I. Newspapers and Periodicals

Daily Extra is the dean of the pro-paranormal press, publishing sensationalist headlines and articles on local earthquake predictions, doomsday prophecies, UFOs, etc. Of course there are other similar but newer ones like El Popular.

The weekly esoteric periodical La Huaringa is one of the newest; its name is a reference to a northern Peruvian town known for its many shamans.

The bi-weekly Salud, dinero y amor (Health, Money and Love) was launched about nine years ago. It has columns on dreams, astrology, and other paranormal articles.

Peru News Review-a Peruvian monthly publication in Spanish printed in the USA-had a paranormal column, Lo conocido deconocido or The Unknown Known, which was published until the October 2002 issue. When CIPSI-PERU’s letter criticizing their paranormal claims appeared, it was discontinued. That periodical has its own Web site: www.perunews.com, and a new freethought column authored by me.

The serious and respected Diario El Comercio, (Daily Commerce) had an esoterica page, appearing on Sundays until last year, but it was changed for a sexological one-and has a daily horoscope. Some pro-paranormal articles have appeared in El Comercio's Saturday’s magazine Somos (We Are), such as reports on crystal healing power (April 28, 2001) and fortunetellers and political elections (May 26, 2001). Another issue reported both a believer’s and skeptic’s view on The X-Files in Peru and UFOs contacts (February 2, 2002). In El Comercio's Sunday’s supplement, El Dominical, a note appeared on Nostradamus’s quatrains predicting the September 11 tragedy (October 7, 2001), one false and the other one real; in addition to a piece on extraterrestrials and movies (October 6, 2002). Both Saturday’s magazine and Sunday’s supplement published CIPSI-Peru’s letters where we refuted their paranormal claims and applauded presentation of a skeptical view. (Of course we have our own magazine Neo-Skepsis and books published through Peruvian Editions of Applied Philosophy.) El Comercio published a feature story about us on December 11, 2002, and two days later we appeared on America TV morning news to talk about Ouija boards. The electronic version of El Comercio is at www.elcomercioperu.com.pe.

Founded about four years ago, Diario Liberación (Daily Liberation) had as its first editor Mr. César Hildebrandt-one of the most important journalists in Peru-and also had an important role in the fight against disgraced President Alberto Fujimori’s regime. But until October 2002, with a change of editors, Liberación had a paranormal section and a daily horoscope by astrologist Aghata Lys. The section was changed to an entertainment page but the horoscope remains.

Daily Peru 21 was launched last year and has published many of our letters critical of its paranormal news. Its Web page is at www.peru21.com.

II. Television Shows

Utilísima (Very Useful) was a daily morning talk show aimed at women (broadcast until recently by América TV) where tarot card reading was promoted during the 1990s. Ayer y Hoy (Yesterday and Today) is a Frecuencia Latina TV Sunday magazine that sometimes airs foreign reports of paranormal events such as supposed apparitions of the Virgin Mary, ghosts, faith healings, etc. They have shown Brazilian reports with skeptical and scientific explanations of, for example, a “strange” light near a hospital where a famous medium was, or the alleged image of Virgin Mary on a window, or a scientific investigation on the Shroud of Turin’s age.

Daily El Comercio until last year featured their own tarot readers and fortunetellers, the “Arcanos,” on its news channel, Canal N.

You can watch a paid short segment on miraculous healing of the Brazilian international church Pare de Sufrir (Stop Suffering) every day at about 11 p.m. on the two more important private channels, Panamericana TV and América TV. In its first minutes people give tearful testimony of their miraculous cures. Then a pastor with a Portuguese accent offers both “real” peace and healing while inviting the public to his churches, where they offer religious objects blessed in Israel like dirt, oil, crucifixes, etc. The Spanish Catholic priest Manuel Rodríguez is very popular because of his laying of hands during mass aired on his own religious channel and on Televisión Nacional del Peru (Peru’s National TV) at the end of the programming schedule.

The number one Peruvian paranormal program until July 2002, Más allá (Beyond), was hosted by Ms. Josie Diez Canseco, an astrologist and tarot card reader. Monday through Friday she had many paranormal guests like Mr. Sixto Paz, the founder of the international UFO cult Rama Mission, and others including supposed psychics and paranormalists. She currently reads a weekly horoscope for Ayer y Hoy TV show and writes a daily zodiac for both a local newspaper (Peru 21) and a radio program.

Physician Javier Pérez Alvela has a Saturday morning program Bien de Salud (Good Health), a mixture of mysticism, medicine, and natural living, broadcast also through Red Global TV; years ago it was transmitted by Peru’s National Television.

One of the most famous Peruvian medicine men, Adrián Vera (or El Tuno) had his own paranormal show briefly last year. Red Global TV transmitted it Saturdays at midnight.

In his weekday news and talk show aired by América TV, César Hildebrandt featured an investigation by reporter Ms. Mariella Patrieu. The story was about two Venezuelan tarot card reading sisters, Nelly and Norelia Pompa, known as “Las Mentes Gemelas” ("Twin Minds”). They were very famous and successful after living and working in Peru for years. The sisters used to claim that they are right 99 percent of the time. But the reporter made a list of their mistakes-for instance they failed when predicting that the Peruvian soccer team was going to have a better performance. They were also wrong to say that American Lori Berenson, who is still in jail for a terrorism conviction, would be released. Finally the sisters missed when they claimed that political fugitive Mr. Vladimiro Montesinos-accused of corruption-was hidden in a non Spanish-speaking country when in fact he was captured in Venezuela. After the report, Mr. Hildebrandt interviewed the sisters in a sympathetic way.

On the same show but on another occasion there was a slightly ironic report on the Peruvian UFO religion Alfa y Omega (Alpha and Omega) and its failed doomsday prophecies. The report also examined the telepathic communications between its Chilean founder Luis Antonio Soto Romero (said to be Jesus in his Second Coming, now in the Himalayas) and his Peruvian representative.

In 1992, when President Fujimori fled to Japan in the wake of a coup d'etat, a supposedly “miraculous” image of the Virgin began shedding tears. Hildebrandt, in a former show, produced the same effect in a similar icon proving it was artificially and chemically caused. His show was then canceled. Even some priests have shown that it is possible to produce “crying” and “bleeding” from portraits by applying certain chemical substances. Caretas (Masks), the most important Peruvian magazine, said that an owner of a house with a crying Virgin icon was a government employee who used the event to distract attention from the government’s drastic economic policy.

Mr. Marco Aurelio Denegri, host of La Función de la Palabra (The Function of the Word) reviewed our magazine-Neo-Skepsis #3 on ESP and parapsychology-on one of his programs. He is a sexologist, Spanish language expert, and a freethinker. He said that researchers and intellectuals like Prof. Mario Bunge have a right to criticize paranormal phenomena but they shouldn’t ignore “important” work like John Hasted’s and Jole Eisenbud’s parapsychological research. Mr. Denegri also defended Uri Geller, Ted Serios, and yogis. Although he received skeptical literature by Randi, Kurtz, Polidoro, and other skeptics, he went on attacking skepticism in a future episode.

Ms. Jeanet Barboza was a host of successful popular musical shows and later of talk shows. One of the latter, Noche a Noche (Night to Night)-now canceled-had an almost weekly debate segment, many times on paranormal topics like exorcism, ouija, haunted houses, shamanism, etc. Her present show, La alegría del mediodía (Joy at Noon) has a similar segment with guests like shamans, psychics, astrologists, religious and psychic healers as well as skeptics, psychologists, lawyers, magicians, and philosophers like myself. In one episode (April 1, 2002), I was pleased to give a skeptical view on telepathy and other paranormal claims like psychic surgery. A supposed psychic surgeon was invited to perform on a lady with an alleged tumor who later said she was better because of the “operation.” Then after audience gave their opinions (for and against the surgeon), he was revealed to be professional illusionist Magician Khalid (Mr. Guillermo Carranza). He revealed the miracle as a fraud and a magic trick. He said, “you will not be cured although you may have less pain but finally you will lose your money.” Other guests included Mr. Jonel Heredia, a psychic surgeon, and religious healer Rodríguez. Joy at Noon's production team contacted me before 2003’s Holy Week in order to participate again. But eventually they stopped calling me-maybe because I am also a secular humanist!

CIPSI-PERU was initially contacted both by an America TV news morning show America Hoy at the end of 2001 to present our “predictions” for the new year and by Red Global TV’s Beyond to talk about paranormal cases. In the end we were not invited on, probably because we explained our skeptical view to their production people. However we have participated in two college TV courses, and have been interviewed for other journalism courses.

III. Radio Shows

Entre amigos (Among Friends), aired by Peru’s most important radio station, Radio Programas del Perú, has consulting segments with medical doctors, psychologists, lawyers, nutritionists, a Catholic priest, and even a tarot reader! The lady doing this psychic consulting is called “Amatista” and she offers also advice on traditional medicinal plants. Mr. Marco Antonio Talledo’s radio promotions bill him as the “best parapsychologist” in Peru, and his radio shows are on the air three times per week in the mornings in Radio Libertad (Freedom Radio). This station has also a daily morning news program which specializes in social and political affairs, called El Reportero (The Reporter). Hosts of this show read daily horoscopes, like most other Peruvian radio stations.

IV. Web Pages

• www.angelfire.com/ms2/ipri/principal.htm (no longer available) About the UFOlogist group Peruvian Institute of Inter-Planetary Relationships founded by the late Mr. Carlos Paz (who was not a relative of mine!). One of his children is Mr. Sixto Paz, who was mentioned before as the founder of Rama Mission, a Peruvian International UFO cult. You can see several pages from several countries like this one from Spain: http://www.geocities.com/ovni_rama (no longer available)
• www.alfayomega.com.pe; www.pagina.de/alfayomega, and others. These are about the above-mentioned Peruvian cult Alfa y Omega, a mixture of Christianity, Marxism, and UFOlogy. They offer a great deal of paranormal information at www.geocities.com/divinaciencia and some of their doctrines are in English in www.alfayomega.com.pe/. They claim that many drawings were transmitted by God through telepathy to their founder (see mx.geocities.com/rollostelepaticos). Alfa and Omega has also a daily program La hora estelar de la divina revelación (The Prime Hour of the Divine Revelation) on Radio Union.
• cnnenespanol.com/horoscopo. Josie Diez Canseco’s daily horoscope for CNN in Spanish’s Web page (both American and European versions lack something similar).
• www.radioa.fm/horoscopo_diario/horoscopo_diario.php and www.radioa.fm/horoscopo_semanal/horoscopo_semanal.php. The first one is on astrology and the second one is on dreams.
• www.geocities.com/athens/styx/9321. (no longer available) This page offers Vedic astrological services from the International Hare Krishna’s Peruvian branch.
• www.geocities.com/chamandelnorte. About the very popular medicine man “Chamán del Norte” (Northern Shaman).
• www.lhuisconh.20m.com. From the astrologer “Lhuis con h” (Luis with an ‘h').
• www.homeopatiaperu.8m.com. Homeopathic consulting.
• orbita.starmedia.com/~shamanic. On visiting the mystical jungle of Manu, a national nature preserve (with an English version).
• ayahuasca.tripod.com.pe. This Web page offers the psychedelic drink ayahuasca for money.
• www.travelperu.com (in English): From a company in America selling mystical tours to archeological Incas sites and yoga exercises in the Andes.
• cefefas.tripod.com. (no longer available) This site belongs to Franciso de Asis Center of Espirita Fraternity, promoting a Christian Spiritism, parapsychology, and UFOlogy through Allan Kardeck’s books, magazines and audio-visual means.

Thankfully, CIPSI-PERU has its own critical Web page (www.geocities.com/cipsi peru) with an introduction, explanatory links, and letters to mass media and articles, including one on the paranormal in Peru published originally in English in the Skeptical Briefs. The media, college students, and people interested in our work can contact us easily and quickly by e-mail at: cipsiperu@yahoo.com.

In an article in the Skeptical Inquirer (Stevens 2001) I identified six principles of magic and magical thinking, as guidelines for recognizing that much of the assumptions underlying alternative medicine derives from fundamental pan-human magical beliefs. And I concluded my discussion with a summary of the aims and methods employed by the late Elisabeth Targ,¹ M.D., in her celebrated studies of the effects of “distant healing” on AIDS patients. Apparently on the basis of one study having been published in a leading medical journal (Sicher et al., 1998), she received grants of over $1.5 million from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine to continue such investigations (see Gardner 2001, Jaroff 2002). Targ’s methods were classically magical: in the 1998 study she and her colleagues contracted with forty “experienced distant healers” from a variety of religious traditions, giving them “subject information packets” which contained, as I wrote in 2001, “subject’s first name, a current color photograph, and written notations on blood count and current symptoms. Healers were instructed to open their packets on certain dates and ‘to direct an intention for health and well-being’² to the subject” (Stevens 2001, 36) who had never met and were far distant from the healers and who did not know whether they were among the healers’ targets or in a control group.

Targ was essentially given generous government grants for the testing of ancient and universal forms of magic, involving four of the classic principles: power, interconnections in nature, symbols, and similarity. And I added (2001, 37, n.8) that any traditional person whose culture holds a magical worldview could have advised Dr. Targ that she ought to have incorporated the final principle, contact, into her methods. It is universally believed that the principle of contact is the most powerful of all; if the “subject information packets” had contained some items that had been in intimate physical contact with the subjects-like hair or fingernail clippings, or sweaty or bloodstained underwear, the efficacy of her methods would have been greatly enhanced. (Indeed, because her methods were so classically magical, I wondered why she hadn’t.) During her 1998 study, drugs had become available that could prolong life for AIDS sufferers; the disease was no longer a certain death sentence. But it was discovered that one of her treated patients who recovered had also recovered from brain cancer. So she added to her NCCAM proposal the most vicious form of brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), and funding was granted. She prepared to apply distant healing to two 150-patient groups: AIDS sufferers and victims of glioblastoma.

In March 2002 Elisabeth Targ, age forty, was diagnosed with glioblastoma, and on July 18 she died. This tragic story should surely be recorded as one of the most extraordinary coincidences in medical history. But for people whose cosmologies are governed by principles of magic-certainly a huge majority of the world’s peoples-certain details of Elisabeth’s research would generate another explanation for her death. This explanation reveals a dimension of magical thinking which I did not discuss in my 2001 article, but one which is fundamental in much of complementary and alternative medicine (and in many New Age beliefs) today.

Targ’s 1998 Research

Po Bronson tells Elisabeth Targ’s story in a very sensitive and balanced article in Wired magazine (2002; summarized in Skeptical Briefs by Victor Stenger, 2003); but he adds an unfortunate facet of her research and the 1998 publication.

Citing for his information the project’s biostatistician and co-author Dan Moore, physicist Mark Comings (Targ’s husband, whom she married just two months before her death), and commentary from senior author Fred Sicher, Bronson reports that “her study had been unblinded and then ‘reblinded’ to scour for data that confirmed the thesis-and the Western Journal of Medicine did not know this fact. . . .” The data were fudged-seriously fudged-and this is, as we will see, a kind word for what she and her team did. The original aim was to measure mortality, which failed badly because of the anti-AIDS drugs that had become available. So the data were unblinded and sifted several times to look for positive results. Bronson reports that Targ (encouraged by her father, alleged psychic Russell Targ), and Sicher, a strong believer in distant healing, ordered Moore to search and re-search the data to find results that seemed statistically significant. The account of how this was done reveals shameful violations of scientific procedure (Bronson 2002, 222). Desperate to produce positive results, the team finally decided to measure a new set of data, the incidence of twenty-three AIDS-related illnesses which had not even been part of their study. And “when Targ and Sicher wrote the paper that made her famous, they let the reader assume that all along their study had been designed to measure the twenty-three AIDS-related illnesses-even though they're careful never to say so. They never mentioned that this was the last in a long list of endpoints they looked at, or that it was data collected after an unblinding” (Bronson 2002, 222). This is a serious charge which, if true, represents incredible violations of the principles of scientific research.

The Attitude of the Practitioner

A basic principle of a magical worldview is the belief of people in all cultures that all things in the cosmos, past, present, and future, are actually or potentially interconnected, and that such connections are affected by people’s behavior, emotions, and intentions. Positive social behavior, emotions, even just thoughts, can have beneficial effects on the environment and hence on people’s opportunities. Negative behavior, emotions and/or thoughts have negative results. The anthropological literature is filled with examples; I will cite just two. Dorothy Lee’s famous 1971 paper, “Religious Perspectives in Anthropology,” gives many examples of cultural beliefs in the interrelatedness of people with their surroundings. Her description of the clown-priests in the agricultural dramas of the Hopi of the American southwest could be applied to priests and magicians in other societies throughout the world:

. . . this is not mere art. It is an important way of helping nature in her work of growing the corn. Even the laughter of the audience helps. . . . The actors have prepared themselves as whole persons. They have refrained from sexual activity, and from anything involving conflict. They have had good thoughts only. They have refrained from anger, worry and grief. . . . Corn wants to grow, but cannot do so without the cooperation of the rest of nature and of man’s acts and thoughts and will. . . . Art and agriculture and religion are part of the same totality for the Hopi (Lee 2001, 23).

My second example is a line from a film I show my classes in introductory anthropology, The Spirit Possession of Alejandro Mamani (American Universities Field Staff, 1974). Alejandro, an old man of the Bolivian Aymara, dictates his will to the village school teacher who prepares him to swear his oath, saying finally: “Now, do you give this land voluntarily? The land will be more fertile if you give it voluntarily.”

So people recognize that their emotions and thoughts are always active in nature. An act of magic involves intentional intrusion into the processes of nature by the manipulation of supernatural power, and magicians should be especially careful. The great ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski, in his 1935 Coral Gardens and their Magic, described open, good magic, performed by gardeners of the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia. The pristine order of nature is considered good; the sort of magic performed by Melanesian gardeners, if done correctly, works by helping the forces of nature along paths they would follow anyway, and should produce only beneficial results. People everywhere recognize the potential harmful use of magic, which anthropologists generally call sorcery, which aims to harm another person or to benefit oneself by depriving another. Sorcery works by interfering with the natural order of things, in effect re-directing nature by altering the speed or direction of natural forces, and this is universally dangerous. Powers activated by the careless sorcerer can run amok, striking others or returning and inflicting on the practitioner the same fate he wished on his target.

For these reasons sorcery is feared, hidden, and usually illegal. As a Peace Corps teacher in Nigeria in 1965 I witnessed an act of sorcery openly conducted by a young boy from my school against table-tennis players from a visiting school. Terrified students from both schools chased the boy with an aim to nullify the terrible forces he might have loosed, even if that meant beating him to death (Stevens 1988).

But even the apparently well-intentioned “good” magician is conducting a risky enterprise. Malinowski gave a lot of space to what he considered the three most important elements in the magical rite: the formula, the conduct of the rite, and the condition of the performer-which includes careful observance of dietary and other taboos, and maintaining proper social relationships. He must undergo a ritual cleansing both before and after he handles supernatural power. Magic worked by an insincere or deceptive practitioner can rebound, like sorcery. Magical thinking based on the principles I have identified is absolutely universal; and it seems that beliefs in the contributory effect of the magician’s state of mind are also universal.

Participants in Wicca believe firmly in “magick” and their own abilities to influence the natural world through the classic principles of sympathetic magic-but only for good. They say that what they do will come back threefold, and if their intentions are selfish or deceitful the return might be devastating. When skeptics ask psychics why they don’t win the lottery or break the bank at a casino, the invariable answer is that their powers would dissolve or turn sour if they used them for personal gain. Advocates of Therapeutic Touch insist that “The use of conscious intent (sometimes called intentionality) is thus essential for the practice of Therapeutic Touch. The practitioner must establish the intent to become a calm, focused conduit for the universal life energy and to direct the energy to the patient” (Macrae 1988, 18). And that under the conditions imposed in fourth-grader Emily Rosa’s famous experiment (Rosa, Rosa, and Barrett 1998) that clearly debunked the therapy, such calm focus was impossible. Proponents of various methods of manipulating qi, as in tai chi, qigong, feng shui, etc., say that without the proper mental attitude they cannot activate and detect qi.

Having seen my 2001 Skeptical Inquirer article, Norwegian homeopathic and acupuncturist veterinarian Are Thoresen sent me an article he had written, “How Do Homeopathy and Acupuncture Really Work?” and the citations to two published versions of it (Thoresen 2003). Therein he presents what he says is a real problem: why these methods do not work on animals under well-regulated scientific conditions, but they work very well in the clinic with just the animal, its owner, and the practitioner present. After a well-documented survey of such studies Thoresen says the answer lies “in the qualities of the therapist, especially yì, intention.” He cites many other strange and amazing cures, inventions, events, and methods, including an Indian proof for a “soul-life” in plants and metals, and biodynamic agriculture (see www.biodynamics.com and similar Internet sites, and the Aymara belief cited earlier), for which the only explanation for their (occasional) successes is the positive intention of the practitioner.³ According to Bronson’s report, in their efforts to show positive effects of distant healing Elisabeth Targ and her colleagues committed serious violations of the principles of scientific research; they were-let’s say it-dishonest. Their methods are quite obviously magical, recognizable in probably all traditional areas of the world. When informed of Targ’s intentions, her deception, and her rapid death from glioblastoma, that same “traditional person whose culture holds a magical worldview” I referred to earlier would understand immediately. And, in a magical cosmos, her death is solid confirmation of both the efficacy of magic, and the dangers inherent in performing it.

Notes

1. Apparently her name is correctly spelled with an s, but not all writers were careful, and researchers will find additional information about her on the Internet under the alternate spelling, “Elizabeth.”
2. Targ does not call this “prayer” in her scholarly reports, though others immediately do (e.g., Jaroff 2002), and in public speculation on how it works she suggested “God” among several possibilities ("consciousness, love, electrons, or a combination"; as reported by Gardner 2001 and Jaroff 2002). Anthropologically this is explicitly magic, as it addresses the forces of nature, not a divinity.
3. Anyone who thinks about such subjective situations will realize other explanations for Thoresen’s original “problem,” and his conclusions; such explanations are suggested in my 2001 Skeptical Inquirer article. Dr. Asbjørn Dyrendal of the Norwegian University for Technology and Natural Sciences (NTNU), Trondheim, kindly informed me that Thoresen’s 2003 publication in the Norwegian Veterinary Journal, an important mainstream publication, is a “reader’s response” (a letter to the editor). It generated some criticism in the next issue.

References

• Bronson, Po. 2002. A prayer before dying. Wired 10, 12, December, 174-179, 221-223.
• Gardner, Martin. 2001. Distant healing and Elisabeth Targ. Skeptical Inquirer 25(2):12-14.
• Jaroff, Leon. 2002. Investigating the power of prayer. Time Online, Wednesday Jan. 16.
• Lee, Dorothy. 2001. Religious Perspectives in Anthropology. In Arthur C. Lehmann and James E. Myers, eds, Magic, Witchcraft and Religion. 5th ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, pp. 20-26. (Orig. in Lowell D. Holmes, ed., Readings in General Anthropology. New York: Ronald Press, 1971, pp. 416-27).
• Macrae, Janet. 1988. Therapeutic Touch: A Practical Guide. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1935. Coral Gardens and their Magic. 2 vols. London: Allen & Unwin.
• Rosa, Linda, Emily Rosa, and Stephen Barrett. 1998. A close look at Therapeutic Touch. Journal of the American Medical Association 279:105-1010.
• Sicher, Fred, Elisabeth Targ, Dan Moore II, and Helene S. Smith. 1998. A randomized double-blind study of the effect of distant healing in a population with advanced AIDS. Western Journal of Medicine 169:356-363.
• Stenger, Victor. 2003 The Tragic Story of Elisabeth Targ. Skeptical Briefs, 13(1): March.
• Stevens, Phillips, Jr. 2001. Magical Thinking in Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Skeptical Inquirer 25 (6): Nov./Dec., pp. 32-37.
• —. 1988. Table tennis and sorcery in West Africa. Play & Culture 1, 2, Summer, pp. 138-145.
• Thoresen, Are S. 2003. How Do Homeopathy and Acupuncture Really Work? Norsk Veterinærtidsskrift (Norwegian Veterinary Journal; in Norwegian), No. 3, pp. 176-177; “Ein Beitrag zur Erklärung des klinischen Effects von Homöopatie und Akupunktur,” Ganzheitlische Tiermedizin (Holistic Veterinary Medicine) 17:75-78.

I agreed to meet Deputy Omans at her office in the Wyoming County Courthouse in Warsaw, New York. I packed a kit of items I thought I might need-camera, close-up lenses, scale, stereomicroscope, evidence-collection materials, notebook, etc.-and was soon on the road. By shortly after two in the afternoon I was looking at the strange object (figure 1), and for the next two hours I was alternately photographing, examining, and discussing it with a number of local folk, including deputies, a district attorney, courthouse staff, and of course Jane Monaghan and Sue Omans. A photographer from the local newspaper had already been by. Having grown up in a small town myself, I well knew how quickly word of something unusual could spread.

The object was clearly not a human hand, since it lacked an opposable thumb, and it did not look like an animal paw or bird claw; neither did it have the characteristics of a plant root. In short, it did not appear to be any of the things people had suggested or I had envisioned-except for one, a genuine or simulated “alien hand.” As I told Deputy Omans, I think she acted commendably, securing the unusual object, handling it cautiously, and seeking to have it identified.

Among the first things I did after removing the curious object from its zipper-lock plastic bag were to photograph it and examine it with various lighted magnifiers, including a Bausch & Lomb 103 illuminated coddington loupe.

Figure 2

It did not look like diseased or decomposed material, and I decided to risk the often very instructive sniff test. The “skin” smelled exactly like latex. Some of the dozen or so curiosity seekers who came by were reluctant to put their noses in potential harm’s way, but I coaxed each in turn and received unanimous agreement that it smelled like latex. I found that, indeed, the material stretched with the elasticity of a balloon or rubber band. The underlying structure did resemble bone and even had recognizable knuckles and other joints. Close inspection, however, also revealed an unmistakable seam mark on either side of the long “bone” (figure 2)-evidence of the casting process that utilized a two-piece mold.

Figure 3

The “skin” being torn here and there, I discovered underneath, at the tip of the “little” (?) finger, a silver-color metal ring which further indicated manufacture (figure 3). I suspected it might have been a means of suspending the figure’s articulated skeleton for dipping in a solution of green, liquid rubber. With the stereomicroscope, I even examined a fiber embedded in the “skin” of the back of the hand, its ends sticking out-an indication that it had been trapped in the rubber before it had solidified.

With Sue Omans’s permission, I took small scrapings of the “bone” and removed a little piece of green “skin” for further examination. At my lab the next day, I subjected a bit of each to a flame test, using tweezers to hold it in the flame of an alcohol lamp. The “bone” flamed readily, unlike actual bone (or at least actual terrestrial bone) but consistent with plastic. The “skin” was also readily flammable and produced black smoke, just like rubber.

The mystery object had obviously been broken from a larger piece, which I suspect was an entire figure. Although it might have been a ghoul or leprechaun, I think the structure of the hand indicates an “alien"-probably the stereotypical little humanoid “extraterrestrial” with big head and wraparound eyes, the product of cultural evolution of an image (Nickell 1997).

One possibility is that it was a lawn figure that was displayed, say, at Halloween and later ended up, perhaps wind-tossed, in a field. If it was not already broken, a mowing or bailing machine probably did the damage and it could have found its way into a hay bale, thus explaining its presence in some hay outside the Omans barn. If the figure was manufactured in some quantity, perhaps an entire specimen will eventually surface for comparison and final identification.

Until then, I am telling anyone who asks that it was a real alien hand-not genuine but real (a distinction often made by carnival showmen). It appears to have come from the remote realm I can only name Planet Latex.

References

• Nickell, Joe. 1997. Extraterrestrial iconography. Skeptical Inquirer 21:5 (September/October), 18-19.
• Nickell, Joe. 1999. The Silver Lake Serpent: Inflated Monster or Inflated Tale? Skeptical Inquirer 23:2 (March/April), 18-21.