At the opening reception for this year's CSICon conference, the audience was polled to ask who was attending their first CSICon. A very large number of hands went up, initiating sounds of surprise, quickly followed by appreciative applause from the audience. Personally, this was only my second CSICon so I still felt new at this conference thing myself. I had attended both times due to my association with the Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia (GSoW) team. So I began to wonder about the diverse reasons these people had for coming to their first conference, and I decided to make it my goal to ask a number of them to share their thoughts on their first CSICon experience.

The skeptics you will meet in this article have a wide variety of backgrounds and interests and are from Canada, Denmark, Poland, and the United States. This group includes an undergrad student/science communicator, a PhD candidate doing research on the spread of fake news, a fellow GSoW team member, the creators of a website tackling 9/11 Truther claims, and a popular atheist and skeptical activist YouTuber checking out the skeptical conference scene for the first time.

I met Claus Flodin Larsen and Steen Svanholm, the creators of 911facts.dk, early in the conference. Like me, the pair were scheduled to speak at CSICon for the first time. They had the final speaking spot of the six presentations at the Sunday Papers session, so we certainly had much to talk about. I was especially intrigued by the unique story of how their trip from Denmark was funded. You can watch their CSICon presentation, “The Harrit Syndrome: A New Explanation of Why and How People Become Evangelical Conspiracy Theorists,” here.

Claus and Steen on stage at CSICon. (Photo by Karl Withakay.)

Claus: Steen and I had long wanted to attend a major conference of skeptics. Having been to the first six TAMs, I wanted to introduce Steen to the conference scene, so in 2017, I suggested that we both attend CSICon 2018. The timing was right, since by then we had reached a point in our research on conspiracy theorists where we felt we had something to contribute to the community. We were also fully funded, since we had recently won a copyright infringement lawsuit against a conspiracy theorist, which netted us a cool $9,000. We may be the world's only skeptics attending a skeptic conference on a Truther scholarship!

Highlights were many: Stephen Fry was uncannily eloquent, Steven Pinker was a shot of optimism in an otherwise doom-and-gloom world, and Deborah Hyde took us on an intriguing tour of vampirism. Of special interest to us were Mick West, who took on—and down—the perhaps central claim of the most dominant conspiracy theory of our times, the (non)existence of nanothermite in dust from the World Trade Center. Joseph Uscinski explained well how conspiracy theories are a coping mechanism for loss of trust and subsequent control, confirming our own findings.

We would highly recommend anyone to attend such conferences. Not only do you learn a lot about how easy we all can be deceived, but also meet with like-minded people from all over the world. The atmosphere is very relaxed, generous, and tolerant, where you mingle with attendees and speakers with the same ease. It is particularly easy to make new friends at CSICon, and a joy to re-connect with old ones.

The Sunday Papers is a great way to share your work with the community. The short format not only forces you to condense your ideas in an effective way, it also makes room for more speakers.

I met Magdalena de Góralska from Poland at the Guerrilla Skeptics’ table, where she was asking questions about what our team does to fight misinformation and add skepticism to Wikipedia articles. I took her aside, and we talked for quite a while on the topic. I also learned a bit about why she was attending the conference, and it turned out that her questions about GSoW were in support of her academic research for the Oxford Internet Institute. (After the conference, Magdalena followed-up by interviewing me over Skype about GSoW for her project.)

A CSICon selfie with yours truly, Alice Vaughn, and Magdalena de Góralska.

de Góralska: I came to CSICon as an anthropologist, researching alternative sources on information about science online. It happens that many participants of the convention are engaged, on different levels and in different ways, in science popularization.

My interest in the topic started with a concern over misinformation that happens online and may affect our choices in the areas of great importance, such as health and nutrition. To examine the issue, I have designed a mixed-method study that I hope will bring more insight into how misinformation happens and spreads online. Speaking to different internet users engaged in sharing information helps me to understand what happens with all these particles of data when they circulate online.

The conversations I had gave me much insight into the matter, and I decided to come to Las Vegas to meet some of the people I spoke to and meet more, in the hope to gain more understanding of their ways of communicating about science.

CSICon is an extraordinary event that brings together people with various background, concerned about similar things. Skepticism, whatever its source, is what unites every participant of this conference. Through exchanging our experiences, we can grow our understanding of the community, and perhaps find out new ways to collaborate to improve online communication about vital topics such as science, health, or nutrition.

I first corresponded with Thomas Westbrook three weeks before the conference after watching a debunking video, Psychics: What's the Harm?, that he made for his popular Holy Koolaid YouTube channel. Sandwiching the great takedown job, the video began with Thomas discussing “C.S.I.” Con and its speakers, and ended with him expressing his intention to attend “C.S.I.” Con. From his repeated non-standard pronunciation of the conference name, it was clear to me that he was going to be a first-timer. I made it a point to talk to him in Vegas and was not disappointed. I only wish we had hung out more, especially because that may have led to having dinner with Bill Nye. (Read on!)

Another CSICon selfie: Thomas Westbrook at dinner with that Science Guy.

Westbrook: Hey! Thomas Westbrook here. I was raised as a missionary kid in a former-Soviet, Muslim country. I was pretty heavily indoctrinated with religious teachings and was taught that the Earth was created in six days and was literally 6,000 years old. It wasn’t until college that I really started to dig deeper. I fell in love with science and started looking behind the curtain—reading the Bible with skeptical glasses on. I realized that truth withstands scrutiny and set out to explore the world from a scientific perspective, leaving no stone unturned.

Early in my exploration, I set up a YouTube channel called Holy Koolaid to document the journey. I would dive deep into a scientific field, drink it all in, and use what I learned to evaluate paranormal/supernatural claims. I covered faith healing, miracles, and alternative medicine. I even created an entire series on psychics. It wasn’t long before I found the works of James Randi, Banachek, Dr. Ray Hyman, Dr. Susan Blackmore, and so many other legends in the world of skepticism, and I repeatedly referenced their works in my videos.

You can imagine my excitement when I discovered CSICon and saw just how many of my heroes were speaking! This was my chance to meet them in person, shake their hands, and thank them for helping me in my journey to discover how the universe actually works. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the funds to attend, but I reached out to the organizer, Barry Karr. I showed him my series on psychics and asked if I could help promote the event on my channel in exchange for a ticket. He not only agreed but was generous enough to give me a press pass and my own press room to interview people at the conference! My friend Greg was also attending and had an extra bed in his hotel room, which he generously let me have for free. The next thing I knew I was on a flight to Vegas!

The conference itself exceeded my expectations with so many highlights; I don’t know where to begin. The speakers were friendly and approachable. I got to interview Dr. Ray Hyman and Dr. Jennifer Gunter. Banachek had retweeted some of my videos before, so I not only got to interview him for my channel, but he asked if he could interview me for his podcast as well (which was a huge honor)! James Randi signed a copy of his book, Faith Healers, for me. I got professor Stephen Pinker to get out on the dance floor during the pajama party (he’s got moves). I was able to meet Stephen Fry and Adam Conover, and I even had dinner with Bill freakin’ Nye, who just showed up to the conference out of the blue! I walked out of the conference hall, saw a group of friends talking with him, and they asked me if I wanted to go to dinner with them. I sat right next to him, and he just turned to me and said, “Hi, my name’s Bill.” After Alice Vaughn told him about my channel, he asked me what it was called, and wrote “Holy Koolaid” down on a piece of paper. The whole thing was pretty surreal.

CSICon was just one highlight after another! If anyone loves science, wants to know how the universe works, or wants to meet the scientists and academics at the forefront of this exploration, CSICon is the conference to go to. And not only that, but these people are incredibly genuine and super fun! It was my first time going, but I really felt like I found my people there.

One of the most interesting first-timers I encountered at the conference was Ada McVean. This multifaceted undergrad student, barely in her twenties, had travelled solo to the conference (and from another country to boot)—something I would never have done at twice her age. On advice from her colleagues, she had sought out the Guerrilla Skeptics team and wound up hanging out with us quite a bit. Although still a student, she is already an accomplished science communicator writing for Montreal’s Office for Science and Society. You can check out her articles here.

Ada McVean (Photo by Matteo Zamaria Photography.)

McVean: Hi! I'm Ada McVean. I'm in the last semester of my undergraduate degree at McGill University (in Montreal, Québec) where I'm finishing a double major in bioorganic chemistry and gender, sexual diversity, social justice, and feminist studies (the evolution of women's studies). I've worked with the McGill Office for Science and Society (OSS) for almost three years now, first as a filing assistant and now as a science writer, communicator, IT helper, and general get-shit-done person. 

The story of how I wound up at CSICon is very indicative of how our office operates a lot of the time. I was just walking into the office one morning when my colleagues started discussing their travel plans for their attendance of CSICon. I asked when it was, and my boss, Joe Schwarcz, responded: "October. We'll send you too!" Just like that, I was set for my second science communication and skepticism convention and my first trip to Las Vegas. 

In the end, every one of my colleagues ended up cancelling their attendance due to personal reasons, leaving me, the 22-year-old intern, to travel to Las Vegas and represent the OSS alone. A slightly anxiety-inducing task. A short 7 AM flight later, I was in a foreign town in a foreign country surrounded by foreign people, trying to adjust my brain to its first ever time change. At the advice of my colleague, I sought out Susan Gerbic (the leader of the GSoW team), and meekly introduced myself and asked for her help meeting people. From that moment on all was well. 

The GSoW team and CSICon, in general, welcomed me into their ranks and helped to make sure I was meeting who I should, seeing what I should, and having a great time. It's funny how much having someone to sit next to during talks can help you feel welcome, but it's certainly true. The talks were really fantastic. Covering an incredibly wide range of topics, from things I'd consider myself somewhat of an expert in (like sex vs. gender or chemophobia) to things I'd never heard of (9/11 conspiracy theories based around microspheres), they entertained, taught, engaged and amused, and almost more importantly encouraged. 

Comparing my fellows in science to my fellows in gender studies can sometimes leave the scientists seeming a bit stuck in their ways, elitist, unwelcoming, or even rude. But that was not the experience I had at CSICon, and I'm so happy to have made so many contacts with people who share the same penchant for busting pseudoscience as me and who can also take a joke, have a drink, and generally operate in approachable, kind ways. Come next semester I'll be applying to graduate schools and making decisions about my future. Experiences like CSICon helped me to cement a place in that future for science communication. I also met Bill Nye, so that certainly provided a fair amount of scientific inspiration.

Jeff Gehlbach is a fellow Guerrilla Skeptics team member, and we had interacted online, but this was our first real-world meeting. Jeff spent much of his between-presentation time at the GSoW table (located just outside the presentation room) discussing Wikipedia editing with curious conference attendees and even demonstrating how to improve an article in real-time. (See the video here.) Jeff is currently writing his own article for Skeptical Inquirer, which will cover his CSICon experience in more depth. Keep an eye out for it!

Jeff taking a break at the conference. (Photo by Karl Withakay.)

Gehlbach: A child of the 1980s, I came up in a small town in the southeastern United States, luckily in circumstances that instilled a mostly pro-science worldview. Over time I picked up a now-mortifying degree of credulity around spirituality, the paranormal, and alternative medicine. The first two I shed gradually at university; the last one was on its way out when a terminally ill family member's turn away from medicine threw reality into sharp focus for me. I committed myself to scientific skepticism and filed my first medical board complaint against a quack MD, a rewarding but somewhat time-consuming process. These days I do most of my activism through the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project, which I joined in late 2017.

From my work with open-source software I have long known how valuable conferences are as a way to make contacts and get involved, so I was sure that I wanted to attend skeptics' conferences. I knew about CSICon through word of mouth, and decided to make it my first skeptical conference after seeing that many of my fellow GSoW editors would be attending. The event did not disappoint! The workshops, sessions, and "hallway track" provided an abundance of opportunities for learning, collaboration, and networking.

The most memorable moments involved getting to know my fellow GSoW editors in person, as well as meeting and chatting with communicators whose work I have long admired, including Ross Blocher, Brian Dunning, Bill London, and Bill Nye. Everybody involved in scientific skepticism, whether an old hand or just getting started, should go to at least one conference, and CSICon should be at the top of the list to consider.

It is my impression that most people come to the big-name conferences, including CSICon, to hear and meet the well-known speakers. However, what makes a bigger impact long after the conference is over is not necessarily the details of the presentations by those skeptical-movement luminaries. Sometimes it is the contacts you make, and even friendships that grow out of time spent with average skeptics like yourself—including first-timers like the people featured here. Hopefully these personal accounts will convince some readers who have not yet done so, that they should attend a future CSICon themselves. Be sure to introduce yourself to me when you do!

Source: Instagram

There is a new celebrity fad: vampire facials. Have you seen the pictures of Kim Kardashian West after her vampire facial, showing her face spattered with blood and covered with tiny puncture wounds? If not, click on the link and look now. Pretty horrific.And she now says she regrets doing it, and it was quite painful. But she said that only after many others had been impressed by her original account and had been persuaded to try it for themselves.

Human ingenuity is endless. People are always looking for the next secret that will improve their health and appearance. Fad follows fad, often involving something disgusting and painful. Apparently fad-addicts subscribe to the “no pain, no gain” theory. Most of us think drinking your own urine or eating the placenta after childbirth is disgusting. “Detoxing” with days of a maple syrup, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper diet sounds pretty obnoxious. Everyone says blue-green algae tastes vile; I haven’t tried it, and I’m not planning to.

Disgust is bad enough, but physical injury is worse. What amazes me is how often these fads deliberately cause actual damage to the patient. Remember those ugly bruises on the Olympic swimmers who had been treated with cupping? Vampire facials are one of several treatments that claim to stimulate healing by first causing injury. Frankly, that doesn’t sound like a very good idea to me. What happened to “First, do no harm”? It seems to have been replaced by “To heal an injury, first cause more injuries.”

What Is a Vampire Facial?

Vampire facials don’t involve any vampires. The name comes from the bloody appearance. The procedure has two components: the preparation of platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and the puncturing of the skin to allow penetration of PRP into the tissue. The patient’s blood is drawn and centrifuged to separate out the PRP. Then a pen-like instrument called a micropen is used; it has twelve automated acupuncture-sized needles that move up and down while the device is moved in improvised patterns over the face, and the PRP solution is dripped onto the areas being treated. It is painful, so usually the skin is pre-treated with a numbing agent. Microneedling or microdermabrasion perforates the skin and creates tiny microinjuries that bleed. Hence the bloody appearance of the face after treatment.

The cost varies but may be as much as $1,000. Multiple treatments are often needed at intervals of a month. Sometimes it is combined with other treatments such as Botox and hyaluronic fillers. Providers claim that patients recover in a day or two, but there are reports from patients whose recovery took a week or more, with scabbing and other problems. Sometimes benefits may not be perceived until months later.

Some patients have tried to save money by do-it-yourself treatments at home. One young man reported using numbing cream and a microneedling device to treat his acne (without a blood draw or PRP). One woman tried using blood from a fingerstick. That didn’t supply enough blood to do the job. She got no results except that her finger hurt.

The Claimed Benefits of Vampire Facials

PRP contains growth factors that supposedly act as energy boosts for our skin and help our skin function optimally, increasing collagen and elastin, providing antioxidant and hydrating properties. It has “advanced anti-aging properties,” makes skin smoother, provides a clearer complexion and more even skin tone, aids in the overall firming and toning of the skin, and increases blood flow and oxygenation, all leading to a more youthful and rejuvenated appearance.

One provider says “Your skin will thicken to reduce the look of broken capillaries. Your skin tone will be evened out and hyperpigmentation will be diminished. Fine lines and wrinkles and any crepey texture will also be smoothed. Firmness of your skin will increase and the appearance of scars will be reduced.”

But a critic says“Claimed benefits of the platelet-rich plasma (PRP) Facial Injections include reducing the prominence of scars, wrinkles, sun damage, and dark circles. ... Yet, rigorous scientific studies on this popular “Vampire Facial” procedure find that it is no more effective than injecting saltwater into your face.

And a published review concluded: “Based on in vitro and in vivo research, PRP may play a role in promoting tissue regeneration, oxidative stress and revascularization, which form the theoretical basis for the use of PRP in the clinical treatment of facial rejuvenation” (emphasis added).

So there is a theoretical basis but no good clinical studies supporting vampire facials. Speculation but no real evidence.

Evidence for PRP

Providers claim that PRP has been proven effective in studies. PRP was originally marketed as a treatment for sports injuries. It is rich in platelets and growth factors that theoretically might improve healing, but (1) there’s no evidence that increased platelets speed healing, and (2) doctors are still not sure if PRP helps with chronic or acute injuries. The only good news is coming from isolated or scientifically flawed studies. The first rigorous study asking whether PRP injections actually work found they were no more effective than saltwater. They claim that after a series of three injections (one a month) most sports injuries are cured, but most sports injuries heal themselves in three months anyway.

Val Jones reviewed the evidence for PRP in an article on the Science-Based Medicine website titled “A Case Study in Aggressive Quackery Marketing.” Here’s what she found:

1. One abstract discussing PRP’s use in degenerative knee arthritis. The study is not available for review in its entirety—but the abstract suggests that an improvement was noted at 6 months (in pain scores) with a significant worsening at month 12. No control group.
2.  One small study that did not find a benefit to ACL healing in the presence of PRP.
3. Quite a number of studies related to the treatment of bone defects (mostly periodontal) with PRP. Most of those showed no improvement or a fleeting, temporary improvement with PRP.

Overall it seems that the dental and oral and maxillofacial surgery literature has found no use for PRP, and the orthopods simply haven’t paid too much attention to it. There is almost no published research related to tendon injuries—the major indication for PRP.

According to some reports, investigations by The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons have found that only 40 percent of people will see any temporary benefits at all.

Evidence for Microneedling

Microneedling causes microinjuries. These microinjuries are said to stimulate wound healing and new collagen production.

According to a systematic review, studies demonstrate microneedling efficacy and safety for the treatment of scars, acne, melasma, photodamage, skin rejuvenation, hyperhidrosis and alopecia and for facilitation of transdermal drug delivery. While permanent adverse events are uncommon, redness and hyperpigmentation are common. They concluded that microneedling appears to be an overall effective and safe therapeutic option for numerous dermatologic conditions, but that more trials are needed.

Conclusion: Not Supported by Science

Vampire facials may offer hypothetical benefits, but they are not supported by scientific evidence from clinical studies. They are not a part of mainstream medicine and are not covered by insurance. They are attractive to consumers because they are “natural”— using your own blood rather than drugs—the procedures are high-tech and impressive, and they have been popularized by testimonials from celebrities.

One of the organizations that offers vampire facials is DripDoctors. They claim there are no adverse reactions since this procedure uses your own blood. Of course, there are side effects of redness, swelling, bruising, tenderness, tingling, numbness, lumpiness, and/or a feeling of pressure or fullness at the injection sites—but no adverse reactions! They also offer a number of other very questionable therapies including IV vitamins, O-shot sexual wellness for women and P-shot sexual wellness for men at $1,500 a pop, anti-aging, stem cell treatments, and micronutrient testing. No thank you.

I am not impressed. I wouldn’t want to look like those bloody pictures. I prefer to think of vampire facials as something to laugh about, not something to try. I’ll follow the evidence, not the fads.

Belief: What It Means to Believe and Why Our Convictions Are So Compelling. By James E. Alcock. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. 2018. ISBN: 9781633884038. 638 pp.

In James E. Alcock’s classic 1995 Skeptical Inquirer article “The Belief Engine,” he wrote, “Our brains and nervous systems constitute a belief-generating machine, a system that evolved to assure not truth, logic, and reason, but survival.”

Now he has expanded that thesis into a book, Belief: What It Means to Believe and Why Our Convictions Are So Compelling. It’s much more than a book about belief. In the foreword, Ray Hyman says it would be an ideal textbook for a course that provides an integrated overview of all the areas of psychology. He says every psychologist and psychology student should read it. It is an outstanding achievement of scholarship; its 638 pages include over seventy pages of references. It covers everything from the latest findings in neuroscience to a catalog of many of the questionable beliefs people hold and why they hold them.

Alcock is the ideal person to write such a book. He has a BSc in physics and a PhD in psychology and has been teaching psychology at York University since 1973. He is one of the founders of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (formerly CSICOP), a CSI fellow, and a member of its Executive Council. He has also won numerous awards for skepticism and psychology. He has written extensively on social psychology and the psychology of belief. He is a registered clinical psychologist with his own private practice and is also an amateur magician. He has stature in both senses of the word (if I remember correctly, he’s about six-foot-five).

The Power of Belief

Beliefs guide all our thoughts and behaviors, from brushing our teeth to voting for a particular political party. They have power over life and death: people have willingly died for their beliefs, and someone commits suicide terrorism every forty seconds. Alcock elucidates the various factors that contribute to suicide terrorism. And he tries to explain why some beliefs are so powerful that they are impervious to reason and evidence.

There is nothing fundamentally different about the nature of beliefs that we consider rational and those we deem irrational. We do not choose our beliefs; they are generated and maintained through automatic processes in our brains. Alcock explains what goes into those automatic processes: perceiving, remembering, learning, feeling, and thinking. And he shows how those processes can depart from reality.

The brain uses sensory input to construct schemas that may not represent the real world accurately. It fills in missing information. It creates visual illusions. Attention is selective: We think we are aware of everything in our environment, but we aren’t. We see things (pareidolia) and hear things (apparent words in random noise) that are not really there. We sometimes confuse mental imagery with external reality. So, we need to be cautious when basing a belief entirely on what our senses tell us.

Recent research has revealed how unreliable our memory is, even when we are most confident that we are remembering correctly. Memories are reconstructed each time we remember. Experiments have shown how easily false memories can be implanted and elaborated. Contaminating influences can distort our memories in various ways. Memories “recovered” under hypnosis are confabulations. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable; errors and bias in memory have led to false convictions and ruined lives. It’s clear that memories should not be treated as unshakable foundations for our beliefs.

Alcock explains how we learn through our own experience, through watching others, through what we are taught, and through what we read. Many beliefs are established in childhood: children soak up new information like a sponge. He covers classical conditioning, operant conditioning, reinforcement, superstitious conditioning, and the power of coincidence. He shows that we must trust others for most of our information and discusses how we decide whom to trust. He shows how beliefs influence emotions and emotions influence beliefs. Belief in magical remedies can reduce despair when scientific medicine can’t provide a cure. Learning from others means we must trust their accuracy, reliability, and honesty, which leaves us open to error and manipulation. We must use critical thinking skills to help us separate fact from fiction.

Thinking Processes

Alcock explains the two types of thinking: System 1 (experiential, intuitive) and System 2 (rational). System 1 thinking involves intuitions and rules of thumb that are a practical necessity for rapid response and the necessities of daily life. However, our intuitions are subject to many biases, including the availability heuristic, the simulation heuristic, the representativeness heuristic, the introspection illusion, and confirmation bias. He discusses hunches gone wild, the Gambler’s Fallacy, misunderstanding probability and statistics, the need to look at base rates to determine what is anomalous and what isn’t, and so on. System 2—rational processing—can be led astray by errors of logic, belief bias, abduction reasoning, and enthymematic reasoning (reasoning from an unstated premise). Logic doesn’t come naturally; it can be trumped by emotion and intuition and be sullied by various errors and biases. It’s important to remember that even rational thinking can be fallible.

Alcock also focuses on how beliefs are formed, how some beliefs resist change while others submit to contradictory information, and how beliefs motivate people to achieve difficult goals, even to the extent of dying for them. We all hold beliefs that are wrong but that seem just as reasonable as any other belief. We automatically believe new information; only later do we examine it for truth. True knowledge must be based on evidence, but we can’t personally verify many of our most important beliefs, so we must rely on the pronouncements of authorities.

Before people’s actions and allegiances change, their beliefs must change. Many beliefs are so entrenched that they resist powerful evidence against them. Alcock addresses collective delusions, conspiracy theories, and moral panics such as the one that led to false accusations of Satanic ritual abuse. He lists the factors that make beliefs unlikely to change, the ways people rationalize away new evidence, and how disconfirmation can actually strengthen beliefs. And he discusses how sometimes even the most extreme beliefs can change through conversion. He covers persuasion, Hitler’s cardinal rules for successful propaganda, gas-lighting, brainwashing, interrogation, fake news, alternative facts, and post-truth. He describes some of the suggestions in the psychological literature for getting people to change their beliefs.

The book discusses suggestibility, the Barnum Effect, cold readings, imposters, con artists, hoaxes, Ponzi schemes, Nigerian email scams, lie detection, and self-deception. He stresses that we can all be fooled. We are poor at detecting deceit in others and fail to recognize when we have fooled ourselves. Alcock explains how our beliefs about our bodies, our minds, and our well-being sometimes stray significantly from reality. He covers various illusions such as phantom limbs, the rubber hand illusion, body maps, the “ghost in the machine” belief, the mystery of consciousness, the workings of the unconscious, and ideomotor actions (dowsing, Ouija boards, etc.). Recent research has established that our actions are determined unconsciously before we are consciously aware that we have decided to act.

The brain can fool us with remarkable experiences that we can’t distinguish from external reality, often accompanied by strong emotions and lasting effects. Alcock covers transcendental experiences, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, meditation, hypnosis, dreams, and sleep paralysis. There can be illness (subjective symptoms) without disease (pathophysiology). Beliefs about the state of our health may not reflect the actual state of health but can contribute to it. Is stress harmful? The belief that stress is bad for us can be deleterious to our health. Alcock examines possibly unreliable reports of people scared to death, dying after hexes or curses, the “broken heart” syndrome, etc. He discusses hysteria, mass hysteria, hypochondria, the worried well, and questionable mental diagnoses, including multiple chemical sensitivity and electromagnetic hypersensitivity.

Belief and Healing

Feeling better after a treatment doesn’t necessarily mean we actually are better. Suggestion is powerful, and healing rituals are persuasive. He covers Anton Mesmer’s “animal magnetism,” placebo effects, sham surgeries, learned responses, expectancy effects, conditioning, social learning, and theological placebos. He says there are three types of healing: natural (the body heals itself), technological (drugs, surgery), and interpersonal that depends on context and personal interactions and that leads to improvements in illness but not in disease.

Belief includes a long chapter on belief in remedies that either lack evidence of effectiveness or have been proven ineffective. He covers traditional Chinese medicine, qi gong, acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy, chiropractic, aromatherapy, therapeutic touch, Reiki, thought-field therapy, and cranial-sacral stimulation. He investigates the reasons people choose alternative medicine and reject science-based treatments and vaccines. He covers beliefs in psychology, including recovered memories, EMDR, Munchausen by proxy, and seasonal affective disorder. He concludes, “Let careful scientific research rather than hyperbole, gushing testimonials, or ‘ancient wisdom’ be the foundation for our beliefs about what is or is not effective.”

That would be a good motto for the Science-Based Medicine website.

We are born magical thinkers, and magical thinking is hard to overcome. Alcock delves into beliefs associated with magic, religion, superstition, and the paranormal, examining how they reflect our constructed representations of reality. He discusses stage magic, sympathetic magic, magical thinking, hyperactive agency detection, magical contagion, and the persistence of superstitions. In separate chapters, he covers the origins and psychological benefits and harms of religion, anomalous experiences and parapsychology, illusory experiences, and a caboodle of strange beliefs, from alien abductions to the Bermuda triangle, from electronic voice phenomena to reincarnation, from fire-walking to energy fields, from spontaneous human combustion to astrology.

Building a Firewall against Folly

In the final chapter, Alcock shows how we can all become better at critical thinking. He gives these eight rules:

1. Remember that we can all be fooled.
2. Be wary of your intuitions.
3. Be wary of the Fundamental Attribution Error: attributing people’s behavior to their characters and intentions while overlooking the power of the situation.
4. Be wary of validation by personal experience.
5. Don’t rely on a single source of information.
6. Don’t over-interpret correlations.
7. Ask “compared to what?”—a wine was rejected because it was found to contain two million asbestos particles per liter, but the concentration of asbestos particles in the city water supply was higher than that.
8. In the face of inadequate evidence, suspend judgment rather than jumping to conclusions

Finally, he reminds us that critical thinking means we should be prepared to disagree with ourselves, which is never easy.

A Great Book

Belief: What It Means to Believe and Why Our Convictions Are So Compelling covers a huge variety of topics. It’s written in a style that is accessible and appealing to the lay audience yet rigorous enough to satisfy professionals. I think everyone would benefit from reading it. It is the equivalent of a psychology course and an owner’s manual for the brain; it explains how our minds work, how we come to believe the things we do, and why it is hard to change those beliefs. It explains our biases and errors and how critical thinking can help us distinguish true beliefs from false ones. It combines the latest scientific knowledge with the best incisive thinking. It provides insight into many of the problems facing our society. And it’s an entertaining encyclopedia of strange and false beliefs.

The book’s principles are illustrated by many fascinating examples and anecdotes. My favorite was the rectal piano. One of Alcock’s patients held the delusion that there was a small piano in his rectum, and he was obsessed with a desire to play it. He wanted to have his fingers surgically removed to eliminate the temptation! Alcock asked if he had considered having the piano removed; he thought that was a great idea and asked Alcock if he would do the surgery.

I can’t praise this book enough. You can borrow it from your public library for free or buy the Kindle edition for only $11.99. Read it! It will educate you and entertain you, and you will begin to question some of your beliefs that you might not have thought to question before. Our society would be a much better place if everyone would read this book and absorb its lessons.

Vaccines are unquestionably one of the greatest triumphs of modern medicine. Smallpox was the deadliest scourge in human history, responsible for 300 million to 500 million deaths in the twentieth century alone, when it was already on its way out. Thanks to vaccines, smallpox has been completely eradicated. And now polio is well on its way to eradication. Today it occurs in only three countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria (except for a recent isolated case reported in Papua New Guinea).

How quickly we forget! Only some of us older folks can remember our parents not letting us go swimming in the summer because of polio risk. We’ve made great progress against many other vaccine-preventable diseases. Today’s children won’t get sick with chickenpox, mumps, and measles like I did. We even have two vaccines against viruses that cause cancer: human papillomavirus (HPV) and hepatitis B.

Vaccinations constitute a wonderful insurance policy. You’d think no one would want to refuse that protection. But plenty of people do, because of misinformation being spread by misguided vaccine opponents. I’ll call them antivaxxers. They may protest, like Jenny McCarthy, that they’re not against vaccines but just want safe vaccines or a delayed schedule. But they are clearly antivaccine. They are vaccine denialists, not vaccine skeptics. They reject the overwhelming scientific evidence for the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. And they’re endangering us all by reducing the herd immunity in our communities.

Antivaxxers claim that vaccines cause all sorts of terrible harm. The biggest kerfuffle was over concerns that the MMR vaccine caused autism. For a time, the mercury-based preservative thimerosal was blamed; however, when thimerosal was removed from vaccines, the rate of autism didn’t decline. Multiple scientific studies have failed to even find any correlation between vaccines and autism, much less evidence of causation. In fact, one study seemed to show that vaccine recipients were less likely to be diagnosed with autism.

VAERS

Antivaxxers love the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). They gleefully point to it as evidence that vaccines cause serious adverse effects and deaths. However, they don’t understand how VAERS works. It doesn’t collect data systematically, nor does it constitute proof of harm from vaccines. It accepts any and all anecdotal reports from patients, doctors, lawyers, or anyone who thinks an adverse event has happened after a vaccination. The anecdotes are neither investigated nor verified. There is evidence that whenever a particular adverse event such as autism is being litigated, the number of reports of that adverse event in VAERS increases. Perhaps the litigants are putting more reports into the system so they can present the data as evidence in the courtroom.¹

Anyone could lie and put in a false report. Dr. James Laidler did just that. He submitted a report saying that after he got a flu shot, his skin turned green and his muscles swelled up; he described turning into the Incredible Hulk comic book character. His report was accepted and entered into the database. To the credit of VAERS, they noticed that the report was suspicious, so they phoned him and asked his permission to remove it, which he readily granted. Had he refused, the report would still be in the database and antivaxxers could point to proof that the flu vaccine turns people into Incredible Hulks.

VAERS data can be useful when used appropriately. There were a number of reports of intussusception (where a section of bowel “telescopes” into an adjacent section, causing blockage and cutting off blood supply) after the older RotaShield rotavirus vaccine. An investigation showed there really was a connection, and that vaccine was taken off the market. But the anecdotes in VAERS are only a starting point. Reports of deaths are investigated; in most cases, they have found a non-vaccine cause of death. One girl who died after the HPV vaccine was found to have died of a drug overdose. In other cases, there was not enough information to determine the cause of death.

Anecdotes alone are not data. Bad things can happen to anyone. We need to know if they happen more often in vaccine recipients than in the general population. If so, that establishes a correlation. But a correlation is not enough to establish causation. You may remember the graph showing an almost perfect correlation between autism diagnoses and the sales of organic food.

In a study that reviewed VAERS data looking for causality, “Causality was thought to be probable or definite in less than one quarter of reports, and these were dominated by local reactions, allergic reactions, or symptoms known to be associated with the vaccine administered.”² Most of these were “probable.” Only 3 percent were “definitely” related to the vaccine, and most of those were not serious.

Relying on VAERS has been described as dumpster diving for data. The antivaxxers love that sport. For the HPV vaccine Gardasil, they proclaim, “Gardasil is killing women!” They cite VAERS reports of thirty-two deaths and 12,000 complaints. In reality, after more than 170 million doses, no death has ever been linked to Gardasil.

For HPV vaccines, none of the events reported to VAERS was found to be any more common after HPV vaccination than among the comparison groups. In a large controlled study, only two things were associated with the HPV vaccine: venous thromboembolism (VTE, or blood clots) in 0.2/100,000 doses and fainting after the injection in 8.2/100,000 doses. The numbers for VTE were not statistically significant, and most of the patients had other risk factors for VTE. Causation was not established. In another study with 200,000 subjects, they only found a correlation with fainting (six times as likely in recipients) and skin infections in the two weeks following vaccination (1.8 times as likely in recipients).

Japanese Oversight

One bit of fake news that’s been circulating is the rumor that Japan banned the HPV vaccine; in fact, it did no such thing. The vaccine has been available for free in Japan since 2010, and it is still available for free. What happened was that the Japanese government temporarily suspended their official recommendation to get the vaccine while they investigated anecdotal reports that thirty-eight girls had experienced pain and numbness after vaccination. The investigation was soon completed, and it found the vaccine wasn’t responsible. But for some reason, they never got around to reinstating the recommendation. As a result, completion rates for the HPV vaccine series plummeted from 74 percent to 0.6 percent. This is very unfortunate. It means Japanese children have been deprived of the protection against cancers caused by HPV. That includes cervical, anal, oropharyngeal, vaginal, vulvar, and penile cancers. It can take twenty years or more for those cancers to develop: a few decades from now, Japan will be seeing cancers that could easily have been prevented. Even if they don’t get cancer, some people will develop genital warts and other STD symptoms that could have been avoided.

Hepatitis B Vaccine

The hepatitis B vaccine is routinely given to newborns in 184 countries. It has an excellent safety record. After over a billion doses given, the only serious adverse event that has been identified is an allergic reaction in fewer than one in a million recipients. It is given to newborns because the younger the age at infection, the more likely hepatitis B will persist as a chronic infection that carries a risk of liver failure and liver cancer later in life. A whopping 80–90 percent of those infected before the age of one will develop a chronic infection, compared to only 5 percent of adults. It’s clearly working: the incidence of hepatitis B infections in the United States has dropped dramatically since we began vaccinating newborns.

The antivaxxers ignore these facts and offer their own version. Here’s what one antivaxxer said about the hepatitis B vaccine:

It is a toxic exposure that has unknown and unpredictable effects. It has never been appropriately studied in humans (true placebo control), and what we are observing from population-based reports is that 443,093 adverse events (headache, irritability, extreme fatigue, brain inflammation, convulsions, rheumatoid arthritis, optic neuritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) and neuropathy) have been registered including >1500 deaths, often labeled as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.³

None of that is true. The writer had to dive deeply into the VAERS dumpster to come up with these fantasies. Talk about fake news!

The Vaccine Court

Another favorite tactic of the antivaxxers is to claim that the government knows vaccines are harmful and it pays out money to compensate victims. They cite cases from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), also known as the Vaccine Court. NVICP is a no-fault system for litigating vaccine injury cases. It was established in 1986 in response to a threat to the vaccine supply. Disregarding strong scientific evidence about the safety of the DPT vaccine, juries had been awarding large sums to plaintiffs who claimed they had suffered vaccine injuries. In self-defense, most companies had stopped producing the DPT vaccine.

Under the provisions of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, vaccine injury lawsuits can no longer be filed in state and federal courts. Instead, these cases are heard by a Special Master in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The petitioner must present a biological theory of harm, give a logical sequence of events connecting the vaccine to the injury, and establish an appropriate time frame in which injury occurred; the petitioner must also show that there is not another biologically plausible explanation for the injury. These are legal requirements and are not sufficient to establish scientific truth. In 2006, an award was granted to a petitioner who claimed that a hepatitis B vaccine caused her multiple sclerosis (MS), despite several scientific studies showing that the vaccine doesn’t cause or exacerbate MS.

Some recognized vaccine injuries are listed in an official Table of Injuries along with a time frame. For instance, anaphylaxis is known to sometimes (rarely) occur with vaccines, and it usually occurs within four hours of the injection. For a claim of vasovagal syncope, it must have occurred within an hour. If an injury is listed on the table and the time frame is appropriate, compensation is automatically granted. For off-table injuries, the claimant has to show that it is more likely than not that the vaccine caused the harm. The standard of proof is much lower than in regular courts.

In short, this is a no-fault system designed both to preserve the vaccine supply by protecting manufacturers from liability and to facilitate compensation for people who are assumed to have been injured by vaccines. A successful lawsuit does not constitute scientific proof that the vaccine caused the injury.

Vaccines are safe. The antivaxxers are trying to create a “manufactroversy” based on dumpster diving for data in VAERS and other sources of misleading information. They are spreading fake news. Remember, VAERS is very unreliable.

1. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/01/18/how-vaccine-litigation-distorts-the-vaer/
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23063829
3. https://kellybroganmd.com/hepatitis-b-vaccine-for-your-newborn/

Courtesy of NASA

Scientists expect this year globally to be the fourth-hottest on record, with the only warmer years being the three previous ones. Since 2001, we have lived on a planet that has experienced seventeen of the eighteen hottest years ever observed.

The alarming temperature records set over the past two decades are consistent with a century-long pattern, rigorously confirmed by multiple lines of scientific evidence: the burning of fossil fuels has driven a rise in heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere, which has already caused nearly a 1 Celsius (C) degree rise in global temperatures.

The impact from destabilizing Earth’s climate system are being felt by people living in every country of the world. This summer, record heat in Japan and elsewhere caused dozens of deaths. Firefighters in California struggled to control the largest forest fire on record, one of about twenty that ravaged the state. Forest fires also raged across Canada and even in the Arctic. In Europe, where fires led to deaths in Greece, record-setting heat also severely damaged crops and caused other freakish events. Rivers were so warm in some places that some nuclear reactors had to shut down because the water was too hot to cool them.

“This summer of fire and swelter looks a lot like the future that scientists have been warning about in the era of climate change,” wrote Somini Sengupta (2018) in a front-page story in The New York Times. “It’s revealing in real time how unprepared much of the world remains for life on a hotter planet.”

Teasing out the unique role played by human-caused climate change in contributing to extreme weather events (in comparison to natural fluctuations) has long been a scientific challenge. But in recent years research in the area of “attribution science” has developed into a mature field. To date, scientists have published more than 170 reports covering 190 extreme weather events around the world, according to an analysis by the journal Nature. About two-thirds of extreme weather events studied were determined by scientists to have been made more likely, or more severe, by human-driven climate change. Heat extremes accounted for 43 percent of these events, followed by droughts (18 percent) and extreme rain or flooding (17 percent) (Schiermeier 2018).

Acknowledging the threats posed by human-caused climate change, in 2015 almost all of the world’s countries pledged as part of the United Nations climate treaty to keep global temperature rise this century to lower than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels and to strive for a 1.5 degrees C. But to achieve this goal, greenhouse gas emissions would need to be cut by at least 70 percent by 2050 (Tollefson 2018).

As the shift away from fossil fuels to low carbon energy moves at a snail’s pace compared to what is needed, in 2017 emissions worldwide rose by nearly 2 percent, the first increase in four years. In an August 2018 lead editorial at The Economist, the typically optimistic magazine put the state of progress in the bluntest of terms, running the headline: “The World is Losing the War on Climate Change” (“The World” 2018).

In countries around the world, to replace fossil fuels the massive deployment of solar and wind power will likely need to be supplemented by thousands of advanced nuclear power plants; natural gas plants that capture and bury their emissions; and a gigantically bigger, more powerful, and vastly more complicated energy transmission and storage system. These are just the challenges in decarbonizing the electricity sector. Equally daunting obstacles exist in the agriculture and transportation sectors (Temple 2018).

As countries struggle to limit their greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize their economies, there has emerged a space in public life for new ways of thinking about climate change, energy, and politics. In books, essays, and research, a group of intellectuals and scholars calling themselves “ecomodernists” or “ecopragmatists” have put forward a set of ideas that break from conventional thinking, challenging longstanding paradigms about nature, technology, and progress (Fahy and Nisbet 2017; Nisbet 2014).

The Decarbonization Challenge

Most of today’s rise in greenhouse gas emissions is driven by energy-hungry Asian nations seeking to rapidly grow their economies and improve the standard of living for billions of people. Between 2006–2016, energy consumption in Asia rose by 40 percent. In India, where emissions are growing the fastest, the country remains highly dependent on coal to produce three-quarters of its electricity. In 2017, the country’s use of the world’s most polluting fossil fuel grew by 5 percent (“The Year” 2018).

In Germany, even as the country has made unprecedented gains in the deployment of solar and wind power, emissions over the past two years have slightly increased. In 2011, Germany made the rash political decision to phase out its seventeen emissions-free nuclear power plants, which at the time accounted for 25 percent of the country’s electricity generation. In doing so, Germany has remained strongly dependent on some of the dirtiest coal power plants in the world for more than 40 percent of its electricity. Efforts to cut emissions have also faltered because of unexpected growth in the economy and lower oil prices, which encouraged greater use of home oil heating and car transportation (“Germany” 2017).

In the United States, the good news is that emissions have declined since their historic peak in 2007, though they still remain above 1990 levels, according to official government estimates. The decline has been driven primarily by the revolution in shale gas drilling or “fracking,” which lowered the cost of generating electricity from cleaner burning natural gas power plants, putting many dirtier and more expensive coal power plants out of business (Barboza and Lange 2018).

Questions remain, however, about how much methane is leaked into the atmosphere from natural gas production and transport. A recent study estimated that the leakage rate was 60 percent greater than the U.S. government had previously estimated. Such a discrepancy is important to evaluating the benefits of natural gas, since the atmospheric warming impact of methane during the first two decades after its release is more than eighty times more potent than carbon dioxide (Guglielmi 2018).

A glut of cheap natural gas also threatens the country’s 100 emissions-free nuclear power plants, which generate 20 percent of U.S. electricity. Because the United States does not have a national carbon tax or fee, the climate change benefits of nuclear power plants are not factored into their operating costs. Since 2013, five nuclear plants have closed and six more are scheduled to shut down by 2025, even though these older plants could still operate for decades. In most states, solar and wind power will not be able to take up the slack in electricity generation. Instead, nuclear power will be replaced by dirtier natural gas (Plumer 2017).

A bright spot may be California, the fifth largest economy in the world. Even as the state’s population has surged—its economy has grown by 40 percent over the past two decades—the carbon intensity of California’s economy (the amount of carbon pollution per million dollars of economic growth) has declined by 38 percent and is now below 1990 levels. In 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, carbon intensity declined 6 percent even as the economy grew by 3 percent (Barboza and Lang 2018).

The shift is driven by a major decline in emissions from the electricity sector. Not only have state-wide improvements in energy efficiency decreased the demand for electricity even as the economy and population have grown, a sharp drop in the price of solar panels combined with state renewable energy mandates have accelerated the transition from natural gas plants to clean energy sources. Rain in the state after five years of drought also boosted electric generation from hydropower (Barboza and Lange 2018).

Many challenges remain for California. The scheduled shuttering of the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant may shift some electricity generation back to natural gas. Emissions from cars and trucks, already the biggest source of carbon pollution in the state, continue to increase. Lower gas prices until recently have not helped, nor has consumer preference for bigger, less efficient cars and the relatively slow adoption of electric vehicles (Barboza and Lange 2018).

Continued success in California and the United States also hinges on U.S. federal policy. But the Donald J. Trump administration since taking office has installed at major regulatory and scientific agencies fossil fuel industry lobbyists and conservative operatives who have spent their careers casting doubt on climate science and opposing any policies to cut emissions. According to one recent study, the fossil fuel industry and other sectors that are major emitters enjoy a ten-to-one lobbying advantage over environmental groups and the clean energy sector (Brulle 2018). At such a disadvantage, even if Democrats were to win back control of the White House and Congress, any successful climate change–related legislation will not only need some Republican support but also the backing of major players from the fossil fuel industry.

But such concessions are likely to be opposed by many environmentalists, who have gained considerable sway within the Democratic party. To win party primaries, Democrats running in districts and states where liberal voters dominate have pledged to promote a “100% renewables” platform that opposes all new fossil fuel infrastructure, seeks a ban on natural gas “fracking,” and demands the closure of nuclear power plants (Nisbet 2015).

The Rise of Ecomodernism

The roots of ecomodernism can be traced to a handful of influential books, articles, and policy papers first published a decade ago. In 2009’s Whole Earth Discipline, ecologist and futurist Stuart Brand laid out a range of innovation-driven strategies for achieving a sustainable society. His ideas were captured effectively by the subtitle: “Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary.”

Brand correctly warned that “soft energy path” technologies such as solar and wind favored by environmentalists were unlikely to be able to overcome the problems of intermittency, storage capacity, and cost and be scalable in time to alter the dynamics of fossil fuel energy use and dependency worldwide. He and other ecomodernists have pointed to the demand for growth in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe and the sunk costs that these regions are putting into coal power and other fossil fuels.

The more than one billion people worldwide who still lack basic access to electricity means that climate change is a reason to accelerate rather than slow energy transitions, echoed the ecomodernist thinkers Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger (2007; 2013) in a book and numerous essays. Those countries over the past century that have gained access to abundant, cheap forms of energy have achieved huge gains in economic growth and human security. Today, the main imperative for people living in developing countries such as India is to gain the same access and to achieve a Western standard of living.

During the 1960s and 1970s, as North American and European countries achieved economic security and prosperity, their citizens began to put pressure on their governments to accelerate efforts to reduce pollution, slow rates of deforestation, and limit land use, thereby conserving nature rather than destroying it. A similar pattern is occurring in China, which through state-managed economic growth has achieved a rising, affluent middle class.

But for growth to continue in China, and for India and other developing countries to also gain access to abundant forms of energy, transformative innovations in “hard energy” path options such as nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage are required, along with similar advances in high-tech solar, energy transmission, and energy storage technologies. These advances would be needed to not only meet the demand for growth in these regions but also limit emissions from the thousands of coal plants already in place and scheduled to be built around the world.

In 2009’s Why We Disagree about Climate Change, University of Cambridge geographer Mike Hulme argued that climate change had been misdiagnosed as a conventional environmental problem. Instead, it was what policy scholars referred to as a uniquely “super-wicked” problem, not something society was going to end or solve; like poverty or war, it was something that we were going to do better or worse at managing over time. As a super-wicked problem, argue other ecomodernists, climate change is so complex in scale with so many different drivers that a single omnibus solution such as a national carbon tax or an international emissions agreement is unlikely to be either politically enduring or effective. Instead, policies would be needed to be implemented at the state, regional, and bilateral levels and through the private and nonprofit sectors (Prins and Rayner 2007; Verweij et al. 2006).

At the international level, examples include focusing more narrowly on reducing especially powerful, but easier to tackle, greenhouse gases such as black carbon (or soot) from diesel cars and dirty stoves and methane from leaky gas pipes. At the national and state levels, examples of smaller scale policies include government technology procurement programs; major investments in climate change resilience to protect cities, people, and industries; subsidies for renewables, nuclear energy, and carbon capture; funding for clean energy research; and investments in climate resilience efforts. As these smaller successes are achieved, argue ecomodernists, we not only gain more time to deal with the bigger policy challenges but also start to rebuild networks of trust and cooperation across lines of political difference while experimenting with new solutions and technologies (Nordhaus et al. 2011; Prins and Rayner 2007).

These ideas and others have been researched, expanded on, and promoted by the Breakthrough Institute, a left-of-center think tank founded by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. In 2015, the two brought together sixteen other similarly minded thinkers to author An Ecomodernist Manifesto. They argued that climate change and other environmental crises are not reason to call into question the economic policies and technological advances that have enabled human society to flourish over the past century. Indeed, halting the many societal gains we have achieved through technological innovation, they argue, rules out the best tools we have for combating climate change, protecting nature, and helping people. The urgent environmental problems we face are evidence in favor of more modernization, not less (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015).

Hope for a better future, they contend, starts with advanced technologies that intensify rather than weaken our mastery of nature. High-tech crops, advanced nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, aquaculture, desalination, and high-efficiency solar panels all have the potential to not only reduce human demands on the environment but also spark the economic growth needed to lift people out of extreme poverty. These advances will enable more people to live in bigger cities that are powered and fed more efficiently. People in cities also tend to have fewer children, slowing population growth. From this perspective, technological advances and urbanization will free up more space on the planet for nature, “decoupling” human development from fossil fuel and resource consumption.

To achieve this future, ecomodernists warn that we have put too much faith in carbon pricing, social-impact investing, venture capital, Silicon Valley, and other market-based “neoliberal” mechanisms to spur technological innovation and social change. We need to instead focus more intensively on understanding how technological advances happen and the role of government planning and spending—rather than the market—as the main driver of innovation and societal change. Once there are technologies available that make meaningful action on climate change and other problems cost less, ecomodernists predict, much of the political argument over scientific uncertainty will diminish. The challenge is not to make fossil fuels more expensive but to make their technological alternatives cheaper and more powerful.

Under these conditions, it will be easier to gain political cooperation from across the ideological spectrum and from developing countries. National leaders and their constituents are far more likely to spare nature because it is no longer needed to meet their economic goals than they are for any ideological or moral reasons. Over the past year, ecomodernist ideas have received a boost from Harvard University cognitive linguist Steven Pinker (2018), who in his best-selling book Enlightenment Now devotes his chapter on the environment to advocating on behalf of the philosophy and the need for technologies such as nuclear energy.

Pinker is part of a parallel genre of “New Optimist” authors who have been inspired by the work of Hans Rosling and affiliated data scientists. In TED talks, a recent book, and vividly illustrated graphs available at the website Our World in Data, Rosling and colleagues have shown the many ways in which human societies are flourishing in the age of climate change, countering a powerful cultural narrative that the world for decades has been in a state of escalating crisis, decline, and suffering (Rosling et al. 2018).

Valuing Dissent

For ecomodernists, technological and political progress also require respectful engagement with a diversity of voices and ideas. “Too often discussions about the environment have been dominated by the extremes, and plagued by dogmatism, which in turn fuels intolerance,” they write in the Manifesto.

At their core, ecomodernists believe in applying the Enlightenment principles of skepticism and dissent, which are essential to wise and effective decisions, especially in relation to wickedly complex problems such as climate change. Numerous social science studies demonstrate that in situations where groupthink is closely guarded and defended to the exclusion of dissenting voices, individuals and groups tend to make poorer decisions and think less productively. In contrast, exposure to dissent, even when such arguments may prove to be wrong, tends to broaden thinking, leading individuals to think in more open ways, in multiple directions, and in consideration of a greater diversity of options, recognizing flaws and weaknesses in positions. “Learning and good intentions won’t save us from biased thinking and poor judgments,” notes UC-Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth. “A better route is to have our beliefs and ways of thinking directly challenged by someone who authentically believes differently than we” (Nemeth 2018, 191).

Acting on these principles, the Breakthrough Institute has invested in twice yearly “Dialogues” in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., creating the rare forum where progressives, liberals, conservatives, environmentalists, and industrialists come together to debate ideas and to connect over civil, cross-cutting conversations. To elaborate on these ideas, the Institute also publishes the Breakthrough Journal and produces the podcast series Breakthrough Dialogues.

On the road to managing the many threats we face from climate change, grassroots activism and political reforms that hold the fossil fuel industry accountable are important, as is the quest for a more advanced arsenal of technological options and a reconsideration of our economic goals. But so too is investment in our capacity to learn, discuss, question, and disagree in ways that constructively engage with uncomfortable ideas (Nisbet 2014).

Unfortunately, most academics and journalists avoid challenging the powerful forms of groupthink that have derailed our efforts to combat climate change. In this regard, attacks on those who question cherished assumptions have had a powerful chilling effect. We therefore depend on risk-taking intellectuals such as the ecomodernists to lead the way, identifying the flaws in conventional wisdom and offering alternative ways of thinking and talking about our shared future.

• Asafu-Adjaye, J., L. Blomqvist, S. Brand, et al. 2015. An Ecomodernist Manifesto. Oakland, CA: The Breakthrough Institute. Available online at http://www.ecomodernism.org/.
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• Fahy, D., and M.C. Nisbet. 2017. The ecomodernist: Journalists who are reimagining a sustainable future. In P. Berglez, U. Olausson, and M. Ots (Eds), What Is Sustainable Journalism? London: Peter Lang.
• Hulme, M. 2009. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
• Germany is missing its emissions targets. 2017. The Economist (November 9).
• Guglielmi, G. 2018. Methane leaks from US gas fields dwarf government estimates. Nature 558: 496–497.
• Nemeth, C. 2018. In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business. New York: Basic Books.
• Nisbet, M.C. 2014. Disruptive ideas: Public intellectuals and their arguments for action on climate change. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 5(6): 809–823.
• ———. 2015. Environmental advocacy in the Obama years: Assessing new strategies for political change. In N. Vig and M. Kraft (Eds), Environmental Policy: New Directions for the Twenty-First Century, 9th Edition. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 58–78.
• Nordhaus, T., and M. Shellenberger. 2007. Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
• ———. 2013. How the left came to reject cheap energy for the poor. The Breakthrough (July 10). Available online at http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenbergerand-ted-nordhaus/the-great-progressive-reversal.
• Nordhaus, T., M. Shellenberger, R. Pielke, et al. 2011. Climate Pragmatism: Innovation, Resilience, and No Regrets. Oakland, CA: The Breakthrough Institute. Available online at http://thebreakthrough.org/ archive/climate_pragmatism_innovation.
• Pinker, S. 2018. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. London, UK: Penguin Books.
• Plumer, B. 2017. Glut of natural gas pressures nuclear power, and climate goals, too. The New York Times (June 14): A17.
• Prins, G., and S. Rayner. 2007. Time to ditch Kyoto. Nature 449(7165): 973.
• Rosling, H., A.R. Rönnlund, and O. Rosling. 2018. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. New York: Flatiron Books.
• Schiermeier, Q. 2018. Droughts, heatwaves and floods: How to tell when climate change is to blame. Nature 560(7716): 20.
• Sengupta, S. 2018. The year global warming made its menace a reality. The New York Times (August 9): A1.
• Temple, J. 2018. At this rate, it’s going to take nearly 400 years to transform the energy system. MIT Technology Review (March 14). Available online at https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-going-to-take-nearly-400-years-to-transform-the-energy-system/.
• Tollefson, J. 2018. Can the world kick its fossil-fuel addiction fast enough? Nature 556(7702): 422–425.
• Verweij, M., M. Douglas, R. Ellis, et al. 2006. Clumsy solutions for a complex world: The case of climate change. Public Administration 84: 847–843.
• The world is losing the war against climate change. 2018. The Economist (August 2). Available online at https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/08/02/the-world-is-losing-the-war-against-climate-change.
• The year global warming made its menace a reality. 2018. The Economist (August 2).

Arkansas’s White River holds claim to a “monster” that has been said to have appeared intermittently for a century or more. Its reality is defended by cryptozoologists and skeptics alike (I am both), but what is the huge aquatic creature that has proven so elusive? The late cryptozoologist Roy Mackal (1980) thought he knew, but there were problems with his theory. Can we finally solve the mystery?

Monster and Lair

Sightings have been claimed from 1912 and 1917, among other years, but it was July 1937 that confirmed the existence of a great river creature—albeit one that is variously described. At some point, named for its lair, it was dubbed “Whitey,” although almost everyone agreed its color was gray. Some added that its skin was “crusty” or “peeling.”

Its size was not so certain, with estimates ranging from at least twelve feet to sixty-five feet or more—although Mackal wisely cautioned (1980, 205):

I ask the reader to take my word for the observation that untrained observers estimating size of unknown objects in water range from exactly right to threefold or fivefold too great. This is especially true when the observer has no object of known size with which to make a comparison. It is generally not appreciated to what extent we rely on comparison to make size estimates.

The creature’s weight was also variable—1,000 pounds or more. Although the head was almost never seen, one eyewitness reported glimpsing it and thought it had a protruding horn (Mackal 1980, 207; Cox 2011).

The 1937 sightings placed the creature at a portion of the White River—a major tributary of the Mississippi—just below the city of Newport. A farmer named Bramlett Bateman signed an affidavit as to his observations—which began at about one in the afternoon on July 1 and lasted for five minutes. He subsequently saw it several times over more than two months and believed it to be “about 12 feet long and 4 or 5 feet wide.” Three other affidavits were produced—one by a deputy sheriff—and Bateman said he knew of two dozen others who could similarly attest to the unusual creature. Resulting newspaper accounts catapulted the monster of White River “into national prominence” (Mackal 1980, 200).

During the flap, a woman named Ethel Smith of Little Rock stated she had seen the creature thirteen years earlier—i.e., in 1924—while vacationing with her husband and children. Elements of her description tallied with those of others: “It was making a loud blowing noise but never did show its head or tail. It was a terrible-looking thing with dingy gray crusted hide. It frightened me badly.” A local fisherman said he had also seen the creature previously at the same site around 1915, and sightings were also reported in 1971 and 1972.¹ As was common, the creature appeared following a widening ring of bubbles and thrashed about for five minutes or more before resubmerging (Mackal 1980, 204). It left in its wake open-mouthed eyewitnesses.

Mackal’s Identification

Roy Mackal (1925–2013), a biologist as well as a cryptozoologist, featured the White River Monster in his seminal cryptozoological book, Searching for Hidden Animals (1980, 197–208). He brought a great deal of expertise and good sense to the subject.

Mackal was persuaded that those who encountered the White River creature offered useful testimony: “Except for size there is a remarkable consistency among the different witnesses over a long time. There can be no doubt that a real animal or animals had been observed” (Mackal 1980, 205). Mackal collected and summarized the applicable zoological details to produce a sort of composite picture of the creature, as we have seen.

He concluded:

The White River case is a clear-cut instance of a known aquatic animal observed outside of its normal habitat or range and therefore unidentified by the observers unfamiliar with the type. The animal in question clearly was a large male elephant seal, either Mirounga leonina (southern species) or Mirounga angustirostris (northern species).

His identification has convinced many, but there is a serious problem.

Ranging Afar?

The creatures (it’s unlikely to be the same individual given such intervals) would have had to enter the river from the Mississippi, and to have connected with it from the Gulf of Mexico. However, it is more than difficult to hypothesize, in the gulf waters, either species of the elephant seal. The Northern species ranges over the Pacific coast of northern Mexico, the United States, and Canada (Whitaker 1996, 742–744), while the Southern elephant seal migrates from Antarctic and sub-Antarctic waters north to Argentina, New Zealand, and South Africa, and even wandering individuals are not found above the equator (“Ocean” 2018).

Another plausible aquatic mammal is the hooded seal. Although it is smaller than the Northern elephant seal (at up to ten feet versus thirteen), it could fit descriptions of “Whitey” pretty well. Although the hooded seal’s habitat is the Arctic and North Atlantic, it is very migratory, and individuals have “strayed as far south as Florida” (Whitaker 1996, 739–741). Nevertheless, I am unaware of one ever having reached the Gulf of Mexico, let alone to have then traveled far up the Mississippi and to have done so repeatedly.

One of the seals, the Caribbean or West Indian monk seal, did once populate the very waters of the gulf. Unfortunately, it is now extinct (Whitaker 1996, 741–742).

I believe there is yet another possibility, and it is not only found in the Gulf of Mexico but known to have swum hundreds of miles up the Mississippi!

The Best Suspect

I am referring to the Florida manatee (a subspecies of the West Indian manatee).² It is a “massive” aquatic mammal with a minimum length of about thirteen feet (although the largest recorded was fifteen feet). It may weigh as much as about 3,500 pounds. Like the White River monster, it has gray, smooth skin that can appear mottled due to barnacle-like crusts of algae or to common injuries from boat propellers (Whitaker 1996, 807–808; “Florida” 2018; “West Indian” 2018).

It has no “horn,” but whereas Mackal postulated that that once-only descriptor was due to the elephant seal’s proboscis (short trunk), I suggest it was one of the manatee’s front flipperlike legs, seen beside its head when it rolled over in the water. These appendages have three nails at their end and would seem capable of leaving on shore the fourteen-by-eight-inch, three-toed tracks attributed to the “monster,” which also flattened grass and saplings (Mackal 1980, 203, 205, 207). Manatees do crawl onto shores to graze on plants as part of their herbivore lifestyle. And just like the monster, the manatee also makes “blowing” noises (“Manatee” 2014). Again, it basks on the water, rolls, dives, and so on (“West Indian” 2018).

Significantly, the manatee is adapted to both fresh and salt water and so is found in rivers and in the Gulf of Mexico as well as the Atlantic Ocean. It ranges as far west as Texas and as far north as Massachusetts. In fact, in 2006 one traveled some 720 miles up the Mississippi River to enter the Wolf River near Memphis. It was eventually found dead on the banks of McKellar Lake, a slackwater lake south of that city (“Manatee” 2006). That animal’s journey shows a manatee to be a very real possibility as the White River creature.

The Memphis manatee died in October and was thought to have succumbed to the cold. However, when a manatee is found north of Florida, it is as “mainly a summer immigrant” (Whitaker 1996, 807). That is consistent with the fact that the White River monster was observed mostly during the summer months: July 1924; June to early September 1937; June, July, and August 1971; and June 1972.

All things considered, the Florida manatee surely represents the preferred hypothesis in the case, which I believe we may now mark closed.

1. One witness in 1971 made a Polaroid snapshot of the supposed creature, which “appeared to have a spiny backbone that stretched for 30 or more feet” (Mackal 1980, 202). In my opinion this looks unnatural and more like a series of dashes made by a retoucher using a pen.
2. I learned a bit about manatees in 2001 when I was in Appalachicola National Forest in the Florida panhandle, which is also supposedly home to a Bigfoot-like creature called the Florida Skunk Ape.

• Cox, Dale. 2011. A River Monster in Arkansas? Available online at http://www.exploresouthernhistory.com/whiteriver1.html; accessed January 29, 2018.
• Florida manatees. 2018. Marine Mammals of the Gulf of Mexico, brochure of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies.
• Mackal, Roy P. 1980. Searching for Hidden Animals. Reprinted, London: Cadogan Books, 1983, 197–208.
• Manatee found dead on banks of McKellar Lake. 2006. Available online at http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/story/5798366/manatee-found-dead-on-banks-of-mckellar-lake; accessed January 24, 2018.
• Manatee Making Strange Noise: Blowing Raspberries. 2014. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SZ-eJ1Ub71; accessed January 25, 2018.
• “Ocean Treasures” Memorial Library. 2018. Available online at http://otlibrary.com/southern-elephant-seal/; accessed January 26, 2018.
• West Indian manatee. 2018. Available online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Indian_manatee#Description; accessed January 19, 2018.
• Whitaker, John O. 1996. National Audubon Society Field Guide to North America, revised edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Wikipedia — The Flammarion engraving (1888) depicts a traveler who arrives at the edge of a flat Earth and sticks his head through the firmament.

Back in the 1970s when organized science-based skepticism was just getting on its feet, someone such as The Amazing Randi or Joe Nickell could just investigate and solve mysteries such as spoon bending, Bigfoot, crop circles, or the Roswell crash and share the information in Skeptical Inquirer magazine or with Johnny Carson. With a little care and attention, most wacky claims were debunked and the conclusions disseminated.

Today, skeptics fight not only false assertions and misinterpretation of facts but also a fundamental distrust of science and a deep-seated paranoia about reputable institutions lying to the entire culture. As formidable as these issues are alone, they become exponentially worse because the spreaders of all this bad information have at their fingertips massive reach. Such is the case with flat earthers.

On Sunday, June 10, 2018, about a dozen pro-science skeptics from the Independent Investigations Group (IIG) at the Center for Inquiry West in Los Angeles met a similar-sized group of flat earthers to demonstrate the curvature of the earth across the Salton Sea, a troubled body of salty water 160 miles southeast of Los Angeles, whose water level is going down and salinity is going up. There is also toxic dust from nearby agriculture that is polluting the air in the area. National Geographic Explorer was there to video the encounter.

Though flat-earther models vary significantly, many believe water, like the rest of the planet, is flat. Assuming clear enough air and a powerful enough telescope, they believe a person standing near the water on one shore can see someone standing on another shore miles away. In fact, Earth’s curve makes an average-height person disappear below the horizon to a similar-sized person at a distance of about six miles.

We decided to conduct this demonstration of a well-known fact for three reasons. First, as science-based skeptics we think it’s okay to question any proposition with sound inquiry, and we’re keen to hear which twisted denials the “high ranking” flat earthers who attended would proffer after they saw the curve for themselves. My eighteen years of experience with testing extraordinary claims has exposed me to a mountain of lame excuses. What would these be?

Second, we were kind of excited to see the curvature ourselves. Most people know Earth is a sphere but don’t get to witness the evidence so beautifully through telescopes across bodies of water.

Third, we wanted to address this rampant denier culture face to face. Skeptics use science to look into all sorts of wild claims but are willing to adjust their thinking when presented with strong evidence. Deniers refuse to accept conclusions even when there is overwhelming evidence and scientific consensus.

Predictably, the demonstration went about as the science said it should. Our shore-to-shore, balloon-raised target couldn’t be seen from 9.6 miles until it was some forty-five feet in the air. The 9’x 6’ boat-based target lost most of one of its (one-foot-wide) horizontal stripes at three miles away from shore.

The flat-earth backpedaling to this confirmation was both immediate and fervent. The mental gymnastics ranged from “what we just saw didn’t happen like that” to citing non-Earth-curve-related optical effects that obscured the targets. They denied the validity of the whole demonstration, though only after it went against them. The post-demo face-off quickly devolved into tangents about the alleged “moon hoax,” NASA cover-ups, and why us “globers” can’t see how we’re being played by various powerful and secretive institutions.

Therein lies one of the differences between today’s crackpots and the bizarre claims of the past. The flat earthers, the 9/11 “truthers,” the moon hoax advocates, chemtrail advocates, and any number of fringe groups believe in ideas that require massive conspiratorial cover-ups to hold together. They think powerful cabals are in charge of covering up bomb evidence at the World Trade Center, suppressing information about alien landings, and countless other schemes. The flat earthers bristled when I called them conspiracy theorists, then trumpeted the idea that higher-ups at NASA had PhotoShopped all the round Earth photos from space.

This rife, tinfoil-hat paranoia about the dishonesty of various institutions has also led deniers to believe that average people have the intellectual chops to assess complex scientific ideas. It takes only a paper-thin YouTube challenge or a half-baked website to undo 400 years of science. They simply do not recognize scientific methods and expertise and are quite content to assemble their view of reality from internet hearsay. One flat earther thought peer review could be done by anyone. Another trusts no scientific theory whatsoever because it’s “only a theory.”

This casual dismissal of scientific achievement is more than just wrong. It’s dangerous. Our species doesn’t make significant advances through popular opinion and webcasts. It makes them through hard work and the acquisition of expertise.

There was a certain irony to many flat earthers using some form of GPS and highly engineered automobiles to get to the Salton Sea. They admit to owning computers and rely on modern, science-based medicine in emergencies but see no contradiction between their everyday implicit faith in science and what that same science says about the shape of Earth.

Belief in a flat Earth may sound like a joke, but the proponents aren’t kidding. They are using science-based technology on a scientifically challenged populace to add to their credulous legions. Decades ago, the members of the lunatic fringe had trouble finding each other. Today, they grow.

Source: Max Pixel

Continuing education is part of most professional jobs. Having been a social worker for twenty years and an elementary education teacher for the past sixteen years, I have experienced ongoing training throughout my professional careers. However, nothing prepared me for the workshops my colleagues and I were required to attend this past winter. This continuing education day was billed as a “health day” and was different from any other of the professional workshops I have attended.

My colleagues and I were given many options to choose from, including courses on topics such as self-defense, cooking in healthy ways, mindfulness, and essential oils. Having been a skeptic my entire life, one of the courses I knew I had to sign up for was essential oils. I am constantly hearing about people who claim that essential oils have changed their lives, cured many ailments, and provided overall physical and mental happiness. I wanted to experience what all this buzz was about.

In conducting some research in the days before the workshop, I found that aromatherapy and essential oils can be defined as using plant life to improve well-being. These two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, and I found this a rather vague definition, so I decided to hold back the rest of my research until after the class.

Upon entering the classroom where the course was taking place, I couldn’t help but notice the softly lit diffuser in the back of the room. The instructor, “Anne,” identified this as an “immunity booster” combination of oils. She explained that she chose this due to the enormous number of germs found in schools during the winter months.

Anne introduced herself to the crowded all-woman class, explaining how she began her career as an aroma therapist by making lip balm and soap. She described how soaps sold commercially in stores contain bar detergent—which, apparently, is not a good thing—adding how all her soaps are vegan and contain essential oils. She went on to describe the many uses she found for essential oils, including anti-itch creams and teething remedies.

Anne also distributed a handout that included many more uses for her essential oils. The top eight claimed to help with ailments such as insomnia, pain, acne, migraines, depression, and nausea, to name a few—as well as help with cold and flu prevention.

In a Time magazine article (Heid 2016), Dr. Edzard Ernst, a former chair of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter in the U.K. (and a frequent contributor to Skeptical Inquirer), said that he found no “convincing” evidence that aromatherapy does any good when it comes to calming hypertension, depression, anxiety, pain, and symptoms of dementia. “Aroma therapists claim that specific oils have specific health effects,” Ernst said. “This, in my view, is little more than wishful thinking.” Ernst has published two review studies that closely examined the health effects of aromatherapy (Ernst and Cooke 2000; Ernst et al. 2012).

Given my curious nature and my scientific aptitude to not accept things at face value, I began asking Anne questions—starting with scientific research and where to find it. Anne responded that she “didn’t know of any” and could not answer my question. Obviously sensing my immediate skepticism, she followed up by saying, “There are two sides to everything.”

Anne continued her presentation by discussing the various companies that sell essential oils, including how they are sold and what she prefers to buy and use. One of these companies is doTERRA. In an entry titled “The Controversy and Hypocrisy Surrounding Essential Oils,” blogger Jessie Reimers, who describes herself as a doTERRA “Wellness Advocate,” states:

It is about taking a proactive role in our health and that of our families. It’s about getting rid of toxic, endocrine disrupting, health damaging household chemicals and cosmetics, cleaning with something pure and natural, supporting ourselves on a physical, cellular, and emotional manner to assist the body in doing what it does best, maintaining homeostasis. … I think we all really need to calm down, look at the situation sensibly, and work together to have as many options as possible available to people. (Reimers 2015)

This sounds good at the outset but relates to another question that was asked in the workshop. A colleague of mine asked, “Why are people suspicious of these pure things but will buy medicines from the store?” I couldn’t help but respond to that question with “Because the medicines from the store have gone through scientific studies with results that have been replicated over and over again. This has not.” Sadly enough, there were no other responses either supporting or denying my answer, and the instructor continued with her presentation of the various concoctions she uses to treat a menu of ailments.

It was surprising to me that so many well-educated attendees seemed to accept the remedies at face value; many even bought numerous products at the end of the session. Several people chimed in with anecdotal evidence about their own positive experiences using essential oils.

What came to my mind while listening to these comments is well-stated in the Time magazine article: “If you believe sniffing rosemary or eucalyptus is going to perk you up or mellow you out, your expectations can result in placebo benefits that stem from your brain—not the plant essences you’re inhaling. These variables are common in aromatherapy studies.”

Going back to my initial definition of aromatherapy, I found much of the advice given about its uses as vague as its definition. My presenter continuously made comments such as: “It could work one day and not work the next day.” “It’s all individual.” “It depends what you’re using them for.” “As an individual, you have to know what works best for you.” “Not everyone is a believer.” And my favorite, quoted by both my presenter and Jessie Reimers, the wellness advocate: “… never claim to cure, diagnose, treat, or prevent any specific condition.” Then why was I sitting here for two hours listening to a presentation about the uses of essential oils suggesting that they cure, diagnose, treat, or prevent specific conditions?

Although I found the presentation quite entertaining, there appeared to be absolutely no solid scientific evidence for spending money and using these products. I guess it’s hard to resist when you are told that you are “investing in your health.” I would rather save my money and wait until actual useful evidence is found. To quote the Time magazine article, “… it’s safe to say the science on aromatherapy’s health perks is, at best, inconclusive.”

• Ernst, Edzard, and Brian Cooke. 2000. Aromatherapy: A systematic review. British Journal of General Practice 50(455): 493–496.
• Ernst, Edzard, Myeong Soo Lee, Jiae Choi, et al. 2012. Aromatherapy for healthcare:  An overview of systematic reviews. Maturitas 71(3): 257–260.
• Heid, Markham. 2016. You asked: Does aromatherapy really work? Time (July 20).Available online at http://time.com/4413812/aromatherapy-essential-oils-tea-tree/.
• Reimers, Jessie. 2015. The controversy and hypocrisy surrounding essential oils (blog entry). Jessie Reimers Get a Fresh Start (July 8). Available online at http://www.getafreshstart.com.au/controversy-hypocracrisy-essential-oils/.

Source: Find a Grave

In the first decade of the twentieth century, an enterprising man in Grand Rapids, Michigan, named A.W. Van Bysterveld claimed that he could “locate the cause of your aches and pains” for free via the mail, if only you would send him a vial of your urine. Van Bysterveld was a self-proclaimed “Expert Inspector of Urine” and claimed that he used a “secret process handed down generation after generation, and most carefully guarded by the old families of Europe.” Van Bysterveld assured prospective clients that though his “secret methods are not taught in schools,” he “examines on an average of 25,000 bottles of urine a year. This alone stamps him as an authority of exceptional qualifications” (Cramp 1911a, 56).

Between March and November 1910, the American Medical Association’s (AMA) Propaganda for Reform Department, led by Dr. Arthur J. Cramp, investigated Van Bysterveld’s claims. A sample (containing tap water, pepsin, aniline dye, and ammonia) prepared by the chemists at the AMA was sent to the Van Bysterveld Medicine Company. The diagnosis came back: “Careful examination of the urine shows there is too much acid in the blood, which will cause a rheumatic condition, the back is weak, and you will have a tired nervous feeling most of the time” (Cramp 1911a, 56). Meanwhile, correspondents working with Cramp in Iowa and Michigan contacted Van Bysterveld’s company and sent in samples that were identical to the first vial from the AMA. This time, the mixture in one case indicated poor blood, a malfunctioning liver, gas, nervousness, and heart problems; in the other case, it indicated weakened kidneys, a “catarrhal condition [inflammation of mucosal membranes] of the stomach and bowels,” and nervousness (Cramp 1911a, 56–57).

Lastly, two more samples were sent in from different addresses in Chicago. This time, both vials were filled with 95 percent tap water with 5 percent glucose. This would indicate that the patient was not merely diabetic but was urinating a substance with more than twice the sugar content of a Red Bull. Again, the diagnoses came back as either liver disease or a catarrhal digestive track. Cramp’s conclusion was unequivocal: “The whole things shows conclusively that the ‘examination’ of the urine is a farce, the diagnosis is a fake, and taking the money from victims for the ‘treatment’ of a purely imaginary disease is a fraud and a swindle” (Cramp 1911a, 57). Cramp further condemned those who profited from this mail-order pseudomedical company: “Those publications which accept the advertisements of this concern are, wittingly or unwittingly, participating in the profits of scoundralism” (Cramp 1911a, 57).

Arthur J. Cramp, MD, played an outsized but oddly unacknowledged role in the professionalization of American medicine. American medicine after the Civil War was still unorganized and largely unregulated. Practitioners needed little formal education and no single commonsense, science-based standard of evidence for treatments applied. As a result, numerous competing schools of thought and private interests fought for the attention of the American consumer, who was barraged with advertisements for nostrums and cures on nearly every page of every popular periodical. The American Medical Association, founded in 1847, had always looked down on secret proprietary treatments, and it saw as an important part of its mission the suppression of quack medicine. For instance, Eric W. Boyle notes that the AMA reserved the right to refuse admittance of journals that advertised proprietary medicines into the Association of Medical Journal Editors, a group that had been established by the AMA to raise the standards of medical publications. Nonetheless, the revenue generated by advertising questionable remedies was so substantial that even the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) failed to uphold its own standards until the turn of the twentieth century (Boyle 2013, 12–3). Dr. Cramp contributed to the professionalization of American medicine by identifying and exposing quackery; subjecting claimed remedies to scientific analysis; assisting government, public, and professional policing efforts directed at controlling health fraud; and pursuing an aggressive thirty-five–year public education program.

Arthur J. Cramp was born in London on September 10, 1872. According to British public records, his father was a blacksmith, and at the age of sixteen, Cramp was apparently an engineer’s apprentice. He moved to the United States at twenty. According to an undated biographical blurb in the files of the AMA, Cramp “did farm work in Missouri for a few years, attended an academy in that state. And then taught in a country school, at the same time writing a weekly column in the local newspaper” (Cramp, Arthur J, Special Data, n.d.). He married a woman from Missouri named Lillian Torrey. Cramp’s family eventually settled in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where he and his wife worked at the Wisconsin Industrial School for Boys, a reformatory high school. According to the 1900 census records, they lived on the campus where they worked. Long before he became a quackbuster, then, he was an educator, and that ethos informed his later work. While at the school, they had a daughter, Torrey, who died a little over a year later. According to her death record, Torrey died January 2, 1900, from seizures related to meningitis. According to a letter from a colleague at the AMA to the historian of American quackery, James Harvey Young, Torrey’s death while being treated by a quack is what compelled Cramp to pursue medicine and expose quackery. (It should be noted, however, no effective treatments for communicable meningitis existed at the time.) In 1906, Cramp graduated from the Wisconsin College of Physicians and Surgeons and joined the American Medical Association (Cramp, Arthur J., Correspondence, n.d.) as a medical editor in December of that year.

Cramp joined the AMA at a particularly auspicious time for practitioners who sought to combat quackery, as the country was in the middle of a period of progressive reforms. In 1905, the year before Cramp was hired, the AMA established the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry, an in-house lab that analyzed the contents of patent medicines. That same year, Samuel Hopkins Adams published a series in Collier’s that would be collected in an edition called The Great American Fraud, a monumental and damning exposé of modern medical charlatanry. Adams named names of fake practitioners, revealed the alcohol and narcotic content of supposed cures, and laid bare the profitable codependence of nostrum advertisers and publishers. In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel based on his observations of appalling and dangerous conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry.

All of this occurred at the same time a pure food and drugs bill was moving through the Congress. The Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 regulated claims that were made on drug packaging, but in 1911 it was interpreted by the Supreme Court very narrowly to mean only that the ingredients on the label needed to be accurate. Claims of effectiveness remained unregulated. The 1912 Sherley Amendment was introduced to close this loophole, but during the legislative negotiations language regulating “false or misleading” claims was replaced by “false and fraudulent,” which introduced the question of intent into legal matters, a more difficult case for regulators to prove (Cramp 1924, 424–425).

In 1910, the Carnegie Foundation released what was known as the Flexner Report, a comprehensive survey of medical education in the United States and Canada. The report led to reforms that standardized medical education, established scientific medicine as the educational gold standard, and diverted educational resources and accreditation away from homeopathic, proprietary, botanical, and eclectic medical schools (Page and Baranchuk 2010, 74). All these developments informed and validated the AMA’s work of shedding light on proprietary medicines and quackery through aggressive public education, a campaign in which Cramp would feature prominently.

Even though the Pure Food and Drugs Act staked out new territory in the government’s interest in public health, few federal resources were available to regulate medicine; each state had (and still has) its own medical board and standards of practice. As such, the AMA as a national organization was one of the few institutions that could conceivably standardize the practice of medicine. Cramp thought the AMA was taking on a job that should in theory be done by the government; however,

the exigencies of politics make it well-nigh impossible for health agencies to tell unpleasant truths when these involve huge vested interests. Nevertheless, if the public’s health is to be served, these truths must be told. The medical profession of America, recognizing this fact has assumed this responsibility and is discharging it through the Bureau of Investigation. (Cramp 1933, 54)

The American Medical Association, as part of its attempt to promote the interests of its members, became, in the words of Eric W. Boyle, “the primary arbiter in disputes over the legitimacy of medical therapies” (Boyle 2013, 62). This aspect of the professionalization of American medicine was achieved largely through the efforts of Arthur J. Cramp. As soon as Cramp was hired on as an editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, he began contributing regular pieces about quackery to it. As part of the general push to improve the quality of medical information available to physicians and the public, the AMA established the Propaganda for Reform Department, which grew out of the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry and was headed by Cramp (Cramp 1933, 51). Cramp believed in what he once called “public education through publicity” (Cramp 1920, 788), and he believed that “the best that the medical profession can do in protecting the public is to turn the light on the methods of the faddist and the quack, so that his ignorance or fraud becomes apparent” (Cramp 1927b, 727–728). This was the mission of the Propaganda for Reform Department, which became the Bureau of Investigation in 1925 and the Department of Investigation in 1958 (Hafner et al. 1992, viii).

The centerpiece of the Propaganda Department was a growing collection of materials related to quackery. The collection grew out of information from Cramp’s prodigious correspondence with professionals and members of the public who queried the AMA for information about a variety of treatments, practices, and practitioners that they encountered. Between 1918 and 1930, the number of letters answered by Cramp’s office ballooned from under two thousand inquiries per year to over twelve thousand a year (Boyle 2013, 79). A fairly typical example of how this collection grew bit by bit can be seen in the file for a treatment called “Spray-O-Zone.” In 1925, Cramp received a query letter from Francis E. Fronczak, Buffalo, New York’s Public Health Commissioner. Fronczak asked for any information the AMA had on Spray-O-Zone, a nighttime nasal spray that claimed to “protect your children from infantile paralysis [polio],” and he included a sample of the nostrum in its packaging. On October 9, 1925, Cramp replied to the query:

Your letter of September 23 was received in due course as was also the specimen of “Spray-O-Zone”. As we had no record of Spray-O-Zone and had received no inquiries whatever about it, we were not justified in going to any large amount of work in investigating the nostrum. We did, however, ask the A.M.A. Chemical Laboratory to make a preliminary examination of the product. (Spray-O-Zone, 1925–1927)

He quotes the lab report, in which the chemists suggest that Spray-O-Zone was borax and potassium nitrate dissolved in water. A synopsis of the cursory qualitative evaluation of Spray-O-Zone appeared in the February 12, 1927, edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (Cramp 1927a, 501). All of these items, and the packaging material, are preserved in the Spray-O-Zone folder. Through thousands and thousands of similar exchanges with physicians, regulators, and members of the public, Cramp steadily amassed a vast arsenal of information to unleash against medical hucksters and their enablers. Within five years of arriving at the AMA, according to historian James Harvey Young, “Cramp’s office contained over 12,000 cards in a ‘Fake File,’ listing products, firms, and names of promoters. His ‘Testimonial File’ held the names of over 13,000 American and 3,000 foreign doctors who had given testimonials for proprietary drugs” (Young 1967, 131–2). By 1937, this card catalogue had expanded to some 300,000 entries (Boyle 2013, 80). Eventually, the collection would grow to 3,500 files spread over some ten thousand folders, totalling 370 cubic feet of material, or, as the archivists who described and catalogued the entire collection put it the 1990s, 185 standard file drawers (Hafner et al. 1992, x).

Cramp made extensive use of this collection during his time at the AMA. He wrote a weekly column in JAMA, where he put the extraordinary medical claims to scrutiny, and he contributed the occasional article to H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine and the AMA’s popular health magazine, Hygeia, for which he was an advisor (Fishbein 1969, 132). Not only did he investigate the products and quacks, but he also looked into the histories of the people involved, gathered information about their business plan, fact-checked advertisements, discussed the reasons that quacks were so convincing, and generally pulled back the curtain of a type of medicine grounded in marketing rather than science.

Among Cramp’s other duties, he answered thousands of letters written to the AMA by laymen, Better Business Bureaus, and the advertising managers of publications that vetted ads they printed (Cramp 1933, 52). His department also supplied services that members of the public sought from government agencies, for instance, handling queries about questionable medical claims, products, and services that had been redirected to the AMA by local, state, and federal authorities. The AMA answered questions from government authorities seeking information about questionable medical practices that had appeared in their jurisdictions, and, said Cramp, “[played] an important part in bringing to the attention of state and federal officials schemes and methods that seem to be a menace to the public health, a violation of the law, or both” (Cramp 1933, 53). Starting in 1912, the Bureau also published educational materials, including posters, slide shows, and offprints of Cramp’s JAMA articles about different forms of quackery. Much of that material, in turn, was gathered into Cramp’s three volumes of Nostrums and Quackery, which he described as “a veritable encyclopedia on the nostrum evil and quackery” (Cramp 1933, 51–53). These were published between 1911 and 1936. Cramp was so central to the fight against quackery in the early twentieth century, Young remarks, that “scarcely an investigation was launched by a regulatory agency but that an inquiry went to Cramp to see what information the AMA already had on hand” (Young 1967, 132).

One of the challenges that dogged Cramp throughout his career was lax advertising standards. Though the Pure Food and Drug Act regulated what could be said on drug packaging, it did nothing to regulate advertisements and marketing of drugs elsewhere. Cramp knew that he was fighting an uphill battle as long as patent medicine manufacturers were able to market directly to potential consumers. His critiques of nostrum advertisements tended to focus on a few themes. First is the use of “selling copy,” which sought to plant a need for a product in the minds of a target audience rather than indicating where products for a preexisting need could be found.

In practice, ads for quack remedies were intended to convince members of the public that they were sick with a particular condition, a sort of unethical, induced hypochondria. “No man,” Cramp argued, “has any moral right to so advertise as to make well persons think they are sick and sick persons to think they are very sick. Such advertising is an offence against the public health” (Cramp 1918, 757). He roundly condemned “such periodicals and newspapers as are not above sharing the blood-money” of quack remedies (Cramp 1911b, 134). He saw these periodicals as enabling especially cruel fraudsters, or as he described them, “The swindler who sells stock in bogus companies to presumably intelligent human beings is a gentleman compared with those scoundrels who lie to the sick, humbug the suffering and fraudulently take the money of the incapacitated” (Cramp 1911a, 56).

Second, while other forms of merchandise that did not perform their advertised function or purpose would quickly be found out, fake medicine conspired with nature to trick patients into believing that fake treatments worked:

The healing power of nature … is such, fortunate for biologic perpetuity, that the general tendency of the disordered animal economy is to get well. … In probably eighty per cent of all human ailments the afflicted person gets well whether he does something for his indisposition or does nothing for it. Herein lies the opportunity of the quack and the nostrum vendor. (Cramp 1924, 423)

He lamented the same difficulty modern quackbusters have in convincing the already committed that they are wrong and notes the power of the post hoc fallacy, which allows patients to mistake “sequence for effect” (Cramp 1918, 756).

Cramp also despised the use of testimonials in advertising, knowing how misleading they could be. Cramp’s fights against testimonials were some of his most devastating attacks on quacks’ credibility. A 1913 investigation into a supposed tuberculosis cure called Pulmonol is a case in point.

The testimonial-givers are, as always, divided into two classes; those who really had tuberculosis and those who did not have it. As we have said many times, it is useless to investigate fresh testimonials. Most of them are written in good faith and not until the cases have progressed further are the victims undeceived as to the efficiency of the nostrum. It is therefore necessary to wait a year or two before looking into testimonials of this class. We then find, invariably, that the consumptive who had relied on the nostrum is dead. (Cramp 1913, 1998)

Cramp then lists nine patients who had provided testimony on behalf of Pulmonal that had appeared either in newspapers or in advertising pamphlets. Cramp had statements from patients’ physicians and some of the patients themselves, and, as so often was the case, he often found that the patients had either never been sick (if they existed in the first place), had self-diagnosed their disease, were still sick, or had died of the ailment they thought they had beaten (Cramp 1913, 1998–1999). When possible, Cramp would juxtapose a patient’s testimonial with their obituary, as was possible when “Sargon,” a preparation that was 18 percent alcohol, placed an ad in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle featuring JR Kimber’s testimony on June 25, 1930, five days after the same paper had announced his death (Cramp 1930, 285). Especially vexing to Cramp was that the Pure Food and Drugs Act regulated claims made only on packaging, not the claims made elsewhere. He used this fact to suggest a clever way that the public could check the magnitude of nostrum makers’ false claims: “One can with almost mathematical accuracy determine the falsity of modern ‘patent medicine’ advertising: Subtract the claims made on the trade package from those made elsewhere; what remains—and the residuum will be large—is falsehood!” (Cramp 1920, 788).

Another important aspect of Cramp’s educational project at the AMA was to give public lectures to schools, professional groups, and civic organizations across the country. He gave talks on subjects such as “Patent Medicine and the Public Health,” “Pink Pills and Panaceas,” “Fighting Deafness Quackery,” and “Objectionable Medical Advertising.” The AMA did not charge for Cramp’s appearances (they only asked that a projector be available for his slides). During the early 1930s, Cramp was giving dozens of talks a year.

In June 1934, Cramp was in Cleveland attending the AMA’s annual conference when he suffered a debilitating heart attack from which he never fully recovered. He was bedridden for several weeks following the episode, and when he returned to work, he tired very easily and was unable to keep his former pace. As a result, he canceled numerous presentations and took a drastically reduced workload. As he explained in a letter dated January 1935, turning down an offer to give a presentation in St. Clair County, Missouri:

Last June, on the day I reached Cleveland for the annual meeting, I came down with a coronary thrombosis that kept me in the hospital for nearly six weeks and kept me away from my work for over four months. I am still able to work only at a very greatly diminished tempo and as avoiding all evening talks. As a matter of fact, I turned down some talks right here in Chicago because they were to be given in the evening. (Cramp, Arthur J., Correspondence)

By September of 1935, the frustrating limitations that Cramp’s heart attack placed on him prompted him to retire prematurely. In a letter dated September 24, 1935, Cramp explained:

I have found that it is impossible for me to keep up my work here at the A.M.A. headquarters, and I expect in a few weeks’ time (the end of November) to give up my work entirely. I had hoped to be able to stick it out until the end of November of next year, when I should have completed thirty years of continuous service, but I find that is impossible. (“Cramp, Arthur J., Correspondence”)

In his retirement, he moved to Fort Lauderdale and then to North Carolina. After he retired, he still corresponded with the AMA and his editor Morris Fishbein, and he completed and published the third and final volume of Nostrums and Quackery.

Only one detailed description of Cramp’s personality seems to exist, from W.W. Bauer, Cramp’s colleague at the AMA during his final years with the organization, who was responding to an inquiry from the historian James Harvey Young. Bauer, who directed the AMA’s Bureau of Health and Public Instruction, gave details that one would scarcely be able to perceive in Cramp’s publications and correspondence. Bauer reported that Cramp was “typical of the small, slight Englishman. He was slender, quick, and birdlike in his movements with ruddy cheeks, clear blue eyes, [had] a small clipped mustache, and an imperial. In his later years, his hair and whiskers grew white.” Cramp was a “perfectionist,” and this trait characterized both his work and his personal habits. “He was always perfectly groomed and meticulously dressed,” said Bauer. “He never sat down on a chair without first running his fingers over it to be sure there was no dust. He was also particular about his food and might be called a true gourmet. He ordered the best of food and usually in considerable variety and fairly large quantity, but he ate only a little of each. He usually had a bottle of imported ale with a meal and only took a few sips.” Bauer said Cramp’s home life was “devoted to reading and study” (Cramp, Arthur J., Correspondence, n.d.). Cramp was a cultured man and was a member of the Chicago Literary Club and the Chicago Ornithology Society, as well as numerous medical associations. Cramp wrote with a sharp wit and keen sense of the absurd, and he kept a copy of Lewis Carroll’s works by his desk to get in the proper mindset to write about the absurdities he was fighting (Young 1967, 132). In an article about quack treatments that had received U.S. patents, Cramp singled out a concoction patented in 1913 by (the late) Alois Viquerat that claimed:

The present invention relates to a composition which is intended to be used internally and which confers to the organisms immunity against the following microbial infectious illnesses: diphtheria, pneumonia, typhus, scarlet fever, influenza, septic infections, cerebral-spinal meningitis, syphilis, pest, cholera and tuberculosis; it is also effective in another kind of disease, viz. goiter.” (Viquerat 1913)

Cramp wryly noted, “By the time the patent was granted the inventor was dead and his estate got it. Since, by the use of his own preparation he should have been immune to practically all diseases, he probably died of senility” (Cramp 1926, 191–192). His colleagues at the AMA joked that quacks “had been pursued into the beyond by Doctor Cramp and his unrelenting ridicule” (Cramp, Arthur J., Correspondence).

Dr. Cramp died at the age of seventy-nine, in Hendersonville, North Carolina, on November 25, 1951, according to his obituary in JAMA, of arteriosclerosis and urema. The editors remembered him as a “prolific and constant contributor to the Journal, and a pioneer in the fight against quackery and fraud in the healing arts” (“Deaths” 1951, 1773). The legacy he left behind was well expressed in an earlier review of his Nostrums and Quackery series in the British Medical Journal:

All volumes have been compiled by Dr. Cramp, who for thirty years has led the struggle against heartless fraud. This is a fine record of courageous persistence in public service. The persistence is all the more remarkable because the struggle is endless. … Whenever a fraud is exposed half a dozen new ones spring up to take its place, but Dr. Cramp has never been disheartened by the unending nature of the task to which he devoted his life. (“Work” 1937, 565)

The AMA closed the Department of Investigation in 1975. The files that Cramp and his successors had gathered over the decades became known as the American Medical Association Health Fraud and Alternative Medicine Collection, which is the only AMA archive that is open to non-members.

• Boyle, Eric W. 2013. Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America. Santa Barbara: Praeger.
• “Cramp, Arthur J., Correspondence, May, 1934–August, 1963.” Folder 0176-03. American Medical Association Historical Health Fraud and Alternative Medicine Collection. American Medical Association, Chicago.
• “Cramp, Arthur J, Special Data.” Folder 0175-10. American Medical Association Historical Health Fraud and Alternative Medicine Collection. American Medical Association, Chicago.
• Cramp, Arthur J. 1911a. The Van Bysterveld Medicine Company. Journal of the American Medical Association 56(1) (January 7): 56–7.
• ———. 1911b. Lawrence Hill, A.M., D.D., M.D.: Another consumption cure fake in Jackson, Michigan. Journal of the American Medical Association 56(2) (January 14): 134–137.
• ———. 1913. Pulmonol. Journal of the American Medical Association 61(2) (November 29): 1998–1999.
• ———. 1918. Modern advertising and the nostrum evil. American Journal of Public Health 8(10) (October 1): 756–758.
• ———. 1920. Truth in advertising drug products. American Journal of Public Health 10(10) (October): 783–789.
• ———. 1924. Therapeutic thaumaturgy. The American Mercury (December): 723–30.
• ———. 1926. Patent office magic—medical. The American Mercury (June): 187–194.
• ———. 1927a. Some miscellaneous nostrums. Journal of the American Medical Association 88(7) (February 12): 501.
• ———. 1927b. Fakes and fads in deafness cures. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 2(12) (December 1): 726–728.
• ———. 1930. A posthumous testimonial. Journal of the American Medical Association 95(4) (July 26): 285.
• ———. 1933. The work of the Bureau of Investigation. Law and Contemporary Problems 1(1) (December): 51–54.
• Deaths. 1951. Journal of the American Medical Association 147(18) (December 29): 1773–1774.
• Fishbein, Morris. 1969. Morris Fishbein, M.D.: An Autobiography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
• Fresh family medicines. 1851. Semi-weekly Camden Journal 2(90) (November 14): 1.
• Hafner, Arthur W., James G. Carson, and John F. Zwicky, eds. 1992. Guide to the American Medical Association Historical Health Fraud and Alternative Medicine Collection. Chicago: American Medical Association.
• Page, Douglas, and Adrian Baranchuck. 2010. The Flexner Report: 100 years later. International Journal of Medical Education 1: 74–754.
• “Spray-O-Zone, 1925–1927” Folder 0818-14. American Medical Association Historical Health Fraud and Alternative Medicine Collection. American Medical Association, Chicago.
• The work of Dr. Cramp. 1937. British Medical Journal 1(3975) (March): 565.
• Viquerat, Alois. 1913. Medicinal composition. US 1081069 A. (December 9). Google Patents. Available online at https://patents.google.com/patent/US1081069.
• Young, James Harvey. 1967. The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The authors would like to thank Eve Siebert for her assistance in genealogical research and the student tutors of the Stockton University Writing Center for help deciphering truly baffling handwriting.

Robert Blaskiewicz (robert.blaskiewicz@stockton.edu) is assistant professor of critical thinking and first-year studies at Stockton University in Galloway, New Jersey. He studies medical quackery, conspiracy theory, and pseudoscience.

Mike Jarsulic (mjarsulic@bsd.uchicago.edu) is the senior HPC administrator at the University of Chicago’s Biological Sciences Division. His skeptical interests include cancer quackery, the history of skepticism, and philosophy of science.

Source: Pixabay

The holiday season is upon us, and you know what that means: eating foods you don’t really like because you’ve always done it, seeing relatives you’ve successfully avoided for eleven months, and asking your children to abandon all the skeptical principles you’ve taught them so they’ll accept that a relativity-defying fat man can travel the world instantly and apport his way into your house.

But it’s not just in December! We recently showed that we skeptics can have blind spots all year long, just like everyone else. So by popular demand, here is another gathering of the superstitions that still plague our otherwise rational minds.Eat, drink, and be wary!

Evan Bernstein (cohost, Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast): As a young child, I developed a habit of sleeping with my head under the covers because ghosts were a very real thing to me, and I couldn't stand the idea of ghosts finding me while I slept. So I would "hide" from them under the security of the covers.

While I have long since "exorcised" my belief in ghosts, I still catch myself occasionally pulling the covers over my head. On a practical level, it probably has thermal advantages (it warms up the bed quicker by keeping the heat emanating from my head under the blankets), but on a subconscious level, it is a very old habit based on a very old fear that I, apparently, have not yet entirely purged from my mind.

Stuart Vyse (“Behavior and Belief” columnist for Skeptical Inquirer, author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition): I should say from the beginning that I am not superstitious at all, as far as I can tell. However, there are a number of superstitions that I cannot help but find endearing. The most obvious example is knocking on wood. You may have noticed that people almost never knock on wood when they are alone. Unlike many other superstitions, knocking on wood tends to happen during conversation with another person, and more than anything else, it is an expression of hope. A shared wish that whatever has just been mentioned will come to pass.

In many cases, it is considered a jinx to mention something you want. For example, it is a well-known superstition in baseball that, when a pitcher is in the midst of a no-hit performance, it is a strict taboo to mention it. No-hitters are extremely rare, and anyone who mentions a pitcher's no-hitter in the dugout risks ruining it. Knocking on wood seems to be a shared gesture aimed at removing the jinx that might come from mentioning something you want to happen. To me, there is something about this shared superstition that is optimistic and sweet.

Miles Greb (writer of science and skepticism comic After the Gold Rush): I used to have this idea, silly as it was, that my dice needed to be worn in. I suppose it's some kind of gambler’s fallacy. I had to roll them a bunch before playing Dungeons & Dragons to “roll out the ones.”

This idea was part of the culture of D&D where I came up playing games. I suppose I never really believed it truly, but it was fun engaging in it culturally. If someone did roll a one with new dice, we would all ridicule them for not putting the work in to roll out the ones before the game.

Grant Ritchey (dentist, Science-Based Medicine blog contributor, cohost of Prism podcast): Things like hotels not having a labeled thirteenth floor are interesting because it represents an institutionalized (or social) brand of superstition, not just one person’s beliefs (although I suppose it’s all social, since we get superstitions from society). I’m a sports fan, so any superstition/ritual is intriguing to me. The most superstitious thing I will do is if my beloved Kansas Jayhawks are losing a basketball game, I’ll go watch the game on a different TV set.

Celestia Ward (caricaturist, cohost of the Squaring the Strange podcast): Superstitions that are anchored to OCD-type rituals sometimes tug at me—avoiding cracks on sidewalks, making a wish when you glimpse the clock reading 11:11, that sort of thing. And rationally I know it has no significance, but some kind of ritualistic muscle memory pulls me to do it.

I regularly engage in the knock-on-wood tradition, not for any obsessive reason, but simply because it’s a fun little challenge to locate some wooden object nearby at a moment’s notice. It feels like a win if you do—and if you have to resort to knocking on your forehead, then you lose that round!

Another superstition-ish thing for me is tipping. Plenty of people think it’s not just bad manners but in fact bad luck to not tip appropriately. And I call it wishful thinking more than superstition, but I always tip well on the hope that what goes around comes around. Not “karma,” that misunderstood mystical notion, but rather a recognition of human kinship: I will tip you well because I have been tipped well in the past. It’s my little way of fighting against the tragedy of the commons. I can’t say it’s completely out of the superstition camp though, because tipping the lunch server a decent amount does make me feel like things are more likely to go better in my life.

Rob Palmer (author of CSI’s “Well-Known Skeptic” column, Guerilla Skeptics on Wikipedia volunteer):If I’m eating Chinese food in a restaurant or even as take-out, if a fortune cookie is provided, then I feel uncomfortable about leaving it unopened and uneaten after the meal. I’m not even sure why this is, but it’s been a “thing” as far back as I can remember. I speculate that I was told that it was bad luck at some point in my childhood, but I’m not even sure of that. It’s even odder because I feel no compulsion to read the “fortune,” which one might think would be the reason. Like, “What if I’m going to be told something I should know, and miss it?”

Kenneth W. Krause (“Science Watch” columnist for Skeptical Inquirer): I'm an avid mountain biker.Sometimes, the trail leads me into high-risk predicaments in which stopping is simply not an option.Years ago, I somehow concocted the notion that, if I installed my water bottle into its cage with the label facing directly rightward, I'd stand a significantly better chance of remaining intact and unbloodied. The results have proven inconclusive, but I continue to indulge the concoction because doing so affects no one but perhaps me.

Carrie Poppy (journalist, comedian, cohost of the Oh No, Ross and Carrie podcast): I won't sign my soul over, even for a cookie. It's too valuable an imaginary concept!

Ross Blocher (animator, cohost of the Oh No, Ross and Carrie podcast): Funny enough, I've already sold my soul a couple times, once for a DVD and another time for a cookie. No one seemed to notice, so I may sell it again. The last time I caught myself thinking superstitiously was at the wheel, when I expressed joy that traffic had been so clear. I had this momentary jolt of panic: "Oh shoot! I shouldn't have said that." I quickly realized that was ridiculous and that my thoughts have zero effect on the general flow of traffic. This was many years ago, but I think I may have overcompensated to the point of a new superstition.

If someone makes a bold prediction about something unlikely ("There will be a big earthquake next month," or "The next five cars that pass us will be green"), I immediately assume they'll be wrong. I tend to overcorrect for their certitude and place my expectations lower than the chances of that outcome occurring naturally. This burned me in the last presidential election.

Carrie Poppy: Side note: I did randomly think, "There will be a big earthquake," and told Ross about it so we could mentally log whether it really happened (instead of only remembering the hits and forgetting the misses). Sure enough, there was no "big earthquake" in the next thirty days. There was one big enough for us to feel it about two months later, but .... we live in Los Angeles, so that's not exactly shocking. We've gotten pretty good at gamifying our own funny, evolutionary mental quirks.

Jonathan Jarry (McGill Office for Science and Society, cohost of the Body of Evidence podcast):There is one superstition that was particularly intriguing and that has a neat "skeptical" end. It's the claim that Chinese people die more on the fourth of every month than on any other day, because "four" and "death" are homophones in Cantonese and Mandarin. Essentially, we're told, having a literal "death day" on the calendar increases mortality rates on that very day. It's a superstition that kills! I've even heard a major researcher proclaim as much to a large audience, as if this were a fact.

Well, I did some investigating, and it turns out that the one study that showed this link was deeply flawed. The researcher cherry-picked the data he looked at, it would seem, as other researchers thoroughly debunked this link. I wrote this up as an article for the McGill Office for Science and Society, and someone from Susan Gerbic's Guerilla Skepticism updated the Wikipedia page on this superstition to reflect this knowledge. It's known as the Baskerville Effect, and now people visiting its Wikipedia page will know that it's balderdash.

***

There you have it, following superstitions can actually help resolve them! Also note another OCD incidence and a pair of wood-knockers. Maybe skeptical superstitions come in twos? Did you notice my new one? Needing exactly ten participants for each of these articles! What are some of your unshakable superstitions? Share this article on social media, tag Skeptical Inquirer, and include your own.

Here’s what we know: People report seeing things in the sky they cannot explain. Reported objects come in all shapes and sizes: saucers and triangles and cigar shapes and everything in between. Glowing orbs and rotating lights have been reported as well. Some people report encountering entities associated with these objects. They, too, come in all shapes and sizes, but most reports of the beings are anthropomorphic. Due to a lack of better explanation, some people conclude (despite all the differences) that there’s a core truth here that the human race is not alone, that it’s being visited or coexisting with an entity that appears to be so advanced and mysterious that it’s nearly godlike. We don’t know if the entities are extraterrestrials, interdimensional beings, or some combination thereof. They are, however, undoubtedly the greatest players of hide-and-seek the human race has ever encountered.

In the early days of UFOlogy, that of the 1940s, 1950s, and some decades later, the extraterrestrial hypothesis was the preferred explanation. But it never panned out; there never was a White House landing or equally clear public revelation. So UFOlogy evolved, only in the wrong direction. An intelligence was still assumed in play, and the search continued to explain what it was. Name your flavor of what it is and there’s now a book, blog, or article trying to convince you of the author’s preferred hypothesis: extraterrestrials, ultradimensionals, interdimensionals, and even demons bent on perverting Christians.

In an attempt to throw a larger fishing net to explain the diversity of the phenomenon, Jacques Vallee penned Passport to Magonia in 1969, cataloging stories similar to twentieth-century UFO encounters. Vallee showed that UFO reports go back as far as the oldest written records and are just as varied as today. Sightings were interpreted differently depending on the culture, era, and all the other variables afforded by the time in history in which they occurred. Not only things in the skies but encounters with nonhuman beings were reported as well (Vallee 1993). Human history is filled with stories of demons, succubi, fairies, angels, leprechauns, Jinn, ad infinitum. What they all have in common is they are all just stories. This cannot be stressed enough. There is no evidence that passes scientific muster to conclude there really is an alien intelligence interacting with human beings.

Let’s take the UFO occupants for starters. Joe Nickell’s Alien Time Line (first published in the September/October 1997 Skeptical Inquirer) is a handy chart listing numerous types of reported nonhumans in chronological order of when they were seen. Most are anthropomorphic: a head, two arms, a midsection, and two legs. Some look like robots or a toaster. There’s a big blue grasshopper, too (Nickell 1997). Based on just this, if we have a nonhuman intelligence piloting UFOs, it appears there’s a lot of different species who managed to make contact but remain relatively hidden for whatever reason. The question has to be asked and answered: Is it likely different races just happen to evolve on different planets/dimensions to be anthropomorphic and these many races are able to get here and they all have chosen to stay out of human reach? What are the odds of this? Or are all the reported races better explained by a psychological explanation? Until we have real tangible evidence, a psychological explanation seems more realistic according to Occam’s razor.

What of the fantastic machines? After ruling out balloons, airplanes, drones, and birds—after one concludes the UFO is an “other”—what then? How do we compare the saucer to the triangle? And what of the numerous kinds of saucers—fat, slim, wide, nearly ball shaped? How about the single orb of light to the many orbs of light? Are we to conclude numerous types of craft are being used by numerous species of aliens? Or is faulty human psychology a better explanation?

In an attempt to explain the elusive nature of this intelligence, Greg Bishop (2017) uses a co-creation hypothesis. This hypothesis argues that UFO alien intelligence interacting with humanity is so alien that the human mind describes it the only way it can, which accounts for the varied sightings and encounters. This hypothesis fails in that it assumes there’s an alien intelligence in the first place. The horse is before the cart.

Where Bishop is correct is the human mind is a key part of the phenomenon; that is, when it comes across something it cannot account for, it does its best. And since the human mind quite often sees purpose in random events and natural occurrences, it’s hardly a surprise we have a history of fairies and demons and now, in our space age, the varied descriptions of extraterrestrials or interdimensional beings in their wondrous flying machines.

UFOlogy has an endless supply of anecdotal reports of unidentified things seen in the sky. There are also endless photographs and videos, many of which turn out to be hoaxes or are later identified. The logical fallacy occurs when the combination of all UFO reports that remain unidentified is attributed to a nonhuman intelligence as opposed to something else. It’s one thing to see something in the sky you cannot identify; it’s quite another to conclude after running through the possibilities that what you saw was of an intelligence yet to be defined by us. Even if you truly could rule out the mundane, can you seriously confirm intelligent alien control? The first thing we have to do before assuming there’s an alien intelligence driving some UFOs is to verify there’s an alien intelligence there at all. And most important, verify that it isn’t in our own heads. The sheer number and diversity of sightings and encounters suggest human psychology is more in operation here than an objective phenomenon.

As I pondered this, Benjamin Radford’s SI article “The Curious Question of Ghost Taxonomy” came to my attention, and its argument regarding ghosts is exactly what I was thinking regarding UFOs. Radford writes, “Over the years various attempts have been made to classify and categorize ghosts … usually according to eyewitness reports.” And then he makes it clear anecdotal information is subject to human error and is unreliable. Radford continues, making the point throughout the article that there are so many definitions with equal amounts of evidence as to pretty much make the whole subject useless. He writes, “Trying to classify inherently unknown entities whose very existence and nature remains unproven is a fool’s errand: How many types of ghosts are there? As many as you want there to be” (Radford 2018).

Speaking particularly about cryptozoology but applicable to UFOlogy, geologist and investigator Sharon Hill notes:

The primary problem … by and large [is they] assume that a mystery creature is out there for them to find. They begin with a bias … . They are not testing a hypothesis but instead seeking evidence to support their position … . They also begin with the wrong question. Instead of “what happened?” they ask “Is it a cryptid?” (Loxton and Prothero 2015)

I discussed this topic with Tyler Kokjohn, professor of microbiology at Midwestern University, who also publishes and contributes to articles critiquing alien abduction claims. He wrote to me in a July 5, 2018, email:

Seeking confirmatory evidence for a position is not a sin; scientists champion hypotheses all the time. The problem here is that they never get any data or [they] interpret junk data in the most hopeful way. In science at some point no means no and is accepted as such. In ufology it is a signal to multiply hypotheses to explain failure.

Back to ghosts, Radford writes:

Ghost reports and sightings can of course be catalogued, analyzed, and categorized, but ghosts themselves cannot. This is a basic mistake, confusing a type of ghost for a type of ghost report; they are not the same thing at all, and ghost hunters confuse the two at their peril. A ghost report is merely a record of something that someone—for whatever reason and under whatever circumstances—could not explain and chose to attribute to an unseen spirit and may or may not reflect an actual ghost appearance. (Radford 2018)

Change the word ghost to UFO in that above paragraph, and you have the current field of UFOlogy.

Radford concludes in his column that although ghost hunters are convinced ghosts exist, they still can’t tell you what they are. The same applies to those who believe some UFOs are of extraterrestrial origin or are otherwise an “other” intelligence. What ghost hunters and UFO hunters have in common is both assume their unproven entity of choice is an intelligence. And they do so by the fallacy of arguing from ignorance.

UFO believers who have concluded there’s an intelligence flying around have offered just as many properties on the ET as ghost hunters have on ghosts and the religious have on the old gods. I say this with purpose. UFOlogy operates very much like a religion. Absent real evidence of aliens and their machines, faith is the operating virtue of the believer. Why are they here? Why did they come? Why are they not more communicative? Any day now, a big enough sighting will come that everyone will have to acknowledge it. Disclosure is always expected but never comes. Aliens are preparing humanity for full contact that never comes. Chosen people are picked to spread their message. Aliens have replaced the angels. Aliens will help us solve (insert coming disaster here). If there’s any evidence to Jung’s archetypes, aliens and flying saucers are the space age imprints on them.

Human history is full of misunderstandings and wrong interpretations and in many cases is thought to have an amazing godlike intelligence acting on its behalf. Once it was thought the sun went around Earth due to the gods; the rain fell for the same reason, and the crops grew when they favored them. Disease struck when the gods were displeased, and mental illness was the work of a demon. And yet, time and again, these mysteries were found to have natural explanations. Attributing intelligence to mysterious, unidentifiable phenomena seems to be a very human thing to do. It is my conviction that it was only through the error of claiming to already know the answer that questions stopped being asked and it took longer than it should have to solve what is common knowledge today.

UFOlogists suffer from the same confirmation bias, arguing from ignorance, and the god of the gaps fallacies as ghost hunters, cryptid hunters, and religious types. They are all prone to draw conclusions that what they experienced was a nonhuman intelligence. In fact, the bottom line is probably more a very human intelligence that is much more faulty—and yet creative—than we give credit.

• Bishop, Greg. 2017. The co-creation hypothesis: Human perception, the informational universe, and the overhaul of UFO research. In UFOS: Reframing the Debate. Ed. by Robbie Graham. White Crow Books.
• Loxton, Daniel, and Daniel Prothero. 2015. Abominable Science! Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Nickell, Joe. 1997. Extraterrestrial iconography. Skeptical Inquirer 21(5) (September/October): 18–19. Alien timeline graphic available online at https://www.joenickell.com/Iconographer/Iconographer2.html; accessed July 6, 2018.
• Radford, Benjamin. 2018. The curious question of ghost taxonomy. Skeptical Inquirer 42(3) (July/August).
• Vallee, Jacques. 1993. Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds. Chicago: Contemporary Books.

On the eve of CSIcon 2018, my wife, Donna, and I arrived in Las Vegas excited to begin a week of learning, networking, and the pure enjoyment of hanging out with friends—both old and new. After checking into our hotel, we joined Susan Gerbic and Mark Edward for a quick lunch before the four of us headed out for our first adventure: touring Zak Bagans’s The Haunted Museum.

The museum came to my attention last year during CSIcon 2017, but I was unable to make it over there due to an already packed schedule. I had heard from several of my paranormal enthusiast friends that it was a “must-see” attraction. The website boasts that guests “will venture down creepy winding hallways and secret passages into more than 30 rooms that rival scenes from Hollywood horror films, setting the stage for frightening facts about each paranormal piece” (Bagans 2017), which included the Dybbuk Box (which inspired the film The Possession), Dr. Kevorkian’s “Death Van,” the basement staircase from the Demon House (a film by Bagans), and many more.

The four of us arrived at the museum early that afternoon and got in line. While waiting for well over an hour to enter, we were given waivers to sign. When reading the waiver, one can certainly see the tone being set for the tour; listing first and foremost that the tour may include “spirit detection activity, interaction with spiritual and/or unexplainable phenomenon, and/or other unexplainable, unusual or paranormal activities or interactions which necessarily include certain risks which may or may not be foreseeable.” The rest of the waiver basically had you sign away any rights in case one would trip or otherwise injure him- or herself inside the extremely dark interior.

The waiver also allows the staff to take photos of guests to be used in “any or all publications and websites.” However, they were sure to repeat ad nauseam about their strict policy of “No Video/Audio Recording or Photography.” We were told several times while waiting in line, it’s printed on the back of the ticket, there were signs up in multiple locations, and the first of too many guides reminded us of this as her cheerful smile turned into a serious and stern look of “You Better Listen or Else.” Also, no ghost hunting was allowed—sorry, ghost hunters. You’re out of luck. We were also informed that no phone calls or texting was permitted during the tour.

After an hour of waiting outside, we were finally admitted into the museum. We handed in our waivers, received our tickets, and then … waited some more. After another fifteen minutes of waiting, our guide got the “all clear’” to get us started. The guide gathered us all on one side of the waiting room and asked if we had read the big warning sign on the wall. We were told we were going to read it again because it was a “Zak requirement.” The guide had everyone raise their right hand (mimicking a sworn oath) and repeat after her as she read the sign aloud: “This building is known to contain ghosts/spirits and cursed objects. By entering you agree that management will not be liable for any actions by these unseen forces.” Bagans was really taking the “cover your ass” advice to the max, though I’d eagerly follow the trial if someone sued the museum for damage done by an evil spirit that followed them home. Rest assured that my three skeptical companions and I fearlessly disregarded the dire warnings about the paranormal threat to our sanity, health—and our very lives!

The guide informed us of four optional rooms with the most allegedly haunted/cursed objects of all and if anyone felt uneasy or feared them, we could opt out from going into that room without fear of shame. The four items mentioned were Bela Lugosi’s mirror, the Dybbuk Box, Peggy the Doll, and the Demon House room. These rooms were the only reason I was here, so I can guarantee you, my dear reader, I was not “opting out.” No fainting couch would be needed for our team. Steeling my nerves in the face of unspeakable horrors that had apparently terrified countless ghost hunters, we were finally off!

... And then we went back outside. The tour took us around to a door on the opposite side of the building where we were greeted by our second guide. He brought us into two rooms. The first contained dozens of objects: human skulls, a huge doll house (with various photos of Bagans inside), dolls, a collection of Anton LaVey memorabilia, and a Zak Bagans Zoltar fortune telling machine, in which Zoltar was not Zoltar but Zak Bagans…complete with glowing eyes (this was the only thing I was jealous of). The second room contained various gambling items, including a large (and rigged) roulette table.

As we were ushered from dark room to dark room, it became clear that this “museum” was really more of a warehouse collection of Bagans’s stuff than a museum dedicated to haunted or cursed objects. We had been in four rooms already with only one allegedly haunted object—one out of hundreds so far. One room was set up like a wake, complete with an open coffin (with skeleton) at the front of a seating area. Our third guide popped out of a slightly hidden door beside the casket and spoke in such a dramatic and heavy accent that none of us understood anything he said. Another room was set up as a puppet theater with a few dozen puppets hanging around the room; it contained no haunted items. Although this particular guide was the highlight of the tour, the overall content was boring and felt like filler to make the tour longer and enhance the waiting experience.

As we were ushered from room to room, there was a clear sense we were being rushed through. I like to read everything, and many of the rooms contained multiple items with written descriptions alongside of them, which I and my fellow guests wanted to read. The problem was that when we tried, we were often pressured out of the room with a “come on, let’s go” look from the guide. I had the distinct impression that “quantity of guests” was much important than the “quality of experience.” Honestly, if I hadn’t been taking detailed notes, most of the experience would have been lost.

My overall impression of the museum was one of dissatisfaction. I went in expecting to see a museum showcasing a bunch of allegedly haunted objects (“cursed” sounds scarier) with interesting background stories. Instead, only a few “haunted” items were pointed out, and they turned out to have less-than-interesting (or factual) backgrounds than I was led to believe. Many areas/rooms were sideshow attractions: two hallways of mannequins in clown costumes, a guy putting a drill bit up his nose, and a diorama of a circus—nothing haunted, cursed, or even particularly interesting about these. I think the museum relies heavily on fans that are already convinced that the word of Zak Bagans is law, thus anything deemed “haunted” no doubt is—at least to them.

I expected to have time to view all the objects, read any descriptions posted alongside them, and to have better lighting in order to see what I was looking at. Instead, it was too dark (several guests tripped throughout the tour), and the guides actively discouraged any real examination of the featured items. The guides relied on a well-rehearsed script and seemed to just repeat paranormal claims that were introduced on Bagans’s television series Deadly Possessions. This series showcased many of the “haunted” items donated to the museum and their former owners. When asking questions that deviated from the script, the guides found themselves in uncharted territory (see my upcoming article on the Bela Lugsoi mirror).

Was it worth the $44 per person ticket price? Nope. It was a novelty that relied too heavily on the die-hard beliefs of fans and much less on the museum atmosphere of allowing the visitor to see and experience as much as possible. This was a disappointment, even from a geeky skeptic like me. I love visiting movie/film locations, seeing/touching screen-used props, and being able to visit objects and locations I’ve either investigated or read about in paranormal literature. But the overall experience here killed that excitement. Granted, Bagans does have a lot of very cool, very freaky furniture and Dime Museum props that I admired, but the overall quality of the experience was a disappointment.

I did miss an opportunity to meet Bagans and perhaps speak to him face-to-face. My wife noticed him standing behind a “secret” door we were ushered through. In a miscommunication, I didn’t realize she was trying to point him out to me (I thought she was referring to a guy hiding in an alcove waiting to jump out and scare guests). I regret the misunderstanding and the missed opportunity to speak to Bagans personally. It would have been interesting to get his opinion directly from him. Perhaps next time.

At this point I’m going to step aside and allow my friends, Susan Gerbic and Mark Edward, to give their own impressions of the museum. In addition, I will be following up this review with a few installments focusing on specific objects in the museum, specifically the Big Four items we were warned about. I’ll be taking a much closer look at a few of them.

Susan’s Impression - I’d not heard of the Haunted Museum before Kenny suggested a visit, but I’m always up for a good ghost story. We found the tour to be very expensive, $44 a person, and there was a long line. I think we waited ninety minutes to get inside where we could buy our tickets and wait for the tour to start. The tour guides were pleasant enough, trying not to show that they were rushing us along—while still rushing us along. The banter was very scripted; Mark leaned over a few times to whisper that we were being primed to experience something we weren’t actually going to see or feel in the museum. I was having a difficult time deciding if this was a “wink, wink, nod, nod” all-in-fun ghost tour. Or did they really believe they were bringing us through a building that had dead people trying to communicate? 

The artifacts were really interesting, with a mix of macabre clowns and dolls. Where they real antiques? We were told they were, but then again, we were told a lot that was unbelievable. The smells were very well done, something that Mark explains is necessary for a great séance. What disturbed me was the rooms exhibiting real death photos, especially the room that contained the bed where many men were tortured and murdered. There was a photo of a man getting injected with Clorox into his neck, so he could not scream. These are real people with real horrors, and they felt out of place in a museum like this. Likewise, with the Jerry Lewis clown costume and the story about how he made a movie about a clown escorting a child to the gas chamber in the Holocaust. The same was true of Kevorkian’s death van, complete with a mannequin representing a named woman who really did end her life in that van.

I think the museum really didn’t know what to focus on. Scaring the guests with people jumping out at them along corridors? Ghost stories about creepy dolls and boxes? But using real crime scene photos and real artifacts of death seemed like it crossed the line into sensationalism and murderabilia. I’ve been to the death museum in Los Angeles, which starts out with a video showing an embalming; at least there I knew what to expect. The people who run this place should decide if they are telling ghost stories with fun, scary effects or telling the stories of real people who did horrible things to living people. In my opinion, those are two very different things.

Mark’s Impression - If you asked me if I enjoyed the overall premise, I didn’t really care for it. For my money, when the term haunted is attached to any venue, it better be full of haunted relics, good storytellers, and an atmosphere that creates wonder as to whether objects might be real artifacts taken from real events or historic sources.

I don’t really see how paintings and other cast offs from serial killers, Manson’s trinkets, and Truman Capote’s ripped pajamas work into their haunted theme, unless there’s a connection related by the curator or tour guide, which wasn’t a part of the deal most of the time.

As customers walking through, we were basically left to make up our own ghost story for most of the tour. The employees were competent, and the individual objects were certainly creepy enough, but there was a clear lack of true interest or real passion for what these folks were presenting that left me feeling a bit conned. I don’t know what I expected, but at the prices we paid and after all being in Las Vegas, a little more showmanship and a little less hustle would have been better. There was one dwarf character used twice in the tour who was a standout and made the whole thing tolerable. Still, this and the other Grand Guignol set pieces were more like a side-show “ten-in-one” circus tent attraction that moves you along from room to room than a true museum. For me, the term museum implies a collection of some integrity or specificity, and having a side-show geek pound a nine-inch nail into his nostril as “The Human Blockhead” can be entertaining but has nothing to do with ghosts or hauntings. Padding like this just pisses me off.

No lingering or photos were allowed, which was major drawback that was nonsensical given the scenery and the out-front pitch. No one was allowed to take a really close look at anything for very long. The tour guides played a tag-team of completely unlinked tableaus, with each room’s separate story rattled off like a tired magician merely going through the motions of their tricks. It’s the “burn ’em and turn ’em” style of delivery common to places such as Disneyland and the Jungle Boat ride when the hippo pops his head out of the water. There’s no real scare here.

That said, I will admit that the general look of all of the set pieces and props is top rate, and I wondered throughout the hour-long tour how a ghost show television guy (Zak Bagans) could possibly have amassed such a huge selection of weirdness all on his own. I asked the gift shop staff how this was accomplished and was told Zak’s mom was an antique dealer. That explained a lot. The furniture, lighting, and design shows a real talent for interior decoration. Unfortunately, it’s like special effects in horror movies: without good actors and a good script, it’s is all just “for show.”I give it a seven out of ten.

• Bagans, Zak. 2017. About – The Haunted Museum. https://thehauntedmuseum.com/about/
• Edward, Mark. 2018. Personal email correspondence
• Gerbic, Susan. 2018. Personal email correspondence

The important things to remember about UFOs are, first, that they are just alleged sightings that are unidentified—that is, they are not proof of anything—and, second, that eyewitnesses make identification difficult by so often being mistaken. As UFO investigator Allan Hendry (1979, 6) aptly noted, “We only get to study reports of UFOs—not the UFOs themselves.

The term UFO is problematic. Often the phenomenon is neither “flying” nor an “object”; consider, for example, a bright disc that is really only the effect of a searchlight playing on a low cloud layer. Unidentified aerial phenomenon would be a more inclusive term (although itself not always accurate), but it seems we are stuck with UFO. Unfortunately, UFOs are mostly reported by untrained observers—those lacking necessary expertise in astronomy, atmospheric phenomena, aeronautics, physics, and perception, among other factors (McGaha 2009; Frazier et al. 1997). So, the widespread attitude that because they are unidentified they are therefore probably extraterrestrial craft is a logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance.

In fact—with careful, prompt investigation—most UFOs become IFOs, identified flying objects. To assist in this process, we have prepared the accompanying table (on pp. 35–36). It is necessarily oversimplified due to the number and complexity of factors involved. It cannot, of course, be expected to identify something that never existed (for example, a false claim) or that is—as so often is the case—seriously misperceived (such as a reflection on one’s window or windshield being perceived as a bright object at a distance). Nevertheless, the chart introduces several of the most common descriptions of UFOs, together with some of their possible identifications. (We have drawn heavily on Allan Hendry’s The UFO Handbook [1979], supplementing it with other sources—e.g., Klass 1976, Sheaffer 1980, and Frazier et al. 1997—as well as our own experiences.)

Observational Issues

Sightings are influenced by the conditions under which they are observed. For example, bright stars and planets may become UFOs due to being watched from a moving car and thus seeming to keep pace with it (Hendry 1979, 27).

An important basic observation-related fact is that neither an estimate of the presumed craft’s distance from the viewer nor its size or speed can be made unless one of the factors is known. With multiple unknowns, one is simply engaging in the wildest guessing. If the guess as to one of the three factors is in error, the others will be wrong accordingly.

The only way to objectively evaluate an object or light in the sky is by first characterizing it with (1) angular velocity (how fast it is moving through the sky, measured in degrees per second), (2) angular size (measured in degrees—for example a full moon subtends an angle of half a degree), and (3) angular position (measured in degrees of altitude and azimuth).

Illusions

For our purposes here, we define illusion as a deceptive but objectively existing image—that is, something that can actually be seen (and photographed), such as a mirage. We distinguish this from the mental image that is imaginary, hallucinatory, or the like, understanding that one can transform an objective image into something quite different by mental action (for example, one’s expectation may transform a light into the perception of a shiny metallic object).

Various common illusions need to be understood. One can occur when the observer stares at a bright light in the dark, whereupon it may seem to dart about, zigzag, wobble, etc. This can be caused by the natural, involuntary jerking movements of the human eye and is known as the autokinetic effect (Hendry 1979, 26, 44, 95).

Another illusory effect includes the movement and flashing of colors that are sometimes ascribed to a bright UFO seen at night. Called scintillation, it causes the “twinkling” of stars due to atmospheric turbulence—or of planets when our atmosphere is especially turbulent. It may occur even on a clear night and can affect a single celestial light (Hendry 1979, 26). Indeed, scintillation can affect any visible point of light. The effect results from refraction (bending) of the different wavelengths, producing (to the eye or camera) the changing colors and motion.

An illusion of hovering can occur when, for example, a slow-moving craft flies directly toward or away from the observer. This gives the impression that the “UFO” is remaining motionless and thus “hovering.” In one case, a New Hampshire UFO with colored lights appeared to remain stationary for a minute before it “moved away” from the observers “as if sensing their approach.” It was, in fact, a well-lit airplane, a DC-9, making its final approach to an airport. In one instance a UFO—another plane—was reported “hovering” in the distance for some twenty minutes (Hendry 1979, 37–38).

Size can also be illusory. For example, it is a human tendency that the brighter a light appears, the larger it is perceived.

The dramatic “disappearance” of a UFO may occur for a variety of reasons. An aircraft may shut off its bright lights or change the angle at which the observer views it. As well, a star, perhaps watched for a long time due to its flashing colors, may be obscured suddenly by moving clouds (Hendry 1979, 26, 38).

Many illusions occur in daytime as well. For example, a UFO that appears to move against the wind, and so supposedly cannot be a balloon, may be propelled by high-altitude winds that can differ in direction from ground winds (Hendry 1979, 61).

The UFO Impostors

Many things can go unidentified in the day or night sky, particularly to untrained observers—as most people are. (Interestingly, according to one study [Hynek 1977, 261] even pilots make “relatively poor witnesses”—no doubt because they are trained to fly airplanes, not identify a UFO under unknown and perhaps unusual conditions.) The following flying-saucer impostors offer specific identification problems.

Stars and Planets. Bright stars and planets represent the primary UFO impostor. As we saw earlier, their seeming ability to dart, wobble, or zigzag and to change color rapidly (the effects of autokinesis and scintillation—especially when exaggerated by binoculars and telescopes) make them ideal candidates for UFOs. Certain stars (Antares, Arcturus, Capella, Sirius, and Vega) and planets (Jupiter, Mars, occasionally Saturn, and especially Venus¹) prompt some eyewitnesses to insist their UFO “was too bright to be a star” (Hendry 1979, 24–31; see also Sheaffer 1980).

Airplanes. These frequently become UFOs, such as when seen head-on and so resemble a classic flying-saucer in edge view. Not only can aircraft seem to hover (as explained earlier), but they “are capable of performing side-to-side motions, climbing vertically, descending and changing direction abruptly.” Also, rows of anti-collision lights on the wings, blinking sequentially, can give the impression that they—and the craft—are rotating.

Significantly, “One of the leading causes of surprise is the inability of the reporting witness to hear any noise from the aircraft.” Indeed, “even low-flying aircraft like advertising planes [now scarce] have a 91 percent occurrence where no sound is ever heard by the reporting witness.” Helicopters likewise often go unheard, and they are also capable of particular freedom of motion (Hendry 1979, 38, 40).

Meteors/Fireballs. A meteor is the flash of light from a stony or metallic celestial object that burns due to friction upon entering Earth’s atmosphere; a fireball is a very bright meteor (brighter than Venus). Meteors may be seen any time of night—and fireballs day or night—during any part of the year. However, they are most likely to be seen during major meteor showers that occur on certain peak dates (give or take a few days): the Quadrantids (January 4), Perseids (August 12), and the Geminids (December 13). Notably, “since we are only viewing an apparent trajectory along our line of vision, any meteor/fireball can appear to adopt any direction and angle including upward, and it need not move in a curving path.” Usually, the paths of meteors/fireballs (and of re-entry of space debris) are short and the duration measured in seconds (but as long as three minutes for re-entry objects). Few meteors/fireballs are heard (Hendry 1979, 41–44).

Balloons. Balloons are chameleons of the sky. A research balloon can achieve high altitudes and reach speeds of over 200 miles per hour (seeming to be faster if its size or altitude is misestimated). It can stop, seem to hover, move erratically, or execute sharp turns—depending on the winds. It can even appear to change shape and color. Depending on how sunlight strikes its surface, the balloon can appear to be white, metallic, red, glowing, and so on.

Moreover, as Martin Gardner observed (1957, 57–58):

At a distance, a balloon loses entirely its three-dimensional spherical aspect. It takes on the appearance of a disc. From beneath, instruments hanging below the balloon’s center, can easily be mistaken for a “hole,” giving the disc the shape of a doughnut. If viewed from the side, the disc seems to be flying on edge, like a rolling wheel.

Others. While stars, aircraft, and meteors account for the greatest proportion of UFO reports, other phenomena also represent significant UFO impostors. These include those “nocturnal lights” UFOs subsequently identified as satellites, searchlights (playing on clouds), prank balloons, and others, including flares. Flares are not reported often as UFOs, but when they are they prompt some of the more sensational cases.² “Daylight disc” UFOs that subsequently become identified include weather balloons, aircraft, meteors, Venus (again), certain cloud effects, and even birds.

Radar anomalies were once common but of little evidential value due to the number of known natural causes for them. Such anomalous radar targets—called “angels”—have been eliminated by modern radar. However, they are still cited in older cases where they may be attributed to birds, smoke, dust clouds, areas of atmospheric turbulence—even reflecting layers in the atmosphere returning echoes of fixed or moving objects on the ground (Klass 1976, 208–210). Radar-visuals represent the supposed matching of a radar return and a sighting of a UFO, but once again investigation converts some of these UFOs to IFOs—prank balloons in some cases. False correlations have occurred in other instances, such as a supposed match between a scintillating star and a supposed radar return that was instead attributable to ground clutter (Hendry 1979, 70–71; for more on radars and UFOs, see Klass 1976, 207–219).

Although there are countless other potential UFOs, this discussion and accompanying chart should prove helpful as a first-look source in the identification process.

1. Venus can be eighty times brighter than surrounding stars and is most often seen in twilight (because the angular separation from the sun can never be greater than 47°).
2. See, for example, “The Stephenville Lights: What Actually Happened,” Skeptical Inquirer, January/February 2009, 56–57. This represents a detailed investigation by James McGaha.

• Frazier, Kendrick, Barry Karr, and Joe Nickell, editors. 1997. The UFO Invasion. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Gardner, Martin. 1957. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. New York: Dover.
• Hendry, Allan. 1979. The UFO Handbook: A Guide to Investigation, Evaluating and Reporting UFO Sightings. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
• Hynek, J. Allen. 1977. The Hynek UFO Report. New York: Barnes & Noble.
• Klass, Philip J. 1976. UFOs Explained. New York: Vintage Books.
• McGaha, James. 2009. The trained observer of unusual things in the sky (UFOs?). Skeptical Inquirer 33(1) (January/February): 56–57.
• Sheaffer, Robert. 1980. The UFO Verdict: Examining the Evidence; reprinted Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986.

Joe Nickell, PhD, is a skeptical UFOlogist and author of many articles on extraterrestrial visitation, a coeditor of The UFO Invasion, and contributor to The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters.

James McGaha, major, USAF retired, is a former special operations and electronic warfare pilot and now an astronomer and director of the Grasslands observatory in Tucson, Arizona.

2018. The year brought viral moments and memes like the “In my Feelings” challenge, BBQ Becky, and “is this a pigeon.” It also brought us breathtaking, groundbreaking, and at times disturbing science news, such as the highly-anticipated touchdown of NASA’s Mars InSight lander, mounting evidence on the scope of the impact of climate change, and the claim that a Chinese researcher created the first gene-edited babies. And, as predictably as death and taxes, bullshit peddlers—from Dr. Oz to Donald Trump—employed tried and true snake oil sales tactics to sell their ideologies and wares. Below, I take a look at the most egregious, amusing, and just plain weird woo-related news of 2018. Part one, below, will cover the first five, and I’ll give you the rest in part two, coming next week.

(I based this list, presented in no particular order, on a few rather unscientific criteria, including popularity, impact, weirdness, and feedback from readers. Didn’t include a story you thought was the wooiest woo of 2018? Feel free to get a hold of me on social media, where I’ll happily share the runners-up.)

Move over raw milk, raw water is here.

The media rang in 2018 with stomach churning news of Silicon Valley’s obsession du jour—raw water. Fans continue to rave about raw water’s exceptional taste profile and note that it doesn’t contain chlorine or fluoride like treated tap water.

A few companies have cashed in on the unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water that promises to get customers “off the water grid.” Maine-based seller Tourmaline Spring boasts that its raw “sacred living water” goes straight from spring to a stainless steel containment apparatus, allowing it to “retain its natural purity without becoming exposed to and getting contaminated by radioactive isotopes, acidic rain, pollutants/etc.” Oregon company Live Spring Water, which offers a subscription water jug delivery service, proclaims that it “[honors] the earth’s natural gifts without the notion they need to be altered,” and that humans “are biologically adapted to drink unprocessed spring water” because “[o]ur ancestors drank this for 99% of human existence.”

Not only is raw water the ultimate in the appeal to nature fallacy, it’s also far pricier than regular water and just plain a bad idea. “There is a whole menu, if you will, of intestinal germs that can get into untreated ground,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, told Healthline. “The water can look wonderfully clear, but as we learned in the Boy Scouts, don’t trust that water.” Vince Hill, chief of the CDC’s Waterborne Disease Prevention branch told Time that “[w]hen water isn’t treated, it can contain chemicals and germs that can make us sick or cause disease outbreaks,” and that “[a]nything you can think of can be in untreated water, really,” including but not limited to agricultural runoff, naturally occurring chemicals, and pathogens.

It’s important to note that, like other woo trends, raw water is a symptom of well-placed distrust—in this case, distrust in the public drinking water supply. But as science journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis aptly noted, the solution to this healthy distrust isn’t “for the richest and the most capable of us to opt out” of the public drinking water supply, but to continue holding government and industry accountable for keeping our water safe. 

More on raw water:

• What is Raw Water: Eater
• What to know about the “raw water” trend:Vox
• A Deep Dive into the "Raw Water" Craze: The Daily Show
• “Raw water”: The latest dangerous “natural health” fad:Science-Based Medicine

“Right-to-try” becomes federal law.

Framed as giving terminally ill patients the opportunity to receive promising experimental drugs that do not yet have FDA approval, President Trump signed the federal bill known as the “right to try” bill into law on May 30 with much fanfare and typical Trump rambling. But atypical for Trump this time was that the arguments he parroted from the law’s proponents are quite convincing—James Hamblin, writing in The Atlantic, said that right-to-try is “a step in the wrong direction, but one that is easy to misrepresent and to sell as good.”

This much was clear as Trump signed the bill, flanked by a small boy with muscular dystrophy and two men suffering from ALS. Christina Sandefur, the executive vice president of libertarian think tank Goldwater Institute that spearheaded the right-to-try initiative, said in 2016 that it’s about protecting terminally ill patients’ “basic human right to try to save their own lives.” Of course, any compassionate human being would want terminally ill people to be able to seek out and try promising treatments.

But that’s not how the law works. As surgical oncologist David Gorski explained at science-based Medicine, the bill that was finally signed into law was “the worst” of proposed federal and existing state right-to-try legislation. Ultimately, the law gives terminally ill patients the right to bypass the FDA and obtain experimental drugs from the company making them, all without oversight from the institutional review board that provides ethical guidance.

Proponents of the law, including the Goldwater Institute, suggest that drugs eligible for right-to-try are safe, because they’ve had to pass phase I of clinical trials. Except that’s not how it works. Only about 10 percent of drugs that pass phase I trials go on to be deemed effective and safe. Gorski called the claim that phase I testing is enough “utterly insane” in a Twitter thread outlining the fundamental problems with the law.

More on right-to-try:

• Trump Oversells New ‘Right to Try’ Law:New York Times
• The Disingenuousness of ‘Right to Try’: The Atlantic
• Right-to-try is now law. Let patients beware!: Science-Based Medicine
• Why the “Right to Try” bill Trump just signed could offer false hope to patients: Vice News

Rise in autism prevalence figures spurs anti-vaccine frenzy.

Vaccines save lives—the facts don’t lie. But the infamous fraudulent 1998 study by the discredited-many-times-over former gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, which linked the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine with autism, planted a stubborn killer fear of vaccines in the parenting world. That fear has proven impossible to dislodge, and purveyors of a slew of unsubstantiated yet prevalent therapeutic interventions (which I covered in this column earlier this year) have cashed in.

The usual suspects pounced when the CDC released its report in April of this year on 2014 data, which showed an autism prevalence of 1 in 59 children born in 2006, compared to 1 in 150 in the year 2000. That’s alarming, but the figures don’t necessarily mean that there are more autistic children. Rather, the changing numbers most likely represent increased surveillance, changes in diagnostic criteria, increased awareness and educational support, and reduction in stigma, so that more of the population falls under the ASD umbrella.

In a since-deleted Facebook post, the anti-vaccine World Mercury Project (now the “Children’s Health Defense”) shared the view of its famous chair Robert F. Kennedy Jr. following the CDC’s report:“Genes don’t cause epidemics, environmental toxins do. Why is the CDC doing nothing to identify the environmental toxins responsible for the most cataclysmic epidemic of our era?”

“Not surprisingly, the antivaccine movement pounced on this report, which showed a modest increase in prevalence since the last CDC report in 2016, as proof that it must be the vaccines, because to antivaxers it’s always—always—about the vaccines. But is it?” asked David Gorski in Science-Based Medicine. “Of course not. However, as usual, unpacking the data is far more complicated than antivaxers like to make it sound.”

More on autism prevalence:

• The CDC just announced one in 59 children are autistic. Here’s why that’s not evidence of an epidemic.: Vox
• Ask SciMoms: Are there more cases of autism?: SciMoms
• Autism prevalence increases to 1 in 59, and antivaxers lose it…yet again: Science-Based Medicine

The newest book from the “Medical Medium” taking over the nutrition fad scene.

Anthony “Medical Medium” William combines the appeal of John Edwards and Gwyneth Paltrow to spread health woo with the added unfalsifiable aura of cosmic authority. Claiming to be “born with the unique ability to converse with Spirit of Compassion who provides him with extraordinarily accurate health information that’s often far ahead of its time,” William’s ascent into the upper echelons of health woo has been sudden—Google trends show a steep rise in the volume of queries starting in 2015 and shooting up sharply in just the past few months.

William’s most recent rise in popularity coincides with the release of his newest bestseller (it’s a mouthful) in October of this year:“Medical Medium Liver Rescue: Answers to Eczema, Psoriasis, Diabetes, Strep, Acne, Gout, Bloating, Gallstones, Adrenal Stress, Fatigue, Fatty Liver, Weight Issues, SIBO & Autoimmune Disease.”

His bio explains that William’s work has “earned him the trust and love of hundreds of thousands worldwide, among them movie stars, rock stars, billionaires, professional athletes, best-selling authors, and countless other people from all walks of life who couldn't find a way to heal until he provided them with insights from Spirit.”

Eleven-time Grammy winner Pharrell Williams is among William’s celebrity fan base, saying of Liver Rescue, “Anthony’s understanding of foods, their vibrations, and how they interact with the body never ceases to amaze. Effortlessly he explains the potential harmony or disharmony in our choices in a way anyone can understand. He has a gift. Do your body a favor and treat yourself.”

It’s no surprise that Gwyneth Paltrow shares the enthusiasm, gushing that “[w]hile there is most definitely an element of otherworldly mystery to the work he does, much of what Anthony William shines a spotlight on—particularly around autoimmune disease—feels inherently right and true.”

Scott Gavura sums it up at Science-Based Medicine: 

“William may genuinely believe he has a gift. But he has no medical knowledge or training. His ignorance of medical science is evident from his dismissal of it. It’s worth remembering that William has enough sense (or caution) to write a disclaimer that emphasizes that anything he says should be reviewed with a medical professional.”

More on the Medical Medium:

• Feedback: Spirit guides have spoken, and they say more juice: New Scientist (paywalled, unfortunately)
• Goop's "Trusted Expert" Anthony William Dispenses Junk Science, Say Critics: Inverse
• The Medical Medium’s Thyroid Pseudoscience: Science-Based Medicine

The newest in false health halos: Non-GMO Vodka.

It makes sense to seek quick fixes and easily-avoidable scapegoats when it comes to what we put in our bodies—it’s only natural to want to do everything in our control to stay healthy. After years of covering food and health, it’s clear to me that “GMOs” have become a lightning rod for the myriad ills of the current food system. As my fellow SciMoms and I wrote at our blog in May, “[t]he GMO debate has been raging for two decades, but this debate isn’t actually about GMOs at all. Rather, ‘GMOs’ have become a stand-in for a number of very real concerns: Who controls our food supply? Who makes sure our food is safe to eat and our environment is protected? Who looks out for small farmers? What about health and economic disparities that are surely tied to food?”

Perhaps nothing juxtaposes the simultaneous meaninglessness and utter weightiness of “GMO” better than Smirnoff’s 2018 ad campaign for—get this—non-GMO vodka. The brand announced a new ad campaign in October featuring celebs such as Jonathan Van Ness, Ted Danson, and Laverne Cox, all proudly announcing that “Smirnoff No. 21, which has always been gluten-free, is now also made with non-GMO grain, specifically non-GMO corn."

Now, I adore Jonathan Van Ness and I hate to tell him that this martini is not a good look.

I won’t get into every one of the myriad reasons that “non-GMO” is a frivolous claim at best and misleading at worst for any product, let alone vodka, but for one, there is no genetic material or protein in vodka (or any other distilled spirit), so there’s nothing in a shot of Smirnoff to warrant the distinction. Even though it feels good to slap a health halo on a cocktail (the authors of “Clean Cocktails: Righteous Recipes for the Modernist Mixologist” give it a shot in their 2017 coffee table book), it’s pretty clear that there’s not really a known “safe” level of alcohol consumption. 

Smirnoff wasn’t the first to go non-GMO—Ketel One and several other brands have announced non-GMO spirits over the last couple years—but its campaign brought non-GMO back to the forefront of the distilled spirits world. “We know that Smirnoff's new status update has everyone (OMG!) excited,” the brand stated in a press release, which also specified that neckers (paper tags around the bottle necks) will accompany each newly packaged Smirnoff No. 21 bottle noting the brand's new non-GMO status.

Note that it seems that these neckers have helped Smirnoff exploit a loophole (which I described here). Alcohol labeling falls under Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, and TTB currently doesn't approve non-bioengineered labels. Neckers are considered advertising according to an email from a media representative and "unlike labels, advertising does not require pre-approval from TTB.” 

As ridiculous as non-GMO vodka is, far more ridiculous is that “GMO” as a larger concept has served only to keep us distracted from what’s really important, not only in the food system, but as a larger society. As I wrote in a post at the Biology Fortified blog:

“[W]hat’s so interesting about GMO; what gives GMO so much power:‘GMO’ represents a lot more than just genetic engineering. It’s a social construct. Like any social construct, what ‘GMO’ means to people can vary from person to person. And it’s precisely for this reason that the polarization around GMO has done us no favors. Seriously, if you want to see all of the nuance and critical thinking get sucked out of a room, just say GMO. Nuance gone. On all sides. GMO is positioned, both by design and happenstance, as a spoke around which conversations about the food system spins. And because food is one of the foundations of life itself, it is powerful.

GMO raises a vast array of justified socio-economic anxieties — including very real anxieties about our environment and the future of our planet, workers rights, disease rates, corporate control of the food and political systems, and the systemic inequality propping up our society, from systemic racism, sexism, and the yet unhealed gaping wounds of the legacies of colonialism, slavery, and environmental destruction around the world.

Because GMO represents so much more than just genetic engineering, and because it can represent so much to different people, the polarization of arguing ‘against’ GMOs and arguing ‘for’ GMOs is really, on several levels, a conversation about any and all of those things.”

In that sense, the non-GMO angle is smart, from a marketing standpoint at least—it serves as a shortcut to the feel-good perceived rejection of a symbolic all-encompassing bad guy. But it does nothing to solve any specific problem related to health or the food system.

More on non-GMO vodka:

• OMG! Non GMO Poison!: Know Ideas Media
• Absolut Vodka and other GMO-Free Posers: Modern Farmer
• Farmers Smeared by Smirnoff Over Non-GMO label?: Drovers

That’s it for part one of 2018 in woo news! Come back next week, on January 31, as we dive in to the last five woo-related stories of the year.

This post picks up where I left off last week with the first five in the top ten woo news stories of 2018. Check out the last five here. Do you think I left out the wooiest 2018 woo? Feel free to hit me up on social media, where I’ll be sharing the runners-up.

Anti-vaccine “hotspots” are getting worse.

A June 2018 study published in PLOS Medicine reveals a disturbing story about the impact of anti-vaccine movement—the rise of nonmedical vaccine exemptions (NMEs) in pockets of vaccine resistance in areas in twelve of the eighteen U.S. states where religious and philosophical-belief exemptions are permitted. The study details how the rise in NMEs is leading to “hotspots” where vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks are more likely. Several of these hotspots are in major metropolitan areas, some of which have airports, ultimately leaving swaths of the population vulnerable to vaccine-preventable illness. 

“Our concern is that the rising NMEs linked to the antivaccine movement in the US will stimulate other countries to follow a similar path,” the authors note. “It would be especially worrisome if the very large low- and middle-income countries—such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC nations), or Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan—reduce their vaccine coverage. In such a case, we could experience massive epidemics of childhood infections that may threaten achievement of United Nations global goals.”

Study author Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, is vocal about his concern as a vaccine scientist and a father of four children, including a daughter diagnosed with autism and intellectual disabilities. He described how anti-vaccine political action committees work to stoke parental fear in an essay published in The Conversation.

“Researchers are still in the early stages of understanding the reasons behind the anti-vaccine movement. A couple of these states, Oklahoma and Texas, host well-organized political-action committees that lobby their legislatures and even raise campaign funds for candidates to endorse anti-vaccine positions. These committees appeal to parental fears of unwarranted government interference.” 

More on anti-vaccine hotspots:

• Anti-vaccine movement thrives in parts of the United States: Spectrum News
• Anti-vaccine movement embraced at extremes of political spectrum, study finds: Cornell Alliance for Science
• Anti-Vaccine Hotspots are Getting Hotter: Science-Based Medicine
• Anti-vaccine hot spots on rise across U.S., study finds: NBC News

The centuries-long scourge of scientific racism rears its head.

In perhaps the most infamous 2018 example of the scientifically racist trope, Roseanne Barr suggested that Valerie Jarrett, an African-American woman who served as an adviser to President Barack Obama, is descended from apes, promptly resulting in ABC cancelling her show. But the Ambien-popping sitcom mom was hardly the only one in 2018 pushing scientific racism—the use of pseudoscience to corroborate theories of racial hierarchy and justify white supremacy. Writing in The Guardian, science journalist Angela Saini observed:

“Over the past year I have been investigating this tight, well-connected cabal of people, who nowadays call themselves ‘race realists’, reflecting their view that the scientific evidence is on their side. Their work is routinely published by Mankind Quarterly, a marginal journal operating since the 1960s, when it was founded by a group of scientists disgruntled with the fact that mainstream journals were unwilling to publish their controversial ideas.

Its earliest editions argued against desegregation in the United States, and warned that inter-racial conflict was the byproduct of natural selection. Many of its writers became sources for the notorious 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which drew links between race and IQ scores.”

Editor-at-large at Vox Ezra Klein pointed out that it’s crucial to contextualize the evidence that bolsters scientifically racist arguments and take accountability for disparities:

“International evidence suggests oppression, discrimination, and societal resentment lowers group IQs. As the New York University philosopher of neuroscience Ned Block has written, quoting the work of anthropologist John Ogbu, oppression has a clear effect on marginalized groups globally. ‘Where IQ tests have been given, ‘the children of these caste-like minorities score about 10-15 points ... lower than dominant group children,’’ he writes.”

The American Society of Human Genetics responded to the resurgence of scientific racism (which, of course, never went away) in November of this year, officially denouncing the misuse of genetics to fuel racial ideologies.

There is, perhaps, one horrific silver lining to the scientific racism cloud—that the reemergence of this latent phenomenon, emboldened in the age of Trump, renders it accessible for the dismantling. As political science professor and writer Edward Burmila wrote in The Nation:

“It is tempting to frame the current prevalence of racialism—immigration restriction, scientific racism, and eugenics—as a revival. In truth, it never went away. It was in hibernation as intellectuals, scientists, and political elites rejected the ideas after World War II. Adherents were simply waiting for the right time, the right social and political climate, to emerge from with their long-discredited and bigoted pseudoscience.”

More on the revival of scientific racism:

• ASHG Denounces Attempts to Link Genetics and Racial Supremacy: ASHG Perspective
• Scientific Racism Isn’t ‘Back’—It Never Went Away: The Nation
• There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label: National Geographic
• Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science: Vox
• Racism is creeping back into mainstream science – we have to stop it:The Guardian

Goop pays up for jade vaginal eggs.

No year in woo is complete without a Goop-related story, and 2018 was no different. In an apparent win for the world’s most pampered yonis, a group of California lawyers fined Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand $145,000 in September of this year, leaving some reveling in schadenfreude. Goop agreed to pay the civil penalties following an investigation by the California Food, Drug, and Medical Device Task Force into its jade eggs and quartz eggs for “vaginal wellness,” and a flower essence blend that “could help prevent depression.”

According to the Orange County District Attorney’s office, as part of the settlement, Goop was “barred from making any claims regarding the efficacy of its products without possessing competent and reliable scientific evidence, and from manufacturing or selling any misbranded, unapproved, or falsely-advertised medical devices.”

“The health and money of Santa Clara County residents should never be put at risk by misleading advertising,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement. “We will vigilantly protect consumers against companies that promise health benefits without the support of good science … or any science."

Note that this settlement only applies to advertising claims, though—not claims on the lifestyle website’s blog or other platforms. The jade and rose quartz vaginal eggs, which are “pre drilled for string add-on,” remain up for sale at goop.com as of the writing of this piece, albeit with toned down language to “ensure compliance” with the terms of the settlement.

The news left some wondering whether the yoni egg gaffe would leave a dent in Paltrow’s lifestyle empire, but don’t expect Goop or Paltrow to go anywhere soon. According to a December 4 interview in WSJ Magazine, Gwyneth Paltrow sees Goop as “trailblazers” for women’s health. Goop told the magazine that it has tripled revenues in the past two years and is on track to double them this year, in part from direct-to-consumer sales of Goop-branded products, which are up 80 percent year-over-year.

More on Goop’s jade egg settlement:

• Goop Agrees to Pay $145,000 for ‘Unsubstantiated’ Claims About Vaginal Eggs: New York Times
• Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop touted the ‘benefits’ of putting a jade egg in your vagina. Now it must pay.: Washington Post
• Goop was fined $145,000 for its claims about jade eggs for vaginas. It’s still selling them.: Vox
• Goop Settled a Lawsuit Over Jade Egg Health Claims–Here's Why You Still Shouldn't Put One in Your Vagina: Health
• Researchers Have Debunked Goop’S “Ancient Chinese” Jade Vaginal Eggs: Quartz

The frantic news that our kids’ breakfast food is laced with toxic Roundup.

A slew of news outlets, including CBS News, Mic, CNN, The Hill, and more, raised the alarm over an August report from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) finding trace amounts of the herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, in several "children's" breakfast foods. I covered the uproar in an in-depth article on Mom guilt and the glyphosate saga for my column earlier this year:

“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 those of us who regularly try to make sense of whether or not people really need to worry about the latest alarming chemicals-in-things news know too well, the damage was already well past containable as soon as the story broke. For instance, after a recent panel I sat on following a screening of the Food Evolution documentary at the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago, a gentleman approached me with one pressing question: Is it safe to start eating his beloved cereal again? The poor guy had stopped eating his usual morning breakfast after reading about the EWG report. I told him that I’ve continued serving my kids the oat and wheat cereals that they like, and I’m not afraid that it’s poisoning them. His sigh of relief made my day.

As I wrote:

“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.”

More on glyphosate and your kids’ breakfast:

• How worried should we be that glyphosate was found in our Cheerios?: Popular Science
• Don't worry, your cereal probably won't poison you with pesticides: Mashable
• You Don’t Need to Worry About Roundup in Your Breakfast Cereal: Slate
• Weed killer in your cereal? Maybe, but don't panic: NBC News

CFI sues CVS for misleading marketing of homeopathy.

The Center for Inquiry (CFI, which publishes this column via the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) filed a lawsuit in June on behalf of the general public against drug retailer CVS for consumer fraud over its misleading sales and marketing of homeopathic products—in other words, suggesting that they work for stated purposes.

In a nutshell, homeopathy is founded on two basic principles that render it the perfect quackery:1) that a condition can be cured by the substance that caused it and 2) that repeatedly diluting the substance until an infinitesimal amount of the original substance remains increases its potency.

In a July 9 press release, CFI stated:

“Apart from being a waste of money, choosing homeopathic treatments to the exclusion of evidence-based medicines can result in worsened or prolonged symptoms, and in some cases, even death. Several products have been found to contain poisonous ingredients which have affected tens of thousands of adults and children in just the last few years."

CFI’s Legal Director Nick Little has made clear that the lawsuit came after years of trying to convince CVS to market homeopathic remedies responsibly to no avail. “I genuinely thought that once we brought this to their attention, they’d turn around and say, ‘You know what, you’re right. We should deal with this,” Little said in a phone interview with Gizmodo. “But they didn’t, they stopped communication with us.”

“Homeopathy is a total sham, and CVS knows it. Yet the company persists in deceiving its customers about the effectiveness of homeopathic products,” the press release quoted Little as saying. “Homeopathics are shelved right alongside scientifically-proven medicines, under the same signs for cold and flu, pain relief, sleep aids, and so on.”

“If you search for ‘flu treatment’ on their website, it even suggests homeopathics to you,” he pointed out. “CVS is making no distinction between those products that have been vetted and tested by science, and those that are nothing but snake oil.”

In an update shared with me, Little explained that CVS and CFI have “agreed, on the basis of the discussions, to extend the time permitted for them to file their answer and for us to have the first conference with the court. That will now be in January, and we are seeking to arrange another in person meeting before then to explore the situation further.”

More on the CVS lawsuit:

• Why Are We Suing CVS?: Center for Inquiry
• CVS sued for deceiving consumers in sale of homeopathic remedies: Science-Based Medicine
• CVS Is Being Sued for Selling Bullshit Homeopathic Products: Gizmodo
• CVS Sued by CFI for Fraud Over Sale of Homeopathic Medicines: MD Magazine

That wraps up the first (annual?) edition of the year in woo. Keep an eye out for new episodes of Point of Inquiry in the beginning of 2019, in which I interview some great scientists, authors, subject matter experts, and stars on topics covered in this column and more. Here’s to good health and joy in 2019!

In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the widespread medical use of animal products such as bear bile, rhino horn, tiger bone, and pangolin scales has resulted in cruelty to animals and has threatened several species with extinction. All kinds of animal parts have been proposed as medicines or as magical charms, as in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: "Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg and owlet's wing … .”

Maybe not “wool of bat,” but did you know that “blood of bat” is considered a medicine?In a way, it’s poetic justice. Vampire bats are known for sucking the blood of humans, cattle, and other animals. Now humans are turning the tables. They are drinking the blood of bats in the misguided belief that it has health benefits. No, really! This might sound like a joke, but it has been widely reported in reliable sources such as National Geographic.

National Geographic reports that in the Andes, traditional folk medicine includes the belief that bat blood can treat epilepsy. Despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence to support that claim, people continue to use bat blood for epilepsy. Luis Aguirre, head of the Bolivian Bat Conservation Program, says he gets calls requesting bats at least five times a year from as far away as France. Blood is seen as a strong life force that can transfer its qualities to those who consume it. Bats are seen as powerful creatures with unique characteristics; they are mammals who can fly. It’s magical thinking.

National Geographic reports two ritual ways of using bat blood. “Typically, a bat would be obtained alive, its head chopped off, and the blood drunk fresh.” But if the bat is already dead, they can “fry the bat with its fur on and place it in a cloth bag that would then be soaked in alcohol for future quaffing.” I can’t imagine that either method of consumption would be very palatable.

They further report that “It’s not hard to find bats for sale in the marketplaces of Bolivia. They’re usually tucked away in pungent shoeboxes, some with as many as 20 bats jammed together, the live ones crawling over those that have already succumbed to disease or stress.”

Never mind that it’s illegal. Bolivian law prohibits the killing or sale of any wild animal without proper permits, and offenses are punishable with up to six years in prison. But bats for sale are still easy to find. Research published in 2010 found that more than 3,000 bats were illegally sold every month in just four major Bolivian cities. The researchers comment that that is probably an underestimate since not all bats were located by the researchers and some vendors refused to cooperate. The species sold included fruit bats, insect-eating bats, and, yes, vampire bats. Dead bats cost the equivalent of 93 US cents; live ones cost $2.47.

Bats are vitally important to the ecosystem. Some plants rely on them to disperse their seeds or pollinate their flowers. They help control agricultural pests. Their guano is a valuable fertilizer. They eat mosquitoes and other arthropods that can carry parasites and malaria. The fewer bats there are, the greater the chances that humans will get yellow fever, Zika virus, malaria, and other diseases.

Conservationists have found that more than 60 percent of Bolivia’s known bat species are threatened to some degree, and one species is endangered. Some of the rarer species are becoming extinct in some ecosystems. The biggest threat is logging and habitat destruction. Bats are sadly misunderstood. They are reviled as dirty, ugly, rabid, and portents of bad luck, and people hunt and torture them. Conservationists are using outreach educational programs to teach children about bats under the premise that once people get to know bats, they will like them and help protect them.

There is no evidence that bat blood has any benefits for human health. On the contrary, people who drink bat blood actually face direct health risks. Vampire bats are the best vectors of rabies, and while the blood itself is not likely to transmit the infection, handling rabid bats could easily transmit it, and bats can carry and transmit other pathogens.

At least the names of bats are entertaining. In Spanish they are murciélagos (blind mice); I love the sound of that. In French they are chauve-souris (bald mice). In German, a bat is a Fledermaus (flutter mouse). Die Fledermaus is the title of a Strauss operetta.

But the idea of drinking bat blood is a terrible idea, hazardous to health and to the environment. The very thought is repulsive, and the taste is probably disgusting. It’s a bad idea—batty any way you look at it.

Donald Gary Young (aka Don Gary Young, D. Gary Young, and Gary Young), the founder (in 1994), chairman of the board, and former CEO of the Lehi, Utah–based multilevel marketing company Young Living Essential Oils, died on May 12, 2018, at age sixty-eight due to complications from a series of strokes. The Christian Broadcasting Network’s (CBN) obituary for Young referred to him as a leader in the essential oil movement and a devout Christian but did not mention that in the 1980s, Young pleaded guilty to practicing medicine without a license in the State of Washington and operated clinics in Chula Vista, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, offering bizarre “alternative” medical services. In 2000, he opened the Young Life Research Clinic Institute of Natural Medicine in Springville, Utah, which he closed around the time the clinic was sued in 2005.

Young authored several books, including Aromatherapy: The Essential Beginning (1996), An Introduction to Young Living Essential Oils (2002), Essential Oils Integrative Medical Guide: Building Immunity, Increasing Longevity, and Enhancing Mental Performance with Therapeutic-Grade Essential Oils (2003), Raindrop Technique (2003), and Essential Oil Desk Reference Special Third Edition (2015).

I believe a close look at Young’s activities can be illuminating for consumers who might be attracted to charismatic health gurus who base their teachings on alleged sources of knowledge from antiquity or tradition rather than on rigorously designed clinical research. Thus, this column concludes with a brief discussion of three other faith-guided healers who made news in 2018.

CBN News reported:

Described as a “modern pioneer,” Young was part inventor and part historian. His pursuit of new wellness discoveries was rooted in ancient practices as he attempted to unlock and share the benefits bestowed by herbs, plants, and trees.

According to the news release [from Young Living Essential Oils], while visiting Oman and walking through a market with thousands of giant bags of frankincense resin piled in the streets, Young decided to build a distillery in Salalah, the center of frankincense history; and in January 2010, Young Living opened the first large commercial distillery for the extraction of Sacred Frankincense essential oil in modern times.

My previous column, “Essential Considerations about Aromatherapy” provided an overview of aromatherapy and essential oils that addressed: (1) how essential oils are regulated in the United States, (2) some market research findings for aromatherapy, and (3) the lack of clinical research support for various therapeutic uses of essential oils. My introductory paragraphs were:

The practice of administering plant-derived essential oils on the skin, via inhalation of vapors, or internally via ingestion for supposed healing power is commonly called aromatherapy. The oils for aromatherapy are described as “essential” to refer to the volatile, aromatic components that some people describe as the “essence” of the plant source, which represents the plant’s “life force,” “spirit,” or soul. Aromatherapy is thus rooted in vitalism, which is described in The Skeptic’s Dictionary as:

… the metaphysical doctrine that living organisms possess a non-physical inner force or energy that gives them the property of life.

Vitalism is apparent in Young’s unusual approach called the Raindrop Technique, which has been harshly criticized even by aromatherapy practitioner organizations. 

Young’s Raindrop Technique

Young’s twenty-seven-page book Raindrop Technique (2003) is described on Amazon as:

A full explanation of each step and the details involved in giving a Raindrop with the Young Living Essential Oils for a therapeutic technique for the spine and body.

If you were interested in giving a Raindrop, Young apparently expected you to pay plenty for the privilege. The book’s current Amazon sales price in a paperback edition is $143.50 and as a “mass market paperback” the price is $635.23. Young Living has promoted the approach in meetings about the Young Living Empower: Raindrop Technique that have had an advanced registration charge of $150 and on-site registration of $219. Nevertheless, there are free, lengthy videos available online that demonstrate the technique.

Young Living describes the technique on its website:

Young Living’s proprietary Raindrop Technique® combines unique, targeted massage and energy approaches with pure, authentic essential oils for a deeply harmonizing, rejuvenating, and relaxing experience. The technique, developed by Young Living Founder and CEO D. Gary Young, draws from his experience with Native American wellness traditions and provides a revolutionary means of nurturing harmony—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

These oils are used in the technique in a specified sequence: Valor II, Oregano, Thyme,

Basil, Cypress, Wintergreen, Marjoram, Aroma Siez, and Peppermint.

A Young Living webpage links to its promotional video for the technique on Vimeo and describes in some detail these five steps:

1. Prepare
2. Balance body energy
3. Roll and release
4. Spinal application of essential oils
5. Complete the Raindrop Technique

A seventy-minute YouTube video featuring Gary Young describes the technique as combining essential oils, manual technique, and acupressure point manipulation resulting in “energy alignment,” stress relief, and system balance. The video recommends receiving the technique four times a year for general wellness but monthly or weekly as recommended by your health care professional for chronic or sudden illness. Seemingly contradicting the last part of that recommendation is this disclaimer, which appears on screen at the beginning of the video: “Raindrop Technique is not intended to treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

The technique, as demonstrated by Young, begins with rubbing different oils in a particular sequence with specified grips and motions into foot reflexology points that supposedly represent different parts of the body, including the brain. In the video he goes through the steps described by Young Living. When he administered wintergreen, he claimed without providing evidence that the methyl salicylate in it is beneficial to bone. He referred to peppermint as a detoxifier and a “personifier” (to supposedly make all the previously administered oils work better). He referred to Valor as a “harmonizer.” I imagine that his instructions sound scientifical to many people, especially those who relate to vitalism.

The Aromatherapy Registration Council (ARC), which endeavors to self-regulate aromatherapists and to enhance the credibility and visibility of aromatherapy, uses the term Raindrop Therapy to refer to the Raindrop Technique and similar approaches offered by Young Living’s competitors. In its “Statement of Policy Against Raindrop Therapy” ARC expresses these concerns:

ARC believes that Raindrop Therapy poses risks to the public health. Raindrop Therapy techniques are typically practiced as a one-size-fits-all technique, and may not be suitable for people with compromised liver or kidney function, those with heart disease, those on blood thinning medication, those with allergies to aspirin, and other disorders. Topical application of undiluted oils has a high risk of creating adverse skin reactions. ARC also believes that there is no published, research-validated clinical evidence to support any claim that Raindrop Therapy is able to assist in correcting spinal curvatures caused by scoliosis or to align electric and structural elements of the body, and that, therefore, claims made in this regard or the application of Raindrop Therapy for these purposes is detrimental to the public health. ARC believes that aromatherapy should only complement, not substitute for, conventional medicine.

ARC defines undiluted as “more concentration of essential oil than 2% or the proper dilution ratio generally accepted as safe for that oil.”

In its Code of Conduct, the Alliance of International Aromatherapists (AIA), a nonprofit professional organization for aromatherapists, calls for its members to “neither teach or practice unsafe essential oil administration, such as used in Raindrop Technique^®, or Aroma Touch^®, or any similar techniques.” AIA issued a white paper on Raindrop Therapy that states:

“Raindrop Therapy” technique as developed by Mr. Gary Young is not to be regarded as a best practice because:

• It promotes the unsafe use of essential oils, putting people at risk of skin irritation and
• There is no published empirical substantiation to support its claims that RDT is a “tool for assisting the body in correcting defects in the curvature of the spine, such as scoliosis.”

D. Gary Young’s (Lack of) Credentials

In the 1980s, brochures for Young’s Rosita Beach Clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, indicated that he had graduated from the American Institute of Physioregenerology (which taught therapeutic massage). In a column for the Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington) on October 28, 1986, Doug Clark wrote that the founder and operator of that institute said that Young falsely claimed that he graduated, only took a few classes, did only a third of the homework, owed $1,000 in tuition, and said: “To be honest, I’d hesitate to have anybody go to him for any kind of therapy.” According to Clark, Young said he owed nothing but admitted not graduating and characterized the false claim in the brochures as a “typographical error.”

According to his personal achievements page on his website in 2017, D. Gary Young studied various science subjects and the historical significance of essential oils in various countries and universities. The page indicated that he attended Bernadean University between 1982 and 1985 and earned a doctorate in naturopathy. But Bernadean University was a mail-order diploma mill, which had never been authorized to operate or to grant degrees.

Another listed achievement was that he received a humanitarian award from the State Medical Examiner’s office of Baja, California, in 1985 after opening a “natural healing research clinic” and having “designed and built advanced equipment for essential oil distillation that has garnered reviews from authorities… .” However, the page didn’t mention that on August 17, 2000, as documented by the Utah Occupational Safety and Health Division (UOSHD), one of his homemade distillers ruptured at the lid, fatally wounding a worker at Young Living Farms in Mona, Utah, a 1,000-acre farm where plants were cultivated for essential oil extraction using a steam distillation process. Young Living Farms was fined a total of $10,280 for seven safety violations. UOSHD reported: “The entire operation was designed by Gary Young President and built on site. The vessels were not built under any consideration to ASME [American Society of Mechanical Engineers] code for pressure vessels. No type of pressure relief device was installed on any of the vessels.”

According to his biography page from 2017, he earned a degree in nutrition before he earned his Bernadean doctorate, but the specific degree or institution that supposedly conferred the degree is not mentioned. A nutrition degree is not mentioned at all on his 2017 personal achievements page. It is unclear, then, if he earned any degrees from any respectably accredited institutions.

The biography page also reported that at age twenty-four he had suffered a nearly fatal logging accident that left him in a coma for three weeks. It says he was paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, which launched him on a lifelong personal journey to take back control of his life. It says that when he regained feeling in his lower body three years after the accident, he began researching and using essential oils to alleviate his pain. Eventually, as the story goes, he regained all feeling and mobility and ran a half marathon thirteen years after the accident. Of course, the story ends with victory over adversity: “And Gary Young decided to share his experience of the healing properties of essential oils with the world.”

I’ve seen other stories of founders of multilevel marketing companies facing adversity and then turning their lives around. Such stories probably help to inspire people to invest in becoming distributors. But they don’t establish that safe, cost-effective products are promoted.

Young’s current website provides a list of fifteen reference citations to published research papers he coauthored. While he has a record as a coauthor (never as senior author) of research papers in scientific and medical journals, it isn’t clear to me what role he had in any of the research or how his roles could establish him as an expert in therapeutic uses of essential oils. I reviewed each of the papers he coauthored. I see nothing in them that established him as having expertise regarding use of essential oils for therapeutic purposes. None of the papers provide evidence to support his Raindrop Technique or any other approach to therapeutic use of essential oils. My comments about each of the papers are in an appendix following this column.

Pre-clinical research papers similar to Young’s are sometimes given press coverage. HealthNewsReview.org warned in 2017 that consumers are poorly served by press reports about essential oils that rely only on preliminary evidence to support claims and that use sources with conflicts of interest.

Unlicensed Practice of Medicine in the State of Washington

In 1983, while living in Spokane, Washington, Young was arrested for practicing medicine without a license. Based on a three-week undercover investigation, Young allegedly offered: (1) to deliver a baby, (2) treat cancer, and (3) detect cancer using a blood sample. According to investigators, he also allegedly offered to determine the “nutritional needs of another person during pregnancy by drawing blood and interpreting the results of a blood test.” Young pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge. He was given a sixty-day sentence, fined $250, and placed on probation for one year.

Several months earlier, Young’s infant daughter died of cardiac arrest during delivery in a whirlpool bath at Golden Six Health World, which Young owned. According to the County Coroner, she apparently remained under water for almost an hour before she was removed. Press reported the County Coroner as saying that she probably would have lived if she had been delivered under more conventional conditions.

Young’s Rosarita Beach Clinic

In the late 1980s, Young ran the Rosarita Beach Clinic in Tijuana, which offeredlaetrile; colonics; iridology; massage; vegetarian diet; vitamin C therapy; reinfusing blood that had been drawn from patients and exposed to direct current; and a diagnostic test involving looking at dried blood under a microscope, which Young claimed was 95 percent accurate for identifying current and future diseases such as arthritis and leukemia.

The clinic sent prospective patients a kit for collecting blood samples on slides using pin punctures of the little finger of each hand. Prospective patients would mail the slides with $60 for diagnosis using “blood crystallization analysis.”

In his Dictionary of Metaphysical Health Care (1997), Jack Raso offered this description of blood crystallization (diagnostic blood crystallization):

Mode of pseudodiagnosis that involves introduction of a blood sample to a copper chloride solution. “Crystal signs” of illness in the resultant “blood-crystal picture” allegedly express the guidance of “a higher functional plane coming to expression.” “Organ-signs,” for example, purportedly indicate dysfunction of an organ or a bodily system. Supposedly, each so-called organ-sign reflects a “multi-layered organ principle” (which includes “the organ-bound ‘soul organ’”) and, on “the psychic plane,” is the foundation for related “soul qualities.”

As far as I can tell, blood crystallization was developed by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer as a “demonstration of formative forces in the blood” and as a method of diagnosis with suggestions made by the Austrian mystic and self-proclaimed clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner, who founded the religion of Anthroposophy. However, blood crystallization diagnosis remains such a dubious, nonstandard approach that a webpage promoting it as capable of “representing inflammatory or degenerative problems” offers this disclaimer:

Live Cell Analysis using Dark Field Microscopy and Blood Crystallization (Oxidative Stress Test) using Bright Field Microscopy given by your health professional are for nutritional information only and should not be considered a medical diagnosis.

In 1987, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Rosarita Beach Clinic gave these results of “blood crystallization analysis” of three sets of slides submitted by a reporter who presented himself as a prospective patient:

• Evidence of “aggressive cancer” that had been in the reporter’s cells for four or five years plus liver problems even though the blood had been taken from a healthy seven-year-old, twenty-pound tabby cat.
• Evidence of “latent” cancer, liver dysfunction, pancreas problems, and thyroid problems, but no evidence of “aggressive” cancer when the reporter’s own blood sample was submitted. The clinic representative reported: “Elevated level of toxicity must be reduced in order to promote assimilation, increase oxygenation and prevent degeneration. We recommend a supervised program of cleansing, detox and rebuilding.”
• “There is inflammation in the liver. Your blood is indicating the possibility of a pre-lymphomic [sic] condition. It appears as though you’ve recently undergone a high level of upset in your life which has weakened your immune response considerably.” Again, detoxification was recommended. But the blood tester didn’t notice that the red blood cells had a distinctly non-human appearance since it came from a chicken from a poultry shop.

The Times also reported:

The detoxification program at the clinic, which consists of colonics, a special diet and various nostrums, costs $2,000 per week, payable in advance. An at-home program is also available for $90 plus about $400 worth of vitamins and supplements that Young sells through his vitamin company in California.

“Alternative” regimens for detoxification and supplementation are neither evidence-based nor of plausible value for health enhancement.

Young’s Chula Vista, California, Clinic

In the late 1980s, Don Gary Young, Dixie Young, and Richard Crow Jr. operated Young Life Wellness Center and Young Life Products in Chula Vista, California. In 1988, a female investigator for California’s Department of Health Services purchased two “blood crystallization test kits” from this clinic and submitted her own blood sample with the medical history of a fictitious male to the clinic for testing. The clinic responded that the test revealed that, among other ailments, she had “enlarged prostate and that carcinogenic cells existed in a ‘potentially aggressive pattern.’” (The prostate is a gland located between the bladder and penis just in front of the rectum in males.) The district attorney’s office convinced a Superior Court judge to issue a temporary restraining order prohibiting the operators of the Chula Vista and Rosarita Beach clinics from advertising and selling misleading and deceptive health cures and to schedule a hearing for an injunction.¹

In June 1988, the judge issued a preliminary injunction against the Youngs and Crow prohibiting operation of the Chula Vista clinic. One of the defendants told the court that the clinic already ceased operation.²

The district attorney’s office also filed an unfair business practices complaint that accused the Youngs and Crow of claiming they can cure cancer and other degenerative diseases by techniques such as implanting electrodes into cancerous tumors and reinfusing electrically treated blood. The complaint also stated that the defendants: (1) falsely said they could identify thirty-four medical conditions, including stress, bowel gases, hypoglycemia, fluid retention, leukemia, multiple sclerosis, parasites, and immune deficiency, and (2) sold unapproved new medical devices and unapproved new drugs, manufactured medical devices and drugs without a license, advertised drugs and devices to cure cancer, and practiced medicine without a license. Deputy District Attorney Donald Canning said: “Don Young holds himself out to be a doctor in his audio and video tapes, but he is not a licensed physician in any of the United States.” Prosecutors sought a penalty of $2,500 for each violation proved in court and a minimum fine for defendants of $150,000.³ I don’t know whether the defendants were financially penalized.

Young Life Research Clinic Institute of Natural Medicine

In her October 9, 2017, article in The New Yorker, Rachel Monroe reported that Young opened the Young Life Research Clinic in Springville, Utah, which offered essential oils and other alternative treatments for various diseases. In 2005, the clinic settled a lawsuit with a patient who claimed that infusions of vitamin C had caused kidney failure, almost killing her. Young closed the clinic and opened one in Ecuador.

Young Living Essential Oils

Young Living claims to be the “world leader in essential oils and wellness solutions.” It has websites in almost seventy countries around the world. For some countries, Young Living sites were created in more than one language.

Rachel Monroe’s article in The New Yorker described Young Living’s multilevel-marketing model:

Distributors often buy products at wholesale prices and sell them at a retail markup, but the real money comes from recruiting other distributors into your “downline,” and getting a commission on their sales. Young Living divides its sales force into a complex hierarchy stratified partly by sales volume, ranging from Distributor (the lowest level, comprising ninety-four per cent of members) to Royal Crown Diamond (less than one-tenth of one per cent).

Though the medium may have changed, the sell remains the same—becoming a distributor is a path to independence, flexibility, and “abundance,” the industry’s favorite euphemism for money.

The reality for most recruits is quite different. Multilevel-marketing companies are structured in such a way that a large base of distributors generally spend more than they make, while a small number on top reap most of the benefits. It is often expensive to invest in an initial stock of products, as well as to make required minimum monthly purchases—around a hundred dollars for Young Living members who want to receive a commission check. According to a public income statement, more than ninety-four per cent of Young Living’s two million active members made less than a dollar in 2016, while less than one-tenth of one per cent—that is, about a thousand Royal Crown Diamonds—earned more than a million dollars.

Young Living has good reason to avoid making specific medical claims for its products in the U.S. In 2014, the Food and Drug Administration warned Young in his role as Young Living CEO that distributors promote many Young Living products for conditions that cause them to be drugs because they are intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease. The warning noted:

Your consultants promote many of your Young Living Essential Oil Products for conditions such as, but not limited to, viral infections (including ebola), Parkinson’s disease, autism, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, insomnia, heart disease, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dementia, and multiple sclerosis, that are not amenable to self-diagnosis and treatment by individuals who are not medical practitioners.

One of Young Living’s ads stated: “Viruses (including Ebola) are no match for Young Living^TM Essential Oils”

While Young Living marketed its essential oils as dietary supplements, the FDA warned that the products were misbranded and that products not intended for ingestion, such as oils applied to the skin, cannot be considered dietary supplements. On the same day, the FDA also warned dōTERRA International, LLC, Young Living’s major competitor, which was founded in 2008 by former Young Living executives, about improper representations of its essential oil products.

In 2017, Young Living pleaded guilty in federal court to federal misdemeanor charges regarding its illegal trafficking of rosewood oil and spikenard oil in violation of the Lacey Act and the Endangered Species Act, and was sentenced to a fine of $500,000, $135,000 in restitution, a community service payment of $125,000 for the conservation of protected species of plants used in essential oils, and a term of five years’ probation with special conditions.

Following in Young’s Footsteps?

With dubious educational and professional credentials, Young developed a career as a promoter of egregious pseudomedicine and a leader in the essential oil movement. He was especially influential in launching Young Living Essential Oils, which remains a big player in the aromatherapy industry. But even organizations devoted to advancing aromatherapy have raised safety concerns about Young’s Raindrop Technique and have criticized Young for making unsubstantiated therapeutic claims.

Young was revered as a Christian by the Christian Broadcasting Network. His teachings about healing with essential oils were significantly rooted in the Christian Bible. It seems likely that he attracted devout conservative Christian customers by appealing to Christian scripture and nature. But even Young’s teachings about healings rooted in non-Christian traditions of holism, spirituality, and vitalism could have appeal for many Christians.

In The Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America (2013), religious studies scholar Candy Gunther Brown noted that many devout Christians interpret the Bible as providing endorsement for a wide range of dubious approaches to healing, including detoxification methods and vitalistic practices such as homeopathy. She notes the recent marketing of Christianized versions of practices such as acupuncture, reiki, yoga, and chiropractic.

I see people who use religiously based qualifications to provide health care services as following in the footsteps of Donald Gary Young.

For example, in January 2018, Malachi Alexander Love-Robinson, aged twenty, who received national media attention in 2016 for operating a South Florida holistic clinic and pretending to be a doctor, signed a plea agreement that called for a sentence of forty-two months of incarceration with credit for more than a year already spent in prison. It appears that his only “doctorate” was a divinity degree from the online Universal Life Church Seminary that could have been bought for as little as $29.95.

In March 2018, the Los Angeles City Attorney charged Timothy Morrow, aged eighty-three, with child abuse causing death and practicing medicine without a license. The City Attorney’s press release describes the alleged circumstances this way:

During 2014, Morrow allegedly began to treat the 13-year-old victim for his diabetes by prescribing herbs in lieu of the insulin the victim’s pediatrician had prescribed. In August, 2014, Morrow allegedly came to the family’s Harbor Gateway home to treat the 13-year-old victim after he became sick and semi-comatose due to complications from his Type-1 diabetes. Shortly before the victim died, Morrow allegedly told the victim’s parents not to give him insulin but instead to administer the herbal oils that he was selling. The victim suffered a cardiac arrest and died the next day as a result of complications from his diabetes. The medical examiner determined the victim would have lived had he received proper medical treatment.

Morrow’s YouTube channel offered forty videos and had at least 2,700 subscribers. His “Message from Our Founder” on the Common Sense Herbal Products website describes him as a “Master Herbalist and Iridologist” to whom God began talking about herbs over twenty-five years ago.

Hundreds of practitioners are using the credentials “PSc.D.,” “D.PSc.,” and/or “Doctor of Pastoral Medicine” obtained through the Pastoral Medical Association (PMA) to promote their services. The PMA describes itself as:

…an established ecclesiastical association developed over a decade and a half ago to restore bible based wellness and counseling services, to provide a constitutionally sound path for licensing of spiritually oriented practitioners that desire to offer those services, and to connect the millions seeking such services with our licensed providers.

We now serve a community of hundreds of thousands of individuals and families in all U.S. States, throughout Canada and many other countries who value and prioritize their health, who believe in freedom of choice when it comes to health, and who are seeking natural means for restoring and building good physical, mental and spiritual health.

In June 2018, James Joseph Martin of West Sacramento, California, who did business as Dr. James Martin, D.PSc., was sentenced to one year in jail and five years of probation after pleading no contest to three felony counts of practicing medicine without a license, four felony counts of grand theft, and two misdemeanor counts of improperly using the titles “Dr.” and “physician.” He was also ordered to:

• stop portraying himself as practicing functional or pastoral medicine
• surrender his chiropractic license (which, at the time, hadthe status of denied)
• pay $67,934 in restitution to his victims

I imagine that many other spiritually oriented practitioners without real medical expertise strive to be as consequential as Donald Gary Young was. I recommend that consumers be wary of Young wannabes.

1. M. Himaka. “Clinic Given Order of Restraint.” San Diego Union, March 8, 1988.

1. “Judge Orders Chula Vista Medical Clinics to Shut Down.” San Diego Union, June 18, 1988.

1. B. Callahan. “Court Blocks Ads, Sales by Chula Vista Clinic.” San Diego Union, March 11, 1988.

Appendix: Comments about Papers Coauthored by Young

Only one of the papers Young coauthored can be considered a clinical investigation, but that paper is a case report—an anecdote backed with documentation. It’s the least informative type of study in the hierarchy of clinical evidence regarding safety and effectiveness of treatments. The paper, “Management of Basal Cell Carcinoma of the Skin Using Frankincense (Boswellia sacra) Essential Oil: A Case Report,” was published in OA Alternative Medicine, a journal of Open Access Publishing London. Assuming that the oil could receive Investigational New Drug status in the U.S., it would take three phases of increasingly rigorous research with well over a thousand people before standards for drug approval could be met. Effective treatments of basal cell skin cancers are already available.

Another paper he coauthored in OA Alternative Medicine reviewed the anti-cancer activity of frankincense essential oils in laboratory studies, but such studies don’t establish that the oils are safe, effective treatments for any specific type of cancer.

I’m not qualified to evaluate “Detecting Essential Oil Adulteration,” a paper coauthored by Young and published in the Journal of Environmental Analytical Chemistry, but I’m all for quality control of consumer products. Purity is important, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for safety or effectiveness.

Perhaps other papers coauthored have value in answering questions of interest to some serious scientists, but I don’t see how any of the papers answer any practical questions that consumers should ask about any product promoted to them for health enhancement.

Young coauthored a paper published in the Journal of the American Nutraceutical Association about an explicitly pre-clinical investigation that involved injecting wolfberry juice and other juice mixtures into the abdominal cavity of mice and then looking for effects on immune function. I don’t imagine that many people interested in essential oils would be interested in receiving injections of juices into their abdomens.

He coauthored a paper published in Flavour and Fragrance Journal reporting inhibition in cell culture of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) by fifty-two of sixty-four blends of essential oils. The paper acknowledges that much more research is needed before clinical safety and efficacy in treating MRSA infections can be established.

A Young paper published in Pharmaceutical Biology addresses technical aspects of assessing anti-microbial activity of essential oils in a laboratory, not in or on people.

Young coauthored two papers published in BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine. One reported on Boswellia sacra essential oil effects on cultured breast cancer cells. Another reported on frankincense essential oil effects on cultured pancreatic cancer cells. Neither study establishes that the oils are safe and effective to use in treating actual breast or pancreatic cancer patients. The other, “Differential Effects of Selective Frankincense (Ru Xiang) Essential Oil versus Non-Selective Sandalwood (Tan Xiang) Essential Oil on Cultured Bladder Cancer Cells: a Microarray and Bioinformatics Study” published in the journal Chinese Medicine, is similarly uninformative regarding how cancer should be treated.

Another paper reported on a cell culture study and was published in the Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters: “Inhibition of LPS Induced Nitric Oxide Production in Murine RAW Macrophage-like Cells by Essential Oils of Plants.” The authors noted: “…The correlation of results from these data to in vivo anti-inflammatory activity along with the overall benefits to the patient is still speculative.” In other words, the research doesn’t support any meaningful health claim about any essential oil.

Five of the papers were published in the Journal of Essential Oil Research. Those papers reported: (1) reductions in aerosol-borne bacteria under a fume hood with exposure to an oil blend, (2) reduction of bacterial plaque production when mixed with some oils, (3) three of seventy-three oils having highly inhibitory activity and fifteen having moderately inhibitory activity against cultures of Streptococcus pneumoniae R36A, (4) descriptions of the chemical composition of essential oils from herbal parts of three varieties of Chrysothamnus nauseousus, and (5) a description of the chemical composition of an essential oil found in the stem of a plant from Ecuador. None of the studies provides a sound basis for recommending essential oil treatment for any health concern.

In this column, we will be investigating the first of the “big four” cursed objects in Zak Bagans’s Haunted Museum (see the previous column): the Bela Lugosi cursed mirror.

The atmosphere was set as my intrepid companions and I entered the room. The boredom of having waited in long lines finally gave way to something interesting: a mirror hanging on the front wall, hidden behind a thick, black curtain. Once all the guests were inside, our tour guide began pointing out the various items around the room, building up suspense before the main event. The room contains several paintings/prints, including a screen-used movie prop painting from the film Silent Hill. Our guide pointed out two “Crying Boy” paintings (a third was in the gift shop), “believed to be cursed” and according to our guide “known” to mysteriously start fires. For a well-researched article that examines Crying Boy paintings, look up “Curse That Painting!” by Massimo Polidoro (2012) in Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the work of British folklorist David Clarke in the May 2008 issue of Fortean Times.

We finally came to the star object of the room: the Bela Lugosi Haunted/Cursed Mirror (they used both terms to describe it). The guide informed us that Lugosi was obsessed with the occult, particularly the practice of scrying. Scrying is the practice of looking into a suitable medium, such as a crystal ball or mirror, in the hope of detecting messages from spirits or visions of the past or future. Our guide went on to claim that Lugosi used this mirror for scrying and that “he did this after his wife died, trying to contact her.” The guide mentioned that this occult practice may have opened a “portal” to the other side.

Our guide then related how they have had to call 911 after guests have gazed into the mirror and how she had personally witnessed people physically get sick while encountering the looking glass. We were then offered the chance—if we dared, after having signed waivers in the event we were physically harmed or psychologically scarred in some horrific Lovecraftian way—to gaze into the mirror ourselves. All of us—Donna (my wife), Susan Gerbic, Mark Edward, and myself—didn’t hesitate. Just in case you were worried, my skeptic team did not require emergency services (nor did anyone else).

We were never told the name of Lugosi’s wife, who he was trying to contact. This stuck out to me and got my “skeptical spidey sense” tingling. I later learned Lugosi had been married five times. Being a curious chap, I decided to do a little bit of research and find out which of Lugosi’s wives had passed away and had been the object of his attempts to contact through supernatural means. What I found was interesting:

• Lugosi married Ilona Szmik in 1917, but they divorced in 1920.
• In 1921, he married Ilona von Montagh, but they divorced in 1924.
• In 1929, he married Beatrice Woodruff Weeks, and they divorced just four months later.
• In 1933, he married nineteen-year-old Lillian Arch and divorced in 1953. He had one child with Lillian, Bela G. Lugosi Jr.
• Finally, in 1955 he married Hope Lininger, and they remained together until Lugosi’s death (1956). Hope passed away forty-one years later in 1997 at the age of 77.

Curiously, none of Lugosi’s wives died while married to him, and therefore he was not a widower and was not trying to contact his recently-deceased spouse. This made me wonder: If this claim was incorrect, what about the claim Lugosi was highly into scrying and the occult? After an extensive search across the vastness of the internet for sources that documented the life of Lugosi, including belalugosi.com (run by his son and granddaughter), I could find no references to him being involved in any sort of occult practices at all. At best, there were vague references to Lugosi “delving vaguely into the occult, more specifically voodoo, in Victor Halperin’s White Zombie” (Scovell 2012) and “leaving behind an occult-obsessed cinema” (Turley 2015); but these comments were in reference to film themes, not his personal life.

Let’s get back to the “haunted” mirror. Our guide told us that after Lugosi died, a man named Frank Saletri had rented Lugosi’s home, and the mirror behind the curtain hung in Frank’s bedroom. We were informed that Frank died a horrific death in that bedroom, a likely mob hit, stating he had “screwdrivers to the back of the elbows, to the knees, to the back of the head. He was shot, and that screwdriver dug out those bullets.” The tour guide went on to say the only witness to the event was ... this mirror, and “if Bela left any kind of portal open, all the energy from the murderer looking into this mirror and also the energy from that horrific death would be trapped.”

Saletri was a criminal lawyer and a part-time producer, director, writer, and actor. He wrote several film scripts, most of which were spoofs of classic horror films (McMillan 1986) and succeeded in producing one: Blackenstein in 1973 (which I enjoyed). By all accounts, he was a fun and loving man. Sadly, Saletri was brutally murdered in his home on Primrose Ave in Los Angeles. His body was found on July 12, 1982, bound up in the master bedroom with a single gunshot to the back of the head. This was referred to as “gangland execution style” by many reports. Sadly, the murder remains unsolved to this day and most likely will remain that way.

What really stood out to me during this tour was that they were calling this object the “Bela Lugosi Haunted (or cursed) Mirror” rather than the “Saletri Haunted Mirror.” Since they made it sound as if the “murderer’s energy and the energy of the death was trapped” within, it only seems logical to at least name it after Saletri. On Bagans’s TV show Deadly Possessions, we meet Cindy Lee, owner of the mirror and niece of Frank Saletri. She brings the mirror to the museum and gives Bagans a little background on the mirror, including the claim that “the mirror was in Bela Lugosi’s house” and her uncle lived there when she was a child (Deadly Possessions 2016). Okay, so this is obviously why the museum named the mirror after the classic horror film star, to capitalize on the name and star-power of the famous actor. Bagans further attaches Lugosi to the mirror by claiming that Lugosi opened up a “portal” during his alleged scrying practices. However, there were several details that struck me as out of place, so I took a closer look.

Saletri was murdered in 1982 in the bedroom of his house located at 6216 Primrose Ave. in Los Angeles, a house our tour guide claimed, “after Bela Lugosi died, a fellow by the name of Frank Saletri rented Bela’s home.” This statement gave us the impression that Lugosi had owned the Primrose house and that the murder took place soon after his death. In fact, several realty sites have (sold) listings for this house that begin their descriptions with “This home, rumored to have been Bella Lugosi's house at one point …” (Estately 2018; Zillow 2018; Trulia 2018).

I checked this address against the Residences section of BelaLugosi.com, which has a listing of his former residences from 1921 until his death in 1956, twenty-seven in total (Lugosi Enterprises 2017). The Primrose house was not among them. I began to doubt whether the Lugosi claim had any truth to it whatsoever.

I checked another lead. Included on the blu-ray release of Blackenstein (Saletri’s only film that was ever produced), there is a featurette called Monster Kid, which is an interview with June Kirk, Saletri’s sister. In the featurette, I learned that the house Saletri owned prior to the Primrose house was located at 6764 Wedgewood Place in Hollywood—this is the house he actually claimed had belonged to Lugosi, not the house where the murder took place. Strike two, Zak.

This earlier address also appears on an invitation from The Count Dracula Society for a reception at the “home of Count Dracula himself: Bela Lugosi,” naming Frank Saletri as the owner of the residence (Kirk 2017). Saletri moved into the house around 1966 (Luther 1971), which is still a decade after Lugosi’s passing in 1956. Ten years is a long time, and I highly doubt the high-rent Hollywood Hills house would have remained empty for that duration.

I checked the list of residences at BelaLugosi.com again and found the Wedgewood address was also not listed. I searched the internet for any information connecting Lugosi to the Wedgewood home; this address had no recorded link to Lugosi other than the claim of Saletri. According to an article in the Beverly Hills Citizen, the Wedgewood house was razed sometime at the end of 1971 to accommodate the expansion of the Hollywood Freeway (Luther 1971).

I reached out to the Lugosi family and got in touch with Lynne Lugosi Sparks, the granddaughter of Bela Lugosi, who was extremely helpful. I explained why I was researching Lugosi’s former residences and asked (in two separate emails) whether he had owned either the Primrose or Wedgewood houses. This was her response:

Thank you for contacting us. We know about the mirror and its inclusion in the museum in Las Vegas. We do not have any information documenting that my grandfather lived at the Primrose residence. My father, Bela Lugosi, Jr., has no recollection of the mirror or of his father mentioning the mirror. Bela Lugosi lived in quite a few places around Los Angeles, and while it is possible that our list is incomplete, we have tried our best, with the help of a trusted researcher and biographer, to record Bela Lugosi’s homes for which we have documentation. The list is currently missing a few addresses and we will be updating our website as soon as possible, but Primrose is not one of them.

In a follow up email she added, “We do not have Wedgewood Place in our records either. We always welcome getting new information, so if you find documentation of either residence or of the mirror, please let us know.” (Sparks 2018)

There just doesn’t seem to be a connection between either of these houses and Bela Lugosi (aside from the claim made by Saletri and carried on by his family). In addition, according to the Lugosi family, they have no recollection, information, or documentation about this “Bela Lugosi Mirror” in the Bagans Museum

I reached out a third time to the Lugosi family, inquiring about the alleged claim that Lugosi “was into scrying and highly into the occult.” A few weeks later, I received a reply from Sparks that confirmed what I found—or rather, what I had not found—so far. She stated:

I do not have a copy of the museum’s script as it relates to Bela Lugosi, but from your information, it seems that the museum has made things up about his life to make a good story for the mirror’s placement in the museum or is perpetuating rumors. We have no knowledge of Bela Lugosi being into the occult –or “Scrying”—or of any desire or practice to contact a deceased wife. And, again, we have no information about the mirror at the museum or the house from which the museum claims the mirror came. (Sparks 2018)

With this information, I can’t help but conclude the claims promoted by our tour guide (and thus Zak Bagans and his not-so-Haunted Museum), are not supported by any documentation or valid evidence. I re-watched the episode of Deadly Possession, and I realized that Bagans himself seems to be the original source of the “scrying and highly into the occult” claims of this story. During his interview with Cindy, Bagans declares he “knows a little bit about Bela Lugosi,” knew he was into the occult, and suggests that Lugosi used the mirror in his occult practices. Bagans states in the episode “I tend to believe that this mirror was used by Bela Lugosi, that he was doing scrying rituals with it, knowing his past in the occult. And if he did, then this [mirror] would be a portal. And if the portal was left open and it captured the reflection of this murder, then that energy would still be consumed in it, and possibly the killer … the killer’s soul” (Deadly Possessions 2016). This melodramatic statement is pure fabrication and downright non-sensical; seriously, his statement makes no sense whatsoever. Yet this is what they promoted at the museum during my visit. Strike three, Zak.

Is there a connection to Bela Lugosi? I don’t think so, but I wasn’t done. So far there has been no documentation (chain of custody or provenance) that the mirror was a possession of Lugosi or that it came from a house previously owned by him. This claim comes from, but does not originate with, Cindy during her interview with Bagans. In the episode she states, “This mirror used to be in Bela Lugosi’s house. My uncle lived there when I was a child.” To be clear: I’m not saying Ms. Lee is fabricating or embellishing a factual connection between the mirror and the legendary Dracula actor; I’m saying this might be a case of mundane misinterpreted or erroneous family history in connection with the mirror.

I reached out to Cindy to fill in the gaps of my research. She called me some time later, and we had a wonderful conversation; she is a delight to speak with, being very open and honest with me, as well as understanding where I was coming from as an investigator. Cindy told me that the idea of the house once belonging to Bela Lugosi was just something they had always known, accepted, and never had cause to doubt. She explained that when her uncle moved into the Wedgewood residence there had been various items that had been left behind by the previous owner—the mirror being among them. When Saletri moved out (because the house was being razed), he took all his possessions with him, including the remaining items, to the Primrose residence. Eventually many of these items, the mirror among them, came to be in Cindy’s possession.

I related the research I had done and my exchanges with the Lugosi family, both revealing no connection between Lugosi and the Wedgewood house. From the list of residences provided by BelaLugosi.com, we can confidently account for where Lugosi lived from 1921 to 1956. Other than a few interviews in which Saletri is the source of the claim, there is simply no solid documentation that would prove this to be true. After some more conversation, Cindy herself began to wonder, saying “You put a big doubt in my mind, and now I’m really curious ...”

Cindy agreed to investigate the matter a little further over the next few days but was unable to locate any documentation that would establish a clear connection with Lugosi. However, after speaking about this a little more, she will continue to search her uncle’s belongings to see if any paperwork turns up. If additional information is found, I will certainly update this article to reflect it.

Saletri was a big fan of horror movies (Kirk 2017), wrote his own horror-spoof movie scripts, and was a member of many clubs such as The Count Dracula Society. In an interview he gave just before the Wedgewood house was torn down, we learn that “when Saletri moved in five years ago, he also found a scrapbook of clippings about Lugosi” (Luther 1971). It is plausible that the scrapbook was mistakenly assumed to have belonged to Lugosi, and this evolved into the idea the house itself must have belonged to the actor at one time. I’m hoping the scrapbook still exists and can be examined in the future (perhaps it has an owner’s name inside somewhere).

In conclusion, there isn’t any available evidence that the house Mr. Saletri owned, or mirror he found in it, ever belonged to Bela Lugosi. The claims made by Bagans about Lugosi being into the occult and practicing scrying with this mirror are entirely false and fabricated—and he should be ashamed of himself for creating and promoting such rumors about someone else’s family (obviously without even checking with them). All we can say with confidence, based on the information we have, is that Bagans has a mirror hanging in his museum that was discarded by an unknown Los Angeles homeowner in 1966.

I would like to express my gratitude for research assistance to the Lugosi family, Mellanie Ramsey, Cindy Lee, and Donna Biddle.

• Deadly Possessions (Television show). 2016. “Bela Lugosi's Mirror and Charles Manson's TV”. Season 1, Ep. 4. Aired April 23.
• Estately. 2018. 6216 Primrose Ave. Available at https://www.estately.com/listings/info/6216-primrose-avenue--8#gallery.
• Kirk, June. 2017. Monster Kid: Interview with Writer/Producer Frank R. Saletri’s Sister, June Kirk. BlackensteiBluRay release.
• Lee, Cindy. 2018. Personal correspondence via phone calls.
• Lugosi Enterprises. 2017. Bela Lugosi Residences.Available at http://belalugosi.com/residences/.
• Luther, Claudia. 1971. “Lugosi House to be Razed.” Beverly Hills Citizen.
• McMillan, Penelope. 1986. “Sister of Slain Lawyer Offers $10,000 Reward.” Los Angeles Times. Available at http://articles.latimes.com/1986-01-23/local/me-27803_1_slain-lawyer-offers.
• McPadden, Mike. 2017. Cult Film, Cold Case: Who Murdered the Man Who Made “Blackenstein”? Accessed on December 19, 2018. Available at http://crimefeed.com/2017/06/30826/.
• Polidoro, Massimo. 2012. “Curse That Painting!” Skeptical Inquirer 36.6 (November/December). Available at https://www.csicop.org/si/show/curse_that_painting.
• Scovell, Adam. 2012. A Brief History of Occult and Folk Horror. Available at https://celluloidwickerman.com/2012/11/29/a-brief-history-of-occult-and-folk-horror/.
• Sparks, Lynne Lugosi. 2018. Personal correspondence via email.
• Trulia.com. 2018. 6216 Primrose Ave. Accessed on December 19, 2018. Available at https://www.trulia.com/p/ca/los-angeles/6216-primrose-ave-los-angeles-ca-90068--2077479860.
• Turley, K. 2015. The Curse of the Cape: The Real Horror of Bela Lugosi. Available at http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/11/the-curse-of-the-cape-the-real-horror-of-bela-lugosi.html.
• Zillow.com. 2018. 6216 Primrose Ave. Accessed on December 19, 2018. Available at https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/6216-Primrose-Ave-Los-Angeles-CA-90068/20807355_zpid/.

The cohosts of the Squaring the Strange podcast.

In May 2018, Susan Gerbic published an article about her trip to New Mexico to speak about the Guerrilla Skeptics project for New Mexicans for Science and Reason, the local skeptics group. En route, she dropped by the Squaring the Strange podcast studios for a guest appearance. Susan’s article about her trip mentioned the podcast, but that was not the main topic; reading it left me with many questions. To learn more, I decided to interview one of the three people who make the podcast happen. Flipping my three-sided coin resulted in selecting cohost, content producer, and “SkeptiCrate sender-outer” Celestia Ward. Luckily—once I explained that I wasn’t just a random fan bugging her on Facebook but was a random CSI online columnist bugging her on Facebook—she happily consented to an interview.

When Squaring launched as a weekly podcast in April 2017, it had just a pair of cohosts: Ben Radford and Pascual Romero. Celestia was primarily the behind-the-scenes content producer, who made only short, sporadic “appearances” with a fortune-cookie segment. Eventually she became a cohost, converting the arrangement to a triumvirate and transforming the character of the podcast.

Rob Palmer: So Celestia, thanks for doing this interview! First, can you give readers a summary of your background?

Celestia Ward: Well, I went to Johns Hopkins with the notion of going there for pre-med, but after a year and a half I went to the dark side—liberal arts—and ended up graduating with a writing degree and a minor in psychology. I went immediately to work for the University Press there and ended up going up the ladder in the manuscript editing department. Within five or six years I was one of the senior manuscript editors there, so I was an academic editor for the first ten years out of college. So, I was doing copyediting and I got to read all of this fascinating stuff. I got to correct PhDs, which I think a lot of skeptics end up doing for fun. Once I got to age thirty, I decided I didn’t want to end my life as a copy editor. Many of the people I was working with had done it for forty years. The only place I could move up to at that point was to my boss’s chair—a very stressful job that I didn’t want.

I had been doing caricatures on the side because I couldn’t give that up. I did it in college to earn a living but while I was a copy editor, I kept doing it on weekends and at nighttime—doing parties, etc. So, I got to the point where I decided to give it a shot as a full-time thing. I moved back to Las Vegas, where you could do something like caricatures and not starve. So, then I ended up switching things up where I did art full-time, and in my off hours I would do some editing. I’m still doing both, in one way or another.

Palmer: But how did all of this lead you to the skeptical movement? I don’t see the intersection.

Ward: Probably the earliest skeptical influence I had was Penn and Teller. When I met Teller in Vegas, he said, “Ah, leaving academia to join the circus! I know how that feels. Good luck!”

Palmer: But how did you get to talk to Teller? He doesn’t talk!

Ward: Privately, he does. He’s the salt of the earth. I love him. So yes, Penn and Teller led me to the skeptical movement. I was a big fan of their show Bullshit! They turned me on to James Randi. I became a big fan, and then I started getting into skeptical podcasts. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe was one of the first ones I listened to. I actually had a period in my life about nine or ten years ago when I got hit with a bacterial infection and had to be on all these antibiotics and have surgery. I ended up in the hospital for almost four weeks. And it was then that I started listening to every podcast under the sun. Daytime TV bores the crap out of me. I went through all the backlogs of The Skeptic Zone and the SGU and Skeptoid… I actually learned a lot about bacteria from listening to all these podcasts.

Palmer: I started listening to Squaring the Strange right from the podcast’s beginning, and it’s one of the podcasts in my weekly rotation that I try not to fall behind on. To start with, for my readers unfamiliar with it, can you give a description?

Ward: While we love doing skeptic outreach, we also have a love for the … well, the strange! So, cryptids, ghost stories, and folklore get rotated in. We like going cryptid or folklore at least once a month!

Palmer: Please outline the format of the podcast. How is it unique in the crowded skeptical podcast arena?

Ward: A lot of skeptical podcasts, including the ones I like, go right to current events. We have specifically tried to make a lot of our shows “evergreen” so that if you listen to it, say, next year, you’re still going to get a kick out of listening. We have recently gravitated toward an opening segment of what we call SWAYSO, which started with Ben and Pascual just asking each other “So, what are you skeptical of this week?” And a listener named Justin did the jingle for it as a one-year anniversary present.

Palmer: What can you tell me about the origin of the podcast?

Ward: Ending up on the podcast was quite accidental. I was in Albuquerque for some other reason, and I was working with Ben [Radford] on a different project. So, I was meeting up with him while I was in Albuquerque, and he said “Hey, I’ve got a friend who wants to start a skeptical podcast. Would you like to sit in on the meeting?” I told him. “No, I would just be intruding.”But Ben said, “You listen to more podcasts than anyone I know.” So, I sat in and met Pascual. And three hours later, we had filled up a legal pad of paper and had eaten an entire large green chile pizza. We had all these ideas, and we had a name, and we had a plan, and we had segments, and we had topics!

Palmer: How did the three of you—from such diverse backgrounds—get together to do this?

Ward: Ben and I actually met at a caricature convention because he has an interest in caricatures. I had heard of his name, and I am quite sure that I’m the only one at that convention who had, so he was a little weirded-out that I recognized his name badge. And it was strange to have someone show up to a caricaturist convention who is not a professional caricaturist. So of course, I cornered him and we talked about skeptical stuff. And it turns out, we had a lot of friends in common already because I knew people in the movement. I had been going to TAMs, and of course listening to all the podcasts and immersing myself in the community that way. It was a treat to meet him. And then shortly after, we partnered to do a series of greeting cards called Creature Cards. And that ended up rolling into us doing this little folding puzzle called Fold & Find. Also, Ben wrote some very nice folklore descriptions for some Creature Cards about classic folkloric monsters.

I know that Ben had known Pascual for at least a couple of years prior. And I think they had worked on some video stuff together. In fact, they just finished working on an audiobook together: Ben’s latest on investigating ghosts. Pascual brings with him a background of being a traveling heavy-metal performance artist, as well as working as a producer and behind the scenes on TV stuff in Hollywood. He’s got a talent for knowing the markers when something has been staged, something the average person might not recognize. But Pascual knows all the nitty gritty behind it, like how you can get a man on the street to say a bunch of dumb stuff and make it look like it’s genuine. Pascual had never been on a skeptical podcast before, but he did have a podcast for a while. But I think this is his first foray into skeptical activism.

Palmer: Where did the podcast’s name come from?

Ward: Well, tooting my own horn … I sat there with the yellow pad of paper and I just wrote down all types of things. I came up with the name because I always liked the phrase “squaring the circle.” It calls to mind Greek philosophers searching for mysterious formulas. So, I figured we were going to be talking about strange things that we couldn’t always solve. So, I suggested “Squaring the Strange” and they both kind of liked it. We explored some other options, but wound up coming back to that one.

Palmer: When you started with Squaring, you were “just” the content producer. How did your transition to cohost happen? Were bribes involved? In either direction?

Ward: Initially, my job was to listen to the podcast and the final take and to assess what they could use more of … what to back away from or cut out … and to kind of shape the banter, reminding them of the things that would make the podcast more fun to listen to from the perspective of someone who listens to a ton of podcasts. I also kept the list of topics—and we have a long list of topics to last to the end of time. So, my job was primarily behind the scenes, and once or twice I showed up as a guest cohost, for instance talking about gambling superstitions because I live in Las Vegas and I see a lot of that. And so, I found myself participating more and more, and it became easier to do that with Skype. Then once we added the third voice, we heard a lot of good feedback from listeners.

Some friends said that they were glad to have a female voice break up the male-to-male banter, which a lot of skeptical podcasts have. On some podcasts I listen to—not just skeptical ones—you have a bunch of guys and it’s hard to tell who’s who. There’s one I like with four guys on it, but it’s hard to listen to because I can’t tell who’s talking.

Palmer: There seems to be lack of female hosts on skeptical podcasts. It seems like the entertainment industry has a lot—but not skeptical podcasts. I know about Cara Santa Maria of course who does her own podcast as well as being on the SGU. But who else is there?

Ward: Well, there’s Sharon Hill’s 15 Credibility Street. I drew their logo, by the way. That’s one of the things I’ve done for people: I’ve drawn a lot of logos. 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! 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.

[Note: Shortly after this interview, production of 15 Credibility Street ended. You can read Sharon’s blog post, “Please Don’t Call Me a Skeptic” here, as well as my CSI online opinion piece, “I’m Keeping My Skeptic’s Card!” here.]

Ward: I have heard people complain about “sausage fests.” I’ve heard podcasts called that. I did not want to be just the token female. But some of the things that I was doing as content producer, I realized I can do a lot more easily in real time, with a lot less frustration. If I’m there in the room I can do in real time what I would like to have done in post-production, like purposely ask a “dumb question” to get something answered. Something that makes Ben come down from intellectual mode and explain something. A friend of mine who’s been in podcasts for a dozen years says one of the problems he has with skeptical podcasts is “there’s too much smart.” He says you need to break it up with a little bit of stupid. So, I can ask those questions. Otherwise, people are going to glaze over. And when I say “stupid,” I’m not talking about bringing the Food Babe on. I’m talking about little things like a dumb pun, or a joke, or some good-natured ribbing. If I wanted to listen to just one person going over facts and figures, I’d get a dry audio book or something. But if I’m listening to a podcast, I want a conversation. There are many flavors of podcasts. And there’s actually a Facebook page that helps people decide what to listen to based on what they already like. It’s called “Podcasts We Listen To.”

Palmer: And besides taking on cohost responsibilities, you maintained all your other podcast tasks, right? Including personally packaging the SkeptiCrates? How is the work broken up now?

Ward: I do still keep up the Google doc and get the guys to look at it to pick topics. I keep the meeting notes for what we’re going to talk about in the next episode. Ben brings a lot of the research muscle, as he’s got the investigation experience. Pascual has been the audio guy doing the editing work, and a lot of the music we use is directly from Pascual—although our opening is by a pretty popular band from the 80s called Shriekback. Ben had the opportunity to get a custom composed piece of music from them, and so we use a bit of that for the opening. Recently Pascual has had a bunch of things to attend to involving a job change and family issues. So, I’ve gone ahead and, thanks to tutorials and some help from Pascual, I’ve been getting up-to-snuff on audio editing. The past month or so I’ve kind of taken over some of Pascual’s work, just on a temporary basis.

Palmer: So, then it seems since you took over cohost responsibilities, now you’re actually doing more, not less, of the other work!

Ward: It’s kind of just circumstantial. Ben works a tremendous number of hours anyway and does the show nights and weekends, so he’s not really game to learn a whole new platform of software to edit audio. I have a little bit of video editing experience already, so it wasn’t really hard for me to adapt to the programs that Pascual is using. So, I was able to pick up on it quickly enough, and hopefully it will all work out because I’m hitting a “baby deadline” soon. I don’t see myself being able to put in this much time once that happens.

Palmer: So, Pascual’s time because of family and job circumstances is more limited than it used to be, and yours is certainly going to be more limited really soon. So, what’s going to happen to the podcast?

Ward: Pascual is working toward a point where hopefully he won’t have to put in as much time at his new job, and we’ll be able to go back to business as usual before all this happened. If not, we’ve talked about contingency plans such as going bi-weekly, but we’ll see what happens.

This interview will be continued in part 2 of this article, to be published shortly. As we did the interview, Celestia was just weeks from the arrival of her baby, who has since arrived happy and healthy. In September 2018, Squaring the Strange did move to a biweekly format, but Celestia says they have not ruled out bringing back the weekly schedule, provided everyone’s work life allows it.

Prior to the inception of Squaring the Strange, Ben Radford interviewed Celestia for Skeptical Inquirer and covered the intersection of her art with skepticism. For a deep dive into that topic, see Ben’s article here. Also, visit Celestia’s website here, her caricature blog here, and the Squaring the Strange homepage here.

Acknowledgements: For suggesting several of the questions I put to Celestia, a special thank you goes to my Guerrilla Skeptics teammate Paula Serrano. And, when you interview a copy editor for an article, how can you not use her skills to improve the article itself? Thank you Celestia for your unexpected but appreciated input, including teaching me the proper use of an m-dash!

In this installment of my column, we’re going to focus on an item that I’ve wanted to write about for some time: the Dibbuk Box. As luck would have it, this is another one of the “Big Four” haunted objects in Zak Bagans Haunted Museum.

This allegedly haunted object first appeared in pop culture in a 2003 eBay auction from Kevin Mannis, a professional writer and recording artist from the Pacific Northwest (Broadjam 2018). In his eBay description, Mannis claimed to have acquired the box (thought to be a wine cabinet) at a 2001 estate sale. He proceeds to spin a tale of a paranormal experiences that rivals many horror films and seemed destined for the big screen itself (which it eventually did).

The backstory is much too long for the scope of this article, so I’ll give you the CliffsNotes version. Mannis claimed to have purchased the box at an estate sale of a 103-year old Polish woman who, after growing up and raising a family, was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Her entire family—parents, brothers, a sister, husband, two sons, and a daughter—were all killed. She escaped with some other prisoners and somehow made it to Spain, where she acquired the wine cabinet. The granddaughter of the woman noticed that Mannis had purchased the box and related the history behind it and how it was always called a Dibbuk (or Dybbuk) box. (Wait—if the original woman’s entire family was killed, where did a granddaughter come from?)

The granddaughter also stated she and her siblings were always told it “was to never, ever be opened.” Of course, Mannis opened it once he got it home (I would too). Inside the box, he found several items: a 1928 U.S. Wheat Penny; a 1925 U.S. Wheat Penny; one small lock of blonde hair; one small lock of black/brown hair; a granite statue engraved and gilded with the Hebrew word shalom; one dried-out rosebud; one golden goblet; and a very strange black candlestick holder with the legs of an octopus. It didn’t take long for all sorts of Hollywood-horror antics to manifest including apparitions, people getting sick, and even causing a stroke. For a full description of those events, visit the website in the references below (Mannis 2009).

So, what is a dibbuk? According to the Jewish Virtual Library, “in Jewish folklore and popular belief is an evil spirit which enters into a living person, cleaves to his soul, causes mental illness, talks through his mouth, and represents a separate and alien personality is called a dybbuk. The term appears neither in Talmudic literature nor in the Kabbalah, where this phenomenon is always called ‘evil spirit’” (JVL 2018). I also consulted my Jewish encyclopedia from 1966; “(Heb. ‘adhesion’) In kabbalistic folklore, the soul of a sinner which, after his death, transmigrates into the body of a living person” (Roth 1966).

Advertisement for the 1937 film The Dybbuk, directed by Michał Waszyński.

A search of various media revealed a play by S. Ansky titled The Dybbuk, written between 1913 and 1916, making its stage debut in 1920. The play was adapted into a motion picture in 1937. The idea of trapping this spirit inside a box was never brought up. Brian Dunning, in an episode of his Skeptoid podcast, points out “the word (Dybbuk) comes from the Hebrew verb ‘to cling,’ so a dybbuk is specifically a soul who clings to another. Nowhere in the folkloric literature is there precedent for a dybbuk inhabiting a box or other inanimate object” (Dunning 2014). My own search also did not find any mention of these spirits of folklore ever being trapped in a box—until Mannis’s 2003 eBay auction.

The eBay auction was won by a Missouri student named Iosif Nietzke (username Spasmolytic) for $140. After claiming the box did all kinds of horrible things to him, Niezke re-listed the box on eBay eight months later. The winning bidder was Jason Haxton, museum director at the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine at A.T. Still University in Missouri (username Agetron). In an interview Haxton gave in 2012, we find out Haxton learned of the box through one of his students; the roommate of Iosif Nietzke (Campbell 2012). Haxton eventually purchased the Dibbuk Box and wrote a book detailing all the Hollywood-horror style experiences he claimed to have happened to him: bloody/bleeding eyes, choking on water, full-body welts and hives, and so on (Haxton 2011).

Eventually the entire story found its way to Hollywood and inspired the film The Possession, produced by Sam Raimi. I learned that in 2016 Haxton donated the box to Zak Bagans, star of the TV show Ghost Adventures. The Dibbuk box was put on display in his Haunted Museum, surround by (more than a grain of) salt and under a protective case (Bagans 2016). This is where I saw it up close during my visit in October of 2018. See my review of this Not-So-Haunted museum (Biddle 2018).

I’m not going to focus on the paranormal claims associated with the box from the various owners, because that would be a fruitless endeavor; there is simply no physical evidence of the claims to examine—just anecdotes that amount to nothing in the way of objective evidence implicating the Dibbuk Box as the cause. What I do plan on focusing on here is the question of whether the Dibbuk Box was a fabricated attempt to earn some extra cash and inadvertently became a paranormal pop-cultural icon.

When I began researching the history of this box, it appeared that Haxton was the driving force behind the box becoming popular in the paranormal community. Although Mannis was the first to write about it, his eBay auction never reached the viral status a seller hopes for. Haxton published a book in 2011 entitled The Dibbuk Box, which reached a much wider audience and solidified the object’s place in paranormal lore. This book straddles the line between “it’s haunted” and “it’s a hoax,” never making a final decision and evoking the trite, open-ended method of “I’ll let the reader decide.” I’m not a fan of such approaches, so I took a closer look at Haxton’s time owning the box.

On a website dedicated to recording the various traditions and folklore surrounding the Kirksville area, best-known for being the home of Truman State University and A.T. Still University, I found the Dibbuk Box in a featured story. Before I read the story, there was something that caught my attention: a photograph at the head of the page of not one, but two identical Dibbuk boxes. When I went to click on the image, text popped up over the photograph stating “The Real Dybbuk box on the left, on the right is a replica. Photo by Jason Haxton” (Payne 2016).

Screenshots from website showing both the original box and the replica side-by-side.

Front view of original and replica boxes open. Apparently, no one was worried about the Dibbuk escaping.

The image only showed us the back of the boxes, in which both had a Hebrew prayer carved into the wood. However, we could plainly see that Haxton had found and/or fabricated duplicates for three of the larger items that were inside the box: the granite tablet with Shalom engraved on it, the golden goblet, and the candlestick holder with octopus legs.

The story on the website stated that Haxton buried the box somewhere on his property and “claims in his book that he won't tell anyone its true location until he dies and keeps a replica for media purposes” (Payne 2016). I ordered Haxton’s book to read about his side of the story and confirm the claim he had buried it on his property. The last location he mentions the Dibbuk Box being stored appears on page 146, “I shut the doors of the ark, sealing the Dibbuk Box within, and carted the whole thing to the attic.” I found no mention (in the book) of him burying the box, except for the idea of having it buried with him when he died. However, on the episode of Deadly Possessions, Haxton does state he had buried the box on his property.

With a bit more digging, I found another site showing the replica box in progress of being built side-by-side with the original (Macabre 2015). What struck me as odd was that in the photograph, the original box—which is supposed to be housing a dangerous Dibbuk spirit—was wide open and didn’t have all of its contents inside (the granite tablet was missing). I guess Haxton wasn’t worried about the Amish people being harmed or cursed by the Dibbuk Box (Macabre 2015).

I was a bit upset with myself for not knowing there was a duplicate before I visited Bagans’s museum. The photo of the two boxes side-by-side showed an obvious difference in the wood grain on the back of the boxes. If I had known this, I could have figured out if this was the original or the replica. However, something else immediately caught my attention: the granite tablet. Two distinct features stood out: the shape of each rear granite slab on the left side was different from each other, and the unique patterns of the granite were very different.

My next step was to check the episode of Deadly Possessions in which Jason Haxton presents Zak Bagans with the famous box, donating it to the museum. I wanted to see if there were any shots of the contents and/or the back of the box to determine whether this was the “real” box or the replica (Deadly Possessions 2016). Although I could not get a clear view of the back, they did have several cut-scenes showing the front of the box, as well as some of the contents, which included the granite tablet. It was easy to see the granite tablet within and matched the replica, not the original. In addition, the box had several distinctive scratches on the front doors. The replica has scratches in a similar pattern to the original, but a side-by-side comparison easily distinguishes which box is the replica and original. The box shown in the cut-scenes was also the replica.

Although this demonstrated they were using the replica box for filming, I wasn’t sure if the original box was what I saw in the museum. Lucky for me, I was informed that Bagans was going to open the box during his Ghost Adventures LIVE show airing on Halloween night. There was a chance the contents would be displayed in glorious HD; I set my DVR to record the four-hour program and patiently waited. Unfortunately, Bagans didn’t make good on his promise; he never opened the box. However, the broadcast did give me several close-up views of the box under its protective case. I compared these close-ups with high resolution images of the original box taken by Jamie Carroll, the photographer Haxton used for his book (Carrol 2012). As I mentioned earlier, there were several distinct scratches on the front doors of both boxes that identified which was the original and replica. I found the markings do indeed match the original box; at least the box is real (if not the background story).

The LIVE event would not be the first time the box was to be opened on Bagans’s TV show. In the episode of Deadly Possessions in which he receives the box, Bagans invited the original owner, Kevin Mannis, to share his experiences. At one point, Bagans puts the box in a basement “isolation room” and asks Mannis to go down and sit in the room to see if any paranormal activity develops. Once in the room, Mannis walks up to the box and doesn’t hesitate to open it. To my disappointment, the box was facing away from the camera and we never get to see inside it.

An interesting experience does take place during this segment; Mannis wanders to the back of the dark room (you can no longer see his face) and after a few minutes, he begins speaking with a slight accent and recites a poem. This drives Bagans nuts! Mannis is saying things such as “shadowman,” “I wait here in the darkness,” “in the nighttime till morning I’ll torment your soul …” (Bagans changes this to “Come out of this box and torment these souls”—which was not said). Bagans then sends an elderly man (Theodore) to go in and check on Mannis (not very brave, Zak). Afterward, Mannis claims to have no memory of this experience.

The poem that Mannis recites was very well-spoken and seemed well-known to him, even rehearsed. I was already aware of his professional writing and recording work, so this entire experience seemed staged to me. I typed a few lines of the poem into Google and tapped the Enter button. The search results took me to the archived forum of “4plebs” where an anonymous poster solved the mystery (Anonymous 2016). He/she posted a link to a website Broadjam.com, a site for musicians and bands to promote their music online. Kevin Mannis has his own page with eight works uploaded. One of them, called “The Shadowman Part 1” is the exact poem, along with the same accent, he recited on the episode (Mannis 2018). It is important to note the episode of Deadly Possessions aired on April 2, 2016, and Kevin Mannis had uploaded this poem to his Broadjam page four years prior on March 23, 2012.

In a post to the Haunt ME Facebook page, dated October 24, 2015 (see screencap), Kevin Mannis, the originator of the Dybbuk Box legend, admitted that he fabricated the story:

I am the original creator of the story of The Dibbuk Box which appeared as one of my Ebay posts back in 2003. The idea that dibbuk boxes have some kind of history prior to my story, and the idea that a dibbuk box could contain anything other than a dibbuk, along with any deviation to the type of contents I created to be found inside of a dibbuk box is laughable at best. How about this- if you or anyone else can find any reference to a Dibbut [sic] Box anywhere in history prior to my Ebay post, I'll pay you $100,000.00 and tattoo your name on my forehead.

Screenshot showing Mannis admitting he originally created the story.

This appears, at least to me, that Mannis admitted creating the story from whole cloth and takes ownership of the story’s creation. This elaborate story that started the entire legend was not an account of real supernatural events, but instead a fictional backstory he came up with to sell an ordinary and incomplete mini bar.

A mini-bar? It’s not a Jewish wine cabinet. After seeing the box at the museum, I realized how small it was, measuring approximately 14 ¼ x 12 ½ x 6 ¼ (inches). I became curious (some would say obsessed) whether the racks on the doors could hold wine bottles, as many descriptions would lead us to believe. I searched the all-knowing internet for a few days and finally found a near duplicate online. Then found another and another, all with slight variations of hardware.

It turns out that the boxes are mini-bars from the 1950s and 1960s. They included four shot glasses, four highball glasses, and four liquor bottles, all having been made by Robert B. Karoff of New York. Karoff owned a company called Karoff Originals, which was known for its various hostess gifts, kitchen items, and other unique items. His original design for the “Liquor Bar Cabinet Structure” can be found documented extensively in Patent #2836477, filed on September 18, 1957 (Karoff 1957). Despite what various owners would have us think, the infamous Dibbuk Box is not a Jewish wine cabinet from Spain but instead a minibar from New York.

Original sketch design filed with patent 2.836,477 by Robert Karoff for a Liquor Bar Cabinet Structure in 1957.

So, is there any validity to the Dibbuk Box being haunted or inhabited by an evil spirit? Absolutely not. The evidence leads to the conclusion that the Dibbuk Box is nothing more than a vintage mini-bar that began its journey into the paranormal by a story created in 2003 by a professional writer to boost his eBay selling price. The box’s reputation was propelled into paranormal pop culture by a later owner (via a published book) and later by a movie (The Possession). Today, it sits in a museum with paranormal celebrities claiming all sorts of pseudoscientific paranormal activity associated with it, completely ignoring the fact they have been duped by a hoax.

Zak Bagans claims that the Dibbuk Box is one of the most haunted objects in the world. He seems to be, at least on the surface, deathly afraid of opening the box for fear of something evil coming out. I would like to sincerely offer my services to Mr. Bagans; I will happily open his Dibbuk Box for him. Think about it, Zak … how cool would it be to show a skeptical guy like me how insanely haunted the box is and not a hoax as all the evidence concludes? My email is listed below, feel free to contact me.

By the way, after finding duplicate boxes online, I went ahead and ordered one. So, if you can’t make it to the museum, feel free to stop by and see my Dibbuk Box. Unlike Bagans’s, mine has both high level of proof and spirits in it—rum—because I got the complete set.

My Dibbuk Box actually has spirits in it; I call them Rum and Vodka.

References

• Anonymous. 2016. So on the new show deadly possessions … .Available at https://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/17539778/.
• Biddle, Kenny. 2018. The Not-So-Haunted Museum of Zak Bagans. Available at https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/the_not-so-haunted_museum_of_zak_bagans.
• Campbell, Hannah. 2012. Jason Haxton “The Dibbuk Box” Part One. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykCOdNdaR_s.
• Carrol, Jamie. 2012. The Dibbuk Box – Stock Image. Available at https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/the-dibbuk-box-gm157743419-21900517.
• Deadly Possessions (television show). 2016. Robert the Dool and The Dybbuk Box. Season 1, Episode 1. Air date April 2.
• Dunnig, Brian. 2014. The Haunted Dybbuk Box. Skeptoid Podcast #428. Available at https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4428.
• Haxton, Jason. 2011. The Dibbuk Box. Truman State University Press. Kirksville, Missouri.
• IMDb.com. 2018. Kevin Mannis. Available at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0543432/.
• Jewish Virtual Library. 2018. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise. Available at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/dibbuk-dybbuk.
• Karoff, Robert. 1957. Liquor bar cabinet structure. Patent application. Available at https://patents.google.com/patent/US2836477.
• Macabre. 2015. Jewish Pandora’s Box – Dybbuk Box. Available at http://www.paranormalne.pl/tutorials/article/871-zydowska-puszka-pandory-dybbuk-box/.
• Mannis, Kevin. 2009. The Dibbuk Box; A.K.A. The Haunted Jewish Wine Cabinet. Available at https://web.archive.org/web/20120825053726/http://voices.yahoo.com/the-dibbuk-box-4184199.html?cat=44.
• ———. 2018. The Shadowman Part 1. Available at http://www.broadjam.com/kevinmannis.
• Payne, Lucas. 2016. A Cursed Box Gone Viral. Available at http://kirksvilletraditions.weebly.com/the-dybbuk-box.html.
• Roth, Cecil. 1966. The Standard Jewish Encyclopedia. Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, NY. Pg. 557.
• Wikipedia. 2018. The Dybbuk. Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dybbuk.