Pablo Sandoval

Let us stipulate that there is no magic. Sleight-of-hand, deception, illusion, and conjuring, yes, but no “real” magic. On this, most science-minded people agree. But when it comes to superstition, there has always been an additional, less obvious question. Of course, superstitions do not have a magical effect on the world, but do they have psychological benefits? Could superstitions make difficult situations easier to handle? Furthermore, if they have an emotional or psychological benefit, could they also produce better performance in situations where skill is involved? The psychological benefits of superstitions—if they exist—would not be expected to change your luck at the roulette wheel, but perhaps an actor’s pre-performance ritual could reduce anxiety, allowing for better acting.

Despite several decades of research on superstition, these questions remained unanswered for many years. Most researchers assumed superstitions were irrational and focused their attentions on discovering why people were superstitious. It was often assumed that there might be some direct psychological benefits of superstition, but these were rarely studied.

Then in 2010 there was a great advance—or so it seemed. Researchers at the University of Cologne in Germany conducted the now famous golf ball study (Damisch et al. 2010). Participants were given a putter and asked to hit a golf ball into a cup on the carpet of a laboratory. Half the participants were handed a ball and told, “This ball has been lucky today.” The other half were told “This is your ball.” As it turned out, more than 80 percent of the German participants reported believing in the concept of good luck, and when the results were tallied, the researchers discovered that participants in the lucky ball group sank significantly more of their putts than the other group. Furthermore, Damisch et al. replicated this result with different tasks and several different luck-activating superstitions. Of course, there still was no magic, but these studies seemed to have demonstrated that believing in luck gave participants the confidence to perform better than they otherwise would. A phenomenon long speculated to be a possibility had finally been demonstrated in a laboratory setting.

Except there was a catch. As I reported in my January 2017 online column, a group of researchers at Dominion University in Illinois conducted a replication of the Damisch et al. study in 2014 and found no luck-enhancing effect on putting ( Calin-Jageman and Caldwell 2014). Furthermore, the 2014 study included over three times as many golfers and was a pre-registered study—meaning that the design and methods of the study were publicly posted prior to the start of data collection. The Dominion study was much more thorough and scientifically sound, and it came up empty. So, at least with respect to the effect of luck of putting performance, the jury is still out.

What About Rituals?

Some topics go unstudied for many years until someone comes up with a clever way to conduct the right kind of experiment. Such was the case when it came to rituals. The use of rituals in moments of trouble seems to be both timeless and universal. Consider the Jewish practice of sitting Shiva and the lengthy mourning ritual that follows. On the surface, this and other rituals of burial and mourning appear to have a comforting value for the bereaved, but how would anyone test that hypothesis? It would be unethical to create a similar loss in the laboratory, and even if you could overcome that obstacle, how would you choose the right ritual to use?

In 2014, two researchers at Harvard Business School (yes, Business School) found a way. Michael I. Norton and Francesca Gino (2014) did a series of experiments that looked at the role of rituals in coping with loss. To create a sense of loss, they invited people into the laboratory in groups of 9 to 15 and held a drawing for a $200 cash prize. The person who won the prize got to take the money and leave early, and the rest stayed for the coping-with-loss part of the experiment.

To look at the effect of rituals, Norton and Gino created an arbitrary ritual for people to perform in the lab. After losing the lottery, participants were each placed in a separate cubicle and told that, “Previous research has found that people often engage in rituals after a loss.” Then they were asked to follow the procedure below.

Step 1: Please draw how you currently feel on the piece of paper on your desk for two minutes; Step 2. Please sprinkle a pinch of salt on the paper with your drawing; Step 3. Please tear up the piece of paper; Step 4. Now please count up to ten in your head five times. Step 5. You have now completed this task.

Other participants were given the same “Previous research has shown…” information about rituals but not asked to perform one. Still others were given a similar instruction “Previous research has found that people often sit in silence after a loss” and were asked to sit in silence in their cubicles.

The primary findings of the research were that performing the ritual increased feelings of control and reduced the negative emotions of loss. Sitting quietly or simply being told that some people engage in rituals was not enough. Only actual performance of the ritual produced the effect.

Source: Pixabay.

Superstitious Rituals

Once Norton and Gino had paved the way on rituals and loss, it was not long before others adapted their procedures to other uses of rituals. Furthermore, Norton and Gino had pointed out that the ritual they devised involved tearing up a picture of “how you currently feel,” a feature that gave the actions a kind of symbolic meaning. The implications for superstition and other performance enhancing rituals were not hard to see. The results with lucky golf balls had been murky, but if symbolic rituals were effective in coping with loss, perhaps they could be useful in other situations, too.

In 2016, Alison Wood Brooks, also of the Harvard Business School, along with colleagues from four other institutions, published a study called, “Don’t Stop Believing: Rituals Improve Performance by Decreasing Anxiety” (Brooks et al. 2016). Rather than create a situation of loss, Brooks and her colleagues brought people into the laboratory and confronted them with a number of potentially anxiety-provoking tasks: taking a difficult, timed math test or singing the song “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey in front of other participants.

Once the participants knew what they would have to do, Brooks and colleagues split people into ritual or non-ritual groups. Prior to the anxiety-provoking task, the ritual group performed a sequence of activities very similar to the one used by Norton and Gino:

Please do the following ritual: Draw a picture of how you are feeling right now. Sprinkle salt on your drawing. Count up to five out loud. Crinkle up your paper. Throw your paper in the trash.

In a series of experiments, Brooks et al. showed that participants who performed this ritual did better on the task—high-pressure math problems or singing—than those who did not. Furthermore, they were able to show that the effect was mediated by a reduction in anxiety. So performing a symbolic ritual prior to a high-anxiety task reduced anxiety, which, in turn, produced better performance. The experimenters tested a number of controls to determine what was behind this anxiety-reducing effect. For example, in both the Norton and Gino study and some of the Brooks et al. experiments, the ritual involved the participant drawing a picture of their current feelings, after which they would rip it up or crinkle it up and throw away the drawing. To determine whether this was an important part of the formula, Brooks et al. created a new sequence that removed the artistic expression of emotion and the symbolic destroying/discarding of the emotions:

Please count out loud slowly up to 10 from 0, then count back down to 0. You should say each number out loud and write each number on the piece of paper in front of you as you say it. You may use the entire paper. Sprinkle salt on your paper. Crinkle up your paper. Throw your paper in the trash (Brooks et al. 2016, p. 80).

Math anxiety. (Photo credit: wecometolearn on Flickr)

For one group of participants, this new sequence was described as “random behaviors,” and for another it was described as a “ritual.” Finally a third group did not perform the sequence of actions at all. The results showed that the ritual group had lower anxiety and performed significantly better on a timed math test than either the random behaviors group or the no ritual group. The authors suggested that merely calling the sequence a “ritual” was sufficient to give it the necessary symbolic function to reduce anxiety and increase performance. Brooks et al. did not find that participants had an increased sense of control, which was surprising because a desire for control has often been cited as a motivation for superstitious behavior (e.g., Hamerman and Johar 2013). Instead, the effect on performance was entirely due to reduced anxiety.

So What Does This All Mean?

Does this mean that superstitious rituals work? Yes and no. The Brooks et al. study suggests that superstitious rituals do work—not because they are superstitious but because they are rituals. Any old ritual will do, including writing numbers on a piece of paper, crinkling it up, and throwing it away. But it appears to be important that the sequence of actions be defined as a ritual not as random behaviors. So there is no real magic, but there is a bit of calming magic in performing a ritualistic sequence before attempting a high-pressure activity.

As a prelude to conducting the experiments in their study, Brooks and colleagues surveyed 400 people with the following question:

Think about a time when you faced a difficult task and you felt anxious about it (e.g., a test, a sport competition, an interview). Did you engage in a ritual before performing the task? (YES/NO)

Forty-six percent of participants answered “yes.” Interestingly, the rituals these people reported using were overwhelmingly nonreligious and absent of references to luck or superstition. When Brooks et al. went on to do their laboratory studies, they chose rituals that were not expressly superstitious, and yet the rituals “worked.” The minimum amount of symbolism required was the “ritual” label. Furthermore, there is some evidence that rituals work even if you don’t believe in them. In their study of rituals and loss, Norton and Gino (Experiment 2) asked people if they had used rituals in the past and whether they believed “performing rituals influenced the way people feel (e.g., more calm, less sad).” Participants’ responses to these questions were completely unrelated to whether the rituals they performed in the study worked or not. You don’t have to believe in the efficacy of a ritual for it to help you feel better. All of these studies are preliminary, and it will be important to see whether they hold up when other researchers try to reproduce the results. Furthermore, there is much more we need to know about why and how rituals work. But these early findings are quite interesting.

Any Old Ritual Will Do

For skeptics who would like to discourage superstitious and irrational thinking, this line of research has both a downside and an upside. The downside is that the research by Brooks et al. suggests that superstitious rituals do work—not because they are magic but because they are rituals. As a result, the calming features of superstitious rituals and the improved performance they engender are likely to sustain superstitious thinking. The superstitious person’s beliefs will appear to be validated. The upside, however, is that skeptics now have a ready response to those who claim their superstitions work: Yes, your superstitions work, but it’s the ritual, not the superstition, that’s making you feel better. Any old ritual will do.

• Brooks, Alison, Juliana Schroeder, Jane Risen, et al. 2016. Don’t stop believing: Rituals improve performance by decreasing anxiety. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 137: 71–85.
• Calin-Jageman, Robert J., and Tracy L. Caldwell. 2014. Replication of the superstition and performance study by Damisch, Stoberock, and Mussweiler (2010). Social Psychology 45(3): 239–245.
• Damisch, Lysann, Barbara Stoberock, and Thomas Mussweiler. 2010. Keep your fingers crossed!: How superstition improves performance. Psychological Science 21(7): 1014–20. Available online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20511389.
• Hamerman, Eric J., and Gita V. Johar. 2013. Conditioned superstition: Desire for control and consumer brand preferences. Journal of Consumer Research 40(3): 428–443.
• Norton, Michael I., and Francesca Gino. 2014. Rituals alleviate grieving for loved ones, lovers, and lotteries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(1): 266–272.

Sometimes what is missing from a psychic reading is more interesting—and more important—than what was actually said.

Case in point: In the summer of 2016, as a promo for the third season of E! Network’s Hollywood Medium, psychic Tyler Henry sat down with American television host of The Today Show, Matt Lauer. They recorded for an hour, and The Today Show released a 6:35 segment on YouTube. This video has been watched 1,025,162 times, and has more than 4,000 likes, and 890 comments.

As I write this, Lauer has just been fired from his job as the host of The Today Show. The media is reporting that Lauer was accused of many cases of inappropriate sexual behavior with women. Lauer released a statement soon after, and apologized for his actions, admitting that some of the allegations were true. I remembered that Tyler Henry had done a psychic reading for Lauer and I wondered if there was any foreboding of this scandal. Most people would say that this has been the worst week of Lauer’s life, surely Tyler Henry must have seen it coming and warned him?

I’m going to give a brief overview of the reading, with my explications of what is on the video. Then I will describe what is missing. The video, if you want to follow along, can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98oa05-MC3g

Let’s set the scene first. Tyler Henry is sitting with cameras and lights on a set, and Lauer walks in with ease and confidence. He shakes Henry’s hand and says he really doesn’t know how this works. There is voice-over from Lauer telling us that Henry has been on The Today Show doing readings before and that Henry did not want to know who he was going to read in advance. This is typical of all of Henry’s videos; there is strong stress on this point: Henry does not know who he is going to read. This is a reaction to skeptics claiming that Henry Googles people in advance. I’ve written about Henry many times, here, here, here, and here stating that, from my investigations, it appears that Henry does not need to do research. By using cold-reading techniques, he can produce the same effect as what we see happening during a reading.

In this case, Henry does know Lauer, and they greet each other with Lauer saying, “Good to see you again Tyler, how have you been?” Henry knew that he was shooting a promo for Hollywood Medium, so it seems probable that he knew he would be reading Lauer.

Henry uses psychometry (holding a personal object) in order for him to focus on who the sitter would like to “come through” during the reading. Lauer (this is explained by a voice-over) brought a pocketknife that was given to him by his maternal grandfather. Lauer gave it to Henry, who then said that many people want to come through. This is a statement that mediums use as a way to transition between “stories”; if they aren’t getting good hits with someone, they just move to the next person, saying things like, “so now an older woman is pushing her way forward and wants to acknowledge a dog. Does that connect to you?”

Henry then mentioned a “fatherly kind of essence” who did not want to die in a hospital surrounded by doctors. I’m not sure how many people would be happy to die in a hospital, but Henry goes on to acknowledge that this person was grateful that he did not die “in a traditional kind of facility.” At first, I wondered about this statement, as it does seem a bit of a risk to state it with certainty at the beginning of the sitting. So, I went back and watched this exchange a few more times, paying attention to the body language of Lauer. And sure enough, you can watch him agreeing with Henry, nodding his head, making eye contact and reassuring Henry he was on the right track. Henry is young, but he has done over a thousand readings and is no fool when it comes to body language feedback.

I also want to point out that as soon as Henry starts talking about this “fatherly kind of essence,” Lauer’s demeanor completely changes. His head drops and his voice softens. During a voice-over, Lauer says that Henry is talking about his father who died in 1997.

At this point, Lauer in his mind has claimed the “fatherly kind of essence” as his father. But for Henry, he still does not know if this is a father, grandfather, father-in-law, a mentor, uncle, brother, or a close male friend. Henry plays it safe and continues saying “he” or “this person” but nothing else to describe him.

Next Henry moves onto something that seems specific but really is a common general statement made by mediums doing readings. The “fatherly kind of essence” is showing Henry, “a coin, coins, or a coin collection.” Henry follows up with, “that is a really odd thing.” Henry does this all the time; he makes a very general statement and acts like it was specific. Lauer says that he has a couple of silver dollars from him but not a lot. Henry replies that there is a third coin somewhere.

Next Henry lightens the mood a bit and throws out another general “vision.” The “fatherly kind of essence” is showing him a bird that was in the house and someone had to trap the bird and it was really funny. Lauer said that this had actually happened.

How risky was that statement for Henry? Birds fly into homes, and businesses, and all kinds of places; it’s not that unusual. And they often will not leave on their own and need to be removed. I’m sure it is pretty comical when it happens. (One of the people who commented on the video said that while watching, a bird flew into her house.) The odds of Lauer connecting to this story are pretty high, a quick YouTube search and you will find endless videos of birds flying inside homes. If Lauer had not connected, then Henry had several options. He could have said, “this happened before you were born, ask someone else in the family” or maybe it was on a TV show they could have watched together, or it could have happened to someone else in the family. Henry does not say to whom this happened or when. That leaves the door wide open for Lauer to make the connection. Or the final out, if Lauer had not connected to the story, Henry could just move on to something else knowing that only the best parts of the reading will actually air. And Lauer (like most humans) will remember the hits and forget the misses.

And once again, Henry makes a statement claiming that what he just said was really specific, “It’s random details like that that proves someone is coming thru.”

Next, Henry says that the “fatherly kind of essence” has just told him that Lauer has sleep apnea; something that Lauer confirms. Sounds like a specific hit. Well … what are the odds that a man would have it? A Google search tells me that about 4 percent of men have it, so that does look like a hit. Well done “fatherly kind of essence.” Oh wait … a Google search for “Matt Lauer” and “sleep apnea” returns a 2014 article, How early does Matt wake up? In this article, Lauer says that he “sometimes” has sleep apnea. Very possibly Lauer has discussed this on The Today Show; maybe when Henry was present. When Henry was getting his makeup and hair done before the taping, he could have innocently asked the stylists something like, “Matt must get up really early in the morning; he probably has sleeping problems?” With that little question mark at the end of the sentence and a pause, they easily could have told him all kinds of things. Not so difficult for a personable Tyler Henry to glean a bit of information. It’s not as if this was a test for the JREF million-dollar challenge. So the sleep apnea was not so much of a hit as I first thought.

The “fatherly kind of essence” now acknowledges a lone individual in a boat with a fishing pole. Lauer is nodding in agreement. The video cues the emotional music, so viewers know we need to start getting misty eyed. Lauer clearly emotional, tells Henry that this “fatherly kind of essence” is his father. Which leads Henry to smoothly say, “Your father is SO immensely proud of you, you didn’t have to get to where you are today for him to be proud of you … or successful in his eyes. He views you as successful regardless.” Very smooth Henry! He added that tidbit as if he had known all along they had been talking about Lauer’s father.

Next, Lauer asks if there is something his father wants to know. Which is a rather odd question, but Lauer is probably a bit emotional as he has been convinced that he is speaking to his father who died nineteen years ago. Henry says, “He just wants to know if you are happy.” “Yes,” Lauer says, “I am.”

Then the video cuts to Lauer on the beach wearing sunglasses and talking to the other hosts who are back in the newsroom. Lauer is telling them that after that reading, he cried and cried. He said his hands were shaking the whole time and Henry was “spot on.”

Remember that what we were shown was only five minutes of an hour long reading. So, a lot is missing; editing pulls together the best bits for the video promo. Anything that was a miss would not make the cut. Only the best parts would be shown. If there were a lot of great hits, they would have cut the part about the coins or the sleep apnea. They could have run a longer video; so I assume these were the best hits: A “fatherly kind of essence” who did not want to die in a hospital and who gave Lauer three silver dollars and wants him to go find the third one. Then there was a bird was loose in someone’s house, and he also wanted to tell Lauer something that he already knew—that he has sleep apnea. Oh, and about the boat: it looks like another hit. Or does it? A Google search for “Matt Lauer” and “father” gives me this article, Today’s Anchor Chat: Matt Lauer’s Fish Tale from 2007 where he says, “One thing you have to understand about me is that outside of my family and my work, I have two passions, both instilled in me by my father: golf and fishing … We also used to do a lot of freshwater fishing, which we both loved … .”

I’m not saying that Henry did a Google search as I did; I’m saying that Lauer’s love for fishing came from his dad, and this was not a well-guarded secret. In that same article, Lauer mentions his favorite photo of his son is one he took on the boat with a striped bass that they had caught minutes before. Perhaps that photo is framed on Lauer’s desk. What is more likely? That a dead person communicated to Tyler Henry a vision of Matt Lauer sitting in a boat with a fishing pole? Or, Henry saw a photo, or heard a story from Lauer’s co-workers, about how much he likes to fish on his boat?

It’s possible, even likely, that Lauer really did think Henry was “spot on.” This was an hour sitting, and a very emotional hour. Lauer is not asking the questions, he is not in control as he is used to. The psychic was throwing a lot at him very quickly, and his brain tried to make sense of it all. That’s how human brains work; we look for connections. Even if something is a bit of a stretch, we will try to make sense of it all. Plus, we want the psychic to be accurate. Henry is very personable and charming, and Lauer likely wanted to make a really good promo. Henry claimed to be speaking to his father, and Lauer really wanted that to be true. And, as we tend to remember the hits and forget the misses, I can’t blame Lauer for thinking the reading was accurate. I’m at home, able to rewind, over and over, rewatch whatever I want, and think about what happened. Lauer wasn’t even taking notes during the reading. I have a notebook with many pages full of notes.

As I said at the beginning, sometimes what is missing is more important than what was said.

What happened to the maternal grandfather who gave the pocketknife to Lauer? We don’t hear from him at all. If it had been a hit, then it would have been included in the segment. In this review of the reading, you might have become annoyed with me continuality using the phrase, “fatherly kind of essence” instead of just saying “father” as we knew that Lauer thought his dad was coming through. We know this is supposed to be dad. But until Lauer said it, Henry didn’t know. And Henry carefully guarded his words with just “he” or “this person” until just seconds after Lauer admitted it was his dad.

Henry, never mentioned a name, not initials, not even one letter. No places, no dates, no mention of a wife, other children, siblings, his parents, grandchildren. Nothing. He mentioned he died, but nothing about the illness or the room. What about pets or family friends, anniversaries or … well … anything?

Lauer had the chance to talk to his father and never asked him any questions? He didn’t ask for advice or even about what the future has in store for him and his family. Dad just wanted him to find the third coin! Really?

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. As I write this, Matt Lauer has just been fired from The Today Show. This is all over the news; it is a very big deal. It is possibly the most important thing that could have happened to him outside of him becoming a star journalist. The allegations against him, if true, are disgusting. Coworkers are coming forward saying that they all knew he was unfaithful to his wife, but they didn’t know that he was having non-consensual relations with other women. Lauer’s father said he is “immensely proud” of Matt. Really? If these claims of infidelity and or sexual harassment are true, you are immensely proud of your son?

And if they are not true, or only partly true, then why was dad spending his precious, limited time communicating through Henry about sleep apnea? Dad just wanted his son to “be happy.” How about a head’s up dad? This week has been earth-shatteringly difficult for Lauer and his family; for the next few years, Matt Lauer will be the butt of many jokes. He is likely to lose his wife and children; he has already lost his career, and dad just wants to talk about a bird that flew into the house?

Something is really missing here. And that is the point. Each of these recorded readings can be reviewed years later and analyzed. Just like when Tyler Henry didn’t mention to Alan Thicke that just two months after their reading, Thicke would be dead.

I’ve read through the comments on this video. Some are believers, hoping they will be able to get a reading from Tyler Henry. Others are slamming psychics as frauds. Almost no one is commenting on the actual statements from the reading or noticing what is missing. As I noted at the beginning of this article, sometimes what is missing from a psychic reading is more important than what was actually said.

I would like to thank Rob Palmer for suggesting I write this article and Stuart Jones and Rob Palmer for reviewing my writing.

Cover Photo Credit: HamletHub

In 1989, Ralph Rosnow and Robert Rosenthal, two well-respected experts on statistical methods in psychology, wrote the following memorable line: “We want to underscore that, surely, God loves the .06 nearly as much as the .05” (p. 1277).

For researchers in psychology—as well as in the biological and social sciences—this was an amusing statement because .05 is the Holy Grail of statistical significance. It may seem unusual to use religious language when writing about scientific methods, but the metaphor is fitting because, for almost as long as scientists have used statistical methods, achieving a probability of .05 or less (e.g., .04, .027, .004) meant publication, academic success, and another step toward the financial security of tenure. But .06 or even .055 meant nothing. No publication and no progress toward a comfortable retirement.

Rosnow and Rosenthal were arguing that scientists had been overly concerned with a single, arbitrary cut-off score, p < .05, but today their plea sounds a bit antique. In the latest response to the “reproducibility crisis” in psychology (see my December 2015 online column, “Has Science a Problem?”) a group of seventy-two accomplished statisticians, biologists, and social scientists have signed a statement proposing that the criterion be changed from .05 to .005. This may seem like a nerdy technical issue, but the proposed change has profound implications for the progress of science and has ignited a vigorous controversy in the field. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s step back and figure out what this is all about.

The Reverse Logic of Statistical Significance

The idea came from the British biologist and statistician Ronald Fisher, a man Richard Dawkins has called “the greatest biologist since Darwin” (The Edge 2011). Fisher invented many statistical techniques—including the analysis of variance (ANOVA)—and, ever since learning how to use Fisher’s methods, has been the bane of graduate students in biology, psychology, and many other disciplines.

Fisher recognized that you cannot affirm the consequent. Scientists are commonly in the position of wanting to prove that a variable they are interested in causes something to happen. For example, imagine a chemist has identified Compound X, which she believes will promote hair growth in balding humans. She creates a Compound X lotion and a placebo lotion and conducts an experiment on balding volunteers. Lo and behold, the people in her Compound X group grow more hair than those in the placebo group. If her experiment was otherwise well designed and conducted, can she safely conclude Compound X grows hair? Of course not. It might just have been a lucky test, and furthermore no number of positive tests can prove the rule.

Ronald Fisher (1890-1962) Source: Wikimedia

Understanding this, Fisher proposed to turn the question around, creating a straw person that could be knocked over with statistics. What if we assume the opposite: Compound X has no effect at all? This idea is what Fisher called the “null hypothesis.” The hypothesis of nothing going on. No effect. Then, he reasoned, we can determine the probability of our experimental findings happening merely by chance. This is where ANOVA and other statistical methods come in. Fisher suggested that statistical tests could be used to estimate the kinds of outcomes that would be expected due to random variations in the data. If the result obtained in an experiment was very unlikely to occur by chance, then the researcher would be justified in rejecting the null hypothesis of no effect. It would be fairly safe to say something real was going on. For example, if our chemist’s statistical analysis found probability of getting the amount of hair growth she saw in the Compound X group to be .04—meaning that by chance alone we could expect the same result in only 4 of 100 similarly run experiments—then it would be reasonable for her to conclude Compound X really worked.

So was born the Null Hypothesis Significance Test (NHST), and before long it was the law of the land. Fisher proposed a probability (p-value) of .05, and it came to pass that researchers in a variety of fields could not expect to get their articles published unless they performed the appropriate statistical tests and found that p was < .05 (a probability of the null hypothesis being true in less than 5 percent of cases). Point zero five became the accepted knife edge of success: p < .055 meant your results were junk, and p < .048 meant you could pop the champagne. P < .05 was not a magical number; it just became the accepted convention—a convention that Rosnow and Rosenthal, as well as others (e.g., Cohen, 1990) have criticized to no avail. It remains a fossilized criterion for separating the wheat from the chaff. But perhaps, not for long.

A histogram of iris sepal widths showing a roughly bell-shaped distribution. Based on a dataset maintained by Ronald Fisher. (Source: Wikimedia)

Strengthening Scientific Evidence

Statistics is one of those fields that has been plagued by a number of dustups over the years, but this latest controversy over p-values is inspired by the reproducibility crisis, the discovery that many classic experiments—primarily in social and cognitive psychology—could not be reproduced when attempted again. The resulting loss of confidence in research findings has spawned a number of reforms, most notably the Open Science movement, about which I wrote in my December 2016 online column, “The Parable of the Power Pose and How to Reverse It.” The open science approach makes research a much more public and collaborative enterprise and makes the common practice of “p-hacking”—fiddling with your data until something significant pops out—much more difficult.

Then, in July of 2017, seventy-two scientists (Benjamin, et al. 2017) wrote the proposal to simply make the criterion for significance more difficult by moving the cut-off from 5 out of 100 to 5 out of 1000 (p < .005). This would greatly help one of the issues the authors presume to be a cause of the reproducibility problem: Type I error. When we say something is statistically significant, we are simply saying that it is unlikely the observed effect is due to chance. But it’s not impossible. By definition the choice of the .05 significance level means that we are willing to live with a 5 percent chance of an error—saying there is an effect when actually our results were caused by normal random variation. This is a kind of false positive result. For example, if Compound X is useless, our choice of the .05 criterion means that in five tests out of hundred, we would conclude something was happening when nothing was. And when, as is most often the case, we conduct just a single test, how do we know whether ours is one of the five random cases that just happened to make Compound X look like it works? Based on a single test, we really can’t say.

Moving the statistical criterion to .005 would make the chances of a Type I error much lower, which means that the findings that reach publication would be more trustworthy and more likely reproducible. This is a worthy goal, and there is no easier fix than simply requiring a stronger test. But such a change would not be without costs. When you reduce the chances of a Type I error, you increase the chances of a different kind of error with the clever name of Type II. Type II errors are caused when the effect you are studying is real but your test fails to show it. Compound X really can grow hair, but by chance, your test came up nonsignificant: p > .05. A kind of false negative result. The change to .005 proposed by the gang of seventy-two would make false negatives more common, and given the often enormous time and cost involved in modern research, it would mean that important results that would contribute to our knowledge base are likely to die on the vine. Ultimately the progress of science would be slowed.

Perhaps anticipating this objection, the seventy-two authors propose that results falling between the traditional .05 and the new .005 might still be published as “suggestive” rather than statistically significant. Furthermore, the < .005 criteria would only be applied to tests of new phenomena, and replications of previously published studies could remain at .05. But it is clear the change would still have a powerful impact. As someone on one of my Internet discussion groups suggested, this change might make many psychology journals much thinner than they are now. I haven’t checked, but I am fairly certain several of my own published studies would have to be demoted to the “suggestive” category.

The Response

The proposal by the seventy-two researchers is scheduled to appear in a future issue of the journal Nature Human Behavior, but the prepublication copy posted online has already attracted much publicity and considerable comment from the scientific community. Many researchers have welcomed the .005 suggestion, which has been offered by others in the past (Resnick 2017), but there has also been some pushback. Psychologist Daniel Lakens is organizing a group rebuttal. According to an article in Vox, one of Laken’s primary objections is that such a technique will slow the progress of science. It may strengthen the published research literature at the cost of discouraging graduate students and other investigators who have limited resources.

Typically, the most effective way to increase the power of a statistical test and the likelihood of reaching a stringent significance level, such as < .005, is to increase the number of participants in your study. Although the Internet provides new opportunities for collecting large amounts of survey data, consider the difficulties of developmental psychologists who study infant behavior in the laboratory. As important as this work is, it might end up being limited to a few well-funded centers. Psychologist Timothy Bates, writing in Medium, makes the more general argument that a cost-benefit analysis of the switch to .005 comes up short. Research will become much more expensive without, in his view, yielding equal benefit (Bates 2017).

Finally, there is the question of placing too much emphasis on one issue. John Ioannidis is a Stanford University statistician and health researcher whose 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings are False” is a classic document of the reproducibility movement. He is also one of the seventy-two signers of the .005 proposal. But Ioannidis admits that statistical significance is not the only way to judge a study: “statistical significance [alone] doesn’t convey much about the meaning, the importance, the clinical value, utility [of research]” (quoted in Resnick 2017). Even if Compound X produced a significant increase in hair growth (p < .005), the hair growth in question might not be noticeable enough to make the treatment worth using. Under the proposed, more stringent statistical criteria, researchers might concentrate on getting results that are likely to get them over the statistical goal line and pass up more meaningful topics.

Will It Happen?

So how likely is it that the goalposts will get moved and journals will begin to require a p < .005 level of significance? I suspect the probability is low. Not five chances out of a thousand, but less than 50:50. There are good reasons for making this correction, particularly at this time when confidence in social science research is at a low point. But, for a couple of reasons, I don’t think it will happen.

First, because this controversy is relatively new, the objectors are still developing their responses. As the conversation gets going, I suspect we will hear more concerns about Type II errors—real phenomena that will be missed because they fail to meet the p < .005 criterion—and about discouraging young investigators from going into research. No one is in favor of that.

But I suspect one of the biggest sources of resistance will be based in economics rather than in arcane technical and professional issues. It turns out that academic publishing is enormously profitable—a $19 billion worldwide business that, according to The Guardian, is far more profitable than either the film or music industries (Buranyi 2017). A large portion of this success comes from a unique business model in which the product being sold—academic scholarship—is obtained essentially for free. Research that often costs millions of dollars in research grants and salaries to produce is handed to publishers such as Elsevier or Springer for nothing. Even peer reviews of submitted manuscripts are done by researchers who donate their time for free.

Academic publishing is a kind of crazy incestuous feedback loop. Researchers must get their work published in high quality journals if they wish to advance their careers, and scholars and university libraries must pay exorbitant subscription costs to gain access to the same journals. The current system is being threatened by Sci-Hub, a pirated archive of scientific publications, and by a growing number of scholars who are posting prepublication versions of their work online (Rathi 2017). Eventually, all scientific publishing may be entirely free and open, but until that day, the publishing industry will continue to be hungry for material. As a result, the prospect of much less content and thinner journals will not be a welcome thought, and I suspect this attitude will be communicated down the line to editors who must choose whether to adopt the new standard or not. The publishing gods love .05 much more than .005.

References

1. Bates, Timothy. 2017. "Changing the default p-value threshold for statistical significance ought not be done, and is the the least of our problems" Medium. July 23. Accessed August 13, 2017. Available online at https://medium.com/@timothycbates/changing-the-default-p-value-threshold-for-statistical-significance-ought-not-be-done-in-isolation-3a7ab357b5c1.
2. Benjamin, Daniel J, James Berger, Magnus Johannesson, Brian A Nosek, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Richard Berk, Kenneth Bollen, et al. 2017. “Redefine Statistical Significance”. PsyArXiv. July 22. Available online at osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/mky9j
3. Buranyi, Stephen. 2017 "Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?" The Guardian. June 27. Accessed August 14, 2017. Available online at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science.
4. Cohen, Jacob. 1990. "Things I have learned (so far)." American psychologist 45, no. 12:1304.
5. The Edge. 2011. “Who is the greatest biologist of all time?” Edge.org. March 11. Accessed August 13, 2017. Available online at https://www.edge.org/conversation/who-is-the-greatest-biologist-of-all-time.
6. Ioannidis, John PA. 2005. "Why most published research findings are false." PLoS medicine 2, no. 8: e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124.
7. Rathi, Akshat. 2017. "Soon, nobody will read academic journals illegally - the studies worth reading will be free." Quartz. August 09. Accessed August 14, 2017. Available online at https://qz.com/1049870/half-the-time-unpaywall-users-search-for-articles-that-are-legally-free-to-access/.
8. Resnick, Brian. 2017. "What a nerdy debate about p-values shows about science - and how to fix it." Vox. July 31. Accessed August 13, 2017. Available online at https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/7/31/16021654/p-values-statistical-significance-redefine-0005.
9. Rosnow, Ralph L., and Robert Rosenthal. 1989. "Statistical procedures and the justification of knowledge in psychological science." American Psychologist 44, no. 10: 1276.
10. Vyse, Stuart. 2016. "The Parable of the Power Pose and How to Reverse It." CSI. December 15. Accessed August 13, 2017. Available online at http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/the_parable_of_the_power_pose
    _and_how_to_reverse_it.
11. Vyse, Stuart. 2015. "Has Science a Problem?" CSI. June 18. Accessed August 13, 2017. Available online at http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/has_science_a_problem.

Photo Credit: Amila Tennakoon

I frequently get emails asking whether I think a certain treatment is supported by evidence or is quackery. I recently got one from an elderly man who was wondering whether he should take a friend’s advice to consult an Ayurvedic doctor. That was the first time I’d ever been asked about Ayurveda. I knew it wasn’t science-based, but I wanted to learn more, so I did a little investigating. What I found was pretty amusing.

What is Ayurveda? Deepak Chopra explains that it was developed by the sages of India (ancient wisdom!) and that it is one of the world’s most sophisticated and powerful mind-body health systems. More than a mere system of treating illness, it is a science of life. Nothing has more power to heal than the mind. Freedom from illness depends upon expanding our own awareness. The body is naturally balanced through the process of meditation. There is a website that generates fictional Chopra quotes from random words. His actual words don’t make much more sense.

Chopra says, “Making your doshas happy will make you happy.” Ayurveda is the original personalized medicine, with every health-related measure (diet, exercise, supplements, etc.) determined by the person’s individual constitutional type, one of the three doshas in the prakruti. In other words, medical treatment is individualized according to metaphysical fantasies rather than physiology.

“Your prakruti is determined at the moment of conception and is the blueprint of all of the innate tendencies built into your mind-body system, including your physical and emotional characteristics.” There are three types of prakruti, the three doshas: vata, pitta, and kapha. Each dosha is governed by two of the five master elements. The ancient Indians thought there were five master elements (space, air, fire, water, and earth); the ancient Chinese counted five elements but not the same ones (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth); the ancient Greeks counted four elements (earth, water, air, fire). Then along came troublesome Mendeleev with his Periodic Table of the Elements. Modern science currently numbers the elements at 118. Who ya gonna believe?

Each dosha is related to two elements and has its own qualities, physical characteristics, and emotional characteristics. For instance, vata is cold, light, dry, irregular, rough, moving, quick, and changeable. Its physical characteristics include dry skin and cold hands among many others. Its emotional characteristics include loving excitement, being quick to anger, etc. etc. There are detailed lists of specific foods that each dosha should eat and should avoid.

This dosha stuff sounds pretty much like a horoscope and is just as reliable. How do you think the ancients could have figured all this out right down to the specific foods to avoid? How do you think the ancient astrologers figured out which personality traits were associated with each zodiac sign? How do you think they validated their findings? The answer is obvious: they just made it all up and made no effort to test their hypotheses.

I wondered what my dosha was. I took Deepak Chopra’s dosha quiz to find out. I had trouble answering some of the questions:

Weight: low, moderate, or heavy. My weight is low, but that choice also specifies “I may forget to eat or have a tendency to lose weight,” neither of which is true.

Eyes: (1) My eyes are small and active, (2) I have a penetrating gaze, or (3) I have large pleasant eyes. This one really stumped me; I checked large pleasant eyes because they sounded the nicest.

Joints: thin and prominent, loose and flexible, or large, well knit and padded. Beats me! I have no idea how you could tell.

To get my results, I had to provide my email address and agree to get a weekly newsletter and exclusive offers on dosha-balancing products. My results said I was 40 percent vata, 30 percent pitta, and 30 percent kapha. It described my characteristics in horoscope-like fashion. Under my “Shopping Style,” it said “Buy, buy, buy” which anyone in my family can tell you is absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong. I hate shopping and am reluctant to spend money. It said I was an extremely rare “three-dosha” type, with a balance giving me a sturdy constitution, good health, and longevity. It recommended that I maintain proper balance by restful sleep, exercise, meditation, time with family and friends, work or activities that give me a sense of purpose and joy, and meals that include the six Ayurvedic tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent, astringent). Except for the six tastes, that’s all just good general health advice for anyone. And the report came with offers of products appropriate for my dosha, including a Joyta Invigorating Aroma Candle and Invigorating Abhy organic massage oil. Which I am absolutely not going to “Buy, buy, buy.”

I took another online quiz that asked totally different questions. That one diagnosed me as a pitta-vata type. It recommended yogic breathing exercises; choosing foods that are sweet, sour, and salty; and taking various supplements that they sell, including Vata Digest tablets. Deepak Chopra tells us that Ayurvedic supplements “take the intelligence of the universe and match it with the intelligence of our own body.” I doubt that.

Another quiz on another website asked totally different questions and said I was kapha/vata. The website sells a facial massage wand made of Kansa, a very pure form of bronze known as the healing metal. The video about the wand is very imaginative; it made me laugh. It reminded me of Perkins’ tractors.

A fourth dosha quiz, also with different questions, said I was a vata body type. Among other things, it said I was clairvoyant (I don’t think so!). It said I should avoid cranberries, pears, persimmons, pomegranates, watermelon, and apples; any frozen, raw, or dried veggies; numerous grains and legumes, etc. Says who? Unless you can show me evidence, I’ll continue to eat the foods I like, thank you very much.

According to a quotation from Kurt Butler in the Skeptic’s Dictionary,

“The beliefs and practices of Ayurvedic medicine fall into three categories: (1) some that are obvious, well established, and widely accepted by people who have never heard of Ayurveda (e.g., relax and don't overeat); (2) a few that proper research may eventually prove valid and useful (herbal remedies may contain useful drugs, but their dangers and limitations often have not been scientifically investigated); (3) absurd ideas, some of which are dangerous (e.g., that most disease and bad luck is due to demons, devils, and the influence of stars and planets; or that you should treat cataracts by brushing your teeth, scraping your tongue, spitting into a cup of water, and washing your eyes for a few minutes with this mixture).”

In a Skeptic magazine article, Marc Carrier summed up the science behind Ayurveda: “... credible randomized, placebo-controlled trials with clearly positive outcomes for Ayurveda therapies remain non-existent.”

That just about sums it up. Ayurveda is basically superstition mixed with a soupçon of practical health advice. And it can be dangerous. 64 percent of Ayurvedic remedies sold in India are contaminated with significant amounts of heavy metals like mercury, arsenic, and cadmium. And a recent study of users in the United States found elevated blood lead levels in 40 percent of those tested.

Ayurveda originated in India and is still widely used there. In a list of longevity by country, India ranked 125th. That suggests that the “science of life” hasn’t done a very good job of keeping people alive. But if the Indians see it differently and want to rely on “ancient wisdom” instead of on modern science-based medicine, it’s their funeral (sometimes literally!). Deepak Chopra is the most prominent proponent of Ayurveda in the United States. He was trained in India; in my opinion, America would have been better off if he had stayed there.

Artículo traducido por Alejandro Borgo, Director del CFI/Argentina.

Frecuentemente he sido invitado a participar como consejero en casos o investigaciones judiciales donde podría ser útil debido a mi experiencia como ilusionista, aunque siempre me negué a aceptar la evidencia obtenida por el polígrafo, o detector de mentiras, como se lo conoce usualmente. Sin embargo, si recurrieran a mí para negar que este absurdo dispositivo es efectivo o confiable, no dudaría en hacerlo. La evidencia está en contra de esta tecnología, es difícil creer por cuánto tiempo existió como noción supuestamente válida.

Demos una mirada a la llamada “detección de mentiras”. El dispositivo es en sí mismo una pesadilla, constituida por tuberías, cables, electrodos y agujas que se mueven… algo similar a una producción de Bugs Bunny. Midiendo y mostrando cambios en la respiración, latidos del corazón, presión arterial, conductividad de la piel y otras variables del sujeto en cuestión, se genera una compleja serie de gráficos -líneas- y un técnico es, teóricamente, capaz de decidir si las respuestas a un conjunto de preguntas fueron respondidas honestamente o no. No es necesario involucrarse en todos los aspectos del procedimiento, por ejemplo, quién se encarga de las preguntas que deben ser contestadas, aunque esto es un problema de gran importancia. Examinemos las opiniones de los “profesionales” que deberían saber algo.

El 5 de noviembre de 2002, con el membrete del Pentágono, como Secretario Adjunto de Defensa de Comando, Control, Comunicaciones e Inteligencia, este memorándum fue enviado por John P. Stenbit a los directores y administradores de todas las principales oficinas militares del Departamento de Defensa:

ASUNTO: el continuo uso de las técnicas del polígrafo

Recientemente he revisado el informe del Consejo de Investigación Nacional (NRC) sobre la evidencia científica de la validez de la técnica del polígrafo. Si bien el informe contenía varios hallazgos que llevaron a mejorar los métodos para la detección del engaño, pienso que es importante enfatizar que el NRC encontró que ninguna de las potenciales tecnologías para la detección del engaño mostró alguna promesa para reemplazar la técnica del polígrafo en el futuro cercano.

Creo que esto podría haber incluido también a las cartas del Tarot o las tablas Ouija, tal vez con mayor sensatez. ¡Nótese que no dice que el polígrafo no funciona en absoluto! La verdad es que es un montaje de alta tecnología que ha fallado permanentemente en pruebas de doble-ciego para demostrar su eficacia, pero en la forma que fue escrito el párrafo arriba mencionado, hay una fuerte sugerencia de que la farsa realmente había funcionado como se afirmaba. El siguiente párrafo es peor aún, repitiendo la misma necia afirmación e implicando que el polígrafo realmente funciona:

Mientras el Departamento continúa investigando tecnologías alternativas en este área crítica, creo que es importante recordar que el informe del NRC determinó que la técnica del polígrafo es la mejor herramienta de que disponemos para detectar el engaño.

¿”La mejor herramienta”? No, me inclinaría por un par de dados. Siguiente: en un solo párrafo el Secretario Stenbit se refirió al polígrafo como “una herramienta importante” —¡en dos oportunidades!— cuando es virtualmente inútil, de acuerdo con el mismo reporte de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias/ NCR (como ya veremos). Se trata simplemente de una descarada negación de un hecho para apoyar una opinión errónea, aunque oficial.

En los meses siguientes, nuestro país va a enfrentar muchos desafíos respecto de la seguridad nacional. La técnica del polígrafo permanece como una herramienta importante para detectar el engaño en cuestiones de seguridad nacional y la ejecución de leyes. Donde sea apropiado y autorizado, recomiendo que continuemos usando la técnica del polígrafo como una herramienta importante en nuestro proceso de tomar decisiones.

A fines de 2002, como reacción a los comentarios de Stenbit, el NCR, dependencia de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias, emitió su informe oficial sobre el uso del polígrafo. El secretario Stenbit ignoró completamente el informe, que decía que el uso del dispositivo no estaba justificado — y aunque era peligroso para la seguridad nacional, el informe no describía al polígrafo como “la mejor herramienta disponible para detectar el engaño”, como Stenbit había escrito. En su resumen, el Consejo (NCR) concluyó: “En general, la evidencia (acerca de la validez del polígrafo) es escasa y científicamente débil… y algunas alternativas potenciales al polígrafo son promisorias, pero ninguna ha demostrado ser mejor”.

Ya que el polígrafo funciona tan bien como el Oráculo de Delfos —una dudosa promesa, aunque más antigua— no ayuda en nada. Respecto de la tecnología del polígrafo en general, la NAS/NRC manifestó que “… no hay evidencia sobre la validez del polígrafo, esto es, su habilidad para proporcionar un valor predictivo acerca de lo que pueden conseguir otros métodos”.

Examinemos la realidad, muchachos. Un relato del noticiero de la CBS de un atentado suicida en la base de la CIA en Afganistán estableció, sobre la negligente aceptación de un espía de la base: “El doble agente fue llevado a la base sin ser sometido a un test poligráfico, una de las herramientas básicas para establecer la confianza de un espía”. Esto no tiene sentido, el polígrafo simplemente no funciona.

Aldrich Ames

La historia de esta farsa es larga y con varios “expertos” desinformados delirando sobre éxitos y agencias que aceptan los resultados como si fueran válidos. Hablando del caso de Afganistán, algunos ejemplos constituyen ejemplos muy fuertes de este error: en 1985, el uso del polígrafo no expuso el hecho de que Larry Wu-Tai Chin, traductor de chino que trabajaba para la CIA, estaba vendiendo información crucial a China durante 33 años, a pesar de haber sido puesto a prueba con tests poligráficos. En 1994, Aldrich Ames, analista de primera línea de la CIA, pasó todos los exámenes del polígrafo, aunque durante años fuera un gran espía soviético que pasaba información a sus empleadores. (Aldrich confirmó esto directamente al Skeptical Inquirer (SI). Luego de que el científico de los laboratorios Sandia, Alan P. Zelicoff publicó una denuncia sobre el test poligráfico en el Skeptical Inquirer, en 2001, Ames escribió al SI desde la cárcel, estando de acuerdo con el artículo y diciendo que el polígrafo era “ciencia basura” y “una superstición”. El SI publicó su carta (Vol. 25, Nro. 6, 2001); también véase la nota de tapa del volumen de Enero/Febrero de 2016 “El detector de mentiras otra vez examinado”, por Morton Tavel. En 2001, Robert Hanssen, del FBI, no fue detectado a pesar de los monitoreos periódicos de los empleados del FBI que usaban polígrafos. Su traición se describió, en una revisión de los programas de seguridad del FBI, como “posiblemente el peor desastre de la historia de la inteligencia en los Estados Unidos”.

This article was originally available in English.
Click here to read it.

El hecho es que ni un solo espía ha sido detectado por un polígrafo. En 2003, la Academia Nacional de Ciencias emitió su informe final titulado “El polígrafo y la detección de mentiras”. Halló que la investigación poligráfica es “no confiable, no científica y distorsionalda”, y que en asuntos de seguridad nacional, el nivel de precisión llega a un punto en el que su exactitud para distinguir violadores potenciales o reales de la seguridad es insuficiente para justificar la confianza sobre su uso en monitoreos del personal de los empleados en las agencias federales”.

La NAS también detectó la alta tasa de falsos positivos obtenida con el detector de mentiras y la consideró inaceptable. El médico y miembro del CSI, Bob Parks, con su usual humor irónico dijo: “He discutido, sin embargo, que el problema real es el pequeño número de positivos verdaderos. Propongo reemplazar al polígrafo con una tirada de monedas. El desafortunado incremento de los falsos positivos constituye un daño colateral, el cual es inevitable en la guerra”.

Los medios también están encantados con esta estupidez electrónica, que agrega luces intermitentes, zumbidos y misterio. A principios de 2010, una potencial pareja de padres adoptivos —llamada por el FBI como “sospechosos” acerca de la desaparición de un bebé de ocho meses en Arizona— apareció en la televisión pidiendo un test poligráfico para determinar si estaban diciendo la verdad. La prueba fue debidamente ejecutada, y al día siguiente los examinadores poligráficos anunciaron los resultados: no concluyentes. Sin embargo la percepción del público es que el polígrafo es un dispositivo científico que funciona. Los medios no dicen nada acerca de la sólida evidencia científica acerca de la validez del polígrafo. De hecho, como lo señala el ingenioso Bob Park: “El polígrafo busca picos en la presión arterial, los latidos del corazón, la respiración y la transpiración. En otras palabras, no puedes mentir sobre el acto sexual”.

Stephen E. Fienberg, presidente del departamento de estadística de la Universidad Carnegie-Mellon en Pittsburgh, que estuvo al frente del panel designado por la Academia Nacional de Ciencias para evaluar la validez del polígrafo, dijo: “Está en cualquier agencia que tenga tres o cuatro letras, incluyendo al Correo Postal de los Estados Unidos”.

El informe del panel concluyó que casi un siglo de investigación puede haber producido una pseudociencia capaz de engañar a la gente ingenua dejando escapar la verdad, pero no más que eso. Así el presidente Fienberg se sorprendió al encontrar que el informe de su panel avalaba el creciente número de tests de detectores de mentiras que el Departamento de Defensa (DOD) puede administrar anualmente.

En un informe junto con el Congreso, en enero, el DOD afirmó que había administrado más de 11.500 tests de ese tipo en el año fiscal 2012. ¡Eso significa más de veinte en un solo día! De ese total, 4.219 fueron “polígrafos en el ámbito de la contrainteligencia”, o exámenes CSP, con un límite de 5.000 exámenes por año. En su propio informe, el DOD informó al Congreso que debería pedir autorización para llevar a cabo más exámenes, y citaba el informe de la NAS como apoyo, de acuerdo a Steven Aftergood, que monitoreaba la política poligráfica para la Federación de Científicos Estadounidenses. El informe del DOD indicaba: “Es importante observar que el informe del NRC ha concluido que la técnica del test poligráfico es la mejor herramienta actualmente disponible para detectar el engaño y evaluar la credibilidad… El Departamento continuará usando la técnica del polígrafo como lo ha hecho en el pasado, hasta que haya tecnologías o metodologías mejores, como resultado de la investigación científica”.

Muchachos, cualquier cosa puede ser una “tecnología mejorada” respecto de este juguete de alta tecnología, ¡la mejor herramienta actualmente disponible! El presidente Fienberg llamó desinteresadamente la referencia del DOD al informe de la Nas “falsa”. Un vocero del DOD dijo que provenía directamente de la conclusión del panel de la NAS que, mientras haya más tecnologías promisorias, ninguna ha suplantado al polígrafo. Debería haber agregado que el Ratón Pérez no había suplantado a otros medios para proveer fondos a los niños. Cuando se le preguntó a Don White, vocero de la Oficina de Inspección General (OIG), del Departamento de Salud y Servicios Humanos, no discutió si las pruebas del detector de mentiras formaban parte de su protocolo de investigación, aunque el vocero del DOD nombró a la OIG como uno de los organismos que usa polígrafos.

Para cerrar la denuncia de esta particular pseudociencia, yo remarcaría en primer lugar que en el ejemplar de Marzo/Abril de 2013 del Skeptical Inquirer, Dr. L.G. Wade Jr. comentó un artículo sobre frenología, el arte de leer protuberancias en la cabeza para determinar el carácter y los talentos. Alguna vez fue utilizada por empleadores, los militares, e incluso en los procedimientos judiciales para examinar a los individuos, especialmente en Francia, y fue considerada como ciencia real, tanto como el polígrafo lo es hoy. El Dr. Wade escribió:

Primero fui alertado sobre el fraude del “detector de mentiras” por dos casos: un asistente del tesoro del condado que fue falsamente acusado de malversación de fondos y un consternado viudo que fue también falsamente acusado de matar a su esposa. Ambos acusaron como “fallido” al examen del polígrafo (sea lo que signifique esto) y fueron inmediatamente condenados en los periódicos, con sus reputaciones destruidas. Ambos fueron exonerados. Las medidas poligráficas respecto a los indicadores de estrés, y la gente honesta que es falsamente acusada de crímenes atroces, probablemente “fallen” en el examen. Por otro lado, los criminales reincidentes muestran poco estrés cuando se les pregunta sobre sus crímenes.

A diferencia de la frenología, las pruebas con el polígrafo todavía se usan y son aceptadas por la ley y el gobierno. Todavía se usan en el FBI, la CIA y otras agencias para exámenes de empleo.

¿Que harías si te hicieran pasar por un examen poligráfico? Si accedes a someterte a uno, podrías estar depositando tu reputación en manos de un charlatán que puede decir que eres culpable o inocente. Si te niegas, vas a ser considerado culplable. Nuestro gobierno debería ser presionado para abandonar semejante pseudociencia.

Otras participaciones en casos judiciales donde se me solicitó mi experiencia personal, fueron menores o muy similares a las que mencioné. Muchos casos involucraban estafas de gitanos, que son las más típicas, según creo, porque aprovechan las supersticiones o religiones étnicas. Otra vez, la religión está detrás de nuestra aceptación de la realidad.

Nada nuevo en esta afirmación.

James Randi

James “el sorprendente” Randi es ilusionista, investigador de las afirmaciones sobre lo paranormal, autor (Flim-Flam!, The Faith Healers, The Mask of Nostradamus, The Magic of Uri Geller), y presidente de la Fundación Educativa James Randi. Fue miembro fundador del CSICOP. El presente artículo está basado en una presentación especial que dio en el Quinto Congreso Mundial de Escépticos, en Abano-Terme, Italia, 8 de octubre de 2004.

The seventieth anniversary of the so-called Roswell Incident came and went this past summer with a refreshing lack of fuss. One might even hope to think the passions it evokes among believers that a flying saucer crashed on a ranch in south-central New Mexico back in July 1947 have, over time, finally waned. But the rationalists in us realizes that is not likely. Maybe they are just tired and will be back again after a rest.

That’s kind of what happened with Roswell. It was a big story back in early July 1947 for a few days, but then when the Air Force announced that what the rancher found was related to balloon flights and not to anything more mysterious, the story disappeared from public discourse until it was resurrected again by several factually unscrupulous writers in the early 1980s.

From your editor’s vantage point as a Roswell-watcher from Albuquerque, only about a hundred air miles from the supposed crash site, the most noticeable recent blip on the radar was an anniversary story by the Carlsbad Current-Argus reprinted in the July 8 Albuquerque Journal and titled “Roswell Incident Lives on 70 Years Later.”

The largest newspaper in the state, the Albuquerque Journal has been noticeably free of sensationalism about Roswell for a long time. This reprinted story was a bit of an anomaly. It basically recounted the myth and various claims believers have put forth about it since but unfortunately gave no information that explains the origin story.

That moved me to write a letter to the Journal that, to their credit, they published as a short op-ed piece in their Sunday, July 16, edition, “Roswell Myth Lives on Despite the Established Facts.” (Available online at https://www.abqjournal.com/1033584/roswell-myth-lives-on-despite-the-established-facts.html.)

In it I simply pointed out some key facts the article failed to mention. It may be worthwhile reminding you, our readers, of those, and a few others as well.

What rancher W. W. (Mac) Brazel reported finding on his ranch, sixty miles northwest of Roswell, was simply this: Debris consisting of a large number of pieces of paper covered with a foil-like substance and pieced together with small sticks, much like a kite. And also some pieces of grey rubber (my emphases). All were small and hardly some high-tech alien flying saucer!

The reporter should have told readers what we now know (almost certainly) the debris to have been: remnants of a long vertical “train” of research balloons and equipment launched by New York University atmospheric researchers and not recovered—specifically, Flight No. 4. The research team launched NYU Flight #4 on June 4, 1947, from Alamogordo Army Air Field and tracked it flying east-northeast toward Corona. It was within seventeen miles of the Brazel ranch when the tracking batteries failed and contact was lost.

New York University’s role in launching the “constant-level” research balloons was unclassified. In the 1990s, it was learned that the mission also had a classified purpose, called “Project Mogul,” to learn whether such balloons could take highly sensitive microphones and keep them at a level in the atmosphere (the tropopause) where they might be able to detect acoustic signals channeled round the Earth from Soviet nuclear tests.

On the evening of February 8, 1995, I was present at a meeting in Albuquerque of New Mexicans for Science and Reason (NMSR) when the man who helped launch Flight 4, Professor Charles B. Moore, showed us some of what was on that flight. In 1947, Moore was an NYU graduate student, working on the balloon launches. He spent the rest of his career as a respected professor of atmospheric physics at New Mexico Tech in Socorro.

NMSR is the local science-oriented skeptics group in Albuquerque. I helped found it in 1990, based on CSICOP’s inspiration, and it has been headed for years now by physicist/mathematician and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Fellow Dave Thomas. Thomas works in Socorro and also teaches a course on pseudoscience there at New Mexico Tech.

In addition to Thomas and me (and many others), physicist and CSI Fellow Mark Boslough told me recently that he remembers being in the audience at that remarkable 1995 evening meeting.

Moore brought with him a radar reflector like the three that were attached to Flight 4. Specifically, they were Signal Corps ML 307B RAWIN targets. It looked much like a box kite but with some angular surfaces. The sticks and metallic paper are similar to what Brazel described. The rubber Brazel noted was similar to the neoprene balloons used to carry equipment aloft. The radar reflectors contained small metal eyelets, similar to those Brazel had described on the debris he found.

Moore also provided a new and very telling detail. The reinforcing tape used on the NYU targets had curious markings; UFO believers later described these markings on the debris Brazel discovered as “hieroglyphics,” implying some form of alien writing. In fact, Moore told us the tape had been purchased from a New York City toy factory and the symbols on the tape were “abstract flower-like” designs made to appeal to kids (Figure 1).

These and other established facts of the Roswell incident will of course never catch up with the charming myth. It is understandable that UFO believers and Roswell city boosters will promote the myth as possible reality (wink, wink), but, as I wrote in my op-ed, “in this day of ‘fake news,’ let’s not be a party to that.”

All these facts, and many more supporting details, have been widely available since the mid-to-late 1990s in various scholarly publications. They include a book that Charles Moore himself coauthored with two anthropology professors, UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth, Benson Saler, Charles A. Ziegler, and Charles B. Moore (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); The UFO Invasion, a Skeptical Inquirer anthology I coedited with Barry Karr and Joe Nickell (Prometheus Books, 1996), which includes David E. Thomas’s special report from the July/August 1995 Skeptical Inquirer “The Roswell Incident and Project Mogul” and many other Roswell-related articles; and two U.S. Air Force investigative reports, Report of Air Force Research Regarding the ‘Roswell Incident’ (1994) and The Roswell Report: Case Closed, Headquarters United States Air Force, written by Capt. James McAndrew, 1997.

The NYU balloon flight assemblages were huge. The diagram Moore supplied in his talk for flight 2, similar to flight 4, and published in the above-mentioned Skeptical Inquirer article (Figure 2 here), requires three vertical columns to display all the components. They include three radar reflectors, various measuring instruments, and twenty-four separate balloons. Charles Moore told us the whole interconnected array extended a vertical distance of 700 to 800 feet. So the common explanation of “weather balloon” is quite the understatement.

Some additional points: The director of research for the NYU balloon-launch experiments in 1947 was famous New York University geophysicist and meteorologist Athelstan Spilhaus. I knew Spilhaus when I was editor of Science News in the 1970s because he then was on the Board of Trustees of Science Service, Science News’s publisher. I knew nothing about Roswell then. Spilhaus died in 1998 at the age of eighty-six.

Figure 1. “Abstract flower-like designs” on toy-factory tape used on the NYU radar targets.

In 2009 when his son, Fred Spilhaus, retired from his longtime position as executive director of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C., he wrote whimsically that his father was the man responsible for the Roswell Incident (Physics Today, February 2009, quoted in the May/June 2009 Skeptical Inquirer). Athelstan Spilhaus was quite a colorful character. He is the only scientist I have ever heard of who had his own Sunday newspaper comic strip. Titled “Our New Age,” it ran in color in 110 newspapers all over the world from 1958 until 1975. When President Kennedy met Spilhaus in 1962, JFK told him, “The only science I ever learned was from your comic strip in the Boston Globe” (see http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/sunday-funnies-blast-off-into-the-space-age-81559551/).

If what Brazel found was so mundane, why did someone think it had to do with a crashed “flying saucer”? The reason is that the term flying saucer had just hit the news media for the first time. On June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported a series of what he described as boomerang-shaped objects flying up and down near Washington’s Mt. Rainier. He said they “flew erratic, like a saucer if you skip it across the water,” and from then on the term flying saucer took hold, even though he never said they looked like saucers (see Robert Sheaffer, The UFO Verdict, Prometheus Books, 1998, p. 15). This started a media frenzy and people began looking to the skies and seeing things they’d never seen before (including over New Mexico) and reporting more “flying discs” or “flying saucers.” Many possible explanations for Arnold’s sighting have been suggested. In their May/June 2014 Skeptical Inquirercover article “Mount Rainier: Saucer Magnet,” James McGaha and Joe Nickell describe McGaha’s hypothesis that it was due to optical phenomena called “mountain-top mirages.” (I wonder if at least some of the “flying disc” sightings in New Mexico were reflections of the huge NYU/Project Mogul balloon assemblages being launched fairly regularly.)

Figure 2. Diagram of balloon train from NYU Flight 2, similar to that of Flight 4, debris from which seems to have stimulated the original Roswell Incident.

Brazel had been persuaded that the debris he had found might have something to do with the reports of “flying discs” that were then exciting everyone. His report was made public in Roswell July 8, 1947, at the height of the craze.

A public affairs officer at the local army air field was excited about the find and so made the now-famous announcement that it had something to do with saucer sightings, without further checking. That made front-page news. By then Brazel said he was amazed at the fuss and sorry he said anything about it.

Ironically, the report of what Brazel actually found, an explanation that it was a “weather balloon”(not quite right but kind of close), and the date he had found it, June 14, before the media frenzy of sightings started—all are reported in an Associated Press article published on page 2 in the July 9, 1947, Carlsbad Current-Argus (“‘Flying Disc’ turns Out to Be Weather Balloon”; I have a copy of it, see Figure 3). This is the same newspaper that unfortunately seemed to forget those facts in their July 2017 anniversary article.

In the subsequent mythmaking, one of the main sensationalist books (The Roswell Incident, Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, 1980) claimed that the debris was from a flying saucer that passed over Roswell the evening of July 2, 1947. But in fact Brazel had found the debris much earlier, on June 14, just ten days after the NYU team had lost track of Flight #4, headed toward his ranch. (“This blows the whole yarn out of the water,” wrote James Moseley in his Saucer Smear newsletter, v. 29, No. 4, May 15, 1982.)

Back then these “flying discs” didn’t have the associations they have today. Nobody knew what they might be (and indeed some reports at the time did suggest that they were meteorological phenomena, or delusions, or mass hysteria, or visual misinterpretations of things seen in the skies). The idea of alien spacecraft hadn’t gained hold yet. At best the concern was that if they were physical craft at all, they might be Soviet or even holdover Nazi aircraft.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the mythmaking process really took off. More fantastic and wild stories emerged (or were concocted) in a process familiar to folklorists. Three out-and-out hoaxes were widely publicized, then exposed.

As for reports of sightings of alien bodies, the second (1997) U.S. Air Force report investigated and found there were no contemporary reports of alien bodies being found in 1947. These (unverified) reports came only in UFO books and articles published after 1978.

The Air Force report describes in detail a long series of Air Force experiments over decades in which instrumented lifelike anthropomorphic dummies were dropped out of high-altitude research balloons over New Mexico. This began in the 1950s and continued for many years. Most were launched over Holloman Air Force Base or the White Sands Missile Range, but the balloons soon floated beyond those boundaries. The idea was to measure the effects of extreme environments and situations deemed too hazardous for a human being (page 17).

Such instrumented crash-test dummies were not familiar at that time, and the report suggests that one “very likely could be mistaken for an alien.” This conclusion was widely ridiculed by UFO believers at the time, but the report gives a large amount of supporting detail and shows dozens of photographs. That explanation, to most fair-minded observers, has stood the test of time. Among the kinds of eye-witness statements that support the crash-test dummies explanation were statements such as “his eyes were open, staring blankly,” “their skin coloration . . . a bluish-tinted milky white.” At other times, the report says, injured airmen, some seriously so, were brought to the Roswell base after accidents, and it suggests some reports are mixed-up remembrances of those.

One last piece of corroborating testimony: In 2001 journalist Guy P. Harrison interviewed Joe Kittinger (Colonel, U.S. Air Force, ret.), one of the great aviation pioneers of the twentieth century. In 1960 Kittinger had jumped out of a balloon over New Mexico from the very upper edge of the atmosphere (102,800 feet, or nineteen miles). In a free fall that lasted four minutes, he reached a speed of 600 miles per hour.

Harrison was mainly interested in those kinds of real adventures, but he hesitantly asked Kittinger about Roswell. “It never happened,” Kittinger said, and went on to describe the events involving the NYU balloon experiments I have reported here. “The so-called alien spaceship was that balloon. . . . A lot of people want to believe it was aliens, and they want to believe there was a big cover-up. But I’ll tell you, it never happened.”

Figure 3. Associated Press article published July 9, 1947, reporting that the debris rancher Mac Brazel had found on June 14 (long before the July 2 “flying saucer” sighting over Roswell) consisted of “pieces of paper with a foil-like substance, and pieced together with small sticks, much like a kite.” Plus “pieces of grey rubber. All were small.” (Author’s collection.)

What did happen, he said, is that these high-altitude drops of humanlike dummies contributed to the Roswell myth. “Absolutely they did. These dummies we dropped from balloons were dressed in pressure suits, so they looked unusual.” (These quotes are from Chapter 13 of Harrison’s excellent 2012 book, 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True [Prometheus Books], and I relate them here with his permission.)

“One time we dropped one and it fell way up in the mountains,” Kittinger said. “These dummies weighed more than two hundred fifty pounds. So how do you carry one out of the mountains? We put it on a stretcher and carried it in the back of an ambulance to take away. Now if somebody is back in the weeds watching this they are going to say, ‘Wow, look at that alien they have there.’ We think that a lot of the alien sightings were actually us doing our work with the test dummies.”

Hollywood, myth-infused home of the movie industry, is like any other town in that it has its share of curses and mysterious legends. Stories about cursed productions take on a life of their own, making horror movies in particular seem even more ominous and frightening than if they were just works of entertainment.

When a movie deals with the subject of demons, it is all too easy to believe in a curse. Be it superstition or not, many people believe that merely dealing with occult subjects, dabbling in them, is a sure way to invoke malevolent forces. The legend of the curse surrounding the film The Exorcist can be traced to promotional materials, specifically book tie-ins, including Harold Newman’s The Exorcist: The Strange Story Behind the Film. Blame might be more correctly placed on the book’s publishers, Pinnacle Books, for their marketing. Two fatal incidents related to the production are noted in Newman’s book. The most pertinent is the death of actor Jack MacGowran from influenza. It is something of a stretch to blame MacGowran’s death on The Exorcist, as he died four weeks after all his scenes had been filmed on another continent. Then there was the death of the brother of actor Max von Sydow, which the veteran actor learned of during the shoot. As with MacGowran, the death occurred in another part of the world, Scandinavia. It is even more of a stretch to blame this on The Exorcist.

Newman’s text is actually a bit more circumspect in its implications. As for near-fatal occurrences, the most dramatic is the one that opens Newman’s book, an accident that nearly claimed the life of Jordan Miller, the five-year-old son of actor Jason Miller (who played Father Damien Karras). Newman certainly has no problem with sensationalism or any hesitancy about spreading rumors. But he stops short of explicitly endorsing them (Newman 1974).

Critic Mark Kermode claimed that William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, “played up” these sorts of rumors, especially MacGowran’s death, presumably as a means of publicity. Questioned by interviewer Michael Doyle, Friedkin denied Kermode’s claim. “He’s wrong,” said Friedkin, before going on to elaborate: “I never ‘played up’ rumors of an Exorcist curse, although the idea of such a thing has been around almost since the beginning of [production on] the film. No, people like Ellen Burstyn played up those rumors, not me. I did everything I could to deny the existence of a curse and I don’t accept the idea now.” The director indicated that an actor expiring after a shoot was less unnerving than having an actor die on the set. “Yes, there were strange things that went on but there had been stranger and more troublesome events that have occurred on movie sets—like people dying during the course of shooting. An agnostic, Friedkin concluded, “Personally, I don’t believe in curses, but I’ve only mentioned them because you just asked me about The Exorcist curse—as many others have over the years” (Doyle 2013).

Despite such denials, Kermode seems to have had a reliable source in the late William Peter Blatty, who wrote and coproduced The Exorcist. Blatty was a believer in the afterlife and gave some credence to the notion of supernatural forces, yet he dismissed the much-ballyhooed Exorcist curse as purely Friedkin’s invention. Surprisingly, he does not accuse the director of inventing the legend for publicity purposes. Instead, he believes Friedkin needed an excuse to explain the production’s numerous and costly delays to impatient (and penny-pinching) executives at Warner Brothers. The motivation Blatty ascribes is faintly laughable, as it’s hard to imagine many cynical Hollywood producer-types being moved by a director blaming budget overruns on supernatural forces, possibly including the devil (Kermode 1998).

The curse as a publicity tool certainly reared its head with The Omen, an expensive attempt to rekindle the kind of unholy profits summoned by The Exorcist. Once again, we have the death of a movie star’s relative; in this case Gregory Peck’s son shot himself. This death has only a tenuous link since it occurred two months before Peck began the film. The movie was cursed from the beginning, if we are to believe Bob Munger, the religious adviser who came up with the idea for the film.

If Satan was indeed behind the Omen curse, then it was surely one of his cruelest curses, or most random, as it also involves mass death resulting from a plane crash. The problem with attributing the crash to a curse is that the plane was never actually used in the movie. It was scheduled to be used in the movie, but the producers decided to use a different plane for aerial photography, whereupon the original plane crashed upon takeoff, killing all on board. Satan, it seems, was unaware of the change in planes. If there was a curse, then that means a number of people were punished, not for being associated with the movie but for riding on a plane that was almost, but not quite, associated with the movie.

Director Richard Donner scoffed at any supernatural notion: “I say no, it’s just an incredible coincidence. There are those that would like to think about it, that it’s something more. And when the publicity department at Fox got their hands upon it, we all said, yes, it’s The Omen, because we’re all selling our movie” (Curse or Coincidence? 2006).

Movie rumors are sometimes spread by shadowy sources. The tabloid National Enquirer used anonymous sources in a story about mysterious events relating to the Poltergeist movies.

An unnamed source, supposedly “close” to the series, was quoted thus: “The films have been plagued by such problems and tragedies that it really makes you wonder if somebody—or something—was trying to tell us something” (George et al. 1988). This source could have been anybody from a studio executive to a lowly crewmember to someone in the publicity department. Or, given the Enquirer’s track record, the quote could have been fabricated.

Certainly the films are associated with a number of untimely deaths. But if someone was trying to send an occultic message, who were they and what was the message? Urban legends provide a partial explanation. When word got out that the skeletons seen in the original film’s climax (described below) were actual cadavers, a story began that the misuse of corpses was at the root of the resulting occurrences. This explanation is ironic, in that the movie uses similar disrespect for corpses to explain the poltergeist activity.

Actress JoBeth Williams seems to have been a major factor in spreading these rumors. While chatting on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show to promote Brian Gibson’s Poltergeist II: The Other Side, Williams claimed that actual corpses were her costars in the original film. In Poltergeist, Williams falls screaming into a swimming pool full of muddy water and grotesque skeletons. Production of the second film was only rescued from preternatural turmoil because the filmmakers called in an Indian shaman to the cave that provided the setting for the film’s climax. He performed a ceremony that apparently appeased the spirits, temporarily at least. In more recent interviews, Williams often reminisces about coming home from the first film to find the picture frames on her wall mysteriously slanted.

Williams has admitted being terrified during the swimming pool scene—attributing her fear not to the fact that she was swimming with corpses but because she feared electrocution. It seems bizarre that real corpses would be used in an expensive Hollywood production, yet the film’s makeup artist, Craig Reardon, swore under oath that thirteen of the swimming pool corpses were real (Furtney 2013).

Author James Kahn, enlisted to write the novelization of Poltergeist, claimed to be haunted by “actual poltergeist events” while writing the novel, or so he has been quoted by the National Enquirer. When asked directly, the author is not quite so dramatic: “I’m not really a believer in paranormal experiences, as such,” he told me in a 2013 Facebook message.

When little Heather O’Rourke (the girl famously depicted with her hands on a haunted television on Poltergeist posters) died from a bowel defect at the age of twelve, the National Enquirer didn’t wait long to attribute the actress’s death to a supernatural cause. The most popular U.S. tabloid cited “bizarre events on the sets of the films—including vanishing scripts and mysterious problems with a sound track.” Apparently disappearing scripts were a recurring theme on the first film, with the copies belonging to actresses Zelda Rubinstein and JoBeth Williams all vanishing at some point.

The sequel, Poltergeist II: The Other Side, led to more mysterious script disappearances. Actor Will Sampson, of the Creek Nation, performed a spiritual ritual to cleanse the house used for shooting of unclean spirits. Supposedly this was due to his conviction that the house was full of mysterious malign threats, but the act nonetheless has the air of a publicity stunt. Julian Beck, a legend of bohemian theatre, died at the age of sixty, soon after filming his creepy portrayal of an evil reverend. Beck had been diagnosed with abdominal cancer at least a year before, so his death was hardly unexpected (Folkart 1985).

College-age Dominique Dunne was strangled by her ex-boyfriend right after making the first Poltergeist, but fate allowed little Heather O’Rourke to live to make two sequels. If some supernatural force wanted her dead, why would it wait so long? Why would it single out the two young girls of Poltergeist but allow the boy, Oliver Robins, to live? What supernatural criteria are at work here? Robins is on record as not believing in the curse. As he put it:

There wasn’t anything abnormal from any other set I’d ever been on. There are always technical problems, but people always want to bring those elements together because it’s a ghost movie and it’s easy to connect the dots. People want to believe it’s haunted or it’s cursed, when the fact is those same things happen on almost every other set. For instance, they said on one of the Poltergeist installments the film got fogged. Well, that happens all the time; when I was in film school that happened to me all the time. It’s just a technical error, you know. Of course it’s fun to talk about because of the ghosts in the movie. (Rob 2009)

Nor does Steven Spielberg believe in the legend. Asked by People if anything eerie happened on the set, he answered:

No. But this wasn’t a demonic possession movie like The Exorcist. This was more about aspects of life after death. Sure, lights fell, and people bumped into each other on darkened sets. And people fell into the swimming pool next to the house the main characters lived in. But those kinds of things happen on a Neil Simon film. (Calio 1982)

Some movies are said to be cursed in some vague way due to unfortunate circumstance. Rebel Without a Cause is sometimes called the most cursed film of all due to the high number of deaths associated with it—deaths of actors that is. Yet these deaths occurred years after the film was released. Nick Adams died in 1968 and Sal Mineo in 1976. The last death, Natalie Wood’s, occurred almost three decades after Rebel was shot. Director Nicholas Ray went on to live another two and a half decades, though by then his career was long decimated by a life of self-destruction. But if there is a curse on Rebel Without a Cause, why? Is God punishing the filmmakers for their wild lifestyles? If so, why did Dennis Hopper, no stranger to excess himself, go on to live for decades, eventually staging one of Hollywood’s biggest comebacks in the eighties? Hopper is practically the only member of the youthful cast not to be bisexual, giving God’s wrath a Sodom and Gomorrah-like overtone, if indeed he is the deity responsible for all this senseless dying.

Brandon Lee’s death on the set of The Crow might be easier to write off as one more movie accident were it not for the eerie parallels with the death of Lee’s father, martial arts great Bruce Lee. Bruce’s death was already shrouded in mystery. For the world’s greatest athlete to suddenly die of a brain embolism at a young age was too much for some fans to take, and rumors spread that he’d been felled by a “death touch,” assassinated by traditionalists outraged that Lee had spread their secrets in the West (Halland 1985).

The idea of martial arts gangsters sneaking an assassin onto a North Carolina movie set and taking out a budding action star is ridiculous but theoretically possible. Yet no evidence of foul play has ever turned up. As far as can be determined, a crew member simply loaded a gun with a real bullet instead of the fake he was supposed to use. New Line Cinema’s cost-cutting non-union tactics, built on a foundation of fatigue-inducing sixteen-hour shooting days, were a recipe for disaster when combined with dangerous stunts, and had already led to the electrocution of a carpenter and the disfigurement of a construction worker’s hand.

Even unmade movies are the subject of mystery-mongering lore. A humorous story about an Eskimo is the unlikely source of the most famously cursed unmade script of all. Todd Caroll of National Lampoon adapted a satirical novel by Mordecai Richler, The Incomparable Atuk, into a film script. Dwarfish and fat, the embittered ex-preacher standup comic Sam Kinison was about as unlikely as a movie star can get. The film was shut down after a single day of New York shooting in February 1989. No mysterious force was behind the film’s cessation. Kinison never bothered to read the script, telling friend Joey Gaynor he’d read it when he got to the set. He must not have liked what he read. Shutting down production was an extremely risky act on Kinison’s part, as breach of contract does not sit well with the studios. United Artists slapped Kinison and his manager Elliott Abbott with a lawsuit, demanding $4.5 million in actual damages plus another million in punitive damages (Variety 1992).The suit dragged on into 1992, forcing the comedian to put on a fundraiser to raise one million dollars in order to pay off a settlement with the studio (Variety 1992).

None of this is particularly eerie, but here’s where curse lore comes in, taking the form of a story that the Atuk script means certain death—that it in fact killed not only Kinison but also other comic actors who had considered the role. It seems that John Belushi, John Candy, and Chris Farley were also victims of Atuk. Keep in mind that Kinison didn’t die until three years after the one-day shoot, making this a somewhat delayed curse.

As far as I can tell, the story of the Atuk curse can be traced back to Doug Draizin, the producer who first offered the screenplay to Kinison. Draizin seemed to have a meager foundation upon which to build his reputation, so an association with a spooky curse was better than nothing (not surprisingly, the producer declined to clarify things for this article). Draizin took his story to the mainstream on Hollywood Ghost Stories, a 1998 AMC TV special hosted by William Shatner. Shatner described the screenplay as “a screenplay that’s to die for” before relating a legend claiming that John Belushi was considering the project during his final days. Yet Bob Woodward’s Wired: The Fast Times and Short Life of John Belushi, which details the actor’s last days in labored detail, makes no mention of the project. At the time of his death, Belushi was hellbent on pushing a romantic comedy called Noble Rot, even as studio honchos wanted him to take the low road and do a comedy called Joy of Sex. Atuk doesn’t appear to have been a serious contender for the actor’s attention, if indeed he even read it.

Similarly, an unfilmed adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is the subject of occasional arcane speculation due to the deaths of actors who were at one time connected with it, however briefly. Once again, John Belushi is the original victim of this curse, followed by the likes of John Candy, Divine, and yes, Chris Farley (Lippman 1999). At least in this case, Belushi’s involvement was confirmed by manager Bernie Brillstein, whereas I can find no concrete evidence the actor was ever considering Atuk or that there was ever serious interest in the project until the script was presented to Kinison.

Maidee Walker, a writer who was shopping the script around town, later admitted, “I interviewed every fat actor in Hollywood” for the role. The problem with this curse story is that the script has also attracted a number of actors who are still with us, such as Will Ferrell, Jack Black, John Goodman, and Josh Mostel, as well as one comic, Jonathan Winters, who lived to a ripe old age. Also there is the rather obvious point that the actors who died early lived rather unhealthy lifestyles.

We all like to attach special significance to the events in our lives to make our lives appear unique. We like to see ourselves as worthy of attracting preternatural attention, rather than merely being victims of harmless pranks, theft, or our own forgetfulness. This is true even of famous actors with disappearing scripts. The human tendency is to find significance of some kind, religious or occult, to things that would otherwise be written off as mundane or coincidental.

This is true of anyone: famous actors, less famous crew members, on down to journalists and anonymous fans. If such stories can provide good publicity for a movie franchise, so much the better. As long as a curse or similar mysterious story provides an element of the eerie and keeps interest in a movie series alive, these stories will live on in the public imagination.

• Calio, Jim. 1982. Steven Spielberg’s musings on Poltergeist. People (November 1).
• Curse or Coincidence? featurette. 2006. The Omen Collector’s Edition, (DVD). Twentieth-Century Fox Studios.
• Doyle, Michael. 2013. Is there someone inside you? Rue Morgue 140 (December).
• Folkart, Burt A. 1985. Julian Beck, 60, living theater founder. Los Angeles Times (September 18).
• Furtney, David. 2013. Craig Reardon on the film’s makeups. Poltergeist: The Fan Site. Available online at http://www.poltergeist.poltergeistiii.com/reardon.html.
• George, Jerome, Sam Rubin, and Michael Glynn. 1988. The Poltergeist curse: Child star Heather O’Rourke’s death is the latest tragedy to haunt horror movie series. The National Enquirer (February 23).
• Janet Halland. 1985. The death touch. Black Belt 23(6) (June).
• Kermode, Mark. 1998. Lucifer rising. Sight and Sound (July).
• Lippman, John. 1999. “Confederacy of Dunces” adaptation remains mired in rewrites and handovers. The Wall Street Journal (September 30).
• Newman, Howard. 1974. The Exorcist: The Strange Story Behind the Film. Pinnacle Books, Inc.
• Rob, G., 2009. Icons of Fright, Fright Exclusive Interview: Oliver Robins! Available online at http://iconsoffright.com/news/2009/02/fright_exclusive_interview_oli.html.
• Variety. 1988. February 26.
• ———. 1992. August 12.

As a skeptic, I try to view the world in a rational way, but I’m also a parent, which means I’m insane.

In April 1995, I became very ill. My doctor performed tests and found a parasite dwelling in my abdomen. I was overjoyed. During the infestation, I experienced nausea, exhaustion, and frequent urination. Finally, I endured hours of excruciating pain, culminating in surgical extraction. Afterward, I hugged the parasite and named it after a dead poet. I brought it home, cuddled it, and bought it many nice toys. The parasite emitted piercing screams and soiled itself. I found this encouraging and took many photographs.

Twenty-two years have gone by since the infestation. The parasite lives in my house and downloads music from iTunes without my permission. I’m a rational person, but I’m smitten. I’d do anything for her.

She is my daughter, Emily. She’s disabled, and she’s anything but a parasite to me.

Meet the Parents

When it comes to skepticism, parents of children with disabilities are a special case. Special-needs parents are particularly vulnerable to fraudulent claims and quack medicine and are often shamed for not trying alternative cures. Imagine: your child has been diagnosed with a chronic condition that cannot be cured. Everything you’d hoped for your child—to grow up to be a happy, healthy, independent individual—has been taken away. You mourn the child you expected to have while still trying to be the best parent you can be for the child you do have. Special-needs parenting requires extraordinary commitments, among them:

Time. Parenthood demands taking time for your kids, obviously. Special-needs parenting demands more. Time for therapy, doctor’s appointments, time off work. If you have other, healthy children, you have to balance the time you spend with your special needs kid with time spent with their siblings.

Money. Insurance never covers everything. You still pay for medication, adaptive equipment, after-school care. Even if your child receives social security, it doesn’t go far. You may have legal fees, for example having to set up a special-needs trust. Save all you can so when your child becomes an adult, she or he will be well cared-for. Try not to think what will happen when you’re not there anymore.

Energy. You probably work a forty-hour week. Your spouse (if you have one) probably also works. And you have a home. And children. So you come home from work to deal with your kids’ needs, cooking, cleaning, and homework. You’re probably dealing with all this as a single parent; 80 percent of marriages with special-needs kids end in divorce (Thorpe N.d.; Anderson et al. 2007). Extended family can ease the burden, but the stress is still phenomenal.

There’s joy, too. You get excited over every milestone and bond over silly stuff like any other family. Ultimately, this is your child, and you’ll do whatever it takes to help this kid grow up as safe, happy, and healthy as possible. If this means sacrifices or trying things that are a little out of your comfort zone, fine.

So when someone tells you about a cure they heard about for your child’s disability, your guard is down. It’s easy—and probably expensive—but it’s a cure.

This messes with your head in two ways: obviously, the happy (but unlikely) possibility that your kid can be cured, but also the guilt and shame you’ll feel if you don’t try it. The implication of the existence of a cure is that it’s within your control. What happens if you don’t try this new treatment? Maybe your child won’t get better. You could have done something, and you didn’t…. Shame on you for not even trying. What do you do?

Seizure the Day

When my two-year-old daughter was diagnosed with autism, it broke my heart. Every night, I drove myself nuts researching autism treatments. I was a classic special-needs parent: constantly stressed out, reading everything I could find on the subject, and desperate for answers to fundamental questions: Why does she have autism? What can I do to mitigate it? How do I advocate for her?

When Andrew Wakefield’s now-
discredited paper posited a vaccine-autism link, I was cautiously optimistic, and then disappointed to learn Emily’s MMR vaccine hadn’t contained thimerosal. While our experience with the vaccine claim was quickly debunked, not all autism parents had that comfort. I’ll never forget hugging another parent as he sobbed with guilt because he’d held his daughter down for the injection that (he thought) might have caused her autism.

It seemed like there was a new treatment or cure every month. When I didn’t try treatments that seemed experimental or quackish, I felt guilty. Other parents admitted feeling the same way. But Emily was growing up healthy and happy, even without woo. I eventually stopped feeling guilty for not jumping on treatments that seemed iffy.

In February 2009, Emily experienced a tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizure. At the emergency room, I learned that about 25 percent of children with autism experience at least one seizure by the time they reach adulthood (Brain Injury Association N.d.). Later that year, after her second seizure, she received her epilepsy diagnosis. With medication, she was fine. In July 2012, two months shy of being seizure-free for three years, Emily had a complex partial seizure. A twenty-four–hour video EEG revealed abnormalities, spikes in brain activity, and subclinical seizures during sleep. We adjusted her medications with every seizure. Since then, the frequency and duration of the seizures has increased. Epilepsy is here to stay. As I write this, she averages about one episode a week, and now has simple (conscious) partial seizures as well. Fun.

It’s easy to joke, to refer to my daughter as my parasite. But Emily’s my only child, and like other special-needs parents, I tend to go overboard on her behalf. When her seizures returned in 2012, I found an article from the Journal of Child Neurology, which terrified me: “when epilepsy and autism occurred together, the mortality rates increased by more than 800 percent” (Pickett et al. 2011).

I also discovered something called Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP). The cause of death is unknown, but subclinical seizures during sleep are suspected (Sudden Unexpected Death, N.d.; Sperling 2001). Just like Emily. Being a parent (and therefore insane), I became hysterical. Our neurologist was sympathetic but not encouraging. Even with heightened risk, SUDEP is extremely unlikely. What I heard was: Emily could die!

I fixated on the 800 percent increased mortality rate, calculating average mortality for an American female (Xu et al. 2007) and multiplying to estimate a 0.00416 percent chance of early death. So Emily’s in more danger of dying in a car accident than of SUDEP. Not so bad, right? But emotion made it difficult to differentiate between the reasonable collection of data for information and the hysterical collection of data because oh my god, she’s gonna die! The statistic I got my number from was based on females who were in good health, but what counts as good health? I did more frantic research and arrived at a statistical mortality rate of 0.00041 percent (Minino 2010), 800 percent of which is 0.00326 percent. Reasonable, right? I could relax.

Or could I? Statistics are useless when it comes to individuals. Besides, what if I did my math wrong? The parental part of my brain had turned into a raving lunatic. But my reasoning was flawed. My starting premise was “she’s gonna die,” a far cry from “my daughter has a relatively common seizure disorder, and she will in all likelihood be fine.”

I’m literally a card-carrying skeptic, and even I had trouble discerning actual danger from what wasn’t dangerous. Can you imagine how much harder it is for the average special-needs parent?

Parents Again

Emily likes to go bowling or see movies with her friends, who also have autism. We parents drive them and chat while the kids have fun. Sometimes we discuss past treatments. Some gave their kids vitamins or special diets. Some tried chelation or hyperbaric therapy. They’ve all been burned at one time or another by pseudoscience and have all spent thousands of dollars. They’re all cynical about autism treatments yet—ironically—when they learn about Emily’s epilepsy, they don’t hesitate to make suggestions based on something they saw on the Internet: Have we tried melatonin? The ketogenic diet? Aromatherapy? Medical marijuana? (One parent actually tried to give me a vape kit and cannabis oil—which is illegal in the state where we live.)

Separating the wheat from the chaff isn’t easy, especially when you’re dealing with the pressures of parenthood and disability. This makes us all the more vulnerable. Furthermore, different doctors make different recommendations. Emily’s pediatrician had different recommendations than the pediatric neurologist. When Emily switched to an adult neurologist, he had a slate of new protocols to run through. While we’ve been careful to stick with evidence-based medicine, many medical professionals don’t. When the line between hard medicine and woo is blurred, it’s confusing. Just recently, Emily’s school sent home a flyer for a new integrated medicine center for autism, where patients can receive reiki treatments while they get speech therapy. With woo consistently lumped in with evidence-based medicine, how can parents know how to tell the good from bad? How do we protect parents—and kids—from quack treatments?

Vet the Net

There are certain questions we should always ask whenever a treatment is publicized anywhere: (Using Trusted Resources 2015)

Who manages this information? Who posted the information? Are they generally reliable? Is it a medical organization, a pharmaceutical corporation, or a private individual?

Who’s paying for the project, and what’s their purpose? What’s in it for the organization that’s paying for the website or study this information comes from?

What’s the original source of the information? Did the authors research their topic in medical journals? Are multiple sources cited?

How is information reviewed before it gets posted or publicized? Peer-reviewed medical journals are a good start. The National Institutes of Health, Cancer.gov, and CDC.gov also provide peer-reviewed information with links to sources.

How current is the information? Medical research is conducted constantly all over the world. Start with data based on recent findings and work your way back. If a treatment was popular in the 1800s then fell out of use, it’s probably because a more effective or reliable treatment exists.

How do parents know to ask these questions? Education is a good place to start. Let’s see famous figures on television explaining those questions and why evidence-based medicine is so important. For most first-time parents attend birthing classes, parenting classes, etc., let’s add a lesson: how to evaluate medical information. The National Institutes of Health has excellent video tutorials to help people assess results of Internet health searches (Evaluating Health Information 2017). We can guide parents through these tutorials before their children are even born. And brochures and posters can illustrate the basics of how to locate and identify valuable health information. Make them available from obstetricians, pediatricians, and school nurse offices.

Finally, let’s advocate for the inclusion of this information in public school health education programs. Teach kids how to perform a useful Internet health search while they’re still in school. These lessons will stay with them when they become adults—and parents—themselves.

• Anderson, Donna, et al. 2007. The personal costs of caring for a child with a disability: A review of the literature. Public Health Report 122(1) (Jan-Feb): 3–16, US National Library of Medicine—National Institute of Health. Available online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/.
• Brain Injury Association of Queensland. Nd. Seizures, epilepsy and autism. Autism Spectrum Disorders Factsheets. Available online at http://www.autism-help.org/comorbid-seizures-autism.htm.
• Evaluating Health Information. 2017. MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. Available online at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/evaluatinghealthinformation.html.
• Minino, Arialdi M. 2010. Mortality among teenagers aged 12–19 years: United States, 1999–2006. NCHS Data Brief 37 (May). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Available online at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db37.pdf.
• Pickett, J., E. Xiu, R. Tuchman, et al. 2011. Mortality in individuals with autism, with and without epilepsy. Journal of Child Neurology 26(8). DOI: 10.1177/0883073811402203. Available online at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0883073811402203.
• Sperling, Michael R. 2001. Sudden unexplained death in epilepsy. Epilepsy Currents 1(1): 21–23. Available online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/.
• Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unexpected_death_in_epilepsy.
• Thorpe, Jen. N.d. Divorce rate higher among couples with special needs children (blog post). Families.com. Available online at https://www.families.com/blog/divorce-rate-higher-among-couples-with-special-needs-children.
• Using Trusted Resources. 2015. National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. Available online at http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/cancerlibrary/health-info-online.
• Xu, Jiaquan, et al. 2007. Vintage 2007 bridged-race postcensal population estimates. National Vital Statistics System. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Available online at www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/bridged_race/data_documentation.htm#vintage2007.

1. What do you think are the main factors that influence how effective a biology teacher is at teaching evolution?

It’s all about content knowledge. A teacher should know the definition of a scientific theory, current examples of evolution, and, as a result, have confidence when teaching the subject.

2. How does evolution education differ from country to country?

Our teachers [in the United States] have to constantly defend evolution. That’s not the case in most first-world countries. Like Richard says in The Greatest Show on Earth, it’s like a professor of Roman history having to defend the existence of the Roman Empire every year, year after year. I’m not as familiar with other countries, but as far as the United States is concerned, I am getting published soon in a journal titled Evolution: Education and Outreach. I did a comprehensive state-by-state comparison of our nation’s middle school science standards.

3. Why is it important for students to understand evolution?

Evolution is cool! It’s a beautiful web that underlies biology, making everything connected. It explains the history and diversity of all of the amazing life on Earth. And, in a practical sense, it helps us develop new medications and plays a key role in conservation of ecosystems.

4. What type of evidence is important for students to view in a biology classroom?

It is important that they understand that there are multiple lines of evidence for evolution all leading to the same conclusion. Evidence for evolution comes from many areas, including the fossil record, the law of superposition, biogeography, artificial selection, homologous structures, vestigial organs, and genetics. Teachers should definitely cover phylogenetics.

5. What techniques should be used for teaching evolution?

Make sure students understand scientific inquiry first and how science finds answers through observation, experiments, data collection, and sharing results. Try hands-on activities —and it’s very important to use modern-day examples of evolution, not just Darwin and his finches.

6. What is your opinion of biology teachers who don’t accept evolution?

They do not understand how science finds its answers and are doing a terrible disservice to their students.

7. At what point do you think students should be exposed to evolution?

Students should be exposed to evolution in Kindergarten, though New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and a few other states start in early elementary. Evolution ties the life sciences together and is the perfect thread: “Without evolution, life science is just stamp-collecting.”

8. With the current administration, how do you think science education, mainly evolution, will change?

Americans are becoming more accepting of evolution. The people President Donald Trump has hired and the decisions being made (see for example Florida SB 989) will slow down this positive trend. Darwin said, “Ignorance begets confidence more often than knowledge.” People who do not know what they are talking about will make decisions that will hurt us as a nation. The United States has been a wonderfully innovative and scientifically curious country; this is one of the most wonderful things about our great nation. I’m worried that scientific discoveries and the economic benefits that accompany them will begin happening more in other countries. Look at green technology, for example, and how much profit there is to be made in that field! We are not taking advantage of it just so the fossil fuel industry can continue making profits. Imagine if the candle-makers had impeded the promotion of Edison’s light bulb! It’s tragic.

9. How should the education of science teachers change to have more effective teachers in the classroom?

We have become an assessment-mad culture, with too much emphasis placed on test scores. In my district, teaching practically shuts down for six weeks so all of the tests can be administered. Instead of so much emphasis on teaching teachers how to analyze test data, give them content knowledge on the science topics they must cover. Emphasize hands-on activities and lessons that highlight the scientific method. I know it’s costly, but new teachers should have time to observe worthy veteran teachers for as long as possible.

10. What challenges do students who don’t accept the evidence of evolution face when they go to college?

I stress the way science finds its answers to questions about the natural world around us. Evolution is an elegant example of how thousands of repeatedly tested hypotheses, countless observations, and collaborations over 170 years led to a big idea in science. Not accepting evolution can be a handicap because it means you do not understand how science works.

“There is no shortage of stories from impressive people attesting to the reality of UFO technology or extraterrestrial bodies held in secret at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, or near Area 51 or elsewhere” (Dolan 2014, 152).

It started with a simple question: Why would otherwise successful, professional people with long, prosperous careers tell wild tales? Why would someone of good reputation, education, and a gainful career embellish their record with incredible adventures? Why would, say, a retired lieutenant colonel with numerous high-level accomplishments in his career, awarded numerous medals and praises from superior officers, why would he upon retirement, start telling people he was part of a team that analyzed the wreckage of a crashed UFO? And why go through the elaboration with painted-in details, citing documents and naming others who were involved? Why would he do this if it were not true?

It seems to me that as someone gains credibility, status, and a reputation, he or she would become less inclined to puff themselves up with fantastic tales. Why risk losing it all by going off the reservation and telling incredible narratives? Why would someone do that?

Philip J. Corso, in my opinion, is someone who had an impressive resume. According to his DA Form 66, he was a U.S. Army battalion commander for a time and Chief of the Foreign Technology Division. He was granted numerous awards and decorations and served in World War II and Korea. He then retired March 1, 1963 (“Phillip J. Corso” 2016). But in 1997, he published The Day After Roswell where he claimed that when he worked with the Foreign Technology Division, not only did he divvy up Russian and German tech to private companies for back engineering, but he also sent out parts of the UFO Roswell crash as well.

Why would a man of his prestige say such a thing if it were not true?

Philip J. Klass has already taken Corso to task on the book, noting several glaring errors such as Corso’s claim that the U2 flights over Russia were, in part, to see if they could fire on us by provoking them and to see if Russia had obtained UFO technology. But most important, he challenged Corso on his claim that the Roswell wreckage sat unattended for fourteen years until he was allegedly put in charge by General Trudeau. Klass notes:

(Choosing) Corso for this task is surprising because Corso did not have even a bachelor’s degree in science or engineering. (He had majored in Industrial Arts at a teachers college prior to being drafted in 1942.) One would expect Trudeau, or one of his predecessors, to have thought of turning the Roswell debris over to some of the many very competent scientists with Top Secret clearances then employed in Army research and development laboratories. (Klass 1998)

Is Corso a guy who sought secret clearances, secret projects, and late-night phone calls like Neo received from Morpheus in the movie The Matrix, only to have never received them? Did he put in his time only to come to believe he was never quite rewarded as he felt justified? In other words, did he embellish his career wildly years after retirement to compensate for twenty-one-years of “normal” service? Are there some people that regardless of their accomplishments never seem to see themselves as accomplished unless it’s truly fantastic?

Robert O. Dean is another person with a quality resume. He had a career in the United States Army, starting in 1950 and retiring in1976. He was in the wars of Korea and Vietnam and highly decorated for his service. He was at NATO headquarters from 1963 to 1976 with a rank of master sergeant (Klass 1997).

Watching Robert Dean “evolve” over the decades has been quite an adventure in itself. During his first appearances, he claimed that while at NATO he was an intelligence analyst and that one evening when he was tired and could not stay awake, a senior officer tossed him a thick manual and said this would keep him awake. Said manual supposedly documented a three-year study by NATO on UFOs and extraterrestrials. He said it was called “an assessment,” which concluded that there were several races of extraterrestrials flying around and landing and making face-to-face contact with people. The aliens were, however, not a threat (Nintzel and Acuna 1995).

Of course, Dean never produced this report for inspection. Philip Klass found no such study had ever been undertaken by NATO and that Dean’s record showed nothing of intelligence training, but that he was a Chief Clerk in the Language Service Branch (Klass 1997). Again, as in the case of Corso, it is doubtful a person with Dean’s actual rank and status would be so casually tossed the most important “Cosmic Top Secret” (which he called it) report just to keep him awake when a cup of coffee would do.

Over the years, Dean has given several lectures and interviews that, thankfully for us researchers, have been uploaded to YouTube. The preservation of this material is invaluable. Over the years, we can see how Dean expands his story and adds extraordinary pieces. And of course, all claims come with no way to verify them.

In one interview, he claimed he now has personal contact with extraterrestrials, to have been “taken off world” where they gave him “encouragement” and showed him the future. (Project Camelot 2016). In a 2010 lecture, he reported he was now remote viewing (Vimanaboy 2016). In another interview, he claimed a Navy Seal team was dispatched to the “Ararat Anomaly,” which was a large boat, and after several days of exploration, the team was extracted via helicopter with several “anomalous artifacts that have never been described or named” (Project Camelot 2008). All of these incredible claims are provided without a shred of evidence.

How about a nonmilitary person with impressive accomplishments? What of Dr. Steven M. Greer? He earned a medical license in 1989, had a career as an emergency room doctor, and held the position of chairman of the department of emergency medicine at Caldwell Memorial Hospital in Lenoir, North Carolina. He gave it all up in 1998 to pursue his UFO Disclosure Project (Greer 2010), headquartered in Crozet, Virginia.

Telling his origin story in 2006, Greer says that in October 1973, he was at the top of Rich Mountain, 5,000 feet above the town of Boone, North Carolina. Before he meditated, he witnessed an extraterrestrial’s vehicle that was like one he saw at the age of nine. He then meditated so hard he entered into a state of consciousness similar to a near-death experience he had years earlier. When he started to walk down the mountain, he was greeted by an extraterrestrial. He and the ET went aboard a craft that was out in space and translucent, allowing him to see space all around him. Greer claimed the extraterrestrials wanted to communicate with someone who could meditate like he does, and they were concerned for a peaceful human race and were looking for ambassadors, which Greer agreed to become (Greer 2006, 23–24). He was then returned to Earth and descended the mountain at steps of “leaps of 20 to 30 feet at once” and his physical body actually was light! (Greer 2006, 26).

None of this was revealed in Greer’s early UFO days when he appeared on Larry King Live in 1994. When King asked him, “How did you get into (UFOs)?” He said he had an uncle who worked on a project for an Apollo mission, was himself interested in space, and that he had a UFO sighting himself (StevenGreerArchive 2013). He makes no mention of multiple sightings, no mention of being taken up in space, and no springing down the mountaintop in a body of light. Furthermore, when King asked him if he’s made any contact, he said, “We have had limited exchange by light signaling and graphic signaling . . .” (StevenGreerArchive 2013). Then, after explaining the signaling, he says, “there have been reports of more advanced communication but . . . any craft capable of getting here from another star system is not gonna have technology that would be used by AT&T so we have to keep an open mind about what modalities of communication might be out there” (StevenGreerArchive 2013).

Wouldn’t this have been the place for Greer to have told King what he tells us in the 2006 book? When King asks him how he knows extraterrestrials have no hostile intentions and wish to establish a liaison with them, instead of telling King what he tells us in his 2006 book, Greer answers that he knows this because he’s “. . . personally been within a few hundred feet of these craft …” and then the talk about signaling. Finally, King takes a caller from Petoskey, Michigan, who asks if there is proof of alien abductions where people are taken and returned. Greer says, “I think it is extremely rare that anyone is taken onboard (UFOs) . . . It is much rarer than what UFO followers would have you think” (StevenGreerArchive 2013). Another missed opportunity to have discussed his own as told in 2006, I guess.

Greer claimed he had the opportunity to “brief” CIA director James Woolsey on the subject during a dinner party, but Woolsey, along with three other signatories to a letter on the matter, explained that Greer took polite conversation and questions as affirmation of his view when in fact, it was not (Letter to Greer 1999). Why would a CIA director need Greer’s briefing anyway? But that’s not all: He told podcaster Joe Rogan that he was asked by “someone senior involved with (President Obama’s) team (to provide a UFO briefing)” (PowerfulJRE 2013).

To my knowledge, none of the people I have discussed here started out with tall tales. None of them, to the best of my knowledge, fibbed on their resumes to get into the military or medical school. We’re talking about people who already had impressive resumes who seemingly needed to embellish their work and life afterward. Why? Since no proof has been provided to substantiate the above-noted claims, our answers will have to be sought elsewhere.

There are many reasons people lie: to avoid punishments, wish fulfillment, as acts of aggression, to gain favor, to feel powerful, to put one over on others, to not hurt others’ feelings, and so forth. What I’d like to focus on that appears the most relevant to this study is what is called “pseudologica fantastica,” otherwise known as pathological lying.

This has been defined as

the repeated utterance of untruths; the lies are often repeated over a period of years, with the lies eventually becoming a lifestyle; material reward or social advantage does not appear to be the primary motivating force but the lying is an end in itself; an inner dynamic rather than an external reason drives the lies, but when an external reason is suspected, the lies are far in excess of the suspected external reason; the lies are often woven into complex narratives. (Dike et al. 2005)

There may or may not be a neurological defect behind why someone would engage in this behavior (Ford 1999, 136; Dike et al. 2005). In other words, perfectly “normal” people, even those with true and proven accomplishments, may engage in this behavior.

As an example, witness Judge Patrick Couwenberg who in 2001 was investigated by the State of California Commission on Judicial Performance for constant lies during the course of his duties and for outright lying to the Commission, claiming he was employed by the CIA, taking part in operations in Southeast Asia and Africa and that he had a master’s degree in psychology. None of this was true (Dike et al 2005).

Also witness another judge, Judge Jack Montgomery, in the State of Alabama. Through an FBI investigation in 1992 and subsequent trial for taking bribes, he was found to have told some outlandish lies. He claimed to have been the first herpetologist at the Birmingham Zoo and to have been a tortured prisoner of war in China in the Korean War. None of this was true (Ford 1999, 134).

Some people do embellish their already impressive careers and lives with fantastic adventures and accomplishments, and they seem to do so for no other reason than for the sake of telling the lie itself. So, when you hear that a wild story must be true because the person is not out to seek financial rewards or might actually risk a social standing, those factors aren’t a part of the equation.

So why would anyone embellish their lives with UFOs? It works great for those making up a unique life. It accomplishes at least two things: first, it’s pretty cool (to this author) and second, the vaguer and more unverifiable the claim, the less likely it is to be proven a fraud. It’s the same game played by televangelists. Someone who claims to have been in contact with aliens or to be speaking to God holds all the cards. You can’t ever with 100 percent satisfaction conclude a fakery, unlike someone who may fib research results in a lab that can be easily duplicated and retested by other scientists. Making claims that you were once allowed to review secret dossiers and reports of contact with aliens, claiming you handled UFO wreckage but couldn’t keep any—all of these are difficult to prove conclusively one way or the other. Plus, in regard to UFOs, the mythology of a military/government cover up has been in place since the beginning of the modern UFO era—1947. All one has to do is plug their narrative into it. It already has an audience.

Are Phillip J. Corso, Robert O. Dean, and Stephen M. Greer engaging in make-believe as described above? I don’t know. Either they are telling something truthful or they are not. It’s quite possible all three truly believe what they are saying and not consciously lying. But in any case, it is up to them to bring forth the evidence, which they have not. If their extraordinary claims are false (and they appear to be), then the only explanation appears to be a psychological one speculated here, a need to embellish a rather “normal” career, a need to make their lives more exciting than they actually are perceived to be (by them), a wish fulfilled.

I remember my time in college, bright-eyed, out to change the world. I imagine lots of young people have the same world outlook. College or military or none-of-the-above, we all want great things for ourselves when we journey into adulthood. Is it possible that once we move into the real world and most of us feel like we’ve led “normal” or otherwise “uneventful” lives we start making stuff up? If we take financial gain out of the equation, the only other solution as to why this happens is that the person is making up for a perceived failure to be part of something greater.

To answer my question that started all of this: yes, sometimes otherwise accomplished people will invent tall tales for any number of reasons. Some choose great war stories; others choose to embellish their personal narratives with great adventures with UFOs.

• Dike, Charles C., Madelon Baranoski, and Ezra E.H. Griffith. 2005. Pathological lying revisited. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 33(3): 342–349. Available online at http://www.jaapl.org/content/33/3/342.long.
• Dolan, Richard. 2014. UFOS for the 21st Century Mind. New York: Richard Dolan Press.
• Ford, Charles V. 1999. Lies! Lies! Lies! The Psychology of Deceit. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press.
• Greer, Steven M. 2006. Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge. Virginia: Crossing Point.
• ———. 2010. Credentials. Available online at http://www.disclosureproject.org/presskit/credentials.shtml; accessed July 13, 2017.
• Klass, Philip J. 1998. Philip J. Corso’s Roswell book is riddled with factual errors as well as (the) ridiculous claim that army couldn’t figure out how to exploit (alleged) ET technology for 14 Years until Corso was given the task. The Skeptics UFO Newsletter 49 (January 1). Available online at http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/klass_files_volume_49.
• ———.1997. UFOlogist Robert Dean claims “it’s quite easy to lie to the American public,” and demonstrates this claim to be true. The Skeptics UFO Newsletter 48 (November 1). Available online at http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/klass_files_volume_48.
• Letter to Greer. 1999. Available online at http://siriusdisclosure.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/1999-Woolsey-Petersen-letter.pdf; accessed July 13, 2017.
• Nintzel, Jim, and Hector Acuna. Secrets and saucers: For Tucsonan Bob Dean, the truth is out there. Tucson Weekly (June 29–July 5, 1995). Available online at http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/06-29-95/cover.htm; accessed July 13, 2017.
• “Phillip J. Corso.” 2016. Available online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_J._Corso; accessed July 13, 2016.
• PowerfulJRE. 2013. Joe Rogan Experience #331 - Dr. Steven Greer. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gVLv5eg4Xg; accessed July 13, 2017.
• Project Camelot. 2008. Project Camelot interviews Bob Dean: The coming of Nibiru. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbgHyrmgRZM; accessed July 13, 2017.
• ———. 2016. Bob Dean and Clifford Stone Project Camelot great interview. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk4ls_1QCyI; accessed July 13, 2017.
• StevenGreerArchive. 2013. Steven Greer - Larry King Live - UFO Cover-Up - Oct 1, 1994. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzsjzS7O4cU; accessed July 13, 2017.
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IT HAPPENED less than a year ago. On December 4, 2016, customers were sitting down for a Sunday afternoon meal in the Washington, D.C., pizzeria Comet Ping Pong. Known locally for its quirky atmosphere, live music, and of course its ping pong, on this day the restaurant would make national headlines. Shortly before 3 PM, a man walked in bearing an assault rifle. The man took aim in the direction of one employee, who quickly fled, before discharging his firearm. Law enforcement promptly responded to calls, and officers were able to take the man into custody without further incident. They found two firearms on the suspect and another in his vehicle. Fortunately no one was hurt, but the event has left many people shaken, and not only for the obvious reasons. The accused had apparently not intended to commit a mass shooting, nor had he intended to rob the restaurant. The truth, such as it is, turned out to be quite strange nonetheless.

The accused shooter was twenty-eight-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, a father of two daughters and resident of Salisbury, North Carolina. After his arrest, he told police that he had made the 350-mile drive up to the capital to investigate claims regarding a conspiracy theory, circulating online, that quickly came to be called “Pizzagate” (Metropolitan Police Department 2016). According to this outlandish set of claims, leaked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, contained coded signs and messages revealing that Comet Ping Pong was actually a front for an occult, child sex slave ring involving the owner of the restaurant, James Alefantis, Podesta, and Clinton herself. For several days before the presidential election, claims of this sort proliferated across the Internet. Alefantis and his employees began receiving menacing messages via social media, including overt death threats (Kang 2016). The events seemed to reach a climax with Welch’s misadventure. He subsequently told police that his intention was to investigate these claims in person and, if he found them to be true, rescue the children held captive there.

This story is admittedly bizarre in many ways, and learning more about the shooter’s motivations does not seem to shed much light on it. Likewise, while others have documented the origins and spread of the groundless Pizzagate conspiracy theory (e.g., Kang 2016), neither does this mapping necessarily help us understand how something so ludicrous found traction in a surprisingly wide audience, nor why it would motivate anyone to investigate in person. These events—preposterous as they are—can be understood by applying well-established lessons from social research.

First, there is the peculiar nature of the conspiracy theory itself. Unlike many of the stories one might encounter in everyday life, stories of this sort can be understood as legends. According to folklorists, a legend is a type of story about supposed past events told as though it might be real: a “legend is a legend once it entertains debate about belief” (Dégh 2001, 97). Unlike a fable or literature, the events described are presented as possible, even if they are bizarre and not necessarily plausible. For example, one legend theme that used to be told frequently involves encounters with an exotic and dangerous animal in a typically safe and familiar place. People telling the legend usually claim that a friend-of-a-friend, or some other indirect acquaintance, had gone shopping for a carpet at a local department store (Brunvand 1981). He or she put their hand inside a rolled-up rug and felt a sudden, sharp pain. They had been bitten by a snake hiding in the carpet, an exotic species that had apparently been imported, by accident, along with the carpet from some far off, foreign land.

Two characteristics of the story indicate its status as a legend with little or no factual basis. First, no firsthand witnesses can ever be found by researchers. Second, multiple versions of it can be found with varying details. This is because legends constantly change to suit the narrator and the locale in which they are told—the type of shop, the animal, the protagonist—and they can circulate over the years, becoming associated with different people and places (e.g., Radford 2016). Both characteristics apply to the claims about Comet Ping Pong. No witnesses, victims, or perpetrators have come forward, and similar stories have been told about other places at other times. Similar allegations and threats occurred in 2015 in regard to a day care center in Salt Lake City (Peterson 2016), for example. Going further back into history, unfounded panic over alleged occult sexual abuse of children ran rampant during the 1980s and 1990s, and many places and people became the target of groundless accusations (Victor 1993). It appears that the pizzeria was just the latest target of a perennial fear.

Given the ambiguous nature of such stories, people rarely find it easy to determine their credibility. Rather, they must invest a degree of thought and emotional engagement into the narrative while they appraise its merits. One legend, for example, suggests that Martha Washington accidentally invented ice cream when she “left a bowl of cream outside one cold night for a neighborhood kitty and found it frozen solid in the morning” (Ellis 2009, 59). Is this legend true? No, but it sounds like it could be, and the central claim is compelling. Consequently, if listeners are engaged with the story, they will frequently seek out further information and participate in intense discussions with others over the legend and its claims. This was certainly the case with the Pizzagate theorizing and, as is the case with conspiracy theories, further information and discourse is likely to be found online and from sources as dubious as the original story. However, the abundance of sympathetic websites and the sheer number of credulous user posts dealing with the topic may appear to be, themselves, evidence that a credible claim has been made. As social psychological research has illustrated, “we determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct” (Cialdini 2009, 99).

Participation in legends is not necessarily limited to discussion alone. Sometimes the action they provoke manifests in a form called “legend-tripping” (Hall 1973). Inspired by a legend, a person may travel to the alleged site of the story to investigate its validity directly. In doing so, participants enter into the legend itself, acting out a part of it as one of its characters, and thereby “telling” its narrative through the process of ostension—through their behaviors rather than through words (Dégh and Vázsonyi 1983). This usually takes on a fairly innocuous form, such as when adolescents visit a reputedly haunted graveyard and reenact certain behaviors that legend claims will invoke the spirit, such as calling its name at midnight. However, this sort of legend-tripping is precisely what the shooter did as well, albeit much less innocently. Welch saw himself as the potential hero of the story—a rescuer of children. Instead, he put them at risk, since the only danger present was the danger that he brought with him. As one news headline correctly pointed out, “Fake News Brought Real Guns” (Kang and Goldman 2016). Similarly, legends are not simply stories about events that supposedly occurred in the past. They also serve as “maps for action” (Ellis 2003, 325). As such, they can tell more about the future than the past. Perhaps it should have been expected that the Internet threats against the pizzeria would eventually escalate into something much more serious once sufficient and sustained interest was aroused. The peak in Internet chatter before the election, in hindsight, was a likely warning.

Given the level of absurdity involved in this episode and the lack of anything approaching evidence to corroborate the claims made (LaCapria 2016), it might be reasonably expected that most people would soon realize there was never any truth to the story and move on after its exposure in the media. This, however, is not the nature of the legend process nor was it what happened in this case. Conspiracy theories in particular are notoriously resilient to criticism (Goertzel 2011). Many people remained convinced of Pizzagate and—as is typical with conspiracy theories—public disconfirmation only served to convince diehards of a cover-up in the works. To believers, it seems the media doth protest too much.

As frustrating as this stance may be to those wishing to falsify absurd theories, such a mindset is far from abnormal. Psychological research illustrates how it is difficult for most people to admit they were wrong when they have committed strongly to a belief or course of action. Leon Festinger and colleagues (1956) famously documented how members of a UFO cult doubled down on their belief system after their predicted apocalypse failed to show up on December 21, 1954. The group was saved the trouble (and the cognitive dissonance) of having to admit they were wrong when their prophet conveniently received a last-minute revelation from God via automatic writing. It turned out that the Almighty decided to postpone Armageddon thanks to the cult’s faith and devotion. Alex Jones, the extreme right-wing radio show host and conspiracy theorist well-known for promoting claims that the September 11 attacks were hoaxed, inadvertently offered an example of this sort of revisionist postscript shortly after the media storm that followed Edgar Welch’s misguided adventure into the pizzeria. In a video posted to the infowars.com website, Jones conceded that the story about a sex ring in the basement was “absurd” without going so far as to disavow it, then promptly suggested that it was a smoke screen used by the media to cover up the “real” revelations found within the Podesta Wikileaks (Jones 2016). By planting and subsequently debunking an absurd story, Jones claimed, the media makes all of the “real” and damning content of the emails seem false by association. This allows him and his devotees to step away from a debunked claim and simultaneously not have to admit they were wrong. All this, despite the fact that the allegedly “real” information in the email is no less absurd and no more substantiated than the sex ring claim (e.g., high level involvement in secret cults, black magic rituals, and so forth). Jones also conveniently overlooked the fact that he himself was one of the primary disseminators of the claims against Comet Ping Pong in the first place. According to his own logic, this must mean that he is actually part of the conspiracy he claims to oppose.

At first blush, the Pizzagate drama seemed so bizarre that it was beyond the bounds of comprehension. It is easy to discount those involved as mentally ill, unintelligent, or perhaps bright but manipulative hucksters. While tempting, doing so would misdiagnose conspiracy theorists, most of whom are mentally healthy individuals (Bost 2015). Moreover, this would result in a missed opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the situation and others like it. After all, this story is far from unique in its outlandish claims. Whatever the truth may be about the person or persons who initiated the legend, the fact that they took root at all in a wider audience reveals something about them that may help us understand those who entertained the possibility of a Clinton-linked sex slave ring. Legends are generally false in a literal sense, but they also reveal deeper truths about those who tell them, reflecting their “hopes, fears, and anxieties” (Brunvand 1981, 2). Legends about finding a mouse’s tail in a soda bottle may not be literally true, but they reveal real concerns about health and safety in industry. People who rank highly in conspiracy ideation also report high levels of support for democratic values and strongly negative attitudes toward authority (Swami et al. 2011). Pizzagate, as a conspiracy legend, reflected these concerns: fears over the trustworthiness of big government, big media, and elites that represent excessive authority and seem to threaten democratic values.

There is a less savory side of the concerns involved as well. A Slate article correctly suggested that the very characteristics of Comet Ping Pong that make local leftists love it are what made it a focus for the fears and concerns of the far Right. The place is a haven for artists, punks, gays, and other marginal groups: a tangible emblem of inclusivity, tolerance, and other progressive values that are threatening to the conspiracy-prone alt-Right (Cauterucci and Fischer 2016). Tellingly, the physical signs of these competing values are read differently by those who do not share them. For example, in a “mural of people and faces by an artist who’s played the Comet stage, conspiracy theorists see a depiction of a child being strangled. In run-of-the-mill bathroom graffiti, they see secret sexual messages. In the lack of labeling for the gender-neutral bathrooms, haters with a political agenda see ‘secret rooms’” (Cauterucci and Fischer 2016). In a previous era, ice cream parlors evoked a similar fear in some Anglo-Americans (Ellis 2009). Distrustful of the foreign, Italian immigrants who frequently owned the parlors, legend had it that young women risked a morally and physically dangerous slippery slope into drugs and forced prostitution if they visited them. The parallels are striking and troubling. A legend such as Pizzagate can only spread if the regressive values it reflects—nativism, racism, and xenophobia—are alive and well and resonate with a sympathetic audience. Strangely, it also indicates that these values may paradoxically be expressed by the same people who support democracy and anti-authoritarianism, odd bedfellows that may find common cause in populism (Panizza 2005).

Legends, just like fake news, can lead to real-world consequences. In addition, these outcomes can themselves reinvigorate the original legend and encourage its further transmission. Discussion of the Pizzagate claims led to action: online threats and an active shooter. These in turn sparked further debate on social media and in the mainstream media. Whether intentionally or not, this continued discussion may encourage further exploits. Hopefully lessons can be learned from all this. While reputations have been damaged, fortunately no one was physically harmed this time. But rumors continued to circulate over online blogs and videos, threatening comments continued to be posted to the Comet Ping Pong Facebook page, and the possibility for further disturbances inspired by dubious legends remains strong. Within days of the shooting, a fifty-seven-year-old woman named Lucy Richards was arrested for texting death threats to another woman who had lost a child in the Sandy Hook School shootings of 2012. According to the Department of Justice, Richards was convinced by conspiracy claims that the shootings were a hoax and, presumably, that the unnamed victim was somehow in on it (Boxley 2016). With an understanding of the social processes at work in these matters, it can be hoped that we will be better-prepared for the next outbreak of conspiracy-inspired legend-tripping.

• Bohn, Kevin, Daniel Allman, and Greg Clary. 2016. Gun-brandishing man sought to investigate fake news story site, police say. CNN (December 5). Available online at http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/04/politics/gunincidentfakenews/index.html.
• Bost, Preston R. 2015. Crazy beliefs, sane believers: Toward a cognitive psychology of conspiracy ideation. Skeptical Inquirer 39(1). Available online at www.csicop.org/si/show/crazy_beliefs_sane_believers_toward_a_cognitive
  _psychology_of_conspiracy_id.
• Boxley, Mark. 2016. Florida woman calls sandy hook massacre a “hoax,” threatens to kill parent of victim, officials say. WFV 9 ABC (December 7). Available online at http://www.wftv.com/news/local/florida-woman-calls-sandy-hook-massacre-a-hoax-threatens-to-kill-parent-of-victim-officials-say/473918395.
• Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: Norton.
• Cauterucci, Christina, and Jonathan L. Fischer. 2016. Comet is D.C.’s weirdo pizza place. Maybe that’s why it’s a target. Slate (December 6). Available online at http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/12/06/comet_ping_pong_is_a_
  haven_for_weirdos_and_now_a_target.html.
• Cialdini, Robert B. 2009. Influence: Science and Practice. New York: Pearson.
• Dégh, Linda. 2001. Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Dégh, Linda, and Andrew Vázsonyi. 1983. Does the word “dog” Bite? Ostensive action: A means of legend-telling. Journal of Folklore Research 20(1): 5–34.
• Ellis, Bill. 2003. Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.
• ———. 2009. Whispers in an ice cream parlor: Culinary tourism, contemporary legends, and the urban interzone. Journal of American Folklore 122(483): 53–74.
• Festinger, Leon, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. 1956. When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World. New York: Harper and Row.
• Goertzel, Ted. 2011. The conspiracy meme. Skeptical InquirerR 35(1) (January/February): 28–37. Available online at http://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_conspiracy_meme.
• Hall, Gary. 1973. The big tunnel: Legends and legend-telling. Indiana Folklore 6(2): 139–73.
• Jones, Alex. 2016. Pizzagate is a diversion from the greater crimes in Podesta Wikileaks: Why not cover the hundreds of other dastardly deeds in the emails? Infowars (December 5). Available online at http://www.infowars.com/pizzagate-is-a-diversion-from-the-greater-crimes-in-podesta-wikileaks/.
• Kang, Cecilia. 2016. Fake news onslaught targets pizzeria as nest of child-trafficking. New York Times (November 21). Available online at http://nyti.ms/2f0L9G9.
• Kang, Cecelia, and Adam Goldman. 2016. In Washington pizzeria attack, fake news brought real guns. New York Times (December 5). Available online at http://nyti.ms/2h8nPmp.
• LaCapria, Kim. 2016. Chuck E. Sleaze. Snopes (December 4). Available online at http://www.snopes.com/pizzagate-conspiracy.
• Metropolitan Police Department. 2016. Arrest made in assault with a dangerous weapon (gun): 5000 block of connecticut avenue, northwest. December 5. Available online at mpdc.dc.gov/release/arrest-made-assault-dangerous-weapon-gun-5000-block-connecticut-avenue-northwest.
• Panizza, Francisco (ed.). 2005. Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. New York: Verso.
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• Radford, Benjamin. 2016. Mistaken memories of vampires: Pseudohistories of the chupacabra. Skeptical Inquirer 40(1) (January/February): 50–54.
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• Swami, Viren, Rebecca Coles, Stefan Steiger, et al. 2011. Conspiracy ideation in Britain and Austria: Evidence of monological belief system and associations between individual psychological differences and real-world and fictitious conspiracy theories. British Journal of Psychology 102(3): 443–63.
• Victor, Jeffrey S. 1993. Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend. Chicago: Open Court.

Britt Marie Hermes used to practice naturopathy… until she realized it was pseudoscience. She now sheds a much-needed light on the belief system of naturopathy and its dangerous practices.

Jonathan Jarry from the McGill Office for Science and Society conducted mini-interviews with many of the speakers of CSICon 2017, a conference dedicated to science and skepticism.

Want to see more from CSICon? Check out all the speakers at Reasonable Talk!

An email correspondent occasionally sends me items of interest from the Indian press. He recently sent me two clippings about initiatives to solve all of India’s problems by studying the Vedas (for Hindus) and the Qu’ran (for Muslims).

The Vedas

The headline read, “For diabetes, cancer cure, Raj institute to study the Vedas.” The article asked, “Are you curious to discover the science behind unresolved mysteries of the universe or looking for a permanent solution to disorders and illnesses like diabetes, blood pressure or cancer? Well, the Vedas could show you the way.” It said the Rajasthan government is forming a Research Institute of Mantra Sciences to reclaim and revive the lost ancient knowledge of Bharat. It is currently recruiting and hopes to become functional in 2018. It will do primary research work in the areas of Ayurveda, Dhanur Veda, Gandarva Veda, and Shilpa Veda, since ancient texts have answers to the all the questions of the universe.

In a sidebar, there was a quotation from the retired head of the Vedic Department. “The answer as to how a simple line drawn by Lord Ram prevented Ravana from crossing over lies in Vedic science. This ancient wisdom can safeguard India from our enemies. … The chanting of mantras can help in condensing vapours and bringing rain. This can solve the major problem of water scarcity.”

Sure, chanting is likely to work! It’s scientific: Vedic Science and Mantra Science. Who knew?

In case you didn’t get the reference, Ravana was the ten-headed demon king in the ancient Indian epic poem Ramayana. Clearly a valid scientific reference, although you won’t find it in PubMed or Google Scholar.

The Qu’ran

The headline read, “Solution to all problems can be found in Qu’ran.” The article is a report about a recent Qu’ran Conference, and a Qu’ran exhibition that “was highly praised by all the women and girls.” Representatives explained that the Qu’ran is a divine book that shows the best path for all the humans, is beneficial for everyone, and must be read, studied, and followed wholeheartedly. It encompasses all the knowledge in the world. “Everything that science is telling us is already there in Qu’ran.” “The solution to every single problem exists in this holy book.”

Which One? Both?

It’s good to know that science is advancing in India, and I hope they will publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals and share this ancient knowledge to help the rest of the world solve all our problems. I wonder what the Qu’ran and the Vedas have to say about global warming. I wonder what they can tell us about dark matter—maybe they can help out our puzzled physicists and cosmologists. I wonder, if both books have all the answers, are they the same answers? Wouldn’t it be fascinating to have a debate between a Vedic scholar and an expert on the Qu’ran? Perhaps the French academic Gilles Kepel, who has demonstrated that he knows the Qu’ran better than the Islamists who have vowed to kill him. Of course, police protection would have to be provided.

A Proposal to Solve India’s Doctor Shortage

Steven Novella recently wrote an article https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/indian-doctors-fight-against-quackery/ in Science-Based Medicine about a bill proposed by Indian’s health minister JP Nadda. It would license practitioners of Siddha, Ayurveda, and homeopathy as health care providers and allow them to prescribe drugs and function as primary care doctors after a brief crash course. This would amount to legalizing quackery and allowing pseudoscience to triumph over science. Fortunately, the Indian Medical Association is vigorously opposing the bill.

Meanwhile, in China

In China, the Communist Party has insisted that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) be made equal in status to “Western” medicine. In the public schools, children as young as 12 are being taught how to administer acupuncture. They say this is “a way to get Chinese medicine’s scientific values and spirit into every household. Instilling a love of our country’s traditional culture in primary and secondary school students will be good for the health of the whole society.” There is already a backlash from Chinese doctors who practice real medicine; one commented, “Let’s also start courses in fortune telling and palm reading.”

There’s No Such Thing as “Western Medicine”

Science-based medicine is the same everywhere in the world. There is no such thing as “Western” or “Eastern” medicine. There is just medicine that has been scientifically tested and shown to work and medicine that hasn’t. In these recent developments in India and China, it seems superstition and tradition are enjoying a resurgence and science is losing ground. This is a big mistake.

Regardless of what you may be hearing in the news, claims that a “sonic attack” took place in Cuba are dubious. If one follows the facts and leaves politics aside, the evidence overwhelmingly points in one direction: mass psychogenic illness. There is no concrete evidence that an acoustical weapon was used to sicken twenty-four U.S. Embassy staff in Havana over the past year. However, you would not reach this conclusion if you had watched the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearings on January 9, 2018. Committee Chair and former Republican Presidential candidate Marco Rubio left the meeting asserting that Embassy staff were the victims of an attack and the Cubans knew about it. This is a serious situation because it has real-world consequences for U.S.-Cuban relations. There is even talk about shutting down the Embassy.

State Department Medical Director Dr. Charles Rosenfarb told the Hearings that he had all but ruled out “mass hysteria” as a cause of the strange illness that has sickened staff in Havana. “The findings suggest that this is not a case of mass hysteria,” he said. His use of the pejorative term “mass hysteria” was dismissive. When Senator Rubio asked him about this possibility, it was done so in a condescending manner. Mr. Rubio quipped: “Dr. Rosenfarb ... is there any thought given to the fact that this is a case of mass hysteria. That a bunch of people are just being hypochondriacs and making it up.” This is a loaded question meant to ridicule the possibility of a psychological cause and implies that all victims of mass psychogenic illness are hypochondriacs and fakers. On the contrary, most are normal, healthy people who are experiencing a collective stress reaction. A more professional response would have been to substitute the terms mass psychogenic illness or group stress response instead of the emotionally-charged label mass hysteria.

The claim that psychogenic illness is not involved because some “victims” have experienced “white matter track” changes in the brain and “mild brain trauma,” appears sound on its face but delve deeper. These conditions are not associated with acoustical weapons or waves. All of the “victims” were in homes or hotels. Sonic devices are bulky, inefficient, and ineffective. To single out individuals in a hotel or their home, and affect their health, is science fiction. The main symptoms of acoustical weaponry are nausea, anxiety, and irritability. These are common medical complaints. I experienced each one while watching the Hearings. I am sure if I had paid attention I would have heard anomalous sounds as well, but that does not mean I was the victim of a sonic attack. It would violate the laws of physics for an acoustical device to cause brain damage. There is not even a plausible pathway for this to occur.

A Self-Fulfilling Prophesy

The only reason why State Department doctors initially suspected a “sonic attack” was the presence of sounds and sensations accompanying the symptoms. Rosenfarb writes that among the descriptions were “a high pitched beam of sound,” and a “’baffling sensation’ akin to driving with windows partially down … .” These are very vague and are more consistent with tinnitus and ambiguous somatic complaints than a sonic attack. This is reminiscent of the old medical adage: “When you hear the sound of hoof beats in the night, first think horses, not zebras.”

Politics Dressed Up as Science

It is important to remember that these “attacks” were not at the Embassy but in two nearby hotels and at the homes of Embassy staff. These staff, while part of a close-knit group, were spread out all over the place when they were supposedly targeted, often in close proximity to other people, yet others were not affected. Once the initial cluster of symptoms appeared and those affected noted sounds accompanying their symptoms, there was an immediate assumption that the most likely cause was an acoustical weapon and a specialist in acoustical attacks was consulted. This is a crucial point. With only an array of vague symptoms to go on, most of which have no association with acoustical waves, they immediately assumed the more exotic hypothesis. This was entirely unjustified given that the majority of symptoms are not associated with sonic weapons, including the two most dramatic ones that grab the headlines: mild brain trauma and white matter track changes in the brain. It cannot be overstated: There is no evidence that infrasound or ultrasound can cause changes to white matter tracks, while acoustical waves cannot cause brain trauma.

I am convinced that we are dealing with an episode of mass psychogenic illness and mass suggestion. If these same symptoms were reported among a group of factory workers in New York or London, you would get a different diagnosis. No one would even consider the involvement of a sonic weapon. The initial assumption is key in driving the diagnosis. There is also another possibility to consider here: government officials trying to defend their initial diagnosis.

Rosenfarb states that “Mission personnel describe a multitude of symptoms, many of which are not easily quantifiable and not easily attributable to a specific cause. The sharing of information that occurs in a small, tight-knit community has helped identify more affected personnel, but, as typically is the case with any community outbreak, also can complicate an epidemiological investigation. However, the most challenging factor is the lack of certainty about the causative agent and, therefore, the precise mechanism of the injuries suffered.” This statement strongly suggests psychogenic illness: an outbreak of an array of ambiguous symptoms within a close-knit community under stress in a foreign country that has a long history of difficult relations. What about white matter track changes and mild concussions? What caused these conditions? White matter track changes are common in a variety of conditions including depression. They are very common as people age. Interpreting these changes is a subjective, interpretive process. Scans are not an objective given from which medical facts are gleaned; they are open to interpretation. What about “concussion-like symptoms”? This could have been caused by pre-existing conditions. It is a very ambiguous term. Many of those supposedly affected are now back at work.

I keep getting emails from people saying things like, “You do not know what you are talking about. The U.S. government or the Russians have obviously developed a secret sonic weapon.” Any such device would rewrite the laws of physics. If such a weapon exists, why didn’t the U.S. or Russian military use it recently in expelling ISIS from cities in Iraq and Syria instead of putting their solders in harm’s way as they fought from house to house, street by street, clearing insurgents?

In the end, the key question is not whether or not a sonic attack took place, but why American officials would assume that an attack took place in the wake of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Kevin Folta is the chairman of the Horticultural Sciences department at the University of Florida. He recalls his recent visit to Uganda where he saw Ugandan scientists using genetic engineering to solve a food crisis... and initially being denied the use of this technology.

Jonathan Jarry from the McGill Office for Science and Society conducted mini-interviews with many of the speakers of CSICon 2017, a conference dedicated to science and skepticism.

Want to see more from CSICon? Check out all the speakers at Reasonable Talk!

Dear skeptical friends,

You may know that Britt Hermes, who is an international skeptical campaigner about naturopathy, is currently being sued for defamation.

Britt used to be a naturopath herself, but she now spends a lot of time and effort exposing naturopathic practices, including on her blog “Naturopathic Diaries”.

She’s been taken to court in Germany by US-based naturopath ‘Dr’ Colleen Huber, who is claiming that Britt has defamed her on her blog. Huber is a critic of chemotherapy and radiation therapy in cancer treatment. Instead, she uses ‘natural’ therapies that include intravenous infusions of vitamin C and baking soda.

The international skeptical community is concerned that the case against Britt may have the effect of silencing a major campaigner against unproven and disproven ‘medical’ practices, through the imposition of considerable legal costs.

For this reason, the Australian Skeptics have set up a fund-raising campaign to help cover Britt’s legal costs.

If you would like to contribute to the fund, or want more information, then go to www.skeptics.com.au/BrittHermes.

Best regards,
Claire Klingenberg

If you'd like to learn more about Britt Hermes' story and her experiences with naturopathy, check out her presentation from CSICon Las Vegas 2017:

Eugenie Scott is a Bay Area Skeptic and the former director of the National Center for Science Education. She has spent most of her career fighting for the science of evolution and climate change.

Jonathan Jarry from the McGill Office for Science and Society conducted mini-interviews with many of the speakers of CSICon 2017, a conference dedicated to science and skepticism.

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Fish oil supplements are immensely popular these days. According to the New York Times, 10 percent of Americans consume fish oil supplements regularly. In the United States, fish oil supplements accounted for $1.2 billion in sales for the year 2014. Most commonly people take these supplements for cardiac health, but many claims have been made for benefits besides protection of the heart. Claims for substances that act as panaceas are familiar to skeptics. Skeptics may take interest in the variety and boldness of claims made for fish oil supplements—particularly since fish oil is not a “miracle drug” but a nutritional supplement.

Conditions for which fish oil supplements have been claimed to be helpful include cardiovascular disease, depression, anxiety, seasonal affective disorder, postpartum depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, cancer, eczema, psoriasis, sunburn, diabetes, eye disorders, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and endometriosis. They have also been claimed to help increase a child’s intelligence and help people achieve weight loss. Clearly an extensive analysis of all these claims is beyond the scope of this article, yet a summary is still possible.

Where do we begin? How did fish oil supplements become so popular in the first place? First off, “fish oil supplements” should be disambiguated from cod liver oil, which has long been used as a source of vitamins A and D. The fish oil under consideration here contains high amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, primarily DHA (docosahexanoic acid) and EPA (eicosahexanoic acid), not vitamins A and D. Omega-3 fatty acids are like vitamins and minerals in that they are required for human nutrition and can’t be manufactured by the body. They are considered “essential fatty acids.” The designation “omega” refers to one end of the fatty acid molecule, and the “3” indicates a double bond three carbon atoms away from that end. Unlike other fats, these molecules are not “burned” for caloric fuel but function to modulate biochemical processes such as inflammation.

The current fascination with these molecules largely began in the 1970s, when two Danish researchers—Bang and Dyerberg—began investigating Inuit Eskimos living in Greenland. They wanted to understand the consequences of this unique population eating so much fat. The Inuit’s diet consisted “mostly of meat of whales, seals, sea birds, and fish” according to the researchers. Bang and Dyerberg suspected that the omega-3 oils in the fish they ate acted to protect against cardiac disease, which would be expected to result from a diet rich in saturated animal fat. Bang and Dyerberg were clinical chemists, not epidemiologists, yet their research was epidemiological in nature as they analyzed records maintained by Greenland’s chief medical officer. In addition, they drew blood from 130 natives of the small town of Uummannaq. Compared to their control population of Danes, the Inuit had lower levels of triglycerides and cholesterol, as well as higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids. Bang and Dyerberg published their findings in 1971 in the British journal The Lancet, one of the preeminent medical journals in the world. By 1980, they began to publicly suggest that omega-3 fatty acids in the diet might help prevent cardiac disease in populations besides the Inuit.

According to George Fodor, a cardiologist at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, the number of individuals that died of cardiac disease may have been significantly underrepresented in the Lancet study. Since this was a remote area, with people living far from urbanized medical centers, the exact cause of death may have not been precisely determined. In any event, this was the birth of the meme that fish oils may help prevent cardiac disease. Since that time, a wide variety of studies have been done regarding heart health. It’s fairly well established that fish oils can lower LDL or “bad” triglyceride levels, which is a valid risk indicator for heart disease.

In fact, the FDA has approved several drugs, including Lovaza and Vascepa, which are semi-synthetic versions of fish oil, meaning that the natural fatty acid has been slightly chemically modified. These drugs are indicated for people with very high levels of blood lipids. In addition, fish oil has an anticoagulant effect, much like aspirin, that may reduce the risk of blood clots.

The problem is that a “risk indicator” is not the same as the risk itself. The important question is whether fish oil supplements actually lower risk of cardiac disease, not just bad triglyceride levels. Between 2005 and 2012, at least two dozen large scale studies of fish oil were conducted in high-risk populations. All but two found no benefit, including one published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which included 12,000 people. The evidence simply doesn’t support the claim that fish oil supplements can reduce the risk of cardiac disease, at least in high-risk individuals.

What about other claims for fish oil supplements, besides amelioration of cardiac disease? Perhaps the most encouraging findings are those related to rheumatoid arthritis. Essential fatty acids within fish oil act as anti-inflammatories by blocking the action of prostaglandins and cytokines. Multiple studies have demonstrated significant pain relief for rheumatoid arthritis sufferers, in some cases enabling individuals to completely discontinue use of conventional non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

Fish oil supplementation has also been studied for its potential to prevent dementia in the elderly. Study findings have been mixed, some suggesting benefit while others show no benefit. Thus, unambiguous evidence that fish oil can prevent the onset of dementia is lacking. If there is a silver lining to this unfortunate state of affairs, it’s that studies of longer duration should be undertaken in order to observe greater mental changes in study participants. It’s possible that positive benefits of fish oil may appear over greater time spans.

An interesting set of claims surrounds the use of fish oil for exercise recovery. The idea is that exercise induces some degree of inflammation and oxidation in the body, and fish oil can help suppress these negative processes. There are studies that support this. Even more suggestive is the claim from a popular bodybuilding website, Bodybuilding.com, that fish oil can help add muscle mass: “Perhaps more interesting for people looking to build muscle, EPA and DHA supplementation has been suggested to support muscle protein synthesis and limit muscle protein degradation. This can mean less muscle breakdown and more muscle growth.” Note this claim hinges on the word suggestive. Indeed, a number of studies point in the direction of fish oil having at least some positive impact on muscle building for those who exercise. It should be noted that how positive an effect is often not overtly stated and only inferred.

The story of fish oil is not unusual. There are many drugs and nutritional supplements for which the evidence of efficacy is marginal or for which the effect is minimal. For most people, the choice to buy and consume fish oil is a simple binary; Should I take this? Yes or no? If I spend money on this supplement, will it provide a benefit commensurate with the money spent? The bulk of studies for a wide range of conditions indicate either no effect or a mildly positive effect. In many cases, the evidence is “suggestive,” which really means there is a physiological mechanism why fish oil could work. The exception seems to be rheumatoid arthritis, for which the evidence of benefit is fairly compelling. Unless one is on anticoagulant drugs, introduction of fish oil supplements to the diet has not been shown to be negative and may provide a positive benefit for a variety of conditions, though this benefit is likely mild. A decision to supplement one’s diet with fish oil is therefore reasonable, though ironically not for what many people take it for, which is prevention of cardiac disease.

In addition to being a comedian and skeptic, a lot of people don’t know that I train MMA, or mixed martial arts, fighters for organizations like the UFC. Martial arts and fighting is a passion of mine, and I have trained in just about every form of martial art and with some of the best coaches, trainers, instructors, Senseis, Sifus, whatever one might choose to be called, since age six. I have trained in everything from traditional martial arts such as karate and kung fu to more combat-based disciplines such as boxing and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. During my junior high and high school years, I was training in the more traditional martial arts, and even though I had a fairly progressive teacher, there was still a lot of myth and talk of chi energy within the lessons.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of chi, it is supposed to be the life energy, one’s life force, and if developed can give a person super strength and often magical powers like projecting it across the room to take out assailants with “no touch knock outs.” Nowadays, there are many examples of “masters” trying this and failing miserably online. If you too enjoy watching frauds fail, check out Bullshido.net. However, back in the 1970s and ’80s, stories of Kung Fu masters’ nearly super human feats were abundant, so I practiced and learned but as a young skeptic, I thought there had to be some scientific explanation. In class, we spent many an hour doing breathing exercises to “cultivate our chi.” As it turns out, the only thing copping a goofy fight stance in the park, wearing Kung Fu pants, breathing loudly, and doing magic hands was scientifically proven to “cultivate” was my virginity. I have since found that some of the breathing exercises do work for slowing down the mind and the heart rate when anxiety kicks in, as it often does in fights, but I would hardly call not going comatose from fear a “super power.”

In 1993, a family from Brazil named the Gracies who had been doing challenges to prove they had a realistic self-defense system and claimed to have never lost a fight, created a new event called the “Ultimate Fighting Challenge.” The idea was to get the best martial artist from every style around the world and have a no holds barred tournament. A member of the Gracie family won every fight for the first several events because Gracie Jiu-Jitsu (now called “Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu”) was the best single fighting system. They used no magic techniques, but they focused on the science of fighting. Knowing that 90 percent of all fights end up on the ground, they developed their style to fight on the ground with submission holds, joint locks, and chokes. It immediately put into question the myth perpetuated in the old movies where Kung Fu and Karate guys could easily dispatch 400 armed men, who for some reason always attacked one by one, and the stories of masters with magic chi power. Over the years, people learned to ground fight and started mixing many styles to create nuanced, well-rounded fighting styles to beat the single discipline guys. This became what is known today as MMA where fighters train in boxing, kickboxing, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, wrestling, etc.

Amazingly much of the old martial arts myths still exist and in fact are having a resurgence in popularity. I hear all the time now that MMA is a sport and “not real fighting” because “There are rules. In a real fight, there are no rules.” On several occasions, I have been told the classic line “Well I could beat you with my style, but I’d have to kill you.” My response is now to carry around a waiver. “Well I release you from all liability should that happen.” Of course, their response is “No, I just wouldn’t be able to live with myself.” So from now on I am just going to tell them:

I am suicidal, and I have seven-and-a-half terminal illnesses all at once. You’d be doing me a favor. I have a waiver in my pocket, and we can video this. I will again indemnify you of all guilt, because nothing would make me happier than to go out via a fiery chi ball of death. Please triple back flip in at unrecordable speed, so that I can turn around to find you behind me with my heart still beating in your palm. Then I can look down at the hole in my chest for my last moments, give you a Kung Fu salute and say “I am sorry for doubting you! Please forgive me, Master!” Before over-dramatically dropping to the floor.

But let’s be honest, we both know that the end result would be you charging me, eating a right cross, then getting quickly caught in a choke hold and going to sleep momentarily, only to wake up realizing you just defecated yourself (this sometimes happens when choked unconscious) and are now YouTube famous, known to millions simply as “Kung Poo Guy” with comments like, “I think that guy just chi’d his pants.” You don’t need that kind of embarrassment. After all, you have a martial arts school to run with dozens of students and of course yourself to lie to. Sure, you pooped your kimono, but you saved that poor, finely tuned, professional MMA fighter’s life, so it was all worth it.

Se ha paseado desde 1996 como un gurú de la salud por las principales cadenas de televisión, radios y periódicos españoles. En los últimos veinte años, Txumari Alfaro ha recomendado a mis conciudadanos desde comer rabos de pasa y llevar una nuez en el bolsillo para mejorar la memoria –dado el parecido entre este fruto seco y el cerebro– hasta beber la propia orina. Pero no ha sido hasta ahora que los mismos grandes medios que le han promocionado acríticamente durante dos décadas han puesto el grito en el cielo: se han enterado de que aconseja a las enfermas de cáncer de mama renunciar a cualquier tratamiento médico si quieren curarse. ¿Pero qué se pensaban que ha hecho siempre?

El curandero navarro Txumari Alfaro intervino el 13 de enero en Barcelona en el congreso Un mundo sin cáncer: lo que tu médico no te cuenta. Antes de la celebración del encuentro, en el que participó lo más granado de la comunidad pseudomédica, el Colegio de Médicos de Barcelona pidió la intervención del Departamento de Salud catalán porque se ponía en duda “de manera explícita, el papel de los médicos a la hora de informar de manera veraz sobre el cáncer a los pacientes y los ciudadanos en general”. Y el Gobierno catalán envió un observador al congreso, que se celebró con gran éxito de público en el hotel Barceló Sants, donde Alfaro y sus colegas difundieron, ante gente desesperada, sus peligrosas ideas sobre el cáncer.

En un momento de su charla, el curandero contó que tres mujeres –cada una con una hija con cáncer de mama– le habían preguntado en un descanso qué hacer ante el diagnóstico de la enfermedad. “Nada. Ahora la terapia consiste en no hacer nada”, les respondió él. Es un devoto de la llamada nueva medicina germánica. Los practicantes de esta pseudoterapia, inventada por el ex médico alemán Ryke Geerd Hamer, consideran que enfermedades como el cáncer y el sida se deben a conflictos emocionales no asumidos. Olvídense de mutaciones del ADN y virus. Según dijo Alfaro en Barcelona, sólo con “tomar conciencia” del conflicto emocional que te ha causado la enfermedad –el cáncer mama, en este caso–, ésta mejorará, y los médicos tendrán que darte menos medicación y “menos quimio”. “Quiero incidir en esto para lograr el 100% de curación del cáncer de mama”, sentenció. Además, añadió entre otros disparates que “el tamaño del tumor es proporcional al volumen conflictual que ha vivido” la mujer y que los niños que sufren cáncer lo padecen porque no fueron deseados. Así que ya lo sabe: si es madre y uno de sus hijos tiene cáncer, la culpa es suya. Palabra de Txumari.

A raíz de estas afirmaciones, los mismos medios que hasta hace cuatro días promocionaban sin pudor los libros y programas de televisión del curandero han arremetido contra él. Ha pasado de ser un personaje “entrañable” con cuyos encuentros virtuales con el público conseguir clics en las webs a ser un peligro público. Ya era hora. No es la primera vez, ni mucho menos, que las grandes cadenas de televisión y cabeceras periodísticas españolas descubren, escandalizadas, que aquí se juega. Eso sí, tras haberse llevado sus ganancias. Ya ocurrió con la homeopatía, que durante años vendieron como una alternativa a la medicina y de la que ahora prácticamente todos reniegan. Ahí están las hemerotecas digitales donde Txumari Alfaro recomienda impunemente homeopatía para acabar con las verrugas, dormir en una habitación sin aparatos eléctricos enchufados para evitar los dañinos efectos de los campos electromagnéticos y no tomar leche “si queremos tener una piel tersa, relajada y resplandeciente”, entre otros sinsentidos. En la televisión pública vasca (ETB), por ejemplo, animaba hace diez años a beber el propio pis y en diciembre de 2016 aseguraba que cura la celiaquía. Siempre sin oposición, siempre sin réplica. ¿Qué ha pasado para que los medios ahora renieguen de él?

Un currículo de fantasía

Que el cáncer tiene un origen emocional lo sostiene desde hace años, como seguidor que es de la nueva medicina germánica. Txumari Alfaro no dice hoy más burradas que ayer. No da más consejos peligrosos contra la salud que en los años 90, cuando los escépticos españoles empezaron a denunciar públicamente sus tonterías mientras los grandes medios miraban hacia otro lado. Debutó en 1996 en la televisión pública española (TVE) con La botica de la abuela, un programa dedicado a la promoción de remedios caseros del que nació una franquicia de tiendas. Desde entonces, ha vendido su sabiduría en otros canales de televisión –Antena 3, Telecinco, La Sexta, ETB e Intereconomía– y ha sido amablemente entrevistado –nada de cuestionar sus afirmaciones, por favor– en casi todas las radios y diarios del país. Lo sorprendente es que hasta ahora ninguno de esos medios se haya dado cuenta de que estamos ante un peligro público. Tanta ceguera tiene su mérito, créanme, porque nuestro protagonista nunca ha sido otra cosa que un buhonero.

Txumari Alfaro carece de titulación médica. A pesar de eso, dirige desde hace años en Pamplona un negocio que presenta en sus charlas como “centro médico colegiado”. En realidad es una clínica alternativa que él disfraza de otra cosa. Sus únicos avales como profesional sanitario son sus supuestos títulos en naturopatía, iridología, hipnosis, acupuntura, biodescodificación… Ante un currículo plagado de títulos sin validez académica y conocido desde hace años, ¿cómo es posible que los grandes medios hayan sido altavoces de sus afirmaciones? ¿Es que ningún periodista se ha molestado en todo estos años en verificar las credenciales de alguien que hace recomendaciones sobre salud más que cuestionables hasta para un lego? Ésa es la gran incógnita.

La repentina conversión de los medios de comunicación españoles a la racionalidad en el caso de Txumari Alfaro puede que sea sincera –no seré yo quien diga lo contrario–, pero no sirve para que el mal periodismo lave sus culpas. Sin el respaldo de televisiones, radios y periódicos, este curandero nunca habría llegado a ser la celebridad que es, sus consejos a popularizarse y vaya usted a saber cuántos enfermos de cáncer a morir prematuramente por renunciar a tratamientos que podían haberles salvado la vida. Desde sus comienzos en TVE, los medios han preferido hacer caso a este curandero frente a los escépticos que han denunciado sistemáticamente sus disparates. Escépticos como el periodista científico Mauricio-José Schwarz, quien hace diez años, con motivo del fichaje del curandero por La Sexta, advertía de que “este personaje es peligrosísimo y puede llevar a que pierdan la salud o la vida muchas personas que confían en su bonachona sonrisa, su pausada voz, su intensidad fanática y su aparente sinceridad”. Ay, qué entrañable, Txumari.