The Shaker motto was “Hands to work, and hearts to God.” Their craftwork em­bodying Shaker design was renowned for its aesthetic simplicity. They sold to the outside world furniture, brooms, nesting boxes, and myriad other craft items and marketed herbs and other goods.

In Kentucky in 1805, the Shakers founded a farming community they called Pleasant Hill. Spanning some 3,000 acres of largely rolling land, it is located about twenty-five miles southwest of Lexington. It consists now of thirty-three restored buildings where Shaker-costumed interpreters demonstrate crafts, give tours, and perform authentic Shaker songs and dance in the Meeting House. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The “haunted” Farm Deacon’s Shop at Pleasant Hill was built in 1809 and remains the oldest permanent structure there. (Pen and ink drawing by Joe Nickell.)

Enter Spirits . . .

Thomas Freese, who became one of the Pleasant Hill Singers in 1996, has collected accounts of alleged spirit encounters there, publishing them in his book, Shaker Ghost Stories from Pleasant Hill, Kentucky (Freese 2005). We met when we had tables next to each other at the Kentucky Book Fair in Frankfort. I read my autographed copy of the book with the interest of one who has himself often toured, lectured, and re­searched at Shakertown at Pleasant Hill. (I even prowled the outlying grounds looking for the possible site of a reputed paper mill, only to finally determine the Shakers never had such an enterprise there.)

Freese acknowledges (2005, 3) that “a number of the sightings of Shaker spirits were assumed to be encounters with Pleasant Hill employees who were dressed in Shaker style clothing.” (This is like re-enactment soldiers being mistaken for ghosts at Gettysburg and other historic battlefields [Nickell 2012]). Other apparitions are at­tributable to the percipient being tired or in a daydream state or the like, in which imagery may well up from the unconscious and be superimposed on the visual scene (Nickell 2001).

An overnight guest had a rather common ghostly experience. She awoke at about 3 AM feeling a “heaviness” and seeing a “series of faces” that was, she said, “almost as if I was watching an old movie reel” (Freese 2005, 26–27). She is giving an excellent description of a common “waking dream” that occurs in the twilight between being fully asleep and awake. The heavy feeling is due to the body being still in the sleep mode, and the hallucinatory imagery is common to the experience (Nickell 1995, 41, 214).

A former employee who worked night security at Pleasant Hill recalled his first evening there: “I was in the Trustee’s Office and I went up to check on one of the security locks. When I went up the spiral stairs and reached the top floor, I felt something breathing down the back of my neck. But there wasn’t anyone there.” However, the man concedes that while the sensation may have been “a ghost or the boogie man,” it could also be attributed to “first-night jitters” (Freese 2005, 19).

. . . Or Not

Indeed, a maintenance worker acknowledges that many of the sounds made by old buildings have nothing to do with spirits of the dead. “Pipes will moan,” he says. “I’ve heard that.” And creaking sounds can result from an old building’s settling, from woodwork that yields knocking and popping noises due to temperature changes, and from various other causes. This could well explain the report of a man at work below the floorboards of a shop building who heard “bumps and stomping” (Freese 2005, 10, 19). It could also account for “footsteps” heard here and there (Freese 2005, 9, 20, 45).

There could be similar mundane causes for other spooky happenings: a rocking chair moving by itself (possibly caused by people walking on a rickety floor), rattling pots and pans coupled with an unaccountably open back door (due to a forceful wind), during a storm the repeated sound of something falling (thought to have been possibly “a loose shutter,” but the earwitness was too fearful to investigate), and other incidents (attributable to overactive imaginations or even the outright pranks of others) (Freese 2005, 13, 23, 25, 74).

Sheer superstition can cause someone to imagine the supernatural from the merest coincidence. For instance, when some employees visited the Shakers’ secret worship site that was being excavated by archaeologists, they were greeted with an “unusual sleet storm” that drove them to their cars then “suddenly stopped.” Freese (2005, 106) ventures, “Perhaps the Shaker spirits were restless and had not approved of the excavation?” Yet no unusual storm plagued the actual archaeologists before or after. In any case, to suppose that spirits of the dead were capable of causing a sleet storm is an exercise in magical—superstitious—thinking.

That the Shakers themselves engaged in trancelike behavior, “speaking in tongues,” and channeling “prophecy” has obviously set the stage for impressionable people to expect mystical happenings at Pleasant Hill and to interpret almost any out-of-the-ordinary occurrence accordingly. But are there really spirits of the dead at the site, or are they just expressions of our own hopes and fears?

References

Freese, Thomas. 2005. Shaker Ghost Stories from Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse.

Houran, James, and Rense Lange. 2001. Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company.

Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 2001. Phantoms, frauds or fantasies? In Houran and Lange, 2001, 214–223.

———. 2012. The Science of Ghosts (in press). Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. This interdisciplinary field encompasses the search for habitable environments in our solar system and habitable exoplanets outside our solar system, the study of prebiotic chemistry, laboratory and field research into the origins and early evolution of life on Earth, and studies of the potential for life to adapt to challenges on Earth and in outer space. Astrobiology ad­dresses the questions of whether life exists beyond Earth and how humans can detect it if it does.

Astrobiology grew out of a previous discipline called “exobiology,” and often the two terms are used interchangeably. Exo­biology, however, is somewhat narrower—it focuses on the search for life beyond Earth and the effects of extraterrestrial environments on living things. The transition to the term astrobiology at NASA in the mid-1990s was a response to several discoveries that suggested that the space exploration program might help provide answers to fundamental questions about the origin, distribution, and future of life on Earth as well as beyond. These events included the evidence that Mars rock ALH84001 might contain microbial fossils, the amazing life found deep in the ocean at hydrothermal vents, recognition that Jupiter’s moon Europa had a vast ocean of liquid water, and the discovery of the first planets orbiting other stars. Today astrobiology has become a major area of space research globally, although we have not yet found evidence of life on other worlds.

Question: How could we find life on other planets? Does life in the universe have to be rare because life requires very specific environments?

Never having found any life outside the Earth, we cannot answer the question of whether life is abundant or rare. However, recent research with the Kepler mission and other astronomical observations suggests that habitable planets are common, with Earth-sized planets within the habitable zone orbiting at least 1 percent of stars. Even if only one-tenth of these planets actually support life, there are still roughly a billion living planets in our galaxy alone. We have no reason to think that our own planet Earth is unique or even unusual among the rocky worlds orbiting distant stars. But until we have data, this is just speculation.

There are three ways that we might discover life on other worlds: (1) Within our solar system, where we have direct access through spacecraft missions. We are especially interested in Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa, and Saturn’s moon Titan. It is possible to search directly for microbial life on these worlds. (2) If abundant microbial life exists on an Earth-like planet orbiting another star, it is likely to change the atmosphere in ways that can be detected using large telescopes. On Earth, life has contributed oxygen and methane to our atmosphere, both “biosignature gases” that can be detected remotely. (3) Finally, if an intelligent, technological civilization has developed on any planet, and if “they” choose to broadcast radio or optical signals, then perhaps these signals could be detected by SETI searches.

Question: Why is the U.S. government building bunkers to house the elite in case of a global disaster? Also I heard about two suns in China. Is one of them Nibiru?

These two questions both illustrate the Big Lie, which can happen when a story goes viral on the Internet. Both are old hoaxes that just won’t go away. The government bunker rumor has two sources. First is the well-known fact that the U.S. government built many deep air raid shelters during the early stages of the Cold War, including the underground complex at Greenbrier, West Vir­ginia, which was supposed to provide protection for the President and his staff, and the Cheyenne Mountain complex in Colorado, which is still used by the Strategic Air Com­mand. Second is an episode on bunkers in Jesse Ventura’s TV series Con­spiracy Theory. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize this is an entertainment show, not journalism—something that is given away by the title, since the phrase “conspiracy theory” implies an interpretation that is not based on facts. But even his episode about shelters is all innuendo; Ventura does not actually interview anyone who claims to have seen one of the phantom “government bunkers.”

The source of the “two suns in China” report is even less well understood by the public. If you watch the original news video with a friend who speaks Chinese, you will see that this is about a single photo, broadcast by a local TV station on a small island near Taiwan. It is based on a still picture (not a video), apparently rephotographed with a hand-held video camera. As far as I can tell, the “two suns” were not seen elsewhere in Taiwan, let alone across China. And obviously if this phenomenon were real, billions of people everywhere could have verified it just by looking up at the Sun.

Question: Is it true that the reason the far side of the Moon has more impact craters than the near side is because the Earth shields the near side from incoming comets and asteroids?

The Earth shield is not large enough to in­fluence crater densities. Just using simple straight-line geometry, you can calculate how much of the lunar sky is obscured by the Earth: about four square degrees out of 41,000 square degrees for the whole sky. Only one in ten thousand incoming projectiles would be intercepted by the Earth. The real reason there are more impact craters on the far side of the Moon is that the near side has a thinner crust that allowed volcanoes to erupt about three billion years ago, and these large lava flows have covered the craters that were formed early in the Moon’s history. It is likely that each side of the Moon has received equal numbers of impacts, but the resurfacing by lava results in fewer craters being visible on the near side than the far side.

Question: I’ve recently been hearing a lot about something called global/solar dimming. Are we headed for another ice age or will some horrid catastrophe be caused by the Sun?

Global dimming or solar dimming usually refers to the reduction in sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface due to atmospheric aerosols (smog). During the middle of the twentieth century, the increase in industrial smog partly compensated for the greater greenhouse effect by adding carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thereby slowing the global warming that would have been expected. One effect of the environmental movement of the last third of the twentieth century was to clean up the emission of smog, which had the unintended effect of accelerating global warming from the greenhouse effect. The other effect that you mention, a decrease in solar energy output during time of low solar activity, is much smaller. The Sun’s energy output (which we measure with satellites built for that purpose) varies by less than one percent, as you might expect since the number of sunspots or flares at the surface can’t influence the rate of nuclear fusion in the core of the Sun. The Sun’s brightness cannot drop enough to counteract current global warming due to the greenhouse effect. There will be no more ice ages if humans keep polluting the atmosphere with more carbon dioxide and methane and other greenhouse gases.

Question: A recent spate of furious eruptions on the Sun hurled a huge amount of heat toward Earth, the biggest dose our planet has received in seven years. The solar storm of March 8–10, 2012, deposited twenty-six billion kilowatt-hours of energy in the upper atmosphere, enough energy to power every home in New York City for two years. Would this intense heating have any effect on the Earth’s climate?

Your question is an excellent example of how solar activity is being hyped as if it were a major threat to Earth. The Sun is the source of almost all of our energy, and Earth intercepts almost 200 trillion kilowatts from the Sun continuously in the form of light and infrared (heat) radiation. Thus in the three days (seventy-two hours) of March 8 through 10, we received about 10¹⁶ kilowatt-hours of ordinary sunlight. Compare this with 26 billion kilowatt-hours from the solar eruption. The energy from the eruption is less than that from sunlight by a factor of nearly a million, negligible compared to regular sunlight. Solar outbursts make no contribution to heating the Earth or to global warming. In the report you read, don’t you think it would have been more realistic if they had noted this fact rather than talk about the solar storm in comparison to the energy needed to light New York City?

Signs of the Times (www.sott.net) was created by historian and author Laura Knight-Jadczyk. The About section on the site mentions that her husband is “one of the world’s few living experts in hyperdimensional [HD] physics” (Knight-Jadczyk 2002). Another notable person that claims to be an “expert” in hyperdimensional physics is Richard “Face on Mars” Hoag­land. HD physics has been associated with energies at the “mysterious” Coral Castle in Florida and Comet Elenin, and it has even been linked to the Mayan Calendar (Scott 2011). The network page QuantumFuture.net lists Cassiopaea.org, Cassiopaea.com, and QuantumFuture.net as separate websites founded by Arkadiusz Jadczyk and his wife (Jadczyk and Knight-Jadczyk 2000).

In 2011, Signs of the Times featured an intriguing article under the category “Science of the Spirit” titled “The Truth about Hair and Why Indians Would Keep Their Hair Long.” The author, C. Young, sets the tone of things to follow: “Our culture leads us to believe that hair style is a matter of personal preference, that hair is a matter of fashion and/or convenience, and that how people wear their hair is simply a cosmetic issue” (Young 2011). However, just a little further along in the article, another more interesting claim pops up: “Back in the Vietnam War however, an en­tirely different picture emerged, one that has been carefully covered up and hidden from public view.”

This particular story involves an account from a woman going by the name of Sally (to protect her privacy) who reported a shocking discovery made by her husband while he was working at a VA Medical hospital as a “licensed psychologist.” Sally is quoted in the article:

I remember clearly an evening when my husband came back to our apartment on Doctor’s Circle carrying a thick official looking folder. Inside were hundreds of pages of certain studies commissioned by the government. He was in shock from those contents. What he read in those documents completely changed his life. From that moment on my conservative middle of the road husband grew his hair and beard and never cut them again. What is more, the VA Medical center let him do it, and other very conservative men in his staff followed his example.

According to the author, the contents supposedly contained details about special departments being sent undercover to infiltrate Native American reservations in an attempt to recruit young scouts who ap­peared to have “almost supernatural” abilities. It also allegedly mentioned that these men were “. . . extensively documented as experts in tracking and survival.” However, much to the dismay of the military re­cruiters, “Once enlisted, an amazing thing happened. Whatever talents and skills they had possessed on the reservation seemed to mysteriously disappear, as recruit after recruit failed to perform as expected in the field” (Young 2011).

This was said to have been followed by a government-led investigation into what could cause such a drastic reduction in performance. The investigators’ findings are presented in the following quote from Young’s article: “When questioned about their failure to perform as expected, the older recruits replied consistently that when they received their required military haircuts, they could no longer ‘sense’ the enemy, they could no longer access a ‘sixth sense,’ their ‘intuition’ no longer was reliable, they couldn’t ‘read’ subtle signs as well or access subtle extrasensory information.”

More trackers were recruited in order to carry out further testing. This time, men who received similar scores were tested in pairs; one of them got a military haircut and the other kept the more traditional longer hair length. When these changes were put into effect, the testing resumed and “time after time the man with long hair kept making high scores. Time after time, the man with the short hair failed the tests in which he had previously scored high scores.”

If there is any doubt as to what is going on here, the author of the article provides an example of some typical tests. One scenario describes a recruit sleeping outside in the wilderness who would suddenly wake up before anyone approached within earshot. Another example involves an attack situation where the recruit “pretending to be sleeping” would turn things around and subdue the potential assailant. After this series of tests, a military haircut was administered, and the recruit would start to fail “many other tests that he had previously passed. . . .” In the end, the government “recommended that all Indian trackers be exempt from military haircuts. In fact, it required that trackers keep their hair long,” according to Young.

Close investigation into various tribal beliefs might help explain the origin of this story. Though Native American legends and belief systems do incorporate terms for the supernatural, they do not use phrases found in New Age mysticism like “aura” or “sixth sense.” The aspects surrounding the long hair of Native American boys and men cannot be accurately understood without in­sight from a part of American history that might not be as widely known. While there might be some variability in the details re­garding the reasons for long hair from tribe to tribe, there is one major component that has remained consistent: long hair has never been about aesthetics but instead is a religious concern. Generally, long hair has strong religious implications based on tribal beliefs that often go unnoticed, but it is commonly more known to be associated with a connection to the ancestors; severing it symbolizes the mourning of a close loved one or family member.

During the early periods of America’s history, Native Americans were subjected to a conversion process administered by the United States government. The religious be­liefs of the government agents and other missionaries led them to consider long hair offensive, simply labeling Native American religions to be un-Christian. The aspect of this government program that makes it an infamous part in Native American history is the notion of using boarding schools to systematically remove tribal cultures and traditions from the lives of young Native people in an attempt to “civilize” them. During this time, phrases like “Kill the Indian and save the man” and “The only good Indian is a dead one” (Pratt 1892) became quite popular and were ultimately adopted as slogans by the federal government.

Most of the struggles that Native Amer­icans face seem to come from the fact that their spiritual beliefs are not recognized as a legitimate religion. Not only is this reflected in society, but it also floods over the walls of institutions and into the system itself. Most recently, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling in the case A.A. ex rel. Beten­baugh v. Needville Independent School District, which involved a young Lipan Apache boy attending kindergarten in Texas. A trial court originally settled in favor of the parents, but the school district appealed the ruling. The Circuit judges’ ruling appears in the official document filed in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals as follows: “A Native Amer­ican boy and his parents challenge a school district’s requirement that he wear his long hair in a bun on top of his head or in a braid tucked in his shirt. We agree with the district court that the requirement offends a sincere religious belief and hold it invalid under Texas law” (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit 2010). Accord­ing to tribal historian Nancy Minor, many considered this a “. . . victory for the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, since it validates the fact that we are a legitimate American Indian tribe with members who practice traditional beliefs” (Minor 2010).

C. Young also claims that “Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved ‘feelers’ or ‘antennae’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brain stem, the limbic system, and the neocortex” (Young 2011). However, this does not fit the description of what hair is according to Hairbiology.com (2012), an informative website that is solely dedicated to helping explain the biology of hair. There is mention of hair being used for everything from trapping heat to protecting the scalp from ultraviolet light from the sun and even providing “. . . tactile information about the environment.” There is actually a variety of different types of mammalian hair, but human does not fit the antennae description. While the hair that grows on a person’s head might provide some sensory input, it functions more like cat whiskers than insect antennae. Even in this case, the whiskers of a cat are not really doing the feeling; it is in the follicles below the whiskers where most of the sensing is occurring. In fact, Robert Kunzig’s (2002) article in Discover magazine, “The Biology of . . . Hair: Zeroing in on the Molecular Switches That Regenerate Hair Growth,” tells us that “The hair we see, fuss over, curse, write lyrics about, is just dead stuff, pushed up and out of the skin by the follicles below. It is those follicles that are alive, and that drive the growth and shedding we see.”

Not only are there many holes in the presented account of the government using Native Americans in special experimental research, but also records pertaining to the special tracker units seem to be missing. The only source that appears associated with this account comes from United Truth Seekers, a website that promotes itself as “A ‘SOCIAL NETWORK’ & Was Created To: Expose The New World Order! Join Us Exposing The Evil New World Order!” (Suggs 2012).

However, the Signs of the Times site also has another conspiracy-tinged statement providing insight into the perspective shared by its contributors: “Our work has been attacked, suppressed, and marginalized by the Powers That Be in ways that no other work has been, leaving us with the distinct impression that we must be on the right track!” (Knight-Jadczyk 2002).

Laura Knight-Jadczyk also makes another revealing statement by highlighting the point that her website “. . . stands out from the crowd . . . for its commentary on world events and tracking of global trends, patterns, and energies” (Knight-Jadczyk 2002). While the author and the website presenting the article both seem to show a genuine interest in science, there is a serious lack of the necessary critical thinking skills needed to effectively engage these specific subjects. For example, the following is the logic that Young offers as explanation for unique qualities of hair: “Not only does hair in people, include[ing] facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain, hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment. This has been seen in Kirlian photography when a person is photographed with long hair and then rephotographed after the hair is cut” (Young 2011).

For those unfamiliar with Kirlian photography, or electrophotography, it involves fun with some conductive material and an electrode (Carroll 2010). Photo­graphing the corona discharge produces an impressive effect and array of streaking colors that some people allege is the depiction of the “human energy field” commonly referred to as the body’s “aura” (Barrett 2001). It is pure pseudoscience.

The following is another indication that this entire account of Native American “trackers” being used in any research resembling the sort mentioned is more than likely completely fabricated: “SOTT can’t confirm this story or the research it suggests took place, however, we have wondered on many occasions, what is the use of hair and why so many legends refer to hair as being a source of strength, from Samson, to Nazarenes, to the long haired Franks” (Young 2011).

In the end, Young finally manages to make one reasonable statement stick out through this aura of mystical energy and pseudoscience: “In searching for solutions for the distress in our world, it may be time for us to consider that many of our most basic assumptions about reality are in error. It may be that a major part of the solution is looking at us in the face each morning when we see ourselves in the mirror.”

References

Barrett, Stephen. 2001. Kirlian photography. Quack­watch (June 2). Online at http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/kirlian.html.

Carroll, Robert T. 2010. Kirlian photography (electro­photography). The Skeptics Dictionary (Decem­ber 9). Online at http://www.skepdic.com/kirlian.html.

HairBiology.Com. 2012. Hair fiber function. Online at http://www.hairbiology.com/hair-fiber/hair-fiber-function.shtml.

Jadczyk, Arkadiusz, and Laura Knight-Jadczyk. 2000. Quantum Future.net (May 6). Online at http://quantumfuture.net/.

Knight-Jadczyk, Laura. 2002. About sott.net. Online at http://www.sott.net/page/1-About-Sott-net.

Kunzig, Robert. 2002. The biology of . . . hair: Zeroing in on the molecular switches that regulate hair growth. Discover Magazine (February). Online at http://discovermagazine.com/2002/feb/featbiology.

Minor, Nancy. 2010. Arocha case won in fifth circuit court of appeals! The Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas Official Website (July 31). Online at http://www.lipanapache.org/AdrielArocha/AA.html.

Pratt, Richard C. 1892. ‘Kill the Indian, and Save the Man’: Capt. Richard C. Pratt on the Education of Native Americans. History Matters. Online at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/.

Scott, Greg. 2011. What Is Hyperdimensional Physics? Conscience Life News. Online at http://consciouslifenews.com/hyperdimensionalphysics/1120831/.

Suggs, Pam. 2012. United Truth Seekers. Online at http://unitedtruthseekers.com/.

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. 2010. Ruling of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas Official Website. (July 9). Online at http://www.lipanapache.org/AdrielArocha/AApages/1.html.

Young, C. 2011.The truth about hair and why Indians would keep their hair long. Signs of the Times (September 8). Online at http://www.sott.net/articles/show/234783-The-Truth-About-Hair-and-Why-Indians-Would-Keep-Their-Hair-Long.