It’s for the latter reason that Professor Jean-Denis Rouillon of Universite de Franche-Comte has been the talk of this week’s news cycle, with headlines like Research Suggests Bras Do No Good, Do Women Need Bras? French Study Says Brassieres Are a ‘False Necessity’, and French Study Suggests Younger Women Should Stop Wearing Bras.

Here’s a quote from the CBS News effort:

Professor Jean-Denis Rouillon, a sports medicine specialist from Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Besancon in Besancon, France, published a study on Wednesday that shows that wearing bras may not prevent women’s breasts from sagging, and may in fact increase it.

With any viral story, my skeptic sense begins tingling almost immediately, but the point at which I began to really get suspicious was when I discussed it with my fellow Skepchick contributors, Mary Brock and Will Robertson, and we noticed that we each had a different idea of how many subjects were involved in this study. Was it 320 as reported here, or 330 as reported at CBS News and elsewhere, or 130 as reported here? This is usually easily solved by getting ahold of the actual published study, but unfortunately none of the articles mentioned what it was called or what journal it was in.

A search of the literature turned up nothing, and there were no press releases from the University that mentioned it. Because everything was in French, we engaged several French-speaking Twitter followers who also combed through the literature for us, but again, they found nothing (thanks to @LeBiochimiste, @ologies, and @Bookmore for the help). This was odd, especially considering that CBS News reported that there was a study and further that it was published on Wednesday.

Mary Brock found what appeared to be the oldest source: an interview Rouillon participated in with a student radio station. So it appears that by “published a study,” CBS News and other outlets actually meant, “spoke on the radio.” A fine distinction, I’m sure you’ll agree.

In the radio interview, Rouillon discusses his ongoing research and reports that his preliminary findings suggest bras don’t help with back pain or breast firmness. One twenty-eight-year old subject is interviewed as well and offers her anecdotal testimony that going without a bra has improved her breathing and posture.

Rouillon’s preliminary research, though, is based on only 330 women in total, none of whom was over the age of thirty-five. Rouillon himself has stated that his findings, when (if ever) they’re published, will have nothing to say about the population of women as a whole. He told Reuters that despite his preliminary findings, “a middle-aged women, overweight, with 2.4 children? I’m not at all sure she’d benefit from abandoning bras.”

Additionally, this research clearly suffers from a lack of proper blinding. The study isn’t even over yet, but one of the subjects is on the radio boasting about how great it is to not wear a bra, indicating that she knows what the study is about. Is it possible that she’s more cognizant of her posture? That she’s reporting less back pain because she believes strongly in the power of going bra-less? That she’s undergoing any other treatments to increase, er, “firmness”?

And what about the fact that this study is reported to have been going on for fifteen years? My first assumption upon reading that was that Rouillon was studying the long-term effects of wearing a bra or going without, but if all subjects have been aged eighteen to thirty-five, then the twenty-eight-year old who was interviewed hasn’t been in the study the entire time, and she states that she’s only been bra-free for two years. How are subjects added to this study, and for how long have they been tracked? Without an actual published study to check, it’s impossible to say. We only have Rouillon’s opinion of his own research, which could be based almost entirely on self-reported data.

Rouillon says researchers used calipers and rulers to measure “lift,” but for how long? And did they take into account the woman’s fluctuating weight, breast size, and level of activity? And considering that Rouillon is mentioned as an expert in sports medicine, did they study any women who go for jogs without a sports bra? Because, really, ouch.

Again, without a paper to look at, we don’t know. We only have the opinion of Rouillon and the intercontinental game of telephone that media outlets like CBS News play, resulting in misinformation reported as fact simply because no journalist bothered to take a few minutes to look for an actual published study at the source of the soundbite.

So, is it better to go braless? The answer is yes, if that’s what you prefer. Really, bras don’t appear to be giving people cancer or causing earthquakes in Iran. They exist to give you support if you need it, cleavage if you want it, and nipple coverage if your cultural milieu demands it. If you decide to go without, you may not get perkier breasts and less back pain, but you’ll definitely save the time and cost of a trip to Victoria’s Secret. Maybe that’s worth it.

Thank you for sitting down with me, Ron. So I heard CSI has been throwing skeptical conferences since before it was cool. True?

True!

Tell me a bit about that.

Well, CSI has been around, under different names, since 1976. I can’t tell you the exact year the first conference was started but it was in the ‘80s.* We were the pioneers of skepticism. We were essentially the only skeptical organization around, for a long time. We had nationwide, even international conferences, for instance in Beijing. We were the forerunners.

Unfortunately, for a period of time we didn’t have conferences that had a specifically skeptical theme, as part of the relationship between CSI and the other affiliates, CFI and the Council for Secular Humanism. At one time, before I became president and CEO, there was a deemphasis on skepticism, but with CSICon, we’re picking it back up again.

Well, these days we’re very lucky to have tons of skeptical conferences happening around the world. Why should people come to CSICon?

The Halloween Party, of course! No, that’s part of it, but I think one thing that distinguishes CSICon from other conferences, and not to say anything bad about them as they all have their virtues, but we have a bit more of an academic orientation – but not in the sense of “ivory tower” sort of stuff. We try to get all our presentations geared toward contemporary, important issues but we do call upon experts in different areas so they can apply their background and their research to those issues.

For instance, the panel I’ll be on has Chris Mooney and Daniel Kahan, and we’re talking about the research Dan and Chris have done about how people arrive at certain conclusions. Is there a difference in the way conservatives and liberals reason? This is research that has important implications.

Likewise, we have a panel on gender differences and science, and we’ll have three people talk about the psychology of gender differences and talk about the research in that area. Is there really a difference between how men and women reason about certain things, and if so how would that play out in certain behaviors? Is it innate, or is it a reflection of culture? These are issues people are talking about, without necessarily paying attention to the research.

So one of the important contributions of CSICon is that we’re bringing the actual research to bear on the issues people are talking about.

But there will still be fun Bigfoot talks, right?

We try to cover the whole area of skeptical interests, so yes! We’ll have talks on Bigfoot and other phenomena like that. So we’re covering some of the same topics but from a different orientation.

And not to emphasize it too much, but we’re going to have a lot of fun! We’ll have some nice parties, and the Halloween party with a skeptical theme and the award for best costume.

And this will be an exclusive scoop for you – the party will be a big, fun event like it was last time. We’ll have prizes for best costume, best skeptical costume, but also, because there are people out there who say they have psychic powers, we’re going to give them a chance to prove it. This week, I will write down the costume I’ll be wearing at the party, put it in a sealed envelope, and deliver it to Barry Karr. The person who is able to use his or her psychic powers to figure out what costume I’m wearing will be inundated with fabulous prizes.

That’s right, at the CSICon costume contest last year, you dressed as some kind of German soldier. How do you plan to top yourself this year, in terms of lightheartedness?

[Laughs]
I won’t be wearing an authoritarian-themed costume this year, but it wasn’t a German soldier! It was supposed to be a Latin American dictator.

[Laughing] That’s not better! That’s still a terrible costume idea!

It was mock ironic! Because I’m the CEO! But no, there won’t be any kind of overtones like that this year. It will be a costume everyone can rally behind.

So why Nashville?

We thought Tennessee might be good, because Tennessee sadly has been at the forefront of some anti-science legislation, some legislation that got across the church-state boundary. Some might see that as a reason to avoid Tennessee, but we saw it as an opportunity to bring some enlightenment, to bring the skeptics down there.

And we also wanted a city we thought had a fun reputation, and Nashville seemed like a good choice.

Nashville is known as Music City. If Ben Radford and Joe Nickell were to perform a duet of "Islands in the Stream," who do you think should be Dolly Parton and who should be Kenny Rogers?

[Laughing]
This... I have to work with these people! I think their talent is so deep and varied that each of them could play both those characters very well, so actually they’d probably trade off during the duet.

Wow, that’s a very diplomatic answer and an intriguing possibility.

I’m going to have nightmares now thinking about that.

So CSICon, and in fact all CFI-sponsored events, now has an anti-harassment policy. Why did you decide to outlaw fun?

[Laughs]
Well, we didn’t outlaw fun. It’s important. I’m somewhat embarrassed that we did not think of this before because at all of our conferences, including CSICon, what we’re most interested in is having people feel free to exchange ideas, because that’s what skepticism and free inquiry are all about: exchanging points of view, discussing things. To do that, you need to feel comfortable, you need to feel safe. You need to feel like it’s a welcoming environment. And that’s not the case if you have to worry about hostile conduct or harassment.

So we really see this as a way to further our objective to have free and open discussions. I’ve had this criticism, since we’ve implemented the policy, “Oh you’re against free speech.” Quite to the contrary, we feel this is a way of ensuring we have free speech, so that people there feel comfortable, feel free to exchange ideas, and it’s not going to outlaw fun at all.

I don’t want to get too much into people’s proclivities, people want to do what they want to do and that’s great. We as an organization are in favor of adults having consensual relationships and pursuing fun as they see fit, but the key there is “consensual relationships.” So in prohibiting hostile conduct and harassment, what we’re doing is trying to eliminate the jerks, to put it as bluntly as possible, and make sure everyone else has fun.

Speaking of fun, a seance will be held Saturday night at the conference. If you could conjure the ghost of one deceased skeptic to give the paranormal keynote at CSICon, who would it be?

Oh my goodness, this is going to be a very difficult question.

I don’t know if he counts as a skeptic, but Carl Sagan is certainly someone who i think approached things with a scientific mind, and he was the one who I think coined the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”** He’d be my first choice.

He definitely counts as a skeptic! And he had a relationship with CFI, right?

He did! He talked at a number of our conferences, he received a couple of awards, and we have a continuing relationship with his widow, who continues to give us support and allows us to use his name in promotional materials and such. So yeah, I think he’d be my choice.

Good choice. One last question: has CSI ever considered pranking the attendees of CSICon by creating a tale about the hotel being haunted, then using an elaborate set-up of projectors and two-way mirrors to see if you can convert them?

Did you gain access to our memos? I thought that was confidential.

I knew it!

[Laughs]

Thanks very much Ron!

Thanks!

*According to Barry Karr, the first CSI conference (then known as CSICOP) was in 1983 in Buffalo, NY.
**Apparently, Sagan popularized the saying but CSI cofounder Marcello Truzzi may have originated “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”

I’ll save you the frustration of continually reading a word you may not be able to sound out: it’s "show-sigh," as in "SHOW me the evidence that this candy bar can do what you claim" and "SIGH, I guess I’ll see myself out."

Xoçai chocolate is sold by MXI Corporation in a variety of products, from solid chocolate nuggets to weight-loss shakes. MXI’s website carefully avoids making any solid claims about the exact health benefits of its healthy chocolate, sticking instead to vague phrases like "antioxidant powerhouse," "diabetic-friendly," "health-promoting" and "all-natural." On the "science" page, the text reads, "science now tells us that cacao and dark, healthy chocolate can support the health of most of the body’s major systems." One might guess from this that you can replace all your blood with chocolate and still mostly function, but I’m unable to find any studies to back this up.

Those claims pale in comparison to the assertions of Xoçai distributors, though. Xoçai is sold using multi-level marketing, which is like a pyramid scheme only legal, since there’s a product to be bought and sold. It works the same way, though: you sell the chocolate to your friends and convince them to start selling chocolate, too. Then, you make a percentage of everything they sell, and a percentage of everything sold by anyone they recruit. It’s a great idea provided you have a lot of friends with a lot of money who really love chocolate.

But it’s the distributors, like you and those you recruit, who do all the dirty work of suggesting that Xoçai fights cancer, slows aging, promotes weight loss, prevents cavities, and acts as a mood-stabilizer. They support their claims by citing studies funded by MXI, including this twelve-week weight loss "study" of 50 people that required them to consume no more than 1,200 calories a day (1,500 for men) and exercise at least 20 minutes a day at least 3 times per week while replacing two meals per day with Xoçai shakes. Shockingly, the weight came right off. Was it the eating less and exercising more, or the chocolate?

Other scientific "evidence" cited is anything showing even a slight possibility of a health benefit of antioxidants, which are in fact packed into Xoçai. Distributors make a great fuss over Xoçai’s high ORAC—oxygen radical absorbance capacity, a measure of antioxidants. Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence to indicate that a food’s ORAC has any effect whatsoever on human health, as stated quite clearly by the USDA.

In case you’re starting to think this is some kind of scam, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Searching "Xoçai scam" gets you examples like this one, in which you are informed of the many "pros" of becoming a Xoçai distributor and the only "con" is that the reviewer only has one mouth with which to eat the delicious, delicious chocolate.

And who could possibly criticize a chocolate so beloved by no less an authority than a Real Housewife (not the real kind—I mean the kind on TV):

One early convert was Robin Cofer, an ordained swami and ballet dancer who lives on the 90th floor of Trump World Tower. She signed up in August and said she has about 20 executives—high-volume sellers—working beneath her. One of the friends she signed was Jill Zarin, one of the stars of the show "Real Housewives of New York City."

"Robin is a very holistic light person," said Ms. Zarin, a former Avon lady (at 14, on Long Island). "She says, ‘Jill, I have to tell you about this thing I found, this chocolate, it’s unbelievable, and not only that, you can make money.’ I said, ‘You know what, Robin? Here’s my credit card. You’re my friend, I trust you, sign me up.’ "

Still, there are critics of the healthy chocolate revolution. Several years ago, a Norwegian blogger wrote a post critical of Xoçai health claims as well as the way it's sold, via MLM. Another blogger on the same site also guest-posted a piece questioning the chocolate claims.

There were some contentious comments, apparently, but nothing came of it until just this past April, when the blogger—who remains anonymous for his own protection—received a letter from Sjokoservice Norge, a member association for Xoçai sellers in Norway. They were angry that when Norwegians searched Xoçai, the blogger's critical post was at the top of the rankings. They threatened him with a seven-figure lawsuit (they didn't specify which seven figures) and also contacted his employer to point out that most of his posts go up during work hours.

Sjokoservice Norge also updated their website with a photo of the blogger, his name, employer, home address, telephone number, and e-mail address, encouraging their members to contact him personally.

The next day, the blogger got another email from Sjokoservice Norge that included attachments such as a family tree, which included photos, names, occupations, birthdates, and addresses of the blogger's parents, siblings, and wife. It also included a Google map showing his residence.

The accompanying email read in part, "The last weeks the organization has received several e-mails from Norwegian Xoçai members, with the following attachments.

"From what we’ve been told this information is being sent out to ca. 9000 members in Norway alone, as well as your co-workers at [anonymous].

"It’s obvious someone has put a lot of effort in gathering this data. Who is responsible, and why information concerning your family and home address has been sent out to our members all around Norway is something on which we don’t wish to speculate, but in the light of the information we have received we assume the probability of you receiving quite a few inquiries from Norwegian Xoçai members is high."

That's the English translation via Marcus Glenton Prescott and Gunnar Roland Tjomlid at the blog Unfiltered Perception, where you can find all the emails in question.

The anonymous blogger responded to Sjokoservice Norge by politely asking them to provide specifics about which of his statements they felt were incorrect.

The letter he received back from Sjokoservice Norge includes some remarkable quotes, like this:

In a closed group on Facebook your blog and person is currently the subject of heated discussion, where creative ideas are being put forth to stop your attack on the product Xoçai, the company MXI Corp. and the representatives of the company – once and for all.

…

Some also wish to gather a group of people to visit you at [place of residence] to discuss your blog face to face.

We have of course discouraged such action, but it’s out of our hands.

At this point, the blogger's employers were worried and asked him to remove the blog posts.

That would be the end of it, if only this weren't 2012 and we weren't talking about the Internet. Just like what happened to Stanislaw Burzynski, the Streisand Effect has come into play.

In addition to posting all the emails from Sjokoservice Norge, Gunnar Roland Tjomlid has reposted the two deleted posts while continuing to protect the identity of the original blogger. The story promptly went viral in Norway, making the leap from blogs to mainstream news articles and causing no small amount of unwanted attention for what Tjomlid has termed "the Norwegian Chocolate Mafia."

Tjomlid posted an update recently in which he also confirms that complaints were made to the Norwegian Food Safety Authority about Xoçai health claims. The agency reacted quickly, demanding that the distributors stop using false claims to push the chocolate. They responded by claiming that they are not employees of MXI Corp, which Tjomlid quickly debunked using their own copy. He’s now urging Norwegians to help report any misleading claims to the authorities by taking screenshots of websites. With a bit of dedication, it’s possible that the skeptics of Norway might either shut down Xoçai distributors or at least force them to clean up their act.

It would be great to see some intrepid American skeptics take up the same cause, but the danger here is much greater—I’ve seen those Real Housewives fight, and it isn’t pretty.

So it is with explaining a phenomenon that can take form in a hundred different ways. Today's topic: strange sounds coming from the sky, which have taken YouTube by storm. I'm going to explain some of them, but as soon as I do, someone will upload a new video using a new trick and someone else will have to start all over again to debunk it.

Creepy sounds are probably about as common as creepy sights, but for some reason photos of UFOs tend to get more attention than recordings of the weird bleeps and bloops and rumbles in our lives.

The rumbles, when they most likely have a natural origin, are known as "brontides," deep booming sounds that seem to come from very far away. They're often heard near bodies of water, like the "Seneca Guns" at Seneca Lake in New York, or the Barisal Guns near the Bay of Bengal. They could be caused by thunder, natural gas explosions, seismic activity, or even waves hitting at resonant hollows, and they can easily be confused with manmade sounds like sonic booms, artillery, and construction.

There's also the Bloop, an ultra-low frequency sound that was detected underwater by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1997. It was several times louder than our loudest known creature, the blue whale, and no one knows what caused it. NOAA has also found five other sounds of unknown origin underwater, known as Julia, Train, Slow Down, Whistle, and Upsweep, which I think we can all agree are simply terrible names compared to "the Bloop." "The Bloop" forever.

Even fairly well-known animals can make sounds that scare people – owls, foxes, fisher cats, and even rabbits can sound like people screaming. As a child, I had a cat that was the perfect killing machine, so I can describe in detail exactly how horrific bunnies sound as they're having their entrails spread across a driveway. Keep your cats indoors, friends.

Anyway, all of these weird sounds can freak people out, in much the same way that satellites and the moon and stars and weather balloons can freak people out when they're not sure what they're looking at. So ordinarily if you go on YouTube, you can find a lot of videos of people who have recorded sounds that genuinely scare the crap out of them.

If you go on YouTube to search for strange sounds these days, though, you'll most likely only find lies. Bald-faced lies.

I first became aware of this around January 12, when blogs started picking up on a huge influx of videos featuring creepy sounds. All that week, there were an insane number of videos being uploaded from all around the world – the US, Canada, Brazil, Russia, Australia – all claiming to demonstrate a creepy sound sort of like trumpets signaling the oncoming apocalypse. Here's an example:

That's from Melbourne, and it's one of the first I saw. I found it suspicious firstly because there's no one else around, even though the person with the camera seems to be asking someone if they can hear the noise. Plus, his delivery sounds about as natural as Keanu Reeves in any movie where he doesn't play a stoner.

So, I got the audio off the video and put it in Audacity to have a look at it. I noticed that it's in stereo, which made me happy, because I don't know a lot about audio but I do know that there's a really neat trick you can do with a stereo track that may have been manipulated. You see, if the manipulator is particularly lazy or just ignorant, they may actually record their audio in mono but add a stereo sound effect to it. Audacity has a plugin called Center Pan Removal, which basically inverts one of the channels and then puts the audio back together again, causing the waves of the mono sound to cancel each other out, and you're left hearing only the stereo sound.

So I did that, and 10 seconds later, this is the audio I had:

Download MP3 file

The man's voice has mysteriously disappeared! So, either the angels of the apocalypse broadcast in magical stereo that bypasses mono devices, or this is a fake.

It doesn't really matter what the strange sound really is, and it could be any number of things, but I happened to have watched Kevin Smith's film Red State last month and – spoiler alert everyone – at the end, there's an apocalyptic trumpeting sound. And – seriously, this is a big spoiler though it's not a great movie so it's not that big of a deal – the trumpeting in the movie is actually caused by some kids playing a prank on a Christian doomsday cult. Since Red State is now available for free on Netflix Watch Instantly, that may be what is inspiring people to make these videos.

Here's the Red State audio:

Download MP3 file

Sound familiar? Maybe that's it, or maybe it's something else, but I found that a number of the videos had that sound or something very similar.

Here's one from Dawson Creek, British Columbia that uses a different creepy sound but makes the same stereo/mono mistake:

And here's a clip of that after center pan removal:

Download MP3 file

Just for fun, here's the same clip sped up 250%:

Download MP3 file

It sounds to me like an instrument or a toy, plus a cymbal crash, but your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, the safe bet is that it's probably not the apocalypse.

There are, of course, many videos that are all in stereo or all in mono, so our center pan trick is no good. However, the more I listened to a lot of these, the more I heard the exact same sounds over and over again. Not just the creepy sound, but also the ambient noise around the sound. I clipped out the key bit that tipped it off for me, from Chicago:

Download MP3 file

And here's a clip from Kiev:

Download MP3 file

The Kiev video was the earliest I could find, having been uploaded August 11 of last year. I figured it was some sound from a sci-fi movie, but I wasn't sure which one until I Tweeted about it and one of my Twitter followers, NotInMyName2050, pointed me to a video by youtuber V00D00Sixxx in which he figures out that it comes from the 2008 film War of the Worlds. So, there you go.

That should explain the vast majority of the YouTube videos that are currently popular with the conspiracy crowds. We're only left with the question of "why?" I initially suspected that this was a viral marketing job, due to the large amount of people who uploaded videos all within the same few days, so I looked for any upcoming films that might go for that kind of promotion. Sadly, JJ Abrams is busy with Star Trek 2, Neil Blomkamp's next film takes place on another planet, M Night Shyamalan's next film takes place far in the future and is only just starting principal photography, and Spielberg is producing something called Robopacalypse, which personally I'm already excited about just from hearing the name, but it's not due out till mid-2013.

But anyway, my theory about viral marketing got less and less likely as more and more of the videos turned out to be rather amateurish fakes, mostly using clips from other movies. Instead, I think this is just the work of a few people pranking the Internet, possibly inspired by the hoaxers in Red State. Once the initial few videos got popular, more and more people piled on surprisingly quickly with their own fakes.

It's kind of a shame, really, because if it was viral marketing, it would be brilliant. Even some of the crappy videos are still a little scary, and a good marketing company would be able to create better, creepier videos that were more difficult to crack than these. Spielberg, are you listening? This is your chance to really make me fear the Robopacalypse. Get on it.

I was wondering if the hosts would actually take a skeptical look at the paranormal, so I checked out their website and was happy to find an article titled 5 Historic - and Spooky - Hoaxes. The five hoaxes in question are The Blair Witch Project (yes, that was debunked. The same day that Ghost Dad was debunked), The Amityville Horror (ditto), Ghostwatch (a BBC show that was debunked literally in the credits of the show), War of the Worlds (ditto), and THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS. Did you guys know that that had been debunked? Chief investigator: my fourth grade social studies teacher.

Good job, team. Good debunkings. It should now be clear that this team isn't afraid to go after the tough cases.

But really, I like the idea of the show—in each episode the hosts try to recreate "paranormal" videos in an attempt to explain them. So I decided to go ahead and watch the latest episode, which is called the “Mexico City Cave Witch.” That is a superb title and it filled me with hope.

Here's the promo for the episode, for those who aren't in the United States or don't want to waste their brain cells watching an entire episode.

The show opens with the team hanging out, showing each other the spooky videos they found on YouTube this week. The FoFPF team includes Ben, a former FBI agent (no explanation for why he left the FBI, but we can probably extrapolate from the fact that he is now on a show talking about how spooky witches are); Jael, an investigative reporter; Bill, the "lead scientist" with absolutely no scientific qualifications; Austin, a personal trainer with "a degree in biology"; Lanisha, a photographer; and Devin, "tech specialist."

Austin breathlessly shows the cave witch video, which I have turned into an animated gif for your convenience:

Professor Bill provides the scientific description of what he has just seen: "To me it looked like she's just floating there, and then it took off."

One host suggests that maybe someone just stood on top of the cave and pulled an object up, but Austin counters with the ironclad fact that the video maker claims he has nothing to gain from hoaxing this video . . . besides appearing on television, of course. People eat rat intestines for the chance to be on television, but Austin doesn't think someone would spend ten minutes making a "witch" video? No matter—if they act like it might be real, they get a free trip to Mexico. Admit it: you, too, would exchange your very dignity for a vacation in Mexico.

But first, they need to investigate the Case of the Exploding Bar Ashtray. There's security cam footage that shows an ashtray sitting on a bar, and then it explodes. Oh, also, everyone pretends to see some kind of ghostly orb that is nearly invisible on my computer screen, but never mind that, because the ashtray explosion is actually a pretty neat puzzle. My hopes are high.

The team heads to the bar, where they test a few hypotheses, just like in real science. One idea is that something fell on the ashtray, so they drop a "very small screw" approximately 2.5 feet into a glass ashtray to see if it will explode. They count down to make everything more dramatic.

"3-2-1 GO DEVIN!"

Nothing happens of course, so next they drop a ball bearing.

"3-2-1 RELEASE THE BALL!"

The ball bearing broke the ashtray, but they act as though the breakage is substantially different from the original video (it isn't), plus they point out that there's no visible falling object in the original video.

At this point I had to wonder if any of them had ever worked in a restaurant, or if they would talk with someone who works regularly with glass. If they had, I feel like maybe it would have occurred to them sooner that glass explodes more often than one might think. Tempered glass with a small defect could break at any time, but particularly with quick temperature changes that could be caused by, say, an ashtray that comes straight out of an industrial dishwasher and onto a counter directly above an ice box. This, of course, would be difficult to recreate with a single "experiment" because it's a rare event that requires a flawed glass.

They do come tantalizingly close. They talk about temperature changes, and they have a very high-tech animation showing what happens to the molecules in glass that undergoes thermal shock. They suggest that maybe the ashtray was very cold for some reason and someone put a lit cigarette in it, which they test by placing a hot coal in an icy ashtray. Nothing happens, so they take a blowtorch directly to the ashtray. It explodes! They astutely point out that there is no blow torch visible in the footage, so they deem the possibility of extreme temperature change "unrealistic." Remember that line in five minutes when they're talking about how maybe ghosts did it.

Next they try a controlled explosion, and of course the ashtray explodes. But then they realize that ghosts are the more likely explanation so they go looking for "cold spots." They use walkie talkies, despite being in the same bar, because without walkie talkies you can't say things like "NEGATIVE" without looking just plain silly. They find a warm spot along the bar where an electric cord is. They do recall that they took a blow torch to that bar hours ago but declare that it is impossible that it would still be several degrees warmer.

"Maybe this is a communication attempt," they guess. They think it's the previous owner of the bar, who shot himself. No one asks the important question: Did he hate smokers?

Suddenly, a glass falls in the darkened bar, confirming the fact that this is definitely a ghost with little respect for expensive glassware.

As a final nail in the coffin, Professor Bill finds electronic voice phenomena (EVP), which is just garbled white noise and background sounds that cause people to hear any message they'd like, such as Satanic messages in Queen songs.

Anyway, yes, the group agrees that "ghost" is the most likely explanation. I was disappointed—not just because they settled for a supernatural explanation, but because they didn't even bother to get an opera singer in to sing a note at the exact frequency of the glass. "3-2-1 RESONATE!"

Next up: Witch cave. Let's go to Mexico!

So, this video is pretty obviously not a witch. In fact, it is so obviously not a witch that I was initially astounded that these people could actually keep a straight face while pretending as though there's a possibility this is a video of an honest-to-goodness witch. But then I thought, "Wait a minute, Rebecca. You're an adult of average intelligence. Maybe it's not so obvious to other people."

That's why I decided to poll some children to find out what they think of it. Each of the kids' parents showed them the above animated gif, explained that a man says it's a witch but he may or may not be telling the truth, and asked them what they thought it was. Here are the responses:

"It could be, I dunno, a bird flying off carrying a black cloth?"
Joe, age 10

Joe's mom Lorna says: I told Joe about the man saying it was a witch, but who might or might not be a liar, and he climbed right behind me on my office chair to view the gif, which is a signal that he was *expecting* it to be a witch or something scary, but when I asked him afterwards if he thought it was a witch, he gave a very emphatic and scornful "no".

“That’s not a witch! Looks like someone doing their washing! … Looks like a bit of cloth being caught by the wind. Witches don’t exist.”
Scarlett, age 10

“Looks like something leaping, like a cat? You can see its tail.”

"So, you don’t think it’s a witch?"

“No, everyone knows witches aren’t real.”
Lucas, age 7

"It looks like a bin bag."
Natasha, age 10

"I think I know what that is. I think it's an animal that's either going off looking like it's flying or it's a kind of bird with a long tail. Or it could be someone just playing a trick on him and like, just lifting up some black clothes. It's not a very good job with the camera either."
Izzie, age 8

So there you have it—from this sample we can conclude that the majority of children aged seven to ten understand that witches don't exist and that even if they did exist, this is not a video of one. However! I bet if you offered those children the opportunity to go to Mexico to be sure, they'd … well actually they probably wouldn't do it, because most children have yet to learn the joys of spending long days on sandy beaches drinking margaritas.

Anyway, our intrepid team of adults decide to start their investigation with the hypothesis advanced by Joe (age 10), by dragging an owl out to the cave in the middle of the day to see if the witch could have been a bird. The poor nocturnal creature is clearly not amused, but this is science.

"3-2-1 RELEASE OWL!"

The lack of any kind of flapping wing in the original video shoots this hypothesis down. Next theory: parkour. It is obviously not parkour, any more than it is planking or coning. Parkour does not involve a floppy, limp body wobbling several feet into the air. They are now really stretching my patience by pretending to be morons in order to get a few more hours in Mexico. Again, maybe I would do the same. It looks nice there. Anyway, physical therapist and "stunt expert" Austin gets to show off his skills.

"3-2-1 MAKE THE MOVE!"

They figure out that it's probably not parkour, so at last they make a dummy, dressed all in black, and tie it to a string. Just like the original video maker obviously did.

"3-2-1 PULL THE DUMMY!"

Kudos to the editing team who valiantly tried to make this part suspenseful. The team was pulling a string with a dummy attached, but the music suggested they were firing their last bullets at an advancing horde of zombies.

Everyone is surprised that the video of their dummy looked exactly like the original. Final conclusion: hoax. Final cost: hotel and airfare to Mexico for three hosts, cameraperson, audio tech, and producer, plus one-day owl rental.

All in all, I can't say this is the worst paranormal show on television. The hosts act like morons, but I think it's pretty clear that most of them (I'm really not sure about Bill) are just going through the motions to be on television and get free trips to Mexico. This is pretty much just the world we live in now, and we're all complicit … especially me, because I watched this show and then wrote a really long article about it.

Final rating: 2 out of 5 broken ashtrays for FoFPF. 1 out of 5 floppy witches for society. 5 out of 5 angry owls for the kids in my survey group, who were so great that I'm thinking of using them as a regular resource.

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For further reading about Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, please see CSI's earlier article by Karen Stollznow.

Mount Etna is an active volcano located on Sicily that has erupted several times this year. An eruption in May was particularly impressive, and was soon followed by another smaller eruption in July. Both eruptions grounded flights due to the ash plume, but it was the May eruption that was rumored to have caused some temporal anomaly, as reported in this Italian newspaper. The Daily Mail seems to imply it was the July eruption, but as we’ll see, that’s the least of their sins in this particular lump of journalistic gold.

"Bemused Sicilians, meanwhile, were quick to blame the volcano after thousands noticed that their clocks were running 15 minutes fast," The Daily Mail reported. "The fast forward time keeping has affected a wide spectrum of digital clocks and watches—from computers through to alarm clocks.”

Sicilians were accidentally showing up at work early, which is apparently an unusual and rather horrific occurrence in that part of the world. (In related news, I believe I may be part Sicilian.) And what could have possibly caused such a phenomenon? Our intrepid reporters have done their homework:

"As well as Etna’s volcanic activity, users have so far blamed aliens, poltergeists, solar explosions and electrical disturbances caused by underwater cables."

I realized that there might be more to this story, so I decided to do a little research of my own. My first step was figuring out how clocks work, which is one of those bits of knowledge that I could have sworn I already knew. I mean, I could figure out how pendulums and gears work, but I immediately realized that to me, electricity was indistinguishable from magic. Luckily, there is the Internet.

Here’s the quick version: digital clocks that plug into the wall use the frequency of the power lines to keep time. In the US, that’s 60-hertz (Hz) and in Europe, where our story takes place, it’s 50 Hz. There are counters inside the clock that divide the 50 Hz base into 1 Hz segments. Each hertz is an oscillation per second, so one hertz is what you use to count each second. Easy enough.

So how could you mess with that, and could a volcano do it? Well, if you change the frequency, you would effectively speed up or slow down an electric clock. That’s what’s happening when you use the buttons on your clock to set the time– it just lets a higher frequency in to make the time speed up. But in this case we’re not talking about speeding up the time on one clock; we’re talking about speeding up the time on all the clocks in an area, and to do that you’d need to change the frequency of the power lines that are feeding electricity to the clocks.

And is that even possible? Well, yes! A bit of reading on the subject informed me that the frequency coming out of power plants isn’t always exactly 50 or 60 Hz–it’s constantly fluctuating ever so slightly. But ever since the invention of the electric clock, grid operators have regulated the daily frequency so that at the end of the day, it averages out to the right frequency and therefore the right time, give or take a few seconds. The larger networks are incredibly precise: the synchronous grid of Continental Europe is the largest grid in the world, and it recalibrates its frequency every morning at 8:00 at a control center in Switzerland. You can actually see a real-time readout of the frequency that all of Europe, including Italy, is getting.

Considering all that, I figured that all the clocks in mainland Italy must be rather precise at all times, making this story improbable to say the least. But I realized that Sicily isn’t actually on the mainland—it’s an island off the coast of Italy.

“Aha!” I thought triumphantly. Yes, sometimes I think triumphantly. “The island probably has its own power grid, and smaller grids are sometimes not as precise as the larger ones!”

It turns out that Sicily does get its power from the same grid, via one underwater cable that comes from the mainland.

At that point I was nearly ready to declare the Case of the Early Workers as some mass delusion on the part of Sicilians. My thinking was that a few people happened to turn up at work early one day and blamed their wonky clocks. Word spread, and more and more people noticed that their clocks were wrong and assumed it all must have a common cause, when really they were all just bad at setting clocks properly. But before I fell back on this theory, I wanted to be sure that the one cable that provides power to Sicily didn’t have anything go wrong around the time of the volcano eruption.

And you know what? It did.

It turns out that for about twenty days in May, the cable was disconnected from the mainland to undergo some maintenance, and during that time Sicily was being powered entirely by hydroelectricity. Hydroelectric power has more fluctuations in frequency, and the smaller grid wasn’t able to self-correct as quickly as the larger grid, so for awhile any electric clock was going to be off.

Finally, I found an article in an Italian newspaper that confirmed that this was, in fact, the cause of the fast clocks. Note the date of publication: June 9th, a full month before The Daily Mail posted their article.

So once again we find that The Daily Mail is wrong about nearly everything: no watches were affected (since those run on batteries and thus have a different method of keeping time) and the fast clocks were not caused by the volcano, or aliens, or poltergeists, or solar explosions. But hey, credit where credit is due: you could say that the problem was "electrical disturbances caused by underwater cables," though maybe not in the sense they implied.

As an outspoken skeptic with a large audience and a keen interest in not dying of horrific diseases, I’m often accused of being in the pocket of “Big Pharma,” the shady multinational conglomerate of drug companies that makes money by poisoning our water supply and injecting children with heroin and thumbtacks.

Critics of Big Pharma rush to comment whenever I post a video describing the relative safety of vaccines, the effectiveness of achieving herd immunity, or the underhanded tactics of frauds like Andrew Wakefield. I am told that I must be cashing checks to defend products produced by pharmaceutical companies, since there is so much anecdotal evidence that they are evil.

When I first started getting comments like that, I had to laugh – back in 2003, I worked for a progressive activist organization in Seattle that was fighting the pharmaceutical industry in the hopes that Medicare could be reformed to include coverage for prescription medication.

When Medicare was enacted in 1965, prescription drugs weren’t very expensive and so it wasn’t a great burden for the elderly to pay full price for their medicine. A few decades later, the costs skyrocketed in the US with the pharmaceutical companies’ newly discovered power of marketing directly to the consumer: “Be sure to ask your doctor how Fungallipitox can work for you.” I knew many seniors in the area who took buses a few hours north to Canada, where their inhalers cost $20 per month instead of $200.

My organization and others like it eventually found a bit of success fighting the extraordinarily powerful pharmaceutical lobby ( tied with the financial lobby as the US’s largest), and in 2006 a prescription drug benefit was added to Medicare. Unfortunately, there are still gaps that leave many seniors paying a large portion of their income to keep themselves alive.

But this is what it means to be a skeptic – doing your research and understanding that an industry can be suspect and immoral without necessarily being pure evil. I know that pharmaceutical companies play dirty, but I also know that vaccines save lives.

All of which brings us to sex, and whether or not women are having enough of it. I know, way to bury the lede, right?

Female sexual arousal disorder is a hot new area of interest for pharmaceutical companies, who, you may recall, recently solved all of mankind’s problems by inventing Viagra. Viagra works by increasing blood flow to the genitals, thus curing erectile dysfunction, a disorder coined by Pfizer. Interestingly, it works the exact same way in women.

The problem that pharmaceutical companies face is that women don’t necessarily seem to react the same way to Viagra. Some feel their sexual problems are fixed, and others feel no difference. Women and their bodies, as you may know, are grand mysteries. Like unicorns. And for some reason, simply stimulating their genitals is not necessarily a guaranteed way to get them interested in having intercourse. “I’ve baked this lovely cake and set it in front of the unicorn, but the unicorn isn’t eating. Why is the unicorn not eating?”

“Perhaps we can invent a pill that will make the unicorn want the cake?”

“Yes!”

And so it was that the pharmaceutical companies created a pill: Flibanserin (sexy!), which directly affects the brain to trigger sexual desire.

With Viagra, the data showed that it could drastically improve the sex lives of men, and so it is difficult to fault drug companies for coining a phrase, tutoring doctors, and marketing their cure to the general public. In the case of female sexual arousal disorder, though, things are a bit more nuanced.

Dr. Petra Boynton recently spoke publicly about being offered £250 by a pharmaceutical company to sign her name to a pre-written paper that would tell doctors how many women suffer from arousal disorder. That same company offered her £1000 to attend sessions where she would hear more about the disorder before being encouraged to go tell her students, doctors, and the media about the issue. All of this was done before clinical trial data was made available.

She refused. She believes that the data supporting the safety and efficacy of these medications is unconvincing, noting that they perform only slightly better than placebo and they are never compared to alternative psychosexual therapies.

Dr. Ben Goldacre is similarly unconvinced. He also points out that much of the data on female sexual arousal disorder is suspect – for instance, one of the most cited papers on the prevalence of the disorder claims that 43% of women have it. This is based on a three-question survey that was sent out to 1749 women; an answer of “yes” to just one question is all that is needed for that woman to be labeled with the disorder. One of the paper’s authors later admitted that he held a paid advisory position with Pfizer.

It’s difficult for me, as a pro-sex feminist skeptic, to argue against a medical treatment that might improve the sex lives of women. It would be wonderful for pharmaceutical companies to once again coin a new disorder, and in doing so open up conversation about it. Ideally, this would encourage women to feel more comfortable opening up more about their sexual health problems, and researchers would commit more time and resources to studying these problems and putting them into context. Is the woman under stress? Is she unfamiliar with her body? Is her partner unwilling or unable to satisfy her? Or is she having a biological problem?

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the path we’re on. Instead of exploring those questions and encouraging sex education, pharmaceutical companies’ marketing departments are selling a magical cure-all pill that likely won’t cure anything at all in the women they are targeting. It’s classic Big Pharma: questionable trial results, paid opinion leaders educating doctors, marketing departments guiding research, and other underhanded, non-science-based tactics. As skeptics, we should speak out against this behavior when it is uncovered, and it will only strengthen our position when we are defending the Big Pharma products that are actually saving lives.