claws do not suggest the legendary man-beast. Indeed, John Napier, a primate expert at the Smithsonian Institution and author of Bigfoot (1973, 74), thought the print could well have been a bear’s (whose small inner toe might not have left a mark). Thompson himself thought it likely “the track of a large old grizzled bear” (quoted in Hunter with Dahinden 1993, 17).

But what about sightings? It is not uncommon for eyewitnesses to state that at first impression their Bigfoot looked like a bear, thus proving the similarity (see Figure 1). Yet many go on to rule out that identification, based on some aspect of appearance or behavior. However, as considerable evidence in fact shows, many Sasquatch/Bigfoot encounters may well have been of bears. Mistaken identifications could be due to poor viewing conditions, such as the creature being seen only briefly, or from a distance, in shadow or at nighttime, through foliage, or the like—especially while the observer is, naturally, excited. Non-expert observation is also problematic, as is expectancy, the tendency of people who are expecting to see a certain thing to be misled by something resembling it (Nickell 2012b, 347).

Comparisons

A published compilation of 1,002 American and Canadian Sasquatch/Bigfoot reports from 1818 to November 1980 is instructive (Bord and Bord 2006, 215–310). Analysis of the cases (which are presented as brief abstracts) reveals that not only general anatomy but also color variations, footprints, behavior, and geographical distribution of Sasquatch/Bigfoot are often quite similar to those of bears.

Anatomy. Bigfoot is typically de­scribed as a large, hairy man-beast. It is said to walk on two legs, to have long arms, large shoulders, and, often, no neck. Although it is frequently likened to an ape, it has been reported many times to have claws (Bord and Bord 2006, 215–310; Wright 1962).

Like Bigfoot, bears can appear as large, big-shouldered, hairy, manlike beasts. Their anatomy is consistent with bipedal standing (hence the long “arms”) though much less so with walking—and, according to the Smithsonian expert John Napier (1973, 62), “At a distance a bear might be mistaken for a man when standing still. . . .” Consider this incident of a creature on the porch of a ranch house in western Washington State in 1933 (related at second hand, years later, by the daughter of the woman who observed it):

It was moonlight outside, and at first she thought it was a bear on the porch, but this animal was standing on its back legs and was so large it was bending over to look in the window. She said it appeared over 6 feet tall and it didn’t look like a bear at all in the moonlight. She said in a few minutes it walked over [no doubt only a couple of steps] and jumped off the porch and started around the house. She went into the kitchen so she could get a good look and she said it looked just like an ape. (Lund 1969)

Ape, Bigfoot, bear? You decide, but remember, this was bear territory. And a standing black bear can be up to seven feet tall (Yosemite 2013).

During several days in April 2013 in New York State’s massive Adirondack Park, where there are scattered Bigfoot encounters, I talked to hunters and others who had witnessed standing bears. One man, at whose remote home I boarded for an evening, told me of once standing face to face with a black bear: it was on its hind legs looking in the window at him!

Figure 1. Split-image illustration compares a standing bear (left) to the creature it is often mistaken for, Sasquatch/Bigfoot (right). Drawing by Joe Nickell.

The often-reported action of Bigfoot running on all fours is entirely consistent with a bear, as in a case of late April 1897. Near Sailor, Indiana, two farmers witnessed a man-sized beast covered with hair walking on its hind legs, but it “afterwards dropped on its hands and disappeared with rabbit-like bounds” (Bord and Bord 2006, 23, 221). No doubt the “hands” were really paws. Again, in 1970, a Manitoba man saw a seven-foot, dark Bigfoot “stand up” by the roadside at night. And in 1972, at an Iowa state park, a seven-foot brown Bigfoot was shot at and “ran away on all fours” (Bord and Bord 2006, 260, 264; see also Green 1978, 246, 178).

One Bigfoot report was inspired when, in April 1978, a Maryland farmer saw a “bear” walking upright across a field, followed by two “smaller creatures on all fours” (Bord and Bord 2006, 300). This is consistent with a mother bear in alert mode with cubs. Bears often stand on their hind legs to look and to sniff the air, and black bears usually have a litter of two, born in January or early February (“Black Bears” 2013; Whitaker 1996, 703). And so, apparently, a stated bear encounter was converted by enthusiasts into a sighting of “Bigfoot.” Some months earlier, in the fall of 1977, two South Dakota boys (ages twelve and nine) saw only “long hairy legs” in the bushes (Bord and Bord 2006, 294), and that likely bear became another “Bigfoot.” Reports of Bigfoot’s gait as “peculiar” or the like (Bord and Bord 2006, 290, 291) could be consistent with the awkward gait of an upright bear.

Coloration. Like descriptions of Sasquatch/Bigfoot, black bears can not only be black but also dark brown, brown, cinnamon, blond, off-white, and white (Herrero 2002, 131–34). The same is true of grizzly (brown) bears (Ursus arctos), which—just like a Bigfoot reported in northern California (Bord and Bord 2006, 246)—often has dark-brown, silver-tipped hair (Herrero 2002, 133; Whitaker 1996, 706).

“To confuse the novice further,” states a noted authority, “there are also variations in color patterning on the coats of each species.” This is due to genetic factors and to molting. With most bears, a lightening in the color of the coat occurs between molts (Herrero 2002, 133, 134).

In nighttime sightings, color may go unreported, but the animal’s eye-shine is frequently described. There are numerous reports of “gleaming eyes,” “large glowing eyes,” “green shining eyes,” “glowing amber eyes,” and the like, including occasionally “red eyes” (Bord and Bord 2006, 259–300). Generally, bear eyeshine is reported as ranging “from yellow to yellowish orange, though some people report seeing red or green” (“Backpacker” 2013). The North American Bear Center mentions a black bear with mismatched eyes, due to an injured eye that “shines red rather than yellow” (“Mating” 2013).

Footprints. Bigfoot has been re­ported to leave tracks that had two to six toes and ranged in length up to twenty or more inches (Bord and Bord 2006, 215–310). Of course, many large tracks—like the fourteen-inch ones of Patterson’s “Bigsuit” creature—are hoaxed (Nickell 2011, 66–75; Daegling 2004, 157–87).

As to bears, Napier (1973, 150–51) observes that “The hindfoot of the bear is remarkably human-like,” and that near the end of summer when worn down, the claws “may not show up at all” in tracks. Also at moderate speeds the hindfoot and forefoot prints may superimpose to “give the appearance of a single track made by a bipedal creature” (Napier 1973, 151).

Bears’ five-toed hindprints range from about seven to nine inches long for the black bear to approximately ten to twelve for the grizzly (brown) bear, although some can be more than sixteen inches, and “In soft mud, tracks may be larger” (Whitaker 1996, 704, 707). As bear expert Herrero cautions: “I don’t give measurements because track size varies so much depending on substratum. If a track seems very large, look at other track characteristics.”

A bear’s smallest toe (the innermost one, as opposed to that of humans) “may fail to register” (Whitaker 1996, 704), no doubt explaining many four-toed “Bigfoot” tracks. As well, “In mud a black bear’s toe separation may not show” (Herrero 2002, 178), possibly giving rise to the illusion that—depending on just where there might be a slight separation—a “four”-toed track might appear to have been made with only two very broad toes, or even perhaps three. Rare, six-toed tracks (unlikely for either Bigfoot or bear) were found in Iowa in 1980 after a witness saw a “strange creature on all fours eating [a] carcass” (Bord and Bord 2006, 307). Except for the tracks (which were probably due to some anomaly like the overlapping of hind and fore feet), the creature is consistent with a bear.

None of the tracks mentioned in the 1,002 abstracts under study, representing reports from 1818–1980 (Bord and Bord 2006, 215–310), were reported to have dermal ridges (the friction ridges of, for instance, fingerprints). These are common to both apes and man, as well as, presumably, to an ape-man. (Although in 1982, a U.S. Forest Service patrolman discovered such prints in Oregon’s Blue Mountains, in the Mill Creek Watershed, noted Bigfoot skeptic Michael Dennett [1989] turned up evidence that those tracks were part of an elaborate hoax.)

Behavior. Bigfoot’s reported actions are quite varied. Aside from such outlandish reports as of a Sasquatch treating an Indian for snakebite or kidnapping people, numerous acts attributed to the fabled creature again have a ready explanation: bears. For example, Bigfoot often eats berries, fruit, grubs, vegetation such as corn, fish, animal carcasses, and human rubbish. It may be seen day or night. It often visits campsites, like one raided by a “cinnamon-colored Bigfoot” in Idaho in the summer of 1968 that left tooth marks on food containers. It also peers into homes and vehicles, and sometimes shows aggression (Bord and Bord 2006, 215–310; Merrick 1933).

Similarly, bears share these and other aspects of behavior with Bigfoot. For example, bears feed on most nonpoisonous types of berries (which they eat by moving their mouths along branches). As well, they tear open rotten logs for grubs, and they feed on fruit, corn, and other vegetation, fish, live or dead mammals, and human rubbish (Herrero 2002, 183, 149–71, 47; Whitaker 1996, 708). Bears likewise are encountered both day and night (Herrero 2002, 170; Whitaker 1996, 703–709). They visit homes, vehicles, and campsites looking for food, and they sometimes show aggression (Herrero 2002, 83–87; Whitaker 1996, 703–709). These and other parallels with Bigfoot are striking.

Then there are Bigfoot’s vocalizations—many of which could well be those of bears. For example, Bigfoot often growls (Bord and Bord 2006, 237, 256, 268). One “snarled and hissed” at witnesses (268), and another “chattered its teeth” (255), while others “screamed” when shot at (247, 252). Similarly, bears growl and snort, and they make loud huffing or puffing noises (Herrero 2002, 15, 16, 115). Their most common defensive display is “blowing with clacking teeth”; as well, they may bawl (from pain), moan (in fear), bellow (in combat), and make a deep-throated, pulsing noise (when seriously threatened). Cubs “readily scream in distress” (Rogers 1992, 3–4).

Distribution. The habitat of Bigfoot in the 1,002 abstracts we are studying—from 1818 to November 1980—is extensive. It includes most continental American states (excepting Delaware, Rhode Island, and South Carolina) and eight of thirteen Canadian provinces. The greatest number of sightings were in Washington State (110), followed by California (104), British Columbia (90), and Oregon (77)—that is, in the Pacific Northwest, the traditional domain of Sasquatch—followed by Pennsylvania and Florida (42 each). It is reportedly seen in woods and fields, along streams, and so on (Bord and Bord 2006, 215–310; Nickell 2011, 225–29).

The distribution of black bears is strikingly similar, as shown by population maps provided by the Audubon Society (Whitaker 1996, 704) and elsewhere (Herrero 2002, 80). America’s grizzly population was once quite extensive and included the western states (Herrero 2002, 4); however, grizzlies are now relegated mostly to Yellowstone Park (chiefly in northwest Wyoming) and its vicinity, and to portions of the northernmost areas of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, as well as most of British Columbia, Northwest Territories, the Yukon Territory, and Alaska (Herrero 2002, 4; Whitaker 1996, 708). Like Bigfoot, bears are also seen in woods and fields, along streams, and so on.

Assessment

Again and again come eyewitness reports of Bigfoot that sound like misreports of bears. In Washington State, for instance, in 1948, a man saw a “thin, black-haired, 6-ft Bigfoot squatting on [a] lake shore.” In September 1964 a Pennsylvania man spotted “Bigfoot peering in a window of his mother’s home at dusk,” while a man sleeping in his car in northwest California was “woken by Bigfoot shaking it.” In July 1966, a British Columbia woman saw “head and shoulders of Bigfoot above 6-ft raspberry bushes at night.” In June 1976, three Floridians saw a creature “6 ft tall, with long black hair, standing in a clump of pine trees.” In August 1980, two Pennsylvania men “Driving down a mountain, saw husky black hairy creature standing in road.” And so on, and on (Bord and Bord 2006, 230, 241, 244, 287, 309).

Let it be understood that I am in no way saying that all Sasquatch/Bigfoot sightings involve bears. After all, some are surely other misidentifications or hoaxes involving people in furry suits (Nickell 2011, 72–73). As well, Venezuela’s “Loy’s Ape” of the 1920s was identified as a large spider monkey, and two specimens of China’s legendary Yeren, shot in 1980, proved to be the endangered golden monkey (Nickell 2011, 85–87, 96).

I am merely pointing out, what should now be obvious, that many of the best non-hoax encounters can be explained as misperceptions of bears. Of creatures in North America, standing bears are the best lookalike for the bipedal, hairy man-beasts called Bigfoot. Bears also frequently behave like Bigfoot, and they are found in regions common to the legendary creature—no certain trace of which, in the fossil record or otherwise, has ever been discovered.

References

Backpacker Blogs. 2013. Ask a bear: What color are your eyes at night? Online at http://www.backpacker.com/ask_a_bear_night_eyes_shine/blogs/1944; accessed April 2, 2013.

“Black Bears.” 2013. Online at http://www.catskillmountaineer.com/animals-bears.html; accessed March 25, 2013.

Bord, Janet, and Colin Bord. 2006. Bigfoot Casebook Updated: Sightings and Encounters from 1818 to 2004. N.p.: Pine Winds Press.

Daegling, David J. 2004. Bigfoot Exposed. NY: AltaMira Press.

Dennett, Michael. 1989. Evidence for Bigfoot? An investigation of the Mill Creek ‘sasquatch prints.’” Skeptical Inquirer 13(3)(Spring): 264–72.

Green, John. 1978. Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us. Saanichton, BC: Hancock House.

Herrero, Stephen. 2002. Bear Attacks, rev. ed. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press.

Hunter, Don, with René Dahinden. 1993. Sasquatch/Bigfoot. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.

Long, Greg. 2004. The Making of Bigfoot. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Lund, Callie. 1969. Letter to John Green, quoted in Bord and Bord 2006, 31–33.

Mating Battle. 2013. Online at http://www.bear.org/website/bear-pages/black-bear/reproduction/14-mating-battle-combatants.html; accessed April 3, 2013.

Napier, John. 1973. Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality. New York: E.P. Dutton.

Nickell, Joe. 2007. Lake monster lookalikes. Skeptical Briefs (June): 6–7.

———. 2011. Tracking the Man-Beasts. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 2012a. CSI Paranormal. Amherst, NY: Inquiry Press.

———. 2012b. The Science of Ghosts. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Rogers, Lynn L. 1992. Watchable Wildlife: The Black Bear. Madison, WI: USDA Forest Service, North Central Station Distribution Center.

Whitaker, John O., Jr. 1996. National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mammals, rev. ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Wright, Bruce S. 1962. Wildlife Sketches Near and Far. Fredericton, NB: Brunswick Press. Quoted in Bord and Bord 2006, 35–37.

Yosemite Black Bears. 2013. Online at http://www.yosemitepark.com/bear-facts.aspx; accessed March 25, 2013.

The Raëlian Happiness Academy was the culmination of our five months undercover with the UFO-believing group. During those five months, we spent many hours in one Raëlian sister’s apartment, cross-legged and staring sublimely into one another’s eyes. At our third meeting, we arrived a bit late and found everyone in a semi-circle quietly staring at one another. Ross and I also sat quietly and stared, since it seemed the thing to do. I now know that if I ever enter a room full of dead people, it will take me at least thirty minutes to catch on.

At first, the staring was a bit unsettling, even creepy. Everyone was smiled at me, completely silent, while I adjusted my skirt and took the occasional baby carrot from an untouched display of food. It seemed a bit like open-eyed meditation or perhaps the way lovers gaze into one another’s eyes, but instead of two smitten lovebirds, we were ten UFO devotees, looking vacantly into each other’s souls. Not that the Raëlians believe in souls, per se. According to Raël, we can achieve immortality only through DNA replication. A soul extends as far as a chromosome.

When the silence finally ended, half an hour had passed. Gabriel, a man in his late thirties wearing a long tie-dye shirt, announced, “You know, all sickness is caused by stress.”

The rest of the members bobbed their heads in agreement. Ross and I looked at them, puzzled. Then we looked at each other. Then we looked at them again.

“Hm,” I said slowly, trying to sound more interested than concerned. “What about viruses and bacteria? Pathogens?”

“It’s the stress that lets them in,” Gabriel replied.

“What about cancer?” I asked.

“Cancer is caused by stress,” he said.

It was a bit early in our assimilation to fight him on this, but I was skeptical that all cancer could be reduced to simply too much time at the office.

“There’s new research all about it,” he said.

“So, tell me what you think about evolution,” Ross piped in, trying to change the subject. “It sounds like, with your respect for science, you probably share scientists’ view that we evolved from other species?”

A chuckle arose from the crowd. Winston, a devoted attendee who had become a good friend, grabbed his copy of Intelligent Design, written by Raël himself, who they say transcribed every word the aliens spoke to him while on a French mountaintop:

Evolution of the various forms of life on Earth is really the evolution of techniques of creation and the increased sophistication of the creators’ work. This eventually led them to create people similar to themselves... This continued right up to your present form, which is the exact replica of your creators who were afraid to create anything highly superior to themselves, although some were tempted to do so.¹

In other words, if you believe in evolution, the Raëlians don’t think you’re foolish for doing so. After all, our creators did leave behind traces of their handiwork that looks a lot like natural selection. But scientists have the mechanism all wrong. It wasn’t survival of the fittest; it was survival of the sexiest. That which excited the Elohim was developed, and that which displeased them was done away with. And what pleased them most were carbon copies of themselves.

The meeting carried on this way, not bound to the rules of an agenda or even the standard rules of conversation. Members would make sudden announcements of inspired wisdom, seemingly unrelated to the topic at hand. Eventually, they got to talking about the Happiness Academy, which was coming up in a few months.

“It’s amazing,” they said. “There’s nothing like it. Will you two be joining us?”

Ross and I explained that we both had jobs that might prevent us from attending the entire week but that we were looking forward to coming to part of the event and to getting our “transmissions,” the Raëlian version of a baptism. Linda’s face lit up. She was our hostess and one of the highest-ranking members of the organization. She wore a long, flowing white dress made of sheer fabric and bounced with joy when she spoke.

“You will be receiving your transmissions!” she said, her eyes watering with pride. She told us about her own baptism, and how central it had been in her life. The Raëlians believe that during the ceremony an individual who has devoted his or herself to the beliefs of Raël has their DNA uploaded to a “master computer” flying overhead in a spacecraft. There, the Elohim begin the process of cloning each Raëlian. The only shot we have at eternity is to have our DNA cloned forever.

“I’m so excited for you both!” she said. Then she guided us all to her living room to watch a History Channel special on aliens. A statue of the Buddha holding a swastika sat in the corner of the room, watching over us.

***

The monthly meetings went on like this, with unplanned talks and organic finger foods. Each conversation would start relatively normally, and though the Raëlians certainly attracted a certain type of follower (the kind who might wear eight scarves during the summer), I rarely felt like much of an outsider. It was almost as if they weren’t a sex-obsessed movement based on the belief that a racecar driver could speak to aliens.

When it was time to register for the Happiness Academy, Ross and I signed up eagerly. We would only be able to make two of the days, but it was better than nothing. And anyway, we would be there for our transmissions. After all, our eternal lives—our DNA—was at stake.

Read the last installment about Carrie’s experience with the Raëlians in the next Poppycock.

¹ Raël, “Intelligent Design,” 2005. Pg. 92-93

Miracles are pretty rare events. Except on television’s Dr. Oz Show, where they appear with astonishing frequency. Oz of course doesn’t claim to raise the dead or part the Red Sea, but he does raise people’s hopes of parting with their flab. And he’s certainly not shy about flinging the word miracle about. But it seems miracles fade as quickly as they appear. Raspberry ketones, acai berries, and African mango, once hyped as amazing “fat busters,” have already given way to newer wonders.

Granted, Dr. Oz—or more likely his producers—do not pull miracles out of an empty hat. They generally manage to toss in a smattering of stunted facts that they then nurture into some pretty tall tales. Like the ones about chlorogenic acid or Garcinia cambogia causing effortless weight loss. The former piqued the public’s interest when the great Oz introduced green coffee bean extract as the next diet sensation. Actually “chlorogenic acid” is not a single compound but rather a family of closely related compounds found in green plants, which perhaps surprisingly contain no chlorine atoms. The name derives from the Greek “chloro” for pale green and “genic” meaning “give rise to.” (The element chlorine is a pale green gas, hence its name.)

It was an “unprecedented” breakthrough, Oz curiously announced, apparently having forgotten all about his previous weight-control miracles. This time the “staggering” results originate from a study of green coffee bean extract by Joe Vinson (2012), a respected chemist at the University of Scranton who has a long-standing interest in antioxidants, such as chlorogenic acid. Aware of the fact that chlorogenic acid had been shown to influence glucose and fat metabolism in mice, Vinson speculated that it might have some effect on humans as well. Since chlorogenic acid content is reduced by roasting, a green coffee bean extract was chosen for the study.

In cooperation with colleagues in India who had access to volunteers, Vinson designed a trial whereby overweight subjects were given, in random order, for periods of six weeks each, either a daily dose of 1,050 mg of green coffee bean extract, a lower dosage of 700 mg, or a placebo. Between each six-week phase there was a two-week “washout” period during which the participants took no supplements. There was no dietary intervention; the average daily calorie intake was about 2,400. Participants burned roughly 400 calories a day with exercise. On average there was a loss of about a third of a kilogram per week. Interesting but hardly “staggering.” And there are caveats galore.

The study involved only eight men and eight women, which amounts to a very statistically weak sample. Their diet was self-reported, a notoriously unreliable method. The subjects were not really blinded since the high-dose regimen involved three pills and the lower dose only two pills. A perusal of the results also shows some curious features. For example, in the group that took placebo for the first six weeks, there was an eight kilogram weight loss during the placebo and washout phase, but almost no further loss during the high-dose and low-dose phases. By the time, though, that critics reacted to Oz’s glowing account, overweight people were already heading to the health food store to pick up some green coffee bean extract that might or might not contain the amount of chlorogenic acid declared on the label. As for Dr. Oz, he had already moved on to his next “revolutionary” product, Garcinia cambogia, unabashedly describing it as the “Holy Grail” of weight loss.

We were actually treated to the Grail in action. Sort of. Dr. Oz, with guest Dr. Julie Chen, performed a demonstration using a plastic contraption with a balloon inside that was supposed to represent the liver. A white liquid, supposedly a sugar solution, was poured in, causing the balloon, representing a fat cell, to swell. Then a valve was closed, and as more liquid was introduced, it went into a different chamber, marked “energy.” The message was that the valve represents Garcinia extract, which prevents the buildup of fat in fat cells. While playing with balloons and a plastic liver may make for entertaining television, it makes for pretty skimpy science.

Contrary to Dr. Oz’s introduction that “you are hearing it here first,” there is nothing new about Garcinia. There’s no breakthrough, no fresh research, no “revolutionary” discovery. In the weight-control field, Garcinia cambogia is old hat. Extracts of the rind of this small pumpkin-shaped Asian fruit have long been used in “natural weight loss supplements.” Why? Because in theory, they could have an effect.

The rind of the fruit, sometimes called a tamarind, is rich in hydroxycitric acid (HCA), a substance with biological activity that can be related to weight loss. Laboratory experiments indicate that HCA can interfere with an enzyme that plays a role in converting excess sugar into fat, as well as with enzymes that break down complex carbohydrates to simple sugars that are readily absorbed. Furthermore, there are suggestions that Garcinia extract stimulates serotonin release, which can lead to appetite suppression.

Laboratory results that point toward possible weight loss don’t mean much until they are confirmed by proper human trials. And there have been some: fifteen years ago a randomized trial involving 135 subjects who took either a placebo or a Garcinia extract equivalent to 1500 mg of HCA a day for three months, showed no difference in weight loss between the groups (Heymsfield et al. 1998). A more recent trial (Kim et al. 2011) involving eighty-six overweight people taking either two grams of extract or placebo for ten weeks echoed those results. In between these two major studies there were several others (Onakpoya et al. 2011), some of which did show a weight loss of about one kilogram over a couple of months, but these either had few subjects or lacked a control group.

Basically, it is clear that if there is any weight loss attributed to Garcinia cambogia, it is virtually insignificant. But there may be something else attributed to the supplement, namely kidney problems (Li and Bordelon 2011). Al­though incidence is rare, even one is an excess when the chance of a benefit is so small. So Garcinia cambogia, like green coffee bean extract, can hardly be called a miracle. But it seems Dr. Oz puts his facts on a diet when it comes to fattening up his television ratings.

References

Heymsfield, Steven B., David B. Allison, Joseph R. Vasselli, et al. 1998. Garcinia cambogia (hydroxycitric acid) as potential antiobesity agent: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of the American Medical Association 280. Online at http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=188147.

Kim, Ji-Eun, Seon-Min Jeon, Ki Hun Park, et al. 2011. Does Glycine max leaves or Garcinia cambogia promote weight-loss or lower plasma cholesterol in overweight individuals: A randomized control trial. Nutrition Journal 10. Online at http://www.nutritionj.com/content/10/1/94?a_aid=3598aabf.

Li, J.W., and P. Bordelon. 2011. Hydroxycitric acid dietary supplement-related herbal nephropathy. American Journal of Medi­cine 124(11): e5-6. doi: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2011.03.015.

Onakpoya, Igho, Shao Kang Hung, Rachel Perrt, et al. 2011. The use of Garcinia extract (hydroxycitric acid) as a weight loss supplement: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised clinical trials. Journal of Obesity. Online at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobes/2011/509038/abs/.

Vinson, Joe. 2012. Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, linear dose, crossover study to evaluate the efficacy and safety of a green coffee bean extract in overweight subjects. Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity: Targets and Therapy (January 17). Online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc3267522/.

The latest public confusion about climate change involves an apparent slowing of the rise of global temperatures. What is the reality concerning this putative temperature ‘plateau’?

Human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming has been a topic of major scientific interest for more than half a century, and its consequences are broadly apparent in rising surface and ocean temperatures, dramatic changes in Arctic ice, rising sea levels, and a multitude of stresses placed on ecosystems around the planet, such as poleward migration of bark beetles killing vast forests. However, some powerful organizations dispute the reality of this climate change and the role of the greenhouse effect as its cause. In the United States, there is widespread public confusion—or even outright denial—about global warming.

Atmospheric CO₂ as measured from the Mauna Loa Observatory since 1958. Note the small repeating seasonal variations. There is a steady overall increase from 315 to 400 ppm, and the slight upward curvature shows the acceleration in the deposition of CO₂. Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, and as such is the main driver of climate change. The increasing CO₂ greenhouse is causing an energy imbalance, with more heat added to the Earth every year. However, only a part of this excess energy goes to increase the surface air temperatures, which are also subject to a variety of other influences. Data from Pieter Tans, NOAA/ESRL (www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/) and Ralph Keeling, Scripps Institution of Oceanography (scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/).

A major recent source of public misunderstanding is the slowing of the rise of temperature (the so-called temperature “plateau”) that is apparent in annual average global surface temperature over the past fifteen years, following rapid warming in the preceding twenty-five years. Adding to some people’s bewilderment is the fact that atmospheric and climate scientists tend to downplay this supposed plateau and continue to assert that the planet is warming at a dangerous rate. What is the reality behind this divergence of opinion between scientists and their critics concerning the reality and significance of the putative plateau?

Evidence for Global Warming

Before addressing the surface temperature issue, it’s helpful to review the scientific case for continuing global climate change. The reality of the greenhouse effect and the implications of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been known since the pioneering work of Svante Arrhenius in 1896. The steady increase in atmospheric CO₂ since the beginning of the industrial revolution has been monitored directly since 1959 and reconstructed for earlier years from atmospheric samples trapped in ice. In May 2013 the concentration reached 400 ppm, 43 percent above pre-industrial CO₂ levels. This increase is almost entirely caused by human burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. Basic physics tells us that the increasing CO₂ greenhouse effect will affect the temperature of the planet; the key question is by how much.

In the past two decades we have been able, for the first time, to measure the greenhouse heating and to track where the excess heat is deposited. Excess greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere and reduce infrared radiation to space. The imbalance causes the Earth to absorb more energy than it radiates. Most of that energy is going into the ocean, not the surface or atmosphere. Global ocean temperatures are now measurable for the first time by the Argo deep ocean probes—an international network of more than 3,000 measuring stations that measure ocean temperatures down to two kilometers depth. One consequence of ocean heating is sea level rise from thermal expansion of the water, now taking place at an average rate of 3.3 ± 0.4 mm per year (based on data from 1993 to 2009).

The effects of global warming are visible in many natural systems. The most dramatic changes are in the Arctic. In the Arctic Ocean, the minimum summer ice cover has shrunk by more than 50 percent, and the residual ice is only about half as thick as it was thirty years ago. The Greenland ice sheet is rapidly shrinking, as measured by satellites that sense the total mass of ice, and in the summer of 2012 it lost an astounding 500 cubic kilometers of ice. Most of the ice does not melt in place, but surface melt water lubricates the ice flow and causes much more ice to flow into the sea. The warming ocean then supplies the energy to melt this ice. There is similar ice loss in the Antarctic, primarily by erosion of floating ice shelves from below by warmer seawater.

All this evidence demonstrates the recent acceleration of global warming. But what about the evidence from global surface temperatures?

The Temperature Plateau

The often-quoted global surface temperatures are a measurement of only a very small part of the global energy balance. However, they are important for two reasons. First, they are part of a continuous record of thermometer measurements that can be traced back a century and a half (and extended further into the past by geologists), unlike the measurements of deep ocean heat or polar ice loss, which are limited to the past few decades. Second, these measurements are easily appreciated by the public, relating to their sense of what warming means.

Surface temperatures fluctuate for many reasons other than greenhouse warming. For example, they are slightly affected by small variations in solar heating (the solar activity cycle). They are dominated on the short term by weather and by such multiyear cycles as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which involves major redistribution of heat between the ocean and the atmosphere. The year 1998 saw one of the largest ENSO events in history, with resulting high measured temperatures. For all of these reasons, climate scientists looking for the effects of greenhouse warming prefer to average surface temperatures over timescales longer than a decade to help smooth out the “noise” caused by the solar cycle, ENSO, and other short-term changes due to volcanic eruptions.

Two perspectives on the global average temperature changes since 1970. In the upper panel, the data are fit with a straight line. In the lower panel, they are fit with several straight-line segments, giving a “stair-step” fit. Both show the same temperature increase of 0.7 C over forty-two years, but we react differently depending on the way the data are presented. The plots show annual temperatures, relative to the average from 1964–1994. Data are averages from NASA (Goddard Institute for Space Studies), NOAA (National Climatic Data Center), and the UK Met Office (Hadley Centre). Figure compliments of Dana Nuccitelli (skepticalscience.com).

Climate is not the same as weather, nor is it defined by this short-term interannual variability. Climate has long been considered to be a twenty- to thirty-year average. So whatever plateau may appear in annual temperature records, it is dominated by short-term fluctuations. There is no plateau in climatologically significant temperature. However, we are impatient and unwilling to wait twenty to thirty years to assess the reality of climate change. Looking at just the past decade of surface temperature measurements, there is an apparent plateau.

The two charts on p. 9 illustrate two different ways to look at the same information. Both plot the measured global temperatures from 1970 to 2012. The first fits a straight line in order to derive an average rate of heating over the past half century. The second fits the same data with a series of straight lines. The multiple straight-line fits show a temperature plateau from 2001 to 2012.

These charts illustrate two equally plausible ways to look at the data. One indicates a steady increase in temperature; the other shows a stair step or “escalator.” Both show that the temperatures are rising, either continuously or episodically—take your choice. The temperatures in every decade over the past half-century have been higher than in the previous decade, and the two warmest years were both in the past decade, in 2005 and 2010.

Is the short-term temperature “plateau” significant? Perhaps, taken alone, it might be. But seen in the context of other evidence for a rapidly warming planet, this recent fluctuation in the surface temperature data is not evidence against global warming. Heat is being deposited on our planet, whether or not it yet shows up in short-term surface temperature data.

Conclusion

This short-term temperature plateau has become the primary argument of those who either question or outright deny the reality of human-caused global warming. Their argument is part of an overall denialist position that does not recognize the reality of climate science. Sometimes it is said that carbon dioxide is such a minor fraction of the atmosphere that it could not contribute to climate change, or even that it is absurd to imagine that anything humans do can have a major effect on our planet. This narrative asserts that climate scientists are simply seeing a correlation between temperatures and CO₂ concentration and claiming naively that this correlation implies causation. Therefore, if the temperatures do not rise steadily with CO₂, this disproves the entire idea of climate change.

The denialists do not acknowledge the broad-based evidence of climate change, or the thousands of scientific papers published annually that strengthen our understanding of climate and have never been rebutted scientifically. Their tactic is similar to that of the evolution deniers, who ignore entirely the research of evolutionary scientists and assert, simply, that biologists believe absolutely in the correctness of Darwin and have been naively interpreting all evidence according to a Darwinian dogma.

Those who deny climate science and evolutionary biology set up a strawman caricature of science and often succeed because so few people understand how science really operates.

For Further Reading

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/)

National Center for Science Education (http://ncse.com/climate)

NOAA: National Climatic Data Center (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.php)

Skeptical Science: Climate Change Myths (http://www.skepticalscience.com/fixednum.php)

Skeptical Science: Getting Skeptical about Global Warming Skepticism (http://www.skepticalscience.com/)

University Corporation for Atmospheric Re­search (https://www2.ucar.edu/news/backgrounders/understanding-climate-change-global-warming)