One 1995 victim was a quiet-spoken peasant, a farmer named Mjaka Hamad, who said he does not believe in spirits. He first thought he was having a dream. However, “I could feel it,” he said, “something pressing on me. I couldn’t imagine what sort of thing was happening to me. You feel as if you are screaming with no voice.” He went on to say: “It was just like a dream but then I was thinking it was this popobawa and he had come to do something terrible to me, something sexual. It is worse than what he does to women.”

The demon struck Zanzibar in 1970 and again briefly in the 1980s. According to The Guardian: “Even those who dismiss the attacks as superstition nonetheless admit that for true believers they are real. Zanzibar’s main hospital has treated men with bruises, broken ribs and other injuries, which the victims blame on the creature.” (McGreal 1995)

I was given an article on the Zanzibarian affair by Matt Cherry — new Executive Director of the Council on Democratic and Secular Humanism (CODESH) — who half-jokingly remarked, “Here’s a case for you to solve.” I read a few paragraphs and replied, “I have solved it.”

One needs only to read Peter Huston’s “Night Terrors, Sleep Paralysis, and Devil-Stricken Telephone Cords from Hell,” which appeared in the Fall 1992 Skeptical Inquirer, to learn that the popobawa is simply a Zanzibarian version of a psychological phenomenon known as a “waking dream.” One of the characteristics of such a dream, known more technically as a hypnopompic or hypnogogic hallucination (depending on whether one is, respectively, waking up or going to sleep), is a feeling of being weighted down or even paralyzed. Alternately, one may “float” or have an out-of-body experience. Other characteristics include extreme vividness of the dream and bizarre and/or terrifying content. (Baker and Nickell 1992)

Similar feelings were also common to persons in the Middle Ages who reported nighttime visitations of an incubus (a male demon who lay with women) or succubus (which took female form and lay with men). In Newfoundland the visitor was called the “Old Hag” (Ellis 1988). In the infamous West Pittston, Pennsylvania, “haunted house” case of 1986, tenant Jack Smurl claimed he was raped by a succubus. As “demonologist” Ed Warren (1989) describes it: “He was asleep in bed one night and he was awakened by this haglike woman who paralyzed him. He wanted to scream out, of course — he was horrified by what he saw, the woman had scales on her skin and white, scraggly hair, and some of her teeth were missing — but she paralyzed him in some manner. Then she mounted him and rode him to her sexual climax.”

Such accounts come from widespread places and times. For example, consider this interesting encounter which occurred in the seventeenth century. It concerned one Anne Jeffries, a country girl from Cornwall. According to Ellis (1988): “In 1645 she apparently suffered a convulsion and was found, semi-conscious, lying on the floor. As she recovered, she began to recall in detail how she was accosted by a group of six little men. Paralyzed, she felt them swarm over her, kissing her, until she felt a sharp pricking sensation. Blinded, she found herself flying through the air to a palace filled with people. There, one of the men (now her size) seduced her, and suddenly an angry crowd burst in on them and she was again blinded and levitated. She then found herself lying on the floor surrounded by her friends.” (p. 264)

This account obviously has striking similarities to many UFO abduction accounts — some of which, like those of Whitley Strieber’s own “abduction” experiences which he describes in Communion (1988), are fully consistent with hypnopompic or hypnogogic hallucinations. (Baker and Nickell 1992) Still other entities that have appeared in classic waking dreams are ghosts and angelic visitors (Nickell 1995).

As these examples illustrate, while the popobawa seems at first a unique, Zanzibarian creature, it is actually only a variant of a well-known phenomenon — one that western skeptics, at least, have little to fear.

References

• Baker, Robert A., and Joe Nickell. 1992. Missing Pieces: How to Investigate Ghosts, UFO’s Psychics and Other Mysteries. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, pp. 226-27.
• Ellis, Bill. 1988. “The Varieties of Alien Experience,” Skeptical Inquirer 12:3 (Spring), pp. 263-269
• Huston, Peter. 1992. “Night Terrors, Sleep Paralysis, and Devil Stricken Demonic Telephone Cords from Hell,” Skeptical Inquirer 17:1 (Fall), pp. 64-69.
• McGreal, Chris. 1995. “Zanzibar Diary,” The Guardian, October 2.
• Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 41, 46, 55, 59, 117, 131, 157, 209, 214, 268, 278.
• Streiber, Whitley. 1988. Communion: A True Story. New York: Avon.
• Warren, Ed and Lorraine Warren with Robert David Chase. 1989. Ghost Hunters. New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks, pp. 105

Related Information

• Scams from the Great Beyond by Peter Houston

A recent issue of Science (29 September, 1995) reports on two papers in the October 1995 issue of the Journal of Radiation Research, describing attempts to replicate the earlier work, with negative results. The new research not only repeated the older work, but improved on the methods of analyzing the data. According to Jeff Saffer, of the Pacific Northwest Laboratories, Goodman and Henderson had failed to include certain controls and calibrations. When these precautions were taken, “There was no observable effect,” Saffer said.

Here we go again. One experiment says yes, another experiment says no. Well, this often happens in science. We won’t know the final result until enough different people repeat the same work. In the meantime, the EMF work begins to show ominous similarity to the cold fusion brouhaha of a few years ago. Great initial excitement, followed by a simmering down of claims as more careful research finds nothing to get excited about.

In the cold fusion case, physicists with experience in fusion work were initially skeptical because they could not imagine any kind of nuclear reaction that would produce the effects claimed. They thought they had a quite complete knowledge of all the nuclear reactions in existence. But, on the off chance that there were obscure reactions lurking about, they could not come right out and say “cold fusion is impossible.” Therefore a great deal of time, effort, and money had to be spent replicating the original experiments.

In the case of EMF and cancer the situation is even more complex. Here we are dealing with living cells, and we don’t know everything that goes on inside them. We really don’t know much about the interaction between 60 Hertz electromagnetic fields and living matter.

My own initial skepticism on the subject was colored by my experience in working with powerful magnetic fields. When I was at the fusion lab in Princeton I worked with a machine called a stellarator, the precursor of the present tokamak. This was a large device about twenty feet long and eight feet high, consisting of a racetrack-shaped vacuum vessel surrounded by magnetic coils encased in blocks of stainless steel. Occasionally when the coils were being tested I would stand on the platform adjacent to the stellarator and watch in wonder as the four-inch steel slabs would slowly bend toward each other when the magnetic field was pulsed. This was a strong field! But standing a few feet away I felt nothing. Therefore I didn’t think magnetic fields had any effect on me.

However, fields from power lines alternate at sixty cycles per second, quite different from the slowly varying field from the stellarator. These alternating magnetic fields are accompanied by electric fields whose strength is not insignificant. However, to calculate the electric field strength inside a living person and to calculate the effect of this field on living cells is a very complex matter. For this reason it would be foolhardy to claim ahead of time that alternating electromagnetic fields do not have an effect on the health of people exposed to them. The subject is not at all like cold fusion. We have no theoretical reasons for saying EMFs are either good or bad for people. The question must be answered with careful experimental tests.

And I’m glad to see that they are being done.

But let us not go out on a limb like a friend of mine who gave a lecture before a local club extolling the benefits of optimism. He was saying that we cannot put limits on future discoveries in biomedical science. He expected new advances in medicine to increase the human life span indefinitely. I objected, saying that if people live forever then the population growth rate will increase even faster than it does now; in a few hundred years there will be one person for every square foot of the earth’s surface. He replied: not to worry, people will learn how to live in the ocean, how to live underground, how to populate the planets. (Sounds like a lot of the science fiction stories I used to read in the 30s.) The obvious answer to that is: suppose the population doubling time is 100 years, and suppose in the year 2500 you ship half the earth’s population off to Mars to free up some living space. By the year 2600 exponential growth has brought you right back where you were.

There’s no answer to the population problem other than zero population growth.

Figure 1. The start of a dolly forward-zoom back shot. Camera with telephoto lens films two persons standing side by side. A telephoto lens captures an image along a narrow angle, so in order to fit both actors into the frame the camera must be placed a moderate distance away. Even so, because the narrow angle the image subtends a narrow slice of the background behind the actors.

Figure 2. The end of the shot. The lens has zoomed from telephoto (narrow angle) to wide angle. Because of the wide angle the camera must move closer to the actors to keep their images filling the frame. But look at the background! In spite of the camera’s forward movement, the image subtends a much broader portion of the background.

Photos A, B, and C illustrate the same process.

Photo A. CSICOP Senior Research Fellow Joe Nickell stands in profile, pointing. His image fills the frame. This image was made with a telephoto lens (135mm lens on 35mm camera) from a substantial distance away. Note how little background is included, which is why Skeptical Briefs production editor Tom Genoni (out of focus in the background) subtends about a quarter of Joe’s apparent height.

Photo B. Made with a 50mm ("normal”) lens. I moved substantially closer to keep Joe the same relative size in the frame. We see a lot more background; Tom has shrunk appreciably.

Photo C. Made with a 24mm (wide angle) lens. I’m only a few feet from Joe, and the entire Center for Inquiry stands tiny in the background. Tom is almost invisible.

Imagine a motion picture sequence that moved through this range. The apparent separation between Joe and background objects would increase dramatically. The emotional subtext would suggest Joe being wrenched from his surroundings, or perhaps his environment fleeing from him. Powerful stuff.

Photos D, E, and F show what happens when one zooms in while keeping the background roughly the same size.

Photo D. Shot with telephoto lens from about 75’ away. Library windows fill the image from side to side. CSICOP staffers Marsha Carlin and Etienne C. R'os seem to occupy the same plane though Marsha stands about 12’ in front of Etienne. (See where their feet are!)

Photo E. Shot with a normal lens. Marsha and Etienne have not moved, yet their apparent separation has ballooned.

Photo F. Shot with wide angle lens. I’m only about 2’ from Marsha, too close to hold her in focus! She and Etienne seem to be in different zip codes. Both also seem much more distant from the building.

Last issue, we examined the once-difficult, now-routine motion picture shot in which the camera dollies forward while zooming out at a rate which maintains the foreground subject at a constant size. The eerie result: While the foreground character remains stationary, the background flees outward in all directions. It’s a great way to express sudden isolation or dramatize a character’s response to some shocking revelation. No sooner did I finish writing the last installment than I saw Ron Howard’s Apollo 13. That film uses the dolly forward-zoom out technique for a brief reaction shot of flight director Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) at the moment when the astronauts report their emergency. It’s sound movie-making — and one more indication that this formerly-exotic device has become an accepted part of film grammar.

But what makes it work? Consider the effect of lens length and camera-to-subject distance — in a word, of perspective — on the way a shot “feels.”

By selecting lens length and camera distance wisely, movie and TV directors can control the emotional resonance of their shots — creating subtle impressions of camaraderie or loneliness, enmeshing individuals in their environment, thrusting them into savage isolation, or placing a romantic couple in a “zone of their own” set off from their surroundings. It’s one of the strongest ways to influence audience response to an image, yet few suspect anything — until a director draws attention to the process by means of a bracing dolly in-zoom out shot.