I’m joined by psychic expert and mentalist Mark Edward and European Skeptic Podcaster (ESP) András Gábor Pintér. We are now about to start day 17 of my About Time tour; I would have thought I would be exhausted by this point, but I was still running on energy and having a great time.

The three of us arrive in Cesena, Italy, on Friday September 29 for our first CICAP FEST. This is an Italian skeptic organization founded in 1989 by Italian science journalist Piero Angela and scientists including Luigi Garlaschelli. As it was becoming more and more obvious as I visit skeptic organizations all over the world, the influence of the American group CSICOP was being felt all over the skeptic community. CICAP, Comitato Italiano per il Controllo delle Affermazioni sulle Pseudoscienze—or in English, Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences—was born after Angela’s television show Indagine sulla parapsicologia (Inquiry on Parapsychology) spurred scientists to meet in Turin and formalize the group. The current president is author, Massimo Polidoro. He is also a cofounder of CICAP and along with Angela, a fellow of CSICOP.

I need to make sure you all understand who Piero Angela is and how influential he is in Italy. Angela was born in 1928 in Turin, Italy, to an anti-fascist doctor. He studied literature and became an amateur jazz pianist, he became a reporter on the state radio in 1952, and when television was introduced, he was part of the only news broadcasting team in Italy. He became known for his science reporting, directing science documentaries on subjects about space, biology, economy, parapsychology, and more. He is a well-spoken, sympathetic, non-controversial man who is loved throughout Italy. I spoke to many people at the CICAP FEST conference about the allure of Angela. On Friday, the conference was open to the public for free, and Angela was the draw. Lines were long with fans waiting to get his autograph, take a photo, and meet him. It was explained to me that when television came to Italy, his face was one of the first people remember seeing; all of Italy grew up with him, hearing his voice and learning about science from him. Attendees explained to me that teenagers had tears in their eyes when they met him at the conference. Over 800 people attended Friday, most to see his lecture. I’ve been trying to find a way to explain to Americans just how popular he is. Imagine Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, and Walter Cronkite rolled into one person, whom you have watched on television for sixty-five years (he does still appear on TV) and maybe that will explain the fascination the Italians have with him. He is a champion of science and scientific skepticism. When I asked CICAP staff and conference attendees what would be the state of pseudoscience in Italy without Angela, they said that it would be difficult to imagine any kind of organized skepticism existing, and the country would be overrun with nonsense.

Teatro Bonci Auditorium

Okay, now that I’ve explained who Piero Angela is, let me explain what this conference was all about. The venue was the amazing, jaw-dropping beautiful Teatro Bonci, which is an opera house built in 1843. The town of Cesena located in Northern Italy has a population of under 100,000 people. Parking is not abundant, but everything is within walking distance; shops and restaurants are all over the city. The hotel we stayed at kept its reservations on paper. It’s a very quaint town with lovely friendly people.

CICAP had two conference buildings to accommodate the over 800 attendees. One held 200 people, the Palazzio del Ridotto, and was used for workshops and smaller lectures. CICAP publishes the skeptic magazine Query: La Sciencza Indaga I Mysteri as well as many books. Sadly, I had no room for book purchases in my luggage, plus everything was in Italian. I did purchase one thin book by one of my favorite people, Ray Hyman, The Art of Cold-Reading. Randi wrote the forward and while there I got him to autograph it, and then later at CSICon I got Ray to sign it for me. One man I met the first hour I was there was Francesco Grasssi, who had written a comprehensive book on crop circles. The book has amazing photographs of crop circles, most he created himself. http://www.francescograssi.com/ András interviewed him talking about his book Crop Circles: Signs of Intelligence on the ESPodcast.

The conference was completely in Italian, but many people spoke English, and everyone went out of their way to make us feel comfortable. James Randi and myself were the only non-Italian speakers. I was on a panel on Sunday morning called “Debunking and Fact-Checking: Servono Oppure No?” They wired me with an earpiece and assigned me a translator to tell me everything that was being said in one ear, and I answered in English. It was hilarious; I hit it off instantly with my “babel fish,” Veronica Padovani. I tried to keep up with the panel discussion and questions asked of me, but as I was always a few seconds behind the conversation I had to take matters into my own hands. I only was able to speak four times, so each time I got a chance I didn’t completely answer the question asked, but made clear that I was at the conference to find people I could train to become Italian GSoW editors. András filmed the panel so hopefully I made my point.

After leaving the stage I waited in the lobby with GSoW editor Raffaella Vitali to see what would happen. We were overrun with people asking questions about GSoW. It was terrific, and gained new Italian editors who are now in training. Hopefully more will follow.

One exhibit set up off to one side was devoted to optical illusions. Magician Carlo Faggi was the host of this exhibit, and I filmed a nice video of him explaining everything to us. As you can probably imagine, there was a lot of food involved in this conference. They treated us really well, and I was shocked to find that I didn’t gain weight on this tour.

One really special thing happened at CICAP FEST was that a couple blocks away from our venue, Pope Francis came to speak in town. It was the 300th anniversary of the birth of Pias the VI, who was born in Cesena. This was an almost surprise visit; the CICAP organizers were not aware it would be happening until shortly before it happened. The Pope was scheduled to speak until 10 a.m. and my panel started at 10 a.m., so I saved him a seat just in case he showed up. Sadly, he didn’t. The Pope helicopter took him to another venue where he spoke to another crowd in a nearby city. I filmed a bit of this experience and you can see it here. On the Sunday morning of the Pope event, we had to walk a long way through crowds and security to get to our venue. András was wearing a Press Badge; at one point he was stopped by security and asked why he was walking away from the Pope event. András explained that he was attending another conference and reporting on that. The security were really confused why anyone would not want to report on the Pope.

Mark, András, and I got to spend quality time with the organizers and Randi. András interviewed people—which you can hear on the ESPodcast—and I asked a lot of questions about the CICAP organization, the successes and difficulties concerning pseudoscience in Italy, and how they managed to get 800 people to show up for a conference in a small northern Italian town.

What I learned was that CICAP is highly organized, especially because many volunteers participate. As CICAP FEST is every two years, they can spend more time promoting. They had a lot of focus on magic, with performers, workshops, and presentations by Carol Faggi, Max Vellucci, Gianfranco Preverino, Pino Rolle, Francesco Busani, Marco Aimone, Alex Rusconi, and of course James Randi. They also had popular TV personalities that dropped in besides Piero Angela. The Executive Director of CICAP is Massimo Polidoro who is a draw all by himself. He has appeared on TV a lot in Italy as well as internationally. He is a podcaster, journalist, and popular writer. His latest books are Segreti e tesori del Vaticano. Un viaggio straordinario nell'unico Stato Patrimonio dell'Umanità - Secrets and treasures of the Vatican. An extraordinary journey in the only World Heritage Site and L'avventura del Colosseo The Adventure of the Colosseum.

So having all that star power, experienced organizers, plus only having the conference every two years really helps boost the attendance numbers. I know it is a cliché, but I found it to be true. Italians are really relaxed. Nothing seemed to phase them, not even having the streets completely closed for parking all around the venue on Sunday, and having big screens with the Pope speaking right outside the entrance to the conference. They may have been stressed, but I could not see it; whatever happened, they just found a way around it. Nothing seemed a big deal, and everything seemed to run smoothly. Speaking to the volunteers afterward, they told me they were getting very little sleep and were exhausted, but they never showed it and went out of their way to find English speakers to talk to Mark and I and make sure we were having a great time. András speaks many languages and did a lot of translating for us around town. He said he barely speaks Italian, but he did just fine.

Outer Façade of Teatro Bonci

My next article will be as we leave Italy and head for Slovenia and Hungary.

Alt-right members preparing to enter Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, holding Nazi, Confederate, and “Don't Tread on Me” flags.
Photo by: Anthony Crider

When my oldest child was in high school, the school encountered its first openly gay student. The young man in question was an exuberant thunderbolt of warmth and talent who, from the moment he entered kindergarten, was loved by all who knew him. When he hit high school, he came out in a big way. “I am gay—very gay,” he said, and he started attending school events with his boyfriend. Our small town had never seen anything like it before.

This story would not be particularly remarkable except that this young man was born into a family of Republicans. His father was a strong Second Amendment advocate who harbored government conspiracy theories, and his mother’s family were Catholics who had been central to local GOP politics for years. But more important to them than politics or religion was their unquestioned love for this boy. Almost overnight, his family became some of the strongest and most vocal advocates for gay rights our town had seen. They did not all become liberal Democrats, but to them the campaign for LBGTQ rights was an important and obvious cause. They were in.

Much of the last twenty years of my career has been spent championing evidence, reason, and critical thinking. I’ve taught the basics of logic and the pitfalls of fallacies. Unfortunately, as much as I continue to value rationality, experience tells me that argument is rarely an effective method of changing minds. As much as I value ideas and facts, these are not the things that mend the divisions between us. Rather the path to greater cooperation and understanding is both simpler and much more difficult.

In 1954, the Turkish-American social psychologist Muzafer Sherif (1961) conducted the now-famous Robbers Cave Experiment. He and a team of researchers recruited twenty-two well-adjusted white Protestant fifth-grade boys to participate in a summer camp in Oklahoma. The boys were split into two groups, the Rattlers and the Eagles, and, during an initial period, the groups were kept apart. Then, after the members of each group had gotten to know each other, the counselor-researchers introduced the groups to each other and organized four days of competition between the Rattlers and the Eagles. The boys played football, softball, and had a tug-of-war, and before long, signs of intergroup prejudice and conflict emerged out of the competitions. The Eagles burned the Rattlers’ flag, and in retaliation the Rattler’s trashed the Eagles’ cabin.

The most remarkable part of the Robbers Cave Experiment was not the ease with which the researchers could instill prejudice in a group of young boys. It was that, once established, they were able to counteract the prejudice they had created. First, they tried merely putting the groups together, but simple contact failed. Fights broke out, and no progress was made. So the researchers rigged a number of situations that required the boys to cooperate across groups for common goals. A broken-down truck needed to be moved, and doing so required all the boys to pull together on the same rope they used for the tug-of-war. A movie night was organized, but paying for it required all the boys to contribute in a manner they devised together. As these contrived cooperative situations unfolded, conflict died out and friendships across groups emerged. Sherif’s simple conclusion was that competition for limited resources breeds prejudice and cooperation toward superordinate goals breeds inter-group harmony.

This seems like such a simple thing. Work together for common goals, and respect and affection will result, but how do we arrange for common goals? The integration of the U.S. Armed Forces in 1948 was widely cited as a significant step forward in the civil rights movement (Conn 1952). The common goals of the military are obvious, and placing white and black soldiers side by side made interracial cooperation a necessity. But integrating the armed forces required an executive order from President Truman. It would not have happened without the right kind of leadership. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, today’s leaders appear to be creating greater competition between groups and fewer opportunities for cooperation toward superordinate goals. There are some unusual circumstances in which the bonds of cooperation are preexisting, such as in the family of the pioneering gay young man in our town. But far too often the bonds of cooperation have to come from somewhere else: our leaders or ourselves.

In the wake of the horrible events of Charlottesville, I came across an article with the unlikely title “We Need to Start Befriending Neo Nazis” (Mandel 2017), which was made even more unlikely because it appeared in a Jewish newspaper, The Forward. The article went on to describe a number of successful efforts to convert people from racist and bigoted organizations by listening to them, rather than arguing with them, and, in one case, by inviting an anti-Semite who had been shunned by the rest of his college community to come to a Shabbat dinner. People who have the extraordinary patience to reach out to those whose beliefs they find abhorrent have, on occasion, been able to forge the kinds of shared bonds that reduce conflict. This kind of work is not for everyone. Even the author of the article admitted that she might not be up to the task. But the message is clear: We do not solve our problems by demonizing our enemies. We do not change minds through argument or violence. We have to treat each other as equals and find new superordinate goals that we can all work toward together. And, of course, elect leaders who will do the same.

• A short video about the Robbers Cave Experiment, “5 Minute History Lesson, Episode 3: Robbers Cave,” including historical footage of the campers, can be found here.

• Conn, Harry. 1952. Military civil rights: A report. The New Republic (October 19). Available online here.
• Mandel, Bethany. 2017. We need to start befriending neo Nazis. The Forward (August 24). Available online; accessed August 28, 2017.
• Sherif, Muzafer, O.J. Harvey, B. Jack White, et al. 1961. Intergroup cooperation and competition: The Robbers Cave experiment,” Vol. 10. Norman, OK: University Book Exchange.

How can we all make better decisions in our lives given that there's so much misinformation out there? Our panel of skeptical interviewees at CSICon 2017 give us their suggestions!

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!

Racism is abhorrent. It is therefore easy for a movement such as skepticism to adopt anti-racism stances, but skepticism must avoid promoting viewpoints because they are politically popular or self-satisfying. Skepticism promotes beliefs that are consistent with thoughtful interpretations of the existing evidence.

Racism is not scientific nor is it reasonable. Racism is essentially a negative attitude toward others based on their membership in a particular race. Racism per se is not pseudoscientific; it is a general mindset toward particular races rather than an identifiable scientific claim. However, racism is typically bolstered by folk scientific claims that do not hold up under scrutiny. The most inflammatory of these types of claims is probably the theory that members of certain races are genetically inferior. This type of folk theory overlooks obvious scientific problems. Racial categories are socially constructed, based more on appearance than genetics. Social and economic factors exert systematic influences that can perpetuate racial stereotypes.

If Racism Is Specious, Why Do People Become Racist?

Skeptics know that people are capable of believing all sorts of unsubstantiated or downright ridiculous claims. A review of all the reasons that people develop prejudiced beliefs is beyond the scope of this piece. At the risk of doing a disservice to the topic, here is a quick overview:

1. Humans are quick to engage in social categorization; they can place others into racial boxes swiftly and efficiently.
2. People tend to favor the groups to which they belong (ingroup bias). This can occur because viewing one’s own group as superior contributes to personal esteem. Ingroup favoritism also justifies distributing more resources to the ingroup, which benefits oneself or others who are emotionally close to oneself.
3. People misperceive others based on race. They can associate traits and behaviors with particular groups that are not really there (illusory correlation). They tend to exaggerate the similarity of outgroup members (outgroup homogeneity effect). They can wrongly assume that members of particular races conform to their impression of the broader group (stereotyping).
4. Stereotypes that accompany prejudice are difficult to eradicate. Outgroup members who do not conform to the stereotype are easily forgotten or subtyped into being uncommon exceptions (confirmation bias).
5. Individuals might engage more broadly in a tendency to overestimate the role of character and underestimate the role of the broader situation (fundamental attributional error). Thus, when people see boardrooms full of white men, they implicitly or explicitly conclude that white men must be more intelligent, more industrious, or both.
6. Individuals can even elicit stereotype-confirming behavior from others (self-fulfilling prophecy). A white supervisor who expects racial minorities to be lazy might unknowingly reveal her or his prejudiced feelings. The supervisor’s employees of color might find this leader unsettling, but the supervisor misinterprets their emotional distance as further evidence that racial minorities do not work hard.

Confronting Racism: Intuition versus Science

Many people recognize the problems with racism without knowing the underlying social scientific principles. Obviously, many individuals have close relationships with people who society designates as representing a different race. Positive experiences in “interracial” relationships belie the stated or unstated claims that accompany racism. Furthermore, even a rudimentary knowledge of history or current events demonstrates the extensive harm that stems from racist ideology. Disagreements about race can therefore become heated. This likely causes individuals to respond in ways that even they might later concede are ineffective.

To wit, yelling at white supremacists seems unlikely to make them less racist. Indeed, it might do more harm than good. White supremacists have likely heard all the arguments that debunk their racist ideology. They will either ignore these arguments or recall ready-made racist responses, much like strong supporters of pseudoscience do. Thus, arguments to the contrary might actually reinforce their racist beliefs. Plus, the conflict between white supremacists and protestors might serve to invigorate the white supremacist community. It gives them a sense of purpose—together they stand against the brainwashed liberals who are taking their country from them.

Of course, not protesting is also dangerous. If white supremacists promote their ideology without eliciting some vitriol, it could make this type of belief system appear more acceptable. Accordingly, protesting against white supremacists and those who promote similar race-based belief systems is almost certainly valuable. It provides an opportunity to demonstrate that most (hopefully almost all) residents of the United States do not support racism. Protesters can improve their effectiveness by thoughtfully considering their overarching goals. Are they trying to influence white supremacists or demonstrate to others that race superiority theories are dangerous and unacceptable? This type of thoughtful approach might be less emotionally satisfying than shouting angrily at neo-Nazis and the KKK, but it will probably be more effective in the long run.

White supremacists are in some ways easier to address because their grassroots race theories are explicit and can be discussed directly. However, racism can also occur in the form of unacknowledged bias. Individuals might disagree with racism, but they unknowingly view members of particular races in ways that are influenced inappropriately by their racial memberships. This type of implicit bias lacks conscious intent but can still cause people to be treated unfairly based on race. Confronting implicit racism is challenging because it can be exhibited by people who do not believe that they exhibit it. Calling these people “racist” is unlikely to be effective because the accusation is likely to elicit defensiveness rather than thoughtfulness.

Furthermore, opponents of certain political views are capable of perceiving racism that might not truly be there. The affirming the consequent fallacy occurs when individuals mistakenly use a statement’s consequent to affirm that the antecedent must be true: All cows have four legs, so an animal with four legs is a cow. Similarly, even though whites who dislike racial minorities typically support certain political views (e.g., limiting immigration), not all people who hold such political views are racists. Equivocating particular political beliefs with racism creates, ironically, a form of the stereotyping that those who contest racism are trying to repudiate. Accusing such people of racism is likely to alienate those who might otherwise be willing to consider whether they are being sufficiently thoughtful about issues involving race.

Effective approaches to confronting racism can be time-consuming and challenging. Those who want to confront racism need to exhibit sustained influence. They should try to remain likable and credible—always useful influence tactics. They must also tailor their arguments for their audience. Too little disagreement is essentially agreement, while too much disagreement can cause others to reject arguments outright. One can more effectively address racism through a discussion where both sides are considering race-based concerns authentically. This is understandably frustrating; it would be much easier if individuals could gain quick insight into their explicit or implicit racial bias, causing it to simply disappear. That just isn’t the way people are, and skepticism is committed to reality, even when that reality is ungratifying.

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

The racial divisiveness and tensions that erupted this past year (and specifically in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August), resulted, predictably, in a maelstrom of opinions—informed and otherwise. Amid all the arguing over whether Nazis should be punched, if and when censorship is acceptable, whether President Trump is racist, the appropriateness of publicly naming and shaming marchers, and so on, one thing largely missing from the debate is evidence-based guidance on what psychology and sociology can teach us about what’s effective at reducing racism and prejudice.

Emotionally satisfying reactions are not necessarily effective ones, and may in fact be counterproductive. Is it better to engage with racists or deny them an audience? What do we know about what is most likely to actually change people’s minds? There’s no panacea, but here are some strategies suggested by experts who have experience in productively confronting racism and prejudice.

Researchers found evidence suggesting that racial and gender biases can be reduced using personal engagement instead of hostile reactions; as a Vox headline noted, “Research Says There Are Ways to Reduce Racial Bias. Calling People Racist Isn’t One of Them.” Likewise, former white supremacists recommend that the most effective way to deal with racists is not to attack, shout down, or insult them because it just fuels their narrative of victimhood and gets them sympathy—even perhaps from whose who otherwise wholly disagree with their views, such as free speech absolutists. Musician Daryl Davis has taken a similar tactic, as explained in a Huffington Post story:

For the past few decades the black musician, actor and author has made it his mission to befriend people in hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan by calmly confronting them with the question: “How can you hate me if you don’t even know me?” … In 1983, after Davis played a gig in an all-white venue in Frederick, Maryland, an audience member approached him to compliment him on his piano playing. The two struck up a friendly conversation, and Davis was surprised to discover the man was a card-carrying member of the KKK. Through this man, Davis got in touch with Roger Kelly, the former Imperial Wizard of the white supremacist organization. Over time, Kelly and Davis became close and Kelly eventually quit the hate group.

That pattern has repeated itself a dozen more times, as seen in the documentary film Accidental Courtesy.

We invited several distinguished experts to contribute their brief thoughts and observations about how best to deal with racism through evidence-based strategies. As Carol Tavris noted, racism and prejudice are thorny, age-old problems with many origins. There is no single solution, no magic spell that will bring everyone together. But—like any human endeavor—some evidence-based approaches show more promise than others. As Stephen Pinker and Michael Shermer argue in their books The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Moral Arc, respectively, the overall historical trends for humanity are encouraging, toward a more peaceful and more cooperative world. Perhaps by applying evidence-based strategies we can nudge that progress along.

How to Be Reasonable (By Someone Who Tried Everything Else) is a graphic novel primer on critical thinking and an introduction to scientific skepticism that will empower you to see the world a little bit more clearly.

The world is a strange, scary, and beautiful place. Author and artist Rebecca Fox suggests that being reasonable helps you to wonder at the strange, avoid the scary, and celebrate the beauty.

You can find her book How to Be Reasonable on Amazon and be sure to check out Rebecca’s website.

Rebecca Fox: When I was a kid, I was really into drawing. It was like the main way I had of expressing myself. I was obsessed with folk law and fairies. I believed in fairies. I believed in fairies well into my twenties, which is slightly embarrassing. But I drew all these creatures I imagined existed, and I got really into art because of that. I was also very into stories and storytelling and literature, and just before I had started my BA, I had to make a choice between art and literature. It never occurred to me to do double honors; I don’t know why. So I had to make the choice between art and literature, and I decided literature, more or less at the flip of a coin, because I loved both. And then, while I studied for my undergraduate degree and then my postgraduate degree, I was just drawing all the time as a way of relaxing and, you know, just for fun.

And then, when I finished my MA, I suddenly realized that I was more interested in art than I was in literature, and I went back to classic art and trained more formally as an artist. I worked on painting and anatomy and drawing in a very technical way, and then I realized that comics were the perfect way to combine my love of literature and art, and I started coming across comics and comic artists who were working in philosophy and personal stories and stuff that wasn’t superheroes, because I was never really interested in superheroes. I was like, “This is my genre. I can make comics like this.” And then I started experimenting.

Kylie Sturgess: What aspects of science and skepticism first appealed to you? Why create a graphic novel book as a result?

Rebecca Fox: Well, after my MA, I still had those supernatural beliefs. I still believed in fairies; I still believed in ghosts; I believed in lots of strange things. I was never taught critical thinking at university, which is either me skipping too many classes or a massive oversight of the syllabus, I’m not sure which. So I started researching other people’s beliefs basically. I was working at a tattoo studio, and there was this guy who told me that the Australia government was fluoridating the water to keep Australians stupid so they could control them!

I thought to myself, “Well, I am a punky type of person. I don’t like the government either; that seems vaguely plausible.” So I started researching it. I came across skeptics talking about it, and I was like, “Oh, these guys seem to have a method for figuring out what’s true and what’s not,” and suddenly, it occurred to me that, previously, I’d been figuring out what was true or what I was going to believe based on whether it sounded good and whether it told a good story. That’s why I believed in all the things I believed, because they sounded good, and seeing skeptics talking about this specific issue led me to reading about other issues, like religion and alternative medicine and all the things skeptics were talking about. I was like, “This system works,” and I started applying it to my own beliefs. As I looked at them critically and considered all the experiences I’d had, which I’d thought of as supernatural or proving that there was something beyond the material world, they, on closer inspection, sort of fell apart.

At that point, I was like, “Well, I guess I’m one of these skeptic people then,” and I just didn’t stop reading and consuming the literature, because it became a part of who I was. I think the problem I found, though, was that I was picking up stuff from here and there—podcasts, books—and putting it together in my head, but there was no, or least not that I could find, concise definition of what skepticism was. I wanted to create something that summed up skepticism in a fairly approachable package, so I started to think about what skepticism actually is, because it’s a big topic—or it seemed like a big topic from the way I was approaching it—and I boiled it down into three aspects, which I think are really key to skepticism, and they are a sort of orientation, which is a belief in and respect for the truth. Like, a desire to know more and a commitment to the rational processes of figuring that out.

And then there’s knowledge, a body of knowledge, which is about how our world works and how our brains work. So that’s about logic and reason and about knowing our own biases and understanding a bit about human psychology. And then there’s the practice, which is, basically, critical thinking skills, thinking slowly and carefully about things, and holding ideas lightly, so it’s easy to let them go if compelling counter evidence is presented to us. So I think those three things really wrapped up skepticism for me, and I wanted to put it in one book. And then, because after writing a book like this, lots of people ask me, “Well, what is skepticism? I can’t be bothered to read the comic, just tell me in two words,” I boiled it down even further, at least when I talk to people, and now I think of skepticism as a Venn diagram. It’s where two things meet, and those two things are reason and compassion, because skeptics care about the truth and other people.

At one point in the book, I say something along the lines of, “If we want to make the world a better place, we all need empathy and math,” and I kept coming back to these things. It’s these two things, it’s reason and compassion, it’s empathy and math, it’s truth and heart. Where those two things meet is where skeptics live, and that’s what made me so passionate about writing this book, and that’s what makes me so passionate about skepticism in general, because I want to share with people that’s what we’re about, because I think we sometimes get a bit of a bad rap.

Kylie Sturgess: It’s an interesting choice of title too, How to be Reasonable, rather than How to be Skeptical. It’s something you pointed out on the inside cover too: “I’m going to be unpacking what skepticism means throughout the book.” What led you to that choice?

Rebecca Fox: Well, I mean, I’m a philosophy nerd, so I like to define my terms!

Kylie Sturgess: Nothing wrong with that!

Rebecca Fox: That’s why I put the definition of reasonable right in the beginning. In the U.K., we mix up cynic and skeptic a lot. I think that’s common everywhere, but it seems to be particularly common here. And then there’s the whole weirdness about the spelling, because we spell “sceptic” as in cynic with a C, but the skeptics movement spells it with a K. Obviously, because we want to link to the board of skeptic movement.

So, if my book had been called How to Be Skeptical, I would have suddenly been on the back foot, explaining that no, I’m not a cynic, and, also, this is why I’ve spelt it in this weird way that you don’t recognize to all the UK people who read the book. So I went with How to Be Reasonable, and my definition of reasonable basically means skeptical. I took it from a couple of different definitions I found online and in dictionaries. It’s basically being sensible and nice.

The definition I actually print at the beginning of the book is something like, “Agreeing to the rules of logic and following evidence, and being sensible, fair and open minded.” That is my definition of skepticism, so I’ve sort of cheated a bit and used the words as synonyms, which I know a lot of people maybe wouldn’t recognize, but I think it works, and it is maybe a little bit more approachable than How to Be a Skeptic.

I did worry a bit though, because I thought maybe people were like the average person, thinks they’re already reasonable, so they’d be like, “Oh, I don’t need this book, How to Be Reasonable, I’m already perfectly reasonable.” But I’ve been surprised by people—self-aware, thoughtful people—picking up the book and going, “Ooh, how to be reasonable. I could do with being a bit more reasonable.” Just being honest about that, which surprised me. Maybe I didn’t give people enough credit. And I think maybe it’s because we’re at a point now where, if you’re self-aware and politically aware, you know there’s a problem with critical thinking in this world, and people seem to actually be really interested in learning those skills for themselves, so I’ve found it a really positive, uplifting experience talking to non-skeptics about this book.

Kylie Sturgess: Now, you’ve already touched upon the structure of How to Be Reasonable. What led you to the decisions you made in terms of composition and design? It must have been a fascinating time mapping out exactly what was going to go where.

Rebecca Fox: Yes, it was. It’s difficult to know what to start with, so I just started with me. The first page is a picture of me all surrounded by all the different confusing things in the world that I was trying to sort through in my mind.

Kylie Sturgess: As someone who’s studied storytelling, you know that the story coming from a personal perspective is a very powerful technique.

Rebecca Fox: Yes, exactly. And, also, I wanted to be honest. I mean, the subtitle is “By Someone Who Tried Everything Else.” I didn’t want to imply that I was a person who was perfectly reasonable and now I’m going to tell you exactly how to do it because I’m so great. I wanted to be honest about the fact that I believed lots of strange things and I was really confused, and then I found this great thing called skepticism, which started to sort stuff out in my head for me. Yeah, as you say, I start with the personal, and then I break down what I see as the six principles of skepticism, which, if you adopt them all, will make you a pretty reasonable person, and then I talk through some reasons why it’s not as easy as just adopting those principles, because our brains are so fallible.

In the book I talk through some common brain mistakes—well, I call them brain mistakes. I’m basically talking about logical fallacies, cognitive biases, confusions, just all those general things that our brains do, because our brains didn’t evolve to be perfectly reasonable; they evolved to keep us alive long enough to have kids and take care of them. So we didn’t evolve to be experts at finding out the truth; we evolved to be experts at survival and sex. So I thought I needed to make it clear. I needed to make the reader aware it isn’t possible to reach perfect reasonableness, but, if you’re aware of these biases, it’s going to help a lot.

I also discuss what I call a falsifiability exercise, where I explain the concept of falsifiability. And I talk through some research skills that you could go about if you’ve identified a belief and you want to see if it’s falsifiable. If you want to go and look for the evidence that disproves your belief—just as an exercise, not necessarily expecting to let go of the belief but just to test it—these are the research skills you’ll need. And there’s all sorts of stuff in there: some useful heuristics like Occam’s razor, and some tips on how to read scientific studies, all sorts of stuff, but quite broad outlines of what to do if you’re interested in finding out if something’s true.

Then I move back to why to be skeptical, and I talk about how important it is to protect ourselves and our communities from charlatans and just from mistakes that can happen if we’re not skeptical, if we’re not careful, and how skepticism is like the engine of progress in the world. Asking questions about the status quo is how we get better. We get better at science; we get better at morality; we get better at art; we get better at everything by saying, “Why is this the way it is? Could we do it better?” All those questions are skeptical questions, so I wanted to make it clear that skepticism isn’t just about protecting ourselves or exposing charlatans and frauds, it’s about making the world a better place. And it’s also about human connection, because skepticism, reason, and evidence give us a language we can speak to each other.

I always think of those astronauts up in the international space station. They can work together, because they’re using science. Science is universal. It doesn’t matter that they all come from different cultural backgrounds and all have different first languages. They’re using this common language of science to communicate with each other and to further their goals of finding out stuff about the world and about the universe, and that’s really cool, and it’s something we can do just in our normal, everyday lives. I can have a conversation with someone from anywhere in the world, and this is really exciting to me as someone who’s studied post-colonial literature and traveled. Finding ways to communicate with people from different backgrounds is one of the things I’m really interested in, and I feel like that’s something that we often don’t talk about when we talk about skepticism—that it gives us a language to have real, authentic, human connections, because we’re talking about the same things and using the same tools, the same thinking tools to communicate.

Also, I want to show my readers that skepticism can make you happier, because it makes you confident in your beliefs. And because you know that they’re based on reason and evidence, it makes you less upset when you have to let one of them go, because you’re holding them lightly and provisionally, which is how we should hold our beliefs. It makes you safer—literally, practically safer—because you see you can make decisions about, you know, what medicine to take and what choices to make in your life that are based on science instead of on whimsy.

Kylie Sturgess: I’m speaking to Rebecca Fox, the author of How to Be Reasonable, and there’s a lot of research that’s gone into this book. There are great footnotes on the website. How much consultation and work went into that particular aspect?

Rebecca Fox: I just became a skepticism nerd, so I was listening to all the podcasts, listened to your podcast, listened to every other podcast. Yeah, so you’re all to blame! Reading everything I could get my hands on relating to skepticism. I drew from all of those sources, and I put together a rough idea of a manuscript, and then I gave it to people, and I gave it to skeptics I knew and non-skeptics I knew, and said “What is unclear? What needs clarification? What needs a footnote? Can I just say this, or do I need to back it up?” And they went through with highlighter pens and said this, this, this, this, this, and the people who I found the most useful, to be honest, were the non-skeptics, because it’s really hard to put yourself back in that head of what I was like when I was in my early twenties and I didn’t know any of this yet. It’s hard to remember what I did and what I didn’t know, and how much I needed to explain. I didn’t want to over explain and come off as condescending, so it’s a hard balance, but just giving it to people who I knew, who were intelligent and curious but not skeptical yet, I could get a grasp on what they needed, and what they needed as further reading, and what they needed to be footnoted and referenced so they knew what was going on.

But actually, in the new edition, the footnotes are in the book instead of on the website, so that’ll make life a bit easier for people.

Kylie Sturgess: The book How to Be Reasonable has been republished by Hypatia Press. You mentioned how you’ve got a new edition of it. How did that come to be?

Rebecca Fox: Well, in the zine comics, indie comics world, it’s quite common to self-publish, and since it was only a forty-page comic, unlike my previous work, which was a bit heavier, I thought, “Well, I’ll just self-publish it and give it to some mates and see if I can sell it on my website; see if people are interested,” which is what I did, and then I took some down to QED, which is huge skeptical conference here in the U.K., and it’s brilliant. This is my second time going, and I set up a little stall there. They were kind enough to let me set up a stall, and I sold a lot of books, and people were really enthusiastic and supportive about it and excited about it, and it made me feel great, obviously.

I spoke to Michael Marshall. He provided a quote for the second edition, which is amazing, because I’m a massive fan of him and his work. And almost more exciting, or, to be honest, much more exciting, Carol Tavris, my personal hero, picked up a copy and gave me lovely compliments and provided a quote for the next edition. So people were really enthusiastic about it, and I was suddenly like, “Oh, I’m this weird person who’s just made a comic, and I’m not really sure what I’m doing here or if people even take comics seriously in the skeptic’s world,” because I’d spent a lot of time talking to comic book people, and we all know what indie comics are; we know what zines are; we’re passionate about that as an art form, and I didn’t know if skeptics would be on board with that or if they’d just think it was weird, but they were, and they were excited, and they were supportive. It was lovely.

That weekend, I got a text from a friend who I’d sent the book to, who was my editor for my last book and has become a friend, so I just sent him a copy, like, “Hey, look what I’m up to now,” and he texted me and said, “Oh, I know this guy who has an atheist press, Hypatia, David Magee. I bet he’d love this. Is it cool if I send it on to him?” And I was like, “Yeah, of course,” and he did, and David liked it, and Hypatia offered to republish it. I had a proper editor look at it this time, which was useful, and now I don’t have to post it out of my house! I was selling them from my website. I posted it to you with my own hands, but now it’s available on Amazon and I don’t have to worry about any of that. It’s all done for me, so that’s lovely.

Kylie Sturgess: Excellent. If people go to your site, they’ll also notice that there are other books like Murmurs of Doubt, which appears to be a series. What else is in the works for you?

Rebecca Fox: Well, I have a few different ideas. I’ve been thinking about the intersection of the zine DIY subculture and skepticism, and how well they fit together, because skepticism, as far as I see it, is a bit punk. It’s a bit like no one can tell you what to think. You have to think for yourself, like that sort of message would be really appealing to teenagers.

Kylie Sturgess: You’ve made a lot of old professors very happy by calling them punks, I’m certain!

Rebecca Fox: Well, it’s true, isn’t it though? It’s about not letting your parents, not letting the man tell you what to think. You learn how to think for yourself, and then you can be empowered in the world. That’s one of the big things about skepticism. For me, it was empowering, because I went around looking for all this stuff that was telling me what to think and that made promises. I was a witch. I was a Wiccan, and I thought that gave me magical powers. That’s exciting, but skepticism gives you real empowerment, because, instead of telling you what to think, it teaches you how to think.

Anyway, I’m trying to think of ways to tidy up that message and talk about skepticism and philosophy in a cool, punk way that will appeal to the sort of people who read zines. I have a couple of different ideas along those lines for more short comics. The next big project that I’m excited about is a graphic novel about free will, but that will take some time to get done. It’s a big subject.

If you are reading this column, you have likely benefited from the scientific and technological advances that have transformed the world’s economy. For well-educated professionals who form the core audience for popular science magazines, these innovations have created new wealth and career opportunities. Yet paradoxically, the very success of the science and engineering sector has also created the conditions that have led so many others to distrust experts and the professional class. The same advances that have enriched those at the top of the global knowledge economy have also eliminated millions of jobs among those at the bottom, transforming entire industries and geographic regions, generating public resentment, and seeding political polarization.

When we think about the roots of antagonism toward scientific expertise in the United States, we too often focus on either partisan or religious differences. Yet analyses I have conducted with several colleagues of large-scale national public opinion surveys show that disparities related to income, education, and race play an even more important role in how Americans view the relationship between science and society, with these reservations transcending traditional left-right ideological differences.

When asked generally about the societal impact of scientific advances and technological innovations, those members of the U.S. public who express the strongest optimism tend to be white, hold a college degree or higher, and rank among the top quartile in terms of income. These individuals can justifiably expect that their careers will benefit from scientific innovations and that they will be able to afford new technologies and medical treatments. In contrast, individuals who express the strongest reservations about science and technology tend to hold a high school degree or less, earn less than $50,000 annually, and are more likely to be non-white. These individuals may be justifiably concerned about how they will compete in an innovation-based economy, afford access to new technologies or medical advances, and how such advances may reinforce patterns of discrimination and other social disparities (Nisbet and Markowitz 2014).

Perhaps in no area is the potential for public anxiety based on socio-
economic disparities clearer than in relation to driverless cars, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI). These innovations are promoted as boosting the economy, contributing to public safety and environmental protection, and enhancing consumer convenience. They are also likely to eliminate the jobs of millions of truck drivers, taxi operators, retail workers, and professionals. Tech companies risk further public backlash as they seek to fast track the adoption of driverless cars and AI applications, spending millions to avoid regulation (Lloyd 2017).

In a recent Pew survey, when asked to consider a future in which robots and computers can do many human jobs, more than twice as many Americans (72 percent) expressed worry than enthusiasm (33 percent) and a similar proportion expected that economic inequality would become much worse as a result of such advances. Concerns about the negative impact of workplace innovations were strongest among those lacking a four-year college degree (Pew Research Center 2017a).

Americans also express strong reservations about the impact on social inequality of biomedical innovations related to human enhancement. Strong majorities say they are “very” or “somewhat” worried about gene editing, brain chips, and synthetic blood and that these technologies would become available before they were fully understood. Much of their anxiety relates to anticipated disparities: more than 70 percent fear these innovations would exacerbate the divide between “haves” and “have-nots,” because they would only be available to the wealthy (Pew Research Center 2017b).

A Different Conversation

Noting broad-based public concern about the use of gene editing for human enhancement, a 2017 report from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences recommended that scientists and policymakers should facilitate ongoing input from the public regarding the benefits and risks of human genome editing and that more research was needed on how to effectively facilitate such a process (National Academies 2017). Studies also show broad-based belief among Americans that scientists should consult the public before pursuing gene editing applications (Scheufele et al. 2017).

Yet if scientists, engineers, university leaders, and CEOs are to address growing concerns about gene editing and other technological innovations, they will need to turn to novel approaches for engaging segments of the public from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Traditional science communication efforts that focus on informally educating the public by way of TV documentaries, popular science books and magazines, and science museums tend to engage the best-educated and highest-earning Americans who on average are the heaviest consumers of these resources, a group that tends to be already enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and optimistic about technological innovations.

A recent Pew survey (2017c), for example, finds that only about 17 percent of Americans are active news consumers, defined as those who seek out and consume science news at least a few times a week. This group tends to be on average better educated, higher wage earners, and predominantly white. In turn, attention to science news along with socio-economic status are the strongest predictors of whether an individual engages in other informal science education activities, such as attending a museum, taking up a science-related hobby, or participating in a citizen science project.

Such disparities in attention present major barriers to addressing public reservations and misconceptions. Consider past communication and outreach efforts related to nanotechnology. Between 2004 and 2007, as hundreds of nanotechnology-related products and applications were introduced into the U.S. marketplace, knowledge of nanotechnology increased substantially among the best educated but declined among the least educated. These disparities in knowledge occurred even as news coverage of nanotech increased and government agencies, science museums, and universities invested considerable resources in informal education and outreach activities.

This “knowledge gap” effect has been tracked by researchers across issues for several decades. As an emerging scientific issue such as nanotech, gene editing, or artificial intelligence gains news attention and is the subject of outreach at museums and other venues, those individuals who hold higher socio-economic status are likely to acquire knowledge at a faster rate than their lower status counterparts, so that the difference in knowledge between these segments will tend to increase rather than decrease.

The reason for these disparities is that better educated individuals tend to absorb new information more efficiently and can rely on their equally well-educated friends and family members to discuss and follow up on concepts they do not understand. As higher wage earners, they also possess the financial means and time to take advantage of high quality sources of news coverage and to attend science museums and similar cultural institutions. In 2012, 40 percent of Americans in the top quartile of wage earners said they had visited a natural history museum or a science center during the past year compared to less than 20 percent among those in the bottom quartile. The knowledge gap effect has even been observed relative to media outreach strategies such as Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel programs that are intended to engage broader audiences who otherwise may never consume science-related information (Corley and Scheufele 2010; Nisbet et al. 2015).

Despite its popularity as a tool among scientists and their allies, social media are no panacea, and initiatives that invest heavily in social media outreach at the expense of other strategies may only reinforce disparities and divisions. According to Pew (2017c), a substantial proportion of social media users say that they incidentally bump into science news stories that they otherwise would not have sought out. But about twice as many social media users also say they mostly distrust rather than trust the science posts they encounter. This sentiment is in line with a growing skepticism of social media generally, and is confounded by the tendency for social media to facilitate the spread of misinformation, to foster incivility, and to inflame group based differences rather than transcend them.

Given public concerns about the role that scientific innovations will play in contributing to rising inequality, scientists and their partners must start to directly address these reservations. Traditional approaches to science communication will not be enough—nor will social media efforts—no matter how clever or well resourced. It is time to focus on novel methods for promoting a more fruitful dialogue about science and society, bringing scientists and people of diverse backgrounds together to spend time talking to each other, contributing to mutual appreciation and understanding, and forging new relationships and insights.

• Corley, E.A. and D.A. Scheufele. 2010. Outreach gone wrong? When we talk nano to the public, we are leaving behind key audiences. The Scientist 24(1): 22.
• Lloyd, L. 2017. A march won’t make the public respect science. Slate.com (April 14).
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
• Nisbet, E.C., K.E. Cooper, and M. Ellithorpe. 2015. Ignorance or bias? Evaluating the ideological and informational drivers of communication gaps about climate change. Public Understanding of Science 24(3): 285–301.
• Nisbet, M., and E.M. Markowitz. 2014. Understanding public opinion in debates over biomedical research: Looking beyond political partisanship to focus on beliefs about science and society. PloS One 9(2): e88473.
• Pew Research Center. 2017a. Automation in Everyday Life. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
• ———. 2017b. U.S. Public Wary of Biomedical Technologies to ‘Enhance’ Human Abilities. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
• ———. 2017c. Science News and Information Today. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
• Scheufele, D.A., M.A, Xenos, E.L. Howell, et al. 2017. US attitudes on human genome editing. Science 357(6351): 553–554.

On February 14, a gunman carried out an appalling crime at Margory Stoneman Douglas High School, killing seventeen people and wounding a further fourteen. While the school shooting has become a depressingly familiar feature of modern media, in this case, the coverage often focused on the victims who were there and escaped unscathed. Within a few days, they had committed themselves to the idea that this should be the last school shooting. Shortly after that, conspiracy theorists did what they often do: accused the victims of the real crime of feigning crimes that never really happened.

The "crisis actor" idea is a fairly new phenomenon, though the accusation that protesters and activist are being paid is as old as politics. The term crisis actor comes from real disaster preparedness drills during which medics or first responders prepare for mass casualty events. Actors or volunteers sometimes portray shooting victims, lying around in realistic makeup and covered in stage blood to give the drill a sense of realism. I first saw the idea that there were bands of paid crisis actors after the Sandy Hook shooting, and now they seem to be a common element of the mass shooting conspiracy genre. Jason Koebler at Motherboard has traced the earliest use of the phrase to a 2012 press release from a Colorado company called Visionbox that provides exactly this sort of service.

Conspiracy theorists think that if they—or think they—recognize the same person at two events or if they can catch supposed victims "out of character," they have shown that the event is a hoax, or at least not what it appears to be. Part of the problem is that school shootings generate lots of similar press coverage: people anxiously waiting outside of the school while talking on their phones, crying, hugging, having press conferences, and so on, so there may be a strong sense that you have seen this all before. In the case of conspiracy theorists, they take it a step further and say they have seen the same people doing this before. For instance:

The vague similarities in the poses of women in horror on their phones is evidence enough, say conspiracy theorists, to say with confidence they are the same person.

Conspiracy theorists often confuse cause and effect. They ask the question "who benefits from a tragedy" ("cui bono?") first and then assign blame retroactively on those who might benefit. It may give you a scapegoat and someone to blame, but it ignores the contingency of history. In this case, because the event is perceived as bolstering the case of those who would oppose certain 2nd Amendment rights, so think the conspiracy theorists, those political actors must be responsible. Generally they are liberals. (It was the same thing after the BP spill in the Gulf. Clearly, it was environmental activists destroying the Deepwater Horizon to ... further the environmental agenda by ... destroying the environment … for some reason.)

The Parkland shooting conspiracy theory is unique to the current bizarre cultural moment. One student, Ben Hogg, is accused of being coached to act like a victim because he is the son of a retired FBI agent (pictured below).

Conspiracy theorists will focus on the "FBI agent" part and not so much on the "retired" part. This is remarkable because in recent weeks, as Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump Campaign and the Russians has yielded numerous indictments, many on the far right have turned on the FBI, which has been recast as a hive of socialist G-men. And who, you may ask, is really in charge of the liberal agenda the FBI is carrying out? Well, according to a tweet from former sheriff and Law Enforcement Clown David Clarke, it’s George Soros, of course!

Invoking the name of George Soros represents a lot here. He's the boogeyman the members of the Freedom Caucus warn their kids about at night, in much the same way the Koch brothers are the boogycreatures of the left—puppet masters using their vast sums of money to directly manipulate the minutiae of the news cycle. I think that most mainstream conservatives see Soros as a meddling liberal figurehead. White supremacists, however, may see him as a rich international Jew controlling world events. These ideas have long genealogies. (In fact, one way to identify a conspiracy theory is when the explanation precedes the event that it is meant to explain. In this case, "set up a fake shooting to generate sympathy for banning guns" existed long before the Florida shooting. Conspiracy theorists just pick the bits they think fit the pattern and ignore disconfirming evidence.)

Another factor that has contributed to the rise of this conspiracy theory is the NRA's Wayne LaPierre, who actively promoted conspiracy theories about Barack Obama for years, repeatedly putting forward the argument that President Obama was coming for all the guns. This despite the fact that the former president really never talked much about gun control before Sandy Hook, and despite a Supreme Court decision expanding handgun rights in D.C. LaPierre has primed his public to expect a conspiracy against 2nd Amendment rights. And believing is often seeing. If you expect crisis actors, you'll see crisis actors. If you expect to see a shadowy cabal of liberal Jews bent on disarming Americans and ushering in tyranny, you'll see a shadowy cabal of liberal Jews. If you expect pandas, you'll see pandas.

Conspiracy theories are a closed belief system—contrary evidence or a lack of evidence actually only illustrates how vast the conspiracy is and how powerful the conspirators are. This is to say conspiracy theories don't obey the normal rules for standards of evidence, where extraordinary evidence is required before someone will believe an extraordinary claim. The lack of evidence for the claim is extraordinary enough, in their mind, to justify the claim.

So, how do you defend yourself against these sorts of conspiracy theories, ones that are drawing on recent news where the whole story has not yet come out? 1) Get your news from multiple sources; there is no reason to consider an extraordinary claim to be true until you see it confirmed by multiple competing news outlets. 2) Be wary of wild, emotionally charged stories that appear in social media, and certainly don't share them. Nobody has any business getting their news of the arrival of the New World Order from you. Let them hear it from the UN or the aliens...or whoever is now in charge. 3) Be suspicious of the motives and objectivity of stories that demonize or make sweeping generalizations about large groups of people or which break the world down into black/white dichotomies. 4) Follow links to the sources of stories and don't bother with stories that don't show you their evidence.

In March 1863, a New York City coroner held an inquest on the death of a three-year-old child living on 83rd street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues. As reported in the New York Times, Mary Nell, the child’s mother, had been told by a previous tenant that there were fairies about in the house where she lived, and growing up in Ireland she had learned this was a sign that a child in the household had been exchanged for a fairy child.^[1] The prescribed test for a suspected changeling was to heat the blade of a shovel until it was red hot and have the child sit on it. If a fairy child had been substituted for the true child, it would fly away. Ms. Nell performed this test on her child (gender not specified) without her husband’s knowledge, and the resulting burns were so severe that the child died a week later. Mr. Nell testified that “for some time past he had occasionally thought his wife was insane, she acted so strangely.” The coroner decided to hold the mother in custody until the question of her insanity could be determined.

The devil steals a baby and leaves a changeling behind. Detail of “The legend of St. Stephen” by Martino di Bartolomeo, early fifteenth century. (Source: Wikimedia)

There are few events in life more anxiously anticipated than the birth of a child. The arrival of a healthy baby brings the prospect of happy years ahead and the fulfillment of many parental dreams. But childbirth has never been an easy passage. Prior to the twentieth century, both maternal and infant deaths were common, and after they arrived, children frequently succumbed to disease. Half of Martha Washington’s four children lived to the age of five, and only one of Mary Todd Lincoln’s four children achieved the age of twenty. Although in much of the world today maternal and infant mortality are less of a problem than they once were, many children continue to be born with abnormalities and developmental problems that profoundly alter their parents’ expectations.

The story of the changeling is said to be pre-Christian in origin, but many of the best written sources come from the late Middle Ages. An early mention of the phenomenon is found in the writings of William of Auvergne, who was Bishop of Paris from 1228 to 1249. According to Auvergne, children of incubi demons were exchanged for mothers’ healthy babies, and the changelings were discovered to have symptoms very similar to what today we would call “failure to thrive”:

They say they are skinny and always wailing and such milk-drinkers that four nurse maids do not supply sufficient milk to feed one. These appear to have remained with their nurses for many years, and afterward to have flown away, or rather vanished. (Cited in Green 2016, 114).

Stolen babies were the subject of common legend in England, Germany, and Scandinavia, and both Martin Luther (1483–1546) and the Grimm brothers reported cases of changelings (Ashliman 1997). The changeling legend was integrated into Luther’s Christian belief, and as a result, counterfeit children were said to have been left by the devil. Other traditional versions of the myth implicated witches, fairies, elves, incubi, succubi, trolls, water spirits, dwarves, or demons. Changelings were also described in the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), a popular manual on witchcraft, the original 1486 edition of which was written by German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer (Kramer and Sprenger 1928). The Malleus Maleficurum advocated the extermination of witches and had a profound effect on witch hunting and the torture and murder of women. For almost two hundred years, it was the second most popular book in Europe after the Bible (Guiley 2008).

The case of the changeling has been a remarkably popular subject in art and literature. The Irish poet W. B. Yeats made reference to the legend in his 1889 poem “The Stolen Child,” which includes the repeated refrain:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Fictional accounts of changelings have been written by the Swedish Nobel Prize winning author, Selma Lagerlöf (Bortbytingen 1915) and contemporary American novelist Victor LaValle (The Changeling 2017). A 1980 horror film The Changeling starred George C. Scott under the direction of Clint Eastwood, and the 2008 Academy Award nominated film Changeling starring Angelina Jolie (also directed by Clint Eastwood) was based on the highly publicized late-1920s Los Angeles case of Christine Collins, whose nine-year-old son Walter disappeared. [Spoilers.] After several months without any progress, the L.A. Police claimed to have recovered Walter in Illinois. The boy was brought to Los Angeles, but Ms. Collins soon recognized that he was not her son. Far from being a supernatural abduction, the changeling in question admitted he had posed as Walter Collins in the hope of going to Hollywood to meet the movie star Tom Mix. Subsequent detective work suggested that the true Walter Collins was one of the victims of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, although his mother never accepted that explanation.

Common Themes of Changeling Stories

The folklorist Joyce Underwood Munro (1997) reviewed many of the traditional changeling stories and identified a number of common themes. The following is a brief summary of some of the features she discovered:

• Circumstances of the parents: In most cases, changelings arrive in homes that are not entirely happy to begin with. They come to widows and widowers, single mothers, and others involved in some form of strife.
• Baptism and naming. Children who are unbaptized or unnamed are at greater risk. Changelings are often referred to as “it.”
• Leaving the child alone. Stories often involve children being left alone, even for a short time. Constant vigilance is commonly recommended as a defense against babies being switched.
• Parents recognize the change. Like Christine Collins, typically parents see a change and claim the child is not theirs.
• Physical changes. The changeling is often described as ugly, deformed, shriveled up, and shaggy, but it always still bears a resemblance to the original child.
• Behavior. Changelings are said to be always crying, never satisfied with food, and wailing at night. But the children are also often described as very changeable in their behavior, displaying a sweet and compliant demeanor with others when their parents are not around.
• Scapegoating the changeling. Many of the stories suggest that the changeling has brought a general cloud over the household. Disappointments and misfortunes are blamed on the changeling.
• Lack of growth or development. Despite reports of eating large quantities of food, the child fails to grow. In some cases, not gaining size at all over the course of an entire year.
• Consulting with a wise person. Often the parents consult with someone with greater knowledge who advises them as to what to do next. As pointed out by Ashliman (1997), this provides a sense of shared responsibility for the actions taken by the parents.
• Tricking the changeling. In many of the stories, parents are advised to trick the changelings into revealing their true fairy or demon nature. Special foods are sometimes prepared to be given to the child, but often horribly abusive tests are recommended, such as throwing the child into a fire, burning with a hot poker, placing them on a red-hot griddle, withholding food, or administering beatings. Mary Nell’s red-hot shovel was not an anomaly.
• Changeling betrays self. Often during these tests children are said to reveal themselves to be much older than their chronological age. On some occasions this admission is made to another person not the parents.
• Banishment of the changeling. Sometimes in the course of the test or as a separate act, the family rids itself of the imposter child. The child is said to have gone up the chimney or to have been reclaimed by the fairy mother.
• Return or not of the original child. In some cases, the only outcome of the test and banishment is the disappearance of the changeling. In other cases, the original child returns, either immediately or after some time. Finally, in some cases, the banishment fails and the family makes a positive adjustment to the changeling.

The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli (1781). An incubus perched on sleeping woman. (Source: Wikimedia)

Changeling Prevention and Treatment

Because the fear of stolen children was so rampant, many precautions were proposed for warding off demons and trolls and preventing the theft of a child. In his 1835 book Deutsche Mythologie, Jacob Grimm recommended that babies be constantly watched over: “Women who have recently been delivered may not go to sleep until someone is watching over the child. Mothers who are overcome by sleep often have changelings laid in their cradles” (cited in Ashliman 1997). A number of religious protective measures were employed. Catholics tended to use holy water, crucifixes, and representations of saints, whereas Protestants would often place the Bible or pages of the Bible in the child’s crib. In both sects, an unbaptized child was considered to be at risk (Ashliman 1997).

Once a child was identified as a changeling, the diagnosis often served as a justification for the kinds of horrible treatment described by Munro (1997) above. One of the more famous Grimm brothers’ stories includes many of the elements described by Munro (1997), including the method of banishment. The basics of this case are that, in 1580, a mother who was employed in a nobleman’s field during harvest time placed her week-old infant in a patch of grass while she worked. When she returned to nurse her baby, it drank milk like no child she had ever seen before, and she was convinced the infant was not hers. At the suggestion of the nobleman, she beat the child with a switch until it cried out, at which point the devil appeared and returned her original child (German Legends [1816], no. 88, cited by Ashliman 1997). This kind of treatment did not only occur in books. Eighteenth century European court records show that many parents who were charged with abandonment, manslaughter, and neglect claimed their children were changelings left by demons, fairies, or the devil (Froud 2017).

Medical Explanations for Changelings

It is likely that before the nineteenth century, many conditions that we now known to be medical—rather than supernatural—could have prompted parents to think their children were changelings. As mentioned above, the typical stories point to a condition we know as failure to thrive. This phrase describes a general outcome—not gaining weight or developing normally—that can result from a variety of underlying disorders, including cow’s milk intolerance, celiac disease, and inflammatory bowel disease (Marcovitch 1994; Schwartz 2000). However, the changeling legend was most widely believed in pre-scientific times when witches, the devil, and fairies were thought to be active participants in everyday life, and the medical science had not yet offered an alternative explanation for these conditions.

In addition to failure to thrive, before the development of modern medicine and psychiatry, it is very likely that any number of childhood disorders were interpreted as stolen children. Several modern authors have suggested that, in pre-scientific eras, children born with autism and other developmental disorders were probably considered changelings (Ashliman 1997; Wing and Potter 2002). By the late nineteenth century, science had begun to provide non-supernatural explanations for children who did not thrive or otherwise did not meet the normal expectations for a healthy infant, and belief in changelings faded.

Source (Flickr)

Today’s Changelings

Although fairies, incubi, witches, and demons play a much smaller role in our world today, we are far from free of the changeling impulse. If anything, our expectations about childbirth and parenthood are greater than those of couples in the middle ages.^[2] When children don’t meet these expectations, parents sometimes find a different demon to blame. The anti-vaccination movement attributes autism to a greedy pharmaceutical industry supported by a government conspiracy. Most cases of autism involve developmental delays that begin within the first year of life, but a small percentage of autistic children show a regressive form of the disorder marked by normal development in the first years followed by a decline. Parents report that their children have changed and can no longer perform as they once did, in some cases losing language skills they previously had (Pickles et al. 2009; Taylor et al. 2002). Some of these parents have attributed this regression to the toxic effects of vaccines, but research does not support this conclusion. For example, Taylor et al. (2002) found no change in the rate of regressive autism after the introduction of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine in the United States.

A child not looking at the keyboard while her facilitator guides her hand over the keys. (Source: Wikipedia)

In other contemporary cases, parents of developmentally disabled children reject the diagnosis of autism and claim their children have a physical—rather than a developmental—disability. They are delighted to find out that with the help of facilitated communication (FC) or a variant of FC, such as rapid prompting method, their children’s normally functioning level is revealed in messages typed on keyboards or tapped out on letter boards. The children’s hands may require guiding by verbally competent facilitators to get the sentences typed out, but the result is a remarkably fluent language. A devastating condition is avoided. Unfortunately, the overwhelming evidence of research on facilitated communication shows that the language-competent adult facilitators are unconsciously typing out the messages, and the children are not communicating at all. It is a Ouija-like phenomenon.

Modern Methods of Banishment

Although autistic children are rarely called changelings today, they are sometimes subject to banishments that are, in their own way, almost as cruel as those administered in the Middle Ages. The parents of nonverbal children who embrace facilitated communication unwittingly turn their children into marionettes. Furthermore, because these children often use facilitated communication at school—and even in college—they are denied years of evidence-based education that could help them become truly independent.

In the case of parents who think their children are the victims of vaccines, some have subjected their kids to chelation therapy, an invasive medical procedure used to remove the heavy metals these parents presume to be the cause of their child’s autism. Of course, there is no research support for chelation therapy’s effectiveness as an autism treatment. Worse, there have been a number of reports of deaths of young children with autism who have been subjected to this treatment, both in the United States and Britain (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2006; Woznicki 2006). The chelation-related death of an autistic child in the U.K. prompted the editors of the British Medical Journal to publish an editorial warning against the use of this treatment:

Serious concern should arise about the ongoing use of chelation therapy in children with autism at this time, especially when the side effects of appropriate administration are well reported, a death has occurred with an error of administration, and the treatment incurs a cost for the families. (Sinha, Silove, and Williams 2006)

For so many of us, the dream of a healthy baby to love and hold is central to the story of our lives. Children give us meaning and purpose, and if all goes well, these little people offer us the prospect of a kind of immortality. Unfortunately, sometimes the child we get is not exactly as we imagined, and there are challenges we never thought we would have to face. Today, genetic counseling makes it possible to avoid many unwanted childhood conditions, and when a baby arrives that is not exactly what the parents hoped for, science provides a natural explanation—if not always a cure—for what has befallen the family. It is understandable why many parents might have the urge to deny the truth and declare their child a kind of changeling. But the challenge of parenthood is to recognize our children for who they are and do what is necessary to give them the best life they can possibly have.

• Ashliman, D. L. 1997. “Changelings.” Accessed February 19, 2018. Available online at http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/changeling.html.
• Froud, Mark. 2017. The Lost Child in Literature and Culture. New York: Springer.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2006. “Deaths Associated with Hypocalcemia from Chelation Therapy --- Texas, Pennsylvania, and Oregon, 2003—2005.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,. Accessed February 21, 2018. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5508a3.htm.
• Green, Richard Firth. 2016. Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Guiley, Rosemary. 2008. The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft and Wicca. New York: Facts on File, Inc.
• Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. 1928. The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. Dover. (Original work published in 1484.)
• Marcovitch, Harvey. 1994. “Failure to thrive.” BMJ: British Medical Journal 308, no. 6920: 35–39.
• Munro, Joyce Underwood. 1997. “The Invisible Made Visible: The Fairy Changeling as a Folk Articulation of Failure to Thrive in Infants and Children.” In Narváez, Peter. The Good People: New Fairylore Essays. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky : 251–83.
• Ozonoff, Sally, Brenda J. Williams, and Rebecca Landa. 2005. “Parental report of the early development of children with regressive autism: the delays-plus-regression phenotype.” Autism 9, no. 5: 461–486.
• Pickles, Andrew, Emily Simonoff, Gina Conti‐Ramsden, Milena Falcaro, Zoë Simkin, Tony Charman, Susie Chandler, Tom Loucas, and Gillian Baird. 2009. “Loss of language in early development of autism and specific language impairment.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 50 no. 7: 843–852.
• Schwartz, I. David. 2000. “Failure to thrive: an old nemesis in the new millennium.” Pediatrics in review 21 no. 8: 257–264.
• Sinha, Yashwant, Natalie Silove, and Katrina Williams. 2006. “Chelation therapy and autism.” BMJ: British Medical Journal 333 no. 7571: 756.
• Taylor, Brent, Elizabeth Miller, Raghu Lingam, Nick Andrews, Andrea Simmons, and Julia Stowe. 2002. “Measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination and bowel problems or developmental regression in children with autism: population study.” BMJ: British Medical Journal 324 no. 7334 : 393–396.
• Wing, Lorna, and David Potter. 2002. “The epidemiology of autistic spectrum disorders: is the prevalence rising?.” Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews 8 no. 3: 151–161.
• Woznicki, Katrina. 2005. “British Boy Dies After Chelation Therapy for Autism.” Medpage Today. August 26. Accessed February 21, 2018. Available online at https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/autism/1616.



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Notes
• ^[1] “A remarkable case of hallucination. Mother burns child to death.” New York Times, March 18, 1863, 8. Accessed at: http://www.nytimes.com/1863/03/18/archives/local-intelligence-the-atlantic-telegraph-and-its-prospects.html.
• ^[2] Interestingly, a number of the original texts cited overly doting parents as one of the precipitants of a changeling child (e.g., Kramer and Sprenger 1928).

I’m joined by European Skeptic Podcaster (ESP) and Associate Member of the European Council of Skeptical Organisations (ECSO), András Gábor Pintér. We are now about to start day twenty of my About Time Tour. András and I dropped Mark Edward off at the Bologna, Italy, airport for his flight back to Los Angeles and then we took off in the car for our next destination, Slovenia.

Ljubljana, Slovenia – October 2, 2017

Okay, I must say that this was personally a major highlight of the entire tour, only because my paternal grandparents came from Slovenia. My father was born in Euclid, Ohio, in 1918 to extremely poor parents. He grew up speaking Slovenian and lived in immigrant-rich neighborhoods. Listening to him tell the stories of growing up there, it sounded pretty awful. His father died when he was twelve and things only got worse for his mom and brother. He went to fight in WWII and ended up in Salinas, California, after being demobilized in 1945. I’m telling you all this because we had almost no contact with Slovenia or our relatives at all. The Internet did not exist, and the only way you could research anything was to spend hours at the library. I was fascinated with this very distant place and its exotic people and tiny villages. To say I was clueless is an understatement. On this tour I had already traveled to Scandinavia, Poland, Germany, and more, but Slovenia just seemed impossible to visit. But András arranged a lunch in Ljubljana with three Slovenian skeptics. Wow!

András and I crossed over the Dragon Bridge, which was built in 1901, and I got a thrill knowing that my grandparents must have walked on this same bridge. I know it may sound silly, but it was really meaningful to me. We met up with Maja Žorga Dulmin and her husband, Nejc and their friend Mark Bizman. We met in one of the most beautiful locations alongside the Ljuljanica River in downtown Ljubljana.

They explained that they run the only skeptic group in Slovenia. They do monthly Skeptic in the Pub events (Skeptiki v Pubu). Maja came to skepticism by watching an MIT lecture with someone dissecting frogs. She thought that this wasn’t for her and then found an essay on how linguistics works in the brain and she said, “This is great.” Maja and Nejc soon discovered a science podcast called The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe (SGU) and after a lot of episodes they realized that the rogues were “debunking bullshit.” After that, Maja and Nejc started self-identifying as skeptics.

I asked what skeptical content there is in Slovenian and was told “If you are under forty-five, you speak English” but there are a few Slovenian resources, a popular TV show called Science on the Street and one science podcast exists that mostly focuses on biology. There are influential books such as Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World, with other popular authors being Dawkins, Wiseman, and James Randi.

Anti-vax, homeopathy, and general New Age beliefs are the biggest issues in the country. Because Slovenia was a Communist country, there is less belief in God. But as god beliefs fade, New Age beliefs increase. Also, the Roman Catholic Church is becoming bolder, aggressively entering politics.

Székesfehérvár, Hungary – October 2–3, 2017

After lunch with the Slovenian skeptics, András and I drove to Székesfehérvár, Hungary, which is where András lives. He had business to do on the third in the morning, so I had time to wander around the historical town. Its history goes back to the Middle Ages as the place where all the Hungarian Kings were crowned and buried. I took a lot of photos and video in the few hours I visited. I also got to meet András’s mother and visit her incredible garden with grapes and vegetables, one of the highlights of the day. The town has a lot of beautiful buildings and terrific public art; some is whimsical and fun, some serious and painful. One memorial was devoted to the Jewish population of Székesfehérvár, erected on the site of a Synagogue that had been torn down in 1944. The carving says that 3,000 Jewish people were removed from the town, and only 290 returned after the war. Very sad.

Budapest, Hungary – October 3–4, 2017

We next drove to Budapest where I was to speak later that evening. The Szkeptikus Társaság Egyesület (Hungarian Skeptic Society, HSS) was founded in 2006 and holds monthly lectures. The HSS has participated in Darwin Day and the 10:23 homeopathy campaign. They also hosted the 14th European Skeptics Congress in 2010. The current president is Gábor Hraskó, who until a few days prior was the Chairman of the European Council of Skeptical Organisations. The HSS and Hungary as a whole was very active in the March for Science event in April 2017.

András’s own involvement in the skeptic community happened because he discovered an essay contest sponsored by James Randi for Hungarian students. András responded and won, and he began to come to all the meetings and lectures he could.

András told me about a chemtrail event the HSS infiltrated a few years before. They designed a professional looking website with all the skeptical info about chemtrails they could find. They wrote it in a neutral way so that believers would be comfortable reading it; at no time did HSS want to appear to be ridiculing believers. At the very bottom of the website it mentioned that the page was sponsored by the Hungarian Skeptic Society. About 100 people attended the chemtrail event, and HSS showed up also wearing bright blue t-shirts with an airplane logo and their website name. They looked like the organizers of the event, which made the believer attendees and the media approach them for information. It was very clever, and it seems replicable for other skeptic groups for other pseudoscience topics.

My lecture wasn’t very well attended. It was pouring rain most of the day; only about ten people showed up, but I gained one new Hungarian editor, László Makay. They asked good questions and I think it was a good discussion. Here I left András behind and headed to my next stop of the tour, Bulgaria.

Sofia, Bulgaria – October 5–7, 2017

My plane landed in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the early afternoon. Bulgarian science conference organizer Liubomir Baburov, who toured with us through Germany and Switzerland, met me at the airport. Liubomir runs a science group called RATIO. They put on Skeptics in the Pub events monthly, but a few times a year they organize much bigger events with hundreds of attendees. Liubomir explains that he wants to show people that science is “sexy and fun,” and he sure does pull in attendees. The European Skeptic Podcast has been talking a lot about a November event where Jelena Levin and Pontus Böckman were a part of a panel discussing vaccinations. Professor Chris French was also a speaker, and the event sold out with hundreds attending.

Liubomir had set up a Skeptics in the Pub event for my lecture and told me that the Bulgarian skeptics would probably not be interested in any activism. They love science, but Bulgaria even skipped the March for Science event that year. He thought I should just explain how Wikipedia works and how we shed light on forgotten scientists, and maybe generally suggest that they also can improve Wikipedia pages. The event was like nothing I had seen before. It was dark, with very loud American hard rock music playing, and it was very full. Maybe forty people showed up. I gave my “March for Science – Now What?” lecture a bit more toned down, and after it was over I was flooded with people asking questions. We went to eat afterward and about twelve people came with us; we continued the discussion of science activism. It was very heart-warming and informative.

Madrid, Spain – October 7–8, 2017

For the very last part of the About Time Tour, I flew to Madrid. When I was still in the planning process of this tour, I received a tweet from Luis García Castro who is with Alternativa Racional a las Pseudociencias – Sociedad para el Avance del Pensamiento Crítico (Rational Alternative to Pseudoscience – Society for the Advancement of Critical Thinking, or ARP-SAPC) asking if maybe I could stop in Spain for a lecture. At the time I was planning on flying home (to California) from Italy, but then got talked into Hungary, which led me to get talked into Bulgaria. When I saw how difficult it would be to fly from Bulgaria to San Francisco, I decided I should stop part way; it was either France, Spain, or Portugal. Spain was the one that had asked, so I went to Spain. ARP-SAPC asked if I wanted to go to Madrid or Barcelona. There wasn’t money to do both, but apparently there are active skeptic groups in both areas. I’m not sure how we decided on Madrid, but that is where I went.

What an amazing city! Terrific public transportation and lots of things to see and do. Oddly there seemed to be some fuss over Catalonia. There were flags draped all over Madrid—orange and yellow flags hung from almost half of the city’s balconies. I had been on the road by this time twenty-five days and really wasn’t keeping up on the news. Claus Larson warned me not to talk about Spanish politics when I got to Madrid, so I managed to do some reading before I arrived. Claus was incorrect; politics were everywhere and all the skeptics I met wanted to tell me what was going on. It was really enlightening to be there at that time. Luis García Castro and I spent the day on a historic walking tour around one area of Madrid. I learned so much from that tour that I decided to make sure to do one of them every time I travel.

There was a March for Science held in Madrid and Barcelona. I don’t know how many went to the Madrid march, but “hundreds” attended the Barcelona event. According to Science magazine reporting, “A roundtable discussion was held that included journalists, scientists and science policy officials. A ‘pro-science manifesto’ was read in Spanish, Catalan, and English.”

During lunch, Luis and I discussed the ARP-SAPC. I learned that there are over 400 members and they host lectures and Skeptic in the Pub events every month that average about sixty people. Spain has lots of science and secular humanist organizations but very few skeptic ones. ARP-SAPC often has science-focused speakers at their events, but the skeptics prefer to focus on scientific skepticism, so they usually ask the speaker to add in a critical thinking element.

Luis explained that religion is more cultural and less church attendance; even church weddings are down. People are still getting married in church and baptizing their children, but more from tradition and to keep grandma happy than because they really believe in God.

The ARP-SAPC produces a beautiful professional skeptic magazine called El Escéptico three or four times a year. They also have a digital magazine, and their website has many critical thinking articles in Spanish. I asked about their readership and the expense of publishing a print magazine in this era of the Internet. I was told that they produce the biggest collection on skeptic topics in Spanish of anyone. They have a large readership in Mexico and Latin America. Luis told me that the printed articles will all be released eventually for free online. About the print magazine, he said, “as long as we can afford it, we will continue to print it.”

The ARP-SAPC has an annual assembly that rotates between cities, bringing the whole board together. Currently the president is Alfonso López Borgoñoz. Apparently, the ARP-SAPC began as a group because of an interest in UFOs; the group was called, Objeto Volador no Identificado (OVNI). The group decided to become more diverse and called itself Alternativa Racional Council (ARP) Then again, the group wanted to change names and they came up with Sociedad para el Avance del Pensamiento Crítico. But in order to please original members and the newer people, they kept both names, which is why it is ARP-SAPC.

My lecture had a good turnout with about thirty people. Lots of terrific questions were asked, and I was interviewed in English by the podcast Pensando Críticamente about the GSoW project. A group of us went out to eat afterward, and I was able to add a few more GSoW editors from this lecture. The ARP-SAPC has an active Facebook group called ARP-Sociedad para el Avance del Pensamiento Crítico with over 9,000 members.

The next day I was on a plane headed back to California. I landed Monday October 9, tired but not exhausted. My SD memory cards, as well as my luggage, were all full up. It would take me days to get everything uploaded and posted. It was a once in a lifetime adventure. I had a complete blast and can’t wait to do it again.

In early January 2018, I was informed that Thomas Bopp had died. If that name sounds familiar, think Hale-Bopp comet. It’s very likely that many of you reading this today may have watched the night sky during the months it was visible in 1997.

I’m going to tell you a story. Not just about Thomas Bopp, but the story of his Wikipedia page and how that relates to the powerful crowd-sourced project I run, Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW).

GSoW is a Wikipedia editing team. We completely train people from the most basic edits to becoming advanced editors. We mentor them throughout the training with one-on-one feedback and instruction. We are at about 120 people right now, who live all over the world, and edit in many languages. The GSoW is unique as we focus on Wikipedia pages concerning scientific skepticism, the paranormal, and science. Because most pure science Wikipedia pages are written and maintained by experts, our team focuses on the people and organizations behind the science.

Training to be a GSoW editor typically takes months to complete, and one of the last assignments is to rewrite an existing Wikipedia page. I keep a short list of Wikipedia pages for new editors to choose from, and one name has been on this list for some time: Alan Hale. I’m NOT talking about the skipper from Gilligan’s Island, but the first name on the Hale-Bopp comet. Editor Rob Palmer choose Alan Hale off the rewrite list to finish his GSoW editor training. He brought the page up from eight citations to thirty-five citations. We had a discussion on the Secret Cabal (that is the GSoW hidden group on Facebook), which led us to the Thomas Bopp page.

It was really embarrassing, and comparing it against the Alan Hale page, we felt that we could not allow it to remain in the condition we found it in with four citations. It was smaller than a stub page, what I call a “non-scroller”—you don’t need to scroll to see the whole page on your screen. We knew that Bopp was an amateur astronomer, and although he was the second name on a comet, we really didn’t think we would find enough to improve the Wikipedia page.

GSoW editor Ruth Nolan decided to give it a try. She spent about a week researching Thomas Bopp, reading interviews and news reports adding the content to the page, and just general fussing. Then she gave the page to the Cabal, were editors rip into the citations, improve grammar and sentence flow, read it over and over to make sure the average Wikipedia reader would understand the content and enjoy the page. She took it from four citations to where it is now: twenty-nine. Before Ruth rewrote the page, it was only nine sentences long. Now it’s about six paragraphs long, with a nice photo of comet Hale-Bopp.

I knew next to nothing about Thomas Bopp, and assume that is what most people would say. I rarely get to create Wikipedia articles these days, but I do spend a lot of time reading and reviewing what the team is working on. I learned a lot about this man and think the Wikipedia page holds up well.

I always thought Hale and Bopp were friends or coworkers hanging out together when they discovered the comet. That’s not what happened at all. It turns out that Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp pretty much discovered the comet at the same time, but Bopp didn’t have cell phone coverage in the Arizona desert and traveled toward home and stopped at a pay phone. Then he realized that he didn’t have the phone number with him, so he waited until he got all the way home and sent a Western Union Telegram. Yes, I said a telegram; this was 1995. He had email, but I guess he took the name of the agency he was reporting to literally. He reported the comet to the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. In the meantime, Alan Hale had already emailed the agency the comet’s coordinates.

When Bopp was three, his father showed him a meteor shower while sitting on the front porch of their home in Youngstown, Ohio. When he was ten, he got his first telescope. Bopp joined the Air Force, married, and had one daughter. After leaving the Air Force, he went to college where he took business classes and also astronomy classes. He joined the local astronomy club and became friends with professors, Edwin Bishop and Warren Young, as well as astronaut Ronald Parise. In 1980 after taking a job in Phoenix, Arizona as a manager of the parts department for a construction company, he found new friends at the local astronomy group. The North Phoenix Alternative Astronomical Society would often meet in the desert, set up telescopes, and take turns looking at the sky. Bopp had never seen a comet before; his friend Jim Stevens had set up his telescope to look at globular clusters. After a while, Bopp noticed “a fuzzy little glow” and asked his friend what he thought it was. The group took turns viewing the fuzzy glow, drawing the position, and following its movement.

When the director of the Central Bureau contacted Bopp with the news that indeed he had discovered an unknown comet, Bopp was shocked. It was the very first comet Bopp had ever seen, and finding a new comet was rare. The comet was named Hale-Bopp because Hale’s email reached them first.

As the now-named comet Hale-Bopp became more visible, Bopp’s fame grew. He gave lectures and appeared on TV and even a spot on Bill Nye’s Science Guy show. Bopp was able to quit his job at the construction company; even his father was able to tour with him.

During the week the comet was most visible, in 1997, Bopp’s brother and sister-in-law were out photographing the comet and were killed in a car accident. Bopp said that this was the best and worst week of his life. The astronomers Carolyn and Gene Shoemaker, who were the codiscoverers of Comet Shoemaker-Levy, named an asteroid after Thomas Bopp and his father, and a couple of years later, the Shoemakers died in a car accident.

The other ominous history of the Hale-Bopp Comet you might remember is of a certain UFO doomsday cult that thought a spaceship was traveling behind the comet. They committed mass suicide in 1997 in the belief that they would be picked up by the spacecraft. You might remember this as Heaven’s Gate.

So, Thomas Bopp was just a regular guy—using a borrowed telescope, hanging out with friends in the Arizona desert looking at the sky. He wasn’t an astrophysicist or using an expensive telescope at an observatory. He was just a guy, someone whose father also loved the sky. Astronomy was a hobby, something he spent considerable time learning about, but just a hobby.

Thomas Bopp’s Wikipedia page was an embarrassment until GSoW got interested. Now thousands read about him and his codiscovery. Since we rewrote the Wikipedia page in December 2016, it has been viewed 30,798 times. Not a ton, and most were in the week we launched the rewrite and in the week of his death in January 2018.

We don’t write Wikipedia pages because we think they are popular; we are all volunteers. We work on pages that interest us, and it is important that we write them so they interest average readers. When the media learned of Bopp’s death at the young age of 68, I would not be surprised if they leaned heavily on the Wikipedia page and the citations that Ruth left to be found. All the more reason the Wikipedia page needs to be well-written, accurate, and complete.

What I really love about the Thomas Bopp Wikipedia page story is that possibly thousands of students will find the page, be curious, and follow the twenty-nine citations we have left as a starting point to learn more about him and the history of the discovery of the comet.

I’m writing this in the week that SpaceX has successfully launched a Tesla convertible, complete with a driver and a copy of Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book in the glove compartment. Another generation is inspired to pursue science as a profession and hobby. I’m happy knowing that GSoW has had a hand in helping by creating interesting Wikipedia pages for Hale and Bopp. I’m also smiling because when they read about Thomas Bopp, they will learn that he was not an academic with an advanced degree and he didn’t have an expensive telescope, he was someone who had a love for astronomy and happened to look up at the sky on that night and say, “What’s this fuzzy object?”

I think I should take a moment and mention that GSoW has written or rewritten many Wikipedia pages concerning astronomy. We are up to thirty-three pages at the time I’m writing this, most in English but a few in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Those thirty-three pages have received 716,495 page views since we created them. Every month that number increases by 26K more views.

If you are inspired and want to become a GSoW editor, it isn’t hard to sign up. All training is self-paced, online and with a personal trainer. You need to have a Facebook account, be a self-starter, and good at finishing tasks. Training takes months, but you will be in close association with an awesome group of people. Send me a private message on Facebook, with your email and Wikipedia user name, and I’ll get you started.

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

Si estás leyendo esta columna, es porque te has beneficiado con los avances científicos y tecnológicos que han transformado la economía mundial. Para profesionales bien instruidos que constituyen el principal público de las revistas de ciencia populares, estas innovaciones han creado una nueva riqueza y oportunidades para tener la oportunidad de obtener profesiones. Sin embargo, paradójicamente, el propio éxito de la ciencia y el sector de la ingeniería han creado las condiciones que llevaron a muchos otros a desconfiar de los expertos y de la clase profesional. Los mismos avances que han enriquecido a aquellos que están en la cima de la economía del conocimiento han también eliminado millones de puestos de trabajo entre los que están más abajo, transformando industrias enteras y regiones geográficas, generando resentimiento público, y sembrando la polarización política.

Cuando pensamos en las raíces del antagonismo sobre la pericia científica en los Estados Unidos, a menudo nos enfocamos en el partidismo o en las diferencias religiosas. Sin embargo, los análisis que conduje con varios colegas en entrevistas de opinión pública a gran escala muestran que las disparidades relacionadas con los ingresos, la educación y la raza juegan un rol más importante respecto de cómo los estadounidenses aprecian la relación entre ciencia y sociedad, con reservas que trascienden las diferencias tradicionales entre ideologías de izquierda y derecha.

Cuando se les pregunta sobre el impacto social de los avances científicos y las innovaciones tecnológicas, el público estadounidense que expresan el optimismo más fuerte tienden a ser blancos, tienen un graduación universitaria y se encuentran dentro del rango de mayores ingresos. Estos individuos pueden esperar justificadamente que sus carreras los van a beneficiar a partir de las innovaciones científicas y que van a ser capaces de abordar nuevas teconologías y tratamientos médicos. Por el contrario, aquellos que expresan sus reservas hacia la ciencia y la tecnología generalmente tienen algún título obtenido en la facultad, ganan menos de 50.000 dólares anuales y es probable que no sean blancos. Están preocupados, justificadamente, acerca de cómo van a competir en una economía basada en la innovación, afrontando el acceso a nuevas tecnologías o avances médicos, y cómo tales avances pueden reforzar patrones de discriminación y otras desigualdades sociales (Nisbet y Markowitz, 2014).

Quizá no hay área más clara en la ansiedad de la gente. Es la que se basa en la disparidad económica en relación con la automatización y la inteligencia artificial (IA). Estas innovaciones son promocionadas como estimuladores de la economía, contribuyendo a la protección ambiental y la seguridad pública, y aumentando la conveniencia del consumidor. También es probable que eliminen los trabajos de millones de camioneros, taxistas, la venta minorista y profesionales. Las empresas tecnológicas se arriesgan a la reacción negativa de la gente mientras buscan adoptar aplicaciones de IA, gastando millones para evitar la regulación (Lloyd, 2017).

En una encuesta reciente, cuando se pidió a la gente que considerara un futuro en el cual los robots y las computadoras hicieran muchos trabajos que hacen los humanos, el 72 por ciento de los estadounidendes expresó preocupación contra un 33 por ciento que expresó entusiasmo y una proporción similar pensaba que la desigualdad económica se pondría mucho peor como consecuencia de tales avances. Las preocupaciones relativas al impacto negativo de las innovaciones en los lugares de trabajo eran mayores entre los que no habían completado el cuarto año de la facultad (Pew Research Center 2017a).

Los estadounidenses también manifestaron severas reservas acerca del impacto en la desigualdad social de las innovaciones biomédicas relacionadas con el mejoramiento de la condición humana. La mayoría de la gente dijo que estaba muy preocupada, o simplemente preocupada acerca de la edición genética, chips cerebrales, y sangre sintética y que estas tecnologías estarían disponibles antes de que fueran completamente entendidas. Gran parte de la ansiedad se relaciona con disparidades anticipadas: más del 70 por ciento teme que estas innovaciones podrían exacerbar la línea divisoria entre aquellos que pueden tener acceso a ellas y aquellos que no, porque las tecnologías mencionadas solo estarían al alcance de los ricos (Pew Research Center 2017b).

Una conversación diferente

Teniendo en cuenta la preocupación masiva sobre el uso de la edición genética para el mejoramiento humano, un informe de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de 2017 recomendó que los científicos y legisladores deberían facilitar las novedades en desarrollo respecto de los beneficios y riesgos de la revisión del genoma humano y que se necesitaba más investigación sobre cómo facilitar de forma efectiva los progresos (National Academies, 2017). Los estudios también muestran una creencia masiva entre los estadounidenses acerca de que los científicos deberían consultar al público antes de continuar con las aplicaciones de modificación genética (Scheufele et al. 2017).

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También, si los científicos, ingenieros, líderes universitarios y CEOs van a afrontar las preocupaciones concernientes a la modificación genética y otras innovaciones tecnológicas, tendrán que proponer nuevos enfoques para enfrentar a aquellos segmentos del público que pertenezcan a niveles socio-económicos más bajos.

Los esfuerzos tradicionales por comunicar la ciencia que se centran en educar informalmente a través de documentales en la televisión, los libros y revistas populares de ciencia y los museos de ciencia tienden a interesar a los estadounidenses mejor educados y con mayores ingresos, que en promedio son los más grandes consumidores de estos recursos, un grupo que tiende a ser entusiasta, conocedor y optimista respecto de las innovaciones tecnológicas.

Una reciente encuesta de Pew (2017c), por ejemplo, muestra que solo el 17 por ciento de los estadounidenses son consumidores activos de noticias, definidos como aquellos que buscan y consumen noticias científicas varias veces por semana. Este grupo tiende a ubicarse entre los mejor educados, los que ganan mejores sueldos, y que son, en su mayoría, blancos. En cambio, la atención hacia las noticias científicas de acuerdo al estatus socio-económico la constituyen quienes son eficaces pronosticadores acerca de si un individuo se va a involucrar en otras actividades de ciencia informales, como visitar un museo, dedicarse a un hobby relacionado con la ciencia o participando en un programa científico dedicado a los ciudadanos.

Estas disparidades, son las mayores barreras para acercarse a las reservas y maliterpretaciones del público. Consideremos la comunicación y los esfuerzos relativos a la nanotecnología. Entre 2004 y 2007, cuando se introdujeron cientos de productos y aplicaciones de nanotecnología en el mercado estadounidense, el conocimiento de la nanotecnología se incrementó notablemente entre los mejor educados pero declinó respecto de los menos educados. Estas disparidades respecto del conocimiento tuvieron lugar incluso como cobertura de noticias de nanotecnología por parte de las agencias gubernamentales, museos de ciencia y universidades que invirtieron importantes recursos en la educación informal. Este efecto de “hueco de conocimiento” ha sido seguido por investigadores durante varias décadas. Mientras temas científicos emergentes como la nanotecnología, la modificación genética, o la inteligencia artificial aumentan la atención de las noticias y en los museos y otros lugares, aquellos individuos que tienen un estatus socio-económico más alto es más probable que adquieran conocimiento más rápido que su contraparte, los estratos más bajos, de modo que la diferencia en el conocimiento entre estos segmentos se va a incrementar en lugar de disminuir.

La razón de estas disparidades es que los individuos mejor educados tienden a absorber la nueva información más eficientemente y pueden confiar en sus amigos (igualmente educados) y en los miembros de la familia para discutir y continuar estudiando conceptos que no comprenden. Como aquellos que ganan buenos sueldos, también poseen los medios financieros y el tiempo para sacar ventaja de las fuentes de alta calidad respecto de las coberturas de las noticias y visitar museos de ciencia e instituciones similares. En 2012, el 40 por ciento de los estadounidenses pertenecientes al cuartil más alto de ingresos salariales dijeron que habían visitado un museo de historia o un centro científico durante el año anterior, comparado con menos del 20 por ciento entre los que pertenecen al último cuartil. El efecto del hueco respecto del conocimiento se ha relacionado con el las estrategias de alcance de los medios como el Discovery Channel y el National Geographic Channel, cuyos programas intentaron atraer una mayor audiencia, que de otra manera nunca hubiera consumido la información relativa a la ciencia. (Corley y Scheufele 2010; Nisbet et al. 2015).

Aparte de la popularidad como herramienta entre los científicos y sus aliados, los medios sociales no son la panacea, y las iniciativas de fuerte inversión en el alcance de los medios a expensas de otras estrategias solo podría reforzar las disparidades y divisiones. De acuerdo con Pew (2017c) una proporción importante de usuarios de medios sociales dicen que incidentalmente se encontraron con nuevas historias científicas que de otra manera no hubieran visto. Pero aproximadamente, dos de cada uno de los usuarios de medios sociales dicen que mayormente desconfían en los posts científicos que encuentran. Generalmente, este sentimiento va acompañado de un escepticismo creciente hacia los medios sociales, y se confunde por la tendencia de los medios sociales para facilitar la difusión de la desinformación, alentar la descortesía, y para exacerbar las diferencias en lugar de superarlas.

Dados los intereses del público sobre el rol que las innovaciones científicas van a jugar en contribuir a aumentar la desigualdad, los científicos y otros colegas deben comenzar a afrontar estas reservas. Los enfoques tradicionales respecto de la comunicación científica no serán suficientes —tampoco los esfuerzos de los medios sociales— no importa cuán inteligentes sean o lo sólidamente basados que estén. Es tiempo de enfocarse en nuevos métodos para promover un diálogo más fructífero sobre la ciencia y la sociedad, juntando a los científicos y a la gente de diversos niveles para conversar, contribuyendo a la mutua apreciación y a la comprensión, y forjar nuevas relaciones y percepciones.

• Corley, E.A. and D.A. Scheufele. 2010. Outreach gone wrong? When we talk nano to the public, we are leaving behind key audiences. The Scientist 24(1): 22.
• Lloyd, L. 2017. A march won’t make the public respect science. Slate.com (April 14).
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
• Nisbet, E.C., K.E. Cooper, and M. Ellithorpe. 2015. Ignorance or bias? Evaluating the ideological and informational drivers of communication gaps about climate change. Public Understanding of Science 24(3): 285–301.
• Nisbet, M., and E.M. Markowitz. 2014. Understanding public opinion in debates over biomedical research: Looking beyond political partisanship to focus on beliefs about science and society. PloS One 9(2): e88473.
• Pew Research Center. 2017a. Automation in Everyday Life. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
• ———. 2017b. U.S. Public Wary of Biomedical Technologies to ‘Enhance’ Human Abilities. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
• ———. 2017c. Science News and Information Today. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
• Scheufele, D.A., M.A, Xenos, E.L. Howell, et al. 2017. US attitudes on human genome editing. Science 357(6351): 553–554.

Following many outrages—ranging from school shootings to real or perceived un-American actions by Donald Trump and others—it’s common to hear concerns that Americans are “numb” to terrors and that the transgressions are becoming so routine and “normal” that citizens have lost their ability to be outraged.

However, the reaction to the latest school shooting in Florida suggests that Americans are anything but numb or indifferent to the violence. Gun control advocate (and shooting survivor) Gabby Giffords tweeted on February 14, “The accounts from today’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, strike fear into all Americans. Is it safe to send our kids to school? Are we safe in our homes and communities?” People do not protest against events, situations, and conditions that they consider normal or ones that they are numb to. Yet in the weeks since the latest attack, protests and boycotts have become common.

Fear of Numbness

The concern that Americans are numb to violence is widespread and often shared on social and news media. It’s a common claim among pundits and politicians: In an October 1, 2015, speech shortly after a shooting in Eugene, Oregon, President Obama “said that given the frequency of mass shootings, people had ‘become numb to this.... And what’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation.”

The Washington Post followed up two months later with an article titled “President Obama’s Right: Americans Might Be Growing Numb to Mass Shootings. Here’s Why.” The piece explores a few reasons why a steady stream of violence could desensitize the public.

The author, Colby Itkowitz, did himself no favors—among psychologists and skeptics, anyway—by referencing dubious and discredited theories about the influence of video game violence on real-world violence. (Donald Trump was widely ridiculed recently for suggesting just such a link.)

I encountered an article in The New York Times titled “A School Attack Every Other Day,” with the subhead “Fears of a ‘Numb’ Nation as 2 Die in Kentucky.”

The article, by Alan Blinder and Daniel Victor, quoted former senior FBI official Katherine W. Schweit as saying, “We have absolutely become numb to these kinds of shootings, and I think that will continue” and former Department of Education official William Modzeleski: “I think we’ve become somewhat desensitized to the fact that these things happened.”

However, as I read it, there seemed to be a central question that remained glaringly unanswered, and it’s a basic one: By what measure do we know Americans are becoming “numb” (or desensitized) to school shootings or violence in general? That word, or variations of it, appears multiple times in the piece, including in the subheading and the pull quote on page A18. I reached out to Times journalist Blinder with the following query:

Are you aware of any surveys or polls in which Americans report caring less about recent school shootings than earlier ones? Or is news media coverage an indicator? Shannon Watts is quoted in your article as suggesting some link between short news cycles and American numbness to the tragedy, though that seems a very imprecise marker, since what is reported is less a function of what Americans are numb to (or consider to be of import) than what journalists and news editors consider to be newsworthy. I know there are many factors that determine how much coverage a crime news story gets (including if there’s an ongoing threat to the community; if there’s a famous person involved; if there’s an angle that can hook into a larger story, etc.). The fact that the Kentucky shooting is not getting wall-to-wall coverage on CNN—as some previous school shootings have—does not necessarily mean that Americans don’t care about it, are numb to it, or have lost the ability to be outraged by it.

Alternatively, Schweit suggests that numbness may be correlated with “taking shootings more seriously than we were before,” but I don’t know what that means: Are Americans taking shootings any less seriously today than five or ten years ago? By what measure does Schweit determine this? Enacting gun laws? Responding to polls indicating how concerned people are with various social problems? Surely there must be ways to measure how seriously Americans take school shootings—and, by extension, how “numb” we are to them—but they are nowhere to be found in your reporting. 

I’m sure you didn’t intend to be vague, but neither your piece nor the experts quoted in it offer a clear definition of American “numbness” to tragedies such as the one in Kentucky, nor any real evidence of it. It’s possible that Americans may be becoming “numb” or inured to school shootings (or shootings or violence in general), but without some measurement such as polls, research, surveys, or the like, a central thesis of your piece comes off as little more than speculation and conjecture instead of verifiable fact. I’d appreciate any clarification you can provide.

Neither Blinder nor Victor responded. Journalists are rarely interested in examining their role in sensationalizing and promoting alarmist news stories; news analyses are best done at arm’s length lest the mirror’s reflection become uncomfortably close.

Fear of Normalization

The concern over American “numbness” is related to another issue that’s come to the fore over the past year: fear of normalization. Many pundits and commentators on social media (especially when commenting on something that President Trump did) rush to remind others that “This is not normal!” There are countless examples, including former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s appearance on the Emmys (one story was headlined, “The Emmy’s Normalization of Sean Spicer Dangerously Rewarded a White House Official Who Lied”).

Yet there’s little evidence that the fears of “normalization” have been borne out; this is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the largely negative backlash to Spicer’s appearance on social media. Far from the public becoming “numb” to Spicer’s conduct (or it being seen as “normal” or unremarkable), it was seen as aberrant, “yucky” (Washington Post), “strange” (The Atlantic), “not funny” (CNN), and a “gimmick” that was “astonishingly tone deaf” (GQ) and quickly “resulted in blowback against Sean Spicer” (Vanity Fair).

In fact, the great majority of words and actions—in general, but especially by the Trump administration—deemed “not normal” have been generally recognized as such and not only remarked upon but widely denounced. We need not rely on social media posts to plumb the depths of the dissatisfaction with Trump and his policies; polls and surveys reveal that most Americans disagree with Trump’s positions on myriad topics, including immigration reform, punishing players for NFL protests, the border wall with Mexico, tax reform, his view of the Charlottesville racial protests, withdrawing from climate change accords, trade agreements, and so on. Therein lies the obvious contradiction: The widespread perception that most Americans support Trump (or don’t care about school shootings) when abundant evidence indicates that the opposite is true. The idea that most Americans have a skewed view of what’s normal or appropriate in government or society is itself skewed—fueled, in part, by Trump’s own routine exaggerations of his popularity and widespread support. There’s irony in the fact that Trump’s staunchest critics seem to unquestioningly accept his claims lauding his influence and importance.

A friend of mine worried in a social media post a few weeks ago over the fact that he couldn’t recall details of another school shooting that had happened only a few weeks earlier and suggested he—and, by extension, perhaps most Americans—were becoming numb to the violence.

The poor recall of details he was describing, however, is ordinary memory degradation. It has nothing to do with whether the topic is school shootings or car repair or an overheard conversation in line at the bank. Human memory for recalling details (of anything, especially things we only heard about but did not personally experience, such as school shootings) drops off dramatically after about eighteen hours. I understand that people feel like the details of these horrific attacks should be forever seared into the public’s consciousness, but decades of memory research shows that’s not accurate.

There’s no reason most people would remember the details of each school shooting weeks or months later. Try this experiment: Name the details of any other events that were reported in the national news three weeks ago. Not something ongoing, but something that just suddenly happened, like a plane crash, a world leader being removed from office, a murder, etc. Can you do it? If not, why would we expect that the school shooting would be any different? The specific details and statistics about school shootings are not important or relevant to most people and their lives, so why would we expect anyone to know the names of the shooters and their victims, the dates, locations, motivations, and other details? Most people can’t even remember their important computer passwords. We are reminded to “Never Forget 9/11”—but how many of the 2,974 victims can we name?

Misleading Memes

Another aspect of the phenomenon is that people see (and share) misleading statistics. For example, a widely shared meme circulating in mid-February stated that there had been eighteen “school shootings” so far in 2018. This may help explain the sentiment that Americans have gotten used to these school shootings or have become “numb” to them. It’s easy to think that when you hear an alarming statistic like “a dozen school shootings already this year,” and you’re wondering why you didn’t hear about more of them, or how so many shootings could have escaped your attention or not had more emotional impact on you. When we examine this feeling, however, the fact that such a meme can elicit this (intended) effect undermines the notion of our numbness: the meme’s message is startling—as it was designed to be—because viewers are alarmed when confronted with the fact that so many shootings escaped their notice. This meme would have no effect at all if, indeed, viewers did not care about shootings. It would be met with a shrug and scrolled past rather than induce self-reflection. Instead, the meme caused many to wonder how they missed so many important news events—but did they?

It’s important to understand that the number reflects a very broad definition of “school shooting.” When you look at the breakdown of “school shootings” you realize that many were not incidents you’re likely to have heard about on national news or really cared about if you had: a suicide in a school parking lot, a gun that accidentally went off into a wall, a school bus window shot out with no injuries, etc. The phrase, as defined by the organization Everytown for Gun Safety—whose statistics are widely quoted—includes not only active shooters targeting students at school (i.e., what most people think of when they hear that phrase) but also accidents, suicides, events that didn’t happen at a school, non-injury incidents, and so on. People shouldn’t feel badly that they don’t remember details of events they likely never heard about.

Some have suggested that it doesn’t matter whether there were one, three, eleven, or twenty shootings at schools over the first two months of 2018; “even one is too many.” This is a common retort, but it is misguided; quantifying a threat is important to understanding it. That’s the position that Trump has taken on many threats to make Americans fearful, including attacks by Muslim extremists, and that’s the basis for his statements such as Mexicans are “bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Framing the scenario dishonestly as “one Mexican rapist is too many” clouds the issue rather than clarifying it with reliable data (such as the fact that immigrants are far less likely to commit a serious crime than natural-born Americans). Putting threats in perspective is one role of journalists and skeptics. A first step in trying to address or solve a problem is determining its scope and nature.

Questioning Assumptions

When we hear people on the news and social media concerned about Americans becoming “numb” to terrible things (such as shootings or violence) or aberrant behavior (especially by politicians or other presumably influential people) becoming “normalized,” it’s helpful to employ the skeptical dictum from CSI Fellow Ray Hyman: Before trying to explain why something is the case, be sure there’s something to explain—in other words, question your assumptions.

In this case, there seems to be little evidence that Americans have in fact become “numb to” (or unconcerned about, pick your synonym) mass murders or school shootings, nor do they think such events are “normal.” Yet the reaction on news and social media shows exactly the opposite: people are widely outraged and upset over recent shootings, not “numb.” There’s widespread calls for gun reform and mental health evaluations, student marches on Washington, protests against the NRA, discussions of a teachers’ strike in support of gun control measures, gun sellers such as Dick’s and WalMart imposing stricter constraints on gun sales, and even calls for the FBI director to resign. That’s quite a reaction for a numb country!

I suspect that people are (wrongly) assuming that political inaction on gun control is a result of American ambivalence to the violence. There are many reasons stronger gun control laws have not been passed, but they are not rooted in Americans being “numb” to massacres or school shootings. Conflating the two is neither accurate nor helpful. James Alcock, a psychologist at York University, offered another perspective: “What social psychologists have found over and over is that people almost automatically overlook the power of the situation as an influence on other people’s behaviors and instead attribute their responses or lack thereof to personal factors associated with the people involved. This is so ubiquitous that it is referred to as the Fundamental Attribution Error. And that seems to be what is occurring here.” Though marches and protests are happening, little immediate or measurable change is seen. Social movements take time, and government bureaucracy moves ahead at a glacial pace. There is no mechanism by which to immediately impeach a sitting president; the due process required to do so protects presidents of both parties. The lack of immediate action is wrongly attributed to public numbness or indifference instead of the real-world vagaries and delays of changing laws and policies.

There is of course such a thing as compassion fatigue, but I’m not convinced there’s much good evidence that Americans are (or have become) “numb” to mass attacks or school shootings—or really, by what measure one would determine that. I asked Stuart Vyse, psychologist, author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition, and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, about the topic. He replied, “I would say that we don’t entirely numb to violence. Violence that is close to home and affects people like us or innocent children will always grab our attention and be Breaking News. I do think, however, that as mass violence happens over and over again it becomes typical. It is harder for us all to remember a time when these events were rare, and the American experience drifts away from that of other countries where mass violence is very rare or non-existent.”

As to the moving power of the anecdote, Vyse added that concerns about “the numbing effects of large numbers appears to be a real phenomenon. That is why a single dead child on a beach or the testimony of individual Florida high school children is going to be moving, whereas the thousands dead in Syria or Afghanistan are barely mentioned.”

We see the same thing play out in response to actions by the Trump administration. The president’s actions, tweets, statements, and policies are routinely and widely criticized as anything but normal. The Trump administration is continually described as chaotic, in turmoil, and routinely violating established political norms on subjects including nepotism laws, disclosing tax returns, sexism, unfilled positions, racism, staff turnover, using Twitter to abuse both private citizens and public officials, and dozens of other topics. Trump’s approval levels are at historic lows; most of his policy announcements on controversial topics (such as immigration reform, relations with North Korea, etc.) are met with derision, disbelief, and outrage. Indeed, NBC News noted that “Trump’s presidency has been defined by chaos.”

Unless someone can point to polls or surveys that indicate that most Americans think that chaos (in the White House or anywhere else in American life) is “normal,” I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Trump’s behavior and governing style are not, never have been, and likely never will be, considered “normal” by anyone. There is often a whiff of condescension among those who repeatedly warn people in their social media orbits that a given action is “NOT okay” or “This is not normal.” The identification of anomaly is treated as though it’s something not already widely understood and recognized; the implicit message is, “You’ve probably been fooled into thinking that Trump’s actions are normal and routine, but I know better and you need to understand that you’re wrong and not be complacent.”

New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote a column (titled, of course, “Donald Trump, This Is Not Normal!”) in which he lamented:

To have a president surround himself with a rogue’s gallery of white supremacy sympathizers, anti-Muslim extremists, devout conspiracy theorists, anti-science doctrinaires and climate-change deniers is not normal. To have a president with massive, inherent conflicts of interest between continued ownership of his company and the running of our country is not normal. To have a president who nurses petty vengeances against the press and uses the overwhelming power of the presidency to attack any reporting of fact not colored by flattery and adoration is not normal. To have a president who apparently does not have time for daily intelligence briefings, but who can make time for the most trite anti-intellectual stunts, like staging a photo-op with a troubled rapper and twilight-tweeting insults like a manic insomniac, is not normal. I happen to believe that history will judge kindly those who continued to shout, from the rooftops, through their own weariness and against the corrosive drift of conformity: This is not normal!

I happen to agree with virtually everything Blow wrote. In fact, most people do, and evidence of this is all around us. Blow need not be concerned about fighting the “corrosive drift of conformity,” because he, I, and most Americans are not swimming against the tide on this issue; we are the tide. We see it every day, in the women’s marchers, pro-immigration protests, and elsewhere. There is much more that needs to be done, but instead of trying to convince people of something they already know, we can draw strength from our numbers and leverage our widespread support for change. In fact, the effort by Blow and others to cast themselves as the rebels, the lone voices shouting from rooftops in the face of (fictional) widespread opposition, may be counterproductive because it exaggerates the number and power of Trump supporters. It gives the impression that America is largely pro-Trump and endorses his policies and presidency. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth; Trump lost the popular vote, and his approval rating is at historic lows.

Social movements are most likely to succeed when their champions emphasize the popular support behind them instead of portraying themselves as unpopular voices. When Delta Airlines broke its ties with the National Rifle Association—and then doubled down when financially punished by NRA-backed Georgia lawmakers, saying “Our values are not for sale”—they were surely aware that the majority of Americans are concerned about gun control. Other companies, organizations, and yes, even politicians, will be more likely to follow suit as it becomes clear they are siding with a majority, not a minor faction of outliers. Of course, there are still many Trump supporters across the country, but acting as if they are in the majority, or represent “normal” America, flies in the face of the facts.

If Trump’s aberrant conduct is in fact generally considered “normal” (appropriate, acceptable, unremarkable), then there should be countless other examples of similar routine social or political situations that are equally widely condemned or criticized. The fact is that—like you—most Americans are not numb to tragedies and have a pretty good sense of what is normal and what is not.

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Michael Shermer is an historian of science and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University where he teaches Skepticism 101. He is the founder of The Skeptics Society and the publisher of Skeptic, an international publication that for more than twenty-five years has examined extraordinary claims and revolutionary ideas, and promoted critical thinking. Shermer has also written many great science books for the general audience, such as The Believing Brain (where he addressed the psychology of belief) and The Moral Arc (a fascinating and spectacular well-researched treatise documenting the progress of the world). Indeed, Shermer’s work on communicating science and skepticism is absolutely remarkable.

His new book is Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality and Utopia. The title is indeed pluralized to account in many ways human beings deal with death and our attempts to go beyond it. As he explains:

It is about how the awareness of our mortality and failings has led to beliefs in heaven and hell, in afterlives and resurrections both spiritual and physical, in utopias and dystopias, in progress and decline, and in the perfectibility and fallibility of human nature.

In the beginning of this journey, Shermer shows how humans think about their upcoming death, using research with prisoners to be executed on a death row. Since Texas has a dataset of the last oral statements of 537 inmates, it was possible to compare their thoughts with people in other situations. The result is surprising: death row inmates were more positive—measured by the usage of positive and negative emotion words—than students asked to think and write their thoughts about their own death. Interestingly, Shermer’s analysis found that 15 percent of prisoners express how they felt about death penalty itself, where 12.2 percent was against it.

Shermer also discusses another interesting line of research that shows that some animals grieve and also have some ritual regarding the death of others of their species. Elephants, for instance, carefully touch and move the bones of their own species, which might suggest they’re likely to visit the bones of relatives who die near their home. And death rituals such as burying the dead have been found in our ancestor lineage in Neanderthal sites. Within Homo sapiens, Shermer documents that burial rituals date back at least hundreds of millennia.

The book is not just about religions and related matter regarding the existence of soul or afterlife, but it certainly deals with that as it must. Claims of near-death experiences (NDE) for example, are often seen as evidence for the existence of afterlife. According to Shermer the most famous NDE happened in 1984 but a more recent case was experienced by neurosurgeon Eben Alexender. Those and other experiencers believe that a travel to “afterlife” (or heaven) really happened. NDE reports, however, have yet failed to convince skeptics. When those accounts are actually scrutinized several problems are found. Alexender reports that he was in a coma due to meningitis, but in reality it was medically induced. This is just one example, and there are others. The point is: if there are discrepancies even in the easiest falsifiable part of story—his medical status account, which can be matched by his medical report and doctors—should we believe that NDE part of the story was accurate? It seems we need Shermer’s words to remind people to be skeptical: We have very little evidence for miracles, but we have lots of evidence that people misunderstand, misperceive, exaggerate, or even make up stories about what they think they witnessed or experienced.

Even if NDEs occurred in the way they’re reported, it does not mean that travel to afterlife really took place. As Shermer points out, the word near in “near-death experience” implies that no one who ever experienced a NDE was really dead. So, Shermer asks, what is more likely: “that NDE accounts represent descriptions of actual journeys to the afterlife or are portrayals of experiences produced by brain activity”? He proceeds, analyzing NDE from different angles, such as hallucinations or brain anomalies, to show that NDE is much more likely to be a brain product.

What about reincarnation? Shermer deals with that as well, since it’s also often presented as proof of immortality and the afterlife. One of the reincarnation issues is what Shermer has called “personal identity.” What Shermer means is that if a soul carries all information about us and survives death, why do we need our bodies in the first place? Shermer also brings an analysis that I was expecting: the research of psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, often referred (not by skeptics) as offering empirical evidence of reincarnation. For Shermer, all those reincarnation cases are examples of patternicity, which is “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and random noise.” Shermer reminds a critical aspect of science that is often forgotten, especially when one deals with supernatural accounts: the need to properly define what count as significant, or as “hit.” Shermer is clear:

In reincarnation research, for example, a child’s birthmark, birth defect, or scar is “connected” to a fatal injury of a long-dead soldier in that particular body spot. Ian Stevenson, for example, has even computed the odds of birthmarks appearing in one area of a child’s body as matched to the wounds of a dead soldier. But how many such marks constitute a hit— one, two, ten? And how close do they need to be to count as a hit? Millimeters? Centimeters?

Who does not know Shermer’s long-lasting relationship with spiritual guru Deepak Chopra trying to debunk his vague use of quantum mechanics notations when discussing consciousness? So Shermer discuss Chopra’s afterlife and consciousness ideas in the book as well.

Then it’s fair to say that until the part two’s last chapter the focus is a discussion from different angles about a soul or afterlife. The most unexpected chapter, the last of part two, in the positive way was Afterlife for Atheists, on which Shermer greatly summarizes all groups or movements dedicated to life extension—heavens on earth, in some sense. The cryonicists, for instance, believe they would be able to reanimated and restore human body functions years after it was frozen. It is a strong assumption, since they never had done it so far. There are also those who want to transfer our “soul,” or the information that represents our memory and thoughts, in to a computer. Critically, there are problems with both movements, as detailed by Shermer, sharing his experience as an advisory board of Brain Preservation Foundation.

Shermer deals with all these ideas of immortality with his usual degree of skepticism throughout the book, and he elegantly ends the book with a positive tone—how to find meaning in a meaningless universe. It’s a wide-range book that must be read by those interested in a critical analysis of afterlife and immortality done by one of the greatest proponents of skepticism and science of our time.

In 2015, journalists uncovered the truth: this hero of the wellness world, with over 200,000 followers, international book deals, and a best-selling smartphone app, was a fraud.

Written by the same multi–award-winning journalists who uncovered the details of Gibson’s lies, The Woman Who Fooled the World tracks the twenty-three-year-old’s rise to fame and fall from grace. Told through interviews with the people who know her best, it unravels the mystery and motivation behind this deception and follows the public reaction to a scandal that made headlines around the world.

Token Skeptic podcaster Kylie Sturgess spoke to one of the coauthors of the book, Nick Toscano.

Nick Toscano: The book itself was a few months in the making, with Beau and I both taking two months of unpaid leave from work just to really knuckle down and get the meat of it done, working on it every day out of my crusty little apartment. We really sort of broke the back of it, and it took about two months all up of intense writing. But really, it was probably a couple of years in the making, because what started this book was really our news reporting while we were both working at The Age Newspaper, which is a metro daily newspaper from Fairfax in Melbourne. I’m still working there, but Beau’s left and he’s gone to live in Ireland, where his partner’s from.

In early 2015 was when the name Belle Gibson first came across our desks. Beau and I had sort of parallel careers leading up to this. We both worked for the same kind of community radio stations when we were at Uni doing current affairs. We both worked for the same sort of suburban newspaper group before we both landed jobs at The Age within about six months of each other. We worked closely whenever a big story came across our desks, and we’d often team up on projects and assignments. And this was kind of one of those examples.

So, it was a tip off that came into us through sort of a former colleague of ours, back from the Melbourne weekly newspaper, which was the suburban newspaper that we worked for. And the tip was that there’s this girl, Belle Gibson, and she’s cancer scamming. So, it was a tip that could have come from a friend of a friend. And the source of it all was a friend of Belle Gibson’s, who is someone who was quite close with her, living in Melbourne, in the same sort of social and professional circles. She’d become a kind of confidant of Belle Gibson’s, and she wanted to talk to us because she had started to have misgivings about the veracity of Belle’s story.

Beau spoke to her first to see if it was something worth pursuing. He was left with the impression straightaway that yes, this was worthwhile, and this wasn’t someone who was approaching us with an allegation or someone who was malicious or had an axe to grind. Chanelle, who contacted us, seemed really more than anything genuinely scared of what would happen if Belle Gibson’s stock continued to rise. What if she was given an even greater platform from which to disseminate her potentially dangerous story of ditching conventional medicine and trying to treat her cancer through overhauling her diet? This person was quite worried. And so, we trusted her, and we decided that we’d take a look at who this person Belle Gibson was and dedicate some time to it.

That’s kind of how we got involved. Beau and I never really heard of Belle Gibson before this point; I mean Belle Gibson was something of a celebrity in Australia and elsewhere in the world. I suppose what you’d call a social media celebrity. She had hundreds of thousands of followers, she had a very successful smart phone app that was being given all sorts of awards by Apple. You know, she’d really shot to prominence. Her story had really broken into something quite powerful. Her story of being a young mum who had beaten cancer from the brink of death by choosing to empower herself through a healthy diet—it was a remarkable tale. Unfortunately, none of it was true. So, we’d never heard of her; we’d never heard of this story.

After speaking with Chanelle, we sort of pulled everything there was to find on Belle Gibson; everything that was on the public record so far: magazine interviews, Sunrise appearances of breakfast TV, all her Instagram posts, and we kind of just started piecing together the story so far. Everything she’d said about her life, and her diagnosis and her prognosis, and we were both sort of struck almost immediately by some glaring inconsistencies in her story: things that were just vague or that didn’t stack up, and things that she was clearly lying about. There were little things at the start, and it was kind of hard to define the kind of misgivings that we felt, but that’s how it all sort of began. From there, we took her a case to our oncologist to let her have a look at her account of her sickness, and we started to talk to more of her friends, and before too long, we had enough that we could write a story. Not about her health claims, but about her charity fraud, as she was claiming at this point to give large amounts of money to charity all the while, while launching her business, which she hadn’t done. So that was kind of the first straw that broke the camel’s back and sent the house of cards tumbling down. It kind of all started from there.

Kylie Sturgess: The book delves into the wellness industry. For example, chapter four has a great title with, “What the Hell Is Wellness?,” in addition to the story of Belle Gibson. What was it like researching that aspect?

Toscano: Yeah, it was interesting researching that aspect. I think the story of Belle Gibson in itself is an interesting one, but it probably wasn’t something that we thought there’d be a whole book in by itself. There’s a reason why Beau and I were drawn to taking this book beyond just our general news reporting for our daily newspaper: the fact that it kind of brought in all these other deeply fascinating factors. She was at the center of this kind of perfect storm of factors that led to her rise, we think. I mean, this story of Belle Gibson brings in cancer scammers that have been around forever. There’s nothing new about that, but, we were really interested in what else and who else were complicit in the rise of this young twenty-something girl from Brisbane, what propelled her to fame.

There’s a power of social media, you know, the new age of social media celebrities and the capacity for people now to generate their own fame outside of the mainstream media channels, and also the dangers that can arise when this happens and these people aren’t subjected to the same sort of checks and balances that perhaps once applied. But the other extraordinary thing we were really fascinated by was this world of wellness bloggers and the wellness movement itself. So, I mean, Beau and I had never really much been into juice cleanses or fad diets or wellness bloggers on Instagram, so this was all really new for us. We were sort of fascinated by where this word came from, “wellness.” It is everywhere these days. You see wellness clinics, wellness spas; there are wellness sections in department stores. People go on wellness vacations.

But perhaps the most well-known iteration today of wellness is the wellness blogger. You know, these young women, all who look pretty similar to Belle and all have a really powerful story, who have hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers, and it’s a massive influence. So we thought it would be worthwhile tracking the story of wellness and what it actually means, and we tracked it back to the 60s and 70s, when it was first popularized on a large scale. And largely out of the kind of New Age revolution that was sweeping California. So, we found a young doctor who was one of the pioneers, the early pioneers of wellness philosophy, wellness theory. He told us his story and he told us the origins of this movement and how it’s evolved and unfortunately devolved, which is the kind of interpretation that many give it now.

The general concept of wellness according to Jack Travis, the doctor we speak to, is kind of the opposite of illness, and it was something that medicine had never really thought of before. There’s the idea that medicine is cut and dry. It’s black and white; you’re either sick or you’re not sick. You can go to a doctor and get a clean bill of health, and you’d be well, but Jack and the early pioneers of wellness sort of brought to the fore this idea that there are many degrees of wellness, just the same way that there are many degrees of illness. It’s not just the absence of being sick.

So, essentially, it’s the kind of trinity of mind, body, and spirit that we sort of refer to today that was kind of an early definition of wellness, but wellness also took into account other personal factors of importance, like environmental factors, social, emotional, intellectual. It became a kind of philosophy that was very much a holistic health philosophy. And pretty soon it caught on and it became big business. There were wellness centers springing up around the world; there were clinicians promoting activities like meditation, stress reduction, nutritional counselling, and group therapy, all falling under the umbrella of wellness. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that; it’s perfectly reasonable and a perfectly appealing sort of proposition. The idea was that it’s about learning about yourself and bettering yourself outside of the medical sphere.

Moving through decades to where we are now, wellness has gone beyond those sort of holistic and down to earth values, and in some respects, like we see with the likes of Belle Gibson and other social media sort of gurus like her, their interpretation of wellness is a lot more extreme and a lot more cultish. Ideas that were once confined to the sort of fringe of the wellness movement have now become prominent.

And those sorts of ideas are kind of distrust in conventional medicine. This idea that illness is more about an imbalance in your body than about anything medical. And it’s this kind of world of fad diets and juice cleanses and miracle cures might be nonsense, but it’s harmless. Except, I think, when it’s promoted in the context of cancer, like Belle Gibson did it. And like her predecessor, Jess Ainscough, the Wellness Warrior did.

When it’s promoted in the context of cancer, and at the expense of conventional medical treatments, like chemotherapy and radiotherapy that have the best chances of keeping patients alive, it’s dangerous. And, that’s really the most devastating part of Belle’s story. The whole thing—her whole business, her recipes, her fame, her celebrity—were based on her story that she had ditched chemo and overhauled her diet and look what had happened to her, she’d defied the odds. It’s a very powerful story, and it’s a really dangerous one.

Sturgess: How difficult was it to find out information on the Gibson story? Because there’s a number of interviewees who spoke about how they knew her, and I was quite astounded when reading the book.

Toscano: That was definitely the most difficult part about writing this story. It was the hardest part. From our early news reporting days, I mean, when we were writing on a story as it broke, we spoke to a lot of people, and very few wanted to be named. Which I suppose is fine. I mean, we did a lot of digging and we gleaned a lot of really good information from sources. But for the purpose of writing a book, which was a year down the track by this point, no one wanted anything to do with Belle Gibson. But in the beginning, Belle Gibson was a really inspiring and awesome person to be around by all accounts.

Sturgess: Yes, she comes across as incredibly charismatic.

Toscano: Yes, she had an energy about her that really endeared her to a lot of people. She had a capacity to make friends, close, intimate friends really quickly, and there were a lot of people, not just in Melbourne but all across the country and even when she was touring around the world who sort of latched onto her and they loved being around her. So, these were all sorts of people.

In Melbourne, her social scene included graphic designers, PR people, life coaches, all these so-called wellness celebrities. And this community, this sort of community emerged around her. And they were all there for the rise, and I mean, they had no reason to doubt her claims I suppose, but they were all extremely happy to be a part of her story. And then you got people who were her corporate partners, all these executives at Apple who reached out to her in the early days of her app launching, and really partnered with her and started promoting her behind the scenes and bestowing awards upon her, and gearing her up for talks at Apple stores and flying her to and from California to work on her prototype for the new Apple Smartwatch, for her iApp. And then there was her publishing partners, who similarly were extremely eager to cozy up to her and partner up with her, and they saw dollar signs too.

But when everything came sort of crashing down, when her lies were exposed, no one would sort of utter her name. No one would utter a word. Even people who were, I suppose, marginal characters in her story who we were trying to talk to for the book, they wouldn’t even talk to us on an off-the-record basis. They wanted nothing to do with her. Belle Gibson’s name became poison. And no one wanted their name googled next to Belle Gibson’s I suppose, but it was really difficult. Beau and I made hundreds of phone calls, and the people who are quoted in the book are among a very large number who we spoke to but not everyone spoke to us, so it was quite difficult.

Sturgess: Were there concerns in relation to that about the emotional aspects of health scams and wellness seeking? I imagine that must have made it difficult to edit and structure the story because these are people’s lives in some cases.

Toscano: In some respects, the emotional aspect of health scams and the impact of the wellness trend in these sorts of wellness-seeking people is the most important part of this story. I mean, what really motivated us to write this book, apart from all these really interesting and intensely modern forces that I was talking about earlier, was this absolute flood of emails and phone calls that we received in the early days after our story broke.

Beau and I’d written big stories before, and a big story always elicits big feedback, but neither of us had experienced anything like this. It was hundreds and hundreds of phone calls and emails. And they were from people who were pissed off. They were from people who had bought her book and were her followers. They were sometimes though just people who were appalled at the idea that someone could profit off of such a terrible lie.

The majority of people who called us had cancer themselves. Or they were people who had loved ones with cancer, and there were people who knew about how vulnerable people can be with a terminal diagnosis, and how they’re susceptible to the idea of a miracle cure or something that could beat the odds. Especially in light of the kind of devastating effects of things like chemotherapy and radiotherapy and conventional cancer treatments. I mean, they’re brutal; you put on weight, and you lose your hair, and you’re tired all the time. And it’s devastating.

When you look at the appeal of someone like Belle Gibson and the lies that she was perpetrating, the lies that she was spinning, her story was all about allure, I suppose. When people are suffering from cancer and they want to try everything that they could possibly do to beat it, to beat the odds or to be the one in a million, they’ll go down that kind of rabbit hole, and down that rabbit hole is someone who looked as healthy and as vital and as vivacious as Belle Gibson. She had cancer, yet all her Instagram photos showed her thriving, and sitting by a pool, and touring overseas—glamorous oversea cities. I think that allure can’t be overstated.

So, the personal stories were really what sort of propelled us to devote a large section of the book to the power and the influence of these sorts of wellness therapies or at worst cancer scams. And there were some people who had contacted us after this story who we got into contact with again when we decided to write the book, who were cancer patients who had been inspired and influenced by Belle Gibson. They sort of let us into their lives, and we followed them around and went to appointments with them and stuff like that, and we kind of used their stories as a way to explore the kind of vulnerability of people suffering from terminal cancer, and what it might be like inside their minds when they see someone like Belle Gibson. There were two really brave women who let us into their lives, and it was a special but totally upsetting part of the book to write.

Sturgess: Any plans for following up the story?

Toscano: Following up the story, we’re not sure because she’s kind of gone to ground.

She was prosecuted not too long ago now, in the federal court of Australia by Consumer Affairs. She was fined half a million dollars, which she will have to pay back in some capacity over some period of time. But she didn’t participate in the proceedings against her. She didn’t appear at a single day of court hearings, and the judge was pretty eager to point out in delivering her decision that Belle Gibson’s failure to cooperate or to take part displayed an absolute lack of remorse.

So, I mean, there are a lot of people that are still really cut up about what she did and the fact that she’s given interviews with the Australian Women’s Weekly, and she’s been on 60 Minutes, and she had the opportunity to talk in court and she didn’t. And not once in any of those appearances has she apologized. She’s always stopped short of apologizing, and I think people are still sort of waiting for that. We don’t have any immediate plans to follow this up. We’ll just have to see how we go.

The Woman Who Fooled the World – Belle Gibson’s Cancer Con is out through Scribe Publications.

El ovni de Canarias del 5 de marzo de 1979. Foto: Guillermo Lijtmaer.

No hay en España un lugar más misterioso que las islas Canarias. En sus inmediaciones localizaba en los años 70 el psiquiatra Fernando Jiménez del Oso una base submarina de ovnis –entendidos éstos como naves alienígenas, por supuesto–; en la playa tinerfeña de La Tejita situaba el contactado Francisco Padrón un encuentro con una computadora de Urano llamada Opat-35; en aguas del archipiélago se sumergió el siempre fantasioso Manuel Carballal y encontró restos de la Atlántida; y en Tenerife descubrió el explorador noruego Thor Heyerdahl unas pirámides que consideraba la prueba del paso de los egipcios en su viaje hacia América. El exotismo que esas islas tienen para la mayoría de los españoles –distan de la Península Ibérica más de 1.600 kilómetros y son geográficamente África– se ha visto desde hace décadas espoleado por autores que las han llenado de extraterrestres, fenómenos paranormales y ruinas misteriosas.

“El archipiélago canario es uno de los lugares del mundo donde con mayor frecuencia se produce el avistamiento de ovnis”, se asegura en la contraportada de Los ovnis en Canarias, obra del ufólogo isleño José Gregorio González. El libro data de 1995, y su autor repite una cantinela que era vieja dos décadas antes cuando, en la adolescencia, empecé a interesarme por el fenómeno ovni: que algo raro pasa en Canarias. Ya el 26 de marzo de 1979, Jiménez del Oso dedicaba una entrega de Más Allá, el programa que tenía en TVE, a especular sobre una base submarina de ovnis en las islas. ¿La razón? El avistamiento masivo de un objeto no identificado que salió del mar disparado hacia el cielo canario al anochecer del 5 de marzo de 1979.

Un vehículo “ajeno a la Tierra”

El llamado ovni de Canarias fue visto por decenas de miles de personas, fotografiado a todo color, investigado por los militares y presentado por algunos ufólogos como la prueba de la existencia de una base submarina extraterrestre o algo todavía más increíble. “Resulta curioso señalar que la localización exacta del lugar coincida con la que a lo largo de los siglos han dado la mayor parte de los testigos que han afirmado ver la mítica isla de San Borondón, tierra fantasma que de vez en cuando se deja ver. Quizás en esa zona se concentran determinadas características que propician estos fenómenos anómalos”, escribía González en 1995. (1) Añadía que no existían “pruebas irrefutables” que confirmaran que se tratara de un misil lanzado desde un submarino –como habían sostenido algunos críticos desde el primer momento– y que, de no aparecer éstas, el ovni de Canarias seguiría siendo “uno de los grandes enigmas de la ufología española, quedando abierta pues la puerta a cualquier otra hipótesis alternativa”. (2)

Lo cierto es que en 1995 la única duda que existía sobre el ovni de Canarias era quién había lanzado el misil, extremo que zanjaron seis años después los investigadores españoles Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos y Ricardo Campo en la Revista de Aeronáutica y Astronáutica. (3) “Este avistamiento contó con el dictamen de especialistas muy cualificados que apoyaron desde el principio, a la vista de la documentación fotográfica, la explicación misil o cohete”, recuerda Campo en El fenómeno ovni en Canarias desde el siglo XVIII hasta 1980, una obra que acaba de llegar a las librerías. (4) Desde el principio quiere decir exactamente eso, desde el principio, algo que desagradó profundamente a los ufólogos más sensacionalistas. “¿Qué fue lo observado y fotografiado aquella noche del 5 de marzo de 1979? Repito, en mi opinión, una nave que nada tiene que ver con nuestra tecnología y, consecuentemente, con nuestra civilización. Un vehículo espacial ajeno a la Tierra. Empleando la terminología popular –y sin ningún tipo de recelo o miedo–, una nave extraterrestre”, pataleaba Juan José Benítez en la revista Mundo Desconocido en septiembre de 1982. (5) Una vez más, para desgracia de este autor, sus extraterrestres tenían una explicación convencional: el ovni de Canarias fue consecuencia del lanzamiento de dos misiles Poseidón desde el submarino USS Kamehameha. 

El caso del 5 de marzo de 1979 es, sin duda, el más conocido de los que examina Campo en El fenómeno ovni en Canarias desde el siglo XVIII hasta 1980, una voluminosa obra en la que revisa toda la casuística isleña de ese periodo. Atina el autor al afirmar que el mito de las islas como observatorio privilegiado del fenómeno se debe, en gran parte, a su situación geográfica. “Nadie iba a comprobar qué había de cierto en él y los que se acercaban al archipiélago con implicación en este tema eran turistas ufológicos que echaban más leña al fuego, siguiendo el juego de los líderes de opinión locales. De la misma forma, tampoco había aquí nadie que cuestionase las mismas afirmaciones de los testigos o que realizase un acercamiento al problema mínimamente crítico”. (6) Es un lugar común en la ufología que la nave alienígena se desvanece en cuanto un escéptico se aproxima a ella. Eso ha pasado desde los años 70 con la casuística española gracias al afán revisor del ufólogo valenciano Ballester Olmos y sus colaboradores. 

‘El fenómeno ovni en Canarias desde el siglo XVIII hasta 1980’, de Ricardo Campo.

El emperador está desnudo

Si en Canarias las cosas han ido más despacio, se ha debido a la lejanía de las islas –lo que ha frenado el examen de casos por estudiosos de otras regiones españolas– y al gran número de avistamientos. Con poco más de 2 millones de habitantes –el 4,6% de la población española–, en el archipiélago se registraron entre 1947 y 1980 un total de 319 casos de ovnis, frente a los 4.915 peninsulares del mismo periodo. Por esto último, precisamente, resulta aún más meritorio el trabajo de Campo, que ha revisado montañas de periódicos y revistas en busca de casos, y los ha analizado uno a uno, identificando posibles estímulos que llevaran a confusión a los testigos y desmontando las fantasías de algunos de éstos y de los vendedores de misterios. El autor explica los grandes casos clásicos canarios, pero en otros, lamentablemente, la calidad de la información de partida es tan baja que nada ha podido hacer por llegar a la verdad, por lo que en el libro hay sucesos sin resolver. Eso no ha de interpretarse como que fueran inexplicables en origen, sino como que una primera recogida defectuosa de información, el paso del tiempo o las tergiversaciones –o una combinación de esos factores– imposibilita que cualquier investigación llegue hoy a buen término. Veamos un ejemplo.

A partir de un despacho de la agencia Cifra, el diario Madrid publicaba el 1 de abril de 1950 la siguiente noticia sobre un avistamiento en Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: “Varias personas aseguran haber visto platillos volantes sobre el barrio de Tafira. De madrugada se divisó uno de éstos que caminaba a gran velocidad y, según cálculos, a una altura de 12 kilómetros”. (7) Campo sólo aventura que podría tratarse de estrellas fugaces porque con la información existente es imposible pasar del condicional.

El primer capítulo del libro, dedicado a los supuestos avistamientos anteriores a junio de 1947 –cuando oficialmente empieza la era de los ovnis–, deja ya claro que el autor va a recurrir a todos los medios a su alcance para esclarecer los hechos. Campo recuerda, por ejemplo, cómo, según una crónica de la época, en marzo de 1761 el agua del mar llegó a tener en Tenerife la apariencia del fuego y eso ha llevado al ufólogo José Gregorio González a hablar de “ovnis canarios en el siglo XVIII”. En realidad, fue “un fenómeno bioluminiscente producido por microorganismos marinos”. “Con toda probabilidad, se trata de un fenómeno luminoso producido por dinoflagelados del género Noctiluca” que en esa época del año son particularmente activos, concluye tras consultar con un biólogo. “Cuando nuestra mente se halla predispuesta para detectar misterios por doquier es fácil malinterpretar informaciones antiguas y ambiguas, y pensar que tenemos ante nosotros fenómenos pertenecientes al repertorio contemporáneo del periodismo paranormal”, advierte Campo, en un alarde de generosidad hacia esos ufólogos que donde hay una estrella tienden siempre a ver una nave nodriza y a los que su obra pone en evidencia una y otra vez. (8)

La lectura de El fenómeno ovni en Canarias desde el siglo XVIII hasta 1980 demuestra que esas islas no son en realidad más misteriosas que cualquier otra región española, que allí no hay más marcianos, siempre y cuando excluyamos a contactados como Francisco Padrón y Emilio Bourgón. Ha sido la industria de la mentira –un rentable entramado formado por autores, editoriales y medios– la que ha llenado Canarias de falsos enigmas. Ricardo Campo nos abre los ojos y nos hace ver que el emperador está desnudo, que nos han engañado durante décadas. Como bien dice en el prólogo, “me atrevo a asegurar que buena parte de lo que usted ha leído sobre ovnis o todo aquello en lo que cree al respecto con la mayor sinceridad y profundidad, todo ello, puede ser completamente falso, producto sólo de la mercadotecnia y de sus deseos de creer, de sus sospechas más o menos racionales, de su predisposición a dar por buenas y confirmadas anécdotas que han sido elaboradas en redacciones periodísticas siguiendo los gustos mayoritarios”. (9) Ésa, y no otra, es la realidad de la historia de Canarias y los ovnis.

Campo, Ricardo [2017]: El fenómeno ovni en Canarias desde el siglo XVIII hasta 1980. Le Canarien. Santa Cruz de Tenerife. 698 páginas.

1. González, José Gregorio [1995]: Los ovnis en Canarias. Fenómenos extraños en los cielos isleños. Centro de la Cultura Popular Canaria. La Laguna. 92.
2. González [1995], op. cit., 92-93.
3. Ballester Olmos, Vicente Juan; y Campo, Ricardo: “¡Identificados! Los ovnis de Canarias fueron misiles Poseidón”. Revista de Aeronáutica y Astronáutica (Madrid). Nº 701 (marzo). 200-207.
4. Campo, Ricardo [2017]: El fenómeno ovni en Canarias desde el siglo XVIII hasta 1980. Le Canarien. Santa Cruz de Tenerife. 622.
5. Benítez, Juan José [1982]: “El formidable ovni de Canarias (y 2)”. Mundo Desconocido (Barcelona). Nº 75 (septiembre-octubre). 32.
6. Campo [2017], op. cit., 34.
7. Ibid., 95.
8. Ibid., 41.
9. Ibid., 13.

Promotional image for The Blackwell Ghost

The Blackwell Ghost is a film promoted as a real-life documentary which follows a filmmaker-turned-ghost hunter as he investigates an alleged haunted house. The description on Amazon Prime, which seems to be the only place this film is available, states "A filmmaker tries to prove that ghosts are real but soon regrets his intentions after he finds himself being terrorized in a haunted house by a ghost with a dark past. An authentic documentary that shows actual ghost footage that was captured on camera" (Amazon 2017). It has a 59 minute runtime and only lists one "star," Ruth Blackwell, a character who only appears in the film as a photograph. It seems to have gained a cult following among horror movie fans who are unsure if it is real or fiction. I decided to take a look.

Calling it an "authentic documentary" is a stretch, as we'll see in a bit—and also the reason I'm writing this article. Dictionary.com defines 'authentic' as "not false or copied; genuine; real", and 'documentary' as "based on or re-creating an actual event, era, life story, etc., that purports to be factually accurate and contains no fictional elements.” The Blackwell Ghost is neither; it is a work of fiction.

When I clicked on the trailer I was surprised to see a man I've watched before, Turner Clay. Let me give you some history before moving on to what's wrong with The Blackwell Ghost.

In 2013 I was asked to look at a YouTube video entitled "Ghost screaming in haunted hotel - FULL LENGTH" (Jimmynut22 2012). The video takes place in an unknown hotel, and hotel security has been called to a room that allegedly has a woman screaming inside. No one is checked into the room, and a conversation between "John" (the only person seen in the video) and another off-camera voice tells us the room is torn up and no one is inside. We also watch a white blob-like and cheap special effect "ghost" float out of the room and down the hall.

As I started digging into the hotel video, it became apparent that it was not only a hoax, but one that was staged by a person who I believed was a filmmaker (Biddle 2013). The identity of who made the video presented a bit of a mystery itself; though he was referred to as "John" in the video, there were no credits listed in the video footage or in the YouTube description.

This mystery surrounding the man behind the video, which had eleven million views last time I checked, intrigued me. After a few hours of digging, I found that the creator went by the YouTube handle "jimmynut22", who originally posted the video. At the time of my analysis, Jimmynut22 had a few duplicate videos (of this hotel ghost) under different names. He also had a short video that reportedly came from a 1988 court case that showed "multiple ghosts,” which use the same effect as the "screaming hotel ghost" video.

Eventually my research lead to a short comment by Jimmynut22 on a video review of a film called State of Emergency, in which he writes "Hey! My name is Turner Clay and I made the movie State of Emergency." (Jimmynut 2014) Bingo! According to his IMDb page, Turner Clay is an editor and producer, known for State of Emergency, Disaster L.A. and Interception (IMDb 2018). These are low budget films which is why you most likely haven't heard of them.

Clay made a short video called "Alien Caught on Video - 1988" in which he claims "I was recently hired to transfer a series of video tapes for archival purposes for the state". In that video, he uses the same white blob ghost as the hotel video, which is most likely merely a video overlay. A duplicate video is on the same channel with the name "2013 - Ghost walk by Camera in BASEMENT.” (I guess he couldn't decide between aliens and ghosts.)

Later in 2017 while researching other projects I came across a video by YouTube user ‘LordanARTS’ that focused on the Screaming Hotel Ghost video (SHG). LordanARTS reference my analysis, and took it a bit further; he was able to find a rare photograph of Turner Clay in which he was wearing the same hat and striped lanyard that "John," the guy featured the SHG video, was wearing. It was an exact match...Turner Clay was the guy in the SHG video, and also its creator.

Screen shot of Screaming Hotel Ghost showing “John”. The insert is Turner Clay from when he worked on Toby Keith’s "Live in Overdrive" tour. He most likely filmed the SHG video the same day/weekend the insert photo was taken.

Finding this new information meant that I could update the original analysis of the SHG video. This was how I was introduced to The Blackwell Ghost. Jimmynut22, a.k.a. Turner Clay, had posted two trailers for the film, as well as a short clip. All three had links to Amazon where you could purchase the film, rent for $0.99 or buy for $2.99. Based on his previous videos, I decided it wasn't worth a dollar to rent.

Fast forward to the present; my family now has Amazon Prime which includes free streaming of their video service. I pulled up The Blackwell Ghost and spent the next couple of hours watching it, re-watching specific parts, and taking lots of notes. Let's deconstruct the film.

It open with the narrator (Clay) explaining that his career has been spent making zombie movies, but now he's "ready for a challenge. A challenge that my teacher would be proud of… To prove that ghosts exist." That's a pretty difficult challenge, given that thousands of people—professionals, scientists, investigators, and hobbyists—have been working on this for over a century and haven't come up with anything close to evidence of an afterlife.

Clay continues, "For those haters out there who think this is fake, I'll stop you right there. I was the furthest thing from a believer in the supernatural until about a year ago." I was going to stop right there, since I'm likely one of the "haters" he's referring to, but...I didn't. When I think something is fake, I investigate the case to determine whether I'm right (and I want evidence to support that) or I'm wrong (in which case I want to know why).

The film cuts to, of all things, the SHG video, only this time he blurs out the face on "John" (himself). Clay tells us that he was trying to decide what his next project will be when he came across the SHG video. Clay claims "the guy that made the video reached out to me just recently and my first question was 'why?', but then, I found out we have a mutual friend through Facebook. So, I figured I would start there." Since I already know that Clay is the guy that made and starred in the SHG video, I was amused that he's essentially saying "I reached out to myself." Nevertheless, he calls someone claiming to be "John" (voice disguised) and they have a conversation about the video. Clay "plays" the part of a skeptic claiming the video looks like a bunch of visual effects (it is, and poorly done). The voice on the phone states “this is a real video”—which is true enough, it was indeed really recorded on video. They agree to meet in about a week and hang up.

The film states it is "three weeks later" and we see Clay in his car, on the phone and leaving a message for "John," who is not surprisingly a no-show for their meeting. Clay explains that he's left ten messages for John and "something is going on. I don't know what it is, but it's not good for me, because I'm making a documentary and I need 'em". I'm not sure if it was bad script writing, poor improvisation skills, or perhaps Clay is psychic...but not two seconds later he suddenly knows exactly why "John" didn't show up: "apparently he's taken a new job and doesn't want to mess that up, so he doesn't want to be in this documentary." Clay tells us he is probably going to quit and go back to making zombie movies. I think that would have been a good idea.

I want to inject an interesting side note here; Clay is wearing a lime green "Ash Rapids Camp" cap. This same cap was worn by a friend of his in another film by Clay, "The Phoenix Tapes 97".

The lime-green hat featured in The Phoenix Tapes 97 also shows up in “The Blackwell Ghost.

The film jumps to two years later and we see an excited Clay informing us of a new lead for his documentary. I'm surprised that a filmmaker would just put away his camera and not touch it for two years. But, who am I to judge? He says he was contacted by a man named Greg from Pennsylvania who sent him a video of an alleged ghost. In this video, we see Greg's living room at 1:06AM. A lamp suddenly turns on "by itself" and about fifteen seconds later the lamp turns off. Then we see a “ghost,” the same type of white blob we saw in the SHG video and the Alien in the basement video Clay (a.k.a. Jimmynut22) has on his YouTube channel.

After some replay of the video in case viewers missed it, Clay and his wife "Terri" (not her real name) hop into a private plane and fly off to somewhere in Pennsylvania. No city or town is given, not even a general area of the state. They are dropped off near the house, and this little detail made me raise an eyebrow. He's allegedly using the GPS on his phone for directions, but a quick peek from the camera of his phone shows a blank screen. One would assume they would be dropped off in front of the house. Instead, they are dropped off down the block and, for some reason, have to figure out where the house is.

They get to the house and meet with "Greg", who cheerfully invites them inside. They walk into the living room and Clay asks if the camera on the fireplace mantel is the one that captured the "ghost" video. It is, and Greg also confirms that it is a security camera. Something about the exchange here caused my "spidey sense" to tingle. The two men never mention a ghost or the lamp during this conversation; they simply say "the video footage". Not once do they inspect the lamp or talk about the path the alleged ghost walked. This is speculation on my part, but I don't think the "ghost video" had been shot yet.

Later on, during the second visit (detailed below), Clay tells us that he "just downloaded and installed an app that is in charge of this house's security system and it's also in charge of the camera that's on the shelf over here", referring to the small camera on the fireplace mantel. Here's the problem: the camera is a Xiaomi 1080P Smart Wi-Fi camera with night vision and notably not part of an alarmed security system. It is available online for about $24 and anyone can download the app from Apple iTunes. 

The two men sit down at the dining room table and Greg tells Clay his own history of living in the house and claims there's activity almost every night. This includes the sound of footsteps coming up the main stairs and stopping just outside a bedroom door and a neighbor seeing a figure standing in the window while Greg was out of town.

The real story comes near the end of the house tour, when Greg says "What I'm about to show you may make you run from this house screaming. So you have to promise me, both of you, that you won't do that.” At this point I was expecting him to pause and pass out tranquilizers and adult diapers to everyone, but instead he added, “Off to the basement!”

In the basement, there is a metal "storm sewer" catch basin and cover. Greg tells Clay "It's actually a well, and it used to serve as the house's main source of water." The basin has several bolt holes around its mounting plate, yet it is not bolted to the floor. The lid is also a few inches above the floor, meaning that this would easily leak sewer water in the event of a flood. There is also a lack of pipes or any indication that this was actually a well. There is also a suspicious-looking circular mark on the floor a few inches to the side which may be an indication the basin was resting there before being moved. 

Greg tells us the house was built in 1930 (public records indicate the house was built in 1940, as we will see) and the owner at the time had a wife that was "on the psycho side." He goes on to tell a short story of how children in the area were going missing, and it was later found that their bodies had been chopped up and thrown down this well by the psycho wife. Greg, of course, offers no documentation in support of any of claims he's made. The story is typical of ghost lore; a tragic event sets the stage for haunting activity later. The story doesn't play into the rest of the film, but the well does.

The film jumps ahead another three weeks with Clay receiving an email from Greg inviting them to stay for a few nights while Greg is out of town. Clay and his wife are once again off to Pennsylvania. They arrive at the house and let themselves in. Something stood out to me while watching them walk through the house: Clay and his wife are wearing the same clothes that they were three weeks earlier. Same pants, shirts, and sweaters (his wife has a jacket scarf on during the second visit as well).

Same shirts, sweaters, pants and hat (Clay), worn three weeks apart. Perhaps it was just before laundry day both times. The slight difference is his wife has added a scarf and jacket.

This caused both myself and my wife, Donna (who is now thoroughly interested in the film’s gaffes), to look closer at the footage from both trips and the alleged ghost video. Donna notices that there is a sheet hung up over the front door and a Rubbermaid bin positioned at the front door during the ghost video, but not during Clay's initial visit. They had walked into the house through the front door. However, in the second visit, the sheet and Rubbermaid bin are back in place.

A Rubbermaid bin and sheet covering the front door appear and disappear incorrectly on the time line of events. This is a continuity mistake in editing seen in many films, where objects change position or disappear/reappear between scenes.

The film then follows a Paranormal Activity-style format; the "activity" builds slowly and gets worse. Clay then starts researching the house. Well to be fair he calls someone and asks for microfilm to be emailed to him for all newspapers between the years 1938 to 1942. I don't know about you, but whenever I've worked with historical societies with such research requests, there is a considerable fee involved for them doing the work for you. Many that I have interacted with are way too understaffed to handle such a request. I have never had any offer to email me microfilm copies from all the newspapers of a local area for four years, which Clay himself estimates to be over four thousand newspapers. At the end of the film, a "Special Thanks" is given to Penn Archival Services. A search on Google in Pennsylvania resulted in no matches to such an organization. It doesn't exist.

That doesn't seem to matter, because Clay shows us a microfilm negative of an article from March 21, 1941. The article shows a picture of the house and tells the story of a "horrific event" in which a Ruth Blackwell was looking after some children who were later reported missing and eventually found dead.

There are many, so many, issues here. First, the "1941 article" looks like a modern day document from a newspaper template with added filter to make it look old. From reading and copying old newspaper articles, I'm used to seeing dividing lines between the columns. There were none with this "article." It is also very vague on details, from the location of the house to what the event actually was. Overall, it looked more like a newspaper template one can find online rather than an actual 1941 article.

The article names a Ruth Blackwell as the killer and James Blackwell as her husband. A search of Ancestry.com reveals a 37-year-old white female who lived in Tioga, Pennsylvania (northern mid-state) with her two sons, Lerone and Roger. This was listed on the 1940 census. She was listed as head of the household, and not married. The name James Blackwell also got a hit in the 1940 census, that of a 27 year old black male living in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania with his wife—also Ruth Blackwell—a 23 year old black female.

The article names a Detective Jim Hopper leading the investigation. I'm going to take a guess here and say this is an Easter egg, those inside jokes and hidden messages in movies and TV shows that only hardcore fans will pick up. Jim Hopper is the police chief of the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana in the Netflix series Stranger Things. Despite all the negative things I'm picking out, this was a nice touch. There is one more feature of that article I will return to.

He eventually makes it back down to the basement and opens the storm sewer, revealing nothing exciting. There is no well, not even a hole: it's just a black pan with some water that he tries to make us believe is a deep hole. He even uses string, which is not weighted at the end, to try to convince the viewer he is measuring the depth of the hole. The string can be seen curling up as it hits the bottom of the bowl, which is at the floor level. It's supposed to be a well and it has a black basin inside it. One might say it's a "Blackwell"...

I won't give away the ending, mostly because I'm against spoilers, even with a fake documentary like this. However, the "climactic ending" is the same practical effect he used in another video on his YouTube channel. For a filmmaker that made several zombie movies, he seems to have little imagination when it comes to ghostly activity.

I’d like to return to what I believe is the most significant evidence that this film is a work of fiction. The image of the house included in the 1941 article has a few elements that have not changed in the seventy-seven years that have passed, chief among them are the trees. The trees on the left and right sides of the house are the exact same height and shape in the 1941 image as they are when Clay and his wife walk up to the house during the film. The trees are covering the same sections of the windows with the same branches. There is a floodlight on the front lawn that can be matched up in both the 1941 image and the modern video footage. There are two statues of dogs holding baskets (in their mouths) in front of the pillars of the front door, and one can be seen in the 1941 image (the other is blocked by bushes due to the angle). There is one more glaring mistake; there used to be a huge tree in the front lawn that would have been dead-center of the 1941 photo if it had actually been taken in 1941. How do I know this? I found the house on Google Maps.

The house claimed to be in Pennsylvania is actually in Lexington, Kentucky. Clockwise from top left; Google maps view from 2015, screenshot from The Blackwell Ghost, the alleged 1941 photograph, and a 2013 listing from Realtor.com.

I had a hunch that the house was probably closer to Clay's residence, which would make his job easier. I decided to look around his neighborhood on Google Maps. I was able to locate an address for Clay through public records and used it as a starting point. I put in a second point, an intersection shown in the film, and mapped a route. I searched the adjoining neighborhoods using satellite images, looking for the unique characteristics of the street and houses seen in the film. It took about twenty minutes to find the house, which is in Lexington, Kentucky—not Pennsylvania. I found realtor listings with photos taken in 2013 and 2015 that show a huge tree in the front lawn. It was removed before the film was made. A little more digging revealed that the current owner of the house is... none other than Turner Clay himself! (Spokeo.com 2018) In fact he's owned the house since February of 2015.

Top- a screenshot from the film showing Clay and the houses across the street from the “Pennsylvania” house. Bottom- a Google maps screenshot showing the same background from Lexington, Kentucky.

If this film was promoted and advertised simply as a horror film, I would have watched it and moved on, never giving it a second thought. I have a habit of spending sleepless nights watching bad horror movies, so this would have been just part of another binge-watching night. My problem with the film is that it is presented as an authentic documentary, and it is absolutely not. The entire story is made up, as was the historical document. The Pennsylvania location was a fabrication, since it was filmed in Clay's own home. It is a hoax.

This type of fake documentary is what spreads false beliefs and misleading information to the interested public. In many of the reviews of the film, the question of its authenticity is questioned, but there are many that believe it is a true story. In a review of the film on iHorror.com, the author states "Throughout the film, he never once wavers in his assertion that what he and his wife, Terri, are experiencing is actually real. Furthermore, he backs up those claims with alleged researched proof of the history of the home. I have to admit, by the end of the film I wasn’t entirely sure what to believe" (Jordan 2017). This is a common response I've found (along with a lot of "It's fake" comments) and demonstrates that people might take it seriously.

To be fair, the reporter for iHorror did reach out and contact Dr. Marie Hardin at Penn State University and Jeff Knapp at the Larry and Ellen Foster Communications Library concerning any information about the murder event and found absolutely no evidence that it really happened. Even though the reporter wants to believe (he is a paranormal investigator), he does make it clear that he thinks it is a clever marketing plan rather than a true documentary.

Turner Clay has tapped into the Post-Blair Witch/Paranormal Activity method of filmmaking. While those films eventually revealed themselves as entertainment, Clay has maintained his deceptions and continued to build upon a previous hoax—the SHG video. He's also managed to convince many viewers that his work is a reality, rather than the fiction it really is. If Clay happens to stumble upon this article, I hope he reconsiders making any more of these fake documentaries. Stick to zombie movies, at least those commonly accepted as fiction from the start.

Note: I've left out specific references that would reveal the exact location of the filmmakers private residence. Since he seems to have taken steps to assure privacy, I don't feel it would be right to reveal that information here. The screenshot from Google and images from previous listings of the house should be sufficient evidence that I know where the house is.

• Biddle, Kenny. October 1, 2013. Analysis of the screaming Hotel Ghost video. Available at https://www.facebook.com/IAmKennyBiddle/posts/595841540479212
• Blackwell House, The. Amazon Listing. 2017. https://www.amazon.com/Blackwell-Ghost-Ruth/dp/B072Z62L22
• IMDb. 2018. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2571852/
• James Blackwell in the 1940 Census. https://www.ancestry.com/1940-census/usa/Pennsylvania/James-Blackwell_v5xh4ago.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqPCNppw_qc
• Jimmynut22. January 28, 2012. Alien Caught on Video - 1998. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkU3nEZk0HQ
• Jimmynut22. September 4, 2012. "Ghost screaming in haunted hotel - FULL LENGTH". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BobA5ujHkvU
• Jimmynut22. 2014. Comments section of video.
• Jordan, Waylon. 2017. The Blackwell Ghost: Documentary or Horror Movie with a Great Hook?. iHorror.com. http://www.ihorror.com/blackwell-ghost-documentary-horror-movie-great-hook/
• LordanARTS . Oct 9, 2017. "JohnnyVlogs: Ghost on Tape, Real or Fake?"
  https://baixardoyoutube.top/watch?v=2LJQxa6U-O8
• Rolling Stone. September 18, 2013. 10 Ridiculous Movie Mistakes; Errors in 'Pulp Fiction,' 'Jurassic Park' and more great films. Available at https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/10-ridiculous-movie-mistakes-20130918
• Ruth Blackwell in the 1940 Census. https://www.ancestry.com/1940-census/usa/Pennsylvania/Ruth-Blackwell_qzgdq
• Ruth Blackwell in the 1940 Census. https://www.ancestry.com/1940-census/usa/Pennsylvania/Ruth-Blackwell_v5xh6
• Spokea.com. 2018.
• Xiaomi. 2018. Xiaomi 1080P Smart Wi-Fi IP Camera w/ Night Vision (US Plugs). http://www.dx.com/
• YI Action - AI-Art Edition. Shanghai Xiaoyi Technology Co., Ltd. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/yi-action-ai-art-edition/id963065779?mt=8

The first skeptic conference of 2018 is over. Did you miss it? My local group, Monterey County Skeptics (MCS), has just completed its fourth SkeptiCamp, held January 6, 2018 in Seaside, California.

I’ve noticed that there seems to be less SkeptiCamps these days; I’m not sure why. They are simple and inexpensive to set up. I’ve written about how my group, MCS, managed this process in 2015 and 2017. We have learned a lot over the years and fine-tuned along the way. We have joined with our local humanist group, Humanist Association of Monterey Bay Area (HAMBA) and have established a great relationship with the local media. We used Eventbrite for people to RSVP and we have moved to a new location at the Seaside Community Center.

MCS leaders Kathy McKenzie and Deborah Warcken were instrumental as usual. They wrote a press release and sent it to all the local newspapers and followed up with them if they didn’t hear back soon. This led our SkeptiCamp to be covered in print and online by several newspapers. Two sent photographers who did write-ups on the event. Publicity before is great but afterwards is so satisfying; articles can be used for future events, Wikipedia pages, and more. I would stress to future SkeptiCamp organizers to look to the smaller local newspapers, TV, and radio; they need content, and our world is so interesting to report on.

Our 2018 SkeptiCamp featured many familiar faces, and we added one new speaker, Dr. Jill Yamashita who is a psychology professor at our local university, CSUMB. She researches false memories and how they may be influenced. She spoke to us about her research on eyewitness testimony and how difficult it can be discriminating between faces from a different ethnicity. She explained, “Errors are the biggest factor in false conventions … Juries LOVE eyewitness testimony and trust them more if the witness is confident.” She suggested if you are a witness to an important event, take notes with as much detail as possible before discussing it with anyone. When we talk it over with others, we can be influenced and actually change what we thought we remembered. Our memory uses shortcuts—“we were not meant to remember details but only the gist of it. We fill in the details based on our expectations of what we think we should see.”

Glenn Church, who is a local farmer, businessman, and member of our board, gave us a lecture called “Why Your Vote is Meaningless, and Also Extremely Important.” Church has a skill to explain politics in a non-partisan way, so that even I can understand. He had two visuals that illustrated his point: He made everyone raise their hand if they had voted in the 2017 election. Then he had us put our hands down in turn if we didn’t know who our Senator, House of Representatives, and local judges and representatives are. Finally, he asked the few still with hands up if they remembered any name of anyone from a school board. Out of a room of fifty people, six people’s hands were still up by the end. The other visual was he made a graphic with one black pixel representing every vote in the 2017 presidential election and added one red pixel to represent his personal vote. When visualized this way, it was impossible to see the one red pixel. He kept doing this with different 2017 elections, showing that the ones with the smaller vote counts would show the one red pixel. Glenn pointed out that it is important to vote in all elections, mentioning the Virginia House of Delegates with the two candidates with the same vote total, one vote would have changed the whole election. His point was that it is important to always vote, but pay attention to the smaller local elections as the outcome may have a stronger impact on your life.

Leonard Tramiel Is a physicist from Columbia University, a board member for Center for Inquiry, and a member of the Executive Council of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. His lecture was “Atheism and Skepticism: How They are Related and Why Skeptics Should Care.” Tramiel started by talking about the history of the modern skeptic movement, something he attributes to the book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science by Martin Gardner. The question “Skepticism and Atheism, is there a relationship?” and Leonard answered that a lot of people see this as two very different questions. Skepticism asks, “how should claims be treated?”, and atheism is the answer to the question, “do you believe in the contention that there is a god or gods?” He asked the question, “How can atheism help skepticism?”, and the audience struggled with an answer other than “to get more butts in seats.” In conclusion, Tramiel said that typically people who say they are skeptics are usually also atheists. “Skeptics should care because resources just aren’t finite, and some atheists are NOT skeptics.”

We tried something new this year; we cut back on the Q&A time for the first four lectures and set aside thirty minutes before lunch. We brought up all four of the speakers, and allowed the audience to ask more questions. I really enjoyed it; it allowed people to think about how the various topics related to each other and we got some really interesting questions.

For our lunch, we kept it simple and purchased sandwiches, chips, and sodas and had a few extra-large pizzas delivered. Great looking around the room and seeing people socializing, some with people they met for the very first time that day; it felt wonderful. I even managed to get in a few games of backgammon with Scott and Paula. We returned from our lunch a bit early because mentalist Mark Edward had arranged a séance for us. He brought a giant box of fortune cookies and passed them around. He had everyone read their fortunes and put them in a hat. One person from the audience drew one slip of paper and held onto it far away from Edward. Then he went into a trance and called upon the spirits to reveal the fortune, which was about flowers and sunshine. Edward then asked the audience member to read the fortune he had drawn from the borrowed hat. It talked about flowers and sunshine … incredible, there was no way he could have known that, or could he?

One of our members, Arlen Grossman, has had a recurring trivia segment for all four of our SkeptiCamps. He starts off the Camp with “Questionable Quotations” before the first full lecture and then again before we start after lunch. I think this really sets the tone for the whole SkeptiCamp and allows first-time attendees to relax and understand that this isn’t a typical conference; it is a place to interact in a relaxed atmosphere. Grossman for nine years wrote a weekly quiz for the Monterey Herald called “What’s Your Quotation Quotient?” This year, he gave the audience a series of common statements and asked if it could be attributed to Mark Twain or not. In the afternoon segment, Grossman gave statements and asked if they were from Donald Trump or not. Both segments were very entertaining, with lots of comments from the audience. As a warm-up exercise it was a lot of fun, but more importantly it showed us that we need to be careful what we think we know. Sometimes we just assume a statement is correct because it “sounds like something he would say” or because we “want to think it is true because it satisfies our preconceived beliefs.”

Our next speaker drove the farthest. Kyle Polich has spoken at three other of our SkeptiCamps and lives in Los Angeles, which is about a five-hour drive away. Polich is the host of Data Skeptic Podcast, works in the data scientist field and has a background in artificial intelligence. In 2017, Polich spoke about the Missing 411 books by David Paulides. The video of that talk got the wind of Paulides and his fans and has more views and comments than any video we have on our channel with 2.3K views. It has seventy-five comments, almost all of them negative, and fifty-one thumbs down votes. This is terrific as it means that all these people found our channel and learned about SkeptiCamps and scientific skepticism. Yes, they were not happy about Polich’s conclusions about the Missing 411 conspiracy, but that’s fine with me. The research he did lead to a Skeptical Inquirer article and for GSoW editor Rob Palmer to rewrite the David Paulides Wikipedia page. That rewrite has received 125,885 pageviews to date. So sorry I digressed there for a moment. This year Polich’s lecture was “Artificial Intelligence and Why We’re Afraid of it.” He talked about Anthony Levandowski’s Church of Artificial Intelligence. Polich says that A.I. does not keep him from sleeping at night, some of the things that humans are doing might though. A.G.I. is possible, not soon, but “nothing precludes it from happening.” Someday in the future, we may create intelligent computers; when that happens it isn’t a big leap that we will have to have conversations about computer rights.

Another frequent MCS SkeptiCamp contributor Jay Diamond spoke next. Diamond is the founder of Reason4Reason and a board member of the Bay Area Skeptics. His lecture was “MADMyths: Marketing Myths and Why Skeptics Must Embrace Persuasion.” Diamond gave us three marketing myths, “I’m way too smart to fall for this crap,” “If you just tell the truth, you Win,” and “Anyone can do Marketing”. He asked, “why should skeptics care?” He said that most skeptics that are pushing back on bad marketing are like showing up to a gun fight with only a knife. We need to become persuasive, use it like a tool. Skepticism is a great product and with better public relations, branding, promotion, and packaging we will be able to do more.

I was next up. I also was the emcee for the SkeptiCamp and the main photographer. Next year I don’t think I’m going to take on so many responsibilities. The topic I choose to talk about is one that I have been interested in for several years: Facilitated Communication (FC). This is the discredited technique used by some schools, caregivers, and parents to communicate with people with severe communication disabilities. FC involves a facilitator to touch or hold the arm, wrist, or finger of the disabled person to guide or give moral support allowing them to touch a keyboard. What the scientific skepticism community has discovered is that the facilitator is actually (probably unknowingly) the person guiding the communication. Much as you would with a Ouija Board. When the facilitator does not know the correct response or cannot see the keyboard, then the disabled person is unable to communicate clearly. I showed photos and video of facilitator sessions where the only person looking at the keyboard was the facilitator, in no way was the communication coming from the disabled person.

Our last speaker of the event was also someone who has presented at three different MCS SkeptiCamps, Mark Edward. He said that this was one of his more personal lectures as he talked about his time working in the psychic business. He spoke about one specific time when he did an infomercial for the Psychic Revival Network with two other psychics and celebrities Nell Carter and Erik Estrada. Edward painfully recounted the decision he made to go along with the organizers of the revival, gathering in advance the questions the audience members wanted the “spirits” to answer (mentalists call this pre-show). Edward explained that this was a very difficult situation to be in as he knew that by going along with this, he would be influencing people to believe in psychics. But because he had to learn all the tricks of the psychic business in order to educate the public he felt he had to. Years later, Edward published a book explaining what goes on behind the scenes, Psychic Blues: Confessions of a Conflicted Medium. He is a professional mentalist that specializes in séance and appears on TV and at skeptic conferences explaining the tricks psychics use. Edward was most recently on the Halloween special for Adam Ruins Everything.
Conferences such as SkeptiCamp are relatively easy to organize and run compared to larger conferences. But still there is work to be done to make it look easy and even though this was our fourth many people are needed. We had lots of help, from Robin Welch who gave a room to one of the speakers, to Bay Area Skeptic’s Board member Greg Dorais who arrived early and stayed late with all kinds of audio equipment from the Bay Area Skeptics. MCS member Peter brought several drawings showing differences between religion and science and why people have a need to create a God and then connect with him through meditation or prayer. Stirling helped by putting together Grossman’s slides. The other speakers, board members, and audience were so helpful throughout.

SkeptiCamp is not your typical conference; its goal is to build a local community within your group, to bond them to each other, and to give them the motivation and opportunity to be involved. Outreach is terrific; media coverage and new members to the group are all great goals. The most important outcome of SkeptiCamp is networking with other curious-minded thinkers; people who are willing to spend a Saturday listening to scientific and skeptic related lectures. Can’t wait for next year; Monterey County is amazing in January. Pencil it on your calendar now before you forget. And if you want to present, please be in touch mcskeptics@gmail.com.

Videos from the Camp can be found on our YouTube site.

Local media coverage can be found here:

• http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/events/20180107/skepticamp-voting-witness-testimony-among-topics-questioned
• http://www.montereyherald.com/arts-and-entertainment/20171228/feeling-skeptical-youre-not-alone
• http://pineconearchive.com/180112PCA.pdf

(All photos by Susan Gerbic)

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. By Daniel C. Dennett. W.W. Norton, New York, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-393-24207-2. 496 pp. Hardcover, $28.95, Softcover, $18.95.

For most of human history, people have assumed that some kind of vitalistic essence had to be added to matter to produce life. The belief in an immaterial soul was pervasive. At one point, a scientist even tried to weigh the soul by weighing a body right before and after death, expecting to find a decrease when the soul departed (see Benjamin Radford’s column in the Skeptical Inquirer “Measuring Near-Death Experience,” May/June 2007). For most people, it is almost inconceivable that a purely material brain could produce consciousness. It is all too easy and appealing to imagine that consciousness is an immaterial essence that can survive death or to resort to the cop-out that “God did it.” And we are appalled by the idea that a materialistic account of consciousness might abolish free will and moral responsibility for human actions.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s new book From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds goes a long way toward illuminating these conundrums with facts and arguments from evolution and neuroscience.

Insights from Evolution

We are beginning to understand how “a process with no Intelligent Designer [evolution] can create intelligent designers who can then design things that permit us to understand how a process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who then design things.”

Biology is reverse engineering; we must ask “What has happened?” rather than asking “why” a feature evolved because no intentional purpose was involved.

Organisms have developed spectacular competencies without any need for comprehension. Some animals (for instance, crows) demonstrate a degree of intelligence and problem-solving that is more powerful than simple trial and error, but this can be accomplished by unconscious processes. If unconscious processes can accomplish so much, What is consciousness for? Why do we need conscious comprehension? How could it have come about, and how has it benefited the human species?

Dennett says, “Brains are more like termite colonies than intelligently designed corporations or armies.” Evolution “designed” the brain through a bottom-up process rather than a top-down intentional design. Animals can do things for reasons without having any comprehension of those reasons. Humans can articulate reasons for what we do; they may be self-deceptive reasons, but we “own” them.

Language and Other Memes

Memes are “an element of culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means.” They have their own reproductive fitness. Words are memes that can be pronounced. Like genes, words are informational structures that determine ways of doing things. They are not necessarily discrete and may not be faithfully transmitted. Just as there are typos in printing, there are transmission errors in memes. In computer jargon, a “thinko” is like a typo—a clear mistake or bug in programming. There are standards that allow for correction. Like genes, memes can mutate; transmission errors can lead to extinction of the meme or can serendipitously result in a better meme. Like viruses, memes can spread without being noticed or consciously approved. There is no way to predict how genes or memes will evolve.

Language may have originated as inefficient behavioral patterns. As it progressed, it may have been driven more by its benefits to memes than by its benefits to speakers. Today it has evolved into a remarkable tool that enhances human communication and productivity far beyond anything other animals have achieved. Other social animals might make spectacular use of language if they had it: “Somehow our languageless ancestors stumbled onto a rare path to this treasure and myopically followed it, getting some advantage along the way, or at least not losing ground, until they hit the jackpot,” Dennett writes. Why humans and not other animals? It must have been preceded by prelinguistic cultural transmissions of some sort (cooperation and imitation boosted survival fitness), but the rest can be ascribed to chance. Words are the best memes, but they were not the first memes. There are many hypotheses about why humans were more likely than other social animals to develop culture and language, including bipedality, manual dexterity for toolmaking, and the theory of mind.

Competition may have been a more powerful driver than cooperation. Confirmation bias (highlighting positive evidence for our beliefs and ignoring negative evidence) suggests that certain patterns of errors in human reasoning were honed for persuading others in debate, not necessarily for getting things right.

The development of language enabled cumulative cultural evolution. It was the launching pad of human cognition and thinking, and it has allowed us to transform the environment we live in. Writing—preserving a record of a thought outside the brain—was critical to the development of “the extended mind.”

Consciousness Is an Illusion

Consciousness and free will are real, but they are not what people think they are. This is akin to currency. Dollars are also real, but the actual dollar bill is only a token to represent an idea that everyone has agreed upon. Credit card transactions deal in dollars without actual dollar bills.

Consciousness is not a nonphysical phenomenon. It is an evolved user-illusion, “a system of virtual machines that evolved, genetically and memetically, to play very special roles in the ‘cognitive niche’ our ancestors have constructed over the millennia.” There can be competence without comprehension, and comprehension is expensive, so nature uses the “need to know” principle. Most animals don’t need to know. Are there degrees of consciousness? Where might we draw a line? We draw a line for moral reasons and try to prevent animals from suffering, but what is suffering? We euthanize dogs when we think they are conscious of suffering, but do fish suffer? Do mosquitos suffer? We are willing to exterminate rats but not squirrels; why? Dennett warns that in trying to understand consciousness, “We mustn’t let our moral intuitions distort our empirical investigation from the outset.”

It’s hard to understand how uncomprehending neurons could give rise to comprehension, but they do. We can think about reasons and let these reasons influence our behavior, something no other animals can do. “We can perform many quite adroit and retrospectively justifiable actions with only a vague conception of what we are up to, a conception often swiftly sharpened in hindsight by the self-attribution of reasons.”

“Our thinking is enabled by the installation of a virtual machine made of virtual machines made of virtual machines.” We are only aware of the user interface not of the intricate underlying details. The advantage of the user interface is that it allows us to make our competencies somewhat accessible to other people, and then we get to use them ourselves as “guests in our own brains.” We can explain ourselves to others and to ourselves.

Dennett quotes ethologist and roboticist David McFarland: “Communication is the only behavior that requires an organism to self-monitor its own control system.” Self-monitoring allows an organism to avoid revealing too much about its current state to competitors. Communication may be more grounded in deception and manipulation than in cooperation.

We have the illusion of a “self,” but this self has limited access to what is happening in the brain. Consciousness simplifies things for our benefit; an awareness of all the underlying operations would hopelessly clutter our minds and would only handicap us. We only have access to the results of underlying brain processes, and we confabulate a model to explain what we think has happened. Our first-person reports could be wrong, and there are ways to examine consciousness from a second-person viewpoint. A more objective approach may show you features of your own experience that you were not aware of.

We have an inborn propensity to see causation; we attribute our perceptions to external causes, but some perceptual representations are internal, for instance optical illusions.

Descartes was a dualist who believed an immaterial soul animated the brain. He didn’t know what we know today about neurophysiology. He could only imagine a mechanical model of the brain with wires, pulleys, or hoses, so he jumped to the conclusion that thinking must involve something additional that was immaterial. He relied on introspection without realizing how unreliable it was.

Dennett notes that “Human consciousness is unlike all other varieties of animal consciousness in that it is a product in large part of cultural evolution, which installs a bounty of words and many other thinking tools in our brains, creating thereby a cognitive architecture unlike the ‘bottom-up’ minds of animals.” It is a user illusion that gives us limited access to the workings of our brains and thereby empowers us to be intelligent designers of artifacts and of our own lives.

Dennett says that the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness research, explaining the “qualia” of subjective experience, vanishes when you realize that it is “nothing but an artifact of the failure to recognize that evolution has given us a gift that sacrifices literal truth for utility.”

Free Will Is an Illusion

Free will is not a phenomenon isolated from causation; it is instead an illusion. We feel that we chose freely, but our choice was determined by unconscious processes before we were aware of choosing. Dennett quotes Wegner: “The experience of will, then, is the way our minds portray their operations to us, not their actual operations.”

Free will is not an illusion we would want to get rid of; “it’s where we live, and we couldn’t live the way we do without it.” Dennett thinks our systems of morality and justice should “punish when punishment is called for, but with a profoundly different framing or attitude.” As a thought experiment, he asks us to consider: If you believe no one is ever responsible for what they do, would you abolish all the penalty rules in sports?

Distributed Comprehension and the Future

Some people think consciousness is one of those mysteries we can never hope to solve rather than a scientific problem to be solved. Dennett argues that we may eventually be able to solve it because of all the tools that multiply our cognitive powers and because of the possibility of “distributed comprehension.” In science and technology today, individuals comprehend only a part of the whole, but as a group, humans can understand things too complex for any individual to master. We understand how to drive our cars, but most of us don’t understand how to fix them if they break; and few understand the functioning of all the related systems that make driving cars possible, including auto manufacturers, oil refineries, highway construction, insurance companies, the government, etc. “This distribution of partial comprehension is not optional. The edifices of social construction that shape our lives in so many regards depend on our myopic confidence that their structure is sound and heeds no attention from us.” He says, “We have bootstrapped ourselves into the heady altitudes of modern civilization, and our natural emotions and other instinctual responses do not always serve our new circumstances.”

With computers, we can create things we only partially understand, things that in turn may create things we don’t understand at all. Dennett imagines a future textbook on consciousness encompassing neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and other fields; no reader could claim to have mastered all the levels of explanation.

Dennett is always worth reading, and this latest book distills his current thinking and all he has learned over the years. It’s not a book you would take to the beach for light summer reading; it challenges the reader to think seriously about a variety of subjects. But it’s well written and accessible to the general reader, and it’s a great way to get a better understanding of how consciousness works and how it came about.

“There is no way the psychic could have known that!”

I have been researching psychics since 2002, and I have heard this phrase too many times to count. Mentalist and psychic expert Mark Edward would answer that with “Oh yes, there is.” Let’s look at ten ways psychics could know that, with real life examples. I bet you don’t know them all!

1. These people are very good, slick, practiced, and fast.

Hollywood Medium’s Tyler Henry claims he has already given over a thousand readings, and he is only twenty-two years old. When you look at people who have been in the psychic business for ten or more years, those people are on auto-pilot; the questions and statements flow out of them naturally. To an audience member who is watching them for the first time, they appear to be making statements that seem specific, but if you watch enough of these readings you will see some of the same “specific” statements come up over and over again. Old photographs in a box, the sound of keys or coins in a pocket, a fire in the house, someone fell off a horse, a bird came into the house, a garden with roses—all are generalities that seem specific.

2. They use stooges, and sometimes it’s you.

I’ve attended several psychic group readings, and it is pretty typical to arrive early and find that the first couple rows are saved for friends and the best fans. I purchase the VIP passes to these events and never get to sit in the very front row. When I chat up these front row women (yes, they are usually women) I discover that they attend multiple shows in different cities. They talk comfortably and with statements such as “he usually does this in his shows” or “in his show a couple days ago, he said/did this….” Chip Coffey reserves a segment of his show for something called “Coffey Talk,” which is where he chats with the audience and answers questions. It was clear from the questions that several of his fans knew a lot about the TV shows Coffey had been on years ago. Some were fairly obscure questions only a true fan would know to ask. Later on, during the psychic part of the evening, he “read” one of these women with some specific statements. I guess you would call these people psychic groupies; they are unaware that they are being used as stooges and are honored that their dead family members always seem to come through at each show. The regular audience who is seeing Coffey for the first time think he is really accurate and don’t realize what is going on.

Also, in that same event Coffey said that he was getting a message about a psychic business one of the audience women was thinking of opening. He made it sound like he had received this information from the spirit world, but I knew he had been chatting with the woman during the break.

For Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! Show “Talking to the Dead,” Mark Edward examined the incident of psychic Rosemary Althea connecting with a couple’s daughter who had committed suicide. Althea snapped her fingers and said, “She was gone like that,” and the parents nodded their heads and wiped away tears. Mark explained to the show’s producer that there was something not right with that; you don’t want to say suicide unless you are very sure. The producer interviewed the parents, and sure enough, they said that Althea had done readings for them before and the couple was friends with Althea’s publisher who brought them to this show.

At another psychic show Mark and I attended in 2017, after the event was over I chatted with a woman who was so excited that the psychic had given her a reading. She told me that this time her grandmother had come through, but last time she didn’t. Did you catch that? “This time… last time.” This was a woman who had already been read by the psychic; she was a stooge and didn’t know it. I bet she gets read each time she is in the audience, as the psychic already knows her family. And as the woman was in her late sixties it is probably not much of a reach that at least one of her grandmothers is dead and most likely both. Even if she didn’t know her grandmothers, she did have them.

During the same show, a woman in green a couple seats from us was getting a very specific reading. She was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue and was very convincing. But Mark Edward had a better view and leaned over and told me that there were no tears; she was pretending. We went to the after-party where everyone was given a copy of the psychic’s book, and when the psychic took the book from the woman in green to autograph it, she said “This time spell my name right. It has an I not an E.” Hmmm…. Then later in this meet and greet I asked the psychic if he had other psychics who he respected, and he said that he had several students who were very promising, and he put his hand on the woman in green’s shoulder and said “This is one.”

3. We really want to believe.

These events aren’t cheap. Private readings can be in the $250 to $900 range for thirty minutes. Group shows are $40 to $180 a seat, and VIP is right up front where they want you. The farther back you sit, the less likely you are going to get a reading. Remember the goal is to hook you into getting a private reading, so the psychic is looking for people with disposable income to spend. If you are one of the few that gets called on, you are more likely to search for meaning and make the connections than to say, “They were horrible. What a waste of my money!”

Also, why would you be there if you didn’t think communication with the dead was possible?

4. You were hot-read before the event.

If the psychic can get your name before the event, then with a little Internet searching he or she can discover a lot. When you sign up for events, you give your email and some personal information. I’ve had two psychics contact me after the event to thank me for attending. One found me on Twitter, which was odd because the only way he could have done that was if he looked at the name on the credit card when I purchased my ticket through Eventbrite. At no time did I use my real name other than the credit card. Hmmm…

Mark Edward did a cold-reading demonstration event at CSICon in 2017; the workshop was all skeptics, and you needed a separate ticket to attend. We obtained a list with about fifty names of people who would be at the workshop. All the list had was the name, city, and state. I spent about an hour going through all the names using Facebook as my guide. I had no problem finding about ten people who matched with the locations. By scrolling through their Facebook account, it was pretty obvious I had the right person.

Almost all the accounts were “friends only,” but that didn’t matter to me; enough of the posts were visible, and sometimes photos, favorite books, movies, and favorite groups were mentioned. If you scroll back far enough people will always start wishing you a happy birthday, congratulations, or condolences. All gold to a psychic that plans to hot-read you. Photos are also ripe with information. Are you at a wedding, prom, anniversary party? Are you on vacation, skiing somewhere or maybe at the Olympics? Who are you with? Young children, grandparents, work buddies? They can also click on your friends’ accounts and get information about you from there.

When Mark did the workshop, he peppered his lecture on cold-reading techniques with interruptions from the spirit world giving him messages about people going on vacation and celebrating weddings and new babies. He relayed this information vaguely, never telling them bluntly the day, but he would say, “You are a Leo aren’t you?” or “April is a special month for you… I think you have a child born then… around the middle of the month… I’m hearing the fifteenth?”

Mark tells of attending a show where the psychic told an audience member “I’m getting something about baby clothes,” and the audience member said, “That’s amazing. I just put up a bunch of my son’s clothes he has outgrown for sale on Facebook.”

Tyler Henry gave a reading to Jamie Horn, who won a reading with him by entering a contest on Facebook. Did you get that? She was a fan that entered a contest on Facebook … Facebook. Henry or one of his people could have known all about Jamie just by looking at her Facebook page. She said he didn’t, but then she really wanted to believe, and why should we trust what he said? He also says he is speaking to the dead.

I know if you want to get a ticket to see The Long Island Medium, Theresa Caputo, you will purchase your ticket and get to choose your seat. They also want you to log in using your Facebook or Twitter account, and then after you complete your purchase they ask you to tell your friends and give you the option to share directly to your social media. So now the psychic not only knows your name but also where you are sitting and has a link to your social media. Click, click, click, and they have all kinds of information about you, things it would be “impossible” to know.

5. Psychics are always observing.

They are backstage with the camera crew talking to whomever they can talk to. Makeup and hair are done before the show, and guess what, they are chatting those people up also. Tyler Henry did a reading of Matt Lauer, and when they greeted each other they talked about the last time Henry was on the show a few months back. During that time, I’m sure Henry used his time wisely, looking at photos, talking to the crew, and getting all kinds of information about Lauer and other cohosts, just storing that information waiting for an opportunity to relay it back in a way that would appear to be from the spirit world. In the book The Psychic Mafia, M. Lamar Keene talks about keeping index cards full of information he already knew about his repeat sitters. When he knew a sitter would be traveling to another city, he would share that information with other psychics there. It was an underground network of information sharing. Now with the Internet and computers, it is a lot simpler than ever to know what was “impossible” for anyone to know.

I watched a clip of Theresa Caputo giving a surprise reading to a crewmember who was getting her ready for a shoot she was going to do. She mentioned initials and a date of someone close to him who had died. This was all filmed by a cameraman a bit farther away; that cameraman captured footage that showed the crewmember had a tattoo with initials and a date on his arm with a large cross.

6. He pointed right at me–or did he?

This is a visual example, so hopefully I can explain this well. This was something I had never thought of before but Mark Edward explained this technique when we were watching a video of a psychic reading a large audience in a casino. In this particular case, the room has about 300 people in the audience. Using the rule of large numbers, if you are vague enough, when throwing out a statement to a large group of people, you will have something stick.

Picture this scene: An audience row in that casino has ten people in it. The psychic asks the entire row to stand up, then he points at the row and makes a statement, and someone reacts to the statement. He is pointing right at that person. How is that done? Amazing, right?

It is pretty amazing if the psychic is standing in front of the ten people and they are stretched out twelve to fifteen feet across. He lifts up his arm and outstretches his finger to point at the group. Then he makes a bold statement such as “I’m getting a miscarriage over here.” That’s a pretty personal statement, but actually it’s more common than you think. He watches all the faces for a reaction and then moves his outstretched finger to point at the person. If he is right in front of them, it will be really obvious if he has to move his arm to point at a specific person. But if he is standing off to the side of the people at an angle and makes the same statement, then when he sees the person making the reaction he only has to move his finger a fraction. The woman who says “That’s me!” will later say “He was pointing right at me when he said he was getting a message about a miscarriage,” and it would look that way from her perspective. Also remember the rest of the audience is watching the people the psychic is pointing at, not at the psychic. Misdirection!

It takes a bit of practice by the psychic to get the moves correct; to have his hand and finger already pointing in the right direction, make the statement, and quickly watch for a reaction. Remember trick #1: these people are skilled at this. And if they miss, then what? Well they always have an out. See trick #9.

7. What is missing might be more important than what was said.

In the earlier example of Caputo and the crewmember, it sure looked like a direct hit. She got the death date and the initials. But what was missing? Everything else. Who was this person? What was their name? Why did they die? She missed everything that would show she was really talking to the dead and not just reading his tattoo.

In the Tyler Henry reading of Jamie Horn he told her a lot about “a male figure” or “an older woman” who was watching over her. Jamie would later say Henry got in touch with her father and grandmother. No, Jamie, he didn’t. He said “a male figure” and “an older woman.” You supplied the rest of the information. And why didn’t Dad give anything specific, like his name or any other person’s name? He said he was watching over a young woman who had some difficult life choices to make, but he didn’t tell her anything important about those life choices. What career should she go into? What stocks should she purchase? Who should she trust? Who should she avoid? Why didn’t Dad want to talk to any of the other family members?

And there is the big matter of Tyler Henry giving readings to Matt Lauer and Alan Thicke. A year after the reading, Lauer was fired from his job over sexual abuse claims. His wife divorced him and took the kids, and he is now having to sell his home. It looks like his life is in ruins, but when Henry talked to him he got in touch with Lauer’s father who wanted to say how proud he was of his son. Dad also wanted to mention something about some coins—that there were two and Matt needed to look for a third one or something. And two months after Henry read for Alan Thicke, he was dead (Thicke not Henry). In the reading Henry had mentioned Thicke’s blood pressure and that he should get that checked out, and they both joked about it. When Thicke died from a heart problem, Henry’s fans went nuts saying he got it right. Well if that is so, then why were they joking about it and treating it like it was no big deal? Why didn’t Henry call the paramedics right then sitting in his home and say, “No man. This is very serious. If you don’t take care of this right now, in two months you will be dead”?

8. They have a living to make and will use any means possible.

When you see a psychic on a reality show do readings at a beauty shop or grocery store, remember you are watching a reality show—which is anything but reality. These places have to be approached in advance, and they have to give permission to film inside. Every person who gets a reading has to sign a waiver, and once you have the person’s name and location, you know what that means: hot-reading. Theresa Caputo is famous for walking up to people out of the blue and talking to them about dead family that wants to get in touch. Who are these people? Just random strangers? Or maybe people hired off of Craig’s List as extras for the show? Maureen Handcock did a TV promo a few years ago where she went into a fire station and did readings of the firemen. It turned out to be a small local fire station in her neighborhood. It was a place she knew she would be visiting; maybe she did a little research in advance and learned about the history of the building? Maybe her brother’s friend is a fireman at the location? Or her hairdresser’s son works there and has been telling her all the gossip during her hair appointments? What is more likely? That she is talking to the dead and getting information from the other side or that she found out some local gossip from someone very much alive?

Mark Edward is always saying that the real magic happens in the editing room. These TV shows record for ninety minutes or more, but only show twenty minutes. What was cut out? Maybe all the misses? Same thing with the readings done one-on-one; it has to fit into a three- to six-minute segment. Only the best makes it to the show, so if there is some kind of really great connection—serious evidence of communication with the dead—then it will be on the show and not end up on the cutting room floor.

Let’s talk about something else missing—glaringly missing. Why are there so many missing children in the world? Why so many cold cases? Bones found without knowing who the person is? Why are bridges collapsing and people shooting up churches, movie theatres, and schools? Why isn’t this psychic, or any psychic, clearing these cases up or giving clear warnings in advance? Maybe instead of doing group readings at a casino, they should be spending some time at the police station going through cold-case files. 

Recently a psychic put up a video of himself and another person eating lunch inside a restaurant next to the window, then a car came crashing through, throwing their table and them backward. He put up this video on his Facebook feed with a laugh and never addressed the unspoken question of why didn’t he see that coming? Chip Coffey had a post on his Facebook feed about a young girl that was missing, then a few hours later he posted that the girl had been found unharmed in the back of a neighbor’s car. He was very thankful of the police and the neighbor. Funny that he didn’t just know where to find the child. I read through the comments and no one mentioned this to him either. They were all “how wonderful” and “God bless.” Looking at Chip Coffey’s Facebook feed, I see him posting warnings of bad weather conditions, a tsunami scare in Alaska, and a friend who fell and broke her ankle. I just don’t understand, though. Why wouldn’t he know these things would happen? What kind of person has this ability but doesn’t warn anyone?

Photo Credit: Karl Withakay

When asked, we are told “It does not work like that.” Well, how does it work? Or is the answer evident: it does not work at all.

9. They always have an out.

So, the psychic points at a group and says “I’m getting something about a miscarriage over here” and no one reacts. The odds are in a group of 10 people that someone will have some connection to a miscarriage, either to themselves or someone they know. But if no one reacts, then possibly someone in the row nearby will say “That is me” and they will be close enough. Or the psychic can say, “I know which one of you that it is, but this is too personal, and I know you are struggling with it. Let’s just move on to someone else. Please call me for a private reading so you can heal.”

10. We are human, and our brains will always try to make the connection.

In the CSICon workshop I was telling you about earlier, Mark Edward talked to a woman in the audience (let’s call her Maria) about an older woman he saw standing behind her. Remember that Mark already has done some hot-reading on the audience and already knows who he is calling on and has some facts about Maria. He told the woman, “She was happy to see you join the military.” Afterward, I had a chance to talk to Maria and asked her what she thought of the “reading” Mark gave her. Maria told me that she didn’t have a clue who the older woman might have been. Then she said, “My mother was already dead when I joined the military, so she could not have known.” Do you see what just happened? Maria first said that she did not know who the older woman could be; then seconds later she claimed the older woman as her mom. Maria’s brain was trying to help her make this connection.

We do this all the time: remember the hits and forget the misses. In the Tyler Henry/Jamie Horn reading, Horn says that the psychic contacted her sister and her father. Not quite. What actually happens is that Henry said he is getting an older male and a woman who died too soon, and Horn is the one who made the connection.

What can we conclude here? Psychics are out to fool you. Yep, and they are good at it too. Don’t think you are going to out-think them or show them up; you are in their territory. If you act like a skeptic and point out they were wrong, the people in the audience are going to poo-poo you. You are no fun and are ruining the mood. It’s best to learn the tricks and be forewarned. People who fall for these psychics aren’t stupid; they just want to believe and probably have never thought about it being impossible. Why should they question it when they see it all the time on TV? It all happens so fast, and when it happens in person, no one has the ability to pause, rewind, and replay. It’s wonderful we have the luxury to watch these readings over and over again.

And the psychic is so nice! How could they be lying?

In the end, it is not the responsibility of the skeptics to prove that the psychic can’t talk to the dead. The psychic is making the outrageous claim, so the burden of proof is on them to prove that they are communicating. If someone tells you that they can fly without any device or aid, you are going to say “Show me” not “Let me prove you can’t fly.” So why is it any different with psychics? We need to start pushing the burden to prove the ability to communicate with dead. If it were true, it would change the world overnight.

For more information, here are a few of the articles I’ve written in more detail about the tricks of the psychics mentioned. Thank you to Julie Berents and Mark Edward for their help with this article.