How I miss that voice with its mesmerizing blend of passion, brilliance, warmth, humor, and honesty. Carl spoke and wrote with equal measures of skepticism and wonder; never one at the expense of the other. He managed to maintain an exquisite balance between these two competing values. His life’s work to awaken us to the wonders of the universe revealed by rigorous, skeptical science was a joyful labor of love.

Here we are, a mere ten years later in a radically different cultural atmosphere. Now, we seem to be engaged in a great turning away from reality. The engine of science continues to churn out discoveries at an astonishing rate, and yet our culture seems to have lost the ability to translate these insights into a grander perspective. It’s as if our first forays into the immensity of the universe have sent us flying into a panic. The dawning reality of our tiny portion of space and time has been too much for us to bear. We turn away, seeking refuge in the discredited myths of our centrality.

Evidence of this failure of nerve is plentiful: Public school science educators shrink from teaching the fundamentals of biology. Science museums in the South feel the need to shield their visitors from Imax films that give the true age of volcanoes. Our president declares himself an instrument of God and with impunity makes illegal and baseless unprovoked war. An unctuous piety suffuses every public utterance. Radical religious fundamentalists have seized the national conversation. The rest of us are left to re-fight battles and arguments won decades ago.

Most worrisome is the steady erosion of the Bill of Rights made acceptable by the fearful attacks of September 11, 2001. Our precious constitution is in danger of being tainted with religious-based homophobia, the so-called “defense of marriage” amendment. More and more frequently we are told that we live in a Christian country. In the frightening logic of this moment, the separation of church and state which was the founding source of our national genius is seen as nothing more than an obstacle to a proper commitment to God.

It’s enough to make you long for the days when skeptics could afford the luxury of sparring with mild-mannered Harvard psychiatrists who claimed feebly that their patients had been abducted by aliens. And for countless reasons, I do. However, my overall sense about our future is cautiously optimistic.

My hunch is that we are living during the twilight of the magical thinking phase of human history. Lest you think this is mere faith, I offer some evidence: Consider all the futures depicted in science fiction that you have ever seen or read; whether of life on this world or any other. How many of them imagine a future in which the dominant religious traditions and beliefs of the present survive? Remember: This is the output of countless independent imaginations of every conceivable point of view. Yet, when we imagine the future, the gods of our childhood are long gone.

As the man said, “Prophecy is a lost art.” And yet, I’m happy to venture one. I believe that new Carl Sagans will emerge to uplift us once again with the beauty and truth of natural reality. We will overcome our fears and turn back to look unflinchingly at the vastness. We will find our home in the cosmos. It is only a matter of time.

In fact, the media—especially Court TV’s Psychic Detectives, NBC’s Medium, and various programs of Larry King Live—have shamelessly touted several self-claimed psychic shamuses as if they could actually identify murderers and kidnappers, or locate missing persons. Here is an investigative look at five such claimants. (Another, Phil Jordan, was featured in an earlier SI [Nickell 2004].)

Allison DuBois

Allison DuBois is the “real-life” Phoenix-area clairvoyant / spiritualist whose alleged assistance to law enforcement is the basis for NBC’s drama series Medium (featuring Patricia Arquette as DuBois). Executive producer Glen Gordon Caron (creator of Moonlighting) says of DuBois: “I was amazed by her tale. She has this radio in her head that she has no control over. Wherever she looked, she saw dead people. It was a tremendous albatross in terms of having a family life. And I thought, ‘I’ve never heard that story before, certainly not from the point of view of a soccer mom’” (Hiltbrand 2005).

But Caron has been snookered. The Medium Web site boasts that “DuBois has consulted on a variety of murders or missing persons cases while working with various law enforcement agencies including the Glendale Arizona Police Department, the Texas Rangers, and a County Attorney’s office in the Homicide Bureau.” In fact, however, both the Glendale police and the Texas Rangers deny DuBois worked with them. Glendale police spokesperson Michael Pena told SI managing editor Benjamin Radford that the detective who investigates missing persons cases “does not recall using DuBois at all in [one specific] case, or in any other cases.” And Texas Rangers spokesperson Tom Vinger stated flatly to Radford, “The Texas Rangers have not worked with Allison DuBois or any other psychics” (Radford 2005, 7).

It is curious in any event that the show’s Web site claims only that DuBois “consulted” on cases—not that she solved a single one. The site mentions that DuBois is “the youngest member of the elite medium ‘Dream Team’ studied by Dr. Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona in Tucson.” That isn’t much to boast of: Schwartz, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Arizona, is credulous about the paranormal, and his book The Afterlife Experiments (2002) claims he has provided scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness and the reality of spirit communication. However, noted parapsychology critic Ray Hyman (2003, 22) observes that Schwartz is “badly mistaken,” adding: “The research he presents is flawed. Probably no other extended program in psychical research deviates so much from accepted norms of scientific methodology as this one does.”

Nevertheless, the publicity DuBois receives “appears to have been good for business,” according to one reporter (Hiltbrand 2005) who notes that DuBois now has a “backlog of murder cases,” for which she does not charge, and years of bookings for personal readings, for which she does. She also acts as a jury consultant for prosecutors (Bloom 2005). DuBois thus follows the approach of the late Illinois psychic Greta Alexander who worked free with police at every opportunity, which brought her publicity, thus aiding her business of offering palm readings, operating a 900-number telephone inspiration line, selling astrology and numerology charts, and other endeavors (Nickell 1994, 12; Lucas 1994, 134).

Noreen Renier

High-profile “psychic” Noreen Renier employs an old divination technique called psychometry, by which she claims to get psychic impressions and visions from objects connected with a particular person. Actually the claim of psychometric power is testable, but Renier does not seem willing to accept the challenge of psychic investigator James Randi, who offers a million dollars to anyone who can exhibit such a power under scientifically controlled conditions. (See Randi’s article in this issue.)

Indeed, like many alleged psychics, Renier prefers to avoid skeptics, instead offering her alleged paranormal abilities to the credulous.

For example she claims to have had a vision of President Reagan’s attempted assassination. Actually, there are varying accounts of just what Renier actually said. When asked under oath about having predicted Reagan would be shot, she answered: “Some of those predictions were not mine. The newspaper put in three or four jazzy ones without my—I didn’t do two or three of those predictions” (Posner 1994, 65). Renier is reported to have a history of such pre dictions, forecasting that after his reelection in 1980 President Jimmy Carter would be assassinated on the lawn of the White House; she also saw Vice President Walter Mondale committing suicide (Posner 1994, 66).

Regarding Reagan, on various occasions Renier apparently referred to chest “problems,” possibly a heart attack or at least some chest pains. Then she converted that to a gunshot, finally stating, according to FBI agent Robert Ressler (1986, 12, 13), that Reagan “would be killed in a machine gun assault on a parade stand by many in foreign uniforms. . . .” Renier was then in a position to use a technique called retrofitting (after-the-fact matching). She could score if Reagan had a coronary or other chest pains or problems, or if there was an attack on his life, with or without a bullet to his chest, whether he survived or not—or he could die in a hail of gunfire. In fact, Renier’s error regarding the machine-gunning was later shifted to claim successful prediction of the assassination of Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Renier shrewdly observed that she hadn’t said “which president” (Posner 1994, 64).

One of Renier’s most celebrated “cases” is that of a missing Williston, Florida, resident, 76-year-old Norman Lewis, who vanished on March 24, 1994, and remained missing for two years. The police supposedly had no leads or suspects, but when Renier was consulted she immediately “saw” Lewis in his red truck. She also visualized the numbers “45” and “21” and other “clues,” including a cliff wall, loose bricks, a bridge, and railroad tracks. This led police to a rock quarry, and Navy divers soon located Lewis truck with his skeletal remains. Or so the case is typically presented in the media, citing Renier and Williston police. Court TV (September 22, 2004) featured a slanted treatment of the case that omitted crucial information and offered a highly dubious recreation of events. Like so many psychic sleuth success tales, this one seems to get better with each retelling.

However, the Williston case was thoroughly investigated by Dr. Gary Posner (1997, 2005) with revealing results. Williston police actually knew that Lewis was “despondent” and had confided to a friend that if his situation deteriorated “he would find a river or pit”—that is, one in which to end his life—and “made some reference to knowing every rock pit in the county.” Significantly, Lewis had left behind both his wallet and his respiratory inhaler (he had emphysema), clues suggesting he did not intend to return.

Renier had been informed that Lewis’s truck had not been found, despite intensive searching. If it was in the vicinity, notes Posner (1997, 3), it must surely have been “submerged in a body of water.” If Renier had looked at a map—something she appears often to do (e.g., Voyles 1999)—she would have observed that the Williston area is dotted with limestone quarries and crisscrossed with railroad tracks, as well as highways 45 and 121. In fact, the police had looked “into several bodies of water,” notes Posner (1997, 2), prior to searching the Whitehurst pit, where Lewis’s truck and remains were finally found.

Actually, a different pit was nearer Lewis’s home, and Posner (1997, 2, 6—7) observes that it best matched the psychic’s so-called clues. However, the lead detective on the case, Brian Hewitt, admitted he had “walked around probably 30 quarries” before finally determining to search the Whitehurst pit. If Lewis had traveled north instead of south on the main road from his home (Route 45), the first large quarry he would reach was the Whitehurst pit.

The “clues” Renier provided were either obvious for the area or were the result of retrofitting. After the fact, for example, abandoned railroad tracks that were belatedly uncovered, and an old truck scale that resembled a “bridge,” were interpreted by obviously credulous police to fit Renier’s statements.

Carla Baron

Yet another would-be clairvoyant is “psychic profiler” Carla Baron of Los Angeles. She makes grand claims—such as having solved fifty cases during the last two decades—but there is little to substantiate them. That is the conclusion of the Independent Investigations Group (IIG), which examines paranormal claims, especially in Baron’s bailiwick. The group looked into fourteen cases Baron has claimed involvement with, concluding that “every case we investigated was either solved without Baron’s involvement or remains unsolved” (IIG 2004).

For example, her publicity materials assert that she worked on the “O.J. Simpson case.” She has also claimed to have done “some channeling work” on that case, specifically with the Brown family. The IIG, however contacted Nicole’s sister, Denise Brown, who was primary spokesperson for the family during the Simpson trials, and is now an advocate for victims of violent crime. She responded, “I’ve never heard of this person,” adding that none of her family members has ever heard of Baron either. Concludes the IIG (2004), “It seems clear that Baron’s claim that she worked on the ‘O.J. Simpson case’ is baseless.”

As another instance, Carla Baron claimed on a Los Angeles radio program that she had predicted correctly that Elizabeth Smart would be found alive. (Alive or dead is a fifty-fifty proposition.) The kidnapped fourteen-year-old was found alive, a hostage of a cult leader calling himself “Emmanuel.” Baron further claimed that she provided information to Ed Smart, Elizabeth’s father, through a tip hotline operator named “Melinda,” and the psychic’s publicity materials list the Smart case among those she has allegedly worked on; however Ed Smart was quoted as saying that “the family didn’t get any valuable information from psychics” (IIG 2004).

Baron has reportedly stated: “I don’t think it’s about the accuracy. I think it’s about the assistance that I give.” The IIG (2005) report responds:

But how can you assist people with inaccurate information? Doesn’t providing the missing piece of the puzzle, or insight and information, connecting the dots usually lead to a solution? Implicit in the claim of being a “psychic detective” is the claim that you provide accurate information that leads to the successful resolution of a mystery. Imagine if a police detective said, “police detectives don’t actually solve the case, they just come up with ideas and hope for the best.” Such a statement would not generate much confidence in police procedure, and rightly so.

Carol Pate

We hear a lot about psychics’ alleged successes, but less about their much more frequent and notable failures. Take two “cases” of Little Rock, Arkansas, psychic Carol Pate, for example. The first is claimed a success.

Pate appeared on Court TV’s Psychic Detectives and Larry King Live regarding her alleged assistance in the case of a missing Arkansas teenager. Although it was claimed that Pate “helped find” the boy (“Psychics” 2004), she did nothing of the sort. He was released after being repeatedly raped by his kidnapper. So when the announcer for Larry King Live asked, before a commercial break, “Can detectives use a psychic’s vision to catch a kidnapper?” (“Psychics” 2004), the answer is, no. Pate could only try to match up her stated “clues” by using the police psychic’s stock-in-trade, retrofitting. For instance the word ridge, says Pate, “came into my head,” and Ridge Road was the name of the main route leading away from the kidnap site (“Psychics” 2004). Pate could easily have learned this fact when she visited the location or consulted a map.

Another case involving Carol Pate concerned Dr. Xu “Sue” Wang of Darien, Illinois, who disappeared in 1999 after she left for work at a medical center. Just over a year later, Carol Pate claimed that, from photos mailed to her by the Darien police, she had a psychic vision. She said she visualized the scene where Wang had been buried in a previously dug grave (Zorn 2000a). Subsequently, the police, acting on Pate’s advice, announced plans to conduct an aerial search as well as use dogs to look for the missing physician’s burial site (“Police” 2000).

Reporting on Pate’s claims, Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn was skeptical. He quoted me as stating, “They count their lucky guesses and ignore all their misses,” and “I have just one question for all of them: Where’s Jimmy Hoffa?” Zorn (2000a) gave odds that the police would not “find anything,” and concluded that Pate was merely “guessing.”

Subsequently Zorn sent an e-mail to SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, quoting Darien’s deputy police chief Ron Campo. Campo said of Pate’s psychic input, “It didn’t pan out.” Concluded Zorn (2000b): “Turns out the woman was just guessing, like every other phony who claims to have such powers—exactly, eerily as I predicted. Hey, d’ya suppose. . . ?”

Etta Louise Smith

One of the most unusual “psychic” cases I ever investigated was that of Etta Louise Smith. Actually Smith never claimed to be a psychic sleuth, but she allegedly had a one-time “vision” of a murder victim’s body. This was so accurate that it led to her arrest by Los Angeles police, although she was subsequently “vindicated” by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury. The case occurred in 1980, but was featured on a Larry King Live program in 2004, hosted by Nancy Grace.

Smith’s alleged vision was of the location of the body of a missing nurse, Melanie Uribe, at an area in rural Lopez Canyon. Indeed, after Smith had gone to the police and pinpointed the location on a map, she decided to drive to the site with two of her children. They had located the body and were en route to a telephone when she met the arriving police!

She was later questioned about her precise knowledge and was given a lie detector test, which she failed. According to a detective’s sworn testimony, “the polygraphist indicated that she was being deceptive,” even “trying to control her breathing” (Guarino 1987, 5, 10). She was jailed for four days on suspicion of having some connection with the crime or criminals.

Smith subsequently sued the police for the trauma she had suffered, asking $750,000 in damages. She won her case, but the jury, some of whom were apparently suspicious of Smith’s “psychic” vision, awarded her a mere $26,184— sufficient to reimburse her for lost wages and attorney’s fees, but providing little for pain and suffering (Varenchik 1987).

Forensic analyst John F. Fischer and I looked into the intriguing case, obtaining court transcripts and other materials, and concluded that it was possible to be skeptical of Smith’s psychic powers without suspecting her of being an accessory (Nickell 1994, 161—162). We recalled an earlier case in which police concealed an informant’s identity by means of a cover story attributing the information to a psychic. Is it not possible that an acquaintance of Smith, privy to information about the crime, sought her help in revealing the information? Could Smith not merely have been protecting her source? The possibility gains credibility from the fact that the killers were uncovered because one of them had boasted of the crime to people in his Pacoima neighborhood and, at the time, Smith lived in Pacoima! Interestingly, as Smith went searching for the nurse’s body, her psychic powers seemed to wane, and it was one of her children who actually spied the white-clad corpse (Klunder 1987; Varenchik 1987, 44—45).

That Smith could locate the canyon site on a map is revealing. She was clearly not employing a technique of divination (such as map dowsing, which usually involves the use of a pendulum) to locate something hidden (Guiley 1991; Nickell 1994, 163—164). Instead, she seemed already to know the location and was merely seeking to identify it on a map for police. Smith appears to have given conflicting accounts of her “vision.” She said on a television program, “It was as if someone had put a picture right in front of me” (Sightings 1992). Yet the book Psychic Murder Hunters assures us, “Strangely Etta didn’t have a vision of any kind—she described it as a feeling rather than a vision” (Boot 1994, 348).

That her alleged vision was a onetime occurrence would appear to support police suspicions, as would the failed polygraph test, especially the allegation that she was trying to control her breathing. Revealingly, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children cautions against completely ignoring such “psychic” tips, since the purported visions may be a cover for someone who is afraid or otherwise unwilling to become directly involved (Henetz 2002).

As these cases and profiles indicate, psychics do not solve crimes or locate missing persons—unless they employ the same non-mystical techniques as real detectives: obtaining and assessing factual information, receiving tips, and so on, even sometimes getting lucky. In addition to the technique of “retrofitting,” psychics may shrewdly study local newspaper files and area maps, glean information from family members or others associated with a tragedy, and even impersonate police and reportedly attempt to bribe detectives (Nickell 1994). It is bad enough that they are often able to fool members of the media; detectives, if they do not know better, as most do, should learn better. They should, well, investigate their alleged psychic counterparts.

Acknowledgments

As so often, I am grateful to my colleagues— especially Tim Binga, Benjamin Radford, John Gaeddert, and David Park Musella— for help in various ways.

References

• Bloom, Rhonda Bodfield. 2005. Medium awareness. Arizona Daily Star, January 17.
• Boot, Andrew. 1994. Psychic Murder Hunters. London: Headline Book Publishing, 343—361.
• Guarino, Anthony. 1987. Testimony in Superior Court (Los Angeles, California), Etta L. Smith vs. City of Los Angeles et al., March 25:1—50.
• Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 1991. Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 155—157.
• Henetz, Patty. 2002. For kidnapped girl’s family, “every day is a struggle” of not knowing. The Buffalo News. November 29.
• Hiltbrand, David. 2005. Destined to succeed. The Sydney Morning Herald, April 13 (accessed at www.smh.com.au).
• Hyman, Ray. 2003. How not to test mediums: Critiquing the Afterlife Experiments. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 27:1 (January / February), 20—30.
• IIG special investigation: Carla Baron, psychic detective (?). 2004. Online at www.iigwest. com/ carla_report.html; accessed May 3, 2005.
• Klunder, Jan. 1987. Woman whose “vision” led to murder victim sues over arrest. Los Angeles Times, March 19.
• Lucas, Ward. 1994. A product of the media: Greta Alexander. Chapter 9 of Nickell 1994, 130—155.
• Nickell, Joe. 1994. Psychic Sleuths: ESP and Sensational Cases. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• —. 2004. Psychic sleuth without a clue. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 28:3 (May/June), 19—21.
• Police search ANL-E area for missing doctor. 2000. Argonne News (Argonne, Illinois), September 5. Online at www.anl.gov /Media _ Center/ Argonne_News / news00/an 000905. html; accessed April 27, 2005.
• Posner, Gary. 1994. The media’s rising star psychic sleuth: Noreen Renier. Chapter 5 of Nickell 1994, 60—85.
• —. 1997. A not-so-psychic detective. Skeptic 5:4, 2—7.
• —. 2005. Noreen Renier and the Williston case on Court TV’s Psychic Detectives. Skeptic 11:3, 16—17.
• Psychics helping police solve crimes. 2004. Larry King Live, April 29. Accessed May 25, 2004.
• Radford, Benjamin. 2005. Psychic detectives fail in the real world but succeed on TV. SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 29:2 (March /April), 6—7.
• Ressler, Robert. 1986. Deposition in the Circuit Court of Jackson County, Oregon, September 5; cited in Posner 1994, 63—65.
• Sightings. 1992. Episode on Fox network, September 4.
• Varenchik, Richard. 1987. L.A. court vindicates psychic vision. Fate, August: 42—48.
• Voyles, Karen. 1999. Psychic discovery: Levy woman claims she solves cases. Gainsville, Florida, Sun, June 8.
• Zorn, Eric. 2000a. Psychic’s guess is as good as no guess at all. Chicago Tribune, August 31.
• —. 2000b. E-mail to Kevin Christopher, October 5. .

I am going to describe difficult, impossible, and unknowing contestants who’ve applied for the James Randi Educational Foundation’s million-dollar prize. I can say this from the very beginning: give me a faker, give me someone who appears before me and is lying, who is attempting to fool me, to deceive me, or to deceive anyone else, the media, or other scientists. Please don’t give me the innocent who really believe they have the powers. They’re the difficult ones to handle; a true believer is a terrible enemy, but the fakers I can handle. Those people I can come out against, I can confront them, I can show what they are doing, and get rid of ’em.

Now, of the people who apply for the million-dollar challenge of the James Randi Educational Foundation—and I’m sure you all go to my Web site regularly, right? It’s randi.org. All right. You will find, reading over the archives on that Web site, that about 80 percent or more of the people who apply are dowsers, or diviners. That is, people who, with a forked stick or with a pendulum or with some sort of wire stretched out in front of them, believe that they can find water, gold, oil, lost jewelry, children, anything.

One man even told us that he had a particular, specific ability. This dowser lived in Kentucky, and said that he had the ability to find lost hunting dogs; that was the only thing he could find. He was very sensitive to that, and if you were able to give him a little hair from the hunting dog, he would put it on the end of his dowsing stick and it would lead him directly to the dog.

Sometimes there was an error. Sometimes it would lead him to another hunting dog, which was very similar because the DNA would be very similar, you see? He actually told me that he was tuning in on the DNA, and then he said, “Oh, there’s one other thing that I can find, too.” We said, “What is that?” He said, “I can find bullets, because I tune in on the DNA of bullets.”

Now, I didn’t know that bullets reproduce that way. Perhaps you take two .38-caliber bullets, leave them alone for a while, and they produce .22-caliber bullets? I don’t know. These people are so exceedingly naïve. These are the hard people to handle. Someone who has a trick, I can get ’em right away.

Now, handling the subject of difficult cases that we have to investigate, I hate to tell you this, but the application form for the James Randi Educational Foundation prize has twelve, I think now thirteen, rules. Very simple. They’re not difficult to understand. The most important one of the rules is that you have to say what you can do, under what circumstances, with what accuracy. How could anything be simpler?

Well, a good 80 percent of the people who apply can’t make that statement. Not only that, they’re told on the application form that they must write two paragraphs—no more— describing what their ability is.

People can write very long paragraphs. Some of those paragraphs run three pages. We had one just recently from a gentleman who had some strange claim—I don’t remember—he did 18 pages, filled on both sides, in handwriting. I think his ancestry must have been Turkish or something, he was still using, I think, the Turkish alphabet. It was almost impossible to understand what he was writing about. We had to get him down to two paragraphs, and that’s not easy.

Completing the form is the most difficult thing that these people have to do. After that, it’s pretty easy. That doesn’t seem logical. You would think at this very moment there should be people knocking on the door trying to get my attention so they could try for the million-dollar prize. I don’t hear anybody knocking, do you? No.

Now, another thing that is very, very difficult to investigate is medical claims. Our colleagues in India, through B. Premanand there, a most estimable gentleman, good friend of mine, the people in India have a little more freedom to investigate these things. There is a wonderful documentary made by the BBC some years ago in which they followed Mr. Premanand around and they had to demonstrate that the so- called “god men” of India could not heal as they claimed they could heal. They actually had a snake bite a dog. Now, that’s not acceptable in our society, particularly not in England, where animals are more important than human beings, believe me. They had the snake bite the dog, and then the guru, the “god man,” tried to save the dog. Not to your great surprise, I will tell you that the dog died.

Now, the guru, the “god man,” was most amazed at this. “Oh, it always worked before,” he said. Well, we offered to do another test with him. He didn’t want to do that, and we haven’t seen him since. See, you can get away with that sort of thing in some countries, but certainly not in England, not in the United States, and—I suspect—certainly not in Italy.

Now, every now and then the difficult cases are ridden, like a horse, by some scientist, some academic who has adopted this as his cause célèbre, something that he’s going to promote, he just knows the claim must be true.

Just recently I was in Würzburg, in Germany, where we ran some tests of people who were applying for the prize. Again, so that the tension won’t be too much for you, they all failed and the million dollars is still quite safe. There was a gentleman there who I won’t name so that he won’t be embarrassed. This is a scientist with a German university, retired, who said I cheat all the time, otherwise there would have been a winner a long time ago. And, he said, in some cases, people have already won the prize but I won’t pay them. He also said that I’m too aggressive and rude.

Now, I can be aggressive, that’s quite true. Yes, just try me and you’ll see. But with these innocent people who are self- deceived, certainly I am not aggressive.

Well, this professor, he showed up in Würzburg and at first he was very angry about everything, and he looked at me with this awful expression on his face. After half an hour he was lightening up a little bit because he found that I was not the very bad person that he’d believed I was.

But then—it’s hard to tell you this, really—he was doing tests that he wanted the million dollars for, but he wanted to see how I did the tests first, that’s why he was in Würzburg. This man had said that he didn’t like my attitude—all of those things. He showed up, he watched me do some of the tests, and he lightened up considerably, but then he showed his weakness. Now, this is an academic, a man with a university degree. I don’t have a university degree. I’m merely someone who observes and uses common sense. You don’t get a university degree for common sense, apparently.

This gentleman was doing tests with children in which he had a large bag, and inside were ping-pong balls numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., all the way up to 25, and the children were supposed to reach in and select any given number—ah-ha! There it is! I win!

Well, I wondered about that. What was his expertise in ping-pong balls? He showed me the bag. He laid it on the table, and Martin Mahner and I, who were there watching the tests, looked at one another in astonishment. The bag was made out of a netlike plastic material. You could read the numbers of the balls from outside the bag! You could see it very plainly, and on my Web site I have—I will have shortly— some photographs that I took with my digital camera where you can see the numbers through the bag.

Well, then I decided to test the man to see what his observing powers were, so I said, “Let me demonstrate.” I reached into the bag and I took out a ball with number 3 on it, and I said, “That would be ball number 3.” He said, “Yes.” I put it aside and said, “Now I will choose ball number 5.” Ball number 5!

He was astonished. Of course, now he assumed that I had psychic powers, too, you see? Well, I’ll tell you the secret, it’s very simple: when I reached in, I took two balls. One here, and one down here [shows hand] and I looked at both number 3 and number 5, and I said, “Number 3”—having the number 5 ball still in my hand—then I reached into the bag and came out with number 5. That’s what had astonished him.

Now, that’s two things in which he demonstrated his ignorance of scientific procedure. But then it really got to me. We had two thermometers laid there that were measuring the air temperature. He wanted to photograph them with his digital camera to make sure the two of them were reading exactly the same temperature. He reached down and took one of the thermometers and he turned it around so the numbers were facing his camera. He took the photograph, then he looked at the thermometers. He said, “Oh, this thermometer is reading about one- third of one degree Celsius higher.” That was because he had picked it up by the bulb end so it was measuring his body temperature! This is a scientist! I am not a scientist, but I have common sense.

Now, we get claims all the time—as far as difficult claims go—from people asking, can we prove that God doesn’t exist? Ah, but they have the wrong picture, you see? I don’t say that any of these powers, including God, doesn’t exist; I make no claim. I ask them to make the claim, and they have to prove that they’re right. So they say, okay, “God exists.” I say, “Prove it.” “Ah, um, I’ll call you back.” “Hello?” and we never hear from them again.

Now, the other people who are difficult to test are those with very strong emotional investment in the tests. I’m a sympathetic man, I really am, I’m considerate of these people. They come to me and they want to be tested, but I know that when they fail the test, theoretically they should be very depressed, they should feel very sorry: “Oh, something’s awfully wrong here.” It will destroy their emotional stability. I don’t want to do that, but in some cases it’s not possible to avoid it.

For example: Linda, my administrative director, came to me recently and she said, “There’re some people at the front door from Lithuania.” Now, I’m in Florida. They came all the way from Lithuania because they were sure they could win the million-dollar prize. They said they could do psychic diagnosis of the human body, and I said, “Well, we’re not ready for you. If you want to give a quick try, you can do that, sure. Ah, try me.”

Now, that was unwise of me because many details about me are on the Web and can be found with the search engine Google. Google knows everything, you know that, yes? Google knows all facts. And I thought maybe they would look me up in Google. No, they weren’t that smart.

The two women who came in did a complete analysis of my body, and they decided that I had every disease that a 74-year-old man should have. I don’t have any of those. I have others, and they didn’t spot any of the other ones, and I won’t tell you what they are.

But it was so typical. They know that I should have prostate problems. I should have this. I should have other problems. But I didn’t have any of those, and I said, “Now, you told me that you would be one-hundred percent correct.” “Yes, yes, yes.” And I said, “Well, here’s a medical examination from two months ago, there’s all the details there.” They just pushed it aside. I said, “But you aren’t a hundred percent correct.” “Oh, yes, yes! But we know things that the doctors don’t know.”

Okay . . . . But, you see, that’s a very difficult thing to handle. How do you answer something like that? Of course, the point is they had not made out the application form, filled out the required documentation in advance, so the tests were not valid. However, the sad part of this is that the new president of Lithuania has now employed one of these woman as his official psychic! That’s a little worrisome. I wouldn’t go to Lithuania. Not now.

We had other sad cases, difficult situations. One Mexican man showed up at our door with an empty suitcase in his hand—to hold the million dollars. We asked him, through our interpreter, why he had come. He was a very poor man, and he’d come from Mexico, somehow, with this empty suitcase, and he said, “I can win the million dollars because I met a UFO out in the desert.” “Yes. . . ?” “And they spoke to me.” “Yes. . . ?” “And now I glow in the dark. You can see me in the dark.” “Okay, we can test that right now.”

So we took him into our library, which has no windows, it’s all dark inside, and I went and got two people off the street. I said, “Would you volunteer to do a scientific experiment?” “Oh, yes, of course.” So they came in, I put them in the room, put the man in the room, turned out the lights. I said, “Can you see this man?” They said, “What man?” I said, “The Mexican gentleman here says he glows in the dark.” “No, no.” “You can’t see him?” “No.”

We turned on the light again. I said, “They can’t see you,” and he replied, “Oh, I’m not feeling strong, I haven’t had breakfast yet.” I said, “Well, go and have breakfast, if you want, and come back.” “Oh, I will, I will.” He took his suitcase and he left. I didn’t see him again. He didn’t come back. But you have to feel sorry for people like this.

I also tested a group of children from an organization called Instituto Más Vida—the Institute for More Life. This is a group in Mexico that teaches children to see while blindfolded. Well, actually they don’t teach them to see while blindfolded, they teach them to cheat while blindfolded. When you give the children something written and they’re wearing a blindfold—you see them peeking . . . ah, yes, then they can read it, you see? Or if you hold it up here, they say, “What paper? Where? Where?” You hold it down here, way down here, they can see it, and they like to put it on their laps while they’re sitting in the chair, and then they read it like this, with their head tilted up.

So I simply take a little bit of tape and put it into their eye orbits over their eyelids so they cannot open their eyes, and they lose their psychic powers immediately. I tested them live on Japanese television, and another group like that in Korea. These are some of the difficult ones to handle because these are children, and you don’t want to be cruel to children. They’re doing a little joke. They don’t think it’s serious, but of course it can be very serious.

You must know that most of the people, the vast majority of people who come to be tested for the million-dollar prize, are innocent. They’re self-deluded. They’re not the fakers. Oh, I’ve had a few of those, but I get rid of them. I point where the trick is, good-bye, and they’re gone. But very few. Most of them are very innocent, so innocent that when you ask them, “How successful will this test be?” They always say, “One-hundred percent. I never miss.” That’s an easy test to do. As soon as they miss one . . . arrivederci. Goodbye. Out of here.

I have tested many people who said one- hundred percent, and I must tell you this to show you the poor understanding that some people have of statistics. On a program that we did for Lexington Broadcasting Corporation, before the million-dollar prize— for one hundred thousand dollars—I spoke with the producers and they said, “Now, we’ve got to be careful that we don’t lose our hundred thousand dollars.” I said, “Oh, yes, of course.” An astrologer applied, and he said, “If you give me twelve people from the audience who have their drivers licenses to prove what month and date they were born. . . .” “Yes. . . ?” “Make sure they’re twelve different signs of the Zodiac. . . .” “Yes. . . ?” “And I will ask them simple questions and I’ll be able to tell what their sign is.” “Okay.”

So we got twelve people and he asked them questions. He said things like, “When you see a motion picture in the theatre, do you like a comedy better than a drama? Ah, I see, that’s significant. Do you like red and orange better than you like blue and green? Ah, really?” And then at the end he gave them a piece of paper, sealed in an envelope, which had their sign, what he thought their Zodiacal sign was. There were twelve of them.

Now, I said to the producers, “This man says that he can get eleven out of twelve right. Think about that.” And they said, “No, it should be twelve.” I said, “No, I’d like to make it ten.” And they said, “Oh, no, that’s too easy, no, it’s too easy.” They didn’t understand that getting eleven out of twelve is also twelve out of twelve, and I tried to show them on paper, and they were saying, “No, no. We want twelve out of twelve.” “Okay.” This was the producer of the program and all of his staff. Strange, but nonetheless true.

Now, as I said, the major proportion of our claimants are dowsers, and they’re almost always innocent, except in two cases that happened—both in Australia. In one case we found the dowser asking the superintendent of a building where the pipes were under the ground before we got there. That’s not allowed, no. In the other case, a man had developed an electronic method of telling something about a machine. I won’t get into all the details on that one, but only twice have dowsers ever actually tried to cheat to win the million dollars.

We just did tests, as I said, in Würzburg. Well, I’m always ready for a surprise. Würzburg wasn’t very much of a surprise because the tests were more or less what I expected. One of them will really interest you. A man who said that if he took a bottle of water right from the store and passed his hand around it, it would taste better than the other bottle which he didn’t affect.

Well, we tested that, and it was very easy to do. We gave him fifty trials, where after he left the room, the randomizing team would take samples from the treated bottle and put them into certain wine glasses and from the untreated bottle into other wine glasses. His chance was 50 percent—one in two—of being successful.

He was very pompous. “Oh, yes, I’m gonna win this prize, heh, heh, heh, I’m very successful at this.” Well, at the end of the test, we showed him that he had gotten twenty-two correct out of fifty, when twenty-five would be expected by chance. Well, he has now called the GWUP [German skeptics group] and offered all kinds of excuses. One of the excuses was when he was [makes hand gestures] doing this, the other bottle was too close, because these powerful vibrations, you see, go out to the other bottle, too. Okay, well, we’ll do it next time with them five meters apart, and then twenty meters apart, but I think he won’t be back. They very seldom return to be tested again.

They get stranger and stranger. One man said that he had an object with him that he could dowse or divine with his pendulum. He had a piece of wire that he wiggled around, and he was very sensitive to this object. I said, “Use whatever object you want.” Now, I thought it might be a piece of gold, or something like that. No, it was a little heart-shaped piece of soap. You don’t ask questions of these people, you just say, “Okay, if that’s what you say, we’ll do it.” So we did some “open” trials where he knew where the soap was in one of ten boxes, and he was successful every time because he knew, you see? But the pendulum went like mad! Over this box, nothing; this box, nothing; this box, nothing. Oh, there it goes! When he knew.

Well, then we had him do thirteen tests for another statistical reason. At the end of it he had gotten one correct out of the thirteen which is in good agreement with the one out of ten the chances were that he would have.

He said that he was very sensitive to this piece of mineral. I said, “If I conceal it in my hand, can you still detect it?”

He said, “Oh, yes!”

So I concealed it in my hand and the wire went like crazy. “Oh, but look,” I said, showing that hand to be empty.

And, without pause, he said, “Oh, yes, I was detecting it from your other hand.”

Now, that’s what they do. To him, he had not lost the contest at all, he simply was detecting it in the other hand because his powers were so great.

Well, the “soap dowser,” ah, failed. Goodbye. But then we had a man who could make a mask move. He took aluminum foil and pressed it onto his face, and took it off. That gave him a “mask.” He suspended it on a fine hair, a human hair—not from me, obviously!—inside a sealed container, and naturally it sat there and very slowly turned, then it very slowly turned back, very, very slowly. We said, “Okay, we’ll give you the instruction when it will turn and when it will not turn.” But it never stopped turning. Back and forth, all the time, going, going, going, and he couldn’t understand that, either.

This is the kind of people who are innocent; they really believe they have the powers. This “mask” man has since come up with excuses as to why he failed. But there are some cases that are impossible, absolutely impossible, and most of those cases are created by the claimant’s lawyers. Remember lawyers? You’ve seen them, yes, I’m sure you have them in Italy, too. The lawyers often make it impossible, because for months and months they exchange letters. We want to change this rule, we want to change that rule, we want to take this adjective out, we want to change this number and, okay. . . . Yawn. And we go on and on and on with the lawyers. So most of the cases that it’s impossible to test, it’s because of the lawyers.

But there are others, too. . . . You may think that I’m making these up. I don’t have to invent these things. In fact, I could not invent these crazy claims like the heart-shaped piece of soap. That would take Victor Hugo or some other great fiction artist to create. I couldn’t create them.

There are two brothers in Dubai, Arab Emirate. They sent an e-mail saying, “We want the million dollars.” I said, “Okay, why?” “Well, because the two of us make the sun rise every morning.”

Well, I thought about that. I wonder how we could design a test? So I said, wait, wait, this may be just a joke. Well, whether it is or not, I’ll treat it as if it’s serious. So I wrote back to them and I said, “Which one of you makes it rise?” “Um, we don’t know. We both work on it and the sun rises every morning, you can see that.” I said, “Yes, the evidence is 100 percent in your favor.” Then I said, “I have an experiment. One of you shoot the other one. Then if the sun rises the next morning, it wasn’t him. Must be you. Well, then, what you do is you shoot yourself, and if the sun rises the next morning, you lose. But if the sun doesn’t rise the next morning, I’ll pay you.” I don’t think we’ve heard back from them.

The worst things that are impossible to test are the anecdotal stories. Anecdotal stories like “Oh, my grandmother did this, she did that.” I wasn’t there, I don’t know your grandmother, I don’t want to hear stories about what happened in the past, and the rules specifically say it must be here and now, with an experiment that we agree on and design together. But anecdotal stories are by far the greatest part of it.

Now, another test in Würzburg. A lady showed up with her husband, and she said if we provided her pictures of people, she would be able to tell if these people had heart conditions. Okay, that’s a good test. So we got her thirty-eight photographs of people of all ages and different genders and a great variety of people, and we knew from medical examinations and from medical records that some of these people — approximately half of them—had very obvious heart conditions for which they were being treated. For the others, EKGs checked them out perfectly. No problems with their hearts.

Well, she also said that she would be one hundred percent correct. By chance, she should have identified nineteen out of the thirty-eight samples that she had. She was using the strangest method I ever saw in my life. It was a combination of Therapeutic Touch, Chinese pulse reading, and applied kinesiology—forcing the arm up and down—all done on her husband while he held the photograph! Don’t look at me like that, that’s her idea, not mine. Well, she got eighteen correct out of thirty- eight, just less than chance. Well, now, of course, she’s also written to GWUP with all kinds of excuses, and now she wants her lawyers to stop me from publishing this information. I have just published that information. Now, go ahead, stop me.

This is difficult in many ways, this whole subject of testing people. It’s difficult from a moral point of view. Now, a person like Uri Geller—you remember him? He used to bend spoons. There’s an occupation for you! “Mr. Geller, what do you do for a living?” “I bend spoons.” “Do you straighten spoons, too?” “No, no, I just bend them. . . .” I ask you: has bending spoons ever moved humanity forward one little bit? No. He’s been doing it for thirty years and our history hasn’t changed one bit. Hasn’t made any difference whatsoever!

People like Geller say they don’t want to take the million- dollar prize—well, for many excuses. “There’s no million dollars.” Well, there is. “And you won’t give it to me.” I have to, under the law; I don’t have any choice. But Geller’s reason is very unique. He says, “No, I won’t try for the million dollars, because I don’t like James Randi.”

Wait a minute. If he doesn’t like me, why doesn’t he take my million dollars? You show me somebody I don’t like who wants to give me a million dollars, I’ll take it, right away, and be very happy about it.

I’ll close with some comments on what should be done when you do these tests. Some people have said, “Oh, with Geller, give him a spoon, an ‘industrial-strength’ spoon that nobody can bend.” No, you have to do it their way, under their circumstances. You have to give them as much play as you can. The point is not to prevent them from doing it, but to catch them at the trick, if there is a trick. Catch them, because otherwise you have no evidence.

Always get statements in advance. From all of the people who apply, of the about two to three percent who get through the first process just to do the preliminary test, I get statements in advance. I ask them, what are the statistics that you will agree to, and what will happen if you don’t succeed? That’s the interesting question. I say to them, “If you fail in this test, what will your conclusion be?”

And they say, “Oh, I don’t have to answer that because I know I will win.”

“Well, wait a minute, just get crazy in your head, just suppose that maybe you won’t win the million dollars. What will your conclusion be?”

They say, “Oh, well, then I haven’t got the power.”

At that point, I give them a sealed envelope and I say, “Open that up after the test.” I say, “Now, you won’t have any excuses?”

“No, no. No, no. I know I’m going to win, I won’t make any excuses.”

Okay. They do the test, they fail, and immediately they say, “Oh, well, it was Thursday, that’s a bad day for me.” Or, “Jupiter was in Sagittarius. That’s a very bad combination for me.” Or it was too hot or it was too cold, whatever. They always have excuses.

I say, “Open the envelope.”

Inside the envelope it says, “Though you agreed not to make any excuses, you have now made the excuses. I have the power of prophesy. I should win the million dollars. In fact, I think I will.”

People have asked me a very important question: What would happen if somebody did win the million dollars? Now, I don’t think it’s likely, I think it’s very highly unlikely. But I would gladly pay the million dollars because it would mean that all of us, the whole world, would know a new aspect of science that never existed before. In fact, that discovery would overturn science completely, and scientists don’t mind that. They’re prepared to be reversed, because that gives them a better knowledge of the universe. So if I have to pay the million dollars, oh, it would hurt, yes, but I would also be very happy. That would be my investment in increasing the knowledge of human beings, and we are all human beings. Let’s celebrate that fact.

The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge

At JREF [James Randi Educational Foundation], we offer a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event. The JREF does not involve itself in the testing procedure, other than helping to design the protocol and approving the conditions under which a test will take place. All tests are designed with the participation and approval of the applicant. In most cases, the applicant will be asked to perform a relatively simple preliminary test of the claim, which if successful, will be followed by the formal test. Preliminary tests are usually conducted by associates of the JREF at the site where the applicant lives. Upon success in the preliminary testing process, the “applicant” becomes a “claimant.”

To date, no one has ever passed the preliminary tests.

Your claim casts you in the role of the defendant, and the only thing the JREF asks of you in defending your claim, is to demonstrate it. No theories, no stories, no anecdotal evidence, no photographs, no tape recordings; just a simple demonstration. Nothing more is required. The Challenge rules may seem complicated upon first glance, but they are not. You have a paranormal claim? Great! Demonstrate it successfully, and the Million Dollar Prize is yours. It’s really that simple.

—From the James Randi Educational Foundation Web site (www.randi.org)

QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, you mentioned in your talk that one of the most important functions in science is to reward those who disprove our most closely held beliefs. Sir, if you were to look ahead two or three or four generations, which of our most closely held beliefs today do you think are the most likely candidates for disproof?

SAGAN: Maybe the belief that challenges our most closely held beliefs. Prophecy is a lost art. I have no way of doing that. If I could do that, think of the enormous effort we could save. The question flies in the very face of what I was just saying about how the most obvious points, the things we’re absolutely sure of, may turn out to be wrong. So I am not immune to that fallibility and frailty. Let me give another example. It’s the middle of the nineteenth century. The leading futurologist— although the word didn’t exist then; it’s a terrible word— was Jules Verne. He was asked to project a century ahead. What would be the means of transportation, the most exotic means of transportation, in the middle of the twentieth century? He then did whatever he did, looked into his crystal ball metaphorically speaking, and then gave the following conclusion: by 1950 there would be Victorian living rooms with lots of red velvet plush, I imagine, in the gondolas of great airships (they were called, but essentially dirigibles) which would cross the Atlantic Ocean in no more than a week. And people said, “Whew! That Jules Verne, he sure is farseeing. Who could have thought of that?”And he was grossly off. Why was he off? Was he stupid? Was he not a good futurologist? No. He didn’t foresee heavier-than-air aircraft, nor did anybody else. The view in the middle of the nineteenth century was that it was impossible. And in just the same way, whatever I would tell you, where we would be in space or something like that, is bound to be, through the arguments on the idea that unless we destroy ourselves, overtaken by scientific ideas and technological developments that I haven’t a ghost of a chance of foreseeing. So forgive me for not being able to answer your question.

QUESTION: Thank you for your talk.
I just wanted to challenge the idea that the reward system in science is essentially different from any other system. A person who successfully challenges the emperor gets the greatest rewards. An entrepreneur who successfully displaces some other technology or some other entrepreneur gets the greatest rewards. And a scientist who fails to successfully challenge the head of his discipline can see his head rolling, professionally, just as quickly, I think, as the unsuccessful coup d’etat. Thank you.

SAGAN: Thank you. I think you raise a good point; permit me to disagree. There are certainly similarities along the lines that you say and, for example, maybe you remember the novel and television series, Shogun, in which the English sailor, washed ashore in Japan, is brought to meet Tokanaga, the future Shogun, who is very autocratic and authoritarian, hierarchical, as of course all military leaders are. And when he discovers that the Dutch were revolting from their Spanish overlords, he immediately identifies with the Spanish. He never met a Spaniard in his life, but they were in charge, and anybody challenging them must be doing something wrong. The hero then says, “The only mitigating condition is that the upstarts win.” And Tokanaga says “Yes, yes, very true,” and then they are friends. That’s the point you just made. But that doesn’t mean that there’s a reward structure that encouraged the Dutch to revolt against the Spanish. It just means that if they succeed, then they succeed. It’s a tautology. Whereas in science, there is a reward structure from the beginning. It doesn’t mean that if somebody challenges Newton he is immediately rewarded. Einstein had some difficulties with special relativity. His Nobel prize was not even for relativity, it was for the photoelectric effect, because relativity was considered to be worrisome. Nevertheless, there were many scientists who recognized the value of what Einstein said. He was not challenging Isaac Newton; Isaac Newton was dead. The value of what Einstein said was there plain for anyone to see; nobody had thought of it before. As soon as people had worked through the arguments on the idea that simultaneity was a nonsensical idea, many were converted on the spot. I don’t say that everybody was; I don’t say that there weren’t some problems with it, but there is a reward structure built in. And Einstein, just a few years after his 1905 relativity paper, was Full Professor and at the top of his profession.

QUESTION: Did you really say billions and billions of — (Laughter)

SAGAN: Never. Johnny Carson said it. I once saw him put on a wig and a corduroy jacket and pretend to be me, but I no more said it than Sherlock Holmes, in any of the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, said “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

QUESTION: I find it a little surprising that you use the words “science”and “truth” together in the same sentence. You said that science doesn’t seek absolute truths, but asympomatically tries to approach truth. I find truth is something that is very anthropocentric, relative to human being at a given time and a given place. I usually think of science more as seeking asymptomatically a better understanding of reality, not of truth.

SAGAN: I won’t quibble on words. There are as many people who argue about the existence of reality as about the existence of truth. I encourage them to debate each other. (Laughter)

QUESTION: If I understand the theory of relativity, the space/time viewpoint, a causal violation should not be able to create a paradox. Do you think we may ever have as much control over space/time geometry as we do over electricity?

SAGAN: That’s an awfully good question and I don’t know the answer. But yes, a topic that is being hotly debated these days in the gravitational physics community is whether producing a paradox is a contradiction, or whether a paradox of the sort you referred to is just something we are going to have to live with. Can effects precede causes, for example. We have a tendency just to throw up our hands in amazement and despair: “What are you talking about? It’s nonsense!” But there are certain sciences that seem to be in a funny way internally consistent with what else we know about physics and which may say effect can precede causes. I don’t guarantee it’s true, but if it is true it’s just another one of those cases where our common sense doesn’t apply everywhere.

QUESTION: Richard Hoagland has recently got hold of some pictures, Hasselblad pictures from NASA, which were taken some twenty years ago of the moon, and he has been describing those in great detail. He gave a talk at Ohio State University a couple of weeks ago and he had video cameras on and they were supposed to have videos available. I wonder if you’ve heard about this and had previous knowledge of . . . .

SAGAN: You forgot to mention what is on those videos.

QUESTION: Structures on the moon.

SAGAN: Richard Hoagland is a fabulist. By the way, it’s not difficult getting hold of the hand-held Hasselblad camera pictures; NASA freely releases them to everybody. These are in the public domain, they’re available to anybody. You don’t have to do something remarkable to get the pictures. The aspect of this story I know best has to do with the so-called Face on Mars. There is a place on Mars called Sidonia, which was photographed in a mission I was deeply involved in, the Viking mission to Mars in 1976. And there is one picture in which along a range of hulking mesas and hillocks, there is what looks very much like a face, about three kilometers across at the base and a kilometer high. It’s flat on the ground, looking up. It has a helmet or a hair-do, depending on how you look at it, it has a nose, a forehead, one eye—the other half is in shadow—pretty eerie looking. You could almost imagine it was done by Praxiteles on a monumental scale. And this gentleman deduces from this that there was a race of ancient Martians. He has dated them, he purports to have deduced when they were around, and it was 500,000 years ago or something like that, when our ancestors were certainly not able to do space flights, and then all sorts of wonderful conclusions are deduced and “we came from Mars”or “guys from other star systems came here and left a statue on Mars and left some of them on Earth.” By the way, all of which fails to explain how it is that humans share 99.6 percent of their active genes with chimpanzees. If we were just dropped here, how come we’re so closely related to them? What is the basis of the argument? How good is it? My standard way of approaching this is to point out that there is an eggplant that looks exactly like former President Richard Nixon. The eggplant has this ski nose and, “that’s Richard Nixon, I’d know him anywhere.”

What shall we deduce from this eggplant phenomenon? Extraterrestrials messing with our eggplants? A miracle? God is talking to us through the eggplant? Or, that there have been tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of eggplants in history, and they all have funny little knobs, and every now and then there is going to be one that by accident looks like a human face. Humans are very good at recognizing human faces. I think clearly the latter. Now let’s go to Mars. Thousands of low, hilly mesas have all sorts of features. Here’s one that looks a little like a human face. When you bring out the contrast in the shadowed area it doesn’t look as good. Now, we’re very good at picking out human faces. We have so many of these blocky mesas. Is it really a compelling sign of extraterrestrial intelligence that there’s one that looks a little like a human face? I think not. But I don’t blame people who are going into the NASA archives and trying to find things there; that is in the scientific spirit. I don’t blame people who are trying to find signs of extraterrestrial intelligence—I think it’s a good idea, in fact. But I do object to people who consider shoddy and insufficient evidence as compelling.

QUESTION: May we hear your opinion on the canceling of the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas?

SAGAN: Yes. There are many physicists who think that that latter was a great tragedy. My own view is that it was not nearly explained well enough. We’re talking about eight, ten, twelve, fourteen billion dollars to do very arcane experiments — and I don’t think physicists did a good job at all in explaining to Congress why at a time of many pressures on the discretionary federal budget so much money should go to this. It doesn’t build weapons, it doesn’t cure diseases, it isn’t generally known or understood. What is it about and why should we spend money on it? I think the physicists have, not altogether but to a significant degree, themselves to blame.

QUESTION: A question concerning the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It seems that we as skeptics, there’s an argument that seems very disappointing and maybe a bit persuasive in the Fermi paradox, the idea that if civilizations were to arise at any significant level, that even given a very extremely slow rate of expansion in the galaxy, that there’s been more than enough time for them to have populated the galaxy several times over. What’s your view on the Fermi paradox?

SAGAN: The Fermi paradox essentially says, as you said, that if there’s extraterrestrial high technology intelligence anywhere they should have been here because if they travel at the speed of light, the galaxy is 100,000 light-years across, it takes you 100,000 years to cross the galaxy. The galaxy is 10 billion years old, they should be here. And if you say you can’t travel at the speed of light, take a tenth of the speed of light, a hundredth of the speed of light, still much less than the age of the galaxy. William Newman and I published a paper on this very point, in which we point out: Imagine there is a civilization that has capable interstellar spacecraft and now they start exploring. What are we talking about? That they’re sending out 400 billion spacecraft, all at once, simultaneously, to every star in the galaxy? Not at all. Interstellar space flight is going to be hard, you’re going to go slow, you’re going to go to the nearest star systems first, you’re going to explore those stars. It is not a straight line but a diffusion question. And when you do the diffusion physics with the appropriate diffusivity, that is, the time to random walk, there are many cases in which the time for an advanced civilization to fully explore the galaxy in the sense of visiting every star system is considerably longer than the age of the galaxy. It’s just a bad model, we claim, the straight line, dedicated exploration of every star in the galaxy.

QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, you’ve spoken about the need to, as you say, be defenders of science, or to spread the wonders of science and the value of science among those who are perhaps less well educated or have less of an appreciation of it. It seems to be quite a challenge, and I was wondering, in particular, there are many people, of course, plus the people in this room, perhaps a fairly large portion have some background in science. Amongst people who have what is called a liberal education, who may be in the arts or in the humanities, science has among many of them something of a bad name. I wonder if you have any thought on what path might be taken to remedy that situation.

SAGAN: I think one, perhaps, is to present science as it is, as something dazzling, as something tremendously exciting, as something eliciting feelings of reverence and awe, as something that our lives depend on. If it isn’t presented that way, if it’s presented in very dull textbook fashion, then of course people will be turned off. If the chemistry teacher is the basketball coach, if the school boards are unable to get support for the new school bond issue, if teachers’ salaries, especially in science, are very low, if very little is demanded of our students in terms of homework and original class time, if virtually every newspaper in the country has a daily astrology column and hardly any of them has a weekly science column, if the Sunday morning pundit shows never discuss science, if every one of the commercial television networks has somebody designated as a science reporter but he (it’s always he) never presents any science, it’s all technology and medicine, if an intelligent remark on science has never been uttered in living memory by a President of the United States, if in all of television there are no action-adventure series in which the hero or heroine is someone devoted to finding out how the universe works, if spiffy jackets attractive to the opposite sex are given to students who do well in football, basketball, and baseball but none in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, if we do all of that, then it is not surprising that a lot of people come out of the American educational system turned off, or having never experienced, science. That was a very long sentence.

QUESTION: Good evening, Dr. Sagan. Just one point first. Both the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the CTV private network have female science reporters.

SAGAN: Excellent. I was only talking about the U.S. and I recognize that you are within range of Canadian broadcasting here in Seattle.

SAME QUESTIONER: I’m a Canadian myself.

SAGAN: I’m very glad to hear it. David Suzuki has done for many years an excellent job on Canadian television.

SAME QUESTIONER: Absolutely. With the debacle of cold fusion, which may be said to be the ultimate proof of the scientific method with its peer review and its replicability or lack of same, if you were a person who is interested in the question of developing energy sources that would be both safer than the ones we use now and less expensive, would you continue to work in the area of fusion, and if not where would you work?

SAGAN: Cold fusion or hot fusion?

SAME QUESTIONER: I understand that hot fusion takes up a lot more energy than it ultimately produces.

SAGAN: But the margin is shrinking. If it were up to me, there’s nothing in the way of compelling evidence for cold fusion, but if there were such a thing as cold fusion—you know, desktop conversion into enormous energy—we need that. So I can understand why there are companies, especially abroad, that are devoting small resources to it. I don’t think that’s cause for apoplexy. It’ll probably come to nothing, but if there are scientists who want to spend their time on that, let them do it. Maybe they’ll find something else that’s interesting. On hot fusion, the margin, as I said, is shrinking, but the predicted, even optimistic estimates when commercial, large-scale, worldwide hot fusion would be available is too far into the twenty-first century to solve the energy problems we have today.

The energy problems I’m talking about are in particular global warming, the burning of fossil fuels. So what I would encourage is first of all, much greater emphasis on efficient use of fossil fuels—fluorescent rather than incandescent bulbs, you save a factor of several, or to put it another way, with the same amount of photons you put three or four or five times fewer carbon dioxide molecules into the atmosphere from the coal- burning power plant that provides the electricity. And I would put the money into forcing the automobile companies to produce cars that get 75, 85, 95 miles a gallon. Why are we satisfied with 25 miles a gallon when it is commercially perfectly possible to have safe, quick acceleration, spunky-looking cars that are efficient in their burning of petroleum? And then the other area where I would put emphasis is in non-nuclear alternatives to fossil fuel, of which I would stress biomass conversion, solar-electric power, and wind turbines, all of which are technologies that are coming along very swiftly despite, until recently, real hostility in the U.S. government. Let me give you just one political story. There was once a president of the United States recently in the news named Jimmy Carter. He thought that there was an energy problem and he gave, in effect, talks to the nation in his cardigan sweater saying about how you should save electricity. He put into the roof of the White House a solar thermal converter which circulated cold water to the roof, and on sunny days in Washington sunlight heated this water and in repeated passes it made it very hot, and when it was time for a Presidential shower, here was hot water that did not rely on a power plant. He was succeeded by a President named Ronald Reagan. One of the first acts in office of President Reagan was to rip out the solar thermal converter from the roof of the White House at considerable cost—after all, it was in there and working—because he was ideologically opposed to alternatives to fossil fuels. We lost twelve years in research into these alternatives during the Reagan-Bush administration.

QUESTION: The dapper gentleman there, Bill Nye, his work on television bodes well for science education; he’s to be applauded. I also want to thank you for answering all my questions about Richard Nixon; it explains a lot. You expressed some encouragement about the age mixture represented here in this audience. I wonder if you would comment on the conspicuous lack of racial diversity and the implications for science education in general.

SAGAN: Thank you. We also might ask how it is that of the first ten or twelve questioners only one was a woman in an audience in which women are much more strongly represented. These are wide-ranging, difficult questions. I don’t claim to have the answers except to say that I know of no evidence that women and what in the United States are called racial minorities are not as competent as anybody else in doing science. It has to do, I think, entirely, or almost entirely, with the built-in biases and prejudices of the educational system and the way the society trains people. Nothing more than that. Women, for example, who are told that they’re too stupid for science, that science isn’t for them, that science is a male thing, are turned off. And women who despite that try to go into science and then find hostility from the high school math teacher—“What are you doing in my class?”—find hostility from the 95 percent male science classes, with the kind of raucous male culture in which they find themselves excluded, those are powerful social pressures to leave science. I wrote a novel once, Contact, in which I tried to describe what women dedicated to science have to face, that men don’t, in order to make a career in science.

QUESTION: I would like to challenge you to answer the questions without ridicule....

SAGAN: Fire away.

SAME QUESTIONER: ...whether they be about crop circles, Richard Hoagland, or the abductees.

SAGAN: I didn’t think I had any ridicule there.

SAME QUESTIONER: I think you had quite a lot. I was quite offended.

SAGAN: Which one particularly?

SAME QUESTIONER: The crop circles, the jokes you started with, the answer about Richard Hoagland offended me.

SAGAN: Okay, let’s take one. Let’s take Richard Hoagland —

SAME QUESTIONER: I would like to ask you in general to watch the ridicule. There are so many people here that think such ideas are worthy of ridicule. You have spoken about the need for compassion. I would like to see you model that here.

SAGAN: I appreciate that remark, and if I had not done what I preached I apologize. However, you must recognize —

SAME QUESTIONER: I accept your apology.

SAGAN: There was an “if” in front of the apology: However, you must recognize that vigorous debate is an essential aspect of getting to the truth, and the fact that Mr. Hoagland, for example, is not here—unless he is somewhere— I had nothing to do with it. Someone asked me a question about Richard Hoagland; I said what I thought. I happen to know that when Mr. Hoagland is asked questions and I’m not present, he says things about me, that I sometimes wish I had a chance to —

SAME QUESTIONER (interrupting): Are you capable of modeling him?

SAGAN: I don’t understand the question. What do you mean “modeling?”

SAME QUESTIONER: Modeling. Modeling compassion.

SAGAN: I’ve known Richard Hoagland for many, many years. I think I have just the right measure of compassion. (Laughter)

QUESTION: After the lady’s question I don’t know if mine is appropriate. I was going to ask you: We have Scott Peck, psychiatrist, Dr. [Brian] Weiss, he wrote Many Lives, Many Masters, Dr. [John] Mack [the Harvard psychiatrist who contended patients who say they were abducted by aliens are describing real events, and who spoke at the conference], we saw him yesterday, Dr. [Raymond] Moody—they’re all mighty good thinkers. How do you think they went wrong?

SAGAN: I’m being asked to speculate offering psychiatric matters—hard to do. Some of those people I know very well, some I have never met. I don’t think it would be right for me to guess why it is that they don’t agree with me. I think that’s all I want to say about it. I tried to stress before that it doesn’t matter what the character of the debater is, it doesn’t matter what reservations we have about him or her, what matters is the quality of the argument presented. For each of these people, I think the issue is: is there evidence? Yes, Dr. Moody has an M.D. but he uses, as I said, my own memories of my parents speaking to me as evidence of life after death. I know that’s not a good argument. I know better than he what those voices are about, and so, by extrapolation, I think maybe the rest of his argument isn’t so good. To the extent that I have some way of hooking onto the arguments I try to use what I know and see if there’s a good case or not. I want to stress that there are some claims in the areas of parascience or pseudoscience that may well turn out to be right. And I don’t think that is a reason for us not to demand the highest standards of argument about it.

For example, one thing I didn’t mention to the last questioner: when Mars Observer was on its way to Mars with the high-resolution camera that might photograph things about the size of this, I thought that among the many other targets, it ought to take a look at the so-called face and settle the issue. If it’s just some odd aspect of eolian abrasion on Mars, let’s find that out. If it’s something else, let’s find that out. The fact that I think I understand, via the Richard Nixon eggplant, what the face on Mars is, doesn’t mean that I don’t want anyone to check it out. I could be wrong. If we have the tool to, with a few pictures, find out what the answer is, for heaven’s sake let’s do it. So each of these cases. In Johnny Mack’s case I would say: “Never mind anecdotes, let’s ask about physical evidence.”

The claim is that many abductees have probes inserted up their nostrils, into their sinuses, which are, who knows, monitoring devices telling about where they’ve been and what’s happening to their bodies. I say—and I’ve said to Mack a number of times—you give me one of those and we’ll give it a really close scrutiny, and let’s see if can we find evidence of alien manufacture. Are there principles of physical laws we don’t understand? Are there isotopic ratios or the immiscibility of metals that we don’t know about on Earth? Are there elements from the so-called island of stability, heavy elements, transuranic elements that are thought to be stable but we don’t have any of them on Earth? There are many possibilities and you’ve certainly guessed that in some way an object of manufacture by aliens of extremely advanced capability—they travel from interstellar space, they effortlessly slither through walls, those guys really have powerful technology. Let’s look at this. Never has there been one made available. There’s always one about to be made available, there’s always one that is going to be given to a laboratory, but it never happens.

What is that standard story that I get from Mack and others about the implants? It’s that the abductees, going about his or her everyday life, and in many cases like this it is alleged the implant dropped out, clunk. The abductee picks it up, looks at it incuriously, and throws it in the garbage. Never once— and as a rule, this may prove my case—does he give it to some chemist or physicist, a chemist or physicist who could demonstrate the existence of alien technology. They’d give their eye teeth for that. They would be crawling all over each other to be able to examine the artifact. How come we’ve never had one case like that which really works out? I think that is a telling counterargument to all the anecdotal claims.

QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, we are fourteen years into the AIDS epidemic, HIV epidemic right now in this country, and apparently scientifically we are not coming any closer to finding a cure, creating a vaccine, even though there’s lots of money being expended. And apparently also now there are new superbugs or new strains of bacteria that are becoming resistant to many of the antibiotics. You spoke about a concern for your children and your grandchildren in terms of what’s happening. I’m just curious; what implications you see with these newfound illnesses, viruses, that are all of a sudden coming to us who believe that we were conquering everything in this day and age.

SAGAN: This is natural selection in action. If we overdose ourselves with antibiotics, we wipe out all the microorganisms not resistant to antibiotics and preferentially amplify the ones that are resistant. Eventually we arrange things, very cleverly, so that the entire population of microorganisms inside our bodies—including the disease-causing ones—are resistant to antibiotics. So overdosing antibiotics, which physicians have done routinely for reasons that are not hard to understand, is a mistake. Part of the answer is of course not to overdose anymore, and also to develop new strains of antibiotics. There ought to be major efforts to do that. On AIDS, my impression is that while there is nothing like a vaccine or a cure, there are substantial advances in the molecular biology of the HIV virus, and I take that to be a sign of significant hope, but of course  not on the time scale of someone who is dying of AIDS. It’s very slow in that respect. I don’t think this is a money-driven situation. I don’t think there just isn’t enough money. I think there is enough money and some things maybe are not supported well enough, but in general there is, and it’s a matter of not enough wisdom, not the right experiments, not having progressed far enough, not having done it swiftly enough. There’s nothing magical about the HIV virus. It will succumb eventually to the ministrations of molecular biology. And I hope, for the reasons you mentioned, that that time will come soon.

QUESTION: Dr. Sagan, my question is in regard to the future of the skeptical movement.

SAGAN: Thank you. That’s a good thing to end on.

SAME QUESTIONER: The responsibility that we have now, I feel, is as great as ever. The skeptical movement has been around for a number of years, perhaps thousands. First of all, I’d like to applaud the leadership of the skeptical movement we have here with you and the panel of speakers we have this weekend. But also important is the grassroots movements, the consensus of opinion of those that do adhere to the tenet, logic, reason, skeptical inquiry. We’re at a point in time now that it’s very important, and after having read the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER over a number of years and other articles and books and so forth, I find it somewhat amusing to see some of the investigations on a number of subjects like Paul Kurtz mentioned, we have hundreds of them—crystal power, pyramid power, a Loch Ness monster, whatever, I could go on and on. To be most effective in the long run I would think that would be something we would need to look at.

SAGAN: What would be?

SAME QUESTIONER: To be effective in fostering the logic and reason in skeptical thinking. I have found these various subject matters to be interesting and yet probably a greater area we could look at is the investigation into the major religions of the world.

SAGAN: Now we’re to it. Okay.

SAME QUESTIONER: There are billions and billions of people that adhere to the tenets of these religions and I would imagine that we could spend more time in the skeptical movement—

SAGAN: In essence your question is: Should the skeptical movement devote some of its attention to religion?

SAME QUESTIONER: Well said.

SAGAN: This is a really good question, and I know that Richard Dawkins talked about this a year or so ago, and drew the conclusion that many religious beliefs were not noticeably different from any of the parasciences or pseudosciences beliefs, and why one of them is the object of our attention and the other is off-limits, and he urged that we be, if I may use the expression, more ecumenical in our hostility. I will answer in the following way: first, that there is no human culture without religion. That being the case, that immediately says that religion provides some essential meat, and if that’s the case shouldn’t we be a little careful about condemning something that it desperately needed? For example, if I am with someone who has just lost a loved one, I do not think it is appropriate for me to say, “You know, there’s no scientific evidence for life after death.” If that person is gaining some degree of support, stability, from the thought that the loved one has gone to heaven and that they will be joined after the person I’m talking to, himself or herself, dies. That would be uncompassionate and foolish. Science provides a great deal, but there are some things that it doesn’t provide. Religion is an attempt to provide, whether truly or falsely, some solutions to those problems. Human mortality is one of those where there isn’t a smidgeon of help from science. Yes, it’s a grand and glorious universe, yes it’s amazing to be part of it, yes we weren’t alive before we were born (not much before we were born) so we hope we’re alive after we’re dead. We won’t know about it. It’s a big deal. But that’s not too reassuring, at least to many people.

Take the issue of the Bible. The Bible is in my view a magnificent work of poetry, has some good history in it, has some good ethical and moral scriptures—but by no means everywhere, the book of Joshua is a horror, for example— and on those grounds is well worth our respect. But on the other hand, the Book of Genesis was written in the sixth century B.C. during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. The Babylonians were the chief scientists of the time. The Jews picked up the best science available and put it in the book of Genesis, but we have learned something in the intervening two and a half millennia, and to believe in the literal truth of the attempted science in the Bible, is to believe too much. I know there are Biblical literalists who believe that every jot and tittle in the Bible is the direct word of God, given to a scrupulous and flawless stenographer, and with no attempt to use the understanding of the time, or metaphor or allegory, but just straight-out truth. I know there are people who think that. That seems to me highly unlikely. I think the way to approach the Bible is with some critical wits about us, but not dismissing it out of hand. There’s a lot of good stuff in the Bible. Case-by-case basis is what I’m saying. Where religion does not pretend to do science, I think we should be open within the boundaries of good sense. I think that you cannot extract an “ought” from an “is,”and therefore science per se does not tell us how we should behave, although it can certainly shed considerable light on the consequences of alternative kinds of behavior. From that we can decide how to arrange our legal codes and what to do. So the idea of an all-out attack on religion I think on many grounds would be foolish, but the idea of treating Biblical literalism, for example, with some skeptical scrutiny is an excellent idea. But it is being done, has been done for the last century by Biblical scholars themselves. I don’t think there’s any particular expertise in this movement for a critical examination of the Bible. There are other people who are doing it just fine.

I hope that sort of middle ground is not too different from what you were asking about, but I certainly don’t think that religion should be off-limits. I don’t think anything should be off limits. We should feel free to discuss and debate everything. That’s what the Bill of Rights is about. And in that sense, and many other senses, the constitution of the United States, particularly the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment, and the scientific method are very mutually supportive approaches to knowledge. Both of them recognize the extreme dangers of having to pay attention to and do whatever the authority says.