In the mid-1970s various government organizations involved in the study of UFOs stepped up their investigation of the alleged phenomena. As a result, public interest in the topic increased considerably. The UFO debate became a prominent social phenomenon in the country, especially among the scientific and technological intelligentsia. Soviet UFOlogists delivered well-attended lectures and published literature based on speculation fueled by foreign publications. The government bodies of the former Soviet Union did not actively promote discussion of UFO claims in the mass media, but neither did they discourage lectures at institutes, military installations, and other organizations - events that continually drew crowded audiences.

The lecturers entertained outlandish hypotheses, including that UFOs represented submarine and subterranean civilizations making contact with mankind.

The “research” into UFO claims within various government organizations during this era was limited to the uncritical collection of information about alleged encounters. The data were frequently of dubious origin, distorted by repeated layers of hearsay, and frequently left unchecked. The lecturers simply used claims of strange phenomena to speculate on the presumed activities of alien civilizations. The conclusions drawn from the analyses of observed data and measurements at the locations of alleged sightings were - to put it mildly - incorrect.

However, during this period, the investigation into the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations was being carried out around the world (e.g., SETI and CETI). It was not at all difficult to arouse public interest and opinion or to establish the importance of making contact with our “space brothers.” Over the next few years several publications appeared discussing the observation of extraordinary lights and other optical phenomena in various Soviet republics. In the Soviet Academy of Sciences (AS), in newspapers and journals, and in private collections a significant number of claims and amount of data accumulated - along with requests for a scientific (or simply reasonable) explanation of these phenomena. The Department of Physics and Astronomy of the AS organized a group of its employees headed by V. Leshkovtsev, the secretary of the department, to address the correspondence on UFO claims. The task of the group was to file the received correspondence, consult with appropriate experts, analyze the data, and respond to the inquiries. It was only natural that such an ill-conceived, ad hoc approach to research would fail to bring good results. A comprehensive investigation into UFO claims would require the creation of a team of specialists, the coordination of contacts between the departments of the AS, the Ministry of Education, the Hydrometeorology Committee and, of course, the Ministry of Defense, since such an investigation was assumed to require tight cooperation with the military.

The Petrozavodsk Incident

The “Petrozavodsk Incident,” as it came to be known, gave an impetus to the development of such a cooperative activity. Over a period of several minutes on September 20, 1977, in the middle of the night, the inhabitants of the northwest region of the USSR observed an extraordinary, massive, luminescent UFO phenomenon. The description of this event, based on accounts of eyewitnesses, appeared in the newspaper Izvestiya on September 23, 1977, under the headline “Unidentified natural phenomenon: The inhabitants of Petrozavodsk were witnesses to an extraordinary natural phenomenon.” According to the article, on September 20, about 4:00 a.m., there suddenly appeared in the night sky a huge “star” radiating pulsating beams of light to the ground. This object slowly moved toward Petrozavodsk, lingered over the town like a “huge jellyfish,” and illuminated the area with tendrils of radial beams, described as being similar to a downpour of rain.

After a few minutes, the luminescent “shower” stopped. The “jellyfish” wrapped into a bright half-disk and began heading toward Onega lake, in an overcast sky. There, a round depression of bright red color in the middle and white on each side formed in the clouds. This phenomenon, according to testimony from the eyewitnesses, lasted for ten to twelve minutes.

Yuri Gromov, the director of Petrozavodsk hydrometeorologic observatory, told a correspondent of the Soviet news agency TASS that the workers at the hydrometeorologic station in Kareliya observed no such anomalies. Nevertheless, eyewitnesses to this colorful phenomenon were numerous. They included workers of a first-aid unit, on-duty employees of the militia, seamen and the longshoremen at Petrozavodsk’s port, military, local airport staff, and even an amateur astronomer. Thus, the fact extraordinary aerial phenomenon of some sort had occurred was undisputed. It was soon discovered that at the same time a similar phenomenon was observed in the sky in regions far away from Petrozavodsk, including as far away as Sandalkul, Finland, where photos of this phenomenon were taken. It was impossible to disregard or dismiss such a widely observed event. The local authorities wrote the Presidium of the Academy of Science desperate for an official explanation. At the same time the AS and the newspapers were flooded by letters from the public demanding to know what had taken place in the night sky. Finally, official government letters from the nations of northern Europe to the Anatoly Aleksandrov, president of the AS, expressed concern about whether the observed phenomenon came from Soviet weapons testing and whether there were dangers to the entire region’s environment.

An Inquiry Begins

Under the pressure of these domestic and international inquiries, Aleksandrov wrote a letter to L. Smirnov, vice-president of the government and the Chairman of Military-Industrial Commission (MIC), urgently requesting him to consider starting a thorough investigation. In response Smirnov enlisted one of his assistants, Dr. A. Schokin, then Chairman of the Scientific and Technical Council (STC) of MIC, to consider the suggestions outlined in Aleksandrov’s letter at the next meeting of the STC. This meeting, presided over by Lieutenant General B.A. Kijasov (one of Schokin’s associates), was held in October 1977 at the Kremlin.

Opening the meeting, Kijasov briefly stated the contents of Dr. Aleksandrov’s letter to the MIC. He summarized the essence of his request in one quote: “The Academy of Sciences of the USSR can neither ignore, nor explain the paranormal phenomena similar to that observed in September, 1977, in Petrozavodsk, and, thus, the AS asks to organize a thorough investigation of paranormal phenomena with the involvement of organizations of the Ministry of Defense and MIC.”

The MIS members who spoke after Kijasov supported the AS president’s proposal. They noted that information on the sighting came to the offices of the Ministry of Defense from servicemen as well. The meeting resulted in a resolution recommending that the MIC include in the state plan for 1978 defense research projects a program titled “Research of paranormal atmospheric and space phenomena, and the reasons of their origin and influence on the operation of the military procedure and condition of a personnel.” The STC recommended (before the end of 1977) to send a group of experts, including members of the military, to Petrozavodsk to investigate.

The recommendation was adopted by the MIC under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and at the following update of the current five years’ plan for defense research activities they included two topics for 1978 to studying the paranormal phenomena:

• “Setka MO” (Ministry of Defense): “Research of paranormal atmospheric and space phenomena and their influence on the operation of military technical equipment and personnel";
• “Setka AS” (Academy of Sciences): “Research of a physical nature and mechanisms of paranormal atmospheric and space phenomena.”

Thus in 1978 the USSR began its state program to study UFO phenomenon, which proceeded without interruption for thirteen years until 1990. The STC-MIC meeting in October 1977, which played so important a role in the organization of this research program, was the first and last measure on UFO phenomena involving such high level officials. The five-year plans including defense-related paranormal research were approved twice after the groundbreaking 1977 resolution (in 1981 and 1986). And it should be noted that even after the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Academy of Sciences ceased its investigation into UFO phenomena, the group of experts that had been under its aegis continued its work up to 1996. The task of the group throughout was to analyze alleged eyewitness claims, testimony and other materials offered as evidence coming to the Academy of Sciences. Nowadays such correspondence with the public is rare, and is no longer the project of the Department.

After the STC-MIC meeting in October 1977, the representatives of the State Machinery, including the members of STC MIC, started to display keen interest in the question of UFO phenomena, and some of them have personally participated in individual projects. Nevertheless, official recognition of any urgency in studying paranormal phenomena was incomplete. In official documents the use of the abbreviation “UFO” was not accepted: instead, the term “paranormal phenomenon” was used.

To reduce the likelihood of the public’s overreaction and to avoid any assumption that the government’s research was a tacit endorsement of various unfounded “theories,” the UFO research was classified. Research was regulated by three stipulations:

• The program of activities formally entered the classified plan of defensive research;
• At the outset of research there was an assumption that observed UFO phenomena was due to military activity and/or research and development; and
• In the event of a verification of wholly new phenomena (such as actual alien flight technology), any knowledge gathered was to first be used for military applications: e.g., absence of a radar contrast, high maneuverability, etc.

Because of the classified nature of UFO research activities, the number of publications in press was rather limited, and it was recommended that the publications be first directed to the Soviet Academy of Sciences (AS) for review. The MIC actually created two centers of UFO research: one in the Ministry of Defense (MD), the other in the Academy of Sciences. The lines of research differed in the sources of the respective organizations’ data. The MD worked with the data coming from servicemen in the field, and the AS conducted the research based on correspondence gathered among scientific organizations, such as the Hydrometeorology Committee, newspapers, journals, etc.

There were differences in the purposes of the two centers’ activities. One of the main objectives for the military was to discover possible data about UFOs related to the (mal)function of military technology and personnel stress, and, if any phenomenon were verified, to isolate the cause and the degree of danger it posed.

The Academy of Sciences framed the main line of inquiry as the identification of the causes of unexplained phenomena, i.e., modeling of the processes of development and vanishing of the unknown effects, correlating them with physical conditions in the environment and identifying possible man-made sources.

The main military institution involved in UFO research was one of the central military research institutes near Moscow. V. Balashov, a highly qualified expert in the study of the effect of radiation and other phenomena on military equipment, was assigned to the position of scientific chief for this line of inquiry. To conduct the research, a small group of military and civilian experts (including four to five individuals in any given year) was formed at the MD lead institute. This group executed the bulk of work collecting, processing, and examining correspondence and data on UFO sightings, along with preparing documents.

Dr. V. Migulin, the director of the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation of the AS (IZMIRAN), was a radio physicist and a leading expert in the field of radio wave oscillation and propagation, and radiolocation. He was assigned as chief of “academic” research, and IZMIRAN was designated the head institute. A workgroup of four to five persons was formed for direct activity on the topic of research. The group was headed by Yuri Platov. The institutes of the Academy of Science, the Hydrometeorology Committee, and the Ministry of Education became the “executors.”

Their participation in the work varied from the collection of the UFO sighting correspondence to the analysis of data and development of scientific models for various kinds of paranormal phenomena. All the money came from the budget of participating organizations: there was no special financing earmarked for the research. It should be noted that the program of investigating paranormal phenomena was the least funded among the scientific defense projects. The shortage of financing hindered progress and prevented the acquisition of specialized equipment for particular projects. Therefore some of the scheduled investigations\emdash in particular the ones concerning the development of large-scale plasma formations in atmosphere\emdash were never carried out.

Budgetary restrictions hindered research, which was mostly limited to the analysis of the assembled material and development of hypothetical models for the observed phenomena. Only in the most interesting cases did researchers visit the locations of UFO sightings.

In spite of the fact that from the outset a rather large collection of archival material on the observations of strange phenomena had been assembled, only a small portion of this information was subjected to review.

The research program was based on these main principles:

• A serious approach to the problem, an understanding that the observation of phenomena per se is an actual objective fact and that the testimony about the UFO observations came from eyewitnesses who, for the most part, sincerely want to understand the nature of the phenomena they have been witness to.
• Rejection of a priori solutions of the problem.
• Dedication to long-term and thorough investigation of a problem.

There was a recognition of three possible general sources for UFO sightings:

• UFOs are the product of human activity, i.e., these phenomena are of “anthropogeneous” origin;
• UFOs are the product of natural processes taking place on Earth, Earth’s atmosphere and in near space\emdash in short, a hypothesis of a natural origin of paranormal phenomena;
• UFOs are the result of the activity of extraterrestrial civilizations.

The last version, though the most intriguing, aroused no enthusiasm as a likely conclusion but neither would it have been proper to completely eliminate its consideration.

A major boost to the scope of Soviet UFO research came from a document prepared by the Ministry of Defense program’s chief executive and authorized by the Chief of General Staff of the USSR in January 1980. This directive allowed participants in the program of paranormal phenomena research to use the massive information gathering potential of the Soviet armed forces.

Each serviceman, wherever he was, became (without knowing it) a potential participant of the program, since in case of any observation of inexplicable, unusual, or extraordinary phenomenon he was obligated to report about it in written form and present the information to his superiors.

The directive effectively placed the army on full-time duty for thirteen years collecting data on observations of UFO phenomena across the whole territory of the USSR\emdash approximately one-sixth of the globe. It is unlikely any private body could ever organize such a large-scale research, especially with the same limited financing. There were two levels of priority for the transmission of the information about UFO sightings. The first - routine - was used when the observed phenomena did not result in any direct effects on the safety or normal function of the military unit. However, when equipment failures allegedly occurred, information on such phenomena was sent directly to program chiefs, circumventing all intermediate stages.

During the work on the program about 3,000 pieces of testimony, data and correspondence about extraordinary phenomena had been obtained. Practically all of these were analyzed and identified by a small group of researchers. The majority of the information relates to mass observations, i.e. when many independent eyewitnesses described one and the same phenomenon.

The Results

Practically all the mass night UFO sightings were conclusively identified as phenomena caused by rocket launches and tests of aerospace equipment. Researchers arrived at this conclusion by correlating the times and place of UFO sightings with schedules of launches. Launches of space rockets can be observed at a significant distance (thousand of kilometers - even on other continents). The main optical mechanism of this class of UFO sighting involves the scattering of solar light on the gas-dust cloud formed by the combustion byproducts of the rocket fuel. Thus the most favorable conditions for such observations are under twilight conditions, when the path of the a rocket lies in the region illuminated by the Sun, and the observer at a distance at a location still in night conditions. Depending on the altitude of the rocket flight, engine design, and composition of the propellant, the configuration of a gas-dust cloud and its size can vary widely. It is enough to say that in some cases the characteristic cross-sectional size of the rocket trace can reach many hundreds of kilometers. It is no wonder that given their size and altitude, along with the absence of sound, these exhaust trails evoke surprise and bewilderment in an uninformed observer.

Among the most interesting records of “rocket effects” in the annals of Soviet UFO sightings is the famous, above-mentioned Petrozavodsk Incident. This sighting was eventually attributed to the launch of the Kosmos 955 satellite from the cosmodrome in Plesetsk, USSR.

An additional example is connected with another rocket launch from Plesetsk. A massive “dolphin-shaped” object was observed by witnesses in the night sky on June 14\endash 15, 1980, across the vast territory of the European part of Russia. This UFO was seen during the launch of the Kosmos 1188 satellite. Interestingly, in less than an hour this satellite had left visual traces in, of all places, South America. In the USSR a gas-dust track left by the enormous thrust of the booster was observed, and in South America witnesses had observed a cloud connected with the thruster burn (used to accelerate the satellite into its working orbit).

The second significant class of UFO phenomena observed by the eyewitnesses were indeed “flying objects.” Or rather, “floating objects.” Balloons turned out to be a significant source of UFO sightings. In order to study conditions in various atmospheric layers and to carry out regular meteorological observations, spherical balloons are widely used worldwide. The modern “ball-probe” has a rubber shell about two meters in diameter at the ground with suspended measuring instruments. Sometimes they can climb to an altitude of about thirty kilometers (90,000 feet), where the diameter expands to nearly ten meters in the reduced air pressure.

These ball-probes are sent up regularly, but the distance of their flight usually does not exceed ten to fifteen kilometers (six to nine miles) from the start position. Therefore, as a rule, the observation does not puzzle hapless observers. However, surprising things do sometimes happen.

One episode took place on June 3, 1982, involving an air-defense squadron located near Chita in Transbaikalia. The air-defense command post received an urgent report from the squadron that while patrolling the border with China one pilot had detected, at an altitude about 17 kilometers (50,000 feet), an extraordinary spherical object. He prepared to attack it, but the object unexpectedly disappeared. The report stated that the spherical UFO could not have been a meteorological ball-probe, since such objects are well known to the pilots, are much smaller in size than the observed object, and never climb up to such altitudes.

In the region in which the fighter had met the UFO there were no settlements on the ground except the frontier post and meteorological station. Researchers decided to start by checking with the meteorological service. A telephone call to the station revealed that the launch time of a ball-probe balloon from this station coincided with the UFO encounter, and also that the shell of the launched balloon has turned to be very strong and it climbed many kilometers higher than usual. The last altitude of a probe fixed by the telemetry read 47,000 feet.

A similar incident took place on September 13, 1982, in an air-defense regiment located on Chukot Peninsula. Again, a military aircraft encountered an unidentified spherical object at an unusually high altitude - this time in the region of Anadyr Bay. The object also unexpectedly disappeared. The difference from the first case consisted in the fact that the meteorologists did not know the altitude reached by the balloon they had launched due to a failure in the telemetry. It is quite possible that both balloons with unusually strong shells belonged to one defective batch. These episodes show that even experienced pilots are not immune from errors in the identification of observed objects.

We have reported only the two most important causes of UFO sightings: the flights of the balloons at high altitude and rocket launches. These causes explain the majority of the observed phenomena (more than 90 percent). There is no doubt that the offered explanations are not the only possible ones. We do not assume that the solutions offered for the majority of observed UFO phenomena is the sum of possible explanations.

The results of the committee’s research have shown that the majority of sightings have tangible, down-to-earth explanations. These phenomena are explained mainly by either activity of human beings, or with rare forms of natural phenomena.

To our minds the explanation of the greater part of UFO phenomena was not the most important result of the research, though extremely interesting results were obtained. The most surprising realization is that, in contrast to numerous descriptions and “proofs” of aliens contact assembled by the UFOlogists, we could not obtain any material evidence or testimony to substantiate claims that an unidentified craft from an alien world landed in the Soviet Union, made contact with pilots, or abducted servicemen or civilians. And this is despite evidence gathered within the framework of a thirteen-year project that involved the great observational potential of the entire Soviet military and many civil organizations.

This means that either the territory of the USSR was closed to alien travellers during the years 1978 to 1995 or that the hypothesis of an extraterrestrial origin for UFOs is sorely lacking even the thinnest shred of evidence. Any serious UFO investigator must, at the very least, face this reality. In recent years many UFO publications have mentioned “KGB secret files,” the “classified capture of UFOs", etc. There are now many films promoting these claims. We can hardly imagine a greater absurdity. There is a good proverb in the English language: “Somebody is fooling somebody all right.” This well illustrates the symbiotic relationship between UFO authors and their readers.

The outcome of the work covered in this article has shown that the truth, is, almost always, elsewhere. There are eyewitnesses to strange occurrences that cannot always be precisely explained by any natural cause. However, this amounts to a very insignificant minority compared to the huge majority of readily explained cases. Nor does any probable inference of extraterrestrial visitation follow from the handful of unexplained encounters.

In conclusion we would like to cite UFO investigator R. Cowen, who discusses the possible results from the analysis of correspondence with eyewitnesses:

It is tempting to dismiss the charge made by UFO buffs that intelligence agencies have secret files on UFOs that they are reluctant to release. Most such material, when it is made available, contains no revelation on alien visitations. But it undoubtedly does pay such agencies to sift through UFO reports for any light they can shed on Soviet space secrets. To the extent that this process involves classified techniques, intelligence agencies probably and properly are withholding UFO information. . . . Once again, a hard-headed UFO study has shown that this seemingly goofy subject deserves serious research. UFOs are as real and significant as the secret space shots and other genuine mysteries that underlie reliable sightings.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to all the observers of the paranormal phenomena who stimulated the execution of the research program. We would also like to note the large personal role in organization of researches and scientific management of project scholar V.V. Migulin, and General V.P. Balashov. The very useful and active work was made by Prof. N.V. Vetchinkin, Ph.D.s S.A. Chernous, A.A. Plaksin, A.A. Abdulin and V.V. Rubtsov and the other collaborators. Unfortunately, we cannot name all of them here. We are also grateful to our foreign colleagues for stimulating and helpful contacts.

Skeptical Briefs co-editor Kevin Christopher extensively revised this version from the original draft.

In my years at Pinkerton’s, now and then we were retained to determine the true facts of various “supernatural” cases. One such assignment stands out after all these years.

An enormously wealthy but somewhat eccentric client formed an intense dislike for psychics and fortune tellers when a friend in his dotage was victimized. He had us investigate all those listed as such in the Boston telephone book. The total was twenty-five or thirty, and without exception, every one had a criminal record of some type. Several had outstanding warrants and the various police departments involved had a field day picking up these crooks.

The second case was a remarkable coincidence as I had grown up in the area and as a youth was friendly with one of the principals involved in the scam although he was long dead.

This was mechanical genius Charlie Norton, hired as engineer and supervisor by a promotional group who founded the showplace Knollwood Cemetery in Sharon, Massachusetts, just before 1900. Business flourished until the depression struck America in 1929 and within a year the corporation went bankrupt. Charlie, then over sixty five years old, was all that remained of the many employees who were once busy at Knollwood. He lived in a small cottage on the premises with his wife, who soon died, leaving Charlie alone nearly a half mile from the nearest neighbor.

During the decades Charlie spent at Knollwood, he selected his last resting place and his tombstone. This was a huge, jagged, irregularly shaped rock protruding six feet above the ground. It resembled an object pictured in an illustration of a scene in Dante’s Inferno.

When Charlie died on Saturday, July 10, 1948, at nearly eighty four years old, he was buried beneath this stone on the northeast corner of the Bradford section just across from Canton Street, opposite the main entrance of the present Sharon Memorial Park Cemetery, once again a thriving, well kept place. A bronze plaque was fastened to the stone about four feet above the ground. Vegetation soon began climbing on this grim rock.

For some unknown reason, possibly due to a schoolboy prank based on the weird unearthly appearance of the Norton memorial, rumors began to circulate that the area around this distinctive gravestone at the edge of the woods was haunted by the ghost of old Charlie. A whimsical reporter wrote a tongue-in-cheek article about the doings at Charlie’s grave and this resulted in many midnight excursions of college students from Boston tramping through the cemetery and being a pain to the local police. Soon the bronze plaque disappeared, reportedly to grace the wall of a fraternity house. Then another highly implausible tale was invented; old Charlie was a warlock.

All this foolishness led to a more sinister development.

A prestigious Boston law firm contacted the 294 Washington Street office of Pinkerton’s. A worried attorney advised he had reason to believe one of their valued clients, a wealthy widow of quite mature years and a member of a prominent Yankee family, was being hoodwinked by a woman believed to be a gypsy who had convinced the society grande dame that she was a psychic. The lawyer knew no other details but had been advised by the doddering socialite’s banker that she had made substantial withdrawals recently. Pinkerton’s was retained to check this matter out in a most confidential investigation in order to keep things out of the newspapers. We managed to do so.

At the time I was an agency official and was assigned by the manager, the late Walter W. Martin, a lifelong employee and a Pinkerton’s legend, to handle the case. One of our female operatives, using a “suitable pretext” interviewed the widow and to her surprise was informed that the widow and two dear friends were going to interview her husband in the afterworld, the conduit being the famous warlock, Charlie Norton. (I could not believe my ears!) The meeting would take place at midnight the following Friday at Charlie’s last earthly resting place. Plans were made between Pinkerton’s, the law firm, and the District Attorney’s office.

That Friday evening the late Arthur F. Canzano, the best tail man in the entire agency, and I drove to the cemetery, hid our car in the woods, and concealed ourselves in the trees near Charlie’s stone, looming up in the moonlight and casting a ghastly ominous shadow. It was a very effective backdrop indeed for the coming seance.

About five minutes before midnight, a car drove up, parked, and turned out the headlights. In the fairly clear moonlight, three figures left the vehicle and slowly approached the Norton tombstone. The widow, an aristocratic elderly woman was among them. A garishly dressed, heavily built middle-aged woman, the psychic, was the other. A tall man, the driver of the car, the assistant of the psychic, was the third.

Arriving at Charlie’s plot, the gypsy went into a trance, mumbled incantations in some foreign tongue, and after performing suitable gyrations, she reported to the widow that Charlie had spoken to her long-dead husband who requested the widow to pay an additional $34,000 to the psychic; and on their next visit, the widow would be able - using the psychic as a spiritualistic telephone, to talk directly to her husband in the beyond.

As the society woman fumbled with her handbag, that act triggered decisive action on our part. Arthur sprang out of a nearby clump of shrubbery and grabbed the startled psychic who immediately started cursing in really fluent and obscene English. Arthur advised the widow that the psychic was a common, cheap swindler and he was a Pinkerton man. (The widow later informed her law firm that she initially thought Arthur was old Charlie in person.) The tall lad, a quicker thinker than the swearing psychic, and a pretty good runner, sprinted through the woods towards the railroad tracks at full speed. He tripped and was captured. The trio was taken to the police station where a representative of the District Attorney’s office was summoned and swore out the charges.

Even at the police station the wealthy socialite was not fully convinced the psychic was a crook until she was shown mug shots and scrutinized the extensive criminal record of the gypsy. Her companion, naturally had matching credentials.

(If old Charlie really was in the area he must have had a good laugh!)

This is all smoke and mirrors. Intelligent Design arguments amount to just one more set of variations on the argument from design. The Intelligent Design movement, despite protestations to the contrary, is nothing more than stealth creationism, yet another effort to introduce the particular sectarian belief of a personal creator into science education.

The argument for design of the universe is, of course, ancient. What is new here is the wrongful claim that this philosophical and theological argument is now supported by conventional science. This assertion appears on several fronts. In cosmology, for example, the Big Bang is cited as evidence that the universe had a beginning and thus a supernatural cause.

Here I will focus on another aspect of Intelligent Design that has received considerable media attention. It is regarded by theists as a great scientific breakthrough that makes the existence of divine purpose in the universe virtually irrefutable.

In his 1998 book Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1999) and other published works, William Dembski asserts that he can mathematically and logically prove, from modern information theory, that life and the universe cannot possibly be the result of natural processes and chance. Thus, the argument from design has donned yet another set of clothes. However, as we will see, these new duds are almost as transparent as the Emperor’s, scarcely hiding the naked creationism that lies below.

Dembski derives what he calls the law of conservation of information. He argues that the information contained in living structures cannot be generated by any combination of chance and natural processes. Neither mechanism, he insists, is capable of increasing information.

Dembski uses as his quantity of information what in information theory is called Shannon uncertainty. This equals the number of bits that are needed to transmit a signal communicating a message, irrespective of the content of the message. A more conventional definition of information, consistent with the vernacular use of the term, is the decrease in Shannon uncertainty under the action of some process. If fewer bits are needed to describe the system after the process, then information about the system has been obtained. In any case, this is just a matter of definition.

More important is Dembski’s law of conservation of information, which states that the number of bits of information cannot change in any natural process such as chance or the operation of some physical law. As he explains it, “chance and laws working in tandem cannot generate information.” Since the universe contains information, that information must have come about by other means that he labels Intelligent Design. While he insists that this argument does not depend on any specific theological assumptions, his book unabashedly promotes his interpretation that the design inferred is the work of the Christian God. Indeed, the whole Intelligent Design movement is being more than a bit disingenuous when it claims that it has no religious agenda. I do not know of a single participant who is not a Christian and one only has to look at their Web pages to learn about their “wedge strategy” to get Christianity into science.

Now, it turns out that the Shannon uncertainty and the physicist’s entropy are identical within a trivial constant, a point that Dembski either does not recognize or chooses to hide. As is well known, entropy is a measure of “disorder.” The Shannon uncertainty is likewise a measure of the disorder in a signal, applied in communication theory.

In physics, the second law of thermodynamics specifies that, on the macroscopic scale of many-body processes, the entropy of a closed system cannot decrease. Thus Dembski’s law of conservation of information is nothing more than “conservation of entropy,” a special case of the second law that applies when no dissipative processes such as friction are present. This is a rare occurrence in everyday phenomena.

In fact, entropy is created naturally a thousand times a day by every person on Earth. Each time any friction is generated, information is lost. When Dembski says that information cannot be generated naturally, he seems to be voicing yet another muddled version of the common creationist assertion that the second law forbids the generation of order by natural processes. Like his predecessors, he ignores the caveat “closed system” in the formal statement of the second law. Open systems can and do become more orderly by their interaction with other systems.

For example, Earth is ordered by the action of energy from the Sun. The Sun provides for the generation of order on Earth, including that contained in living organisms.

Whenever a drop of water freezes into an ice crystal we observe the creation of order by a “mindless” natural process. We don’t need fancy information theory to tell us that. We can see it with our own two eyes. Dembski’s law of conservation of information and the rest of Intelligent Design are not just pseudoscience, they are wrong pseudoscience.