I found Feltham more or less by accident. I was at Scotland’s famous loch for about a week following a speaking engagement in London where I discussed my original research into “America’s Loch Ness Monster,” the creature supposedly inhabiting Vermont’s Lake Champlain. I had spent much of the day near Inverness, conducting a series of experiments on judging the size and distance of unknown objects in lake waters. By mid-afternoon the weather grew too Scottish, and I had to pack it up.

Instead of conducting more experiments, I walked along a chilly beach near the town of Dores, where, to my surprise, I found about twenty Loch Ness monsters. They were various colors—mostly red, green, purple, and blue. Some were perched on rocks; others were on little acrylic ice cubes; all were on a wooden shelf supported by a waist-high tree stump. They were only a few inches high and had big, cute eyes. Above them was a multicolored, hand-drawn sign that read, “Nessie Models For Sale.” Just behind that lay a converted mini-bus with faux wood paneling and a giant logo that read, “Nessie-sery Independent Research.”

The Loch Ness monster—in doll form—can be found in the tourist traps at Inverness.

It’s part tourist shack, part library, part monster research facility, and all home to Steve Feltham, the world’s only full-time Loch Ness monster researcher. Feltham, with his easy smile, shock of gray and white hair, and clipped British accent, is a fixture at Ness. He’s lived on its shores since 1991, when he abruptly moved from England. The vehicle, which is not much bigger than some walk-in closets, has everything he needs: a bed, a desk, a tiny sink, and a cooking burner. The walls are plastered with posters, photographs, maps, and shelves with Loch Ness-related books and papers. (I was pleased to see some of my own articles and research on his shelves.)

Being both in the (very) shallow pool of serious lake monster researchers, we talked shop for an hour, swapping stories, research findings, and theories about our elusive prey. He asked me about some of my lake monster investigations and gave me a tour of his place.

Steve Feltham in his trailer at Scotland’s Loch Ness.

I perched on a tiny stool, and Steve Feltham told me his story. He spoke of a fairly ordinary childhood and rattled off a list of his previous occupations: “I was a potter for a while . . . then I installed alarm systems. You know, peoples’ houses, commercial, all that lot. And, I’m an artist, of course,” he quickly added, gesturing to the Nessie figurines. He sculpts them in his spare time (which he has a lot of) to earn a living, selling them for £10 each (about $20).

Growing up he’d always been fascinated by Scotland’s Nessie but never seriously pursued it. When he installed residential burglar and fire alarms in London, he said he’d usually make small talk with the owners, who were often elderly. As old folks are often wont to do, the pensioners shared stories of their lives. Feltham noticed a common theme: many expressed regret at not having followed the dreams of their youths. One retiree had spent years working in a pastry shop and always wanted to open his own bakery, but he never did. Another woman once had dreams of moving to America and pursuing a career in dance or theater; instead she spent thirty years in a comfortable but unfulfilling office job. Feltham took that as a sign that he should seize his dream of searching for the Loch Ness monster and dedicate himself to it full time. He quit his job; left his friends, family, and life; and drove to Loch Ness to live alone in a van and spend all day, every day, looking for the beast (and greeting the occasional tourist).

I know better than most people what a bold move that was. Monsters in Loch Ness are a possibility but a very remote one, given the fact that there is no hard evidence that they exist. No such creatures have ever been captured. If they exist (and there would have to be dozens of them in the lake to sustain a breeding population), they have miraculously managed to avoid leaving any teeth, bones, or carcasses.

Loch Ness has been repeatedly searched for over seventy years, using everything from miniature submarines to divers to cameras strapped on dolphins. In fact just three years before my meeting with Feltham, a team of researchers sponsored by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) undertook the largest and most comprehensive search of Loch Ness ever conducted. They scoured the lake using 600 separate sonar beams and satellite navigation. One of the lead searchers, Ian Florence, was quoted in a BBC press release: “We went from shoreline to shoreline, top to bottom on this one; we have covered everything in this loch and we saw no signs of any large animal living in the loch.” No monsters; no nothing. I asked Feltham what he thought about that.

The author scans the cold, dark waters of Loch Ness near Dores Beach.

He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “It was flawed,” he sniffed. “Yes, it made the papers, but they didn’t scan [the loch] all at once, so to me the results are suspect. They searched it over three days in three parts, so the animals might have moved around between the searches.”

I understood his point, though it seemed unlikely to me that such a thorough search had somehow missed a half dozen or more large creatures. I didn’t challenge him on it.

Though I was used to being the only skeptic in the conversation when it comes to eyewitness reports, Feltham shared my doubts about many sightings. He explained that many “eyewitness” sightings of Scotland’s famous lake monster can be traced back directly to Hollywood movies about the creature. He had no doubt that eyewitnesses sometimes describe seeing things that they really saw only in fiction: “You remember the movie here on the loch that came out [in 1996]? The one with Ted Danson? Well, there’s a scene at Urquhart Castle that shows two Nessies there with long, thin necks.” That scene, Feltham told me, changed real-life eyewitness descriptions of things people saw on the loch: all of a sudden people started reporting seeing monsters with necks exactly like those depicted in the film. “Nobody reported seeing twenty-foot-long necks until after that film came out,” he said. Unless the Nessie monsters had somehow seen the film and changed their appearance to fit what people were expecting them to look like, this was a clear example of how pop culture influences the public’s sightings.

The picturesque ruins of Urquhart Castle sit along the shores of Loch Ness.

He said that a few years earlier he had been contacted by a woman offering a video of what she thought was the neck of the Loch Ness monster, low in the water. “She’d come out to the loch on holiday and had a video camera with her. She was out by the castle [the ruins of Urquhart Castle, the most famous and most photographed spot on the lake] on a tour, I think it was, and she’d panned along the shore and countryside. She didn’t think a thing of it at the time.” It wasn’t until she and her husband returned home that they watched the video of their vacation and noticed a long, dark, indistinct form seeming to come vertically out of the water. They were sure she had accidentally filmed the Loch Ness monster’s neck; what else could it be?

“It was a boat mast,” Feltham said with a weary smile. “Clear as day, a boat mast. You don’t see the rest of the boat because she was taping the hills instead of the water, but there it was.” At Loch Ness—as at many reputedly monster-haunted lakes around the world—the bulk of lake monster sightings are made by tourists. If the creatures live in the lakes, one would think that the people who spend the most time on the lakes would be more likely to see them than someone who’s at the lake only for a few days. Over and over I have interviewed fishermen and boat captains who have criss-crossed lakes daily (sometimes several times daily) for years or even decades and never seen anything unusual. Feltham’s story provides part of the explanation: people who are often around the lake recognize normal features of the lake that weekend tourists might mistake for a monster head or neck (unusual wave patterns, masts, floating logs, swimming deer, and so on).

One of the most popular theories about what the Loch Ness monster might be is a dinosaur-like plesiosaur. There are myriad problems with this theory, including that plesiosaurs died out millions of years ago and Scotland’s lochs are only about 10,000 years old. Feltham rejects the plesiosaur suggestion, offering instead his best guess: Nessies are probably fish, most likely catfish.

I asked how he would feel if he was proven correct—if, after all the monstrous speculation and blurry photos, the world-famous Loch Ness monster turned out to be an ordinary catfish (albeit a large one). How would he feel if, after spending twenty years of his life searching for the mysterious beast, the monster turned out to be something most people can find in their local supermarket? He thought for a few moments and answered in a soft voice: “I guess I’d be philosophical about it,” he said as his sweatered shoulders betrayed a slight shrug.

I bought one of his Nessie sculptures, shook his hand, and wished him luck. As I left Feltham’s van/home/research center on the windy shores of the small, cold lake in Scotland, I couldn’t help admiring his dedication. People should pursue their dreams and quests—but also realize that those dreams can come at a high cost.

When we hear news stories about Bigfoot or Nessie or ghosts (whether we believe in them or not), it is easy to forget that some people—in some cases many people—are completely convinced that they exist. Some hardcore enthusiasts spend precious years of their lives (and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars) searching for them in vain. The lines between casual interest, serious hobby, and outright obsession can be fuzzy.

I realize that Feltham and I are in many ways more alike than different. There are millions of people around the world who are interested in unexplained mysteries, yet you can count the number of serious, scientific investigators—not the weekend warriors who go on camping trips looking for monsters or to cemeteries at midnight looking for ghosts—on one hand. We scientific investigators spend years and even decades writing, investigating, and researching these topics. For better or worse (and I’m not sure which), Feltham and I are part of a very exclusive club.

Of course I didn’t quit my job, leave my friends and family, and go live alone in a minibus on a clammy Scottish lakeshore for the sake of my research. I like to think that makes me more grounded than Feltham is, but maybe we aren’t so different. Part of me admires his certainty and wishes I had the courage of his convictions. If I were as convinced as he that some strange creatures existed out in the loch—and that I’d discover their nature if I moved there and devoted my life to searching for them—would I do it?

Maybe his obsession will pay off; maybe one day I’ll pick up a copy of The New York Times or the Albuquerque Journal to see a front-page story with a big color photo of Feltham, beaming his triumphant smile next to a monstrous beast he’s captured or found in the loch. Maybe he will go down in history books as having solved the most famous lake riddle of all time.

But maybe he won’t.

There will be a certain irony if the Nessie creatures turn out not only to exist but to be an endangered species, be it plesiosaur, monster, or catfish. The lake creatures might live and die without ever having been proven to exist. Stories and eyewitness reports of the Loch Ness monster will continue—with or without any actual creatures in the lake. Tourists will continue to mistake floating logs, boat masts, fish, wakes, and other normal lake phenomena for potential monsters. The existence of lake monsters, like that of Bigfoot and ghosts, cannot be disproved, but it takes only one live or dead monster to prove forever that they exist. Until that time, Steve Feltham will continue his search.

This article is adapted from one that first appeared in the July 15, 2010 Weekly Alibi newspaper.

II recently saw an episode of the "reality" TV show Ghost Hunters, and the T.A.P.S. team used an infrared camera to look for ghosts. At one point a camera captured a form in the general shape of a person near a wall--but everyone is accounted for and the ghost hunters see nothing except via the camera. Any idea what that was?

Ghost Hunters is the world's top ghost-themed television show, and it has been misinforming the public about both ghosts and science for six seasons (see "Ghost-Hunting Mistakes: Science and Pseudoscience in Ghost Investigations" on page 44 of this issue). The Ghost Hunters team prides itself on using modern technology to detect ghosts and other paranormal phenomena, and infrared cameras are among their staple devices. Like the other scientific gear that ghost hunters employ, infrared cameras are valid and useful devices when used correctly.

More often than not, infrared cameras create false-positive readings that amateur ghost hunters mistake for ghostly activity. Without seeing the specific video clip that you are referring to, it's impossible to know exactly what was recorded, but in my years of ghost investigations I have encountered many similar readings. To uninformed audiences and unscientific investigators, the fact that an infrared camera reveals a human-shaped form where clearly no one is around can seem very spooky and mysterious. There is, however, often a perfectly rational and scientific explanation.

The first step to explaining the nature of these "ghostly auras" is understanding the nature of the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light--the light that our eyes can see--makes up only a fraction of the electromagnetic waves in the world. The next-lowest category of frequency below visible light (and above radio waves and microwaves) consists of infrared electromagnetic waves. In a nutshell, infrared cameras simply allow us to see a lower-frequency wavelength, detecting variations in heat instead of light.

Heat is of course far less transient than light; if we turn off a light switch in a closed room, the area goes dark almost instantly. But if we turn off a source of heat--including body heat--in an area or room, the heat may remain long after the source has been removed. This can seem mysterious to amateur ghost hunters.

At an investigation I carried out last year for the TV show MysteryQuest, one of the ghost hunters used a forward looking infrared (FLIR) camera to detect a foot-long vertical warm spot on a pillar. No one in the room could explain what caused it; one person suggested it was a sign that a ghost had been watching us. In fact I had seen one of the ghost hunters leaning against the pillar a few minutes earlier, and the warm spot matched exactly the height and shape of the man's upper arm. All the ghost hunters swore that none of them had leaned against the pole, but when I suggested they review a video tape, they saw I was correct. If they had not been recording that area (or if I hadn't seen the investigator create the warm spot), it likely would have remained mysterious. This is quite common on TV ghost-hunting shows, and it is likely the explanation for what you saw.

Millions of people are interested in ghosts. One 2005 Gallup poll found that 37 percent of Americans believe in haunted houses, and even more believe in ghosts. The “reality” TV show Ghost Hunters has been a huge hit for the Syfy channel, lasting six seasons so far and inspiring other shows. The show's ghost-hunting methods have been adopted by thousands of amateur ghost investigators across the country and around the world.

Just about every ghost-hunting group calls itself “skeptical” or “scientific.” Many investigators believe they are being scientific if they use electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors or infrared cameras-or if they don't use psychics or dowsing rods. But the best way to know whether an investigator or group is scientific is to examine methods and results. Does the investigator use the pseudoscientific methods described here? What is the group's track record of solved cases? Does an investigation end with inconclusive and ambiguous results or a solved mystery?

Ghost investigations can be deceptively tricky endeavors. Very ordinary events can be-and indeed have been-mistaken for extraordinary ones, and the main challenge for any ghost investigator is separating the facts from a jumble of myths, mistakes, and misunderstandings. It can be very easy to accidentally create or misinterpret evidence: Is that flash of light on the wall a flashlight reflection-or a ghost? Are the faint sounds recorded in an empty house spirit voices-or a neighbor's radio? It's not always clear, and investigators must be careful to weed out the red herrings and focus on the verified information.

The most famous ghost hunters in the world, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson (co-founders of The Atlantic Paranormal Society-T.A.P.S.-and stars of Ghost Hunters), agree that using science is the best way to approach investigations. They have always claimed to use good scientific methods and investigative procedures, for example writing that “T.A.P.S. uses scientific methods to determine whether or not someone's home might be haunted,” and “We approach ghost hunting from a scientific point of view” (Hawes and Wilson 2007, 270).

Yet in their 2007 book Ghost Hunting: True Stories of Unexplained Phenomena from The Atlantic Paranormal Society, Hawes allots a grand total of four paragraphs (within 273 pages) to a chapter titled “The Scientific Approach.” He doesn't have much to say about science or scientific methods, and in fact it's the shortest chapter in the book. Hawes is wrong in his belief that he and his T.A.P.S. crew are using good scientific investigative methods. After watching episodes of Ghost Hunters and other similar programs, it quickly becomes clear to anyone with a background in science that the methods used are both illogical and unscientific.1

Some of the T.A.P.S. crew's methods are slightly better than those of earlier groups (for example, Hawes and Wilson were among the first ghost hunters to dismiss the “orbs of light are ghosts” theory), but they are not much more scientific. The Ghost Hunters lacked good science to begin with, and their methods have not become any more scientific (or any more effective) since they began.

What follows is a short survey of the most common logical and methodological mistakes being made by the T.A.P.S. team and other groups that carry out ghost investigations.2

1.Assuming that no specialized knowledge or expertise is needed to effectively investigate ghosts.

One of the most common assumptions among ghost investigators is that in the paranormal field “there are no experts.” If there are no experts, then of course anyone can effectively investigate ghosts. Almost all ghost hunters are amateur, part-time hobbyists, and they come from all walks of life. On Ghost Hunters, two ordinary guys who work as plumbers during the day are touted as experts on ghost investigations, although none of the team members has any background or training in science, investigation, forensics, or any other field that might help solve mysteries.

Why it's a mistake: Paranormal investigation requires no certificate; anyone can do it with no training, knowledge, or expertise whatsoever. Whether they are effective or not-actually able to solve mysteries-is another matter entirely. Effectively investigating claims and solving mysteries does require some experience and expertise-specifically in investigation, logic, critical thinking, psychology, science, forensics, and other areas.

2.Failing to consider alternative 
explanations for anomalous or 
“unexplained” phenomena.

Ghost hunters often over-interpret evidence and fail to adequately consider alternative explanations, assuming for example that “orbs” are ghosts, EVPs (electronic voice phenomena) are ghost voices, and so on.

Why it's a mistake: The designation of “unexplained” or paranormal must be accepted only when all other normal, natural explanations have been ruled out through careful analysis. The explanation that orbs are flash reflections of dust, insects, mist, etc., has been widely discussed for years (see Radford 2007, Nickell 1994). Many ghost hunters who accept the scientific, skeptical explanation for orbs continue to record EVPs as ghost voices despite the fact that scientific evidence of the validity of EVPs is as poor as it is for orbs.

Another common error is over-interpreting supposedly anomalous phenomena. Ghost reports are filled with phrases like “one investigator heard a young girl singing softly” or “the shadow of an old man appeared in the hallway.” How, exactly, does the ghost hunter know for a fact it was a young girl's voice or an old man's shadow? I know adult women who can convincingly mimic the soft singing of a young girl or cast a shadow that might look exactly like an old man's. It is of course possible that the sound and shadow are of a young girl and an old man, respectively, but an investigator must be careful not to go beyond the established facts and assume that his interpretation is the correct one. After you have made a specific, declarative statement like “a young girl singing softly,” you have locked yourself into that interpretation without keeping an open mind about other interpretations. Unless someone verifies the source of a sound, it is logically impossible to identify with any certainty who or what created that sound. An adult, an animal, a breeze whistling through an unseen passage, or something else altogether might sound like a child's voice. These types of reports are very common and cannot be accepted at face value.

3.Considering subjective feelings 
and emotions as evidence of 
ghostly encounters.

Ghost hunters often report descriptions of personal feelings and experiences like “I felt a heavy, sad presence and wanted to cry,” or “I felt like something didn't want me there,” and so on (see, for example, Avakian 2010). They may also describe in detail how they got goose bumps upon entering a room or grew panicked at some unseen presence, assuming they were reacting to a hidden ghost.

Why it's a mistake: Subjective experiences are essentially stories and anecdotes. There's nothing wrong with personal experiences, but by themselves they are not proof or evidence of anything. Most people who report such experiences are sincere in their belief that a ghost caused their panic, but that belief does not necessarily make it true. The problem, of course, is that there is not necessarily any connection between a real danger or a ghostly presence and how a person feels. The power of suggestion can be very strong, and a suggestible ghost hunter can easily convince herself-and others-that something weird is going on in a dark and creepy house.

4.Using improper and unscientific investigation methods.

Ghost hunters often misuse scientific equipment and ignore good scientific research methods. A few typical examples of this type of error follow.

Investigating with the lights off

Nearly every ghost-themed TV show has several scenes in which the investigators walk around in a darkened place, usually at night, looking for ghosts. Purposely conducting an investigation in the dark intentionally hobbles the investigation and is completely counterproductive. It also violates common sense and logic: If you are trying to identify an unknown object, is it better to look for it under bright lights or in a darkened room? There are no other objects or entities in the world that anyone would think are better observed in darkness instead of light; why would ghosts be any different? Humans are visual creatures, and our eyes need light to see-the more light, the better. Darkness, by definition, severely limits the amount of light and therefore the amount of visual information available. Searching at night in the dark puts investigators at an immediate and obvious disadvantage in trying to identify and understand what's going on around them.

Furthermore, this strategy fails on its own terms. Although some report seeing ghosts as glowing figures, many people report them as shadows or dark entities. Searching a dark room for a shadowy figure is an exercise in futility. Unless a ghost or entity has been specifically and repeatedly reported or photographed emitting light, there's no valid, logical reason for ghost investigators to work in the dark. The reason it's often done for television shows is obvious: it produces more dramatic footage. It's spookier and more visually interesting to film the ghost investigators with night-vision cameras.

Sampling errors

In my book Scientific Paranormal Investigation, I explain why a ghost stakeout or overnight investigation is a bad idea. But there's another, less obvious, basic scientific mistake made by many ghost hunters. Usually ghost hunters will begin their stakeout by taking readings with their high-tech equipment. Even though a thorough investigation into specific claims or phenomena (such as a door opening on its own or a strange noise) can be conducted in a matter of hours, a complete investigation into a haunted location can't be done in a few hours or even during an overnight stay. The reason is very simple: a few hours or overnight is not enough time in which to gather enough information. Establishing a valid set of baseline (or control) measurements for what “normal” (i.e., presumably ghost-free) conditions are at the location takes a lot more time.

To know what is extraordinary for the area, an investigator must first determine what is ordinary. Many ghost hunters understand this general principle but greatly underestimate the importance of valid sampling. For valid experiments, scientists must take dozens-sometimes hundreds-of independent measurements and analyze the results to derive a statistical average (along with a range of normal variation), which then can be used as a basis for research. The time frames and number of samples that most ghost hunters use are far too small to yield any scientifically meaningful baseline numbers.

Using unproven tools and equipment

Many ghost hunters consider themselves scientific if they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, EMF detectors, ion detectors, infrared cameras, sensitive microphones, and so on. Yet for any piece of equipment to be useful, it must have some proven connection to ghosts. For example, if ghosts were known to emit electromagnetic fields, then a device that measures such fields would be useful. If ghosts were known to cause temperature drops, then a sensitive thermometer would be useful. If ghosts were known to emit ions, then a device that measures such ions would be useful.

The problem is that there is no body of research showing that anything these devices measure has anything to do with ghosts. Until someone can reliably demonstrate that ghosts have certain measurable characteristics, devices that measure those characteristics are irrelevant.

Ineffectively using recording devices

EMF detectors, ion counters, and other gear have no use in ghost investigations. Ordinary cameras and audio recorders, however, can be helpful if used correctly. Unfortunately, many ghost hunters don't know how to use such equipment effectively.

One common example is the use of voice recorders. Most ghost hunters, including the T.A.P.S. team, use handheld voice recorders in an attempt to capture a ghost voice or EVP. Often the ghost hunter addresses the supposed spirit while holding the recorder and either standing in the middle of a room or walking around. Sometimes a voice-like sound or noise will be heard at the time; if so, the ghost hunter(s) will ask more questions, or the sound or EVP will be saved for later analysis.

Unfortunately, this is an ineffective protocol. To identify the nature of the sound (human, ghost, cat, furnace, etc.), an investigator must first determine its source, which in turn involves locating the sound's origin; this can be very difficult for a ghost hunter to do, especially in a darkened room. If the sound came from an open window, that suggests one explanation. If the sound's origin can be traced to the middle of an empty room, that might be more mysterious. Locating the source of a sound is nearly impossible using only one recording device.

A better way to scientifically determine the source location of a sound is with more than one microphone-at least three, and the more there are the better. By placing sensitive microphones throughout the location (and certainly in the four corners of a room), the signal strength of the sound can be measured at each microphone. Along with a basic knowledge of acoustics and math, these readings allow the investigator to triangulate within a few feet where the sound came from. Ideally this work should be done in real time so that ghost hunters can immediately investigate the cause; finding some “anomaly” while reviewing evidence days or weeks later is pointless.

5.Focusing on the history of a haunted location instead of the specific phenomena reported at it.

Ghost hunters often spend considerable time and effort researching the history of a house or building by scouring local records and newspapers to determine when the place was built, who built it, and who may have lived or died there or by looking for stories, legends, tragedies, lists of past owners, and so on. This is a staple of Ghost Hunters investigations, which often begin with the T.A.P.S. crew and the TV audience listening to (real or fictional) stories about the history of the place.

Why it's a mistake: Although a supposedly haunted location might have a fascinating history, this almost always has little or nothing to do with the current haunting claims or phenomena. If a ghostly figure is reported in a stairwell, a spooky face is photographed in a bedroom, or a mysterious noise is reported coming from the attic, knowing who built the place in 1928 (or the name of the little girl who died in a fire there fifty years ago) is completely irrelevant. It has nothing to do with the face or noises, which must be investigated completely independently of this information. Sometimes ghost hunters will hear or record what they believe is the sound of a voice and assume it must be a ghost, then get so wrapped up in researching the house's history trying to “identify” the ghost that they neglect to fully investigate the source of the sound.

6.Conducting a stakeout or “lockdown.”

A stakeout is typically an overnight “investigation” into a haunted location, usually with a half dozen or more people wandering around the premises, setting up cameras, taking readings, and so forth. All ghost-themed TV shows feature this activity, which is standard procedure for most ghost-hunting groups. It's also a sure sign of pseudoscience and amateur investigation.

Why it's a mistake: As an investigative modus operandi in ghost hunting, the stakeout (or “lockdown,” as it's sometimes melodramatically called) has a 100 percent track record of failure; of the hundreds of stakeouts conducted by ghost hunters, not a single one has yielded any significant evidence of ghosts. (As I previously noted, they might have better success if they left the lights on.) A stakeout is essentially a scientific experiment without the science. Real experiments are carefully controlled by the investigator: he or she controls some variables or conditions and measures the variation. Ghost hunters seem to think that by controlling access to the property in question, they are reducing or eliminating any false evidence of ghosts.

However, in a stakeout the ghost hunter cannot control all, or even most, of the variables and conditions in the experiment he's conducting. It's important to remember that nearly anything that anyone thinks is odd for any reason can be offered as evidence of a ghost. There is an impossibly broad spectrum of phenomena that have been claimed as signs of ghosts, including lights, shadows, noises, silence, heat, cold, moving objects, smells, uneasiness, and so on. If the presence of a ghost could be narrowed down to a specific phenomenon-for example, if everyone agreed (or it had been somehow proven) that ghosts give off red light or a certain high-pitched sound-then the problem of not having a controlled location would be greatly reduced. An investigator wouldn't need to rule out every possible source of sound, smell, light, etc., but instead would need to rule out merely any sources of red light or high-pitched sounds. But because just about any phenomenon can be attributed to ghosts, there is no way to rule out or control for the conditions. A ghost stakeout or lockdown is a completely unscientific waste of time.

Ultimately, of course, whether ghost hunters choose to use scientific methods and strategies is up to them. I personally don't care either way; it's not my time, effort, and money that's being wasted by doing fundamentally flawed investigation. But over the years I have gotten results and solved many cases using scientific techniques.

If ghost hunters don't care about performing scientifically valid investigations and are happy with the level of evidence they are getting, they are welcome to ignore this information. But they can't complain that no one offered a science-based paradigm for paranormal investigation. I believe that if ghosts exist, they are important and deserve to be taken seriously. Most of the efforts to investigate ghosts so far have been badly flawed and unscientific-and, not surprisingly, fruitless. If investigation is to be done, it should be done right. n

Notes

1. Ironically, Hawes and Wilson formed T.A.P.S. because they were dissatisfied with the lack of good investigation methods they saw among ghost hunters. According to Jason Hawes, “Finally I said, ‘Screw the rest of what's out there,' referring to other ghost hunters and their methods. ‘Let's do it our own way'” (Hawes and Wilson 2007, 5).

2. There are far too many mistakes in the typical ghost investigation to discuss them in any depth here. A fuller discussion can be found in chapter 4 of my new book, Scientific Paranormal Investigation.

References

Avakian, Laura. 2010. Surviving lockdown: Behind the scenes with the Ghost Adventures crew. Haunted Times 4(3): 19.

Hawes, Jason, and Grant Wilson. 2007. Ghost Hunting: True Stories of Unexplained Phenomena from The Atlantic Paranormal Society. New York: Pocket Books.

Nickell, Joe. 1994. Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Radford, Benjamin. 2007. The (Non)mysterious orbs. Skeptical Inquirer 31(5) (September/October): 30.

The Australian manufacturer of Power Balance, the wildly popular rubbery bracelets embedded with holograms claimed to somehow adjust the body’s energy or vibrations, admitted in January 2010 that there is no proof their product works. A representative of Power Balance Australia issued a statement that read in part, “We admit that there is no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims. Therefore we engaged in misleading conduct.”

Power Balance bracelets achieved global popularity, in part because they were embraced by a parade of celebrities. Dozens of professional athletes, movie stars, and musicians use them and have been photographed wearing the bands. Australian researcher Richard Saunders said that “The claims are that these bands will improve your strength, your balance, and your flexibility. They also suggest it will improve your well-being, give you clarity of thought, improve your stamina and sports performance, that sort of thing.”

Saunders, co-host of the Skeptic Zone podcast, was asked by an Australian television show to test the bands on a representative from Power Balance. “I tested the head of the Australian branch, and he failed five times out of five tests. So it was pretty conclusive. These were blind and double-blind tests where he had to tell which one out of six volunteers had the band on. He was pretty shocked when they failed to work.”

Josh Rodarmel, co-creator of the bracelets, tried to explain the “science” behind his product by claiming that everything in nature has a “frequency,” and that the Power Balance bands restore a “natural healing frequency.” Claims like this, though common in New Age and “alternative” health circles, are laughable to scientists and skeptics like Harriet Hall, a retired medical doctor and former Air Force surgeon. Hall, who runs a Web site called SkepDoc devoted to examining dubious medical claims, told Discovery News that such claims about body vibrations and resonance are pure nonsense. “This whole resonance and vibration business is pseudoscience emanating from the myth of the human energy field—not the kind of energy physicists measure, but some vague and unproven life energy like the acupuncturists' qi (or “chi”).”

A: Rods are a footnote in forteana, a blip on the paranormal radar. What are they? It depends on who you talk to. Some believe they are extraterrestrial entities; others believe they are a species of unknown invisible animals. (One might think that animals, whether invisible or not, that zoom through the air at high speeds might have been noticed by now—if only because they would regularly collide with people and objects.)

Curiously—and very tellingly—rods almost invariably appear only in photographs, films, and videotapes. To an investigator, this is a big red flag suggesting that the phenomenon is a photographic artifact. In a nutshell, rods are to cryptozoology (or UFOs) what orbs are to ghosts.

The main proponent of the rod phenomenon is a man named Jose Esca­milla, who first “discovered” and publicized it in 1994. Escamilla’s rods “al­legedly zip through the air, never seeming to stop or slow down [and] have been seen almost everywhere that anyone has bothered to look for them.... The best way to spot them is to take a video or movie camera and point it at the sky. Sooner or later some little dark spot will be seen to zip across at high angular velocity, and when it does you will have a rod sighting” (Sheaffer 2000). So what might these mysterious, elongated, blurry “rods” caught on video be?

Bob DuHamel, editor of AmSky, an online amateur astronomy magazine, wrote a detailed analysis of Escamilla’s “rods.” He began by noting a photographic phenomenon “so unremarkable as to be virtually ignored”—namely that fast-moving objects appear elongated in photographs. “When a blurred streak ap­pears on a photograph most of us will see it as a fast moving object; Jose Escamilla sees [it] as an unidentified life form” (DuHamel 2000). Are the rods perhaps merely flying insects caught on film?

Doug Yanega, an entomologist at the University of California at Riverside, not­ed that a rod is “a videographic artifact based on the frame capture rate of the videocam versus the wingbeat frequency of the insects. Essentially what you see is several wingbeat cycles of the insect on each frame of the video, creating the illusion of a rod with bulges along its length. The blurred body of the insect as it moves forward forms the rod, and the oscillation of the wings up and down form[s] the bulges. Anyone with a video camera can duplicate the effect, if you shoot enough footage of flying insects from the right distance” (quoted in Carroll 2003).

Still, Escamilla is undeterred. He has created a Web site featuring pictures of his rods and a documentary film about the subject. Escamilla’s rods are a classic example of how “unexplained” phenomena often occur: someone notices something he thinks is odd or unexplainable and assumes that because he can’t understand it, it must be novel or mysterious. l

References

Carroll, Robert. 2003. Rods. The Skeptics Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions and Dangerous Delusions. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.

DuHamel, Bob. 2000. The ‘rods’ hoax. AmSky, February. Available online at www.amsky.com/ufos/rods.

Sheaffer, Robert. 2000. ET, you’ve got mail. Skeptical Inquirer 24(2).

Dragon*Con, the massive science fiction/fantasy conference held annually in Atlanta, Georgia, came and went this past Labor Day weekend. Amid the bizarre costumes and assorted geekery, the skeptic’s track drew sizeable crowds. The skeptical presence at the event has flourished in recent years, due largely to the effort of Skepticality podcast co-host Derek Colanduno. The pro-paranormal X-Track, often a source of friendly friction in past years, was somewhat anemic this time.

There were far too many talks, panels, presentations, and events to mention here—about forty in all. Guests included a who’s who of skeptics, as well as some fresh faces. Topics ran a wide gamut, including skeptical parenting, magic, fiction writing, Tim Minchin’s new animated film Storm, pop psychology myths, skepticism and sexuality, blogging, and critical thinking in education. Several sessions of Skeptical Coffee Talk (“An informal chat with three of your popular skeptic guests”) were conducted, though the 8:30 AM start time dampened the attendance—at least for those who had indulged in late-night revelry.

For those who couldn’t make it to Dragon*Con (or prefer their skepticism digitally downloaded), there were podcasts aplenty. Rebecca Watson and the Skepchicks hosted a late-night Friday podcast with special guests Bill Corbett and Scott Sigler, while Desiree Schell’s talk radio show Skeptically Speaking, normally broadcast from Edmonton, Canada, originated for the first time from Atlanta. The inimitable and ever-dapper George Hrab (nee George Harb) spewed forth his joculomusicommentarial Geologic Show podcast from Dragon*Con once again, featuring a special phoned-in, homoerotic-tinged appearance by The Bad Astronomer himself, Phil Plait.

I joined Blake Smith, my co-host of the MonsterTalk podcast, for a special live show in which we discussed monsters, the history of the show, and took questions from the audience (our other co-host, Karen Stollznow, was unavailable). Richard Saunders, Kylie Sturgess, and Rachie Dunlop did their Skeptic Zone Live, and Brian Thompson broadcast his Amateur Scientist podcast as well.

I took the opportunity to present my recent research and new investigations. I gave two talks, one about my participation in a ghost hunting television show last year, and the second on a discovery I made revealing the origins of the famous chupacabra vampire beast. After all, my specialty is investigation, and that’s what many professional conferences are about: updating members and the public about what’s new. The paranormal is not a static field; there are always new developments, new revelations, and investigations afoot.

Organizations such as the Independent Investigations Group (IIG) are working on starting up local skeptical investigation groups across the country. Hopefully future Skeptracks at Dragon*Con will include more presentations by skeptics who showcase their own investigations. Until next Dragon*Con!

Interview with Scott Crocker

Strangely enough, the ivory-bill has captured the imagination of people the world over for a very long time.

The chance sighting in Arkansas's Cache River National Wildlife Refuge of a presumed extinct woodpecker led to a 2005 scientific expedition that confirmed that the birds still live. The ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis), last known to exist in 1944, was supposedly sighted in eastern Arkansas in 2004. A blurry video clip showed the bird's distinctive size and markings. "The bird captured on video is clearly an ivory-billed woodpecker. Amazingly, America may have another chance to protect the future of this spectacular bird and the awesome forests in which it lives," said John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

The discovery of the bird spawned international headlines and an article in the journal Science (see "Rare Woodpecker, Presumed Extinct, Found in Arkansas," SI, March/April 2006). The rediscovery was also trumpeted by believers in Bigfoot and lake monsters as proof that animals thought long extinct may still exist.

Yet after five years of searching (at a cost of over $10 million) the ivory-billed woodpecker's existence remains unproven. Not a single bird has been found. A discovery once touted worldwide as a hopeful environmental miracle has turned into a complex and fascinating tale of environmentalism, anecdotal evidence, and scientific debate. What happened is the subject of a new documentary film titled Ghost Bird. I interviewed the film's director, Scott Crocker.

Benjamin Radford Why was the story of the rediscovery of an obscure woodpecker such a big deal?

Scott Crocker Strangely enough, the ivory-bill has captured the imagination of people the world over for a very long time. They were truly striking black and white woodpeckers, the males having bright red crests, and they were once the largest woodpeckers in North America. Full grown they were two feet tall and had a wingspan of nearly three feet.

The alleged rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker in 2005 made headlines around the world. That a species of this magnitude had returned from the dead after being presumed extinct for over half a century was both miraculous and astonishing. A kayaker's sighting was confirmed by a search team from Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology, one of the world's leading institutions devoted to studying all things avian. Their rediscovery in Arkansas was perceived as a kind of environmental miracle suggesting that mankind was getting a second chance to save a species he had singlehandedly exterminated. And just maybe, the efforts of conservationists were beginning to turn the tide of human-caused extinctions.

Radford The tiny town of Brinkley, Arkansas, was the epicenter of the furor over the ivory-bill. What effect did all this international publicity have on the town?

Crocker Brinkley played a central role in both receiving and reinforcing the rediscovery hype, partly because they had nothing to lose.

Radford Many towns that have a local "monster" are quick to capitalize on their local mystery (for example, Bluff Creek, California, has a booming Bigfoot-related business, and Inverness, Scotland, earns a lot of money from Nessie tourism). Brinkley, quite understandably, did the same thing.

Crocker They tried. While some locals were quick to capitalize on the publicity by selling ivory-bill burgers, haircuts, and T-shirts, the influx of birders and their fat wallets never quite materialized. The world's only ivory-billed woodpecker gift shop has closed, and there was only one Annual Ivory-bill Celebration in Brinkley's new convention center.

Radford How did you get involved in making Ghost Bird?

Crocker I heard about the ivory-bill's rediscovery like everyone else, when then-Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton announced it had been seen in Arkansas. And as fascinating as the rediscovery was, I was equally intrigued by the descriptions of the yearlong top-secret search and the many hours birders spent deep in the snake- and mosquito-infested cypress swamps of Arkansas waiting for a glimpse of the largest and rarest woodpecker in North America. It sounded like a Samuel Becket play, Waiting for a Woodpecker.

I didn't get personally pulled into the story until the following September. I was attending the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival where I met a cameraman who had practically lived in those swamps waiting for the ultimate money shot. Fourteen months later he emerged with a couple brief sightings and a few compelling bird sounds only to discover his second wife had left him. I thought, wow, these people are seriously obsessed. I needed to find out why. While I didn't go into it as a skeptic, I also didn't unquestioningly accept everything the search team announced or claimed about their very blurry video of something flying through the swamp.

Radford One person in your film described the debate as about "hope versus skepticism."

Crocker That was [bird expert] David Sibley's distillation of the whole issue, and I think he hit the nail on the head. The sightings by top ornithologists, their scientific documentation, and the controlled media campaign announcing the ivory-bill's rediscovery created an atmosphere that was not unlike G.W. Bush's doctrine of "Either you are with us or you are against us."

Radford That doesn't sound like open, scientific debate.

Crocker Well, some of that exclusiveness came down to the good intentions of protecting the species from being "loved to death" by birders. However, it was also driven by the need to raise money and acquire local land inexpensively. Questioning the evidence was a threat to the $10 million in federal, state, and private money the search team raised. Questioning the sightings also meant questioning the integrity of the ornithologists and birders who made those sightings—and the birding community heavily relies on individual integrity. Since the search scientists didn't invite any real critique of their findings, in the end you were either on board and hopeful, or you were a skeptical outsider. And no one wanted this iconic bird's rediscovery not to be true.

Radford Political grandstanding and bird expert squabbles aside, the ivory-bill's rediscovery was given scientific credibility by a high-profile cover article in Science, right?

Crocker Absolutely. The Science article in many ways is the lynchpin to all of this. Without that article and the magazine's enormous clout, I don't think the rediscovery would have had much traction. That their editorial staff seemingly looked the other way and gave the ornithologists the benefit of the doubt raises some of the more interesting questions about the whole rediscovery fiasco. How much of this had to do with selling magazine issues? How much had to do with everyone hitching a ride on a career-making moment?

Radford What does the story of the woodpecker say about how science works?

Crocker I think the most disturbing message of the rediscovery is the central role money plays in driving scientific inquiry and research. One academic who has been tracking this trend described to me the process of acquiring funding for research as being akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall: whatever project sticks gets the green light. This "stickiness factor" of proposals is often determined by very unscientific agendas having more to do with commercial and public relation interests.

Radford How did the search for the ivory-bill become so politicized, with agendas and egos?

Crocker Territorial squabbles are of course nothing new to academics. And there was a healthy amount of slinging from both sides in the ivory-bill debate. However, the real anger surrounded the redirection of scarce funding from existing endangered species recovery programs to the search for a ghost bird. It's one thing to run around in the swamp seeing things. It's another thing entirely to do that with money "rediscovered" in the research accounts of other scientists. This brings us back to the legacy of the Bush administration: they promised $10 million in funding for the search but then robbed Peter to pay Paul; it wasn't new funding.

Radford What's been the response to your film? Is there any current funding for the search, or is it effectively dead?

Crocker Cornell continues to maintain that they saw an ivory-bill and documented it on video. They admit that the bird has not been quite as "persistent" as they had hoped. As of this year they are no longer actively searching for the bird in Arkansas, though they were one of two groups looking in Florida last year.

Radford Does it matter if the ivory-billed woodpecker exists or not?

Crocker If there's only one of them, no, not really. I think what matters is that we collectively come to grips with taking responsibility for the species mankind is causing to go extinct. Ultimately, perhaps the most lasting significance of the ivory-bill is how it has become a mirror that reflects back to us our difficult relationship to the natural world and our uncertain place in it. We can look deeper into that mirror and change how we inhabit the planet, or we can look away and go about our business as usual.

Ghost Bird opened in New York City at the end of March for a week at Anthology Film Archives. The DVD should be available in June; find more details at www.GhostBirdMovie.com.

Benjamin Radford is managing editor of the Skeptical Inquirer and an avid fan of documentary films.

The fact that either of these authors felt the need to write their respective books is, in a way, somewhat bizarre and sad. Charles Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species in 1859; the world has had 150 years to digest and understand evolution, and evidence for Darwin’s theory has grown more robust with each passing year. In an ideal world, Dawkins and Loxton would be chided for wasting their time and effort pointing out the patently self-evident. What’s next, a book explaining to the public that the sun shines upon them every day?

And yet polls and surveys show that a significant number of people (around 40 percent, but depending on the exact poll question) have doubts about evolution. Some of them are creationists, but many others simply have never had evolution explained to them correctly.

Evolution by natural selection is not necessarily clear or intuitive. Evolution is not inherently obvious; it is a slow, complex process with many nuances. Whether stunted by a poor educational system or religious fundamentalists, it is a minor tragedy that one of the greatest scientific ideas in history remains the subject of dispute.

That is why books like The Greatest Show on Earth and Evolution are important. The former is meant for educated adults who want complete, well-rounded information on the evidence for evolution; the latter is aimed at children and teens who want a solid understanding of evolution’s fundamentals. Each is very appropriate for its audience, and paired together both books make a complete evolution literacy package (along with On the Origin of Species, which remains very readable). To be honest, I’ve not had a chance to more than skim Dawkins’s 460-page tome, though I expect it’s excellent. Loxton’s book, with only fifty-five pages and enticing full-color art on every page, is more accessible, and I’ll focus on that.

Loxton has a lot of ground to cover, and he begins by noting that different fossils are found in different geological strata—a fact that suggested to early researchers that many now-extinct animals had once roamed the planet (and much longer ago than most people could imagine). Evolution goes on to touch on a wide variety of subjects related to evolution, from DNA to the alleged “living dinosaur” mokele-mbembe. Along the way, new concepts such as species and mutation are introduced, often in the form of posed questions. Charles Darwin’s experiments are briefly described, including his research into avian inbreeding and the variations in beaks in isolated populations of Galapagos island finches. The elements of evolution are explained in terms that are neither dumbed-down nor too complex for its target audience.

Loxton, editor of Junior Skeptic, also shows off his considerable illustration skills. The book is clearly written for children, and eye-catching graphics are of course a necessity. Every page has one or more enticing, full-color images illustrating everything from dinosaurs to the bird-dinosaur Archaeopteryx to cute, flirty little zebra-like things called Zooks. This helps reinforce the important concept that evolution is not a stale, dry theory dusted off from irrelevant history or science books but instead a real, active process occurring all around us at this very moment. It’s rare to find such an accessible, dynamic treatment of the subject of evolution.

Evolution also wisely anticipates and addresses some of the most common anti-evolution fallacies (such as that the eye is too complex to have evolved naturally). This feature alone makes the book better than other simplified descriptions of evolution because it inoculates readers against bogus creationist arguments they may hear but would be otherwise unable to answer.

While the content of the book is very good, a few elements could have used better organization. For example, there are about a dozen sections that begin with a question. This is a useful way to present information, but the questions appear next to illustrated oval portraits of people whose relevance to the book is unclear. The questions themselves are fine, but I found the associations with anonymous portraits confusing at first. It might have been more effective if the book had begun with two or three recurring characters who would be asking questions on behalf of the reader throughout the book, instead of introducing a different, apparently random face each time. The book also needed a references or further reading section. Though Richard Dawkins is quoted several times in the text, for example, none of his books or articles are mentioned or referenced. Overall, however, these minor issues don’t detract from the book’s presentation and message.

I hope that 150 years from now books on evolution, such as those by Dawkins and Loxton, will be considered obsolete, a redundant parroting of basic facts that every schoolchild knows.

Until then, the world is sorely in need of high-quality, accessible science and skeptical books for teens and children, and Loxton’s book is an excellent and long-overdue introduction to evolution.

Darwin (played by Paul Bettany) struggles to write his books as he battles poor health, internal and external pressures, and personal demons, especially regarding his wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) and his brightest daughter, Annie (Martha West). In one of the most moving and impassioned scenes, we see Darwin's furor after Annie is punished in Sunday school for questioning her vicar and asking about dinosaurs. Darwin's outrage is palpable as he prepares to confront the priest about punishing his daughter for simply speaking a self-evident scientific truth--not blasphemous impertinence.  

Charles Darwin was clearly a man as enamored with his family as with his study of the world around him. Charles explains the naturalistic world to his children: how a camera works, how the geological strata of rocks tells a story of what happened millions of years ago, and so on. Several fanciful segments appear, essentially miniature documentaries depicting nature's life cycles. Rarely has a film so effectively conveyed a wonderful, humanistic sense of the magic and awe of science. 

When Annie dies, Charles is devastated and struggles to find the faith in himself to complete his book. While Emma takes solace in the idea that their beloved daughter is in heaven with God, Charles can't bring himself to share her comforting belief. Nor is he willing to accept the insulting and feeble “comfort” that Annie's death is part of some greater divine plan; he has studied nature's cruelties and is too much a scientist to pretend that his family is exempt from them.  

While Charles struggles with personal demons, the rest of the world waits for the product of his work. In one pivotal scene, Thomas Huxley (a piss-and-vinegar brimming Toby Jones) confronts Darwin, urging him to complete his long-gestating book. When Darwin says he needs more time and more evidence, Huxley barks: “Mr. Darwin, either you are being disingenuous, or you do not fully understand your own theory. Evidently what is true of the barnacle is true of all creatures--even humans. Clearly the Almighty can no longer claim to have authored all species in under a week. You've killed God, sir. You've killed God.”

Never before has the threat of Darwin's ideas to creationism been so clearly depicted in a mainstream movie. While other films have downplayed or glossed over the friction between On the Origin of Species and the Bible, Creation tackles it head-on. Stephen Jay Gould's conciliatory notion of the non-overlapping magisteria of science and religion is out the window; here we have the bare-knuckled, Richard Dawkins view.

Creation's most remarkable achievement is to humanize one of the most important and influential scientists in history. It's no secret that most scientists in films are depicted in an unflattering light. Horror films often depict scientists as Dr. Frankenstein-like evil geniuses whose experiments bring death and destruction. Comedies show scientists as socially inept nerds obsessed with numbers and data crunching. In the wake of the recent “Climategate controversy,” climate scientists were portrayed as deceitful and conspiratorial hoaxers trying to mislead the public about global warming. Rare indeed are films that show scientists as real humans with problems and struggles who do their best to reveal scientific truths. (A few of the best are Contact, The Dish, and A Beautiful Mind.) 

Creation premiered on the opening night of the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival in September. At the time, Creation producer Jeremy Thomas lamented the fact that the film had not yet found a distributor in the United States. Creation was eventually picked up by Newmarket Films--ironically perhaps best known for releasing Mel Gibson's controversial 2004 religious gorefest The Passion of the Christ.  

The performances in Creation are as remarkable as the script. Paul Bettany evokes Charles Darwin with seeming effortless ease, and truly inhabits the role. His Darwin is deeply conflicted, afraid of how his ideas may hurt those he loves, and wracked with guilt that he may have contributed to Annie's death. Jennifer Connelly is wonderful as Emma, depicting not only her strength and devotion to Charles, but her own conflicted devotion to her faith and her husband's work.

The film was directed by Jon Amiel, from a screenplay written by John Collee, which in turn evolved from the biography Annie's Box, written by one of Darwin's great-great grandsons. Though Creation has been well received, some early reviewers groused that the film is boring; perhaps they were expecting the story of the theory of evolution would be told amidst action-packed swashbuckling and explosions. Creation is beautiful and powerful, with great performances and important ideas about faith, love, loss and truth.

One might be excused for wondering what, exactly, German director Roland Emmerich has against the United States. After all, his films (such as Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow) are known for showing American icons such as the White House and the Statue of Liberty being destroyed.

With his new film 2012, Emmerich ups the ante, depicting a global disaster caused by terrestrial instability. John Cusack stars as Jackson Curtis, a Los Angeles writer whose failed novel causes the end of his marriage. Jackson wants to reunite with his family and ends up (almost literally) going to the ends of the earth to save them. At the same time in Washington, DC, the president’s chief science advisor discovers an impending danger in the earth’s unsettled tectonic plates. He butts heads with the chief of staff over when the information should be made public and who they should tell first.

The film tackles a variety of weighty questions, such as: If the end of the world was coming, what would you do? If only the government knew, who should be told? If there was a way that some people could survive, who should decide who lives and who dies?

In the case of a true global catastrophe, is there really any point to announcing it to the world? Put simply, if everyone’s going to die in thirty-six hours and there’s nothing anyone can do, what’s the point in telling people? Assuming you had perfect knowledge, why bother? Some people would panic, others wouldn’t believe it anyway, and still others would try to write and market their book on it overnight.

These are interesting questions, but they unfortunately get lost amid the film’s shouting, explosions, and crashes. About a half dozen subplots appear, several of them awkwardly aborted in the rush to get to the disaster scenes.

Then there are the implausibilities—and I’m not even talking about Los Angeles sliding into the ocean in such a cinematic fashion. Jackson Curtis has more lives than James Bond and Indiana Jones put together: he literally outruns fireballs and earthquakes, saving the day with each step. But my favorite eye-roller is when almost the entire world has been consumed by fire and flood—except, apparently, the parts that allow a last-minute cell phone call so that two lead characters can share one last scene together.

But to criticize a disaster film for being implausible is a bit silly itself. People don’t go to disaster movies to see rich emotional tapestry or Memento-like airtight logic; they go to see stuff get blown up. And on that level, it succeeds.

Destroying the world is not easy, and the filmmakers used a variety of special effect techniques to bring global disaster to the big screen. From a visual effects standpoint alone, 2012 is a remarkable achievement. The actors were often on moving sets—none of that cheesy original Star Trek technique of throwing actors to the floor while shaking the camera to simulate explosion concussions. In many of the scenes, the objects are actually collapsing around the actors while giant gimbals and hydraulic lifts jostle and jolt the sets. Some of the scenes are remarkably effective (a shot of a giant wave overtaking a cruise ship is genuinely chilling, reminding me of The Perfect Storm), while others look like a cartoonish video game.

The film is basically a retelling of the biblical flood story and has nothing to do with the date 2012. It could have been set in 1995 or 2013, but the 2012 angle made a perfect hook for the film: Why not tie it in with the supposed end of the world, allegedly tied to the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012?

Not surprisingly, Columbia Pictures is taking full advantage of the New Agey 2012 doomsday discussion/panic/concern to help promote the film. Over the past year or so, many people have suggested that the year 2012 will bring some sort of significant change, either catastrophic disaster (as in the film) or perhaps a new age of enlightenment (as in what did not happen with the so-called Harmonic Convergence in 1987). The link between global catastrophe and Mayan calendar-based prophecy is tenuous at best. Some ads for the 2012 film begin with the phrase “The Mayans warned us,” though of course the Mayans did not “warn” anyone—they simply had a calendar system that happens to “end” in 2012, much as our Gregorian calendar “ends” on December 31. The Mayans never said the world would end that year and have shown irritation and contempt for the way that their culture has been co-opted into pop-culture notions and Hollywood blockbuster film promotions.

New Age and doomsday authors have been cranking out 2012-themed books at an amazing pace over the past six months; there are literally tens of thousands of such titles in print, with more hitting bookstores every day. It seems that anyone with access to a keyboard and an opinion on 2012 (or prophecy in general) is out there trying to cash in. It will be interesting to see how many of these books will be for sale on Amazon.com for even one cent on January 1, 2013.

I interviewed the director and cast of 2012 for LiveScience.com; you can see the videos of the interviews online at http://www.newsarama.com/common/media/video/player.php?videoRef=NA_091028_2012-Emmerich#playerTop. Of particular interest to Skeptical Inquirer readers is my interview with Chiwetel Ejiofor, in which he discusses how his character struggles to maintain scientific integrity in the face of political influences. After the Bush administration’s well-publicized antiscience stance and overt attempts to bend scientific research for political ends, this point seems especially relevant.

Though 2012 is not a great film, it does have some interesting pro-science aspects that skeptics should take note of. While John Cusack is the lead star, the hero of the film is really a black scientist, Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Helmsley is the president’s chief science advisor, and it is he who first discovers the impending danger. The film somewhat realistically portrays the difficulties of scientific uncertainty—how sure do you have to be to sound the alarm? This is not an academic question but arises in discussions of scientific prediction on a wide range of topics, from asteroid impacts to global warming.

Not only is the scientist the hero, he is also the film’s major moral compass. There are no evil, white lab-coated scientists in 2012; there are only scientists (and a few nerds thrown in for good measure) doing their best to save humanity. 2012 is a completely humanistic disaster film; the catastrophes are not the work of either angry gods or magic spells but nature itself. The film shows prayer failing miserably to stop the destruction—even the Pope in the Vatican gets smacked away (Emmerich told me he originally wanted to show Mecca being destroyed but didn’t want to risk a fatwa). In the end it is science—hardworking, unglamorous science—that saves the day.

These are wonderful, humanistic, pro-science depictions that I’d hope to see in more films; it’s a shame to see them buried amid so many CGI disasters and explosions in 2012.