Doubting that I could withstand this ordeal alone, and not wanting to renege on a promise, I invited Tad S. Clements, a member of our group and a retired professor of philosophy, to accompany me. The offer of a free lunch was enough to entice him to join me in this endeavor. While driving to the school, the two of us racked our brains as to what to tell the assembled hordes. A learned discussion on the differences between Stratonician and Cartesian skepticism didn’t seem quite appropriate. I encouraged Tad to speak first, but he demurred. As president of the group, he strenuously argued, I had a moral responsibility to precede him. I began to question the wisdom of inviting a professor of ethics along.

Entering the library, where flashbacks to my own parochial education assaulted me, I noticed several books by Charles Fort and Erich von Daniken on the shelves. Not a good omen. As the first study group marched sullenly in, I began to understand what actors mean by the concept of “flop sweat.” Cursing Tad under my breath for his refusal to be first in the firing squad, I wondered what I could possibly talk about that would interest these young men and get them to understand the importance of skepticism. And then, like a gift from heaven — secularly speaking of course — it came to me: Tell them about urban legends!

Urban legends are stories passed along as true — such as the “spider in the bubble gum” or “the vanishing hitchhiker,” which, while usually quite entertaining or frightening, turn out to have no basis in fact. As Jan Harold Brunvand points out in his many books collecting these legends, when you try to verify them, the usual response is that “they happened to a friend of a friend.” Such “FOAFs” never seem to have a definite name or other identifying features when you wish to track them down.

“How many of you saw the movie Three Men and a Baby?” I asked the students. Most of their hands went up. “Has anyone heard anything unusual about it?” Indeed they had. As the story goes, in one scene in the film, you can see the ghostly image of a young man hovering in the background. It was rumored to be the spirit of a young boy who had been killed years before in the home the movie was filmed in. Apparently he must have been a member of Screen Actors Guild as well.

Tad, sensing that we were not going to be pummeled with flying projectiles, got into the act. “What might you do to investigate this claim?” he queried. He was on to my scheme — get the kids to come up with their own version of Occam’s Razor: What might be the simplest explanation for this ghostly apparition? After some vigorous give-and-take, I explained to them that a few skeptics had decided to see what this really was. They discovered, by freeze-framing the video, that it was the blurry background image of a manikin that had been featured earlier in the film. Also, it couldn’t have been the ghost of a former inhabitant of the home, since the scene was filmed on a sound stage. The legend was interesting, but so was discovering the truth behind it.

The students came up with other urban legends they were familiar with, and we discussed what sort of support would be needed to verify them. Tad and I then ended with a few basic pointers on the scientific method and how it can be applied to paranormal claims. We chanted together the skeptics’ mantra: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The students seemed, for the most part, genuinely interested — we could at least hold their attention for ten minutes, and most importantly, we had made them active participants in the discussion. I highly recommend this approach to any of you who might find yourself in a similar situation.

Tad and I heaved a sigh of relief that we'd escaped our ordeal. To show her appreciation, the librarian led us to the school cafeteria, where she bought each of us lunch. Come to think of it, maybe we didn’t escape unscathed after all — I'd repressed the memories of how awful such meals can be. It reminds me of the story of the rat in the fried chicken . . .

In February the Belgian government confirmed that for this case “paranormal” leads are being examined by the police. The Disaster Victim Identification Team of the Belgian Gendarmerie has received the order to collect all tips coming from psychics.

This news created some commotion, since it is the first time in Belgian history that psychics have been used for official purposes. (The professions of “psychic” and “clairvoyant” are theoretically prohibited in Belgium, although no one is ever prosecuted.) A newspaper sarcastically asked if the Gendarmerie should also burn candles or make a pilgrimage to Lourdes. One senator said that science is discredited by taking psychics seriously. A well-known, free-thinking scholar compared this mixing of the rational and the irrational to a violation of the separation between church and state.

Belgian Justice Minister Stefaan De Clerck tried to moderate the news. He emphasized that information coming from psychics should always be considered supplementary, never decisive. Rumors that one or two psychics were selected as judicial experts were denied by De Clerck. But the police and the parents of the children received hundreds of tips from psychics, and two university professors, presented as “academic authorities concerning hypnosis and parapsychology,” were commissioned to “filter” the reliability of those tips.

It is not clear what criteria will be used to “filter” the tips. One of the two “authorities” told the press that he will not take into consideration psychics who ask for big money or who cannot tell more about the missing children than what one can find in the newspapers. This “authority” is Jean Dierkens, emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Mons. For more than twenty years, Dierkens has represented himself as an expert in parapsychology. He claims to have conducted successful experiments in which tables were moved by spirits in his house. The only critical remark I have ever heard him make is that he is hesitant about the value of astrology.

Minister De Clerck also confessed that the Belgian Gendarmerie “has not had much experience with psychics” but that a number of well-known foreign police forces, like the FBI, Scotland Yard, and the Dutch criminal police, have used the services of psychics. The Gendarmerie even stated that Scotland Yard has psychics as official experts. Asked for a reaction, the British skeptic Mike Hutchinson said that “Scotland Yard doesn't have official [psychic] experts” and that “it is most unlikely that any police force has official psychics, although psychics do claim that this is the case.” The reference to the Dutch police seems to be to an article about missing persons and psychics published in a Dutch scientific police review. While this critical paper states explicitly that “the practical informative value of paranormal statements made by psychics can be neglected,” it recommends verification of tips coming from a psychic if the family of a missing person requests it.

It seems indeed that the judicial authorities were embarrassed by the fact that the parents of the missing children were visited by numerous psychics. Since the authorities were (rightly) criticized for not following all the possible leads to the children, they did not want to neglect the psychic tips completely. But each time a child was found, it was obvious that the information coming from psychics was completely worthless. The mother of Julie Lejeune confessed she consulted psychics, fortunetellers, and dowsers by her own initiative. Not one of them came close to identifying the place where Julie was incarcerated for months and where she was buried after she died of starvation. The father of An Marchal, another girl who was kidnapped and assassinated together with friend Eefje, said he was visited by at least eighty psychics. “They saw An and Eefje everywhere in the world, but never in the place where they were finally found.”

Belgian skeptics were never consulted about the “filtering” of paranormal tips — neither about the criteria used in this filtering nor the “authorities” doing the filtering. And it is not just the government that seems to be uncritical in this case. Marc et Corine, a well-known private organization for tracing missing children that has done very good work, warned in its magazine against tips from psychics but published at the same time a very positive article about dowsing.

Many of the practices that one can witness daily in Taiwan, such as the burning of “ghost money” and “god money,” are a mix of folk beliefs and religion. Like our Halloween, there is a day during “ghost month” in the fall in which people put out offerings of food and drink for ghostly hellions on little tables out side their houses.

During the Dragon Boat Festival, held in the late spring, there is usually an egg-balancing contest, but given the following favorable conditions, one wonders how anyone can lose: On that day, “the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar, the orbits of the sun moon and earth are perfectly lined up. The interaction of the gravitational forces of the three heavenly bodies lends eggs the unique power of being able to stand up on end without any external support” (Tung 1996a).

As in the West, many Chinese look to the stars for guidance in their lives. Asian astrology, unlike its Western counterpart, uses a twelve-year cycle of signs, based on their own pictures in the sky. Hence the return of the Year of the Ox. But this is only part of the information the compleat fortuneteller uses. Seated beside little tables in the arcades or in the underground passageways, Chinese soothsayers combine one’s star sign with blood type as well as palm and face reading to reveal the future.

Although I rarely see anyone other than teenage girls at the tables, many Chinese do follow the list of astrologically derived dos and don’ts in the equivalent of a farmer’s almanac, found in most businesses and homes. In addition to days for planting and harvesting, some days are said to be good for travel, others for cutting your nails! One of two English-language papers, The China Post, even runs a regular column entitled “Science and Myth” to explain the good and bad-omened days.

True believers here also have to make sure their lives are in line with the wind and water, a practice called “feng-shui” in Chinese. At first glance, feng-shui is a commonsense alignment of structures to conform to the shape of the land, an idea shared by any sensible architect in a land fraught with typhoons and torrential rains. Actually, however, as Stored (1994) and Bruun (1996) point out, it is more of a mystical belief in cosmic harmony. This Chinese geomancy can “explain” one’s good or bad fortune, as well as affect the choice of a site for a new building or a grave. While Tomb Sweeping Day in April is an obvious instance of the intermixing of custom and belief, the desire for south-facing or slightly angled entrances to businesses reflects the combination more subtly. A friend back from the U.S. tells me that a feng-shui expert, or geomancer, was called in to decide the position of a house in Vermont last year (Yen 1996).

Hand in hand with concern over the future and fate is the preoccupation with good health and longevity. Good diet plays its role toward those ends, but the rationale given for consuming certain animal products puts a new twist into the old snake oil. Most worrisome is the use of parts of endangered species, based on the notion that elixirs made of, say, tiger penis or rhino horn will enhance a man’s virility and hence prolong life (Wong 1995). In a slightly different vein, a family reaped the deadly reward of believing that the meat of toads would have “therapeutic effects” when a two-year-old boy died and other family members got seriously ill from eating mom’s toad soup (China Post 1996b). Another man “frequently” told his neighbor that he was drinking motor oil because it “contained a secret medical remedy to cure his liver-related diseases” (China Post 1996a). A strong Chinese belief in noninterference with the private lives of neighbors may have played a role in their inaction as the sixty-four-year-old man finally drank himself to death.

As far as I can tell, people in the Occident aren’t bullish on Asian astrology, nor do I suspect toad soup will be on the menu at Ye Olde Macrobiotic Shoppe any time soon. But acupuncture, Chinese herbal elixirs, and now feng-shui have made their way to many lands outside the Orient. Can the old Chinese almanac be far behind?

Note

1. Pronounced “chee-gong,” Storey (1994, 23) calls it a kind of faith healing; Zhu and Penny (1994) report a “resurgence” on the mainland.

References

• Alcock, J., et al. 1988. Testing psi claims in China: Visit by a CSICOP delegation. Skeptical Inquirer 12 (4), Summer: 364-75.
• Basser, S. 1994. Acupuncture: The facts. Rocky Mountain Skeptic 11 (5), January/ February: 1, 4,6-7, 10-12,15.
• Beyerstein, B. L., and W. Sampson. 1996. Traditional medicine and pseudoscience in China: A report of the second CSICOP delegation (Part 1). Skeptical Inquirer 20 (4), July/August: 18-26.
• Bruun, O. 1996. The fengshui resurgence in China: Conflicting cosmologies between state and peasantry. The China Journal, no.36, July. China Post 1996a. Man dies from drinking lubricant as tonic. June 14, n.p.
• China Post 1996b. Toddler dies, family ill from toad soup. July 31, p. 16.
• Holmes, T. 1994. Chee’s sandwich, etc. Taiwan Skeptics, September: 1-2.
• Huston, P. 1995. China, chi, and chicanery. Skeptical Inquirer 19 (5), September/ October: 38-42, 58.