Tampa Bay Skeptics Report (Tampa Bay Skeptics), Winter 2005—06, Gary Posner:

This past October, Gary Posner received a telephone call from Ron Pearce of Prattville, Alabama, asking to be tested for the Tampa Bay Skeptics “$1,000 Challenge.” The contest promises a $1,000 prize to anyone providing verifiable scientific proof of the reality of any paranormal phenomenon.

Pearce claimed that he could use psychic abilities to determine the medical ailments of ten volunteers simply over the phone or via e-mail without actually seeing them in person. Furthermore, he said, “I do not need photographs—just names and conditions or problems . . . for me to put together with the names . . . or you may even use numbers instead of names.”

Posner then used the TBS e-mail list to solicit volunteers, explaining the nature of the challenge and assuring them that medical information would be kept confidential. A list of ten ailments, ranging from high cholesterol to multiple sclerosis to mental retardation, was then e-mailed to Pearce along with, naturally, a numerical list, keyed to volunteers, 1—10. In order to win the challenge, Pearce would need to match each person’s number with its corresponding medical condition.

In the end, out of ten determinations, only one was correct. Pearce explained that he had never been tested in this way before, but that he would be able to demonstrate his “empath” abilities in person. He said he could relieve patients of their symptoms and diseases and added, “I’ve had people [whose] cancer has actually disappeared” [as a result of his presence]. When asked to provide medical record documentation of these cases, he declined to even make the attempt.

Posner explained that TBS and the scientific community cannot accept paranormal claims without solid, reproducible evidence and Pearce agreed that, at least in this test, he failed the challenge.

The Power of One

New Zealand Skeptic (New Zealand Skeptics), Spring 2005, Jay Mann:

Jay Mann entered his local pharmacy one day and was disturbed to find a sign announcing that a certain iridologist would be offering consultations there at a later date. [Iridology is the belief that you can diagnose illness, both past and present, by studying the pattern of lines in the iris of the eye.]

“I asked the pharmacist if he really felt this was helping the community or his image,” writes Mann. “I said that I had to rely on his professional expertise for assistance in choosing between competing products, and his promotion of iridology would make me (and others) dubious about his professional judgement.”

Mann went home, found the “Truth Kit on Iridology” by John Welch, and later left it with the chemist [pharmacist]. He had noticed an ad in the local “old-folks publication” promising that the pharmacy would host regular visits from the iridologist and so left the store with minimal expectations—clearly the pharmacy was already committed.

Writes Mann, “To my utter surprise, on a later visit to the shop, the Truth Kit was returned with a comment that the iridologist would not be returning again. . . . We agreed that a ‘discipline’ purporting to diagnose illness, that would misdiagnose nonexistent problems while missing actual disorders, was not acceptable.”

Mann explained that this was his first success in changing a misleading action by a pharmacy and acknowledged other “total failures.” For example, a pharmacist selling “oxygenated vitamin water” dismissed Mann’s skepticism saying, “many people think it’s very powerful.”

When trying to improve awareness at a local level, the difference between success and failure seems to depend on the claims made by the product or procedure. As Mann notes, “most health products are sold with no real claim to do anything. Cleverly worded but meaningless statements . . . are neither provable nor disprovable.” But, he writes, “iridology makes specific claims for efficacy and accuracy, and these claims had been demolished by the Truth Kit.” Success.

The Wisdom of Experts

NMSR Reports (New Mexicans for Science and Reason), January 2006, John Geohegan:

Skeptical of a recent book, The Wisdom of Crowds, members of New Mexicans for Science and Reason began their December meeting with a creative exercise designed to test the questionable claims made by the author, James Surowiecki.

In his book, Surowiecki proposes that collective intelligence is likely to be superior to the intelligence of experts. To test this theory, member Keith Gilbert designed two experiments:

At the opening of the meeting, the group would 1. Estimate the number of beans in a jar and 2. Estimate the number of cards, on average, which would be dealt from a deck before all four suits appeared. By then plotting a histogram of the estimates, Geohegan explained, “If crowds are much wiser than individuals in the manner implied in Surowiecki’s book, we might expect to see the standard bell-shaped normal probability curve.”

For the first test, however, what they saw was not a bell. Though there were 704 beans in the jar, the average guess was 563. Not only was this a 20 percent error rate, there were no guesses at all in the 700’s. Judging from the graph, the median guess was even less than 500, a higher percentage of error lost in the average number because of three members who guessed wildly wrong above 1,200.

For the second test, on average, the group guessed that 10.33 cards were needed in order for all four suits to appear. The graph showed a noticeable peak at 10 cards and the beginnings of a bell shape. The problem, though, is that the algebraically calculated answer is 7.665. So, though the group produced a more statistically uniform response than in the bean problem, their answer was wrong by a margin of 35 percent!

Though these games are a fun way to begin a meeting, they are relevant to a more important issue. At a time when many Americans want to write science education standards according to majority belief rather than scientific evidence, these tests provide easy and obvious examples of the inaccuracy of public opinion and alert us to the inherent danger of acting upon it.

But promotion of the giant North American bipedal creature, also known as Sasquatch, seems to be in resurgence. This burst of activity comes from a new generation of Bigfoot proponents. Prominent among them are author and educator Loren Coleman and Idaho State University’s Jeffrey Meldrum. Christopher Murphy’s 2004 book Meet the Sasquatch has gathered considerable media attention and Daniel Perez, with his Bigfoot Times newsletter, has become the movement’s chronicler.

To those reporting stories about the big guy we must add the “field researchers.” In the forefront are Richard Noll, discoverer of the only “full body cast of the Bigfoot monster,” and C. Thomas Biscardi. Recently Biscardi and his Great American Bigfoot Research Organization caught media attention by claiming the capture of a Bigfoot. By the time I contacted Great American’s publicity agent, Robert Barrows, the assertion had already evaporated. Barrows’s casual explanation: “Tom [Biscardi] believed a woman’s declaration she had a Sasquatch,” though later she turned out to “be crazy.”

The Bigfoot community was not so nonchalant. Dan Perez headlined a short article about the incident: “Biscardi’s Bull Crap.” The article, written by Loren Coleman, [1] said Biscardi “fumbled along” when interviewed about the alleged capture “first saying it [Bigfoot] was 800 pounds, then telling [the interviewer] that he hadn’t said how much it weighed, only that it was over eight feet tall.” Coleman elaborated: Biscardi “hadn’t even seen it . . . but [somehow] knew it was seventeen years old.” He further warned of Biscardi’s “checkered Marxian past,” a reference to Bigfooter Ivan Marx, [2] not Groucho Marx.

Yet the Great American Web site still proclaimed: “Imminent Capture [of Bigfoot] Anticipated.” I asked Biscardi, who bills himself as a “world famous Bigfoot researcher,” how he might bag the monster when others had been unsuccessful.

“Because nobody has the technical equipment, or the experience we have,” he told me in a telephone interview from Happy Camp, California. They had, he assured me, “identified a migration pattern” for the creature and with the “most powerful stun gun available,” they would catch a Sasquatch alive. “There would be no killing [of a creature] and after science had thirty days to examine the animal,” Biscardi would “release it back to the wild.”

More revealing was his boast their cameras had seen an encounter between “a bear and Bigfoot on 12 September” [2005 near Happy Camp] and broadcast this via their subscription-only Webcam (see the December 2005 Briefs Briefs). Later when I asked for information about the encounter story the editor of the Happy Camp News, Linda Martin, a sort of pit-bull defender of the Biscardi expedition (because it was bringing much need attention and cash to the community), gave a different story. According to her account, someone claimed they saw the encounter via Webcam with the Bigfoot approaching the bear from the nearby spring, but when “we looked for this incident on the video archive and saw the bear walking down the path—but no Bigfoot . . . in fact we could find nothing coming out of the spring.” Martin was oblivious to the fact that once again Biscardi was flippantly making extraordinary yet unsupported assertions. Oddly, when we spoke on the phone Martin had attacked Coleman’s credibility by saying he had misappropriated another Bigfooter’s photos. [3]

Brandon Tennant, a protégée of Jeff Meldrum who is organizing a Bigfoot Conference to be held in Pocatello, Idaho in 2006 said he thought Biscardi “might be giving the field a bad name,” something — considering the past history of Bigfoot research — that would be quite an achievement.

Biscardi told me he has Web subscribers in sixty-five countries, has had great response to his efforts and doesn’t care if others, especially those not “in the field,” criticize him. He called Coleman and Perez “bottom feeders.” But at least tepid support for Biscardi can be found. Veteran Bigfoot buff Jon-Erik Beckjord, who on his Web site compares himself to Galileo, Pasteur, and the Wright Brothers, says Great American should continue the effort. “They may get some images,” Beckjord said. “But not a live creature?” I asked. “Of course not, and you know why,” he replied. Having been exposed to Beckjord’s theories I answered: “Because Bigfoot is inter-dimensional?” “Yes, or possibly a time-shifter,” and therefore when injured or killed it would return to its own dimension or time.

If Biscardi is really on the trail of the monster, by the time you read this, you will have already seen the big story on television.

When I talked with Biscardi I promised him I would mention his Web site in my article. As others were also helpful I would like to give their contact information as well.

• Great American Bigfoot Research Organization, headed by C. Thomas Biscardi: www.findingbigfoot.com
• Loren Coleman’s Web site is: www.lorencoleman.com
• To contact Dan Perez & The Bigfoot Times try: perez952@sbcglobal.net
• Erik Beckjord’s Web site is: www.beckjord.com/bigfoot
• For information on Brandon Tennant’s Pocatello conference, e-mail fallingrock@onewest.net

Notes

1. Coleman is not always as combative and was most generous with information when I queried him for this article.
2. John Green once called the late Ivan Marx the biggest “yarn-spinner in California.” For more about Marx’s dubious activities see Sasquatch by Don Hunter and René Dahinden, Signet 1973, chapter 8.
3. For more on this issue see Bigfoot Times, newsletter, October-November 2005 issue, front page.

Significantly, in light of today’s fascination with “unexplained phenomena,” Holmes was also a pioneer paranormal investigator. (“Paranormal” is a broad term that includes not only supernatural claims but others beyond the normal range of nature and human experience—Bigfoot for example.) As such, he was a rationalist and advocate of naturalism (a philosophy which denies the supernatural). In “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” the detective announced: “This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”

Yet the case of the Sussex “vampire” at first seems to cross the threshold into the supernatural: Robert Ferguson’s Peruvian wife acts strangely and is even caught sucking blood from a wound in her infant boy’s neck. But Holmes pronounces at the onset: “Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in the grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy.” Indeed, he soon uncovers the truth, seeing in the partially paralyzed family dog a clue to the mother’s sucking of her child’s wound: the older stepbrother had pricked the object of his jealousy with a poisoned arrow from his father’s collection. The “vampire” claim is vanquished.

Again, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes confronts a family “curse,” involving a seemingly demonic beast, when the current tenant of Baskerville Hall is found dead; nearby are “the footprints of a gigantic hound!” Yet the detective chides the local physician for having “quite gone over to the supernaturalists,” and in time he uncovers a very real plot. Entomologist Jack Stapleton proves to be a black-sheep Baskerville who hopes to inherit the family fortune. Taking advantage of an old legend and local superstitions, he simulated the ghastly beast with a massive killer hound smeared with phosphorous. After being given the intended victim’s scent, it was loosed upon the night.

Similarly, apparently paranormal phenomena are suggested in four other stories. In two, “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” victims seem to have confronted something so inexplicably horrible that they were frightened to death. A third, “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” features as “strange” a problem, said Holmes, “as had ever confronted me.” And “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” presents distinct overtones of a Jekyll/Hyde transformation.

Yet Holmes discovers that each of these cases has a real-world, naturalistic explanation. The first two (“Devil’s Foot” and “Speckled Band”) were murders caused by, respectively, a poisonous Devil’s foot root and the bite of a swamp adder, “the deadliest snake in India.” The attacks on the beach in “The Lion’s Mane” proved not to be homicidal but rather from the deadly stings of Cyanea capillata, a type of Atlantic jellyfish. And the strange behavior of Professor Presbury in “The Creeping Man” was due to his injections of Langur monkey serum, taken for “rejuvenescence” in anticipation of marrying a much younger woman.

In addition to these six cases, at least two of Holmes’s unchronicled cases also evoke the paranormal. In one (mentioned in “The Sussex Vampire”) Holmes refers to “the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared.” This suggests a matter for cryptozoologists (those who study alleged, unknown creatures, like the Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster). On the other hand, the gargantuan rodent may have been an imported animal like the typical “Giant Rat” of carnival sideshows: The South American capybara. Or it may only have somewhat resembled a giant rat and have actually been, say, a Sumatran tapir. Or there may have been still some other solution. (Recall, for example, that in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” the dying victim’s mention of “a rat” proved to be a reference to Ballarat in Australia.) Perhaps it was not even the creature itself, but instead some other element in the case, for which the world was supposedly unprepared.

Another unchronicled case that suggests the paranormal is described by Dr. Watson as “that of Mr. James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world.” The case is mentioned in “The Problem of Thor Bridge” which, having been published in 1922, could have recalled the mysterious disappearance of American horror writer Ambrose Bierce (in late 1913) or that of Canadian theater magnate Ambrose J. Small (1919).

Interestingly, Bierce had published a trilogy of stories titled “Mysterious Disappearances,” each of which had elements of the supernatural. And some mystery mongers have suggested that disappearances like Bierce’s may have a paranormal, other-dimensional explanation. However, evidence I developed in 1982, and later endorsed by Bierce’s biographer, Roy Morris Jr. (Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company, 1995), shows that the famous writer had carefully planned his own disappearance-suicide.

Perhaps Holmes eventually would have deduced a similar fate—or perhaps uncovered an accident or a murder plot—behind the disappearance of James Phillimore, even though Watson pronounced it one of the detective’s “complete failures” and indeed among those “unfinished tales.”

In any event, Holmes was a committed rationalist—a firm believer in the scientific method and the investigative approach. “I make a point of never having any prejudices,” he said in “The Reigate Puzzle,” “and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me.” Many have wondered how the man who introduced the analytical genius to the world, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, could have himself been so emphatically credulous, endorsing Spiritualist phenomena, fairy photographs, and other silly claims.

Holmes was Conan Doyle’s alter ego, embodying the rational faculty that existed in the creator himself. But to him, that could be carried to extreme and Holmes represented something of a caricature. For example, in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” regarding the topic of love, Watson says of his friend, “All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.” In fact, Conan Doyle’s own excessive credulity of the paranormal was obviously due to his habit of thinking with his emotions. But, despite the caricaturing and the occasional instance of faulty reasoning that he unwittingly attributes to the pipe-smoking sleuth, Sir Arthur actually wrought much better than he knew.