Sporting AK-47 assault rifles and axes, the group of men stalk a black rhino through the African bush. They soon bring it down with powerful volleys. While still alive, the rhino peers at the men as they approach. The poachers quickly use the axe to sever its horn from its head, not caring that they are inflicting great pain as they hit a nerve and leave the rhino dehorned and its head a pulpy mess. It dies, leaving its own family behind because of human greed.“‘Rhino have a particularly plaintive cry,’ (conservationist Ian) Player¹ wrote (in The White Rhino Saga), ‘which once heard is never forgotten. The screams of agony from rhino that have had their horns chopped off while still alive should reach into the hearts of all of us’” (Rademeyer 2017).

The poachers sell that horn to a middleman, who may be working for yet another smuggler, a criminal syndicate, or even terrorists. Government border agents and officials are bribed as the horn makes its way to countries such as China and Vietnam, where the horn is used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to treat various ailments, none of them proven scientifically to work.²

While most rhino horns are ground into powder and used as medicine to supposedly cure cancer, impotence, or, as an illegal wildlife trade monitor says, “you name it,” people in Asia have begun wearing beads or bangles made from rhino horns thought to cure ailments as well as for status symbols. Some horns are fashioned into ceremonial cups (Kolata 2018).

Why is the illegal supply and demand for rhino horns so pervasive? Rhino horn, after all, is mainly composed of keratin, the same substance in human hair and fingernails. But it’s as valuable as gold or heroin. A kilogram, for instance, can sell for $60,000 (Kolata 2018).

The killing of rhinos is just the tip of the iceberg in the ever-increasing destruction of wildlife for dubious reasons. Not only rhinos are facing extinction but also African elephants; certain species of lions, tigers, and wolves; Grauer’s gorillas; and even giraffes. All this is done primarily at the hands of humans despite courageous efforts by conservation groups, governments, and individuals to stop the attacks. Some wildlife, such as rhinos and wolves, among many others, faced extinction when trade in animal parts was legal, but they now face that possibility again with illegal trading and other extinction pressures.

“Leading international wildlife crises involve illegal poaching of rhinos, elephants, and sharks for their body parts, to be sold on the Asian black market for exorbitant prices and used for medicinal purposes or art,” stated Cristina Eisenberg, chief scientist at Earthwatch Institute in Boston and author of The Carnivore Way: Coexisting with and Conserving North America’s Predators.

The myth underlying this illegal bone trade runs very deep. Proponents tout rhino horn, shark fin (cartilage), and elephant tusk medicinal uses, as tonics, blood-purifiers, or aphrodisiacs. But ultimately, it’s about money—these illegal products are primarily seen as status symbols in Asia. While the purported medicinal use of these items has not been proven by science, the profound negative consequence of poaching has been thoroughly documented and is decimating populations of rhinos, elephants, and sharks, leaving them at or near extinction. (Eisenberg 2018)

As of 2016, there were only 29,500 rhinos left in the world, 70 percent of them in South Africa. There are five species of rhinos—most of them endangered—with two subspecies going extinct in 2011 (Gwin 2012). Just a century ago, there were an estimated one million rhinos in Africa (Ellis 2005).

Some 30,000 elephants are poached yearly for their ivory (Showing That Every Elephant … 2017). The Ivory Game documentary warns that African elephants may become extinct in fifteen years. Biologists estimate that total loss of large mammals in Africa went up to 60 percent between 1970 and 2013 (Paterniti 2017). In the “Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: Second Notice” last year, signed by more than 15,000 scientists in 184 countries, a highlight of the document was a 29 percent reduction in the numbers of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish since the publication of the first notice in 1992 (Houtman 2017). The global black market in live animals and parts is the fourth largest in the world, with an estimated $20 billion in profits (Tackling Wildlife Trafficking 2017).

“Traders in ivory actually want extinction of elephants, and that is probably the biggest danger,” warns Craig Millar, head of security for the Big Life Foundation/Kenya, in The Ivory Game. “The less elephants there are, the more the price rises. The more the price rises, the more people want to kill them. And this is an ever ongoing circle that is just going to end up bringing about exactly what they want—extinction.” The same could be said about rhinos, lions, gorillas, and many other animal species.

Myths and Superstitions

While the trade in rhino horn is banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES), the black market fueled by demand particularly from China and Vietnam is lucrative and primarily recent. In 2005, according to the organization Save the Rhino International, about sixty rhinos were killed for their horns or as trophies in Africa. Since then, more than 7,000 have been killed, with 1,346 in 2015 alone (Poaching in numbers 2017). In South Africa alone, poaching increased 9,000 percent from thirteen in 2007 to 1,215 in 2014 (Juskalian 2017; Save the Rhino International 2018).

Connecting a real animal with a mythical one is a task undertaken by marine biologist Richard Ellis, author of Tiger Bone and Rhino Horn: The Destruction of Wildlife for Traditional Chinese Medicine. He is a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. “The use of rhino horn … can be traced to the unicorn, another animal with a horn growing from a totally unsuspected place” (Ellis 2005). He also wrote this for the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria’s rhino campaign in 2005:

It is not clear that rhino horn serves any medicinal purpose whatsoever, but it is a testimony to the power of tradition that millions of people believe that it does. Of course, if people want to believe in prayer, acupuncture, or voodoo as a cure for what ails them, there is no reason why they shouldn’t, but if animals are being killed to provide nostrums that have been shown to be useless, then there is very good reason to curtail the use of rhino horn … . It is heartbreaking to realize that the world’s rhinos are being eliminated from the face of the earth in the name of medications that probably don’t work. (Save the Rhino International 2017)

While the scientifically unproven medicinal uses of rhino horn have driven the eastern Asian black market, there are additional extinction drivers, including the superstitious beliefs in the efficacy of rhino horn for hangover cures and as aphrodisiacs. While the media reports were actually wrong about Asians using rhino horn as a sexual stimulant, the attention paid to that error ironically sparked interest in using it for that equally scientifically unproven purpose! Elizabeth Kolbert pointed out in The Sixth Extinction that rhino horn in recent years is “even more sought-after as a high-end party ‘drug’; at clubs in southeast Asia, powdered horn is snorted like cocaine” (Kolbert 2015).

An even more sensational claim is that rhino horn cures cancer, fueling even more demand. There’s no scientific basis for that claim. The cause was likely a rumor started in Vietnam a decade ago that rhino horn had cured cancer in a near-death South Vietnamese Communist Party official. The rumor spread rapidly, and the price of rhino horn surged (Rademeyer 2017). This myth prompted poachers to increase their efforts at killing rhinos in Africa, some even using helicopters to track them down (Watts 2011).

Of course, there may be a placebo effect for some users of rhino horn. “Belief in a treatment, especially one that is wildly expensive and hard to get, can have a powerful effect on how a patient feels,” stated Mary Hardy, medical director of Simms/Mann UCLA Center for Integrative Oncology and “a traditional medicine expert,” according to National Geographic magazine (Gwin 2012).

While TCM does include a lot of vegetable- and herbal-based medicines, as well as non-endangered animal parts, the use of critically endangered animal parts that it promotes for scientifically unproven treatments and cures has been a major factor in the decline and extinction of animal species. Numerous articles in science publications, including this magazine, confirm that these purported remedies have no basis in fact. The late Robert Carroll wrote in his Skeptic’s Dictionary that “Magical thinking is clearly the basis for some of these concoctions, e.g. deer penis to enhance male virility. Many of the medicinals lead to the suffering and unnecessary maiming and killing of many animals.” As examples, Carroll relates how thousands of bears are kept in cages throughout Asia so their bile can be tapped and sold to cure various ailments. “Other animals are treated with equal disdain: sharks for their fins, rhinos for their horns, and tigers and tortoises for various body parts” (Carroll 2018).

As TCM continues the pressure on the illegal use of rhino horn, other connected factors help to reduce the numbers of these animals, as well as other wildlife. Some 73–100 million sharks are killed yearly, primarily for their fins for shark fin soup in Vietnam and China (Masson 2014; Defenders of Wildlife 2018) There’s no scientific evidence that the soup treats any medical condition, including cancer. It’s primarily a luxury item in Chinese culture, although consumption of the soup has been reduced in recent years with the introduction of an imitation shark fin soup (Shark fin soup 2018).

The vaquita, the smallest marine mammal that lives exclusively in the upper Gulf of California in Mexico, is almost extinct because they get caught in gillnets used to catch Mexican shrimp. Because of a high demand in China for its dried swim bladders “for their supposed medicinal properties,” the endangered totoaba fish is caught in the illegal gillnetting in the Gulf. A campaign urging consumers to boycott Mexican shrimp and asking the Mexican government to ban all gillnetting to save the vaquitas and totoaba has not been successful. “The Mexican government is putting shrimp industry profits over saving this tiny porpoise from its freefall into extinction,” says Alejandra Goyenechea, senior international counsel for the Defenders of Wildlife organization (Boycott Mexican Shrimp to Save Vaquitas! 2017). In 2018, the Elephant Action League’s Sea Shepherd ship continued its battle with fishermen and the illegal nets; one of their anti-poaching camera drones was shot down there in late December 2017 (Tillman 2017).

Another mammal under assault for its dubious medicinal qualities is the pangolin, who rolls up in a ball for defense with scales on the outside. While not currently endangered, the pangolin may be the most illegally trafficked animal in the world, with some estimates as high as 2.7 million yearly. The pangolin scales are sold for as much as $750 a kilogram. “Most … end up in China and Vietnam,” reports The Economist. “In these countries pangolins’ meat is a treat and their scales are used in folk medicine, even though the scales are made of keratin … and thus have no medicinal value” (A problem of scale 2018).

Some providers and consumers of sharks and other endangered species in East Asian countries may argue that the animals are killed for calories and protein, in addition to dubious medicinal practices, and continue to be needed to help feed growing populations. As far as they are concerned, animal species may be low-hanging fruit, whether endangered or not. They also may question whether those in the West who are critical of their eating habits should deal with their own issues of overfishing in the Gulf of Mexico, the waters of the Pacific Northwest, and Chesapeake Bay. Then there is the religious argument that humans have “dominion” over the animals, as mentioned in Genesis 1.

The Price of Poaching

With retail prices per kilo in the tens of thousands of dollars, the $20 billion black market hosts brazen players trying to make a buck. The mastermind sellers in animal parts, with methods for extraction, distribution, and financing, are likely to operate their networks similar to that of international drug cartels or arms dealers. Along the supply chain exist financial incentives for personnel with wealth accumulating to those who can control most of the network. From poachers to wholesalers to dealers to art merchants to buyers at the retail level, the profit margins drive incentives. Enforcers of the parts trade accumulate wealth but so do those at the retail end who can distribute to mass markets, whether in the form of “medicine” or in the form of “art.” For example, poachers will receive as little as $7 per kilo of ivory for an African elephant tusk. In the documentary The Ivory Game, an arrested Tanzanian poacher received from a dealer such a sum—a couple hundred dollars—for two tusks weighing fifteen kilos each. The dealer then parlayed his purchase into $3,000 per kilo in China.

On the streets across the world, there’s significant variance in the economic value of the tusks, or rhino horns, driving the incentive for wholesalers to move more product. In one instance, the ivory tusks were found in a Chinese retail shop that was selling a painted tusk for $330,000, or $22,000 per kilo. If that same tusk had been extracted by the Tanzanian poacher, that would be more than 3,000 times the price paid at the source.

With the recent banning of the ivory trade in China, prices for the legal selling of tusks dropped, but it’s too early to determine that impact on the black market. However, documented evidence of the illegal trade, such as that highlighted in The Ivory Game, is shining a light on the amounts involved along the supply chain. As a tusk, or a rhino horn, travels from the animal carcass on the plains of sub-Saharan Africa to the medicine cabinet of an East Asian retiree, the price increase has been phenomenal in recent years.

Other Animal Extinction Pressures

According to a 2013 survey by TRAFFIC, an organization that monitors illegal wildlife trade for the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)—known for its Red List of Endangered Species—rhino horn also is a status symbol for the rich in countries such as China and Vietnam. “The motivation for consumers buying rhino horn (are) the emotional benefits rather than medicinal, as it reaffirms their social status among their peers. Image and status (are) important to these consumers,” and “they tend to be highly educated and successful people who have a powerful social network and no affinity to wildlife. Rhino horns are sometimes bought for the sole purpose of being gifted to others; to family members, business colleagues or people in positions of authority” (Save the Rhino International 2017).

Even war is bad for wildlife, as shown by researchers Rob Pringle and Joshua Daskin in their recent Nature article. They conclude that wars do wildlife more harm than good, exposing animals to bombs and landmines and increasing the demand for ivory and bushmeat that are used to finance and feed armies (Conflict’s other casualties 2018; Kaplan 2018).

The emotional impact on chimpanzees and gorillas was well illustrated in the documentary Virunga, which showed the heroic struggles of Virunga National Park caretakers and military rangers to protect the animals from the intrusions of armies as well as poachers. Seeing the fear in the animal faces as they clung to the caretakers as bombs exploded nearby shows the difficulties faced by both wildlife and humans.

An additional pressure on wildlife and their ecosystems is the proposed completion of the U.S.-Mexico border wall by President Trump. According to studies, some 700 vertebrate species, such as jaguars, Mexican gray wolves, ocelots, mountain lions, and black bears, rely on the borderland habitat—and more than 180 of the borderland species are already listed as endangered or threatened. A wall also would keep those animals from natural crossings—wildlife corridors (State of the border 2018). While U.S. laws could help protect endangered species, Congress passed a law in 2005 giving the Department of Homeland Security authority to waive all laws when constructing a wall. The agency already has used its authority to waive forty laws, such as the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act, in constructing 650 miles of barrier in past years. (Schlyer 2018).³ There have been border protests against the new wall and pending lawsuits by environmental and animal rights organizations (Against the Wall 2017).

One area of dispute as to whether it contributes to the decline in large animals is trophy hunting. Hunters who paid a lot of money for permits to shoot and import elephant and other wildlife trophies argue that the money helps in the conservation of animals in Africa, while animal rights groups say the trophy hunting “causes immense suffering and fuels the demand for wild animal products” (Pearce 2017b). For a big game hunt, for instance, a hunter might pay up to $200,000 for a rifle and $80,000 for a fourteen-day single elephant hunt (Paterniti 2017). A portion of the fee is paid to community members, such as the San in Namibia, and a portion for a conservation fund. An African trophy hunt for a leopard may bring in as much as $55,000, while a lion fetches up to $76,000. While some people still hunt to eat, sport hunters are in it for the thrill and to show off their “trophies,” although some face severe criticism as did the American who killed the well-known Cecil the Lion (Paterniti 2017).

President Trump planned to partially reverse an Obama-era ban last November by allowing hunters to import trophies from Zambia and Zimbabwe, then he reversed himself and postponed the decision after an outcry from citizens and lawmakers. California Rep. Ed Royce, a Republican Congressman, pointed out that the political turmoil in Zimbabwe could spell doom for wildlife. “Elephants and other big game in Africa are blood currency for terrorist organizations, and they are being killed at an alarming rate,” he said (Pearce 2017a). In that country, points out Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of The Extinction Market, authorities seize the hunting preserves and keep the profits; they don’t reinvest in conservation. She said the trophy hunting business “becomes very commercialized and the profits are captured by elites. You can also end up with trophy hunting serving as a cover for trafficking” (Nuwer 2017).

Climate change provides additional pressures on wildlife, such as polar bears coping with the shrinking of Arctic ice. There are many other effects. “As the seasonal cycles in temperature and rainfall shift,” writes climate scientist Prof. Michael E. Mann, “altering by different amounts the timing of the hatching of insects and the arrival of birds, entire food webs are in danger of disruption. Plants and animals possess a certain amount of behavioral elasticity, but the more rapid the changes, the more likely this intrinsic adaptive capacity will be exceeded, and the more likely that we humans will be responsible for one of the most devastating extinction events in Earth’s history” (Mann and Toles 2016).

These additional pressures—added to the demand for certain wildlife, such as rhinos and elephants, based on myths and superstitions—may indeed produce a wildlife apocalypse.

Live Wild Pet Trade

While China and Vietnam have been the main drivers for the extinction of rhinos and elephants, the United States and Europe have surprisingly major black markets for the trade in wild, exotic pets. Birds and snakes from overseas are stuffed into soda bottles for transit to the Western countries. Tragically, 90 percent of these animals die in transit (Wild Matters 2017). Many of the same black marketers in wild animal parts, such as rhino horn, also spark the trade in live animals (Conniff 2017).

“Many of these people who were doing the traditional medicine trade are now branching out because the high-end pet trade in China has grown immensely,” commented Brian Horne, a herpetologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society. Critically endangered adult ploughshare tortoises that live only in Madagascar cost $100,000 each, which now draws in criminal elements. For example, thieves broke into a captive breeding facility in Thailand—set up by conservationists to rebuild populations of endangered species—and stole six ploughshare tortoises. The trade in exotic pets, according to conservation biologist David S. Wilcove, has “the potential to drive species to extinction even when they have suitable habitat, and to do so without anyone being aware of it” (Conniff 2017).

How Smartphones Decimated Grauer’s Gorillas

Just when anyone interested in preserving species on the verge of extinction feels comfortable that many efforts are being made to fight back through the work of governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and concerned individuals, the disquieting news is the human demand for cell phones is the cause of at least one mammal’s near extinction. Grauer’s gorillas in the Congo have suffered a 77 percent decline in the past two decades because of the consumer electronics explosion. How?

One of the key components of a cell phone is the mineral coltan, and 80 percent of it is found in mines in the Congo. Those mines that destroy the land to unearth coltan and other minerals often use young children. These are “artisanal” operations, meaning that the mining requires not machinery but laborers digging craters into stream beds by hand. Amnesty International reports that as many as 40,000 children may be mining for coltan in the Congo.

“To feed these people, wildlife is hunted from the surrounding forests,” said Tara Stoinski, president and chief scientist of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. “This includes gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants, and many other species.” Trade in bushmeat is illegal, but the Congo is a war-torn region that makes such laws unenforceable (Posada 2017).

Fighting Back

While the outlook is dire for many species, including giraffes in Africa that have seen their numbers decline nearly 40 percent from 1985–2015 to less than 100,000 now, the good news is that many governments, NGOs, conservation organizations, and individuals are banding together to save as many species as possible. As of January 1, 2018, China has banned all trade in ivory, which follows the lead of the United States in 2016 (Giraffes newly classified 2017). Hong Kong also announced in late January that it would ban all ivory trade by 2021. Just this past July, 7.2 tons of new elephant tusks were found under frozen fish in Hong Kong and confiscated. Only ivory acquired before 1970 is legal there (May 2018).

In 2017, Operation Thunderbird, a sixty-nation global seizure of illegal wildlife and floral trade, identified 900 suspects, with 1,300 seizures worth $5.1 million (Wild Matters: Tackling Wildlife Trafficking 2017). More than 1,000 rangers have given up their lives from 2004–2014, primarily in Africa, protecting wildlife from poachers (Chancellor 2014).⁴ A conservation organization, The Nature Conservancy, partnered with the Northern Rangelands Trust to reduce poaching in Northern Kenya (Oluchina 2014). However, the fight against poachers in Africa received a setback when famous American conservation investigator Esmond Bradley Martin, seventy-five, was stabbed to death at his home in a possible murder that may have been disguised as a robbery of the long-time activist who uncovered illegal global trafficking of ivory and rhino horn (Dixon 2018).

In January 2018, Ivory Coast officials said they broke up an international ivory-smuggling network, the second such bust on the continent that month. They arrested six people and confiscated more than half a ton each of ivory and pangolin scales, as well as leopard parts. The network hid ivory parts in hollowed-out logs that were resealed and shipped to Asian countries. The suspects had made calls to tax-haven countries, leading officials to suspect money laundering. In another bust in Gabon, officials said they also broke up a smuggling network that had ties to a cell of Boko Haram, the Islamic militant group responsible for numerous murders and kidnappings in northern Nigeria and bordering countries (Searcey 2018).

Undercover NGO investigators and journalists have been instrumental in identifying companies, merchants, and corrupt businessmen involved in the illegal wildlife trafficking trade, as shown in the documentaries The Ivory Game and Virunga. There are many organizations working to save wildlife, from long-standing ones such as The Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife to newer ones such as the Elephant Action League, Wildleaks, and United for Wildlife, which was created by the Duke (Prince William) and Duchess (Catherine) of Cambridge and Prince Harry. Others, such as Earthwatch, engage citizen scientists in worldwide expeditions to provide data for scientific studies on wildlife, climate change, and other matters.

There’s even a new tactic in wildlife conservation: horn and tusk forensics. Like the genetic fingerprinting methods in the criminal justice system, scientists are making efforts to match the DNA of a rhino or elephant with its horn or tusk in possession of a poacher. A scientific database called Rhodis (modeled after the FBI’s Codis system) has been established with some 20,000 samples taken from rhinos by Dr. Cindy Harper, a veterinarian at the University of Pretoria, and her colleagues (Kolata 2018).

These efforts may be too little, too late for some species, but they give hope to others. Not only is there some success in reducing poaching, but there is also increasing awareness in the public about the wildlife trafficking issues. The false beliefs that have driven poaching and decimation of various species need to be corrected, and the “profits captured by elites,” as termed by Felbab-Brown, need to be stopped (Nuwer 2017). Even John Hume, the controversial rhino rancher behind the rhino-ranching movement to legalize the rhino horn trade in South Africa and the subject of the controversial documentary Trophy, thinks rhino horn medicinal uses are bunk. It doesn’t matter to him that rhino horn is snake oil when it comes to treating serious maladies. “I’m not ashamed that the rhino horn I make available to the world could possibly be ingested by somebody who’s got cancer and he dies anyway. It’s not going to help them” (Christy 2016).

It’s hard not to feel sad for the brutality inflicted on animals for purposes of human beliefs in myths and superstitions, for status and appetites, and for plain old greed. A lasting image of the horrible legacy of inhumane treatments of animals can be seen in The Reliquary, a U.S. government warehouse outside Denver that holds 1.3 million products made from animals, many of them threatened or endangered species. Many were donated, but most were seized upon entry. Just 10 percent of global trade in banned wildlife is intercepted. In the repository, you’ll see an African elephant footstool, tiger teeth and claws fashioned into jewelry, a hat made of black bear skin, Tibetan antelope shawls, and a rhinoceros snout and horns on a wooden platter (Spinski 2017).

The fight continues to save endangered animals, and we can only hope that all humans realize the necessity for animal biodiversity and the need for scientific evidence in the use of medicines. “Too many animals, from sea horses to rhinoceroses, are endangered by the demands of traditional Chinese medicine,” says author Richard Ellis.⁵ “Of course, TCM is not the only factor in the endangerment of these animals, but it plays an enormous part. If present trends continue, tigers and rhinos will become extinct in the wild, perhaps in our lifetime and almost certainly in the lifetime of our children’s children” (Ellis 2005).

From the savannahs of Africa to the ports of North America, the black market trade in animal parts is lucrative for top smugglers. Demand is driven for many reasons, of which belief in false medicines can perhaps have the best chance of being reduced through educational outreach and policies guided by progressive studies of human behavior. Government programs and public-private agency partnerships can and have demonstrated success in nudging consumer behavior in a direction that can produce positive outcomes for the self and the community. It can start with something as little as a contest for an anti-littering slogan along Texan highways to change human behavior. It can be a program to frame better choices for consumers who desire certain attributes from parts of animals. Though affecting the behavior of those who demand parts for status or for value may prove the hardest work, moving humans toward awareness through education and science may have the most profound effect on a mass scale.

For Carl Sagan, it would be “far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring” (Sagan 1997). Though Sagan focused on the possibility of life beyond Earth, he knew that the greatest dangers to our own well-being and to that of our environment came from within ourselves. For our planet, the reduction and loss of species from these delusions of grandeur is tragic. It also would be a tragedy if we weren’t able to fight off the AK-47s and machetes with better knowledge on why people reject science in favor of the dark.

1. Ian Player is credited with saving South Africa’s rhinos from extinction in the 1960s.
2. A 2015 article in Skeptical Inquirer by Harriet Hall, for instance, casts doubt on TCM versus science-based medicine: “Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Didn’t Win a Nobel Prize, Scientific Medicine Did.” It is available online at https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/traditional_chinese_medicine_tcm_didnrsquot_win_a_nobel_prize_scientific_me.
3. The value and extent of wildlife corridors in North America is explained by Cristina Eisenberg in her book The Carnivore Way: Coexisting with and Conserving North America’s Predators.
4. For a more detailed account of how rangers face dangers from poachers, see Robyn Dixon’s “Elephant Men,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2017. Another article on the rhino horn legal trade controversy is Robyn Dixon’s “It’s Cruelty beyond Words,” Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2017.
5. In Ellis’s Tiger Bone & Rhino Horn: The Destruction of Wildlife for Traditional Chinese Medicine, chapter 3 (“Chinese Medicine, Western Medicine”) discusses TCM in detail, while chapter 4 (“Horn of Plenty”) details the history of the “unicorn” and its connection to the supernatural and the reality of real animal horns.

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• Wild matters: Tackling wildlife trafficking. 2017. Defenders (Summer).
• Watts, Jonathan. 2011. “Cure for cancer” rumour killed off Vietnam’s rhinos. The Guardian (November 25). Available online at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/nov/25/cure-cancer-rhino-horn-vietnam.

Bob Ladendorf is a freelance writer, former chief operating officer at the Center for Inquiry Los Angeles, and coauthor of an article on “The Mad Gasser of Mattoon” for Skeptical Inquirer. He also recently reviewed the documentary The Pathological Optimist and Michael E. Mann’s book on climate change for this magazine. Brett Ladendorf has worked in the financial markets for more than twelve years and currently has a financial services consulting practice for alternative investment managers and financial technology firms. He holds a BA in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA in finance and accounting from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His coauthor is his father.

Image by Susan Gerbic

Working behind the scenes to make a conference run smoothly is usually an army of people. Over the years, I and others have come to appreciate the calm and organized nature of Scott Romanowski. After seeing him at over 9,000 skeptic conferences, I thought maybe I should talk to him about how he came to be in charge of volunteering, and hopefully he’ll share some history and behind-the-curtain stories with us.

Susan Gerbic: Scott, please give readers your bio.

Scott Romanowski: I'm an electrical engineer and have been writing software for embedded systems like toys, GPS receivers, and coffee brewers for thirty years. I already had a history of helping before I attended my first TAM. I GMed the Squad Leader tournament at Avaloncon 1992, then helped as an assistant GM for the Advanced Squad Leader tournament there in subsequent years.

Gerbic: How did it happen that you became the skeptic volunteer guy?

Romanowski: I didn't plan to become the “volunteer guy”; it just happened. At the first The Amaz!ng Meeting in 2003 (TAM wasn't numbered at the time), I passed Hal Bidlack, Linda and Karl Shallenberger, and others unloading boxes of books into a suite. I recognized some of the books as being for TAM. This was my first TAM and I knew no one, so I offered to help. Later, during a break, I noticed Linda sitting at one end of a long set of tables, with so many people standing there with books in hand, looking for where to pay, they couldn't see Linda. I offered to stand at the far end and tell people to go to her to pay. She accepted. The table proved to be a good place to hide later. Hal Bidlack coordinated the volunteers for TAM 2, and I volunteered. Hal was too busy with MC duties to do it at TAM 3, and I was asked if I could take over that role. The role later expanded to coordinating the speaker-media interviews.

After TAM13, Ray Hall asked if I could coordinate the volunteers at CSICON. I of course said yes, and here I am!

Gerbic: As someone who has attended a lot of TAM’s what are some of your memories?

Romanowski: The JREF Forum was the place to talk about JREF back then. About a dozen of us planned to get to the hotel on Thursday before TAM, drive to Kennedy Space Center, then return to attend Randi's internet talk show at the JREF. I remember our tour guide at KSC was so cheerful. She said if any of us were going to be in the area, even as far west as Orlando, we should listen to the double sonic boom on Saturday from first the nose then the wings of the space shuttle. That was Thursday, January 30, 2003.

You may know where this is headed.

That Saturday morning, I stepped out for a moment and passed Randi. Randi looked like he had a bad head cold with running eyes and nose. I asked Linda if Randi was OK, that I hoped he didn't have a cold. Linda told me that Randi was upset because they had learned we lost the Columbia, that there was going to be an announcement, and not to say anything. I went back inside for the last half of Michael Shermer's talk but I don't remember anything about it. Phil Plait wrote about it. I wanted to be alone during the break, so I took up my position behind the table. I could see a TV and be alone to think.

Gerbic: My GSoW editors have been talking about their past experiences with volunteering at CSICon. They tell me that you are really good at arranging so they can attend specific lectures they want to see. There also are perks, I understand, besides a special meal with Dawkins and a free Halloween Party ticket.

Romanowski: The rule I was given by Hal and Linda was that the volunteers don't miss anything they paid for. Linda explained how close to breaking even the early TAMs were, and that they couldn't give a discount, so we had to make sure we didn't take away something a volunteer had paid for. We have enough volunteers that I need only about four hours per person, so it's easy to schedule with a spreadsheet I developed to help.

We get free admission to the Halloween party at CSICon. The ticket takers for the workshops get to attend the workshop for free. They have to stay near the door during the workshop as people come and go, so it's not the perfect experience. I really do pick those people randomly from those who want that job—I have dice. I'm not eligible though, by my own fiat. I also count a workshop as only thirty minutes of your four hours.

[To give some context, a 2017 Doctor Who convention on Long Island cost about $50 to attend. If you volunteered for a dozen hours you'd get free admission, but those hours would be during the conference and you would miss talks. The organizers would try to work around what you really want to see, but no guarantees.]

The special meal isn't with Richard Dawkins per se. It's a staff and volunteer dinner, and some speakers attend. I don't remember if RD attended them all, but I remember one. There were some new volunteers and I joined them, just to talk and make sure they were included. Robyn Blumner came in and sat at the table. That wasn't surprising because we know each other from various conferences. What was surprising was that when RD came in, he sat with the person he knew best, Robyn, so we had dinner with Richard Dawkins!

Gerbic: Are you looking for more volunteers for CSICon 2018?

Romanowski: Yes, I could use a few more volunteers. It's never too late to volunteer. Even if the schedule is complete and I have all I need, I always can use a few alternates in case someone has to cancel at the last minute. I can't guarantee Richard Dawkins will sit at your table though.

Gerbic:They say that organizing skeptics is like organizing cats. I haven't experienced that while running GSoW all these years. What do you think?

Romanowski: It's not at all like that! All the volunteers have been motivated, punctual (which is much more important than you’d think) and devoted to getting the job done. I think we all do this for love of the "cause"—critical thinking.

Gerbic: You have attended more TAMs than I have. I've done ten, started at TAM 4. So, you have seen the history of modern skepticism in ways that others have not. What are more of your favorite memories?

Romanowski: I've attended all fourteen TAMs in the USA plus TAM Australia.

• Meeting the friends I've made at TAM and CSICon year after year.
• Watching TAM grow from 150 to over 1,000. I remember Linda S. talking about the first TAM, that they were hoping that they'd get enough attendees (fifty?) to break even.
• Jerry Andrus and his optical illusions. He'd set up in the hall outside the conference. I noticed more and more hotel staff coming by as the conferences went on.
• I must have the "volunteer look." While I was waiting to check in at TAM OZ, Simon Singh asked me where he should check in.
• Attending Penn Jillette's fund-raising lunch at his house, then seeing "The Aristocrats." I knew nothing about the movie except that it was about a joke. Was I surprised!
• Learning that you really can talk with the speakers at TAM and CSICon.
• Sharing a table for breakfast with Joe Nickell at a CSICOP conference.
• The first live JREF $1M challenge with Connie Sonne in 2009. Over a thousand people in the audience and you could have heard a pin drop during the entire test. [Gerbic edit: The silence was incredible. Here are two articles by Mark Edward who interviewed Sonne. Connie’s Conundrums and Connie’s Maddie Madness.]
• In 2008, before it closed, about seventy of us went to dinner at Star Trek: The Experience.

Gerbic: I didn’t attend that Star Trek dinner but heard lots of stories about it, plus there was a t-shirt if I remember correctly? Tell us all that story please?

Romanowski: I've forgotten who organized it. ST:TE was closing later that year, and some of us fans wanted to celebrate with one last dinner at Quark's, their restaurant. The organizer knew that Quark's couldn't (wouldn't?) give us separate checks, or even break it up by table, so we all brought cash. The total with 19 percent mandatory gratuity and tax came to $2388.66; we gave them $2400 in cash. The staff told us we were the largest cash total they'd had. As I recall, my hamburger and soda made up less than 1 percent of the total.

Someone later made t-shirts with "2388.66" on them, and I've got one in a box of memorabilia in my attic. Kitty Mervine made this video of the experience.

Gerbic: Do you get to watch lectures also? What have been your favorites and what are you looking forward to this year at CSICon?

Romanowski: Yes, I do get to attend the talks. All the volunteers do. I pay the normal fee, and I'm not going to shortchange myself. There are so many I remember! I enjoyed Neil deGrasse Tyson's keynote talks, and Randi's reminiscing about $1M Challenge tests, Phil Plait's talk about Planet X, given after the Columbia disaster, and Ray Hyman's Cold Reading workshop (I'm an amateur magician, but I don't perform, so I'll never use it).

This year I'm making sure that I attend Steven Pinker's talk because I recently read Enlightenment Now; Susana Martinez-Conde’s and Stephen Macknik’s previous two talks and books were so interesting that I must hear what they have to say this year; and Paul Offit's talk because I called some local radio DJs talking about people mailing chicken pox–infected lollipops. I knew the dangers of this from his books, and my call was played on the air!

Gerbic: What kinds of tips would you give brand new attendees to CSICon?

Romanowski: Socialize! The friends you make are at least as important as what you learn from the speakers.

Gerbic: Thank you so much, Scott, for speaking with me. There were lots of things I had forgotten and things I didn’t know. For anyone attending CSICon 2018, please remember there is a Halloween party (pajama theme, family friendly) and also follow the conversations and updates on the Facebook page for CSICon.

Massimo Polidoro is a writer and an internationally recognized “mystery detective.” He began his career as James Randi’s apprentice and is the cofounder and head of the Italian skeptics group CICAP. He is a TV personality in Italy, a research fellow for CSI, and a longtime columnist for Skeptical Inquirer magazine. He is starting a new series in English, “Stranger Stories,” on his YouTube channel. He will be speaking twice at CSICon, Thursday, October 18, at 8:00 pm with James “The Amaz!ng Randi” and Saturday, October 20, at 2:30 pm.

Susan Gerbic: Massimo, so great to talk to you again. And it was wonderful to spend time with you in Prague, Wrocław, Poland, and then at CICAP Fest in Cesena, Italy. I can barely believe that I was able to visit all those amazing places. Can you please tell readers a bit more about yourself?

Massimo Polidoro: Well, you already said a lot! My fascination with mysteries started when I was a kid, and it never stopped. Thanks to Randi, and to Piero Angela’s support, I was able to transform my dream of making the investigation of mysteries and unusual things into my job. I write a lot of books (my fiftieth is coming out this November, and it will be about Leonardo, the topic that I will cover during my talk at CSICon), but I also love talking in public. I teach a course in science communication at the University of Padua and I appear weekly on TV, with Piero Angela, who is a sort of Carl Sagan for Italians, debunking “fake news” and false myths. As you said, now I am developing my presence on YouTube, a vehicle that I see as a most useful instrument, one that we, as skeptics, should use more today to spread our work.

Gerbic: First off, let’s give a mention to CICAP Fest that is happening this September 14–16 in Padova, Italy. That is very unusual to have it annually, isn’t it? Mark Edward, András Gábor Pintér, and I had such a great time last year. I think you had over 800 attendees and such a beautiful location; the Pope even tried to crash the conference. The entire conference is in Italian. Mark, Randi, and I were the only people who didn’t speak Italian, but that wasn’t a problem as everyone was wonderful and helpful and enough of the attendees speak excellent English that we didn’t have problems. I highly encourage people to attend. András is really excited to go again and has been working on improving his Italian in time for the event. There was so much work that went into the 2017 one, why not skip a year like usual? And tell us what you can about what people can expect at CICAP FEST this year?

Polidoro: You are absolutely right! We should have skipped a year… but, things don’t always go the way we wish. We were offered this very precious chance, by the University of Padua, to hold our CICAP Fest this year, and we took it. You were in Cesena last year and it was quite a big event. This time it is, I think, at least four times bigger. It’s now a science festival, with over 200 events in ten different locations: lectures, panels, workshops, laboratories for kids, shows, exhibitions, poster sessions, street performances…. We are really going big this time and we will “invade” Padua with science and reason during that weekend. After all, it’s the city where Galileo lived and taught! We will hold many of our meetings right next to Galileo’s original wooden tribune from where he taught. If anyone is interested (and I know there are friends coming over from various parts of Europe and even the United States!) the full program is here at cicapfest.it.

Gerbic: Oh, that looks amazing! This is so tempting; I’m seriously wondering how I can get myself there.

You have written many books, in Italian as well as English. Mystery novels, biographies, and deep dives into history. You just finished Secrets and Treasures of the Vatican and The Adventure of the Colosseum, and I believe both are only available in Italian? Today I was listening to the European Skeptics Podcast and our friend András told the story that he was giving a tour (he is a professional tour guide) at the Colosseum and went into the gift shop and there was your book. He said he got a thrill as he showed it to the entire group and was able to say, “I know this guy.”

Polidoro: That’s very nice! Yes, as I said, I write a lot and it is something that I can’t stop! Even if today the book market is no longer what it used to be, I keep doing it because for me it is still the best way to go deep into a subject. It’s a fantastic way to constantly learn new things … and you get paid for doing it! You don’t get rich with money, however, but at least you get richer with knowledge. And then, all this research gives me material for my lectures, tv shows, and, of course, YouTube episodes!

Gerbic: And now you are writing a new book and will be telling us about it at CSICon, The Mind of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Polidoro: Oh, yes! I have always loved Leonardo since I was a kid. I remember watching in awe a series on TV, in the 1970s, where excellent French actor Philippe Leroy perfectly played the part of Leonardo. It was shot by RAI, the Italian national TV (the same one where I appear with Piero!) with a fantastic budget, I guess, because they were able to recreate Renaissance Italy, often in the actual locations where Leonardo really lived and worked. Lots of perfectly cast actors, with faces that seem to come straight out of Leonardo or Raphael’s paintings! Beautiful costumes and perfect recreations of the great artist’s works; and it was all done without a single digital effect! Next year, 2019, will mark 500 years since Leonardo’s death, so I thought it would only be fitting for me to write my fiftieth book about him. In truth, there are so many excellent works on him that it is very difficult to write something new, but I chose a different path. I imagined finding a lost manuscript from his disciple Francesco Melzi, who was with him until his death and inherited all of his writings. In this way, I can tell the story through the eyes of someone who knew him well, based on all the excellent research that has been going on in the past two centuries…. Sorry, I was a bit long here, but I could talk for hours about Leonardo! At CSICon I will try to define his pre-scientific approach to nature and his very practical way of thinking. His suggestions and ideas can come very handy, even today.

Gerbic: You also will be interviewing Randi on Thursday night. You are going to tell us the Untold Stories, and I’m very much looking forward to that. You have been working on Randi’s biography; how is that going?

Polidoro: That is a dream project for me, as you can imagine. And I almost feel like Francesco Melzi to Leonardo here! Having the opportunity of taking a dive into that fantastic life, so filled with stories and adventures and meetings and genius and care for others. However, the book is still waiting for me to devote all the time it needs (and it’s a lot). And this is the difficult part. As I said last year, at CSICon, since today’s usual book advances could never pay for the work that is needed on this fantastic project, we need to find an alternative way to sponsor it. In the past few months I haven’t had a single moment to think about it (not only did I have CICAP Fest to organize and Leonardo’s book to write, but I was also writing three other books at the same time: a kid’s adventure novel, “The Secret of Columbus,” which just came out; a new edition of my biography on Houdini, which will be out in September; and a “secret” project that will be published in October). However, now I think I know what we can do to solve this riddle and, when we’ll meet at CSICon in October, I should be able to share this idea.

Gerbic: You have a new project, a YouTube channel called Stranger Stories. Tell us about that please?

Polidoro: YouTube today is the best vehicle for reaching a wider, and mostly younger, audience. On YouTube I can talk to people who don’t usually read my books, hear my lectures, or see me on TV. So, last May I started a news series in Italian, “Strane Storie,” where in ten to fifteen minutes I would tell you the story of a famous, or less famous, mystery (the Bermuda Triangle, time travel episodes, X-ray vision, the Shroud of Turin…), and then walk you through the solution. All done with vintage material from my collection or that of other fellow skeptics, and also a bit of humor. I could find nothing of the sort on YouTube and so I thought there could be an audience for it. So I made a plan, wrote a format, then I wrote a few episodes, learned how to film them properly, how to edit them in a smooth and professional-looking way, and finally started putting them online: one episode a week, every Friday. And I was right. From having almost no subscribers to my channel, I raised the first 5,000 in three months. Now my plan is to start a new series in English, “Stranger Stories,” which will take the same approach but address an audience that is a gazillion times bigger. Of course, there’s more competition, but I bet there is a niche out there for a series like this, and I hope that we will make another interview, in a few months, discussing how it went. In the meantime, I hope that your readers will be curious enough to check out my channel, YouTube.com/MassimoPolidoro and maybe subscribe. They will be the first ones to know when “Stranger Stories” will start.

Gerbic: Well I’m a subscriber to your channel and look forward to the English version. Yes, it will get a great audience. We know that the speakers are only half of the conference experience—the rest of the event is seeing old friends, making new ones, and just hanging out enjoying the community. I look forward to seeing you again soon!

In part one of this article, here, I gave an introduction to one-of-a-kind detective Bob Nygaard. I covered his August 11appearance in the CBS series Pink Collar Crimes playing himself in his investigations of psychic fraudster Gina Marie Marks and discussed another high-profile case with Nygaard. He talked about his client’s appearances on Dr. Oz and with Anderson Cooper, described techniques used by “psychics” to gain trust and scam their victims, and discussed the difficulty of getting cases prosecuted.

Here is part 2 of my conversation with Nygaard.

Rob Palmer: Since the TV show aired this past weekend, let me ask you: What has the reception been like?

Bob Nygaard: The reception I have received from people I know and work with has been 100 percent positive. Some of my friends have been kidding me and calling me "Hollywood Bob" and my coworkers have told me that they found the episode to be interesting and entertaining. My friends are telling me that I'm a natural on camera and many viewers have been contacting me and complimenting me for my storytelling ability.

Palmer: How do you feel the show did in telling the story that these “psychics” are dangerous and need to be prosecuted more strenuously?

Nygaard: First, I would like to stress how ruthless these self-proclaimed psychics are. They have absolutely no regard for their fellow human beings. They emotionally abuse and financially decimate their victims. While the crimes they commit are classified as non-violent, victims often call me and tell me that these heartless miscreants often drove them to the brink of suicide.

I think the show was very effective in terms of showing how ruthless these fraudsters are. For example, the show accentuated how ruthless Gina Marie Marks was when she exploited a young mother who was desperately seeking a cure for her young son's autism. And [the show was effective] in terms of explaining the impediments to prosecution that often exist in regard to psychic fraud cases. It depicted how very often police and prosecutors try to work nefarious restitution deals in lieu of arrests. The show also correctly and importantly emphasized that [these] deals only serve to increase the likelihood that more vulnerable people will be victimized. I was actually amazed at how closely the producers and writers listened to me and nailed the points that I felt were important to emphasize. In short, they did me right and did justice to the story.

Palmer: Do you think anything could have been presented more clearly or in better detail?

Nygaard: The "untold story" so to speak is the enormous degree of difficulty that often exists in order for me to obtain justice for psychic fraud victims. The pushback that I often receive from police and prosecutors is beyond what most people would ever imagine or could possibly endure. The sheer mean-spiritedness and viciousness directed at me by many police and prosecutors, as a result of my simply doing my job, is astounding.

Palmer: Back to specifics about your cases: Have you seen the experience of being scammed change a client’s mind regarding psychic powers, as opposed to believing that just the one individual who ripped them off was a fake?

Nygaard: Sometimes it’s like I’m trying to help them become more skeptical … and then they fall right back into it because they think it’s just that one person. When that happens, it’s disheartening. I’d say it’s like 90 percent of my clients say, “I’m never going to fall for that again.” But then there’s that other 10 percent, or maybe a bit less … It’s disheartening.

Palmer: Let’s talk about “psychic detectives.” The Squaring the Strange podcast recently did an entire episode on Nancy Weber and her supposed amazing insights into the murder of Amie Hoffman in 1982. This case was claimed by Skeptiko podcast host Alex Tsakiris to be the strongest proof available for someone having psychic abilities, and yet investigator Ben Radford easily tore it to pieces. (See the summary here.) Well, I gave the opportunity to my Facebook followers to ask you questions, and my favorite one came from Bruno Multari who coincidentally wanted to ask you about this very topic! Bruno’s question is “While on the police force, did you work with, or know of, any so-called ‘psychic detectives,’ and has that helped form your general opinion of psychic abilities?”

Nygaard: I never worked with one—ever. I never called one in on a case. I never saw someone call one in on a case. I never even saw a family do that. I was a New York transit cop and no one ever did that, and a Nassau County police officer for twenty years and no one ever did that. [Regarding the Hoffman murder case] I don’t see how anyone could even remotely think that could be used as an example of a good case!

Palmer: That’s an indication to me that none are real, because if even one person could do what they claim, then they certainly would be known about in law enforcement and in high demand. So, regarding the high-profile “psychic mediums” such as John Edward, Tyler Henry, Chip Coffey, and the deceased Sylvia Browne: the Guerrilla Skeptics team has helped make it clear on Wikipedia that what these people do is not real. However, these people have millions of devoted followers, in part at least due to credulous fawning by reporters for national media outlets. These famous psychics may not rip off individual clients for huge sums as happens to your clients, but the media spotlight makes these people famous, and lends credibility to the already widespread belief that mediumship is real. I think that perhaps this leads some people to fall victim to street-corner psychics like the ones you have investigated and brought to justice. What do you think about this trickle-down hypothesis?

Nygaard: I despise all of them. And yes, those [famous psychics] are a gateway. They are promoting something that’s harmful to the masses. It’s harmful to a lot of vulnerable people. So, I was actually on Dr. Oz. One of my clients that I helped get money back [Priti Mahalanobis, who was mentioned in part one of this article] was on the show and I was sitting in the front row. First Dr. Oz talks about my cases but then he brings on this woman and she’s one of these Long Island psychics. The “Happy Medium” … her name is Kim Russo. Oz had her go into some psychic shops in New York City and record how they were trying to scam her. So, she was saying that these are phonies, unlike herself. What are you doing Dr. Oz? You got my client on there; you got me on there. You got us talking about how this is all a scam and then you promote this woman. It kind of hurt. This is a perfect example where a show sent out completely mixed signals. Oh … backstage she tried to give me a reading. I was like ma’am what are you doing? … [later] she said, “you’re not ready” and I said, “I’m never going to be ready.” (See a clip from Bob’s appearance on Dr. Ozhere.)

Palmer: Were you previously aware that there was a skeptical movement, with people outside of law enforcement trying to educate the public about psychics and mediums and their ilk?

Nygaard: No. I had no idea. The first one who called me might’ve been Derek [Colanduno from Skepticality podcast]. I didn’t even know that this all existed. I am a young skeptic as far as understanding this whole movement. I believe in God. I was brought up Lutheran. I’m not a regular churchgoer but I do pray, and I believe in God. I’m not an atheist, and I said to Derek when he first called me, “I don’t know if that fits in with what you guys are about.” When I go after these people I go in with an open mind, but I prove the lies. I go in with a skeptical mind, but then I find the provable lies. I don’t ever start a case with the perspective that this is just a bunch of bull.

Palmer: Some of your cases have involved people having their religious beliefs used against them, such as the woman who was told her son’s soul was burning in hell and that she could release him from the torture ... for a price. Do you think that religious belief lends itself to making people fall for this sort of stuff?

Nygaard: You know, I’ve never come across a case where an atheist got taken by a psychic. I’ve never had a case like that. I’m not saying it can’t happen, but I haven’t seen it.

Palmer: What are your thoughts on the psychic sting operations sometimes run by skeptics? These don’t lead to prosecutions but aim to expose high profile psychics as a lesson for the public. Is it worthwhile to spend time doing this?

Nygaard: The only one of these I knew about was with James Randi and Peter Popoff. That rubs me wrong when I see that Peter Popoff on TV, I just get mad. I can’t believe the guy is still on today!I know Houdini devoted a lot of his life debunking these people and I think your skeptical community does a great job exposing them and I think that it’s definitely worthwhile to expose these con artists and conduct undercover stings for the purposes of educating the public and trying to get through to people. But I have a whole different angle: when I investigate these con artists, I investigate them to put them in prison.

Palmer: Another member of GSoW, Annika Merkelbach, wanted me to ask you “Have you ever been afraid or threatened as a reaction to your work?”

Nygaard: Nothing in relation to my psychic investigations, but when I was a cop I had to have a [special alarm] put in my house because I was going after drug dealers and they were going to do a hit on me. There was a plot to kill me and my partner … I had something like fifty-one drug arrests in fifty-two days. In regard to the alarm, if I pushed the button it would go directly to the bureau of special operations and they would come immediately.

Palmer: Are there any other people doing the psychic-busting stuff anywhere?

Nygaard: Not that I know of. There are guys in the bunco association that talk about it, but there isn’t any other private investigator in the world, that I am aware of, who is actively doing it. 

Palmer: Then when you retire, it’s the end. At some point, would you consider switching to training others to carry on this sort of work?

Nygaard: I have. I thought of writing a book. I’d like to do a movie. I think a book and a movie would help to educate a lot of people. And the bunco association has asked me to give lectures to teach police and prosecutors, but I just haven’t had the time. I just have so many cases right now. But it’s really hard [to teach this]. People don’t see the fight I go through on a daily basis with police and prosecutors from around the country in different jurisdictions ... there’s an actual hatred toward me for what I’m doing because I’m forcing them to do something they don’t want to do.

Again, I want to thank Bob Nygaard for the time he spent with me for this interview, and of course for doing this important work. I also have to thank Bruno Multari and Annika Merkelbach for submitting questions for this interview. As a reminder, Bob is scheduled to participate in Dragon Con 2018, as part of the Skeptrack, to discuss his experiences in the world of psychic fraud. Let me close with a post made by Bob on his Facebook page as an unsolicited reaction to the publication of part one of this article on August 15. Bob said:

“I really enjoyed doing this interview with Rob Palmer! Rob and Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia - GSoW - are doing such an amazing job of helping me spread the word about psychic fraud all around the world. Undoubtedly, many vulnerable people will be helped by Rob's and GSoW's efforts! I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been as welcomed and embraced by the skeptical community as I have!”

Adam Conover (Left) and Mark Edward (Right)

I’d like to introduce you all to Adam Conover, who I’m sure you will all recognize as the host and creator of the TruTV comedy show Adam Ruins Everything. This show is one of the few currently on TV that strongly encourages critical thinking. The show makes a claim of some sort, oftentimes something that is commonly believed, and then Adam “pops” in and states why what you think is true… isn’t. Adam will be speaking at CSICon on Sunday, October 21, at 9 am.I’m sharing the brief conversation I had with him. 

Susan Gerbic: I’ve actually met you in person. I was with mentalist and psychic expert Mark Edward, who filmed a segment for Halloween 2017. That was such a blast! Everyone was so kind and helpful. It was a great experience. Here is the link to that episode “How Fake Psychics Fool Their Victims.”

Adam Conover: I remember you from that day on set. Mark was terrific on the show. Give him my best!

Behind the scenes of Adam Ruins Everything

Gerbic: I would like to welcome you to CSICon. I’ve heard from many people that they are very excited that you will be speaking.

Conover: I'm very excited to come to CSIcon. I've been a skeptical thinker for a long time, and it's very heartening to be able to bring these themes to such a wide television audience. Our show proves, I think, that the American public loves to learn; not only that, but that they love to find out that everything they thought they knew was wrong. We use comedy to make the lesson go down easily, but it's the strong, factual, fascinating information that keeps people coming back. New episodes of the show are coming this fall on TruTV. Look out for them!

Gerbic: We have a Halloween party on Saturday night that is always a blast; hopefully you will be attending. I usually lead everyone in Bohemian Rhapsody during the karaoke part of the event, so brush up on your air guitar. I hope you like karaoke.

Conover: I enjoy it in small doses.

Gerbic: Will you be staying for the full conference?

Conover: I will have to fly in and out of Vegas quickly, but I'll attend as much as I can!

Gerbic: Thank you, Adam. We are all looking forward to seeing you and hearing you speak at CSICon.

Attendees and people thinking about attending: October is quickly approaching. CSICon has moved to a much larger venue because we have outgrown the space we have used before. So, I won’t say that general tickets are going to sell out, but some of the workshops and separate ticketed events will. The Halloween party will be a blast, so make sure you get your tickets for that as well. For tips and a great way to meetup with others who are attending, check out the event page on Facebook!

Natalia Plasternak showing off her Double-Helix hair, and Carlos Orsi with his cat, Violet.

Hello readers, I have a real treat for you all. I want to introduce you to two of my newest acquaintances who will be attending CSICon from Brazil: Carlos Orsi and Natália Plasternak. Their goals are to meet people in our community and learn what projects people are working on and how others are growing their local groups. They want to take these connections and ideas back to their community where they are hoping to start a local skeptic group.

Susan Gerbic: Olá Carlos and Natália! I was very happy to read the message on the CSICon Facebook Event page from organizer Barry Karr that you both would be joining us at the conference. I love to attend these conferences to reacquaint myself with old friends, but it is a special thrill to see that we are growing and including more people world-wide. Can you please tell readers more about yourselves?

Natália Plasternak and Carlos Orsi: Hi, Susan! We were thrilled when Barry posted about us on the event page, and even more when you asked us for this interview. Contact with other skeptics and organized groups that promote critical thinking and science-based approaches to social problems is very important to us.

About ourselves: Natalia has a PhD in Microbiology and is a research fellow and lecturer at the University of São Paulo (USP), the largest in Latin America and one of the top-ranked research and higher education institutions of the region. She is also the main director of the Brazilian editions of the Pint of Science Festivals.

Carlos is a science journalist, science popularization writer, and fiction writer. He was one of the first Brazilian journalists to create content about science specifically for the internet, beginning in 1996. He is the author of three books of science popularization with a skeptical bent—one about religious miracles, one about quantum quackery, and one about astrology.

We are working together with a group of friends and colleagues to establish in Brazil an institute for the promotion of skepticism, critical thinking, and science-based public policies. Our main role models are the Center for Inquiry (CFI) and the British group Sense About Science.

Gerbic: In the intro to this interview, I said that you were coming to CSICon to meet people and to learn more about what others are doing to combat pseudoscience and grow local skeptic communities. Can you tell me what kinds of organized skeptic groups we might find in Brazil? São Paulo, as the biggest city, has a population of over 12 million people; we should have multiple large groups and CSICon held there every few years.

Plasternak and Orsi: Organized skepticism has quite a checkered history in Brazil, I'm afraid. Informal groups, such as Sociedade da Terra Redonda (Round Earth Society) or Sociedade Brasileira de Céticos Racionalistas (Brazilian Society of Skeptic Rationalists), form from time to time, but after an initial flurry of activity they tend to disappear, sometimes dissolving, sometimes just falling into a kind of coma. We hope that our institute will break this pattern for good.

Gerbic: What are the obstacles you think are keeping this from happening? I know when my Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) project has looked to find skeptic podcasts and groups we can beg for publicity to attract more Portuguese editors to train, we have struggled to find them. Carlos you told me that you are aware of only two skeptic podcasts, Ácido Cético (Skeptic Acid) and Dragões de Garagem (Dragons in the Garage).

Plasternak and Orsi: Even these podcasts are not devoted to full-time skepticism—they are general-purpose science popularization podcasts, that produce some skeptical episodes from time to time (NOTE: the podcast from the Ácido Cético group is really called Fronteiras da Ciência [Frontiers of Science]; I was mistaken when I first quoted the name to you, Susan! Carlos).

Our belief is that organized skepticism fails to flourish for a series of reasons. They usually pop up around someone who feels they have a mission to promote rational thinking, and when this one person finds some other priority—gets a job, has a kid, whatever—the groups disperses.

We also notice that it is hard to find activists for skeptical activism. Activism requires a certain mindset and disposition, and people with this kind of disposition often gravitates toward what they perceive as more urgent causes, such as social inequality, which in countries such as Brazil is quite an open wound, or environmental degradation. The synergy between the promotion of skepticism and of the respect for scientific evidence and the amelioration of the more visible social issues is not quite clear for most people.

Another reason is that skepticism is an abrasive topic. Doing science popularization by talking about supernovas or colorful butterflies is relatively safe, and usually viewed as praiseworthy, but trying to explain that someone’s favorite therapy doesn’t, or in fact can’t, work, or that the flying saucer they visited last night wasn’t real, but a product of sleep paralysis, is usually frowned upon. “What’s the harm” and “don’t be a spoilsport” are the most frequent reactions. It tends to drain a lot of energy.

Gerbic: Great insight; I really hadn’t thought of activism that way. I understand that you both have given TEDx talks. Carlos yours was called Três perguntas contra fake news (Three questions about fake news) and Natália yours A ciência brasileira e Síndrome de Cassandra (The Brazilian Science and Cassandra Syndrome). By the way, if anyone wants to help out the world-wide community of skepticism by translating and transcribing, please be in touch with me. Can you both please tell us more about these TEDx talks?

Plasternak and Orsi: Natalia is a lab researcher in Bacteriology, and she felt—feels—that scientists in general, Brazilian scientists in particular, are betraying their responsibility in educating the public. The media bombards the audience with advertisements for products that are clearly bogus—shampoos that promise to “restore hair DNA”, for instance—and not a single voice of protest is raised among those who know better, the scientists who actually work with DNA.

She calls attention to the fact that scientists are quite ready to appeal to the public when they need public support, for funding, for instance, but that they just forget all about it when everything is going smoothly. Scientists should be aware of their social responsibility and of the cost of scientific illiteracy to society.

Carlos’s talk draws from his experience of more than twenty years writing about science for the online audience. He notes that science news has always been a fertile ground for fake news—UFOs, conspiracies, health scares—and distils from that three questions that he suggests people ask themselves every time they find some piece of news that seems too good (or bad) to be true or that comes laced with language meant to rouse indignation or outrage: “What are they talking about?”; “What exactly are they saying?”; “How do they know?”.

Gerbic: Natália I am really interested in this Cientistas Explicam (Scientists Explain) group you organize in Brazil. I love the idea of getting scientists into casual situations like at a pub to explain what it is like to be a scientist and answer questions about their research. One of the problems with this war on science we seem to be involved in these days is that people think scientists are some kind of elite group of people who mysteriously “do things” and would never speak in a language that an average person would understand. There is a lot of work to do to change that attitude, please give us a ray of hope that this is possible world-wide.

Plasternak: There are really two projects—Pint of Science Brazil, a franchise from the British Pint of Science, that I organize, that takes scientists to pubs and gets them to talk to the people there; and Cientistas Explicam, which is not organized by me; I am only a participant. It is organized by a group of undergrad and grad students from the University of São Paulo, called Via Saber (Path to Knowledge). This project takes scientists to the sidewalks of busy thoroughfares and places them literally at a table with people who just happen to be passing by and wants to ask questions or discuss science topics. The students keep encouraging passers-by to stop and talk to the scientists about specific themes. It is a more personal interaction than with Pint of Science, and it works really well. I took part twice and talked to several people for three hours nonstop. People asked about safety of vaccines and GMOs, use of pesticides, and alternative medicine. I felt like I could really make a difference in people's lives.

I really enjoy both projects! Pint of Science is growing, with more and more scientists volunteering to talk at the pubs, and Cientistas Explicam is a great way to break this imaginary wall that separates the researcher from the public. Both projects get us out of our lab coats and talking to lay people in an informal environment. But although I am a big fan of these science communication projects, I feel that we need to take the next step and go into science political activism. We need to pressure the government for science-based public policies, and we need to educate the population to start asking for that kind of evidence.

Gerbic: Carlos you are a science journalist. Here in America (and around the world) journalists are facing an ever-increasing mistrust. From what I understand, budgets are being cut in newsrooms, and the science journalist is usually one of the first to go. If they stay, they are asked to do more and more of the tasks that used to be handled by support staff such as taking your own photographs, blogging, tweeting, and monitoring comments. It seems like it is inevitable that journalists will cut corners, not fully check source,s and double check the actual science. Mistakes will be made. When that mistake is revealed, then the public will throw it back in their face to say “See, we can’t trust journalists.” Carlos is there hope? And is there something we in society can do to help?

Orsi: Your description of the situation is quite accurate, Susan, but I would add one extra point: in the cutthroat world of the dispute for audience and attention among shrinking budgets, science news is not only a target for downsizing—which leads to the loss of quality as an unintended side effect—but also for deliberate loss of quality: with the selection of more “sensational” subjects, with an undue alarmist (or optimist!) tone imposed on the stories, and so on.

What can the public do? Support the good work that still exists. And get ready to pay for content—I really believe that the days of good journalism paid for by advertisements are over. Content that is free or very cheap for the consumer will be provided only by institutions or groups with their own funding and their own agendas (which could be laudable, like a skeptic news central, for instance, or not, like an extremist political organization) or by people who are desperate to be read (or heard, or watched), no matter what crap they need to publish to get your attention. Good, independent journalism will cost something to the reader.

Gerbic: I want to plug one very sweet story I wrote about a seven-year old girl living in São Paulo named Isabela. When I get frustrated and upset about pseudoscience in the world, I think of her. I might be an optimist, but I have great hope that we will move beyond the insanity we are experiencing today and think that we might be on the verge of a “Sputnik Moment” where the world wakes up and says “What happened to us? Why did we stop thinking critically and wasting our time arguing with people on social media?” I’m thinking of the children; they might be our biggest hope. Your thoughts?

Plasternak and Orsi: Children are always a source of hope, for sure, but we cannot forget that they live in an environment that was, and is, created by the adults of the previous generations. If we want rational, skeptical, and critical thinking adults in the future, adults that today are children, we must first get to the adults of today to give proper education and opportunities for their children.

The Isabela story is wonderful, but it begins with a skeptical, science-oriented dad. To have more Isabelas, we need more dads like him. So, I would say, yes, let's focus on educating our children to think rationally. But let's help them educate their parents as well!

Gerbic: This year’s CSICon is bigger than ever as we outgrew our last location. Lots of new speakers I’ve never heard before, and many I’m happy to hear from again, so I’m pretty excited about the lineup. Who are you excited to meet?

Orsi: Well, everyone, really. Talking personally about myself (Carlos here!), I am a huge fan of Joe Nickell and his investigative files. Won’t get to his workshop (have another at the same time), but if I can shake his hand and get a book signed and babble something embarrassing, it will make me very happy!

Barry Karr, of course, who has been so generous to us; and to see James Randi, another source of inspiration: a big turning point in my journalistic career came when I read his words in Flim-Flam!, damning the irresponsibility of the press for the prevalence of much pseudoscience. I took that as a personal challenge, really. To read The Faith-Healers was another momentous time in my life. I wouldn’t have written my first skeptical book if it were not for Nickell and Randi.

Plasternak: Talking about myself, and of course this is Natália speaking, you put me in a very difficult situation Susan; I want to meet everyone! I grew up reading Richard Dawkins, and it was probably one of the reasons I became a biologist. I have my copy of The Selfish Gene in Portuguese, ready for him to sign!Meeting James Randi would also be thrilling; I remember reading about him first in Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World and chasing after his work ever since. I've used his talks and videos in my classes and as references in my articles. And of course, I am really anxious to meet you and Barry Karr, who have already helped us so much in our ambitious goal to restore the skeptic movement in Brazil.

Gerbic: I think I’ve taken up enough of your time here. I’m very glad to make your acquaintances and hope to be able to meet you in person at CSICon. As I look at what you are doing to popularize science in Brazil, I think we have a lot to learn from you both. Please tell us how readers can find you if they are interested in your work.

Carlos: Most of my non-fiction work is available only in Portuguese, I am afraid. If any of your readers are fans of murder mysteries, I’ve been published twice in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (last time this year!), and I have some science fiction and horror around in English, too.

Natalia: Most of my work in sci-comm is also in Portuguese, but my TEDx has English subtitles, and I wrote a piece for Skeptic on Brazilian cancer quackery that can be viewed here.

Gerbic: I have read many of the Ellery Queen mysteries and years ago used to subscribe to the mystery magazine; I might have to re-subscribe? Thank you both! Don’t forget that CSICon will be hosting a pajama themed Halloween party on Saturday, October 20 at 8 p.m.

Acupuncture is many things. There’s the traditional insertion of needles at acupoints on the body. But there’s also electro-acupuncture, acupressure, ear acupuncture, hand acupuncture, foot acupuncture, scalp acupuncture, insertion of gold beads, electrodermal acupuncture with a biofeedback machine, moxibustion with burning mugwort, cupping, and even tongue acupuncture. In other variants of acupuncture, homeopathic remedies are injected at acupoints, and acupoints are stimulated with light, sound, pressure, heat, electromagnetic frequencies, and waving the hands over acupoints. The silliest is tong ren, where patients rhythmically tap acupuncture meridians on an acupuncture doll. A close second for silliness is esogetic colorpuncture.

Colorpuncture applies various colors of light to acupoints with a small flashlight-like instrument with a colored quartz rod. The tip of the instrument touches the skin or is held a short distance above it. Seven basic colors are used: the warm colors (red, orange, and yellow) increase energy; the cool colors (green, turquoise, blue, and violet) decrease energy. Using warm and cool colors together will balance yin and yang energy flows. Treatments last 10 to 90 minutes.

Colorpuncture is a form of light therapy based on the hypothesis that photons are emitted by cells, allowing them to communicate. “Illness occurs when the cells can no longer speak the same language.” A German naturopath, Dr. Peter Mandel, supposedly developed colorpuncture over thirty-five years of intensive empirical research. It supposedly addresses the nonphysical origins of illness by “inviting our basic life energy to rearrange itself into a new state of balance.”

Colorpuncturists diagnose by Kirlian Energy Emission Analysis. Kirlian photography captures the phenomenon of electrical coronal discharges. Some claim it depicts the aura or energy field of living organisms, but the same coronal discharges are seen with inanimate objects.

The Institute for Esogetic Colorpuncture offers detoxification treatments, coordination therapies, pain therapies, ophthalmotropic genetic therapies, prenatal therapy, conflict resolution therapy, dream zone therapy, and more. They say even healthy people can benefit from colorpuncture:

“Healthy people, who want to help prevent illness by clearing energetic blockages before they impact the body, as well as those who want access to soul information needed to move more easily on their life paths will find Colorpuncture treatments invaluable. Clients report not only changes in their bodies, but improved emotional outlook and a clearer sense of life direction after treatment.”

Who wouldn’t want access to soul information?

Of course, there is no supporting research. Colorpuncture is mere fantasy. The many testimonials from patients only demonstrate that it elicits a placebo response. So does traditional acupuncture, which has been called a theatrical placebo.

Back to Reality: Skin Coloration and Diagnosis

The nonsense about colorpuncture can be entertaining, but reality can be more interesting than fantasy; truth is often stranger than fiction. Color is not useful for treatment, but it can be very useful for diagnosis. There are a variety of unusual colorations that are useful signs to help doctors figure out what’s wrong with patients. They were featured in a recent report in FP Essentials, a continuing medical education product of the American Academy of Family Physicians. There were several I had not heard of.

In chlorosis or green sickness, the skin has a pale green tinge. It was originally classified as a hysterical condition but was later linked to severe iron deficiency anemia. This disappearing disease frequently afflicted young women in the nineteenth century but it seems to have vanished completely by the early twentieth century, perhaps because of better diagnosis and treatment of anemia. The reason for the green color remains a mystery.

The Blue Fugates were a family in the hills of Kentucky that carried a recessive gene for methemoglobinemia. They were descendants of a French orphan, Martin Fugate, who settled near Hazard, Kentucky, in 1820. Their blue skin color could be reduced by treatment with methylene blue. As their descendants moved out of the area, the recessive gene pool was diluted; the last known Blue Fugate was born in 1975.

Acquired methemoglobinemia can be caused by various chemicals including sulfa drugs, aniline dyes, nitrates in drinking water (from fertilizers leaking into wells), and certain anesthetics like benzocaine. Normal hemoglobin incorporates ferrous iron (Fe2+); methemoglobin incorporates ferric iron (Fe3+), which is less able to bind to oxygen and delivers less oxygen to tissues. Treatment is IV methylene blue, which restores the iron to the normal ferrous state.

Blue baby syndrome can be due to methemoglobinemia (babies are particularly susceptible) or to congenital heart disease, most commonly tetralogy of Fallot, which requires surgical correction.

In osteogenesis imperfecta, the white part of the eye has a blue appearance. The sclera is thinner than normal because of a collagen defect. This genetic disorder causes brittle bones that fracture very easily, often without apparent cause. Parents of these children have been wrongly accused of child abuse.

Red man syndrome is a reaction to IV infusion of vancomycin and some other antibiotics. The symptoms, due to histamine release, include a red upper body rash, itching, dizziness, generalized discomfort, headache, fever, chills, and paresthesia around the mouth.

Gray baby syndrome is caused by a buildup of the antibiotic chloramphenicol, which is not well metabolized in infants. The gray appearance is due to low blood pressure and cardiovascular collapse. It can be fatal. Chloramphenicol is rarely used in the United States but can be bought over the counter in Mexico.

Bronze baby syndrome is a dark gray-brown pigmentation of the skin, mucous membranes, and urine of a jaundiced infant undergoing phototherapy.

Bronze diabetes is another name for hemochromatosis, an iron-overload condition that can be hereditary or due to multiple blood transfusions. Patients look like they have a deep suntan. Iron accumulation in the pancreas can cause diabetes.

Yellow fever is a viral disease transmitted by mosquitos. In severe cases, patients become jaundiced, hence the name yellow fever.

Carotenosis or carotenemia is a yellowing of the skin that can be differentiated from jaundice because the whites of the eyes are not affected. It is usually caused by an excessive intake of foods that are high in carotene. I once had a very yellow patient who had been trying to lose weight by eating LOTS of carrots; she was a light-skinned redhead and her colorful appearance was really striking.

Jaundice refers to a yellowish or greenish discoloration of the skin due to high levels of bilirubin in the blood. It is caused by various diseases including liver diseases and hemolysis of red blood cells. The yellow color first appears in the whites of the eyes. Neonatal jaundice is seen in over half of newborn babies and usually resolves in a few days. Severe cases require treatment with light exposure to prevent kernicterus and brain damage. The ancient Greeks believed that jaundice could be cured by looking at a yellow bird.

In carbon monoxide poisoning, a cherry red discoloration of the lips and cheeks is seen at autopsy but rarely seen in living patients.

Argyria is an irreversible blue-grey discoloration of the skin caused by consumption of silver. Colloidal silver is an alternative medicine treatment that has been used for a variety of conditions including Ebola. It is not effective for anything and it makes chronic users look like smurfs. I wrote about it in a SkepDoc column.

Chrysiasis is a greyish skin discoloration due to excessive consumption of gold. Like argyria, it is irreversible. Gold is an effective disease-modifying treatment for rheumatoid arthritis but has been replaced by newer treatments. Gold supplements are used in alternative medicine to enhance creativity, boost energy and mood, enhance eye-hand coordination, improve memory, aid in relaxation, treat depression, reduce tumors, fight arthritis, and improve overall health. There is no evidence that they can do any of those things.

Albinism is the congenital absence of any pigmentation, caused by inheritance of recessive genes from both parents. These individuals have white skin, white hair, and pink or red eyes. They may have poor vision or other eye conditions, and they are at increased risk of skin cancer. Albinos have been persecuted, killed, and dismembered due to superstitious beliefs in some parts of Africa.

In Vitiligo, patches of skin lose their pigment. The cause is unknown and there is no cure. It can be very disfiguring and can have emotional and social consequences.

One thing FP Essentials omitted was Addison’s disease, an endocrine disorder where the adrenal glands don’t produce enough cortisol. It can cause hyperpigmentation and darkening of the skin.

Conclusion

Acupoints are imaginary. Acupuncture is a theatrical placebo, and it is not surprising that adding colors to the performance contributes to the theatricality. Colorpuncture is fantasy. Skin coloration as a diagnostic sign is reality. I personally prefer reality.

Investigating alleged ghost photographs and offering rational explanations for them has been a focus of mine for well over a decade. I’ve hosted workshops to explain the various causes for “ghosts” and other alleged paranormal entities that seem to appear in photographs and videos. So when I came across a paranormal event advertising a speaker as “The Ghostographer,” I decided to take a closer look. 

Tim Scullion was a featured speaker at the Maryland Paranormal Conference at which he was scheduled to present a slideshow of his best (ghost) photos, many of which are featured on his blog and in his book Haunted Historic Williamsburg, Virginia with Breakthrough Ghost Photography, described as the “world’s first photo study of ghosts” on his Facebook page. Although I wasn’t able to attend the conference, I did order his book with anticipation for the “breakthrough ghost photography” it advertises. Scullion describes himself as a photographer, author, and a musician, who has bachelor and master’s degrees in education from the College of William and Mary.

While waiting for the book, I browsed his blog, which features dozens of images that Scullion claims are ghosts. Long exposures seem to be the technique of choice, evidenced by motion blur, use of ambient light (no flash) in low light environments, and even examples of light painting. Light painting is a technique in which a light source (such as a flashlight) is used as a “paint brush” to paint designs or words with light during a long exposure. Ghost hunters often accidentally get this effect when they turn the camera flash off, causing the camera to take long exposures. Any background lights or other ghost hunters who are carrying devices with lights can cause streaks of light to appear in photos.

Scullion also presents artifacts apparently produced by lens flare as evidence of ghosts, referring to them as orbs. Scullion ignores the fact that in many of the images a line can be drawn (with a ruler) from the “orbs” straight back to an overexposed light source (such as a porch light or street lamp). Another clue attributing the artifacts to lens flare and not ghosts is the shape of many of his orbs: they are hexagonal. This is a common sign of lens flare and is caused by light that reflects off the inside edges of the lens aperture.

Scullion attempts to justify his claim that the lens flare artifacts are ghosts with a blog post titled “Lens Flare…Or Ghost?” He states, “According to just about every professional photographer, the odd shapes of light that I photograph are the result of a lens flare, and that I should immediately dismiss them as inconsequential and move on. But until I can get a thorough, scientific explanation that debunks anything paranormal, I have to dismiss the lens flare explanation of these light anomalies. Why? If my camera is stationary (on a tripod), by the definition of a lens flare, it (the lens flare) would not move nor would it shape-shift!”

He assumes, for reasons that are not clear, that paranormal claims have never been explained by natural causes (that is, debunked) when in fact many have. He also dismisses the lens flare explanation despite hundreds of photography resources (books, websites, tutorials, and photographers) that provide precisely the explanation he claims doesn’t exist. In the specific blog post where the above quote appears, he offers three images to support his claim of “If my camera was stationary, it (the lens flare) would not move nor would it shape-shift.” This is where we see Scullion’s misunderstanding of how science works come into play, especially when it comes to controls. Rather than taking multiple images consecutively from the same angle using the same camera without moving the camera/tripod, he changes multiples variables with each image.

Scullion offers these three images in support of his claim that lens flare artifacts are indeed ghosts. He failed to apply proper controls; he took the images at different times of the year, different angles, different lighting conditions, and different cameras.

The three images were taken months apart over the course of a year; the first in the winter of 2013, the second in summer of 2013, and the final one in the winter of 2014. The camera was in a different position each time, which changed the angle of the images, thus changing how the light entered the lens. Speaking of light, notice the light in the windows; the interior lights change in each image, which adds to the lens flare effect (especially in the right-hand image). Finally, a different camera was used for the third image—a camera modified to allow more infrared and ultraviolet light to be recorded on the image (typically mislabeled a “full spectrum” camera). This was far from a controlled experiment.

Another blog post caught my attention. Titled “Gettysburg: A Gathering of Ghosts,” it describes Scullion’s trip to Gettysburg and a particular apparition he caught on camera while visiting the area of Little Round Top. He states, “Seconds later I picked up a white figure near the trees, and in the nest photo part of it turned navy blue—indicative of a Union uniform. As I went to jump from one boulder to another to possibly get a better photo of the figure, I saw a dark shadow move into the trees from the path.” He provides two images of the apparition, both of which are cropped down to only the figure.

Screen capture of Gettysburg: A Gathering of Ghosts blog post, before it was removed.

Two photos Scullion claimed to be that of an apparition. In reality, this is a statue of a soldier on top of a monument to the 155th Pennsylvania Volunteers.

It didn’t take long to see an obvious explanation for the white/navy blue figure he presents as an apparition: it’s a statue. That’s right; it’s a statue of a soldier atop the monument to the 155th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry (dedicated on September 17, 1886). It’s a monument I’m quite familiar with from dozens of my own visits to the area. The monument is quite tall, rising over fifteen feet (closer to twenty if you include the boulder it sits on). The monument is also easily visible from most of the immediate area of Little Round Top and the fields below it. It’s out in the open, making it a mystery how anyone could sincerely mistake it for a ghost—especially in broad daylight.

I contacted a friend and resident of Gettysburg, Andy Keyser. He was kind enough to head over to the location and locate the same camera angle to replicate Scullion’s “ghost.” He was able to easily duplicate the image, and when compared side-by-side, there’s no question this mystery is solved.

On the left is Scullion’s alleged ghost. On the right is Keyser’s replicated image at the same location.

Kenny Biddle and Andy Keyser in front of the 155th Pennsylvania Volunteers monument.

Looking through more images on his blog, I found many faces, most of them appearing in window panes from various historic sites and a few appearing in fog or mists. There’s a common theme: They are not actual human faces such as in a photograph (or real life). They appear to be paintings and/or chalk drawings that have been edited into the photos. The faces share an artistic style, the proportions are slightly out of proportion and/or irregular, and it’s painfully obvious they are artwork…not ghosts. 

In one image taken at a beach, image noise (known as grain in film cameras) is apparent in several of his ghost images due to the low-light environments. However, closer inspection of the close-ups Scullion provides reveals the image noise is absent only where the faces appear. It looks like he simply took blurry faces and overlaid them onto the photo of the beach, forgetting about all the digital noise that would still be evident over the faces if they were actually there when the photo was taken.

An image Scullion took at a beach showing several extra faces floating around. In the close-up on the right, the distinctive image noise is absent wherever the faces were added.

A few days later, his book arrived and it was, not unexpectedly, a disappointment. It was packed with over 200 photographs, including what seem to be long exposures, lens flare, dust particles, and paintings/drawings inserted into images. It claims to be a study in ghost photography, but it appears to be a mixture of poor photography methods, ignorance of science, simple replication methods, and some fabrication of apparitions.

I reached out to Scullion via his blog on June 8, 2018. I related that I was working on an article about his work and wanted to ask him a few questions to clarify some concerns. He agreed, responding, “I would be happy to answer any questions that I can.” The next day I addressed some of the issues I’ve covered here in a polite and professional manner. I even offered to travel down and accompany him on one of his excursions to observe his techniques and see the images he captures just after they’re snapped. If he truly had “breakthrough ghost photography,” as he boldly claims, I wanted to see it and help promote it. Over a week passed without a direct response, though I did notice that his Gettysburg post—the one with the alleged ghost of a Union soldier that was obviously not the ghost of a Union soldier—was suddenly removed from his blog without comment.

I’m disappointed in the lack of response from Scullion. He had a chance to address fair questions and defend his claims, but instead decided to quietly delete the evidence and ignore my inquiries, perhaps hoping I’d just go away. He’s appeared on several local news programs promoting his “breakthrough” ghost photography, yet these have been nothing more than fluff pieces; no one has asked him the difficult questions or gone along to observe his methods. I see why; when challenged, he backed away and covered his tracks (though not before I was able to screen capture the site).

If this article reaches Mr. Scullion, I’d like him to know my offer still stands; I’ll travel to Williamsburg, Virginia, to observe (and test) his methodology. If he can demonstrate his method actually works, I’d be supportive and help him out. All he has to do is respond (but I won’t hold my breath).

Almost one billion of us take a regular dietary supplement, mainly vitamin tablets. Celebrities enthusiastically endorse vitamins, and vitamin-fortified foods line our supermarket shelves. But how safe are these products? Is it true that vitamins are “natural” and therefore can’t do you any harm? How are they regulated, and how can parents make the right choices for their children’s health?

These questions are investigated by scientist Dr. Derek Muller in Vitamania, the latest documentary made by Emmy Award-winning Australian filmmakers, Genepool Productions.

I spoke to the writer, director, and producer of the documentary, Sonya Pemberton.

Sonya Pemberton: Derek Muller sent me some of his videos back in the day before Veritasium was the huge YouTube five-million-subscribers beast it is today, and I loved his work. I used to send him emails going, “Who does your camera work?” He goes, “Me.” “Who does your editing?” “Me!” “Who writes your script?” “Me!” And I thought wow, he’s an impressive young man! We tried to find ways to work together and it never quite happened.

And then we were doing Uranium: Twisting the Dragon's Tale, our three-part series, and he had put forward some female physicists because I wanted to have a female host. And the various broadcasters around the world just couldn’t agree on which female and they all just kept arguing and arguing. Eventually they said, “Do you have a bloke,” and I said, “We have one bloke and only one bloke, and his name’s Derek Muller. And if we were going to go with a man it would be him.” And they all went, “Yes.”

And so Derek and I worked for the best part of two years on the uranium series and got to know each other really well then. And then we had a bit of a shock with the uranium series: the amount of illegal downloads it got! It has the dubious honor of being the most illegally downloaded series in PBS International’s history. We estimate 1.7 million illegal downloads, which was great on one level but absolutely catastrophic for the business side of trying to make a film and pay for your filmmaking.

Derek and I decided we wanted to do more together, and we wanted to work together as sort of co-executive producers, and I wanted to direct him on another project. We came up with Vitamania, something we both cared about and thought was really interesting. And so began a three-year journey of working on that together. And what’s interesting is making him a co-executive producer was really pivotal because we designed a strategy of releasing it so that his fans could get the film as soon as it became available on any network; they could access it online with a couple of caveats around that.

But it’s the first time a television documentary has been able to be released online within a couple of days of a TV broadcast. That’s a radical shift. And that’s a combination of his world of YouTube where if you’ve got a video you watch when you want to watch it, and my world of TV where we have to raise a lot of money. And therefore the broadcast is control, a release strategy. This was a very interesting hybrid of the two.

Kylie Sturgess: The documentary starts close to my home in Fremantle, Australia, with a football game and the story of a young man going blind. From there it starts an investigation into under-dosing and overdosing of vitamins, even going to the Antarctic. How much work went into making this a world-spanning investigation into vitamins?

Pemberton: An awful lot of work, three and a half years of work. There was a solid year of research where I spoke to numerous experts and I had a team of researchers helping me, and then there was a year of financing, and that was tricky in itself. And then there was a twelve-month production process because we had to film in blocks as we got our financing. And then a good six, seven months in post production. It was a massive amount of work.

We had, I think it's now five researchers, three fact checkers, and the script has 300 end notes. That's about forty pages of end notes. It is the most heavily fact checked and annotated script I've ever been involved with, and that's saying something because most of my scripts are heavily annotated, anyway. The reason it was such a challenge was actually a lot of the information we wanted, like the chemistry and the biochemistry of vitamins is hard to get hold of.

And there's competing experts! Expert A says this and expert B says that … so working our way through and trying to figure out what was the most useful thing we could give people, that was key.

Sturgess: I didn't expect actual funk when it came to talking about the history of vitamins! What inspired those kinds of creative elements?

Pemberton: Well, the fact that we broke into song on occasion is something I really just wanted to do! It was inspired by the research. As soon as I stumbled across the fact that Dr. Casimir Funk was the guy that gave vitamins their name and was the first to actually consider that there was a whole family of nutrients without which we died, that was really extraordinary. And of course, with a name like Dr. Funk, and I've spent twenty years in music as well as making films, I went, “Hello, we're going to have some fun with this!”

Interestingly, we did it in order to keep the film fresh, to make it memorable, because I would challenge anyone to forget the name of the scientist that invented the word vitamins after watching our film and to make it accessible to schools. And already we've had a massive uptake of viewing the documentary in schools, because the reality is the vitamin industry is 100 billion dollars a year. The vitamin industry is 100 billion dollars a year and growing. It's estimated it'll be 200 billion by 2020. That's only two years away.

It's an enormous beast, and it's basically big pharma and it's big vita guys, really. And no film's really going to make a dent in this, but what I wanted to do was make sure that younger people coming up were informed and able to make rational decisions around vitamins. If they understand that they're not natural, they're not made of squished up oranges and bits of broccoli. They're made chemically. There are chemicals and they're made in chemical factories, mostly in Asia. And that's not a bad thing. That's just the facts. Just don't kid yourself they're made out of squished up broccoli.

In the majority of countries such as Australia and America and most of Europe, they're not regulated before they go on sale in terms of safety and efficacy. They don't have to prove that they're safe or effective before they go on sale. I want people to know that because there's a veneer of safety around these things, and what we call a “health halo” around vitamins. And I just wanted people to take a clear hard look at it and if they want to take them, take them, but do it with knowledge that these things are chemical molecules that have powerful effects on people.

Sturgess: Now, you already touched on this, but it must have been a tremendous challenge to sort out what is a fair balance with all the information out there. What was the search like?

Pemberton: Ironically, this was the most difficult science film of my career and I've made maybe fifty films now. We made a series on uranium called Twisting a Dragon's Tale a couple of years ago, but this one was more complex. It was, surprisingly, far more difficult to get access and to get information. It was easier for us to get access to a nuclear power plant in the Ukraine and in America and fly drones over them than it was to even get inside a vitamin raw material plant!

We spent a couple of years writing and talking to as many vitamin raw material manufacturers that we could and none of them would let us come in. They would say, “Yes, yes, yes …” and then we would just get this constant delaying. No one actually says no, but the end result is you never get in. I was really, really surprised and disappointed that we never got to see behind the curtain if you like. But when we made the film about uranium we expected to have difficulties getting into nuclear power stations, getting in to see a nuclear reactor, but once people realized that we were science journalists and we just wanted to know how things worked, then the nuclear industry opened up and wanted to show us the behind the scenes. They wanted us to show how it all works!

The vitamin industry in contrast did not want to show us behind the scenes. And one major Australian manufacturer of vitamins that's well known, an Australian brand actually, said to me on the phone, “Sonya, you do realize we don't actually make any vitamin products in Australia, don't you?” And I went, “Yes, I do. But I wanted you to show how you put them into pills and how you manufacture the bottles of products, and then have you talk me through how the actual raw materials are made.” And basically it just never happened. That was the single most surprising and difficult thing.

And the other really surprising thing that both Derek and I commented on in our various talks and chats was that at the beginning of making this film both Derek and I thought of vitamins as pills. We had actually forgotten that vitamins are actually naturally occurring substances, chemical molecules that occur in food and that you get from sun, in the case of vitamin D. We'd actually forgotten this because the industry has been so successful in rebranding the word vitamin to mean a product.

What was a marvellous journey for us was going: you know what, vitamins are great, vitamins are in food, and they're miraculous. Look at all these great stories of what they can do and how they can save! Let's disconnect the word vitamin from pills. The synthetic vitamins, the manmade vitamins are different things all together. That was a very empowering moment in sifting through all the information because vitamins in their raw, natural state in food are extraordinary. They're wondrous.

But vitamins, when they are isolated from food and then manufactured in chemical factories around the world with very limited regulation and very little oversight in terms of safety and efficacy before sale, and then they're put into pills? Then they're a different kettle of fish. For people who are genuinely deficient, who really have terrible catastrophic deficiencies? They're life savers. There's no question. But for those of us that eat relatively normally and have access to good food, well the pills just don't even come close.

That’s why we ended up going to NASA in the end [of the documentary] because I was trying to figure out how do you clinch this story. How do you go and find people who’ve been studying the best health for humans on Earth and in space, who have been doing the most work? And we found out that NASA spends about fifty-five years researching the optimal human diet—all just to be able to send humans off planet.

And the bottom line is they don't send any vitamins into space other than vitamin D, and that's because if you think about it they can't get any sunlight when they're in a space capsule or in a spaceship. But I was really surprised to hear that they don't send a whole lot of vitamin pills. They actually send real food, and the reason being that all the research shows at the moment that food contains all these incredible molecules that we've barely begun to understand, and they work together with vitamins. All of these vita chemicals and of course there's other nutrients, there's fibre, fats, there's carbs and minerals, there's all these other things that go into food. Together they seem to work in this incredible synergy.

But when you isolate the vitamins and put them in pill form, then you get very mixed results about their efficacy for people who are healthy. That was a really simple but profound end game. And separating the pills from the actual naturally occurring vitamins I think was a really important thing that we had to do.

Sturgess: When Derek started eating a carrot in the middle of a vegetable stall at the start of the documentary, I found myself going to the fridge and getting myself a plate of vegetables in response because I thought, “Derek's having a carrot. I need more salad too …”!

Pemberton: Well, both he and I talk about the change we have made in our lives in terms of diet! We both now look at food as a source of incredible nutrients. Look, it's obvious but we're all so busy we forget some of the basics, and I look at a plate of food now and I can scan it really quickly and make a quick assessment about what vitamins may or may not be missing from that plate. I'm also not so hung up about worrying am I getting enough B12 or what's my D level like. I'm pretty confident that I eat well and that my food can cope with it and I have no health problems, touch wood. I feel much more confident in my ability to get what I need from food, and that came through making the film. And Derek feels the same. He was brought up as a kid on taking multi-vitamins, and there's a little video on our website showing Derek talking about the vitamins he used to take as a kid and the ten things you don't know about vitamins. But, now that he's a dad, he's got a couple of kids, and he was really worrying about whether he should be giving his kids vitamins. And the end result for him was he just feels far more empowered to do it with food. And that's subtle but profound.

Sturgess: What's been other people's response to this documentary? Any surprising ones from audiences?

Pemberton: The response has been phenomenal. We've released it internationally on multiple platforms. Through our website, vitamaniathemovie.com, there's various ways you can get it. We've had people getting it in India, some of the far reaches of Norway, across America, all around the world, and the vast majority of the responses has been, “Oh my God, I didn't realize that vitamins did all this,” and “Yes, I used to think of them as pills. Oh my goodness, this is all news to us.” That's been the biggest response.

Some of the surprising responses, I had a couple of naturopaths come up to me and say, “I came to this film thinking that it was going to be an anti-vitamin film, and instead I realised I was underestimating the power of vitamins, and now I know I have to be far more careful when I prescribe them.” For me, as someone who's a champion, like you, of critical thinking, and using a good dose of skepticism when you approach things, this was the best possible outcome. To have naturopaths and people like that actually say they got a lot from the film, that has been an amazing success.

The other really surprising thing is within a week of release, schools have rung up and asked for the music for the songs. Right now there's a primary school and a high school, the school orchestra is learning the vitamin song!

We've had to send out the sheet music, and I'm being sent all these videos. I'm getting these little videos from kids, such as a four year old singing, “Hey, hey, I'm vitamin A,” and I did not expect that. That's been such a joy. And the other thing is it's already been nominated for three major awards at the Jackson Hall Film Festival and the Science Media Awards, and Derek's been nominated for best science ambassador. It's been nominated for best journalism and best writing. It's been shortlisted for a whole lot of other awards.

From my point of view, I'm going to the people out there that we'd like them to be skeptical about vitamins, as in naturopaths, homeopaths, people who might use vitamins and not think more carefully about where they come from. The fact that they are watching this film means that we have not preached to the choir. The film is designed to go outside the scientific community.

The fact that schools are picking it up and we have a whole education package around that, that's been really important to me, and that people are having fun with it because it wasn't meant to be a heavy film. I've made heavy films, a lot of my films are very dense and very dark really, because they deal with very difficult subjects.

What was really enjoyable was to have a likeness of touch. Some of the science geeks don't like the songs and sometimes go, “Oh, why would you bother breaking into song?” What I would say to them is it was an attempt to be fresh and to have some fun and to attract a different audience. And it looks already, only two weeks after launch, that this is working. And I dare you to forget the name of the scientist that invented the word vitamin after watching it! For that reason alone I think the songs were worth doing. And also, the third song when Derek impersonates Bob Dylan.

Sturgess: Oh yes, that was hilarious!

Pemberton: I think it's just priceless, and Derek had such fun doing it! And if you listen carefully he is actually singing himself and also does do a duet. That was a lot of fun as well.

Vitamania is released worldwide—the official site with bonus videos, educational material, and more can be found at www.vitamaniathemovie.com/.

This past week during oft-contentious Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, things took a turn from the political to the surreal with conspiracy rumors that a lawyer sitting behind Kavanaugh was caught on camera flashing a white nationalism sign with the fingers of one hand as her arms crossed. Memes shared on social media “revealed the truth” about what she was doing; some took it seriously, some as a joke, while others smelled Grade-A trolling.

Snopes notes:

The lawyer, Zina Bash, once served as a clerk for Brett Kavanaugh, who is Trump’s second U.S. Supreme Court nominee. She sat directly behind Kavanaugh to his left, where she was widely seen on camera resting her right hand on her left arm, thumb and pointer finger forming a circle. Bash’s husband, U.S. attorney John Bash, took to Twitter to blast his wife’s accusers, pointing out that she is of Jewish and Mexican descent, and saying the couple has “nothing to do with hate groups, which aim to terrorize and demean other people—never have and never would.”

This is also not the first time that such rumors have surfaced:

Claims that members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration have flashed “white power” symbols are not new. In February 2017, controversy erupted when a Reuters photographer captured Trump adviser Stephen Miller appearing to make the gesture. Similar claims were made again in January 2018 when White House intern Jack Breuer was seen making the gesture during a group photograph. In Miller’s case, the absence of video footage made it unclear whether he was flashing the gesture purposely or merely accidentally did so while flaring his fingers to adjust his suit. In the latter case, Breuer said he was mimicking a gesticulation President Trump often makes during speeches and denied he was making a white power sign.

The Anti-Defamation League posted a page explaining the rumor:

[It began as a] 2017 hoax campaign started by members of the notorious troll website 4chan that has since taken on a life of its own....The “OK” hoax was actually just one in a series of hoaxes in which 4channers (and members of other, similar places on the Internet such as 8chan and Reddit) have tried to take innocuous items, symbols or gestures and falsely attribute white supremacist meanings to them in order to fool liberals and get them to spread such false messages.

Other hand signs have been attributed to politicians and entertainers, including Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Jay-Z as endorsing Satanism instead of, for example, love.

Of course, any high-profile person in the public eye enough may be photographed tens of thousands, or even millions, of times in a wide variety of contexts. Anyone wishing to spend the time and effort to comb through photos searching for a specific, seemingly significant wave or position of the hand or fingers can surely do so.

Hidden Media Messages

Concerns about “hidden signs” go back centuries, though rumors about hidden signs in the mass media specifically emerged in the 1950s with the publication of The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard. In the book, Packard claimed that a movie theater had successfully boosted its concession sales by flashing subliminal messages to drink Coca-Cola and eat popcorn. The claims were later debunked, but the fear that seemingly ordinary images contained hidden messages was implanted in the public’s mind. Two decades later, Wilson Bryan Key, in his influential and best-selling 1970s book Subliminal Seduction—with an introduction by noted media scholar Marshall McLuhan, much to his discredit—picked up the alarmist theme and claimed that advertisers secretly embedded images of sex and death in their ads to manipulate people into buying their products.

Key, Alex Jones, and their ilk play an important role in the promotion of conspiracy theories. They act as the self-appointed revealers of truth, exposing subtle and hidden signs that ordinary people (or sheeple, depending on the “wit” of the conspiracy theorist) miss. Through their wide-but-shallow knowledge of how the world really works (informed by everything from following the money to hunches, anonymous tips, random internet comments, and so on) they help others see the light.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere There’s Signs

These rumors are fueled by ambiguity, and the mind’s pattern-seeking tendencies play an important role in these conspiracies. Humans try to make sense of the world, and in the process sometimes see patterns and meaning where none exist.

We see this psychological process at work when we find faces and figures in clouds, tree trunks, stains, Rorschach blots, and other ambiguous stimuli. This phenomenon, called pareidolia, is well known in psychology, and it is the cause of many supposedly mysterious and miraculous events (including the famous “Face on Mars”). Examples are all around us; in fact, if you have a New Hampshire state quarter, you have an example of pareidolia in your pocket or purse (take a look). As Carl Sagan noted in The Demon-Haunted World, “The pattern-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a face from a clutter of other details that we sometimes see faces where there are none.”

We see real or imagined hand gestures in photographs and videos, and the conspiracy-minded among us “recognize” (or match them to) other symbols and images freighted with meaning and symbolism. They share the discovery with others, who spread memes and information on social media. 

Some people believe that the Denver International Airport, for example, is tied to conspiracies about the collapse of Western civilization. Some say there’s a top-secret underground bunker for the world’s elite to survive a nuclear war (or the Mayan 2012 apocalypse). Some say the airport must have a connection to Nazis since the runways form a perfect swastika (actually, they don’t). On his TV show Conspiracy Theory, ex-Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura says, “There’s a lot of strange things about this airport. It’s twenty-five miles from Denver; that’s nineteen miles further away from old Stapleton Airport, which seemed to be just fine...” It’s not clear why Ventura believes that new airports are always built closer to the nearest city than previous airports, but skeptics are not so sure anything mysterious is going on.

Brian Dunning notes:

It’s nearly impossible to summarize the vast number of ordinary events and objects at Denver International Airport that have been misinterpreted, twisted, and sensationalized into “evidence” for a Zionist New World Order Illuminati conspiracy to control and kill American citizens. There are facets of its planning, its design, its construction, its operational history, and even its artwork that conspiracy theorists point at as proof that we’re all doomed.

Yes, perhaps the strangest claim of all is that the conspirators have gone out of their way to announce and describe their evil plans to the world. They say all the signs are there; it’s all laid out in front of you, if you just understand how to interpret the clues and signs. Conspiracy folks point to murals in the airport depicting World War II–era genocide and environmental degradation, along with a message of global unity, peace, and hope. Reading meaning into art is a time-honored tradition, but the conspiracy-minded find messages about Nazis, Mayan 2012 doomsday predictions, global destruction, the collapse of the American government, and even extraterrestrial contact. Conspiracy theorists love to uncover (or fabricate, depending on your point of view) clues to innumerable hidden agendas. (For more on this, see Dunning’s Skeptoid episode.)

Well aware of the airport’s conspiracy-laden reputation, officials there have decided to have some fun with it. According to the Denver Post, a series of large posters have appeared throughout the airport “confirming” many of the conspiracies.

The graphics are plastered over temporary walls that surround construction zones in the airport. One hints that that the wall is hiding a “new Illuminati headquarters,” or a “remodeling of the lizard people’s lair”—or just new restaurants. Emily Williams, a spokesperson for the airport, said the airport is officially embracing the conspiracy conjecture. “I think that we recognize that conspiracy theories are part of our brand. It’s a fun way that we can engage with our passengers,” she said.

This illogical contradiction is common in conspiracy thinking: It’s a carefully hidden top-secret plot that no one is supposed to know about—except that the conspirators made sure to leave important clues so the public would know about it. Perhaps the most famous case of a conspiracy claiming that the conspirators purposely left clues about a hidden truth was in the late 1960s, when The Beatles guitarist Paul McCartney suddenly died. The remaining Beatles—along with their manager and others—conspired to keep McCartney's death a secret, going so far as to hire a look-alike and sound-alike to take his place in public appearances.

Why? As any good conspiracy theorist worth his salt will tell you, follow the money to reveal the truth: The Beatles were the most popular band in the world, earning obscene amounts of money for promoters, record companies, merchandisers, and others. McCartney’s death could not be allowed to kill this cash cow.

Yet while the conspirators carefully kept the public from finding out about McCartney's death, they also decided that they should reveal the truth in album covers and music. For example, on the cover of the Abbey Road album, all four Beatles are photographed striding across a zebra crossing—but only McCartney is barefoot. On the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, McCartney is the only Beatle photographed with a hand over his head—which, for those smart enough to understand the reference—is a symbol in some cultures that he was memorialized in death. There were dozens of other references in photos and lyrics, all cited as proof and evidence of the conspiracy. It all made sense to many people. And it was all, of course, completely wrong; McCartney remains alive and performing to this day.

In 2013, pop star Beyonce was accused of using her Superbowl performance as an opportunity to tell the world during the halftime show that she’s part of a secret society bent on world domination by making a diamond shape with her hands—said to represent the Illuminati. Could it be that she was letting the world know about her involvement with the Illuminati (in direct defiance to its core tenets)? Or could it be that she was making a diamond symbol with her hands as a plug for her husband Jay-Z’s record company, which uses a diamond as its logo? Or could it be that conspiracy theorists don’t realize that there are only so many symbols that can be formed with four fingers and a thumb, and that by random chance many of them will look similar? 

So is it possible that Mexican-born, half-Jewish Zina Bash is part of a white nationalist cabal and specifically requested that particular seat in the audience where she could somehow be sure that her hands would be visible from one particular camera angle, so that at some point during the hours of sitting she could flash a secret hand sign to racists tuning in to the Senate Supreme Court confirmation hearings hoping to see a reassuring sign that she’s on their side? Sure. Anything is possible.

What’s plausible, likely, or evidence-based, however, is another matter entirely.

Mysterious New Mexico: Miracles, Magic, and Monsters in the Land of Enchantment. By Benjamin Radford. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8263-5450-1. 300 pp. Softcover, $24.95.

Welcome to New Mexico, where I had no idea that there were odd paranormal mysteries waiting to be solved (other than in Roswell). CSI investigator (and Skeptical Inquirer Deputy Editor) Ben Radford has taken a variety of ghost stories, UFO accounts, cryptozoology, crystal skulls, psychics, and all other kinds of pseudoscience under his investigative eye in this 300-page book. Not only is the inside full of the mysterious and creepy, but the cover (featuring a scary ghostly woman holding a baby) is just amazing. It sets the tone for the contents of the book.

Full disclosure: Ben Radford is a friend of mine, and I am listed in the acknowledgment section with a thank you. So of course I’m going to say nice things about the book—but only because I really did enjoy it and am now intrigued enough that I will visit New Mexico someday soon. It’s called the Land of Enchantment after all.

The book is not just about investigation of the paranormal. It is first a collection of stories, mostly ghost stories, told from the viewpoint of the media and the people who pass these stories on to the next generation. Only after Radford has intrigued us with the story does he break it down into thinkable chunks. You can see how he is thinking through how best to investigate it. What are the actual claims that can be tested and researched? Bit by bit, he relates all he discovers and all the frustrations he encounters as the stories change and the documentation that was promised by the ghost story teller does not manifest.

KiMo technician Dennis Potter shows investigator Benjamin Radford the site of a 1951 explosion which spurred a ghost story.

My favorite story was the investigation at the historic KiMo Theater in downtown Albuquerque where in 1951 a child was killed by a water heater explosion in the lobby. Many years later, a story was crafted that the child, Bobby Darnall, is haunting the theater and pulling practical jokes on the actors. People are asked to bring doughnuts and toys to appease him. Using newspaper accounts, interviewing eyewitnesses, and actually showing up at the theater to see for himself (imagine that), he was able to shut down each piece of their “evidence.” I won’t tell you what he finds, but let’s just say that he didn’t find Bobby’s ghost.

Shrine at the KiMo theater where, by tradition, cast and crew leave offerings for the resident boy ghost.

The story of Loretto Chapel’s mystery staircase is one I had heard before. I thought, Wow, they haven’t figured out how that staircase was built yet? As Radford points out, by crediting the paranormal (no less than St. Joseph himself) you are taking the credit away from the real carpenter whose craftsmanship should attract tourist dollars all on its own. Shame on the Chapel for not giving François Jean Rochas his due.

Radford explains his approach to investigating. First he is not a debunker; Radford stresses that “launching an investigation with the assumption (conscious or unconscious) that ghosts are there is just as detrimental . . . as assuming that no ghosts are there.” He believes to do a great investigation some time may be spent on the Internet, in libraries, and searching through old newspapers, but “being there” and talking to the people involved is also very important. The importance of original research—going back to the first source and not relying on secondhand (and more likely fifthhand) stories—cannot be stressed strongly enough. “Doing real investigation is not easy; it is time consuming, difficult, laborious, and often tedious,” Radford explains.

As the leader of the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW) project, I can’t help but look at every published work by our authors as a citation for Wikipedia. This book will keep GSoW busy for a while adding the results of Radford’s investigations to several pages: The KiMo Theater, Loretto Chapel, Santa Fe Courthouse ghost, Aztec UFO, La Llorona, crystal skulls, Thunderbird, West Mesa serial killer murders. That’s a lot of pages that will be affected by the research done in this one book. The current Crystal Skull Wikipedia page attracts over 450 views a day.

There’s one more thing that I feel strongly about, and that Radford repeatedly reminds the reader: These ghost stories are tied to real people who lived and had family that loved and miss them. Even if it was 100 years ago, it is disrespectful to think that these people are haunting hotels, theaters, and courthouses moaning about their deaths. I’ve always loved a good ghost story, but Radford has really made me rethink my position. When a specific person is mentioned, it ceases to be fun. I don’t think I would care to hear stories about my deceased little brother eating stale doughnuts and playing pranks in a theater. I found that the city of Albuquerque’s website tells Bobby’s story complete with the front page of the newspaper talking about the accident. I don’t understand why a city website would feel the need to continue spreading ghost stories. They list three ghost websites with a version of this story, but no link to Radford’s Skeptical Inquirer article where he first reported on the KiMo Theater ghost (May/June 2009, also online on CSI’s web page, at http://www.csicop.org/si/show/ghosts_doughnuts_and_a_christmas_carol_investigating_new_mexicos_haunted_ki/). I’ve asked them to comment and at the time of this writing have not yet heard back. I learned a lot about the mysterious New Mexico from Radford, but the bigger lesson was that reminder: we should be considerate of the feelings of the families these stories are based on.

Radford has traveled all over the world investigating cryptids, ghosts, chupacabras, vampires, miracles, and more. Readers will be glad to see that Radford, at least this time, has found the mysterious can be found everywhere, even in New Mexico.

Okay, so picture this predicament: I am an active member of a skeptical activist organization, the Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia team (GSoW), doing public presentations on behalf of the organization. I was just hired by the Center for Inquiry (CFI) to write a (facetiously titled) column, “The Well-Known Skeptic.” I had just created a Gmail account and a Facebook page, also both using “The Well-Known Skeptic.” To top it all off, I had just ordered my first set of business cards with “The Well-Known Skeptic” boldly emblazoned on them.

Then, on July 11, I opened Facebook to discover that Sharon Hill, an actual well-known skeptic, had written an article on her blog titled “Please don’t call me a Skeptic” (read it here). In the article she lambasted the current state of the movement, and eschewed the “skeptic” label itself, by metaphorically turning in her “Skeptic’s card.” (The article includes a photo of a business card printed in all caps with: HANDING IN MY SKEPTIC’S CARD.)

Ouch. What was “The Well-Known Skeptic” supposed to do? Well, write an article on this subject for CFI’s website, of course!

On the odd chance that a reader does not know of Sharon, I suggest perusing her in-depth Wikipedia bio (which GSoW had a hand in writing). A short summary is that she is a geologist and science writer with a focus on the paranormal, pseudoscience, and anomalous natural phenomena. She ran the Doubtful News site (recently terminated), the Spooky Geology website, and is the producer and cohost of the 15 Credibility Street podcast. Sharon has written for The Huffington Post, and also wrote the Sounds Sciencey column for the CSI website, where her bio identifies her as “a scientific and technical consultant for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.” She also has presented at numerous conferences, including TAM, NECSS, and Dragon Con. Sharon recently had her first book published, Scientifical Americans: The Culture of Amateur Paranormal Researchers.

So, now let’s discuss “Please don’t call me a Skeptic.” Sharon’s blog post began:

Several people have asked me to explain why I now reject “Skeptic” to describe myself. In short, the label is limiting and is overwrought with mistaken assumptions of being elitist, arrogant, and closed-minded. Unfortunately, being labeled a Skeptic sends a signal to some to tune out what I might say by default because of the association with having a dismissive, know-it-all attitude, defeating any efforts at meaningful exchange over questionable claims.

And it ended:

My ideas and goals were no longer in line with the majority. The idea of being a “Skeptic” has become distasteful…

I hope I see the day when skepticism gets a reboot and catches on with a public tired of lies, scams, and nonsense. Until then, I continue to be skeptical as warranted, but please don’t call me a Skeptic.

In reply to some of the comments left on her blog regarding abandoning the “Skeptic” label, Sharon doubled down on this point: 

I don’t think we need a term. The term lately refers to the something other than the process of skepticism. Like I said, I still practice the method because it works but I don’t need a label to define my views. Labels and categories are artificial and often get corrupted. Let your words and behaviors define you instead… But be assured, as I said, I will continue to do what I have been doing, just without a tag that I and others perceive as a pejorative label.

Importantly, Sharon wasn’t saying that the skeptical approach to determining truth was no longer appropriate. She just doesn’t feel comfortable any longer using the word that is universally used to describe the approach. She doesn’t like labels. In fact, as neither her long running websites nor her podcast use the word “skeptic,” I started to be doubtful that Sharon has felt comfortable identifying as a skeptic for a long time. Digging a bit into this, I discovered a 2013 article from Sharon’s column Sounds Sciencey where she foreshadowed her current announcement. That article began:

Does “skeptic” equal nasty, obnoxious and shouty? No? Then why do we get automatically tagged with those characteristics even when we are not? The word carries some connotations…

…This whole piece revolves around mistaken assumptions that observers make. One problem with much of the discussion between skeptics and believers has to do with semantics. Just using the terms “skeptics” and “believers” is limiting and mistaken in many ways. But, I feel I have no choice to use these terms to make this piece reasonably understandable. I am completely aware that this is problematic and I ask that you see this as a panorama, not as sticking people in labeled boxes.

The 2013 article concentrates on the disadvantage that being identified as a skeptic has in dialogs with believers. This perception problem is also mentioned in Sharon’s current blog article as a big reason to abandon the term, but her blog post goes further in that it details numerous other perceived problems with the movement as reasons to abandon the label and the skeptic movement altogether. But I am not going to comment here on all the problems Sharon outlined, because I haven't been involved long enough to know the history. Sharon is a veteran, and she may be correct about some of the flaws she perceives. However, I see the subject of chucking the label as a separate issue, which is fair-game for my newbie two cents. So here goes:

As soon as I read what Sharon wrote, it struck me as the wrong thing to do. I re-read the article several times to consider if perhaps motivated reasoning (concerning my recent branding, plus the $35.27 spent for my skeptic cards!) was the only reason I did not initially agree with her stance. I concede that, as Sharon stated, some people do react badly to the word skeptic. It does have some negative connotations, and I’ve experienced this myself. But is dropping the label useful, or even a remote real-world possibility? I believe that if skeptic were abandoned, the tendency would be for people to look for another label to replace it. But how would such a transformation be accomplished with such a ubiquitous word? The very concept of scientific skepticism includes a form of the word. Without thinking hard, I can come up with many other examples using the word: TheSkeptics Guide to the Universe, The Skeptic Zone, The Skeptic’s Dictionary, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, Skeptical Inquirer, Skeptic magazine, The Data Skeptic podcast, and even Squaring the Strange’s skepticrate, and the use of “Skeptrack” at conferences … . The list is almost endless. Do we begin an international rebranding project? Should we transition to the term doubter? What would be accomplished? I believe that whatever word took the place of skeptic would eventually acquire the same connotations, and by Sharon’s logic, also would then need to be abandoned. Maybe realizing this dilemma is why Sharon followed up, in the comments to her article, with this significant statement:

“I don’t think we need a term.”

But I do think we need a term … a label. The fact is that things, and groups of people, get labeled and categorized because that is the way humans think and process the world around them. Labels are necessary as shortcuts to avoid giving lengthy explanations whenever something is mentioned or discussed.

What about discarding a label with the goal of using an alternative, because the original has acquired negative connotations? This has historically proven to be problematic (think Brights as a replacement for Atheists). On the other side of the coin, gay folks proudly and successfully fought to reclaim a former term of disparagement, queer. Perhaps atheists as well as some skeptics need to take a lesson from that. Alright, the bottom line is that I respectfully disagree with Sharon on this point. I believe dropping the label “skeptic” is not a workable path forward.

But, being a skeptical movement newbie, whose opinion will matter very little on this subject, I was determined to ask some skeptical veterans for their take on this subject. As it turns out, I had it on my near-term schedule to interview two other skeptical podcasters: Celestia Ward, cohost of Squaring the Strange, and Jay Novella of TheSkeptics Guide to the Universe.

During my interview with Celestia (the entirety of which will be published soon), we were discussing the lack of female hosts on skeptically oriented podcasts, and she brought up the subject of Sharon’s blog post unprompted. Listing such podcasts, Celestia mentioned 15 Credibility Street and then said: “Oh … Sharon doesn’t really want to be known as a ‘Skeptic’ anymore, so I don’t even know if I should [list] her as having a skeptical podcast, but it’s a critical thinking podcast!” Then she continued: “Various people have some bones to pick with the movement, and while I fully admit that they have some points, I’m not ready to just throw away the baby with the bathwater.”

In the August 31 episode of Squaring the Strange, “Skeptical Burnout,” Celestia and her two cohosts, Ben Radford and Pascual Romero, discussed these very same topics at length and even mentioned a prior “appearance” of Sharon on Squaring talking about this subject. (This segment was actually recorded prior to Sharon’s July 10blog post, so it was not mentioned.) The “Burnout” episode is available here, and the relevant discussion starts at 40:45.

Celestia’s confusion about not knowing how she should refer to 15 Credibility Street in the wake of Sharon’s announcement actually touches on a big problem. How does Sharon’s request affect Wikipedia? As a member of GSoW, I have a fundamental interest in properly documenting our skeptical spokespeople in the online encyclopedia. So, doing my due diligence, as soon as I saw Sharon’s blog post, I added this entry to her Wikipedia article:

In 2018, Hill publicly eschewed the "skeptic" label due to perceived negative connotations of the term and issues she has with organized skepticism, however she maintains her support for the philosophy and process of scientific skepticism.

Sharon actually messaged me a thank you for this edit. This apprised me that she is (understandably) concerned with how Wikipedia covers her. But to fully honor Sharon’s “Don’t call me a Skeptic” request, much more would have to be done on Wikipedia. Like the rest of the world at large, Wikipedia categorizes things. It labels them. This enables the collection of similar things into lists to allow users to more easily find them. So, for example, Sharon is categorized as an American skeptic in the Categories section of her Wikipedia article:

This entry at the very bottom of her bio article causes Sharon to be listed on the category collection page for American skeptics under “H.” Her name appears on that page with a diverse set of folks whose only commonalities are that they are (or were) Americans and share (or shared) a skeptical viewpoint. These people include: Harry Houdini, Ray Hyman, Sam Harris, Harriet Hall, Britt Hermes, and George Hrab.

Also, there is a separately maintained alphabetical List of scientific skeptics with Wikipedia articles—Wikipedia just loves lists—which is unrelated to the above-mentioned category list:

Sharon appears in this list along with such skeptical luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Robert Todd Carroll, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and James Randi.

And what about Sharon’s work? If she is personally eschewing the skeptic label, does that apply to whatever she creates with skeptical content? Wikipedia has a List of Skeptical Podcasts. And guess what is listed there right at the top, in the company of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, Skeptoid, and The Skeptic Zone: Sharon’s podcast 15 Credibility Street.

If I removed her podcast from this list, where else could it be listed? Nowhere. There is no Wikipedia article called “List of Skeptical Podcasts Hosted by People Who Don’t Want to Be Called Skeptics.” The only mention of this podcast within the encyclopedia would be in Sharon’s own article, making it much harder for someone to stumble across while looking for a new skeptical podcast to check-out. That seems like a bad thing ... for both Wikipedia and Sharon.

Now, I could make edits to modify all of these things and more, but frankly I don’t think I could justify this action to other Wikipedia editors. Everything on Wikipedia is done by consensus, and follows strict rules. With over 6,200 Wikipedia edits thus far, and thus being classified as an “Experienced Editor” (a label!), I have a realistic understanding of what should or should not be changed according to the standards of the encyclopedia. I believe I have already gone as far as I could to honor Sharon’s “Don’t call me a Skeptic” request, without having to face valid pushback from the other editors.

As mentioned, I was interested in other skeptics’ opinions on this subject, so during my interview with Jay Novella of TheSkeptics Guide to the Universe (to be published shortly), I asked if Sharon’s announcement had been a topic of discussion at NECCS (the conference had begun just two days after Sharon’s blog post). It turns out that the younger Novella brother had quite a bit to say on the subject, and so I decided to summarize it here. Jay said:

It's complicated, because any word that we call ourselves is going to be bastardized. And coming up with a new word ... well, some Skeptics that I respect tried to do that and they did a miserable job. Remember the Brights? … I think Sharon made a decision that I find largely unnecessary. She is a Skeptic; that's what critical thinkers call themselves. That's the way we identify ourselves. What are you going to do, create a new word? Skepticism is a thing. It's a word that's in the vernacular. It's our community. So, I just don't know what the point is …

Regarding some of her other points: the Skeptical community is much more diverse now than it’s ever been. At NECSS 2018 we had more than 50% female speakers, and our MC is a woman (Leighann Lord). Our community may have been started by white men but it’s grown past that. The Skeptical community is similar to other communities … . There are misogynists in every community. You get enough people together, and a percentage of them are going to [misbehave]. But there's nothing particular about the Skeptical movement or the science movement that makes us different from any other community.

When [Sharon] says “I'm moving on. I'm backing away out of the Skeptical community …”, I interpret that as her saying “I'm turning my back on people who I share a world view with.” I look at it like this: this is my community for good or bad, and I'm trying to make it better. I am doing everything I can to educate people and make them better Skeptics so we collectively can change the world. I think her heart is in the right place. But I think the body is doing the wrong thing. I wouldn't recommend anyone abandon the word “Skeptic” because you will end up being branded with a new word that you didn't choose, or you will be referred to as a skeptic anyway. If a person or a group were able to re-brand the movement, the reality is that whatever word was picked, it would end up with the same baggage, and have the same feel, as the word “Skeptic” does today.

I am going to leave it at that. After many years of experience in the movement, Sharon has thought this through, come to her own conclusions, and made a public proclamation. She feels she is right and can obviously do whatever she wants regarding this subject. But I believe that if you discard a label there are only two paths forward: you try to not be associated with one at all or you attempt to adopt a new one. I have expressed my belief that neither strategy will work.So, for me, until a clearly better and workable option comes along, I’m keeping my skeptic’s card.

Acknowledgements: For significant input with the details of this article, I am very grateful to Paula Serrano and Diane Palmer.

In May 2018, I spent the night at the White Hill Mansion in Fieldsboro, New Jersey. The mansion has a rich history; it was built in 1757 and survived the Revolutionary War, during which it was even invaded by the British army looking for rebel colonial soldiers. The mansion has changed hands many times over the past two hundred and fifty years. It has been occupied by inventors, doctors, and even a State Senator. In 1923, it housed an upscale German restaurant that was often visited by New Jersey’s elite. In 1972, the restaurant was sold, and the White Hill Mansion eventually came to be owned by the Stepan Company. When the Borough of Fieldsboro learned that Stepan planned to demolish the house, the Borough purchased it and now maintains the property. The White Hill Mansion is currently on the New Jersey State Register of Historic Places. A restoration project began in 2004 and is run by the Friends of White Hill (White Hill 2018).

The mansion, predictably, has its share of ghost stories. From a basement bartender who doesn’t like anyone behind “his bar” to an alleged spirit that either committed suicide or was murdered—no one knows which, and the ghost declined comment—in the bathtub of the “bloody bathroom,” named for the bright red accents throughout the room. Shadow figures have been reported in several areas of the mansion, and objects have been said to be thrown around.

I was first introduced to the White Hill Mansion by a paranormal conference held there in 2017. I was one of the speakers and also took part in a roundtable discussion panel. Over the course of the following year, I developed a great relationship with the members of the preservation society. The staff allowed me the opportunity to investigate some of the ghostly claims and was very accepting when I found several plausible and natural explanations for the spooky experiences (Biddle 2017). They invited me back to stay the night with some of my science-minded friends, adding that we could perform any experiments we wanted. This was an excellent and rare opportunity; most locations that claim to be haunted are resistant to skeptical/science investigators having free reign to potentially solve some mysteries.

In the weeks leading up to my overnight stay, I gathered information from a few dozen ghost hunting teams that visited the mansion and claim to have evidence of paranormal activity. The most common phenomena reported from the mansion are electronic voice phenomena (or EVP). EVPs are described as mysterious voices of spirits that are only heard when a recording is played back or through a “ghost box” (essentially a radio that quickly sweeps through the stations without muting the sound). Most of the teams reported the EVPs were not just random responses; they were direct, intelligent responses to specific questions. I found this interesting and decided to take a closer look.

In my own research, I’ve found EVPs are often presented as the most “valid” form of evidence by ghost hunters. An informal poll on my blog showed 65 percent valued EVPs over photos and video. Ben Radford (2018) notes in his book Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits, “After surveying the efforts and results of ghost hunters over the years it’s clear that, in their opinion, by far the strongest evidence for ghosts they have found has been in the form of EVPs.” Likewise, as Sharon Hill (2018) notes in her book Scientifical Americans, when comparing parapsychologists and amateur ghost hunters, “The amateurs embrace EMF meters, consider electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) to be a primary form of evidence….” It seems a lot of weight is put on EVPs as proof of the existence of ghosts. And alleged intelligent responses offer us a testable claim.

Spending the night looking for ghosts. Left to right: Kenny Biddle, Tim Vickers, Rob Palmer, Chuck Sanders.

I arrived at the mansion with my friend and colleague Tim Vickers, a forensic interviewer from West Virginia. We met up with Rob Palmer, a member of the Guerilla Skeptics on Wikipedia and fellow CSI columnist, and Chuck Sanders, a video producer and photographer. After a short tour of the mansion, I spoke with Loretta (president of Friends of While Hill Mansion) about our experiment (which was originally Tim’s idea); we wanted to try and find a hidden object through the use of EVPs.

I handed Loretta a small foam ghost (a squishy toy named Spooky) and explained that while we waited across the parking lot in the office trailer, she was to hide the toy ghost somewhere inside the mansion. As she walked around deciding where to hide it, she was to speak out loud and inform the spirits (if any were around) what she was doing, what the object (she was hiding) was, and that she needed the spirits to tell us where to find it. The idea was simple: if there were cooperative ghosts here and they could communicate with direct, intelligent responses to our questions, then they should be able to lead us to the hidden toy.

Loretta Kelly, historian and president of the Friends of White Hill Mansion

We used three different recording devices and went floor-by-floor; the basement bar, the restaurant area on the main floor, the main bedroom on the second floor, and finally the central room in the attic. We spent about ten minutes in each area asking questions (to whatever might be listening) and listening to the replay for any voices that didn’t belong to us. Unfortunately, our questions went unanswered, and we never found poor Spooky.

However, this gave me an idea: Why not challenge the ghost hunters that claim to get such EVPs to perform the same experiment? For most of the past decade, I’ve been following the claims of others; investigating and solving the “unexplainable” evidence that has been presented. This time, I wanted to challenge the ghost hunters to actually prove what they claim to get: direct, intelligent responses from ghosts. In this case, ghost voices telling them where a specific object was hidden in the house.

Tim and Kenny trying to get the spirits to tell them where their ghost toy is.

Ghostbuster Kenny in the main bedroom trying to talk to ghosts (they weren’t talking back).

And to make it interesting, we would follow in the footsteps of James Randi and offer a cash prize of $100. I spoke with Tim Vickers, and we developed a rough draft of rules for participation that would be fair but also prevent any cheating from participants and us. I reached out to Jim Underdown of CFI’s Independent Investigations Group (IIG), which has an ongoing $100,000 challenge for anyone who can demonstrate paranormal abilities under controlled test conditions (IIG 2012). Underdown graciously offered his expertise and helped us refine the rules, as well as kicking in an extra one hundred dollars. 

Once we were all satisfied the test conditions were fair, it was time to hide the target object. I made arrangements with the White Hill staff to have the mansion all to myself for a few hours. I acquired a target object and carried it into every room on every floor of the mansion. I spoke out loud (and had video recording me the entire time), proclaiming who I was, what I was doing, what the name of the target object was, and exactly where it was going to be hidden. I have no doubt that if ghosts are haunting the mansion (granted, if they exist at all), they heard me.

I placed the target object in its hiding place and snapped a few photographs. Those images were printed and paired with a written description of the object and its location. Two copies were made and triple sealed in envelopes with several tamper-proof security measures. One copy was given to the Friends of White Hill for safekeeping, and the other was given to Tim Vickers. This measure was to ensure I could not replace or relocate the target object, since I’m the only one who knows what it is and where it is.

On June 30, I posted a video announcing the challenge and what it would take to win the cash prize (Biddle 2018), which was now up to $300 after the White Hill staff kicked in an extra hundred. The challenge is simple: if a team (or individual) can submit an unedited, continuous video of them conducting an EVP session, obtaining EVPs that clearly tell them what the target object is and where it is hidden, they win the prize. (There are additional rules, so be sure to check out the video listed in the references and on the White Hill Mansion website.) This really shouldn’t be too difficult, because it’s basically what ghost hunters are already doing—asking specific questions and claiming to receive direct responses.

There’s been a lot of interest over the past month, with several requests coming from groups overseas about replicating the challenge in their local areas. Although I have serious doubt that anyone will claim the prize, I think this is a good opportunity for ghost hunters to put some solid data behind their claims. If a team gets an audio recording (or voice coming over a sweeping radio) that tells them the name and location of the target object—both of which are completely unknown to everyone but me—I’d be pretty impressed. I would also be out $300. So, who’s up for the challenge?

References

• Biddle, Kenny. 2017. Investigating The White Hill Mansion. Online at https://anomaliesresearchsociety.wordpress.com/2017/09/11/investigating-the-white-hill-mansion/.
• Biddle, Kenny. 2018. White Hill Mansion – Hidden Object EVP Challenge. Online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwj7pjYGJ2o&feature=youtu.be.
• Hill, Sharon A. 2018. Scientifical Americans: The Culture of Amateur Paranormal. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 49.
• Independent Investigations Group (IIG). 2012. The IIG $100,000 Challenge. Online at http://iighq.org/index.php/challenge.
• Radford, Benjamin. 2018. Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits. Corrales, NM: Rhombus Publishing Company, 146.
• White Hill. 2018. History of White Hill Mansion . Online at http://www.whitehillmansion.com/history.html; accessed on August 2, 2018.

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

La práctica que consiste en administrar aceites esenciales (o perfumados) derivados de las plantas, mediante la inhalación de vapores, o mediante la ingestión de una supuesta energía de curación, usualmente es conocida como aromaterapia.

Los aceites administrados en la aromaterapia son descriptos como “esenciales” para referirse a los componentes aromáticos volátiles que algunas personas describen con la “esencia” de las plantas, que representa la “fuerza vital”, el “espíritu”, o el alma. Así, la aromaterapia tiene sus raíces en el vitalismo que se describe en el Skeptic’s Dictionary (Diccionario del escéptico) como

… la doctrina metafísica que afirma que los organismos vivos poseen una fuerza interior no física o energía que les de la propiedad de la vida.

Los vitalistas creen que las leyes de la física y la química no pueden explicar las funciones y procesos de la vida.

Quizá la noción más famosa del vitalismo es “La Fuerza”, en la película Star Wars (La Guerra de las Galaxias), pero hay diferentes nombres que se usan, como parte de la medicina folclórica en varias culturas para describir la fuerza vital, como chi, prana e inteligencia innata. El vitalismo es un componente significativo de los sistemas de creencias religiosos.

Algunas personas sostienen con vigor ciertas creencias religiosas en el poder de ciertos aceites curativos, como se sugiere en la descripción que hace Amazon sobre el libro Chemistry of Essential Oils Made Simple: God's Love Manifest in Molecules (La química de los aceites esenciales, simplemente: el amor de Dios se manifiesta en las moléculas) de David Stewart (2005):

La solidez científica está ligada a las Santas Escrituras y es fácil de entender (sic). Te dará una apreciación de las bases espirituales y científicas de la curación por medio de las plegarias y la unción con aceites.

Que se base en las Santas Escrituras no es lo que espero de un libro científico, pero quizá el libro de Stewart se podría citar como evidencia contra la noción de magisterios que no se superponen (Non-overlapping magisteria).

Regulación de los Aceites Esenciales en los Estados Unidos

En los Estados Unidos, el marketing de los productos de aceites esenciales está sujeto a la regulación de la Comisión de Seguridad de Productos del Consumidor (CPSC), en la Administración de Alimentos y Drogas (FDA) y en la Comisión Federal de Comercio (FTC).

La CPSC regula un gran cantidad de productos para el consumidor para asegurarse de que los consumidores no se expongan a riesgos que pueden provocarles daños o la muerte. Los aceites esenciales son similares a productos como desodorantes de ambientes y velas aromáticas, que están reuglados por la CPSC.

También, los aceites esenciales son algo similar a los cosméticos y/o las drogas, que son dos categorías de productos regulados por la FDA. El uso intencional es clave para la regulación de productos por parte de la FDA. Cuando los productos (excepto el jabón) son indicados para purificar el cuerpo o hacer que una persona luzca más atractiva, se regulan como cosméticos. Cuando se indica que los productos son para fines terapéuticos que conllevan cambios en la estructura o función del cuerpo, entonces están sujetos a la autoridad de la FDA para ser regulados como drogas. En los Estados Unidos, las drogas necesitan la aprobación de la FDA antes de salir al mercado. Las nuevas drogas en fase de investigación (INDs) deben demostrar que obtienen buenos resultados en tres fases de un estudio riguroso para recibir la aprobación de la FDA. Es ilegal lanzar al mercado drogas no aprobadas.

La FTC regula la publicidad de los productos de consumo. La FTC puede tomar medidas reguladoras cuando los aceites esenciales se publicitan con afirmaciones falsas o confusas.

El mercado de la aromaterapia

De acuerdo a un informe referido a una investigación de mercado publicado en 2018:

• El mercado regional más grande, en lo referido a la aromaterapia es Norteamérica.
• Las compañías de aromaterapia son: doTerra International Edens Garden, Frontier Natural Products Co-op., G Baldwin & Co., Mountain Rose Herbs, Ouwave Aroma Tech(shenzhen)Co., Ltd., Plant Therapy Inc., Ryohin Keikaku Co., Ltd. (Muji), Thann-Oryza Co., Ltd., Young Living Essential Oils and Zija International.
• “...el mercado global de la aromaterapia fue valuado en 1.413 millones de dólares en 2016 y se espera que llegue a los 3.200 millones...”
• El modo más común de usarlos es la aplicación sobre la piel, pero los métodos de difusión aérea son cada vez más populares.
• Se usan para el cuidado de la piel y el cabello, la relajación, el tratamiento del dolor, de las cicatrices y del sueño, y para el bienestar general de la salud.
• Los aceites esenciales se ofrecen como sanadores naturales y los usan los aromaterapeutas y los spas para tratar el dolor, las heridas, el mejoramiento del sueño, el cuidado de la piel y las alergias.
• La utilización histórica de la aromaterapia fue para tratar sarpullidos, eczema, quemaduras y acné.

La Asociación Nacional de Aromaterapia Holística (NAHA), una “asociación sin fines de lucro dedicada a la integración holística y la educación en aromaterapia dentro de una gran variedad de prácticas complementarias de la salud que incluye el cuidado de uno mismo y la ffarmacología casera”. Establece que el uso doméstico de los aceites esenciales es común en todo el mundo, pero que a menudo se lleva a cabo sin suficiente conocimiento en lo que concierne a la seguridad.

La NAHA advierte: “Si los aceites esenciales se usan en casa, recomendamos hacerlo bajo la dirección de un profesional de la salud bien informado”. No estoy seguro cómo los consumidores pueden tomar determinaciones consistentes y válidas sobre qué profesionales de la salud que promueven el uso doméstico de los aceites esenciales está suficientemente bien informado.

De acuerdo con la NAHA:

… la aromaterapia es una profesión no autorizada en los Estados Unidos. Muchos practicantes de la aromaterapia tienen una licencia perteneciente a otra disciplina, por ejemplo enfermería, terapia de masajes, estética, naturopatía, acupuntura, etc.

La aroma-acupresión

La aromaterapia ha sido aplicada en conjunto con la acupresión o digitopuntura. La acupresión es una variante de la acupuntura que usa la presión de las manos en lugar de la inserción de agujas en puntos específicos del cuerpo supuestamente para activar varios tipos de curación en todo el organismo. Pero algunos aficionados a la acupuntura afirman que ésta tiene efectos terapéuticos reales y sugieren varios mecanismos de acción. Para ellos,tanto la acupuntura como la aromaterapia sugieren varios de estos mecanismos se basan en el vitalismo.

En 2015, la revista BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, publicó un artículo sobre un estudio que eligió al azar a seis instituciones que se especializan en el cuidado de pacientes con demencia en Taiwán para que los pacientes recibieran una de tres intervenciones cuyo propósito era evitar su agitación o nerviosismo: 1) aroma-acupresión con un 2,5 por ciento de aceite de lavanda en cinco puntos específicos de la acupuntura (56 pacientes), 2) aromaterapia con un 2,5 por ciento de aceite de lavanda en cinco puntos no especificados (73 pacientes), o una intervención usual de control (57 pacientes). Se eligieron dos instituciones para cada intervención. La medición de los resultados se realizó usando un inventario para evaluar la agitación y un analizador de la variabilidad del ritmo cardíaco (HRV). Los investigadores informaron que ambos grupos de aromaterapia tuvieron puntajes menores de agitación que el grupo de control y que en algunos períodos de seguimiento el grupo de aroma-acupresión tenía la actividad del sistema nervioso más favorable en relación al estrés, en respuesta a algunos, pero no la mayoría de los períodos de seguimiento.

Tal vez usted podría estar confundido sobre cómo la intervención con aroma-acupresión difirió de la intervención con aromaterapia. Lo mismo me pasa a mí.

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

Focus on Alternative and Complementary Therapies publicó mi crítica del estudio. Yo noté que: 1) el estudio fue un cuasi-experimento más que un experimento verdadero ya que fueron elegidas las instituciones más que los individuos dentro de cada institución; 2) hubo diferencias notables entre los grupos respecto de la edad, el género, y las categorías de diagnósticos; 3) a los pacientes no se les ocultó el tipo de intervención que estaban recibiendo (lo cual significaba que podrían haber respondido a la atención extra que estaban recibiendo en los dos grupos de aromaterapia); 4) los investigadores no dijeron que el HRV es válido para medir la función autonómica del sistema nervioso; y 5) los investigadores no dijeron por qué es clínicamente significatico considerar al HRV cuando se intenta controlar la agitación de los pacientes con demencia.

Revisiones sistemáticas de la aromaterapia

Se han hecho muchas afirmaciones terapéuticas sobre la aromaterapia. Es una tarea enorme hacer un escrutinio sobre ellas cuidadosamente. Si bien yo no he revisado sistemáticamente los estudios o las revisiones sistemáticas de los estudios individuales que afirmaban la seguridad y los beneficios de la aromaterapia, puedo resumir al menos algunas revisiones sistemáticas.

Una reseña publicada en 2012 de las revisiones sistemáticas de la aromaterapia concluyeron que: “… la evidencia no es lo suficientemente convincente para afirmar que la aromaterapia es efectiva para cualquier estado” (pág. 257).

En 2012, una revisión sistemática de informes sobre casos que informaban acerca de efectos adversos (AEs) de la aromaterapia identificó a setenta y un pacientes que experimentaron efectos desfavorables y concluía: “… la aromaterapia tiene el potencial para causar Aes que pueden ser ocasionalmente serios. La frecuencia de estos efectos no se conoce” (pág. 147). La dermatitis fue el efecto adverso más frecuentemente mencionado. Los aceites que más se usaron eran lavanda, menta, árbol de té y ylang-ylang.

Una revisión sistemática publicada en 2012 sobre once ensayos clínicos de aromaterapia respecto de problemas de conducta debidos a la demencia mostró varios efectos positivos, pero indicó diseños experimentales erróneos en la mayoría de los estudios, así que “… la evidencia disponible en la literatura no es suficiente para efectuar una afirmación concluyente” (pág 380).

En 2012, los autores de una revisión sistemática sobre el tratamiento con aromaterapia de la hipertensión concluía: “La evidencia de ensayos existente no demuestra convincentemente que la aromaterapia sea efectiva respecto de la hipertensión” (pág. 37).

Una revisión sistemática publicada en 2011 basada en dieciséis ensayos randomizados controlados de aromaterapia, la cual se usó para tratar síntomas de ansiedad, halló que la mayoría de los estudios indicaban efectos positivos y se informó sobre ningún episodio desfavorable, pero los investigadores dijeron: “La calidad del diseño de los estudios no permitía sacar conclusiones válidas respecto de la eficacia clínica de la aromaterapia” (pág. 106).

Hay revisiones sistemáticas más recientes que dicen que los ensayos clínicos rigurosamente randomizados no son concluyentes debido a las limitaciones de los diseños de los estudios revisados. Los ejemplos son revisiones que se remiten a estudios de los efectos de la aromaterapia sobre la dismenorrea, síntomas de depresión, síntomas asociados con quemaduras, estrés, agitación en la demencia, y sobre el sueño. Las revisiones menos rigurosas proveían algunos rasgos positivos en los hallazgos a pesar de las limitaciones de los estudios que investigaron.

En 2016, una revisión sistemática y un meta-análisis de los ensayos clínicos acerca de la influencia de la aromaterapia sobre el dolor dieron resultados favorables, pero combinaban la aromaterapia como un agregado a tratamientos convencionales, mientras que los grupos de control no tenían una intervención especial. Los estudios con tales diseños están sesgados a favor de los grupos de intervención para generar resultados favorables subjetivos, ya que los participantes recibieron la información de que estaban siendo tratados con algo especial mientras que los grupos de control no la recibieron. Una revisión sistemática de 2017 sobre la aromaterapia usada para paliar el dolor posoperatorio no encontró evidencia para respaldar su utilización.

Un artículo de revisión sistemática publicado en 2018 que examinó quince ensayos randomizados controlados, dos ensayos no controlados y cinco cuasi-experimentos (la comparación de los estudios grupales no estaba debidamente controlada) de inhalación o (en seis de los estudios) de tratamientos aromaterapia por medio de masajes acerca de complicaciones en la hemodiálisis informó que la aromaterapia tenía efectos favorables en la ansiedad, la fatiga, picazón, calidad del sueño, depresión, estrés y dolores de cabeza. Los autores no discuten sobre el tamaño del efecto, de manera que no está claro a partir de su revisión cuánto impacto tuvieron las intervenciones tuvieron las intervenciones con aromaterapia sobre las complicaciones de la hemodiálisis. La significación estadística no quiere decir que los descubrimientos falsos sean improbables y no implica que los efectos positivos sean lo suficientemente importantes para hacer una diferenciación práctica referida a los pacientes. Los puntaje de calidad de los estudios revisados varía entre 2,2 a 3,5 en una escala de 5 puntos.

Por lo que puedo decir, ninguno de los estudios tuvo un grupo de control que recibiera la atención, el cuidado, el confort y el contacto corporal de los masajes, aunque sin los pariculares aromas de los aceites recomendados. Los masajes deben ser la causa principal del alivio, más que cualquier aceite particular.

Sin embargo, los autores daben esta conclusión favorable, aunque tentativa:

Teniendo en cuenta las complicaciones y el enorme costo de manejarlas en pacientes que están en hemodiálisis, parece que la aromaterapia se puede utilizar como tratamiento baratoeficaz para reducir las complicaciones de los pacientes que están bajo hemodiálisis, sujetos a más estudios para asegurar la seguridad y efectividad de los procedimientos.

Conclusión

En The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine (Los hechos innegables sobre la medicina alternativa, 2008, W. W. Norton & Company), los autores Simon Singh y Edzard Ernst dieron su conclusión sobre la aromaterapia:

La aromaterapia tiene efectos desestresantes a corto plazo que pueden contribuir a mejorar el bienestar luego del tratamiento. No hay evidencia de que la aromaterapia pueda tratar enfermedades específicas (pág. 299).

También escribieron que ya que los efectos relajantes de los masajes de la aromaterapia duran poco, son “de valor terapéutico discutible”.

Creo que sus afirmaciones se mantienen diez años después.

Reconozco que algunas personas disfrutan de los aromas de los aceites esenciales. Mientras la aromaterapia se ofrece como algo barato para los consumidores, no estoy seguro de que esos rigurosos estudios sean necesarios para verificar afirmaciones modestas y no-médicas como: la gente experimenta mejoras temporales cuando se exponen a perfumes que les gustan. Tal vez hay una cabida para algunas aproximaciones hacia la aromaterapia para confortar a la gente. Pero no veo ninguna razón para esperar que cualquier tipo de aromaterapia altere el curso de cualquier enfermedad o tenga efectos vitalistas como “balancear las energías del cuerpo”, como proponen algunos entusiastas.

La aromaterapia no es necesariamente barata. Los aceites esenciales se han promovido a través del marketing, lo cual eleva el precio de los productos de manera tal que los distribuidores puedan recibir, en cada nivel, una porción de los pagos. Los consumidores deberían ser precavidos cuando las compañías de marketing publicitan a mansalva los aceites esenciales y otros productos usando testimonios.

Reconozco que muchos aromaterapeutas luchan por ser responsables y profesionales, y tienen éxito de alguna forma. Por ejemplo, la NAHA menciona consideraciones de seguridad acerca de la piel, los ojos y durante el embarazo cuando se administran aceites esenciales.

Algunos partidarios de los grupos de aromaterapia han tomado serias y encomiables posturas contra los profesionales que han promovido el uso inseguro de los aceites esenciales e hicieron afirmaciones falsas acerca de que la aromaterapia va a mejorar los procesos corporales o va a aliviar problemas específicos de salud. Mi próxima columna se centrará en los charlatanes de los aceites esenciales que promueven métodos curativos a la gente que sufre de enfermedades serias.

Susan Gerbic: Marsh, I’m one of your biggest fans and love all the projects you do. The palmist videos were terrific, the 10:23 Homeopathic campaign is legendary, and of course all the work you do at the Good Thinking Society is impressive. We need to clone you. But the real reason I wanted to talk to you today was because of ONE of the podcasts you do called, Be Reasonable. First, please tell readers a bit about yourself, and then we can talk about the podcast.

Michael Marshall: That’s very nice of you to say so, Susan! I recently spoke at NECSS in New York, and they threatened to clone me too, so you may have some collaborators on that project! It’s quite surreal to hear those kind of kind words, when I reflect on the past ten years of being involved in skeptical activism. In February, we’re coming up to the tenth anniversary of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, the local skeptical group I cofounded in Liverpool, UK, and it’s interesting to see how things have changed in that time. When we first set that group up, I’d never have imagined that ten years later skepticism would be my full-time job (I work for Good Thinking, which is a charity set up by Simon Singh), or that we’d have been able to have such an impact, in particular on homeopathy here in the UK.

Gerbic: Be Reasonable is a monthly podcast that started in January 2013. It is a reasoned discussion with people who are outside what we would call the scientific world. You are trying to get at what their actual argument is, where their reasoning is taking them. It’s a fascinating and often frustrating hour of discussion. I really want to know more about how you prepare and manage to stay so calm and focused.

Marshall: You know, a lot of people ask me that, or they tell me that they’re amazed that I can be so polite in the face of someone who is at best making an inconsistent argument and at worst is being outright insulting to me. It’s not actually something I have to work too hard at these days, in part because I try to keep in mind the goal of the show: not to “win” the argument, but to understand as fully as possible what the other side of the argument is, and how people come to believe in the ideas I explore—and, to a degree, how anybody comes to believe in anything, really. So, knowing that is my goal, it rarely crosses my mind to lose my temper or calmness, because to do so would run completely counter to what I’m trying to achieve. That’s not to say there haven’t been a few shows where I’ve struggled to keep myself in check, of course!

Gerbic: I sometimes post on Facebook your shows after I’ve finished them, and the comments I get are from people who can’t understand how you stay so calm. Frankly, sometimes it takes me a few tries to get through the whole interview as I get angry and frustrated that the person you are speaking to is so off the mark about their reasoning. Also, sometimes these people are pushing very dangerous medical claims.

Marshall: Oddly enough, the ones where people are pushing such dangerous ideas as conversion therapy, AIDS denialism, or cancer cures are the ones where I find it easiest to focus, I think. Perhaps it is because the stakes are so high. I’m aware I’d be doing my listeners a disservice if I didn’t keep myself in line and get as much as possible to what’s behind the pseudoscientific claim, what logic or arguments are made to support it. A few years ago I interviewed Jim Humble, the founder of Miracle Mineral Supplement (the interview was actually from a previous podcast I appeared on, Righteous Indignation, but I republished the interview as a Be Reasonable episode). I recall he wouldn’t give interviews to the mainstream press at the time, and this was when MMS proponents were being featured in the BBC and the Guardian for encouraging very ill people to swallow industrial bleach to cure everything under the Sun. For some reason, Humble agreed to do an interview with me. Even now, I’m not sure I know of another interview he’s given to someone who doesn’t agree with him. During the show, he talked about tens or hundreds of thousands of people with deadly diseases who he has given MMS to. Even if he was exaggerating by a factor of 100, I thought as I spoke to him, he may still have given dangerous treatments to thousands of people who could die without real treatment. That’s a sobering and surreal thing to go through your mind while you’re talking to someone, but it illustrates how serious pseudoscience can be and how important it is that we are on top of our game and striving to be as effective as possible.

Gerbic: You are so well versed in their argument; I hear you say that you have watched a bunch of their videos and read their websites. I suppose you learn all the different arguments they make over the years, but you are all over the place with these various pseudoscience’s, alt-med, 9/11 truthers, hollow-earthers, witches, psychics. Is there a commonality between them you find? Some kind of center you can start from?

Marshall: I think it varies when I’m talking to people with very varied beliefs, and I’m definitely not always across all of the information—sometimes I can only scratch the surface or pick up on one aspect where I think I can find an interesting way to question and delve. I’m definitely far from perfect; I miss an awful lot and there’s a lot I don’t know. That’s why I try to avoid as much as possible talking over the details of factual claims, where I can’t tell in the moment whether a fact is valid or misrepresented, but instead I try to look at the logic built around that particular fact. I guess part of my approach is to think, “If I were going to subscribe to these beliefs, what questions would I want satisfactory answers to before I believed in them myself?” That way it’s less of a confrontational “my facts versus yours” experience and more of a conversation.

But in terms of the commonality of beliefs, I think the first thing I assume is that they genuinely believe what they’re saying, and that they’re intelligent people who have thought about things first—those are two mistakes we as skeptics can make too often, where we assume the people we disagree with are foolish or gullible, or that they’re con artists. In my experience, the vast majority of believers in pseudoscience—even active proponents of pseudoscience—believe in what they’re doing and have thought about it. They just haven’t asked themselves the right question, or they’ve asked it at a time when something else was going on in their lives that caused them not to accept the answer that best fits reality. That said, there are definitely knowingly disingenuous people out there, but I trust my listeners to be able to form their own opinions on that, from my line of questioning and the way my guest responds. My listeners are smart, and they can hear someone dodging a question or obfuscating a mile away.

Gerbic: It’s pretty easy to find these people, and I’m sure people suggest who you might interview, but do they ever come to you? I’m wondering because I think one of the common threads I hear in their argument is that they really want skeptics (and scientists) to accept them, and you are so reasonable to talk to. They know you aren’t going to be the angry skeptic that calls them nuts.

Marshall: Sometimes people do come to me, absolutely—I interviewed someone a while back who wanted to be tested because they believed they could transmit their thoughts to other people, and I’ve had a few other people ask to be interviewed too. A lot of the people who suggest themselves to me, I tend not to interview—sometimes because I don’t see enough in their ideas to talk about or because I get the sense they’re looking for a combative debate where they can “own” a skeptic. I’m not interested in those style of conversations; they tend to be much more about ego and bravado than they are about truth.

The people I like to interview are people who didn’t necessarily realize there would be someone out there willing to actually converse with them, people who might have never had a civil conversation with a skeptic before. That’s often because the ideas they’re putting forward are objectionable or dangerous, but in a way I think if we don’t take the time to engage with them on a human level and let them know skeptics are human too—that the reason lots of us are skeptics is because we are compassionate and concerned with ensuring people don’t get harmed—then the pseudoscientist can keep writing us off as the caricature bad guys, shills for this, that, and the other. I’ve had interviewees tell me after we’ve stopped recording that they welcomed being able to talk about what they believe without being yelled at, and my podcast is a useful space for that because my listeners know what they’re getting—a conversation between a skeptic and a believer.

Gerbic: If allowed most of your interviewees would be all over the place with moving goal-posts and multiple conspiracy theories. You are pretty good at keeping them focused and tell them to give you their best argument. Is this a skill you have developed over time and are you aware you do this well?

Marshall: I think I’m actually very hit and miss on this! Sometimes I am able to reign people in, but I think there are just as many shows where I don’t do a good enough job at getting my guest to stay on one topic or to pause in their answers long enough for me to ask another question! That said, some of my favorite conversations are where I’ve gone into a show expecting one thing, but the conversation has gone in a new direction and I’ve just followed it where it leads. The “Hollow Earth” episode in particular was a recent favorite of mine—I had no idea where that conversation would end up! But I think the ability of the show to be nimble like that is because I don’t go in with a concrete list of questions that I have to get through, and I almost never have a “gotcha” question that’s there to make the guest look foolish and make me look good. I don’t do the show to make myself look smart or to make them look silly, I just want to talk to people who believe the world is so completely different to how I see it and to what (as best as I can tell) the facts support. I think the fact that so many of the beliefs I talk through go hand in hand with a dozen other pseudoscientific ideas is in itself interesting—as skeptics we sometimes think of as “woo” idea existing on its own, and then we think we can dismantle belief in that idea by giving the facts that contradict that one idea. We miss that we aren’t dealing with one idea, we’re dealing with a whole cluster of ideas, beliefs, and values, all intertwined in their own ecosystem. Understanding how different conspiracy beliefs make for such comfortable bedfellows makes us much better at engaging with those ideas and much better at illustrating why their flawed, I think.

Gerbic: Obviously, you are not trying to convince these people. And I doubt that you expect to change minds of people listening, if you are listening and you believe in a hollow Earth, I doubt you will be convinced by anything on this show. I think this is a show for skeptics. You are trying to teach us to be better listeners and kinder to people who hold these beliefs.

Marshall: I think you’re right, although I’d never be so bold as to express it that way myself! I think kindness is crucial, compassion is absolutely key. We can be right when it comes to the facts, but way off on how to engage with people at an emotional level, or a values level, and that’s one of the reasons we can lose ground, I think. I see a lot of skeptics yelling “Facts don’t care about your feelings” as if that somehow “won” the argument, but they’re completely missing the point that feelings don’t care about facts! I was as guilty of it as anyone else, when I first found skepticism—we all go through our skeptical adolescence, where we run looking for people to shout the names of logical fallacies at! But the more you think about what you’re trying to achieve, the more you realize that approach is utterly self-defeating, it might make you feel smart but it achieves absolutely nothing. That’s because people aren’t logical robots, we don’t all assess and process the data first and then decide what our emotional values are second; we feel first, and then seek out facts to support that. We don’t have to look much further than the way some skeptics responded to credible revelations about skeptical figures they respect—how people double-down, doubt countless testimonies, demand ludicrously high standards of evidence: they’re being led by their feelings, first and foremost.

So in that sense, you’re right: the show tries to show a skeptical audience that the people we disagree with are human beings too, and that we get further by remembering that—even when they’re saying awful, or dangerous, or objectionable things. And it’s also a way of showing believers that we skeptics aren’t all angry or unapproachable. I like to think there are moments in lots of my shows that will stay with my guest, that will make them think for long after the conversation ends. But even if there isn’t, at least they’ll go away thinking “Well, I disagreed with him, but he seemed nice—maybe skeptics aren’t the angry, evil people I assumed them to be.”

Gerbic: I’ve dealt with many people who hold these beliefs. One thing that I learned was that to most of these people this is real. They aren’t faking their experiences, they really believe this. Of course, there are many fakers, I see this mostly in the grief vampire psychic world, but for someone that thinks they see ghosts, they really do think that they are seeing ghosts. It is not a good idea to start in on them as if they are liars or idiots, but to them it can be a scary experience. It’s possible they experience ghosts because of a medication they are taking or something in their brain firing strangely or sleep issues.

Marshall: I agree, absolutely. It seems an obvious thing, in a way, that people might actually believe what they’re saying, but sometimes it really does take experiencing these ideas for yourself, speaking to people and understanding them, for it to hit home that they’re genuine in their beliefs, they’re just (as best as we can tell) wrong. I think it’s even true with some psychics—I’ve definitely seen psychics at Mind Body Spirit shows or Spiritualist Churches who seem to really believe what they’re doing. You can often tell that, because they’re not doing as many of the quick-win tricks that someone who knows they’re faking it will employ—and they’re often much less interesting to watch as a result! But I’ve also met or investigated plenty of psychics who you do get a sense are knowingly faking it: the psychic at a spiritualist church who took out a handkerchief mid-reading, looked at it, put it away again and then suddenly got a lot more psychic; the stage medium who had an interesting knack of recounting tragic stories that just happened to have been featured in the local newspapers a little while before their show; the faith healer who used a member of his team as a plant in the audience when it came to demonstrating his miraculous curative powers.

I think the principle of charity is an important one to remember: if you work on the assumption first that people believe what they’re saying, believe the claims they’re making, you’ll be right more often than wrong. Even for those who are faking it, you can treat them exactly as you treat someone who believes it, even while you might be putting in place the kind of measures that would expose fakery if it is there. Even when you can demonstrate that someone is knowingly faking it (which is a very hard thing to demonstrate), it can be best to be charitable when you communicate that—that person’s followers will be more likely to listen to what you’ve found if they think you’re presenting it fairly.

Gerbic: In the case of the people you interview, it isn’t that they don’t have enough information, its that they have too much information about their belief. Maybe I’m being too general. The conspiracy theorists you talk to have a ton of facts, and many seem to be experts in this area. I wouldn’t have a clue how to answer. Is it that they rely on the wrong information, overly trust people or websites that agree with them? Or is it just a personality trait that would exist regardless, if not flat-Earth then bigfoot?

Marshall: I think this comes down to what gets people to a belief—it’s often not the facts, it’s their personal values and feelings. Conspiracy theorists often feel (and even “know”) that authority can never be trusted and that life can’t be as mundane as the “real” world seems, and then they find the theory that explains why. Once you have the idea that fits what you feel, you’ll go a long way toward finding “facts” that support that feeling, and you’ll do very little to contradict it. In a way, skeptics are no different in that regard—when we hear a claim we suspect isn’t true, how many of us look for reasons it might be true before we look for reasons it isn’t? How often do we search for something that debunks the idea, and then stop there because we have found the “answer?” In our case, we’re probably right, a lot of the time (especially around extreme cases like ghosts, homeopathy, the flat-Earth, etc.), but I don’t necessarily think that’s because we’re better, especially if our process is to fact-check claims we disagree with and accepting those we agree with. I think the main difference is that we aren’t better, but we are trying to be.

When it comes to conspiracy theories in particular, it really is fascinating how many theories overlap. It’s something I saw up close when I attended the UK’s Flat-Earth convention and spent the weekend observing—people believed the world was flat, but they also believed that NASA was Satanic and filled with Satanist symbology, that the New World Order and Illuminati were in control, that chemtrails and vaccines were forms of population control, that the moon landing was faked (sometimes because they believe there is no moon or outer space in the first place). It’s often less about believing in a theory, and more about rejecting the mainstream version of reality: once they’ve done that, people are primed to accept other ideas that rely on the same rejection of the mainstream. Taking away one of those beliefs, if you can even manage to do that, likely only shunts that person to another belief, unless you can tackle the feelings and thought processes that caused them to reject mainstream thinking in the first place.

Gerbic: Another thing I’ve often wondered is that they seem to think that all options are on the table and everyone might be right. At a UFO convention, they might have speakers that believe that our government are reptilians, and the next speaker thinks that they are shape-shifters but not reptilians. And the next speaker thinks that the space aliens came to Earth thousands of years ago and established humans but haven’t been back. In other words, they all conflict, but they don’t get into fist-fights or scream at each other over the conflicts. Are you seeing the same thing and what do you think of this?

Marshall: Absolutely! This was something that was really apparent at the Flat-Earth conference, I wrote a couple of articles about it for The Guardian and Gizmodo, and I’m touring the UK giving a talk about exactly this: how one flat-Earther thinks the world is this shape, the next thinks it’s radically different. There are disagreements, but they often are superficial—it’s sometimes the case that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so long as we both agree that the world isn’t spherical we’re on the same page. It’s the same with alternative medicine, you’ll have homeopaths tell you that the most important thing in homeopathy is that the pills are individualized, yet when the pharmacy sells off-the-shelf homeopathic medicines, the only people complaining are skeptics, not the homeopaths. Ask a homeopath if they think pre-packaged homeopathic hay fever tablets are useless because they aren’t at all individualized, and they’ll often deny that individualization matters in that instance. Chiropractors will support acupuncturists who will support reflexologists, even though they’re each based on models of biology that are fundamentally incompatible: Is disease caused by blocked chi or by subluxations? As long as they agree that it’s not what mainstream medicine says, they’ll see themselves as being on the same page, because it’s about their shared value that mainstream medicine is flawed.

Gerbic: I must know if anyone has contacted you later that you interviewed and changed their mind if even a little.

Marshall: I’m not sure that they have, but then again I’m not sure that if anyone had changed their mind they’d be likely to tell me anyway—we aren’t wired that way. It’s much easier to change your mind if you never have to admit it, but if you’re having to visibly or publicly recant something you’ve previously espoused, it can feel like such a heavy weight that it’s psychologically easier to double-down and continue believing. That said, because I tend to speak to people on the show who are active proponents of ideas, whose identities and personal life is so invested in their belief system—people who, if you asked them “tell me one thing about you” they’d tell you first of all “I’m a psychic / homeopath / 9-11 Truther”—I think those are the people least likely to be able to change their mind and do a 180 on their beliefs. But I hold out hope that one day I might be pleasantly surprised!

Gerbic: How do you deal with the people who are doing really harmful things like promoting anti-vax or some of these other harmful medical claims? I can barely listen, but I know I really need to do so.

Marshall: I do find those tricky, especially if I quite like the person making those claims, which is often the case. But I try to approach them as honestly and fairly as I can, and to learn as much as possible about why people hold those beliefs. Fortunately, I trust my audience enough that I don’t feel I have to comprehensively disprove or debunk every single claim they’re making, which I’d feel a responsibility to do if the conversation were happening on a more mainstream platform or where it might not be clear that the views do not align with reality—my show is a space where these discussions can happen without a huge amount of worry that listeners will be overly swayed by any argument I don’t directly address. I do think it’s important that there’s somewhere where these views can be heard where they won’t harm people—so we can understand how these beliefs are promoted and discussed and how they might be expressed to the public. I think it’s important that we know what’s being said; it helps us be prepared for when we encounter these kind of beliefs in the wild.

Gerbic: When the interview starts, most of the time I think “Oh Marsh is interviewing a scientist or someone who is an expert on conspiracy theory.” They seem so “normal” at first. I hate to use that charged word, but I can’t think of a better way to explain it. You ease into the interview and then I say, “Oh no—no way!” as things start to get weird. Have you ever decided you could not proceed with the interview or decide not to interview someone?

Marshall: I’ve never stopped an interview before the end, and I don’t think I’ve ever rescinded an invitation once my interviewee has accepted it, though there have certainly been times where I’ve had to review whether publishing an interview were the right thing—by which I mean, whether it reflects so badly on my guest that it would be unfair to them to publish it. Often, my biggest discomfort with publishing isn’t that the guest might be exploited or that they might be too hard for the audience to follow, but that they might be upset by the reaction the show receives. Fortunately, listeners to the show are pretty great and usually are very conscious of the fact that the guest has given their time and made the effort to engage with me, and so they’re respectful with their responses. Sometimes it might be the case that listeners get a little overly-enthusiastic about a particular show or a particular point my guest has made, but I’m often impressed by how respectful and mature they are.

Gerbic: You are on episode 52; I just listened to your discussion with Michael Fullerton who is a 9/11 truther. I don’t think I have a favorite topic or a favorite interview, maybe the hollow Earth or UFO people.I really like it when you ask them “What evidence would they need to see in order to change their minds?”Do you have a favorite interview or topic?

Marshall: That’s definitely one of my favorite questions to ask, and one that elicits the most telling of responses—from guests who really take it on board and give a reflective answer, to others who flat-out say “nothing could change my mind.” I don’t know that I have a favorite topic as such, but I definitely enjoy talking over conspiracy theories: I love the way innocuous facts can be used to support such grand narratives, where every inconsistency in the mainstream view is scrutinized, yet vast gaping holes in the conspiracy theory itself are waved away. I also love it when an interview goes somewhere I’m not at all expecting, and I have to react and politely challenge while trying to follow the threads. I think that might be when the show is at its best, when someone makes a point or goes in a direction that’s a total curveball to me, and I have understand it, consider it, and raise a valid challenge to it—all while continuing to keep up a polite rapport.

Gerbic: Some of these people have advanced degrees, most are just like the person you talk to every day at the coffee shop or walks their dog past your house and you say “good morning” too. It’s so important that we as skeptics understand that we need to be kind and respectful to everyone. It’s such a struggle at times; we are such a tribe culture that we want to split off into us vs them.I have a lot to learn and I really highly recommend Be Reasonable to the skeptic community as a way of learning to listen and understand.

Marshall: I really appreciate that, and I do agree that it’s very easy—and so, so seductive—to get into an “us versus them” mentality, but I try to challenge that in myself as much as I can. I think we lose a lot of the high ground and our ability to reach people when we are reactively disrespectful to ideas we dislike. We are already hamstrung by having to be honest and rigorous, so we really need to consider how we communicate with people.

I also think we might also be kidding ourselves if we think we are radically different from believers. I’m pretty sure there’s a belief I hold that is totally wrong, and as a skeptic I hope that I’m intellectually honest enough to review those beliefs objectively and change my mind when I’m shown to be on the wrong side of things. I think that’s a useful thing to strive for, but I think it’s far less likely to happen if I consider myself superior to someone who believes in something I think is nonsense. There but for the grace of a god I don’t believe in, go I …

Gerbic: Marsh, thank you so much for answering my questions. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this for a long time and finally I had to just sit down and do it. Keep up the amazing work you and your team does with the Merseyside Skeptics and Good Thinking Society. I hope to see you at some conference somewhere, but we keep seeming to be speaking in opposite parts of the world, almost like “they” are trying to keep us apart. Maybe there is a plot against us? 

Marshall: Thanks so much Susan, thanks for interviewing me! And yes, I do think it’s strange that we’re being kept apart all round the world—what are they trying to hide? You know, I’ve a few dozen contacts on Skype by this point who might have some ideas as to what’s going on there …

Nothing raises a parent’s hackles more than the thought of harm coming to their child. Manipulating that instinct is no new marketing trick and neither is the special flavor of fear mongering directed at moms—often rooted in the evidence-scarce, reductionist, and sexist notion that mothers should rely on emotion and mommy instinct rather than evidence, that dads are best relegated to the parenting sidelines, and that the views of non-parents don’t count when it comes to protecting our children.

This is perhaps no better represented than in the glyphosate saga. The active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate is the ubiquitous herbicide (and crop desiccant) mired in a weighty controversy that raises questions about corporate control of our health and food system, our understanding of risk assessment, our environment, transparency in industry and science, and food justice. Glyphosate is often used with “Roundup Ready” (RR) crops genetically engineered to tolerate it. I often say that “GMO” is the bogeyman of the food world, representing all of the very real (and some perceived) ills of the food system. Indeed, it was an open letter from me and other science-minded moms asking celeb moms to “weigh GMO foods with facts, not fear” that led to the Science Moms movie and later the SciMoms project. And when it comes to “GMOs,” glyphosate is the ultimate hot button. Opponents of the herbicide, many of whom call for a ban, say that it’s responsible for the purported rise in cancer incidence, autism, damage to the gut microbiome, and more, and that it wreaks havoc on the environment and non-target organisms. Proponents say that, when it comes to herbicides, glyphosate is one of the safest and most effective, that there is no compelling evidence it affects the microbiome at environmentally relevant exposures, that its categorization as a probable carcinogen is fundamentally flawed, and that banning it would mean reverting to more caustic formulations.

(Author’s note: I put “GMO” in quotes because it’s a social construct. The polarization around “GMO” and the movement against it perpetuate harm, as I’ve discussed extensively. To be clear, none of this is to say that the “pro-GMO” movement isn’t also problematic, including the far too popular notion that “anti-GMO” means “anti-science,” and that science and safety should be our only inquiries. As the SciMoms and I have explained, “Questions about which crops to grow and for whose benefit, are rooted in values, not science.”)

Much has been written about glyphosate and Roundup, so I won’t delve into the science for the purposes of this article. For those who want more details, I highly recommend starting with Iida Ruishalme’s “17 Questions on Glyphosate” series, Dr. Alison Bernstein’s piece on acute and chronic toxicity assessments (is glyphosate really less toxic than caffeine, and is that even a sound comparison?), and Dr. Andrew Kniss’ several posts on the herbicide. The National Pesticide Information Center (a cooperation between Oregon State University and the U.S. EPA) provides a detailed fact sheet.

What I do want to talk about is the mom guilt woven through the glyphosate battle, which follows the pattern of sexism targeted at moms in the larger “anti-GMO” movement (and the natural parenting movement, among others) that I’ve covered extensively in my work.

Though it may come as a surprise, especially to women and moms who pride themselves on being savvy shoppers, it’s no secret that we’re among the most coveted demographics of the non-GMO marketing machine.

Jeffrey Smith, one of the stars of the anti-GMO movement and founder of the inappropriately-named Institute for Responsible Technology boils it down to the 5 “most receptive demographic groups to switch to non-GMO eating.” Along with pet owners, those suffering from chronic conditions, and religious folks who think GMO stands for “God Move Over,” Smith said in a 2015 video that moms, “especially moms with children suffering from chronic conditions, or those trying to prevent those chronic conditions,” are a lucrative target group.

Most recently, a slew of news outlets raised the alarm over a report from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) finding trace amounts of the herbicide in several "children's" breakfast foods, including CBS News, Mic, CNN, The Hill, and more. Note that EWG receives a large portion of its funding and support from organic industry players such as Organic Valley and Stonyfield Farms.

Fortunately, as it often goes, the “[Scary Substance] in Children’s Food or Other Products” headlines were quickly followed by “Actually, You Don’t Need to Worry About [Scary Substance] in Kids’ Food” articles. In this case, Slate (where I sometimes contribute) set the record straight with “You Don’t Need to Worry About Roundup in Your Breakfast Cereal” and Mashable laid out a solid case to not worry about the Roundup in your morning oatmeal. For those who like a visual debunk, Know Ideas Media put out a video aiming to get to the bottom of EWG’s findings.

As is often the case, the truth lies somewhere between the “Oh my lord my kids are eating Roundup!” and “chill out, there isn’t any pesticide in your corn flakes” extremes. As widely used as the herbicide is and as sensitive as techniques for measuring its presence has become, EWG’s claims about the amounts of glyphosate their analysis detected in tested cereals weren’t particularly surprising to me. In a nutshell, the glyphosate levels detected in some of the cereal samples crossed EWG’s “child-protective health benchmark” threshold of 0.01 mg/entire human child/day, which is naturally alarming at first glance. But it turns out that your elementary schooler would have to scarf hundreds of bowls of Quaker Dinosaur Eggs Instant Oatmeal to consume the EPA’s reference dose (RfD, or estimate of daily exposure that would not cause adverse effects throughout a lifetime) of 2 mg/single kilogram of bodyweight/day. EWG’s much lower threshold isn’t based in evidence that EPA’s RfD is too high to be safe (the Slate piece linked above thoroughly explains the discrepancy between the two). Alas, as this column’s readers know, even the most thoroughly sourced and compelling refutations face an uphill battle in dousing the fear flames once they ignite and spread through mainstream news and take hold on social networks.

Not to say that alarm isn’t an appropriate initial response to learning that there’s a harmful pesticide in our Nature's Path Organic Honey Almond Granola. It’s not foolish, it’s human. Frankly, exploiting consumer fear is a tried and true EWG tactic, and they’re quite good at it. Known best for its annual Dirty Dozen list of fruits and veggies to purchase organic to avoid “toxic” pesticide residues, EWG’s grip on Americans’ sense of well-being has held steady despite repeated censure from scientists for methodological flaws in evaluating produce items, cosmetics, sunscreen, and more. While eating more fruits and veggies is among known, science-based ways to reduce the risk of certain cancers, obesity, type 2 diabetes, a 2016 survey suggests that fear-based messaging about pesticides in produce may discourage low-income shoppers from purchasing the items on these lists altogether. (Disclosure: I attended a tour hosted by the Alliance for Food and Farming, during which I attended a presentation by an author of the referenced Nutrition Today study. I received a small honorarium for attending this tour and sharing social media updates.)

Glyphosate is among the most conductive lightning rods to manipulate parents’ fears about feeding our children food that, in the developed world, has never been more abundant, safe, or accessible (whether that food is “healthy,” or whether it’s equally accessible to ALL people in the developed world is an entirely separate and crucial discussion). But even though glyphosate levels in cereal don’t even come close to the EPA’s threshold—which was set in 1993, decades before the Trump presidency—that doesn’t matter in EWG’s quest for moms’ hearts and wallets. Not only has EWG been blasting its email list with its testing results, replete with stock photos of concerned women in cereal aisles and innocent chubby-cheeked toddlers eating Cheerios (the mailings are under copyright so I won’t screenshot them here) these organizations thrive on stoking distrust of government agencies. And that works really well because, well, "legal is not the same as safe” probably sounds a hell of a lot more convincing to the typical scared parent than, yeah there’s a teeny tiny bit of glyphosate in your cereal, but don’t forget the dose makes the poison from a food industry Goliath to EWG’s ostensible David. (I’m not basing this last sentence on data, but take it from me, a mom who believed not long ago that arsenic in apple juice is a scary thing because Dr. Oz said so.)

As I mentioned, scaring moms about “GMOs” and glyphosate is nothing new, nor is EWG the only culprit. Take Moms Across America (MAA), which aims to raise awareness about “GMOs and toxic exposures.” Sounds benign enough, before digging into the harmful claims powering the MAA machine. On the EWG report, MAA urged:

Every person who reads this to throw out not just Cheerios and Quaker Oats, but all non-organic foods, especially processed oat and wheat products because we now know that they likely contain high levels of glyphosate. We urge you to buy organic, whole foods, and as plant-based as possible. We know it costs more money to make this switch. The fact is that it costs far less to buy organic food than it does to pay for the doctor’s bills that accrue when you eat the Standard American Diet (SAD)[.]

MAA’s founder and director Zen Honeycutt is known in skeptic circles for suggesting that glyphosate causes infertility, cancer, mental illness, infectious diseases, and more—and for selling supplements that claim to mitigate the “everyday toxic burden we all bear.” She’s also known for asserting that non-parents shouldn’t have a place at the table because they “haven’t had a being come from” their bodies (the one time I addressed Honeycutt face-to-face, she brushed off the scientific opinion of my friend and fellow science activist Dr. Karl Haro von Mogel because he’s not a dad. The culmination of that confrontation appears in the Food Evolution documentary). CBS News quoted Honeycutt on the cereal scare saying, “[w]e want to trust that what is in the grocery store is safe and the shocking reality is that in many cases it's not.” According to Honeycutt, a glyphosate ban is warranted for myriad reasons, including one described at Exposing Autism One:

1) Human wombs are full of salt water (amniotic fluid contains electrolytes, proteins, sugars, lipid and phospholipids and is not like seawater) and 2) fetuses look like shrimp (comparative embryology is a field of study, but it doesn’t mean what she thinks it means). In other words, because human fetuses are like womb shrimp, glyphosate is responsible for all modern medical problems. That is not how anything works. It’s so wrong, it’s “not even wrong” as people say.

There’s way more where “womb shrimp” came from but it could fill several more articles, so I’ll move on for now. 

As predatory as organizations and industries that prey on parents’ fears have proven, it’s important to stress again that several of these fear-driven movements in the food and health spheres are rooted in some very justified concerns. There are plenty of facts to show that we should worry about our kids’ breakfasts. Obesity rates have risen dramatically, children are bombarded with predatory marketing of added sugars and empty calories, and far too many kids don’t have access to nutritious breakfasts. As complex as tackling the challenges of the food system has proven, one thing’s clear—the EWGs of the world have done as good of a job of keeping consumers complacent as the Monsantos have. MAA’s motto is “Empowered Moms, Healthy Kids,” but being afraid of herbicide in our kids’ cereal isn’t empowering; it’s a distraction at best.

*Disclosure: I attended a tour hosted by the Alliance for Food and Farming, during which I attended a presentation by an author of the referenced Nutrition Today study. I received a small honorarium for attending this tour and sharing social media updates.

Skeptic Tim Farley has produced an excellent website called “What’s the Harm?,” which catalogs tangible negative consequences from belief in pseudoscience. It’s an answer to the common apologetic from believers who claim that belief in things such as acupuncture, astrology, Bigfoot, and ghosts is harmless, or even beneficial. Farley’s catalog is an excellent resource, but I believe there are additional reasons to eschew involvement in what we can call intellectual “rabbit holes.”

The use of the term rabbit hole has recently been popularized by Mick West in his book Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect. A rabbit hole is an excellent metaphor, as it captures the byzantine complexity and disorienting incoherence of many fringe beliefs.

1. Human attention is finite. Modern life offers myriad intellectual “rabbit holes” into which to plunge. Virtually all conspiracy theories and pseudoscience are rabbit holes in the sense that one is never able to get a well-established resolution of fact. There are hundreds of books on the assassination of John F. Kennedy alone. Logically, the competing theories can’t all be correct. A deep dive into any rabbit hole is time not spent engaging in creative enterprises. Learning a skill; exercise; exposure to science, art, music; or other productive activities demonstrably enhance the functioning of one’s mind, body, and economic status. Entry into a large library is a humbling experience, as it’s immediately apparent that one can only hope to read a tiny fraction of the intellectual output of humanity. The experience should reinforce the need to carefully choose what to read. Focus on rabbit holes and pseudoscience is time not spent assimilating the best of what humanity has created.

2. Intellectual rabbit holes foster inauthenticity. We see this in the attitude of Alex Jones, whose lawyer argued in court that Jones’s public behavior was “an act.” This is understandable, as publicly voicing outrageous sentiments can extract a social cost to one’s reputation. An easy defense is that one is “just asking questions.” For someone such as Jones, this allows for overt promotion of fringe and often toxic beliefs, yet when challenged or rebutted, a fall-back defense of “just asking questions” can be employed. The social gambit of asserting that one is “just asking questions” is ultimately inauthentic, as it acts as a shield from announcing one’s true beliefs. It’s impossible to forge deep and meaningful human connections with another human being if we don’t even know if their values and beliefs align with ours.

3. Crunch Time: We are all going to die. This is the hard fact of life, a fact most of us most of the time would simply like to ignore. The corollary to this is that we (or the ones we love) will almost certainly fall ill during our lives. If one’s intellectual life is spent cultivating scientific, political, journalistic, and medical uncertainty, one is primed to discount evidence-based treatments when illness occurs. The brute fact of our lives is that illness will occur. Living a life completely free of serious illness at some point is extraordinarily unlikely. To illustrate this, I’d like to suggest what I call the “quadratic formula” analogy. Since most adults have attended high school, and most high school curricula include algebra, most adults will have learned the quadratic formula in their lives. How many of us remember it now? More seriously, do you remember it well enough to actually use it to solve an algebraic equation? I suspect probably not for most adults. This example illustrates that certain types of ideas need to be cultivated and used periodically to be remembered. Similarly, if a life is lived with no attention paid to a skeptical analysis of claims, particularly medical claims, when “crunch time” hits critical thinking skills that should have been exercised throughout one’s life will simply not be manifest. Suppose one is given a diagnosis of a serious condition. At this point a decision is mandatory, as even doing nothing is itself a choice. Will the decision be based on well-cultivated critical thinking skills and good evidence, or are those skills nonexistent and forgotten, like the quadratic formula of our high school years?

4. Intellectual rabbit holes are not particularly challenging to the mind. The corpus rarely rises above personal anecdote. This is in direct opposition to real science, which seeks to establish causal chains between events and has a mathematical foundation. As an example, there are thousands of ghost stories, yet there is no reputable theory on the origin of ghosts, their life cycle, their relationship to each other, their population numbers, their energy sources, and many other characteristics. We know far more about neutrinos than we do about ghosts, despite centuries of ghost claims. Learning real science is intellectually challenging. This is an intrinsic moral virtue not shared by pseudoscience. Even the best fictional narratives produced by humans have a depth and structure that warrants deep analysis. One can earn a PhD in the study of Shakespeare. This is not a feature of the generally simplistic narratives of fringe pseudoscience.

5. “Alternative facts” whether in the political, social, historical, or scientific domains are socially schismatic. They needlessly divide people into tribes. Do you believe in astrology, yes or no? Do you believe in reiki, yes or no? Is The New York Times “fake news?” Reality becomes “my truth” vs. “your truth” when we should all strive to embrace the best models of reality based on reason and evidence. The more our species converges on knowledge based on reason and evidence, the fewer opportunities for needless division there are. We don’t divide ourselves into camps over “my” version of plane geometry and “your” version of plane geometry; there’s simply plane geometry.

6. Fringe beliefs in a person, even those that are relatively benign, may be the tip of the iceberg or, to use a biological metaphor, an “indicator species.” In many cases people don’t hold just one fringe belief but instead hold numerous fringe beliefs. This is likely because such an individual doesn’t hold or exercise critical thinking skills in general, which explains why they have the known fringe belief in the first place. While failure to apply critical thinking skills to something such as astrology may not result in negative consequences, a similar failure with regards to medical treatments can result in significant problems. So by this argument the answer to “what’s the harm?” with regards to astrology or Bigfoot is that it diagnoses a lack of applied critical thinking. Lack of critical thinking skills in one’s life is a fundamental problem.

With many things in life, it’s easy to ask simple questions. For instance, why do we parallel park our cars backward instead of forward? To answer this question honestly actually requires a significantly complex answer, with reference to an arcane domain of mathematics known as “kinematics.” Similarly, the answer to “what’s the harm?” also requires some degree of nuance and complexity, as there are several interconnected issues at hand.

Deborah Hyde is a British skeptic, folklorist, editor-in-chief of the UK The Skeptic, and also a fellow of The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). She writes about numerous topics concerning the paranormal but is known for her work on superstition, witches, exorcism, and vampires. Deborah will be speaking at CSICon on Friday, October 19, at 2:00 pm.

Susan Gerbic: Hello, Deborah. So glad to be able to talk to you again. We got to spend quite a bit of time hanging out together at the European Skeptic’s Congress (ESC)in Wrocław, Poland, this past September. What a beautiful city, and what a great conference. Also, congratulations on becoming one of CSI’s newest fellows. Please tell readers a bit more about yourself.

Deborah Hyde: Great to talk to you, too. Didn't we have fun at the ESC in Wroclaw?

Yes. I was hugely honored to become a fellow of CSI. Totally unexpected.

I have always been fascinated by belief in the malignant supernatural. Even as a child I'd rather read about poltergeists and werewolves than anything else. But if you read around this subject well, you reach the point that you realize the accounts and events aren't objectively true. However, they are pretty consistent. This means that the belief in the dark supernatural says something about us.

Hyde's lecture at Wrocław

So this became my abiding interest and my career! I figure that I have the best of both worlds. I can enjoy the dark frisson you get from a horror movie while simultaneously looking through a window onto fundamental aspects of our human nature.

Gerbic: Your website Jourdemayne has an interesting name, can you tell us about that and what people will find if they venture over there to look?

Hyde: I started out jourdemayne.com but I've moved to DeborahHyde.com now.

Margery Jourdemayne was a fifteenth century London witch. Since she knew about the supernatural, it was a vehicle for me to write about mythology, witch hunts, and belief in magic and so on. But I suffered from huge mission-creep—hence the move. The section headings at the moment, to give you an idea, are vampires, skepticism, alt-med, animal, religion, witchcraft, lucid dreaming, “psychics,” ghosts, and poltergeists. I'll write about anything with a supernatural belief/skeptical stance. I often write for The Guardian and do TV shows such as Mysteries at the Museum from a similar angle.

Gerbic: You are also the editor-in-chief of the UK magazine The Skeptic. How did that come about? And tell us about your magazine.

Hyde: I took over the magazine several years ago now after Professor Chris French stepped down. He'd been doing it for a long time and deserved a rest! It's been a great opportunity for me to engage with other areas of skepticism: alt-med, science outreach, and so on.

It's been a massive honor and a little bit intimidating, as the magazine has been established for so long. That's an amazing tradition to take on. It was established by Wendy Grossman in 1987.

We produce more digital content than print content as this is the way that people engage with each other now. But I still love print, and there's a book in the works at some point. The website is at skeptic.org.uk.

Gerbic: The magazine also gives out an Ockham award each year. I accepted the award for Skepticality Podcast in 2014 when I was speaking at QED where the Ockham is awarded. I know people who are nominated for the award are really excited. The European Skeptics Podcast (the ESP) were over the moon when they won best podcast for 2017. There is also a Rusty Razor Award as well. Can you tell us about the Ockhams?

Hyde: We have a wonderful skeptic convention over here. It's called QED and it's held in Manchester. I thought that since the most active people in skepticism in the UK (and Europe and the rest of the world too) are there each year, it would be a great place to mark the work of the people who put their own time and money to make the world more rational. Our shortlists are assembled with public votes. I emphasize to our shortlisters every year that even if they don't win, being on that list means there's a whole load of skeptics out there who notice their work and appreciate it.

You've been there, so you know the buzz in the room when The Ockhams ceremony is on.

Last year I added the “Rusty Razor” award for bad thinking to the line-up, again awarded via public votes. It was won by a landslide! Gwyneth Paltrow didn't accept the award personally, nor did anyone from “goop” attend, but we feel they must have been proud to get such a prestigious award for pseudoscience.

Gerbic: I understand you are writing a book called Unnatural Predators about folklore and why it is common throughout our history. Can you tell us about that?

Hyde: Using a combination of approaches—history, psychology, anthropology—I think we can come to an understanding of why people believe vampire-like supernatural creatures exist … even though they don't. I've started to produce video blogs too, so I don't have much spare time!

Gerbic: At CSICon you will be talking about vampires. That is such a sexy topic, and I’m not talking about the sparkly kind.

Hyde: There is a lot of good historical and anthropological work on vampires, so I'm going to go right back before all the literature to contemplate the creature as it was in folklore in Eastern Europe. There were vampire-like traditions in the USA too—in New England—and I did a short video blog about them if you'd like to get your fangs sharpened before my talk at the convention.

Gerbic: Thank you so much, Deborah. CSICon is quickly approaching, and I understand that we are already surpassing 2017 attendance numbers. Attendees, please check out the Event page on Facebook for in-between activities and to get to know other attendees.

An August 7 article in the Great Falls Tribune offered a shocking and discouraging statistic in its headline. The piece, by Kristen Inbody, “Survey: People think Native Americans don’t exist/aren’t discriminated against,” states that “For many Americans, tribes are relegated to history books. A recent survey found 40 percent of respondents didn’t think Native Americans still exist.”

One commenter on the story, Emily Mayer, wrote that “Forty percent is an awful lot of stupid people. It’s time education changed in America ... why are my tax dollars going to pay for so much stupid? Totally and completely unacceptable.” Native American activist Tara Houska shared the statistic on social media, also lamenting the lack of education: “40% of America thinks we don’t exist, yet 36% think they have ‘some Native ancestry.’ Education is critical.”

The shocking statistic made the media rounds, and appeared on the Coloradoan website (part of USA Today). Under the headline “Survey: Some people don’t think Native Americans exist if they think about them at all,” Fortune.com noted that “This is the finding from The Reclaiming Native Truth project, which sought to determine the prevailing narratives around Native Americans and how that impacts attitudes and policies. Some 40% don’t think Native Americans exist at all? Really?”

An August 10 piece on Red Lake Nation News asks, “Where are Native Americans? For many Americans, tribes are relegated to history books. A recent survey found 40 percent of respondents didn't think Native Americans still exist,” and links to the Great Falls Tribune piece. Blogger PZ Myers picked up the story in a headline titled “40% of Americans don’t believe Native people exist?!?” and begins “That’s one of the results of a report on American perspectives on native peoples ... we ought to be outraged at this level of ignorance—ignorance that dehumanizes.”

The comments were damning: A sign of American stupidity and lack of education. Dehumanizing. Outrageous.

But was it true? How is that possible?

I live in New Mexico, a land rich with pueblos and Native Americans. They are a part of everyday life here, and the idea that people would think that they don’t exist is absurd. Films such as Wind River, Smoke Signals, Thunderheart, and Dances With Wolves show both past and present native communities. America (and Canada for that matter) has a clear, tragic, and undeniable history of racism, treachery, and neglect of its native peoples.

But something about that factoid just didn’t seem plausible. What did those 40 percent think native people were? A figment of Hollywood imaginations? Did they think native people used to exist but don’t any longer?

From my background in psychology and research design, I wondered if the survey was the problem. Maybe the question was worded in a strange way or was confusing. Flawed polls are not uncommon; perhaps the best known was a Roper poll taken in 1992, which found that 1 in 5 Americans doubted that the Holocaust had happened. That shocking statistic was widely reported and touted as evidence of American ignorance about history—if not a sign of rising racism and anti-Semitism. A later poll found that one percent of those surveyed said it was possible that the Holocaust had never happened; 8 percent said they didn’t know; and 91 percent said they were certain it had happened. So what happened? The 1992 poll used a double negative construction that confused respondents: “Does it seem possible or does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?” I wouldn’t have any idea how to accurately answer that question, and most people didn’t.

Maybe the Native American survey’s sample size was tiny and just happened to encompass a large proportion of people who somehow thought that Native Americans don’t exist. There are many confounding factors in surveys that can result in invalid responses.

Digging Deeper

In order to unravel this mystery I did what journalists are supposed to do: I actually read the study.

With a few clicks of the mouse I opened the full report of the Reclaiming Native Truth survey that article was based on. I skimmed through it, did several keyword document searches, and then read it more closely. It’s an insightful, interesting, and important look at various issues facing Native Americans, including the use of sports mascots, discrimination, and perhaps most importantly how the use of framing narratives can help dispel myths about different groups (see pages 42 to 45). However, I eventually concluded that the headline statistic does not appear anywhere in the survey.

Puzzled, I contacted Inbody of the Great Falls Tribune to ask where that number came from—it was, after all, not a minor passing statistic but important and shocking enough to highlight in the headline and first sentence. Inbody soon replied: “The report was analysis about the findings. Rebecca Nagle of the Cherokee Nation released further information that explained the findings, such as the 40 percent detail.”

This response raised more questions than it answered; Inbody’s news article clearly stated that the 40 percent finding appeared in the study (hence the headline “Survey: People think Native Americans don’t exist”). She seemed to contradict her reporting, saying instead that the statistic came not from the study cited in the headline but from unspecified “further information” released by Nagle.

I responded to Inbody with a brief and polite request for clarification, but it went unanswered. Further web searches for that statistic were fruitless, so I contacted Nagle, of the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, and asked her where that information came from. She, also, did not respond to my query.

It seemed to be a phantom factoid, a bogus—yet newsworthy if not clickbaitey—shocking statistic that nobody seemed to accept responsibility for creating. Inbody first claimed the number came from the Reclaiming Native Truth survey, but later claimed instead that she got it from Rebecca Nagle, who won’t respond to confirm or deny it.

It’s possible that the statistic really is buried somewhere in the report, and I just haven’t found it. It’s possible that Nagle accurately quoted a valid statistic from some unknown poll or survey that for whatever reason no one else has referenced and that can’t be found in a Google search. It’s possible that Nagle misspoke or made up the statistic and Inbody just quoted her instead of fact-checking it. It’s possible that Inbody just made it up. I honestly have no idea, but something’s not right.

Credulity and Skepticism

One of the most interesting aspects of this was seeing how people failed to challenge even a statistic that sounded dubious on its face. They responded with comments that suggested incredulity (“Really?!?”), but no one seemed to question the numbers. Media literacy and skepticism were entirely absent in most of the responses.

I first noticed this story posted on a friend’s page and noted, “This headline seems to be mistaken; I looked through the report and didn’t find anything suggesting that people think Native Americans ‘don’t exist,’” and I linked to a PDF of the report. She replied, “The first two paragraphs of the article,” and quoted them. It took me a few seconds to understand that she didn’t realize I had already gone to the original source and that she considered the Great Falls Tribune piece as authoritative. When I replied, “But the survey (linked to above) doesn’t seem to say that ... If I missed it please correct me!” No one took me up on it. It seemed that people wanted to be outraged about the topic but not spend a few minutes to verify that what they were upset about was real.

Under the pressures of deadlines, reading a study is an easy step for a journalist to skip; after all, if you just have an expert comment on it, you can shift the burden of doing research to others. Quoting others is always easier than reading articles and studies. Usually it’s a safe shortcut, since the chances are that most of your readers won’t bother to read the study either; they will accept what you said that other people said the study said. Despite appearing as first-hand (if not first-class) reporting, it’s actually a kind of third-hand story, and with each iteration, details get dropped, misinformation creeps in, and facts get mangled.

This is of course only one of many news stories whose headlines turn out to be misleading, or outright false, upon reading the research that spawned them. In May of this year, I wrote about national headlines claiming that a recent study at Arizona State University found that college men think they’re smarter than women.

I read the 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). You can read my full article here but the TL;DR version is that if you actually read the study it says nothing about men thinking they’re smarter than women.

Americans have misconceptions about a great many things and a demonstrable blindness to social problems facing Native Americans and others, but misinformation isn’t helpful. Native Americans face myriad real problems, but a significant number of Americans not believing they even exist is not one of them. As always, a healthy dose of media literacy is the best antidote to media myths.

Psychiatry is arguably the least science-based of all the medical specialties. There are no objective blood tests or imaging studies to diagnose mental illness, medications are often not very effective and have bad side effects, and it’s hard to do good controlled studies on talk therapies. No wonder people are skeptical.

Szasz and Denialism

Some have gone beyond skepticism to denial. In his book The Myth of Mental Illness, Thomas Szasz denied that mental illness even existed. He thought it was a metaphor for problems in living. He said it had no underlying physiological basis and only described unwanted and unpleasant behaviors. He said diseases are what people “have” while behaviors are what people “do.” He believed that calling it “illness” was a nefarious collaborative conspiracy of the state and the medical establishment to control people whose behavior was inconsistent with societal norms and to repress disapproved actions, thoughts, and emotions.He saw psychiatric diagnoses as judgments of disdain. He rejected the idea of insanity as a legal defense, saying “mental illness” did not explain or mitigate guilt.He accused patients of malingering. He was adamantly against any kind of involuntary psychiatric treatment or commitment. He practiced psychiatry himself, but only as an interaction between consenting adults.

Szasz called psychiatry a pseudoscience like alchemy and astrology. He spawned an anti-psychiatry movement that continues to flourish today. Psychiatry bashing is a popular sport. And psychiatry is the butt of many jokes. One of my favorites: neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in the castles, and psychiatrists collect the rent.

Antidepressants

Some people assert that antidepressant drugs are no more effective than placebos. But there is good evidence that they are effective when appropriately prescribed for severe depression. They have been accused of causing suicides and violent behavior, but that’s not true. Depression can lead to suicide; treating depression can prevent suicide.

A 2008 study by Turner et al. was reported as showing that Big Pharma and the FDA had covered up negative information about antidepressants. “Health Ranger” Mike Adams said it would be considered criminal activity in any other industry. The reports were very misleading: the study actually confirmed that antidepressants worked.

I covered that kerfuffle in an article for Science-Based Medicine. Basically, Turner compared published studies to unpublished studies and found that the published studies showed an effect size of 0.41 while the unpublished studies indicated a much smaller effect size of 0.15. Pooling the published and unpublished studies gave an effect size of 0.31. But every drug studied outperformed the placebo. In this table, the squares represent the actual results obtained and the bars represent the 95 percent confidence interval (CI). In no case does the CI bar overlap the “no effect” line.

A critic named Kirsch argued that any effect size of less than 0.5 meant ineffective. Turner argued that a small to medium effect had been demonstrated, that 0.31 meant the glass was one-third full not empty, and that even partial responses could be clinically important for patients. Ironically, while rejecting antidepressant drugs, Kirsch strongly supports psychotherapy even though the effect size for psychotherapy is lower than for antidepressants.

What Are We To Do?

The reality is that mental illness exists. It disrupts lives, incapacitates patients, results in deaths, and causes untold suffering for patients and their families. What do those who reject drugs and psychiatrists imagine we are supposed to do about people who are too depressed to get out of bed or who try to kill themselves or others because of hallucinations or delusional beliefs?

Trying To Understand

Anecdotes are not evidence, but they can help us understand. Even fictional stories can provide a lot of insight. The famous conundrum in consciousness studies asks, “What is it like to be a bat?” We can’t get inside the mind of a bat, but human minds can hope to better understand what other humans experience.

Have you ever tried to imagine what it would feel like to have a severe depression or a psychosis? Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be a doctor responsible for helping patients with those diagnoses? Bats may be beyond our reach, but psychiatrists and patients are not.

Steve Sobel, MD, is a psychiatrist who teaches at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. His book A Five Hundred Pound Amoeba and Other Psychiatric Tales is a collection of ten vignettes of patients with various psychiatric diagnoses, each followed by a narrative from the psychiatrist who treated them. The patients are fictional, but they are realistic composites of patients Dr. Sobel has seen in his practice.

Jake couldn’t think straight and could barely talk. He felt guilty and worthless. He had suicidal thoughts but was too incapacitated to devise or carry out a suicide plan. He wanted to get out of bed, but his body simply wouldn’t obey: he felt like a 500-pound amoeba. Dr. Katz hospitalized him and started him on antidepressants. After three weeks in the hospital, he was ready for discharge. With continued outpatient therapy, he had soon “returned to the human world” and was working and functioning well.

Kevin suffered from bipolar disorder. He knew Taylor Swift was in love with him because she sent him messages in her songs. He heard her voice coming out of his radiator, describing erotic fantasies. During one manic episode, he started hitchhiking to California to join her, calling her his “fiancée.” Every time he went off his lithium, he ended up in the hospital. Finally convinced he needed to stay on medication, he also benefited from intensive case management, community support, and employment counseling. His delusions and his bizarre behavior subsided, and he returned to a productive life.

Dr. Katz couldn’t save every patient. Evan was haunted by a demon. Dr. Katz diagnosed him with schizophrenia and tried a series of medications, none of which worked. Evan seemed to be doing better for a while, but on a walk with his parents, the demon unexpectedly returned and forced him to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. Dr. Katz was tormented by thoughts that he might have done something more to prevent Evan’s suicide but was reassured by his colleagues and was even thanked by Evan’s parents for his support and for sharing their pain.

Alice was psychotically depressed and violently angry. She was convinced her husband was having an affair with a nonexistent woman in the attic. Dr. Katz hospitalized her and started her on antidepressant and antipsychotic medication, and she responded remarkably well after only two weeks. She eventually made a full recovery and was able to laugh at the idea of a woman in the attic.

Sobel describes other patients with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, body dysmorphic disorder (Lisa thought her perfectly normal shoulders were lumpy and wanted surgery to remove the lumps), severe anxiety disorder, fear of heights, dementia, and PTSD.

Well Worth Reading

This short, accessible book puts a human face on a problematic subject. It brings the patients to life and makes you care about them. It is nuanced, describing contributing factors and the complexities of treatment.After reading it, only the most perverse denialist could maintain that mental illness doesn’t exist or that psychiatrists are useless. Thank you, Dr. Sobel.