Geoffrey C. Kabat, a senior epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, argues strongly and persuasively in this excellent book that misinterpretations of epidemiological data, often by epidemiologists themselves, have resulted in a society “hyperattuned to anything that may affect our health” (p. xi). He tells four important scientific detective stories, all ending with the accused being cleared of almost all charges. The original charges were brought by epidemiological studies of, at best, dubious quality. In one case, that of possible effects of second-hand cigarette smoke, the science was badly perverted to support the preexisting expectations of the prosecutors. Findings that contradicted the politically correct view were met with attempts at outright suppression and when published, were followed by personal attacks on the authors’ integrity but not on the quality of their science. This is a disturbing story of science’s betrayal by the very people who are charged with using scientific results to guide rational decisions about health risks.

An introductory chapter titled “Toward a Sociology of Health Hazards in Daily Life” sets the stage for the author’s discussion of how social and political influences shape the way health risks are investigated and reported. The second chapter, “Epidemiology: Its Uses, Strengths, and Limitations,” is an excellent review of epidemiological methods and techniques. It clearly explains different types of studies, such as descriptive, case-control, cohort, randomized, etc., and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Tricky subjects such as statistical interactions, establishment of causality, absolute versus relative risks, pooling of studies, and meta analysis are all covered.

The next four chapters are case studies of specific health scares. The chapters cover environmental causes of breast cancer (chapter 3); power lines and cancer (chapter 4); risks of residential radon (chapter 5); and, finally, the risks of second-hand cigarette smoke (chapter 6). There is a concluding chapter followed by two appendices, extensive bibliographical notes, bibliography, and an index.

In the 1990s it was claimed that there was an epidemic of breast cancer on Long Island. Sometimes cancer does occur more often than would be expected by chance. The psychological desire to blame something obvious and identifiable for such clusters is easy to understand. It’s much more satisfying to have a known villain to blame than to put the cause down to amorphous statistical deviations from chance. The result is a search of the local environment. Inevitably, such a search yields an excess of power lines, leaky old oil tanks, microwave towers, or some such, which are promptly blamed for the cluster.

The villain singled out in the Long Island breast cancer scare was unspecified environmental pollution. The belief that this was responsible led Congress to require an expensive study of environmental factors in the causality of breast cancer on Long Island that ended up costing millions of dollars but provided no new knowledge about the causes of breast cancer. This is a prime example of political and social—as opposed to scientific—factors driving which issues receive research funding. In the end, all the expensive government-funded research showed no influence by environmental pollutants on breast cancer rates.

In the next chapter Kabat takes up the claim that electromagnetic fields from power lines cause cancer. This health scare first popped up in the 1980s. Even though it has been entirely debunked in the scientific community, it is still alive and well in the public mind. It is far easier to whip up fears than to reduce them. Much like the Long Island breast cancer scare, the hysteria over power lines started when untrained individuals, especially parents of children with cancer, noted that cases of childhood cancer seemed to be more common in areas with a large number of power lines. This sort of “evidence” is emotionally compelling but totally invalid—a dangerous combination. The hysteria was further fed by conspiracy theorist Paul Brodeur, who wrote a series of articles in the New Yorker and books promoting the view that the power companies were covering up the danger of power lines. This chapter covers the history of the power line controversy quite well, with discussions of some of the hypotheses put forth to explain the relationship between power lines and cancer that, in the end, didn’t exist.

One failing of this otherwise excellent book is that Kabat doesn’t emphasize one of the major reasons for the false belief in these various health scares: the multiple comparison fallacy. The basic idea is that if one makes enough comparisons one can find, just by chance, results that seem to show that, say, stamp collecting causes cancer. The classic example of this was the infamous Swedish study of the dangers of power lines. The published paper reported sixty-six different risk ratios. The only one that got much attention was one that showed a four times higher risk of cancer for those living near power lines. But this one was only one out of sixty-six reported results. It gets worse. The published paper (American Journal of Epidemiology, 1993, 138, pp. 467–481) was just a summary of a study in which nearly 800 risk ratios were computed. Out of that huge number, it would be very surprising if at least one result didn’t show such an increased risk, just by chance. And, of course, among those 800 results many showed that those who lived near power lines had a reduced risk for developing cancer.

The next chapter discusses the risks of residential radon. Remember that scare from the 1980s? That health worry has happily gone the way of eight-track tapes. But as Kabat explains, the hype about the risks of radon was based on the same sorts of errors as those made in overstating the risks of environmental pollution for breast cancer and power lines for cancer. A special strength of this chapter is an important discussion of the difficulty in measuring actual exposure to residential radon, which might seem simple but certainly is not.

The final case study is by far the most controversial. Kabat argues that there is essentially no risk of getting cancer or heart disease from second-hand or passive tobacco smoke. This flies in the face of accepted wisdom. I was very surprised as I read this chapter to see that the evidence linking second-hand smoke to disease was so weak as to be basically nonexistent. So where does the hype come from? It is here that Kabat is at his best as he describes how the actual results of studies of second-hand smoke have been co-opted to push the political agenda of those wanting to ban smoking in public places. I’m totally in agreement that such smoking should be banned. It’s as annoying and repulsive as someone sitting at a nearby table in a restaurant playing a loud radio. But we can quite properly ban playing loud radios in restaurants, theaters, airplanes, trains, and offices without having to resort to distorting the science to argue that “second-hand listening” causes cancer of the inner ear.

The misrepresentation of the studies of the effects of passive smoking has clearly distorted the science that aims to prove ill effects of passive smoking. At this point, I expect that someone will point out that Kabat was an author of a large study funded by the tobacco industry that found no effect of passive smoke. True enough—the study, funded by the Center for Indoor Air Research (CIAR), was published in the British Medical Journal (May 17, 2003). It reported further follow up of more than 115,000 individuals who had been examined for effects of passive smoking over a period of many years. The American Cancer Society (ACS) had started the study in 1959. Kabat and his co-author James Enstrom tried to obtain funding for this study from several sources, including the ACS, and were turned down. Kabat makes it clear that CIAR had absolutely no influence over the study at any time and was not even given a copy of the paper. They, like everyone else, saw it upon publication. The paper was roundly attacked by the American Cancer Society and its supporters. Letters poured into the British Medical Journal. But the great majority simply raged at the authors without making any attempt to criticize the paper on scientific grounds.

Kabat quite properly calls this response scientific McCarthyism. He shows that agencies like the ACS and state and federal environmental protection agencies have willfully distorted the science of second-hand smoke to push the otherwise laudable goal of banning smoking in public places. In one case the Massachusetts Lung Association attempted to suppress publication of a study that did not support its position that second-hand smoke is dangerous, but “Harvard University had a firm policy” (p. 163) that allowed the paper to be published. These attempts to distort the science to support a particular policy, something done for years by the tobacco industry when it came to the dangers of actual smoking, can properly be called a “betrayal of science.” This book, especially this chapter, should be read by anyone interested in how political pressure can change not only what science gets funded but how science is misrepresented even in official documents that should be objective.

Neither of these cases seems particularly surprising. Both patients were already in the hospital and not for trivial reasons. Both must have been anxious. Undoubtedly many patients in such situations express anxiety and fear of death, even when they are not expected to die. When, as expected, they do not die, it’s no big deal and isn’t remembered. But when such a patient does die, it’s a notable event and is remembered.

This type of selective memory is an important cause of belief in many nonexistent phenomena. Another from the medical arena is the belief that more babies are born when the moon is full. This is simply false. There have never been any well-done studies that support such a belief. So from whence did the belief spring? Selective memory on the part of maternity-room personnel. When there happens to be a lot of births during a full moon, it is noted and remembered. Neither slow nights when the moon was full nor busy nights when it wasn’t are taken into account as evidence against the relationship. Selective memory also plays an important role in the belief in such things as astrology, biorhythm theory, prophetic dreams, and the like.

But memory is not only selective, it is constructive. The physician who believes in the prophetic abilities of patients to foretell their own deaths will be very likely to misremember patients’ comments as more prophetic than they actually were. Any claim that is based only on such selective memories should be viewed with great suspicion.

Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. By Susan A. Clancy. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2005. ISBN 0-674-01879-6. 179 pp. Hardcover, $22.95.

The one question that my students always ask when I introduce the topic of alien abductions is how could anyone possibly really believe that such a thing had happened to them if they weren't just plain barking mad. It takes a fair amount of background in memory and related subjects to understand the psychology of the alien-abduction experience. In Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, Susan Clancy has masterfully combined this background information with her own important research on alien-abduction claimants. She writes with the skill of an experienced novelist telling an exciting story. Consider the opening paragraph:

“Will Andrews is an articulate, handsome forty-two-year-old. He’s a successful chiropractor, lives in a wealthy American suburb, has a strikingly attractive wife and twin boys, age eight. The only glitch in this picture of domestic bliss is that his children are not his wife’s-they are the product of an earlier infidelity. To complicate matters further, the biological mother is an extraterrestrial.”

Following that opening, it took me only a very pleasant fall afternoon to read this book from cover to cover. The title of each chapter is a question, and the first chapter is titled, “How do you wind up studying aliens?” Here, Clancy gives a very open and personal account of how she became interested in the topic of alien abductions. The next five chapters cover the most important questions that people ask about abductions and that abductees ask themselves. Chapter 2, “How do people come to believe they were abducted by aliens?", and chapter 3, “Why do I have memories if it didn't happen?", cover the various factors that go into the creation of an alien-abduction belief. Clancy makes it clear that no one wakes up in the morning with a full-blown abduction experience. Sometimes, the experience is created and molded from the starting point of a dream or hypnogogic/ hypnopompic hallucination experienced during sleep paralysis. Other times, it starts with just a vague feeling that something had happened that needs to be explained.

According to Clancy, all of the abductees she studied “had sought out books, movies, researchers, and hypnotists in an effort to understand the things that were troubling them” (143). Since sleep paralysis and its related hallucinations are almost unknown to the general public, the real explanation is not available. Thus, when someone who has had such an experience reads one of the books touting the reality of alien abductions or hears such claims on television or elsewhere, it seems the only explanation available. If they then fall in with some alien-abduction guru and support group, techniques such as hypnosis and guided imagery are used to reinforce the seeming reality of the event while adding much more detail. As Clancy notes, “Belief precedes memories because developing detailed, personal memories . . . requires intervention on the part of some kind of therapist” (63). Clancy does a marvelous job of describing sleep paralysis, the changeable nature of memory, and how hypnosis and other techniques are used to create false memories that become very real for the abductee.

A common claim in alien-abduction circles is that the abduction stories are highly consistent and thus must reflect real events. In chapter 4, Clancy shows quite clearly that the stories, while having overall similar themes, vary greatly.

In chapter 5, “Who gets abducted?", she reports the results of her own research on dozens of abductees, whom she interviewed and gave psychological tests. In general, these people are quite normal. They are certainly, with an exception or two, not “crazy,” as so many first suspect upon hearing their tales. They are, however, more imaginative, creative, and fantasy-prone than the general population. They also score higher on a trait called schizotypy. This does not mean that they are schizophrenic, but “they're generally a bit odd. They tend to look and think eccentrically and are prone to 'magical' thinking and odd beliefs” (129). When one combines this type of personality with a strange nighttime experience and then adds in the efforts of UFO-abduction “experts,” the memory of an experience that never actually happened is almost inevitable.

In the final chapter, “Why would I want to believe it?” Clancy discusses why some abductees prize their abduction experience, even though it was terrifying. When she asked, “'If you could do it all over again, would you choose not [emphasis in original] to be abducted?' No one ever said yes. Despite the shock and terror that accompanied their experiences, the abductees were glad to have had them. Their lives improved. They were less lonely, more hopeful about the future, felt they were better people. They chose abduction” (149).

Throughout the book, Clancy maintains a respectful tone toward the abductees. She clearly found almost all of them to be pleasant and interesting people. There are vignettes of about half a dozen of her subjects in the book. These illuminate the diversity of abductee experiences and personalities. The book is aimed at the proverbial intelligent lay person but it is well referenced with fourteen pages of notes at the end. Clancy has reported her research findings more formally in the scientific literature, and citations to her published research reports are usefully included in the notes. Clancy has produced a real masterpiece.

The planet Vulcan? Hey, wasn't that just a made-up planet Gene Roddenberry created for Star Trek? Not at all, gentle reader. For a period of many years in the late nineteenth century, some, if not all, of the world’s astronomer’s believed in the existence of a planet Vulcan that orbited the Sun inside the orbit of Mercury. Vulcan was actually “observed” quite a few times through the telescope by both professional and amateur astronomers. But, Vulcan never really did exist. It was a theoretical construct created to solve a problem in planetary dynamics that never would be solved by the then-standard Newtonian model of planetary motion. The story, with its fascinating twists and turns, the fleeting and ambiguous sightings of Vulcan, and the lengths to which supporters of Vulcan’s existence went to explain away the lack of evidence make this story of interest to skeptics.

The story actually starts in 1781 with the discovery by William Herschel of the planet Uranus. It soon became clear to astronomers that Uranus was behaving badly — it wasn't moving along the orbit predicted for it by Newtonian physics. What could be the matter? Was Newton wrong? Impossible! If Newton wasn't wrong, then he had to be right, and something else had to be causing the odd orbit of Uranus — something doing so in obedience to Newton’s laws. The obvious answer was that there was another planet beyond Uranus, the gravitational influence of which was causing Uranus to orbit as it did.

Finding this hypothetical planet was a huge challenge. In the early 1840s, two mathematicians, John C. Adams of England and Urbain Jean Joseph LeVerrier of France (shown above on a 1958 French postage stamp — England has never so honored Adams), both started working on the problem independently. It was incredibly complex, for it required taking into account the gravitational influences of the Moon, the Sun, and the known planets on the orbit of Uranus and then using the nature of the unexplained Uranian movement to predict the orbit of the new planet. Adams and LeVerrier solved the problem almost simultaneously. On September 23, 1846, German astro-nomers in Berlin, using LeVerrier’s predictions (Adams had been somewhat shy about publishing his work) discovered Neptune.

The discovery was hailed, quite properly, as a great victory for Newtonian theory. LeVerrier and Adams went on to great fame. The discovery of Neptune was, it should be noted, a great embarrassment to astrology, which had never even hinted at the existence of such a planet. The same was true of the earlier discovery of Uranus and the later discovery of Pluto. Not to be phased, however, astrologers attributed influences to the planets following their discoveries. Linda Goodman, in her 1968 Love Signs, stated that planets have no astrological effects until discovered by astronomers!

Impressive as the discovery of Neptune was, another challenge to the Newtonian view of the solar system remained. Mercury was also orbiting in a fashion that was not predicted by Newton’s laws. It was natural to try the same approach to the problem of Mercury’s orbit as had been applied so successfully to the case of Uranus. And try LeVerrier did. He spent much time and effort throughout the rest of his productive life calculating where the planet Vulcan, interior to Mercury’s orbit, should be. He was occasionally buoyed by supposed reports of sightings of Vulcan where the calculations, sort of, said it should be.

LeVerrier died in 1877 and so never knew the solution to the mystery of Mercury’s orbit. It’s orbital deviations were shown by Einstein in 1915 to be due to relativistic effects of the Sun’s huge mass bending space-time. These effects are utterly trivial for planets further away from the Sun.

The authors trace the entire story of Vulcan from the time of Herschel to the resolution of the problem by Einstein. They cover some of the same ground as Grosser did in his wonderful 1962 Discovery of Neptune but add substantially to the post-1846 events. They include much on the personalities (often, but not always, charmingly eccentric) of the major players in the story and the difficulties of doing astronomical observation in, say, the South Seas or American Indian Territory in the late 1800s. It is an exciting and adventurous scientific mystery, very well told.

Skeptics will be especially interested to note that while Vulcan was abandoned by astronomers by the early twentieth century, astrologers, no doubt stung by being caught out when Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were discovered, have refused to give up on Vulcan. Thus, Goodman, again in her 1968 Love Signs, assigned astrological influence to Vulcan, calling it the “true ruler of Virgo” and stating that it “will become visible through telescopes in a few years.”