Q: I recently came across a Christian publication which claimed that Noah’s Ark had been found. I don’t believe it. What is the truth?

—M. Andrade

A: In this world there are things that seem on the verge of being discovered every so often, yet never quite materialize. The “Lost City” of Atlantis, for example, has been claimed to have been found at least a half dozen times. One researcher is pretty sure it is in Bolivia; another says it is Antarctica; a third claims that Bimini beachrock may be from the lost civilization (see Eugene Shinn’s article in the January/February 2004 SI). So it is with Noah’s Ark.

The difference is, of course, that the implications of Noah’s Ark actually being found extend far beyond archaeology. The weight of all the world’s animals is nothing compared to the religious freight that the Ark carries.

The Ark story is implausible on the face of it; there simply wouldn’t be enough space on the boat to accommodate two (or seven, depending on the source) of every living animal (including dinosaurs), along with the food and water necessary to keep them alive for over six months. Still, biblical literalists—those who believe that proof of the Bible’s events remains to be found—have spent lives and fortunes trying to validate their beliefs.

Before discussing the recent claims regarding the whereabouts of Noah’s vessel, a history of Ark “finds” is instructive. Violet M. Cummings is the author of several books on Noah’s Ark, among them Noah’s Ark: Fable or Fact? (1975), in which she claimed that Noah’s Ark was found on Turkey’s Mount Ararat. According to the 1976 book and film In Search of Noah’s Ark, “there is now actual photographic evidence that Noah’s Ark really does exist.... Scientists have used satellites, computers, and powerful cameras to pinpoint the Ark’s exact location on Mt. Ararat.” This is a rather remarkable claim, for despite repeated trips to Mt. Ararat over the past thirty years, the Ark remains elusive. Undeterred by a lack of evidence, in 1982 Cummings issued a book titled, Has Anybody Really Seen Noah’s Ark?, published by Creation-Life Publishers. The subtitle, “An Affirmative Definitive Report,” hints at Cummings’s conclusion.

Interest in Noah’s Ark resurfaced in February 1993, when CBS aired a two-hour primetime special titled, The Incredible Discovery of Noah’s Ark. (Little did CBS know that they were using incredible in its accurate, proper meaning: “not credible.”) As Ken Feder describes in his book Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries, the special “was a hodgepodge of unverifiable stories and misrepresentations of the paleontological, archaeological, and historical records.” It included the riveting testimony of a George Jammal, who claimed not only to have personally seen the Ark on Ararat but recovered a piece of it. Jammal’s story (and the chunk of wood he displayed) impressed both CBS producers and viewers. Yet Jammal was later revealed as a paid actor who had never been to Turkey and whose piece of the Ark was not an unknown ancient timber (identified in the Bible as “gopher wood”) but instead modern pine soaked in soy sauce and artificially aged in an oven. Red-faced CBS, which had not done a whit of fact-checking for their much-hyped special, said that the program was entertainment, not a documentary.

So the matter stood until June 2006, when a team of archaeologists from the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration (B.A.S.E) Institute, a Christian organization, claimed to have found Noah’s Ark at 13,000 feet in the Elburz mountains of Iran. “I can’t imagine what it could be if it is not the Ark,” said team member Arch Bonnema. They brought back pieces of stone they claim may be petrified wood beams, as well as video footage of the Ark (and by “the Ark” I mean “a large dark rock formation”).

The team believes that within the rock they can see evidence of hundreds of massive, hand-hewn wooden beams laid out in the presumed size and shape of the Ark. They seem to have experienced pareidolia; seeing what they want to see in ambiguous patterns or images. Just as religious people will see images of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in toast, stains, or clouds, they may also see images of Noah’s Ark in stone cliffs. (In New Mexico’s Santa Fe National Forest there is a large rock formation called Battleship Rock, which—from a certain angle—does indeed look like a battleship. One wonders what the B.A.S.E. team would make of that.)

Noah’s Ark enthusiasts are in the somewhat awkward position of deciding which (if any) of several alleged Ark finds is the real one.

The B.A.S.E. claims have yet to be proven. Ultimately, it may not matter, because, as founder Bob Cornuke states, “I guess what my wife says my business is, we sell hope. Hope that it could be true, hope that there is a God.” Yet the question is not about faith, hope, or God; the question is whether Noah’s Ark is real and has been found. Like Atlantis, the Ark will continue to be “found” by those looking for it— whether it exists or not.

For the fiftieth anniversary of the incident, I was invited to give a talk at a Little Green Men Festival in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, staged by its Chamber of Commerce. I determined to investigate the story that had caught the attention of the U.S. Air Force’s “Project Blue Book” (which investigated 12,000 UFO reports from 1952 to 1969) and that also inspired a novel (Karyl 2004), a video documentary (“Monsters” 2005), and even an X-Files comic book (“Crop” 1997).

My investigation included visiting the site in the company of UFOlogist and fellow invited speaker Peter Davenport. (We were each given a key to the city by Hopkinsville mayor Richard G. Liebe and chauffeured in his car on research jaunts by Rob Dollar.) I also obtained copies of original newspaper clippings at the Hopkinsville Public Library, conducted further research at the local museum, talked with witnesses to the events, studied detailed reports on the case, and much more. I even attended a Holiness Church tent revival, just down the road from the site of the Kelly incident, held in response to the Little Green Men Festival. Many of the congregation wore green T-shirts with the slogan “Son of Man Is Coming Back.” Pastor Wendell “Birdie” McCord (2005) told me, “I don’t know whether the green men is [sic] coming back, but I know the Son of Man is coming back.”

Background

On the evening of Sunday, August 21, 1955, present at the Sutton farmhouse at Kelly were eleven people: widowed family matriarch Glennie Lankford (50); her children, Lonnie (12), Charlton (10), and Mary (7); two sons from her previous marriage, Elmer “Lucky” Sutton (25) and John Charley “J.C.” Sutton (21), and their respective wives, Vera (29) and Alene (27); Alene’s brother, O.P. Baker (30 or 35); and a Pennsylvania couple, Billy Ray Taylor (21) and June Taylor (18). The Taylors, along with “Lucky” and Vera Sutton, had been visiting for a while, being occasional carnival workers.

Not all of the eleven were eyewitnesses to the most significant events. One of the women, apparently June Taylor, had been “too frightened to look” (Davis and Bloecher 1978, 14), and Lonnie Lankford (2005), speaking to me at age 62, said that, during the fracas, his mother had hidden him and his brother and sister under a bed.

About seven o’clock, Billy Ray Taylor was drawing water from the well when he saw a bright light streak across the sky and disappear beyond a tree line some distance from the house. According to researcher Isabel Davis, who investigated the case in 1956 (Davis and Bloecher 1978, 15), Billy Ray Taylor was different from the other eyewitnesses:

He had looked at the creatures with extravagant success. He was the only member of the group who appeared to arouse immediate doubt in everyone who talked to him. . . . Even among the family he had a low standing; when he first came into the house and reported a “spaceship,” they paid him no attention. Later, during the investigations, he basked in the limelight of publicity. He elaborated and embroidered his description of the creatures (though not his description of the “spaceship”) and eventually produced the most imaginative and least credible of the little-men sketches. Several skeptics who labeled the story a hoax referred to him as the probable originator. His behavior was in sharp contrast to that of the other witnesses, none of whom aroused such prompt suspicion in the investigators.

About an hour after Taylor reported his “flying saucer” sighting, a barking dog attracted him and “Lucky” Sutton outside. Spotting a creature, they darted into the house for a .22 rifle and shotgun, thus beginning a series of encounters that spanned the next three hours. Sometimes, the men fired at a scary face that appeared at a window; sometimes, they went outside, whereupon, on one occasion, Taylor’s hair was grabbed by a huge, clawlike hand. Once, the pair shot at a little creature that was on the roof and at another “in a nearby tree” that then “floated” to the ground. Either the creatures were impervious to gun blasts or the men’s aim was poor, since no creature was killed.

After a lull in the “battle,” everyone piled into their cars and drove eight miles south to Hopkinsville’s police headquarters. Soon, more than a dozen officers—from city, county, and state law-enforcement agencies—had converged on the site. Their search yielded nothing, apart from a hole in a window screen. There were “no tracks of ‘little men,’ nor was there any mark indicating anything had landed at the described spot behind the house.” By the following day, reportedly, the U.S. Air Force was involved ([Dorris] 1955) but ultimately listed the case as “unidentified” (Clark 1998).

Aliens?

Figure 2. Lonnie Lankford was only twelve when the “Little Green Men” incident occurred.

The earliest articles on the incident did not refer to “Little green men.” That color was apparently later injected by the national media, although “Lucky” Sutton’s son now says his father described them as “silver” with “a greenish silver glow” (“It Came” 2005, 8, 10).

Other details are also somewhat fuzzy. The beings were described in the first newspaper story as “about four feet tall,” having “big heads” with “huge eyes,” and “long arms” ([Dorris] 1955). However, they were downsized by Glennie Lankford (1955) to “two and a half feet tall” and were said to have large pointed ears, clawlike hands (with talons at the fingers’ ends), and eyes that glowed (or shone) yellow. They also had “spindly,” inflexible legs (Clark 1998; Davis and Bloecher 1978, 1, 28).

Although the earliest published story claims there were twelve to fifteen creatures, the fact is that in only one instance did the eyewitnesses see more than one creature, and that was the time (mentioned earlier) when a pair was spotted (one on the roof, one in a tree) (Clark 1998; Davis and Bloecher 1978, 18, 27).

From the outset, people offered their proposed solutions to the mystery. In addition to those who thought it was a hoax, some attributed the affair to alcohol intoxication. I talked with one of the original investigators, former Kentucky state trooper R.N. Ferguson (2005), who thought people there had been drinking, although he conceded he saw no evidence of that at the site. He told me he believed the monsters “came in a container” (i.e., a can or bottle of alcohol). A visitor to the farm the next day did notice “a few beer cans in a rubbish basket” (Davis and Bloecher 1978, 35). Whether or not drinking was involved, it was not responsible for the “saucer” sighting; other UFOs were witnessed in the area that evening (Davis and Bloecher 1978, 33). (More on this later.)

Monkeys represented another “theory.” Supposedly, one or more monkeys had escaped either from a zoo or a traveling circus. However, there was never any credible evidence of such an escape (Clark 1998; Carlton 2005). The search for a terrestrial explanation of the incident would have to continue.

Solution

Figure 3. The author is “kidnapped” by “aliens” at the fiftieth-anniversary festival of the incident in Kelly, Kentucky.

I long ago recognized the Kelly flap as being very similar to two alleged alien-encounter incidents that occurred in West Virginia, the 1952 appearance of the “Flatwoods Monster” and the 1966 “Mothman” sightings—the first convincingly identified as a barn owl (Nickell 2000), the second as a barred owl (Nickell 2002).

A year after my Flatwoods Monster article appeared in Skeptical Inquirer, a young French UFOlogist, Renaud Leclet, wrote articles on the Flatwoods and Kelly cases. He concurred with my determination in the former case, and now I can return the favor in the latter. I had suspected owls in the Kelly case, but—since I prefer to investigate on site—I was awaiting an opportunity to visit the area; that came with my invitation to speak at the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the event. By then, Leclet had ventured to identify the Kelly entities from afar.

Although he and I have reached the same conclusion, he refers to the creature as an “eagle owl” (Leclet 2001), a designation for the genus Bubo that is not generally used by most authorities when specifically referring to the species Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus)—popularly called a “hoot owl.” (See, for example, National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: Eastern Region [Bull and Ferrand 1994].) Confusion can thus occur. [1]

Echoing descriptions of the Kelly “little men,” the Great Horned Owl has a height of some 25 inches; very large, staring, yellow eyes; long ear tufts; a large head, set (without apparent neck) on its shoulders; a light-grey underside; long wings that, seen on edge, could be mistaken for arms; spindly legs; claws with talons; and so on (“Great” 2006; Bull and Ferrand 1994). An owl could be on a roof or in a tree and be perceived to “float” to the ground. As to their behavior, Great Horned Owls are “extremely aggressive when defending the nest,” and their activity typically “begins at dusk” (“Great” 2006).

Although some accounts claim the little beings “glowed,” Glennie Lankford, in her statement (1955), actually used the word shining. That might have been simply an effect caused by the farm lights.

As to the “flying saucer” sighting that preceded the encounter, there were area sightings of “meteors” at the time (Davis and Bloecher 1978, 33—34, 61—62). Most likely what was witnessed was a very bright meteor (or “fireball”).

In summary, allowing for the heightened expectation prompted by the earlier “flying-saucer” sighting, and for the effects of excitement and nighttime viewing, it seems likely that the famous 1955 Kelly incident is easily explained by a meteor and a pair of territorial owls.

What a hoot!

Acknowledgments

In addition to those mentioned in the text, I am grateful to Betsy Bond and her colleagues at the Hopkinsville-Christian County Chamber of Commerce and all the other area folk who assisted me in my work, notably Donna K. Stone of the Pennyroyal Area Museum in Hopkinsville and William Turner, county historian with the Christian County Historical Society. I am as usual grateful to CFI Libraries director Tim Binga, and also library assistant Lisa Nolan, for research assistance.

Note

1. For example, somehow Leclet (2001) reports “eagle owls” as having facial discs that are “white,” whereas those of Great Horned Owls are yellow (or “tawny-buff”: see “Great” 2006).

References

• Bull, John, and John Ferrand, Jr. 1994. National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: Eastern Region. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
• Carlton, Michelle. 2002. Kelly green men: Children of witness to alleged alien invasion defend father’s 1955 claim. Kentucky New Era (Hopkinsville, Ky.), December 30.
• —. 2005. Myriad of theories speculate on Kelly legend. (In “It Came” 2005, 3, 14).
• Clark, Jerome. 1998. UFO Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., in two volumes. Detroit: Omnigraphics, volume II: 552—554.
• Crop Duster. 1997. Issue 32 of X-Files comic book, New York: Topps Comics; cited in “It Came From Kelly” 2005: 5, 12.
• Davis, Isabel, and Ted Bloecher. 1978. Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955. Evanston, Illinois: Center for UFO Studies.
• [Dorris, Joe]. 1955. Story of space ship, 12. Little men probed today. Kentucky New Era (Hopkinsville, Ky.: August 22. (Cf. “It came” 2005, 10.)
• Ferguson, R.N. 2005. Interview by Joe Nickell.
• Great horned owl. 2006. The Owl Pages; accessed July 7, 2006.
• It Came from Kelly. 2005. Publication of Kentucky New Era newspaper, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, n.d. [August].
• Karyl, Anna. 2004. The Kelly Incident. Vallejo, California: Gate Way Publishers.
• Lankford, Lonnie. 2005. Interview by Joe Nickell, August 20.
• Lankford, Glennie. 1955. Statement signed August 22; text given in Davis and Bloecher 1978: 112.
• Leclet, Renaud. 2001. Kelly-Hopkinsville. Series of articles dated August 28; online here; accessed July 10, 2006.
• McCord, Wendell. 2005. Interview by Joe Nickell, August 19.
• Monsters of the UFO. 2005. Video previewed August 20, referenced in “It Came” 2005: 12—13.
• Nickell, Joe. 2000. The Flatwoods UFO monster. Skeptical Inquirer 24(6) (November/ December): 15—19.
• —. 2002. Mothman revisited. Skeptical Briefs 12:4 (December), 8—9.

Emerging from the conference was an agreement between humanists and skeptics from Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Chile, and Venezuela to found an Ibero-American Federation of Centers for Inquiry. The federation will help to increase the influence of science and humanism in Latin America. This represents the first effort at organizing a rationalist-freethought alliance across the region. Meeting with Paul Kurtz, Joe Nickell, Benjamin Radford, and Norm Allen, all from CFI headquarters in Amherst, New York, were Hugo Estrella and Alejandro Borgo of Argentina, Hernán Toro of Colombia, Guido Nuñez of Venezuela, Manuel A. Paz y Miño of Peru, and Enrique Bernain of Chile, among others.

From left to right: Alejandro J. Borgo, Joe Nickell, Hugo Estrella, and Benjamin Radford answering questions from the audience. (Photo: Hernán Toro)

The objectives of this new federation include forming an international advisory board of distinguished people of Latino descent, such as Mario Bunge (of Argentina and Canada) and Ruben Ardila (of Colombia); issuing a declaration to the media and public at large, that spells out the federation’s aims and objectives; starting an e-mail discussion list (this has been done already); designating the Center for Inquiry/Peru as the headquarters for the publication of books on skepticism and humanism in Spanish, and the Center for Inquiry in Argentina, for magazines; and starting a Spanish-language newsletter for skeptics and humanists.

From left to right.: Enrique Bernain (Chile), Rubén Ardila (Colombia), Héctor Guillén (Perú), Guido Nuñez Mujica (Venezuela), and Joe Nickell (USA) during a coffee break. (Photo: Pensar magazine)

During the conference, CFI chair and founder Paul Kurtz delivered an address on “Humanism and Planetary Ethics.” In addition, while in Peru, Kurtz received an honorary award from San Marcos University, founded in 1512, the oldest university in the Western Hemisphere.

CSICOP and leading scientists have long argued that the public needs to be more scientifically literate. Paul Kurtz, Chairman of the Center for Inquiry and CSICOP, has pointed out that the foundations of our democratic society are now under attack. “The social and scientific progress we take for granted have been advanced by a basic scientific philosophical point of view: scientific naturalism,” said Kurtz. “The methods of the sciences, and the assumptions upon which they are based, are being challenged culturally in the United States today as never before. Despite its success in providing us with unparalleled benefits, religious fundamentalists seek to inhibit free inquiry and to misrepresent the tested conclusions of scientific naturalism. This is a highly charged political issue—both science and secularism are under political attack.”

Recently, several public-policy controversies have illustrated the public need for a broad expertise in scientific naturalism. President Bush’s blatantly political veto of Congress’s bipartisan bill to expand federal funding of stem-cell research illustrates vividly how both the will of the majority and scientific progress are under attack at the very highest levels.

The intelligent design debate culminated in the Dover, Pennsylvania, lawsuit, but continues through local and state attempts to dilute science curricula. It is not only a scientific dispute but a part of a broader cultural war on scientific naturalism and the values of the Enlightenment in general.

NASA became embroiled in another public controversy when a politically appointed spokesperson began insisting that references to the Big Bang be diluted with language indicating that NASA took no position on whether that event actually happened and that it is only a “theory.” Under intense criticism, that spokesperson resigned, but the incident calls attention to the dangers of mixing science, religion, and politics.

The Center for Inquiry’s Office of Public Policy will draw on CFI’s relationship with leading scientists, academics, and public intellectuals, who all share the Center’s stated purpose and concerns. The office intends to develop relationships with sympathetic legislators in D.C.; provide experts to testify in legislative hearings; submit white papers, solicited from CFI’s and CSICOP’s impressive network of fellows and scholars; and work with legislators who care about science and reason to affect legislative responses to attacks on Enlightenment values. In sum, the Center for Inquiry is expected to become a full-fledged player in the public-policy arena, aspiring to the ranks of organizations such as Brookings, Heritage, and Cato, all of which serve as both think tanks and public-policy advocates.

The new office is located at 621 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, Washington, D.C. 20003. The telephone number is (202) 546-2331. CFI DC’s website can be found here: http://www.cfidc.org.

See Also

• Center for Inquiry - DC: Office of Public Policy
• Declaration in Defense of Science and Secularism
• Press Release

Leakey called the churches’ plans “the most outrageous comments I have ever heard.” He told The Daily Telegraph (London): “The National Museums of Kenya should be extremely strong in presenting a very forceful case for the evolutionary theory of the origins of mankind. The collection it holds is one of Kenya’s very few global claims to fame and it must be forthright in defending its right to be at the forefront of this branch of science.” Leakey was for years director of the museum and of Kenya’s entire museum system.

The museum’s collections include the most complete skeleton yet found of Homo erectus, the 1.7-million-year-old Turkana Boy unearthed by Leakey’s team in 1984 near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.

The museum also holds bones from several specimens of Australopithecus anamensis, believed to be the first hominid to walk upright, four million years ago. Together the artifacts amount to the clearest record yet discovered of the origins of Homo sapiens.

Leaders of Kenya’s Pentecostal congregation, with six million adherents, want the human fossils de-emphasized. “The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact,” said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, head of the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya, the Christ is the Answer Ministries.

“Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory,” the bishop said.

Bishop Adoyo said all the country’s churches would unite to force the museum to change its focus when it reopens after eighteen months of renovations in June 2007. “We will write to them, we will call them, we will make sure our people know about this, and we will see what we can do to make our voice known,” he said.

It was these comments Leakey termed outrageous. Calling members of the Pentecostal church fundamentalists, Leakey added: “Their theories are far, far from the mainstream on this. They cannot be allowed to meddle with what is the world’s leading collection of these types of fossils.”

For its part, the museum sounded like it was trying to walk a tightrope. It said it was in a “tricky situation” in trying to redesign its exhibition space for all kinds of visitors. “We have a responsibility to present all our artifacts in the best way that we can so that everyone who sees them can gain a full understanding of their significance,” said Ali Chege, public relations manager for the National Museums of Kenya. “But things can get tricky when you have religious beliefs on one side, and intellectuals, scientists, or researchers on the other, saying the opposite.”

Joshua Fineberg is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and a composer whose works are widely performed in the United States and Europe. He collaborates with computer scientists and music psychologists to help develop tools for computer-assisted composition, electronic sound manipulation, and in music perception research. In 2004 Fineberg became the U.S. editor of The Contemporary Music Review. In 2006 his book Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture through a Composer’s Ears was published by Routledge. Fineberg is associated with the movement known as “spectral music,” which draws on acoustics and computer technology to explore the fundamental nature of sound (a spectrum is a representation of a sound in terms of the amount of vibration at each of the individual frequencies that make it up). In spectral composition, timbre often eclipses melody as the primary musical element.

What is spectral music?

All such labels are kind of awkward, but the common thread is that rather than taking for granted certain sonic categories as the most musically relevant way to divide up the soundstream—notes, for example, that are played for particular durations at a particular volume—you start from the assumption that what you have is the soundstream itself. Though sound can be parsed in the traditional way, it can be parsed lots of other ways. By understanding the physical and psychophysical principles of sound, you can gain an understanding into the possibilities and methods best adapted to modifying sound over time.

In what ways has spectral composition been influenced by science and technology?

This is a kind of music that couldn’t have happened without the progress in acoustics and psychoacoustics in the late 1960s and 1970s when people started having access to the first analog sonograms and then electronic software sonograms that let you see the interior composition of sound. The personal computer enabled people to analyze sounds more easily with less demanding equipment.

Spectral music has been called a post-electronic approach to music. Sometimes it uses electronic synthesis; often it doesn’t. But the knowledge acquired in order to make (synthesize) sounds from scratch is essential to writing this kind of music. To really control sound as we want to, we must understand enough to be able to make it.

Is the movement French?

Initially it was centered around an ensemble called L’Itinérarie in early 1970s Paris, a very experimentally oriented group that was trying out these ideas. But once you had the basic concepts it became very clear that you needed computer tools. Because in France music in general is not at the universities, except for musicology or music history, the place where a lot of this happened was IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ Musique). It’s a research institute started in the mid-1970s and built on the idea of providing tools to musicians at the interface between science and art. In the early 1980s, the computer-assisted composition techniques that IRCAM was developing prompted them to bring spectral composers into the fold.

Spectral music became one of the first real implementations of computer-assisted composition that went beyond what I would call algorithmically produced music. What spectral composers wanted was much more like what happens in computer-assisted design in architecture.

In music there has been a long tradition of laborious hand-calculation, but the reality is that if you spent four weeks calculating something, you’re going to use it whether it turned out to be what you wanted or not! Whereas if you spent twenty minutes on it with a computer, you might have the courage to go back and try it seven or eight times until you really find the thing you were looking for.

Some see spectral music as a reaction to the artificiality of serialism and 12-tone-row music. Is it somehow more natural?

We are creatures that are tremendously sensitive to timbre because the vowels of language depend on timbral perception, as does our auditory scene analysis. The fact that we are relatively less good at identifying things like pitches and intervals is part of why for a long time they were interesting. But when you start thinking you can do anything that is mathematically possible with musical symbols, you get a kind of speculative music that at a certain time loses all contact with perceptual reality. Spectral music certainly strove to reground musical discourse in human perception and cognition.

Your book asks, Classical Music, Why Bother? What’s your answer?

In order for subsidized art to survive it must be seen as having importance and intrinsic value independent of how much entertainment value it has. You’re not just going out and buying it. You’re supporting it because you believe that the world is a richer place with this art in it. That is a much harder sell than it used to be. Now, most people believe that in most domains, there isn’t better or worse. You also see this in the debate over evolution, in the idea that we should teach all the alternatives.

I don’t mean that these abstract criteria are based on something divine. I think they are based on parameters of human perception and the way the human mind is built, certain things may have richer content than others. I tend to think we’d be better off pretending that it were so, even if it turns out not to be so. The belief that there can be great literature will make you wrestle with, say, James Joyce. You can develop a lot of capabilities in that effort that you probably couldn’t in reading more facile fiction.

Spectral composers are anti-establishment figures in their own way, aren’t they?

I still don’t understand how I got the job I have! In a composition seminar of mine, I’m just as likely to pull out an article from Perception & Psychophysics as a piece by Beethoven. Western classical musicians are quite conservative people. I mean, we’re trained in conservatories, for God’s sake!

You’re challenging their self-conception.

In a lot of the music, we are using the musicians as incredibly sophisticated tone generators. What matters much of the time is the sum of all of the sounds that the musicians are making. Each of their individual parts may not make much sense by itself. And that can be very frustrating for a performer. That is very different from a lot of the Western tradition, where each line should sing and have its own sense.

When will we see a Lincoln Center premiere of a composition written by no one?

The factual answer is that we have already had more than one. But I think the real question is more like a musical Turing test: Will we ever hear a piece written by a computer that feels as successful and original as one written by a gifted human being? And in that context, do not expect one anytime soon.

Music is so tied to the human perceptual system that until one has a complete map of that, I don’t know how you would get a computer to write really effective music. It would have to weigh every choice against the perceptual system. This is what composers are doing, even when they don’t think about it: playing things or thinking through things in their minds and applying them to their own perceptual systems.

What pieces do you recommend as an introduction to spectral music?

First, Gérard Grisey’s Les Espaces acoustiques (The acoustic spaces), which is to my mind the twentieth-century equivalent of the Ring Cycle. Another composer who is essential to the beginning of this music is Tristan Murail. Listen to Gondwana, and what I think is the first piece where electronics and acoustic writing really meet as equals, Désintégrations. More recently, there is Grisey’s last work, Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil (Four songs for crossing the threshold), Murail’s L’Esprit des dunes (Spirit of the dunes), or my Recueil de pierre et de sable (Collections of rock and sand).

In one early test of telepathy, in 1882, pseudo-psychic G.A. Smith and his accomplice, Douglas Blackburn, were able to fool researchers of the Society for Psychical Research. In a later confession, Blackburn described how they had to think fast and frequently invent new ways of faking telepathy demonstrations. Once, for example, Smith had been swathed in blankets to prevent him from signaling Blackburn. Smith had to guess the content of a drawing that Blackburn had secretly made on a cigarette paper. When Smith exclaimed, “I have it,” and projected his right hand from beneath the blanket, Blackburn was ready. He had transferred the cigarette paper to the tube of the brass projector on the pencil he was using, and when Smith asked for a pencil, he gave him his. Under the blanket, Smith had concealed a slate coated with luminous paint, which in the dense darkness gave sufficient light to show the figure on the cigarette paper. Thus he only needed to copy the drawing.

I was lucky enough to learn the art of improvising from one of the greatest “teachers” on the subject, the Amazing Randi. I had met him only a few hours before, nearly twenty years ago, and he was already teaching me how to conduct a perfect swindle!

A Puzzle

Randi had come to Italy to help us promote CICAP, the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, and he was expected to be on a talk show in Rome to discuss his work and talk about the Committee. The host, an actress called Marisa Laurito, asked him what he was going to do in front of the cameras, and he said that he planned to duplicate a drawing made by her in secret. She agreed and asked what was needed.

“Just some paper and some envelopes,” said Randi.

“Chiara,” said Marisa, addressing her secretary, “please, go and get those things from the office.”

Randi shot a glance at me and said “Massimo, maybe you should accompany her, to see if they are the right size.”

The right size? I did not know what the right size was; I had never seen him perform up close, and I could not imagine what was needed. But, as soon as I was going to open my mouth, Randi smiled and said, “Go, Massimo, please,” pushing me ahead.

I went out the door, following the woman, and a moment later, Randi came out as well and shouted at me: “Massimo! I am sorry, while you go, please throw away this junk I had in my coat.”

There was a wastebasket in Marisa’s dressing room; why did he need me to throw things away? However, he was my hero, and I was glad to help. I immediately went back to collect some scraps of paper and used train tickets, and, under his breath, Randi said to me, “When you are in the office, just get a few envelopes and sheets of paper without her seeing you, and then come back here. Now, go!”

I was quite confused, but I did as he asked. I made some gracious comments about the woman’s blue eyes while we were in the office, and a little chitchat later, I had some sheets and envelopes hidden under my jacket without her knowing it.

When we got back to Marisa’s dressing room, she and Randi were laughing at something he was telling her.

“Good, now here you are,” Randi said to the secretary. “I do not want to touch anything,” he stated, raising his hands up in the air, like a surgeon ready to operate. “Please give this stuff to Marisa.”

The girl obeyed, and Randi continued: “Now, Marisa, please go to another room, the bathroom will be fine, close yourself inside and draw whatever you like on that piece of paper. When you are done, fold the paper and seal it in one of the envelopes.”

As soon as she closed the bathroom door, Randi addressed her assistant. “Er . . . Chiara, I am sorry, could I have a glass of water? I need to take my medication.”

“Sure,” she said, and went out of the room. Now we were alone.

“Quick!” said Randi. “Give me the things you took in the office.”

Randi took one of the blank sheets of paper, folded it in thirds, and placed it in an envelope, which he sealed and then put in his jacket’s inner pocket.

I was more and more confused. “Mr. Randi,” I said, “would you please tell me what this is all about?”

“Later, now she’s coming.”

Sure enough, the door of the bathroom opened up and Marisa was out, waving her envelope. “Here it is! Now, what do we do?”

Randi looked puzzled. “Hmmm . . . you know, that envelope doesn’t convince me . . . excuse me.” He took the envelope from her, even though he had said that he was not going to touch anything. Holding it quite high, with just two fingers, as if it might be contaminated, Randi approached the window.

“Please, I won’t look. Tell me if you can see through the envelope, Marisa.”

“No, it’s quite thick. You can’t see anything.”

“Good! I do not want anyone to think that I merely saw your drawing through it. Well then, keep your envelope with you all the time now. Don’t tell anyone what you drew and then, when we are on stage, keep hold of the envelope until I have made my guess. You will agree that there is no way for me to know what’s in it.”

“Quite right!”

“Good. If you think so, just say it when we are on air. Then, if I am able to correctly guess your drawing, this will mean that I have some extraordinary ESP ability—or I will have showed you that what I do is quite indistinguishable from real ESP. Ergo, the public should always doubt these kinds of demonstrations, unless there is someone really expert in this kind of thing checking everything out.” I noticed that he did not use the word tricks. “Now, if you will excuse us, I need to get some rest before we start. I have arrived only a few hours ago from Miami and I am still jet-lagged.”

It wasn’t true, he had arrived about a week earlier, but as I would discover, he needed some time in private.

The Switch

“Mr. Randi,” I said as we were walking down the empty hall, “can you explain to me what we are doing? Why did you place an envelope in your pocket?”

“You mean this one?” he said, taking it out of his jacket.

“Yes. How can a blank sheet of paper be of some help in. . . ?”

The words died in my mouth as he opened up the envelope and I saw a drawing on it: a very simple pencil drawing showing a house and a cat!

“What the—?”

“Later. Now get in our dressing room.”

When the door closed, Randi took a good look at the drawing.

“Quite simple, isn’t it?”

“Do you mean that this one—”

“—is the drawing that Marisa drew, yes,” he finished. He was clearly amused by the look on my face. “You wonder when I took it, right? Well, there was really no need to check if the envelope could be seen through, it’s really thick and I probably looked a bit dumb to her by asking that question. But I needed to have the envelope with her drawing in my hands for just a few seconds, in order to do the switch.”

“You mean. . . ?”

“Yes, when I approached the window, I turned my back to you all for just an instant, but that was enough for me to throw her envelope inside my jacket and take out the dummy one.”

“But I didn’t see you do it!”

“Well, thank you. That was the point.”

Quite ingenious, I thought. I was soon going to learn that the best way to duplicate a drawing sealed in an envelope (and so far nobody has shown that another way exists) is to “somehow” secretly get a look at the drawing. That’s all there is to it. It doesn’t matter how: switching envelopes, looking at a reflection in a mirror, watching the pencil move on paper, have an accomplice take a peek. What matters is that you know beforehand what’s inside that envelope. Well, most of the time: Randi has been able to go even further than this, but that is another lesson.

Confusion

Now, the problem was that Marisa had in her possession an envelope containing a blank sheet of paper: what was Randi going to do?

“Well, now that I know what she drew, I need to give this back to her . . . without her realizing it.”

So he placed the drawing in another similar envelope—that’s why he had asked me to get “a few” of those—and put it back again in his jacket pocket.

“Now, we only need to wait.”

“Wait? Wait for what?”

“For the show to begin.”

“Do you mean that you are going to do the switch live on camera?”

“Of course not, but I need her to be distracted a bit more now, and so we will wait just five minutes before the show starts. She will have a thousand things to think about, and will not have much time for me.”

And that’s what he did. Five minutes before showtime, Randi knocked on Marisa’s dressing-room door just as she was coming out with all her assistants, producers, writers, coiffeur, and make-up artist all buzzing around her like she was the queen bee.

“I am sorry, Marisa” he said with a smile. “But while I was resting, I had this great idea. Let’s put your drawing in one of the bigger envelopes there on the table. This way, we can show that your drawing was really impossible to see and the effect will be much stronger.”

She had many people and distractions around her. “Yes . . . well, whatever you say. Here is my drawing, where should I put it?”

“Here,” said Randi, taking her envelope and placing it in a bigger envelope. “Now we can seal it and you can put your signature on it. This will really shock the viewers!”

“Okay, just let’s move on, we are about to start.”

She signed her name on the envelope and then took it along with her.

Resolution

We remained alone, again, in the dressing room. I stared at Randi, and said, “Now that that didn’t work, what will you do?”

“What do you mean it didn’t work?”

I was silent for a minute. “But you never had a chance. . . . When did you do the switch? It was impossible.”

Randi chuckled. “Okay, okay, I will tell you. When we got in, with all those people and the confusion, I quickly put the envelope with her drawing inside one of the bigger ones that were resting on the table. Then, when she gave me the envelope with the blank sheet—and, of course, she thought that it contained her drawing—I acted as if I was placing it inside the envelope, but, actually, I was putting it behind it. So, when I placed the whole thing on the table to have her seal and sign it, on top of all the other envelopes lying there, the thing was done: the drawing was already inside, and the envelope with the blank one was mixed with all the other envelopes. In fact, here it is.”

He took a sealed envelope from the lot and put it back in his jacket. It was later destroyed to avoid even the remotest risk of someone discovering the trick.

Of course, later on, when the show started and Randi joined Marisa on stage, all went perfectly. Marisa told the viewers how she had kept hold of the envelope the whole time, and when Randi—after much concentration, grinning, and sweating—duplicated her drawing, she was flabbergasted.

For me, that was the first important lesson I got from Randi: real tricksters rarely read magic books and magazines, they just invent their methods along the way, quickly improvising something on the spur of the moment.

I was going to find that out at my expense very soon, as we shall see in the next “lesson.”