The show, which airs Saturday nights, recasts major historical events, beginning with the Kennedy assassination, as part of a UFO invasion and coverup, asserting in the opening credits that “History as we know it is a lie.”

The May 24 episode, set during the Vietnam War era, suggested that Sagan’s lifelong quest to find evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence was fueled, in part, by a secret meeting with the director of the top-secret Majestic-12 project. In the Dark Skies version of history, a young Sagan comes face to face with a living space alien, learns that extraterrestrial parasites have been seizing control of humans, and develops a way to identify people who have been infected with one of the parasites.

“How many planets are out there, doctor? How many galaxies, how many worlds?” the Majestic chief asks Sagan as he stares at the alien.

It’s an excuse to get the Sagan impersonator to say “billions and billions.”

“Well, somewhere out there is the planet that thing came from,” the director says. “I need you to search the stars, doctor, to find that planet.”

The encounter is supposed to explain why Sagan became such a proponent for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program.

The show was riddled with errors. It made a reference to the Planetary Society (which wasn't founded until 1981), cited Sagan’s doctoral dissertation at Cornell University (he got his doctorate at the University of Chicago), and credited him with the idea that our radio and television transmitters are sending signals into space (a theory Sagan embraced but did not originate).

But those are minor compared to the way the show’s executive producers, Bryce Zabel and James D. Parriott, shamelessly chose to turn Sagan, who passionately argued that there was no convincing evidence that UFOs were extraterrestrial spacecraft, into a hypocrite and government conspirator.

Even if the show had aired before his death, it is not clear that Sagan, a public figure, could have done anything about the Dark Skies portrayal. To successfully sue, public figures must prove malice, which is extremely difficult. Dead people cannot be libeled.

Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan, said before the program aired that she was unaware that Sagan was going to be portrayed on the show. She later called the episode “terribly silly,” in part because of the errors.

“When you think of what’s possible with the media, and then see what impoverished and pathetic programs we actually get,” she said, “it’s really dismal.”

Dark Skies was not renewed for NBC’s fall schedule.

Carol Araujo must have been one of the proudest women in Rhode Island last Mother’s Day. She had been named “Mother of the Year” after her thirty-three-year-old autistic daughter, Tammy Galuska, submitted an essay explaining how Mrs. Araujo “sacrificed a year of her life to teach me how to communicate.”

“She has given me a new life. I reached a time in my life where she was the only one who believed that I could learn to communicate. Mere understanding is death to a non-verbal person.” These were the winning words Tammy wrote.

Or did she?

At the age of two, Tammy showed signs of retardation and was eventually diagnosed with Retts Syndrome, a severe brain disorder that only affects girls.

The 154-word essay was created using facilitated communication (FC), a questionable technique in which a helper (or “facilitator”) holds the hand, wrist, or finger of the person and “helps” them point to letters on a board or keys on a computer. Test after test has shown that it is the facilitator, not the handicapped person, who subconsciously determines what letters will be touched.

When WPRI-TV in Providence did a Mother’s Day feature on Mrs. Araujo and Tammy, the reporter showed Mrs. Araujo grasping three of Tammy’s fingers and bringing the young woman’s index finger to a specially designed computer so a key could be pushed. Tammy’s job coach, Andrea Healey, a caseworker with RI ARC, a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, association that helps the handicapped, was the one who held Tammy’s hand when the essay was written.

Testing a person who claims to be communicating through FC is easy: See if the person can identify a simple picture when nobody else in the room (especially the facilitator) knows what it is. In 1994, when I tested four Rhode Island people who supposedly were spelling out messages through FC, all four lost their ability when the facilitator didn't know the correct answer. One of them was Tammy.

Unfortunately, too many people — including reporters, contest judges, and folks who work with the handicapped — aren't even aware of the controversy surrounding FC and wouldn't know how to conduct a proper test.

“Tammy’s touching story moved the hearts of the judges to choose Carol Araujo,” according to a news release from radio station WARV, the chief sponsor of the contest. Station spokesman Emanuel DaCunha later reported that neither the station nor the judges were aware that there was controversy surrounding the technique used to created the essay. The station learned the circumstances of Tammy’s life by talking to Healey, an avid believer in FC.

In an interview, Healey said she is aware of the controversy but believes Tammy is truly communicating even though Tammy has never passed a simple double-blind test.

“Tammy doesn't want to hear a word about validation or anything else like that,” said Healey. “Tammy gets highly insulted when she is put in a position of having to prove anything to people who are skeptical.” Healey’s information about what Tammy is thinking, of course, comes from the FC messages.

Carol Araujo’s unshakable conviction that she has helped her daughter reestablish communication with the world may make her worthy of a Mother of the Year award. But there was a second-place finisher in the contest who lost a richly deserved honor because people don't know a bogus technique when they see it.

Finally, let’s have a moment of silence for the media professionals of the Denver Press Club. Never has a group of journalists worked so hard to lose a Pulitzer Prize.

It seems the press club building has been haunted for at least eighty years by four now-deceased reporters whose interest in poker has persisted long after they officially cashed in their chips.

After putting up with a toilet that seemed to flush by itself and miscellaneous knocking sounds, club officials brought in “psychic Cleo of Spirit Clearings” and her sidekick, Eshaya, on September 23, 1996.

Cleo sensed the presence of the poker players and also claimed to get vibes from (a) the ghost of a woman murdered twenty-five years earlier, (b) a hanged body (one too many changes by copy editors, perhaps), and (c) a reporter standing lookout at the club.

Now, in anybody’s book, being able to produce long-sought proof that an afterlife exists would be the scoop of the century — if not the millennium.

But how did the reporters of the Denver Press Club react?

According to the January 18 Editor & Publisher (pp. 8-9), they asked Cleo and Eshaya to get rid of the ghosts! (Colorado’s crooked politicians must love being covered by a press corps that destroys the evidence.)

Fortunately, although the spirit of the murdered woman was sent “home” to her final rest, the poker players and their lookout refused to shuffle off, according to the E&P article.

Thus, the journalists in Denver still have a chance to redeem themselves.

With the spirits still floating around, and with the press club “documenting” the ghosts with fuzzy infrared photographs (available on the Internet at http://www.pressclub.org/ghosts/pictures.htm), perhaps one of the club’s members will recognize the importance of this discovery, call in a team of real scientists with infrared detectors, find proof of the hereafter, and get that Pulitzer for investigative reporting after all.

Twenty-eight years after Chariots of the Gods? author Eric von Däniken brought pseudoscience to new lows by suggesting that our ancestors were too stupid to create the pyramids, Stonehenge, and other monuments without the help of space aliens, his ideas are alive and well thanks to a prime-time September 26, 1996, ABC-TV special, ”Chariots of the Gods? The Mysteries Continue.”

The show suggested that there might be new information to support von Däniken’s theories that ancient drawings depict spaceships and our ancestors’ knowledge of the universe must have come from extraterrestrials.

The odd thing was that the program gave plenty of hints to suggest that von Däniken is a crank. Yet ABC chose to gloss over the problems.

One of the first hints came when von Däniken talked about the ruins of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, where the main ceremonial plaza with its huge flat-topped pyramids was supposedly laid out in a way that produced “a remarkably accurate scale model of our solar system,” complete with Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, three planets invisible to the naked eye.

If anybody at ABC had known anything about astronomy, they should have questioned several aspects of the “model.” First, if it was so accurate, why was the only big gap between Saturn and Uranus? (Answer: The layout wasn't intended to be a model of the solar system.) Why did von Däniken choose not to put a planet in the circle next to Uranus, which looked tailor-made to house a planet? (Answer: Then the “model” wouldn't fit right.)

And if space aliens really developed the solar system model, why is Pluto included? These days, because of its size, orbit, and origin, astronomers barely regard Pluto as a real planet. It retains that distinction out of tradition.

The hour-long program was filled with such problems.

On another artifact, an image of what appeared to be a snake became, in von Däniken’s eyes, a light bulb filament. In another case, three lines of stones that formed a jagged line were, instead, magically converted into two equilateral triangles and a right-angle triangle — supposed proof that space aliens gave our ancestors geometry, trigonometry, and the Pythagorean theorem. The famous markings on the Nazca Plains in Peru were shown, with host Richard Karn (of the ABC comedy series Home Improvement) stating that “without the ability to fly, experts don't know how the Nazcans gained the perspective needed to create such elaborate figures on such a huge scale.” Von Däniken and the folks at ABC are probably still wondering how the streets of New York City or Washington, D.C., could have been laid out so precisely when none of the engineers responsible had ever been in an airplane, or how hoaxers can create intricate crop circle patterns in the dead of night — best viewed from the air — without high-tech equipment.

The problem with such shows is that they are often produced by the network’s entertainment division, where accuracy and fairness don't have a high priority.

But the ”Chariots of the Gods?” special was followed by a Turning Point program on ”Alternative Medicine: Hope or Hype?” that was produced by ABC News. It featured respected moderator Hugh Downs talking about therapeutic touch, hypnosis, iridology (the alleged ability to discern diseases by looking at the colored part of the eye), and ozone enemas.

The program was a mix of messages. While Downs cited several alternative medical methods and pointed out that “no medical studies have proven that any of these systems work,” he also spoke of trying “unorthodox treatments with mind-boggling results.”

It featured a patient of cardiac surgeon Mehmet Oz, of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York, who has decided to offer some of his patients a menu of techniques — hypnosis, Yoga, therapeutic touch — in an effort to see what works. Left unanswered was the question of how he’s going to be able to tease out which discipline is beneficial and which is bogus if each patient is being given several types of treatments.

The show also profiled a former ABC News producer with breast cancer who decided not to have radiation treatments so she could, instead, follow the guidance of Park Avenue physician Dr. Nicholas J. Gonzalez. Gonzalez, according to the program, had her taking 134 nutritional supplement pills a day, performing two coffee enemas a day, and drinking glasses of Epsom salts, olive oil, and whipping cream every few weeks. Gonzalez freely acknowledged that there were no scientific studies to back up his regimen.

Downs and ABC didn't seem particularly alarmed by all this, approaching the story with sometimes-bemused curiosity and making it sound like we'll soon know whether this stuff works.

But from the consumer’s point of view, there’s a big difference between a medical treatment where the scientific evidence is not yet in, and one where tests have been conducted and the results show that the treatment is bogus.

ABC repeatedly failed to make that distinction.

Take iridology, for example. The network pointed out that there was no proof that iridology worked. That’s true. But that’s only half the truth. Iridology is not just unproven; it has been tested and shown to be bogus.

ABC also took a hands-off approach to reporting on therapeutic touch, neglecting to note that there are legitimate scientific reasons why doctors are skeptical. The program mentioned that the people who perform therapeutic touch claim to be able to massage and mold an invisible energy field into a healthier shape. But in order for therapeutic touch to work, (1) an energy aura must exist around the human body, (2) practitioners must be able to sense it, (3) the aura must be malleable by human hands, and (4) changes in the shape of the aura must translate into effects on the health of the body.

Downs and his ABC team neglected to note that nobody’s been able to prove that the field exists, never mind that it’s malleable. (Therapeutic touch promoters try to counter with the argument that the field has been photographed using Kirlian photography, which supposedly captures energy around living things. They usually have trouble responding if someone asks, in turn, why energy auras have been seen around Kirlian photographs of inanimate objects like paper clips.)

The network boasts that “more Americans get their news from ABC.” But if news means giving viewers the whole story, this was one night when ABC did a disservice to its audience.

Dixon became famous for predicting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Yet hers was a forecast that nobody has been able to document.

Various obituaries made reference to a 1956 article in Parade magazine in which she supposedly said that a tall, young, blue-eyed, Democratic president elected in 1960 would die in office.

Actually, the May 13, 1956, article in Parade said, “Mrs. Dixon thinks (the 1960 election) will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office, ‘although not necessarily in his first term."' As Terence Hines noted in Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (Prometheus Books, 1988, p. 43), her prediction covers a lot of possibilities. In fact, she predicted in a 1960 forecast that “John F. Kennedy would fail to win the presidency.”

Nonetheless, virtually every obituary gave her far more credit than her actual forecast deserved. USA Today, in its January 27 edition, bluntly stated that “her prediction that President John F. Kennedy would die in office came true.”

Most news outlets tempered their stories by mentioning a few of her mistakes, most notably her forecast that the Soviet Union would beat the United States to the moon and that World War III would begin in 1958. Unfortunately, the “sometimes she was right, but sometimes she was wrong” attitude doesn't cut it. Because nobody expects a psychic to be perfect, the failed forecasts may have simply reinforced the idea in the minds of some that her gifts were real.

In fact, Dixon seldom made a real forecast. She was the queen of equivocation. Her predictions in the supermarket tabloid the Star were so full of ifs, coulds, and mights, she almost always had an excuse if a prediction failed to come true.

Consider, for example, her predictions for last year: “This winter, Nelson Mandela faces a personal crisis — and danger could return in April. His former wife Winnie could win an election and be returned to government (Star, January 9, 1996, emphasis added). For 1997, she said, “Late October could bring another plane tragedy over water,” “Roseanne is headed for big health problems if she doesn't slow down,” and “A temptress or even a female assassin could be waiting for President Clinton on a foreign trip. His best defense to ward off trouble will be to bring along his wife Hillary” (Star, January 7, 1997, emphasis added).

She also could be extraordinarily vague. The February 11, 1997, issue of the Star, which carried an eight-page tribute to her, had to stretch to find seventeen “amazingly accurate” predictions. The magazine gave her credit for forecasting the March 24, 1989, Exxon Valdez oil spill because she reportedly said, “A shipping accident will make headlines in the spring.” The tabloid gave her credit for predicting the AIDS epidemic, which surfaced in the early 1980s, because she said, in 1978, that “a dreadful plague will strike down thousands of people in this country.”

On the unusual occasion when she made an unequivocal prediction for an unexpected event that would be guaranteed to make news, her forecasts nearly always flopped. In the 1995 issue of the Star, she said it would be the year “Pope John Paul II will have a hand in liberating Cuba from Castro” and “a whole new world of dinosaurs will be discovered in Central Asia.”

With Dixon’s death, members of the media had a chance to set the record straight about a woman whose name had become a household word, largely on the basis of a myth. By and large, they missed the opportunity.

Since then, IBM has released the 1997 World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia (Windows, $50), and the good news is that it scores even higher than Grolier, garnering 21 points on the scale. From astrology to UFOs, when it covers pseudoscience topics, it often does so in a way to give readers some idea why there is reason for skepticism.

Part of the reason for the high score may be that CSICOP fellows James Oberg and James Alcock contributed to the sections on UFOs and parapsychology, respectively. But other topics reflect a similarly skeptical viewpoint.

While the article on astrology says that “people declare there is no scientific basis for astrology” (it’s not clear who these “people” are or why their declaration should carry any weight), the article goes on to note that discoveries made by Copernicus and Tycho Brahe conflict with astrology, and that the constellations have shifted over the past two thousand years to the point where most astrologers don't even know a person’s true sun sign.

The entry on creationism, although brief, is one of the best I've seen. Although it doesn't get into specifics, World Book makes it clear that the debate is actually a religious battle over biblical literalism.

The Bigfoot and abominable snowman sections note that scientists believe some evidence, including footprints, have been faked and that the sun can often melt footprints in the snow, making them appear unnaturally large.

None of the encyclopedias scored well on the topic of homeopathy, and World Book missed the biggest criticism of this “alternative” medical system — that its medicines are so diluted, no active ingredient may even be present.

But overall, it’s nice to see that Grolier isn't alone in giving a rational, scientific assessment of topics that the public finds so fascinating.

There’s nothing more maddening than having someone invite you to make up your own mind about a controversy, only to have them refuse to give you the tools to do it.

That’s precisely what the Fox television network did August 28 and September 4, 1995, when it presented a one-hour special “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?” that was billed as the network premiere of a 17-minute film purporting to be the autopsy of a space creature found near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. [See also the SI Special Report on Roswell by Philip J. Klass in this issue, and Joe Nickell’s column.]

Instead of simply showing the 17 minutes, viewers got to see maybe three, four, or five minutes of footage chopped up into MTV-sized snippets that were repeated throughout the hour.

Instead of a tough skeptical analysis of a film that has been kept tightly under wraps by its owner, executive producer Robert Kiviat — whose resume includes being a coordinating producer on Fox’s pseudoscience newsmagazine program “Encounters” — “Alien Autopsy” tended to showcase interviews from people who seemed convinced that the footage was either real, or a complicated hoax that would have been extremely difficult to pull off.

“Alien Autopsy” was far from one-sided. Kiviat repeatedly had the host, “Star Trek” actor Jonathan Frakes, note that the movie could be a hoax, and Kiviat addressed some key criticisms. But other important criticisms were muted, ignored, taken out of context, or simply brushed aside.

It’s understandable that some people would be impressed by the film. The snippets the producers chose to air looked convincing in many ways. Scalpels seemed to cut flesh. A skin flap from the skull seemed to be pulled over the face. Dark innards were removed from the brain area and the body cavity, and placed into pans. The tools and equipment seemed to be from the right era.

Yet when it comes to exposing a clever fraud, the devil is in the details.

By failing to show the entire film, one was left to wonder whether Fox was leaving out the portions that might have flagged the movie as bogus.

“Alien Autopsy” comes at a difficult time for UFO enthusiasts. Today’s cutting-edge UFO tales have become so extraordinary, they're often met with derision, even by people in the increasingly sensationalist media.

That’s why the focus seems to have shifted to Roswell, where the details are still intriguing enough to fire the imagination, and the facts and recollections have been polished bright by the passage of time. With its simple tale of a crashed saucer, a few space aliens, and a government cover-up, the Roswell story seems far more plausible (relatively speaking) than today’s tales of aliens passing through walls, millions of Americans being abducted by sex-obsessed space creatures, and extra- terrestrials who create alien-human babies.

UFO believers thought they had the Roswell affair pretty well figured out. “Alien Autopsy” has shaken things up because the images in the film don’t always conform to the picture the believers have painstakingly constructed over the years. The creature on the autopsy table is tall, its eyes are too small, it has too many fingers and toes, and it looks too humanlike, complete with humanlike ears and toenails.

Some enthusiasts had expressed the fear that “Alien Autopsy” would discredit some of the work that has gone into uncovering the truth at Roswell. Such fears may be justified. In the media, it’s the images, not facts, that shape public attitudes and debates these days. Long after people have forgotten the details of a Roswell book or article, they're going to remember the video of this six-fingered “alien” undergoing an “autopsy.”

The film snippets that were shown raised all kinds of questions, and provided few answers. Some examples:

• One small part of the film shows someone making a cut in the skin along the neck. Did the full-length film include the showing of any dissection of the cut area? Was this cutting of skin simply done for effect, possibly with a trick knife that makes a glistening mark on the body that appears to be the blood from an incision?
• One section of the film shows an intact body (except for a large leg wound). Another shows the thorax and abdomen cut open. Were there any steps in between, or did possible hoaxers making the film simply cut open a latex dummy, dump animal guts inside, and pretend to take them out?
• There were film clips of organs, such as the brain, being removed. But organs can’t be pulled from a body like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. They're held in position by sometimes-tough connective tissue that must first be cut away. The film snippets on “Alien Autopsy” showed no evidence of that type of dissection. That flaw — if it is a flaw — was most obvious when the doctor plucked the dark covering off the eye. Unless these were simply extraterrestrial contact lenses, a piece of the eye isn’t going to come away that easily without some connective tissue being sliced first.
• Where was everybody? How many people would turn down the chance to watch the historic autopsy of a creature from another world? Yet there were only two people in this room, in addition to the cameraman.
• Why did the person watching from behind the glass partition, and not in the room, need to be suited up?
• For such an extraordinary autopsy, why did there seem to be so little effort to document it? There was no attempt to weigh or label the specimens, and there were just a few shots of someone putting data on a single sheet of paper.
• Why was the supposedly experienced cameraman — who also claims to have been present when three alien creatures were found — trying to take close-ups that invariably made the film go out of focus? Good photographers know when they're getting too close to their subject and need to switch to a lens with a more appropriate focal length.

The fact is, an autopsy on a creature this extraordinary wouldn’t be done the way this one was. The being would have been turned over so the back could be examined (in fact, the “doctors” seemed reluctant to move the body much at all). The skin would have been carefully stripped away to examine the pattern of the musculature. The origin and insertion of individual muscles would have been documented. Samples would have been taken, weighed, recorded and photographed. Only then would the people behind the protective hoods have gone deeper into the gut, repeating the documentation process.

When critics have questioned the quick removal of the black sheath on the eyes, the argument has been made that this was the third or fourth alien autopsied, so the procedure was becoming easier. The argument doesn't wash. Unless this was one of scores of alien bodies, researchers would want to handle each case with excruciating care so they could compare and contrast the individuals.

Unfortunately, the people who were skeptical of the film — ironically, including people prominent in the UFO movement — were given little time and almost no opportunity to explain their skepticism, making them appear to be little more than debunkers. Kent Jeffrey, who argued months earlier that the film is a hoax, only got to predict that it will probably eventually be exposed as a fraud. The criticisms of one Hollywood filmmaker, who thought the movie was bogus, were quickly countered by a cameraman from the era who said it wasn’t surprising that this autopsy cameraman would allow his view to be blocked or parts of the movie to be out of focus.

Then there were things the show didn’t tell viewers.

“Alien Autopsy” quoted Laurence Cate of Kodak, who said the markings on the film indicate it was manufactured in 1927, 1947 or 1967. The program didn’t make it clear that Cate is not an expert in authentication, according to the Sunday Times of London.

Paolo Cherchi Usai, senior curator at George Eastman House, a photography museum, based his observation that the film would be difficult to fabricate on seeing the 17 minutes of film and about five frames of leader film that carried no date coding and was supposedly clipped from the beginning of one of the rolls of film. Conclusive tests on the film had yet to be done.

The Hollywood special effects team led by Stan Winston gave the most impressive testimonial. But I got the impression they were being asked to gauge the difficulty of staging a bogus alien autopsy back in 1947. Winston and his associates said the special effects were good, even by today’s standards, but from the clips shown on “Alien Autopsy,” this television program didn’t seem to come close to rivaling the quality of films you could rent in any video store.

The bottom line is that if the film is legitimate and this is the first solid evidence of life on other planets, it deserves real authentication, not the casual checking the program provided.

Independent experts need to pinpoint the date of the frames, then examine all the reels to be sure the entire film has the same date code. For all we know, most of the film is from contemporary stock. Checking the whole film would dramatically narrow the range of possibilities for a hoax.

The cameraman needs to be identified and questioned to confirm that he exists, that he was in the military, and that he really was the cameraman. There’s been talk that he wants to avoid being prosecuted by the government for keeping a copy of the film all these years. That’s claptrap. If the film is a hoax, why would the government bother him? If the film is real, dragging a more-than-80-year-old military veteran into court would be an admission by the government that the footage is real, and that would spark some tough questions about who or what was on that examining table. The government, not the photographer, would be on the hot seat.

But instead of insisting on authentication first, Fox seemed intent on milking the movie for every penny possible. The network repeated the program one week after its original showing and tried to drum up renewed interest for the rerun by promising more footage from the 17-minute film. Those who turned in saw about three additional minutes of footage, but Fox still didn’t show the whole 17-minute film. In all, the autopsy sequences were only on the screen for 13-1/2 minutes and, once again, that total included clips that were shown repeatedly.

It was not what you would expect from a major network that thought it was broadcasting a history-making film.

It was, however, what you would expect from a network trying very hard not to spoil an illusion.