1. Ignore her.
2. Argue with her.
3. Try to explain rationally why she is incorrect.
4. Put her in a room with a rolling video camera, and ask her to show you.

The answer is all of the above, in sequential order.

I’m a high-school senior in Colorado Springs, Colorado. During my ten years here, I have earned a reputation as being argumentative and skeptical, often to the point of irritating people. One of my peers has pointed out that if someone taped a sign to a brick wall that read, “Telekinesis is real,” I would argue with the wall until one of us collapsed.

I became devoted to debunking the paranormal five years ago. The Metaphysics Fair was in town, and my mother decided it might be an “entertaining” experience. For five dollars, I got to spend two hours exploring vendors who sold everything from meditation music to ionized water. I even coughed up a few more bucks to have my personality read with tarot cards.

Even at the age of twelve, my humbug detectors were up and running, so I gave very explicit instructions to the medium. I didn’t want to know my future-I wanted to know my past, since that was the only way I could confirm her accuracy.

She then went through her complex card-shuffling act, and I wrote down each of her comments with the intention of checking them later. The results? There were none. You see, she didn’t make any statements that were concrete enough to be testable. She merely made vague predictions about my social and academic life, and watched my face to see if she was on the right track. The medium promised an enlightening experience, and I was enlightened. I vowed never to give money to people like that again.

After the Metaphysics Fair, my exposure to the paranormal broadened to include the television series, Penn and Teller: Bullshit, a subscription to the Skeptical Inquirer, and a series of books by one of my favorite writers, James Randi. I even got a chance to meet Joe Nickell. Seeing how good they were, I shifted to debating political and economic issues, and left the paranormal to those guys. But then, earlier this year, a new student came to my school. She jarred me out of my anti-paranormal paralysis.

At her request, I won’t reveal her name, but I can tell you she was a high-school freshman, a tarot card reader, a crystalologist, and a witch in training. Put the two of us together for five minutes, and you will have a heated debate about the paranormal. Our debates would range over such New Age topics as reincarnation, telekinesis, crystalology, Armageddon, and even the lost continent of Atlantis. I learned quickly that debating a paranormalist is nothing like debating a political idealist. I had to continually pull our arguments back to their original topics. And she forced me to debunk increasingly larger and larger ideas. For example, I recall one of our first debates:

Her: The world will suffer a cataclysmic event in 2012.

Me: Why do you say that?

Her: Because the Mayans predicted it.

Me: And how do you know the Mayans are correct?

Her: Because they were colonized by the Atlanteans.

Me: And how do you know that?

Her: You can tell by comparative palmistry.

See what I mean?

I would ask her to accept James Randi’s One Million Dollar Challenge. I even went so far as to tape an application to the inside of her locker. Predictably, my efforts came to no avail. Somehow, she doubted the prize’s authenticity. If, she reasoned, it was a genuine test, someone like her would have already claimed it. She went on asserting that tarot cards, herbology, and reincarnation were all scientific and had passed a number of scientific investigations.

Eventually, I grew tired of engaging in these dead-end debates. I had discovered, like so many skeptics before me, that the devotion of a paranormalist is almost absolute. Finally, I offered her a challenge.

I challenged her to demonstrate, under controlled circumstances, any of the paranormal powers she claimed to control. To my surprise, she said yes.

The most testable talent she could readily demonstrate was tarot card reading.

But I vividly remembered my experience at the fair. I had since learned that tarot reading was nothing more than an elaborate form of cold reading. And I didn’t have the experience to tackle the vague and often universal claims of a cold reader.

But eventually, I got it out of her that she could “sense” the suit of a card through an opaque barrier. That was testable enough. We agreed on a time and location for the experiment.

Later that week, we met in the physics lab (how appropriate) of our high school. While I set up the video camera, she laid out a set of colored stones and crystals. I was going to ask her what these crystals were for, but she had already placed one on her forehead, and was sitting on the floor in a lotus position.

I’d spent the previous night setting up the standards for the test. I consulted several of James Randi’s books on testing claims of the paranormal but was unable to find a setup that suited all of her requirements. So, I took a risk and designed the testing parameters on my own.

Earlier that day, I had placed forty of her tarot cards in opaque envelopes. It was her job to determine the correct suit without opening them. Since we expected a 25- percent hit ratio by chance, we agreed that 50 percent and above was evidence of ESP. But even before the test began, things started going downhill-for her. While I was setting up, she commented that my aura was very green. I’d had a picture of my aura taken at the metaphysics fair. If I have an aura at all, it is a very a bright shade of blue. She shrugged that off when I told her.

To be honest, I suspected that the only reason she was being so cooperative was because she had an effective means of cheating. After looking at the video of the experiment, I can catch a dozen places were she had the chance. But I've reviewed that video at least a dozen times, and I can very confidently say that she never cheated.

I should also mention that I gave her a small envelope at the beginning of the proceedings. This will be important later on.

Apparently, I couldn’t be in the room during testing. My green/blue aura was somehow “distracting.” I could not be in room when she was examining an envelope, but she did permit me to watch through a window.

Just before starting, and keeping with a practice adopted by Randi, I asked her to promise one thing. I wanted her word that she would not make excuses if her results were less than she expected. She agreed.

I won’t relate every detail of the test, but it was a very elaborate ritual. I brought the envelopes in one at a time, then left the room. She would wrinkle her brow in concentration, wave her hands over the envelope, tap it with a crystal, write her answer on a sheet of paper, and ask for the next one. After about an hour and a half, we finished all forty envelopes.

She commented that she thought the test went very well. She felt that she had correctly guessed the suit of the concealed card between 40 and 70 percent of the time. We then opened the envelopes and compared the results. Out of the forty cards, she correctly guessed the suit on only six of them. A 15 percent hit ratio. This, by any standards, counted as a failure. I asked her what went wrong.

“I don’t dispute the results,” she said, “but the people in the hall outside were talking very loud and they may have interfered.”

I rolled my eyes and asked her to open the small envelope that I gave her at the beginning of the test and read the enclosed note.

“At the beginning of this test,” she read, “you promised not to make excuses if the results didn’t validate your claims. You have just made an excuse. I have just demonstrated the power of precognition and should be awarded the Randi Prize.”

Thanks, Mr. Randi! A piece of his that had been published in the Skeptical Inquirer about a month earlier had taught me to prepare for just this situation. She promptly shook hands with me and left the room.

Two weeks later, I confronted her and again asked why she had failed. She told me that her selfishness and her desire to prove her abilities had inhibited her powers. She said that often karma would prevent a tarot-card reader from using her power to its full extent. (She never explained what karma had to do with anything.) Furthermore, she stated that tarot-card reading was not meant to be scientifically testable. What? Wait, wait, wait-slow down. Only a month ago, she had insisted that talents like hers had stood up to intense scientific scrutiny! She had stated up front that tarot-card reading was a statistically testable skill! Two days later, I overheard her discussing the powers of rubies and crystals with one of her friends. While the power of the tarot failed, the power of Randi’s prediction has stood the test of time.

Clearly, many conceptual problems are associated with this question. How do we define nothing? What are its properties? If it has properties, doesn't that make it something? The theist claims that God is the answer. But, then, why is there God rather than nothing? Assuming we can define nothing, why should nothing be a more natural state of affairs than something?

In fact, we can give a plausible scientific reason based on our best current knowledge of physics that something is more natural than nothing! Of course, that requires providing a physical definition of nothing. Can I imagine a physical system that has no properties? Yes, as long as you do not insist on playing word games with me by calling the lack of properties a property.

Suppose we remove all the particles and any possible non-particulate energy from some unbounded region of space. Then we have no mass, no energy, or any other physical property. This includes space and time, if you accept that these are relational properties that depend on the presence of matter to be meaningful.

While we can never produce this physical nothing in practice, we have the theoretical tools to describe a system with no particles. The methods of quantum field theory provide the means to move mathematically from a state with n particles to a state of more or fewer particles, including zero particles. If an n-particle state can be described, then so can a state with n = 0.

Let us start with a monochromatic electromagnetic field, which is described quantum mechanically as system of n photons of equal energy E. The mathematical description of the field is equivalent to a harmonic oscillator whose quantum solution is a series of energy levels equally spaced like the rungs of a ladder by an amount E, each rung representing a field with one more photon than the field represented by the rung below. Stepping down the ladder you find that the bottom rung corresponding to a field of zero photons is not zero energy but rather E/2. This is called the zero-point energy.

This result is true for all bosons, particles that have zero or integral spin. On the other hand, fermions that have half-integral spin, such as the electron and quark, have a zero-point energy of -E/2 (negative energy is no problem in relativistic quantum mechanics; in fact, it is required by the simple mathematical fact that a square root has two possible signs).

In the current universe, bosons outnumber fermions by a factor of a billion. This has led people to conclude that the vacuum energy of the universe, identified with the zero point energy remaining after all matter is removed, is very large. A simple calculation indicates that the energy density of the vacuum is 120 orders of magnitude greater than its experimental upper limit. Clearly this estimate is wrong. This calculation must be one of the worst in scientific history! Since a non-particulate vacuum’s energy density is proportional to Einstein’s cosmological constant, this is called the cosmological constant problem.

Instead of using numbers from the current universe, we can visualize a vacuum with equal numbers of bosons and fermions. Such a vacuum might have existed at the very beginning of the big bang. Indeed this is exactly what is to be expected if the vacuum out of which the universe emerged was supersymmetric-that is made no distinction between bosons and fermions.

This suggests a more precise definition of nothing. Nothing is a state that is the simplest of all conceivable states. It has no mass, no energy, no space, no time, no spin, no bosons, no fermions-nothing.

Then why is there something rather than nothing? Because something is the more natural state of affairs and is thus more likely than nothing-more than twice as likely according to one calculation. We can infer this from the processes of nature where simple systems tend to be unstable and often spontaneously transform into more complex ones. Theoretical models such as the inflationary model of the early universe bear this out.

Consider the example of the snowflake. Our experience tells us that a snowflake is very ephemeral, melting quickly to drops of liquid water that exhibit far less structure. But that is only because we live in a relatively high temperature environment, where collisions with molecules in thermal motion reduce the fragile arrangement of crystals to a simpler liquid. Energy is required to destroy the structure of a snowflake.

But consider an environment where the ambient temperature is well below the melting point of ice, as it is in most of the universe far from the highly localized effects of stellar heating. In such an environment, any water vapor would readily crystallize into complex structures. Snowflakes would be eternal, or at least will remain intact until cosmic rays tear them apart.

What this example illustrates is that many simple systems are unstable, that is, have limited lifetimes as they undergo spontaneous phase transitions to more complex structures of lower energy. Since “nothing” is as simple as it gets, we would not expect it to be completely stable. In some models of the origin of the universe, the vacuum undergoes a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. The transition nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any external agent.

As Nobel Laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, “The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.”

Detecting a Hoax

The film-purporting to depict the postmortem of an extraterrestrial who died in a UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 (see figure)-was part of a “documentary” that aired on the Fox television network. Skeptics and many UFOlogists quickly branded the affair a hoax.

Among numerous observations, they noted that the film bore a bogus, nonmilitary codemark, that the injuries sustained by the extraterrestrial were inconsistent with an air crash, and that the person performing the autopsy held the scissors like a tailor rather than a pathologist (who is trained to place his middle or ring finger in the bottom of the scissors hole and use his forefinger to steady the blades). Houston pathologist Ed Uthman (1995) faulted the film for lacking what he aptly termed “technical verisimilitude.”

Other pathologists agreed. Cyril Wecht (1995), former president of the National Association of Forensic Pathologists, described the viscera in terms that could apply to supermarket meat scraps: “I cannot relate these structures to abdominal context.” Nationally known pathologist Dominick Demaio (1995) was even more succinct: “I would say it’s a lot of bull.”

Hollywood special-effects expert Trey Stokes (whose film credits include The Blob, Batman Returns, and Tales from the Crypt) told CSICOP that the alien corpse behaved like a dummy, seeming lightweight, “rubbery,” and therefore moving unnaturally when handled (Stokes 1995).

The Perpetrator

Belatedly, a Manchester sculptor and special-effects creator, John Humphreys, now claims the Roswell alien was his handiwork, destroyed after the film was shot. He made the revelation just as a new movie, Alien Autopsy, was being released, a film for which he recreated the original creature. Released in April 2006, it retells the making of the 1995 hoax autopsy film, with a pair of British television celebrities playing the original producers, Ray Santilli and Gary Shoefield. Santilli now claims the 1995 film was a recreation of genuine footage that became damaged when its container was opened after forty-eight years (Horne 2006).

As Humphreys told the BBC, “Funnily enough, I used exactly the same process as before. You start with the stills from the film, blow them up as large as you can. Then you make an aluminum armature, which you cover in clay, and then add all the detail.” The clay model was used to produce a mold that yielded a latex cast. The body cavities were filled, Humphreys admitted, with chicken entrails, sheep brains, and the like, purchased from a meat market near the north-London flat in which the film was shot (Horne 2006).

Are Humphreys’s claims credible? Indeed, not only is he a graduate of the Royal Academy and a special-effects model-maker-his credits include Max Headroom and Doctor Who-but his recreations are so good as to leave no doubt of his ability to have made the originals. And examples of his work displayed on his Web site (Humphreys 2006) are stylistically consistent with the hoaxed aliens.

Humphreys also admitted that in the original autopsy film, he himself played the role of the pathologist; his identity was concealed by a contamination suit.

Roswell Saga

The alien-autopsy hoax represented the culmination of several years’ worth of rumors, urban legends, and outright deceptions, purporting to prove that saucer wreckage and the remains of its humanoid occupants were stored at a secret facility-e.g., a (nonexistent) “Hangar 18” at Wright Patterson Air Force Base-and that the small corpses were autopsied at that or another site.

Among the hoaxes were the following:

• A 1949 science-fiction movie, The Flying Saucer, purported to contain scenes of a captured spacecraft; an actor actually posed as an FBI agent and swore the claim was true.
• In 1950, writer Frank Scully reported in his Behind the Flying Saucers that the U.S. government possessed no fewer than three Venusian spaceships, together with the humanoid corpses found on board. Scully had been fed the tale by two confidence men who had hoped to sell a petroleum-locating device allegedly based on alien technology (Clark 1993).
• In 1974, Robert Spencer Carr began to promote one of the crashes from the Scully book and to claim firsthand knowledge of where the pickled aliens were stored. But as the late claimant’s son told Skeptical Inquirer readers (Carr 1997), Carr was a spinner of yarns who made up the entire story.
• In 1987, the author of a book on Roswell released the notorious “MJ-12 documents,” which seemed to prove the crash-retrieval story and a high-level government coverup. Unfortunately document experts readily exposed the papers as inept forgeries (Nickell 1995; Nickell and Fischer 1990).
• In 1990, Gerald Anderson claimed that he and family members had been rock hunting in the New Mexico desert in 1947, when they came upon a crashed saucer with injured aliens among the still-burning wreckage. Anderson released a diary his uncle had purportedly kept that recorded the event. Alas, forensic tests showed that the ink used to write the entries had not been manufactured until 1974 (Nickell 2001, 120).

Conclusions

The most elaborate Roswell hoax, however, and the one that probably reached the largest audience, was the “Alien Autopsy” film. It will be remembered as a classic of the genre. The truth about “the Roswell incident"-that the crash device was merely a secret U.S. spy balloon, part of Project Mogul, which attempted to monitor emissions from anticipated Soviet nuclear tests-continues to be obscured by hoaxers, conspiracy cranks, and hustlers.

We should again recall Paul Kurtz’s statement at the time of the original film’s airing: “The Roswell myth should be permitted to die a deserved death. Whether or not we are alone in the universe will have to be decided on the basis of better evidence than that provided by the latest bit of Roswell fakery” (Nickell 1995, 19).

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Timothy Binga, David Park Musella, and Benjamin Radford for research assistance and to Paul Loynes and Lisa Hutter for production assistance.

Note

1. My article on the case (Nickell 1995) inaugurated my column, “Investigative Files,” in SI.

References

• Carr, Timothy Spencer. 1997. Son of originator of ‘Alien Autopsy’ story casts doubt on father’s credibility. Skeptical Inquirer 21:4 (July/August) 21(4): 31-32.
• Clark, Jerome. 1993. UFO hoaxes. In Encyclopedia of Hoaxes, ed. by Gordon Stein. Detroit: Gale Research: 267-278.
• Damaio, Dominick. 1995. Appearance on American Journal, September 6.
• Films. 2006. BBC Homepage, April 18. Available here; accessed April 18, 2006.
• Horne, Marc. 2006. Max Headroom creator made Roswell alien. The Sunday Times (Britain), April 25; available here; accessed April 25, 2006.
• Humphreys, John. 2006. Official Web site: http://www.john-humphreys.com/; accessed April 18, 2006.
• Nickell, Joe. 1995. “Alien Autopsy Hoax.” Skeptical Inquirer 19(6): (Nov./Dec.), 17-19.
• —-. 2001. Real-Life X-Files: Investigating the Paranormal. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky.
• Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1990. The crashed-saucer forgeries. International UFO Reporter, March/April: 4-12.
• Salford man admits alien autopsy fake. 2006. Manchester Evening News, April 6; available here; accessed April 6, 2006.
• Stokes, Trey. 1995. Personal communications, August 29-31.
• Uthman, Ed. 1995. “Fox’s ‘Alien Autopsy': A pathologist’s view.” Usenet, sci.med.pathology, September 15.
• Wecht, Cyril. 1995. Quoted on “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?” Fox Network, August 28 and September 4.