I have inquired for most of my adult life about studies that might show that the death penalty is a deterrent, and I have not seen any research that would substantiate that point.

—Attorney General Janet Reno, January 20, 2000

All of the scientifically valid statistical studies—those that examine a period of years, and control for national trends—consistently show that capital punishment is a substantial deterrent.

— Senator Orrin Hatch, October 16, 2002

It happens all too often. Each side in a policy debate quotes studies that support its point of view and denigrates those from the other side. The result is often that research evidence is not taken seriously by either side. This has led some researchers, especially in the social sciences, to throw up their hands in dismay and give up studying controversial topics. But why bother doing social science research at all if it is impossible to obtain accurate and trustworthy information about issues that matter to people?

There are some questions that social scientists should be able to answer. Either executing people cuts the homicide rate or it does not. Or perhaps it does under certain conditions and not others. In any case, the data are readily available and researchers should be able to answer the question. Of course, this would not resolve the ethical issues surrounding the question, but that is another matter.

So who is right, Janet Reno or Orrin Hatch? And why can they not at least agree on what the data show? The problem is that each of them refers to bodies of research using different research methods. Janet Reno’s statement correctly describes the results of studies that compare homicide trends in states and countries that practice capital punishment with those that do not. These studies consistently show that capital punishment has no effect on homicide rates. Orrin Hatch refers to studies that use econometric modeling. He is wrong, however, in stating that these studies all find that capital punishment deters homicide. In fact, some of them find a deterrent effect and some do not.

But this is not a matter of taste. It cannot be that capital punishment deters homicide for comparative researchers but not for econometricians. In fact, the comparative method has produced valid, useful, and consistent findings, while econometrics has failed in this and every similar area of research.

The first of the comparative studies of capital punishment was done by Thorsten Sellin in 1959. Sellin was a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the pioneers of scientific criminology. He was a prime mover in setting up the government agencies that collect statistics on crime. His method involved two steps: “First, a comprehensive view of the subject which incorporated historical, sociological, psychological, and legal factors into the analysis in addition to the development of analytical models; and second, the establishment and utilization of statistics in the evaluation of crime” (Toccafundi 1996).

Sellin applied his combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in an exhaustive study of capital punishment in American states. He used every scrap of data that was available, together with his knowledge of the history, economy, and social structure of each state. He compared states to other states and examined changes in states over time. Every comparison he made led him to the “inevitable conclusion . . . that executions have no discernable effect on homicide rates” (Sellin 1959, 34).

Sellin’s work has been replicated time and time again, as new data have become available, and all of the replications have confirmed his finding that capital punishment does not deter homicide (see Bailey and Peterson 1997, and Zimring and Hawkins 1986). These studies are an outstanding example of what statistician David Freedman (1991) calls “shoe leather” social research. The hard work is collecting the best available data, both quantitative and qualitative. Once the statistical data are collected, the analysis consists largely in displaying them in tables, graphs, and charts which are then interpreted in light of qualitative knowledge of the states in question. This research can be understood by people with only modest statistical background. This allows consumers of the research to make their own interpretations, drawing on their qualitative knowledge of the states in question.

Figure 1 is an example of the kind of chart Sellin prepared, using recent data. The graph compares homicide rates per 100,000 population in Texas, New York, and California. From 1982 to 2002, Texas executed 239 prisoners, California ten, and New York none. The trends in homicide statistics are very similar in all three states, all of which follow national trends. These states were chosen arbitrarily, but data for other states are readily available. If you prefer to compare Texas to Oklahoma, Arkansas, or New Mexico, the data are readily available in back issues of the Statistical Abstract of the United States and Uniform Crime Reports. The results will be much the same.

Hundreds of comparisons of this sort have been made, and they consistently show that the death penalty has no effect. There have also been international comparative studies. Archer and Gartner (1984) examined fourteen countries that abolished the death penalty and found that abolition did not cause an increase in homicide rates. This research has been convincing to most criminologists (Radelet and Akers n.d.; Fessenden 2000), which is why Janet Reno was told that there was no valid research linking capital punishment to homicide rates.

The studies that Orrin Hatch referred to use a very different methodology: econometrics, also known as multiple regression modeling, structural equation modeling, or path analysis. This involves constructing complex mathematical models on the assumption that the models mirror what happens in the real world. As I argued in a previous Skeptical Inquirer article (Goertzel 2002), this method has consistently failed to offer reliable and valid results in studies of social problems where the data are very limited. Its most successful use is in making predictions in areas where there is a large flow of data for testing. The econometric literature on capital punishment has been carefully reviewed by several prominent economists and found wanting. There is simply too little data and too many ways to manipulate it. In one careful review, McManus (1985, 417) found that: “there is much uncertainty as to the ‘correct’ empirical model that should be used to draw inferences, and each researcher typically tries dozens, perhaps hundreds, of specifications before selecting one or a few to report. Usually, and understandably, the ones selected for publication are those that make the strongest case for the researcher’s prior hypothesis.”

Models that find deterrence effects of capital punishment often rely on rather bizarre specifications. In a rigorous and comprehensive review Cameron (1994, 214) observed that, “What emerges most strongly from this review is that obtaining a significant deterrent effect of executions seems to depend on adding a set of data with no executions to the time series and including an executing/non-executing dummy in the cross-section analysis . . . there is no clear justification for the latter practice.”

In less technical language, the researchers included a set of years when there were no executions, then introduced a control variable to eliminate the nonexistent variance. The other day upon the stair, they saw some variance that wasn’t there. It wasn’t there again today, thank goodness their model scared it away. Not all the studies rely on this particular maneuver, but they all depend on techniques that demand too much from the available data.

Since there are so many ways to model inadequate data, McManus (1985, 425) was able to show that researchers whose prior beliefs led them to structure their models in different ways would obtain predictable conclusions: “The data analyzed are not sufficiently strong to lead researchers with different prior beliefs to reach a consensus regarding the deterrent effects of capital punishment. Right-winger, rational-maximizer, and eye-for-an-eye researchers will infer that punishment deters would-be murderers, but bleeding-heart and crime-of-passion researchers will infer that there is no significant deterrent effect.”

The Mythical World of Ceteris Paribus

Econometricians inhabit the mythical land of Ceteris Paribus, a place where everything is constant except the variables they choose to write about. Ceteris Paribus has much in common with the mythical world of Flatland in Edwin Abbot’s (1884) classic fairy tale. In Flatland everything moves along straight lines, flat plains, or rectangular boxes. In Flatland, statistical averages become mathematical laws. For example, it is true that, on the average, tall people weigh more than short people. But, in the real world, not every tall person weighs more than a shorter one. In Flatland knowing someone’s height would be enough to tell you their precise weight, because both vary only on a straight line. In Flatland, if you plotted height and weight on a graph with height on one axis and weight on the other, all the points would fall on a straight line.

Of course, econometricians know that they don’t live in Flatland. But the mathematics works much better when they pretend they do. So they adjust the data in one way or another to make it straighter (often by converting it to logarithms). Then they qualify their remarks, saying “capital punishment deters homicide, ceteris paribus.” But when the real-world data diverge greatly from the straight lines of Flatland, this can lead to bizarre results.

Figure 2: Anscombe’s Quartet (by J. Randall Flannigan)

Statistician Francis Anscombe (1973) demonstrated how bizarre the Flatland assumption can be. He plotted four graphs that have become known as Anscombe’s Quartet. Each of the graphs shows the relationship between two variables. The graphs are very different, but for a resident of Flatland they are all the same. If we approximate them with a straight line (following a “linear regression equation”) the lines are all the same (figure 2). Only the first of Anscombe’s four graphs is a reasonable candidate for a linear regression analysis, because a straight line is a reasonable approximation for the underlying pattern.

Figure 3: Executions and murder rates in the United States.

The data on capital punishment and homicide, when plotted in figure 3, look a lot like Anscombe’s fourth quartet. Most of the states had no executions at all. One state, Texas, accounts for forty of the eighty-five executions in the year shown (the patterns for other years are quite similar). An exceptional case or “outlier” of this dimension completely dominates a multiple regression analysis. Any regression study will be primarily a comparison of Texas with everywhere else. Multiple regression is simply inappropriate with this data, no matter how hard the analyst tries to force the data into a linear pattern.

Unfortunately, econometricians continue to use multiple regression on capital punishment data and to generate results that are cited in Congressional hearings. In recent examples, Mocan and Gittings (2001) concluded that each execution decreases the number of homicides by five or six while Dezhbaksh, Rubin, and Shepherd (2002) argued that each execution deters eighteen murders. Cloninger and Marchesini (2001) published a study finding that the Texas moratorium from March 1996 to April 1997 increased homicide rates, even though no increase can be seen in the graph (figure 1). The moratorium simply increased homicide in comparison to what their econometric model said it would have otherwise been. Of all the econometric myths, the wildest is this: We know what would have been.

Cloninger and Marchesini concede that “studies such as the present one that rely on inductive statistical analysis cannot prove a given hypothesis correct.” However, they argue that when a large number of such studies give the same result, this provides “robust evidence” which “causes any neutral observer pause.” But if McManus is correct that econometricians are likely to specify models to fit their preconceptions, then if many of them reach the same conclusion it may just mean that they have the same bias. Actually, there are a variety of biases among econometricians, which is why there are almost as many on one side as on the other of this issue. In response to Ehrlich’s (1975) initial econometric study, other econometricians using the same data included Yunker (1976), who found a stronger deterrent effect than Ehrlich, and Cloninger (1977), who supported his findings. But Bowers and Pierce (1975), Passel and Taylor (1977), and Hoenack and Weiler (1980) found no deterrence at all.

Econometricians often dismiss the kind of comparative research that Thorsten Sellin did as crude and unsophisticated when compared to their use of complex mathematical formulas. But mathematical complexity does not make for good social science. The goal of multiple regression is to convert messy sociological realities into math problems that can be resolved with the certainty of mathematical proof. Econometricians believe they can control for the myriad variables that affect homicide rates, just as a chemist eliminates impurities to see how two chemicals interact in their pure form. But they cannot convert the real world into a Flatland, so they use statistical adjustments to compensate. With these adjustments, they claim to answer the Ceteris Paribus question: If everything else were equal, what would the relationship between capital punishment and homicide be?

It would be handy for social scientists if we lived in a Flatland where everything else was equal and questions could be answered with a few calculations. But multivariate statistical analysis does not answer real-world questions such as, “does Texas, with a high execution rate, have a lower homicide rate than similar states?” or “did the homicide rate go down when Texas began executing people, compared to trends in other states that did not?” Instead, it answers the question, “If we use the latest, most sophisticated statistical methods to control for extraneous variables, can we say that the death penalty deters homicide rates other things being equal?” After decades of effort by many diligent researchers, we now know the answer to this question: There are many ways to adjust things statistically, and the answer will depend on which one is chosen. We also know that of the many possible ways to specify a regression model, each researcher is likely to prefer one that will give results consistent with his or her predispositions.

It is time to abandon the illusion that mathematics can convert the real world into the mythical land of Ceteris Paribus. Social science can provide valid and reliable results with methods that present the data with as little statistical manipulation as possible and interpret it in light of the best qualitative information available. The value of this research is shown by its success in demonstrating that capital punishment has not deterred homicide.

References

• Abbot, Edwin. 1884. Flatland: A romance of many dimensions. Accessed on January 29, 2004, at: www.alcyone.com/max/lit/flatland/.
• Anscombe, Francis. 1973. Graphs in statistical analysis. American Statistician 27, 17—21.
• Archer, Dane, and Rosemary Gartner. 1984. Homicide and the death penalty: A cross-national test of a deterrence hypothesis. In Archer and Gartner, Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective, New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Bailey, William, and Ruth Peterson. 1997. Murder, capital punishment, and deterrence: A review of the literature. In Hugo Bedau, ed., The Death Penalty In America: Current Controversies. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Bowers, W.J., and J.L. Pierce. 1975. The illusion of deterrence in Isaac Ehrlich’s work on capital punishment. Yale Law Journal 85: 187—208.
• Cameron, Samuel. 1994. A review of the econometric evidence on the affects of capital punishment. Journal of Socio-Economics 23: 197—214.
• Cloninger, Dale. 1977. Deterrence and the death penalty: A cross-sectional analysis. Journal of Behavioral Economics 6, 87—107.
• Dezhbaksh, Hashem, Paul Robin, and Joanna Shepherd. 2002. Does capital punishment have a deterrent effect? New evidence from post-moratorium panel data. American Law and Economics Review 5(2): 344—376. Accessed on January 12, 2004, from: http://aler.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/ abstract/5/2/344.
• Ehrlich, Isaac. 1975. The deterrent effect of capital punishment: A question of life and death. American Economic Review 65: 397—417.
• Fessenden, Ford. 2000. Deadly statistics: A survey of crime and punishment. The New York Times September 22, 2000. Accessed on January 20, 2004 from: www.nytimes.com
• Freedman, David. 1991. Statistical models and shoe leather. Sociological Methodology 21: 291—313.
• Goertzel, Ted. 2002. Myths of murder and multiple regression. Skeptical Inquirer 26(1): 19—23.
• Hatch, Orrin. 2002. Minority views, appended to the “report” of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate on The Innocence Protection Act of 2002, 107th Congress, Second Session, Report 107-315, Calendar No 731. Accessed on January 12, 2004, from: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/
• Hoenack, Stephen, and William Weiler. 1980. A structural model of murder behavior and the criminal justice system. American Economic Review 70, 327—41.
• McManus, Walter. 1985. Estimates of the deterrent effect of capital punishment: The importance of the researcher’s prior beliefs. Journal of Political Economy 93: 417—425.
• Mocan, Naci, and Kaj Gittings. 2001. Pardons, executions and homicide. Working Paper 8639, National Bureau of Economic Research. Accessed on January 12, 2004, from: www.nber.org/papers/w8639.
• Passell, Peter, and John Taylor. 1977. The deterrent effect of capital punishment: Another view. American Economic Review 67, 445.
• Radelet, Michael, and Ronald Akers. (No date). Deterrence and the death penalty: The view of experts. accessed on January 23, 2004, from: http://sun.soci.niu.edu/.
• Reno, Janet. 2002. Quoted in Mocan and Gittings 2001.
• Sellin, Thorsten. 1959. The Death Penalty. American Law Institute, Philadelphia.
• Toccafundi, David. 1996. The Sellin Collection at Penn. Accessed on January 24, 2004, at: http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/pennhistory/library/sellin.html.
• Yunker, James A. 1976. Is the death penalty a deterrent to homicide? Some time series evidence. Journal of Behavioral Economics Vol. 5, 45—81.
• Zimring, Franklin, and Gordon Hawkins. 1986. Capital Punishment and the American Agenda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Greene writes in a similarly optimistic spirit, hoping to convince us that his field of physics (M-theory, previously known as superstring theory) has the potential to reveal the ultimate secrets of nature and to unify our best theory of the very large (relativity) with our most successful theory of the very small (quantum mechanics).

But is his argument convincing? This skeptic is forced to admit harboring serious doubts. While the conventional beef about M-theory among non-string theorists is that it is not falsifiable (and thus not genuine science), a more profound critique—curiously omitted from Greene’s discussion—is that it does not appear to be “brittle” in the sense of yielding a single unique solution that corresponds to the universe we inhabit.

The closest Greene comes to acknowledging this problem is the following passage:

Over the last century, scientists have realized that the universe has the familiar features of common experience only because the [subatomic] particles . . . have precisely the properties they do. Even fairly minor changes to the masses or electrical charges of some of the particles would, for example, make them unable to engage in the nuclear processes that power stars. And without stars, the universe would be a completely different place. Thus, the detailed features of the elementary particles are entwined with what many view as the deepest question in all of science: Why do the elementary particles have just the right properties to allow nuclear processes to happen, stars to light up, planets to form around stars, and on at least one such planet, life to exist?

In fact, the universe unveiled by the hellishly complex mathematics of superstring theory is not even remotely close to what string theorists anticipated. Instead of a unique solution that corresponds to the world we inhabit, the theory has revealed instead a terrifyingly vast landscape of theoretically possible universes, the overwhelming majority of which would be utterly alien and devoid of any possibility of birthing life and intelligence. The equations of superstring theory provide no insights about how our particular universe, with all of its stunningly life-friendly physical characteristics, just happened to pop out of the Big Bang, seemingly pre-engineered to speed down the pathway of cosmological evolution toward the emergence of those very results.

Just how big is this landscape of possible alternative models of particle physics that’s allowed by M-theory? According to Stanford physicist and superstring pioneer Leonard Susskind, the mathematical landscape is horrifyingly gigantic, permitting 10500 different and distinct environments, none of which appear to be mathematically favored, let alone foreordained, by the theory. And in virtually none of those other mathematically permissible environments would matter and energy have possessed the qualities that are necessary for stars, galaxies, and carbon-based living creatures to have emerged from the primordial chaos.

This is, as Susskind says, an intellectual cataclysm of the first magnitude, because it seems to deprive our most promising new theory of fundamental physics—M-theory—of the power to uniquely predict the emergence of anything remotely resembling our universe. As Susskind puts it, the picture of the universe that is emerging from the deep, mathematical recesses of M-theory is not an “elegant universe” at all. It’s a Rube Goldberg device, cobbled together by some unknown process in a supremely improbable manner that just happens to render the whole ensemble miraculously fit for life. In the words of Steve Giddings, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, “No longer can we follow the dream of discovering the unique equations that predict everything we see, and writing them on a single page. Predicting the constants of nature becomes a messy environmental problem. It has the complications of biology.”

Confronted with this mystery, advocates of M-theory-as-final-theory take two principal approaches. The first (apparently favored by Greene) is to continue searching patiently for a unique final theory—something that you could write on your tee-shirt like E=mc2—which might yet, against the odds, emerge from M-theory or one of its competitors (like loop quantum gravity) aspiring to the status of a so-called “theory of everything.” This is the fond hope of virtually every professional theoretical physicist, including those who have been driven to desperation by the horrendously messy and complex landscape of theoretically possible, M-theory-allowed universes that distresses Susskind and other superstring theorists. Perhaps the laws and constants of nature—an ensemble the late New York Academy of Sciences president and physicist Heinz Pagels dubbed the cosmic code—will, in the end, turn out to be uniquely specified by mathematics and thus subject to no conceivable variation. Perhaps the ultimate equations will someday slide out of the mind of a new colossus of physics as slickly and beautifully as E=mc2 emerged from Einstein’s brain. Perhaps. But that prospect appears increasingly unlikely.

A second approach, born of desperation on the part of Susskind and others, is to overlay a refinement of Big Bang inflation theory called eternal chaotic inflation with an explanatory approach that has been traditionally reviled by most scientists, known as the weak anthropic principle. The weak anthropic principle merely states in tautological fashion that since human observers inhabit this particular universe, it must perforce be life-friendly or it would not contain any observers resembling ourselves. Eternal chaotic inflation, invented by Russian-born physicist Andrei Linde, asserts that instead of just one Big Bang, there are, always have been, and always will be, zillions of Big Bangs going off in inaccessible regions all the time. These Big Bangs create zillions of new universes constantly, and the whole ensemble constitutes a multiverse.

Now here’s what happens when these two ideas—eternal chaotic inflation and the weak anthropic principle—are joined together. In each Big Bang, the laws, constants, and the physical dimensionality of nature come out differently. In some, dark energy is stronger. In others, dark energy is weaker. In some, gravity is stronger. In others, gravity is weaker. This happens, according to M-theory-based cosmology, because the ten-dimensional physical shapes in which superstrings vibrate—known as Calabi-Yau shapes—evolve randomly and chaotically at the moment of each new Big Bang. The laws and constants of nature are constantly reshuffled by this process, like a cosmic deck of cards.

And here’s the crucial part. Once in a blue moon, this random process of eternal chaotic inflation will yield a winning hand, as judged from the perspective of whether a particular new universe is life-friendly. That outcome will be pure chance—one lucky roll of the dice in an unimaginably vast cosmic crap shoot with 10,500 unfavorable outcomes for every winning turn.

Our universe was a big winner, of course, in the cosmic lottery. Our cosmos was dealt a royal flush. Here is how the eminent Nobel laureate Steve Weinberg explained this scenario in a New York Review of Books essay a couple of years ago: “The expanding cloud of billions of galaxies that we call the Big Bang may be just one fragment of a much larger universe in which Big Bangs go off all the time, each one with different values for the fundamental constants.” It is no more a mystery that our particular branch of the multiverse exhibits life-friendly characteristics, according to Weinberg, than that life evolved on the hospitable Earth “rather than some horrid place, like Mercury or Pluto.”

If you find this scenario unsatisfactory—the weak anthropic principle superimposed on Andrei Linde’s theory of eternal chaotic inflation—I can assure you that you are not alone. To most scientists, offering the tautological explanation that since human observers inhabit this particular universe, it must necessarily be life-friendly or else it would not contain any observers resembling ourselves is anathema. It just sounds like giving up.

One thing it certain: there is a profound mystery here, captured eloquently by the great Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson: “Mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our understanding.” True enough, but the fundamental credo of science is that deep mysteries like these will someday, if only in the distant future, succumb to rational explanation.

M-theory, contrary to the faith expressed by Brian Greene and other superstring enthusiasts, may not turn out to be the final explanation of what Greene aptly calls “the deepest question in all of science”—why the universe is life-friendly. But M-theory’s inherent shortcomings—its messiness and the fact that it seems to exhibit all the complications of biology—may offer valuable clues about the existence of some fundamental cosmological process or principle that lies just beyond the reach of current scientific theory.

But Meier is in contact with the space people from the Pleiades (he calls them “Plejarans”; I suppose that “Pleiadeans” sounds too unwieldy). And according to Michael Horn, who says he is the officially authorized media representative of Meier in the United States (which so far as I know Meier has never disputed), the Plejarans have warned that when Toutatis is closest to Earth, it will suddenly veer off course and head straight toward us. Horn says that it will require a “pre-emptive nuclear strike” to keep this multi-kilometer-sized asteroid from slamming straight into Earth. Before you dismiss this prophecy as the ravings of a demented man, be forewarned that Meier claims a long list of successful predictions (no doubt selectively culled from a much longer list of unsuccessful ones—Meier reportedly has written thousands of pages of predictions). Horn says that Meier predicted back in 1987 that Islamic fanatics would destroy the World Trade Center in New York. If true, this information will be of great interest to the current Congressional investigation into the September 11 attacks: What did Meier know, and when did he know it?

Others are also starting to sound alarm bells. The Web site of the conspiracy-oriented radio host Jeff Rense carries similar warnings (see www.rense.com/general50/sep29th2004.htm). There is even a claim of a secret government missile program to save us from disaster on September 29. And the biblical prophecy expert Arnie Stanton suggests that the encounter with Toutatis indicates that the Second Coming will be just a few months away. Stanton also warns that a larger, as-yet undiscovered asteroid will definitely smack into Earth sometime in 2006.

This is the first time to my knowledge that the world is ending in 2004. The world most recently ended in May of 2003, when a mysterious Planet X, inhabited by Zetans, was reported to be on its way to a disastrous close encounter with Earth, moving the poles and flooding entire countries. The Web site www.zetatalk.com is still there. It talks a lot about the disasters expected in 2003 but says nothing about there being a year 2004; as near as I can tell, their claim is that a disastrous planetary encounter did occur in 2003, but was covered up by NASA. Before that, the “planetary alignment” of May 5, 2000, was threatened as a trigger for all manner of earthly havoc. And of course, society as we know it ended on January 1, 2000, when every major computer system in the world not only failed, but became contagious, infecting even computers that did not suffer from the Y2K bug. The next scheduled major world-ending is in 2012, when, according to a number of reliable experts, the Mayan Calendar simply “runs out,” apparently making it impossible for time to continue.

During April a major conference on UFOs and “Exopolitics,” called “the X-Conference,” was held near Washington, D.C. (see www.paradigmclock.com/X-Conference/X-Conference.htm). It featured the usual suspects sounding alarm bells over supposed “government cover-ups” of UFO and alien hijinks. However, the speakers at this conference delved even farther into the vast conspiracy than anyone has dared to delve before. Phil Corso Jr., whose late father wrote in The Day After Roswell how much of our high-technology (such as transistors) was reverse-engineered from the crashed Roswell saucer, explained that the Roswell aliens were in fact simply “us” from the future, returning as time travelers. This he has learned from notes and manuscripts left by his father, explaining that “we” went back in time to warn “ourselves” about the nuclear threat.

There was much controversy over the claims of Dan Burisch, supposedly a Ph.D. microbiologist who has worked on designer diseases for the military at Area 51 in the Nevada desert—and who also studied the extraterrestrial beings in residence there. Burisch warns of a sinister conspiracy between E.T.s and the military to develop deadly diseases to wipe out humans that the conspirators want to be rid of. Burisch is now reportedly in “lock-down” at Area 51, and is requesting immunity from Congress in return for his testimony about this nefarious program. Some of the UFOlogists at the conference cautiously supported Burisch’s tales, others supported the stories even more strongly while accusing the first group of distorting them, and yet a third faction angrily charged that the Burisch supporters were disinformation agents charged with “spinning” wild tales to sow confusion within UFOlogy. (UFOlogists seldom believe that other UFOlogists with whom they disagree are simply mistaken—they are usually either pathological liars or government agents.)

Steven Greer was at the conference to talk about his Project Disclosure, which three years after its much-ballyhooed launch at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., featuring twenty supposedly credentialed military/intelligence/defense-industry witnesses (reported in this column, March/April 2002) has yet to present any of its supposedly solid evidence of UFO cover-ups to any official government investigations. Greer reportedly acknowledged his disappointment that more progress has not yet been made, but he kept the faith. However, the defrocked psychologist Richard Boylan charged that Greer and others are in fact disinformation agents funded by powerful moneyed interests. Apparently the purpose of the disinformation must be to keep UFOlogists from finding out what Boylan considers the real stuff, like alien-hybrid children and “Walk-in” Star Visitors (a contemporary analog of demonic possession).

For another example of the truly stellar quality of contemporary “scientific” UFO research (pun intended), see The Lawton Triangle UFO Hoax at http://ufohoax.tripod.com. In March 2002, hoaxer Carl Wilson submitted a dubious-looking, indistinct photo of red and white lights against a black background to Jim Hickman, a “research specialist” with MUFON, the largest UFO group in the U.S. He wrote of seeing these lights in the night sky over Lawton, Oklahoma. Hickman sent a copy of the photo to Bruce Maccabee, the best-known “scientific” UFO photo analyst, who has “authenticated” many classic UFO photos such as those from McMinnville, Oregon, and Gulf Breeze, Florida. It didn’t take long for Maccabee to conclude “unless someone has a better idea, I would have to classify this as a True UFO (TRUFO), which might be some sort of Alien Flying Craft (AFC) (or two such craft)?”

Not content with fooling the “experts” once, a few months later Wilson submitted to Hickman a similar photo, purportedly of a UFO seen hovering over Fort Sill, Oklahoma, near Lawton. Hickman again sent a copy to Maccabee, who could barely contain his excitement: “Wow! Got to pull out all the stops on this one! A rare event, two photos of the same (apparently) thing!”

Were these two photos of some alien craft? No, says Wilson: “In reality, these pictures were nothing more than a picture of Microsoft Optical Mouse taken with the room lights and camera flash turned off!” When he revealed his hijinks on the Internet newsgroup alt.alien.research, many asked him whether he was a paid government debunker. He replies, “I did it to demonstrate how easy it is to fool the so-called ‘UFO experts’ and how willing they are to take any claim at face value. But rather than learn from this example, their reaction was one of hostility.” And he reports being harassed in many ways. Wilson concludes, “Clearly many of those involved with or supporting ‘UFO research’ are less interested in ‘Finding the Truth’ as they claim, as they are in silencing their critics.”

While NASA continues to glean astonishing amounts of information about Mars from the Mars Rovers, others are finding plenty of things in the photos that NASA seems to have missed. UFOlogist George Filer, MUFON’s Eastern Director, writes that “Our examination of thousands of images has led us to theorize that we might be observing an ancient civilization. . . . Strangely, the symbols and writing are very similar to English” (see www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2004/mar/m10-029.shtml). He notes that “The symbols or letters A, E, G, H, P, V, and Y have been found. The Y symbol is the most numerous and often has deep round holes drilled at the three corners.” (The letter B, Filer reminds us, had previously been spotted by the Viking lander carved into a rock way back in 1976.) Filer is far from the only person making such remarkable discoveries. According to a Knight-Ridder news story of March 6, NASA is being deluged by supposed “Mars discoveries” from civilians, including stone tools and dinosaur fossils (see www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/nation/8124461.htm).

The most dramatic Mars finding would appear to be from the above-mentioned Boylan: based upon news reports that Mars’s ice caps appear to be melting, he suggests that Mars is being “terraformed” by alien intelligences to make it more habitable (see www.drboylan.com/trfmars2.html). Boylan informs us that “the U.S. has a tiny forward station on Mars, staffed by astronauts from a secret space program operated by a military black project agency . . . the Star Visitors [also] have a long-term presence on Mars.” The Mars Society proposes the eventual “terraforming” of Mars to turn it into another habitat for humans, but if Boylan is correct, we may arrive there someday to find the work already finished.

In the May/June 2003 issue I reported about the giant scorpions allegedly being bred in Iraq by Saddam Hussein, to be used as secret weapons. While no giant scorpion bioweapons have yet been found, the Web site of the Coast to Coast AM radio show carries a photo of what is alleged to be a “camel spider” supposedly facing our troops in Iraq. According to one caller to that show, “They run 10 mph, jump three feet, are a nocturnal spider. . . . When they bite you, you are injected with Novocain [sic] so you go numb instantly. You don’t even know you are bitten when you are sleeping, so you wake up with part of your leg or arm missing because it has been gnawing on it all night long” (see the purported photo of this critter at www.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page440.html).

As if to make up for the dearth of giant scorpions, the region is currently in the grips of UFO fever, with sightings running at a high pace, especially in Iran. Sa’dollah Nasiri-Qeydari, head of the Astronomical Society of Iran, told Reuters that people were probably seeing Venus, which was near its greatest brilliance in the evening sky. But Michael Salla, author of Exopolitics: Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence, begs to disagree. Salla, who was educated in Australia and has degrees in government and in philosophy, is currently a Researcher in Residence in the Center for Global Peace, American University, in Washington, D.C. He suggests that the UFOs being seen across the Middle East are “very likely related to Stargate/energy portal activity in Iraq/Iran and the region generally. It is very likely that the whole region comprising Iraq/Iran/ Afghanistan is a vast energy portal that was strategically chosen for this reason as the home base for extraterrestrials known as the Anunnaki during the Sumerian era” (see www.exopolitics.org/Exo-Comment-15.htm). The anger of Moslems over the U.S. occupation is so intense that, according to Salla, “What they might manifest by all this rage/anger is an opening of the portals and literally the gates of hell opening with the return of the Gods—the Anunnaki—who take the rage around the region as permission to intervene and punish U.S. forces and their allies.” But apparently Bush and his fellow conspirators, who head up a secret “shadow government” in collusion with extraterrestrials, knew about this all along, and this was the real reason for the war in Iraq: “it wasn’t Oil, Weapons of Mass Destruction, or the ‘War against Terror,’ just a desire to be in Iraq if and when the energy portals/Stargates became active.” He warns, “The ultimate result of extraterrestrial intervention responding to regional rage against the U.S. is a military confrontation that could lead to a domineering extraterrestrial race having a major strategic toehold in human affairs.” And wouldn’t that be terrible!

We want to be deceived.

—Blaise Pascal

I think Pascal is right. We want to be deceived. Deception is an essential tool for the survival of our species. We might well be hardwired for deceiving others and taking delight in being deceived. On the other hand, there are many times when we don’t appreciate deceiving or being deceived. And most of us feel uncomfortable when we’re not sure whether we’re being hoaxed. Is there any way to reconcile our love of a good prank or magic trick with our hatred of being defrauded or made to look foolish? Is there any surefire way to avoid being hoaxed?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Most of us have been victims of pranks, hoaxes, or frauds. We may even have mistaken one for the other. For example, in April 2002, in Loomis, California, two teenagers got inspired by the MTV reality show Jackass. One of them videotaped his buddy as he ran along a rural road wearing handcuffs and an orange jail jumpsuit that he’d bought at a flea market. Unfortunately, some local citizens and law enforcement officers didn’t know it was a prank, and they pursued the “escapee” with tracking dogs, patrol cars, and a helicopter. Folsom Prison ordered a full-scale lockdown and did a head count. They also did head counts at the jails in Placer and Sacramento counties, at some expense to the taxpayer.

It’s sometimes hard to know whether something is a prank or a hoax or whether we’re being defrauded. The jackass could well have been an escapee. If you saw someone in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs running down the road and you didn’t see the cameraman, your first thought probably would not be: “Ah, another Jackass prank.”

Most of us have heard of the 1938 Halloween Eve radio broadcast by Orson Welles of an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds that many took to be an announcement that Earth had been invaded by Martians. Announcements that the story was fiction were made four times during the broadcast. Welles ended the show by announcing that the broadcast was a “holiday offering”: “the Mercury Theater’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and shouting boo.” The disclaimers did little to prevent many people from believing we’d been invaded by Martians. It’s been called the hoax of the century, but it wasn’t even a hoax. It wasn’t a prank, either. It wasn’t intended to fool people but to entertain them. Yet it fooled many people for several reasons.

1. It was presented realistically and authoritatively.
2. The story itself was credible at the time. There were flying machines, and the possibility of interplanetary travel was easily conceivable. It was not farfetched that some other race of beings might be more technologically advanced than we were.
3. Radio would have been the medium used to announce such an invasion.

Fooling the Experts

We can excuse ourselves, I think, for being taken in by some hoaxes because they’re so believable. But others are so unbelievable, we have to wonder how anybody could fall for them. For example, how could Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, have fallen for the Cottingley Fairy hoax? Two children, Frances and Elsie, photographed cutouts of fairies that shouldn’t have fooled anybody. And how could the King’s surgeon and the most famous obstetrician in eighteenth century England be duped into believing that the servant girl Mary Toft had given birth to rabbits?

How did the children and the servant fool such eminent men? It was easy: (1) The hoaxers put on a good game face. The kids didn’t let on that they were making it all up—and we all know that children don’t lie. Frances maintained until her death in 1986 that at least one of the photos was genuine. It wasn’t until Elsie was a grandmother that she gave broad hints that the stunt was a hoax. And Mary Toft must have been a pretty fair actress as well. (2) The hoax fit with the beliefs of the eminent men. Doyle was a believer in the occult and paranormal, so the idea of fairies appearing to children and allowing themselves to be photographed did not strike him as obviously preposterous. He corresponded with Elsie and even wrote a book about the fairies (The Coming of the Fairies). The event was within the realm of the possible for him. And once Doyle gave his nod to the belief, others would follow.

The belief that a human could give birth to rabbits is a bit more complicated, yet the same principle applies. The medical establishment seemed to be willing to believe in this absurdity because of another false belief that was consistent with the rabbit-birth hypothesis: the theory of maternal impressions.

Maternal impressions is the notion, widely believed in eighteenth-century England, that a pregnant woman’s experiences could be directly imprinted on her unborn child. The theory was used to explain birth defects. A child being born deaf was due to the mother having been shocked by a loud sound during pregnancy. If a pregnant woman looked at a blind person her baby might be born blind. Toft, who had been pregnant but miscarried, claimed to have had an intense craving for roast rabbit. She said she admired rabbits, dreamed about them, and spent time trying to catch them. Thus, her claim of giving birth to rabbits fit with the notion of maternal impressions and didn’t seem absurd to the local doctor, the King’s surgeon, or a famous obstetrician, and with their support for the claim Mary’s hoax took root.

Now, I may not have fallen for any whoppers lately—to use Marvin Minsky’s description for unbelievable beliefs—like the Cottingley Fairy or the Rabbit Birth hoaxes, but I’ve been hoaxed more times than I care to remember (actually given the state of my memory, more times than I can hope to remember).

For example, I was once hoaxed by my online editor John Renish, who sent me a link to a Web site with the cryptic note “I do like the part about how women are different from men.” I looked at the Web site and it claims to be a report on the Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair 2001. I went right to the part about how women are different from men and found an essay that supposedly won second place in the Middle School Division called “Women Were Designed for Homemaking” by Jonathan Goode (grade 7):

• physics shows that women have a lower center of gravity than men, making them more suited to carrying groceries and laundry baskets;
• biology shows that women were designed to carry unborn babies in their wombs and to feed born babies milk, making them the natural choice for child rearing;
• social sciences show that the wages for women workers are lower than for normal workers, meaning that they are unable to work as well and thus earn equal pay;
• and, exegetics shows that God created Eve as a companion for Adam, not as a coworker.

Given other things I believe about fundamentalist creationists, it was not outside the bounds of credibility for me that some poor kid might actually believe this stuff and be encouraged to believe it by his elders.

The caption under the first-prize winner’s picture reads, “Patricia Lewis displays her jar of non-living material, still non-living after three weeks.”

Even the notion that such an experiment would be thought relevant to the belief that life doesn’t come from non-life isn’t that farfetched when you consider some of the other things some creationists teach their children.

But if you dig around a bit on the Web site, there are some giveaways that this site is an elaborate hoax, such as the advice to dress up like John the Baptist on Halloween and scare kids when they come trick-or-treating before sending them off with no candy and a Bible tract. Somebody (actually a man named Chris Harper) had gone to an awful lot of trouble to make fundamentalist Christians look very silly.

Being hoaxed by my editor reminded me that it is people you trust who can most easily mislead you, because you let your guard down and aren’t critical enough. If you’re trying to avoid being hoaxed, here’s lesson number one: Don’t trust people you trust!

Whoppers

I think it goes without saying that anybody can be hoaxed. Nobody is exempt. Even famous newscasters can be duped. Tom Brokaw and many others were hoaxed by David Rorvik in 1978 when Rorvik claimed he had proof of human cloning. Twenty-five years later we saw the same hoax perpetrated by the Raelian Bishop Brigitte Boisselier, who claimed a group she headed called Clonaid had cloned five humans and that proof would be forthcoming. (That’s proof, not truth, that would be forthcoming.) The leader of the group, Rael, was a race-car driver and sports journalist who was known as Claud Vorilhon until he was picked up by aliens near a volcano in France, taken to a planet in the Pleiades, and sent back to start a UFO cult. He says the cloning hoax was worth millions in publicity. Who could doubt him?

The idea of a human cloning is not as farfetched today as it was twenty-five years ago. Human cloning doesn’t deserve to be categorized in the whopper class of beliefs. The whoppers are ones we should recognize immediately as 99.99 percent likely to be hoaxes. The hoaxes I’m going to go over with you now I think are of the whopper variety.

For example, there’s the Indian Rope Trick. How could any rational person believe such a story, which, on its face, is as absurd as that of a woman giving birth to rabbits? This alleged trick involves an Indian fakir who throws a rope to the sky, but the rope does not fall back to the ground. Instead it mysteriously rises until the top of it disappears into thin air. A young boy climbs the unsupported rope, which miraculously supports him until he also disappears into thin air. The fakir then pulls out a knife and climbs the rope until he, too, disappears. Body parts fall from the sky into a basket next to the base of the rope. The fakir then slides down the rope, empties the basket, throws a cloth over the scattered body parts, and the boy miraculously reappears with all his parts in the right places. Thousands of people claim to have witnessed this trick that never happened.

Actually, the only thing needed for this trick is human gullibility. According to Peter Lamont, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh and a former president of the Magic Circle in Edinburgh, the Indian Rope Trick was a hoax played by the Chicago Tribune in 1890. Lamont claims the newspaper was trying to increase circulation by publishing this ridiculous story as if there were eyewitnesses to the event. The Tribune admitted the hoax some four months later, expressing some astonishment that so many people believed it was a true story. After all, they reasoned, the byline was “Fred S. Ellmore.” They hadn’t reckoned that their audience, many of whom believe in magicians with miraculous powers, wouldn’t find this story that hard to accept.

Our next hoax is about an event that really did happen in India. Ramar Pillai astounded the world when he announced that he could change water into diesel fuel. He claimed he had some magic herbs that, when added to boiling water, could produce a virtually pollution-free diesel fuel or kerosene for about twenty-three cents a gallon—not quite as impressive as Pons and Fleishmann’s cold-fusion claim, but impressive nonetheless. Pillai was promoted on the Internet as the new Isaac Newton. To produce his fuel, Pillai cooked leaves and bark from a special plant for about ten minutes in hot water. He stirred the mixture and let it cool down. The liquid fuel would float to the top and be separated by filtering. The entire process took less than thirty minutes.

His fuel was allegedly tested at the Indian Institute of Technology and was shown to be a pure hydrocarbon similar to kerosene and diesel fuel. Engineers conducted tests and concluded that the herbal fuel offered better fuel economy than gasoline. One scientist tried to explain the magic by offering the theory that atmospheric carbon dioxide might be sucked in during the reaction. The carbon dioxide combines with hydrogen liberated from water and forms the hydrocarbon fuel. A better explanation seems to be that Pillai’s stirring stick is filled with fuel and when his mixture is heated up, a wax plug at the end of the stick melts, liberating the fuel. Pillai, it seems, was part of gang who hoped to trick people into buying fuel they’d stolen from Indian oil companies. Pillai was very convincing in his role as a peasant-genius. I remember reading one news account in which he described how he’d been kidnapped and tortured by a gang trying to wrest from him his secret recipe. He described how he’d been hung from a ceiling fan and burned with cigarettes. Poor fellow.

Cabrera’s Stones

Next, we go to Peru and Dr. Javier Cabrera’s stones. Dr. Cabrera gave up his medical practice in 1996 to open a museum for some stones he bought from a local farmer that depict stylized men who look like ancient Incas or Aztecs. What is unique about these stones is that they depict activities such as astronomy and surgery, indicating a very advanced civilization. Furthermore, there are also stones that are said to show extinct fish and humans riding dinosaurs. The stones are said to provide evidence that the ancient locals not only had an advanced civilization, but they lived at the time of the dinosaurs. The stones call into question just about everything science has taught us about the origin of our planet, ourselves, and other species. The farmer who sold Dr. Cabrera the stones at first claimed that he had found them in a cave, but later admitted that he made them himself to sell to tourists.

Even though this hoax was created for a tourist trade, there are three groups in particular who have endeavored to support the authenticity of the stones: (1) the followers of Erich von Däniken (author of Chariots of the Gods?) and those who believe that extraterrestrials are an intimate part of Earth’s “real” history and were the ones who brought advanced civilization to the ancient Indians; (2) fundamentalist creationists who drool at the thought of any possible error made by anthropologists, archaeologists, or evolutionary biologists, and who relish the thought of evidence that humans, dinosaurs, and extinct fish lived together a few thousand years ago; and (3) the mytho-historians, followers of Immanuel Velikovsky or Zecharia Sitchin who claim that ancient myths are accurate historical records to be understood literally.

Any rational person examining all the evidence should conclude that the probability is about zero that these stones are evidence of extraterrestrials or the validity of ancient myths or proof that men lived with dinosaurs. But if you already believe that extraterrestrials have been among us for millennia, then you may well find the extraterrestrial account plausible or even probable. Likewise, if you believe that Earth is only a few thousand years old and are well-versed in Flintstone science, then the idea that these stones depict actual events may well be believable to you.

The Visions of Catalina Rivas

Catalina Rivas of Cochabamba, Bolivia, was a “fallen-away Catholic” until 1993, when she went to see a woman named Nancy Fowler. Fowler is from Conyers, Georgia, and for several years claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared to her on the thirteenth of each month (à la Fatima). Rivas claims she went to Conyers and had her first stigmatic experience there. You may have seen Rivas in the July 1999 Fox television special “Signs from God: Science Tests Faith.” A more apt title would have been: “Dollar Signs: Fox Tests Gullibility.” In that program, reporters Giselle Fernandez and Michael Willesee took viewers on an uncritical tour to “scientifically” examine weeping and bleeding statues, rose petals with “miraculous” images of Jesus and Mary, and the stigmata of Katya Rivas, among other things.

Rivas is hailed by her thousands of admirers as the spiritual mother of not one but two international religious movements, The Great Crusade of Love and Mercy and the Apostolate of the New Evangelization. In 1996, she claimed she was getting messages from God, not only in Spanish but also in Greek, Latin, and Polish. These allegedly divine messages were photocopied and sold at religious rallies. Her bishop, René Fernández Apaza, authenticated both her stigmata and her messages from God.

On June 22, 2001, I received an e-mail from a man named José H. Prado Flores, who told me that he was “a writer of books oriented to forming leaders in the Catholic Church.” Several years ago, he wrote, he had co-authored a book with Salvador Gómez called Formación de Pedicadores (“Training Preachers”) and that Katya Rivas had rewritten their book as “messages from Jesus ‘dictada a la sierva de Dios’ (‘dictated to God’s servant’).” He told me that when Rivas, “the famous ‘visionary and stigmatic’” was scheduled to appear at a religious rally in Guadalajara, Mexico, where Prado Flores lives, a friend showed him a set of books that were to be sold during the convention. “You can understand my total amazement,” he wrote, “when I put two and two together and figured out she was the same lady that had ‘stolen’ my book. We then went to the bishop of Guadalajara, Juan Cardenal Sandoval Iñiguez, who, after seeing our study on her material, immediately cancelled her participation.”

Why, you might wonder, would a Catholic author contact an atheist who is skeptical of all things miraculous about this matter? José had read my rather unflattering review of the Fox special, and said he wanted any information I might have that would help prove that Rivas “is a compulsive and professional liar.”

For over a year and a half, I exchanged e-mails with José and his wife Susan about Catalina Rivas. I obtained copies of his book and copies of her messages. I established that he and Salvador Gómez had written hundreds of pages that are nearly identical to the material being published by Rivas, and that the pair of Mexican authors had written some of the material at least sixteen years before Katya’s “messages.” My edition of Formación de Predicadores is dated 1992, four years before her messages, which have page after page of nearly verbatim plagiarizing.

To her followers who ask me how it is possible for a peasant woman with no formal education to write books in Spanish, Polish, Greek, and Latin, I say it is simple: she copies them. It seems obvious that she did it for her Spanish messages from Jesus, and I suspect that if the Bishop who authenticated her stigmata would have put a little more energy into authenticating her messages, he would find the same is true for her works in other languages as well.

Channeling Dr. Fritz

Another whopper began with Zé Arigó (1918—1971), a Brazilian faith healer who, in the early 1950s, claimed to channel the spirit and healing power of Dr. Adolf Fritz, a German doctor who allegedly died during World War I. Arigo developed quite a reputation as a faith healer and psychic surgeon, but his ploy seemed to have been aimed at directing business toward his brother, a pharmacist. He would write out illegible prescriptions for people that only his brother could read. People came from far and wide to be cured by Arigo. His reputation soared after it was alleged that he did a bit of psychic surgery and removed a cancerous tumor from the lung of a well-known Brazilian senator. For twenty years, Arigó’s fame spread as he “cured” and “operated” on thousands of people, including the daughter of Brazil’s president. Despite his fame, he was twice convicted of practicing medicine illegally.

Arigo performed his psychic surgery with a pocketknife and a heavy German accent, perhaps to misdirect people so they wouldn’t notice his lack of concern for medical hygiene.

Arigo died in a car crash in 1971, but Dr. Fritz didn’t go with him. He took over the body of another Brazilian healer who went by the name of Oscar Wilde. (I’m not making this up.) Wilde didn’t last too long before he, too, died a violent death. After that, a gynecologist from Recife, Dr. Edson Queiroz, claimed Dr. Fritz was his. The doctor, however, was stabbed to death in 1991.

The current channeler of Dr. Fritz is engineer Rubens Farias Jr., who heals the astral body with energy healing and does some psychic surgery with unconventional instruments such as scissors. Farias is also unique in that he claimed Dr. Fritz came to him in 1986, while Dr. Queiroz was still alive. I had to consult Thomas Aquinas to see whether it is possible for the same spirit to appear in two bodies simultaneously; it turns out spirits don’t occupy space so they can be everywhere at once. Anyway, despite the dual channeling and the fact that he has also been accused of practicing medicine without a license, Farias has endless lines of people with faith in miraculous cures waiting for a bit of his magic.

Exposing the Hoaxes

Some skeptics suggest that the best way to undermine such faith and enlighten people is to demonstrate how easy it is to fake the paranormal and the supernatural. I’m not so sure. I think we could expose dozens of fake healers, but it would not make it any easier to expose the next one who comes along because we wouldn’t be destroying the underlying belief system that is needed to make the faith healer plausible. I believe this partly due to what happened with a fake psychic and a fake channeler who were sent to Australia to enlighten the people.

In 1986, Mark Plummer, former president of the Australian Skeptics and former Executive Director of CSICOP, and Dick Smith, a patron of the Australian Skeptics, invited magician and mentalist Bob Steiner to come to Australia to perform as a psychic. Steiner often pretends he is an astrologer, tarot card reader, palm reader, or a psychic. After his performances he reveals that he is not psychic but uses trickery and deceit to fake paranormal powers.

For two weeks, Steiner hoaxed Australia as Steve Terbot. He appeared on television programs, gave performances at cultural centers, and in a very short time became a hit. He appeared on Tonight with Bert Newton (similar to The Tonight Show) three times and in his last appearance revealed the hoax, explaining that he used cold-reading techniques and other tricks to deceive people into thinking he was psychic. The purpose of the hoax was to “warn the people of Australia to beware of people claiming to be psychics.” Plummer and Smith had brought Steiner to Australia because of a fairly large influx of foreign psychics who were being welcomed and accepted with incredible credulity by the natives. They hoped that once the people saw how easy it is to fake being psychic, they would see the error of their ways.

Did it work? According to Steiner, it worked extremely well and effectively put an end to the influx of foreign psychics. Mark Plummer agreed. Here’s what he told me in a recent e-mail message when I asked him whether he thought the hoax did any good:

Yes. Before then Australia was regularly visited by “internationally known” psychics. Since then we have only had a couple. Also the organisers are terrified that if they promote someone that person will turn out to be a skeptic.

To put it in a wider international context: Before, there were skeptics groups in most countries [but] individuals had no easy way of checking up on the claims of “international psychics.” Once CSICOP could act as a central library and clearing house and the national skeptics groups started talking to each other it became much harder for such charlatans to operate internationally. Then, with the invention of the fax and the Internet, the exchange of skeptical information has become much easier.

Steiner also exposed a man named John Fitzsimons as a fraud, paving the way for a $64,000 judgment on behalf of one of Fitzsimons’s clients. Seventeen years later, however, I found Fitzsimons on the Internet. He runs a New Age group called Aspects in a small town outside of Melbourne. He leads discussions on topics such as past lives, karma, out-of-body experiences, spirit guides, prayer, healing, White Eagle (a channeled being), multiple personality disorder, mediumship, cults, night terrors, spiritualism, psychic readings, exorcism, Ouija, channeling, Seth, aliens, Atlantis, UFOs, and chronic fatigue syndrome. In short, Steiner was about as successful in putting away Mr. Fitzsimons as he and Randi were in putting away Peter Popoff, the faith healer they exposed as a fraud in 1986.

Speaking of the Amazing Randi, a tour of world hoaxes would not be complete without a discussion of the “Carlos” hoax. According to Randi, in 1988, channeling was the rage in Australia, and an Australian television program contacted him about finding someone who might go down under and pretend to be a channeler. The plan was similar to the Steve Terbot hoax. This time, José Alvarez would channel an ancient spirit he called Carlos. Alvarez would tour Australia, appear on TV, and appear in various venues, including the Sydney Opera House. At the end of a few weeks, the hoax would be revealed. Again, the purpose was to enlighten Australians by demonstrating how easy it is to fake channeling. Like Steiner, Alvarez was very convincing and he had a large following in a very short time. And, in the end, everything was revealed.

Did the hoax work? Was anybody enlightened? I was able to discuss this question at length with both Alvarez and Randi while at the JREF Amazing Meeting in February 2003. Both think the hoax accomplished its mission. In fact, Alvarez continues to take Carlos on the road in an effort to enlighten people with what he calls “performance art.”

What was most revealing about both the Steve Terbot and Carlos hoaxes was how the media didn’t bother to check their credentials or their claims about themselves. The media took it for granted they were who they said they were and did what they said they did. Looking to the media for protection against being hoaxed is probably an exercise in futility. So, here is valuable lesson number two: Don’t expect help from the mass media.

Nevertheless, I sought the opinion of someone in the Australian media and asked him if he thought there were any benefits or long-term effects of either the Steve Terbot or the Carlos hoaxes. I tried to contact Phillip Adams, a well known Australian journalist, writer, and media personality. Adams wasn’t directly involved with either hoax. In fact, he was writing scathing articles condemning the phony psychics plaguing the land during the time Bob Steiner was gathering his flock as psychic Steve Terbot. Adams was out in the bush or someplace where they don’t have e-mail when I tried to contact him, but his assistant, Amanda Bilson, got in touch with him and relayed this message:

. . . he asked me to pass on a couple of comments to you. First of all he wasn’t involved with the Randi/Terbot hoax[es] and is not convinced [they were] entirely successful. Perhaps the media learned to be a little more sceptical—but they soon returned to their old standards of gullibility. And many people blame the messenger for the message, turning their anger on the Sceptics rather than the charlatans. He thought [they were] great fun but, given the attention span of public and media alike, of little long term significance.

Recently, Michael Shermer, of the Skeptic Society, discovered the same thing: It’s easy to hoax people and it’s great fun, but rather than enlighten people, it seems that you just anger some of them. Shermer used the cold-reading techniques described by Ian Rowland in his book The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading and pretended to be a tarot card reader, a palmist, an astrologer, a psychic, and a medium who could get messages from the dead. He did this on camera with five strangers who did not know who he was or what he was doing. He seems to have been pretty successful in convincing his clients of his paranormal powers. However, when he revealed to them that the whole thing was a hoax, two were so upset that they refused to sign a release to use the material in the show he was filming. Three of his subjects were college students who seemed less concerned about being duped than in finding out when they would be on TV. If any of them thanked Shermer for helping them see the truth about the paranormal, he didn’t mention it.

So what can we learn from all this? Well, it’s pretty easy to hoax people. Pascal is right: We want to be deceived, and that makes it easy to hoax us. Also, many of us already have beliefs that make us vulnerable to being hoaxed about certain kinds of things. Furthermore, most of us enjoy being deceived by a good magician or by someone pulling off a non-malicious prank or hoax.

But we don’t always want to be deceived. We don’t want to be made to look like idiots or be led into believing something foolish. Nor do we ever wish to be defrauded. And most of us don’t like that uncomfortable feeling that rises in us when we’re not sure whether we’re being hoaxed. We know some hoaxes are benevolent and pleasant, while others are malicious and unpleasant. Ideally, we’d like a surefire way to tell the difference so we’d never be hoaxed against our will.

That’s why I wrote the book Don’t Get Hoaxed, in which I explain such things as the hoax-prone personality: the person who is trusting and honest; attracted to attractive people; believes the believable and the unbelievable; and lacks a good understanding of confirmation bias and cold-reading techniques.

I also reveal that if you map out the locations of the world’s greatest hoaxes, you will find that they lay along ley lines that, when connected by a line to the north star at the vernal equinox, form a pyramid with the exact proportions as the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Trust me, I teach ethics.

References

• Carroll, Robert Todd. 2003. The Skeptic’s Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Also online at www.skepdic.com.
• Levine, Robert. 2003. The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
• Pickover, Clifford A. 2000. The Girl Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: A True Medical Mystery. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.
• Polidoro, Massimo. 2002. Ica stones: Yabba-dabba do! Skeptical Inquirer 26(5): September/October.
• Randi, James. 1989. The Faith Healers. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.
• ———. 1982. Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.
• Rowland, Ian. 2002. The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading. 3rd ed. London: Ian Rowland Limited.
• Shermer, Michael. 2003. Psychic for a day, or how I learned tarot cards, palm reading, astrology, and mediumship in 24 hours. Skeptic 10(1): 48—55.
• Stein, Gordon. 1995. Hoaxes!: Dupes, Dodges & Other Dastardly Deceptions. Canton, Michigan: Visible Ink Press.
• Steiner, Robert A. 1989. Don’t Get Taken!—Bunco and Bunkum Exposed: How to Protect Yourself. El Cerito, California: Wide-Awake Books.
• http://www.augustachronicle.com/stories/041102/biz_UE0007-0.shtml (“Woman gives birth to rabbits! Or so they said . . . ,” by Michael Woods, The Augusta Chronicle, April 11, 2002).
• http://home.vicnet.net.au/~johnf/biogjfit.htm (John Fitzsimons).