To the Editor:

In “Nessie Hoax Redux” (March 1996), Joe Nickell ignores the greater issue raised in my November 1995 article in Fate magazine — the unacceptable double standard applied during debates over cryptozoology.

Self-proclaimed conspirator Christian Spurling waited more than a half century before claiming to have helped stepfather M. A. Wetherell use a modified toy submarine to fake a “Nessie” image in 1934; he never presented a shred of corroborating evidence to support his allegations; he was suspiciously vague when asked about a second, lesser-known photo; and he even failed to identify the bay where the hoax supposedly took place.

What if Spurling had claimed to have really seen and photographed a large unknown animal? Would this level of “proof” still be acceptable? Of course not. But because he was debunking Lt. Col. R. Kenneth Wilson’s famous photo the rules are very loose indeed. His mere say-so is okay. Ronald Binns excuses lapses and contradictions in Spurling’s story by suggesting that he was an old man when he finally gave his account and “maybe just confused.” (Of course, scientific studies have shown that it is short term, not long term, memory that typically fades with age.) Worse still, Binns and other apologists are ready to blithely modify Spurling’s account whenever problems arise — “Maybe he was right about how the model was made but wrong about the dimensions,” Binns hypothesizes — until what should be consistent, definitive testimony becomes conveniently malleable.

Spurling’s supporters allow no such excuses for Col. Wilson, who denied on occasion late in life that he ever photographed a Loch Ness monster; not allowing that this was likely his way of getting rid of pesky reporters. (In fact, Wilson stuck by his original story when interviewed in the 1960s by Member of Parliament Sir David James.)

Nickell calls Binns’ The Loch Ness Mystery Solved “the definitive skeptical book on the subject.” That honor should go to Steuart Campbell’s The Loch Ness Monster (Aquarian Press, 1986). Campbell is the best and most thorough of the Nessie debunkers — therefore it is highly significant that he too rejects Spurling’s toy submarine story. In a letter to the CSICOP magazine Skeptical Inquirer (“Nessie ‘model’ explanation suspect,” March/April 1995), Campbell notes: “In their eagerness to undermine paranormal claims, writers in SI exhibit a tendency to accept any normal explanation, whether or not there is adequate evidence.”

How true. There have certainly been many hoaxes at Loch Ness, and we must all remain vigilant against bunkum. But rationality demands that we have one stringent standard of evidence for proponent and debunker alike, and that we never abandon a healthy skepticism to embrace stories as flimsy and unsubstantiated as the one told by the late Christian Spurling.

Sincerely,

Richard D. Smith

Joe Nickell replies:

What Richard Smith sees as an “unacceptable double standard” is simply the necessary implementation of the maxim, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” This means one must have considerably more proof for the sighting of a sea monster than for that of a fish — or a sea-serpent model.

While Smith attempts to cast doubt on details of the photo affair, the arguments of Binns and others are persuasive that the famous photograph is indeed a hoax (as related in the March 1996 column). The points Smith raises range from the untrue to the dubious, as we have seen, and he is merely repeating himself. In response, I will repeat again what Simon Hoggart and Mike Hutchinson so aptly state in their Bizarre Beliefs (1995, pp. 198-99): “...given an explanation which fits virtually all the facts, and meshes in so neatly with what are known of Duke Wetherell [a previous Nessie hoaxer] (and the gullibility of tabloid newspaper editors) it seems positively perverse not to accept the Spurling account.”

The events began on Thursday, June 20, with a press conference that drew a record media turnout. It was there that conference organizer Paul Kurtz, chair of CSICOP, Kendrick Frazier, editor of Skeptical Inquirer, and many others presented examples of the media’s pandering to pseudoscience. Kurtz announced the formation of CSICOP’s Council for Media Integrity, a new watchdog group that will monitor and respond to media mishandling of the paranormal. “The media have now virtually replaced the schools, colleges, and universities as the main source of information for the general public,” said Kurtz, according to press reports. “If you look at these shows, Unsolved Mysteries, Sightings — there are a whole slew of them — they make it seem as if what they're portraying is real. Yet they don’t provide any scientific evidence.” Kurtz called for either allowing a fair chance for the rebuttal of questionable material or presenting it as fiction.

CSICOP fellow Joe Nickell also made comments that were picked up by the media. With respect to claims of UFO abductions, he was quoted by Ulysses Torassa of the Religious News Service as saying, “I'm now encountering children who believe that they might be abducted by extraterrestrials.” Also quoted by Torassa was Australian skeptic and TV moderator Phillip Adams, who pointed out, "We are seeing a new delivery system for pathological states of mind.”

The congress itself opened formally with remarks by Erie County (New York) Executive Dennis Gorski and a performance of selected movements from Gustav Holst’s The Planets by the Buffalo Philharmonic Ensemble. This performance was accompanied by a special video production based on NASA images of the planets, for which the suite’s movements are named, refocusing The Planets from the composer’s original astrological conception of the work.

Milton Rosenberg, Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and longtime radio moderator, chaired the meeting’s first plenary session, “The Role of the Mass Media in (Mis)Informing the Public.” Panelists included George Gerbner, Professor of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania; Piero Angela, Italian TV journalist; Phillip Adams, Australian columnist and TV moderator; and John Allen Paulos, Temple University Professor of Mathematics and author of Innumeracy. Nationally known radio commentator on medical subjects Dr. Dean Edell also participated by live radio feed as part of his syndicated radio show which airs on several hundred stations. In what was perhaps the congress’s only misstep, one of the panelists onstage mistook Edell’s scheduled participation as an interruption in the program and criticized Edell for disturbing the proceedings. The error was redressed minutes later when Paul Kurtz appeared on Edell’s program by telephone for about six minutes clarifying what had happened and outlining CSICOP’s call for heightened media responsibility, a call which Edell himself has long advocated.

The Conference Address, “A Strategy for Saving Science,” was delivered Thursday evening by Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate in physics and Director Emeritus of Fermilab.

The congress resumed Friday with a plenary session entitled “The Growth of Anti-Science,” chaired by John Maddox, former editor of Nature. The participants included Paul R. Gross, director of the Center for Advanced Studies; Norman Levitt, Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University; Susan Haack, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami; and Victor Stenger, Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii.

Skeptical Inquirer editor Ken Frazier and X-Files creator Chris Carter.

A luncheon address was given by Chris Carter, creator of the Fox TV series The X-Files. Carter defended his series against critics who say he promotes paranormal beliefs. He claimed that the series is meant solely to entertain and should actually heighten, rather than dull, viewers’ skepticism. But at least some congress participants doubted such an optimistic assessment of the program’s effects.

The afternoon was devoted to concurrent sessions. One session was on UFOlogy, given by Philip J. Klass, James McGaha, and Robert Sheaffer. Another program dealing with astrology was given by Cornelis de Jager, J.W. Nienhuys, and Ivan Kelly, while homeopathy was considered by Wim Betz and James “The Amazing” Randi. Vern Bullough, Bela Scheiber, and Dale Beyerstein examined therapeutic touch. Prominent anti-health-fraud activist and author Dr. Stephen Barrett discussed chiropractic. And National Center for Science Education Executive Director Eugenie Scott and Professor of Anthropology H. James Birx looked at the evolution/creationism controversy.

The Keynote Address was given by Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who drew (according to one local media estimate) some two thousand persons to an illustrated lecture on Darwin, evolutionary theory, and the role of skepticism in forming and evaluating hypotheses.

Saturday opened with a plenary session titled “Parapsychology: Recent Developments.” This session was chaired by James Alcock, Professor of Psychology at York University in Canada, and featured: Ray Hyman, University of Oregon Professor of Psychology; Richard Wiseman, University of Hertfordshire (U.K.) Professor of Psychology; Jessica Utts, University of California-Davis Professor of Statistics; and Stanley Jeffers, York University Professor of Physics and Astronomy. The focal point of this session was the disagreement over interpretation of laboratory studies of parapsychology by Hyman and Utts, who had come to contradictory conclusions after analyzing data from the U.S. government’s Stargate project. Utts believes that meta-analysis has clearly proven the existence of some sort of cognitive anomaly such as psi, so that further research should be aimed at probing its nature rather than multiplying efforts to establish its existence. Hyman believes that the existing studies are generally so flawed that they do not constitute proof of any anomaly, so that the existence of psi remains a very open question and one clouded by more than a century of laboratory failures to isolate a replicable psychic phenomenon.

John Maddox, emeritus editor of Nature, spoke on the importance of the scientific method at a gala luncheon at The Center for Inquiry, located across the street from the State University of New York at Buffalo’s Amherst Campus.

Saturday’s concurrent sessions included “Mechanisms of Self-Deception” by Barry Beyerstein, Thomas Gilovich, and John Schumaker; “Alternative Health Cures” with Jack Raso and Wallace Sampson; “Philosophy and Pseudoscience” with Paul Kurtz, Daisie M. Radner, Lewis Vaughn, Theodore Schick, and Tim Trachet; "Psychoanalytic Therapy and Theory After 100 Years” with Adolf Grunbaum; "Critical Thinking in Education” with John Kearns, Clyde Herreid, Lee Nisbet, Carol Tavris, and John Corcoran; “Spiritualism and the University at Buffalo Expose” with Joe Nickell and Gordon Stein; and “The Paranormal in China” with Chinese skeptics Madame Shen Zhenyu, Lin Zixin, Sima Nan, Zu Shu-Xian, and Guo Zhenyi.

The last two of the above-mentioned sessions were of special interest. For as it happens the University of Buffalo (UB), a precursor of SUNY at Buffalo, was celebrating its 150th anniversary during the congress, and one of the first "extracurricular” activities undertaken by UB faculty a century and a half ago was one of the earliest scientific examinations of the Fox Sisters, three young women whose floor-tapping activities launched nineteenth-century spiritualism. The UB investigators succeeded in partially unmasking the Fox Sisters’ fakery, an expose which was, tragically, insufficiently noted at the time. In later life, the sisters themselves confessed to having been frauds.

The session on paranormalism in China, meanwhile, represents the latest fruit of a long and productive relationship between CSICOP and pro-scientific persons and organizations inside mainland China. The session also included a report by members of the CSICOP delegation to China, which recently returned from an expedition of fact-finding and investigation of Chinese paranormal claims.

Stephen Jay Gould accepts the CSICOP “Isaac Asimov Award” from new CSICOP Executive Council Member Eugenie Scott.

Leon Lederman accepts the CSICOP “In Praise of Reason Award” from astronomer Cornelis de Jager.

An awards banquet followed Saturday’s sessions at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Buffalo. CSICOP bestowed the Isaac Asimov Award upon Stephen Jay Gould. The In Praise of Reason Award was presented to Leon Lederman; the Public Education in Science Award to Dr. Dean Edell, who accepted via videotape; and the Distinguished Skeptic Award to James “The Amazing” Randi. The Distinguished Skeptic/Lifetime Achievement Award was given to talk-show host, humorist, author, and general Renaissance man Steve Allen, and the Responsibility in Journalism Award went to Phillip Adams, Piero Angela, and Pierre Berton. The banquet was also marked by news that independent astronomical working groups had succeeded in naming asteroids for Paul Kurtz and CSICOP. The CSICOP asteroid ended up being named “Skepticus” after concerns were aired among astronomers that people might not know how to say “Csicop.” Steve Allen, author, entertainer, and creator of the original Tonight Show, provided entertainment at the banquet.

Sunday’s session was devoted to a three-hour “World Skeptics Update” in which leaders of skeptical groups from across the globe described the situations in their home countries. Participants included Tim Trachet (Belgium), Mario Mendez Acosta (Mexico), Amardeo Sarma (Germany), Michael Hutchinson (UK), Miguel Angel Sabadel (Spain), Henry Gordon (Canada), Stephen Basser (Australia), Lin Zixin (China), Massimo Polidoro (Italy), Cornelis de Jager (Netherlands), Valery Kuvakin (Russia), Rudolf Czelnai (Hungary), Premanand (India), and Sanal Edamaruku (India).

The congress attracted unprecedented media coverage, including partial coverage on C-Span. In addition, National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation: Science Friday” program made a rare trip out of the studio to originate from the congress site with host Ira Flatow. The congress was also distinguished by the raising of more than $200,000 toward the “Fund for the Future” campaign, a $20 million Center for Inquiry program and endowment fund. Congress proceedings are now available on audiotape.

At that time I thought that these were merely adolescents playing around with their imaginative notions of science. In time, as they went to school and learned real science they would grow out of it. So I thought. However, my hopes were shattered when I graduated to America Online and discovered the Internet. There I found the same fantasies, masked by more sophisticated homepage techniques, created by adults, some with Ph.D.'s.

A very elaborate homepage is called the Internet Science Education Project (ISEP), a California non-profit 501(3c) corporation. (For those who are not familiar with the Internet, a homepage is a page that appears on the screen, created by some interested person, and accessed by a specific address — one of those lengthy strings starting with “http://". From the homepage you can jump to other pages, from which you can jump to other pages. This is what we do when searching or surfing the web.) On the ISEP homepage we are greeted by a picture of a ravishing beauty who claims to be Lt. Alexandrova from Space Force Academy at the San Francisco Presidio in the year 2196. She is communicating with us by advanced quantum waves from the future. (In physics an advanced wave is a solution of a wave equation that lies in the future light-cone of space-time. At present there is no physical interpretation to this wave.)

Clearly somebody is having fun. The person in charge is Jack Sarfatti, Ph.D., "President of the Corporation.” Dr. Sarfatti uses the Science Education Project to publicize his advanced ideas, which he calls post-modern physics. At the bottom of the homepage we find a logo for the Space Force Academy which we click to reach the next level (the next page). Here we find a large number of choices: Muse Magazine, PSI Wars, Quantum Mind & Microtubules, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Animation, UFOs: Fact or Fancy?, Quantum Teleportation, to name a few.

Examining some of the pages, and accumulating a large pile of printouts, we are able to distinguish the pattern of post-modern physics. It is an interlocking set of theories centered on the non-locality of quanta — that is, on the observation that within a single quantum (wave packet) a particle such as an electron or photon can appear to be in two places at the same time. It is also deeply concerned with quantum gravity and its possible uses.

The post-modern enthusiasts claim that recent work in “anomalous cognition,” teleportation, and the relation between quantum gravity and consciousness presages a revolution in physics analogous to the quantum-relativity revolution that took place at the end of the nineteenth century. It certainly would if true.

Reading the theories found on these Internet pages we find certain technical terms used repeatedly: quantum gravity, Bohm pilot waves, microtubules, qualia, etc. A typical sentence: “The qualia [i.e., subjective mental experiences] are excitations in the macroscopic coherent quantum Bohm mental ‘pilot wave’ attached to the material vibrations of ‘Frohlich collective modes’ of electric dipoles in the microtubules inside living cells.” Or, look at this one: “The Mind of God hangs suspended in the Hilbert raum of Wheeler’s superspace guiding the evolution in time of the three-dimensional space geometry of our Universe — at least in Bohm’s pilot wave theory of quantum gravity that, according to Penrose and Nanopoulos, form the substratum of our consciousness.”

Here we see a concatenation of perfectly legitimate physical concepts (and physicists) to form a string of words that convey very little meaning to my impoverished brain. Quantum gravity is a theory that combines quantum mechanics (the theory of small objects) with general relativity (the theory of gravity and the curvature of space). Many of the greatest physicists have worked on this, with a variety of results. Pilot waves were proposed by David Bohm to explain certain mysterious phenomena stemming from the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. (Bohm was a great quantum theorist in the old days — I read his quantum mechanics textbook from cover to cover back in 1952.)

An example of an incomprehensible observation that relates to pilot waves is an experiment I did myself in 1976. (It’s a rather simple experiment that can be done in any optics laboratory.) In this experiment, a beam of light is passed through a half-silvered mirror inclined at 45° to the beam. Cut down the intensity of the light so that just one photon wavepacket passes through the mirror at one time. Quantum theory tells us that half of each wavepacket is reflected while the other half is transmitted. We know that this happens because if you bring the packets together in an interferometer, you do get interference fringes, showing that both transmitted and reflected waves go around the interferometer. But if you detect the photons with two photodetectors (A and B), you find that if the reflected wave is detected in one location by phototube A, the transmitted wave is not detected at the same time by phototube B, and vice versa. How does one detector (A) know not to trigger when the other (distant) detector (B) does trigger, even though both are being hit by exactly the same wave? This is very hard to explain by classical quantum concepts. To make sense out of this paradox, Bohm proposed that inside each quantum was a “pilot wave” that hid within one of the split wavepackets and determined which detector was going to trigger. For many years physicists believed that pilot wave (hidden variable) theories were untenable, but later came to believe they were not so untenable. As a result, the use of pilot waves is a possible way of explaining the observations associated with the above experiment, just one of the many experiments that have a bearing on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox.

Quantum gravity theories are legitimate theories; the only problem is that so far no one has figured out how to test any of these theories. But there is always hope. The mischief arises when you take a theory that has no visible consequences and apply it as an explanation of a phenomenon such as consciousness. The post-modern physicists do this by stringing together a bunch of legitimate terms like beads on a string, piling conjecture on top of conjecture. It’s great entertainment, but is it science?

My fundamental objection to the use of quantum-gravity pilot waves to explain consciousness is this: the authors of these theories provide no mechanism to explain how the sub-sub-microscopic entities control what happens in the brain. What happens to pilot waves when a person dies? Do they disappear, or are they effective only when interacting with a brain that has a certain type of organization? And what were they doing during all the billions of years before human brains came on the scene? Are we to assume that the pilot waves cause consciousness only when they meet a brain with a certain kind of organization? Perhaps it is the organization that causes consciousness, and quantum-gravity pilot waves are simply a bit of poetry.

On another web page we find the breathless news of a new breakthrough in space propulsion. Listen carefully: ” . . . the quantum potential Q found in Bohm’s hidden variable version of quantum mechanics is able to transform ordinary protons into virtual ‘faster-than-light’ tachyons. This would permit the construction of a new type of rocket engine that would enable low-cost highly fuel-efficient practical interstellar flight for large manned spacecraft.” Using tachyons as the propellant, a large spaceship could be pushed to velocities approaching the speed of light, using a relatively small amount of energy.

My question is: how much energy does it take to generate a stream of tachyons? To provide a reasonable amount of thrust, the tachyon beam must have a certain amount of momentum. The relativistic relation between momentum and energy is surely the same for tachyons as it is for other particles. And the mass-energy of the spaceship approaches infinity as the ship approaches the speed of light. So from where do we get this high energy efficiency? (Besides, nobody has seen a tachyon yet.)

AFTERTHOUGHT: It occurs to me that Scarfatti’s Internet Science Education Project with all its scientific double talk makes perfect sense if we consider it to be parody. It is an education project in the sense that it forces the reader to examine what he knows and decide whether the writing makes sense or not. If the writing is intended to poke fun at the new-age, post-modern physics, it succeeds admirably. If it is really supposed to be serious, well, then . . . . Personally, I hate it when I can’t tell whether a writer is serious or not. It goes back to the time fifty years ago when I wrestled with John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, who presented a new loony idea in each issue of his magazine. I hated to think that such a talented, intelligent person might be a bit less than totally sane.

To save our sanity, true skepticism may be found on the Internet. Set your web searcher to look for “skepticism,” and you will find a large number of items, most of which I have not yet looked at. One useful item is an annotated bibliography of books on skepticism, with one-paragraph reviews. It is very expert and knowledgeable. There is also a list of skeptical journals.

CSICOP has its own homepage (http://www.csicop.org), and past issues of Skeptical Briefs and Skeptical Inquirer can be found therein. Congratulations to CSICOP for joining in the fun. (And now I can e-mail this article to Barry Karr. In about a thousand years I will have saved enough postage to pay for my computer.)

Related Information

• Followup article: Pseudoscience on the Internet