Do we care what's true? Does it matter?

… where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise

wrote the poet Thomas Gray. But is it? Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better:

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

It's disheartening to discover government corruption and incompetence, for example; but is it better not to know about it? Whose interest does ignorance serve? If we humans bear, say, hereditary propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn't self-knowledge the only antidote? If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

In The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, as so many before and after, decries the “unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man” brought about by the scientific revolution. Nietzsche mourns the loss of “man's belief in his dignity, his uniqueness, his irreplaceability in the scheme of existence.” For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Which attitude is better geared for our long-term survival? Which gives us more leverage on our future? And if our naive self-confidence is a little undermined in the process, is that altogether such a loss? Is there not cause to welcome it as a maturing and character-building experience?

To discover that the universe is some 8 to 15 billion and not 6 to 12 thousand years old¹ improves our appreciation of its sweep and grandeur; to entertain the notion that we are a particularly complex arrangement of atoms, and not some breath of divinity, at the very least enhances our respect for atoms; to discover, as now seems probable, that our planet is one of billions of other worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy and that our galaxy is one of billions more, majestically expands the arena of what is possible; to find that our ancestors were also the ancestors of apes ties us to the rest of life and makes possible important—if occasionally rueful—reflections on human nature.

Plainly there is no way back. Like it or not, we are stuck with science. We had better make the best of it. When we finally come to terms with it and fully recognize its beauty and its power, we will find, in spiritual as well as in practical matters, that we have made a bargain strongly in our favor. But superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way, distracting us, providing easy answers, dodging skeptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the experience, making us routine and comfortable practitioners as well as victims of credulity. Yes, the world would be a more interesting place if there were UFOs lurking in the deep waters off Bermuda and eating ships and planes, or if dead people could take control of our hands and write us messages. It would be fascinating if adolescents were able to make telephone handsets rocket off their cradles just by thinking at them, or if our dreams could, more often than can be explained by chance and our knowledge of the world, accurately foretell the future.

These are all instances of pseudoscience. They purport to use the methods and findings of science, while in fact they are faithless to its nature—often because they are based on insufficient evidence or because they ignore clues that point the other way. They ripple with gullibility. With the uninformed cooperation (and often the cynical connivance) of newspapers, magazines, book publishers, radio, television, movie producers, and the like, such ideas are easily and widely available. Far more difficult to come upon are the alternative, more challenging, and even more dazzling findings of science.

Pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science because distracting confrontations with reality—where we cannot control the outcome of the comparison—are more readily avoided. The standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed. In part for these same reasons, it is much easier to present pseudoscience to the general public than science. But this isn't enough to explain its popularity.

Naturally people try various belief systems on for size, to see if they help. And if we're desperate enough, we become all too willing to abandon what may be perceived as the heavy burden of skepticism. Pseudoscience speaks to powerful emotional needs that science often leaves unfulfilled. It caters to fantasies about personal powers we lack and long for (like those attributed to comic book superheroes today, and earlier, to the gods). In some of its manifestations, it offers satisfaction of spiritual hungers, cures for disease, promises that death is not the end. It reassures us of our cosmic centrality and importance. It vouchsafes that we are hooked up with, tied to, the universe.² Sometimes it's a kind of halfway house between old religion and new science, mistrusted by both.

At the heart of some pseudoscience (and some religion also, New Age and Old) is the idea that wishing makes it so. How satisfying it would be, as in folklore and children's stories, to fulfill our heart's desire just by wishing. How seductive this notion is, especially when compared with the hard work and good luck usually required to achieve our hopes. The enchanted fish or the genie from the lamp will grant us three wishes—anything we want except more wishes. Who has not pondered—just to be on the safe side, just in case we ever come upon and accidentally rub an old, squat brass oil lamp—what to ask for?

I remember, from childhood comic strips and books, a top-hatted, mustachioed magician who brandished an ebony walking stick. His name was Zatara. He could make anything happen, anything at all. How did he do it? Easy. He uttered his commands backwards. So if he wanted a million dollars, he would say “srallod noillim a em evig.” That's all there was to it. It was something like prayer, but much surer of results.

I spent a lot of time at age eight experimenting in this vein, commanding stones to levitate: “esir, enots.” It never worked. I blamed my pronunciation.

Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood—except that the language breaks down here. If you've never heard of science (to say nothing of how it works), you can hardly be aware you're embracing pseudoscience. You're simply thinking in one of the ways that humans always have. Religions are often the state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artifact from times long gone. In some countries nearly everyone believes in astrology and precognition, including government leaders. But this is not simply drummed into them by religion; it is drawn out of the enveloping culture in which everyone is comfortable with these practices, and affirming testimonials are everywhere.

Most of the case histories I will relate are American—because these are the cases I know best, not because pseudoscience and mysticism are more prominent in the United States than elsewhere. But the psychic spoonbender and extraterrestrial channeler Uri Geller hails from Israel. As tensions rise between Algerian secularists and Moslem fundamentalists, more and more people are discreetly consulting the country's 10,000 soothsayers and clairvoyants (about half of whom operate with a license from the government). High French officials, including a former president of France, arranged for millions of dollars to be invested in a scam (the Elf-Aquitaine scandal) to find new petroleum reserves from the air. In Germany, there is concern about carcinogenic “Earth rays” undetectable by science; they can be sensed only by experienced dowsers brandishing forked sticks. “Psychic surgery” flourishes in the Philippines. Ghosts are something of a national obsession in Britain. Since World War II, Japan has spawned enormous numbers of new religions featuring the supernatural. An estimated 100,000 fortunetellers flourish in Japan; the clientele are mainly young women. Aum Shinrikyo, a sect thought to be involved in the release of the nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo subway system in March 1995, features levitation, faith healing, and ESP among its main tenets. Followers, at a high price, drank the “miracle pond” water—from the bath of Asaraha, their leader. In Thailand, diseases are treated with pills manufactured from pulverized sacred Scripture. “Witches” are today being burned in South Africa. Australian peace-keeping forces in Haiti rescue a woman tied to a tree; she is accused of flying from rooftop to rooftop, and sucking the blood of children. Astrology is rife in India, geomancy widespread in China.

Perhaps the most successful recent global pseudoscience—by many criteria, already a religion—is the Hindu doctrine of transcendental meditation (TM). The soporific homilies of its founder and spiritual leader, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, can be seen on television. Seated in the yogi position, his white hair here and there flecked with black, surrounded by garlands and floral offerings, he has a look. One day while channel surfing we came upon this visage. “You know who that is?” asked our four-year-old son. “God.” The worldwide TM organization has an estimated valuation of 3 billion. For a fee they promise through meditation to be able to walk you through walls, to make you invisible, to enable you to fly. By thinking in unison they have, they say, diminished the crime rate in Washington, D.C., and caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, among other secular miracles. Not one smattering of real evidence has been offered for any such claims. TM sells folk medicine, runs trading companies, medical clinics and “research” universities, and has unsuccessfully entered politics. In its oddly charismatic leader, its promise of community, and the offer of magical powers in exchange for money and fervent belief, it is typical of many pseudosciences marketed for sacerdotal export.

At each relinquishing of civil controls and scientific education another little spun in pseudoscience occurs. Leon Trotsky described it for Germany on the eve of the Hider takeover (but in a description that might equally have applied to the Soviet Union of 1933):

Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives along side the twentieth century the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms. . . . Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!

Russia is an instructive case. Under the tsars, religious superstition was encouraged, but scientific and skeptical thinking—except by a few tame scientists—was ruthlessly expunged. Under Communism, both religion and pseudoscience were systematically suppressed—except for the superstition of the state ideological religion. It was advertised as scientific, but fell as far short of this ideal as the most unself-critical mystery cult. Critical thinking—except by scientists in hermetically sealed compartments of knowledge—was recognized as dangerous, was not taught in the schools, and was punished where expressed. As a result, post-Communism, many Russians view science with suspicion. When the lid was lifted, as was also true of virulent ethnic hatreds, what had all along been bubbling subsurface was exposed to view. The region is now awash in UFOs, poltergeists, faith healers, quack medicines, magic waters, and old-rime superstition. A stunning decline in life expectancy, increasing infant mortality, rampant epidemic disease, subminimal medical standards, and ignorance of preventative medicine all work to raise the threshold at which skepticism is triggered in an increasingly desperate population. As I write, the electorally most popular member of the Duma, a leading supporter of the ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is one Anatoly Kashpirovsky—a faith healer who remotely cures diseases ranging from hernias to AIDS by glaring at you out of your television set. His face starts stopped clocks.

A somewhat analogous situation exists in China. After the death of Mao Zedong and the gradual emergence of a market economy, UFOs, channeling, and other examples of Western pseudoscience emerged, along with such ancient Chinese practices as ancestor worship, astrology, and fortune telling—especially that version that involves throwing yarrow sticks and working through the hoary tetragrams of the I Ching. The government newspaper lamented that “the superstition of feudal ideology is reviving in our countryside.” It was (and remains) a rural, not primarily an urban, affliction.

Individuals with “special powers” gained enormous followings. They could, they said, project Qi, the “energy field of the universe,” out of their bodies to change the molecular structure of a chemical 2000 kilometers away, to communicate with aliens, to cure diseases. Some patients died under the ministrations of one of these “masters of Qi Gong” who was arrested and convicted in 1993. Wang Hongcheng, an amateur chemist, claimed to have synthesized a liquid, small amounts of which, when added to water, would convert it to gasoline or the equivalent. For a time he was funded by the army and the secret police, but when his invention was found to be a scam he was arrested and imprisoned. Naturally the story spread that his misfortune resulted not from fraud, but from his unwillingness to reveal his “secret formula” to the government. (Similar stories have circulated in America for decades, usually with the government role replaced by a major oil or auto company.) Asian rhinos are being driven to extinction because their horns, when pulverized, are said to prevent impotence; the market encompasses all of East Asia.

The government of China and the Chinese Communist Party were alarmed by certain of these developments. On December 5, 1994, they issued a joint proclamation that read in part:

[P]ublic education in science has been withering in recent years. At the same time, activities of superstition and ignorance have been growing, and anti-science and pseudoscience cases have become frequent. Therefore, effective measures must be applied as soon as possible to strengthen public education in science. The level of public education in science and technology is an important sign of the national scientific accomplishment. It is a matter of overall importance in economic development, scientific advance, and the progress of society. We must be attentive and implement such public education as part of the strategy to modernize our socialist country and to make our nation powerful and prosperous. Ignorance is never socialist, nor is poverty.

So pseudoscience in America is part of a global trend. Its causes, dangers, diagnosis, and treatment are likely to be similar everywhere. Here, psychics ply their wares on extended television commercials, personally endorsed by entertainers. They have their own channel, the “Psychic Friends Network”; a million people a year sign on and use such guidance in their everyday lives. For the CEOs of major corporations, for financial analysts, for lawyers and bankers there is a species of astrologer/soothsayer/ psychic ready to advise on any matter. “If people knew how many people, especially the very rich and powerful ones, went to psychics, their jaws would drop through the floor,” says a psychic from Cleveland, Ohio. Royalty has traditionally been vulnerable to psychic frauds. In ancient China and Rome astrology was the exclusive property of the emperor; any private use of this potent art was considered a capital offense. Emerging from a particularly credulous Southern California culture, Nancy and Ronald Reagan relied on an astrologer in private and public matters—unknown to the voting public. Some portion of the decision-making that influences the future of our civilization is plainly in the hands of charlatans. If anything, the practice is comparatively muted in America; its venue is worldwide.

As amusing as some of pseudoscience may seem, as confident as we may be that we would never be so gullible as to be swept up by such a doctrine, we know it's happening all around us. Transcendental Meditation and Aum Shinrikyo seem to have attracted a large number of accomplished people, some with advanced degrees in physics or engineering. These are not doctrines for nitwits. Something else is going on.

What's more, no one interested in what religions are and how they begin can ignore them. While vast barriers may seem to stretch between a local, single-focus contention of pseudoscience and something like a world religion, the partitions are very thin. The world presents us with nearly insurmountable problems. A wide variety of solutions are offered, some of very limited worldview, some of portentous sweep. In the usual Darwinian natural selection of doctrines, some thrive for a time, while most quickly vanish. But a few—sometimes, as history has shown, the most scruffy and least prepossessing among them—may have the power to profoundly change the history of the world.

The continuum stretching from ill-practiced science, pseudoscience, and superstition (New Age or Old), all the way to respectable mystery religion, based on revelation, is indistinct. I try not to use the word “cult” in its usual meaning of a religion the speaker dislikes, but try to reach for the headstone of knowledge—do they really know what they claim to know? Everyone, it turns out, has relevant expertise.

I am critical of the excesses of theology, because at the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion. Nevertheless, I want to acknowledge at the outset the prodigious diversity and complexity of religious thought and practice over the millennia; the growth of liberal religion and ecumenical fellowship during the last century, and the fact that—as in the Protestant Reformation, the rise of Reform Judaism, Vatican II, and the so-called higher criticism of the Bible—religion has fought (with varying degrees of success) its own excesses. But in parallel to the many scientists who seem reluctant to debate or even publicly discuss pseudoscience, many proponents of mainstream religions are reluctant to take on extreme conservatives and fundamentalists. If the trend continues, eventually the field is theirs; they can win the debate by default.

One religious leader writes to me of his longing for “disciplined integrity” in religion:

We have grown far too sentimental. . . . Devotionalism and cheap psychology on one side, and arrogance and dogmatic intolerance on the other distort authentic religious life almost beyond recognition. Sometimes I come close to despair, but then I live tenaciously and always with hope. . . . Honest religion, more familiar than its critics with the distortions and absurdities perpetrated in its name, has an active interest in encouraging a healthy skepticism for its own purposes. . . . There is the possibility for religion and science to forge a potent partnership against pseudo-science. Strangely, I think it would soon be engaged also in opposing pseudo-religion.

Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.

Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.

Motor ability in healthy people is almost perfect. We rarely stumble and fall, except in young and old age. We can learn tasks such as riding a bicycle or skating or skipping, jumping rope or driving a car, and retain that mastery for the rest of our lives. Even if we've gone a decade without doing it, it comes back to us effortlessly. The precision and retention of our motor skills may, however, give us a false sense of confidence in our other talents. Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone. A most illuminating book called How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich, shows how people systematically err in understanding numbers, in rejecting unpleasant evidence, in being influenced by the opinions of others. We're good in some things, but not in everything. Wisdom lies in understanding our limitations. “For Man is a giddy thing,” teaches William Shakespeare. That's where the stuffy skeptical rigor of science comes in.

Perhaps the sharpest distinction between science and pseudoscience is that science has a far keener appreciation of human imperfections and fallibility than does pseudoscience (or “inerrant” revelation). If we resolutely refuse to acknowledge where we are liable to fall into error, then we can confidently expect that error—even serious error, profound mistakes—will be our companion forever. But if we are capable of a little courageous self-assessment, whatever rueful reflections they may engender, our chances improve enormously.

If we teach only the findings and products of science—no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be—without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience? Both then are presented as unsupported assertion. In Russia and China, it used to be easy. Authoritative science was what the authorities taught. The distinction between science and pseudoscience was made for you. No perplexities needed to be muddled through. But when profound political changes occurred and strictures on free thought were loosened, a host of confident or charismatic claims—especially those that told us what we wanted to hear—gained a vast following. Every notion, however improbable, became authoritative.

It is a supreme challenge for the popularizer of science to make clear the actual, tortuous history of its great discoveries and the misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by its practitioners to change course. Many, perhaps most, science textbooks for budding scientists tread lightly here. It is enormously easier to present in an appealing way the wisdom distilled from centuries of patient and collective interrogation of Nature than to detail the messy distillation apparatus. The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, we've been assured by proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that physical evidence—not star maps remembered from years ago, not scars, not disturbed soil, but real alien technology—was in hand. The analysis would be released momentarily. These claims go back to the earliest crashed saucer scam of Newton and GeBauer. Now it's decades later and we're still waiting. Where are the articles published in the refereed scientific literature, in the metallurgical and ceramics journals, in publications of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, in Science or Nature?

Such a discovery would be momentous. If there were real artifacts, physicists and chemists would be fighting for the privilege of discovering that there are aliens among us—who use, say, unknown alloys, or materials of extraordinary tensile strength or ductility or conductivity. The practical implications of such a finding—never mind the confirmation of an alien invasion—would be immense. Discoveries like this are what scientists live for. Their absence must tell us something.

Notes

1. "No thinking religious person believes this. Old hat," writes one of the referees of this book. But many "scientific creationists" not only believe it, but are making increasingly aggressive and successful efforts to have it taught in the schools, museums, zoos, and textbooks. Why? Because adding up die "begars." the ages of patriarchs and others in the Bible, gives such a figure, and the Bible is "inerrant."
2. Although it's hard for me to see a more profound cosmic connection than die astonishing findings of modem nuclear astrophysics: Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up—the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains—were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starsruff.
3. As the pioneering physicist Benjamin Franklin put it, "In going on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find ourselves obliged to destroy?" At the very least, he thought, the experience sufficed to "help to make a vain Man humble."

“Not actually,” I tell them. “Vlad Drakul was a figure in Romanian history whose only association with the vampire lore is that Bram Stoker named the character Dracula after him. Until Dracula came out, no one ever associated the historical figure with the vampire lore.” This has been pointed out many times, and the Romanians have often expressed their dismay over the way we have expropriated their national hero and made him into a vampire. But in the media the sensational always has an edge on the prosaic, and by being associated with vampires — even if only via fiction — Vlad Drakul has become the only figure in Romanian history that Americans have ever heard about. If the Romanians began to make movies portraying George Washington as a ghoul, we would know what they feel like.

Here we see fiction becoming “historical fact,” while the scholars who try to correct the “facts” find that they have no hope of getting equal time with the people who purvey mythologies. One of these is Stephan Kaplan, who I think — but I'm never sure — is a notoriety freak who is putting us on and having a wonderful time doing it. For example, he was quoted recently as saying that vampires can come out in the daytime, they just need to wear a sunblock of 15 or higher. As wit, this ranks among the best things I've heard recently, right up there with the story that the Florida citrus industry is trying to get O. J. Simpson to change his first name to Snapple. I suspect that Kaplan will one day call a press conference, wearing a silly hat, and say, “I was just fooling, and you fell for it!” I got a call from the BBC a while back asking me for my reaction to Kaplan’s announcement that Los Angeles is awash in vampires. To me this is like an adult asking me what Santa Claus brought me this year: The question had better be ironic, and the answer may as well be. So I told the interviewer that it was true that vampires are everywhere in Los Angeles, but because of the muggers they're afraid to go out at night.

The folklore of the vampire has only a slight connection with the fiction, much the way the folklore of ghosts has little to do with the movie Ghostbusters. Most people aren't aware that, throughout European history, there have been extensive and detailed accounts of bodies in graveyards being dug up, declared to be vampires, and killed. I took some years out of my life to study these accounts and find out what in the world could have caused people to set out to kill dead bodies. And here we encounter our first real/non-real boundary: the digging up of the bodies was unquestionably real — indeed, beyond any doubt. We know this because we have a vast array of evidence to that effect, both archaeological and documentary, including highly detailed accounts written by literate outsiders, who gave information that they could not possibly have made up. For example, unless you are a forensic pathologist, you probably don't know that decomposing bodies may undergo a process called “skin slippage,” in which the epidermis flakes away from the dermis. The following account, from the eighteenth century, tells of the exhumation of a man named Peter Plogojowitz and remarks on this phenomenon: “The hair and beard — even the nails, of which the old ones had fallen away — had grown on [the corpse]; the old skin, which was somewhat whitish, had peeled away, and a new fresh one had emerged under it. . . . Not without astonishment, I saw some fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common observation, he had sucked from the people killed by him.” When we see remarks about skin slippage, we know that the author has either (a) read a text on forensic pathology or (b) looked at, or heard about, a decomposing corpse.

Yet here we are confronted with a predicament: If our source is right about skin slippage, what are we to make of his evidence that the dead body had been drinking blood from the living? The answer, of course, is that we are not obliged to believe our informant’s interpretations, let alone those of his informants, just because he is giving us an accurate description of a corpse. Scholars have always thrown out the observations because they didn't believe the interpretations. This is not as odd as it might seem, for often description and interpretation are run together, as in such a statement as “the body came to life and cried out when it was staked.” But we'll get to that in a moment.

For now, let’s slow down and look carefully at the observations in the account we have quoted:

1. “The hair and beard have grown on the corpse.” Sorry, this just doesn't happen, even though many people believe it even today. It can appear to happen, however, because the skin may shrink back after death and make hair and beard more visible.
2. “The nails have fallen off and new ones have grown.” The nails do in fact fall off as a body decomposes. The Egyptians were aware of this and dealt with it either by tying the nails to the fingers and toes or by putting metal thimbles over the tip of each finger or toe. The “new nails,” according to Thomas Noguchi, former medical examiner for Los Angeles, were probably an interpretation of the nail bed.
3. “The old skin has peeled away and new skin has emerged under it.” This is skin slippage: epidermis and dermis. Many accounts remark also on the “ruddy” or “dark” color of the corpse, a phenomenon that may be caused by decomposition and a variety of other things as well. Contrary to popular belief, the face of a corpse is not necessarily pale at all, since pallor results from the blood draining from the tissues. If the person was supine when he or she died, the face of the corpse may be pale; if prone, the face may be dark. Those parts of the corpse that are lower than the rest may be gorged with blood that, having lost its oxygen, is dark and causes the skin to appear dark as well. And the parts that are under pressure — where the weight of the body is distributed — may be light in color because the (now dark) blood has been forced away from the tissues. The dark coloration resulting from the saturation of the tissues with blood is called “livor mortis” or “lividity.” It is this phenomenon that allows medical examiners to determine whether a body has been moved after death: If lividity is present where it shouldn't be, or not present where it should, then the body has been moved.
4. “There is fresh blood at the mouth.” The adjective “fresh” is less puzzling if we suppose that the author hasn't actually tested the blood for freshness. What he was surely observing, and confused by, was the fact that the blood was liquid. This was remarked on many times by people who observed such exhumations. It is simply not unusual. In fact, blood normally coagulates at death, then either remains coagulated or becomes liquid again.¹ The reason the blood migrates to the mouth is that the body, as it decomposes, bloats from the gases produced by decomposition, and this bloating puts pressure on the lungs, which are rich in blood and deteriorate early on, so that blood is forced to the mouth and nose.

And did you notice that we were just told why people believed that the dead sucked blood from the living? The standard theory about death was that it came from the dead, and when people dug up the first victim of an epidemic and found that he had blood at his mouth, they concluded that he had sucked the blood from the other people who had died. “Not without astonishment,” says our author, “I saw some fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common observation, he had sucked from the people killed by him.” Moreover, the bloating of the body was taken for evidence that it was full to bursting with the blood of its victims.

So we have cleared up an old mystery merely by paying attention to the people who, centuries ago, tried to tell us about it. From here on things will be easier: If our informants tell us that the vampire “came to life and cried out” when they drove a stake through him, we shall accept the observation and reject the conclusion: Yes, a body would “cry out” if you drove a stake into it, because doing so forces air past the glottis — but this is not because the body is still alive. Among modern medical examiners, there is remarkable agreement on both points.

The vampire lore did not die when people worked out forensic pathology: by that time it had become part of literature. The folkloric vampires had been peasants, but in the eighteenth century, authors were still reluctant to make peasants into major characters in stories, so the fictional vampire was moved into the upper classes. By the time of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), he had became a pallid count, rather than the ruddy peasant of the folklore. Along the way, Linnaeus named a Central American bat after the European vampire, since the bat lived on blood, and the fiction writers, noting this, added the bat to the store of their motifs. This is why, in modern movies, vampires are apt to turn into bats in the night, when they need to go somewhere quickly.

Oddly, when this material became fiction, it once again became “fact,” for nowadays the media keep digging up not just scholars and pseudoscholars who talk about the folklore but also people who actually claim to be vampires. The scholars and the vampires are brought together by their common fate: The media trot them out every year around Halloween. The modern “vampires” derive their inspiration not from the perfectly good material from folklore, which in fact has been sadly neglected, but from the fiction, perhaps because it is more dramatic and coherent. The folklore is about cantankerous peasants who come back as spirits to torment their nearest and dearest, and this simply doesn't translate into a glamorous lifestyle. So our modern “vampires” drive hearses, cap their canine teeth, and wear cloaks when they go out at night. None of these things has anything whatever to do with the folklore of the vampire — even the canines are an artifact of the fictional tradition. Some modern “vampires” claim a taste for blood and tell stories of raids on bloodbanks and of obliging friends who let them open a vein.

The baffling part of this is that the modern “vampires” are claiming kinship not with the vampire that our ancestors actually believed in but with the fictional vampire derived from that one. This is like somebody claiming to be related to Rhett Butler in the movie Gone with the Wind. “You mean Clark Gable,” you say. “No, no: Rhett Butler. You know, the character in the movie. He’s my cousin.” And, lacking anything further to say, you ask, “Do you and Rhett talk a lot?” But in its way, theirs is a successful lifestyle, for those of us who study the folklore have long since become accustomed to getting two minutes on television programs that then give ten minutes to a ditsy lady who sleeps in a coffin. And anyone can get media attention who will bring up Vlad Drakul or even the moribund porphyria theory, which supposes that people really were drinking blood to cure their rare disease, even though we have no evidence either that drinking blood would alleviate the symptoms of porphyria or that any live people were accused of drinking blood — it was always corpses. This theory never got beyond the wild hypothesis stage but has historical interest for following the trend that confuses folklore with fiction. I describe it as “moribund,” but such theories seemingly never die in the media, no matter how often they are demolished by evidence and argument. By now you couldn't kill the porphyria theory with a stake.

The peculiarities of this subject have a way of compounding themselves with time. We have seen how confusing it is to have data in which accurate observation and inaccurate interpretation are all balled up together. As the discipline of anthropology formed and took shape, it looked back on its earlier indiscretions and made a firm resolution not to view other cultures as inferior to that of the anthropologist. Indeed, it took us many decades to figure out that “primitive” cultures aren't any younger than “advanced” ones. But their attempt at dispassion discouraged anthropologists from making distinctions: Now you're not supposed to notice when someone from another culture is simply wrong about something. Indeed, it’s no longer politically correct to make distinctions at all between right and wrong ideas, unless of course they are the ideas of our own culture. So it doesn't bother us to say that Copernicus corrected Ptolemy, but it does bother us if I point out that nonliterate cultures typically misunderstand the events of decomposition. What is odd about our modern view is that it appears to be the very kind of patronizing that we are trying to get rid of.

One review of my book complained about my applying scientific discourse to my subject. The reviewer did not suggest an alternative mode of interpretation — intuition, perhaps? But the reason I studied this particular aspect of the folklore is that it is replete with evidence, and evidence lends itself to analysis better than hunches or intuition. One objective of the serious scholar, it seems to me, is to find likely subjects, ones where there is enough evidence to base an argument on. I have had several fruitless discussions with television directors who wanted me to tell them not just more about the vampire lore than I know, but more than can even be known. “What about the really early stuff?” one woman kept asking. “What about the Paleolithic?”

But we simply don't have any clear evidence from the Paleolithic. The literary evidence, going from present to past, continues to change subtly until finally you would be hard put to identify the “vampire” phenomenon at all. Early Greek views of the dead have much in common with the later vampire lore, but no one would identify Patroclus as a “vampire” simply because he appears to Achilles after his own death. And the early archaeological evidence is often ambiguous: People may put slabs of stone over graves either to keep the dead from returning or to keep animals from digging into a grave.

The fact is, no one leaves documents around explaining the things that everyone knows. It is only much later that it occurs to anyone to wonder about those things — when it is too late, and they are no longer known. So we will almost surely never know anything about the origins of the vampire lore. The most we can know is that by the eighteenth century the vampire was a certifiably dead body that was believed to retain a kind of life and had to be “killed” in order to prevent it from killing other people. And, of course, we now know that the misconceptions about the folklore have proved to be more viable than the folklore itself.

Note

1. There are other correlations here that I've dealt with in detail in a book: Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Perhaps the slick promotional billboards enticed you to make a short excursion from your planned trip. As you neared the site you would have seen a low ridge rising from the flat desert ahead. An earlier generation called the ridge “Coon Butte,” not realizing that it was actually the rim of a three-quarter-mile-wide crater.

When you stand on the rim, you look across an expansive circular cavity in solid rock that is so wide that it changes the wind patterns and attracts raptors that soar in the updrafts. This big hole truly should be listed as one of the natural wonders of the world.

What you may not know is that a century ago Meteor Crater was the subject of a great scientific controversy, and was a focal point for defining the scientific method and promoting scientific research at the dawn of twentieth-century American technological progress. One hundred years after that debate, Meteor Crater serves as a reminder of the importance of scientific knowledge and of the scientific method to our way of life.

In early 1896, the journal Science published an address that geologist Grove Karl Gilbert (1843-1918) had recently given to the Scientific Societies of Washington. Gilbert was the retiring president of the Geological Society of Washington and one of the top scientific thinkers of his time. He had also been chief geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey until Congress slashed the Agency’s budget in half, terminating his and others’ positions. His lecture was titled the “Origin of Hypotheses,” and was a description of the scientific method.

At the center of the scientific method, he said, is the hypothesis, or “the scientific guess.” Gilbert used the origin of Coon Butte to illustrate how this works. Four scientific guesses had been made at the time. The first came from a shepherd named Mathias Armijo, who found pieces of iron near the crater and reasoned that an explosion had hurled the metal out of the ground and formed the big hole (one does not have to be a scientist to think scientifically). Geologists who came to visit the site offered two scientific guesses involving two types of volcanic processes. A fourth hypothesis was the radical idea that a meteorite had hit the Earth.

Gilbert traveled to this then-remote part of the country and made measurements to test the various ideas. Because so little was known at the time about the physics of meteorite impacts, he predicted that such a cosmic collision would have left a very large piece of iron buried under the crater. His tests failed to find the predicted iron, so Gilbert rejected the impact idea. The small pieces of iron found on the surface by Armijo did prove to be meteorites but Gilbert concluded that they fell from the sky in an unrelated event (thereby also rejecting Armijo’s idea that they came out of the ground).

Of the two volcanic ideas, one predicted that volcanic rocks would be found in the crater. But the crater had none, so there was only one hypothesis left that had not been eliminated: some type of volcanic steam explosion.

That was the idea that Gilbert accepted as the correct explanation, even though he had arrived at the crater expecting to demonstrate that it was formed by an impact. He already supported the then-unpopular notion that such craters on the moon were formed by impacts, not volcanoes, but a good scientist does not allow personal feelings to get in the way of evidence. However, Gilbert was very careful to point out that there was much that was still not known about meteorites and impacts. He recognized that new facts might be discovered that would overturn his conclusion.

That is exactly what happened. We now understand that Gilbert overestimated the size of the meteorite that would be needed to pack enough punch to blast out such a big hole: Hypervelocity impacts are much more powerful than he realized. Furthermore, even a large iron meteorite will mostly vaporize in a giant explosion, leaving very few traces. Gilbert had made a mistake by assuming that the impact would leave a lot of buried iron.

It would be many years before a young scientist named Eugene Shoemaker and his colleagues from the U.S. Geological Survey would discover a rare new mineral in the rocks at the crater, a mineral that had been predicted to form from an impact. This discovery finally settled the controversy, and partially vindicated a shepherd’s original hunch that the hole was formed by some kind of colossal explosion involving iron.

The scientific process is sometimes slow, but it always involves making educated guesses that eventually lead to predictions that can be observed and put to a test. If the predictions turn out to be incorrect, the test is still successful as long as scientists learn enough to modify the theory, find a better one, or uncover mistaken assumptions. Unfortunately, even after the successes of twentieth-century science between Gilbert’s time and now, there are a lot of people who still don't like (or don't understand) the scientific form of reasoning.

In fact, modern science is now under attack from many directions. On the left are those who twist legitimate multiculturalism by going way beyond it to extreme relativism. They dogmatically assert that all ways of seeking knowledge are equally valid, but still insist that the scientific method is flawed because it originated in a time and place that causes them to view it as a Eurocentric, white male endeavor. Such thinking has encouraged proliferation of belief in pseudoscientific and unscientific ideas ranging from crystal healing to flying saucers. Even worse, it has turned some women and minorities away from careers in science, not only to their own detriment but to the detriment of society.

Science is also under attack from the religious right, whose literal interpretation of the Bible supersedes scientific evidence, logical reasoning, and common sense. In this fundamentalist view, any fact that is at odds with their own reading of the scriptures must be ignored. Unfortunately, this faction is not satisfied merely to reject science for itself, but it now has an active campaign to remove scientifically validated subjects (such as evolution) from the classroom and have them replaced by their own unscientific opinions (such as creationism).

Worst of all, science is now under attack by a budget-cutting Congress in Washington for whom dollars have measurable value but scientific knowledge does not. Members of Congress think that spending on basic science is like throwing money into a big hole in the ground. They do not realize that a dollar saved may be two dollars (or more) worth of knowledge lost.

Gilbert closed his late-nineteenth-century address by explaining that "fertility of invention implies a wide and varied knowledge of the causes of things,” and that deep understanding of nature through scientific research is essential. Gilbert told his audience that our “material, social, and intellectual condition” advances in lockstep with our “knowledge of natural laws.”

He concluded by comparing science to an investment: “Knowledge of nature is an account at [the] bank, where each dividend is added to the principal and the interest is ever compounded: And hence it is that human progress, founded on natural knowledge, advances with ever increasing speed!”

Since Gilbert spoke these words, our scientific bank account has led to inventions that his audience in Washington could not have imagined. Our investment has swollen with the advances we associate with modern living, with medical discoveries that have given us longer, healthier, happier lives, and with an unprecedented degree of national security.

We can thank Gilbert and his contemporaries for having the foresight to recognize 100 years ago the importance of this scientific bank account, and for making the effort to convince decision-makers to restore and increase funding for science. We should again ask those in Washington to pass along to future generations the American tradition of a strong investment in scientific knowledge, and trust in the scientific method. And we should remind them that research spending is money in the bank, not money in a hole.

The photographs were made by a Sunday school teacher who had visited the Valley Hill site (near Bardstown, Kentucky) with eight girls from her class. I did not see the photographs until the day I was brought on location for filming, but I was sent color photocopies of them in advance. The lack of reproductive quality put me at more of a disadvantage with some photos than with others. I did recognize that the claimed “faces of Jesus and Mary” in one photo were simply due to random, out-of-focus patterns of light and shadow caused by mishandling of the film pack. (More on that later.)

Figure 1

I also recognized in another photo the now common effect at Marian apparition sites, a phenomenon known as the “golden door.” This is an arched door shape, filled with golden light and believed by some to be the doorway to heaven mentioned in Revelation 4:1. In fact, as explained in an earlier Skeptical Inquirer (Winter 1993), it is simply an artifact of the Polaroid OneStep camera, which, when flooded with bright light, as when pointed at the sun or a halogen lamp, produces a picture of the camera’s own aperture (Nickell 1993a) (Figure 1). This was codiscovered by Georgia Skeptics members Dale Heatherington and Anson Kennedy, who tutored me in making such photos. (Together we have wasted much Polaroid film, all in the interest of scientific experimentation.)

I telephoned Kennedy about two of the other “miracle” effects, and he was already familiar with one of them. Sight unseen, simply from my description of the alleged “angel wings,” he diagnosed light leakage into the Polaroid film pack. My subsequent experimentation confirmed his explanation and showed how the leakage could have occurred (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Fortunately, my experimentation also provided an explanation for the remaining effect — one that had at first puzzled both Kennedy and me as well as some professional photographers and film processors I consulted. The effect was that of a chart superimposed on one picture. The chart was slightly out of focus, but nevertheless unmistakable. One of the girls at the site thought she could see in the blurred printing the name of a deceased friend. Where had the chart come from? It appeared to have resulted from a double exposure, although the Polaroid OneStep camera should not ordinarily permit that to occur.

Suddenly, I realized that the card atop the film pack, which protects the film from light and which is ejected when the pack is first loaded into the camera, has a chart printed on its underside! Indeed, that was clearly the mysterious chart in question, somehow appearing in mirror image in the photograph taken by the Sunday school teacher. But how had it gotten onto one photo? My subsequent experiments showed it was possible to produce such an effect by light leakage (the same culprit that produced the “angel wings”). The light had leaked in, between the card and the first potential photograph, bouncing off the white card and onto the light-sensitized surface of the film, thus making an exposure of a portion of the chart. In this way it was superimposed on the first photograph made from that pack (Figures 3 and 4).

Figure 3

Taken together, the evidence from all four photographs, some of which had multiple effects, provided corroborative evidence that the film pack was somehow mishandled and admitted light, maybe by the front having been pulled down with the thumb on being inserted into the camera, or even by someone having sat on the pack. Since the other major effect, the golden door, was due to the construction of the camera, there was therefore no indication of hoaxing with any of the pictures.

On the television program, my comments were edited down to very brief, but sufficient explanations. The treatment of the photographs was uneven from a skeptical point of view. The “faces” were greatly enhanced to make them look more realistic. Commendable was the use of an effective graphics technique whereby the chart was placed on the screen beside the chart-bearing photo, then flopped so as to superimpose it on the photo.

Skeptics who watched the segment with me laughed loudly at the conclusion of my interview when the narrator commented, “Rational explanations may satisfy some people, but. . . .” This comment was followed by various “miracle” claims that went unchallenged. I had not only explained how the “golden door” photos are made, but I showed several of them for the “Unsolved Mysteries” camera (Figure 1); but this was omitted from the program even though such photos were described as “mysterious.” Also omitted were my explanations for silver rosaries supposedly turning to gold — either due to tarnishing or the rubbing off of the silver plating to expose the copper or brass beneath (Nickell 1993b). I included an explanation for a new claim: Glass-beaded rosaries were supposedly turning, momentarily, a golden color; I theorized that the faceted beads were reflecting the golden light of the sun.

Figure 5

Much ado was made about people reportedly seeing the sun pulsate, spin, or exhibit other phenomena — all due to optical effects resulting from staring at the sun, which I discussed at some length in my Looking for a Miracle (1993b). Many pilgrims also had claimed to see showers of golden flakes, which I attributed to their having looked at the bright sun (even though some insisted they had not looked directly at the sun), or to a dappling of sunlight through the canopy of tree leaves, or to the power of suggestion — or a combination. All of my comments about such other phenomena, including faith healing, ended up on the cutting-room floor.

The program did end on a rather skeptical note, with program host Robert Stack stating: “It is interesting to note that the local Catholic church has declined to recognize Valley Hill as anything out of the ordinary. The rest of us will have to decide for ourselves.” Unfortunately, they will have to decide without the benefit of all of the skeptical evidence. That’s why I sometimes refer to the television show as “Unsolving Mysteries.”

References

• Nickell, Joe. 1993a. Miracles in Kentucky. Skeptical Inquirer 17(2) (Winter): 120-122.
• — -. 1993b. Looking for a Miracle:Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions and Healing Cures. Pp.177-178, 196-197. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

Most of these purveyors of psychic myths should not be taken seriously. However, when one of the persons making extreme claims is Jessica Utts, who is a professor of statistics at the University of California at Davis, this is another matter. Utts has impressive credentials and she marshals the evidence for her case in an effective way. So it is important to look at the basis for what I believe are extreme claims, even for a parapsychologist. Here is what Utts writes in her report on the Stargate program: Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research at SRI [Stanford Research Institute] and SAIC [Science Applications International Corporation] have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud. . . . [Psychic functioning] is reliable enough to be replicated in properly conducted experiments, with sufficient trials to achieve the long-run statistical results needed for replicability. . . . Precognition, in which the answer is known to no one until a future time, appears to work quite well. . . . There is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data.

For what it is worth, I happen to be one of those “who does not accept the current collection of data” as proving psychic functioning. Indeed, I do not believe that “the current collection of data” justifies that an anomaly of any sort has been demonstrated, let alone a paranormal anomaly. Although Utts and I — in our capacities as coevaluators of the Stargate project — evaluated the same set of data, we came to very different conclusions. If Utts’s conclusion is correct, then the fundamental principles that have so successfully guided the progress of science from the days of Galileo and Newton to the present must be drastically revised. Neither relativity theory nor quantum mechanics in their present versions can cope with a world that harbors the psychic phenomena so boldly proclaimed by Utts and her parapsychological colleagues.

So, it is worth looking at the evidence that Utts uses to buttress her case. Unfortunately, many of the issues that this evidence raises are technical or require long and tedious refutations. This is not the place to develop this lengthy rebuttal. Instead, I will briefly list the sources of Utts’s evidence and try to provide at least one or two simple reasons why they do not, either singly or taken together, justify her conclusions. As I understand it, Utts supports her conclusion with the following sources of evidence:

1. Meta-analyses of Previous Parapsychological Experiments

In a meta-analysis, an investigator uses statistical tools to pool the data from a series of similar experiments published over a period of time that may involve several different investigators and laboratories. Although some or many of the individual experiments might have yielded weak or nonsignificant results, the pooled data can be highly significant from a statistical viewpoint. In addition to getting an overall measure of significance, the meta-analyses typically also grade each study for quality on one or more dimensions. The idea is to see if the successful outcomes are correlated with poor quality. If so, this counts against the evidence for paranormal functioning. If not, then this is proclaimed as evidence that the successful outcomes were not due to flaws.

In the four major meta-analyses of previous parapsychological research, the pooled data sets produced astronomically significant results while the correlation between successful outcome and rated quality of the experiments was essentially zero.

Much can be written at this point. The major point I would make, however, is that drawing conclusions from meta-analytic studies is like having your cake and eating it too. The same data are being used to generate and test a hypothesis. The proper use of meta-analysis is to generate hypotheses, which then must be independently tested on new data. As far as I know, this has yet to be done. The correlation between quality and outcome also must be suspect because the ratings are not done blindly.

As far as I can tell, I was the first person to do a meta-analysis on parapsychological data. I did a meta-analysis of the original ganzfeld experiments as part of my critique of those experiments. My analysis demonstrated that certain flaws, especially quality of randomization, did correlate with outcome. Successful outcomes correlated with inadequate methodology. In his reply to my critique, Charles Honorton did his own meta-analysis of the same data. He too scored for flaws, but he devised scoring schemes different from mine. In his analysis, his quality ratings did not correlate with outcome. This came about because, in part, Honorton found more flaws in unsuccessful experiments than I did. On the other I found more flaws in successful experiments than Honorton did. Presumably, both Honorton and I believed we were rating quality in an objective and unbiased way. Yet, both of us ended up with results that matched our preconceptions.

So far, other than my meta-analysis, all the meta-analyses evaluating quality and outcome have been carried out by parapsychologists. We might reasonably expect that the findings will differ with skeptics as raters.

These are just two, but very crucial, reasons why the meta-analyses conducted so far on parapsychological data cannot be used as evidence for psi.

2. The Original Ganzfeld Experiments

These consisted of 42 experiments (by Honorton’s count) of which 55 percent had been claimed as producing significant results in favor of ESP. My meta-analysis and evaluation of these experiments showed that this database did not justify concluding that ESP was demonstrated. Honorton’s meta-analysis and rebuttal suggests otherwise. Utts naturally relies on Honorton’s meta-analysis and ignores mine. In our joint paper, both Honorton and I agreed that there were sufficient problems with this original database that nothing could be concluded until further replications, conducted according to specified criteria, appeared.

3. The Autoganzfeld Experiments

This series of experiments, conducted over a period of six years, is so named because the collection of data was partially automated. When this set of experiments was first published in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1990, it was presented as a successful replication of the original ganzfeld experiments. Moreover, these experiments were said to have been conducted according the criteria set out by Honorton and me. This indeed seemed to be the case with the strange exception of the procedure for randomizing targets at presentation and judging. Even in writing our joint paper, Honorton argued with me that careful randomization was not necessary in the ganzfeld experiments because each subject appears only once. I disagreed with Honorton, but even by his own reasoning, randomization is not as important if you believe that the subject is the sole source of the final judgment. But this was blatantly not the case in the autoganzfeld experiments. The experimenter, who was not so well shielded from the sender as the subject, interacted with the subject during the judging process. Indeed, during half of the trials the experimenter deliberately prompted the subject during the judging procedure. This means that the judgments from trial to trial were not strictly independent.

However, from the original published report, I had little reason to question the methodology of these experiments. What I did question was the claim that they were consistent with the original ganzfeld experiments. I pointed out a number of ways that the two outcomes were inconsistent. Not until I was asked to write a response to a new presentation of these experiments in the January 1994 issue of the Psychological Bulletin did I get an opportunity to scrutinize the raw data. Unfortunately, I did not get all of the data, especially the portion that I needed to make direct tests of the randomizing procedures. But my analyses of what I did get uncovered some peculiar and strong patterns in the data. All of the significant hitting was done on the second or later appearance of a target. If we examined the guesses against just the first occurrences of targets, the result is consistent with chance. Moreover, the hit rate rose systematically with each additional occurrence of a target. This suggests to me a possible flaw. Daryl Bem, the coauthor with Honorton of the Psychological Bulletin paper, responded that it might reveal another peculiarity of psychic phenomena. The reason why my finding is of concern is that all the targets were on videotape and played on tape players during presentation. At the very least, the peculiar pattern I identified suggests that we need to require that when targets and decoys are presented to the subjects for judging, they all have been run through the machine the exact same number of times. Otherwise there might be nonparanormal reasons why one of the video clips appears different to the subjects.

Subsequent to my response, I have learned about other possible problems with the autoganzfeld experiments. The point of this is to show that it takes time and critical scrutiny to realize that what at first seems like an airtight series of experiments has a variety of possible weaknesses. I concluded, and do so even more strongly now, that the autoganzfeld experiments constitute neither a successful replication of the original ganzfeld experiments nor a sufficient body of data to conclude that ESP has finally been demonstrated. This new set of experiments needs independent replication with tighter controls.

4. Apparent Replications of the Autoganzfeld Experiments

Utts points to some apparent replications of the ganzfeld experiments that have been reported at parapsychological meetings. The major one is a direct attempt to replicate the autoganzfeld experiments with better controls, done at the University of Edinburgh. The reported results were apparently significant but were due to just one of the three experimenters. The two experienced experimenters produced only chance hitting. There are some inconsistencies in these unpublished reports. Utts points to three different replications that were apparently successful. I have heard of at least two large-scale replications that were unsuccessful. None of these replications, however, has been reported in a refereed journal and none has had the opportunity to be critically scrutinized. So we cannot count these one way or the other at this time until we know the details.

5. The SAIC Experiments

Utts and I were hired as the evaluation panel to assess the results of 20 years of previously classified research on remote viewing and related ESP phenomena. In the time available to us, it was impossible to scrutinize carefully all the of documents generated by this program. Instead, we focused our efforts on evaluating the ten studies done at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) during the early 1990s. These were selected, in consultation with the principal investigator, as representing the best experiments in the set. These ten experiments included two that examined physiological correlates of ESP. The results were negative. Another study found a correlation between when a subject was being observed (via remote camera) and galvanic skin reactions. The remaining studies, in one way or another, dealt with various target and other factors that might influence remote viewing ability. In these studies the same set of viewers produced descriptions that were successfully matched against the correct target consistently better than chance (with some striking exceptions).

Neither Utts nor I had the time or resources to fully scrutinize the laboratory procedures or data from these experiments. Instead, we relied on what we could glean from reading the technical reports. Two of the experiments had recently been published in the Journal of Parapsychology. The difficulty here is that these newly declassified experiments have not been in the public arena for a sufficient time to have been carefully and critically scrutinized. As with the original ganzfeld data base and the autoganzfeld experiments, it takes careful scrutiny and a period of a few years to find the problems of newly published or revealed parapsychological experiments. One obvious problem with the SAIC experiments is that the remote viewing results were all judged by one person — the director of the program. I believe that Utts agrees with me that we have to withhold judgments on these experiments until it can be shown that independent judges can produce the same results. Beyond this, we would require, as with any other set of newly designed experiments, replication by independent laboratories before we decide that the reported outcomes can be trusted.

6. Prima Facie Evidence

Utts and other parapsychologists also talk about prima facie evidence in connection with the operational stories of the psychics (or remote viewers) employed by the government. Everyone agrees there is no way to evaluate the accounts of these attempts to use input from remote viewers in intelligence activities. This is because the data were collected in haphazard and nonsystematic ways. No consistent records are available; no attempt was made to interrogate the viewers in nonsuggestive ways; no contemporary systematic attempts to evaluate the results are there, etc.

The attempts to evaluate these operational uses after the fact are included in the American Institutes for Research (A.I.R.) report and they do not justify concluding anything about the effectiveness or reality of remote viewing. Some stories, especially those involving cases that occurred long ago and/or that are beyond actual verification, have been put forth as evidence of apparently striking hits. The claim is that these remote viewers are right on — are actually getting true psychic signals — about 20 percent of the time.

Call it prima facie or whatever, none of this should be considered as evidence for anything. In situations where we do have some control comparisons, we find the same degree of hitting for wrong targets (when the judge does not realize it is the wrong target) as for the correct targets. A sobering example of this with respect to remote viewing can be found in David Marks and Richard Kammann’s book The Psychology of the Psychic (Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 1980).

Psychologists, such as myself, who study subjective validation find nothing striking or surprising in the reported matching of reports against targets in the Stargate data. The overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target. The few apparent hits are just what we would expect if nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation are operating.

7. Consistency Among the Different Sources

Utts points to consistencies in effect sizes across the studies. More important, she points out several patterns such as bigger effect sizes with experienced subjects, etc. I do not have time or space to detail all the problems with these apparent consistencies. Many of them happen to relate to the fact that the average effect sizes in these cases are arbitrary combinations of heterogeneous sources. Moreover, where Utts detects consistencies, I find inconsistencies. I have documented some of these elsewhere; I will do so again in the near future.

Conclusions

When we examine the basis of Utts’s strong claim for the existence of psi, we find that it relies on a handful of experiments that have been shown to have serious weaknesses after undergoing careful scrutiny, and another handful of experiments that have yet to undergo scrutiny or be successfully replicated. What seems clear is that the scientific community is not going to abandon its fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles on the basis of a handful of experiments whose findings have yet to be shown to be replicable and lawful.

Utts does assert that the findings from parapsychological experiments can be replicated with well-controlled experiments given adequate resources. But this is a hope or promise. Before we abandon relativity and quantum mechanics in their current formulations, we will require more than a promissory note. We will want, as is the case in other areas of science, solid evidence that these findings can, indeed, be produced under specified conditions.

Again, I do not have time to develop another part of this story. Because even if Utts and her colleagues are correct and we were to find that we could reproduce the findings under specified conditions, this would still be a far cry from concluding that psychic functioning has been demonstrated. This is because the current claim is based entirely upon a negative outcome — the sole basis for arguing for ESP is that extra-chance results can be obtained that apparently cannot be explained by normal means. But an infinite variety of normal possibilities exist and it is not clear than one can control for all of them in a single experiment. You need a positive theory to guide you as to what needs to be controlled, and what can be ignored. Parapsychologists have not come close to this as yet.