“Why aren't you there?” I asked him.

“Where?”

“At Wright-Patterson, working the story.”

“It’s top secret,” he replied. “No way they'd let a reporter anywhere near it.”

While this brief exchange shed little light on UFOs, it sufficed to establish that the young man was no journalist. A real journalist who shared his outlook would have been on that story like a coat of paint—living for months on end in cheap lodgings near the air base, shooting pool with flyboys in the local fun zones, crashing parties at the officers’ club, ceaselessly digging until something turned up.

Something will turn up, if there’s a story there and you work it properly. Secrets are not that easily kept. People like to talk, especially about themselves; you'd be surprised at how much even hardened cops and federal agents will spill in the course of a few solid interviews. As the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and CIA expert Thomas Powers has pointed out, those charged with keeping secrets sooner or later lose track of just which parts of them are meant to be kept secret. Inadvertently, they let things slip, and you can leverage those tidbits to give subsequent interviewees the impression that you know more than you really do, which inclines them to mention other things, until eventually the picture comes together. The process is time-consuming, but worth it if the story is big enough—and not many stories are bigger than a UFO crash.

So why haven't journalists swarmed all over Wright-Patterson Air Force Base? It’s not because we find it inconceivable that an alien spacecraft might have pancaked in the desert, or fear that jack-booted troopers will kick down the motel room door if we get too close to the truth, or are worried that disclosing it will cause a public panic. We have our faults and foibles and our bad apples, like any profession, but we're not an unalloyed gaggle of dimwits and cowards, and we certainly don't much care about causing a panic: We're in the panic-promoting business. Rather, it’s because every capable journalist has a bullshit detector, and we think—in our admittedly bemused and imperfect way—that this story is bullshit.

Indeed, from our standpoint, UFO news has been on life support for decades. It used to be that flying-saucer stories normally proffered a mix of eyewitness accounts and physical evidence. The eyewitness accounts may have been conflicting and suspiciously blinkered (as when a few people would report seeing a UFO in a piece of sky visible to thousands of others who saw nothing) and the physical evidence paltry (a scorched spot on a roadway here, a fuzzy photo there), but at least there was some semblance of empirical data. But then UFO tales tilted into the realm of alien abductions. Abductees were expected to produce neither coherent eyewitness accounts nor any physical evidence whatever. All they had to do was claim to feel that something had happened to them—something rather like having a bad dream—that might have involved aliens in spaceships. Abduction interpreters took it from there, like oracles reading tea leaves. John Mack, the Harvard psychologist who went belly-up for abduction yarns years ago, argues that what he calls “the alien encounter phenomenon” may be inherently exempt from the customary rules of evidence, if it “derives from a source which by its very nature could not provide the kind of hard evidence that would satisfy skeptics for whom reality is limited to the material.”

That’s us journalists, all right: We're “limited to the material.” We prefer facts to dreams, feelings, and expressions of faith, and we don't even trust putative facts until we've checked them out. (Journalism students are advised, in the words of a onetime Chicago city-room editor, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!”) Alien abductions don't even begin to check out, as Johnny Mack implicitly concedes. So the more abduction-oriented the UFO yarns got, the less we journalists would have anything to do with them.

But from a science-fiction standpoint, alien abductions put solid-rocket boosters on the UFO story. The flying-saucer spotter of old was a passive observer, who had suffered, at most, a few moments of puzzlement or fear. His report, and its evaluation by skeptics and believers, belonged to the empirical realm of evidence and logical inference—that is, of thinking. But once he claimed to have been abused by aliens—to have been plucked from his farm, taken aloft, and rudely probed, and his poor wife probed, too—the emotional quality of his role improved immensely. Rather than merely being inconvenienced, like an owl stirred to flight by the click of a birdwatcher’s camera, he became a terrified victim. His tale, no longer confined within the narrow riverbanks of factual thinking, now sailed on wide oceans of feelings—and feelings sell a lot more tickets than thoughts do. Abductee reports may be wildly implausible and woefully lacking in verification, but science fiction is a “what-if” medium: What if they're telling the truth?

That speculation is the mainspring driving the longest TV mini-series ever made, Steven Spielberg’s twenty-hour Taken. Billed as a “history” of alien abductions, Taken was a hit, a “water-cooler event” that put the Sci Fi Channel on the map as the most watched basic cable outlet in the nation for ten delirious December nights. It reached well over ten million viewers in the U.S., will be seen by many more around the world, and doubtless will persuade plenty of viewers, especially younger ones, that the alien abduction phenomenon is real—that, as Sean Macaulay wryly put it in the London Times, “It is true, it is part of America’s history, and it has been covered up for too long.”

What fills all that time is, essentially, a demonstration of the logical dictum that all sorts of conclusions may be derived from a false premise. (The syllogism, “If Chicago is south of Miami, I am the king of Bavaria” is logically true.) If you start by asserting, say, that giant squid are the smartest creatures on Earth, then you immediately have a lot of questions to answer—like, “How come giant squid aren't running the planet and hijacking cruise ships?” or, “Do they have condos and cool discos down on the bottom of the sea?” To a journalist this all sounds silly, but for a fiction filmmaker—especially one who’s trying to have it both ways—the plethora of questions is a plus.

Spielberg, the executive producer and guiding light of Taken although he directed none of it, is a fiction filmmaker to the marrow. His artistic vision is as brilliant, if not much deeper, than the layer where light bounces off the silver screen, and he is ill-disposed to let facts get in the way of what works dramatically. As he told The New York Times, "I've always been fascinated with all of the questions that these [UFO abduction] stories raise. What do they want with us? What can they discover by taking us that they couldn't discover simply by taking a small scraping of skin or a follicle of hair? Why physically abduct us? And why do it the way they do it, so secretly? Why not just come to us with a Petri dish and say, 'Could we have a little DNA, please?' We wanted to come up with a story that tries to provide an answer to some of those questions.”

As you might expect, the answers proffered by Taken don't add up to much, but that doesn't prevent its being a pretty good show. Budgeted at $40 million, Taken looks and plays as if it had cost even more, thanks to Spielberg’s undeniable story-telling genius, his weird but genuine devotion to flying-saucer lore, and the impressive team he assembled to make it. The special effects, by Jim Lima (Space Jam, Spider-Man), are gorgeous. Although Lima’s aliens disappointingly resemble the big-eyed, skinny-bodied humanoids familiar from a hundred pulp-novel covers, they have a chilling amorality and an air of cold intelligence that rings true—they're lab technicians as seen by lab rats—and the flying saucers they tool around in are spectacular, even if they are sometimes upstaged by the finned fifties Buicks that adorn the show’s period pieces. The directors (a different one was used for each of the series’ ten two-hour segments) include innovators like Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist) and Breck Eisner (Dead Of Night). The solid ensemble cast, which includes Heather Donahue (The Blair Witch Project), Joel Gretsch (Minority Report), Julie Benz (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and the remarkable child actress Dakota Fanning (I Am Sam), manages to breathe life into a stolid but heartfelt script by Leslie Bohem (Dante’s Peak), who wrote the whole thing after reportedly being converted from flying-saucer skeptic to true believer by Spielberg.

Taken is freighted with portentous pseudo-profundities ("Life is like a roller coaster ride”) and dramatic infelicities. A sequence in which a crazed abductee holds the other members of his abductee support group hostage at gunpoint is so unintentionally funny as to recall the young Harrison Ford’s complaining to George Lucas, on the set of the first Star Wars movie, “George, you can write this shit, but you can't say it.” Yet it also has moments of startling originality, and it sustains a dramatic coherence remarkable in so long a work. Told in a pseudo-documentary framework, with superimposed dates and place names bestowing on each sequence a persuasive if unearned aura of authenticity, it appeals to an even wider audience than the 100 million or so Americans who say they believe that spaceships have visited Earth, and two percent (more than the entire population of Manhattan!) who claim to have been abducted themselves.

The problem, of course, is that all this talent is wasted on telling a story that swallows every absurdity of the alien abduction myth—with the sole exception of crop circles, which are dismissed as fraudulent in a sly bid to make it all seem plausible by showing that the filmmakers aren't thoroughly gullible. Spielberg obviously loves the story, and his affection sells it on an emotional level. “If it’s just another urban myth,” he said recently, “then it’s certainly one that has sustained itself for decades, and with remarkable similarities from one case to the next. They have been around since long before I made Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, and they've persisted way after.” It doesn't seem to bother him that a similar argument could have been employed, at other times, to justify the burning of witches, throwing Christians to the lions, or expelling Jews from Spain. Nor should it, necessarily: Spielberg is in the entertainment business, which generates profits by showing people what they want to see, not what they need to know.

Yet Spielberg’s wide-eyed, “what if?” approach, devoted at such length to so bogus a subject, ultimately drains Taken of the value that great storytelling, as opposed to virtuoso movie-making, can evince. In the end the show is, literally, childish.

It’s a cliché that Spielberg’s tales are character-driven, and this is certainly true of Taken, which traces fifty years in the alien-fretted lives of three families—the Keys, the Clarkes, and the Crawfords. The Keys are abducted, probed, and tossed back to Earth repeatedly, like human recycling bins. The Clarkes become half-breeds after Sally Clark, a tough coffee-shop waitress (played with admirable three-dimensionality by Catherine Dent) has a fling with an alien cleverly disguised as a human hunk (Eric Close, who played a federal agent whose wife was abducted—small world—in the NBC series Dark Skies). The Crawfords, a military clan, busy themselves trying to kidnap the Clarkes and killing anybody who gets in the way. Their scion, the maniacally evil Capt. Owen Crawford (Joel Gretsch), viciously murders his girlfriend, his wife, and even a couple of Boy Scouts, but in the Spielbergian universe his ultimate crime is that he neglects his children.

In a sense, children are the only characters who really matter in Taken. The series is narrated by a ten-year-old (played by an estimably composed Dakota Fanning, who manages to breeze through lines like, "People are lonely in this world for lots of different reasons”), and it makes room for a few adolescents, among them a Berkeley journalism student who fearlessly tracks down an alien tomb and gets his brain and body fried for his trouble. But its grownups are cardboard cutouts. They're adults as seen by children—exemplifications of good or evil, lacking in emotional subtlety except where children are directly involved, whose grown-up lives, especially when sex rears its head, dissolve into a confusing jumble.

This is not to say that the series is meant to be seen by children: Like most sentimentalized treatments of childhood, it’s too scary and routinely cruel for that. (Try showing your kid the upsetting although spectacularly beautiful episode in which a little boy is lured from his bed by an alien disguised as a favorite cartoon figure, only to be abducted and—you guessed it—ruthlessly probed.) But it is told from a relentlessly infantile point of view—which makes sense, since that’s the one perspective from which its many absurdities can be sustained without letting bothersome questions get in the way. How come enormous flying saucers, flying low, are seen by only a handful of people? Go figure. Why don't more of those who do see them come forth with their stories? Because bad men in the military kill or imprison them. (We see a lot of these bad guys, glowering down into the camera like stepfathers bawling out their wards.) Why do the military officers suppress the story, when exposing it would quadruple their budgets overnight? Because they're frightened and mean. (As our child narrator patiently explains, adults get mean because they're frightened. Thanks, kid, but did you know adults can also get testy when they're treated like children?)

In the end, Taken belongs to the time-honored sci-fi tradition of two-dimensional heroes rescuing anxious girls from reptilian aliens, and there’s little harm in that. Sitting through it does make you wonder, though, what would happen if all that talent, money, and time were devoted to a grown-up subject. The Indian wars, for example: Imagine a twenty-hour TV miniseries, rooted in fact rather than fancy, with characters ranging from Sitting Bull and Red Cloud to George Armstrong Custer and U.S. Grant, that covered, say, the forty years between the great council that brought thousands of Plains Indians to Fort Laramie in 1851 and the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. The fact that Taken was a hit demonstrates that viewers are prepared to spend as much time watching a movie as it would take to read a substantial book, provided that they find the drama sufficiently compelling. It may be too much to hope that an epic of comparable quality will soon be devoted to a serious subject like the Indian wars, much less the quest for intelligent life beyond Earth. But surely it can be done for one that’s not claptrap.

“World Exclusive!” proclaimed Biblical Archaeology Review. “Evidence of Jesus Written in Stone,” the cover continued; “Ossuary of ‘James, Brother of Jesus’ found in Jerusalem.” Urged the contents page: “Read how this important object came to light and how scientists proved it wasn't a modern forgery.”

Actually, as we shall soon see, the matter is much less clear than such hype would suggest, and there are many questions yet to be answered.

Background

The initial report in Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR) was written by a French scholar, André Lemaire (2002), who believes both the artifact and its inscription authentic. Such an ossuary, or “bone box,” was used to store bones in Jewish burial practice during the period from the first century b.c. to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 a.d. (In this tradition the corpse would first be interred in a niche in a burial cave. After about a year, when the remains became skeletonized, the bones were gathered into a chest, usually made from a hollowed-out block of limestone fitted with a lid [Figueras 1983, 26]).

Incised on one of the James ossuary’s long sides, the inscription consists of a single line of twenty small Aramaic characters. It reads (from right to left): “Ya'akov bar Yosef akhui diYeshua”—that is, “Jacob [English James], son of Yosef [Joseph], brother of Yeshua [Jesus].” Based on the script, Lemaire dates the inscription to some time between 20 b.c. and 70 a.d. And he believes that the inscription’s mention of a father named Joseph plus a brother named Jesus suggests “that this is the ossuary of the James in the New Testament,” which in turn “would also mean that we have here the first epigraphic mention—from about 63 c.e.—of Jesus of Nazareth” (Lemaire 2002, 33).

The ossuary’s inscription (a portion of which is shown here) seems suspiciously sharp-edged for its apparent age.

Lemaire believes the inscription has a consistency and correctness that show “it is genuinely ancient and not a fake.” The box was examined by two experts from the Geological Survey of Israel at the request of BAR. They concluded that the ossuary had a gray patina (or coating of age). “The same gray patina is found also within some of the letters,” he wrote, “although the inscription was cleaned and the patina is therefore absent from several letters.” They added, “The patina has a cauliflower shape known to be developed in a cave environment.” The experts also reported they saw no evidence of “the use of a modern tool or instrument” (Rosenfeld and Ilani 2002).

Unfortunately, the cleaning of the inscription—an act either of stupidity or shrewdness—is problematic. It might have removed traces of modern tooling. And when we are told that the patina is found “within some of the letters,” we should certainly want to know which ones, since scholars have debated whether the phrase “brother of Jesus” might be a spurious addition (Altman 2002; Shuman 2002).

It is even possible for traces of patination in an inscription to be original when the carving is not. That could happen if—as is the case of the James ossuary—shallow carving was done over a deeply pitted surface. The patinated bottoms of remnant pits could thus remain inside the fresh scribings.

In any case the patina may not be all it is claimed. According to one forgery expert, because patination is expected with age, “The production of a convincing patina has therefore been of great interest to those engaged in faking or restoration” (Jones 1990). Although false patinas are most commonly applied to metalwork, stone sculptures and artifacts—including fake “prehistoric” flint implements—have been treated to create the appearance of antiquity (Jones 1990). For example, the versatile forger Alceo Dossena (1878-1937) produced convincing patinas on marble (a hard, metamorphic limestone) that gave his works “an incredible look of age” (Sox 1987).

The patina traces of the James ossuary inscription have already been questioned. Responding to the claim that patina was cleaned from the inscription, one art expert notes that genuine patina would be difficult to remove while forged patina cracks off. “This appears to be what happened with the ossuary,” he concludes (Lupia 2002).

Provenance

The reason for questioning the patina is that additional evidence raises doubts about the ossuary’s authenticity. To begin with, there is the matter of its provenance, which concerns the origin or derivation of an artifact. Experts in the fields of objets d'art and other rarities use the term to refer to a work’s being traceable to a particular source. For example, records may show that an artifact came from a certain archaeological dig, was subsequently owned by a museum, and then, when the museum sold off some of its collection, was bought by a private collector.

Provenance matters more with a sensational artifact, and the refusal or inability of an owner to explain how he or she acquired an item is, prima facie, suspicious—a possible indicator of forgery or theft. One of my cases, for instance, concerned a purported manuscript of Lincoln’s celebrated Gettysburg Address (actually the second sheet of what was ostensibly a two-page draft, signed by Lincoln). Suspicions were raised when it was reported that the dealer who sold the item wanted to remain anonymous, and my subsequent ultraviolet and stereomicroscopic examination revealed it was a forgery (Nickell 1996).

With the James ossuary, the provenance seems to be, well, under development. In his BAR article, André Lemaire (2002) referred to the “newly revealed ossuary” which he would only say was “now in a private collection in Israel.” A sidebar stated that on a recent visit to Jerusalem, “Lemaire happened to meet a certain collector by chance; the collector mentioned that he had some objects he wanted Lemaire to see.” One of the objects was the James ossuary (Feldman 2002).

The owner had pleaded with reporters not to reveal his name or address, but he was apparently uncovered by the Israeli Antiquities Authority.

He is Oded Golan, a Tel Aviv engineer, entrepreneur, and collector. Golan explained that he had not wished to be identified due to concerns for privacy.

“It’s a character issue,” he told the Associated Press (Laub 2002). “I don't like publicity.” But Golan received some attention that may have been most unwanted: He came under investigation by the Antiquities Authority’s theft unit (Scrivener 2002).

According to Golan, he bought the ossuary in the Old City (old Jerusalem) “in the 1970s,” paying a few hundred dollars to an Arab antiquities dealer he can no longer identify (Van Biema 2002; Adams 2002; Wilford 2002). He has said that it was the box’s engraving that interested him, yet nothing in the phrase “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” ever “rang a bell” in Golan’s mind (Adams 2002). Incredibly, the sensational inscription had to wait three decades before finally being appreciated by André Lemaire.

Many scholars were horrified that the ossuary had apparently been looted from its burial site—not just because looting is illegal and immoral, but because an artifact’s being robbed of its context “compromises everything,” according to P. Kyle McCarter Jr., who chairs the Near Eastern studies department at Johns Hopkins University. McCarter added, “We don't know where [the box] came from, so there will always be nagging doubts. Extraordinary finds need extraordinary evidence to support them” (Van Biema 2002).

Not only the box’s provenance was lost but also, reportedly, its contents which might have helped establish its provenance. “Unfortunately,” stated André Lemaire (2002), “as is almost always the case with ossuaries that come from the antiquities market rather than from a legal excavation, it was emptied.” I lamented this reported state of affairs to a reporter (Ryan 2002), observing that the bones could have been examined by forensic anthropologists to potentially determine cause of death. James was reportedly thrown from the top of the Temple and stoned and beaten to death (Hurley 2002), so his skeletal remains might show evidence of such trauma.

As it turns out, Lemaire did not mention—perhaps he did not know—that Mr. Golan has a Tupperware container of bone fragments he says were in the ossuary when he acquired it. One piece is as large as one-half inch by three inches, and has raised questions about potential DNA evidence. Yet, according to Time magazine, Golan will not allow the fragments “to be displayed or analyzed” (Van Biema 2002).

Further Suspicions

In addition to the questionable provenance, the exterior appearance of the ossuary also raises suspicions. To view the box, which was on display at the Royal Ontario Museum, I recently traveled to Toronto with several of my Center for Inquiry colleagues. They included Kevin Christopher, who has degrees in classics and linguistics, with whom I had been studying the case (see acknowledgments). We were able to get a good look at the box, and what we observed raised eyebrows.

The ossuary was featured in this elaborate temporary exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

First of all, I was surprised to see that the ossuary was far from being “unadorned” as Lemaire (2002, 27) reported. He stated that “The only decoration is a line forming a frame about 0.5 inch (1.2 cm) from the outer edges,” but he is mistaken. Significantly, on the side opposite the inscribed side are circular designs, badly worn but unmistakably present.

Now, ossuaries are usually decorated on only one side (Royal 2002), presumably the one intended to face out during storage. If a name was added (possibly with an identifying phrase), it was apparently carved after purchase by someone such as a family member (Figueras 1983, 18). A look at a number of ossuaries (Figueras 1983; Goodenough 1953) shows that the name might be engraved on the decorated side if there were space for it; otherwise it might be cut on the top, an end, or the back. Wherever placed, it “probably faced outwards where it could be read” (Altman 2002a).

In the case of the James ossuary, there would have indeed been room on the front, yet the scribe elected to carve the inscription on the back. (A possible reason for this will soon become evident.)

Furthermore, the box’s decorations—the carved “frame” Lemaire referred to which outlines all four sides, plus the circular designs—are badly worn, whereas the inscription seems almost pristine. That is, the decorations are blurred, partially effaced, and (like much of the surface) pitted. Yet the lettering is entirely distinct and blessed with sharp edges, as if it were of recent vintage. My colleagues and I were all struck with that observation. So was an Israeli engineering professor, Dr. Daniel Eylon, of the University of Dayton, who noted that “sharp edges do not last 2,000 years.”

Dr. Eylon applied a technique that is employed in determining whether damage to an airplane part occurred prior to an accident or after it.

Examining photographs of the inscription for scratches accrued over time, he stated: `The inscription would be underneath these scratches if it had been on the box at the time of burial, but the majority of this inscription is on top of the scratches” (Eylon 2002).

The inscription’s off-center placement is even in an area of the back that suffers the least damage. Commenting on what is termed biovermiculation—that is, “limestone erosion and dissolution caused by bacteria over time in the form of pitting and etching”—one art historian states: “The ossuary had plenty except in and around the area of the inscription. This is not normal” (Lupia 2002). Indeed, that is one of the first things I had observed in studying the James ossuary. It suggested a forger might have selected a relatively smooth area of the back as a place to carve the small, neat characters.

Early on, the text of the inscription itself raised doubts among experts familiar with Aramaic scripts. They observed that the “James, son of Joseph” portion was in a seemingly formal script while the “brother of Jesus” phrase was in a more cursive style. This suggested “at least the possibility of a second hand,” according to one expert (McCarter 2002). Another states, “The second part of the inscription bears the hallmarks of a fraudulent later addition and is questionable to say the least” (Altman 2002b). But the perceived dichotomy in styles may simply signal that the forger was an inexpert copyist or that the effect results from the vagaries of stone carving.

Taken together, the various clues suggest a scenario in which a forger purchased a genuine ossuary that—lacking feet, elaborate ornament, and inscription—cost little. He then obtained an Aramaic rendition of the desired wording, carved it into what seemed a good spot on the blank back, and perhaps added patination followed by “cleaning” to help mitigate against the fresh look of the carving.

Forgers frequently select genuine old artifacts upon which to inflict their handiwork. Examples that I have personally investigated and helped expose include such inscribed works as two Daniel Boone muskets, the diary of Jack the Ripper, a carte de visite photo of Robert E. Lee, a dictionary with flyleaf notes by Charles Dickens, and many more (Nickell 1990; 1996).

Mounting evidence has begun to suggest that the James ossuary may be yet another such production.

Acknowledgments

Those making the December 5, 2002, trip to view the ossuary were—in addition to Kevin Christopher (who drove, assisted with research, and offered valuable observations)—Benjamin Radford, Katherine Bourdonnay, and Norm Allen. Also, Paul Kurtz provided encouragement, Barry Karr financial authorization, Tim Binga research assistance, and Ranjit Sandhu word processing, while other CFI staff helped in many additional ways.

References

• Adams, Paul. 2002. Ossuary’s owner emerges to tell his story. The Globe and Mail (Toronto), November 7.
• Altman, Rochelle I. 2002a. Final report on the James ossuary. Online at web.israelinsider.com ..., November 6.
• —. 2002b. Quoted in Wilford 2002.
• Eylon, Daniel. 2002. Quoted in Wilford 2002.
• Feldman, Steven. 2002. The right man for the inscription.
• Sidebar to Lemaire (2002) signed “S.F.,” 30. (Feldman is managing editor of BAR.)
• Figueras, Pau. 1983. Decorated Jewish Ossuaries. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
• Goodenough, Erwin R. 1953. Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, vol. 3. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Hurley, Amanda Kolson. 2002. The last days of James. Sidebar to Lemaire (2002) signed “A. K.H.,” 32. (Hurley is an assistant editor of BAR.)
• Jones, Mark, ed. 1990. Fake? The Art of Deception. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 258-261.
• Laub, Karin. 2002. Ancient burial box isn't for sale, owner says. Buffalo News, November 8.
• Lemaire, André. 2002. Burial box of James the brother of Jesus. Biblical Archaeology Review, 28:6 (November/December), 24-33, 70; sidebar 28.
• Lupia, John. 2002. Quoted in Altman 2002a.
• McCarter, P. Kyle. 2002. Quoted in Wilford 2002.
• Nickell, Joe. 1990. Pen, Ink and Evidence: A Study of Writing and Writing Materials for the Penman, Collector, and Document Detective; reprinted New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2000.
• —. 1996. Detecting Forgery. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 45-48, 96, 99-102.
• Rosenfeld, Ammon, and Shimon Ilani. 2002. Letter to editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, September 17 (reproduced in Lemaire 2002).
• Royal Ontario Museum. 2002. James ossuary display text, exhibit of November 15-December 29.
• Ryan, Terri Jo. 2002. Baylor religion professors anxious to check out "James” bone box. Tribune-Herald (Waco, Texas), November 4.
• Scrivener, Leslie. 2002. Expert skeptical about ossuary. Toronto Star (www.thestar.com), November 25.
• Shuman, Ellis. 2002. “Brother of Jesus” bone-box plot thickens. Online at web.israelinsider.com ..., November 5.
• Sox, David. 1987. Unmasking the Forger: The Dossena Deception. London: Unwin Hyman, 8-9, 11, 37, 47, 90.
• Van Biema, David. 2002. The brother of Jesus? Time magazine. Online at www.time.com ..., October 27.
• Wilford, John Noble, 2002. Experts question authenticity of bone box of `brother of Jesus.' New York Times, December 3.

In all early cultures around the world, people observed the magic of nature with great awe. They formulated explanations in the form of myths such as the God of Thunder and the Goddess of Lightning. Behavior, including rituals of sacrifice and prayer, was governed by interpretations of such myths formed from the primitive knowledge of the time. Later, as knowledge of the world expanded, myths became scientific theories. But even these theories resemble myths in that they may be only temporary explanations that direct behavior until the theories change, augmented or supplanted by yet more scientific evidence. Persons who, in the face of contradictory scientific facts, continue to base their actions on disproved ancient myths are behaving in a "make-believe” fashion. Today scientific evidence makes the metaphysical explanations that are the basis of traditional Chinese acupuncture obsolete. The estimated 20,000 acupuncturists in America are therefore practicing a “make believe” kind of medicine. This was the opinion of the American Medical Association quoted in newspapers on August 4, 1974, stating "The AMA Calls Acupuncture Quackery.”

In the late 1960s, before acupuncture was introduced in the U.S., I had learned of it on a trip to Japan. Dr. Kodo Senshu, a retired physician, was translating one of my psychiatric texts into Japanese. When I informed him that we in America knew nothing about acupuncture he set about to rectify my ignorance. He demonstrated the technique on my teenage daughter and I returned home with a textbook and a box of needles. In the following months I tried the method on a number of my patients. I discovered what the Chinese had known for centuries, that acupuncture could be of benefit to patients suffering from chronic pain. I was, however, greatly bothered by the pre-scientific explanations of the mystical needle ritual I was using. As a seventy-year member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, I had long ago learned that behind every event that appears magical there is a string or a mirror.

Early Chinese Acupuncture

My special hobby is Chinese magic and I was eager to look for a scientific explanation of acupuncture. In tracing magic’s early roots in China I found a copy of an engraving showing the sorcerer Yu the Great in the pre-Shang court of the Emperor Shun, around 2,400 b.c. I learned that magicians like Yu were shamans. China’s first physicians mixed their healing with magic rituals and whatever herbal remedies nature offered. These early shamans were also alchemists and practiced astrology. Yu was an expert in divination, and is depicted predicting the future by scapulomancy (reading the cracks produced by heating an animal’s scapula or the carapace of a turtle). He could also prophesy from patterns formed by casting a mixture of long and short yarrow sticks. In later centuries the patterns formed by these sticks were ultimately organized into eight trigram designs of long and short lines. These in turn were doubled and created the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, the “Book of Changes,” one of the most famous fortune-telling books of all times.

Although it is before recorded history, some believe that Yu the Great was a minister in the court of Huang Ti, the legendary Yellow Emperor, reputedly the father of Chinese medicine. The book bearing his name, the Huang Ti Nei Ching, commonly translated as The Yellow Emperor’s Manual of Corporeal Medicine, has been referred to as “China’s Hippocratic Corpus.” Its two main sections, the Su Wen (questions and answers about living matter) and the Ling Shu (the vital axis) were not compiled until the early Han Dynasty (200 b.c.). They are in the form of conversations between the emperor and his ministers. While some credit the Yellow Emperor with being the inventor of writing and author of the text, the work appears to be a compilation of ancient superstitions and concepts from numerology gathered by many authors over preceding centuries.

The Yellow Emperor’s Classic is a fascinating volume containing the metaphysical theories that serve as the foundation for all of the world’s several hundred varieties of acupuncture. Traditional Chinese acupuncture is based on the belief that disease is caused by blockages of qi, a mysterious body energy said to travel in imaginary channels known as meridians. The concept of such a body of energy is common to many cultures throughout the world. It goes by different names, including prana, spiritus, and pneuma. The Chinese ideogram for qi was developed from the pictogram of a pot of boiling rice with the top blown off by rising steam. When I learned of this I thought back to boyhood days of sandlot baseball when our fatigued pitcher was described as “running out of steam.” Today it is known that body energy results from inner- and intra-cellular metabolism manifesting in measurable nervous energy.

There are many hypothetical meridians in which qi is thought to travel. The major ones are bilaterally paired and twelve in number, corresponding to the twelve months and animals of the Chinese zodiac. They also represent twelve body systems, including a vaguely defined mythical organ called the “triple heater.” A minister is said to have told the Yellow Emperor, “On these channels there are 365 acupoints, one for each day of the year.” These points are thought to be hollow areas, hsueh, where qi is believed to come to the surface for manipulation to balance the yin/yang dualism. Traditionally such manipulation is by needles (acupuncture), finger pressure (acupressure), or heat (moxibustion). The manner of application differs with the need to weaken (sedate) or strengthen (tonify) the body energy.

The early Chinese were primarily agrarian and dependent upon the vagaries of nature. Medicine was a part of religion and philosophy, both of which centered on the theme of oneness with nature. Man is but a microcosm of the major cosmos; what happens in nature happens in man. To understand these older conceptions of Chinese medicine is to recognize this cosmogony of the world. There was no supreme creator; instead the world arose from chaos having been formed by the forces of yin and yang, darkness and light. This ancient belief was ultimately given form chiefly in Taoism where the number of paired opposites is seemingly endless with examples such as man/woman, black/white, heaven/earth, cold/warm, etc. The need for the physicians to give prime consideration to balancing yin/yang forces in all the body’s organs permeates medical thinking. Actions, thoughts, food, and medicines all have their ying/yang attributes.

Among the superstitions of ancient China, numerology plays a major role. Here numbers, in addition to any quantitative or ordinal characteristics, have a special magic meaning. Of all numbers, five is by far the most mystical.

An important theory underlying the principles forming the ritual practice of traditional acupuncture is commonly known as wu hing, or “five element theory.” Actually hing is better translated as movement, so the five elements--earth, fire, wood, metal and water--are usually taught using the term “essences.” According to the “rule of correspondences,” derived from ancient numerology, the number five is a governing magical number. Each of the five elements corresponds to classifications of body parts: five odors, five tastes, five orifices, five tissues, etc. As man’s relation to nature renders him susceptible to diseases according to the weather, seasons of the year must also fall under the rule of five.

To solve this dilemma, summer is divided into two parts, “early summer” and "late summer.” In this manner numerology strongly determines the ritual application of acupuncture needles.

The Placebo Factor

Traditional acupuncture is done with needles. Needles have a powerful advantage as it is commonly believed that a “shot” is more powerful than a pill. Treatment is effected by a man in a white coat calling himself a “doctor of acupuncture.” He inserts needles without pain. His office is adorned with posters of human bodies replete with strange lines and Chinese hieroglyphics. Here, then, are all the ingredients for a strong placebo cure. Many of the treatments of alternative medicine depend upon such placebo action for their healing reputation.

Placebo comes from the Greek, meaning “I shall please” and is created by the patient’s belief in the treatment’s efficacy. The response is strengthened when the doctor demonstrates his own faith by an air of confidence. Thus placebo is a mind/body phenomenon.

Research reports suggest that the placebo response is actuated by neurochemicals in the brain. It is estimated that 30 to 50 percent of all healing is due to placebo action. Even the drama of sham surgery has, in double-blind studies, been shown to have a powerful pain-modulating action. During the Middle Ages when medicine consisted mainly of witch’s brew, civilization survived by placebo action combined with the fact that an estimated eighty percent of all illnesses are self healing.

In 1997 the practice of Chinese needle acupuncture was given strong support from a National Institutes of Health/Office of Alternative Medicine consensus meeting. The studies reviewed were done in the traditional manner, and the committee stressed the need for better controlled investigations. The committee was also aware of the placebo factor, as its report mentions that “. . . so called `non-specific' effects account for a substantial proportion of its effectiveness and thus should not be casually discounted.”

Professor Song Keel Kang of Kung Hee Medical School in Seoul, South Korea, wrote that, “The psychological factor becomes important in methods that rely upon endogenous modulation. But whatever placebo effect acupuncture has must be by means of an underlying physiological mechanism.” It is therefore of great importance to examine the scientific evidence for a biological basis of acupuncture.

Acupuncture in America

Early Chinese science was advanced. The Chinese were the first to invent the compass, printing, and gunpowder. But China’s isolation impeded incorporation of knowledge from the Industrial Revolution in the West that spawned the roots of scientific medicine. Opium wars with Britain and dissension over port treaties with foreign powers enhanced a xenophobia and stifled advances of modern medicine. Missionaries brought some knowledge of Western medicine to China, and in the late 1800s a modern hospital and medical school were established in Shanghai. In 1882, when the emperor saw the superiority of Western medical techniques, he banned the teaching of acupuncture in the Imperial Medical College. But the triumph of science over sorcery was short lived. China’s isolation was intensified by the xenophobic Boxer rebellion, war with Japan, and the Communist revolution. Thus the acupuncture “meridian theory” continued unchanged and a “bamboo curtain” impeded the flow of knowledge between China and the United States (figure 1).

In the 1940s, Chairman Mao faced millions in need of medical care with only a very limited number of Western-trained physicians. He solved the problem by re-establishing traditional Chinese medicine. With the stroke of a pen he set back Chinese medical progress by two thousand years. Teenagers were taken into the Red Guard and given three months of training in herbs, acupuncture, and First Aid. Armed with The Barefoot Doctor’s Manual, they spread ancient Chinese medicine throughout the country, giving new credence to ancient beliefs that were solidly established in rural areas. Chinese medical schools now taught both modern and traditional medicine.

When President Nixon’s delegation returned from their visit to China in 1972, they introduced traditional acupuncture to a U.S. enamored of New Age thinking and alternative medicine. These beliefs from the mysterious Orient came as yet another miracle cure-all. In view of the AMA’s negative pronouncement, physicians were reluctant to adopt or study acupuncture. So it was mainly those without medical training who became “acupuncturists.” They thus could play at being doctor without the necessity of going to medical school. Dozens of acupuncture seminars offered expensive courses, and most states soon established certification requirements of up to 1,700 hours of training in pre-scientific Chinese metaphysics. Third-party insurers are increasingly paying for needle acupuncture despite its unscientific basis.

Acupuncture Becomes Scientific

In 1972 the University of Missouri received the first National Institutes of Health acupuncture grant. Colleagues and I designed a study to compare acupuncture and hypnosis for modulation of experimental pain. We were able to report that acupuncture was not hypnosis. Most important was our finding that when the needles were stimulated by electricity it significantly increased acupuncture’s ability to control pain. Although aware of its placebo effect, we were convinced that acupuncture worked by some neuro-physiological mechanism (Ulett and Han 2002). On a trip to China I met Professor JiSheng Han of Beijing Medical University. He showed me that, by transfusion of spinal fluid, he had transferred acupuncture analgesia from a treated to an untreated animal. This proved the neurochemical basis of acupuncture. He then spent thirty years unveiling the biological mechanisms of acupuncture by mapping the anatomical pathways and biochemistry of this ancient practice (Han 1998). He found that with proper electrical stimulation of the nervous system, specific frequencies could effect the gene expression of specific neuropeptides in the central nervous system. Thus he showed that acupuncture could significantly increase the spinal fluid content of substances such as endorphins and dynorphins. These had specific healing actions in the brain and spinal cord. Endorphins, for example, can activate an opioid receptor that is now known to have an important anti-anxiety effect. He also showed that there was a cross-tolerance between acupuncture and morphine in the treatment of drug addiction. Han demonstrated that stimulation could be done with polymer conducting EKG-type pads placed on the surface of the skin over motor points. No “magic needles” were necessary.

By 2001 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, especially those of Professor Z.H. Cho of the University of California Medical School at Irvine, demonstrated significant supporting evidence of a biological basis for acupuncture. Cho showed that electro-acupuncture stimulation can affect the diencephalic area of the brain, a region that promotes the body’s own healing responses. Here sensory stimulation of the hypothalamus enhances homeostasis through activating the autonomic nervous system, balancing hormonal regulation by action of the pituitary gland and effecting anti-pain and limbic system responses (Cho, Wong, and Fallon 2001).

Conclusion

Traditional Chinese acupuncture is an archaic procedure in which needles are inserted through the skin over imaginary channels in accord with rules developed from pre-scientific superstition and numerological beliefs. The needles are manipulated to supposedly influence an imaginary body energy whose blockage is presumed to create diseases that are diagnosed and defined in a manner antithetical to modern medical knowledge. New information from research by Chinese scientists has replaced this mystical sham medical procedure with a simple, evidence-based, no-needle treatment. This method stimulates motor points and nerve junctures. Specific electrical currents induce the gene expression of neurochemicals and activate brain areas important for healing. Here then is a scientifically based alternative to the metaphysical theories and magical rituals of traditional Chinese acupuncture.

Western medicine prides itself on being evidence-based. Schools of medicine, nursing, chiropractic, and naturopathy should therefore avoid teaching pre-scientific traditional needle acupuncture to their students. The integration of unproven mystical methods will serve only to contaminate a scientific curriculum with make-believe medicine. Evidence-based neuro-electric stimulation is an effective, simple, no-needle, drug-free method of treatment that can be taught in an hour’s time (Ulett and Han 2002). Our own experience and reports from clinics abroad have shown this to be a potent technique giving lasting relief from chronic pain with a reduced dependency upon medication. It has also been found useful for a variety of neurological, psychiatric, and psychosomatic illnesses.

References

• Cho, Z.H., E.K. Wong, and J.D. Fallon. 2001. Neuro-Acupuncture. Q-puncture, Inc., Los Angeles.
• Han, J.S. 1998. The Neurochemical Basis of Pain Control by Acupuncture. Hu Bei Science and Technology Press, China.
• Ulett, G., and S. Han. 2002. The Biology of Acupuncture. Warren H. Green, St. Louis.

Resentment of American cultural and political dominance clearly fuels other “disbelievers,” including those political groups who had been hoping for a different outcome to the Space Race—for example, many Cuban schools, both in Cuba and where Cuban schoolteachers were loaned, such as Sandinista Nicaragua, taught their students that Apollo was a fraud.

Like a counter-culture heresy, the “moon hoax” theme had been lingering beyond the fringes of mainstream society for decades. A self-published pamphlet here, or a “B-grade” science fiction movie there, or a radio talk show guest over there—for many years it all looked like a shriveling leftover of the original human inability to accept the reality of revolutionary changes.

But in the last ten years, an entirely new wave of hoax theories have appeared—on cable TV, on the Internet, via self-publishing, and through other “alternative” publication methods. These methods are the result of technological progress that Apollo symbolized, now ironically fueling the arguments against one of the greatest technological achievements in human history.

NASA’s official reaction to these and other questions was both clumsy and often counter-productive. On the infamous Fox Television moon hoax program, which was broadcast several times in the first half of 2001, a NASA spokesman named Brian Welch appeared several times to counter the hoaxist arguments (Welch was a top-level official at the Public Affairs Office at NASA Headquarters, who died a few months later). The poor TV impression he gave (a know-it-all “rocket scientist” denouncing each argument as false but usually without providing supporting evidence) may have been due to deliberate editing by the producers to make the “NASA guy” look arrogant and contemptuous. But to a large degree it accurately reflected NASA’s institutional attitude to the entire controversy. The disappointing results of participating seemed to strengthen the view within NASA that the best response was no response—to avoid anything that might dignify the charges.

Roger Launius, then the chief of the history office at headquarters, was an exception to NASA’s overall unwillingness to engage the issue. As an amateur space historian and folklorist, I had been discussing with him for years the need for NASA to fulfill its educational outreach charter and to issue a series of modest monographs (a historian’s term for a single-theme pamphlet-length publication) on many different widespread cultural myths about space activities. These ranged from allegations of UFO sightings (and videotapings) by astronauts, to the discovery of alien artifacts on the Moon and Mars and elsewhere, to miraculous and paranormal folklore associated with space activities, to the hoax accusations. Launius, nearing retirement in early 2002, decided it was time for a detailed response to the Apollo hoax accusations, and offered me a sole-source contract to write a monograph that analyzed why such stories seemed so attractive to so many people. Launius departed NASA soon thereafter, leaving the project in the care of a junior historian, Stephen Garber.

My requests for inputs from various NASA offices and public educational organizations soon reached the ears of news reporters, and some print stories appeared in late October. Although NASA officials were somewhat taken aback by the publicity, they were at first inclined to defend the project on educational grounds.

Then, on Monday, November 4, 2002, the eve of the national elections, ABC’s World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings chose the subject for his closing story: “Finally this evening, we're not quite sure what we think about this,” he intoned. “But the space agency is going to spend a few thousand dollars trying to prove to some people that the United States did indeed land men on the moon.”

Jennings described how “NASA had been so rattled” it “hired” somebody “to write a book refuting the conspiracy theorists.” He closed with a misquotation: “A professor of astronomy in California said he thought it was beneath NASA’s dignity to give these Twinkies the time of day. Now, that was his phrase, by the way. We simply wonder about NASA.”

Jennings was referring to Philip Plait, an educator (not a professor) in California who runs the Bad Astronomy Web site that discusses many mythical aspects of outer space. What Plait actually had said was that he felt it was proper for NASA to respond, but that it did seem “beneath their dignity” to be forced to do it. Contrary to Jennings’s account, Plait fully supported the monograph contract.

But that TV insult did it as far as NASA management was concerned. Their dignity called into question, and fearing angry telephone calls from congressmen returning to Washington after the election, they decided to revoke the contract. They paid for work done to date and washed their hands of the project.

Many educators contacted me in dismay. Like them, and unlike the NASA spokesmen, I had always felt that “there is no such thing as a stupid question.” And to me the moon hoax controversy was not a bothersome distraction, but a unique opportunity.

This is the way I see it: If many people who are exposed to the hoaxist arguments find them credible, it is neither the fault of the hoaxists or of their believers—it’s the fault of the educators and explainers (NASA among them) who were responsible for providing adequate knowledge and workable reasoning skills. And the localized success of the hoaxist arguments thus provides us with a detection system to identify just where these resources are inadequate.

I intend to complete the project, depending on successfully arranging new funding sources. The popularity of this particular myth is a heaven-sent (or actually, an “outer-space-sent”) opportunity to address fundamental issues of public understanding of technological controversies.