The intent of Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite is to provide scientific explanations for various monsters found in historical legend and literature up through the monsters of today as seen, mostly, in film. Had Kaplan succeeded in this task, he would have produced an exciting and interesting book. Instead, the book is filled with over-explanations, just-so stories, and college-level film criticism, all leavened by one howling error.

The topics covered are arranged in rough chronological order. Thus, the first half of the book deals with monsters from ancient myths and legends such as the Nemean lion, chimeras, the Minotaur, Medusa, Charybdis, and the like. But modern monsters are tossed in too—King Kong and the giant squid (the latter doesn’t really belong since it does exist).

The explanations for ancient beasts are often fairly reasonable. For example, monsters that are giant versions of already scary animals are scary because, well, a giant version of something already scary (e.g., a lion) is even scarier. Snakelike monsters are scary because snakes are scary in the first place. Why do snakes, to this day, generate fear? Kaplan argues, convincingly, that the fear of snakes is part of human’s evolutionary heritage. They posed real danger as proto-humans evolved. So there is an advantage to avoiding snakes even if one has not had a direct scary experience with them.

There is, however, a bit of a problem with this explanation of the commonality of snakes as ancient monsters. Spiders, like snakes, continue to generate fear. Spiders, like snakes, posed a hazard to humans while we were evolving. However, spiders, unlike snakes, did not serve as the basis for legends of any ancient monsters, as far as I know.

Kaplan does occasionally go overboard by trying to come up with a specific explanation for every little variation in a myth. For example, on pages 54 and 55 there is a discussion of the possible factual basis of the “cruel bellowing” of the Minotaur. There is much discussion of caves and other geologic phenomena. But isn’t it just simpler to explain the details of this, and other, myths as devices to make them scarier? Or, as Amazon reviewer sonabeta pointed out in a November 20, 2012, review, “People sometimes just make things up.”

Similarly, on page 102 the discussion turns to dragons. The question is why dragon myths are not consistent across time and place—some with wings and some without, some breathing fire and some not. Well, dragons aren’t real so why should all stories about them be consistent? Still, Kaplan’s explanation for the fire-breathing part is plausible and I won’t spoil it for the reader by giving it away here.

Chapter 6 on “Hauntings—Demons, Ghosts, Spirits” is long on description of these phenomena and short on explanations. Hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations go unmentioned, although there is a brief discussion of sleep atonia and sleep paralysis. But the full power of hypnogogia—with all of its attendant hallucinations—to convince people that ghosts are real is not made clear at all. This is a serious omission.

The book does contain one major and inexcusable howler in Chapter 7, a chapter dealing with vampires, zombies, and werewolves. Kaplan swallows hook, line, and sinker the long-refuted claim of Wade Davis that zombies are real and that they can be created by witch doctors using the poison tetrodotoxin (TTX), found, among other places, in the skin and internal organs of puffer fish native to Haiti. In accepting Davis’s claims Kaplan ignores the overwhelming scientific literature that shows that 1) the “zombie powder” that Davis claims had TTX in it didn’t and 2) even if it did, TTX in any quantity cannot produce zombies. TTX is a nerve poison that does not get into the brain. In terms of motor control, it affects only the skeletal musculature. Its specific effect is to render victims paralyzed, but it is not the stiff (rigid) paralysis of zombie legend but a flaccid paralysis where muscles lose their tone. In addition, in nonlethal doses TTX causes nausea and vomiting. The idea that just the right dose of TTX could transform a person into a zombie and keep them that way while they were walking around being productive slaves is absurd. And its absurdity has been known since the late 1980s. Sadly, Kaplan obviously didn’t get the memo. For a more detailed discussion with appropriate references, see my article “Zombies and Tetrodotoxin” in the May/June 2008 Skeptical Inquirer (vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 60–62).

The last few chapters change focus from creatures of ancient myth and legend to more recent creations, especially alien abductions and movie monsters. The discussions here are quite poor, almost sophomoric, especially where movie monsters are concerned. The first topic in Chapter 8, “The Created,” is the golem. Here either through bad writing or ignorance (or maybe both) Kaplan seems to state that there was only one golem, in Prague, and the whole golem legend dates only from 1909. In fact, there is ample evidence that the golem legend is much, much older. The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia (Facts on File, 1992) notes that the legend dates from at least the fifteenth century. The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (Ktav Publishing, 1964, reprint of the 1901–1906 edition) states that “In the Middle Ages arose the belief in the possibility of infusing life into a clay or wooden figure of a human being, which figure was termed a ‘golem’ by writers of the eighteenth century” (p. 37). Sadly, missing from this chapter is any discussion of that most modern of mythical creatures, the chupacabra. The creation of the myth of this creature was ably told by Ben Radford in his 2011 book Tracking the Chupacabra.

Chapter 9 is devoted to “Terror Resurrected—Dinosaurs.” Here Kaplan discusses the recreation of our old thunder lizard friends in the movies and the possibility for real recreation through use of dinosaur DNA, which, of course, is the theme of the movie Jurassic Park. The discussions of both the film and dinosaur DNA leave much to be desired. Kaplan’s critique of the problems with using DNA to recreate a dinosaur does not come close to that of Desalle and Lindley in their 1997 book Science of Jurassic Park. Kaplan does nicely discuss the problems of recreating a species that would find itself without its natural ecosystem to live in and would thus be confined to some sort of enclosures. However, even here he stumbles by an embarrassing acceptance of the characterization of chaos theory taken directly from the movie—a characterization that is typical Hollywood fantasy. In the film the character Dr. Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) says that chaos theory means that “biological systems are uncontrollable by [their] nature and therefore inherently threatening” (p. 187). Thus, no matter what protective measures are taken, any recreated dinosaurs will break free and terrorize the world. Or at least the local natives. This is Hollywood nonsense. It bears about as much relationship to actual chaos theory as the view of quantum mechanics espoused by New Age proponents does to actual quantum mechanics. In fact, chaos theory deals with systems in which tiny changes in initial conditions can have very large effects on the state of these systems at later times. The theory does not allow the impossible to happen or even predict that the very unlikely will.

The final chapter, “Extraterrestrial Threat—Aliens,” suffers from much the same problem as the section on ghosts: long on description but short on explanation. The chapter starts with a description of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case. It then states that: “Countless tales of abductions and bizarre sightings followed” (p. 198). Kaplan then asks why aliens are visiting Earth but not being detected by “all the space scanning technology that has been developed during the past decades” (p. 199). His answer? “It is an enigma.” No, it’s not, as even a slight familiarity with the skeptical literature on UFOs and alien abduction would have made clear. The rest of the chapter wanders in sort of a haze through various alien-themed science-fiction movies, including an interesting digression on parasites and how they can change animal behavior. And then it stops. It doesn’t end. It just stops.

Perhaps this review should just stop as well. In summary, the book does contain a few interesting insights into the factual backgrounds of several legendary creatures. But in general it is poorly researched and written. Is it good enough for me to recommend that my university library purchase a copy? No. I make the same recommendation for the readers of this review.

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.

Efthimiou and Gandhi describe a zombified patient who had been studied by a Haitian doctor. This patient came to their attention through a 2002 television documentary. The original article contained several errors in the description of the brain scan that was illustrated on page 33. The authors corrected these errors in their reply to letters to the editor regarding the article (Efthimiou and Gandhi 2007b). There are, however, a few more problems in the original paper that need clarification. On page 33, the authors claim that patients suffering from TTX poisoning are sometimes certified as dead but wake up just before burial. This is surely an extraordinary claim, but the authors do not provide a single reference to any such case.

Also on page 33, they state that the body of someone suffering from TTX poisoning will “show signs of rigor mortis and even produce the odor of rot.” Here they confuse paralysis with rigor. As will be described in detail later, the effect of TTX is to block nerve impulses. These impulses are necessary to enable muscles to contract. In the absence of these impulses, patients are unable to move their muscles. But their muscles are not rigid; they are instead limp or flaccid. There are conditions that result in rigid muscles, but these are caused by too many, rather than too few, nerve impulses.

The claim that TTX produces the “odor of rot” is one I have not come across before. It might be the result of the anal sphincter losing tone and thus causing the patient to defecate involuntarily. However, I have enough experience in the autopsy room to know the difference between the smell of feces and a decomposing corpse. Presum­ably, Efthi­­miou and Gandhi have not had these happy experiences.

Efthimiou and Gandhi argue, as did Davis earlier (Davis 1985), that zombification could “easily be caused deliberately by the voodoo sorcerer, say, who could slip the dose into someone’s food or drink.” This claim is implausible. The amount of TTX in puffer fish flesh varies as a function of fish sex, species, and time of year, as well as the anatomical location of the flesh (Kaku and Meier 1995). Further, the effect of any drug on an individual varies as a function of the individual’s age, sex, state of health, body weight, experience with related drugs, and numerous other variables. Even experienced physicians find it difficult to prescribe the correct dosage of drugs to patients who vary on these characteristics as all human beings do. And these are drugs produced to exacting specifications so the physician knows the exact dose the patient will receive. This is a bit different from a bunch of ground up, dead fish and who knows what else produced on the spur of the moment by the local witch doctor. Witch doctors simply could not produce such fine-tuned effects with such poor quality material to work with, even if at some hypothetical “right dose” TTX had such effects. The basic problem is that at any dose, TTX would not have any such effects.

Wade Davis and the Zombies of Haiti

Davis’ claim that TTX in zombie powder is the root cause of zombification first came to the attention of the general public when his book The Serpent and the Rainbow was published in 1985, al­though he published a paper in the scientific literature earlier making this claim (Davis 1983). There are two separate aspects of Davis’ claim. First, he claims that the zombie powder he obtained in Haiti contained significant amounts of TTX. Second, he said that these levels of TTX would produce the traditional zombies known to Haitian mythology.

In his 1985 book, Davis described his trips to Haiti, his introduction to Haitian culture, and his attempts to acquire the powder used to produce zombies. The book is an excellent example of a credulous foreigner taken advantage of by local tricksters and is full of scientific absurdities. On page 26, for example, he informs the reader that the “muscles of the iris continue to contract for hours after death.” This is simply wrong. On page 50, he describes going to a voodoo ceremony specifically produced for tourists (admission was $10) at which a woman took a glowing hot coal in her mouth without suffering any burns. He marvels that she does this every night without harm. His explanation? She had “clearly entered some kind of spirit realm.” Davis obviously never even considered that this perhaps was just a standard sideshow stunt to fool the tourists. No such skeptical thoughts ever seem to have entered Davis’ head. One is reminded of Margaret Mead being conned by clever Samoan children during her studies (see “The Fateful Hoax­ing of Margaret Mead,” SI November/December 1998).

Davis reports that the zombie state can be made to last for long periods of time. Allegedly, one zombie was kept for years so he could work as a slave on a plantation. “Together with many other zombies, he had toiled as a field hand from sunrise to sunset,” claimed Davis (1985, 80). The obvious suggestion here is that witch doctors not only make zombies but keep them in the zombie state for years. This would be quite the pharmacological accomplishment, as will be seen below. Davis later seemed to back off this claim, admitting that the case in point was difficult to verify (Booth 1988).

Ultimately, Davis secured samples of zombie powder. Since one of the powder’s ingredients is bits of dead human tissue, Davis commissioned a grave robbery to obtain the decomposed flesh of a recently buried child (Davis 1985, 92– 95). Pictures of the process, including using a stick to remove bits of decomposed brain, are found in his books (Davis 1988, p. 115–116). As might be expected, Davis was heavily criticized for this ethical breach (Ander­son 1988; Booth 1988).

In the end, several samples of zombie powder were analyzed for TTX levels by Kao and Yasumoto (1986). They found only “insignificant traces of tetrodotoxin in the samples of ‘zombie potions’ which were supplied for analysis by Davis.” Further­more, they stated: “it can be concluded that the widely circulated claim in the lay press to the effect that tetrodotoxin is the causal agent in the initial zombification process is without factual foundation” (p. 748).

This was not the end of the matter, however. Benedek and Rivier (1989) reported that they found significant amounts of TTX in one out of six samples of zombie powder. Kao and Yasu­moto (1990) strongly criticized the Benedek and Rivier report on various technical grounds, including the fact that the analysis these authors used was not specific for TTX.

The refutation of Benedek and Rivier by Kao and Yasumoto is powerful and conclusive but raises another question. If biochemical analyses of the zombie powder supplied by Davis had shown the presence of TTX in significant quantities, would this have strengthened Davis’ claim of the creation of zombies using such a concoction? To answer this question, we need to closely examine the phar­macological effects of TTX.

The fundamental unit of information processing in the nervous system is the action potential, an electrical signal that travels along nerves. It is produced by flows of ions (charged particles) that cross nerve cell membranes through specific channels, one channel for each species of ion. One of the most important channels is the sodium channel, which allows positively charged sodium ions to pass into the neuron, or nerve cell. In fact, it is the passage of sodium ions into the neuron through sodium channels that allows the action potential to proceed along the neuron. If something blocked these sodium channels, no action potentials would be produced. Dire results, including death, are possible if enough sodium channels are blocked. TTX does exactly that; it selectively blocks sodium channels on the neural membrane. TTX prevents so­dium ions from entering the neuron and thus prevents the generation of action potentials. It should be noted that the major effect of TTX is on nerves in the peripheral nervous system that control motor output and relay sensory information to the brain. Little if any TTX actually enters the brain, which is protected by a barrier that prevents certain types of molecules, such as TTX, from crossing the blood stream into the brain.

TTX occurs naturally in a number of animals, the best-known example being several species of puffer fish found in both Asiatic and Caribbean waters. Interestingly, these fish do not themselves produce TTX but obtain it from TTX-producing bacteria (Mebs 2002). Newts and toads in the Pacific North­west produce TTX, but its biological origin is not clear. TTX is best known as the cause of fugu poisoning. Fugu, raw Japanese puffer fish, is a delicacy in Japan prepared by specially trained chefs who remove the poisonous tissues of the fish while leaving uncontaminated portions for consumption.

TTX poisoning is a real and serious medical problem in areas where puffer fish are considered food. The first mention of puffer-fish poisoning, at least by a Western writer, is found in 1774 in the journal of Captain Cook’s second voyage (Isbister et al. 2002). Since the toxin affects motor and sensory nerves, both motor and sensory symptoms are en­countered, especially at higher levels of poisoning. The severity of poisoning is classified by four levels, or grades (Is­bister 2004). At grade one, there are only mild sensory symptoms, such as numbness around the mouth, but nausea may also be present. At grade two, numbness becomes more widespread and there is some motor difficulty, including slurred speech. At grade three, symptoms become more severe, including a “generalized flaccid paralysis, respiratory failure, aphonia and fixed/dilated pu­pils; patient remains conscious” (Isbester 2002, 1635). Finally, in the most severe grade-four cases, one finds more serious respiratory problems, hypo­tension, and cardiac difficulties. The patient may lose consciousness. If enough toxin is ingested, death will oc­cur. If death does not occur, patients generally recover with supportive care within a week.

Note that these symptoms are very different than the usual images of the zombie, either those seen in horror films or put forth by Davis. In both, the frightening zombie, devoid of any but the most minimal level of consciousness, lurches around with stiff arms and legs. But real victims of puffer-fish poisoning aren’t going to be doing much moving around at all. They will suffer from flaccid paralysis, meaning that there will be little or no muscle tone. There will be breathing problems and, in serious cases, the blood will not carry sufficient oxygen to the brain. They will also feel nauseated. As noted above, Davis argues that zombies can be created for use as laborers on plantations in Haiti. It seems to me that a bunch of nauseated, paralyzed guys would not make very productive field workers!

The total lack of similarity between the real symptoms of TTX poisoning and the mythological zombies of Holly­wood should be enough to sink the claim that zombies are caused by TTX poisoning. This fact led the scientific community to dismiss Davis’ claims as absurd back in the 1980s. Unfor­tunately, this debunking never found its way into the mainstream press, as is so often the case.

References

Anderson, W.H. 1988. Tetrodotoxin and the zombie phenomenon. Journal of Ethnophar­macology, 23, 121–126.

Benedek, C., and L. Rivier. 1989. Evidence for the presence of tetrodotoxin in a powder used in Haiti for zombification. Toxicon, 27, 473– 480.

Booth, W. 1988. Voodoo science. Science, 240, 274–277.

Davis, W. 1983. The ethnobiology of the Haitian zombie. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 9, 85–104.

———. 1988. Passage of Darkness. The Ethno­biology of the Haitian Zombie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

———. 1985. Serpent and the Rainbow. NY: Simon and Schuster.

Efthimiou, C.J., and S. Gandhi. 2007a. Cinema fiction vs. physics reality. Ghosts, vampires and zombies. Skeptical Inquirer 31(4), 27–34.

———. 2007b. Skeptical Inquirer 31(6), 66–67.

Isbister, G.K. 2002. Marine envenomation and poisoning. Medical Toxicology. 3rd edition, 1621–1644. Philadelphia: Lippin­cott Williams and Wil­kins.

Isbister, G.K., J. Son, F. Wang, et al. 2002. Puffer fish poisoning: A potentially life-threatening condition. Medical Journal of Australia, 177, 650–653.

Kaku, N., and J. Meier. 1995. Clinical toxicology of fugu poisoning. Handbook of Clinical Toxicology of Animal Venoms and Poisons, 75–83. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Kao, C.Y., and T. Yasumoto. 1986. Tetrodotoxin and the Haitian zombie. Toxicon, 24, 747–749.

———. 1990. Tetrodotoxin in “zombie powder.” Toxicon, 28, 129–132.

Mebs, D. 2002. Venomous and Poisonous Animals. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

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 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.”