The end of the twentieth century was marked by a boom of astrology, mysticism, and occultism in many countries. In the USSR (during the last years of its existence) and then in Russia the situation was even worse in a sense. The system’s collapse and the wreck of old ideals-along with the absence of new ones-caused many people to hope for some kind of miracle. The mass media contributed to this tendency. Through their irresponsibility, pseudoscience has filled newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV.

In recent years a new phenomenon has arisen. Pseudoscience has become a powerful, well-organized force. Over the last decade in Russia, about 120 academies have appeared, many of which don't deserve the name “academy.”

Some of them give their stamp of approval to professionally inadequate doctors of science in various fields. Others do the same in pseudoscientific disciplines, giving diplomas to astrologers, UFOlogists, and others of the sort.

In Russia, even research institutes with pseudoscientific tendencies have appeared. I'll give only two examples: the International Institute of Space Anthropecology and the International Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics. The first has even managed to attain state accreditation with the help of the Russian Ministry of Science. The second has received financial support both from the Ministry of Science and the Ministry of Defense for the well-known swindle of torsion fields.

Peaceful coexistence between science and pseudoscience is impossible. From time to time, science attempts to unmask pseudoscience. The latter fights back with fierce hatred. Pseudoscientists are anxious to settle accounts with the Academy of Science, because the Academy is a great obstacle to these newly half-baked “scientists.” Here are a few quoted statements of such people:

• “By the end of the twentieth century, on the periphery of official academic science, such a substantial arsenal of facts, conceptual guesses, and extravagant technologies was compiled, demanding an integral and unpreconceived comprehension, that it encourages many scientists to expect a new scientific paradigm in the beginning of the third millennium.”
• “The scientific paradigm is hopelessly obsolete. The epoch of materialistic science, which does not recognize this, is finished.” Meanwhile, according to the statements of such “scientists,” “the influence of thought on the composition of liquid chemicals was proved.” Furthermore, “The world’s leading physicists and philosophers warned of an inconsistency between the modern paradigm and the fundamentals of physics.”

Thus pseudoscience predicts the full breakdown of science unless the scientific paradigm is changed. Meanwhile, according to a statement of academician Z.I. Alferov, recently awarded the Nobel Prize, “. . . the crisis in quantum physics is not observed. For the most part in the physics kingdom, it is calm now.”

The Emergence of Antiscience

Where does this passionate desire to replace a scientific paradigm stem from? Here is what one of the pseudoscientists said: “Up to now the broadly spread dogma of experimental studies of the nineteenth century is to recognize as 'scientific' only one such technique, which provides reproducible experimental results irrespective of whenever and wherever they could be obtained.”

What a fertile ground for antiscience if this “dogma” is canceled. There will be no need for explanations or repeatable evidence.

Here is what one of the main theorists of the so-called science of torsion fields, “academician” G. Shipov said: “Now there is no doubt in the existence of telepathy, levitation, clairvoyance, retrovision, or that energy of consciousness plays some certain role in physical processes.” And since science does not recognize this, therefore, “official science lags behind the new developments.”

Science has long been too indulgent to pseudoscience. This cannot continue. Pseudoscience becomes dangerous for both science and society. The bacchanalia of parascientific delirium has even begun to affect the highest echelons of power. Pseudoscience has begun to gain the favor of officials representing the supreme authorities of the country.

In the 1980s, for example, Chumak and Kashpirovsky forced their way onto television in spite of the fact that during those years TV was controlled by the state! This means that paranormalists have appeared on TV with the consent of the supreme officials. These officials might wish to know at least that Mr. Chumak is not original. His trick with “charging” water was unmasked in the beginning of the twentieth century by American physicist Robert Wood.

It is worth mentioning the sad fact that Mr. Kashpirovsky pushed his ideas on members of the state Duma, and Mr. Chumak also has tried to do this.

Here is another case, involving M.D. Maley, chairman of the Interdepartmental Commission on Scientific and Technical Problems of the Industry of Defense of Security Council of the Russian Federation. The purpose he pursued looked rather reasonable: “From the viewpoint of the Security Council, our task is to filter correctly the basic directions and orient the present and future management of the country with respect to a launching position of Russia in this scientific-technical revolution.”

To prepare for scientific breakthroughs, Mr. Maley created a “Large State Research Center.” This is praiseworthy in itself; a high-ranking government official facilitates the development of a science. Alas, when one hears the purposes, you can't help being horrified at the ignorance of the official: “Replacement of the concepts of quantum physics by neutron physics, vacuum as emptiness by the concept of neutrino fields is in prospect for us . . . .We have some works at the R&D; [research and development] stages that contradict common sense and cannot be described by any equation.”

One can add to this many other “pearls” characterizing the activities of the Center, but it hardly seems worth mentioning. But I would mention that the Secretary of the Security Council of Russia, heading the Council in the first years of existence of the new Russia, O. Lobov, has managed to distinguish himself. He patronized the introduction to Russia of the scandalous doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.

Bad Science in High Places

Astrologers, claimants of extrasensory powers, and newly appeared “scientists” of other “professions” more and more actively push themselves through into the State Duma, ministries, and even into the President’s circle. Here are recent examples:

• In the Ministry of Emergency Measures, a laboratory of “extrasenses” was arranged, and though no results have been reported yet, the laboratory nevertheless exists and is financially supported.
• At the Ministry of Defense, a military astrologer is employed. In addition, the Ministry has created a specialized military unit manned with psychics and others who claim special powers. The research is conducted secretly. Such senseless secrecy is advantageous only to dishonest officials. It raises the possibility of corruption and the absence of outside review and control.
• At the Ministry of Defense, the Extreme Medicine Center was created. At first glance, this seems quite reasonable. However, listen to what they do there, as described by the head of the Center, Professor P. Shalimov: “We test charged water, study man’s aura.” Quite frequently in the mass media we hear complaints about the lack of funds for the army. At the same time, inside the Ministry of Defense large amounts of money are spent supporting various programs with a pseudoscientific orientation.
• The deputy chief of the President’s Security, General G. Rogozin, in addition to his main duties, was involved in astrological forecasts and occultism. At the end of 1998, Mr. Rogozin, on the basis of his analysis of Nostradamus prophecies, predicted the beginning of nuclear war in July and August 1999. Fortunately, today this person is out of the President’s circle.
• One academician of the Academy of Natural Science, G. Grabovoy, carried out a psychic check of the readiness of President Boris Yeltsin’s airplane. And recently, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta (a Russian newspaper) revealed to readers how Mr. Grabovoy took part in underground tests of nuclear weapons in Semipalatinsk where he supposedly investigated the influence of some device, “a crystalline module,” on a nuclear explosion. It was asserted that switching on the device makes the force of a nuclear explosion two times lower. But if one can use several such devices simultaneously, the force of explosion could be “nullified.” Under present conditions, it was said the device could be used on atomic power stations to serve as a guarantee against accidents.

This entire swindle is apparent to any physicist at once. Nevertheless, I had to carry out the official investigation. It revealed that Mr. Grabovoy never took part in tests of nuclear weapons in Semipalatinsk. Therefore, he did not test “a crystalline module” there. At the same time, it was revealed that this “doctor of technical and phys-math. science” has never defended any theses. In lists of the Italian Academy of Science, “academician” Gravovoy was never mentioned. It is sad that the governmental Rossiyskaya Gazeta misled its readers; alas, not for the first time.

In the previous State Duma, a rather strange exhibition was arranged, in which the main subject was the so-called sofa-extrasens, which was said to cure nearly a hundred diseases including impotence and frigidity. The same Duma has arranged debates on the problems of the UFOlogical safety of Russian people. To understand how this could happen, I cite the statement of the deputy chair of the State Duma Ecological Committee, doctor of technical science (!) V. Tetelmin:

Science revealed a sufficient number of examples of natural bioresonance processes affecting the human organism. For example, at the Earth, there are many well-known geopathogenic zones. Their basic property is that there, the procession of time is changing. So scientists detected that precise watches failed in the region where the Tunguska meteorite fell, in regions of nuclear weapons tests, near Chernobyl, and in other “fatal” places. . . . It was noticed that places with anomalous proceeding of time are located there, where there are flows of large amounts of water along the circle.

Alternative medicine has dramatically developed. It is attracting numerous unscrupulous swindlers, robbing sick people who cannot find help from traditional medicine. New medical devices claiming to cure patients of any illness are appearing on the market.

A device called “New Cardiomag” recently became available at a price of only 500 rubles (about $16). It supposedly helps with hypertonia, ischemia, arterial hypertension, stenocardia, and headaches. One might question the honesty of developers of the device since one of them, doctor of medical science A.P. Naumov, has written in an advertisement for the “Cardiomag” the following: “This is an ecologically pure autonomous source of gravitation field, pulse bipolar current, and direct magnetic field with special energy characteristics” (Isvestiya, March 14, 2001). In Isvestiya of July 24, 2001 a device called “Vita” was described. Do not think that the device is so different from many other useless devices. The one thing that was different about “Vita” is that it had direct lobbying on its behalf by high-ranking officials. The Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Development, V.A. Yanvarev, requested Federal Organs of Executive Power of Federal Subjects “to facilitate head sanitary physicians in introducing the device 'Vita.'”

And a deputy head of sanitary physicians, professor E. Belyaev, impudently recommends “the use of the bioenergetic safety device 'Vita' as an individual protection against electromagnetic radiation at plants and establishments, on the ground, and air transport. . . .” Even if this device could really protect against electromagnetic radiation, it is improper for high-ranking government officials to be engaged in lobbying. And as Mr. Belyaev ends the letter with the words, “With questions on purchasing the device 'Vita' please address to . . . ,” (and then the address and phone of a commercial firm follows), there is a suspicion that the official does not do all this with much objectivity.

Two conclusions can be made about the device: The product “Vita” is not a means of protection against biological action of electromagnetic fields; and the offered technical information and advertising mislead potential customers.

It is incomprehensible why the Academy of Medical Sciences keeps silent about such fraud. It is time to express its opinion about that. The ever-growing activities of pseudoscience attempt to get money from the government, consumers, and industry while avoiding the standard procedures of review by experts. There are many examples of pseudoscientists managing to get money from state sources.

The most well known is the swindle based on so-called torsion fields. In addition, there are some “studies” on anti-gravity, and on transmutation of elements with an attempt to obtain gold (not involving the known method of nuclear reactions but instead a modern version of alchemy).

In such an atmosphere, at the end of 1998 the President of the Russian Academy of Science, academician Yu. W. Osipov, arranged a special Commission Against Pseudoscience and the Falsifications of Scientific Studies. One of the commission’s very first actions was to prepare a special appeal that was considered and accepted by the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This appeal was published in many Russian mass media outlets.

Members of the commission appeared many times in newspapers and magazines and on radio and TV, addressing the government with suggestions. I think I can say that this commission and its work with the mass media resulted in some corrections of the situation. Some allies appeared among journalists, astrological forecasts vanished from some newspapers, and some science sections appeared. In addition, scientists more frequently were asked to be guests on TV programs. However, these are only small steps. A victory over pseudoscience is still far away.

To conclude, I would like to recall one more story. About twenty-five years ago, fringe-science swindlers pushed through to the level of the government of France an idea of ever-penetrating rays for finding oil deposits. (How similar it is with our torsion fields!) This speculation was blocked by the president, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, by his words: “Assume it is necessary to find expertise aimed at revealing the possibilities of falsification.”

Recently, several members of the 1998 commission (academicians E. Alexandrov, V. Ginzburg, and E. Kruglyakov) sent a letter to the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. They drew the president’s attention to the dangerous growth and influence of pseudoscience in Russia. The first of many suggestions and measures was to seek the expertise of members of the Russian Academy of Sciences in applying the fundamental laws of nature to evaluate projects. We hope that the president of Russia will follow the example of the president of France and apply thorough scientific expertise in examining proposed ideas. If that happens, we will have a chance to witness a cleansing of science from the shameful prevalence of pseudoscience.

Hey, Hey, We're The Monkees

Reports of the “Monkey Man,” as the press promptly baptized it, first reached the local police office on May 13, 2001. According to one report² the masked man had appeared in the village of Ghaziabad around 8:30 p.m. and had remained there till 4:00 a.m., terrorizing the residents. Vineet Sharma, grandson of the first victim, said that that night, when he and his brother were sleeping with their grandmother, a masked man had entered the veranda and attacked the old lady and pushed her. She suffered bruises in the abdomen and arms. Then the assailant went into the neighbor’s house and injured a child, finally disappearing in the dark lane before villagers could be aroused.

After that first blitz, dozens of individuals in a number of areas in East Delhi claimed to have been hurt in subsequent attacks and pictures of scratched victims started to appear in daily newspapers.

Descriptions of the Monkey Man soon appeared to be contradictory: some described the entity as a masked man, others as a monkey, and a few others as a cat with glowing eyes. Some said it wore a skin-tight costume, while others stated it was a bandaged figure with a helmet. At least one witness claimed that it looked “like a remote-controlled robot like object, which jumped high in the air in a jiffy and vanished within seconds.”³

What’s certain, however, is the fact that two people (some sources say three) died because of this creature-or at least, because of the panic created. Early May 15, at 2:30 a.m., a pregnant woman in East Delhi fell down some stairs after being awakened by the shouts of neighbors saying that the Monkey Man had arrived. She died in a hospital, as did another unfortunate soul, who died in similar circumstances.

What is happening here? Is there really some freak monster out in the woods of New Delhi? Or is this some kind of evil superhero, waiting for the local Spider-man to capture him and return him to justice?

During the past century there have been tales of strange creatures or men with properties similar to this Monkey Man, such as the glowing eyes and the ability to suddenly disappear in front of witnesses. In the 1960s, in America, there was a spate of such sightings: the creature was dubbed Mothman or Owlman in different areas.⁴ The past few years have seen a number of sightings of a creature dubbed El Chupacabra.

However, to find another episode that has had a similar impact on the public we need to go back at least 150 years, when Victorian London fell for some time in the clutches of terror of what was then known as “Spring-Heeled Jack.”

Jumping Jack Flash

According to legend, the first reports of a strange leaping figure sighted in London date back to 1837; some descriptions tell of a strange monster, half-man half-bat, complete with wings and horns. Others refer to a powerfully built man in a shiny suit with a helmet and cloak, spitting fire.

Whatever its features, it seems that it was a series of sudden and unexpected aggressions that led an anonymous citizen to write a letter giving details of an attack by a mysterious “Spring-Heeled Jack,” to Sir John Cowan, the Lord Mayor. Cowan drew public attention to the letter and his acceptance of the rumors led to a flood of letters from individuals reporting their own previous encounters with the terrible Jack.

Young Jane Aslop, for one, told the press that one evening she answered a violent knocking at her front door. There was a man in the shadows by the front gate who identified himself as a police officer, and asked her to bring a light . . . he claimed to have captured the infamous Spring-Heeled Jack! Excited, Jane fetched a candle and hurried it out to the gate but nobody could be seen.

Suddenly, two arms grabbed her neck and began to rip up her dress and body. It was only thanks to the arrival of Jane’s sisters, alarmed by the struggle, that she was able to break free wearing only a few scars on her neck and arms. Into the distance, Jack leapt away.

Two months later, another girl, Lucy Scales, was returning home with her sister. As they entered a dark, empty alley, a tall, cloaked figure leaped from the shadows, belched blue flames into Lucy’s face, blinding her, and then disappeared again.

In the ensuing years sightings of Spring-Heeled Jack multiplied and through the 1850s and 1860s he was spotted all over England. Sometimes he enjoyed slapping sentries with his icy hands and jumping atop their guard boxes, while other times he was reported as leaping into some apartment from an open window, trashing the furniture around and then leaving by jumping out of the window again.

The few times when he was cornered he was able to escape thanks to one of his fabulous leaps. He soon became a sort of folklore figure, the subject of so called “penny dreadfuls,” melodramas and at least one later film, The Curse of the Wraydons (1946). Even mothers teaching their children to behave cried the name of that fearful bogeyman: “Be good or Spring-Heeled Jack will get you!”⁵

Just an Illusion

The careful reader will certainly have noticed by now the many similarities between the case of Spring-Heeled Jack and its modern equivalent, Monkey Man. In both cases a mysterious character, half-man and half-something else, on whom descriptions rarely agree, attacks defenseless people unprovoked and then disappears in an impossible way. No traces of his passage can ever be found but there are many who claim to have seen it, or at least to have felt its presence. It is in fact only on the basis of a feeling that the attacker was pursuing them that two people jumped off a roof.

Investigation by the police, finally, brings forth similar results in both cases: some scratches and bruises on the victims of the elusive creatures turn out to be caused by animal bites or accidents, while most of the wounds could have been self-inflicted by impressionable people. Statements from the victims change overnight and are vague and often contradictory. Like in the old days, when sensationalistic newspapers’ accounts fueled sightings of Jack, the same thing happened again recently. The final report from the Indian police said: “It was due to unsubstantiated media reports that people were encouraged to come out with bizarre accounts of the creature though no one had actually seen it.”⁶

Furthermore, in both cases a host of imitators jumped on the bandwagon: pranksters, persons of malicious intent (like in Japan, which is currently experiencing a series of “Pandaman” murders with the perpetrator wearing a Panda mask),⁷ and possibly some who simply saw an opportunity to get some attention.

The conclusion of Indian police is similar to one reached by those who have carefully studied the case of Spring-Heeled Jack: “The mysterious 'Monkey Man' that instilled terror and claimed three lives in the Indian capital was simply the product of the city’s collective imagination.”⁸

In other words, this was another sensational example of what sociologists call collective delusions. “Collective delusions,” say sociologists Robert E. Bartholomew and Erich Goode, “are typified as the spontaneous, rapid spread of false or exaggerated beliefs within a population at large, temporarily affecting a particular region, culture, or country. . . . Many factors contribute to the formation and spread of collective delusions and hysterical illness: the mass media; rumors; extraordinary anxiety or excitement; cultural beliefs and stereotypes; the social and political context; and reinforcing actions by authorities such as politicians, or institutions of social control such as the police or military.”⁹

Usually, it all starts when, in an uncomfortable environment-dark and foggy alleys in Victorian London yesterday, degraded neighborhoods with unrepaired street lights and scarce drinkable water in New Delhi today-something unusual happens. In London, it is quite possible that some street assaults actually took place, since there have always been similar assaults anywhere in the world, but it was only following an anonymous letter that the culprit was identified as the improbable Spring-Heeled Jack. In New Delhi, likewise, it may be that some aggressive, roaming monkey got too close to some people sleeping and scared some child. This spark is usually enough to start the mania: from that moment on, anything that seems a little bit out of the ordinary immediately becomes a Monkey Man, a leaping Jack or anything else: a black cat walks on the roof? It’s Monkey Man! Two drunks get into a fight? It’s Monkey Man attacking an innocent victim!

In Victorian London the imaginary exploits of Spring-Heeled Jack were soon forgotten and replaced in popular culture by the real and horrible ones of another Jack, the Ripper. In New Delhi, on the contrary, the wave of panic resulted in street lights being turned on, plentiful buckets of water being distributed, and better police-guarded streets. As Douglas Chapman remarked in his commentary on the episode for Strangemag.com, “This may be the first time in history that fortean phenomena-genuine, error, or hoax-has resulted in improved social services.”¹⁰ Can you imagine?

Notes

1. “India’s 'monkey man' branded imaginary,” ccn.com, June 22, 2001. See also: Hindustan Times, 16 May 2001; Mainichi Shimbun, 2 May 2001; Daily Pioneer, 16 and 20 May 2001; Times of India, 17 May 2001, 19 May 2001.
2. “Monkey man goes amok,” Hindustan times.com, May 12, 2001 (www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/130501/det1ST03.asp).
3. Ibid.
4. Nickell, Joe. 2002. 'Mothman' Solved! Skeptical Inquirer March/April 26(2): 20.
5. Begg, Paul, “Spring-Heeled Jack: The Terror of London,” in Brookesmith, Peter (ed.), Open Files, London, Orbis Publishing Ltd, 1984.
6. cnn.com, op. cit.
7. Chapman, Douglas, “Chaos in Delhi: Monkey Man Madness,” Strangemag.com.
8. cnn.com op. cit.
9. Bartholomew, Robert E., and Erich Goode. 2000. ”Mass Delusions and Hysterias.” Skeptical Inquirer, May/June 24(3): 20-28.
10. Chapman, Douglas, op. cit.

Belief in pseudoscience and antiscience has been rising in Russia, as it has in other countries of the world. This is especially true in the mass media and popular press, but pseudoscience has also entered into Russian science, largely because skeptical points of view have not been heard. This has been of special concern to many Russian scientists, who believe that the scientific community needs to provide critical examinations of paranormal claims-which mainstream scientists heretofore have largely deplored but ignored.

With this vexing problem in mind, the Russian Academy of Sciences, cosponsored a special conference with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) on “Science, Anti-Science, and the Paranormal.” This was held on October 3-5, 2001, at the headquarters of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Founded in the eighteenth century, the Academy survived Stalinist repression during the Soviet period. The Russian Academy is considered Russia’s elite scientific body. It includes in its highly select roster the most prestigious scientists in the country.

The conference was co-chaired by Edward Kruglyakov, a member of the Academy, who is a research physicist and deputy director at the Russian scientific city of Novosibirsk; Valerií Kuvakin, president of the Russian Humanist Society and former chairman of the department of philosophy at Moscow State University; and myself as chairman of CSICOP.

Well over 200 scientists and researchers came from all over Russia and neighboring republics-from Ukraine to Kazakhstan-to participate. Valerií Kuvakin heads the Center for Inquiry at Moscow State University, which opened four years ago. He is also editor of their journal Zdravyí Smysl (Common Sense or Critical Thinking) and editor of a series of books published in Russian. The Center, a joint project of CSICOP and the Council for Secular Humanism, is committed to reason, science, and free inquiry in all areas of human interest.

This conference marked my fifth trip to Russia in the last twelve years. I have participated in several conferences in Russia over the years, but this is the first one devoted exclusively to science and the paranormal. The Russian intelligentsia is largely unfamiliar with our emphasis on skeptical inquiry, but a number of them are now sympathetic to the agenda defended by CSICOP. During the long period of the Soviet Union, the official dogma of the Communist Party ruled the country, and alternative viewpoints were suppressed, though the rulers defended what they called “scientific Marxism.” With the collapse of the Soviet Union, all sorts of paranormal and religious claims proliferated, but there were few defenders of critical thinking.

Both Kruglyakov and Kuvakin have visited the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, Kuvakin several times as a Research Fellow. The Center for Inquiry in Moscow State University is also a strong proponent of human rights and democracy, which it considers essential for the flourishing of science.

Kruglyakov was appointed chairman of the Russian Academy’s new “Commission Against Pseudoscience and the Falsifications of Scientific Studies.” His task is to work with CSICOP and other skeptical groups in providing information about uncorroborated claims. In his paper, “Why Is Pseudoscience Dangerous?” [see page 33], he was particularly concerned with unsubstantiated pseudoscientific theories that are being introduced into mainline physics and accepted without dissent. Kruglyakov was recently asked by President Putin for recommendations in treating this problem. Kruglyakov urged increased funding for scientific research and education. Incidentally, news of the conference prior to our arrival was apparently discussed in the Duma and engendered heated controversy.

Russian scientists at the conference complained about the growth of astrology, psychic phenomena, UFOlogy, and alternative medicine, but until now they said they did not have the proper tools or the information with which to criticize these topics. The need for scientific education in Russia was emphasized by astronomer D.G. Sordin, who said that the funding for scientific research and education is in crisis, for it has declined precipitously. He cited the fact that Russia’s most influential science magazines have lost readership. For example, Science and Life has dropped from 3.4 million during the Soviet period to 40,000 circulation today. Russia’s leading physics magazine, Quantum, has fallen from 315,000 to 5,000 readers. Garry Abelev, also a member of the Academy, said that pseudoscience is growing in biology and medicine. Well-known TV personality Sergeí Kapitsa, vice president of the Academy of Sciences, attributed the growth of pseudoscience to sociological causes and said that it is a symptom of the “worldwide disintegration of society.” Yurií Efremov, another noted astronomer, in his paper [see page 29] criticized the increasing influence of pseudoscientific philosophies, such as postmodernism and religious fundamentalism, which have subtly undermined the naturalistic outlook and the ideals of the Enlightenment.

Representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church and some exponents of spirituality and the paranormal attended the public sessions of the meetings. Much has been written about an alleged religious revival in Russia. Lev Mitrokhin, a member of the Academy and social philosopher, said popular interest, somewhat intense several years ago, has already begun to abate. Most people do not attend church, but they do not call themselves atheists or skeptics. Many Russians were concerned about the possible growth of cults in Russia, but popular interest here has likewise begun to decline.

A number of members of CSICOP participated in this conference. They included Willem Betz from Brussels, who discussed homeopathy and alternative medicine. Amardeo Sarma, head of the European Council of Skeptical Organizations and of CSICOP’s Center for Inquiry in Rossdorf, Germany, dealt with the Shroud of Turin and the problems of creating a skeptics movement in a country. James Alcock, psychologist at York University, analyzed the question “why people believe.” Richard Wiseman from England criticized parapsychology. In attendance from the United States were Lee Nisbet, who talked about media misinformation; Joe Nickell, who discussed miracles; and Jan Eisler, who dealt with the limitations of “therapeutic touch.”

In the last session of the conference the participants passed a resolution against antiscience, charlatanism, and irrationalism in Russia and supported the work of the new Russian committee [see page 28]. The Russian Humanist Society also passed a resolution protesting the violation of the separation of church and state, and, in particular, the efforts by the Russian Orthodox Church to reintroduce religion into the public schools, which they thought would undermine science. Having suffered decades of religious repression at the hands of Stalinism during the Soviet period, participants, however, were cautious in their criticism of religion.

The conference received extensive coverage in the media, front page in Isvestia and other newspapers, as well as considerable comment in scientific journals, TV, and radio.

Last but not least, the proceedings were held in a friendly atmosphere and concluded with many toasts of vodka at the Academy and at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University, chaired by the dean. The most important conclusion to emerge from the conference is that Russian scientists wish to participate in the world skeptics movement. They wish to take part in future conferences and to dialogue with their colleagues throughout the world.

By the late 1960s the modern theories of continental drift and plate tectonics had become firmly established in geological thought. They had survived close scrutiny and challenges from competing hypotheses and propositions, both within and outside the scientific community. One of the most prominent unorthodox interpretations put forward was Charles Hapgood’s “Earth Crustal Displacement,” which was never accepted as a truly valid competing scientific hypothesis (and Hapgood was not part of the geological community). Popularized in his 1958 book Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science, the Earth Crustal Displacement idea has re-emerged in alternative circles in the last decade. Its most vocal supporters are the librarians Rand and Rose Flem-Ath and the journalist Graham Hancock. Hancock based a large portion of his book Fingerprints of the Gods (1995, revised 2001) on Hapgood’s evidence for catastrophe at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, 12,000 B.P. (before present).

Earth Crustal Displacement is based on the premise that Earth’s lithosphere (the outer part of the rocky Earth, about the uppermost 80 kilometers or 50 miles) has shifted as a whole at different times in the past over Earth’s interior. Hancock (1995, 11) went so far as to claim no geologist “has succeeded in proving it incorrect.” Results from pollen analyses have revealed patterns of climate change that are at odds with the inherent predictions of the Earth Crustal Displacement model. Studies have shown that the Polar regions have either contracted or expanded toward the equator, but have never shifted their positions as required by Earth Crustal Displacement. The CLIMAP Project (1981) reconstructed climatic zones during the Last Glacial Maximum and the results obtained shows the North and South Poles (and the equator) in the same position as today. Paleontological data, summarized by Thiede et al. (1990), reveals that the Arctic Ocean has continuously experienced polar climates, almost permanent ice cover and glacio-marine sedimentation for all of the Late Cenozoic since the mid-Pleistocene. Phillips and Ganze (1997) reconfirm that, regardless of how the climate has varied in the Arctic Polar regions, they have been colder than the oceanic areas south of it for at least the past 7 million years. Earth’s lithosphere is attached to the mantle in such a way as to make Earth Crustal Displacement impracticable. The mechanism for Earth Crustal Displacement was postulated to be the sheer weight of the ice built up over time; this caused the crust to shift through unequal weight distribution. However, this weight is compensated for by isostatic depression of the crust. Finally, there is no paleomagnetic evidence for Earth Crustal Displacement having occurred.

In Fingerprints of the Gods, Hancock hypothesizes that the demise of the mammoths and other megafauna was caused by a catastrophic cataclysm brought on through an Earth Crustal Displacement. The result was that “terrible forces were unleashed on all living creatures during the last Ice Age” and that “the northern regions of Alaska and Siberia appear to have been the worst hit by the murderous upheavals between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago. In a great swathe of death around the edge of the Arctic Circle the remains of uncountable numbers of large animals have been found-including many carcasses with the flesh still intact, and astonishing quantities of perfectly preserved mammoth tusks” (Hancock 1995, 212, 213). Hancock makes a case for Siberia having experienced a warm climate before 11,000 B.P. and contrasts it with the conditions seen there today. As evi-dence, Hancock focuses on stomach contents: “The mammoth died suddenly, in intense cold, and in great numbers. Death comes so quickly that the swallowed vegetation is yet undigested. . . . Grasses, bluebells, buttercups, tender sedges, and wild beans have been found, yet identifiable and undeteriorated, in their mouths and stomachs” (Hancock 1995, 215-16). The source for the quote by Hancock is a 1960 newspaper article by Ivan Sanderson. Hancock (1995, 216) also claims: “Needless to say, such flora does not grow anywhere in Siberia today. Its presence there in the eleventh millennium b.c. compels us to accept that the region had a pleasant and productive climate-one that was temperate or even warm. . . . What is certain, however, is that at some point between 12-13,000 years ago a destroying frost descended with horrifying speed upon Siberia and has never relaxed its grip. In an eerie echo of the Avestic traditions, a land which had previously enjoyed seven months of summer was converted almost overnight into a land of ice and snow with ten months of harsh and frozen winter.”

The positions and actions of ice sheets are more complicated than the blanket portrayal in Fingerprints of the Gods. The Barents Ice Sheet covered most of northern Russia and goes unmentioned in Fingerprints of the Gods, as do the reasons behind why Siberia was not all covered in ice. Siberia lay west and southwest of where the Barents Ice Sheet had formed. There was insufficient snowfall to create enough ice to expand the Barents Ice Sheet into Siberia. Chinooks blowing down off the ice sheet, moderating the climate of the area in front of them, was the cause of the insufficient snowfall. North America was also subjected to its own chinook winds. As has been documented with the Sierra Nevadas and other mountain ranges, the air descending 2-3 km from the top of an ice-sheet would be heated up to an average of 4-7 degrees centigrade. The areas of Siberia and North America in front of the ice-sheets would have experienced a milder winter than present, although their summers were colder, which resulted in more conducive conditions for plant growth and for animals than those currently experienced. Moreover, a rain shadow was cast over Siberia by the ice sheet, and the Arctic Ocean, covered in ice, could provide little moisture for precipitation over Siberia. This scenario was tested by COHMAP (Cooperative Holocene Mapping Project) members (1988) who found a dry Siberia, a glaciated Barents Sea, and a glaciated North America to be compatible.

The Frozen Mammoths

Claims that the mammoths were quick-frozen have been propounded for decades and were disputed by Zimmerman and Tedford as long ago as the mid-1970s (1976, 183): “Histologic examination of rehydrated tissue samples from late Pleistocene Alaskan mammal mummies demonstrates that the preservative effect of freezing and drying extends to remains 15,000 to 25,000 years old. Some muscle and liver retained identifiable histologic structures. Most tissues were completely disintegrated and partly replaced by masses of bacteria, an indication of considerable post-mortem decay before the remains were entombed beneath the permafrost zone.”

These points were taken up and elaborated upon further by Kurten (1986, 51-2): “Various legends exist about frozen mammoths. It has been said, for instance, that the scientists who excavated the Beresovka mammoth, discovered in the year 1900, enjoyed a banquet on mammoth steak. What really appears to have happened (as I was told by Professor Anatol Heinz) is that one of them made a heroic attempt to take a bite out of the 40,000 year old meat but was unable to keep it down, in spite of a generous use of spices... The facts are not hard to find. In 1902, Otto Herz, a zoologist at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Pietersburg published in German an account of the expedition to the Beresovka River which he had led the year before, with the purpose of salvaging the mammoth carcass that had been discovered in 1900. . . . The point here is this: Herz definitely states that it was only the superficial part of the cadaver that had been preserved. The internal organs had rotted away before the animal had become frozen.”

"Blue-babe,” a mammoth that perished 36,000 B.P., was discovered with its chest cavity torn open by predators, which allowed its body to be quick-frozen. If it had been catastrophically frozen, it would have been too hard to tear open and be feasted upon. Second, its predators should have been quick-frozen by the same catastrophe that overcame their feast.

The size of the mammoths was an adaptive advantage to the cold environment in which they lived, and not to the warm environment postulated by Hancock. Low surface-to-body ratios help to reduce passive heat loss through the skin. They had small ears and trunks by comparison with their African elephant cousins, who use their large ears and trunks to dissipate the heat. The mammoth’s body was cold-adapted in other ways. They had a 10cm thick undercoat, 50cm long body hairs and a 10cm layer of white insulative fat under the skin. The woolly rhinoceros, Coelodonta antiquitatis, also had a shaggy coat and a layer of extra fat underneath its skin. Mummified remains of these rhinos have also been found in the permafrost.

Permafrost Plants

The plants and pollen found within the mammoths, together with the remains in the surrounding sediments, consist entirely of plant varieties adapted to cold climates. The plant remains found in the guts of the mammoth and other mummified animals from Siberia have been analyzed and summarized in detail by Ukraintseva (1993). Further work on the climate of Siberia by Russian paleontologists, paleobotanists, and geologists has also been summarized in Ukraintseva (1993). Siberia was not dominated by tundra when the mammoths lived. As Ukraintseva (240) points out, “Integrated investigations threw light on environments of the concrete specimens of fossil animals discussed here and the 'mammoth' fauna as a whole. Most of the mammals died in warm periods during the last 53,000-10,000 years when the vast territory of Siberia was covered by various forests, paludal communities and bogs, whereas communities of azonal character (meadows, steppe meadows, and others) which served as pastures to the mammals sharply reduced in area.” Ukraintseva also says: “Cold (glacial) epochs were dominated by open, treeless landscapes such as arctic meadows, various tundras, periglacial steppes. Remains of fossil trees, dated by C14 analysis, suggest that woody plants did not disappear completely during short cold phases of the last Pleistocene and Holocene. They remained as small forests and separate trees in the river valleys and serves as peculiar advanced posts for forest advance northwards at warm periods.” The arctic meadows, tundras, and steppes contained the herbaceous plants, leaves, and sprigs of shrubs and low shrubs needed for the mammoth to feed on and survive in glacial Siberia. The mammoths also had complex molars that were ideally suited for its macrograzing habitats. These data were available to Hancock when both editions of Fingerprints of the Gods were published.

The problem is that the winters had to have been cold enough to freeze and mummify the remains, and the summers warm enough to melt the permafrost and produce mudflows to bury the carcasses. If the summers were too cold then mudflows wouldn't have occurred and the carcasses be buried and preserved; if the winters were too warm, the carcasses would have been decayed or been devoured fully by predators before being preserved. The remains of Pleistocene mammals in Alaska and Siberia have been discovered in permafrost, which resulted in the body tissue being preserved through desiccation-induced mummification.

The end of the Last Glacial Maximum was a continuation of cyclical events occurring over hundreds of millions of years, which has its origins in slow cyclical changes in the tilt of Earth and Earth’s eccentric orbit around the Sun. Although the latter is mentioned in Chapter 28 of Fingerprints of the Gods, entitled “Machinery of Heaven,” its implications are not discussed. These two Milankovitch factors combine to vary the amount of solar radiation different areas of Earth receive at different times in accordance with orbital forcing. Current cycles last 100,000 years and are affected also by ocean currents and the rise and fall of mountain ranges. In-depth analyses have been undertaken and presented by John and Katherine Imbrie (1979), as well as Wally Broecker and George Denton (1990).

The climate changes that affected the habitats of the mammoths, and other mammals, at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum have been eloquently and concisely expressed by Vereshchagin and Baryshnikow (1984, 506-7): “Winters with little snowfall and the development of a luxuriant grass cover on hard, dry ground with abundant summer insolation allowed horses, bison, and saiga to occupy huge expanses of northern Eurasia. The boundary between the Pleistocene and Holocene was characterized by sharp, short climatic oscillations: The B¿lling interstadial (12,400-12,000 yr B.P.), the Middle Dryas stadial (12,000-11,8000 yr B.P.), and the Allerød interstadial (11,800-11,000 yr B.P.), the Upper Dryas stadial (11,000-10,300 yr B.P.), and so forth, which affected the Pleistocene species decisively. It was precisely in this time range that the massive extinction of the mammoths and their 'fellow travellors’ occurred in the arctic zone. Testimony to this extinction are the hundreds of thousands of bones from disarticulated skeletons and the occasional frozen carcasses buried in Sartan deposits (late Wisconsin) in northern Yakutia and on the Tajmyr Peninsula. Judging from modern examples of mass death among wild and domestic ungulates in the Kazakhstan steppes, the best explanation for such death at the end of the Pleistocene is the frequent occurrence of snowstorms (blizzards) in winter and the transformation of the nutritious Pleistocene tundra-steppe into a boggy, lake-dotted tundra. In subarctic latitudes at this time, taiga and mixed-forests advanced rapidly onto open expanses, and a forest fauna developed. From the paleozoologist’s point of view, the most convincing proof that the landscape changed radically on the boundary between the Pleistocene and Holocene is the change from a steppe, mammoth fauna into a forest fauna on the Russian Plain, in the northern Urals, in Siberia, and even in the Far East.”

These two authors place great emphasis upon the role of climate in the demise of the megafauna (512):

The examples we have presented of extremely rapid decline in some nonexploited mammal species during the Quaternary and at present in northern Eurasia point to the supreme importance of external, abiotic environmental factors in their extinction. The near-total extinction of large species of the mammoth fauna in the tundra and taiga zones and their partial survival in the forest steppe and steppe confirms the decisive effects of climatic and landscape changes for the life and death of this species group. The best proof of what has been said is the ubiquitous transformation of the Upper Pleistocene “steppe” fauna into a forest and taiga fauna over huge areas in upper and middle latitudes in Eurasia. In this case, the primitive species were not crowded out by more progressive ones, nor were their population structures disrupted, nor were they destroyed by human activity. Environmental change was so radical and dramatic that morphological evolution simply did not have time to catch up. The destructive activity of people is often thought to have been decisive in the extinction of Quaternary giants (mammoths, rhinoceros, cave bear, and others). However, while human influence on animal populations steadily increased in prehistory, it became definitive only in the last few millennia and centuries. In addition, the role of man has not been the same in all geographic zones. It has been greatest in the ancient heartlands of civilization in the Mediterranean Basin, western and central Asia, and China, and least in the polar desert. The remaining causes of extinction have apparently been secondary, merely promoting further reduction in ranges and numbers of species after they had suffered from climatic and landscape changes or from human pressures.

Other theories place greater or lesser emphasis upon human involvement on the extinction of the megafauna, but the point is that that alternative theories to a cataclysmic demise are rooted in sound factual evidence that strongly contradicts Fingerprints of the Gods.

The book Quaternary Extinctions is cited four times in Fingerprints of the Gods (Chapter 26), which puts forward Hancock’s view of a cataclysm having struck Siberia and Alaska causing the demise of the mammoths and other fauna. In each case, no mention is made of the evidence and views proposed by the scientists on the basis of valid scientific research into the cause of fauna extinctions at the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary.

Conclusion

In the scenario painted by Hancock in Fingerprints of the Gods, Siberia and Alaska are ice-free with temperate climates prior to a cataclysm occurring at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. This dramatic shift to an ice-bound climate explains the existence of frozen mammoths and the demise of a number of megafauna. Accordingly, to test Hancock’s ideas the following factors would have to be proven correct:

1. The floral remains found inside the mammoths and in the surrounding environment could not be from plants which can adapt to the cold;
2. The dates of frozen mammoths carcasses would be clustered in the couple of thousand years following the Last Glacial Maximum;
3. No mammoths would have survived the Earth Crustal Displacement-induced cataclysm;
4. Earth Crustal Displacement would need to be a valid scientific theory; and
5. No other geological and archaeological theory could better explain the currently available evidence.

Until 3,700 BP, a small woolly mammoth species existed about 200 km off the coast of Siberia, on Wrangel Island. The body of the mammoth was adapted for the cold, and the environment of Pleistocene Siberia and Alaska was far from the warm picture portrayed in Fingerprints of the Gods. Earth Crustal Displacement is a discredited hypothesis which no longer has any factual basis on which to stand: it was tested, as all scientific hypotheses are, and found wanting. The demise of the mammoth and other megafauna at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition is readily explained through climatic influences and human activities.

The information cited in this article was available to Hancock before the publication of the first edition of Fingerprints of the Gods. He has since brought out a second edition, with the only change being an introduction and additional photos. It is fitting to end of this article in Hancock’s own words (2001, xvii-xviii): “I don't believe in revising or 'updating' books. For this reason, I haven't changed a word of the original text of Fingerprints of the Gods. All of it is reproduced here exactly as it was in the first, 1995, edition. . . . The proper place for all this new material to come out, in my view, is in new books, not in updates to old ones. So even as I write this introduction to the 2001 edition of Fingerprints of the Gods I am happy to report that I have also completed the first three chapters of Underworld-which is scheduled for publication in 2002 (please note that Underworld will not be covering the same subject material as Fingerprints of the Gods). Writing new books, rather than going back to tamper with books already written, is also the way I prefer to respond to criticisms of my work. . . . I am proud of this book and continue to stand by it despite the unremitting hostility and criticisms of academics.”

References

• Broecker, W., and G. Denton. 1990. What drives glacial cycles? Scientific American, January: 43-50.
• CLIMAP Project Members. 1981. Seasonal reconstructions of the Earth’s surface at the last glacial maximum. Geological Society of America Map and Chart Series, MC-36. Geological Society of America, Boulder, Colorado.
• COHMAP Members. 1988. Climatic changes of the last 18,000 years: Observations and model simulations. Science 241: 1043-52.
• Hancock, G. 1995. Fingerprints of the Gods: A Quest for the Beginning and the End. London: William Heinemann.
• ---. 2001. Fingerprints of the Gods: The Quest Continues. London: William Heinemann.
• Hapgood, C. 1958. Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Imbrie, J., and K. Imbrie. 1979. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Kurten, B. 1986. How to Deep Freeze a Mammoth. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Phillips, R., and A. Ganze. 1997. Quaternary history of sea ice and paleoclimatic in the Amerasia Basin, Arctic Ocean, as recorded in the cyclical strata of Northwind Ridge. Geological Society of America Bulletin 109(9): 1101-1115
• Thiede, J., D.L. Clark, and Y. Herman. 1990. Late Mesozoic and Cenozoic paleoeceangraphy of the northern polar ocean. In The Arctic Ocean Region, A. Gantz, L. Johnson, and J. Sweeney eds. The Geology of North America, Geological Society of America, Boulder, Colorado.
• Ukraintseva, V. 1993. Vegetation Cover and Environment in the “Mammoth Epoch” in Siberia. San Diego: The Mammoth Site.
• Vereshchagin, N., and G Baryshnikov. 1984. Quaternary mammalian extinctions in Northern Eurasia. In Quaternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution, P. Martin, and R. Klein. eds. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
• Zimmerman, M., and R. Tedford. 1976. Histologic structures preserved for 21,300 years. Science 194(4261): 183-4.

This article chronicles the tribulations noted psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and Melvin Guyer were put through for conducting the investigation that is the subject of their two-part article ”Who Abused Jane Doe?” concluding in this issue of the Skeptical Inquirer
—The Editor

In the olden days, perhaps twenty or thirty years ago, academic debates were marked by sweet discourse and the harmonious if impassioned hum of debate. (Also by sarcasm.) The rule used to be that if you disagreed with someone’s opinion or interpretations of data, you did the civilized thing-you called the person a knucklehead or an incompetent fool. Or you wrote a devastating reply explaining why the knucklehead was terminally wrong, misguided, or drunk.

That was then. Just as noise trumps silence and rage trumps courtesy, the cudgel of lawsuits to silence or cower the opposition trumps free debate. In universities across the country, lawsuits, even spurious and unsuccessful ones, have weakened the once-sacrosanct guarantees to scholars of free speech and association. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and Human Subjects Committees have proliferated, to protect human subjects from harm caused by unethical scientists-and to protect universities from any lawsuits that might ensue.

Of course some scientists have conducted dangerous and/or unethical research. I do not disapprove of efforts to assure the safety of subjects any more than I do of lawsuits to punish those who plagiarize, commit libel or fraud, or maliciously destroy reputations. But all institutionalized efforts to correct one problem will inevitably create other problems. Today, many of the IRBs originally established to protect subjects have instituted so many byzantine restrictions and rules that even good scientists cannot do their work. Some have become fiefdoms of power-free to make decisions based on caprice, personal vendettas, or self-interest, and free to strangle research that might prove too provocative, controversial, or politically sensitive.

The growing power of IRBs in academia, along with the increasing number of restrictions on free speech in the politically correct name of “speech codes” and “conduct codes” (described so well by Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate in The Shadow University), is perilous for independent scientific inquiry. For years, the skeptical movement, which had its birth in the domain of philosophy and the study of logic, has tended to regard failures of skeptical and scientific thinking as failures of reasoning-something amiss in human cognition. The underlying assumption has been that if we can only get people to think straight, junk their cognitive biases, and understand the basic principles and methods of science, pseudoscientific reasoning will become as vestigial to the mind as the appendix is to the body.

Perhaps, but the skeptical movement needs also to focus its energies on the growing institutional barriers to free inquiry, and the efforts to silence those whose inquiries make waves. The story of what happened to Elizabeth Loftus and Mel Guyer when they set out to investigate the case of Jane Doe is itself a case study of the high cost of skepticism.¹ The two demonstrated exactly the kind of openminded spirit of discovery that is at the heart of the skeptical movement. For their pains, they found themselves in an Orwellian nightmare.

The irony is that if Loftus and Guyer were journalists, they would have done precisely the same investigation unhampered and fully supported by their employer. But because they are university professors, they were subjected to a secret, shadowy investigation of their legal right to do what good reporters do every day. And their respective universities, far from supporting their intellectual inquiries and their tenured (indeed American) right to free speech, obstructed and harassed them. Some of these obstructionist efforts linger in the articles they wrote in this magazine [”Who Abused Jane Doe?” May/June and July/August 2002]. If a writer for, say, The New Yorker or The Atlantic had conducted such an investigation, you would know the city and state of all of the individuals interviewed, their names (unless they requested anonymity), the data bases the investigators used to gather information-in short, you would know the details. But Loftus feels she is still not at liberty to provide these details in print, and that her university is still looking over her shoulder.

Who Abused Loftus and Guyer?

After reading David Corwin’s account of Jane Doe in the journal Child Maltreatment in 1997, Loftus and Guyer decided to examine his alleged evidence of a recovered memory of sexual abuse. The stakes were high for their work as scholars, teachers, and expert witnesses, because the case was already being used in court as evidence that recovered memories of sexual abuse in childhood are reliable.

They began by looking into documents in the public record. They found a public court case of “Jane Doe” who fit the description in Corwin’s article, but the court records differed from Corwin’s account in significant ways. They eventually met Jane Doe’s mother, and became convinced that she had been falsely accused many years before, leading to the loss of custody of her daughter. They decided that this was a story worth pursuing and publishing, ideally in a popular magazine.

In the spring of 1998, Guyer contacted the administrator of the University of Michigan’s IRB to make sure the committee shared his view that he did not need their approval because he was not doing “research” but rather “intellectual criticism, commentary on a forensic issue, and an historical/journalistic endeavor.” The administrator and the then-chair of the IRB, Sumer Pek, agreed; Guyer’s investigation would be exempt from IRB oversight.

A month later Guyer received a letter, with no intervening warning that anything was amiss, telling him that his project was not exempt; in fact, that it was assigned a “disapproval” status; and that the IRB was recommending to the Office of the Vice President of Research that he, personally, be reprimanded.

The Catholic Church has given up limbo, but not, apparently, university IRBs. Appeals, protests, and exchanges ensued for nearly a year. In March 1999, Guyer received a letter from the new chair of the IRB, Stephen Gebarski, telling him that his work was indeed exempt from IRB consideration because it was not “human subjects research.” The OVP Research office concluded that there was no basis for a recommendation of “reprimand.” Guyer was given no explanation of the year-long delay, although Gebarski did apologize for any “misunderstandings” that might have occurred that year. He added that he was personally “[looking] forward to seeing your interesting historical journalistic work published in the appropriate forum.”

Encouraged by the green light given to Guyer at Michigan, the two pursued their investigation. Then the University of Washington received an e-mail from Jane Doe, complaining that her privacy was being violated. Considering that David Corwin had published his account of her life and was traveling around the country showing videotapes of Jane at six and seventeen, and considering that no one was making her story public (and hence violating her “privacy”) except Jane herself and Corwin, this complaint should have been recognized as a cry from a troubled and vulnerable young woman, and set aside. Instead, it was enough to set in motion a series of endlessly shifting charges against Elizabeth Loftus, a scientist of international stature who had brought luster and prestige to her university for more than twenty-five years. The “investigation” against her lasted more than twenty-one months, in spite of the University’s own statute of limitations-thirty days for the selection of a committee and ninety days for its deliberations-for bringing all such investigations to a conclusion.

On September 30, 1999, having given Loftus fifteen minutes’ advance notice by telephone, John Slattery of the University of Washington’s “Office of Scientific Integrity” arrived in Loftus’s office, along with the chair of the psychology department, and seized her files. She asked Slattery what the charges against her were. It took him five weeks to respond, and when he did he had transformed Jane Doe’s “privacy” complaint into an investigation of “possible violations of human subjects research.” Loftus later learned that lawyers in another state, who had retained Corwin as their defense expert, were trying to subpoena her personnel file in hopes of finding something there to discredit her as an expert witness for the plaintiffs. Because the University, in the face of her objection, was going forward in complying with this improper subpoena, she was forced to retain her own lawyer to stop them. (Because it was from out of state, it had no force of law or validity in Washington.)

In February 2000, Loftus and her lawyer dislodged some documents from the University’s investigation, and found among them a “Confidential Memo” written by Stanley Berent, a neuropsychologist who was on the IRB at the University of Michigan - Guyer’s IRB. This memo had played a crucial role in the decision to reprimand Guyer and deny him the right to continue his work, yet Guyer was never even told it existed. Berent’s memo, Guyer says, “was the harshest document, filled with false innuendo, malicious insinuations, and outright falsities. Keeping it secret from me denied me the opportunity to correct its mischaracterizations.” To this day Guyer has been unable to get his own university to provide him with a copy of this memo, even after repeated requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Yet a University of Michigan lawyer was happy to send it directly to the investigating committee at the University of Washington, to be used against Loftus. This was the modus operandi at both universities: keep the charges secret, keep changing the charges, keep the meetings secret, keep the accused in the dark.

In the spring of 2001, the three-member investigating committee, consisting of two clinicians and one sociologist, concluded that Loftus was not guilty of the charge of “scholarly misconduct.” But the two clinicians recommended to the dean, David Hodge, that she nonetheless be reprimanded and subjected to a program of remedial education on professional ethics. They instructed Loftus not to publish data obtained by methods they regarded as inconsistent with the “ethical principals” [sic] of psychologists-that is, the methods of a journalistic investigation.

On July 3, 2001, one year and nine months after the University of Washington seized her files, and one month after Loftus won the prestigious William James award from the American Psychological Society for her decades of scientific research [see Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2001], Dean Hodge wrote Loftus a letter of exoneration. Her work, he said, “does not constitute research involving human subjects.” She did not commit ethical violations or deviate from accepted research practices. She was not guilty of any misconduct. She would not have to undergo remedial education on how to conduct research.

But, oh, one more thing: She was not to contact Jane Doe’s mother again or interview anyone else involved in the case without advance approval. Such meetings, he said, would constitute “human subjects research requiring Human Subjects Committee approval.”

The Enemy Within

And there it stands: Loftus and Guyer won; their investigation was published in these pages; but at tremendous cost. Loftus still feels bitter at the dean’s restrictions, which she and Guyer regard as blatant violations of her First Amendment rights. Guyer is still outraged by Stanley Berent’s peculiar and devious memo, not knowing to whom else it was improperly sent or who might next use its innuendos and lies against him.

Of course, their investigation of Corwin’s claims was bound to enflame passions: those of Jane Doe herself, an unhappy young woman whose life has been filled with conflict and loss; those of David Corwin, who has publicly promoted his case study as a personal vindication and a prototype of how recovered memories should be studied; and those of the many clinicians who still cling to the discredited concept of repressed memories. Loftus and Guyer knew they had enemies. They hadn't known that some of them were at their own universities, and that the shields of tenure and the First Amendment would not be sufficient protection.

"I don't see how you can write anything of value,” the great anthropologist Marvin Harris told me years ago, “if you don't offend someone.” Skeptical inquiry is endangered when those who are offended or threatened by knowledge are able to silence those who have something valuable to say. The lawsuit path is crowded because those who take it face no negative consequences: The worst that can happen to them is nothing at all-their target doesn't budge. But often the targets of these threats, weary of being harassed, unable to pay the costs of self-defense, frightened at the prospect of losing their reputations, and unsupported by their publisher or university, do back down. The offending passage is deleted, funny but sarcastic remarks toned down, safer topics chosen, documented evidence of the target’s malfeasance removed.

That is why we must be all the more grateful for the courage, persistence, and integrity of those skeptical inquirers who are still willing to “offend” in the pursuit of truth and justice, heroes like Elizabeth Loftus and Mel Guyer.

Postscript

Institutional Review Boards misuse their power not only when they impose excessive and unnecessary restrictions on free speech in the name of protecting subjects; but also when financial interests influence their approval of research that is potentially harmful to subjects. Consider this irony: Stanley Berent’s confidential memo excoriated Mel Guyer for his alleged scientific and ethical lapses-among them, failing to get Jane Doe’s consent to call her mother, who was eager to tell them her side of the story; failing to enlist the “ongoing cooperation” of Corwin(!), as if Corwin would have granted it; and failing to consider whether this “research” might have “a negative effect upon the dignity and welfare of the participant.” Yet at the very same time, Berent got permission from his own IRB (of which he was a member) to conduct research with, in my view, far graver implications for the dignity and welfare of his subjects.

The Michigan IRB had granted approval for Berent and his associate James Albers to retrieve medical records of railroad workers who had been exposed to dangerous solvents. The workers were suing their employer, CSX Transportation Inc., and Dow Chemical, claiming that exposure had caused brain damage and other medical problems. Berent and Albers, hired by CSX and Dow, examined the medical records - without the workers’ knowledge or consent - and concluded that there was no connection between the workers’ medical problems and their exposure to solvents.

An investigation conducted by the University of Michigan found no conflict of interest in Berent and Albers’ behavior and no need to obtain the workers’ informed consent, because Berent and Albers’ conclusions about the workers were based on “existing non-research data.” (Just the kind of data Loftus and Guyer used.) However, the Office of Human Research Protections at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is continuing its investigation of Berent and Albers’ potential conflict of interest. Berent has taken early retirement.

Note

1. In the interests of full disclosure, I am a friend of both Loftus and Guyer, and I write this essay as a concerned observer, not as a disinterested reporter. Their experiences described here are accurate, but I did not interview administrators or investigators to get “their side.”

About this article:

Second of two parts. Part one appeared in the May/June 2002 Skeptical Inquirer, with sections on “The Memory Wars” and “Our Search for the Full Story.”

Case histories make contributions to science and practice, but they can also be highly misleading. We illustrated with our re-examination of the case of Jane Doe; she was videotaped twice, once when she was six years old and then eleven years later when she was seventeen. During the first interview she reported sexual abuse by her mother. During the second interview she apparently forgot and then remembered the sexual abuse. Jane’s case has been hailed by some as the new proof of recovery of repressed or dissociated traumatic memories, and even as proof of the reliability of recovered memories of repeated abuse. Numerous pieces of “supporting evidence” were given in the original article for believing that the abuse occurred. Upon closer scrutiny, however, there are reasons to doubt not only the “supporting evidence,” but also that the sexual abuse ever happened in the first place. Our analysis raises several general questions abut the use of case histories in science, medicine, and mental health. There is a cautionary tale not only for those professionals who advance the case history, but also for those who base their theories on it or would readily accept it as proof.
–The Authors

Also see ”The High Cost of Skepticism,” Carol Tavris’s essay about the Loftus/Guyer investigation into the case of Jane Doe, immediately following their article on page 41.
–The Editors

Many questions remain unanswered. Did Jane repress and recover an authentic memory of sexual abuse, or did she always remember the charges that cost her mother custody of her? Were those allegations accurate, or is there an alternative that might explain why Jane reported sexual abuse as a child and later came to believe it really happened? What is the truth about Jane’s allegedly “burned” feet? Why were John Doe’s abuse accusations against Dad never pursued?

A memory is, of course, not proof of the event it purports to recall. We all “remember” things that never actually happened, as ample scientific evidence has demonstrated (Loftus 1997). To take Jane’s memory as evidence of an alleged prior event is to beg the question of whether it is a recovered memory. Instead, we must begin with an inquiry into what was regarded as corroboration of the claim of recollection. Thus we are led back to Corwin’s original clinical evaluation.

There was no smoking gun in this case-no first-hand eyewitness accounts from impartial parties, no unambiguous physical evidence of sexual abuse or even of old burns. Corwin rests his corroboration of Jane’s memory upon his clinical opinion that the alleged abuse occurred. The claim of corroboration naturally takes us to questions about the nature of clinical child abuse evaluations and their validity and reliability in general, and in this case in particular. Child sexual abuse is not a diagnosis. Instead such cases typically involve an effort to postdict-to say, on the basis of record review, contemporaneous observations, and credibility judgments whether some event did or did not occur in the past-an enterprise typically outside the scope of mental health expertise.

Can clinicians postdict with accuracy whether child sexual abuse occurred? Based upon a substantial body of scientific research, much of it done after Jane’s 1984 evaluation, we have learned many sobering things about the limitations of clinical expertise in the postdiction of child sexual abuse.

1. We know that clinical judgments of alleged sexual abuse may be unreliable (Horner, Guyer, and Kalter 1993a, b). Even experienced evaluators of child claims disagree markedly.
2. We know that clinical judgments concerning the credibility of children’s statements are not reliable (Ceci and Huffman 1997, Ceci, Loftus, Leichtman, and Bruck 1994), nor are clinical judgments concerning the credibility of adults particularly reliable (Ekman and O'Sullivan 1991).
3. We know that there are few, if any, specific behavioral indicators of child sexual abuse (Kendall-Tackett et al. 1993), and to rely upon any one or two behavioral indicators will result in many false positives.
4. We know that false allegations of child sexual abuse find fertile ground in highly contested child custody/visitation cases and that these are the most suspect cases in which allegations of abuse arise (Benedict and Schetky 1985). We know that children in such circumstances are often subject to so much parental influence that they sometimes lose the capacity to accurately report their own experiences.
5. We know that children, especially young ones, can be made to recall events that have not occurred, especially if they are questioned about them in suggestive and leading ways.
6. We know that interviewers and evaluators who have an expectation bias can influence the recollections and reports of their subjects to be congruent with their bias.
7. Finally, we know that multiple interviews and repeated and prolonged evaluations erode the capacity of people to obtain trustworthy data from child witnesses. Indeed, the study of the malleability of children’s memory constitutes an important area of memory research, and much of it has developed only in the last ten years (Ceci and Bruck 1995).

What does all this mean for Jane Doe’s case? The claim of recovered memory here is founded upon a type of corroboration that in general terms is highly unreliable and invalid, though it was standard throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It is doubtful, for example, whether the clinical evaluation method of assessing abuse allegations would pass the “junk science” test set out by the United States Supreme Court in Daubert v. Merrill Dow, given the demonstrated lack of agreement among clinicians in these sorts of cases. (At the time of Corwin’s 1984 evaluation of Jane, however, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry had not yet promulgated its guidelines for assessing allegations of child sexual abuse and would not do so for several more years.)

To the extent that Jane’s memory can be regarded as an instance of a recovered, accurate memory, there must be some objective and independent corroboration of the events she purports to remember. If Corwin’s evaluation is to serve as the corroboration of Jane’s alleged abuse, it must lay some strong claim to the measure of reliability, validity, and objectivity upon which scientific claims are founded. We have argued that clinical evaluations of abuse allegations, in general, do not have the desired indicia of reliability necessary for corroborating scientific theories. There is nothing that we can see in Corwin’s evaluation that distinguishes it from ordinary, subjective clinical assessments, or that allow him to make some special claim to objectivity and reliability.

Nonetheless, other important questions remain:

Even if there was no corroboration of sexual abuse, was there not corroboration of Jane’s burned feet?

We learned from StepMom that Jane was taken to two hospitals on the same day to get as much documentation about the burned feet as possible. We learned from other sources that Jane had a fungal condition that could have been responsible for injuring her feet. We learned from FosterMom that Mom apparently did not have the type of stove that was supposed to have been used to burn Jane’s feet. We could not access Jane’s medical records, of course, because of confidentiality, but we did have descriptions about the burned feet provided in one of the CPS worker’s reports. We then contacted Edwin Carlson, M.D., who was director of the emergency room at one of the hospitals where Jane was taken for examination of her feet. In response to the diagnosis of almost completely healed second-degree burns, Dr. Carlson told us: “A physician cannot tell the cause of sloughed skin when the area is healing. The sloughed area is caused by vesiculation and it in turn has many etiologies including thermal and chemical burns, exfoliative dermatitis secondary to a drug reaction, bacterial and fungal infections. Therefore the etiology in the diagnosis is related as past history by the patient or the patient’s guardian.”

He added that if there had been any suspicious circumstances, the chance of a report not being filed with Child Protective Services was near zero, especially with the above diagnosis. We also contacted an Emergency Room nurse who knew a great deal about the standard of care at one of the hospitals where Jane had been taken to have her feet examined. She told us that during 1982 (the year Jane was taken to have her feet examined), any suspected child abuse was reported immediately to CPS unless there was an investigation in progress in another county, that the CPS offices were in a building immediately adjacent to the hospital where Jane was taken, and that the staff were on call twenty-four hours a day. “We erred on the side of the child concerning the report,” she told us. She implied that there must have been significant doubt that the “burns” were a result of child abuse.

If Mom did not sexually abuse Jane, why did Jane report abuse when she was six years old?

One possible answer: StepMom and Dad-"The Sexual Angle.” A thorough examination of the data lead us to propose another equally plausible hypothesis about what happened, one that does not involve sexual abuse. Mom and Dad were involved in a prolonged and nasty divorce and child custody battle. Even allegations of deliberately burned feet had not succeeded in getting Mom out of the picture. StepMom seems to despise Mom to this day. Did she, with or without Dad’s involvement, see a way to finally get rid of Mom once and for all? “The sexual angle” is the phrase StemMom used in her interview with us when asked about the initial reports of abuse. Did StepMom question Jane in a suggestive manner? Mom obviously bathed her daughter Jane, and perhaps she might accidentally have poked her. Perhaps it was ordinary bathing with vaginal and anal cleansing of the type done by many parents. Did StepMom misconstrue Jane’s honest accounts of how her mother bathed her? Did she reinforce suspicions and reports of sexual abuse? Documentation from that period reveals that StepMom was the first person to whom Jane “reported” sexual abuse; only later did she tell this story to others. This is only one of the ways that Jane may have come to report sexual abuse if in fact none occurred, but there is contemporaneous documentation that is consistent with this hypothesis.

If abuse did not occur, why were so many people-including Jane herself-persuaded that it did on the basis of the videotaped interviews of Jane at six?

When someone recounts an event, especially if it is detailed and accompanied by emotion, it can be very persuasive (Bell and Loftus 1989). Jane herself was persuaded when she saw herself on tape, as were many knowledgeable scientists. Where would all that emotion and detail come from, many people assume, if the recounted events didn't happen? But of course the fact that a person has come to believe that something happened does not mean it actually did. The belief can be absolutely real and heartfelt without being correct. People who believe they were abducted by aliens, people who believe they were kings and princesses in past lives, people who believe they can recall being born (or being cramped in the womb) will also give detailed, emotional, and persuasive reports of their “memories,” but it seems unlikely that they are right. Thus, Ekman could have been absolutely right in his assessment that Jane’s “emotions” at age six were authentic-and absolutely wrong that she was having an authentic memory.

Where did the pornography accusations come from?

Numerous commentators have puzzled over the accusations of pornography. Corwin and Olafson’s original article repeated Jane’s accusations: “I accused her of taking pictures of me and my brother and selling them,” Jane recalled at age seventeen (Corwin and Olafson 1997, 105-106). Neisser suggested that the pornography accusations were false: “Jane has clearly 'remembered'-and been very upset by-something that never took place” (Neisser 1997, 123). Based on our interviews, we think that these accusations may have originated in the mind of StepMom and were communicated to Jane. They were denied by Jane’s older brother John, who was supposed to have participated. They were denied by Mom. No reports or documentation exist to substantiate them. They almost certainly would have been noted in police reports, therapists’ notes, or other documents had they been mentioned.

The Ethics of Exploring Jane Doe’s Case

Are our efforts to examine this case study ethical? Was it appropriate for us to track down information, reassess the evidence and claims, and come to a different conclusion than Corwin’s? We consulted Thomas McCormick, a physician whose specialty is medical ethics at the University of Washington. McCormick offered a hypothetical situation in which a professional has published a case history claiming that he cured cancer with marijuana leaves and Crisco. Oncologists would naturally have many questions to ask of this case study: Did it really work? If the patient seems to be in better health after the “treatment,” did he or she really have cancer in the first place? Would it be ethical for a physician to talk to the “case history” and to examine the original doctor’s data?

McCormick thinks so, and so do we. The essence of science is its openness to examination by one’s peers. Claims ought to be subject to peer review; facts must be available for verification or criticism; and findings ought to be reproducible. When an author puts forward a hypothesis based upon a case study that he maintains is true, one that he uses to defend his theory, others are entitled-indeed obligated-to scrutinize the methods and findings as long as this can be accomplished without undue harm. In the case of Jane Doe, we followed the trail left by Corwin, and we tracked down many documents pertinent to her case, and met a few individuals who knew her. We found a great deal of material that was damaging to his claims. What we did was reminiscent of the work of scholars who reexamined Freud’s case of Dora, discovering crucial information about her that Freud neglected to tell his readers. Reanalyzing a case study does require detection skills.

Readers may wonder why we did not speak to Jane Doe herself. We thought long and hard about doing this. Although we obtained recorded permission from Jane’s mother to contact her daughter, we worried that such contact might be upsetting to Jane-and she had surely been upset enough in her troubled young life. Given that Jane’s own account at this point might well not shed additional light on the “case study,” as her beliefs had potentially been so contaminated, we decided not to risk upsetting her.

Corwin and Olafson and some of the commentators proposed a new “research paradigm": future studies could take advantage of the existence of vast numbers of decades-old tapes of children making sexual abuse allegations. Adults like Jane who had been videotaped in childhood, reporting that they had been abused, could be recontacted to explore their memory of the childhood trauma. Adults like Jane could be shown their childhood tapes, as Jane was. Lindsay (1997) urged careful consideration of this idea, and after seeing what followed in Jane’s life, we agree. We think this method is risky-indeed, potentially catastrophic.

If the abuse never happened in the first place, the adult-child may be mistakenly led to believe that it did because she does not understand that there are reasons why a child might make an abuse report even when no abuse had occurred. She may be led to act on the basis of this “new information” in ways that she would not have otherwise acted, with results devastating for her and others. In this case, for example, Jane terminated her newly reforming relationship with her mother after seeing her childhood tapes. No one counseled her that her age six statements, however dramatic, might have been the result of suggestion. Moreover, according to many sources, prior to Corwin’s intervention, Jane was frequently questioning her “memories,” talking about them, wondering what “really” happened. Did her 1995 contact with Corwin push her over from uncertain to certain?

Postscript

Our efforts to critically evaluate this claim of the recovery of a repressed memory were met with unexpected and unsettling obstructions. Critics of our inquiry, some of whom shielded themselves in “confidential” memos and anonymous allegations of our supposed wrongdoing (memos to which we were denied access and hence opportunity to respond), were able to impede the publication of our work for more than two years. Indeed, our respective universities issued chilling warnings to us that we were to avoid the publication, in any forum, of any of this material, even that which is in the public domain and readily found by anyone with access to a modem and Google search engine. Our vindication, and concomitant recognition of our constitutionally protected speech, was wrested from the academy not by the shield of “tenure” and its intended protections of the spirited exchange of intellectual ideas, but through the costly (emotionally, professionally, and financially) retention of private counsel. We are alarmed on behalf of all members of the academic community that our universities, institutions that above all others should be championing the right to free speech and academic debate, so implacably opposed it in this instance.

Jane Doe’s case continues to be offered as proof of the authenticity of repressed or dissociated memories in many venues, including court cases involving other, potentially innocent, accused individuals.

Jane terminated her newly emerging relationship with her mother after Corwin came back into her life and replayed her childhood tape. Her mother lost her once, long ago in 1984, and lost her again in 1995. At this writing they are not in contact with one another.

Acknowledgments

We are enormously grateful to Carol Tavris, so generous of her time and her talent, a veritable muse. Many other individuals, friends and colleagues, provided valuable insights and editing assistance.

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