Collecting Tales

What passed for investigation in earlier times is illustrated by a “true” ghost story related by Pliny the Younger (ca. 100 a.d.). It has been “regarded as the first investigated ghost story” (Finucane 2001). A hearsay tale, already a century old when Pliny told it, it involved a house in Athens haunted by the specter of an emaciated, fettered man. It rattled its chains at night and brought disease and death to visitors. Undaunted, however, a stoic philosopher named Athenodorus bought the house, tried first to ignore the beckoning phantom, then calmly followed it into the garden where it vanished. The next day he had local officials dig at the site where they found a skeleton in rusty chains. After a proper burial which appeased the ghost, the haunting ceased.

But Pliny’s tale is as suspect as it is dated, with its motifs of clanking chains, malevolent atmosphere, and ritual appeasement. Over time, people’s notions of ghosts and hauntings have continually changed. According to R.C. Finucane, in his Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts (1984, 223):

Each epoch has perceived its specters according to specific sets of expectations; as these change so too do the specters. From this point of view it is clear that the suffering souls of purgatory in the days of Aquinas, the shades of a murdered mistress in Charles II’s era, and the silent grey ladies of Victoria’s reign represent not beings of that other world, but of this.

Even in a given era, ghosts seem to behave according to individual expectations, being as likely to walk through a wall as to knock on a door before entering (Finucane 1984, 223).

While collecting ghost stories can be helpful in showing just such trends, much that is claimed as the “investigation” of hauntings never rises above mere mystery mongering. Necessarily there is a reliance on anecdotal, eyewitness testimony. Moreover, accounts may be exaggerated and are frequently offered with the implication that the “unexplainable” phenomena are proof of the reality of spirits. Actually, such a view is an example of a logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance (“we don’t know what caused the door to slam, therefore it was a ghost”). One cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. Besides, an event may not be unexplainable at all, only unexplained, possibly later being solved (e.g., a slamming door might have been caused by a draft or may have been a prank).

Uncritical collections of ghost tales—rife with weaselly phrases like “is said to be” and “some believe that” (e.g., Hauck 1996, 1, 12)—are ubiquitous. They include Dennis William Hauck’s Haunted Places: The National Directory (1996) and The International Directory of Haunted Places (2000), as well as a hundred or so books by “ghost hunter” Hans Holzer alone.

The ‘Psychic’ Method

Actually, Hans Holzer sometimes goes beyond mere story relating, relying on alleged contact with the spirit realm. Belief in such contact is called spiritualism, and it is as ancient as the Old Testament’s Witch of Endor who purportedly conjured up the ghost of Samuel at the request of King Saul (1 Sam. 28:7—20). Modern spiritualism began in 1848 at Hydesville, New York, when two young girls, Maggie and Katie Fox, pretended to communicate with the ghost of a murdered peddler. Although four decades later they confessed how their “spirit rappings” had been faked, in the meantime spiritualism had spread across the United States and beyond.

Interest in spiritualism inspired ghost hunting. The first organization devoted to the cause was a ghost society formed at Cambridge University in 1851. It was followed by London’s Ghost Club in 1862, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882, and an American counterpart (ASPR) in 1885. Such organizations attracted both scientists and spiritualists, many hoping to unite science and religion by validating spiritualist phenomena (Guiley 200, 6—7, 151—153, 353—354).

Out of that tradition comes Holzer, who terms himself a parapsychologist. In his book America’s Haunted Houses he relates his “investigation” of Ringwood Manor in northern New Jersey. Holzer arrived at Ringwood with “psychic” Ethel Meyers in tow, a dubious choice given her involvement in the “Amityville Horror” case wherein she failed to realize it was a hoax. She supposedly made contact with former servants of Ringwood, saying that one, “Jeremiah,” had “complained bitterly about his mistress,” a Mrs. Erskine. However, the curator of Ringwood told me he doubted the house was haunted, and disparaged the notion that Mrs. Erskine mistreated any servant—whether “Jeremiah” or not. He observed that the present house was never seen by her, and “isn’t even near the location of the original house!” (Prol 1993) Thus when Holzer writes, “The center of the hauntings seems to be what was once the area of Mrs. Erskine’s bedroom” (Holzer 1991, 125), he betrays an utter lack of historical credibility.

Holzer, while a prolific mystery monger, is not the worst such offender. He observes: “Amateur ‘investigators’ can do more damage than good at times, “especially when they travel as ‘demonologists’ looking for demons and devils as the cause of a haunting” (Holzer 1991, 7).

He could be referring to an elderly couple, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who operate something they call the New England Society for Psychic Research. Ed, the director, has a business card that bills him as a “Demonologist.” Lorraine, sporting a bouffant hairdo, claims to be a “clairvoyant.” They have been called other things, ranging from “passionate and religious people” and “ghost hunters” to “scaremongers” and other appellations, including “charlatans” (Duckett 1991).

The Warrens’ usual modus operandi has them arriving at a “haunted” house where ghost and poltergeist hijinks are blown into incredible accounts of “demonic possession.” Soon the horrific tales become chapters or entire books touting the Warrens’ “cases,” such as the Amityville “horror,” (Amityville, New York, 1975—1976) and the Snedeker family haunting (Southington, Connecticut, 1986—1988).

In the latter case, in addition to Lorraine Warren, “psychics” brought into the house (a former funeral home) included a Warren grandson and a nephew. They were soon reporting their own sightings of ghosts and other phenomena, while also denying that there was any book deal in progress. In fact, such a book did materialize (Warren and Warren et al. 1992).

Alas, when I appeared on the pre-Halloween 1992 Sally Jessy Raphael show with the Warrens and Snedekers, I began an investigation that would thoroughly demolish the case (although it was hyped again later with a made-for-TV movie). “Neighbors of the Snedeker” came on the Sally show to debunk many of the claims. One was an across-the-street resident, Kathy Altemus, who had kept a journal during the events and shared it with me when I subsequently visited Southington.

The journal shed light on the ghostly occurrences. For example, “vibrations” felt in in the house were easily explained by the passing of heavy trucks. Other events could perhaps be attributed to various passersby mentioned in the journal as “pulling pranks on the ‘haunted house’” (Altemus 1988—92). Certain other incidents—including visiting nieces being groped by “an unseen hand”—turned out to have been caused by the Snedekers’ son “Steven” (as he is called in the book). He confessed to police that he had fondled the girls as they slept. He used drugs and was diagnosed as schizophrenic (Nickell 1995, 133—139).

While there is no convincing evidence that demons were at work in the house, the arrival of the Warrens, with their publicity-seeking actions, convinced some people otherwise. Their book—written by a professional horror-tale writer and timed for Halloween release and promotion—was a travesty. It represented the worst of the “psychic” approach to ghost hunting.

As such evidence demonstrates—whether alleged psychics claim to enter a “trance” state, like Holzer’s favorite mediums, Ethel Meyers and Sybil Leek (Holzer 1991, 24, 36), or whether they rely on “channeling tools” such as a Ouija board, dowsing rod, or psychic pendulum as others prefer (Belanger 2005, 17)—psychics have a poor track record. They typically offer unsubstantiated, even unverifiable claims, or information that can be gleaned from research sources or from knowledgeable persons by “cold reading” (an artful method of fishing for information). Alternatively, the psychic may simply make a number of pronouncements, trusting that the credulous will count the apparent hits and ignore, or interpret appropriately, the misses.

Still, not all such offerings are insincere. Those who fancy themselves psychics may exhibit traits associated with a “fantasy-prone” personality—a designation for an otherwise normal person’s heightened propensity to fantasize. Some field research I have done shows a correlation between the number and intensity of ghostly experiences on the one hand and the number of exhibited traits associated with fantasy-proneness on the other (Nickell 2000).

Ghostbusters

With the resurgence of spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century, mediums sought to prove the existence of spirits through certain physical phenomena. Allegedly in dark-room séances, spirits materialized, spoke, wrote messages on slates, posed for photographs, and produced apports (teleported objects)—or so it appeared. Magician Harry Houdini (1874—1926) spent his last years crusading against such phony spirit tricks (Nickell 1995, 17—38).

One of the first to use “modern technology” for ghost hunting was England’s Harry Price (1881—1948). Marrying a wealthy heiress, he was able to indulge his interests in spiritualism and psychical research. A member of the SPR, he became disgruntled with the society’s skepticism of physical phenomena and set up his own research laboratory.

For ghost hunting, Price employed such devices as a camera with infrared filter and film, a remote-control motion-picture camera, “a sensitive transmitting thermograph, with charts, to measure the slightest variation in temperature in supposed haunted rooms,” and an electric signaling instrument to reveal the “movement of any object in any part of the house” (Price 1940, 6—7).

Despite his gadgets, Price still was unable to prove the reality of ghosts. Worse, he “is suspected of fraud in connection with several of his investigations, including the most famous one, the Borley Rectory haunting” (Guiley 2000, 299), which he wrote about in his The Most Haunted House in England (1940). (For a discussion, see Dingwall et al. 1956.)

Ghost hunting began to be popular in the late 1970s with the founding of the Chicago-area Ghost Tracker’s Club. It became the Ghost Research Society (GRS) in 1981, being headed the following year by Dale Kaczmarek, a former Army chaplain’s assistant turned grocery-distribution employee. According to The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits (Guiley 2000, 157), “most GRS members, including Kaczmarek, have seen enough unexplained phenomena to conclude that ghosts do exist and that there is survival after death”—a typical example of arguing from ignorance.

The popularity of the Ghostbusters movie of 1984 may have boosted the proliferation of ghost clubs. Some include psychics and dowsers, but virtually all utilize high-tech equipment for the supposed detection of ghostly “energy.” Unfortunately, that is unknown to science, and the approach of the typical ghost hunter—a nonscientist using equipment for a purpose for which it was not made and has not been shown to be effective—is sheer pseudoscience.

Space permits only a brief overview of their alleged findings and the equipment involved.

Ghost photos

The earliest photographs —daguerreotype (from 1839), ambrotypes (1855) and tintypes (1856)—did not show ghosts. However, following the advent of glass-plate negatives, which permitted double exposures, in 1862 a Boston engraver named William H. Mumler began to produce “spirit” photos. He was revealed a fraud when some of his spirit “extras” were recognized as living Bostonians. Various means of faking ghost photos followed. As well, unintended ghostly effects have been caused by imperfections in film or camera or by conditions under which the photo was made (Nickell 1994, 146—159). Some “ghosts” are only simulacra—faces or other shapes perceived due to the mind’s tendency to “recognize” images in random patterns (Nickell 2004).

Orbs

Typically unwitnessed but showing up in photographs—especially flash photos—orbs are bright spheres touted as “spirit energy” (Belanger 2005, 342). In fact however, orbs are easily made anywhere (as I have done in experimental photographs). When they are not mere reflections from shiny surfaces, they most often result from the flash rebounding from particles of dust or droplets of water close to the lens (Nickell 2002). The characteristics of orbs can vary, depending on how they are photographed. Orbs are more likely to be caused by cameras having the flash located close to the lens, according to Fujifilm (What’s 2006). Also, digital cameras, having a greater depth of field, may be a more frequent offender (Orbs 2006). Responding to the evidence, some ghost hunters now claim to be able to differentiate “genuine” ghost orbs from “false orbs” (Guiley 2000, 270), while still being unable to prove the existence of the former.

Ectoplasm

Ghost hunters often tout the existence of “ectoplasm”—originally a substance supposedly extruded from the body of a medium. It was shown in photographs, extending umbilical-like from the medium’s mouth, nose, or ears, but again and again it was revealed to have been faked with strips of gauze, chewed-up paper, concoctions of soap and gelatin, etc. (Guiley 2000, 116—117). Ghost hunters have seized on ectoplasm as a pseudo explanation for various strand and mist effects in photos. Such effects can be caused by the flash rebounding from the camera’s wrist strap, jewelry, hair, insects, a wandering fingertip, etc., etc. (Nickell 1996; 2002). Or they may be due to other glitches.

Spirit energy

In addition to photography, ghost hunters search for their elusive quarry with a panoply of devices, notably electromagnetic field (EMF) meters. These are highly sensitive and—depending on the model—can be influenced by a number of very real energy sources, including faulty electric wiring, inadvertently magnetized objects (such as a metal bed frame), radio waves, microwave emissions, solar activity, electrical thunderstorms, and many other influences—even the human body! Watching hapless ghost hunters on TV crocumentaries, one often sees them operating EMF meters while holding them in the hand and moving about—a sure recipe for “unexplained” (to them) fluctuations. See figure 1.

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP)

Following the nineteenth-century attempts to amplify spirit voices with tin trumpets, Thomas A. Edison suggested it might be possible to make an electronic device that permitted spirit communication (Gardner 1996). That never materialized, but today’s ghost hunters make audiotape recordings of what they believe are “voices of the dead.” These are unheard during taping but are manifested on playback. Skeptics contend they are either voices from radio, television, or two-way radio transmissions, or that they are imagined. Like visual simulacra, syllable-like effects may be perceived in the randomness of static and background noise (Guiley 2000, 120—121; Flynn 2006).

Cold spots

Ghost buffs tout temperature fluctuations and “cold spots” as evidence a house is haunted. Supposedly, they indicate areas where ghosts reside, and in the past they were picked by alleged psychics. To counter the inherent subjectivity of such an approach (a spooky place may give one “cold chills”), modern ghost hunters employ heat sensors, such as digital thermal scanners which measure instant temperature changes. The practice persists despite a lack of scientific evidence or theory to support equating the temperature with ghosts and the fact that temperatures can vary throughout a building due to normal causes (Warren 2003, 171—172; Guiley 2000, 155; Baker 1992, 123).

The pseudoscientific approach is presented—one might almost say caricatured—by a ghostly reality show airing weekly on the Sci-Fi Channel. Called Ghost Hunters, it features two hapless paranormalists—Jason Hewes and Grant Wilson—who, by day, are Roto Rooter plumbers in New Jersey, and, by night, leaders of The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS). With some skepticism to enhance overall credibility (a token nonbeliever on each show), the duo present “evidence” for alleged hauntings.

Apparently ignoring my debunking of the “haunted” Myrtles Plantation in Louisiana (Nickell 2003), they visited the site for their second-season premier, July 27, 2005. Among their presentations was a video sequence of a lamp gliding across a table in the plantation’s “slave shack.” Many viewers were outraged, according to Television Week (Hibbard 2005, 19):

Upon close inspection, fans concluded, the lamp was being pulled by its own cord. Even worse: a night-vision shot appears to show the cord extending from behind the table to Mr. Wilson’s hand. And the so-called slave shack, Internet researchers said, was built recently and never housed slaves.

A Sci-Fi programming executive said lamely, “It’s definitely important to us that this show is not manufacturing anything, and our assurance comes from those doing that show, because it’s even more important to them—Jason and Grant’s reputations are riding on this more than anybody’s.” He added, “I believe the show is real and I’m the biggest skeptic, out there.”

Scientific Investigation

The scientific approach to hauntings does not begin with the unproven, seemingly contradictory notion that entities are at once nonmaterial and quasi physical. Rather, in scientific inquiry one seeks to gather, study, and follow the evidence, only positing a supernatural or paranormal cause when all natural explanations have been decisively eliminated. Investigation seeks neither to foster nor debunk mysteries but instead to solve them.

This approach can involve scholarly methods (such as historical research and folkloristic analysis) as well as scientific techniques like those used in crime-scene investigation. Indeed, in pursuing the Atlanta House of Blood mystery of 1987, I learned that after the suburban home was reported to spurt blood “like a sprinkler,” police had taken samples and made photographs. I was able to have the latter subjected to blood-pattern analysis. It revealed that the blood had not sprung from the floors and walls as alleged by the residents but indeed had been squirted onto the surfaces—indicating a hoax (Nickell 1995, 92—97).

Another hoax was uncovered by simple interrogation. This was an Indiana case I investigated with my friend and colleague the late Robert A. Baker, famed psychologist and inveterate ghostbuster. The subject, a little boy questioned by Baker, soon blurted out, “You aren’t going to tell on me are you?” (The answer was no, and the matter was handled diplomatically; see Nickell 2001, 219.)

On-site investigation solved my first haunting case, that of the Mackenzie House in Toronto in 1972. Caretakers abed late at night really were hearing footsteps on the stairs when there was no one else in the house. But the footfalls were coming from a parallel iron staircase in the adjacent building (Nickell 2001, 217).

As shown by these and other closed cases (I call them “ex-files”), it is the scientific approach that solves mysteries. Indeed, we could see the advance of science as a progression of solved mysteries.

Acknowledgments

Vaughn Rees, Thomas Flynn, and Timothy Binga were critical in helping me research and evaluate many of the claims addressed in this article.

References

• Altemus, Kathy. 1988—92. Personal journal, copy provided to Joe Nickell, with cover letter of January 16.
• Baker, Robert A. 1992. Investigating Ghosts. . . . Chapter 4 of Baker and Nickell 1992, 113—151.
• Baker, Robert A., and Joe Nickell. 1992. Missing Pieces: How to Investigate Ghosts, UFOs, Psychics & Other Mysteries. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• Belanger, Jeff. 2005. Encyclopedia of Haunted Places: Ghostly Locales from Around the World. Franklin Lakes, N.J.: New Page Books.
• Dingwall, Eric J., Kathleen M. Goldney, and Trevor H. Hall. 1956. The Haunting of Burley Rectory. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.
• Duckett, Jodi. 1991. News item in The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.), cited in Nickell 1991, 65—66.
• Finucane, R.C. 1984. Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• —. 2001. Historical introduction, in Houran and Lange 2001.
• Flynn, Thomas. 2006. Personal communication, January 12.
• Gardner, Martin. 1996. Thomas Edison, paranormalist. Skeptical Inquirer 20:4 (July/ August), 9—12.
• Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2000. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, 2nd ed. New York: Checkmark Books.
• Hauck, Dennis William. 1996. Haunted Places: The National Directory. New York: Penguin.
• —. 2000. The International Directory of Haunted Places. New York: Penguin.
• Hibbard, James. 2005. In search of ghost stories. Television Week, August 22; 1, 19.
• Holzer, Hans. 1991. America’s Haunted Houses. Stamford, Conn.: Longmeadow Press.
• Houran, James, and Rense Lange. 2001. Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 9—17.
• Nickell, Joe. 1994. Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky.
• —. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and other Alien Beings. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• —1996. Ghost photos. Skeptical Inquirer 20:4 (July/August), 13—14.
• —. 2000. Haunted inns. Skeptical Inquirer 24:5 (September/October), 17—21.
• —. 2001. Phantoms, frauds or fantasies? In Houran and Lange 2001, 214—223.
• —. 2002. Circular reasoning: The “mystery” of crop circles and their “orbs” of light. Skeptical Inquirer 26:5 (September/ October), 17—19.
• —. 2003. Haunted plantation. Skeptical Inquirer 27:5 (September/October), 12—15.
• —. 2004. Rorschach icons. Skeptical Inquirer 28:6 (November/December), 15—17.
• Orbs—the skeptical approach. 2006. Online at http://www.btinternet.com/~dr_paul_lee/orbs.htm; accessed Jan. 17.
• Pliny the Younger. Ca. 100. Letters, tr. William Melmoth (in Harvard Classics series), letter LXXXIII; available here; accessed Dec. 28, 2005.
• Price, Harry. 1940. The Most Haunted House in England: Ten Years’ Investigation of Borley Rectory. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
• Prol, Elbertus. 1993. Interview by Joe Nickell, June 12.
• Warren, Joshua P. 2003. How to Hunt Ghosts. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Warren, Ed, and Lorraine Warren, Al Snedeker, Carmen Snedeker, with Ray Garton. 1992. In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting. New York: Villard Books.
• What’s gone wrong? 2006. Online here; accessed January 17, 2006.

Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent protecting children from one threat or other, often with little concern for how expensive or effective the remedies are—or how serious the threat actually is in the first place. So it is with America’s latest panic: sexual predators.

According to lawmakers and near-daily news reports, sexual predators lurk everywhere: in parks, at schools, in the malls—even in children’s bedrooms, through the Internet. A few rare (but high-profile) incidents have spawned an unprecedented deluge of new laws enacted in response to the public’s fear. Every state has notification laws to alert communities about former sex offenders. Many states have banned sex offenders from living in certain areas, and are tracking them using satellite technology. Other states have gone even further; state emergency leaders in Florida and Texas, for example, are developing plans to route convicted sex offenders away from public emergency shelters during hurricanes. “We don’t want them in the same shelters as others,” said Texas Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw. (How exactly thousands of desperate and homeless storm victims are to be identified, screened, and routed in an emergency is unclear.)

An Epidemic?

To many people, sex offenders pose a serious and growing threat—especially on the Internet. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has made them a top priority this year, launching raids and arrest sweeps. According to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, “the danger to teens is high.” On the April 18, 2005, CBS Evening News broadcast, correspondent Jim Acosta reported that “when a child is missing, chances are good it was a convicted sex offender.” (Acosta is incorrect: If a child goes missing, a convicted sex offender is among the least likely explanations, far behind runaways, family abductions, and the child being lost or injured.) On his NBC series “To Catch a Predator,” Dateline reporter Chris Hansen claimed that “the scope of the problem is immense,” and “seems to be getting worse.” Hansen claimed that Web predators are “a national epidemic,” while Alberto Gonzales stated that there are 50,000 potential child predators online.

Sex offenders are clearly a real threat, and commit horrific crimes. Those who prey on children are dangerous, but how common are they? How great is the danger? After all, there are many dangers in the world—from lightning to Mad Cow Disease to school shootings—that are genuine but very remote. Let’s examine some widely repeated claims about the threat posed by sex offenders.

One in Five?

According to a May 3, 2006, ABC News report, “One in five children is now approached by online predators.” This alarming statistic is commonly cited in news stories about prevalence of Internet predators, but the factoid is simply wrong. The “one in five statistic” can be traced back to a 2001 Department of Justice study issued by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (“The Youth Internet Safety Survey”) that asked 1,501 American teens between 10 and 17 about their online experiences. Anyone bothering to actually read the report will find a very different picture. Among the study’s conclusions: “Almost one in five (19 percent) . . . received an unwanted sexual solicitation in the past year.” (A “sexual solicitation” is defined as a “request to engage in sexual activities or sexual talk or give personal sexual information that were unwanted or, whether wanted or not, made by an adult.” Using this definition, one teen asking another teen if her or she is a virgin—or got lucky with a recent date—could be considered “sexual solicitation.”) Not a single one of the reported solicitations led to any actual sexual contact or assault. Furthermore, almost half of the “sexual solicitations” came not from “predators” or adults but from other teens—in many cases the equivalent of teen flirting. When the study examined the type of Internet “solicitation” parents are most concerned about (e.g., someone who asked to meet the teen somewhere, called the teen on the telephone, or sent gifts), the number drops from “one in five” to just 3 percent.

This is a far cry from an epidemic of children being “approached by online predators.” As the study noted, “The problem highlighted in this survey is not just adult males trolling for sex. Much of the offending behavior comes from other youth [and] from females.” Furthermore, “Most young people seem to know what to do to deflect these sexual ‘come ons.’” The reality is far less grave than the ubiquitous “one in five” statistic suggests.

Recidivism Revisited

Much of the concern over sex offenders stems from the perception that if they have committed one sex offense, they are almost certain to commit more. This is the reason given for why sex offenders (instead of, say, murderers or armed robbers) should be monitored and separated from the public once released from prison. While it’s true that serial sex offenders (like serial killers) are by definition likely to strike again, the reality is that very few sex offenders commit further sex crimes.

The high recidivism rate among sex offenders is repeated so often that it is accepted as truth, but in fact recent studies show that the recidivism rates for sex offenses is not unusually high. According to a U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics study (“Recidivism of Sex Offenders Released from Prison in 1994”), just five percent of sex offenders followed for three years after their release from prison in 1994 were arrested for another sex crime. A study released in 2003 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that within three years, 3.3 percent of the released child molesters were arrested again for committing another sex crime against a child. Three to five percent is hardly a high repeat offender rate.

In the largest and most comprehensive study ever done of prison recidivism, the Justice Department found that sex offenders were in fact less likely to reoffend than other criminals. The 2003 study of nearly 10,000 men convicted of rape, sexual assault, and child molestation found that sex offenders had a re-arrest rate 25 percent lower than for all other criminals. Part of the reason is that serial sex offenders—those who pose the greatest threat—rarely get released from prison, and the ones who do are unlikely to re-offend. If released sex offenders are in fact no more likely to re-offend than murderers or armed robbers, there seems little justification for the public’s fear and the monitoring laws targeting them. (Studies also suggest that sex offenders living near schools or playgrounds are no more likely to commit a sex crime than those living elsewhere.)

While the abduction, rape, and killing of children by strangers is very, very rare, such incidents receive a lot of media coverage, leading the public to overestimate how common these cases are. (See John Ruscio’s article “Risky Business: Vividness, Availability, and the Media Paradox” in the March/April 2000 Skeptical Inquirer.)

Why the Hysteria?

There are several reasons for the hysteria and fear surrounding sexual predators. The predator panic is largely fueled by the news media. News stories emphasize the dangers of Internet predators, convicted sex offenders, pedophiles, and child abductions. The Today Show, for example, ran a series of misleading and poorly designed hidden camera “tests” to see if strangers would help a child being abducted. [1] Dateline NBC teamed up with a group called Perverted Justice to lure potential online predators to a house with hidden cameras. The program’s ratings were so high that it spawned six follow-up “To Catch a Predator” specials. While the many men captured on film supposedly showing up to meet teens for sex is disturbing, questions have been raised about Perverted Justice’s methods and accuracy. (For example, the predators are often found in unmoderated chatrooms frequented by those looking for casual sex—hardly places where most children spend their time.) Nor is it surprising that out of over a hundred million Internet users, a fraction of a percentage might be caught in such a sting.

Because there is little hard data on how widespread the problem of Internet predators is, journalists often resort to sensationalism, cobbling a few anecdotes and interviews together into a trend while glossing over data suggesting that the problem may not be as widespread as they claim. But good journalism requires that personal stories—no matter how emotional and compelling—must be balanced with facts and context. Much of the news coverage about sexual predation is not so much wrong as incomplete, lacking perspective.

Moral Panics

The news media’s tendency toward alarmism only partly explains the concern. America is in the grip of a moral panic over sexual predators, and has been for many months. A moral panic is a sociological term describing a social reaction to a false or exaggerated threat to social values by moral deviants. (For more on moral panics, see Ehrich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda’s 1994 book Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance.)

In a discussion of moral panics, sociologist Robert Bartholomew points out that a defining characteristic of the panics is that the “concern about the threat posed by moral deviants and their numerical abundance is far greater than can be objectively verified, despite unsubstantiated claims to the contrary.” Furthermore, according to Goode and Ben-Yehuda, during a moral panic “most of the figures cited by moral panic ‘claims-makers’ are wildly exaggerated.”

Indeed, we see exactly this trend in the panic over sexual predators. News stories invariably exaggerate the true extent of sexual predation on the Internet; the magnitude of the danger to children, and the likelihood that sexual predators will strike. (As it turns out, Attorney General Gonzales had taken his 50,000 Web predator statistic not from any government study or report, but from NBC’s Dateline TV show. Dateline, in turn, had broadcast the number several times without checking its accuracy. In an interview on NPR’s On the Media program, Hansen admitted that he had no source for the statistic, and stated that “It was attributed to, you know, law enforcement, as an estimate, and it was talked about as sort of an extrapolated number.”) According to Wall Street Journal writer Carl Bialik, journalists “often will use dubious numbers to advance that goal [of protecting children] . . . one of the reasons that this is allowed to happen is that there isn’t really a natural critic. . . . Nobody really wants to go on the record saying, ‘It turns out this really isn’t a big problem.’”

Panicky Laws

Besides needlessly scaring children and the public, there is a danger to this quasi-fabricated, scare-of-the-week reportage: misleading news stories influence lawmakers, who in turn react with genuine (and voter-friendly) moral outrage. Because nearly any measure intended (or claimed) to protect children will be popular and largely unopposed, politicians trip over themselves in the rush to endorse new laws that “protect the children.”

Politicians, child advocates, and journalists denounce current sex offender laws as ineffective and flawed, yet are rarely able to articulate exactly why new laws are needed. Instead, they cite each news story about a kidnapped child or Web predator as proof that more laws are needed, as if sex crimes would cease if only the penalties were harsher, or enough people were monitored. Yet the fact that rare crimes continue to be committed does not necessarily imply that current laws against those crimes are inadequate. By that standard, any law is ineffective if someone violates that law. We don’t assume that existing laws against murder are ineffective simply because murders continue to be committed.

In July 2006, teen abduction victim Elizabeth Smart and child advocate John Walsh (whose murdered son Adam spawned America’s Most Wanted) were instrumental in helping pass the most extensive national sex offender bill in history. According to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the bill’s sponsor, Smart’s 2002 “abduction by a convicted sex offender” might have been prevented had his bill been law. “I don’t want to see others go through what I had to go through,” said Smart. “This bill should go through without a thought.” Yet bills passed without thought rarely make good laws. In fact, a closer look at the cases of Elizabeth Smart and Adam Walsh demonstrate why sex offender registries do not protect children. Like most people who abduct children, Smart’s kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, was not a convicted sex offender. Nor was Adam Walsh abducted by a sex offender. Apparently unable to find a vocal advocate for a child who had actually been abducted by a convicted sex offender, Hatch used Smart and Walsh to promote an agenda that had nothing to do with the circumstances of their abductions. The two high-profile abductions (neither by sex offenders) were somehow claimed to demonstrate the urgent need for tighter restrictions on sex offenders. Hatch’s bill, signed by President Bush on July 27, will likely have little effect in protecting America’s children.

The last high-profile government effort to prevent Internet predation occurred in December 2002, when President Bush signed the Dot-Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act into law, creating a special safe Internet “neighborhood” for children. Elliot Noss, president of Internet address registrar Tucows Inc., correctly predicted that the domain had “absolutely zero” chance of being effective. The “.kids.us” domain is now a largely ignored Internet footnote that has done little or nothing to protect children.

Tragic Misdirection

The issue is not whether children need to be protected; of course they do. The issues are whether the danger to them is great, and whether the measures proposed will ensure their safety. While some efforts—such as longer sentences for repeat offenders—are well-reasoned and likely to be effective, those focused on separating sex offenders from the public are of little value because they are based on a faulty premise. Simply knowing where a released sex offender lives—or is at any given moment—does not ensure that he or she won’t be near potential victims. Since relatively few sexual assaults are committed by released sex offenders, the concern over the danger is wildly disproportionate to the real threat. Efforts to protect children are well-intentioned, but legislation should be based on facts and reasoned argument instead of fear in the midst of a national moral panic.

The tragic irony is that the panic over sex offenders distracts the public from the real danger, a far greater threat to children than sexual predators: parental abuse and neglect. The vast majority of crimes against children are committed not by released sex offenders but instead by the victim’s own family, church clergy, and family friends. According to a 2003 report by the Department of Human Services, hundreds of thousands of children are abused and neglected each year by their parents and caregivers, and more than 1,500 American children died from that abuse in 2003—most of the victims under four years old. That is more than four children killed per day—not by convicted sexual offenders or Internet predators, but by those entrusted to care for them. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, “danger to children is greater from someone they or their family knows than from a stranger.”

If journalists, child advocates, and lawmakers are serious about wanting to protect children, they should turn from the burning matchbook in front of them to face the blazing forest fire behind them. The resources allocated to tracking ex-felons who are unlikely to re-offend could be much more effectively spent on preventing child abuse in the home and hiring more social workers.

Eventually this predator panic will subside and some new threat will take its place. Expensive, ineffective, and unworkable laws will be left in its wake when the panic passes. And no one is protecting America from that.

Note

1. For more on this, see my article “Stranger Danger: ‘Shocking’ TV Test Flawed” here.

Today the climate has changed fundamentally. Complementary therapies seem to be encouraged everywhere. A government-sponsored patient guide published by the Prince of Wales’s Foundation for Integrated Health reads like a promotional brochure for complementary practitioners. The recent “Smallwood Report,” which was commissioned directly by Prince Charles (and funded by Dame Porter), goes one decisive step further: it advocates homeopathy as “an alternative” to conventional asthma treatments. And in his WHO address, Prince Charles again spoke out in favor of complementary medicine: “We need to re-discover and re-integrate some of the knowledge and well-tried practices that have been accumulated over thousand of years.”

With all this plugging and promoting, few people seem to bother about the scientific evidence. Is there, for instance, reasonable proof that homeopathy treats asthma effectively? If not, such advice could actually kill hundreds of British asthma patients per year! The answer is that the totality of the best evidence available today fails to show that homeopathy works for asthma. We therefore have a case in which the current trend toward “integrated health” is disclosed as being detrimental to the health of the nation.

Nonetheless, “integrated healthcare” is being pushed at all cost as the new buzzword for providing complementary medicine to the masses. According to Prince Charles, “We need to harness the best of modern science and technology, but not at the expense of losing the best of what complementary approaches have to offer. That is integrated health—it really is that simple.” In his WHO address he put it differently: “I believe that the proper mix of proven complementary, traditional, and modern remedies, which emphasizes the active participation of the patient, can help to create a powerful healing force for our world.”

This statement, it seems to me, is in fairly good agreement with the view expressed in a recent letter by thirteen British doctors (I was one of them) to all National Health Service (NHS) trusts. We urged the NHS to use those treatments (complementary or orthodox) that are backed up by good evidence and abandon those that are not. In other words, we did something entirely obvious and legitimate: we advocated the application of the rules of evidence-based medicine and pleaded for a single standard in healthcare. One could argue that Prince Charles’s public statements are a lay person’s expression of the concepts of evidence-based medicine. Great! I am delighted. But let’s be honest. If he means what he says, he should forthwith instruct all who work for him to stop promoting unproven or disproven treatments.

My team and I have researched complementary treatments for thirteen years. We have found many that generate more good than harm and many that don’t. In the second edition of our Desktop Guide to Complementary and Alternative Medicine (just published by Elsevier), we summarize the evidence in fifty-two different situations where one complementary therapy or another is unquestionably effective and many others where effectiveness is likely. If we all, including Prince Charles and his Foundation for Integrated Health, use this type of evidence wisely we can maximize the benefits of complementary medicine with minimal risk. But this approach requires critical analysis rather than unquestioning belief—and we don’t even need a new name for it. It’s called evidence-based medicine.

In preparation for this overview, I reviewed the entire corpus published in the past thirty years, which will soon be available on CD-Rom. What impressed me greatly was the wide range of topics and the distinguished authors that Ken has attracted to its pages. I can highlight only some of these in this article. I wish to use this occasion to focus on what I believe we have accomplished in the past three decades and to speculate as to what directions our magazine might take in future decades. Today, many threats to science come from disparate quarters—as Ken points out in his editorial, “In Defense of the Higher Values,” in the July/August 2006 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer. These include efforts to undermine the integrity of science and freedom of research, and we are continually confronted by irrational antiscientific forces rooted in fundamentalist religion and ideology. Given these challenges, no doubt skeptical inquiry will continue to be necessary in the future.

The original name of CSICOP was the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and Other Phenomena, but this mouthful was deemed too long—and the acronym would have been CSICOPOP—so we shortened it! It is clear that the Skeptical Inquirer was never intended to confine itself solely to paranormal issues; and the topics it has dealt with have been truly wide-ranging. The subtitle that was eventually developed and now appears on every issue is “The Magazine for Science and Reason,” which states succinctly what it is all about. It has encouraged “the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims,” but “it also promotes science and scientific inquiry, critical thinking, science education, and the use of reason.”

I.

The enduring contribution of the Skeptical Inquirer in its first three decades, I submit, has been its persistent efforts to raise the level of the public understanding of science. No nation or region can cope with the challenges of the global marketplace and compete effectively unless it provides a steady stream of highly educated scientific practitioners. This is true of the developing world, which wishes to catch up with the advanced industrial and informational economies; but it is true of those latter nations as well. Today, China and India have embarked upon massive efforts to increase the number of scientists in their countries—China graduates anywhere from 350,000 to 600,000 engineers annually, compared to 70,000 to 120,000 in the United States, of which some 30,000 are foreign born. Alas, we still have a tremendous task, for U.S. students rank only twenty-fourth in scientific knowledge out of the twenty-nine industrialized countries. Only 40 percent of twelfth graders tested had any comprehension of the basic concepts and methods of science. Presumably, even fewer political figures in Washington have the requisite comprehension!

The long-standing policy of CSICOP has been four-fold: (1) to criticize claims of the paranormal and pseudoscience, (2) to explicate the methods of scientific inquiry and the nature of the scientific outlook, (3) to seek a balanced view of science in the mass media, and (4) to teach critical thinking in the schools. Unfortunately, the constant attacks on science, the rejection of evolution by creationists and intelligent design advocates (some thirty-seven states have proposed programs to teach ID and creationism in the schools), the limiting of stem-cell research by the federal government, and the refusal to accept scientific findings about global warming vividly demonstrate the uphill battle that the United States faces unless it improves the public appreciation of scientific research.

Clearly, the major focus of the Skeptical Inquirer, especially in its first two decades, was on the paranormal; for there was tremendous public fascination with this area of human interest, which was heavily promoted and sensationalized by an often irresponsible media. Our interest was not simply in the paranormal curiosity shop but to increase an understanding among the general public of how science works.

The term paranormal referred to phenomena that allegedly went “beyond normal science.” Many topics were lumped under this rubric. And many credulous people believed that there was a paranormal-spiritual dimension that leaked into our universe and caused strange entities and events. Included in this mysterious realm was a wide range of phenomena, which the Skeptical Inquirer examined within its pages over the years: psychic claims and predictions; parapsychology (psi, ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis); UFO visitations and abductions by extraterrestrials (Roswell, cattle mutilations, crop circles); monsters of the deep (the Loch Ness monster) and of the forests and mountains (Sasquatch, or Bigfoot); mysteries of the oceans (the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis); cryptozoology (the search for unknown species); ghosts, apparitions and haunted houses (The Amityville Horror); astrology and horoscopes (Jeanne Dixon, the “Mars effect,” the “Jupiter effect”), spoon bending (Uri Geller); remote viewing (Targ and Puthoff); cult anthropology; von Däniken and the Nazca plains of Peru; biorhythms; spontaneous human combustion; psychic surgery and faith healing; the full moon and moon madness; firewalking; psychic detectives; Ganzfeld experiments; poltergeists; near-death and out-of-body experiences; reincarnation; Immanuel Velikovsky and catastrophes in the past; doomsday forecasts; and much, much more!

The term paranormal was first used by parapsychologists, but it was stretched uncritically by advocates of the New Age, the Age of Aquarius, and harmonic convergence to include bizarre phenomena largely unexamined by mainline science. Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Laureate and Fellow of CSICOP, at our conference at the University of Colorado in 1986—I can remember it vividly—observed that we skeptics do not really believe in the “paranormal,” because it deals with things beyond science, and as skeptical inquirers, he reiterated that we were dealing with investigations amenable to scientific methods of explanation. We would refuse to stop at any point and attribute phenomena to occult or hidden causes; we would keep looking for causal explanations and never declare that they were beyond the realm of natural causation by invoking the paranormal; and if we found new explanations, we would extend science to incorporate them. Incidentally, he also denied the feeling of some New Agers “that quantum mechanics is so weird, that anything goes” (Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1986).

Sociologist Marcello Truzzi, who studied satanic cults, pointed out in our very first issue that we intended to examine esoteric anomalous claims, the “damned facts,” as Charles Fort called them (hail in July, a rainfall of frogs, etc.), to see what we could make of them. The public was intrigued by such mysteries, and we tried to encourage scientific investigators to explain them and to find out if they ever even existed or occurred.

Almost every issue of the Skeptical Inquirer attempted to fathom what was really happening in one or another alleged paranormal area. Thus, Ray Hyman described the technique of “cold reading” to show how guesswork and cues were used by psychics to deceive people who thought that they were having a bona fide paranormal reading. Philip Klass, head of CSICOP’s UFO subcommittee, tried to unravel unusual cases of alleged UFO visitations and abductions in answer to astronomer J. Allen Hynek or Bruce Maccabee or other UFO buffs, and offered alternative prosaic explanations to account for apparent misperceptions. Conjuror James Randi and Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner looked for fraud or deceit. This was graphically illustrated in the case of a young psychic named Suzie Cottrell, who had bamboozled Johnny Carson by card reading. Put to the test under controlled conditions, Gardner said that she used Matt Schulein’s forced-card trick, and Randi caught her red-handed peeking at the bottom card (see the Spring 1979 issue).

The Skeptical Inquirer published what appeared to be solutions to previously unexplained mysteries. We became exasperated with the media—such as NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries, because they would present persons as having “real” paranormal abilities in spite of the fact that those persons were fraudulent—as in the case of Tina Resch, the Columbus, Ohio, youngster. Poltergeists supposedly manifested themselves when she came on the scene, lamps shattered, lights or faucets turned off and on. She was exposed by a TV camera that the crew left on while she thought that she was alone in a room: she was seen knocking down a lamp herself and screaming “poltergeist!”

I must say that these early years were exciting and exhilarating. We loved working with James Randi, Penn and Teller, Jamy Ian Swiss, Henry Gordon, Bob Steiner, and other magicians, who could usually duplicate a supposedly paranormal feat by sleight of hand or other forms of chicanery.

Deception is unfortunately widespread in human history, and it is revealing to point it out when it is encountered, especially where loose protocol makes it easy to hoodwink a gullible experimenter. Harry Houdini performed yeoman’s service earlier in the twentieth century by exposing the blatant fraud perpetuated by Marjery Crandon and other spiritualists and mediums. I surely do not wish to suggest that conscious deception is the primary explanation for all or even most paranormal beliefs. Rather, it is self-deception that accounts for so much credulity. There is a powerful willingness in all too many people to believe in the unbelievable in spite of a lack of evidence or even evidence to the contrary. This propensity was due in part to what I have called the transcendental temptation, the tendency to resort to magical thinking, the attribution of occult causes for natural phenomena. The best antidote for this, I submit, is critical thinking and the search for natural causes of such phenomena.

Some paranormalists complained that we were poking fun at them and that ridicule is no substitute for objective inquiry. Martin Gardner observed that one joke might be worth a thousand syllogisms, if it dethrones a phony or nincompoop. Editor Kendrick Frazier, in my judgment, has always attempted to be fair-minded; and if an article criticized a proponent of a paranormal claim, he would invariably give that person an opportunity to respond. We attempted to make it clear that we were interested in fair and impartial inquiry, that we were not dogmatic or closed-minded, and that skepticism did not imply a priori rejection of any reasonable claim. Indeed, I insisted that our skepticism was not totalistic or nihilistic about paranormal claims, but that we proposed to examine a claim by means of scientific inquiry. I called this “the new skepticism” (see the Skeptical Inquirer Winter 1994), to distance it from classical Greco-Roman skepticism, which rejected virtually anything and everything; for no kind of knowledge was considered reliable. But this was before the emergence of modern science, in which hypotheses and theories are based upon rigorous methods of empirical investigation, experimental confirmation, and replication, and also by whether a paranormal claim contradicts the body of tested theories or is consistent with them. One must be prepared to overthrow an entire theoretical framework—and this has happened often in the history of science—but there has to be strong contravailing evidence that requires it. It is clear that skeptical doubt is an integral part of the method of science, and scientists should be prepared to question received scientific doctrines and reject them in the light of new evidence.

II.

Looking back to the early years of the Skeptical Inquirer and CSICOP, it is evident that the salient achievement was that we called for new investigations and researchers in our network of collaborators responded by engaging in them.

1. A good illustration of this is the determined efforts by skeptics to evaluate astrology experimentally. Although not paranormal in a strict sense—it was surely on the fringe of science—nevertheless, the claim that there were astro-biological influences present at the moment of birth could be tested. The “Mars effect” was a good illustration of this. French psychologists Michel and Francois Gauquelin maintained that the positions of planets at the time and place of birth—in this case Mars (in the first and fourth sector of the heavens)—was correlated with whether or not a person would become a sports champion. Egged on by Truzzi and a British psychologist, Hans Eysenck, we attempted several tests of this claim, and scientists tested the birth dates of sports champions born in the United States and France (and similar tests were made for other planets and professions). The results were negative, but it took twenty years of patient investigation to ascertain that. The most likely explanation for the “Mars effect” is biased data selection by the Gauquelins. CSICOP encouraged other researchers (such as Shawn Carlson* and Geoffrey Dean) to test classical astrological claims. The results, published in the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer, again were invariably negative. Astrology provided no coherent theory or mechanism for the influence of planetary bodies at the time and place of a person’s birth.

2. Similar efforts were applied to parapsychology. Ray Hyman, James Alcock, Barry Beyerstein, and others were able by serious meta-analyses to evaluate the results of experimental research. Working with Charles Honorton, Robert Morris, and other parapsychologists, they questioned the findings of parapsychological investigations, and they found badly designed protocols, data leakage, experimenter biases, and insufficient replication by independent researchers.

   The significant achievement of the Skeptical Inquirer was that it helped crystallize an appreciation by the scientific community of the need to investigate such claims. After the establishment of CSICOP, many scientific researchers were willing to devote the time to carefully examine the data. These results were published in the Skeptical Inquirer, so there was an independent record of explanation. And anyone who was puzzled by the phenomena could consult this new literature to deflate the paranormal balloon. This applied to a wide range of other phenomena.

3. Near-death experiences provided insufficient evidence for the conjecture that a conscious self or soul left the body and viewed it from afar—this is better explained by reference to physiological and psychological causes, as Susan Blackmore pointed out in the Skeptical Inquirer (Fall 1991).
4. The ability of fire-walking gurus to walk over hot coals was not due to some mind-over-matter spiritual power but rather because hot embers are poor conductors of heat, and it was possible for anyone to attempt it without injury.

5. Another area of importance was the critical evaluation of the use of hypnosis by UFO investigators, who believed they were uncovering repressed memories that depicted alleged abductions. John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, used hypnosis to probe the unconscious minds of certain troubled people who thought they had been abducted aboard UFOs by extraterrestrials. There was a similar pattern in such cases, he said, which was repeated time and time again by his patients: a sense of lost time, flashing lights, out-of-body experiences, etc. Mack thought this provided strong evidence for the claim; skeptics maintained that these evidences were not corroborated by independent testimony. At one point, Carl Sagan wrote to us, urging CSICOP to undertake an investigation of these claims, which by then were proliferating everywhere. We invited John Mack to a CSICOP conference in Seattle in June 1994 to hear what he had to say. There was a colorful confrontation between John Mack the believer and Phil Klass the skeptic—who insisted that hypnosis was unreliable as a source of truth. The influence of urban abduction legends popularized by the mass media predisposed many fantasy-prone persons to imbibe this tale, and the suggestibility of hypnotists reinforced the reality of their subjective experiences. Some critics asked Mack whether he accepted the fantasies of his psychotic patients as true—which gave him some pause.

   “The Amazing” Kreskin, who used hypnosis in his act, appeared at one of CSICOP’s conferences expressing doubt that hypnosis was a genuine “trance state” or a source of truth—it seemed to work in suggestible patients because they followed the bidding of the hypnotist. (Incidentally, many skeptics were highly critical of Kreskin for suggesting that he possessed ESP.)

6. Hypnosis was also used in so-called past-life regressions to provide supposed evidence of previous lives. The Skeptical Inquirer carried many articles criticizing this technique. Past life therapists maintained that the hypnotic state provided empirical support for the doctrine of reincarnation, maintaining that the memory of a previous life was lodged deep within the unconscious. More parsimonious explanations of these experiences are available: creative imagination, suggestions implanted by the hypnotherapist, and cryptomnesia (information stored in the unconscious memory without knowledge of the true source). Again, there was no independent factual corroboration, and these methods seem to rely more on a priori belief in reincarnation than reliable empirical evidence.
7. Many research issues in psychology were critically examined in the Skeptical Inquirer. The work of Elizabeth Loftus is especially noteworthy here. In the decade of the 1990s, the mass media focused on charges that young children had been molested by relatives, friends, and teachers. Many reputations were destroyed after lurid accounts of sexual improprieties were made public. The popularity of such confessions spread like wildfire, and thousands of people claimed that they had been likewise molested. This was dramatized by the McMartin trial in California, where teachers in a day-care center were accused of sexual assaults of young children. This was based on testimony extracted from children and extrapolated by overzealous prosecutors. It had been pointed out that there is a “false-memory syndrome,” which is fed by suggestion, and that testimony based on this is highly questionable. The Skeptical Inquirer was among the first publications to point out the fragmentary nature of the evidence and the unreliability of such testimony. This helped to turn the tide against such accusations, many of which had been exaggerated.

It would be useful at this point to sum up the pitfalls that skeptical inquirers encountered in studying paranormal and fringe-science claims and of guidelines that emerged as a consequence:

• Eyewitness subjective testimony uncritically accepted without corroboration is a potential source of deception (in accounts of molestation, reports of apparitions, past-life regression, UFO visitations, etc.).
• Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
• The burden of proof rests with the claimant, not the investigators.
• Paranormal reports are like unsinkable rubber ducks: no matter how many times they are submerged, they tend to surface again.
• There is widespread gullibility and will to believe expressed by certain segments of the population, fascinated by mystery and magical thinking and willingness to accept tales of the occult or supernatural.
• In some cases, but surely not all, blatant fraud and chicanery may be observed, even in young children.
• In evaluating evidence, watch out for hidden bias and self-deception pro and con (including your own) to determine if something is a pseudoscience or not.
• There is no easily drawn demarcation line between science and pseudoscience, for one may be dealing with a proto-science. In my view, we need to descend to the concrete data and we cannot always judge a priori on purely philosophical grounds whether something is a pseudoscience or not (although I agree in general with Mario Bunge’s views about the characteristics of a pseudoscience; see Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1984 and July/August 2006).

III.

In recent years, popular interest in the paranormal has declined markedly, at least in comparison with its heyday. I do not deny that belief in paranormal phenomena is widespread; however, there are fewer manifestations of it in the mass media, and apparently less scientific interest. In previous decades, there were huge best sellers whose sales figures numbered in the millions: Raymond Moody’s Life After Life, Charles Berlitz’s The Bermuda Triangle, Erich von Däniken’s Chariot of the Gods, etc.

Today, very few such books make The New York Times best-sellers list; and a top-selling paranormal book is likely to sell only 200,000 to 300,000 copies. (Sylvia Browne is the current best-selling guru, but there are few others besides her.) And there are very few major television programs devoted to the paranormal, though there are smaller-market cable shows.

Attention has turned to other areas. First, alternative medicine has grown by leaps and bounds. Prior to 1996, very few medical schools taught courses or offered programs in alternative medicine—and the medical profession was highly skeptical of the therapeutic value of remedies such as homeopathy, acupuncture, Therapeutic Touch, herbal medicines, iridology, and chiropractic. This magazine published many articles critical of these areas. It may be that such therapies are useful—the criterion we suggested was to conduct random, double-blind tests of their efficacy. Until there is sufficient data to support a therapy, the public should be cautious of its use. The medical profession needs to be open-minded yet suspicious of therapies until they are demonstrated to work—notwithstanding the evidential value of placebos.

Interestingly, the skeptical movement in Europe has concentrated on alternative medicines, though this is not strictly paranormal but is on the borderline of fringe medicine. I must confess that we are dismayed by the rapid growth of alternative and complementary medicine, which has had enormous acceptance virtually overnight. This is helped no doubt by the fact that it is a highly profitable source of income for both practitioners and the companies that market herbal remedies. Homeopathy is very strong in Europe and is now making inroads in the United States, though its remedies have never been adequately tested. Therapeutic Touch is so widespread in the nursing profession that it has gained great acceptance, though the basis of its curative powers has not been adequately demonstrated. The role of intercessory prayer as a healing method has provoked considerable controversy. Some advocates of prayer have claimed positive results; however, skeptics have seriously questioned the methodology of these tests. The most systematic tests were recently conducted by a team of scientists led by Herbert Benson (see the July/August 2006 Skeptical Inquirer). Using fairly rigorous protocol, these tests produced negative results.

Many skeptics have likewise been very critical of schools of psychotherapy, notably psychoanalysis, for lacking clinical data about the efficacy of their methods. In this regard, the Center for Inquiry has taken over the journal The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice edited by Scott Lilienfeld, which evaluates the scientific validity of mental-health treatment modalities. Some people say that the change from evidence-based medicine to other forms of medicine spells the emergence of a new paradigm; Marcia Angel has observed that this shift is toward a kind of spiritual medicine, influenced by the growth of religiosity in the culture.

Over the years, the Skeptical Inquirer has dealt with many other areas that needed critical scrutiny, including the efficacy of dowsing, graphology, facilitated communication, SETI, animal speech, the Atkins Diet, obesity, the Rorschach test, holistic medicine, and veterinary medicine. In addition, there were many articles on the philosophy of science, the nature of consciousness, and the evidence for evolution.

IV.

Kendrick Frazier

Numerous distinguished scientists have contributed to Skeptical Inquirer, including Richard Feynman, Glenn Seaborg, Leon Lederman, Gerald Holton, Steve Weinberg, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Jill Tarter, Steven Pinker, Carol Tavris, Neil de Grasse Tyson, and Victor Stenger. Among the topics examined have been quantum mechanics, the brain and consciousness, and cold fusion. Thus, the scope of the Skeptical Inquirer under Kendrick Frazier’s editorship has been impressively comprehensive. And I should add that his fine editorials in every issue have pinpointed central questions of concern to science.

In a very real sense, the most important controversy in the past decade has been the relationship between religion and the paranormal and whether and to what extent CSICOP and the Skeptical Inquirer should deal with religious claims. As a matter of fact, evangelical and fundamentalist religion have grown to such proportions that religion and the paranormal overlap and one cannot easily deal with one without the other. The Skeptical Inquirer has dealt with religious claims from the earliest. First, it was in the vanguard of responding to the attacks on the theory of evolution coming from the creationists. Eugenie Scott, who served on the CSICOP Executive Council for a period of time, has done great service in critically analyzing “creation science,” and the Skeptical Inquirer was among the first magazines to do so, demonstrating that creationism is not a science, for it does not provide a testable theory. The young-earth view maintains that Earth and the species on it are of recent origin, a view so preposterous that it is difficult to take it seriously. Most recently, intelligent design theory (which rejects the young-earth theory) claims that the complexity of biological systems is evidence for design. Numerous articles in the Skeptical Inquirer have pointed out that evolution is supported by overwhelming evidence drawn from many sciences. The existence of vestigial organs in many species, including the human species, is hardly evidence for design; for they have no discernible function. And the extinction of millions of species on the planet is perhaps evidence for unintelligent design.

Second, the Skeptical Inquirer was always willing to deal with religious questions, insofar as there are empirical claims that are amenable to scientific treatment. Thus, the Shroud of Turin has been readily investigated in the Skeptical Inquirer (see, for example, November/December 1999), presenting evidence (such as carbon-14 dating) that indicated that it was a thirteenth-century cloth on which an image had been contrived. Joe Nickell (CSICOP’s Senior Research Fellow for the past decade) has said for years that the shroud is a forgery—as did the bishop of the area of France where it first turned up maintained. Moreover, Nickell has shown how such a shroud could easily have been concocted. Similarly, the so-called Bible code was easily refuted by Dave Thomas (see the Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 1997 and March/April 1998).

In recent years, reports of miracles have proliferated, much to the surprise of rationalists, who deplore the apparent reversion of society to the thinking of the Middle Ages. David Hume offered powerful arguments questioning miracles, which he said were due to ignorance of the causes of such phenomena. There is abundant evidence, said Hume, to infer that nature exhibits regularities; hence, we should reject any exception to the laws of nature. In the late eighteenth century, showers of meteorites were interpreted by religious believers as signs of God’s wrath. A special commission of scientists in France was appointed to investigate whether such reports of objects falling from the sky were authentic, and if so, if they were caused by natural events.

The Skeptical Inquirer has dealt with miracles in its pages, given the great public interest in them. The so-called miracle at Medjugorje, Yugoslavia, at a shrine where the Virgin Mary appeared before young children was critically discussed (November/December 2002). The conclusion was that the children’s testimony has not been corroborated by independent testimony and was hence suspect. But as a result of the attention the children received, they became media celebrities. Oddly, the Virgin never warned about the terrible war that was about to engulf Bosnia and Kosovo. The cases were similar for the numerous other sightings of Mary and those of Jesus, which have attracted great public fascination. The investigations of Joe Nickell are models to follow; Nickell refuses to declare a priori that any miracle claim is false, but instead, he attempts where he can to conduct an on-site inquest into the facts surrounding the case. If, after investigation, he can show that the alleged miracle was due to misperception or deception, his analysis is far more effective.

The one area of interest in the paranormal that has also had a resurgence in recent years is “communicating with the dead.” The form it has taken is reminiscent of the spiritualism of the nineteenth century, which had been thoroughly discredited because of fraud and deceit. The new wave of interest is fed by appearances on radio and television by such people as Sylvia Browne, James Van Praagh, and John Edwards. The techniques that the most popular psychics use are the crudest form of cold reading—which they seem to get away with easily. In some cases, they have resorted to doing hot readings (using information surreptitiously gleaned beforehand). This latter-day revival of spiritualism is no doubt fueled by the resurgence of religiosity in the United States, but it also shows a decline of respect for the rigorous standards of evidence used in the sciences.

The question of the relationship between science and religion intrigues many people today. It is especially encouraged by grants bestowed by the Templeton Foundation. Indeed, three special issues of the Skeptical Inquirer, beginning with July/August 1999 were devoted to explorations of the relationship or lack of it between these two perennial areas of human interest.

These issues of the Skeptical Inquirer proved to be the most popular that we have ever published. Most skeptics have taken a rather strong view that science and religion are two separate domains and that science needs latitude for freedom of research, without ecclesiastical or moral censorship. This is one of the most burning issues today. Stephen Jay Gould defended a dissenting viewpoint of two magisteria: religion, which included ethics within its domain, and science. The Skeptical Inquirer has consistently brought philosophers to its pages to discuss a range of philosophical questions on the borderlines of science, religion, and morality. Susan Haack, Mario Bunge, and myself, Paul Kurtz, among others, have argued that the scientific approach is relevant to ethics and therefore ethics should not be left to the exclusive domain of religion (see the September/ October 2004 Skeptical Inquirer).

V.

Skeptics have often felt isolated in a popular culture that is often impervious to or fails to fully appreciate the great discoveries of science on the frontiers of research. They have done arduous work attempting to convince producers, directors, and publishers to present the scientific outlook fairly. When pro-paranormal views are blithely expressed as true, we have urged that scientific critiques also be presented to provide some balance. Our goal is to inform the public about the scientific outlook. We believe that we still have a long way to go to achieve some measure of fairness in the media. Almost the first official act of CSICOP was to challenge NBC for its program Exploring the Unknown, narrated by Burt Lancaster, which presented pro-paranormal propaganda on topics such as psychic surgery and astrology, without any scientific dissent at all. Our suit against NBC citing the Fairness Doctrine was turned down by a federal judge, and our subsequent appeal to the First District Court in Washington was also rejected (see the Fall/Winter 1977 Skeptical Inquirer). Conversely, the Skeptical Inquirer has been the victim of many legal suits or threats of suits over the years. The most notorious was Uri Geller’s protracted legal suits against James Randi, CSICOP, and Prometheus Books. The most recent suit has named Elizabeth Loftus and CSICOP for an article that she authored (with Melvin J. Guyer) on the case of alleged sexual abuse of “Jane Doe” in the Skeptical Inquirer (May/June 2002). So the struggle that we have waged still continues.

On a more positive note, it is a source of great satisfaction that the Skeptical Inquirer is read throughout the world and that CSICOP has helped generate new skeptics groups, magazines, and newsletters almost everywhere—from Australia and China to Argentina, Peru, Mexico, and Nigeria; from India, Eastern Europe, and Russia to Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom, so that the Center for Inquiry/Transnational (including CSICOP) has become truly planetary in scope. Especially gratifying is the fact that CSICOP has convened meetings in places all over the world, including China, England, France, Russia, Australia, India, Germany, Africa, etc.

Looking ahead, I submit that the Skeptical Inquirer and CSICOP should investigate other kinds of intellectually challenging and controversial claims. It is difficult to know before- hand where the greatest needs will emerge. In my view, we cannot limit our agenda to the issues that were dominant thirty, twenty, or even ten years ago, interesting as they have been. I think that we should of course continue to investigate paranormal claims, given our skilled expertise in that area. But we need to widen our net by entering into new arenas we’ve never touched on before, and we should be ever-willing to apply the skeptical eye wherever it is needed. Actually, Editor Kendrick Frazier has already embarked in new directions, for recent issues of the Skeptical Inquirer have dealt with topics such as cyberterrorism, “A Skeptical Look at September 11,” “The Luck Factor,” and critical thinking about power plants and the waste of energy in our current distribution systems. But there are many other issues that we have not dealt with that would benefit from skeptical scrutiny—and these include issues in biogenetic engineering, religion, economics, ethics, and politics.

Perhaps we have already become the Committee for Scientific Investigation (CSI), to denote that we are moving in new directions. This fulfills our general commitment to science and reason that’s stated in the masthead of the Skeptical Inquirer. But one may say, there are so many intellectually controversial issues at large in society, which do we select? May I suggest the following criteria: we should endeavor to enter into an area, first, if there is considerable public interest and controversy; second, where there has not been adequate scientific research nor rigorous peer review; third, where some kind of interdisciplinary cooperative efforts would be useful; and fourth, where we can enlist the help of specialists in a variety of fields who can apply their skills to help resolve the issues.

We originally criticized pseudoscientific, paranormal claims because we thought that they trivialized and distorted the meaning of genuine science. Many of the attacks on the integrity and independence of science today come from powerful political-theological-moral doctrines. For example, one of the key objections to stem-cell research is that researchers allegedly destroy innocent human life—even when they deal with the earliest stage of fetal development or when a cell begins to divide in a petri dish. First is the claim that the “soul” is implanted at the moment of conception and that human life begins at the first division of a cell, and second, that it is “immoral” for biogeneticists working in the laboratory to intervene. The first claim is surely an occult notion if there ever was one, and it urgently needs to be carefully evaluated by people working in the fields of biology, genetics, and medical ethics; a similar response can be made to the second claim that it is immoral to intervene. There are many other challenges that have emerged in the rapidly expanding field of biogenetic research that might benefit from careful scrutiny: among these are the ethics of organ transplants, the use of mind-enhancing drugs, life-extension technologies, etc. The “new singularity,” says Ray Kurzweil, portends great opportunities for humankind but also perplexing moral issues that need examination.

VI.

In closing, permit me to touch on another practical problem that looms larger every day for the Skeptical Inquirer and other serious magazines like it. I am here referring to a double whammy: the growth of the Internet on the one hand and the steady decline of reading of magazines on the other. No doubt, the Internet provides an unparalleled resource for everyone, but at the same time, it has eroded the financial base of the Skeptical Inquirer; and we do not see any easy solution to the deficit gap that increasingly imperils our survival.

Recognizing these dangers, we have extended our public outreach, first by offering for the first time an academic program “science and the public” at the graduate level. Second, we have just opened an Office of Public Policy at our new Center for Inquiry in Washington, D.C., the purpose of which is to defend the integrity of science in the nation’s capital and to try to convince our political leaders of the vital importance of supporting science education and the public understanding of science.

Finally, the most gratifying factor in all of this has been the unfailing support of the readers of the Skeptical Inquirer, who have helped to sustain us throughout our first three decades. Your support has been especially encouraging to Kendrick Frazier, who has work so diligently in editing and publishing an outstanding magazine. It has been a rare privilege, an honor, for me to have worked with him so closely over these valiant years. We look forward to continuing the great legacy of the Skeptical Inquirer into its fourth decade and beyond.

Notes:

1. Clarification: Shawn Carlson first came to CSICOP’s attention with the publication of his paper “A Double-Blind Test of Astrology” in the December 5, 1985 edition of Nature. CSICOP then summarized Carlson’s paper as the lead News and Comment item in the Spring 1986 issue of Skeptical Inquirer. In November of 1988 Carlson was elected a CSICOP Scientific and Technical Consultant.

But above and beyond there’s still one name left over
And that is the name that you never will guess
The name that no human research can discover
But the cat himself knows and will never confess.

—T.S. Elliot, The Naming of Cats

In the late fall, the constellation Andromeda looms high above the horizon. It’s not a terribly bright constellation: the stars are faint enough that even low lights from a nearby town or city can wash them out.

But in ancient times, when light pollution was lower, those stars shone brightly over the Middle East, and astronomers carefully named them. The stars of Andromeda still bear the nomenclature of their arabic origins: Almach (a wild cat), Mirach (probably a rendition of Mizar, the loin, distorted over the centuries), and Alpheratz (the horse’s navel, of all things).

There are thousands of stars in Andromeda, of course. Most are too faint to have names and instead have catalog numbers, such as SAO 54033, or GSC 2261, or the poetic HIP 7607 (which, unfortunately, has nothing to do with the hip, unlike Mizar). But there is another star in Andromeda, not nearly so bright as Almach or Mirach, even fainter than many of its brethren that boast only serial designations. It’s so faint that you’d need a hefty pair of binoculars or a telescope to see it, and even if you did, you’d probably pass right over it, so ordinary is its glow. Yet it has a name, a full-blown proper name. You might recognize it: the star is named Philip Cary Plait.

How I got that name isn’t terribly interesting (a family tradition to name babies after recently departed loved ones is the culprit), but how the star got that name is a different story altogether. It’s a tale of morally shady dealings, outrage, and sadness. But most of all, it’s plain old bad astronomy.

So Many as the Stars of the Sky in Multitude

What’s in a name? A star, by any other word, would fuse as hot—if only Shakespeare had been an astronomer. But giving things names is so natural to humans. When my daughter was only four years old, she wanted to know the names of everything: types of rocks, insects, trees, even stars. I would tell her what was what (quartz, or praying mantis, or dogwood, or Vega), and she would solemnly repeat it, seemingly committing it to memory. But within a few seconds, we were off to some other phylum of study, the name already forgotten.

Back in the days of CB radio, your name was called your “handle,” a code word I always liked. Names are like handles, letting us grip an object. A name can help you classify an object or understand it better. And really, a name is a way of distinguishing one thing from a thousand others just like it.

The ancient astronomers saw the stars as making patterns in the sky, the constellations. The names they gave the stars were generally associated with the pattern. So the brightest star in Cygnus, the swan, became Deneb, meaning tail. Arcturus means “bear watcher,” appropriate enough for a bright star that appears to follow Ursa Major, the Big Bear, around the celestial pole. My favorite of all are Libra’s Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgenubi, respectively, the northern and southern claws, names given before Libra was split off from Scorpius, the scorpion.

But these are bright stars, of which there are only a few. It’s not hard to imagine astronomers in ancient Greece and Arabia scratching their heads over what to do with fainter stars. The unaided eye can see thousands of stars on a clear night, and that’s quite a brood. The astronomer Bayer simply gave them Greek letters in order of their brightness in a constellation (saddling us with things like Upsilon Coronae Borealis and Epsilon Ursae Majoris).

But even those names run out soon enough, and with the invention of the telescope, things got out of hand. The great cataloguer Flamsteed used numbers, ordering the stars in a constellation from east to west. In the nineteenth century, German astronomers created the Bonner Durchmusterung catalog, using stars’ coordinates (a celestial version of latitude and longitude) to designate them.

After a while, catalogs started getting more specific, so there were lists of double stars, lists of variable stars, lists of red stars, lists of magnetically peculiar stars, lists of stars with an unusual amount of carbon in their spectra. Astronomy, arguably the most beautiful and poetic of the sciences, was becoming laden with a very heavy dose of prosaicness. Of course, there are something like 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. What else can astronomers do?

In reality, astronomers can’t do all that much. But where science sees a dead end, the free market sees an opportunity.

That Worthy Name by Which Ye Are Called

Enter the International Star Registry (ISR). In the early 1980s, they saw that there’s gold in them thar points of light. They figured, with all those stars in the sky, why not sell people the right to name them? So they set up shop. Send them $50 and the name you want to give a star, and in return, they send you a kit that contains an artistically decorated certificate with the star name and coordinates, a small map with the position of the star on it, and a note saying that this is now the official name of the star. They added that “your” star name will be registered in a book that will be placed in a Swiss vault and also registered with the Library of Congress.

Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, there’s a problem with it. Not a problem for the ISR, certainly, since they claim to have sold hundreds of thousands of stars at that price, so they’re doing pretty well. The problem—or actually, problems—is that it’s not much more than a scam.

For one thing, getting something into the Library of Congress isn’t all that hard. They acquire something like 7,000 items every day! According to the Library’s Web site, items are acquired “Through exchange with libraries in this country and abroad, gifts, materials received from local, state and federal agencies as well as foreign governments, purchase, and copyright deposits.” With 530 miles of shelves in the Library, there’s room for lots of things that maybe aren’t all that special. So claiming that getting the catalog into the Library of Congress makes it special is a little deceptive.

Turns out, Switzerland wasn’t all that thrilled with having its name used in the ISR ads—the ISR had neglected to ask permission first from the Swiss government to use their country in the ads. Given Switzerland’s almost pathological history of neutrality, such a statement by them is a pretty strong indication you’ve done something wrong. Anyway, the claim of storing the catalogs in a Swiss vault is simply silly. For a set fee, you can get space in such a vault and put whatever you want in there: a deck of cards, that key on your key ring that doesn’t seem to fit any locks, an unmatched sock, that awful candy dish your mother-in-law gave you on your last birthday, what have you.

A third problem is that the name you give the star is in no way official. In fact, there’s no real official name for any star in the sky. There are names that astronomers use, names they agree upon, but even then, things are a bit fuzzy. The brightest star in the sky has the name Sirius. But it’s also called Alpha Canis Majoris, 9 Canis Majoris, HR 2491, HD 48915, and BD-16 1591. Any and all of these are equally good names for it, and which one you use depends on what you’re doing. At a star party, you’d use Sirius, but if you’re studying X-rays emitted from the star, you’d call it RX J0645.1-1642. Infrared astronomers might call it IRAS 06429-1639. Bad science fiction authors call it the Dog Star.

It’s much the same as how you might address a person depending on the circumstances: John if you’re a friend, Mr. Smith if it’s formal, John Smith if it’s a letter, or Mr. J0hn Sm1th if you’re sending him spam.

As a final piece of silliness, some astronomers told me that they looked into the stars sold by the ISR and discovered that in some cases, the same star has been sold multiple times to different people. 200 billion stars in the galaxy, and the ISR had to resell the same few over and over again.

That Was the Name Thereof

There is a group of astronomers who keep track of all this. They are the International Astronomical Union Commission 5, an appropriate handle for the Keepers of the Names. Basically, they lay out a set of rules to use when something in the sky gets named. Asteroids, for example, need to have well-determined orbits first. Then they are given a number, and then the discoverer can propose a name, which they must defend. Then, sometimes months or even years later, the asteroid gets that name, unless it’s rejected for some reason. IAU Commission 5 has, on its Web page (http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/iau-spec.html) rules for naming just about everything . . . except, apparently, stars. They do list how to name something using coordinates, what symbols you can use (for example, slashes, dashes, and underscores are allowed, though, oddly, not the degree sign), and so on. But they don’t say anything explicit about paying money and giving a star the name of your poodle. Since it’s not specifically ruled out, I suppose you could argue that it’s allowed.

Incidentally, the IAU does have a Web site (www.iau.org/ BUYING_STAR_NAMES.244.0.html) about star-naming companies, and it has a clear ring of distaste running through it (it refers to the practice as “charlatanry”). So their position on this issue is pretty clear.

So, if you are running a star-naming company, you cannot state that the name given to a star is “official,” since there are no real official names for stars. Saying that implies, strongly, that astronomers will use your name for a star instead of whatever designation it already has. Even if this isn’t outright wrong, it’s at the very least misleading.

The New York Office of Consumer Affairs certainly felt this way. It levied an injunction against the ISR for using deceptive advertising in New York City, and the ISR was found guilty on multiple counts, with fines up to $3,500 (a tiny fraction, of course, of the company’s income). The Federal Trade Commission weighed in, forbidding the ISR from using the Library of Congress in its ads too. This small road block hasn’t even slowed down the ISR. It still advertises, mostly around Christmas (though the ads no longer mention the Library of Congress).

Many people ask, understandably, what harm does this cause? Who cares if people are making money by selling star names? After all, caveat emptor. But, it turns out that there is a nasty side to this business.

Purpose Under the Heavens

Many stars are “bought” from the ISR as gifts to friends and family, of course. But a great number of them are purchased as memorials, a tribute to a loved one who has died. This is a sad and beautiful thought, to be able to commemorate a lost relative with a star in the sky.

But the star isn’t really named after that person, and certainly no astronomer uses that name for the star. Again, this wouldn’t normally be a problem (as long as such deception is okay by you), except that there are times when the people involved go to an observatory and ask to see the star named after their dead son or daughter.

Imagine being an astronomer during an observatory’s public night, happily showing people the wonders of the universe through the telescope, then having someone ask you to see the star they named after their daughter who died tragically. They only have the name they gave it, not the position or any other name that might be useful. Worse, they really, honestly think that every astronomer has access to the ISR and can easily find their star. Having run many a public night myself, I can only imagine how horrible I would feel. In such cases, what do you do, tell the people they were lied to, or deceived, crushing them? Or do you keep quiet, spare their raw feelings, and perpetuate the lie by showing them some random star?

Many astronomers don’t have to imagine this. It’s happened to them. One astronomer, Bob Martino, the assistant director of the Perkins Observatory at Ohio Wesleyan University, has had this happen to him at least four times. At first, he learned to swallow his anger and simply point the telescope. Finally though, he couldn’t take it quietly any more. He put up a Web page railing against the idea of selling stars. He said the practice was fraudulent, a scam (after all, the ISR was found guilty of misleading advertising in New York City). He was pretty clear about how he felt.

In the year 2000, the ISR retaliated. Their legal arm threatened to sue the university, the observatory, its director, and Martino. The ISR, backed by a lot of money, put quite a bit of legal pressure on the planetarium, which did not have a lot of money. Martino took his page down, though he was unhappy about it. Nothing Martino said about the ISR was untrue, just unflattering.

It’s interesting to note that the ISR was never directly indicated anywhere on Martino’s page. There was a link at the bottom of the page about the New York City case, which mentioned the ISR, but that was it. Even that was too much for the ISR, which again contacted the university, insisting that the Web site could not talk about star naming at all. From a baseless case of slander, the situation was quickly turning into one of First Amendment rights. As Martino put it, it was “. . . a case of a consumer advocate being muzzled by a company of extremely questionable moral integrity.” After this event, several astronomers who had Web pages about star-naming companies edited their pages, carefully and prominently mentioning the First Amendment. Some sites even linked to a copy of the Constitution.

For his part, Martino kept up the fight. He made his opinion clear on the Internet through various mailing lists and bulletin boards. The ISR once again contacted his university, stating that the company wanted Martino to cease talking about it, claiming that Martino was representing himself as a spokesman for the university. This claim, Martino says, has “no basis whatsoever.” He says his comments were made on his own time, using his private Internet account through his own Internet provider, and the university had nothing to do with it. Still, the university was being pressured by the ISR’s legal arm, so they sent Martino a letter making it clear that he’d better stop talking about the ISR. Martino wound up moving the whole page about star naming to a private Web site, which is mirrored in many places (for example, at www.enzerink.net/peter/astronomy/starfaq/).

Martino is still pretty ticked about all this. As he put it, “A small company operating a business based on deception can squelch free speech rights at a university merely by having a lawyer send a letter.” It also doesn’t help him to remember those grieving people to whom he had to lie.

Martino does extract some small amount of satisfaction, though, that his star-naming page gets far more hits than it did before the ISR threatened him. Evidently, the publicity woke up other astronomers to this, and they now link their sites to his page as well.

I’ll note that Martino has a daughter, named Celeste: she is named after the stars, and not the other way around.

Their Starry Host

And what of “my” star, Philip Cary Plait? It’s a dim bulb, a tenth-magnitude speck, lost among thousands of others. I couldn’t find it with binoculars if I tried. My brothers got it for me for my birthday many years ago—yes, from the ISR. I was curious about it when I was first researching this topic, so I called the ISR and asked them about it. It turns out that this was one of the first stars they “sold,” and they had to go to their first catalog to find it. They couldn’t give me the exact position, but the information I got was good enough that I was able to figure it which star it was. Here’s an image of it:

Can you spot it? It’s the one dead center. The field of view of the image is roughly a degree across, twice the width of the full moon. Look at all those stars! Some people say that studying astronomy makes them feel insignificant. I actually have proof of it.

The final humiliation is that “my” star, of course, already has a name—BD+48 683. It’s been listed for over a century in the German Bonner Durchmusterung catalog used by practically every astronomer on the planet. Now that’s an official name.

The Stars Will Fall from the Sky, and the Heavenly Bodies Will Be Shaken

In the end, I suggest to people that if they really want to buy a star, they should feel free, but they should be aware of what they are getting for their money. You could just as easily pick any star in the sky, even the brightest one, and make your own certificate on your computer claiming ownership. It’s certainly just as official as what the ISR does.

Here’s an even better idea. Most observatories and planetaria are strapped for cash. Instead of buying a star, you could give them a donation, and they can use those funds to sponsor educational programs. That way, instead of hogging one star all for yourself, you’ll be giving hundreds or thousands of people a chance to see all the stars in the sky.

Remember—the stars are for everyone, and they’re free. Go to your local observatory and take a peek.