In my column in Skeptical Inquirer (November/December 1996), I dealt with the major cases of alleged spontaneous human combustion (SHC) reported in Larry E. Arnold’s book Ablaze! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion (1995). Although that selection revealed some of the pseudoscientific attitudes behind SHC, it perhaps did not go far enough to reveal just how silly some of the cases attributed to the imagined phenomenon are.

One such case in Ablaze! is that of a “baffling” and "abnormal fiery accident” that occurred “about fifteen miles southeast of Baltimore, in Arundel [sic] County, Maryland” (actually Anne Arundel County). The date is rather vaguely given as “early April 1953,” a curious way of expressing it, since the accident transpired on April 1 (Baltimore Sun, April 2, 1953). Arnold provides not a single source citation for the case other than to quote briefly the late Frank Edwards, one-time columnist for Fate magazine and author of several mystery-mongering books, like Stranger Than Science, notorious for their errors and exaggerations.

As Arnold relates the case:

Here, Maryland and State Police found Bernard J. Hess in his overturned car at the bottom of a twenty-foot embankment. The Baltimore man had a fractured skull. Therefore, the cause of death appeared obvious, the case routine. Then the coroner investigated. Routine quickly ceased. Although he found no trace of fire damage to the wreckage, the coroner discovered first- and second-degree burns covered two-thirds of the dead man’s fully clothed body. Police failed initially to notice Hess’s searing because . . . well, because his garments hadn’t burned!

Authorities concluded that Hess’s severely blistered skin would make it impossibly painfully [sic] for him to dress himself after being burned. Contemporary reports do not mention officials finding any electrical or fuel problems with the car that would have caused his injuries.

Arnold continues:

Did Hess fall victim to foul play at the scene, as unknown assailants stripped Hess naked, doused him with unidentified chemical accelerants and lit them, then re-dressed and drove their victim to a location remote from the crime to push him over the embankment in his car? No evidence supported this. Did Hess succumb to SHC?

As Frank Edwards remarked three years after this incident: “The burns which played a part in his death constitute another mystery which remains unsolved.”

Whereas Arnold insists that “contemporary reports” give no clue to the mystery, in fact newspaper accounts actually report the official medical examiner’s determination. First, however, the reader is invited to provide a plausible solution to the mystery. There are several potential hypotheses, each more credible than spontaneous human combustion, but you may ignore Arnold’s deliberately silly scenario of “unknown assailants” stripping, burning, and re-dressing the victim. Instead, simply consider the circumstances of an overturned car and the damaged skin coupled with unburned clothing. Please pause here to construct your hypothesis.

Finished? My own analysis began with the possibility that Mr. Hess had simply been scalded by hot water from a ruptured radiator — or from the heater core located in the dashboard. Apparently that was not the true solution, but it certainly represented a hypothetical solution. According to the Baltimore Sun of April 3, 1953, “Gasoline ‘burns’ on the body of Bernard Joseph Hess . . . had nothing to do with his death, an autopsy yesterday disclosed.” Dr. Russell S. Fisher, Baltimore’s chief medical examiner, stated that the 35-year-old Hess died of head injuries suffered when the convertible he was driving overturned on April 1. Dr. Fisher said that gasoline had soaked through the victim’s clothing to inflict what the Sun called “skin injuries similar to burns” caused by a reaction to the fuel. The Baltimore News-Post (April 2, 1953) cited an assistant medical examiner who provided a concurring opinion: “The examiner, Dr. Francis J. Januszeski, said gasoline is an ‘organic solvent,’ used in cleaning to remove grease, and has somewhat the same effect on flesh.”

Interestingly, Bernard “Whitey” Hess was a convicted forger who had been released on probation. He had used another man’s credentials to pose as a potential auto buyer and thus steal the convertible in which he died. His wife — then serving a sentence for embezzlement — was notified in jail of his death (Baltimore Sun, April 2 [evening ed.] and 3, 1953).

Obviously, the Hess case had nothing to do with spontaneous human combustion, as Larry Arnold should have realized. Arnold, who is not a physicist but a Pennsylvania school bus driver, had no justification for asking ominously, “Did Hess succumb to SHC?” The unburned clothing should have led any sensible investigator to one of the possibilities limited by that fact: for example, that Hess had been burned previously, or his skin injuries were caused by steam or hot water, chemical liquids or vapors, or some type of radiation (possibly even extreme sunburn through loosely woven clothing). In any event, Arnold could have done as I did and sought out the newspaper accounts of the day. It would have saved him from yet another folly.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my co-workers Vance Vigrass, Dana Walpole, and Etienne Ríos for their helpful suggestions and discussions.

References

• Arnold, Larry. 1995. Ablaze! The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion. New York: M. Evans and Company, 182-183.
• Baltimore News-Post. 1953. Mystery burns caused by gasoline, doctor reports. April 2 (B).
• Baltimore Sun. 1953. Man hurt in auto crash dies here. April 2.
• Baltimore Sun. 1953. Mysterious death of forger probed. April 2, evening edition.
• Baltimore Sun. 1953. “Burns” on the body of forger ruled out as cause of death. April 3.

These days, alternative therapies and claims of the paranormal are commonly defended by the same line of argument: “We don’t know the mechanism, but that doesn't matter as long as it works.” It seems like a call for simple tolerance in the face of incomplete knowledge. And in the case of aspirin, it was just that. It may seem curmudgeonly to insist that results alone are not enough, and that attention needs to be paid to the mechanism. Well, I guess that makes me a curmudgeon.

In the first place, it has always struck me as deeply suspicious that someone would herald the existence of a new and surprising phenomenon, and then just walk away from it, and claim to have no interest in how it works. If you had been the discoverer of the totally unexpected phenomenon of X-rays, would you have shrugged off the whole thing and washed your hands of any further involvement?

Would this not suggest that you not only had done little in the way of serious investigation yourself, but that you might have some curious disinclination to encourage investigation by others? As James Alcock reminded us in Parapsychology: Science or Magic? (Pergamon, 1981), “within two months of his discovery of X-rays, Roentgen had identified seventeen of their major properties.” Now that’s more like it.

It becomes impossible to take seriously any of the astrologers (including Gauquelin and his “astrobiology”) when you realize that not one of them appears to have the slightest interest in discovering a possible mechanism. The nearest thing we ever get is analogy, not theory. (“Gravity can act across space, can’t it? Well then.”)

“Events that ‘cannot happen’ according to received wisdom rarely gain respectability by a simple accumulation of evidence for their occurrence,” writes Stephen Jay Gould; “they require a mechanism to explain how they can happen.” The lack of any curiosity about mechanism alerts us to the likelihood that someone prefers grinding axes to grinding out experimental procedures. It increases our respect for the founder of evolution that in the early stages he was profoundly disturbed by his inability to answer the question how. In Gould’s words: “Darwin returned to London without an evolutionary theory. He suspected the truth of evolution, but had no mechanism to explain it.”

There is a general belief that until Wegener came along, scientists were compulsively blind to the obvious possibility of a fit between the continents of Africa and America. In fact, there was never any doubt about the shapes and what they might mean. What was lacking was any conceivable mechanism for pushing entire continents across the surface of the globe. But as soon as plate tectonics provided a causal mechanism, the theory of continental drift took off. As Philip Kitcher has pointed out, geologists “do not respond to a particular earthquake by stating some ‘principle of plates'.”

Faced with a firm believer in the existence of witches, you are unlikely to be offered a simple demonstration of a woman turning into a toad. But in view of the enormity of the claim, it would be fair to ask how. Since believers will never have personally witnessed this transformation either, they should at least be willing to explain why they find the mechanism plausible.

Notice that in practical matters of life and death, no one disputes that the question how is vital. If you were accused of murder, it would scarcely do for the prosecution to simply claim that you “obviously” did it. With no satisfactory answer to how, the case would be at an end.

On the night of September 27, this year, certain communities in various parts of the world beat gongs and tom-toms to restore the light of the moon after the eclipse. You may have noticed that this procedure was entirely successful. If you disagree, then you will have relied on asking yourself the simple but powerful question: How?

Those whose professional life revolves around the assessment of psychic events are especially prone to dismiss the importance of mechanism and to show little interest in searching for it. As statistician Chris Scott once wrote, this “encourages a further suspicion: that parapsychologists are, by motivation, not problem-solvers, but mystery-mongers.”

Psychoanalysts have a great deal to answer for in this regard. Psychologist Stuart Sutherland (in Breakdown) has reminded us of “all the poor wretches who have endured to no purpose the pain of analysis, and the fact that the mystique of analysis may have prevented psychologists from attempting to develop more effective procedures for dealing with mental illness . . . . Most hospitals in both Great Britain and North America can instance cases of women who were treated for frigidity by analysts, only to discover eventually that they had a vaginal lesion; or of men who underwent the pain and expense of an analysis to cure depression or agitation, only to discover that their thyroid glands were not functioning properly.”

I will concede only this much: if the claimed results really occur, then (and only then) might you be given a temporary benefit of the doubt; but even so, only on the assumption that you will waste no time in getting on with the task of finding out how the thing works. Only then, as in the case of aspirin, can you begin amending and refining and improving the outcome. In cases where there are no confirmed results of predictions in the first place, even the search for a mechanism is a waste of time.

On this page we learn of an exposition to be held at Philadelphia’s newest basketball arena, the Corestates Center, displaying dozens of new inventions. This show was scheduled for September 23.

Numerous marvels were promised: a 318 Chrysler engine, modified to run on heat taken directly from the air; a heat system that can produce “free electricity” from the air; an engine cycle that lifts 250 pounds a foot high using the air pressure in the room; a gravitational torque intensifier that intensifies energy from the earth’s gravitation; and dozens of other items guaranteed to give you something for nothing. The feature presentation is a technology that can totally neutralize all radioactive nuclear waste and make it harmless in a matter of seconds. Professor Yull Brown is advertised as the most important man in the entire world.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend this fascinating exhibit. Apparently, neither were the local newspapers, because I saw nothing in the news sections following the announced date. How sad that we saw no reports in the papers of inventions that will solve our impending energy crisis. How sad that we saw no report of a new and successful perpetual motion machine of the second kind.

We are all familiar with perpetual motion devices of the first kind. These are the commonplace machines that produce energy out of nothing, violating the first law of thermodynamics. This law, of course, is nothing more than conservation of energy as applied to heat engines. The second law of thermodynamics is less well known. This law tells us that it is impossible to withdraw heat from a reservoir (a gas, a liquid, or a solid) at a single temperature and convert it into mechanical energy (unless the heat travels downhill, so to speak). A heat engine always needs a hot place (a source, from which heat is extracted) and a cold place (a sink, to which exhaust heat goes). A device which claims to extract heat out of the air or the ocean (without a sink, or without supplying external energy) is a perpetual motion machine of the second kind.

Thus, the Better World Technology exhibit is no more than an attempt to sell the public devices which have been tried without success for many years — in some cases, for hundreds of years. The only people who will make money out of this event will be the sponsors who are able to induce the gullible and ignorant to invest money in their schemes.

The sad thing is that I have been watching inventions like this come and go for the past sixty years, since I left the childish interests of high school and embarked upon the professionalism of college. Not once during that time has somebody gotten a Nobel prize for a machine that made energy out of nothing, or for a machine that could collect the heat of the monster ocean. But my skepticism concerning these endeavors is not founded on the failure of individual machines. I know that none of these machines can possibly work because they violate fundamental laws of nature.

Addendum: Since writing the above, I have received a copy of Phactum, the newsletter of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT). Tom Napier, an electronics engineer and devotee of critical thinking, writes that he and some other skeptics attended the above assembly and found themselves surrounded by about 3,000 true believers listening to talks about the wonderful inventions just described. The level of technical knowledge displayed by the speakers was what you might expect from somebody who had flunked thermodynamics in school. Discussion of a heat pump showed an inventor who thought that if you used one unit of electrical energy to pump six units of heat energy from one place to another, you were generating five units of energy. With that kind of logic, you could turn your air conditioner into a generator. But the audience ate it up.

From CSICOP’s Executive Director Barry Karr come two clippings. One, from Business Week (September 30, 1996), tells us of an amazing discovery made by a Russian scientist working in Finland. The scientist, Eugene Podkletnov, has, we are told, been doing research on high temperature superconductivity at the Tampere University of Technology. (High temperature superconductivity is exhibited by certain materials at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, which is quite a bit higher than the temperature of liquid helium.) Cooling a ceramic disk to -334°F, he “zaps it with an electromagnetic field that causes it to spin.” (Not mentioned is the fact that the disk must be levitated in a vertical magnetic field.) At an angular velocity of 3,000 rpm anything placed above the disk loses about 2% of its weight, regardless of what kind of material it is. This is taken as evidence of antigravity.

Another article, in the New Scientist (September 21, 1996), reports pretty much the same discovery, except that this time the superconductor is in the form of a ring, spinning at 5,000 rpm. This time we are told that the ring is suspended in a magnetic field. We are also told that anything placed above the ring has its weight reduced by “up to 2%.” Both articles agree that a paper was submitted to the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, published by the British Institute of Physics, and was scheduled to be published in the October issue. It is difficult to determine what happened subsequently. Business Week claims that Podkletnov withdrew the paper from publication after one of his coauthors complained that he was no longer connected with the project. Cries of fraud were raised. New Scientist, on the other hand, says that the paper was withdrawn after Tampere University issued a statement denying all knowledge of antigravity research. Following which Petri Vuorinen, the supposed coauthor, issued a statement denying he had ever worked on antigravity research.

What is one to believe?

Hoping to obtain more information, I jumped into my webcrawler and typed in the keyword “Podkletnov.” No hits were recorded. (A hit is a positive response when you are looking for a keyword on the Internet.) I then cleverly thought of trying “antigravity.” Aha! That was the secret. This keyword gave me sixty-eight hits, although at least two of them were problematical, with titles of “Guide to Classical Indian” and “Jazz Fusion.” My eyes gave out before I reached the end of the text, but it is possible that one of the jazz groups mentioned includes the word “antigravity” in its name. All I learned from this exercise is that there are a lot of people out there seriously discussing antigravity (as well as perpetual motion, UFOs, and other topics) as a real possibility.

Finally, under a pile of papers, I unearthed a printout labeled “The Institute for New Energy,” which I had a few weeks ago searched out for some forgotten reason. This missive lists for its keywords: New Energy, Free Energy, Cold Fusion, Space Energy, Zero Point Energy, Aether, Ether, Antigravity, and Levitation, among others. Below the keywords are listed several dozen abstracts of articles on these topics for the edification of that part of the population that does not think professional scientists know what they are talking about. Among these is an article on the Podkletnov work published in the Sunday Telegraph, September 1, 1996. This tells us nothing new except for the formula of the superconducting material used.

So there we are. Lots of fuss and fury. Strange that for a topic of such importance there has been no mention in the New York Times or in Science. But what do we expect? The stuffy mainstream scientists have always been hostile to new and original ideas. Perhaps in my next column I will unearth more goodies from the Internet. It is a never-ending source of insanity.

One thing the antigravity folk have not noticed is that their discovery gives them a perpetual motion device as well as a means for space travel. Yes, it gives us free energy, in unlimited quantities. For it is only necessary to put a wheel, like a Ferris wheel, over the superconducting disk (or coil). If you locate it so that half the wheel is over the disk and half is to the side, then half the wheel will be lighter than the other half. Then this will truly be an unbalanced wheel and will turn endlessly, driving a generator and giving an endless source of mechanical or electrical energy, which, of course, is impossible.

I knew about this disproof of antigravity sixty years ago when I was a voracious science fiction reader. We loved to disprove the gravity shield H. G. Wells used in First Men in the Moon. In this story the intrepid space travelers used a material called “cavorite” to block the force of gravity from their ship, which, as I have shown above, is impossible. Science fiction writers never worry about what is possible or impossible. But scientists do.

Once again we use an established law of nature (conservation of energy) to argue against a proposed antigravity scheme. (We don’t have to know anything about gravity to use conservation of energy.) And once again we return to my fundamental theme: once a conservation law has been established with a high degree of accuracy, it is not going to be overthrown, no matter how many malcontents out there may rail against the stuffy establishment. I've seen this going on for over sixty years, and I don’t expect it to change. I admit it would be fun to know in detail just how Podkletnov got his 2% reduction in weight. Was it an error in measurement? Was it an environmental effect such as air currents or electrostatic fields? Was it a plain hoax? But I don’t have the time or energy to go to Finland to find out.

Related Information

• KeelyNet — “Free Energy - Gravity Control - Electronic Health”
• Free Energy Demo in Philadelphia
• The Institute for New Energy

Everything you could ever want to know about alternative healthcare can be found in this one handy little book. Well, not exactly. But, after all, this is a dictionary, not an encyclopedia.

The Dictionary of Metaphysical Healthcare, by Jack Raso, a registered dietitian with a master’s degree in health sciences, contains entries for more alternative/paranormal health “remedies” than you can shake a stick at, although the author has inadvertently omitted “stick-shaking” from his listings. Reading the definitions of the myriad included entries, I would think that “stick shaking” would be at least as effective as most, and probably more effective than many.

Seven years in the making, this dictionary contains more than one thousand straightforward, non-judgmental definitions of therapies dubbed to be “closer to vaudeville than to science” in a previous review by Marvin J. Schissel, D.D.S. During my initial flip through the dictionary, I was surprised to find that chelation therapy, colonic irrigation, and other such commonly employed “cures” are not included among the listings for “Starlink,” “Spirit surgery,” “past-life therapy,” and the like. I then found, in the introduction, the author’s explanation: This book, unlike most on the subject. concentrates on “unnaturalistic” therapies — those that are “out of joint with the worldview that nature as science maps it is all there is and covers only peripherally medical alternativism’s naturalistic minority, which encompasses such methods as chelation therapy and colonic irrigation. The dictionary’s main section, in fact, is titled “Unnaturalistic Methods”.

Should you ever develop an inexplicable desire to undergo a round of “marma therapy” (or perhaps “Marma Chikitsa” for the more adventurous), this is an excellent reference to turn to, not simply for its concise yet authoritative definitions, but also for its topic-by topic bibliography. And the bibliography’s selections are not what one might expect from a book written by a board member of the National Council Against Health Fraud. No, indeed. From what I can see (and I acknowledge that my eyesight is not what it once was, since I discontinued my prophylactic “image magick” treatments), these consist purely of pro-alternative sources of what the author refers to as “information, misinformation, and disinformation.”

But don’t despair. A recommended reading list can be found on the book’s last page. The introduction also makes quite clear the author’s relative views of “science-oriented” versus “alternative” healthcare.

The Chi Nei Tsang II method?

One of the dictionary’s entries offers hope of settling once and for all the debate between evolution and creationism. The Chi Nei Tsang II method (from Tahiland) posits “at least ten kinds of bodily ‘wind’ (flatus), including the “sick or evil wind,'” which its practitioners can presumably differentiate between with olfactory alacrity. If this doesn't prove that humans and canines evolved from a common ancestor, I don’t know what could.

And perhaps many of our readers might benefit from the “grape cure” for “sex problems”: “By the magical purification of the blood the nerves are stabilized, self-control is established and our God-given heritage of sense and desire is transmitted into divine creative power.” I have had some modest experience with the power of the grape, and at first glance was considering giving this juicy therapy a shot, despite my already legendary powers of self-control and ample supply of divine creative power. But, alas, the dictionary’s disillusioning definition makes clear that fermentation is not part of this therapy’s equation.