Carl Sagan was the world’s best-known scientist in the late twentieth century, serving as our guide to the planets during the golden age of solar system exploration. He was both a visionary and a committed defender of rational scientific thinking. Sagan died on December 20, 1996, while only 62, and he has been greatly missed in the decade since. In addition to my own knowledge and insights about his scientific and skeptical contributions, I have made extensive use of the two excellent narrative biographies by William Poundstone (1999) and Keay Davidson (1999). Poundstone is stronger on Sagan’s science, Davidson on his personal history. Neither, however, emphasizes his role as a skeptic.

Sagan was propelled on his academic and public careers by enormous talent, good luck, and an intensely focused drive to succeed. His lifelong quest was to understand the universe, especially our planetary system, and to communicate the thrill of scientific discovery to others. A natural teacher, he loved to explain things and never made a questioner feel stupid for asking. Although Sagan had broad intellectual interests, his pursuit of his career left little time for other activities: he did not play golf or follow sports, take up cooking or photography, sing or play a musical instrument, or join a church or synagogue. His first two wives complained that he devoted insufficient time to his marriages or his children (Davidson 1999). He focused on his career goals, and the world was enriched thereby.

Many scientists would like to be able to communicate with the public about their discoveries. However, few become adept at explaining technical subjects in terms that are readily understood by the lay public. Even fewer are willing to take the time to answer journalists’ questions patiently, to sit still for application of makeup for television appearances, or to return reporters’ calls promptly even when they interrupt a meal or a lab experiment. They might like to be great communicators, but they lack the skills and the commitment. They also recognize that academic rewards generally come to the best researchers, with limited honor associated with excellence in teaching and even less for public outreach. Sagan was different. He recognized his talents as a teacher and popularizer and decided to make such outreach a major aspect of his career.

Born in 1934, Sagan grew up in a working-class Jewish neighborhood of New York and attended urban public schools in New York and New Jersey. The University of Chicago provided him scholarship support when he entered in 1951, and he continued there for graduate work, receiving his doctorate in astronomy in 1960. After two years as a postdoctoral fellow in biology at Berkeley and Stanford, he joined the Harvard College astronomy faculty as Assistant Professor. Denied tenure at Harvard, Sagan moved to Cornell University in 1968, serving as David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary studies until his death in 1996.

Research

Although best known to the public as a popularizer, Sagan first distinguished himself as a research scientist. His accomplishments in research made it much easier for his academic peers to accept him as a spokesperson for science. Sagan loved the research process, especially when it was combined with the exploration of new worlds. As he often noted, only one generation was privileged to grow up when the planets and their moons were little more than dim points of light in the night sky, and to see them emerge as unique worlds with their own geological and perhaps even biological history. Sagan helped define two new disciplines: planetary science and exobiology. As a leading consultant to NASA, he also helped chart the exploration of the solar system by spacecraft.

With training in both astronomy and biology, Sagan brought a unique breadth to the emerging new fields of planetary science and exobiology. At the time he received his doctorate, his thesis advisor Gerard Kuiper recognized that “Some persons work best in specializing on a major program in the laboratory; others are best in liaison between sciences. Dr. Sagan belongs in the latter group” (in Davidson 1999).

Sagan was an “idea person” and a master of intuitive physical arguments and “back of the envelope” calculations. He usually left the details to others, and most of his published papers were collaborations. Much of this work was done with students, many of whom went on to become leaders themselves in planetary science. On much of his later work, including the famous TTAPS paper on nuclear winter (more on this later), his name appears last among the listed authors. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, he also edited the foremost professional journal in planetary science, Icarus.

Sagan’s most important early research dealt with the atmosphere of Venus. Discoveries in radio astronomy made when he was in graduate school first suggested that this planet had a very hot surface, in contrast to previous speculation that the climate of Venus was more Earth-like. Part of Sagan’s thesis consisted of the first computed greenhouse model for the atmosphere, in which the high infrared opacity of carbon dioxide and water vapor produced a surface temperature hundreds of degrees higher than that of an airless planet. Over the decade of the 1960s he improved these models, working primarily with his former student James Pollack, to develop and refine what remains to this day our basic understanding of the atmosphere of Venus.

Mars was another planet that interested Sagan, and with Pollack he modeled the atmosphere and developed the idea, later verified by the Mariner 9 and Viking spacecraft, that quasi-seasonal changes observed on the surface were the result of wind-blown dust. He also wrote a series of papers on Jupiter, focused on atmospheric organic chemistry.

From childhood, Sagan had been inspired by the mystery of the origin and distribution of life. This passion led him to study biology and develop collaborations with leading biologists such as Stanley Miller, and Nobel laureates Joshua Lederberg and George Muller. Early in his career, he received more encouragement from these biologists than from astronomers, many of whom considered planetary studies to lie on the fringes of respectable science, and exobiology to be beyond the pale. A number of his early publications were in exobiology, and at various times he speculated about life not only on Mars, but also on Venus, Jupiter, and even the Moon. In spite of his increasing role as a scientific skeptic, he permitted himself to indulge in this broad speculation, so long as his ideas remained within the realm of possibility. Sagan was also one of the founders of international interest in SETI, the microwave search for extraterrestrial intelligence, although he himself did not conduct any searches.

NASA valued Sagan’s contributions to the spacecraft exploration of the planets during its “Golden Age” (roughly 1960—1990). He was a member of science teams selected for the Mariner 2, Mariner 9, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo missions, among others. With his quick mind and breadth of vision, he was always a welcome contributor to planning sessions and the “quick look” interpretation that followed the first receipt of spacecraft data. His former student Clark Chapman wrote in 1977: “A man of vivid imagination, he keeps alive a wide variety of conceptions of planetary environments. By suggesting often outlandish alternatives and challenging traditionalists to disprove them, he has inspired doubts about many accepted theories. Sagan’s role is essential for healthy science because a bandwagon effect frequently leads to premature consensus among scientists before equally plausible alternatives have even been thought of, let alone rationally rejected.”

Sagan’s own excitement with the process of scientific discovery is captured in the following quote (Sagan 1973): “Even today, there are moments when what I do seems to me like an improbable, if unusually pleasant dream: to be involved in the exploration of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; to try to duplicate the steps that led to the origin of life on an Earth very different from the one we know; to land instruments on Mars to search there for life; and perhaps to be engaged in a serious effort to communicate with other intelligent beings, if such there be, out there in the dark of the night sky.”

Popularizer and Skeptic

At the same time he was building up an enviable bibliography (which grew to 250 pages by the end of his life) and a record of successful students, Sagan also established a growing reputation as a popularizer of science. His boyish good looks, resonant voice, and ability to explain scientific concepts in ways that lay persons and students could understand made him a popular teacher and public lecturer. He won teaching awards at Harvard and Cornell, and even in the busiest times of his life he tried to keep his hand in undergraduate teaching.

In 1966 he first achieved some modest national attention with his book (with the Russian astronomer I. S. Shklovskii) Intelligent Life in the Universe. The following year, Sagan wrote an upbeat article on the potential of life on the planets for National Geographic, and he made a few brief TV appearances. Already it was apparent to some that Sagan sought a broader role than that of academic researcher, a concern that probably contributed to denial of tenure by Harvard University in 1967. Students loved him, but some colleagues bristled at what they perceived as self-aggrandizement and pandering to the public. Unlike Harvard, Cornell University was looking for faculty with a potential for stardom, and they provided Sagan an endowed chair and the solid academic springboard he needed for his future rise to fame and fortune.

Throughout his career, Sagan devoted himself to the quest to improve public understanding of the nature of science. He wanted every citizen to have a “baloney detector” as defense against sham in commerce and politics as well as science. He felt that it was the duty of scientists to face these issues squarely and publicly. The Cosmic Connection (1973), which includes extensive discussions of extraterrestrial life as well as more conventional astronomy and planetary science, even explores the UFO phenomenon and the writings of pseudo-cosmologist Immanuel Velikovsky. However, Sagan opposed tactics that demeaned pseudoscientific beliefs or attacked religion, refusing (for example) to sign a statement against astrology because of its authoritative tone.

His interest in popular misconceptions about science led him to organize two public symposia on fringe-science topics at meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Both arguably concerned real scientific issues, not cases of fraud or religious extremism.

The first AAAS symposium, in 1969, dealt with the reality of UFOs. Like many scientists of his generation, in high school Sagan had been attracted to the idea that UFOs might be visiting spacecraft. At the AAAS, J. Allen Hynek and James McDonald defended UFO studies while Sagan, Donald Menzel, and Lester Grinspoon attacked this position. The proponents on both sides of the issue were scientists, although they took very different approaches to the interpretation of the anecdotal reports of UFO sightings. (The subject of alien abductions or direct contact with extraterrestrials, which has since become so common, was not an issue at that time; the AAAS symposium focused on the interpretation of moving lights in the sky and anomalous radar signals.)

UFO proponents argued that even though there was no individual sighting in which one could make a compelling case for extraterrestrial spacecraft, the sheer volume of reports justified continuing examination and study. In contrast, Sagan emphasized the unreliability of witnesses, the absence of physical evidence of UFOs, and alternative explanations including hallucination and self-delusion. He noted that “there are no cases that are simultaneously very reliable (reported independently by a large number of witnesses) and very exotic (not explicable in terms of reasonably postulated phenomena),” and he applied a skeptical standard that is often associated with his name: that extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of evidence or proof.

The 1974 AAAS symposium, on the work of Velikovsky, was riskier, since Velikovsky himself was invited to speak under AAAS sponsorship, something he claimed as a vindication. While Sagan promoted the symposium, it was actually organized by historian Owen Gingerich and astronomers Ivan King and Donald Goldsmith. Velikovsky’s thesis of global catastrophes caused by numerous planetary encounters within historical times was scientifically indefensible but had attracted a wide popular following. Unlike the UFO symposium, there were no scientists to defend these ideas, published in his 1950 book Worlds in Collision (dismissed by Sagan [1973] as a “speculative romance”). Rather, the 77-year-old Velikovsky confronted his debunkers personally.

Keay Davidson (1999) describes the symposium as part apology to Velikovsky for previous slights from astronomers, and part an effort to reassure the public of science’s basic fair-mindedness. The confrontation of the patriarchal Velikovsky and his young, brash critic was a clash of egos on both sides. Sagan aimed his remarks, published in extended form in Scientists Confront Velikovsky (Goldsmith 1977), primarily at the public and science journalists. By most accounts he was the hands-down winner. Many people credit this debate as the beginning of the end for the Velikovsky cult, which is today reduced to a handful of obscure cranks.

However, Sagan’s role earned him the bitter enmity of Velikovsky supporters. His greatest sin was his lack of respect for the old man, who steadfastly refused to accept any modification of his then quarter-century-old views. Sagan’s critique of Worlds in Collision was also castigated by Velikovsky followers for its failure to address all of his claims, and for some slipshod calculations that were never corrected in Sagan’s published remarks. This symposium has been extensively analyzed (e.g., Bauer 1984), and it still raises unanswered questions about the most effective ways to counter pseudoscientists. Similar scenarios are replayed today by scientists who debate creationists and defenders of intelligent design. I sometimes ask myself if Sagan would have ventured into this lion’s den, and if so how a debate between him and, say, creationist Duane Gish, would have played out.

Both AAAS symposia were widely covered by the media and contributed to a growing public recognition. A further boost came in 1973 with the publication of The Cosmic Connection, described in Science (Hartmann 1974) as “thirty-nine genuine, vintage Sagan dinner conversations.” This description was more accurate than the reviewer may have realized. This book, like all of Sagan’s, was dictated. Creating his books and popular articles this way, Sagan simultaneously developed his unique speaking and writing styles. At his lectures, listeners were impressed by his carefully crafted sentences, and by the way his talks (delivered without notes) seemed to be so well organized. Dictation turned out to be the perfect way for Sagan to organize his thoughts and develop his prose style simultaneously. It allowed him to “write” while traveling or walking on the beach, and it never necessitated his learning to type. It also allowed him to derive multiple value from the same material, typically delivering his message in various lectures, writing it for a magazine article (for such outlets as Parade), and using it as the basis for a chapter in one of his books.

The Cosmic Connection helped open the door to a medium that Sagan seemed destined for: television. In November 1973, he was invited to appear on the popular Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (himself a skeptic). Handsome, articulate, informal in manner, yet enthusiastically discussing real science (and often bringing the latest photos from NASA missions like Viking and Voyager), he captivated both the audience and the host. Over the following thirteen years, Sagan appeared on The Tonight Show twenty-six times. No matter how pressing his other business, he was always willing to take a break and fly to Hollywood for Carson. He considered it “the biggest classroom in history.”

In January 1974, Time did a cover story on life in the universe, in which it called Sagan “the prime advocate and perennial gadfly for planetary exploration.” A few weeks later Sagan published an article in TV Guide, the largest circulation magazine in the United States. Sagan was suddenly hot, receiving media attention normally reserved for a select few Nobel Prize winners. In August 1976, Newsweek put his smiling face on its cover, a rare accolade for any scientist. Their thumbnail sketch stated: “At 42, Carl Sagan has become the leading spokesman and salesman for the new science of exobiology, the search for extraterrestrial life. Lobbying in Washington, appearing on television talk shows, and teaching at Cornell, he is building fresh support for the space program and fulfilling his own fantasies of finding life out there.” Two years later, he received the ultimate tribute for a science writer, winning the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for his book about the human brain, The Dragons of Eden.

Sagan was a founding member of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. CSICOP originated in 1976 in part to direct attention to egregious media exploitation of supposed paranormal wonders. (He was always supportive of CSICOP and the Skeptical Inquirer, and served as keynote speaker at two well-attended CSICOP conferences, Pasadena in 1987, Seattle in 1994, each of which led to a major article in SI: “The Burden of Skepticism,” Fall 1987, and “Wonder and Skepticism,” January/February 1995.) Sagan’s own contributions focused less on critiques of the media and more on creating news, skillfully using the media to inform and entertain about science. He preferred the positive approach, talking about what was correct rather than exposing errors in others.

Showman of Science

In the later 1970s, between the Viking mission to Mars and the anticipated Voyager encounters with Jupiter, Sagan decided to test the capacity of television to bring science to a mass audience. In partnership with engineer and entrepreneur Gentry Lee, a Viking colleague, he formed Carl Sagan Enterprises and began marketing a television series modeled on Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man. They developed a script, raised several million dollars in support, and hired Bronowski’s director, Adrian Malone. At the same time Sagan fell rapturously in love with Ann Druyan, with whom he worked closely for the rest of his life. He and Annie moved to Los Angeles, and production at KCET Public Television started in 1977 on the 13-hour series called Cosmos.

Sagan with colleague Toby Owen at JPL in 1976, examining recent Viking orbiter photos of Mars. Sagan and Owen played key roles in deciding on the landing sites for the Viking spacecraft.

His commitment to Cosmos finally eclipsed Sagan’s academic roles. His classes were canceled, and several graduate students who had come to Cornell to work with him chose other advisors instead. Colleagues complained, and there was an effort to force his laboratory out of the Cornell Space Science Building. In Los Angeles, clashes of will between Sagan and Malone almost derailed the entire Cosmos effort. Cosmos aired in September 1980, accompanied by a promotional effort that exceeded anything seen before in public television. Most reviews were enthusiastic, and suddenly Sagan became a celebrity. The series won the Peabody Award, and eventually more than 400 million people saw Cosmos in dozens of countries around the world. The accompanying book, also called Cosmos, was on the New York Times best seller list for seventy weeks and made him wealthy as well as famous.

In October 1980, Sagan appeared on the cover of Time, shown wading in the “cosmic ocean.” Time described him as the “Showman of Science” and the “prince of popularizers.” They wrote: “Sagan sends out an exuberant message: science is not only vital for humanity’s future well being, but it is rousing good fun as well. Watching with wonder—and no doubt a little envy—the whirling star named Sagan, some of his colleagues feel that he has stepped beyond the bounds of science. They complain that he is driven by ego. They also say that he tends to overstate his case, often fails to give proper credit to other scientists for their work, and blurs the line between fact and speculation. But they probably represent a minority view. Most scientists, increasingly sensitive to the need for public support and understanding of science, appreciate what Sagan has become: America’s most effective salesman of science.”

Sagan with Ann Druyan in 1980 during the filming of Cosmos.

Sagan moved back to Cornell after Cosmos, but he could not return to the anonymity of the campus. People stopped him on the street and interrupted his meals in restaurants to tell him how much they liked Cosmos or to ask for his autograph. He mused to me at the time how strangers felt comfortable approaching him, since after all he had been in their living rooms (on TV). He also received crank calls and death threats, requiring police patrols of his home and prompting the university to remove his name from his office door and from the Space Science Building directory.

Fame also had its rewards. He bought a spectacular home modeled on an Egyptian temple, perched on the edge of one of Ithaca’s wooded gorges, and hired a personal staff. He received an unprecedented advance from Simon & Shuster of $2 million for a science fiction novel to be called Contact, before he had written a word. Contact was published in 1985, and later made into a successful film starring Jodie Foster.

Sagan’s popularity did me a service at about this time. Driving across West Texas, I was stopped for speeding. As the police officer started to write a ticket, he asked what I did for a living. When I mentioned that I had been Carl Sagan’s student, he put away his citation book and launched into enthusiastic praise for Carl and, by implication, for his friends and students.

Journalist Joel Achenbach, in Captured by Aliens (1999), noted that once Sagan achieved superstardom with Cosmos, he became the public lightning rod for both the science and the pseudoscience of extraterrestrial life. As the “keeper of the gates” who effectively defined the border between science and pseudoscience, he was actively courted by many fringe figures who sought in his blessing a legitimization of their interests or beliefs. As an example, Achenbach reported this interview with Richard Hoagland, the popularizer of the “Face on Mars.” Hoagland explained that in a public meeting in 1985, Sagan commented that those planning NASA missions to Mars should be open to discovering the unexpected. According to Hoagland, when Sagan made these remarks, he briefly made direct eye-contact with Hoagland, who was in the audience. In the weird world of pseudoscience, Sagan’s innocent comment was interpreted as a coded message encouraging Hoagland to pursue his advocacy of an artificial origin for the Face—which he continues to this day, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. (See some of Sagan’s thoughts on the Hoagland/Mars Face matter in “Carl Sagan Takes Questions: More from his ‘Wonder and Skepticism’ CSICOP 1994 Keynote,” Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 2005.)

Sagan’s role is especially interesting because he himself was accused of straying beyond the limits of proper science in his pursuit of evidence for life on other planets and his defense of SETI. As Achenbach argues, it was precisely because of his apparent open-minded attitude toward fringe topics that many on the fringe became so bitter when Sagan turned against them.

Making a Better World

Sagan at Cornell in 1974 with three former students (L to R): David Morrison, Joseph Veverka, and James Pollack.

Sagan’s rise to celebrity occurred simultaneously with Ronald Reagan’s escalation of arms spending and cold war rhetoric. He told colleagues that he intended to return to the life of a professor, but he also felt he should use his new wealth and power to accomplish objectives of more global scope. As an early opponent of Reagan’s Space Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars,” he was able to rally vocal objections from the academic community that questioned both the technical basis for SDI and its potential destabilizing effect on the nuclear balance.

In 1982, an even more compelling opportunity presented itself, thanks to research involving two of his former students, Jim Pollack and Brian Toon (both at NASA Ames Research Center). With colleagues Rich Turco and Tom Ackerman, they were studying the influence of dust and atmospheric aerosols on global climate, working to understand the effects of martian dust storms and of the dust cloud that enveloped Earth following the asteroid impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. In 1982, they had realized that smoke, especially from petrochemical fires, would have a much greater effect on global climate than naturally occurring dust. In fact, it appeared that the smoke from as few as 100 burning cities, when lofted into the stratosphere, could lead to severe global cooling (nuclear winter).

Turco and Toon flew to Ithaca in late 1982 to enlist Sagan’s aid, for both the technical aspects of the research and as a means to overcome NASA objections based on the political implications of this work. This collaboration generated the TTAPS paper (named for the first initials of the authors, but with obvious symbolism) on nuclear winter published in Science in late 1983. The TTAPS authors concluded that even a less-than-full-scale nuclear exchange, especially if it were directed against cities, could cause global cooling and collapse of agriculture. The massive loss of life would hit victor, vanquished, or non-combatant nations alike.

Sagan used his prestige to argue that these new findings rendered nuclear war obsolete and undermined the concept of massive nuclear retaliation. The debate was international, including within the USSR, where it stimulated a rethinking of nuclear war-fighting strategies. But the pro-nuclear forces in the United States counterattacked vigorously, vilifying Sagan personally in the process. The National Review called nuclear winter “a fraud” and titled one cover story “Flat-Earth Sagan Falls off the End of the World.”

Edward Teller, who at seventy-three was probably the second best known scientist in America, debated Sagan on nuclear winter before a special convocation of Congress. Sagan also led a delegation to meet with Pope John Paul II, who subsequently issued a papal statement against the build-up of nuclear arsenals. Many people credit this theory, and its advocacy by Sagan, as influential in the move toward nuclear disarmament and the end of the cold war.

Sagan oscillated between roles as scientist and political advocate. In this period, while attending a meeting of the imaging science team for the Galileo spacecraft, Sagan apologized to his teammates for his inability to commit more time to this mission, saying he was “putting most of my energy into saving the world from nuclear holocaust.” Most team members agreed that this effort should indeed have a higher priority for Sagan than planning imaging sequences for the moons of Jupiter.

In parallel with its escalation of the arms race, the Reagan administration cut back drastically on NASA’s program of planetary exploration. In 1981 they threatened to close down the highly successful Voyager 2 spacecraft before its Uranus and Neptune encounters and to turn the Jet Propulsion Laboratory into a defense contractor lab. After the space shuttle Challenger accident in 1986, the momentum seemed to have left NASA, just when Sagan was advocating an accelerated exploration program in his books and lectures. At the same time the USSR, under the influence of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, seemed more open to international collaboration.

Sagan saw an opportunity to achieve two goals of noble dimension. By working together on missions to Mars, the US and the USSR could build confidence and gain experience that would ultimately defuse the cold war and permit cooperation in other areas. By pooling their resources, these two space-faring nations could accomplish together what neither could afford alone—extending human presence into the solar system—and simultaneously ensure peace on Earth.

Sagan formed a close working relationship with Roald Sagdeev, the director of the Space Research Institute in Moscow, and together they opened up the Soviet planetary exploration program, with unprecedented live reporting of the Soviet flybys of Comet Halley in 1986. In Russia, he associated with Soviet cosmonauts and government officials as well as scientists. For a few years, under his leadership, anything seemed possible. Then the USSR disintegrated, and many of its space scientists found themselves unemployed. With the failure of Russia’s last three planetary missions (all destined for Mars), both the motivation and the capability of Russia to partner in exploration of the solar system evaporated.

Disappointments

By the time of the final Voyager encounter with Neptune in 1989, it was apparent that Sagan’s campaign to promote human expansion to Mars was doomed. His Russian friend Sagdeev was emigrating to the United States and marrying (of all people) Dwight Eisenhower’s granddaughter. And after a decade of budget cuts, NASA seemed unable to summon the resources even to maintain a modest program of robotic space exploration. The high hopes of the Viking and Voyager era were gone. In a 1989 lecture at JPL, Sagan could not conceal his frustration and disappointment—the first time I had seen him unable to summon an optimistic perspective. However, worse personal blows were about to fall.

In the autumn of 1990, Sagan made his most serious scientific blunder. Threatened with military opposition to its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq threatened to set fire to the nation’s oil wells. Sagan became concerned that the quantity of petrochemical smoke generated by these oil-field fires could generate a small-scale nuclear winter, endangering crops across Asia and threatening world food production. Of his four TTAPS co-authors, only Turco supported this hypothesis; Pollack, Toon, and Ackerman could not see how sufficient smoke could get into the stratosphere. However, Sagan went public with dire predictions. While he kept his predictions conditional, saying only that we could not show that massive oil-field fires would not have major climatological consequences (a “double negative” logic that he used frequently), his doomsday warning was widely reported. The oil fields were torched in January 1991, blackening the sky over most of Kuwait and disrupting the coastal ecosystem, but there were no climatic effects, even on a local scale. Sagan was widely criticized, and the episode had the further effect of undermining the credibility of the entire nuclear winter scenario.

The next year Sagan was nominated for membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Academy membership requires distinguished research scholarship, but that is rarely sufficient to ensure membership. Considerable weight is also given to public service, as well as more political factors such as where a nominee works and whom he or she knows. Most colleagues agreed that Sagan’s research record was more than adequate (Shermer 1999), and that his additional journal editorship, government service, and contributions to public understanding of science should have ensured his election. But Sagan was blackballed in the first voting round, requiring a full debate and vote by the Academy membership. In the final vote he barely received 50 percent yes votes, far short of the two-thirds majority required for election to membership.

Two years later, the National Academy awarded Sagan its prestigious Public Welfare Medal, perhaps in partial compensation for his earlier rejection. The damage was done, however: not only a stinging personal blow, but also an attack on his credibility as a spokesperson for science. For all his accomplishments—or perhaps because of some of them—influential members of the academic “old boys” network never accepted him.

Other problems multiplied. In 1993 the NASA SETI program, which he had defended on critical occasions in the past, was abruptly terminated by Congress. His book on nuclear winter, written with Turco, sold only a few thousand copies; no one cared much any more about issues of nuclear war. Perhaps worst of all, a book that he and Annie put a great deal of themselves into, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, did not receive the enthusiastic welcome they expected. Although some reviewers consider it one of Sagan’s best works, it was not a best seller. No longer a media star, Sagan was slipping from public consciousness.

Sagan with the author at a planetary science meeting in 1983.

A Candle in the Dark

Sagan’s most important contributions in his final years were in the struggle against pseudoscience. Throughout the last decade of the millennium, this scourge of public irrationality grew, as astrology, alien abductions, alternative medicine, and any number of other New Age and “millennial” fads and cults gained in popularity. Sagan fought back, and after the death of his friend Isaac Asimov, his was the voice most often heard in defense of scientific reason in the United States.

His most influential platform was provided by the weekly newspaper-supplement magazine Parade, one of the two most widely read publications in America. His column appeared there regularly for more than a decade, providing a unique opportunity for outreach and education. He discussed the latest discoveries in science, debunked the purveyors of flimflam, and also delved into sensitive topics of public concern such as abortion and animal rights. His articles in Parade provided the basis for many chapters in his final three books, Pale Blue Dot, The Demon-Haunted World, and Billions and Billions.

The Demon-Haunted World, subtitled Science as a Candle in the Dark, was a passionate defense of science against pseudoscience and irrationality, as illustrated in the following quotes. “It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring [that may be]. . . . Superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way [of understanding nature], providing easy answers, dodging skeptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the experience, making us routine and comfortable practitioners as well as victims of credulity. . . . [Pseudoscience] ripples with gullibility. . . . The tenants of skepticism do not require an advanced degree to master, as most successful used car buyers demonstrate. The whole idea of democratic application of skepticism is that everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and constructively evaluate claims to knowledge. . . . But the tools of skepticism are generally unavailable to the citizens of our society. . . .Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a skeptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging skepticism” (Sagan 1995).

While vigorously advocating the concepts of scientific skepticism, Sagan also raised questions about strategy. He wrote that “The chief difficulty I see in the skeptical movement is in its polarization: Us vs. Them—the sense that we [skeptics] have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe all these stupid doctrines are morons.” He was especially troubled by anti-religious attitudes. While not a believer himself, Sagan had constructive interactions with religious leaders, including the Pope and the Dalai Lama. He wrote “There is no necessary conflict between science and religion. On one level, they share similar and consonant goals, and each needs the other.”

Although more demanding and hence less popular than his books about astronomy and planetary exploration, The Demon-Haunted World is arguably his most mature and valuable publication. Expressing his concerns about the irrationalism that pervades modern society, he wrote: “I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any time that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. . . . How can we affect national policy—or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives—if we don’t grasp the underlying issues? . . . Plainly there is no way back. Like it or not, we are stuck with science. We had better make the best of it. When we finally come to terms with it and fully recognize its beauty and power, we will find, in spiritual as well as in practical matters, that we have made a bargain strongly in our favor.”

Sagan’s example has contributed to increasing efforts by scientists to reach out to the press and the public. For the first time in the 1980s, such professional organizations as the American Astronomical Society and the American Geophysical Union appointed full-time press officers and began sponsoring press conferences at their annual meetings. NASA missions also undertook to identify and encourage project scientists to speak with the press, both informally and as official NASA spokespersons. In the late 1990s this extended to welcoming commercial HDTV crews into high-level NASA meetings and spacecraft encounters. Breaking with tradition, the space agency was now anxious to show the human side of scientific exploration. In the 1960s, Sagan was almost alone in his work with the press, but such activity had become relatively common among space scientists two decades later. None, however, has approached Sagan’s level of charisma or public name recognition.

Cornell’s President Frank Rhodes, speaking at Sagan’s sixtieth birthday celebration, summarized his impact: “I want to salute Carl Sagan . . . as the embodiment of everything that is best in academic life . . . in scholarship, teaching, and service. . . . Carl is an inspiring example of the engaged, global citizen . . . . [He is] a master of synthesis, and he has used that skill to engage us as a society in some of the biggest issues of our time. . . . With the conscience of a humanist and the consummate skill of the scientist, he addresses the needs of the society in which we live, and we are the richer for it” (Terzian and Bilson 1997).

References

• Achenbach, Joel. 1999. Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe. New York: Simon and Shuster.
• Bauer, Henry. 1984. Beyond Velikovsky: The History of a Public Controversy. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
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• Sagan, Carl. 1973. The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective. New York: Doubleday. (Reissued 2000 as Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
• —. 1987. The burden of skepticism. Skeptical Inquirer 12(1): 38—46.
• —. 1995. Wonder and skepticism. Skeptical Inquirer 19(1): 24—30.
• —. 1995. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House.
• Shermer, Michael. 1999. The measure of a life: Carl Sagan and the science of biography. Skeptic 17(4): 32—39.
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• Direct Network Flow Problem.
• Probabilistic Graph Theory.
• Soap Bubble Theory.
• Isospectral Geometry.
• Social Network Analysis.
• Gaussian Plume Dispersion Model.
• Linear Discriminant Analysis.

What television series would you guess discussed and demonstrated these mathematical concepts this past year? Nova? Scientific American Frontiers? A documentary on the Discovery Channel?

No, these mathematical techniques were integral to the prime-time dramatic television series Numb3rs, which began its third season September 22 on CBS.

Just as the trio of CSI dramatic programs has brought the importance of forensic science to the masses in the U.S. and abroad (SI May/June 2005; CBS says CSI: Miami is now the most watched television show in the world), Numb3rs is now demonstrating to millions of viewers each Friday night that mathematics can also have surprising relevance to everyday problems. And all the while providing quality entertainment.

Mathematics is not just a sideshow in the popular television mystery series, which stars David Krumholtz as brilliant young mathematician Charlie Epps, who helps his FBI agent brother Don (Rob Morrow) tackle particularly puzzling cases. More often than not, it is Charlie, seeking mathematical patterns and applying novel mathematical concepts, who plays a central role solving the cases. Judd Hirsch plays Charlie’s and Don’s widowed father, a semi-retired city planner. The quirky Peter MacNicol also stars as Dr. Larry Fleinhardt, Charlie’s physicist mentor and sounding board for new ideas and broader scientific thinking. Navi Rawat plays a former graduate student of Charlie’s from CalSci (a close stand-in for Caltech) and as a bright and attractive woman provides some continuing love interest.

Science, reason, and rational thinking play such a prominent role in the stories that the American Association for the Advancement of Science hosted an entire afternoon symposium at its 2006 annual meeting on the program’s role in changing the public’s perception of mathematics. Nobel laureate David Baltimore, the president of CalTech, took part, and I counted two other Nobel laureates in the audience.

And this past spring, Numb3rs co-creators and executive producers, Cheryl Heuton and Nicolas Falacci, a husband-and-wife team, were honored with the Carl Sagan Award for the Public Understanding of Science. The award was presented by the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, honoring those who have become concurrently accomplished as researchers, educators, and magnifiers of the public’s understanding of science.

“What I especially appreciate about Numb3rs,” CSICOP Fellow and Temple University math professor John Allen Paulos told the Skeptical Inquirer, “is that more often than not the math is somewhat integral to the show, and isn’t just decorative. Also there’s little irrelevant and intimidating dialogue like, ‘Ah yes, that’s a locally compact Hausdorf space we have here.’” Paulos is author of Innumeracy and other books championing better understanding of mathematics and a recipient of the 2003 AAAS Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology.

How did a show incorporating mathematics as a key component ever get sold to hard-nosed, cynical Hollywood producers?

First of all, points out Heuton, “CBS is not in the business of teaching math. CBS is in the business of reaching viewers.” She acknowledges that the wild success of the three CSI (crime scene investigations) series produced for CBS by Jerry Bruckheimer helped pave the way for the idea. “We were interested in a show featuring mathematics,” she says, “and we knew we would have to put it into a format that would appeal to the execs—a crime show.”

“We were sure it was going to be a very hard sell,” she says. A twenty-minute “pitch” meeting was set up. Five minutes into the pitch the answer came: “Let’s go ahead” (with a pilot). “That each step went so well remains to Nick and me completely shocking,” she says.

From the beginning, mathematics was to be featured, not downplayed. Episodes begin with a spoken tribute about the importance of mathematics: “We all use math everywhere. To tell time, to predict the weather, to handle money. . . . Math is more than formulas and equations. Math is more than numbers. It is logic. It is rationality. It is using your mind to solve the biggest mysteries we know.”

When was the last time you heard characters in a prime-time television series tout mathematics and rationality? Let alone really using the mind?

Heuton says in an early test, twelve women who watched the show were asked why. “They said, ‘We love the math.’ The head of Paramount TV turned to me and said, ‘I’m flabbergasted.’”

Some previous movies and shows have included mathematics, notes Tony F. Chan, as of October 1 the assistant director for mathematics and physical sciences at the National Science Foundation. (At the time of the AAAS symposium, which he moderated, Chan was dean of the Division of Physical Sciences and former chairman of the Mathematics Depart¬ment at the University of California at Los Angeles.) He mentions Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting, and Straw Dogs. But, he says, “Numb3rs is mathematics.”

When Numb3rs premiered January 25, 2005, it had 25,000,000 viewers. It is still one of the two most watched shows on Friday nights. Although it had somewhat higher ratings earlier, its 2006—2007 season opener drew 11,400,000 viewers, good enough for a ranking of 32nd among all shows on television.

Gary Lorden, chairman of the department of mathematics at Caltech, serves as the program’s math consultant. The show recruited him in 2004. “I come up with math ideas, techniques,” he says. He produces pages of papers. The equations that fill the blackboard (or, more often, transparent plastic for more dramatic display) when Charlie extemporizes are real. “All that stuff on the blackboard is real mathematics,” he says.

Lorden says Charlie’s character is loosely based on Richard Feynman. “He’s really smart, creative. Give him a problem and let him go.” And he notes, sometimes Charlie’s wrong. “Just as in math.”

David Krumholtz, the actor who plays Charlie, is certainly one of the key reasons for the show’s appeal. With long hair, dark, expressive eyes, and an ability to convey simultaneously an intense passion for mathematics and a kind of endearing vulnerability, he’s an attractive character. He is self-deprecating about his character’s combination of awkward intelligence and good looks. “Charlie’s a ‘geek/sheik, a smart/throb,’” he laughs. And although he is definitely not a mathematician (“I flunked algebra I twice”), Krumholtz says he has quickly become a fan not only of the value of math “but of reason and rationality.”

“Once you understand the Fibonacci sequence,” which played a central role in one episode, “you can’t get past that without becoming a different person,” he says. “I’ve become a deductive reasoner. I try to embody the character as best I can. I spend a lot of time at Caltech, wandering around, going into some of the classes. I listened to some [recordings of] Feynman lectures.”

He says he passionately believes in the message Charlie speaks in one episode: “Math is the real world. It’s everywhere. Math is nature’s language. It is nature’s way of communicating with us. . . . Applying this stuff to real-life applications is very powerful.”

Every show features a turning point where Charlie explains a mathematical idea, and here the show’s visual effects department stepped up from the beginning. The graphics are visually stunning, and often very creative in simply explaining a difficult concept.

“We visualize the math,” Krumholtz says. “When we cut away to these visuals, it’s not vacuum. I do it in real time. It gives it spontaneity.”

“The visuals are indeed key,” says co-creator Nick Falacci. “First the episodes have to be written. Then we look for visual metaphors. Then we have a team of special effects people try to make it as simple and direct as possible. I knew that people wouldn’t try to solve the equations, but I knew that if people could understand the basic concepts behind the math, it really could be very exciting.”

CBS was pleased with the first visual sequence but suggested it could be recycled for each episode. Says Falacci: “We had to tell CBS, just as every math concept is different, so every metaphor is different.”

Even though the show is a drama, Caltech’s Lorden says he thinks it serves as a model for how “educational TV” could have been, or perhaps still might be.

Heuton, a television pro and a realist, cautions, however: “Numb3rs was designed to be a prime-time network show. Numb3rs was not designed to be an educational show.” And she’s right. It is, it should be remembered, a crime drama. As such it has numerous side plots involving human interactions of its many characters (I especially like the family interactions among Charlie, Don, and their father) and its fair share of intense moments, chases, violence, shootings, explosions, and other expected fare of the genre. Nevertheless, the repeated emphasis and use of mathematical thinking as a core plot element is, well, unique.

Is the university in Numb3rs really Caltech? Very close. “I was a supporter of its being Caltech, not CalSci,” says Caltech president David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate in medicine. But Caltech’s lawyers felt otherwise. “We [Caltech] are very strong supporters of this show. We are proud of Gary’s involvement, and we have opened the campus to the show. Anything that says math and science is important is worth supporting.”

Numb3rs co-creator Nick Falacci, NSF/UCLA mathematician Tony Chan, Numb3rs star David Krumholtz, co-creator Cheryl Heuton, Caltech math chairman Gary Lorden, and Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) at AAAS session devoted to Numb3rs’ contribution to improving the public’s perception of mathematics. Photo by Kendrick Frazier.

Television science popularizer and CSI Fellow Bill Nye (“Bill Nye the Science Guy”) is also a supporter. He even appeared in one episode last season, as a combustion researcher. “What’s impressive to me,” he said at the AAAS session, “is how passionate these people are. It’s been fun to hang around with these guys.”

Krumholtz says he feels fortunate to be involved in Numb3rs. “I am the major receptacle of gratitude for the show because I’m its public face,” he says. “It is really inspiring to be the beacon for that. I’m glad that they have allowed me to do this show. I want him [Charlie] to be as believable as possible.”

The show has changed him, he says. “In general I am a more logical thinker. My friends hate this. . . . I love it. I used to hate math. I felt stupid, inept. Now I feel I’m more whole. If there’s one kid out there that Numb3rs helps to feel not stupid, inept, then that’s a wonderful thing to do. My dream is that thirty to forty years down the line I might meet someone who says, ‘I won the Nobel Prize because I watched you in Numb3rs.’”

In mid-2006, I was aboard a Center for Inquiry cruise that traveled north from Seattle, Washington, along the coastal reaches of British Columbia and southern Alaska. As part of our floating conference on “Planetary Ethics”—featuring an address on that crucial topic by CFI chairman Paul Kurtz—we visited Glacier Bay and were treated to lectures on global warming and the melting of the world’s glaciers by Mark Bowen, author of Thin Ice (2005). Among other speakers, Barbara Forrest critiqued recent attacks on the teaching of evolution.

I spoke on “Mysterious Entities of the Pacific Northwest,” which I specially researched for the cruise, and—as opportunity presented itself—I was also able to do a bit of on-site investigating relating to that topic as we occasionally put into port. Here is an overview of what I found.

Sasquatch

The area our cruise skirted is part of the Pacific Northwest, an area loosely encompassing northern California, Washington state, Oregon, British Columbia, and southern Alaska. It contains some of the most extensive forests in North America which, some claim, is home to the fabled Sasquatch (although sightings exist in other states and countries).

The name “Sasquatch” is often said to be Native American; actually it was coined by a Canadian schoolteacher J.W. Burns, in the 1920s. Her Native Coast Salish informants had different names for various unknown hairy giants, the British Columbian version being known as sokqueatl or soss-q’tal. Burns wanted to invent a single term for all of the alleged creatures (Coleman and Clark 1999, 215; Alley 2003, 9). This began a process of homogenization that helped turn various imaginative wild-man concepts into an increasingly uniform type, as we shall see. (I have been investigating this process for many years, just as I did for extraterrestrials which culminated in my pictorial chart, “Alien Timeline” shown in the September/October 1997 Skeptical Inquirer.)

The earliest record of potential Sasquatch footprints is dated 1811 when David Thompson, a trader and explorer, was seeking the mouth of the Columbia River. Crossing the Rockies at what is today Jasper, Alberta, he came upon a mysterious track in the snow. It measured fourteen inches long by eight inches wide and was characterized by four toes with short claw marks, a deeply impressed ball of the foot, and an indistinct heel imprint (Green 1978, 35—37; Hunter 1993, 16—17). Some modern Sasquatch enthusiasts have suggested it was the legendary man-beast, but primate expert John Napier of the Smithsonian Institution was not so sure.

Napier observed (1973, 74) that Thompson’s description was “an inadequate basis for any far-reaching conclusions.” He argued that the print could well have been that of a bear (whose small inner toe may not have left a mark); Thompson himself thought it likely “the track of a large old grizzled bear” (qtd. in Hunter 1993, 17).

Contrastingly, in 1847, a very different type of wild man was reported. Artist Paul Kane was in Washington, in sight of Mount St. Helens volcano, which, the Indians asserted, was “inhabited by a race of beings of a different species, who are cannibals, and whom they hold in great dread.” Called “skoocooms” or “evil genii,” however, they appear to have been seen as supernatural rather than natural beings. In any case, Kane did not refer to them as ape-like (Hunter 1993, 17—18).

The supposed capture of Sasquatch was reported in the Victoria, British Columbia, Daily Colonist on July 4, 1884. Railway men had allegedly captured a hairy “half-man, half beast,” only four-feet-seven-inches tall and weighing 127 pounds. Dubbed “Jacko,” it was allegedly being kept in an area jail, but was to be taken to London to be exhibited.

Although some have suggested Jacko could have been an escapee from a touring circus menagerie, it seems more likely he never existed. He was never heard from again, except that a later newspaper article—in the July 9, 1884, Mainland Guardian—indicated the story had been a hoax, apparently perpetrated by a reporter for the Daily Colonist (Stein 1993, 246—247).

Certainly, hoaxes characterized many Sasquatch reports throughout the next century. A case from 1924 may be one of them. A man named Fred Beck and several fellow prospectors claimed to have shot at several “mountain gorillas” in a canyon near Kelso, Washington. They insisted that that night the creatures bombarded their cabin with rocks and beat upon the door and roof. At daybreak the attack had ceased and giant footprints were found around the cabin (Bord and Bord 1982, 41—42). However, rumors have since persisted that pranksters living in the vicinity had planted the footprints and thrown the rocks (Daegling 2004, 59—70).

Another case took place in 1930, near Mount St. Helens. Some people who had been picking berries returned to their cars to discover huge, manlike tracks circling the area. Excitedly, they reported the tracks to nearby forest rangers, but for more than half a century the tracks remained a mystery. Then in 1982 Rant Mullens, a retired logger who had been working for the Forest Service at the time of the tracks appeared, confessed that he had been involved in faking the giant footprints. As a prank, he had carved from a piece of wood a pair of nine-by-seventeen-inch feet. A friend of Mullens, Bill Lambert, had then strapped them onto his own feet and tromped about the area where the berry pickers’ cars were parked (Dennett 1982). Since then, more realistic footprints have appeared, curiously following extensive published descriptions of what genuine Sasquatch/Bigfoot should be like. So has other evidence.

The 1950s were a watershed in Sasquatch’s history. In 1951 the footprint of a yeti or “abominable snowman” from the Himalayas was photographed by explorer Eric Shipton and received considerable media attention—in California and elsewhere across the United States and even the world.

In 1955, one William Roe claimed to have observed a female Sasquatch for a few minutes at close range. Two years later Albert Ostman swore that, some thirty-three years earlier, in 1924, he had been prospecting alone near the Toba Inlet, British Columbia, when he was abducted—carried off in his sleeping bag—by a male Sasquatch. Ostman claimed he was held captive by a family of the creatures, whom he described in detail, but escaped after almost a week. However, analysis of his story demonstrated that it was more likely the result of imagination than of recollection (Daegling 2004, 31—32, 67—69).

In 1958, Sasquatch was rechristened after making several visits to a road-construction site at Bluff Creek in remote northern California. The tracks were discovered by Gerald Crew, a photo of whom, holding up a cast of a giant footprint, was picked up by a wire service and circulated across the country. As a result, “Bigfoot” (whose name first appeared with the Crew photo in the Humboldt Times on October 5, 1958) began to proliferate. Decades later, after the death of the Bluff Creek road contractor, Ray Wallace, Wallace’s family told the press that he had faked the 1958 tracks, and they even produced pairs of carved feet that matched the Bluff Creek tracks (Daegling 2004, 29, 73; Coleman and Clark 1999, 39).

Another watershed came in October 1967 with “one of the most momentous events in the annals of Bigfoot hunting” (Bord and Bord 1982, 80). Roger Patterson, a longtime Bigfoot enthusiast who had frequently “discovered” the creature’s tracks, encountered a man-beast as he and a sidekick rode at Bluff Creek. It spooked the men’s horses but as his mount fell, Patterson claimed, he jumped clear, grabbed a movie camera from his saddlebag, and filmed the creature as it strode away with a seemingly exaggerated stride, “as if,” wrote Daniel Cohen (1982, 17), “a bad actor were trying to simulate a monster’s walk.”

Patterson’s creature had hairy, pendulous breasts, a detail many thought so convincing that it argued against the film being a hoax. Actually, Patterson had previously made a drawing of just such a supposed female creature which appeared in his book, published the year before (Patterson 1966, 111).

Although early in the next millennium a Patterson acquaintance, Bob Heironimus, confessed he had been the man in the ape suit (Long 2004), some skeptics as well as die-hard monster enthusiasts refused to believe him.

Meanwhile, hoaxes and questionable reports aside, the fact remains that no credible capture of Sasquatch/Bigfoot has ever been recorded, nor has anyone ever recovered a carcass or even partial skeleton in the Pacific Northwest or elsewhere. Insists Cohen (1982, 9), “Surely the creatures die.” Ah, well, but the legend still seems impervious to destruction.

Cadborosaurus

That there are—if not actual “sea serpents”—great denizens of the deep, no one can dispute. Among them are the giant manta ray (frequently twenty feet across), the whale shark (sixty or more feet long), and still other great creatures—including the giant squid and the blue whale (Welfare and Fairley 1980, 68, 71—72).

While there are numerous early accounts of great “sea serpents,” often described as having multiple humps, it is usually difficult to theorize about what was actually seen. In one instance it may have been quite ordinary creatures viewed at a distance, or in another simply the product of an overworked imagination or even a deliberate tall tale. The lack of photographs is one problem, the absence of a single authenticated remnant another.

There are apparently such remains, such as the carcass of one that washed ashore in Scotland in 1808 (known as the Stronsa Beast) and another caught in a Japanese fishing net on April 25, 1977 (Welfare and Fairley 1980, 81; Shuker 1996, 210—211). Both of those turned out to be the rotting carcasses of basking sharks. According to Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World: “The dead basking shark decays in the most deceiving manner. First the jaws, which are attached by only a small piece of flesh, drop off leaving what looks like a small skull and thin serpentlike neck. Then as only the upper half of the tail fin carries the spine, the lower half rots away leaving the lower fins which look like legs.” As this source concludes, “Time after time this monsterlike relic has been the cause of a sea serpent ‘flap’” (Welfare and Fairley 1980, 81).

Indeed, in the case of the creature hauled up by Japanese fishermen (off the coast of New Zealand), tissue analyses were conducted by Tokyo University biochemist Dr. Shigeru Kimora. These revealed the presence of the protein elastodin, found only in sharks (Shuker 1996, 210). Other such “globsters” (as decomposed sea monsters are dubbed) turn out to be whales, oarfish, or other scientifically known creatures (see Radford 2006).

Despite such a bleak state of affairs, an alleged sea serpent is said to appear from time to time in Cadboro Bay, on the southeast coast of British Columbia’s Victoria Island. It was first reported on October 8, 1933, by a barrister, Major W.H. Langley. He was sailing in his sloop Dorothy about 1:30 P.M., whereupon he spied a creature “nearly eighty feet long and as wide as the average automobile.” Langley said it was greenish brown and had a serrated body, “every bit as big as a whale but entirely different from a whale in many respects.” His sighting was reported in the Victoria Times by reporter Archie Willis, and a newspaperman from the rival Victoria Daily Colonist, Richard L. Pocock, dubbed it “Cadborosaurus” (after its habitat, Cadboro Bay, and the Latin word for “lizard,” saurus).

Other sightings soon followed, one on November 29, all made newsworthy by interest in reports and photos of the newly “discovered” Loch Ness Monster. Just as “Nessie” made frequent appearances in her northern Scotland home, “Caddy” became a claimed resident of the bay, and by 1950 some five hundred witnesses claimed to have sighted the creature (Colombo 1988, 379—380).

I can attest that Cadboro Bay is picturesque, even at night, but I suspect there is no Cadborosaurus. The many reports and accounts, I learned, “differed in details” (Colombo 1988, 380)—an indication that there may have been various creatures swimming in the waters off Victoria. As I learned in investigating lake monsters (Radford and Nickell 2006, 117—118), multiple creatures—such as otters swimming in a line—can easily be mistaken for a single one appearing to have multiple coils or humps.

Indeed, that may explain one such Caddy sighting, at Roberts Creek, a community overlooking the Strait of Georgia (between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland). It was made in 1932 by local novelist Hubert Evans (1892—1986) who saw “a series of bumps breaking the water, all in dark silhouette, and circled with ripples.” He told a friend: “Sea lions. They run in a line like that sometimes.” But as they watched, the profile of a head emerged which the two men estimated was extended some six feet out of the water (Colombo 1988, 369—370). However, the creature or creatures were apparently some distance away and could have been misperceived. The story was half a century old when told and related by a rather obvious romantic who gushed, “It just put the hair up on the back of your neck” (Colombo 1988, 370).

Another reported Caddy sighting (so-called, although actually occurring in the San Juan Islands chain) illustrates a similar viewing problem. Terry Graff (2006, 3) reported seeing, in 1997, “what looked like three seals in a row not thirty feet offshore,” but then “realized there was only a head on the first one and the second and third were undulating humps moving up and down.” I would add, “or so it seemed.” Whereas one fellow eyewitness thought it a whale or seal, Graff thought it resembled Ogopogo—actually a purported Pacific Northwest lake monster (Nickell 2006)—stating, “The feeling when you see one is incredible; your mind goes into overdrive trying to classify what your eyes see and the moment you realize that it isn’t classifiable is awesome!” All we can really conclude from Graff’s account is that viewers were unsure of what they saw.

I got a good idea of just how difficult it can be to know exactly what you are seeing, when on board our cruise ship in Glacier Bay’s Tarr Inlet, I had a creature sighting and soon thereafter spoke to a U.S. Park Service ranger about it. She told me it was probably just what I suspected—a sea otter—having actually seen otters at that place and time herself (Cahill 2006).

Two days later, while we were docked at Sitka, Alaska, I went out on a three-hour search—called Sea Otter & Wildlife Quest—aboard the double-decked excursion boat, St. Eugene. In addition to “Whale Rock”—a formation located just under water with waves breaking on it that is often mistaken for a whale—I saw a variety of creatures that under the right conditions could simulate a sea serpent. They included a humpback whale, a group of playful sea otters, and harbor seals basking on a little island. These mammals and others, including sea lions, represent much more likely candidates for Caddy than some imagined, hitherto unknown, leviathan.

Acknowledgments

In addition to individuals mentioned in the text, I appreciate the assistance of those who helped make the Alaskan cruise a success, notably Toni Van Pelt and Pat Beauchamp. I am also grateful to Susan Fitzgerald and Jeff Brown of KTOO-FM, Juneau. Also, CFI Libraries Director Timothy Binga once again provided valuable research assistance.

References

• Alley, J. Robert. 2003. Raincoast Sasquatch. Surry, B.C.: Hancock House.
• Bord, Janet, and Colin Bord. 1982. The Bigfoot Casebook. Harrisburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books.
• Cahill, Adrianna. 2006. Interview by Joe Nickell, May 30.
• Cohen, Daniel. 1982. The Encyclopedia of Monsters. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.
• Coleman, Loren, and Jerome Clark. 1999. Cryptozoology A to Z. New York: Fireside.
• Colombo, John Robert. 1988. Mysterious Canada. Toronto: Doubleday Canada Limited.
• Daegling, David J. 2004. Bigfoot Exposed: An Anthropologist Examines America’s Enduring Legend. Walnut Creek, California: AltaMira Press.
• Dennett, Michael. 1982. Bigfoot jokester reveals punchline—finally. Skeptical Inquirer 13:3 (Spring), 266—267.
• Graff, Terry. 2006. Quoted in “Eyewitness comes forward with possible Caddy report,” BCSCC Quarterly No. 60 (publ. of British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, winter, 3).
• Green, John. 1978. Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us. Saanichton, B.C.: Hancock House.
• Hunter, Don, with René Dahinden. 1993. Sasquatch/Bigfoot: The Search for North America’s Incredible Creature. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
• Kane, Paul. 1847. Journal entry for March 26, quoted in Hunter 1993, 17—18.
• Long, Greg. 2004. The Making of Bigfoot. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• Napier, John. 1973. Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch—Myth and Reality. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.
• Nickell, Joe. 1997. Extraterrestrial iconography. Sketpical Inquirer 21:5 (September/ October), 18—19.
• —. 2006. The Ogopogo expedition. In Radford and Nickell 2006, 111—120.
• Patterson, Roger. 1966. Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? Yakima, Washington: Franklin Press.
• Radford, Benjamin, and Joe Nickell. 2006. Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’s Most Elusive Creatures. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky.
• Radford, Benjamin. 2006. Please pass the globster. Skeptical Inquirer 30:4 (July/Aug.), 25.
• Shuker, Karl P.N. 1996. The Unexplained: An Illustrated Guide to the World’s Natural and Paranormal Mysteries. North Dighton, Mass.: JG Press.
• Stein, Gordon, ed. 1993. Encyclopedia of Hoaxes. Detroit: Gale Research.
• Thompson, David. 1811. Daily journal, quoted in Hunter 1993, 16—17.
• Welfare, Simon, and John Fairley. 1980. Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. New York: A & W Visual Library.

“Dr.” Bearden is fond of putting PhD after his name. An Internet check revealed that his doctorate was given, in his own words, for “life experience and life accomplishment.” It was purchased from a diploma mill called Trinity College and University—a British institution with no building, campus, faculty, or president, and run from a post office box in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The institution’s owner, one Albert Wainwright, calls himself the college “registrant.”

Bearden’s central message is clear and simple. He is persuaded that it is possible to extract unlimited free energy from the vacuum of space-time. Indeed, he believes the world is on the brink of its greatest technological revolution. Forget about nuclear reactors. Vacuum energy will rescue us from global warming, eliminate poverty, and provide boundless clean energy for humanity’s glorious future. All that is needed now is for the scientific community to abandon its “ostrich position” and allow adequate funding to Bearden and his associates.

To almost all physicists this quest for what is called “zero-point energy” (ZPE) is as hopeless as past efforts to build perpetual motion machines. Such skepticism drives Bearden up a wall. Only monumental ignorance, he writes, could prompt such criticism.

The nation’s number two drumbeater for ZPE is none other than Harold Puthoff, who runs a think tank in Austin, Texas, where efforts to tap ZPE have been underway for years. In December 1997, to its shame, Scientific American ran an article praising Puthoff for his efforts. Nowhere did this article mention his dreary past.

Puthoff began his career as a dedicated Scientologist. He had been de¬clared a “clear”—a person free of malicious “engrams” recorded on his brain while he was an embryo. At Stanford Research International, Puthoff and his then-friend Russell Targ claimed to have validated “remote viewing” (a new name for distant clairvoyance), and also the great psi powers of Uri Geller. (See my chapter on Puthoff’s search for ZPE in Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?, Norton 2000.)

Bearden sprinkles his massive volume with admirable quotations from top physicists, past and present, occasionally correcting mistakes made by Einstein and others. For example, Bearden be¬lieves that the graviton moves much faster than the speed of light. He praises the work of almost every counterculture physicist of recent decades. He admires David Bohm’s “quantum potential” and Mendel Sach’s unified field theory. Oliver Heaviside and Nikola Tesla are two of his heroes.

Bearden devotes several chapters to antigravity machines. Here is a sample of his views:

In our approach to antigravity, one way to approach the problem is to have the mechanical apparatus also the source of an intense negative energy EM field, producing an intense flux of Dirac sea holes into and in the local surrounding space-time. The excess charge removed from the Dirac holes can in fact be used in the electrical powering of the physical system, as was demonstrated in the Sweet VTA antigravity test. Then movements of the mechanical parts could involve movement of strong negative energy fields, hence strong curves of local space-time that are local strong negative gravity fields. Or, better yet, movement of the charges themselves will also produce field-induced movement of the Dirac sea hole negative energy. This appears to be a practical method to manipulate the metric itself, along the lines proposed by Puthoff et al. [217]

The 217 superscript refers to a footnote about a 2002 paper by Puthoff and two friends on how to use the vacuum field to power spacecraft. Bearden’s anti-gravity pro¬pulsion system is neatly diagrammed on page 319. “Negatively charged local space-time,” says the diagram, “acts back upon source vehicle producing anti-gravity and unilateral thrust.”

In the 1950s, numerous distinguished writers, artists, and even philosophers (e.g., Paul Goodman, William Steig, and Paul Edwards) sat nude in Wilhelm Reich’s “orgone accumulators” to absorb the healing rays of “orgone energy” coming from outer space. Bearden suspects (in footnote 78) that orgone energy “is really the transduction of the time-polarized photon energy into normal photon energy. We are assured by quantum field theory and the great negentropy solution to the source charge problem that the instantaneous scalar potential in¬volves this process.” I doubt if the Reichians, who are still around, will find this illuminating.

To my amazement Bearden has good things to say about the notorious “Dean drive”—a rotary motion device designed to propel spaceships by inertia. It was promoted by John Campbell when he edited Astounding Science Fiction, a magazine that unleashed L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics on a gullible public and made Hubbard a millionaire. Only elementary physics is needed to show that no inertial drive can move a spaceship in frictionless space. On pages 448—453 Bearden lists eighty patents for inertial drives. They have one feature in common: none of them works.

Counterculture scientists tend to be bitter over the “establishment’s” inability to recognize their genius. Was not Galileo, they like to repeat, persecuted for his great discoveries? This bitterness is sometimes accompanied by paranoid fears, not just of conspiracies to silence them, but also fears of being murdered. Bearden’s pages 406—453 are devoted to just such delusions.

Several kinds of “shooters” are described that induce fatal heart attacks. He himself, Bearden writes, has been hit by such devices. An associate, Stan Meyer, died after a “possible” hit by a close-range shooter. Another ZPE researcher was killed by a bazooka-size shooter. Steve Marikov, still another researcher, was assaulted by a sophisticated shooter and his body thrown off a rooftop to make it appear a suicide. When his body was removed, the pavement “glowed.”

One day at a Texas airport a person three feet from Bearden was killed with symptoms suggesting he was murdered by an ice-dart dipped in curare! “That was apparently just to teach me ‘they’ were serious.” The colonel goes on to explain that “they” refers to a “High Cabal” who were offended by a friend’s “successful transmutation of copper (and other things) into gold. . . . We have had numerous other assassination attempts, too numerous to reiterate. . . . Over the years probably as many as fifty or more overunity researchers and inventors have been assassinated . . . some have simply disappeared abruptly and never have been heard from since.” Overunity is Bearden’s term for machines with energy outputs that exceed energy inputs.

Any significant researcher should be wary of “meeting with a sudden suicide” on the way to the supermarket. Another thing to beware of, is a calibrated auto accident where your car is rammed from the rear, and you are shaken up considerably. An ambulance just happens to be passing by moments later, and it will take you to the hospital. If still conscious, the researcher must not get in the ambulance unless accompanied by a watchful friend who understands the situation and the danger. Otherwise, he can easily get a syringe of air into his veins, which will effectively turn him into a human vegetable. If he goes to the hospital safely, he must be guarded by friends day and night, for the same reason, else he runs a high risk of the “air syringe” assassination during the night.

Simply trying to do scientific work, I find it necessary to often carry (legally) a hidden weapon. Both my wife and I have gun permits, and we frequently and legally carry concealed weapons.

As early as the 1930s, T. Henry Moray—who built a successful COp<1.0 power system outputting 50kW from a 55 lb power unit—had to ride in a bulletproof car in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was repeatedly fired at by snipers from the buildings or sidewalk, with the bullets sometimes sticking in the glass. He was also shot by a would-be assassin in his own laboratory, but overpowered his assassin and recovered.

Obviously, I’m not competent to wade through Bearden’s almost a thousand pages to point out what physicists tell me are howlers. I leave that task to experts, though I suspect very few will consider it worth their time even to read the book. To me, a mere science journalist, the book’s dense, pompous jargon sounds like hilarious technical double-talk. The book’s annotated glossary runs to more than 120 pages. There are 305 footnotes, 754 endnotes, and a valuable seventy-three-page index.

The back cover calls the book “the definitive energy book of the twenty-first century.” In my opinion it is destined to be the greatest work of outlandish science in both this and the previous century. It is much funnier, for instance, than Frank Tipler’s best-seller of a few decades ago, The Physics of Immortality.