One of the joys of attending skeptic conferences such as CSICon is introducing new people to the community and seeing them spark when they meet more people and then become more involved in the getting work done. One way to make sure this happens is to get more first-timers to conferences and that means donating money, arranging everything, and supporting attendees through that process. One of the only groups doing this correctly these days is the Oregonians for Science and Reason (O4SR). I interviewed Jeanine DeNoma and the three people they sent to CSICon in 2016. And when I say “sent” I mean they paid for everything and arranged everything as well as made sure they felt comfortable, introduced them to people, and then when it was all over they followed up with their scholarship winners. It was heart-warming to meet and interview Courtney Shannon, Andy Ngo, and Michael Sieler. You can learn all about their stories and the O4SR scholarship process by reading this article.

CSICon 2017 was held in October, and although it’s been many months, I still think it’s a great idea to talk to the 2017 scholarship winners and touch base with O4SR once again. First, we are going to hear from James Rodriguez who oversaw the scholarship process this year.

James Rodriguez: In 2016, the board of Oregonians for Science and Reason decided to send a small group of Oregon students to CSICon. We wanted to reach as many people as possible and the process we followed to be fair, but we had no formal scholarship application process. A few board members spent time putting together an application packet and the entire board chose the final recipients. Jeanine DeNoma, our board president, handled everything else. She announced the scholarships at meet ups in Oregon, sent the application packets to each individual who was interested, answered any questions, rented the hotel rooms, and issued travel expense reimbursements.

It was a lot of work, and she wasn't sure she had the time to do it all again this year. During one of our board meetings, someone suggested that we form a scholarship committee. Jeanine had already been through the process once, so she was able to provide the committee with a detailed timeline of events. That made things much easier than it otherwise would have been.

The full board met about a month and a half before CSICon to pick the final applicants, and we had one available slot left. Midway through the meeting, Jeanine turned to me and said that she had talked with each board member over the last few months and it seemed to be the case that they all thought I should go to CSICon as a scholarship recipient. I had just graduated from Portland State University with a Master’s degree, and I was very active in the skeptical community, so I met the key requirements of any of our other scholarship applicants. Nevertheless, I was the committee chair, and this was a clear conflict of interest.

Only the board president or the treasurer could spend the organization’s money, and we had pretty much purchased everything in bulk so all the costs would be the same for each recipient. Still, I told the board that I wanted no part of this decision and left the room. They made the decision to send me to the conference anyway.

Introducing the (O4SR) Scholarship Winners

Daniel, Zach and James at CSICon 2017

Zachary Silvey: I’m a research analyst from Portland, Oregon, currently working in the tech industry. I was introduced to skepticism through the Skeptics Guide to the Universe when I was 14. From there I read as much Sagan, Dawkins, and Hawking as I could get my hands on. This interest in science and skepticism eventually led me to study behavioral neuroscience in college. I finally decided to attend my first Skeptics in the Pub in 2016 where I ultimately was introduced to Oregonians for Science and Reason, through which I was able to attend CSICon.

James Rodriguez: My name is James Rodriguez and I have been active in the skeptical community since I was a physics major in the early 2000s. As adjunct faculty in the physics department, I was the advisor for the newly forming humanist group on campus, and I volunteered with science-based organizations in Idaho. Before I met Jeanine DeNoma in 2014, I’d never heard of Oregonians for Science and Reason. However, O4SR seemed like a good fit for my overall interests, and I’ve been volunteering ever since.

Daniel Breitmayer: I’m 18 years old, currently enrolled at LBCC, and aspiring for a Pre-Nuclear Physics degree, though I enjoy spending more time at OSU with my girlfriend. My interests vary across physical/political/economic science, math, and philosophy, but physical science is certainly my foundation when exploring all kinds of topics. I really enjoy playing devil’s advocate, and I think it’s important to discuss avenues of thinking that are just unconventional enough that perspective and humility can make their way to the forefront of conversation.

Why are you interested in the topic of skepticism?

Silvey: Skepticism interested me initially because of how empowering it was as a framework for making decisions and understanding the world.

Rodriguez: When, as an undergraduate student, I learned about homeopathy, my mind was blown. I knew enough about the way matter worked to be able to say that homeopathy had no basis in reality. But people believed it to be true. What was more egregious was that those who peddled homeopathy made a lot of money selling something that was basically water. Clearly science and the scientific method had utility that went beyond numbers and the lab. To get at what’s actually useful to society, we have to adopt a more skeptical mindset and be willing to subject claims to some kind of systematic test so that we can figure out whether they are true.

Breitmayer: I wasn’t really subsumed under the definitive community or philosophy of skepticism until attending this event, but my answer for how I would utilize this mindset is the casual one: sustaining incredulity to the exploits of human nature and avoiding misinformation.

Were you familiar with the CSICon speakers in advance?

Silvey: I was familiar with about half of the speakers, many of whom have been guests on SGU or other skeptic podcasts.

Rodriguez: I listen to a lot of podcasts and a significant number of the speakers have rotated on and off them over the years. I have also read pretty much everything written by authors in our movement since my first Richard Dawkins book as an undergraduate student. That being said, CSICon was my first exposure to Britt Hermes’s story, and the Science Moms Movie.

Breitmayer: I learned about Lawrence Krauss a few weeks before attending CSICon, and I really enjoyed what he had to say about physics. It was a pleasure to meet him and read his book. As far as Richard Dawkins goes, I knew he was a controversial public intellectual but never delved deep into his ideas on atheism and evolutionary biology until going to this event—the latter is really fascinating. All of the other figures were completely new to me.

What did you expect from the conference?

Daniel and Joe Nickell
Photo by: James Rodriguez

Silvey: I expected to meet like-minded people, network with other activists, and learn from the speakers.

Rodriguez: I think the board made the decision to send me to the conference because they were hoping to provide some professional development and networking that would be invaluable to anyone doing our work in Oregon. For me, I was hoping to learn some new information, meet some interesting people, and network with other skeptics who live across the country.

Breitmayer: I didn’t quite know what to expect from the conference. CSICon is clearly for a community of individuals who prioritize critical thinking and skepticism, but apart from the basic predictions of everyone’s average temperament, it’s hard to guess what everyone and everything is going to include. From what I knew at the time, there wasn’t a way I would be able to predict that there would be talks about the history of the Colosseum, the misconception of GMOs, exploited gambling fallacies, neutron star collisions, and various other wonderful topics.

What did you discover?

Silvey: I discovered that this community is one of the most welcoming I have experienced. For some reason I expected to not be able to hang with all the PhDs and long-time members of the community. I was pleasantly surprised when I encountered zero elitism and was welcomed with open arms by everyone I met.

Rodriguez: I sat in the audience next to Richard Dawkins, and I got the chance to have my picture taken with members of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. I also gained a new understanding of naturopathy from an insider’s perspective, and I gained a deeper understanding of the science behind GMOs. Finally, I was given the opportunity to join the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project.

Breitmayer: I found an amalgam of eccentricity, aristocracy, untamed intellectuality, openness, intrigue, maybe some hubris here and there, and so many *widely* varying discussions, some that ended up keeping me on the conference floor until midnight, talking with strangers about particle/wave dualities.

Rewarding moments? Highlights?

James and SGU

Silvey: Seeing a live taping of SGU was a big moment for me. I have been listening to them for nearly half my life; being in the room with them was a bit surreal. I was expecting to be informed and even entertained by the presenters; I wasn’t expecting to be moved. Hearing Britt Hermes talk about her journey out of pseudoscience and into skepticism was inspiring; seeing the Science Moms documentary and then attending the panel was moving.

Rodriguez: For me the most rewarding part of the conference was having lots of conversations with other skeptics.

Breitmayer: All of the people I met and spoke to, as well as the insight, perspective, and food for thought that I was able to experience.

Do you feel this was rewarding?

Silvey: The experience was very cool. I think most of us in the community only ever interact through articles, podcasts, and tweets. Being in the same room as some of the most influential minds in the movement was an incredible experience. One I would recommend to anyone who considers themselves a skeptic.

Rodriguez: All of my experiences at the conference were very rewarding. I am grateful to the board of O4SR for making the decision to send me, and I hope to continue doing my part in the future to ensure that other Oregonians have the opportunity to go.

Breitmayer: Undoubtedly.

What do you think the community should be doing to involve more people ... students?

Silvey: Engaging with students and other young people where they are is key in my opinion. Working with social media influences who are involved in the sciences to expose the movement to younger minds would be huge. The community of science communicators on YouTube is huge and ever expanding, if an organization such as the Center for Inquiry worked with these creators to make skeptical content they would reach a completely new audience.

Rodriguez: Most of our local community organizations already hold low cost lectures and meetups, but I think we also need to make an effort to reach outside of our regular memberships. We should table at events or encourage those who know us to talk to friends and family members about who we are. If there are organizations that have been successful in bringing in new people, we should learn about what they’re doing so that we can see if some of those activities will work for us. We should also be open to talking to the people who keep coming to our events so that we can learn about what works for them. Finally, I think we should talk to younger skeptics in our organizations about what brought them into the movement so that we can better understand their motivations and, perhaps, the motivations of their peers.

Breitmayer: What’s difficult about this question is that we’re talking about a marginal community. While skepticism and critical thinking can always become more prevalent, there are only so many individuals willing to drop their responsibilities to explore terrain like this, especially because this event takes place during the school season. Reaching out to public schools to consolidate the stand-out nerds always sounds like a good idea, but it can only go so far outside of academic institutions because it’s hard to hear about it otherwise; I didn’t know about CSICon until my aunt recommended that I register for this scholarship. But, overall, hit the students where they spend the most time in creative ways, and that may bring the best results

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As you can see, it’s a delight learning more about these people. I felt moved to read how they left inspired and motivated to be more involved. We long-timers forget how intimidating we can be; we seem to know everyone and move with confidence though these conferences. I was really moved to read Zachary’s comment that he felt very welcomed and was surprised to find “zero elitism” amongst the community. That made me smile.

What deeply saddens me is that since my 2017 article about bringing more students to CSICon (and other skeptic conferences) no one has reached out to Jeanine DeNoma or the O4SR for more information about how to offer scholarships to people in their skeptic groups. I didn’t directly ask for donations to O4SR to help them sponsor more people in the future, but I thought that some of the readers might reach out to them and offer frequent flyer miles or money to help. No one did.

Look people, we are not going to get anywhere with growing our movement, encouraging new voices, and making real change if we don’t join together and make an effort. My group, About Time, is an umbrella non-profit that oversees the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project, Monterey County Skeptics, as well as the various investigations I run concerning grief vampires and more. About Time is hoping to fund conference scholarships as well. See our website for more information about our activities and donation information. Here is the meet-up site for O4SR and their Facebook page. Let me be clear, we are both non-profits and would welcome donations to further our outreach. O4SR is more than happy to answer questions about setting up your own scholarships; it is more work than just handing people money, unless of course you want to go through an organization that is already set up to do so.

So, please join with me to welcome more people to our community, our conferences, and our activism. Thank you all for being so welcoming to our first-time conference attendees. If you are new and feel like you know no one, please reach out to myself or really anyone. The person sitting next to you at the conference is probably thinking the same thing: they wish they could know more people also. If you are attending CSICon 2018 (and why wouldn’t you), please join the Facebook social group for updates and information about what is happening, what to expect, and where people are gathering for a beer or coffee to hang out. We will always try to include one more chair at the table; just let someone know, please. We are just as eager to meet you as you are to meet us. Welcome.

Mr. Shaha’s Recipes for Wonder is a science book with a difference written by Alom Shaha, illustrated by Emily Robertson, and published by Scribble Kids Books. Shaha was born in Bangladesh but grew up in London; as a parent, teacher, science writer, and filmmaker, he has spent most of his professional life trying to share his passion for science and education with the public.

Shaha has produced, directed, and appeared in a number of television programs for broadcasters such as the BBC and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA) and the Nuffield Foundation. His new book Mr. Shaha’s Recipes for Wonder gives clear, step-by-step instructions for over fifteen experiments. Whether you’re a science star or just starting out, it will help you inspire young people to learn.

Alom Shaha: I had the idea of doing a science activity book while I was working for the Royal Institution on a video series called Experimental. The Royal Institution hired me to come up with videos to encourage parents to do science activities at home, and I was very lucky to have that job because it allowed me to sit and think about how I would approach this and how I could make videos that were different from the literally hundreds, if not thousands, of videos already out there. If you type in science activities for kids, or science experiments at home, you’ll get a list of hundreds. I watched many of these and I read lots and lots of science activity books.

What I noticed was they all had the same approach, which was to show you, usually, some kind of interesting physical phenomenon, give you instructions how to recreate it, and then give you a scientific explanation. I felt there was something missing. It struck me that none of these videos or books really involved any kind of experimentation or investigation; they missed one of the key aspects of science, which was kind of thinking about what is going on. They were giving you the answers, giving you the instructions for how to create a phenomenon, but not really allowing or encouraging children to think about what was going on.

The second thing that I felt was missing was giving parents information how to actually get the most out of these activities, so I very much approached this as a teacher. As you know, I’m still a science teacher, so I wanted to help parents teach their children, not just to do activities in a hands-on kind of way, but what I would call a minds-on kind of way.

So I ended up convincing the Royal Institution that what we should make were videos which were very different in look and feel to all the other videos out there, and I think if your listeners go and take a look at our films, that they’ll see how true that is. Our videos were made so that parents watching could model the teaching behavior that we showed in our films and encourage children to be thinking about what’s going on, as well as doing.

Kylie Sturgess: This is a book that is illustrated by Emily Robertson. She’s got the challenge of making it an attractive read, and I must imagine it was a very interesting collaboration. Can you tell us about how this book came together, to make it both beautiful looking as well as instructional?

Shaha: Well, the idea for a cookery book came up when I was having lunch with my agent. We were discussing the possibility of my writing a science activity book, and since we were having lunch, we started talking about cookery and so forth. It suddenly struck me that a recipe book approach would work really well because, obviously, science activity books do lay out instructions for doing activities, so that was where the idea for making it a recipe book came from.

Also, I was very keen to not have the word science in the main title of the book because I wanted to appeal to people who wouldn’t necessarily be attracted to something related to science, who wouldn’t necessarily identify as people who were interested in science. I wanted to appeal to a wider audience, and I think we’ve been quite successful with that actually.

That’s where the idea for a recipe book came from; I wanted the book to look and feel very different from any other science activity books out there. Very early on in the process, we agreed that the illustrations would be really important and a key to achieving that aim, and so, along with the publishers, I looked at a number of illustrators. Emily’s work just really stood out for me, and we all agreed that she was the person who could help us achieve this aim of giving the book a really different look, compared to all the other science activity books out there.

People have responded tremendously positively to Emily’s work, and I think we’ve absolutely achieved our goal of making a book that looks and feels very different. That’s also down to the amazing design work done by the people at Scribe.

Sturgess: You already mentioned the Royal Institution playing a part in the trialing of the activities. You’ve worked with them before a few times?

Shaha: I’ve had a long history with the Royal Institution. I think I first worked with them in my 20s, when I was doing a science communication masters at Imperial College. As part of that, I made a CD-ROM of the Faraday Museum, which is based in the Royal Institution, for part of a public exhibition at the Elephant and Castle, where I grew up.

I approached Professor Frank James, who is the world’s leading expert on Michael Faraday and he was just really kind and gave me his time, and advice, and help then, and then somehow I maintained a relationship with the institution doing little bits of work here and there, working with Christmas lecturers and working on small bits of science of communication. But, really, it was a couple of years ago when they asked me to develop Experimental that I really became part of the family there.

Sturgess: At the start of the book, you write about something I’ve heard you discuss before in science communication: that curiosity is one thing, but it’s skills and knowledge that come through guidance by other people, such as teachers, parents. Have you seen a development in how you communicate science during your career?

Shaha: Yes, I think I’ve definitely been on a journey. I’ve been doing science communication close to twenty years, I guess, and like most science communicators, as I’ve progressed, my thinking has, I hope, deepened and developed. I certainly, in the early days, like many science communicators, I probably had ... what’s called the empty bucket or the deficit model approach, where I just thought it was important to tell people about science, but I think my approach has changed hugely since then. I’m not so much interested in telling people the so-called interesting facts that science has given us, but much more about getting them to engage with it for themselves, and that’s really what the book is about.

It’s about encouraging parents to embrace science as a cultural activity in the same way that they embrace art and music and literature. Most parents are perfectly comfortable reading to their children or .... You know, as we’re having this conversation, my wife’s in the other room with our daughter, doing some arts and crafts!

And, for me, science is not just about mixing chemicals in beakers or measuring the acceleration due to gravity. It’s a kind of way of looking closely at the world and asking good questions about it and trying to find out those answers. What I think parents can do is encourage their children to take an interest in the natural world and ask questions which can be answered by observation and experimentation and, to me, that’s doing science.

What I don’t think is doing science is reading some instructions in a book, which tell you how to recreate a so-called exciting natural phenomenon, and then reading an explanation about it. I think that’s not doing science; that’s kind of passive engagement with science.

Sturgess: I’m looking forward to going over this book with my niece and having it open on the table, the same way I usually do with a recipe book. I’ll probably have to buy two copies at this rate! What has been the response by the target audience so far?

Shaha: I’ve done quite a few events now, working with parents and children, and events at which there have even been scientists in attendance, and I guess the highest praise I’ve received is from a scientist who said, “This has reminded me what science is about.” Also, I don’t know if you know Professor Alice Roberts, who is one of the UK’s most famous science television presenters and a practicing scientist? She’s been using it with her children and, to me, that’s just absolutely the highest praise we could have for the book.

What I think I’ve noticed is that the book is engaging with parents and saying to them, “Look, take this approach to the activities ...” and my suggested approach is that when you’re doing the activities, to talk about the activity with the children, particularly to ask questions about what’s going on, what could we change, how could we find this out?

This process of questioning, which is really at the heart of the book, I think can transform doing these hands-on activities into much more than a practical engagement and more of an intellectual engagement as well. Parents then notice that they enjoy the activity more and they certainly get a sense that they’re getting more out of it and that their children are getting more out of it. I can’t make any claims as to having collected data and so forth, so this is a nonscientific explanation. However, my sense is that by taking the approach that I encourage in my book, both parents and children will ultimately get more out of the activity, and that’s what people are telling me is happening. But, obviously, I can’t make any scientific claims about that, being a good scientist!

Sturgess: Well, I’m going to add to the data by adding a review on Amazon as soon as I can, after I’ve done the activities with some young friends. So thank you for talking to me, Alom!

Mr. Shaha’s Recipes for Wonder is available through Scribe Books worldwide.

Kenny Biddle lives in Pennsylvania and was a ghost hunter until he began questioning ghost photographs he and his peers kept shooting. He is a professional photographer, blogger, writer, and science enthusiast. He will be speaking at CSICon 2018 Thursday, October 26, Workshop 2A: The Investigators from 2–4 pm with Joe Nickell.

Susan Gerbic: Kenny, so much is going on in my life and in yours these days; we have to keep in touch more. I formally interviewed you for the ghost photography workshop you did at CSICon 2017. That was a blast and I learned a lot. A full-room also. You are doing a workshop again this year, but this time it is with Joe Nickell and you will be talking about the process of investigating. First tell readers a bit more about yourself; I’ll include last year’s article as well here.

Kenny Biddle: As you mentioned, I started out as a ghost hunter; yes, pretty much like the people on those TV shows. However, there came a point when I started questioning the alleged “evidence” I was getting ... because it seemed that every darn ghost hunter was getting all the same shit I was! As I learned more about the intricacies of photography, I began to understand how much I really didn’t know! So I became a sponge; I started reading all I could, not only on photography, but on investigative methods, science, critical thinking, and skepticism as well. In 2007, I self-published a small book called Orbs or Dust that presented readers with natural explanations (and simple experiments) for the many variations of ghostly photos. I kept learning, soaking up information—knowledge, research techniques, tips, and tricks—from authors such as Ben Radford, Joe Nickell, James Randi, James Alcock, Richard Wiseman, and the great Houdini. I started a blog in 2012 entitled I Am Kenny Biddle, not to be vain, but to let people know who they were talking to (many social media blogs don’t reveal who is running them). That same year I started a YouTube channel focusing on various paranormal topics.

I continued to learn; reading works from Sharon Hill, Mary Roach, Carl Sagan, and more. I began speaking at paranormal-themed events as the “token skeptic.” Although I had a rough start (I was a bit angry in the beginning of my skeptical career), I’ve developed a very good relationship with many paranormal enthusiasts (or “'believers”). I'm often invited to their conferences, events, and even meetings to offer a skeptical point of view and help them understand that not all skeptics are assholes; most of us are not only friendly but damn fun people. Over the last couple of years, I've had the opportunity to speak to several skeptical groups, and last year I hosted the photography workshop for CSICon, which was the highlight of my career up to that point! I've also began submitting articles to CSI on a more regular basis, focusing on paranormal topics such as ghost hunting gadgets, ghostly photographs, and deconstructing videos and documentaries.

Gerbic: Okay, tell us about the workshop, and I believe this is a dream of yours to work on something with Joe Nickell?

Biddle: I love Joe Nickell; the man is a wealth of knowledge, it's as simple as that. I've read much of his work and learned a great deal from him. Two years ago I had the opportunity to sit down and interview Joe for my YouTube channel, and what was supposed to be an hour or two visit, lasted the entire day and included a tour of his Skeptiseum, descriptions on how to make grand crop circles, his philosophies, and—most importantly—advice on how to be a better investigator. Since then, I've written Joe (old-school hand-written letters) and spoken to him over the phone several times, and he's always helped me when I've reached out. I recently spent a few days at the CSI offices in Buffalo, NY, with Joe, something we began planning at last year's CSICon. We started working on a few projects together and had a great time working together. Sorry, no hints on those yet; they're Top Secret.

The workshop is going to be broken into two parts; part one will go into the philosophy of why we investigate paranormal claims. We'll talk about the people we meet, why they believe they had a paranormal experience, and what drives us—as investigators—to keep looking into fantastic claims. Part two will get into the investigative strategies we use to solve mysteries. Every case is different, so no two can be solved—if they can be solved—in the same way. Sometimes it takes some way, way out-of-the-box thinking and ideas to uncover the clue that cracks the case ... and that's what we're going to talk about. Joe and I will relate a few cases in which an odd idea led to solving a mystery. The attendees are going to get a good mix of “old-school” traditional methods, modern Google-powered research techniques, and a few "I can't believe that freakin' worked" ideas. If you enjoy investigating this kind of thing, I think you're going to come away from this workshop better equipped to do so.

Gerbic: You were working on a couple books; one was an introspective of your time as a believer in the paranormal, and the other book is on ghost photography. I don’t know how you find the time, but give us an update on those books? What else have you got going on?

Biddle: All of them—two retrospective and the ghost photography—are still in progress. Since the last interview, things have really picked up; I've been writing more articles and have had the opportunity to speak at a lot more events over the last year. I've participated in a few projects for organizations that took a good chunk of time; unfortunately I can't reveal those yet (they are still ongoing). I work on the books when I can, usually around two in the morning (seriously), when my day finally calms down. I've teamed up with a friend, Chuck Sanders (a video editor), to help tackle the backload of video I've been trying to film for my YouTube channel. Oh, and I was also able to schedule a few investigations at alleged haunted houses that have actually welcomed having a skeptical investigation done. In between all of that, I attend paranormal-themed conferences to collect information on the latest trends, gadgets, methods, etc. Oh, I also fit my day job in there somewhere ...

Gerbic: You and I have a little secret; I don’t know how much we can reveal in this article, but maybe by the time this is published all will be known. I planned a grief vampire sting in January 2018 that happened pretty close by you. We are trying to catch a psychic hot-reading. We sent people into the venue with fake personalities tied to fake Facebook pages. When I realized that the psychic we were after was going to be doing a show near you, I knew I had to get you and Donna involved. And you recruited four more friends to help. We ended up sending six people to this psychic show, all of you with extensive backstories, most of which you didn’t know anything about. Your group supplied my team with selfies at the venue, which we turned around and added to the fake Facebook pages (that your group had no contact with). Donna was a blast with her bright blue wig! I thought for sure we were going to attract the attention of the psychic. Obviously, I can’t reveal what happened here until the main article comes out, but what a blast. I loved working with you all. What can you tell us about that story without revealing too much?

Biddle: You may have to edit this, since I'm not sure what “too much” might be, but I'll try to limit myself. First, it was great working on that project. There was an incredible amount of work done prior to the six of us arriving at the show. What went on behind-the-scenes took real dedication to pull together, and I was amazed when it was all over and we (myself and my team) learned the details. Although my team went in with only the minimal amount of information about our characters, we didn't go in unprepared; we got some great advice from Mark Edward, who is extremely familiar with how psychics operate.

The most difficult part of the entire operation was having to sit in the event and listen to the psychic prey on the grieving families, while sometimes giving an attitude. Not only was the psychic pretending to talk to these people's dead relatives, the psychic would blame the family if there were too many misses (or they "couldn't connect"). The psychic was acting like an asshole and these people were still believing whatever they said. I recognized the "psychic" techniques right away, so it was frustrating not to be able to engage in conversation with other attendees and explain what was really going on (and they should demand a refund).

At the end of it all, I did learn a few things about that type of psychic and the people that follow them. It inspired me to start researching this topic more by sitting for private readings and recording the sessions to analyze later. I sense an article in the future ...

Gerbic: You and Donna knocked it out of the park last year with your Halloween costumes. Did you see that the theme this year is pajamas? I don’t know what CSI is thinking; this will be very interesting. Of course, people can come without a costume or as something completely different. Do you agree, the Halloween party is not to be missed? I know it’s $50 extra but usually it comes with a free drink, karaoke from 8:00 to 10:00 I think. Last year’s theme of disco was hilarious. Four women (including myself) showed up with the exact same costume. I KNOW that won’t happen this year for you two.

Biddle: My wife and I have an unofficial PhD in “How to Party,” and we love to have fun. We go all out and make sure everyone enjoys the night. Our costumes fit in perfectly with the ‘70s disco theme, although I heard some people weren't happy with our choice of costumes, particularly Donna's—and that's a shame (for them). As science and skeptical advocates, we're serious most of the time. But damn, we're allowed to just have fun! There were some crazy costumes last year, and we didn't expect to win second place! We had a blast, even getting up on stage with you for some impromptu karaoke!

I learned this past week about the pajama party while I was at the Buffalo offices. Here's my thought on that: it makes it a hell of a lot easier to just fall in bed at the end of the night! There are so many choices too; there are a ton of adult “onesie” pajamas, from animals to superheroes. And you can customize the crap out of nightshirts: iron on a silly photo of your favorite skeptic and go crazy with the Bedazzler.

Is it worth it? Hell yeah! After the lectures and more professional type socializing during the conference, the Halloween party is a chance to really relax—drink, dance, sing (even if you can't), be silly ... in other words, have fun! I had a great time last year with everyone, and I expect nothing less this year.

Gerbic: I want to make sure to mention to readers, the workshops on Thursday are not to be missed. They are an extra $49, but they are worth it. Your workshop will run at the same time as William London’s “Numerical Hygiene” workshop. I really dislike having to choose these things, but that is the way it is. For brand new people attending their first CSICon, you should know to arrive on Wednesday or at least early on Thursday. Do not assume you will just be attending lectures then dinner and sleep, that’s not what happens. We are all over the place, with lots of great conversations and hanging out all over. Follow the conversations on CSICon’s Facebook feed. And make sure you stay until after breakfast on Monday; the stragglers always gather somewhere and trade favorite memories. Kenny, any tips you want to share?

Biddle: I don't like having to choose between one or the other either, but as you said, that's the way it is. Hell, I'd like to attend London's workshop too! I would suggest attendees plan on spending the entire time at the conference; forget ideas of having lunch somewhere else, skipping a lecture, or even taking a nap while the conference is going on. Take it all in. There are always great conversations going on during the breaks. Last year, Donna and I had a long conversation with Jay Novella who we had just met for the first time (super nice guy). Later on, I got involved with Jim Underdown and Rob Palmer investigating (and solving) a small mystery during a break. While talking to Joe Nickell, Brian Dunning walked up and said he was looking for me! You just never know what will come up or who will walk by. I simply don't leave the conference until they kick me out.

If you spent time on social media a few weeks ago, you may have seen headlines about a recent study at Arizona State University that found, among other things, that college men think they’re smarter than women.

I first noticed it when an NBC News.com story titled “Men Think They’re Smarter Than Women in College Experiment” was shared on a friend’s social media page. And it wasn’t just NBC News; an April 8, 2018, Newshub.com headline by Dan Slatherley read, “Men Think They’re Brainer Than Women, Even When They’re Not—Study”; another, on StartsAtSixty.com, read “Men Think They’re Smarter Than Women, Even When They’re Not: Study,” and below that a photo caption read, “A study has confirmed that men think they’re smarter than women.”

An ABC Radio show on April 6 hosted by Patricia Karvelas was titled “Why Men Think They Are Smarter Than Women.” The British Evening Standard stated that “Men in Science Think They Are More Intelligent Than Female Counterparts, Study Reveals,” going on to explain that “Men in science overestimate their own intelligence and underestimate the intelligence of their female peers, a new study revealed.” And so on; you get the idea.

Accurate or not, it was a typical clickbait article whose headline was carefully crafted to elicit “conversation,” annoyance, exasperation, and—perchance—outrage. The commenters on these posts and stories, in social media-conditioned Pavlovian responses, played their roles by offering personal anecdotes about boorish men they’d encountered who had underestimated women’s intelligence in academic and work settings.

Citing published research—instead of, for example, the ever-present personal opinion—is of course helpful when engaging in “the national conversation” about such topics. But only if that study is correct and the takeaway is accurate; otherwise it’s merely misinformation given legs by confirmation bias. It was clear from the comments on the posts I saw that none of posters had read past the headline, which wouldn’t (necessarily) have been a problem—assuming it was accurate.

A Closer Look

I didn’t necessarily doubt the finding—it’s certainly plausible that a study found college men think they’re smarter than their female peers—but having seen the findings in peer-reviewed journals often get mangled and twisted in the dumbing-down journey from journal study to press release to news item to social media post, I was curious to read about the conditions under which the findings emerged.

It’s Skepticism and Science Literacy 101. If a study finds that substance X causes cancer, the significance of the research invariably lies in the details: What substance and how much of it? What type of cancer, and in what animals? If an artificial sweetener is found to cause cancer, are we talking humans drinking the equivalent of two diet sodas a day, or are we talking about a rat being injected with the equivalent of a hundred diet sodas a day? Are the rats especially prone to cancers with or without exposure to substance X? And so on. These are not nit-picky pedantic questions but instead central to a valid research design and therefore valid findings. Because of the perils of confirmation bias, it’s important to closely examine the methods and results in all studies a person cites or references, not just those our gut tells us to challenge.

I read the NBC News article (it took about 90 seconds) and found no reference at all to any research findings indicating that men think they’re smarter than women. Wondering if the relevant information in the headline had somehow been dropped from the article, I then clicked on the link to the research upon which the news article was based. The study, “Who perceives they are smarter? Exploring the influence of student characteristics on student academic self-concept in physiology,” was conducted by Katelyn M. Cooper, Anna Krieg, and Sara E. Brownell of Arizona State University (ASU), and published in the June 2018 issue of Advances in Physiology Education (Volume 42, Issue 2). It is open access and can be read in full here.

The study involved 244 students in an upper-level physiology course who were given questionnaires about their self-concept as students. Variables studied included gender, English proficiency, race/ethnicity, anxiety level, and transfer status (i.e., if they were new to the campus from a two-year program). “Using a survey, students self-reported how smart they perceived themselves to be in the context of physiology relative to the whole class and relative to their groupmate, the student with whom they worked most closely in class.”

I read through the study (beginning with the Abstract, then the Conclusions, then the Results, and then the rest) and was still unable to find any conclusion suggesting that overall the men in the study believed they were smarter than the women. The closest I could find was a result that read, “When they asked students to ask if they were smarter than their classmates, the average male student thinks he is smarter than 66 percent of the class, while the average female student thinks she is smarter than 54 percent of the class.” While the news headlines generalized the results to overall intelligence, the students were asked how smart they thought they were compared only to their classmates (not men and women in general), and specifically on the subject of physiology (not general intelligence).

Thus the headline could just as easily have read, “Women Think They’re Smarter Than Men in College Experiment.” Both men and women said they were smarter than their classmates (of both genders); there is an 11 percent difference (66 percent for men versus 54 percent for women, all of whom have a 3.3 GPA). That is a significant difference but doesn’t logically lead to the headlines. “Most” (which is implied by grouping the participants by gender) is greater than 50 percent, which in this case applies to both genders (see Figure 1, below).

Figure 1

When I pointed this out, my friend replied, “Haven’t had a chance to read the study but I assumed the headline was in regards to this result: ‘The students worked in groups and as partners and when asked to rate themselves compared to their closest workmate, the men thought they’d be smarter than 61 percent of their colleagues. Women put the number closer to 33 percent.’”

I had seen that as well, but there was no indication that the “closest workmate” was of a different gender; in fact the study said: “Using a survey, students self-reported how smart they perceived themselves to be in the context of physiology relative to the whole class and relative to their groupmate, the student with whom they worked most closely in class.” Without an indication of the gender that each gender thinks they’re smarter than, we can’t tell whether the headline “Men Think They’re Smarter Than Women” is accurate. An accurate headline might be something like “More Men Than Women Think They’re Smarter Than Their Colleagues,” which is not the same measure. The apparent disparity in self-confidence between the genders found in the study is concerning, but irrelevant to the headlines the study spawned: the study says nothing about men thinking they’re smarter than women.

The authors acknowledge an important potential bias in the research design: “reporting on how smart one feels compared with another person may cause students to answer the question in a socially desirable way.” Thus the findings could be attributable not to internalized doubts about their knowledge of academic physiology but instead some people not wanting to appear arrogant or superior to their classmates. This same issue has plagued previous studies involving self-reporting of appearance, for example when women avoid telling researchers they consider themselves “beautiful.” As Autumn Whitefield-Madrano wrote in her book Face Value: The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women’s Lives, “We [women] learn that women aren’t supposed to refer to themselves with words bolder than reasonably attractive” lest they be seen as vain (p. 58). For more see Whitefield-Madrano’s appearance on the Point of Inquiry podcast, interviewed by Lindsay Beyerstein in 2016.

This bias may help explain the disparity between studies that find that many women don’t call themselves beautiful, yet 90 peercent nonetheless report that they are satisfied with their physical attractiveness and beauty (see, for example, the Dove campaign’s The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report).

In the end my friend conceded that the headline was incorrect and didn’t accurately reflect what the study found. I noticed that the dozen or more comments on the thread had all clearly been based on, and responding to, the faulty headline instead of any result that had appeared in the study.

Media and Science Literacy in the Age of Clicks

So what happened? How did dozens of headlines from reputable news organizations from around the world get it wrong? I’m not suggesting that NBC News or the other news outlets have a hidden agenda in trying to portray men and women as more adversaries than allies. As Hanlon’s Razor advises, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” (or, more charitably, incompetence).

In the news media, headlines are often incomplete and/or grossly oversimplified at best, and flat-out wrong at worst. It’s an inevitable editorial necessity when trying to convey the gist of a potentially complex story in only a few words. (Note, however, that the error wasn’t limited to the headlines; several of the news stories led with factually wrong introductory statements.) There’s also a failure of science literacy as well, with many stories written directly from a press release by journalists who didn’t read (or read but didn’t understand) the study. It is encouraging to note that the mistake was not universal; other news outlets offered more accurate and nuanced headlines about the Cooper, Krieg, and Brownell ASU study.

Aside from the poor journalism and misreporting of scientific findings, the more interesting issue is how the headlines were crafted to pit men and women against each other, emphasizing gender oppression. Saying that “Science shows” or “Study finds” that men think they’re smarter than women not only is factually false but counterproductive and divisive. As social psychologist and CFI fellow Carol Tavris notes in her pioneering book The Mismeasure of Woman, men and women are far more alike than different. “By regarding masculinity and femininity as polar opposites, with one side usually better than the other, we forget that, in practice, most of us ‘do’ both ... . Many people persist in believing that men and women differ in important qualities, in spite of innumerable studies that have failed to pin these qualities down and keep them there ... . But people love sex differences ... they love to notice and identify ways in which the sexes seem to differ psychologically, and then to complain or laugh about what ‘women’ are or what ‘men’ do” (p. 293, 288).

The problem is partly sloppy journalism, but it’s also the desire for clicks. Web content editors know that provocative headlines like “Men Think They’re Smarter Than Women” are going to be shared, discussed, and debated in a way that less sensational (and more accurate) ones won’t. Media literacy has many facets, and in the digital age the lessons are more important than ever. Basic guidelines such as reading past the headline, consulting primary sources, and resisting the temptation to share dubious stories on social media often go out the window when stories fit our preconceived assumptions and biases. We all—and especially skeptics—like to think we’re too smart or media savvy to be misled, but as Mark Twain (is said to have) said, “It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

Though the public loves to blame the news media for misinformation—and deservedly so—they are less keen to see the culprit in the mirror. Many people, especially on social media, fail to recognize that they have become de facto news outlets through the stories and posts they share. As Faye Flam noted in a Bloomberg piece about fake news, “False stories are easier than ever to generate and spread. In decades past ... people trusted established newspapers, magazines and TV news programs. But trust in the mainstream media has declined massively over the past 20 years, while a majority of Americans now get news from Facebook.” Flam does not mean Facebook itself, of course, but instead people on Facebook—people like you and I.

Yes, the news media help spread myriad “fake news” stories—but they are gleefully aided by ordinary people like us. We cannot control what news organizations (or anyone else) publishes or puts online. But we can—and indeed have an obligation to—help stop the spread of misinformation in all its forms. It can be as simple as not forwarding, liking, or sharing that dubious news story (especially if it seems crafted to encourage social outrage) before checking the facts. It’s too easy, especially in the heat of righteous indignation, to share and spread misinformation. If news organizations can’t or won’t take responsibility, we as netizens can take that power by refusing to be a conduit for these and other varieties of fake news—or, better yet, fact checking it. We often spread these stories on social media to let others know how awful or outrageous we find it, but sharing misinformation can add to the problem instead of helping.

Men and women need to work together to address social problems including sexism and misogyny, and wrongly telling women that new research found more proof that men think women are intellectually inferior isn’t doing anyone any favors. There are enough legitimate, actual findings about substantive sexism in America that journalists don’t need to manufacture new ones to drive traffic for ad revenue.

One goal of the ASU study was to help find ways to improve self-confidence in female science students. Perhaps one way to encourage women in the sciences is to not misrepresent their research in news and social media and to not give them the notion that science has proven they face a wall of male peers inherently inclined to dismiss them.

Susan Gerbic: Joseph, it’s so nice to meet you. I think this is your first CSICon; I should warn you that this will be a blast. People are very friendly, and they ask great questions. Also, there is a Halloween party to prepare for; the theme this year is pajamas. Oh dear! I see you have a PhD in political science from the University of Arizona and are from the East Coast. Your academic career shows that you have moved around a lot. Please tell us more about yourself.

Joseph Uscinski: I am looking forward to it! I can’t wait to meet everyone and share ideas.

I was born in Connecticut and lived there until 1983 when my family moved to New Hampshire during the big defense boom of the early 1980s. This put me into a weird culture shock because being from Connecticut, I was a Yankees fan. But New Hampshire was Red Sox country. I faced years of torment from classmates. Keep in mind, the Red Sox back then were the biggest losers on the planet, and their fans were terribly angry. Once they started wining in 2004, they went into therapy to deal with the fact that they were no longer losers. Because of this, it’s much easier to visit home now, even though I don’t much.

I went to a very small liberal arts college in northern New Hampshire. I was there for seven years, mostly because I was in a fraternity and partied too much. When I graduated, people made fun of me and said “seven years, you should be a doctor by now.” Just to spite them, I went on to get a doctorate. So, I moved to Tucson where I did my graduate work in political science. After finishing there in 2007, I was hired by University of Miami where I have remained for more than a decade.

Gerbic: Conspiracy theories, oh my! I remember reading about the Lincoln assassination. People believed all kinds of things about that assassination—that Booth wasn’t the killer, that the government was involved, and all kinds of things. I understand that at the time it was difficult to get the story right with word of mouth spreading faster than they could get the paper printed. I suppose the media sensationalized even then. It seemed to me that the problem with conspiracy theories is that it is mostly because of bad reporting. But from what I understand you have a book out with Joseph Parent called American Conspiracy Theories with a different hypothesis: that people who feel like they are losing power in their lives are more likely be believe that “others” are causing the problem and will find someone to blame. Can you tell us more about this idea of “losers”?

Uscinski: It’s funny that you mention the Lincoln assassination because there was a conspiracy to kill Lincoln and a few others. My understanding is that much of the plan failed (except for killing Lincoln), and that is an important lesson: intentions don’t translate neatly into actions, and the even the best laid plans fail. Conspiracies happen, and powerful people are plotting to do evil things right now. But that doesn’t mean that their plans will come to fruition or that they are engaging in the machinations we think they are engaging in. Just as plots fail, conspiracy theorists can be wrong.

In my research, I found that in the U.S., conspiracy theories tend to swing back and forth. When a Democrat is in the White House, the most resonant conspiracy theories accuse Democrats and their allies of conspiring. When a Republican is in the White House, the accusations focus on Republicans and their allies. 

Think of the past few decades. When Bush was in office, the country was most concerned about Bush, Cheney, Halliburton, Blackwater, etc…. When Obama came to power, the country focused more on the “fact” that Obama was a secret communist Muslim who faked his birth certificate. Now, we are concerned about Trump-Russia collusion. As power swings back and forth, so do conspiracy theories.

But beyond the partisan conspiracy theories, people who are on the outside of the establishment tend to believe in conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are in many ways a battle between insiders and outsiders over truth. The insiders should win most of the time, and they do. The inside establishment is about science, experts, and institutions; outsiders don’t have those advantages. But sometimes the experts can be wrong, and conspiracy theorists can provide a public good by pressing for appeals. 

On the other hand, conspiracy theorists can challenge the establishment in a way that becomes degenerative. Think of climate change for example: the deniers don’t have the data, the experts, the published science, or the institutions on their side. They can’t deny climate change by claiming that they have more or better scientists or data on their side. The only way they can compete is with conspiracy theories undermining the role of the data, the experts, the published science, or the institutions. By claiming that the established way of making claims (data and science) is corrupt, conspiracy theorists can change the gamified to favor themselves. This is why, in the U.S., the debate is “Is climate change real?” as opposed to “What should we do about climate change?”

Gerbic: I spend a ton of my time educating people about Wikipedia. One of the things that amazed me most was this notion that “they” are controlling Wikipedia. I’ve heard this from the paranormal community a lot, but I’ve heard this from the skeptic and science community also. Someone tries to make an edit and it’s removed, and I hear complaints that “someone” is trying to shut them down. Usually I can explain that they aren’t following the rules of Wikipedia and although anyone can edit Wikipedia, it does not mean that that edit will stick. It’s most likely that they did it wrong. It’s so odd that they immediately go to the conspiracy angle rather than that they just don’t know how Wikipedia works. Your thoughts?

Uscinski: Some people see events and circumstances and immediately think that a conspiracy is behind them. Other people don’t. Our propensity to see conspiracies lurking behind every corner is largely determined by processes that occurred during our formative years. People’s worldviews are solidified as they move into adulthood. I will spend most of my talk discussing this.

Gerbic: I understand that in 2015 in Miami you organized the first international conspiracy theory conference. That must have been a blast! It must have been difficult to enjoy yourselves with all the obvious jokes about wearing tin foil hats and about Men in Black being in the audience. Yet this is a very serious topic that we are only beginning to understand. And making fun of people isn’t going to help. Tell us more about this conference.

Uscinski: Studying conspiracy theories is a multi-disciplinary venture. That is what makes it so much fun! Scholars from psychology, philosophy, sociology, communications, political science, economics, and history all have something to say. Getting scholars together from the various disciplines was quite a blast. There are quite a few disagreements and some outbursts. I found out that the line between people who believe conspiracy theories and people who study conspiracy theories is sometimes very fuzzy.

Gerbic: I suppose it only seems like conspiracy theories are more prevalent because of social media? YouTube just a few months ago announced at a conference that they are going to deal with conspiracy theory videos by adding the Wikipedia page explaining why it is nonsense beside the video. Of course, YouTube, this wealthy company, didn’t tell Wikipedia, a completely volunteer organization, anything about it first. What ideas are you championing? Is there hope that we can get this under control?

Uscinski: Conspiracy theories are a natural part of life. Trying to suppress them at the institutional level can have terrible unintended consequences. This scheme could backfire by encouraging conspiracy theorists to start editing Wikipedia more.

As much as I don’t like the negative consequences of conspiracy theories, I am uneasy with the current moral panic about conspiracy theories and the internet. People are giving away their freedom to communicate to politicians who are more than happy to take control of the internet.

Gerbic: Okay, I need to know about this idea that dogs are receiving an immense amount of media coverage. I would believe it about cats, but what is going on?

Uscinski: My coauthors and I studied the effect of having a dog in a news event. That news events with dogs get more coverage in local papers than non-dog events. For example, imagine search and “sniff” cases at the Supreme Court getting more coverage than search and seizure cases. The coverage the article received after it was published attests to its findings: it was reported by the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and the Boston Globe. I think it was the first peer-reviewed political science journal article to be featured on a broadcast nightly news program; it was the subject of a three-minute segment on NBC Nightly News. 

Gerbic: So, I have to ask, what is your favorite conspiracy theory? Is there one you really wish were true?

Uscinski: My definition of conspiracy theories excludes wishful thinking, such as scientists are secretly curing cancer for the good of all mankind. I tend to focus on theories that discuss harm. So, I really don’t want any of them to be true.

Gerbic: We have an amazing line-up this year at CSICon. You will be speaking on Saturday, October 20, at 11:00 am. This is a very diverse group. What lectures are you looking forward to? 

Uscinski: Obviously Dawkins and Pinker. I have never seen them in person, so I am very excited about that. I am excited to meet John Cook—we both study climate change opinions and we have shared a coauthor, Stephan Lewandowsky, in the past. Dan Kahan is another speaker I can’t wait to meet. His work on climate change opinions is awesome.

Gerbic: I should warn you since you have spent a lot of time in Florida and Arizona, pretty hot places, that Las Vegas in October is still warm but the conference areas are always chilly. Bring a jacket and a robe to wear over your pajamas at the party. This year we are using a new location, the Westgate Resort and Casino. I’m not sure what to expect from that facility, but CSICon is always great. Also, show up on Wednesday or very early on Thursday; you don’t want to miss the workshops. And don’t go home until Monday after breakfast—trust me on this. All kinds of great people hang out in between the lectures. Follow what is going on where and when on the CSICon Facebook page. I look forward to meeting you in person, Joseph.

Uscinski: Thanks. I have decided to wear a pajama costume the whole conference.

Fox 29 reported on an alleged Bigfoot sighting that took place somewhere in the New Jersey Pine Barrens near Browns Mill in Burlington County. This is a heavily forested area of over one million acres that was designated as the Pinelands National Reserve by Congress in 1978, making it the nation's first national reserve.

In the report from Fox 29, both in article and video segment formats, an unidentified woman claims:

Whatever this was had, literally, leaped across the entire road. It was about six feet tall. Like a light-colored hair, like a deer, but I’m like it certainly wasn’t a deer because it had its legs splayed and it almost looked like a ballerina leaping across the road. Like, even to this day, I am still trying to process exactly what it was that I saw. It’s just hard for me to fathom it, I guess you could say.

The article goes on to explain that she was off road, and she saw the creature in her rearview mirror.

There are several issues with her statement; first, she provides an approximate height of the creature (about six feet). This is quite a remarkable achievement since she viewed the creature in the rearview mirror while driving off road and with the creature at an unknown distance behind the vehicle. Humans are not good at judging the size of unknown objects at a distance, much less one that is reversed and displayed in a small mirror. Studies that tested perception of size and distance found that errors frequently occur in both children and adults (Hagan and Glick 1977), while children tend to undercompensate and adults tend to overcompensate (Granrud 2009).

Given that drivers usually glance at their rearview mirrors, chances are the witness only had a one or two second (if that) look at the small, reflected image in the rearview mirror (rather than directly at the creature). Furthermore, the witness claims the creature had its legs splayed and "looked like a ballerina leaping across the road." With the legs spread out and apart, it would be even more difficult to determine the creature's height, since it was not standing and was in fact airborne at the time.

The witness also states it had light-colored hair "like a deer." Yet she is certain it wasn't a deer "because it had its legs splayed." This explanation does not support her conclusion, since deer are known to leap across fences, gates, walls, and even roads with their legs splayed. A Google search for "leaping deer" will return hundreds of images demonstrating this. In addition, the whitetail deer, known to be present in the Pine Barrens, can leap over fences nine feet tall and across thirty-foot distances when at a run (Big Game Logic 2015). This is more than enough to clear a dirt road, which the witness does mention in her statement.

What really stands out is the witness's statement that "I am still trying to process exactly what it was that I saw." She's not quoted in the article actually claiming it was a Bigfoot, nor does she state this when the reporter calls her on the phone in the accompanying video segment. She clearly states "whatever this was" when referring to the creature, never stating she thought it was a Bigfoot. According to her statements, she doesn't know what she saw—and that's as far as it should have gone. Unfortunately, the witness called Eric Spinner, the New Jersey representative for the National Bigfoot Field Research Organization. This ultimately led to the news media covering the story with the sensationalized headline of "Was Bigfoot Sighted in the New Jersey Pine Barrens?" And in the video segment, it is Hank Flynn, the reporter, who claims "she said she saw Bigfoot.”

The reporter then visits with Eric Spinner, who is asked if he found the witness's claims credible. Spinner responds, "I do, for a couple of reasons. Not only is it uncommon for somebody to report seeing it in their rearview mirror, as she did, but also because they weren’t out there looking for Bigfoot. They were just out enjoying a nice day out in the woods with the dog. Four-wheeling out in the woods. And this happened."

The fact that someone sees an unidentified animal in their review mirror is not evidence of said animal being a mythological creature such as Bigfoot. All we can gather from this is the witness saw a quick glimpse of an animal in her rearview mirror when she glanced at it while driving forward. There is absolutely no detail in that scenario to which we can extrapolate the report to that of a Bigfoot.

Another reason Spinner finds the story credible centers on the fact that the witness (and her husband) were not out looking for Bigfoot at the time. Instead of lending credibility to a Bigfoot sighting, this only shows the witnesses were (quite appropriately) paying attention to the road ahead of them and having fun, rather than investigating a mysterious creature. There is no mention in the article or news segment that the witness (or her husband) backed up to see what the creature might have been or any further investigation at all. Relying on the idea that "they weren't looking for Bigfoot" as meaning "credible sighting for Bigfoot" is nothing more than poor logic based on a belief-biased approach to the mystery.

To be fair, news segments and articles are usually edited for time and space, so there may well be further information that has not been made available. Unfortunately, we cannot speculate on what may or may not be … we can only work from the information available to us at this time. There was no immediate further action taken at the time of the sighting to try and figure out what was seen. The Bigfoot researcher accepted the story at face value, letting his biases guide him in concluding the story was a credible sighting of Bigfoot. However, based on quotes from the witness, the most likely conclusion is that she caught a quick glance of a deer leaping across the road. The experience happened too fast for her to understand what was seen, and the media sensationalized the story.

The bottom line: we have a plausible idea of what she saw, but we just don't know for sure. Until new information comes to light, that's the only conclusion we can come to.

References

• Big Game Logic. 2015. Whitetail Deer Facts. https://www.biggamelogic.com/Articles-News/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/296/Whitetail-Deer-Facts; accessed on May 3, 2018
• Hagen, Margaret, and Rochelle Glick. 1977. Pictorial perspective: perception of size, linear, and texture perspective in children and adults. Perception, 1977, volume 6, pages 675–684.
• Granrud, Carl. 2009. Development of size constancy in children: A test of the Metacognitive Theory. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics. April 2009, Vol. 71, Issue 3, pages 644–654.

Modelo a tamaño real de un A-12 puesto en lo alto de un pilar en el Área 51 para las pruebas de radar. Foto: CIA.

Cualquier misterio gana si hay nazis de por medio. Bien lo saben las revistas esotéricas españolas, que desde hace décadas lucen cada dos por tres en sus portadas a Adolf Hitler o algún símbolo nazi para relacionar ese régimen con el Grial, el ocultismo, los platillos volantes, el Arca de la Alianza, las sectas… En su libro Área 51. La historia jamás contada de la base militar más secreta de América (2011), recientemente traducido al español, la periodista estadounidense Annie Jacobsen va más allá y achaca el caso de Roswell a un plan del sanguinario Iósif Stalin en el que habría participado el no menos sanguinario Josef Mengele. Comunistas, nazis y platillos volantes, ¿se puede pedir más?

El diario Roswell Daily Record informó el 8 de julio de 1947 en su primera página de que el Ejército estadounidense tenía en su poder un platillo volante que se había estrellado en un rancho cercano a Roswell, Nuevo México. Al día siguiente, sin embargo, los militares dijeron que los restos correspondían en realidad a piezas de un globo meteorológico y mostraron a la Prensa unos trozos de madera de balsa y papel de aluminio. Nadie creyó entonces que una nave extraterrestre se hubiera accidentado cerca de Roswell, y el caso cayó en el olvido hasta 1980, cuando Charles Berlitz y William Moore publicaron El incidente, libro en el que sostenían que no sólo se habían recuperado los restos de un ingenio de otro mundo, sino también cuerpos de sus tripulantes. Lo cierto es que los militares habían mentido en 1947 al decir que había caído un globo meteorológico. No había ocurrido eso. Según información desclasificada en 1994, los restos de Roswell correspondían al globo número 4 del proyecto ultrasecreto Mogul, cuyo objetivo era detectar las ondas sonoras de las primeras pruebas nucleares soviéticas. Jacobsen afirma ahora que el platillo volante de Roswell fue una aeronave fabricada en la Unión Soviética y tripulada por seres humanos víctimas de experimentos del doctor Mengele.

“No eran extraterrestres. Ni tampoco eran aviadores convencidos. Eran conejillos de indias humanos. Eran personas inusualmente bajitas para ser pilotos, y parecían niños. No medirían más de un metro y medio de altura”, escribe. Aquellos humanos, de los que sobrevivieron dos “en estado comatoso”, tenían “unas cabezas muy grandes y el contorno de sus ojos tampoco era normal”. Sus restos y los de la nave acabaron en el Área 51, donde los estudiaron cinco ingenieros que descubrieron en el interior del platillo una inscripción en cirílico y determinaron así su origen. El objetivo de Stalin era, dice la periodista, que los estadounidenses creyeran que les invadían los marcianos y provocar escenas de pánico “como las vividas en la retransmisión de La guerra de los mundos” de Orson Welles el 30 de octubre de 1938.

La gran revelación del libro cuenta con una única fuente, uno de aquellos ingenieros, un individuo al que Jacobsen oculta en el anonimato. La autora explica estos presuntos hechos al final de su obra, pero ofrece al comienzo un adelanto de su versión del caso de Roswell. Es de agradecer porque así el lector está avisado de que debe poner en cuarentena todo lo que se cuenta en el libro. No es que todo sea mentira. Al contrario. El panorama general es verídico: durante más de medio siglo, Estados Unidos ocultó al mundo la existencia de unas instalaciones en las que la CIA y la Fuerza Aérea probaron los más modernos aviones espía y se aprovecharon de la histeria de los ovnis para ocultarlos al público, y en cuyas inmediaciones se hicieron decenas de ensayos nucleares. El problema es que, como ya advirtieron en su día expertos en el tema, la periodista comete tantos errores que el lego –como es mi caso– no puede estar nunca seguro de si un dato concreto del relato responde a la realidad o no. De lo que sí estuve seguro desde el principio, por mi afición al tema ovni, es de que su versión del caso de Roswell carece del mínimo fundamento y por eso decidí tomar el resto de sus afirmaciones con la misma cautela que si procedieran de Charles Berlitz.

Preguntas sin respuesta

El relato de Roswell de Jacobsen se basa en una única fuente y anónima. Si no recuerdo mal, la única anónima en un libro plagado de testimonios sobre hechos – muchos conocidos desde hace tiempo– que podrían dañar más a un Gobierno que la revelación de que su principal enemigo le intentó engañar a mediados del siglo XX. Si el suceso ocurrió como sostienen la autora y su presunto informante, un ingeniero de una empresa contratada por el Gobierno, sacar a la luz la historia no dañaría de ningún modo la reputación de EE UU porque los malvados habrían sido otros.

Personal de tierra prepara en el Área 51 un U-2 de la CIA para un vuelo de entrenamiento. Foto: CIA.

¿Dónde están las pruebas de que Stalin dispusiera en 1947 de naves con forma de platillo con una “extraordinaria capacidad de vuelo” que “quedaban suspendidas (en el aire) por unos instantes de vez en cuando antes de reemprender el vuelo”? ¿De dónde sacó el doctor Mengele el tiempo y qué tecnología empleó para crear esos humanos cabezones de ojos rasgados sólo dos años después del final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial? ¿Qué sentido tiene realizar inscripciones en cirílico en una nave que quieres que el enemigo crea procedente de otro mundo? ¿Y llenar el aparato de individuos que, de sufrir un accidente, demostrarían su origen humano? ¿Por qué EE UU habría de ocultar en el siglo XXI un intento de agresión de esas características? Sinceramente, para creerse la versión de Jacobsen hay que suspender la incredulidad más que en una película de Disney.

Según la periodista, el Área 51 no empezó a construirse en 1955 para servir de base a los nuevos aviones espía de la CIA, sino años antes para acoger los restos del platillo de Roswell. “El Área 51 se denomina de este modo no porque fue un cuadrante elegido al azar, como se ha dicho en tantas ocasiones, sino porque los restos del accidente de 1947 en Roswell, Nuevo México, fueron enviados desde la Base de la Fuerza Aérea de Wright-Patterson a un lugar secreto del desierto en Nevada precisamente en el año 1951”, dice. No muestra, claro, ni una prueba que respalde lo que afirma, que además contradice el hecho, de sobra conocido, de que el nombre de Área 51 se debe a que ése era el número de la parcela en los mapas del Emplazamiento de Pruebas de Nevada, dependiente del actual Departamento de Energía.

A la hora de vender su versión de los hechos de Roswell, la autora de Área 51. La historia jamás contada de la base militar más secreta de América ignora toda la información desclasificada sobre el caso en los últimos 20 años. Simplemente, no existe. Así, por ejemplo, no cita en ningún momento The Roswell report. Case closed, trabajo de James McAndrew publicado por la Fuerza Aérea en 1997, a pesar de que –o quizá porque– en él se demuestra que lo que se estrelló en Nuevo México fue un globo del Proyecto Mogul y que los cuerpos que algunos dicen haber visto en el desierto podrían ser maniquíes de posteriores pruebas de caída libre que los testigos ubican mal en el tiempo. Por todo esto, el relato de Roswell de Jacobsen merece tanto crédito como el de Juan José Benítez sobre una base extraterrestre en la Luna, también basado en una fuente anónima.

Mención aparte merece la edición de la obra, con una traducción en la que se suceden errores y erratas, y que al parecer nadie ha revisado; que sitúa al final del libro las notas, pero no la llamada correspondiente en cada página; y que no incluye ninguna de las más de 60 fotos históricas del original estadounidense. La edición española de Área 51. La historia jamás contada de la base militar más secreta de América es una chapuza, una tomadura de pelo a la altura de la hipótesis de Jacobsen sobre lo que sucedió en Roswell.

El libro

Jacobsen, Annie [2011]: Área 51: La historia jamás contada de la base militar más secreta de América [Area 51. An uncensored history of America’s top secret military base]. Luciérnaga (Colección ‘OCultura’). Traducción de Carme Font. Barcelona 2017. 575 páginas.

Image By: Brian Engler

James Alcock is a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada. He is also a fellow and member of the Executive Council for the Committee for the Skeptical Inquiry and one of the original faculty lecturers with the Skeptic’s Toolbox. He will be presenting at CSICon on Friday, October 19 at 9:00 am.

Susan Gerbic: Jim, great seeing you at CSICon 2017. That was a blast. But what a great lineup this year! For new readers, this is the conversation with Jim before CSICon last year. Catch us up, Jim. What have you been doing this last year?

James Alcock: Hi, Susan. Over the past year, I have dedicated most of my time to completing my new book, Belief: What It Means to Believe and Why Our Beliefs Are So Compelling, which was published by Prometheus Books in April of this year. 

Gerbic: You are going to be speaking at 9 am on Friday, October 19, starting the conference off right. Your talk is called “The Challenge of Belief: Fact, Folly, or Propaganda.” Reading over the summary, this talk is very relevant to today’s social media climate, fact-checking, peer review, “alternative facts,” and more. Please don’t forget us at GSoW who are page by page attempting to bring Wikipedia up to snuff. It’s a slow process, but we just added our 605th Wikipedia page. Only about ten-thousand more to go! Seriously, tell us about your talk. It’s a lot to explain in a thirty-minute lecture.

Alcock: The talk draws from material in my book. Many of our beliefs are created and shaped by what other people tell us, and so when we are misled, deliberately or not, we are left with beliefs that do not reflect reality. Worse, research shows that once we have come to believe something, the influence of that belief is not completely erased even if we later find out that it is distorted or false.

An important part of critical thinking is to scrutinize the reliability of our sources of information. This is made much more difficult when there are deliberate attempts by people in power to denigrate what have traditionally been trusted sources by referring to them as purveyors of “fake news.” Added to that difficulty are the many new information sources that are not subject to the usual journalistic standards and that often deliberately slant their reporting in service of some political or religious agenda.

Gerbic: As I said, what a great lineup at CSICon this year. Are there people or talks you are really interested in seeing?

Alcock: I have always enjoyed all the talks that have been presented at CSICon in the past, and I am sure the same will be true this year. I am particularly interested in hearing Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, and Timothy Caufield. However, I also look forward to presentations by people whom I’ve heard speak before, including, of course, James Randi, Richard Dawkins, Susan Blackmore, Banachek, Massimo Polidoro, Paul Offit, Massimo Pigliucci, Joe Nickell, and yourself. Gee, did I leave anybody out?!! I’m sure that the other speakers will be equally edifying.

Gerbic: There are names on the list that I have never heard of before, but as I do these interviews I’m so impressed with the work they are doing. You were involved in the skeptic movement from the beginning; you have heard Asimov, Steve Allen, and Sagan. That must have been amazing.

Alcock: I have been fortunate, as a result of my involvement with the skeptic movement, to have met so many outstanding people, some well-known, others not. Of course, listening to the people you mention has been an unforgettable experience.

Gerbic: Jim, when I was in New Mexico a few weeks ago, a few of the CSI fellows were thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to get the fellows more involved in growing attendance at the grassroots level. The idea is that we could ask all the fellows to voluntarily visit two of the small events a year. They could be a local group or something you stop by when traveling for work or vacation. Just hanging out with the group at a Skeptics in the Pub event or sitting in on the lectures at a SkeptiCamp or a monthly lecture. Get a photo taken with the organizers, and we will find a place on CSICOP.org to keep a blog or something showing the photo. The idea is to encourage attendance and give support and encouragement to the organizers. As a member of the Executive Council, your opinion matters a lot. If you love the idea, it was mine; if you hate it, then blame Ben Radford. I haven’t been able to come up with a catchy name yet. I’m open to ideas.

Alcock: I certainly think this is a good idea, although there may be some difficult practical considerations to address. I guess the first thing to do would be to provide fellows with some sort of list to allow them to identify geographical locations that would be convenient for them to visit while traveling. Of course, making themselves available to speak to groups in their own vicinity is much easier to facilitate. I also think many fellows would be hesitant to make the first approach to a local group, even though they might cheerfully respond to an invitation. Perhaps the CSI office could serve as a coordinator: fellows, after being shown a geographical list of groups, could inform the office of when and where they might give a talk and then the office could suggest to the particular local group that it invite the individual.

Gerbic: We had great attendance at the last two CSICons. In 2017, they had to bring in more chairs to accommodate everyone, and we were almost over-full. But this year it’s being held at the Westgate Hotel and Casino, and I’m told we can double attendance and still have room to grow. For first-time attendees, it’s a great idea to follow CSICon on Facebook to see where people are, what’s going on after the lectures, and photos, photos, photos. I look forward to seeing you again, Jim!

Alcock: And I too look forward to seeing you in October, Susan.

Note: CSICon speaker Kenny Biddle credits James Alcock (and others) in this interview as being an important part of learning about skeptical thinking. “I kept learning, soaking up information—knowledge, research techniques, tips, and tricks—from authors such as Ben Radford, Joe Nickell, James Randi, James Alcock, Richard Wiseman, and the great Houdini.” It’s great to see everything come full circle. At conferences like this, you can meet the people who inspire you.

I have written about the dietary supplement ASEA several times on the Science-Based Medicine website. It is said to contain stable, perfectly balanced Redox Signaling Molecules, “a mixture of 16 chemically recombined products of salt and water with completely new chemical properties.” Nowhere do they divulge the identity of those sixteen products, and the label lists the ingredients as salt and water; so if it does contain those sixteeb products, it is guilty of false labeling. It allegedly enhances immune function, supports cellular communication, and protects against free radical damage. It is sold through a multilevel marketing scheme, and there are testimonials galore; but there is no acceptable published evidence to confirm that it has any health benefits in humans.

A correspondent in Singapore wrote me because his wife is treating their children with ASEA, and she showed him the latest information in the form of this Facebook post:

[errors in original] Little baby Noemi was born without heart valve and Doctors sent her home to spend her last days with family … Parents decided to give her Asea and after three months she went to hospital for test … And the results was: Fully healthy heart))))) … the heart valve has grown … absolutely increadbile story … on the picture with Dr. Paska who brought Asea to Slovakia … Well done to Parents who did not give up the fight…Greetings from Slovakia.

The Redox Ireland Facebook page repeats the story, saying she was born without heart valve.

But there is a somewhat different story on the Feelbetter Club website among numerous other testimonials for ASEA:

Baby Noemi was born with a defective heart valve and Doctors sent her home to spend her last days with the family. For 2 months, they gave baby Noemi 4 ml. of ASEA, 3 times a day. They also sprayed her little body with ASEA. They recently went to the hospital to check her heart; it’s fully functioning!! 4 month old Noemi does not need surgery! 

This is followed by a quotation from Dr. Gary Samuelson, PhD: “The Redox Signaling process is remarkable, because it ihs the process that allows us to regenerate tissue and maintain our normal cell function and capacities.”

All of these stories feature the same picture of a woman holding a baby.

My correspondent was skeptical and wanted to know if there was any way to determine if there really was such a case or if it had been misrepresented. He wondered if it would be feasible to contact hospitals in Slovakia. I told him the burden of proof was on those making the claim. It is up to them to provide details and documentation; it is not our responsibility to prove it didn’t happen as described.

Fake News

There are a lot of things in this story that identify it as Fake News. The story is inconsistent and incomplete: Was a valve missing or just defective? Which valve? How was the diagnosis made? The date of the original Redox Slovakia Facebook post was four years ago. There is no published case report. I could find no other references to the case. I couldn’t even find any media reports, not even in the tabloids. You’d think the tabloids would be all over a story like this one. If a missing part of the heart was actually regenerated by ASEA, it would have been trumpeted in the headlines and someone would be in line for a Nobel Prize.

Babies can be born with a missing heart valve or a defective one; the only treatment is surgery. There has never been a documented case where a new heart valve grew or where a defective valve spontaneously became normal. I found a similar case where the parents were told that part of the baby’s heart was missing, and a cure was attributed to prayer. It seems obvious in that case that the original diagnosis was wrong, and the infant’s echocardiogram was normal.

A little knowledge of embryology shows how unlikely it is that a missing or defective valve could regrow. And it is ludicrous to imagine that salt water could do the job, with or without the alleged sixteen chemically recombined products. ASEA doesn’t have any other testimonials for regrown body parts. If it had restored the leg of an amputee, now there would be a story!

My correspondent’s wife said he shouldn’t be so skeptical about other people's personal accounts and experiences. I am not skeptical about their experience. I don’t have any reason to doubt that the parents recounted exactly what they were told (or thought they were told) about the baby’s missing or defective heart valve. I don’t doubt that the follow-up imaging studies showed a normal heart. What I doubt is that there was ever actually an abnormality.

There is a much simpler and more plausible interpretation of what the parents reported. Someone goofed and reported an abnormality that didn’t exist. We don’t have enough details to know where the error was. I can speculate. Heart valves are most commonly evaluated with ultrasound imaging. These studies are performed by technicians and interpreted by physicians. Some are more skilled than others in interpreting the studies. In one study, there were major discrepancies in 29 percent of diagnoses, and five patients went to the operating room with a wrong diagnosis.

Conclusion: Not Credible

In my opinion, baby Noemi’s original diagnosis of a heart valve abnormality was almost certainly wrong, due to human error. It’s disheartening to see that the Facebook post garnered 125 Comments and 926 Shares. So many gullible people believed this story and passed it on! And they all praised ASEA as a miracle cure. Fake news wins! I’m reminded of those bumper stickers that say, “Beam me up, Scotty; there’s no intelligent life down here.”

Astrology, the oldest and most popular theory of human personality, doesn’t work. I played a small role in proving astrology doesn’t work when a student, who was an astrology enthusiast, came to me and said she wanted to conduct a test of astrology for her honors thesis research. To her credit, she was willing to let the chips fall where they may. With a little guidance, she designed a double-blind test in which college students were presented with their actual horoscope, based on a natal chart produced by a highly-rated commercial astrology software program, and a bogus horoscope randomly selected from those produced for the other students in the study. Each participant had a 50/50 chance of picking their own horoscope, and that’s about as well as they did. In fact, the students only scored a 46 percent correct rate, indicating that there was a slight—though not statistically significant—tendency for the students to pick the bogus astrology horoscope instead of their own.

To eliminate the possibility that the college students were just clueless about their personalities, my student also had each participant fill out a well-research paper-and-pencil personality test. Presented with a similar choice: their own personality scale profile matched with some other random person’s profile, the students did much better. This time, there was a 79 percent correct identification rate, which was far above what would be expected by chance. So, astrology didn’t work but a widely used personality test did. My student’s honors thesis results were consistent with a long line of similar tests showing that astrology does not provide an accurate description of personality, and she went on to publish the study in the Journal of General Psychology (Wyman and Vyse 2008).

Although my student accepted the accuracy of her results, I am fairly certain she did not give up her belief in astrology, and she is not alone. Despite overwhelming evidence that astrology is based on a pseudoscientific theory and is not a reliable measure of personality—much less a crystal ball into the future—this ancient form of divination has not diminished in popularity. Indeed Julie Beck (2018) writing in the Atlantic suggests that we are experiencing a boom in astrology among Millennials driven by diminished stigma and marketing on the internet. Astrology is particularly popular in India where, according to one projection, the online industry will hit $3 billion (Magon 2017). But there may be other explanations for why astrology would be particularly popular at this moment.

Carving of the Chinese Zodiac on the ceiling of the gate to Kushida Shrine in Fukuoka, Japan. (Source: Wikimedia)

The Basics

Astrology is a system of belief that implicates the location of the stars and planets at the time of a person’s birth in the determination of their personality, and its proponents claim it is possible to write an astrological natal chart that reveals your basic nature. Furthermore, throughout your life, the positions of the stars continue to influence your life, making it useful to consult your daily horoscope to find out what is going to happen and how you should approach the day. Astrology is used in a variety of ways and comes in many forms. One scholar writes that, “It may be considered, depending on the definitions of all these words, to be magic, divination, a psychological tool, a religion, an art or a science” (Campion 2016, 1). Astrology is thought to have emerged in Babylon in the second millennium BCE, as a simpler form of omen astrology tied to the calendar and the constellations. Evidence from surviving cuneiform tablets suggests that a natal astrology closer to today’s horoscopes emerged sometime between the seventh and fourth centuries BCE (Holden 2006). Given its ancient origins, astrology has been remarkably successful. Gallup polls suggest that approximately 25 percent of adults in the United States, the U.K., and France believe in astrology (cited in Campion 2016). Furthermore, astrology is a kind of universal language, and the material of horrible pick-up lines. By some estimates fully 90 percent of adults know their astrological sun sign (Campion 2017).

The Demographics of Belief

One of the most noteworthy aspects of belief in astrology is that it is more often embraced by liberals, which places it in the company of the anti-GMO and anti-vaccination movements (Vyse 2015). A 2009 Pew Research Center study found that people who described themselves as liberal were almost twice as likely to say they believe in astrology than self-described conservatives: 30 percent of liberals compared to 16 percent of conservatives (Liu 2009). Similarly, a 2015 study using data from the General Social Survey data of the National Opinion Research Survey at the University of Chicago found that conservatives were more likely to endorse the statement, “we trust too much in science and not enough in religious faith,” and liberals were more likely to have consulted their daily horoscope or astrological profile (DellaPosta, Shi, and Macy 2015, 1482–1483).

According to the Pew study, belief is also more likely to be a youthful phenomenon, with the youngest age group, 18-to-29-year-olds, having a 30 percent belief rate and belief decreasing with each increasing age bracket. Only 18 percent of 65-year-olds and older endorsed astrology. Education was also systematically associated with lower levels of belief, with 18 percent of college graduates endorsing astrology, as compared to 30 percent of those in the high school or less education. Finally, for both Protestants and Catholics, more frequent church attendance was related to lower levels of belief in astrology (Liu 2009).

The Psychology of Belief

Perhaps because astrology is so remarkably resilient, research on the psychology of belief has a long and continuing history. An early research contribution identified one of the reasons people tend to see themselves in their horoscopes—no matter what the horoscope says. The psychologist Paul Meehl named this the “Barnum Effect,” a reference to the famous showman P. T. Barnum’s motto, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” But the most famous early demonstration of the Barnum effect was done by Bertram Forer (Forer 1949; Meehl 1958). Forer gave a class of psychology students a personality questionnaire to fill out, and then later handed out what the students assumed were unique personality sketches. In fact, all of the sketches were the same, and they were drawn from a newspaper stand astrology book. When asked to rate the accuracy of the sketches the overwhelming majority found them to be to be remarkably accurate. Magician James “The Amazing” Randi led a classroom demonstration of the Barnum effect in a PBS NOVA broadcast (Carlson 2000), a clip of which is presented below. It should be noted that horoscopes are particularly susceptible to the Barnum effect, because they tend to be written in ambiguous, non-specific terms that can interpreted in many ways, but psychological tests are also prone to the Barnum effect (Wyman and Vyse 2008). An additional factor that has been implicated in the acceptance of horoscopes is whether the description is positive or negative. In a test using horoscopes that varied in their positive or negative valence, Hamilton (2001) found that—as you might expect—people were more willing to say their horoscope was valid if the description was generally positive, however, using a different method of testing with a German sample Wunder (2004) found no effect of the favorableness of sun signs.

James Randi demonstrates the Barnum effect on NOVA.

For some time following Forer’s study, most scientific investigations of astrology were tests of its validity (Tyson 1984; Carlson 1985; Hartmann, Reuter, and Nyborg 2006). A group of studies tried to determine whether the person is recognizable in the description offered in the horoscope—similar to my student’s honors thesis. In some cases, rather than having the individual pick out their own horoscope from a selection of horoscopes, the identification was made by a friend or relative who knew the target individual well (Tyson 1984), but this technique did not produce any better results. Another approach, used by Hartmann and colleagues (2006), was to administer a validated psychological test of personality to a large group of people and attempt to find any personality trait that was associated with the participants’ astrological signs. This method also came up short. Thus, the overwhelming result of many studies is that horoscopes are not valid descriptions of personality.

One of the major explanations for belief in superstition, is the desire for control over uncontrollable events (Vyse 2014), and a number of studies suggest that the desire for control is also an important factor in belief in astrology. For example, in a Finnish study, Outi Lillqvist and Marjaana Lindeman (1998) gave questionnaires to people who had signed up for adult education classes in either introduction to astrology, psychology, or German. Compared to students in the other classes, astrology students reported having recently experienced more life crises (e.g., divorce, infidelity, or a child leaving home). Interestingly, even among the control groups who took either psychology or German classes, those who reported greater belief in astrology also reported having experienced more life crises. So, it appears that when people lose their footing and are shaken by the world, astrology provides a sense of order and control. In a laboratory study, American research participants were asked to judge how accurate a horoscope was, but before they made the judgment they were primed to have a sense of control or the lack of control. Half the participants were asked to recall a time when something happened to them and they were in control of the situation, and the other half were asked to remember a time when something happened but they were not in control. When later asked to judge the horoscopes, the “out of control” group reported that their horoscope was more accurate. Taken together, these studies point to astrology being used as a form of “compensatory control” to stabilize believers when they feel shaky (Landua, Kay, and Whitson 2015).

The Ingredients for an Astrology Boom

The foregoing summary provides a few hints as to why astrology might be surging at the moment. First, it is a youthful movement, and another recent Pew Research Study shows that Millennials are less religious than older generations but not less spiritual. In answer to the question, “Religion is very important,” only 41 percent of Millennials said yes, in comparison to 59 percent of Baby Boomers. At the same time Millennials were very similar to other generations on questions about having a sense of wonder in the universe, feelings of gratitude, and a concern for meaning and purpose (Alper 2015). So, for some younger people for whom traditional religion does not appeal, astrology may provide a spiritual outlet.

Second, two factors are very likely combining to make astrology more appealing at the moment—liberalism and a need for control. Astrology has a stronger appeal for liberals than conservatives, and in the United States, since November of 2016, the liberal world has been rocked. If ever there was a time when liberals might be looking for a compensatory sense of control, now is it. Conservatives are feeling better, but even if the tables were turned, the Pew survey data suggests they would be more likely to take refuge in religion rather than astrology or other forms of spirituality. If history of this moment has promoted belief in the paranormal, it would not be the first time. Earlier studies have shown an increased interest in astrology and other occult beliefs during periods of economic and political stress, such as in Germany during the 1930s (Padgett and Jorgenson 1982). Similarly, the “Secrets of the Psychics” NOVA program, in which James Randi demonstrated the Barnum Effect, was produced in response to a surge in interest in the paranormal in Russia following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Finally, we cannot overlook an obvious additional factor—the internet. There are fewer television commercials for telephone psychics these days, but the internet has exploded as a new vehicle for psychics and astrologers. Millennials are very adept at computers and smartphones, and the internet provides the opportunity to read a horoscope or consult an astrologer without fear of stigmatization or ridicule. 

If, as I suspect, my student did not abandon astrology after uncovering evidence that it is a baseless pseudoscience (as further evidence for this hypothesis, I will point out that she gave me an astrology book when she graduated), there must be a very large audience for sun signs and natal charts. In addition, the rise of a generation that is not as traditionally religious as previous ones but still seeking a kind of spiritual satisfaction, combined with the vanquishing of liberal politics in the United States and abroad, has created a fertile environment for this form of superstition and unreason. The current pseudoscientific storm may pass, but my student’s story suggests that evidence alone may not be enough to turn believers into rationalists.

• Alper, Becka A. 2015. "Millennials Are Less Religious than Older Americans, but Just as Spiritual." Pew Research Center. November 23. Accessed May 11, 2018. Available online at http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/23/millennials-are-less-religious-than-older-americans-but-just-as-spiritual/.
• Beck, Julie. 2018. "The New Age of Astrology." The Atlantic. January 16. Accessed May 06, 2018. Available online at https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/01/the-new-age-of-astrology/550034/.
• Campion, Nicholas. 2016. Astrology and popular religion in the modern west: Prophecy, cosmology and the new age movement. Routledge.
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The Susan Gerbic tour continues. With the mission to seek out more people to recruit to the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) project, I visited Albuquerque, New Mexico April 10-13, 2018, for the purpose of speaking to the New Mexicans for Science and Reason (NMSR) group, as well as spending some time with friends from the skeptic community.

No visit to New Mexico is complete without a visit to Squaring the Strange Studios to see where the podcast magic happens. I got to hang out and record Episode 53 with Ben Radford and Pascual Romero. Sadly, I missed seeing cohost and content producer Celestia Ward. First, they interviewed Matt Crowley about his years in the circus (he might have been the person who inspired the condom snorting challenge). I kid you not, this is a very strange podcast. Please give it a listen, with the caution that you may feel an overwhelming desire to join GSoW after listening. Trust me, it is a better decision than snorting condoms.

The Squaring the Strange podcast is relatively new. They started in spring 2017 and have turned out a show every week. They just released episode 57. Celestia Ward began as the content producer and was added onto the show with a “fortune cookie” segment, until eventually she became a cohost. Celestia is an artist specializing in caricature; her company is Two Heads Studios. Her artwork can be found in many places, but you might have seen it in the back of Skeptical Inquirer magazine and also in Ben Radford’s Investigating Ghosts book. Pascaul Romero is from a long line of New Mexicans. He has been in many heavy metal bands as a vocalist and bassist and also works in film and TV.

The three of them, Ben, Pascual, and Celestia, form a great team with diverse backgrounds, which makes listening to their take on strange stories all that more interesting. Celestia the visual, Pascual the audio, and Ben the research methods. Give it a listen.

I spent the night at Ben Radford’s house, which was wall to wall books and two cats. My kind of place. I really enjoy spending time in productive people’s offices; it’s inspiring to watch them work and see what tools they use to juggle projects and stay focused. Ben has filing cabinets and piles with past, present, and future projects. According to Amazon.com, he has written over ten books—it’s difficult to keep track. His more recent ones include Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits, Lake Monster Mysteries, Bad Clowns, Tracking the Chupacabra, Media Mythmakers, and one of my favorites, Mysterious New Mexico: Miracles, Magic, and Monsters in the Land of Enchantment.

Ben has a really interesting way of staying organized: he collects clothes pins. It’s an interesting collection that he puts to use; he has strung up a clothes line in a part of his office, and he keeps paperwork and notes associated with his projects and to-do list clothes pinned to that line. Very clever and a nice way to enjoy your collection. Another thing I learned was how he writes indexes for his books; he uses filing cards and manually and meticulously notes page numbers and names to refer to. He explained he discovered that people who are doing research aren’t going to take the trouble to use your book as a citation if they don’t have access to an index. I’ve noticed this since he pointed it out. When we are doing research for a Wikipedia page, we don’t have time to read the entire book looking for a few sentences to quote; often we move on to another book that is indexed.

The next day I was on my own and set out in my rented car to explore Albuquerque, New Mexico. I first stopped at a local library to take a look around and discovered that the Netflix show Breaking Bad was filmed in Albuquerque and also the author George R.R. Martin, who wrote the Game of Thrones books, is from the area. I’m not a fan of either of those things, but my friend Robin Welsh assures me that you can visit all the filming locations for Breaking Bad as she did when passing through New Mexico. Apparently, it is a tourist magnet for the area.

I first headed for downtown Albuquerque to find the KiMo Theatre, which Ben has written about because it was supposedly haunted. This is one of my favorite investigations, and the first time I think I really understood the harm to the family of the “ghost.” Bobby Darnall was a six-year-old who died in the lobby of the theater when a water heater exploded in 1951. The theater and the town have embellished the story to say that Bobby haunts the theater and causes disruptions, takes bites out of doughnuts, and needs to be appeased with gifts of toys. Ben tracked down Bobby’s siblings and asked them what they thought of the story. They were not happy about it at all. They loved their little brother and it hurts them that strangers are capitalizing on their tragedy. It’s cruel, and I think people should contact the city and the theater and pressure them to end this practice. I wrote to the city a year ago and didn’t hear back. Looking at their “things to do” website shows at least six blog posts mentioning Bobby as a ghost. It’s sickening.

After lunch I headed to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and was greeted by two amazing metal sculptures of a pentaceratops, “Spike,” and an albertosaurus, “Alberta.” I noticed a plaque showing the artist’s name was David A. Thomas, which seemed familiar yet also a common name. I later learned that this David Thomas is the father of my lecture sponsor, physicist and mathematician Dave Thomas. Dave is also a fellow of CSI and the current president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason, the group I spoke to that night.

The museum is worth a visit. I didn’t have time to see the da Vinci exhibit or the IMAX but did make it through the rest of the museum, which sadly was pretty empty of visitors. I’m not a scientist but am very interested in science communication. How are the exhibits designed? Are children interacting with the displays in a good way? Are adults lingering to read and discuss the exhibits? Personally, I would have liked to see human evolution exhibits, as they are very focused on dinosaurs. Apparently, this museum showcases dinosaurs found in New Mexico. I had difficulty understanding what I was looking at in the dinosaur areas; the scientific names were too complicated for my little brain. But what it lacked (for me) in that area, it made up for in other areas. The next time I visit, I’ll either get one of their audio tours or take along some school kid who loves dinosaurs to explain everything to me.

There was a glassed-in area called Fossilworks, where you could watch people tediously poking and brushing at large dinosaur bones, which was really interesting. Another of my favorite areas was The Naturalist Center. I wish I had gotten the name of the volunteer that day, because she was terrific. She approached everyone, starting a conversation about whatever they were looking at, telling us the name of the animal, where they found it (most are rescues), and something else about it. She had it down, not spending too much time lingering over something, but just giving you enough to make you say, “oh wow” and then you would feel a bit more connected to the animal and even learn something new.

In the Hall of the Stars, they had an exhibit that allows visitors to interact with the night sky. You can push buttons to see the stars during the seasons and look at constellations or planets; it was very hands-on. One of my very favorite exhibits was a very large elevator that was actually a time machine. Okay, it wasn’t really an elevator or a time machine, but I still enjoyed it. The room shook as it went through time periods, and there is a screen with a person who is leading you through the different eras. He gets out of the elevator/time machine at one point and is chased by a dinosaur. It was a little hokey, but it was fun, and things were explained in a way that I understood.

Onward to the lecture for the NMSR group, which was held at the local community college. The group has a nice setup: AV and seating for 100. We had about thirty people show up, several of whom were old friends from skeptic conferences: Matthew Loftus, Mark Fraser, Gabriel Shalless, and Ruth Frazier. And we also had five CSI fellows: Ben Radford, Kendrick Frazier, Mark Boslough, Dave Thomas, and me. We had five students from the college attending my lecture to get extra credit for a math class they were taking. I made sure to include some statistics in my lecture just for them.

The energy in the room was great. I had a lot of fun and people asked great questions. I did my March for Science lecture but used Thomas Bopp as one of the main examples. We had extra time after the Q&A, so we signed onto the internet and we pulled up the Wikipedia page for James Randi in Korean and we as a group added a photo to the page. The audience loved it. The majority of my lecture can be found here. After the lecture we all rushed outside to watch the International Space Station cross the sky for two minutes.

I stayed the next two nights with Ken and Ruth Frazier. It was really relaxing with books, cats called Pretty Kitty and Hercules, and a dog named Darwin to hang out with. Kendrick is the editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine and has written at least one article for the magazine every edition for the past forty-plus years. He is a science writer with over ten published books as the author or editor on various topics. He has one book about a northwestern New Mexico area called People of Chaco: A Canyon and Its Culture. I was able to visit Ken’s office with overflowing bookcases on every wall. Very inviting. Ken, Ruth, and I spent a few hours at the Botanic Garden and Aquarium in Albuquerque, another really interesting place to visit.

I haven’t (as yet) received any new GSoW editors from New Mexico, but one Squaring the Strange listener, Johan Neser from Perth, Australia, wrote to me after hearing the interview, joined GSoW, and has already finished training and is working on his second Wikipedia page rewrite.

It was a quick three days for me. The weather behaved itself with pretty mild temperatures. I need to get back again, visit the Sandia mountains, and take a trip up to Santa Fe and Los Alamos.

It’s really difficult to know if it is worth the time and expense for me to travel to speak to small skeptic groups for the benefit of recruiting new GSoW members. It’s something I consider every day as I plan for more lectures. I think it is too early to know what the results will be. Sometimes the results are much farther down the road and making connections, renewing friendships, observing, and reporting back (as I’m doing with this article) are what’s important. Time will tell.

If you would like to become involved in GSoW or would like to learn more, please visit our website here. Many thanks to Julie Berents for proofreading this article.

Demon House is a documentary by Zak Bagans, best known for his Travel Channel series Ghost Adventures. During its run time of one hundred and eleven minutes, Bagans and his film crew head to Gary, Indiana, to investigate a property he recently purchased after it was propelled into the national news. Claims from the tenant, Latoya Ammons, and her mother included strange noises, kids becoming violent and speaking in strange voices, a twelve-year-old girl levitating above her bed, and a nine-year-old boy walking backward up a wall and along the ceiling. A psychic, who is never named, claims there were over 200 demons in the house. These claims were investigated in 2014 by Joe Nickell, senior research fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and “Investigative Files” columnist for Skeptical Inquirer. I recommend reading his article for further information. I’m going to focus on several of the claims specifically made in the finished film.

The film opens with a warning that sets the tone for the rest of the viewing: “The following documentary may not be suitable for all audiences. This film shows real people, places and events involving alleged demonic possession. Demonologists believe that demons can attach themselves to you through other people, objects, and electronic devices.” Demons are rooted in mythology and have never been proven to exist. However, even if they were known to exist and we were to believe this warning, Bagans just put all of his fans at risk of demonic possession. If you watch the film in a theater, on your television, or stream it to your computer, tablet, or phone, you would run the risk of being possessed by a demon (according to Bagans and his demonologists). However, fifteen seconds later the blame for such an event is shifted to the viewer when an additional line comes onto the screen: “View at your own risk.”

In the opening scenes, we see Bagans walking alone (something repeated a bit too often throughout the film) while he does a voice over. At one point he tells the viewer “I’m one of the world’s leading researchers on ghosts and demonology.” I found this to be an odd and bold claim. I checked his Wikipedia page (categorized under “Pseudoscience”) and various sources for references to published papers or articles that presented his research. Besides his TV appearances, he coauthored two books, Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (Victory Belt, 2011) and I am Haunted: Living Life Through the Dead (Bagans 2015). I could find no listing or mention of Bagans associated with any actual research— no articles, papers published in journals, not even instructional videos. He seems to be basing his claim on his highly dramatized television series (and appearances on other shows). This certainly does not qualify one as “one of the world’s leading researchers on ghosts and demonology” (or on anything).

Bagans refers to this current case as “the next Amityville,” which doesn’t say much for him, as the Amityville case has been shown to be a hoax over and over again (Nickell 1995, 2003; Kaplan and Kaplan 1995; Moran and Jordan 1978). Bagans is fully embracing the idea that the film is “cursed,” even stating it outright at the end of the opening monologue: “The truth is … this film is cursed.” He pulls inspiration from past films that were allegedly cursed, such as The Exorcist, The Omen, and Poltergeist (Taylor 2017). He tells us that he “fell ill,” crew members quit or had to be fired (one each), witnesses and experts ended up in the hospital, and that it took three years to finish the film. As Brett Taylor writes in his article “Hollywood Curse Legends,” “When a movie deals with the subject of demons, it is all too easy to believe in a curse. Be it superstition or not, many people believe that merely dealing with occult subjects, dabbling in them, is a sure way to invoke malevolent forces.” Whether Bagans truly believes what he promotes in his film (and TV series) or is just selling it as snake oil, it’s clear that he is giving his fans what they want: scary demons and a bravado that crumbles at the first site of any actual threats.

The voiceover Bagans does for the beginning, as well as throughout the rest of the film, is monotone, bland, and just outright boring. His voice lacks enthusiasm and emotion—no fear, excitement, or anxiety. If this was simply a film I stumbled upon while browsing through Netflix, I would have stopped watching within the first few minutes.

The melodramatic and sensationalized reenactments throughout the film (many of which are repeated ad nauseam) didn’t help pique my interest either. The goat-head demon costume used for several cut-scenes made this documentary comical and silly rather than the serious investigation Bagans apparently believes he’s conducting. What’s worse, most of the reenactments do not match the described “paranormal” events.

For example, Latoya’s brother Kevin agrees to take a ride with Bagans (and crew) and tell them about his experiences. Latoya herself refuses to speak with Bagans, most likely because she had reportedly made an exclusive agreement with a national TV show (Nickell 2014). Kevin states “They were all sitting in my living room, and they started this … little weird evil little chant outta nowhere. And it started where … my youngest nephew started. He stopped, my oldest nephew picked it up. He stops, my niece picks it up.” The recreation that follows consists of the younger boy (portrayed by an actor) with his eyes rolled up into his head, breathing heavily with a guttural sound. The older boy is doing the same but with more of a short shrieking sound. The camera pans over to the niece who is now standing in the corner (facing the corner) and shrieking in a very Hollywood-style demonic voice, making angry faces. Kevin doesn’t mention their eyes rolling back or the obvious changes to the children’s voices, nor is there any attempt to describe what the “chant” was. There’s also no sign of Uncle Kevin in the reenactment scene (or explanation of his whereabouts), making one wonder how he witnessed this event in the first place.

Another experience Kevin describes involves the three kids fighting with each other in the car. Kevin states “And then my nephew looked up at my mom and said ‘get your hands off me, you old bitch.’” In the re-enactment, the scene shows an all-out fight between all the family members, with the niece screaming loudly. The younger nephew is shown saying “get your f*ckin hands off me, bitch” first, then another, mostly unintelligible phrase starting with “f*ck” and ending with “bitch.” These sensational changes (rolling eyes, voices, harsher dialogue) for the reenactments are misrepresenting the events described, presenting the viewer with a false narrative that is heavily biased toward the filmmaker’s beliefs. 

When Bagans arrives at the house, he states in a voiceover, “Some squatters have moved in. It takes some convincing to get them to leave.” This is an interesting development, since the squatters seem not to have noticed (or been bothered by) the 200 demons allegedly sharing the house! This should have been a red flag for a serious investigator. Unfortunately, Bagans gets a text from a self-proclaimed psychic telling him about a “demon being very, very large almost like a hulking type figure—Horns turned back and centurion feet.” (As this is a good description of the costume being used for the demon reenactments, I’m guessing this text was the inspiration for it.) Any skepticism from the squatters was immediately forgotten, and Bagans marches bravely ahead.

Bagans reviews video footage of Family Case Manager Valerie Washington (2012) as she describes the incident when the younger boy in the house “went up the wall and came back around, and stood in front of us.” When asked (during the same video footage) “What did you do when that happened?” Washington responded “I left ’em”—and then laughs about it. The grandmother (Latoya’s mother) laughs as well, stating, “she walked out, I saw her.” This was hard to watch, since they were talking about a boy they presumably believed to be possessed by a demon … and they were laughing about “running away.” Whether the boy was dealing with demonic possession or behavioral problems, I fail to see any humor in this situation. Perhaps this representation is due to editing, and I would hope that a child’s welfare would not be a laughing matter to anyone.

Joe Nickell, during his investigation of the case in 2014, met with Washington. Although she was not permitted by her superiors to speak about the case, Nickell was able to gain additional information from the Intake Officer’s Report of Preliminary Inquiry and Investigation she filed in 2012, which is the same one Bagans is reading in the film. In fact, while the camera pans over the document, you can read the lines below what Bagans is reciting, which state “weird grin on his face and began to walk backwards while the grandmother … hand and he walked up the wall backwards while holding the grandmother’s … .” This appears to indicate that the child was supported by the grandmother throughout the entire event, just as Nickell concludes in his investigation. This is not an event that should bring “demon possession” to the top of one’s list of explanations. I was doing this trick with my younger brother about thirty years ago. 

The next big claim comes in the form of electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), alleged ghostly voices that only show up on recordings. Lt. John Gruszka, of the Lake County Police Department, was making an audio recording during a Wellness Check a week after the “wall-walking” incident. He was carrying the recorder and making notes and commenting on things as he made his way through the house. He claims there is an unidentifiable voice that appears on the tape. Gruszka claims, in the film, that it says “Hey.” The alleged EVP comes in between Gruszka noting there was stuff all around and being surprised the fire department hadn’t been here. We have to remember that Gruszka is holding the recording device close to his mouth, speaking into it, while making his way through the house. It sounds like he took a quick intake of air before immediately speaking again. This was also an uncontrolled environment, so any strange noises could have dozens of explanations.

The film then switches to aerial footage outside of St. Stephen Martyr Church in Merrillville, Indiana. In an ominous voiceover, Bagan states, “In light of these developments, Reverend Maginot gets approval to perform a minor rite on the mother, Latoya Ammons.” We are led to believe the exorcism is being performed in the church after seeing several interior shots. However, the photos of the exorcism that are presented are from the living room of the house, not the church. In addition, I didn’t understand why they decided to perform this on the mother. Even if we accept the belief in demons as real, it was the children who demonstrated all the spooky evil stuff!

Then I found an article in the National Catholic Register, which interviewed Maginot about his involvement with the family (Armstrong 2014). According to his interview, “Days later, when the police were investigating with me … . At the end of the interview that night, I put a crucifix on Latoya, and she began to convulse. I realized that she had an aversion to holy things. ‘You are possessed,’ I told her. She looked embarrassed and said, ‘I know.’” It was after this that the priest did a minor rite on Latoya. Maginot is also quoted stating “I also did a minor exorcism on Latoya—this is a matter of going through the rite just one time, and it does not need permission from the bishop.” That’s odd, because Bagans just told us that the priest received (and thus presumably needed) approval to perform this. Further research found that Maginot needed approval for a “major” exorcism that was scheduled for June later that year.

Nevertheless, we see photos of Latoya sitting in a folding chair in the living room of the house. Maginot explains, “I saw she had an aversion to holy objects. I put the crucifix on her head; she began convulsing. I took it off; she stopped convulsing. And I did it a second time, again watching. Consistent. Did it a third time.” This is a different version of events than the interview Maginot gave. Bagans’s film leads us to believe this all took place during the exorcism, but it apparently happened prior to it. In addition, the priest reported no convulsing during the minor rite in his interview with the National Catholic Register. Also revealed in that interview was that the convulsing came every time the priest mentioned a particular demon’s name (perhaps coincidentally one which Latoya had previously looked up). This documentary does a poor job of presenting an accurate timeline.

There are five photos taken of Latoya during the minor rite. All show her sitting in the same chair and basically in the same position. The last one shows her without a wig and a crucifix against her forehead. There is no sign of convulsing here. The photographer in me notices a few things about the photograph: Latoya, the subject of the image, is in shadow. Ambient light from a window to the right is creating shadows on the left side of the image. If the flash were used, these shadows would be overpowered and our subject would be brightly lit. The low light environment would cause the camera to keep the shutter open a bit longer. If there were any “convulsing” going on, it would be extremely obvious in these images. If she did react the way the priest claims, there would be motion blurring and distorting the image.

The film then focuses on digging up the dirt under the basement stairs, finding random objects, like a press-on nail, a pair of panties, a pin to a shirt, and some sort of lid, among other things. When you pause the film at the right time, these items can be seen on the report. Yet Bagans does his best to twist these findings into something paranormal, and so does Fr. Maginot. There’s a short clip of him and Bagans talking about the found items, and the priest states that it could be from necromancy—the supposed practice of communicating with the dead. This is just speculation and seems to be to further along the theme of the house being “cursed.”

Cut-scene showing document detailing several items that were found under the basement stairs, including a pin to a shirt, a lid, and garbage.

There’s a segment that looks at a mysterious oil that is found on blinds in the center bedroom. I can’t comment concerning the source of this liquid (I’m not sure whether it was actually an oil), but I will comment on a claim associated with this fluid. Bagans states that a new CPS worker would be the next to “fall victim to the malevolent energy in this home.” The police captain, Austin, states, “The CPS opened the cabinet, and she took her left hand … and she touched the drippings … and when she touched the fluid, the whole half of her hand changed like all the blood had been drawn out. White.” We then see a photo of a hand (sleeve matches the previous picture of the CPS worker) and see … nothing unusual. There is no discoloring seen in the photograph whatsoever. In the end of this short segment, the viewer is left with the question, “Yeah, okay … so what?” There’s no relevance to the alleged oil dripping from the blinds … except of course linking it thematically to well-known horror films such as The Amityville Horror (1979) with its bleeding walls.

Screenshot of CPS worker’s hand that was described as “half of her hand changed like all the blood had been drawn out. White.” No color change can be seen.

It is interesting to note that in between scenes there is a cut-scene that shows a distorted typed document. When paused, it reads, “Oil seems to condense and drip unto the steps from …, she made above. It also appeared all over the blinds in her bedroom. The p---[word unclear, likely priest] wiped down the blinds, and closed and sealed the door for 1/2 hour and when … [words unclear] again, more oil appeared.” From the way it is worded, this seems to be a report from the priest that indicates a possible source for the oil above the steps. Sadly, the rest of this document is not provided.

A cut-scene showing a document mentioning a possible source for the oil. The entire document was not obtainable.

Bagans then tells us that with “Evidence in hand, he [Maginot] requests permission from Bishop Dale J. Melczek to conduct an official exorcism on Latoya Ammons. His request is granted … immediately. There is a document that the camera is panning across while this voiceover is going on. The document is titled “Report Seeking Permission of Bishop for Exorcism.” When reading the print of the first shot panning over the document, there is a line that states “On Friday morning, April 20, 2012, in the midst of my weekly Bible Study Group, I received a call from Chaplain David Neville of Methodist Hospital, since I was on call for Fr. Joseph Uko, to come to the North Campus to perform an exorcism on a boy witnessed … .” It seems there is a lot left out of this story, since this request is for an exorcism on the young boy who reportedly walked up a wall, not the mother. However, without seeing the entire document, I can’t be sure.

Almost a half hour into the film, we finally learn that Latoya, the mother who started this whole situation, wouldn’t talk to Bagans because she was already committed to another television producer who had optioned the rights to her story. So Bagans heads over to the house’s original landlord, Charles Reed. Here Bagans finally starts to show something resembling decent investigation methods. According to Reed in an interview with Marisa Kwiatkowski of WKYC, “there were no problems in the home before or after the Ammons and her family lived there.” Bagans also notes, after speaking with a female squatter, that “the people that were squatting in the house originally told me they didn’t experience anything there.” The squatter’s husband had some stories to tell, but only after Bagans slipped him some cash (the film cuts back to a scene filmed when Bagans first showed up at the house). Journalistic ethics generally prohibits reporters from paying sources (for several reasons, including that it provides an incentive to make up stories), but at any rate it seems that whatever the issues going on there, they rested solely with the troubled family, not the house.

We cut back to the original landlord’s house, with Reeds handing Bagans an article in which Latoya’s stepmother was interviewed saying the family was outraged by Latoya’s claims. Bagans also has the house inspected, which uncovered black mold in the attic and “probably” carbon monoxide leaking out of the furnace and the water heater exhaust. This is where Bagans stumbles a bit into the unfamiliar territory of actual research. After getting off the phone with the inspector, the scene has an obvious edit—the phone suddenly disappears, and it appears Bagans has already been speaking, but the beginning has been cut out. He makes an attempt to bridge the gap between the inspection results and some sort of explanation that sounds “sciencey”… yet, his explanation is unintelligible nonsense. He is clearly uncomfortable with what he’s trying to say.

According to the Center for Disease Control, “Some people are sensitive to molds. For these people, exposure to molds can lead to symptoms such as stuffy nose, wheezing, and red or itchy eyes, or skin. Some people, such as those with allergies to molds or with asthma, may have more intense reactions. Severe reactions may occur among workers exposed to large amounts of molds in occupational settings, such as farmers working around moldy hay. Severe reactions may include fever and shortness of breath” (CDC 2017). According to the Mayo Clinic (2018), the symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning include “dull headaches, weakness, dizziness, nausea or vomiting, shortness of breath, confusion, blurred vision, and loss of consciousness.”

A former resident, Mika, then drops by with her three kids. The kids are asking Bagans about the house, the demons, and why he started investigating, when the camera pauses on one of the girls. There are some quick cut-scenes of the center bedroom blinds (with the oil on them), photos of the oil on the blinds, and the second CPS worker’s hand (the one that supposedly turned half white). Then we’re back to the kids asking Bagans questions. This is a typical Hollywood set-up telling the viewer that something is going to happen to this particular girl.

And it does. According to the film, the girl attempted suicide a few days later. For some reason, the mother felt the need to call Bagans just after it happened. We hear her on the phone saying she was still waiting for the police to arrive. I can’t imagine why a mother would feel the need to call Bagans immediately after her daughter allegedly attempted suicide. The only concern she should have is the life of her daughter, not calling a TV ghost hunter. Later on, Bagans is with a family member who is describing the injuries as “she had holes in her wrists and her eyes were like red.” When asked to clarify, she said, “It was little cuts, like she had stabbed her wrists … with a pen.” Bagans then likens these injuries with the stigmata of Jesus (the definition of stigmata appears on screen).

Suicide is a sensitive subject, and I certainly do not mean to belittle the experience if this was a genuine situation. However, the investigator in me just doesn’t buy it. The entire segment—from the recorded phone call and one-on-one interviews, to the exorcism performed on the daughter—all lacked believability and seem staged. I hope that I’m wrong about this, because exploiting such a subject to promote a film would be a great injustice to those who suffer from mental illness or depression. As Ben Radford (2017) notes in his book Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits, Bagans has a history of exploiting suicides for his personal projects, such as when he recorded an EVP of what he claimed was the ghost of troubled actor David Strickland (who killed himself in a seedy Las Vegas motel in 1999) and used it in his music. 

Before we get to that, Bagans claims that a microphone on Mika picked up another EVP, allegedly saying “Run, Latoya.” It’s not clear what is really said, but we have to remember that the woman was wearing an open microphone while Bagans, three other kids, and at least one camera person are somewhere in the house. This could easily be attributed to any of these people.

After Mika and her kids leave, Bagans is “overcome by something” and sort of attacks his cameraman, Jay. The scene appears staged, mostly from Bagans’s bad acting and watching a third crew member do absolutely nothing to stop the “attack” or help the other crew member. The “attack” consists of nothing more than some pushing and walking (almost like someone learning to dance with a partner). Even though the camera guy states “You basically slammed me against the wall,” that’s not what we see in the video (which was captured on surveillance video with no audio). This continues the theme of distorting events throughout the film. The whole ordeal is made even sillier with Bagans suddenly being outside (and now being filmed with a microphone) and saying “Billy, what in the f*ck just happened?” It’s not the first time he’s claimed to be possessed, and I doubt it will be the last.

After a discussion with the original CPS case manager, the photo of the second CPS case manager’s hand is shown again with a list of injuries allegedly sustained within thirty days of visiting the house. These include three broken ribs (from jet skiing), third-degree burns (from a motorcycle), broken hand (she hit a table), and a broken ankle (from running). These are all normal things that can happen when engaging in the activities she was doing. What if we extended the time frame to three months? Or a year? How many more injuries or misfortunes could we add to the list? Let’s flip this to the other side and ask how many positive things happened to her in those thirty days?

An image of the home inspector appears along with text stating that after returning home from the house (no time frame is given this time) a variety of misfortunes occurred: a tree nearly fell on his car while driving home; he was choked by an unseen force while sleeping (was it a “force”?); he developed cancer soon after (many people unfortunately develop cancer, but it has nothing to do with demons). The priest adds his own anecdote: a time when he fell off his bicycle—which was turned into “thrown down from his bike”—he blamed the demon. Captain Austin, also has some bad experiences. He tells a story about slipping on ice two days after visiting Bagans in the house. Captain Austin was also shot during a home invasion call he responded to (he recovered). We are led to believe these events were due to the house.

These are tactics that play up the “cursed film” angle. Bad things happen due to career, hobbies, or life. If you take a length of time, say thirty days, and list all the bad things that happened to you, I have no doubt the majority of us could come up with a few things. For example, since my last article was published, I had three days in a row where large machines I was working on failed and I had to work many hours into the night to fix them. I also sliced my hand while rearranging tools, stepped on a thumb-tack while walking barefoot, and found that several old computer files of photographs were corrupted. Did this all happened because I exposed a hoaxer? No! It’s because shit happens.

Then we finally get to some actual ghost investigating. Enter Dr. Barry Taft, most famous for working on the case that inspired the movie The Entity (1982). Taft takes out several meters, such as a handheld frequency counter and geo magnetometer. Everything seems normal until they get to the 60 Hz calibrated Tri-Field meter. Dr. Taft tells us that “Then, a few feet away from the wall [in the basement], about half way up my body, I started seeing like a 1 Hz oscillation.” The scene shows both Dr. Taft and Bagans in the basement of the house, with Taft holding the meter as the needle bounces around. Bagans then does a mini-possession routine, complaining about his eyes hurting (maybe because he’s not wearing the glasses that he had on earlier). When he comes back to stand by Dr. Taft, the meter is now bouncing around while being held just in front of Bagans (who has his hands in his coat pockets). Dr. Taft claims that Bagans is giving off 20 mG, and we see the meter needle bouncing around on the right side of the scales.

There are a lot of things wrong with this scene, many of which would not be obvious to the casual viewer. First, even though the meter is calibrated at 60 Hz (+/- 20% of reading), it has a frequency range of 40 Hz to 100 KHz. This means that the device is measuring the strength of any magnetic field within that range, not just the strength of a 60 Hz frequency. The meter does not distinguish between the frequencies it is measuring. The “calibrated at 60 Hz” is an important fact, since the “+/- 20%” that comes with that affects accurate readings. A 20 milligauss reading, if it is measuring only a 60 Hz field, could be an actual reading anywhere between 16 Hz to 24 Hz. This margin of error is only at 60 Hz. We don’t know how far off the meter would be if it’s measuring frequencies above and below that calibration.

Dr. Taft makes a statement that he is getting “a 1 Hz oscillation.” The meter is set to read magnetic fields, which displays the measurement in milligauss, not hertz. Hertz is a unit of frequency, while milligauss (which the meter is displaying) is a measurement of field strength. This may be just an honest mistake, but it is still worth pointing out.

What really stands out during this segment is that Dr. Taft has the meter on a lower setting. It is set to the “Magnetic 0 – 3” milligauss mode, both when we first see them in the basement and a few moments later when he claims to have a 20 mG reading directly in front of Bagans (the meter is just about against Bagans’s chest). At one point Dr. Taft turns to Bagans and puts the meter to his chest, but nothing happens. Dr. Taft then can be heard softly saying “Let’s try magnetic,” and switches the selection dial from “Electric” to “Magnetic 0 – 3.” This gives the crew the effect they were hoping for; Dr. Taft states “Look, look, look. It’s magnetic. We didn’t get that before, did we?” During an interview scene that is cut in, Dr. Taft is saying “20 mG coming off you, that’s a little high. Why would your body be emitting … now remember, bio-magnetic fields are really weak. You would need a super-conducting sensor.” The mode selection dial on the meter can clearly be seen set to the 0–3 scale; this would make the reading between 2 and 3 mG, not 20 mG, when reading the correct scale. The reading was simply not accurate. The needle on the display was bouncing around like it was overloaded. I’ve reached out to Dr. Taft for comment on these discrepancies, but my efforts to contact him failed.¹

Screenshot showing the Trifield meter set to 0–3 scale, while Dr. Taft claims it was reading 20 mG.

I contacted AlphaLab Inc., a manufacturer and distributer of laboratory gauss meters, tri-field meters, AC milligauss meters, DC milligauss meters, air shipment meters, and more since 1993. I spoke with Bill Lee (2018), president and owner, about the Trifield meter and its use in a normal household. He informed me that a 3 mG reading would be a typical reading in a house that had power on.² This is consistent with the readings we see in the film, which bounce between 2 and 4 mG (since it was set to the 0–3 scale).

When I mentioned the needle bouncing around to Lee, he explained, “the standard motor used in almost everything, like air conditioners, refrigerators, etc., is called an asynchronous induction-motor. They are designed to operate just a little slower than 1800 RPMs, which is 30 revolutions per second. They fall behind a little bit of the 60 Hz; they’re operating maybe at 29.5 Hz, which goes in and out of phase with the 60 Hz. You see a higher and lower drain, therefore a high-low-high-low magnetic field.” During the scene where Dr. Taft is holding the meter to Bagans, we can actually hear one of these motors running in the background. In a scene a few seconds later, we see that the cameraman is standing next to the house’s water heater and furnace—which has one of these motors (and is most likely the source of the sound).

View of the basement showing cameraman standing near the furnace, which contains an asynchronous induction-motor that can cause fluctuating readings with the Trifield meter.

I was able to obtain a Trifield meter, the same one used in the film, for my own testing. Simply walking through the house had the needle dramatically oscillating between 0 and 3 mG, as long as I had it on the 0–3 scale. Once I changed it to 0–100, it became much less dramatic. Also, I found that I could create the same “20 mG bouncing needle” effect seen in the film (when Dr. Taft is holding the meter in front of Bagans) by having my iPhone in the front pocket of my jacket. I can’t be sure if this is what caused the reading in the film, but it does show how easy it is to make such an event happen.

The author in similar a position as Bagans, with the meter reading between 1 and 3 mG.

An iPhone in the author’s pocket easily makes the needle bounce around.

Lee also mentioned that high level fields, such as those around 20 mG, could produce an audio hum that could be heard on audio recordings (such as professional camera equipment used for a ghost hunting film). Another scene has the cameraman complaining about getting “crazy interference” at one point. If they were actually getting a high reading—and we don’t know, since they were on the wrong scale—this is a plausible explanation for the interference.³

The film crew then takes a break, but we see that Dr. Taft is “affected” by the house. Bagans narrates “Weeks after this investigation, we discover something disturbing captured on this camera.” The camera follows Dr. Taft as he walks to the back bedroom. As the camera passes through the doorway, a “black anomaly” comes into the top left of the screen. Bagans takes the footage to Ed Weibe, a video engineer for NASA for thirty-two years.

Weibe states, “Really increased the luminosity just a little bit, just to see some of the other detail in the object. Prior to that, we can see that it’s different intensities; there’s not the same intensity. So, say it was a … we thought it was a hand or something like that from someone else, say, the cameraman, perhaps. His hand wouldn’t be broken up in different intensities; it would all be one hand. I’m 100% sure that is not the cameraman’s hand.”

I disagree with his conclusion (and his reasons for that conclusion) and think it was most likely the cameraman’s hand. First, looking at the details of the scene, I noticed that all the blinds are down and the cameraman is not using a light. Therefore, we’re working in a low-light environment with soft light coming from the blinded windows. The cameraman enters a dark hallway, and the anomaly shows up as the camera pans to the right, across light coming from a window in the bathroom. The anomaly is dark because the cameraman is blocking the soft light from the main room behind him and the brighter light coming from the bathroom window. This is creating a silhouette effect.

The anomaly, dramatically dubbed the “black mass,” is between the wall (just in front of the camera) and the camera lens. It is also out of focus, indicating that the object is close to the lens. When Weibe increases the luminosity to “see some of the other detail of the object,” the attempt fails because it only increases the brightness of the overall image, including the blurry anomaly. It does not sharpen any details or make anything easier to identify. We see some surveillance footage of the event, taken from the far corner of the main room, but the cameraman is blocking our view of what his camera is viewing. The date/time (counter) on this surveillance video are blocking the exact area we need to see: the cameraman’s head, camera, and position of his left hand. Curiously, the time stamp doesn’t appear in surveillance footage after this event.

Surveillance shot of the cameraman when he recorded the black mass. His left arm and hand are obscured by his body.

The time stamp overlay was removed in later surveillance footage.

When holding a professional video (or still) camera (even when on a rig), the left hand is usually used to adjust the zoom, focus, and any other options. Since the cameraman was entering a smaller and darker area, it’s understandable that he would try to adjust the focus or angle for a better shot or maybe to turn a light on. When one grabs the lens to adjust this, your hand is in a “C” shape, so that your fingers wrap around the top and your thumb is around the bottom. Most likely what happened is that while looking through the LCD screen (camera view), he went to grab the lens to make the adjustment and overshot it, sticking his fingers in the frame. He quickly realized what happened and moved his hand out of the way.

Keep in mind, this footage wasn’t discovered until weeks later, according to Bagans. As Ben Radford notes in his book Investigating Ghosts, “Good investigators must fully investigate any unexplained phenomenon at the time it is occurring; noticing something strange on an audio or video playback days or weeks later is pointless.” This anomaly would have been in full view on the large LCD screen the cameraman was looking at, yet he fails to make note of it or mention it to Dr. Taft who is right in front of him. It only comes to light weeks later, after the cameraman was “removed” from the crew a few days after this event. This is far too late to investigate possible causes in the same location (the house was bulldozed after filming wrapped up).

I reached out Ed Weibe (2018), who agreed to answer some additional questions concerning his analysis of the video footage. It turns out that he did perform other enhancements beyond what is shown in the film, though none I would consider relevant to determining what the object might be. One included comparing how dark the anomaly was compared to other shadows and BT709 standards, a recommendation of the ITU-R, which specifies standards for high-definition TV (I’m not sure what this had to do with solving the mystery).

In our conversation, Weibe also mentioned that he had been on a previous episode of Bagans’s “Aftershock” edition of the Ghost Adventures show, where he was introduced as a paranormal investigator. The episode featured a video from Weibe taken at Sloss Furnaces that allegedly shows a headless ghost. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the video impressive, and it resembled someone wearing a hoodie with his head down in front and ducking behind an object. Another teammate who was present during this video was shown to be wearing similar clothing.

Despite the enhancements Weibe did, nothing beats simply trying to recreate the event to see if it’s possible. That’s what I did. I was able to duplicate the anomaly quite easily in my own home, which I assure you is not haunted by ghosts or demons. When I mentioned this to Weibe, he told me that there was additional footage that wasn’t used in the film. The additional video, according Weibe, ruled out the possibility of the cameraman’s hand in his opinion. Unfortunately, this missing footage can’t be taken into account until it is released.

Screenshot of the author’s recreation of the alleged black mass.

Screenshot of author’s recreation of the black mass while viewing the black mass on monitor. That is not his thumb; it’s his fingers lumped together in front of the lens.

Weibe also told me the cameraman’s arm was never in a position, at the time of the anomaly, to suspect his hand was the cause. He also mentions the cameraman’s elbows were back and the camera rig was in the way. This caused me to look at the surveillance footage again. As I watched the cameraman going into the hallway, it is easy to see (and obvious) that his left arm, elbow, and hand are blocked from view by his own body position and a backpack he’s wearing. I also found that the camera rig being used in the film has the operator’s left hand-hold only a few inches from the lens and completely accessible.

After this segment, we’re told that the cameraman, Adam Ahlbrandt, starts acting very strange, like he’s confused. I’m not convinced, since in the first scene showing this we see him sneaking a peek to make sure the others are noticing him. He hurries off to the basement by himself, and we’re treated to some spooky background music as Ahlbrandt walks around the basement by himself. We’re told he was vomiting blood back at the hotel room, in Bagans’s room—if true, it was not filmed. We see Ahlbrandt acting crazy and violent in the hotel, while Bagans and crew fearfully watch from down the hall. Surprisingly, not one other guest comes out to complain about the disturbance or see what’s going on.

He eventually calms down enough to talk to the crew, requesting they “cut the cameras” (turn them off), which is not done. Instead, they hide a camera under a table and continue to film while Ahlbrandt goes into a possession-type story, mixed with bits of threatening Bagans. Soon after that Ahlbrandt is “removed” from the crew.

But Ahlbrandt is not just a camera operator. According to his IMDb page, he’s an actor and cinematographer, known for films such as The Burnt House (2009), Cross Bearer (2013), and The Cemetery (2013). He’s known for violent horror films and has credits as a director, writer, editor, producer, special effects, and so on—pretty much every aspect of making a film, with eight credits as an actor. It’s not a stretch of the imagination that his hotel outburst was nothing more than a performance for the camera. I’m surprised this segment didn’t end with another exorcism.

Finally, Bagans is boarded up in the house alone so he can stay the night. He wanders around the empty house for a while, which is tracked by both Bagans’s handheld video camera and the surveillance cameras he had set up throughout the house. I noticed something peculiar: the video counter was missing from all of the surveillance camera videos. Earlier, when the NASA video engineer was reviewing surveillance video, a counter was onscreen. Now, when nothing important needs to be covered up, the counter has disappeared. This inconsistency suggests shady investigative methodology.

The experiences Bagans has while “locked down” in the house are as anti-climatic as the rest of the “evidence” that has been presented so far. First up is an EVP that he hears (and records) while looking through the glass window of the basement door (which is now closed). This is right next to two windows (to his left) in the kitchen area. The noise is faint and sounds like someone outside. If Bagans would have had microphones outside the house to monitor noise activity, at least we could have had some type of comparison. As it is, the recorded noise is not impressive in the slightest.

Bagans’s next experience is a bit more entertaining, even though it’s still on the silly side. Throughout the film, Bagans has mentioned several times about having a dream about a demon with a goat head. We endure cut-scenes of someone in this costume throughout the film. He continues this theme with another EVP—that of an angry goat. When I heard it, I recognized the sound right away. I did a quick Google search that yielded several videos of angry “demon” goats making noises that were very similar to what we hear in the film (see, for example, Simons 2016). It would not have been hard for Bagans to look up “angry goat” videos on his phone (it has been established he does have it) and play it from the room across the hall or even a small Bluetooth speaker.

Bagans freaks out and tells the “demon” to stay away as he cowers on the bed. Bagans’s handheld camera, which is set on the mattress next to him, suddenly goes out of focus (how convenient). In the extremely blurry view of his camera, we see a dark human shape move from right to left and out of the room. What I found strange here is that the “dark figure” was in the room. I tracked the door frame before the video went out of focus and it is obvious that the figure is in the room. During this whole scene, the video cuts back and forth between Bagans’s camera and a surveillance camera mounted in the corner of the room (with no counter). We never see Bagans get up off the bed from the surveillance camera point of view. Through editing, it would be very easy for Bagans to get up and walk out the doorway, then back again, creating this little scene without the viewer knowing for sure if it was staged or not. I’m leaning toward it being staged.

Closing out the film, Bagans revisits the people he’s met throughout filming and focuses on any negative aspects in their lives. He makes sure to keep things mysterious, even his own issue of diplopia (double vision). He claims it is permanent, though that seems to be a rare diagnosis. With treatment (including corrective lenses, an eye patch, eye exercises, or surgery) people often make a full recovery (Holland 2017). I don’t know the severity of Bagans’s condition, nor am I qualified to diagnose such a condition. I hope he’s not embellishing his condition to make it seem like the house was the cause, even though that’s exactly the impression I get here. In any case, I do hope he makes a full recovery.

The film concludes with the house getting demolished. Bagans decides it “needs to go away,” since he believes it has caused so many problems. It’s a shame, since there is no opportunity for anyone else to investigate the claims or to follow up on Bagans’s own work. I’m quite surprised that he demolished a potential cash cow; ghost hunting groups tend to pay a lot of money to stay in places like this overnight, or even just a few hours. Bagans could have made back the purchase price of the house pretty quickly, I’m sure. Yet I suspect that tearing down the house served two other purposes: first, to end the film on an altruistic “I’m protecting others” note (even though we learned that prior tenants, the tenants after the Ammons family, and even the squatters all had no issues in the house whatsoever). Honestly, trying to protect his viewers is already too late since each and every one of them had something attach to them just by watching the film (remember the “warning” in the beginning of the film). The second reason would be to keep other investigators, especially skeptical ones, from investigating the location and perhaps recreating some “evidence” in the same way Bagans and his crew did.

Good news, though! He kept the basement stairs and some of the dirt from the floor. I imagine it will be on display at his museum in Las Vegas soon (if it’s not already). I guess he’s not too worried about the “curse” of the house. I plan on visiting the museum later this year, so I’ll check it out.

Overall, I found this film to be a drawn-out version of Bagans’s television show. The voiceovers were boring, the overdone reenactments were ridiculously silly, and the acting (such as Bagans’s “almost-attack on Dr. Taft”) were worthy of several eye-rolls if not an audible guffaw. The research and investigation methods were heavily biased by his personal beliefs. Bagans and guests attributed pretty much anything and everything to the alleged demons or “curse” of the house without any good reason. Worse, I saw no actual investigation of paranormal claims; there was ample retelling of experiences and anecdotes, lots of speculation, misinterpretations, and shady editing, but no solid investigating. I wouldn’t call this a documentary, since there’s evidence of cherry-picking information and manipulation of events. There’s a lot you’re not being shown, and for good reason. It would take the suspense out of what little they have to offer. The film has been labeled a “pseudo-documentary,” meaning it is filmed in a documentary style but doesn’t portray real events. That sounds about right to me.

Special appreciation for research assistance from Shannon Bradley Byers, Rick Fisher, Anna Hill, Ruth Himes, William Lee, and Benjamin Radford.

1. I attempted to contact Dr. Taft through social media, email, and a phone number listed on his own website. Both the email and phone number are no longer in service.
2. Bill Lee noted that the meter is sensitive enough to pick up power lines outside the house. However, with power on in the house, the magnetic field from the house wiring would override any readings from the outside power lines.
3. It has been brought to my attention that when using these Tri-field meters, they are too sensitive to be held by hand. I asked Bill Lee about this, and he told me it was fine. Our hands don’t have an effect on the magnetic scale. However, because our bodies are conductors, we can have an effect on the electric field. Holding the meter would often increase the electric field reading. Also, our bodies often reflect radio waves and have an irregular effect on the meter, so you would need to back away from it to get an accurate reading. 

• Armstrong, Patti. 2014. Parish priest aids family in fight against demons. National Catholic Register. Available online at http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/parish-priest-aids-family-in-fight-against-demons; accessed on April 1, 2018.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2017. Facts about Stachybotrys chartarum and other molds. Available online at https://www.cdc.gov/mold/stachy.htm; accessed on April 1, 2018.
• Holland, Kimberly. 2017. What causes diplopia (double vision)? Available online at https://www.healthline.com/health/diplopia; accessed on April 10, 2018.
• Kaplan, Stephen, and Roxanne Salch Kaplan. 1995. The Amityville Horror Conspiracy. Lacyville, Pa.: Belfrey Books.
• Lee, William. 2018. Personal phone conversation with the president of AlphaLab, Inc. 
• Mayo Clinic. 2018. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Available online at https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/carbon-monoxide/symptoms-causes/syc-20370642; accessed on April 1, 2018.
• Moran, Rick, and Peter Jordan. 1978. The Amityville Horror hoax. Fate (May): 44–46.
• Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 122–129.
• ———. 2003 Amityville: The horror of it all. Available online at https://www.csicop.org/si/show/amityville_the_horror_of_it_all; accessed March 31, 2018.
• ———. 2014. The ‘200 demons’ house: A skeptical demonologist’s report. Available online at https://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_200_demons_house_a_skeptical_demonologists_report; accessed on April 1, 2018. 
• Radford, Benjamin. 2017. Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits. Corrales, NM; Rhombus Publishing, 95.
• Simons, Jordan. 2016. Angry goat makes crazy demon noises. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSMg1p8ETus; accessed on April 10, 2018.
• Taylor, Brett. 2017. Hollywood curse legends. Skeptical Inquirer 41(6) (November/December): 47.
• Washington, Valerie. 2012. Intake Officer’s Report of Preliminary Inquiry and Investigation, State of Indiana Department of Child Services, April 23.
• Weibe, Edward. 2018. Personal conversation via LinkedIn.com.

Many years ago, before the internet was even a glimmer in the eye of Al Gore, I found a copy of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine (SI). I don’t remember what issue it was, but it was at the library. I do remember browsing though the pages thinking, “wait, people think that is real?” And to other articles I thought “wait, that isn’t real?” A lot of years have passed, and we now get much of our information from our computer screens. What hasn’t changed in my life is the thrill I get when I see Skeptical Inquirer in my mail.

I browse over the index, read Ken Frazier’s editorial, move to the back pages to read the comments, puzzles, and cartoons, and then to “News and Comment.” All this usually happens within the first hour of receiving the magazine. Then I set aside some time to read the main articles. I’m always surprised at the diversity of the topics, and I learn something new.

You might have heard that I run a Wikipedia editing team; it’s like nothing else that has been tried before. We call ourselves Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW). Our mission is to focus on all Wikipedia pages concerning science, scientific skepticism, and the paranormal. If that isn’t unusual enough, we are attempting to do this in all languages. And to make it even more unusual, we operate in a Secret Cabal on Facebook where we train, mentor, and motivate people from the very first edit they make. We have our own training program with our own videos and assignments. When people leave our training, they are good Wikipedia editors with a broad range of skills. What makes them so different from a non-GSoW Wikipedia editor is that we are continue training and motivating each other. We are over 120 editors strong. This turns our editors from good to amazing. We can claim responsibility for writing or completely rewriting 624 Wikipedia pages, and we keep track of the pageviews for those 624 pages. We add about 34K new views a day, and in total those 624 pages have had 26,551,359 pageviews (as of May 2018).

One of the assignments near the beginning of training is what we call Backwards Editing. It’s something I stumbled across in the early days of GSoW. A non-GSoW editor is more likely to find a Wikipedia page they want to improve or write from scratch and then go looking for notable secondary sources to add to the page. That’s how it works when you are have the page in mind already. What we teach is to find the notable secondary source first, then try to find a Wikipedia page to put it on. Get it? Backwards editing.

The beauty of this is that you spend less time looking for citations to use, you get to use some valuable and interesting independent research, and you are able to edit diverse Wikipedia articles. Let’s talk about Skeptical Inquirer, for example Volume 42, Number 3 the May/June 2018 issue with Steven Pinker on the cover. This magazine is notable, which means it has a Wikipedia page, and it has journalistic integrity. It has oversight, a reputation it wants to keep strong, an editor, a long history, and no pay-to publish articles. Inside you will find articles that are diverse and from many notable people, which means they personally have Wikipedia pages. These articles are now perfect fodder for use as a backwards edit.

Wikipedia does not allow me personally to do original research; we rarely use primary sources. In other words, I can’t go to a primary document and read it through and give my opinion on a Wikipedia page interpreting it. This is a concept lost on most people who are not Wikipedia editors; it seems like a primary source is ideal. What we are looking for are secondary sources, from people who can be considered experts in the area they are writing about. It helps if they are also personally notable (i.e., they have their own Wikipedia page).

On pages 54–57, we have an article called “The 1849 Balvullich Ice Fall” by Randall J. Osczevski. He is an expert on wind chill and did a lot of original research on a very large piece of ice that was found on a farm in Scotland in 1849. Remember I’m not permitted to add original research to Wikipedia, but I can quote and summarize the research that Osczevski did. And that is just what I did. And after looking around for Wikipedia pages on Balvullich and not finding one, I found a Wikipedia page for icefall. A sad little page with a few photographs and only one citation. I was able to sum up and quote the Osczevski article and cite Skeptical Inquirer on the Wikipedia page for icefall. This is a Wikipedia page I would probably never have stumbled across, but this task brought me there and now the information in Wikipedia is increased and improved.

Now this brings me to a task that David Powell and I took on. We wanted to see how many different Wikipedia pages we could edit just by using this one issue of SI. Honestly, I had no idea how many we could do, so we set up a deadline of two-months (when the next issue came out) and using the GSoW Facebook Secret Cabal and a Google spreadsheet to keep track, we set to work.

I should mention David Powell is a librarian living in Ohio who attended CSICon in 2017. While there he heard my lecture “We Marched for Science – Now What?” where I try and recruit new people to join GSoW. David answered the call and finished GSoW training in February with a page rewrite of CSI Fellow Jill Tarter.

David and I (and a few others) worked our way through the issue, egging each other on, and pushing to add more pages to our list. We used the “News and Comment” section to add Bertha Vazquez to the National Association of Biology Teachers Wikipedia page. Robert Bartholomew’s article on the Hawaiian ballistic missile threat alarm made it to the Wikipedia page for “False alarm” see citation #1. My favorite edit was to the Wikipedia page for Prince Charles because of the article by Edzard Ernst on pages 8–9. I just checked and it’s still there, citation #144 and I even managed to mention Ernst’s book More Good Than Harm? on Charles’s Wikipedia page.

There were a couple SI articles we weren’t able to use on Wikipedia, such as Ben Radford’s article on the “Curious Christmas Light” and the Barry Williams obit, which we will eventually use when we write his Wikipedia page in the next couple months.

When we finished, which took us only one month, we had edited on twenty-eight Wikipedia pages. I mentioned earlier that GSoW can claim responsibility for 624 Wikipedia pages. That is just for pages that have seen major contributions by GSoW, not these small backwards edits. There is no way we could keep track of the thousands of pages we have edited. If we were able to count pageviews for these smaller edits, we would be far in excess of 50 million by now. I don’t even think I could guess.Look at this list from just this SI …

Why is all this important to the mission of GSoW and the skeptical community? The mission of GSoW is to rewrite/write all the Wikipedia pages we can concerning science, scientific skepticism, and the paranormal. And what are well-written Wikipedia pages but a bunch of citations just like what we did here. We need these articles in order to have something to add to the Wikipedia page. Another by-product of this task is that we are getting the magazine’s name and all those articles onto one of the most viewed websites in the world including citations that people can follow if they want more information. This action not only supports CSI and Skeptical Inquirer, but it also supports the authors of those articles, helping them and their work get more exposure. Just think how many school-children will be plagiarizing Wikipedia with these articles. Seriously, that is a something I’m striving for. How many students are learning about Skeptical Inquirer because they saw it mentioned on a Wikipedia article about some obscure topic? Maybe they will look into it further and be just like me and say to themselves “wait, people think that is real?” and to other articles think “wait, that isn’t real?” That might just set them down the rabbit hole of critical thinking.

If you would like to know more about the GSoW project, please visit our website here. Thank you, Julie Berents for your help with proofreading.

Troy Campbell is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Oregon, a design psychologist, and a former Disney Imagineer. He develops psychological theories to design better ways to overcome bias; create great experiences; improve well-being; and communicate ideas, stories, and science. He will be presenting at CSICon on Friday October 19 at 11:30 am.

Susan Gerbic: Hello, Troy. Really nice to meet you. I’ve been stalking your social media and web presence, and I a few questions about you. But first, can you tell readers a bit more about yourself and your motivation for becoming a more scientific minded person? I understand it has something to do with ex-girlfriends.

Troy Campbell: I often tell the true story of how an ex-girlfriend didn’t make me more science-minded, but she made me act on science. Those seem like the same thing, right? It seems that if you were science-minded, you would do things based on science. But that is not always the case for many reasons. In my case, it was about motivation.

So a long time ago I dated a girl who was a big environmentalist, and she came over to my house, had a can of diet coke, and then asked me where the recycling was. I did not have a recycling, but I pretended to have one by using a cardboard box. Since that day I have been a much more environmental person in action. I always had the thoughts; I always knew the science, but I didn’t act. I ended up acting because of a girl, not because of any scientific truth.

I will talk about some honest things like that in my talk.

Gerbic: I’ve read over your CSICon lecture synopsis. It looks very engaging, but how are you going to cover all this is a thirty-minute talk? I think learning about why people “deny science” would be a semester-long discussion just by itself.

Campbell: There are many different biases that drive denial of science, so there is no way I can cover all of those. But here’s the fortunate thing: the way you battle those biases is mostly accomplished with just a few general techniques. The spoiler alert is that the title “Battling Bias” is a purposeful misdirect, because what you’ll see is that it is less of battle and more of extending of a welcoming hand and motivating people in the right way, which often, as with my ex-girlfriend example, has nothing to do with the science.

Gerbic: I loved this line of yours from a recent video: “Lies are signals of team commitment. Lying in a certain way, in certain situations, shows how strongly committed to a team you are, and especially what team you are on. … We reward people for engaging in lying.” Wow! Really well said. I guess I see how you are going to cover so much in a thirty-minute lecture.

Campbell: My new work on lying really shows how most of this denial isn’t really about mistrust in the scientific process.Some of it is, but most of it is not. Factual denial is often simply the result of very basic psychology 101 team dynamic behavior.

Gerbic: I also see you are a member of the large Elizabeth Loftus fan club that I am also a member of. I liked your insight into her career as an academic and researcher, you said, “When I met Elizabeth Loftus ten years ago, I thought I had I met the pinnacle of an academic in both research and presentation. Yet watching Loftus over the last ten years has shown me, some of the smartest people never reach a peak, they just keep getting better at talking, researching, and combining classic ideas with modern changes.”

Campbell: Loftus and the amazing political psychologist Peter Ditto were my undergraduate advisors at UC Irvine, and it has been amazing to see these people become even more famous and more relevant since I was their student. What has always amazed me about their work is their ability to reveal simple things we didn’t all know. Loftus’s work on how information after the fact clouds our memory of the original is obvious in hindsight and so is Pete Ditto’s work on how people assess information (they spend more time skeptically analyzing things they don’t agree with). Their experiments and the stories they tell are so immediately enlightening to the public.

Gerbic: I see you are at the University of Oregon, in Eugene. I hope you have been able to spend time with one of the founders of modern scientific skepticism, Ray Hyman. I will be doing a GSoW tour of the West Coast of the U.S. this summer, and I think I will be speaking in Eugene on July 30. I hope you can make my talk. The group Oregonians for Science and Reason is helping to organize it, so stay tuned.

Campbell: I may be still in California for some social science related to Comic Con, but if not, I will definitely make it.

Gerbic: Speaking of great speakers, CSICon has another great lineup this year. Who are you excited about seeing speak?

Campbell: The cultural cognition leader Dan Kahan is a fascinating speaker and often says things that make you think “Oh, how did I miss that?” I always like his talks.

Also, I am really excited to see Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything as my work has been on the show. I really like the way Adam’s show makes being wrong positive. In the harsh world of “woke culture” where knowledge is social status and being wrong is treated by many like an irredeemable sin, Adam is modeling something wonderful. I think there is more to be done building on the Adam Ruins Everything model.

I will say one last thing, and I hope I word this right. I am also excited that there are so many different types of speakers from fiery to less so. My work is all about how we must welcome people and be nice to those who are denying science. That’s not the specialty of everyone at the conference. And this mix is a good thing. Because we need both. We need fiery and sometimes hostile science celebrities, but we also need to be welcoming. Sometimes we can do both and be “radical and welcoming” at the same time. Sometimes we can’t or shouldn’t. I hope everyone leaves with many ideas and a wisdom about how and when to use different strategies with different audiences to bring people to science.

Gerbic: I believe this will be your first CSICon. We are known for friendly attendees and great discussions. Also, a Halloween party; this year’s theme is a pajama party. We also tell people to follow CSICon on Facebook to keep informed of what is happening in between the lectures. I look forward to meeting you in person, Troy. Hopefully in July in Eugene, but for sure in Vegas this October.

Campbell: I look forward to meeting you and everyone, especially after seeing Elizabeth Loftus’s past Facebook posts of the Halloween party. People can feel free to hit me up on twitter, @TroyHcampbell. Thanks for chatting, Susan. See you in Las Vegas!

In my mid-teen years, I was a firm believer in biorhythms, ancient aliens, the Bermuda triangle, ESP, and all manner of pseudoscientific nonsense. At that time (the ’70s) there was no internet (gasp!) and no easy way to find information countering these woo claims. I was lucky that I eventually stumbled upon a copy of Skeptical Inquirer in my school’s library, and it was that event that put me on the path to rationality. I read all the copies available in the library, got a subscription, and found myself being reasoned out of all the false beliefs, one by one, that I had previously acquired. I felt enlightened, but that came at a price.

Convincing my many woo-believing family members, friends, schoolmates, and then coworkers that what I used to believe—and what they still did believe—was likely wrong was just not happening. I spent a great deal of time arguing against their proclamations about the paranormal, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and all manner of nonsense. Sure, I had a few friends who weren’t true believers, but discussing these topics with them wasn’t satisfying at all. That wasn’t doing anything more than shouting into an echo chamber. That was not outreach. I wanted to change some minds, not just reinforce opinions already held that agreed with mine. The advent of social media, of course, only made things much, much worse. Posting about science and reason only earned me the cold shoulder with those I hoped to reach with the truth. The only thing I accomplished was to make myself utterly frustrated. It was like hitting my head on a brick wall. Very hard. Repeatedly. Sound familiar? If you are reading this on Skeptical Inquirer’s website, I think it is likely you can relate to at least some of my experiences.

So, what if I told you that I recently found a way to reach people outside the echo chamber who may be open to what I have to say? A way I could get good information to millions of people who might actually be searching for it to help them make up their minds about topics that skeptics care about? Topics like going to a medium, or using a naturopath, or withholding vaccinations from children? Did I say “millions of people”?Yes, I did. No doubt you are skeptical of this claim, but please read on.

As I mentioned, stumbling across Skeptical Inquirer all those decades ago taught me to think rationally. But it was stumbling across a Skeptic Zone podcast interview in 2016 about the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) project that gave me a way to actually contribute to the cause—in a big way. So, what is this Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia all about?

The Guerrilla Skeptics team is an international group of 100 or so volunteers working in many languages.Our mission is to improve skeptical content on Wikipedia by writing or improving skepticism and science related articles, as well as the biographical articles of notable people involved in the skeptical movement. We add valid material and citations, and we remove unsourced claims from paranormal and pseudoscientific articles. We do everything from making small improvements, like improving existing text and references, to writing entire articles from scratch. The team’s topics of interest are varied and include purported psychic mediums, an international suicide hoax game, the supposed “sonic attack” on the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, documentaries (pro- and antiscience), scientists (both active and deceased), alt-med topics, skeptical movement spokespeople and organizations, and even an astronaut. In fact, we did the re-write of the article for the first and only (underappreciated) astro-cat, Félicette (check it out)! Sometimes we add facts, and sometimes we subtract misinformation (or disallowed information per Wikipedia rules); most often it is a mix of both.

Most importantly, we do all this by following the encyclopedia’s strict rules and guidelines. We are trained to work within the “corporate culture” of Wikipedia—which is extremely collaborative and very pro-science and anti-pseudoscience. (More on that later.)

Sometimes what your detractors have to say about you is very informative. In our case, they tend to get everything wrong about Wikipedia rules and how GSoW operates collaboratively within the encyclopedia. After first saying that Wikipedia had once been “a utopian ideal,” the astrology website Astrology.co.uk went on to claim that Susan Gerbic and her Guerilla Skeptics team had spoiled it all for everyone. They even took a swipe at the Skeptical Inquirer:

… anyone interested in pages on what Wikipedia term 'fringe' topics: those relating to astrology, the paranormal, metaphysics, faith/spirituality or alternative medicine or on atheism or [skepticism] will find editing is a closed shop controlled by a small group of editors…. Their avid faith in science as the only source of truth is known as scientism…. Since most of their knowledge of fringe subjects is acquired from the biased perspective of sceptical publications like the Skeptical Inquirer, conferences and books, subjects like the paranormal, religious belief, astrology and alternative medicine appear objectionable. Scientific evidence supporting fringe subjects is not welcomed in the manner of a good scientist…. Gerbic is clearly very proud that her team changed the homeopathy page "drastically" and managed to insert the word 'quackery' into the lead section on the main homeopathy article … apparently this was with a nod from [Wikipedia founder] Jimmy Wales…. Though I am not a follower of homeopathy, this seemed an unnecessary insult to a well-established therapy used by many medical doctors. Even if it is a placebo as some tests claim (and others do not), it is therapeutic in a way that does not require invasive surgery or drugs with harmful side-effects. Who are we to judge? (http://archive.is/umIsl)

Well, GSoW isn’t the judge, but Wikipedia’s policies are. On Wikipedia, if not elsewhere, homeopathy and other forms of pseudoscience may be called exactly what they are—nonsense and quackery. On Wikipedia, facts matter. Science matters. The members of the GSoW team just do our best to implement the established rules. And the quacks, scam-artists, alt-med, and woo-peddlers of every stripe absolutely hate us for it. Well, that’s just too bad. Some of the team wear this as a badge of honor.

So, what are these Wikipedia rules favoring science and skepticism? According to the “Wikipedia Arbitration Committee Decisions on Pseudoscience” proclamation (http://archive.is/8SgCF):

The Arbitration Committee has issued several principles which may be helpful to editors … when dealing with subjects and categories related to "pseudoscience":

Scientific focus: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and its content on scientific and quasi-scientific topics will primarily reflect current mainstream scientific consensus.

Neutral point of view as applied to science: “Wikipedia: Neutral point of view”, a fundamental policy, requires fair representation of significant alternatives to scientific orthodoxy. Significant alternatives, in this case, refers to legitimate scientific disagreement, as opposed to pseudoscience.

That last point, “as opposed to pseudoscience,” is the key. We actually had to point out this policy when arguing with an opposing editor who was claiming that the article about Modern flat Earth societies needed to be “fair and balanced.” He was complaining on the Talk page (most every Wikipedia article has an associated Talk page where editors argue over what the main article should include) about a section GSoW added that stated that flat Earthers had taken to using social media “...to spread disinformation and attract others to their erroneous ideas....” He didn’t like the use of “disinformation” and “their erroneous ideas,” and said so (http://archive.is/07iH7):

If the article is discussing flat-Earthers, then it should discuss them ****neutrally***. Defining them one way or the other is an opinion, and is absolutely not encyclopedic. It doesn't matter if they're crazy, weird, or whatever you think of them. You could avoid starting a whole article about them in this case. But given the fact that [the article exists] it needs to be very unbiased and neutral, giving both sides of the argument if you need to. But describing your subject with biased descriptions all over the page is not typical of encyclopedias.

Thanks to Wikipedia policies and our push-back citing said policies, despite that editor’s efforts and opinions, the article remains dismissive of the flat-Earth conspiracy theory. No neutrality required.

The same type of thing frequently happens with articles on woo-topics somewhat less out-there than the flat-Earth conspiracy. One more example: take “psychic medium” Tyler Henry. (Please, take him.) An editor with the Wikipedia account name (something like) I-Love-Tyler-Henry deleted all the valid, well sourced criticism that GSoW had added to the Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry article. Their recorded reason for the deletion was that no one who had not directly experienced Henry’s powers had any right to criticize him. Well, Wikipedia rules beg to differ. A non-GSoW editor handled this one by properly following Wikipedia rules and “reverting” the deletion, thus restoring all the valid criticism of Henry from Steven Novella, Susan Gerbic, David Gorski, Sharon Hill, Mark Edward, Hemant Mehta, and the Independent Investigations Group, among others.

Now let me make it clear why Wikipedia, and the quality of the information there, is important in the first place. If no one sees the material, who cares how much woo, alt-med, and other nonsense sneaks in, right? Well, according to Alexa, Wikipedia is the fourth most visited website in the English-speaking world. It is only behind the three giants: Google, YouTube, and Facebook (http://archive.is/fARt3). When you realize that in that group only Wikipedia is, well, an encyclopedia, the importance of getting the details correct on that site becomes clear. And, as both Google (and lately YouTube) point their users to Wikipedia, the importance of the encyclopedia having valid information available to people searching for it is absolutely critical. In many Google searches, the Wikipedia article on the searched-for topic is at or near the top of the list. For a search on a woo claim, sometimes it is the only rational, skeptical hit returned. Someone on the fence about a woo claim may be dissuaded from taking on an irrational belief just by stumbling across a well written Wikipedia article on the subject they were Googling. 

One more important point: Journalists use Wikipedia. And in the course of research for a story, if a reporter finds skeptical information in an article on a woo topic, they might use that as the basis for a story rather than disseminate nonsense to their reading or viewing public. And this isn’t just a hypothesis. We have seen concrete examples of news stories quoting our Wikipedia material. One recent case was in USA Today Sports. When wrestler and Olympian Ronda Rousey sat for a psychic reading on The Hollywood Medium and acted as if Tyler Henry were the real deal (http://archive.is/f8kQs), the USA Today article used the phrase “grief vampire” regarding Henry. It also reported that the show had received the “Truly Terrible Television Award” from the IIG for “extraordinary ongoing deceit of the American public.” These golden nuggets, and more, are in the Tyler Henry Wikipedia article for all to find thanks to the Guerrilla Skeptics.

Now back to my claim regarding providing good information “to millions of people”: Since joining the GSoW team in late 2016, the seventeen articles that I created from scratch, or largely rewrote, have now garnered just over 901,000 pageviews. This tally is currently increasing at the rate of about 2,300 daily. And, as our promo spot says, I reach people even while I sleep. Keep in mind that this does not count the smaller (yet important) contributions I made to many, many other articles. And I’m not done making edits or writing articles. (By the way, in case you’re wondering: we track the pageviews for “our” articles using Wikipedia’s own data, which is available via a simple query.)

What about the entire team? Well, the numbers for the collective major work of the GSoW team—again, just the 627 article rewrites or new articles—are now over 26.6 million, increasing at over 33,000 daily. How’s that for outreach? Personally, I find these numbers mind boggling.

So, there you have it. What Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia does is to promote science and reason using one of the most powerful platforms available. And perhaps just slightly less important than that, being a part of the GSoW team provides its members with a personal sense of accomplishment: We are all part of the skeptical movement, and we know that we are helping make the world a more informed and hopefully slightly more rational place.

So, if you have been wanting to contribute to the Skeptical movement but didn’t know how to go about it, joining our team may be just what you’ve been looking for. We will train and mentor you and provide you with the skills to effectively contribute to Wikipedia, possibly the most powerful education tool in the world. If you think you might like to help us advocate for science and fight woo and pseudoscience, email us at GSoWTeam@gmail.com. Need a bit more convincing? Search for “Guerrilla Skeptics Promo” on YouTube to hear our official recruitment spot, with yours-truly getting the word out on The Skeptic Zone podcast.

Craig Foster received his PhD in social psychology from the University of North Carolina. He currently serves as a psychology professor at the United States Air Force Academy. His research interests include scientific reasoning and the development of pseudoscientific beliefs. Craig has presented a Sunday paper at CSICon 2016 and 2017. This year he will be presenting on Friday October 19 at noon.

Susan Gerbic: Craig, it’s great to talk to you again. It’s been so much fun watching you become more and more involved in the skeptic movement. I was at the Fort Collins, Colorado, SkeptiCamp in April and one of Linda Rosa’s slides came up with your face on it. Apparently you are working with her and Jean Mercer on something? But first, tell the readers a bit about yourself. I’ll link to the two previous articles I’ve written on you at CSICon 2017 and 2016.

Craig Foster: Thanks, Susan. Becoming more involved with the skeptic movement has been really rewarding, both in terms of learning new things and in terms of meeting great people. I am glad to have found a community that thinks and feels the way I do.

On the personal side, I spend the majority of my free time hanging out with my family. I sort of enjoy trail running. I am hoping to get back into photography, which I have neglected for years. I am still searching for the perfect huevos rancheros.

Gerbic: Weren’t you planning on attending a Bigfoot conference? What happened with that?

Foster: I developed a research idea involving the Bigfoot conference over two years ago. I contacted the conference director and he was supportive. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out and I put it on the back burner. One of my students, Alexys, learned about the research and became really interested. We turned it into her senior year capstone project. The conference director was still on board, so we dusted off the old survey and we took it to the 2018 Texas Bigfoot Conference in Jefferson, Texas.

Alexys and I had a great time at the conference. The speakers and attendees were, much like the people at a skepticism conference, charming and friendly. Jefferson was delightful, and the food was exceptional.We were also able to obtain enough completed surveys to draw some interesting conclusions.

Gerbic: You are presenting on Friday at noon, and I understand you will be talking about how belief in the paranormal is a normal human characteristic and “believers” are not crazy or stupid. What more can you tell us about your talk?

Foster: The talk is based primarily on the results we obtained from the Bigfoot conference. The idea that belief in the paranormal is a human characteristic is not new. Plenty of skeptics and social scientists have described characteristics of human reasoning that lead people into paranormal or pseudoscientific beliefs. The unique part of our research was examining simultaneously personality factors, social factors, and scientific reasoning factors as predictors of believing in Bigfoot. By examining these broad perspectives simultaneously, we could estimate which ones had more influence. The results have only reinforced my belief that susceptibility to pseudoscience is a human characteristic. Naturally, I will share the results and the implications for skepticism during my talk.

 Gerbic: I want to hear what Jean, Linda, and you have in the works. What else is on your to-do list these days?

Foster: Please. I wouldn’t say that “we” (air quotes) have anything planned. It’s more like Linda and Jean throw some baby carrots in my Knight Rider lunchbox and take me to school. Linda and Jean have long been outstanding advocates for evidence-based health practices. One of the issues on their radar involved connections between the state of Colorado and practices that did not align with contemporary science. They were particularly concerned about attachment therapy, which has a sad history of promoting holding therapy and other concepts that do not jive with contemporary psychology. We met with two representatives from the Colorado Department of Human Services. It was fantastic. They shared our desire to support evidence-based practices, and they have worked with us in a constructive manner. It has provided a great example of what skepticism and persistence can do. Linda and Jean deserve all the credit though. Since that initial meeting they are the ones who have been lending their expertise to the process. I just sit back and learn from those woo hunters.

The main items on my skeptical to-do list involve completing a few papers about pseudoscience and the paranormal. One paper involves the God and sports topic that I presented at the 2017 CSICon. Another paper examines the reasons that anti-vaccination communities gravitate toward claims about vaccines causing harm. That might seem obvious, but I think the details are important.

Gerbic: Well,we have a fantastic lineup this year. Whose lectures are you looking forward to seeing? 

Foster: Massimo Pigliucci’s. My interest in pseudoscience really kicked off around the beginning of 2014 when I started teaching science-pseudoscience demarcation at the Air Force Academy. I wanted to understand how communities can believe and promote scientifically untenable claims. Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry had just published a tremendous volume called Philosophy of Pseudoscience. His work has been enormously helpful, and I am a big admirer.

I am also looking forward to lunch with Paul Offit. I consider myself a generalist when it comes to understanding pseudoscience, but I have spent the majority of time studying anti-vaccination. This evolved out of the anti-vaccination review that I placed in my statistics and research methods sequence. I wanted the Air Force Academy cadets to see proper and improper methods of scientific reasoning in an applied context. It helps that all the cadets have been vaccinated and not a single cadet has combusted spontaneously.

I want to meet The Amazing Randi. Yeah, I said it. Poor guy has this long line of people just wanting to meet him and here I am just adding to his burden. It’s really selfishness hidden under homage.

Gerbic: This will be your third CSICon. When we talked back in 2016, you were the “new guy.” Now as one of the “old folk,” what advice would you give to first time CSICon attendees?

Foster: Ha! Old guy already? I suppose so.

First, I would remind everybody that we are a peculiar group. It obviously isn’t the norm to spend time and money just to engage in discussions about science, critical thinking, and most of all, woo. We need to celebrate our oddness by encouraging a supportive atmosphere. I would like an environment where attendees can walk up to strangers and say “I am here by myself and I could use a wingwoman or wingman” and receive a positive response. That would be pretty sweet.

Second, don’t believe everything you hear. Skepticism often focuses on cognitive processes at the individual level. Consider the slogan “I doubt it.” This pithy little saying provides a fundamental lesson in critical thinking: Don’t be too quick to believe.

That said, the skeptical community has a vital, additional function. When skeptics gather and discuss issues that are important to them, they create a forum where they can scrutinize the claims with which they take issue. This process is critically important because it minimizes the likelihood that skeptics are going to make misinformed arguments. There is a danger in this process, however. Because the process is generally effective, it can be tempting to believe a claim because the skeptical community generally promotes the claim. I understand this temptation. In my experience skeptics are typically sharp and well-informed. Nevertheless, it would be hypocritical to believe something simply because skepticism says that it is so. Skepticism ultimately is united not around any set of beliefs but around the process that creates those beliefs. This creates an odd paradox: Questioning skepticism is supporting skepticism.

Gerbic: The lectures are only half of the CSICon experience. So much more goes on in the hallways, at the bars, and at lunch and dinners. Anyone who thinks they are going to just show up for the lectures and then go back to their room is missing out on so much. We have a Halloween party too; this year’s theme is pajama party. I would suggest attendees follow CSICon on the Facebook group to keep up with people and share photos and conference tips. The past two years, groups of us took over Johnny Rockets and Baja Fresh. Now that we are moving to the Westgate Casino and Resort, we are going to have to find new places to hang out. And everyone is welcome; just pull up a chair and prepare to hangout, no invite necessary.

Q: A few years ago I took an otherwise normal photo of a Christmas tree hunt near my hometown. The photo is of my daughter carrying our Christmas tree with her dad. You can clearly see a strange orange orb that seems to have a distinct center—inside the tree! I am one to look for logical explanations before jumping to paranormal conclusions, but this one has me stumped. Can you offer an explanation?

—Tammy S.

Figure 1

A: Tammy sent me the photograph (Figure 1), and I then replied asking her to provide more details about the circumstances of the image. She soon followed up:

I have researched fake orbs trying to find a logical explanation for my photo. It was a sunny day, and I suspected there might be some type of reflection or refraction from my camera, but the orb appears in an area where there doesn’t appear to be anything for it to reflect off of, and my camera was not pointed directly into the sunlight. I did take a series of photos immediately before and after (the series is: one cutting the tree, the one with the orb, and then one carrying the tree farther away). Those all appear completely normal.

There wasn’t much more information, though we were able to determine when the photo was taken (Saturday, November 29 at 11:22:58am) by examining the photo properties of the jpeg file—assuming of course that the time was set up correctly when the camera was initialized.

I examined the photo and first tried to determine whether the object was emitting or reflecting light. Given the proximity of her daughter’s right hand (carrying the tree trunk) to the orange glow, at first glance it looked like it could have been a reflection, for example from a piece of amber jewelry. However, the shape of the anomaly made me suspect it was lens flare. To be sure, I spent a few minutes measuring the shadows to get an idea of where (outside the frame) the sun would be and marked them using photo editing tools in a copy of the photograph (Figure 2).

Figure 2

I replied to Tammy and sent her the photo:

You are right that there’s nothing in the outline of the tree to reflect off of; the reflection is not outside the camera but inside it. I have attached the photo showing the location of the sun given the angle of the shadows and the time stamp on the file; the mystery glowing spot is directly beneath the sun. Lens flare occurs when a point of light source (often—and in this case—the sun) is much brighter than the rest of the scene, and it either happens to be in the image (within lens angle of view), or simply hits the front element of a lens without being present in the image. It can take a wide variety of appearances, ranging from haze to round orbs and polygons. Often they are white or transparent white, but sometimes they are orange (as in your photo), yellow, red, or other colors. If you’re interested, you could probably get the same effect with some trial and error! Don’t feel bad about not recognizing it, though—it does look weird.

I was pretty sure of my explanation but also sent it to Kenny Biddle of the Geeks and Ghosts podcast. He agreed it was definitely lens flare; the telltale sign to him was the tiny cross in the center. Even a smart, skeptical person can be fooled by something strange in a photograph; though lens flare often occurs when the sun (or another bright light) is within the frame, it can also occur outside it. Another mystery solved.

The first I heard about a shadowy UFO research program operated by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 2007–2012 was when I was interviewed by New York Times reporter Helene Cooper on December 12, 2017. I was not named in the subsequent two articles (Cooper et al. 2017a; 2017b) except that one included my input under an introductory statement about UFO sightings. It read: “Experts caution that earthly explanations often exist for such incidents, and that not knowing the explanation does not mean that the event has interstellar origins” (Cooper et al. 2017b).

The DIA had not acknowledged the program’s existence until it was revealed by Cooper and two coauthors, reporter Ralph Blumenthal and a credulous flying-saucer promoter and writer, Leslie Kean (see, e.g., Kean 2010). Had I known the latter was involved, I would have warned the New York Times to tread carefully.

Indeed, the respected newspaper did come in for some deserved criticism, including from New York magazine for “implying that extraterrestrials are real.” The magazine added, “For ufologists who had dreamed of being taken seriously by the mainstream media, the story was a dream come true” (Wise 2017). Most problematic was the second of the articles, despite its disclaimer.

Strange Incident

That article told of a 2004 incident that occurred when two Navy F-18 fighter planes were sent to investigate a mysterious object and it suddenly accelerated—like nothing the airmen had ever seen before. Intrigued, I contacted Major James McGaha, with whom I have often worked, especially on UFO cases. A former U.S. Air Force special operations pilot, he is also an astronomer and so has a unique knowledge of the sky. We set to work on the case.

According to the New York Times article, navy airmen—Commander David Fravor and Lt. Commander Jim Slaight—had been with a squadron on a training mission over the Pacific some 100 miles from San Diego. The date was November 14, 2004. The incident began when Fravor was radioed by a radar operator on a Navy cruiser, the USS Princeton, asking them to investigate some unknown objects at a particular vector. He was accompanied by another F-18.

When the two planes arrived at what is termed “merge point”—that is, so close that the Princeton’s radar could not distinguish them from the unknown object—the pilots saw nothing. But when Fravor looked down he saw the sea churning. Was this from a crashed aircraft as Fravor first thought or from, he would later suggest, possibly a submarine (as from the Nimitz’s own carrier strike group)?

Unfortunately, there are different versions of Fravor’s subsequent experience. First the New York Times, mentioning the churning water, states that “some kind” of white, oval aircraft about thirty to forty feet long was “hovering 50 feet above the churn.” But as Fravor descended, the object ascended toward him. He said, “We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point” (Cooper 2017b).

Yet something is wrong in the information here: How could someone see what a forty-foot object was doing from forty miles away?

Another version of Fravor’s experience is provided in a “truly curious document that tells Fravor’s story in the form of a military-style briefing” with portions blacked out to give a pseudo top-secret appearance (Wise 2017). It is in fact a third-person account of an interview with Fravor, produced by a fringe-ideas group called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. That group includes Luis Elizondo, who had previously headed the Pentagon UFO study (actually named Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program), mentioned earlier. The group’s founders include former pop singer Tom DeLonge and former Scientologist and parapsychologist Harold E. Puthoff (Austin 2017).

In this second, earlier report (“Pilot report” 2017), which calls Fravor “Source,” the unidentified object above the churning water “traveled from left to right over the disturbed water at an altitude of approximately 1000 to 3000 feet”—not fifty feet above, as the other version had reported. (Investigators can scarcely be expected to explain some occurrence when what is alleged is presented with such contradictions and seriously incomplete and disjointed reporting.) Fravor went on to say that as the second plane aggressively dropped and maneuvered, to catch up with the object, it behaved “as if it knew or somehow anticipated what they were going to do and even pointed toward them!” To us, it sounds almost as if the airmen were deliberately being buzzed by a reconnaissance drone! Were they being tested as part of their training?

Whatever actually happened, the UFO then disappeared, Fravor said, having “accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen” (Cooper et al. 2017b). When the two jets returned to their aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, something interesting occurred: “… everyone on the ship had learned of Commander Fravor’s encounter and was making fun of him” (Cooper et al. 2017b). They were playing alien movies such as Men in Black and The X-Files on the ship’s onboard closed-circuit TV (“Pilot report” 2017). Given that “everyone” made fun of Fravor, one must wonder why: Did he have a reputation as a UFO believer, or did they know something he didn’t?

The Video

Fravor says another group of F-18s “also encountered the same object later the same day.” Viewing a video from that flight, “Source [Fravor] identified the object affirmatively as the one they saw earlier” (“Pilot Report” 2017). Apparently this video—not one from Fravor’s plane—was the one released by the To the Stars group.

It seems possible that Fravor’s sighting has become merged with the separate incident shown by the video. Both involve an object described as looking like a “tic-tac” candy mint—without apparent wings, rotors, windows, or other features—and completely white. This is indicative of an object seen on an infrared video (like the video in question). Thus, there may well be confusion as to what was supposedly seen by Fravor and what had been related to him. Such confusion could easily have occurred over the intervening thirteen years.

Either the first or second object in question, if seen only on a video screen, might well have been a drone or distant airplane. Even if it were too far away to be visible, its heat signature could have been viewed by infrared. Another possibility was given by Fravor himself. Interestingly, before the planes were sent to the site, the controller had made sure they were not weaponized. After the encounter, Fravor had “initially thought that perhaps this was an unannounced, classified missile test by a U.S. Navy submarine,” but he now concludes, “There is no way any aircraft or missile that I know of could conduct maneuvers like what we saw that day” (“Pilot report” 2017). Nevertheless, there is confusion over just what occurred. Fravor insists, “I know what I saw” (quoted in Finucane 2018), while just as surely admitting, “I have no idea what I saw” (quoted in Cooper et al. 2017b). We have observed this many times: A person has mistaken perceptions, or he experiences something that seems unusual, and soon is insisting that he knows what he saw, ego becoming involved. In fact, he only knows what he thinks he saw, and that can change over time.

In any event, this brings us to the video in question, which shows an object’s rapid acceleration to the left and disappearance from the video screen. What we see on the video is probably a trick of optics, according to Major McGaha. He believes the sudden leftward-zooming of the object resulted from the camera having momentarily reached the limit of its panning ability, at which time the F-18 was banking. This created the onscreen illusion that the object suddenly shot away. As corroboration, McGaha notes that the angle of the object’s moving off the screen is correlated to the bank angle of the F-18. What was no longer viewed was presumed to have disappeared at a tremendous speed.

As it happened, this was Fravor’s “first military assignment as a pilot for the U.S. Navy’s F-18 Super Hornet.” It obviously rattled him. As he was stung by being made fun of on returning to the Nimitz, he “made detailed written notes of the incident” that he mailed to an aunt, noting, “Keep this because this is important stuff about some real X-Files shit” (“Pilot report” 2017). No one was going to tell him he could have been mistaken about his experience—which, after all, appears to have been a series of misunderstandings and misperceptions.

Conclusions

New York magazine summed up the retired Fravor’s current celebrity status:

It seems that To the Stars is trying to shroud Fravor’s account in a spooky fog of faux top secrecy. This is a dicey strategy given Fravor’s prominence in online UFO circles, and gives the impression that Elizondo’s company is repackaging timeworn tales from the internet as freshly revealed government X-files. And, by extension, (it) calls into question the Times’ wisdom in taking his claims about extraterrestrial encounters at face value. (Wise 2017)

To recap, we suggest that several things were going on during what was, after all, a training mission of the USS Nimitz carrier strike group. We believe the churning water Fravor first saw was caused by a submerging sub; that the sightings of a UFO above the water (variously reported)—which hovered, then came toward one pilot—could have been those of a reconnaissance drone; that there may have been confusion (then and later) over the object or objects caused by the admixture of visual sightings with infrared video viewing; and, finally, that one video image showing an object suddenly zooming off screen was likely caused by the plane’s banking while the camera was stopped at the end of its sweep.

If UFO proponents claim inconsistencies in our scenario, we shall point out confusion and incompleteness in the reports. Apparently not only had the incident not been considered serious enough to have warranted a debriefing of Fravor—let alone of the several other pilots and radar operator—but most of the carrier group’s personnel at the time regarded Fravor’s response as laughable. Major McGaha and I regard the entire incident not as evidence of an extraterrestrial encounter but as a comedy of errors involving the pilots.

• Austin, Jon. 2017. Pentagon UFO probe. Daily Express (London), updated December 28.
• Cooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. 2017a. Glowing auras and ‘black money’: The Pentagon’s mysterious U.F.O. program. The New York Times (December 16).
• ———. 2017b. 2 Navy airmen and an object that ‘accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen.’ The New York Times (December 16).
• Finucane, Martin. 2018. This former navy pilot… Boston Globe (January 16).
• Kean, Leslie. 2010. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. New York: Three Rivers Press.
• Pilot report. 2017. 2004 USS Nimitz Pilot Report. Available online at https://coi.tothestarsacademy.com/nimitz-report/; accessed January 5, 2018.
• Wise, Jeff. 2017. What the New York Times UFO report actually reveals. New York magazine. Available online at http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/new-york-times-ufo-report.html; accessed December 27, 2017.

Carl Zimmer is a science writer who reports about biology and medicine. He writes a weekly column for the New York Times and has also written for publications including National Geographic and Discover. Carl has written several science books; his latest is called She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perils, and Potential of Heredity. He has received numerous awards, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism in 2012. Carl will be presenting at CSICon on Friday, October 19, at 10:00 am.

Susan Gerbic: So nice to meet you, Carl. I’ve heard your name before. I see you have been a speaker at NECSS, and I just discovered your latest book on a list of Best Science Books of Spring 2018. I’m surprised I haven’t run into you sooner. You also write a column for the New York Times called “Matter.” Please tell our readers more about yourself.

Carl Zimmer: I started out in science writing as a fact-checker at Discover. I found it incredibly satisfying, allowing me to learn on the job about fascinating discoveries across fields such as biology, geology, and physics. After ten years at Discover, I left to work on books and other projects. I started contributing to the New York Times in 2004, and for the past five years I’ve written the “Matter” column there. You could describe my area of coverage as the “life beat”—the research into biology that’s helping us understand what it means to be alive.

Gerbic: I was just looking at your Wikipedia page, as we do, and I see you have a very unusual claim to fame. You are the only science writer who has a species of tapeworm named for you, Acanthobothrium zimmeri. So please tell us how that happened?

Zimmer: In 2000, I published a book called Parasite Rex, which is a spirited defense of parasites. They’ve gotten a reputation as degenerates and free loaders, but parasites are the most successful lifeform on Earth, simply by counting up all their species. They’re also remarkably sophisticated in their ability to find hosts, live inside them, and sometimes even control their behavior. A researcher who was working on a set of new species of tapeworms decided to name one for me because of that book. My book may go out of print someday, but species names are forever!

Gerbic: At the moment the CSICon website has not been updated with your lecture info. Please tell us a bit about what you are going to talk about.

Zimmer: I’ll be talking about my latest book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perils, and Potential of Heredity. Heredity is a hugely powerful thing in our lives, shaping our sense of ourselves. And advances in technology are letting us examine it in astonishing detail. Millions of people are flocking to services like 23andMe and Ancestry.com to read their DNA and discover how they inherited it from their ancestors. But there’s a lot of pseudoscience and fallacies out there when it comes to heredity. We like to think that we inherited DNA from all our ancestors, for example, but that’s not necessarily so. In fact, the further back you go in your ancestry, the fewer ancestors share a genetic link with you. As we gain more power to edit DNA—and possibly alter the future of heredity—we need to develop a strong, rational understanding of what heredity is and is not.

Gerbic: Another claim to fame in our community: you were the keynote for the inaugural NECSS conference in 2009 and returned to speak to them again in 2011. I think you will find that CSICon will show you how it is done. I’m a little biased. CSICon does have an amazing lineup this year. Are there speakers you are looking forward to hearing? 

Zimmer: I’m delighted that Dan Kahan will be speaking about his work. Dan’s work on how people process scientific information is always thought-provoking and helps me come up with new ideas for how to be a better science writer.

Gerbic: One of the frustrations of the scientific skepticism world is that we are seeing an attack on the media’s reputation, as well as serious financial cuts in journalism. I understand that these cuts are especially hard on science journalists. If true, can you suggest ways our community can help? I remember a year ago after the 2017 election that there was a serge to subscribe to news media sites. I haven’t heard if that had a positive or lasting effect.

Zimmer: Science journalism has indeed taken some big hits over the past decade. CNN eliminated their science team in 2008 and gives very little attention now to the scientific issues that have big impacts on their audience, ranging from vaccines to global warming. In the 1980s, many newspapers launched science sections, but they’re almost all gone now thanks to short-sighted cost-cutting measures. But many new publications are making science a priority, such as Vox and Five Thirty Eight. And older publications, such as The New York Times and National Geographic, are retooling their science coverage for the digital era.

If you want good science coverage to survive, you have to support it. That can include subscribing to publications you like and spreading the word about them on social media. Skeptics should also hold publications accountable when they do a bad job of covering science and medicine. More editors need to learn that these subjects require time and expertise to report well. 

Gerbic: I’m really looking forward to getting your latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. I like to wait and purchase it at the conference, so I can get it autographed and get a selfie with the author. (Tip to new conference attendees: don’t overpack; save room for books!) Can you please tell us more about your book?

Zimmer: My book is a look at the past and future of heredity. The concept has had a central place in our culture for thousands of years, but it’s only been in the past 150 years that researchers have approached heredity as a scientific question. New studies are now revealing heredity’s inner workings but also raising interesting questions about how we define it. A number of researchers are now arguing that heredity can flow through many different channels, such as culture. I explore these ideas in She Has Her Mother’s Laugh through stories—stories about sick kings, monstrous flowers, and my own family’s experiences with heredity.

Gerbic: One thing that CSICon does really well is we are very people-focused and know how to have fun. Attendees please follow the CSISon Facebook event page for updates during the conference. Because this is happening near Halloween, we always have a themed party. This year the theme is pajama party. I suppose this is your chance to wear PJ’s with parasites printed on them?

Zimmer: Never say never.

Somehow, some way, the flat-earth movement continues to make waves. Legitimate news sources and social media platforms have distributed a variety of interesting flat-earth reports over the past year. This news has included an international flat-earth conference in Raleigh, North Carolina; a rapper and apparent flat-earther named B.o.B. who started a fundraising campaign to purchase satellites; and a self-taught rocket scientist who planned to launch himself from a converted motorhome to obtain evidence that the earth is flat.

Stories such as these seem to irritate many of those who recognize that the earth is actually shaped like a ball—an imperfect ball, but still clearly a ball. These “round earthers” demonstrate their frustration by commenting on the absurdity of the flat-earth movement. They sometimes describe flat earthers in pejorative ways. They provide arguments intended to stop the rotational momentum of the flat-earth movement. I even recall a Facebook comment suggesting that round earthers should secretly infiltrate flat-earth meetings to undermine their misshapen belief system. I have to ask—and I truly mean this kindly—why does anybody care?

To be fair, I semi-understand. One hopes that the flat-earth movement represents a low point in contemporary susceptibility to pseudoscience, and it is disappointing to see people promote a claim that is so dramatically misaligned with science and reason. Nevertheless, the potential and kinetic energy devoted to counter the flat-earth movement is wasteful and misguided. It reveals a broad naiveté about which forms of pseudoscience have real gravitas. Specifically, I don’t understand why anybody would worry about the flat-earth gnat while facing the climate change mammoth.

First, the possible expansion of the flat-earth sphere of influence seems to present few, if any, directly destructive consequences. Passenger planes will still land in their intended locations. Skiing enthusiasts will still slide downhill. The major consequence of the flat-earth movement seems to be indirect. That is, if people can be convinced that the earth is flat, what other nonsense might they also believe? In contrast, climate change denial is at best the cause of widespread harm and at worst a likely candidate to snuff the human race. Some people use scientists’ inability to agree on the consequences of climate change as justification for inaction, but this approach is obviously foolish. It is akin to allowing hooligans to continue vandalizing your home because you can’t determine exactly how much the damage will cost.

Second, the flat-earth movement is hardly likely to reach levels achieved by climate change denial. The problems underlying the flat-earth movement are easily identified; arguments referencing ice walls, international conspiracies, and biblical verses (e.g., Job 38:13) sound unconvincing. The flat-earth movement also has limited financial backing (at least it seems that way judging by B.o.B.’s GoFundMe campaign). Climate change denial is much tougher to obstruct. Climate change denial does not require belief. It only requires neglect. Humans frequently neglect problems; just consider the omnipresence of unhealthy diets and credit card debt. Humans are clearly willing to incur greater costs tomorrow to avoid more efficient solutions today. Neglect is particularly easy in the climate change domain because humans cannot sense directly the slow rise in average temperature, and powerful self-interested groups cultivate a belief that climate change is not truly dangerous.

Furthermore, encouraging people to neglect climate change warnings plays on their psychological vulnerabilities. Humans have a well-known tendency to view the future with unrealistic optimism. For instance, they typically believe that their marriages will last, despite the observable frequency of divorce. Humans also have a particular dislike for loss. They would rather avoid losing $1,000 than gain $1,000. This makes it difficult for people to admit that their current lifestyle is not compatible with long-term climate health. Together, these well-known psychological biases make it easy for people to bet that climate change is not happening—and if it is, the consequences couldn’t be that dire.

Climate change denial is much more than any run-of-the-mill willingness to cook up some woo. Climate change denial impedes our ability to pass the ultimate test of whether humans can work together to solve collective problems. Climate change provides a direct threat to humanity. The causes of climate change are known, and the scientific solution is sufficiently clear: decrease the production of greenhouse gasses. Humans can create that solution if they are willing to (a) trust the scientific community and (b) do their part to avoid jeopardizing friends who live next door and strangers who live halfway around the world. The need to satisfy both of these conditions creates the “multiplicative” rule in probability. Accordingly, if the likelihood of sufficient trust in science is 60 percent and the likelihood of corresponding change is 60 percent, the likelihood of a sufficient response is only 36 percent.

As a social psychology professor who examines pseudoscience, I have pondered whether humans are so flawed that we could allow a challenging but ultimately solvable problem to escalate to a point where it extinguishes the human race. Some days I think so. Humans have achieved incredible things, but they are stubborn about changing their beliefs. This pervasive characteristic is particularly dangerous in the context of climate change. All humans need to do is delay a legitimate solution until we pass some ambiguous tipping point where the problem becomes irreversible. In my opinion, humans are entirely capable of that.

That is why I don’t fret about whether people believe that the earth is a disc or a globe—and you shouldn’t either. Don’t mistake a cup of tepid pseudoscience for a pot of boiling denial. Those who believe in man-made climate change should recognize the importance of this issue and avoid being unfittingly distracted by less important forms of pseudoscience. For those of you who doubt that man-made climate change is a serious issue, I kindly ask you to reconsider. Flat or round, Earth is a truly amazing planet. I don’t like playing roulette with it.