First alerted by a CNN producer to a John of God healing service in Atlanta, I determined to go undercover to get a close look at what was transpiring. I worked with National Geographic Television and Film on a segment for their Is It Real? series program, “Miracle Cures,” which included an analysis of the John of God phenomenon.

John of God

Known in his native Portuguese as João de Deus—“John of God”—João Teixeira de Faria was born in 1942 to poor parents. He grew up unable to stay in school or hold a job. At sixteen, he reportedly discovered his miraculous ability when, in a vision, a woman directed him to a nearby church. There, although he maintains he does not remember what happened, having been entranced, he allegedly performed a miraculous healing.

He thus began a career that impresses the credulous. Claiming to be a medium (one who communicates with spirits of the dead), he insists he is guided by more than thirty entities—although, curiously, João speaks only Portuguese, regardless of which entity is possessing him at a given time. King Solomon was his first entity. Others followed, including Ignatius Loyola, the Spanish noble who founded the Jesuit order in 1540; João’s center is named for him: Casa de Dom Inácio de Loyola. Oswaldo Cruz, a physician who helped eradicate yellow fever, is another alleged entity, along with other past healers, in a sort of spiritist pantheon (“Controversial” 2006; “Is” 2005).

Spiritism is essentially spiritualism, a belief that one can communicate with spirits, but with the added conviction that spirits repeatedly reincarnate in a progression toward enlightenment. In Brazil, which is steeped in superstition and has a climate of belief in African spirits, spiritism has become a powerful religious movement, overlayed onto Catholicism. It may involve mediumistic searches for past lives and even so-called “psychic surgery” (Bragdon 2002, 14—20; Guiley 2000, 360—362).

Supposedly, psychic surgeons open the body paranormally—without surgical instruments or anesthetic—and heal diseases by manipulating vital organs. Typically, they have involved fraudulent practices including sleight of hand. For instance, “tumors” have proved to be pieces of chicken intestines and blood that of a cow (Nickell 1998, 159—162).

John of God, however—styled “João-in-Entity” when supposedly possessed—has a different style. He performs dubious “surgeries” that are either “visible” or “invisible.” The former may involve twisting forceps up a person’s nostrils or using a knife to scrape an eyeball or slice open a fleshy abdomen—all without anesthesia. According to a pro-João book, “In over thirty-five years of the Entity’s surgery, it has been extremely rare for there to be any infections” (Bragdon 2002, 11).

With “invisible surgery,” the entity du jour gives a prayer, after which thousands of “healing entities” busy themselves, allegedly, by operating on an organ, revitalizing a muscle, or otherwise “simultaneously attending to the problems of the people in the room” (Bragdon 2002, 11). Augmenting the sessions are encouragements to meditate, drink water blessed by the entities, and take prescribed herbal remedies.

Investigation:

Figure 2. “John of God” (right)—supposedly possessed by a spirit entity—directs treatments for the afflicted. Seated in the background is the author, ready to undergo an “invisible surgery.”

I had already obtained a ticket to the John of God event in Atlanta when I was contacted by National Geographic Television. We then worked together on an investigation that shed new light on the Brazilian’s claims.

Shrewdly, João’s entities avoided performing “visible surgeries” in Atlanta, where he might have been arrested. I was chosen for an “invisible” procedure as I hobbled by with a cane, wearing the requisite white outfit that, I was told, “helps maintain a higher vibrational frequency” (“John” 2006a; 2006b). I also wore a minor disguise since frequent media appearances have made me more recognizable (see figures 1 and 2).

As I would discover, João is an unlikely miracle worker. A grade-school dropout, he was, reports an admirer, “forced to live as a wanderer, traveling from city to city healing the sick and living from their donations of food” (Pellegrino-Estrich 1995). Because, in Brazil, it is illegal to practice medicine without a license, he has been charged and fined—even jailed briefly. A district attorney who investigated him has reported that João sent her—indirectly, through a relative—death threats. John of God denies that, along with an accusation that he took advantage of one woman who had come to him for healing.

“There is a lot of jealousy. People talk,” he says defensively. “What dictates is the conscience toward God.” Noting his apparent wealth, some critics say his “healings” are merely a front to make him a rich man (“Is” 2005).

Certainly, his procedures are a sham. The twisting of forceps up a pilgrim’s nose is an old circus and carnival sideshow stunt, explained in my book Secrets of the Sideshows (Nickell 2005, 238—241). Looking far more tortuous than it is, the feat depends on the fact that, unknown to many people, there is a sinus cavity that extends horizontally from the nostrils over the roof of the mouth to a surprising distance—enough to accommodate a spike, icepick, or other implement used in the “Human Blockhead” act.

At my instigation, National Geographic filmed a performance of such an act at the Washington, D.C., showbar Palace of Wonders, operated by carny impresario (and friend) James Taylor. Our blockhead was “Swami Yomahmi,” a.k.a. Stephon Walker, whom I introduced with my best carny-sideshow spiel. Walker even cranked a rotating drill bit into his nose. He also used a blunt knife to scrape the white part of his eyeball and acknowledged that such stunts look more risky than they are.

A surgeon who commented on John of God’s incisions stated that they were superficial (little more than skin deep, apparently) and would not be expected either to bleed very much or even to cause much initial pain. The same is true of scraping the white of the eye or inserting something into the nasal cavity (“Controversial” 2006). Physicians affiliated with the Skeptical Inquirer voiced similar opinions. The brief nasal procedure occasionally leaves someone’s nose bleeding, but his or her body’s own healing mechanisms will no doubt repair the minor injury. The bottom line regarding the procedures is that they are pseudosurgeries that have no objective medical benefit other than the well-known placebo effect.

Furthermore, the “holy water” that “João-in-Entity” blesses and that supposedly helps effect cures is ordinary water. I provided a specially labeled bottle I had purchased in Atlanta, and National Geographic had it tested at a major D.C.-area facility, the Washington Suburban Sanitation Commission. It was found to have no unusual properties and to be entirely unremarkable (“Miracle” 2006).1

As to João-in-Entity’s herbal remedies, actually only a single herb is prescribed, but those seeking aid are told that the entities are able to use it to help cure a wide variety of ailments (“Miracle Cures” 2006). The herb is one of the many varieties of passionflower, a mystical plant associated with Jesus’ crucifixion, and it has been used since ancient times as a “sedative, nervine and antispasmodic.” Herbalists say it soothes the nervous system and produces restful sleep that brightens one’s outlook (Lucas 1972, 128—129). Small wonder it would be the drug of choice for a “healing” center to distribute widely.

Many people offer testimonials as to the beneficial effects they have supposedly received at the hands of John of God. In fact, however, the successes attributed to the entities may be nothing more than what occurs at other alleged miracle sites, like Lourdes, where the vast majority of supplicants remain uncured. Since such “healings” are typically held to be miraculous because they are “medically inexplicable,” claimants are engaging in the logical fallacy of “arguing from ignorance”—that is, drawing a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. Touted healings may actually be attributable to such factors as misdiagnosis, spontaneous remission, psychosomatic conditions, prior medical treatment, the body’s own healing power, and other effects (Nickell 1998, 133—137).

Consider, for example, the case of Matthew Ireland, a pilgrim from Guilford, Vermont, whose doctor told him he had a type of brain tumor that was fast-growing and inoperable. After two years of radiation treatments and chemotherapy, Ireland made three visits to John of God. Subsequent MRI testing did show that the tumor mass had shrunk by fifty percent, but it was not gone as the entity had claimed. Ireland’s former oncologist attributes the partial success to the aggressive radiation treatment and concedes it is possible that the specific type of tumor may have been misdiagnosed (“Miracle” 2006; “Is” 2005).

Often, at healing services like those of John of God in Brazil, pilgrims’ emotions may trigger the release of endorphins, brain-produced substances that reduce sensitivity to pain. They may thus believe and act as if they have been miraculously healed—even throwing away their crutches—whereas later investigation reveals their situation to be as bad, or worse, than before (Nickell 1998, 136). However, I did note that, at the Atlanta John of God event, those who came with walkers, crutches, and wheelchairs left with them. Sadly, the entities had not taken away their afflictions, only their money.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my wife, Diana Harris, not only for her forbearance but also her direct assistance in this project. I am also grateful to Isham Randolph and others from National Geographic Television and Film for their professional work, as well as to Timothy Binga, the director of CFI Libraries, and Lauren Becker, then CFI’s assistant director of communications, for research assistance.

Note

• At the event I attended in Atlanta on April 4, 2006, at the Renaissance Waverly Hotel, a staffer told me the water could be replenished by refilling the bottle when the level gets low, using ordinary tap water—the original water energizing the newly added.

References

• Bragdon, Emma. 2002. Spiritual Alliances: Discovering the Roots of Health at the Casa de Dom Inácio. Woodstock, Vermont: Lightening Up Press.
• Controversial faith-healer schedules Atlanta visit. 2006. Available at wsbtv.com/print/7257434/detail.html; accessed April 4, 2006.
• Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2000. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, 2nd ed. New York: Checkmark Books.
• Is “John of God” a healer or charlatan? 2005. ABC News, February 8. (Available at religionnewsblog.com/print.php?p=10253; accessed April 4, 2006. (The ABC Primetime Live broadcast on which this article is based aired February 10, 2005.)
• John of God in Atlanta. 2006a. Available at johnofgodinatlanta.com; accessed March 15.
• 2006b. Personal communication from donjenna@johnofgodinatlanta.com. March 8.
• Lucas, Richard. 1972. The Magic of Herbs in Daily Living. West Nyack, N.Y.: Parker Publishing Co.
• Miracle Cures. 2006. Is It Real? TV series, National Geographic Channel. October 9. Nickell, Joe. 1998. Looking for a Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions & Healing Cures. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• 2005. Secrets of the Sideshows. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky.
• Pellegrino-Estrich, Robert. 1995. John of God. Available at johnofgod.com/article.htm; accessed February 21, 2006.

For those who don’t know, Paul supposedly died in an automobile crash in 1966 and was replaced by a double. The new Paul—or “Faul” (for “Fake Paul”)—has been impersonating him for, lo, these many years.

One Web site, at uberkinder.5u.com/paul/, not only has all the usual clues from the Beatles’s album covers and music but compares voices and superimposes pictures of Paul at various times during his career to contrast noses, chins, bone structure, etc. There really is a lot of evidence to support the theory that McCartney is dead. The idea is presented cogently and backed by mountains of evidence. Like so many theories, it is neat and plausible, but, nonetheless, wrong.

The reason conspiracy theories are such an important subject is that we exist in a world awash with them: Kennedy, the origin of the AIDS virus, our supposedly faked moon landing, the death of almost anybody famous (Lennon, Princess Diana, John Kennedy Jr., Elvis, etc.), the government being involved in inner-city drug conspiracies, and on and on it goes. But some might inquire what difference it makes if people believe in cloyingly clever canards? We dwell in a world where fairy tales and fictions are already the norm. According to articles I’ve read, 70 percent of the public believes that there was a vast conspiracy to kill JFK, 80 percent believes in the existence of UFOs, and approximately 95 percent believes in supernatural beings such as ghosts, gods, devils, angels, and poltergeists.

In effect, everything in the world of conspiracies is the opposite of what it is in reality. Paul McCartney, who is really alive, is dead; Elvis, who is really dead, is alive. Since so many people saw JFK being fatally injured, you can’t say he’s alive, so they go for the next best thing: massive conspiracy. Whatever is . . . isn’t. Whatever reality you don’t like, you can change with the handy eraser on the end of your pencil-like head.

So what difference does it make? I maintain that one of the reasons the world is in the jolly shape it’s in is that we have many people believing in and, more significantly, acting upon things that are simply not true. When we believe in fairy tales, we keep ourselves timorous children. We lose our individual strength and begin looking to things outside of ourselves for that strength and guidance.

Let’s look briefly at the most famous conspiracy theory, JFK’s assassination in Dallas. [See also Massimo Polidoro’s column “Facts and Fiction in the Kennedy Assassination,” SI, January/February 2005.] Seventy percent say it was a conspiracy. This makes not believing it was a conspiracy seem naïve, gullible—well, let’s face it, downright jug-headed.

Much is made of the grassy knoll, located in front and to the right of Kennedy when the shooting occurred. Many people have opined that the shots came from there. Oliver Stone, in his movie JFK, suggests that the horrific head shot that killed Kennedy came from there.

As a young boy, my father took me out hunting probably hundreds of times. I shot hundreds if not thousands of animals (something I no longer do). All of the animals that met their deaths from my gun (deer, rabbits, squirrels, birds) died the same way: small holes where the bullet entered, perhaps a minuscule trickle of blood, and, if the bullet hit bone, massive, craterlike holes in their bodies where the projectile exited. It’s simply a case of physics. No bullet ever made has the ability to tear large holes where it enters; it can only create them where it exits. This is because the bullet is intact when it enters and then explodes or fragments upon hitting bone.

And the same is true of the bullet that struck JFK. As anyone who has ever hunted could tell you, the head shot that took the front right part of Kennedy’s head off could have come only from behind. There is no other possibility, so scratch the grassy knoll.

The second area of doubt I would like to broach is the following, which I have never, by the way, seen addressed or answered in all my years of reading about the Kennedy case. If Oswald was part of a grand conspiracy and was ordered, commissioned, and paid to execute the president, is the method of getting a job in a building and then hoping you get lucky with the target actually driving by a viable hitman strategy? Obviously, Oswald didn’t go to Kennedy—as all other hitmen do; Kennedy came to Oswald. Does this really sound like a conspiratorial plot to you? Or does it sound like what it was, not a crime of conspiracy but a crime of opportunity?

By the way, Kennedy wasn’t scheduled to go to Dallas until just a couple of days earlier. His staff made a last-minute change for him, so he could go stumping (i.e., campaigning) for Democratic congressional candidates. Nowhere in the years since the shooting have I ever read or heard that anybody has ever suspected Kennedy’s own inner staff of setting him up. They question every other aspect of the case from A to Z, but I don’t know of anybody, official or unofficial, who has suspected the staff within the White House of being part of a grand conspiracy. His being rescheduled for a visit to Dallas was just one of those things that comes up all the time in politics.

The thing that caught my attention about the McCartney conspiracy case was that it had so much detail, just like the Kennedy case. There are literally hundreds of pieces of “proof” that McCartney is dead. His height changing in different pictures, voice analysis, picture analysis, and on and on. As with the Kennedy case, there are endless pieces and tidbits here and there that can be combined to make it look like a strong case.

However, anything, anywhere or anytime, can be made to look like a conspiracy, if that is what your agenda is at the outset. There are such things as inductive and deductive reasoning. In deductive reasoning, you start with a premise or hypothesis (e.g., Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy) and then you look for all the pertinent information, modify it to suit your hypothesis, and throw out all that doesn’t fit.

It’s what we use in our adversarial legal system. One side scours for what it wants to find and so does the other, to support their diametrically opposed theories of the case. What it really comes down to is modern-day sophism; you have parties spinning theories and then finding, spinning, or cooking up evidence that supports what they want to believe. (It is, in my always humble opinion, one of the principal flaws in our legal system.) Deductive logic is by far the most prevalent way of thinking in our society. The other method is using inductive reasoning. Withholding judgment or theory, looking at all the evidence, and then formulating your belief or theory based on all of the available evidence—regardless of what you may prefer the evidence to say. This is actually one part of the scientific method.

The fact is that Kennedy was shot by Oswald acting alone. We did go to the moon. Inner-city drugs were not the result of a massive government conspiracy. John Lennon was murdered by a lone religious nut (crazy but, nonetheless, religiously motivated by Lennon’s remark about being more popular than Jesus). Princess Diana was killed by a drunk driver. JFK Jr. died when he flew into dark cloudy skies without being appropriately trained to fly by instruments alone. Elvis died from too many pills and too much fried chicken. The government did not create AIDS.

Think about that for a minute. At the time of this writing, Osama bin Laden is still at large. The FBI couldn’t find the Unabomber for eighteen years, until his brother turned him in. This is why I find it hysterically goofy when I hear and read about these great conspiracies that presumably include hundreds of people over the span of many decades. They’re going to keep hundreds of witnesses, investigators, and agents quiet about the Kennedy case? Hundreds of people over decades? Kill the info about UFOs? There are no James Bonds here. No Moriartys, no Holmeses, not even any Watsons. No Goldfingers, either. This is the gang that said security guard Richard Jewell was the Olympic Park bomber. Grand conspiracies, folks? Ha ha ha.

n point of fact, my only concern involving the government in this area is that someone will plant a bomb right on top of the Statue of Liberty’s noggin and the agencies will mistake it for an alarm clock. Of course, I could secretly be an op of the government hired to write articles like this to throw people off the scent. I bet I didn’t fool you one bit, did I?

References

• Morin, Richard. 1998. “Can We Believe in Polls about God?” The Washington Post, June 1.

Q: People keep showing me pictures that have “orbs” in them. They usually look like round spots of light. Some of these people claim that the orbs are angels or ghosts. Any idea what they really are?

—R. Wilber

Figure 1. A ghostly orb photographed in the haunted soldiers’ barracks at Fort George, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada.

A: Orbs appear over my desk on a regular basis. Well, actually, they come across my desk every month or two, when someone sends me, either by e-mail or postal mail, photographs of “mysterious” orbs they find scary, amazing, or simply puzzling. Orb photos are essentially like Rorschach cards, though the forms are usually white and round instead of black and blobby. The interpretations of both, however, reveal much about how the viewer sees the world.

According to most books on ghosts and hauntings that are written by authors with more enthusiasm than critical-thinking skills, just about anyone can find evidence of ghosts using a common device in nearly every home: a camera. Orbs have also been reported in connection with crop circles and UFOs; they are a good, all-around “unexplained” phenomenon that can be adapted to fit many paranormal scenarios.

Most orbs are simply round or oval white shapes, though they may take a variety of forms. There is not one blanket cause for all orbs; many things can create the phenomena, ranging from insects to dust. In a series of experiments, I was able to create orb photos under a wide range of circumstances. The easiest way to create orbs is to take a flash photograph outdoors on a rainy night. The flash will reflect off of the individual droplets and appear as dozens of white, floating orbs. (The effect is most pronounced in a light rain, though even a little moisture in the air can create mysterious orbs.) CSI Senior Research Fellow Joe Nickell (1994), in his own studies, found that flashes reflecting back from camera straps are a common source of orbs, as are unnoticed shiny surfaces that can reflect a camera flash.

During one investigation I conducted at Fort George (“Canada’s most haunted place,” in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario), I examined a large, wooden barracks where both ghosts and orbs had been reported. I took several flash photographs of the area, and I noticed that the building (essentially, a barn-like structure) was quite dusty, which can create orbs. As a television crew interviewed some ghost hunters, I noticed one orb, photographed it, and wondered what it might be (see figure 1). It was at about chest height and did not move at all, suggesting that it was neither an insect nor a dust particle; instead, it seemed supernaturally suspended in the air. It was several feet away from the nearest post, wall, or other visible means of support. It was quite odd, I had to admit. I showed the image to one of the ghost hunters, who seemed pleased that a skeptic had indeed captured what was obviously a ghost orb.

Figure 2. Further investigation reveals that the “orb” was simply a tiny dust particle, caught in a spiderweb, reflected by a camera flash.

Not content to simply declare my orb a sign of the supernatural, I searched harder for a solution. Sure enough, closer investigation revealed that the orb was in fact a tiny piece of dust or lint that clung to the remnants of a spider web (see figure 2). It was a very unusual place for a web, and, had I not traced the long, nearly invisible line to its arachnid anchor, I would have rejected a web as an explanation. But it was a very long strand and just far enough away from the walkway that all but the tallest passersby would not run into it. It was very difficult to see, and only apparent when a dark color was held up in the air behind it for contrast—or when caught in a flash photograph.

Orbs may seem otherworldly because they usually appear only in photographs and are usually invisible to the naked eye. They are often unnoticed when the photo is taken; it is only later that the presence of a ghostly, unnatural, glowing object is discovered, sometimes appearing over or around an unsuspecting person. To those unaware of alternative explanations, it is no wonder that orbs spook them. Most ghost investigators will admit that at least some orb photos are of mundane phenomena and are not necessarily ghosts. Still, they insist, there must be some orbs that defy rational explanation, though none has yet been found. But even if that is true, no one has proven that anything but photographic and optical mechanics can create orbs.

References

• Nickell, Joe. 1994. Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation. Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press.

The “ghost video” became a nationwide hit and has been viewed over 85,000 times on the YouTube Web site (below). What started as a local curiosity soon spread internationally, as CBS News, ABC News, and newspapers across the country from The Boston Globe to the San Francisco Chronicle carried the story of the “courthouse ghost.” Friends and bloggers shared their opinions about the mysterious object; one Santa Fe local asked if psychics had yet been asked to communicate with the restless spirit. Other theories included a video glitch, a hoax, a spider, and a reflection from a passing bicyclist or car.

I was asked by a reporter from the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper to investigate the video. I traveled to Santa Fe to see the original surveillance tape and conducted a series of experiments over the course of two days. After some analysis and a series of measurements, I eliminated some of the more outlandish theories and focused on two of the most likely suspects: a floating cottonwood seed or an insect. There was plenty of speculation, but actually proving that a given suspect could create the “ghost” image is a whole different matter.

Figure 2. A still image of a bug (circled), taken from the District Courthouse’s security camera, duplicating the original “ghost.”

I blew cottonwood seed into the air near the camera to see how closely the resulting image matched the ghost. A review of the tape showed only mixed results: while the size and shape was roughly correct, the color and movement did not match. The second set of experiments involved the bug hypothesis. While a crawling insect had been offered as an explanation, it wasn’t clear that a bug would indeed create that image. The next morning, I returned to the courthouse and carefully placed ladybugs and other insects on top of the video camera (see figure 1). After a few false starts, at 7:26 a.m. (within minutes of the time of the original “mystery” videotaping), I coaxed the “ghost” across the camera lens (see figure 2). Using the insects, I duplicated the ghost image in every respect, including size, shape, color, and movement. The deputies at courthouse agreed; “You got it,” Deputy John Lucero told me. “I’m convinced it was a bug.”

The mystery was solved: the Santa Fe Courthouse Ghost was a small insect or spider. The only real mystery is why the ghost label stuck, though the word ghost often is simply a catch-all term for something someone can’t explain or doesn’t understand. Frequently, these mysteries explode into the pop culture and make a splash, with little follow-up or resolution (while the original story appeared twice on the front page of the New Mexican, the definitive debunking was noted in one short sidebar in the C section).

While the investigation was a textbook success, there was only one thing I wished I’d done differently: before I started, I should have hired some local psychics to contact the ghostly spirit and tell us why it was haunting the courthouse. The answers would have been fascinating.

The first Gulf Breeze UFO photos were published, anonymously at first, in The Gulf Breeze Sentinel on November 18, 1987. These were soon followed by many others, most of them looking laughably bogus, with the Sentinel playing the role of chief UFO booster. It didn’t take long for the identity of the photographer and chief UFO contact to be revealed as local contractor Ed Walters. Author Craig Myers is a reporter for the rival Pensacola News Journal, and seems to enjoy needling the competition’s uncritical, even sensationalist, reporting.

Assigned by the News Journal to do a special report on the UFO hysteria, Myers recounted how UFO buffs would gather at Shoreline Park, near the Pensacola Bay Bridge. Often, they would see a red UFO nearby, which some attributed to a lighted kite, possibly being pulled by a boat. This is where Walters claimed to have discovered several circular UFO landing pads while being interviewed by Myers’s colleague, who later said, “It looked like someone just trampled down the weeds or something.” Ultimately, the UFO issue became very divisive in the community, and Myers gives us an insider’s view of the controversy. In 1990, Walters used his new fame to launch a bid for the Gulf Breeze City Council. Out of a field of nine candidates, he came in “dead last.”

Anyone who is undecided about the Gulf Breeze claims or who may have been swayed by Bruce Maccabee’s pro-UFO analysis needs to read this book. Myers recounts in full detail how the case unfolded, where the battle lines were drawn, and who fired what salvo from what position. MUFON, the largest UFO group in the United States, took an unambiguously pro-Gulf Breeze position. When facts should have gotten in the way of that position, the facts were ignored. MUFON held its 1990 convention in Gulf Breeze to capitalize on the excitement.

Myers was the reporter who interviewed the people who had moved into the house where Walters had been living at the time of his first UFO photos. They found a model UFO, apparently tossed up in the attic, made of styrofoam plates and such. “It was the Gulf Breeze UFO,” writes Myers, and he now held it in his hands. Later, Myers was able to duplicate Walters’s UFO photos almost exactly using the model. Confronted with the undeniable evidence, Walters claimed that the model had somehow been planted in the house by “professional debunkers” who “will do whatever [is] necessary to debunk a case.”

Because the book gives such an in-depth, close-up view of the Gulf Breeze controversy, the story contains many subplots. One is the amusing story of the “Doomsday Six,” six members of a U.S. Army intelligence unit in Germany, who apparently belonged to some sort of end-of-the-world cult. They deserted their posts and traveled to Gulf Breeze for some purpose that was never entirely clear, apparently at the suggestion of a Ouija board!

The book reprints humorist Dave Barry’s satirical essay on his own investigations of the Gulf Breeze photos, in which he recounts his conversations with Walters, who told him weird tales, such as being trapped by the UFO’s paralyzing ray and of hearing strange telepathic voices. The more Barry heard about this case, the more skeptical he became. Most major UFO cases are like that—they sound impressive when one hears just a little about them in sensationalist media reports, but, upon reading the full details of what did (and did not) transpire, the differences between the “UFO incident” and “a real event” become glaringly obvious. Sometimes, Myers stretches his metaphors to the point where they seem to groan back at you right there on the page, and some of his witticisms seem too clever by half. He seems to think he can write like Dave Barry, but, unfortunately, he cannot. This distracts from the serious message of the book. Nonetheless, all reporters who are called upon to write on UFOs and other “paranormal” subjects should read this book for a solid example of hard-headed investigative journalism and proper skepticism.

AIDS denialists are eccentric but not irrelevant, because they campaign actively against the use of ARVs and promote the dangerous view that HIV is harmless (and some say not even sexually transmitted). South African president Thabo Mbeki took the AIDS denialists so seriously that he delayed the introduction of ARVs to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV and invited the leading AIDS denialists to serve on his “Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel” (Nattrass 2007). They recommended that ARVs be avoided and that all forms of immune deficiency be treated with vitamins and “alternative” and “complementary” therapies including “massage therapy, music therapy, yoga, spiritual care, homeopathy, Indian ayurvedic medicine, light therapy and many other methods” (PAAP 2001, 79, 86).

This leap—from the critique of mainstream biomedical science on AIDS to the promotion of unproven and unregulated alternative therapies—is a replay of the classic quack-marketing strategy of promoting belief in alternative remedies by sowing disbelief and skepticism about the medical establishment (Hurley 2006, 216). It is thus not surprising that AIDS denialism has been used by vitamin salesmen (notably the Dr. Rath Health Foundation), self-styled alternative healers, and some traditional healers to promote their worldviews and products (Nattrass 2007). One of South Africa’s current health-policy failings is that, instead of cracking down on those making unsubstantiated health claims and creating markets for their wares, the health minister (Manto Tshabalala-Msimang) has provided cover and support for them.

AIDS denialists downplay their links with the purveyors of alternative therapies, preferring instead to characterize themselves as brave “dissidents” attempting to engage a hostile medical/industrial establishment in genuine scientific “debate.” They complain that their attempts to raise questions and pose alternative hypotheses have been unjustly rejected or ignored at the cost of scientific progress itself.

Dissent and critique are, of course, central to science, but so, too, is respect for evidence and peer review. While it was intellectually respectable to dissent diametrically from mainstream views in the early days of AIDS science when relatively little was known about AIDS pathogenesis, this is no longer the case. In the 1980s, it was understandable that AIDS dissidents were uneasy about the claim that one virus could cause so many different diseases. But, once it was shown that HIV worked by undermining the immune system, thereby rendering the body vulnerable to a host of opportunistic infections, their concerns should have been put to rest. Similarly, the wealth of data on the successes of ARV treatment should have alleviated their initial worries about its overall therapeutic benefit. Thus one of the early AIDS dissident doctors, Joseph Sonnabend, had, by 2000, welcomed the life-saving capacity of ARVs, describing them as a “wonderful blessing” (Sonnabend 2000). However, this did not deter today’s AIDS denialists, who continue to cite his dated views on their Web sites in support of their unchanged views.1

Given their resistance to all evidence to the contrary, today’s AIDS dissidents are more aptly referred to as AIDS denialists. This stance may be attributable, in part, to a genuine misunderstanding of the science of HIV. For example, in his affidavit to the Australian court in the Parenzee case, a member of the Perth Group, Valendar Turner, testified that HIV had not been isolated because it had been identified only through the detection of reverse transcription (the process of writing RNA into DNA), an activity not unique to retroviruses (Turner 2006, 4). In subsequent testimony for the prosecution, Robert Gallo (the discoverer of retroviruses and codiscoverer of HIV) pointed out that HIV had been identified as a retrovirus through the detection of reverse transcriptase, which is an enzyme unique to retroviruses, not the activity of reverse transcription, per se. He added that “only a fool” would mistake the two (Gallo 2007b, 1310, 1313—1314).

Misunderstanding the science of AIDS may be part of the story, but it does not explain why AIDS denialists are so hostile to and disbelieving of AIDS science. Part of the answer probably has to do with the belief that AIDS science cannot be trusted because the “scientific establishment” has been corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry (see, e.g., Farber 2006). This resonates with what Jon Cohen (2006, 1) calls “pharmanoia,” or “the extreme distrust of drug research and development that’s sweeping the world.” John le Carré’s novel (and subsequent hit Hollywood movie) The Constant Gardener, which provides a conspiratorial account of unethical medical trials in Africa, is a classic in this genre (Le Carré 2001). This book was cited approvingly in a South African AIDS-denialist document coauthored by President Mbeki as being “well researched” and “illuminating” about the way the pharmaceutical industry influences academic research (Mbeki and Mokaba 2002).

The pharmaceutical industry is, of course, far from angelic. There are documented cases where drug companies have designed trials in ways to promote sales of particular products rather than to test the best possible treatments; where clinical trials in poor countries have been unethical; where early research indicating dangerous side effects has been ignored for too long; where patent law has been abused to prevent low-cost competition; where too many resources have been spent on marketing “me-too” drugs (that is, drugs that are only marginally different from existing products) rather than investing in innovative drug development; and where unethical financial inducements have been made to doctors, researchers, and politicians (Goozner 2004; Angell 2005). However, what such cases suggest is that the pharmaceutical industry (and industry-funded research) needs to be carefully scrutinized and regulated. It does not imply that the entire industry and associated medical science are harmful to humans. As Cohen (2006) argues, the problem with the new pharmanoia is that it has put “Big Pharma” on a par with “Big Tobacco” and, through wild exaggeration, has turned “shades of moral grey into black.”

Robert Gallo, the discoverer of retroviruses, devoted ten pages of his book on discovering HIV to demolishing Deusberg’s speculations. (AFP Photo/Roland Magunia [Photo via Newscom])

The same applies to AIDS research, where the pharmaceutical industry has a clear incentive to fund and support those research activities most likely to generate profits in the future. This means that additional mechanisms need to be created to ensure that more risky and less profitable—but nevertheless important—areas of research, like vaccine development, are supported. It does not imply, as asserted by the AIDS denialists, that the pharmaceutical industry is funding a global conspiracy including all AIDS scientists, epidemiologists, and medical practitioners to invent a disease in order to market harmful drugs. (This tactic has also been used to great affect by Kevin Trudeau in his infomercials; see SI January/February 2006, “What They Don’t Want You to Know.”) Aside from there being no evidence for this, the idea is incoherent, because the profit motive driving pharmaceutical companies gives them an incentive to keep people alive on chronic therapy as long as possible, not to kill them off quickly with dangerous drugs. Disrespect for AIDS scientists and physicians is a defining characteristic of AIDS denialists. Protected by a cloak of hubris—only they have the intelligence and moral courage to see the world for what it is—they portray themselves as lone, persecuted standard-bearers of the truth. As AIDS scientist John Moore (2006, 293) commented bitterly, their stance implies that “tens of thousands of health care professionals and research scientists are either too stupid to realize that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, or too venal to do anything about it for fear of losing income from the government or drug companies.” Equally galling for scientists is the fact that most of the outspoken AIDS denialists are journalists or academics with no scientific training and that those who have medical qualifications have never actually worked on HIV.

In the normal course of scientific engagement, this would leave the denialists with little if any credibility. Gallo made this point very well in the Parenzee court case with regard to Turner: “Is he a virologist? Does he do experiments on AIDS?” he asked the defense attorney when presented with Turner’s belief that HIV had not been isolated. “No,” interjected the judge. “He’s qualified in emergency medicine.” “I see,” replied Gallo. “I am not. Don’t ever come to me if you are hurt” (Gallo 2007b, 1272—1273). In a subsequent e-mail message to the scientists and activists who run the anti-AIDS-denialist Web site www.aidstruth.org, Gallo talked of his amazement at the “mass ignorance coupled with the grandiosity of selling themselves as experts” displayed by the Perth Group, saying that “it would be like us arguing with Niels Bohr on quantum mechanics” (Gallo 2007a).

The only active AIDS denialist with any major scientific standing is Duesberg, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the first person to isolate a cancer gene.2 But his credibility to speak on AIDS is tarnished by the fact that he has never conducted any scientific research on HIV, let alone published it in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He simply does not have any evidence to support his erroneous claim that AIDS is caused by recreational and ARV drugs rather than HIV.

Unable to convince his scientific peers, Duesberg relies on the media (including the Internet) to promote his views directly to the public. His cause was assisted substantially by The Sunday Times in London from 1992 to 1994, when the science editor ran many long pieces attempting to discredit AIDS science. This enabled Duesberg to achieve a form of socially constructed credibility outside of conventional scientific channels (Epstein 1996, 105—178), which, in turn, prompted John Maddox (then editor of Nature) to go on the offensive and subject The Sunday Times during this period to regular critical review in Nature.

South African President Thabo Mbeki has encouraged AIDS deniers and slowed treatments. (Reuters/Finbarr O'Reilly, South Africa [Photo via Newscom])

Largely as a consequence of Duesberg’s profile, the scientific community was compelled to pay greater attention to his ideas than was warranted by their content. In 1991, Gallo (1991, 287—297) devoted ten pages of his book on discovering HIV to demolishing Duesberg’s speculations. A couple of years later, Science investigated Duesberg’s claims and concluded that none of them stood up to scrutiny (Cohen 1994). Undaunted, Duesberg and his colleague David Rasnick restated their long-refuted hypotheses in a 1998 article (which was followed immediately in the same journal by a point-by-point refutation [Galea and Chermann 1998]). None of this had any impact either on Duesberg or on journalists such as Farber, who continued to promote his views, largely unchanged from the early 1990s.

AIDS scientists are understandably baffled by such conviction-driven refusal to accept the implications of the weight of evidence to the contrary. As Gallo said of Duesburg in 1988, he is “like a little dog that won’t let go” (quoted in Cohen 1994, 1644). Moore (1996) went even further, comparing Duesberg to the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail who, after having all his limbs hacked off by his opponent, keeps on trying to fight with his teeth.

One of Duesberg’s tactics is to exploit the uncertainty that is ever-present in science and demand increasingly exacting standards of “proof,” and, when this is not forthcoming, proclaim fallaciously that the alternative hypothesis must be true. As Maddox observed Duesberg has not been asking questions or raising questions he believes should be answered, but has been making demands and implying (but sometimes saying outright) to colleagues, “Unless you can answer this, and right now, your belief that HIV causes AIDS is wrong.” It is as if a person were to have told Schrödinger in 1926, “Unless you can calculate the spectrum of lithium hydride, quantum mechanics is a pack of lies” (interestingly, that deceptively simple question is only now being answered). (Maddox 1993, 109)

This kind of fallacious reasoning is evident among other kinds of denialists, too, such as evolution deniers who see any gap in the fossil record as proof that God must have created the world (Mooney 2005).

Their zealous attachment to key ideas has a further consequence: the inability or refusal of AIDS denialists to weigh up risks and benefits. Thus, as soon as any toxicity can be shown for an ARV drug in any context, they conclude that the drug should not be prescribed in any situation. For example, when clinical evidence emerged that adverse events occurred among mothers on long-term Nevirapine therapy, this was seized upon by Farber (2006) to argue that Nevirapine should never be used in any circumstances—even as a single dose to prevent maternal transmission of HIV, a drug regimen that had been shown to be safe. When this error was pointed out (Gallo et al. 2006), the AIDS-denialist group “Rethinking AIDS” backed Farber’s strategy on the spurious grounds that it moved “neatly” between the two trial results as part of a single argument against Nevirapine (Rethinking AIDS 2007). They claimed, without any evidence, that both trials showed significant adverse events, when, in fact, not a single life-threatening event has ever been shown for single-dose Nevirapine.

All “debates” with AIDS denialists end up in a stalemate simply as a consequence of their refusal to play by the rules of reasonable debate. This is evident in the “rapid-responses” Web pages of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), where AIDS denialists such as Papadopulos-Eleopulos and Rasnick accounted for a disproportionate amount of space before the BMJ revised its rules and excluded this “shouting match of the deaf” (Butler 2003). Typically, the denialists would paste large amounts of convoluted text into their rapid-response submissions and then argue at length with anyone who responded. After trying to engage with the denialists, Peter J. Flegg, a physician from Blackpool Victoria Hospital, finally erupted with the following:

What is taking place on this forum is a farce, not a debate . . . . Good scientists are meant to accept new evidence and incorporate this into their hypotheses. The denialist approach is to ignore new evidence that is contradictory to their predetermined stance. After comprehensive rebuttal of any point of view, the denialist tactic is to quickly switch to a different topic. Then later, when no-one is looking, they can switch back to the original theme, hoping no-one will realise that these points were completely discredited on an earlier occasion. (Flegg 2003)

Exactly the same tactics are evident on science blogs when AIDS denialists enter into “debate.” Tara C. Smith’s science blog “Aetiology” hosted several rambling and ultimately unproductive interactions with AIDS denialists—most notably Harvey Bialy (Duesberg’s biographer and fellow member of Mbeki’s AIDS panel). The denialists conceded nothing, not even when the case was clearly an open-and-shut one to any reader. For example, AIDS denialists persistently cite an old study by Nancy Padian that reported low HIV transmission rates between sexual partners (Padian et al. 1997) as supporting evidence for their claim that HIV cannot be transmitted sexually. When reminded that participants in the Padian study were strongly counseled to practice safe sex (which means that the study cannot be used to back the claim that HIV, per se, is difficult to transmit sexually) and when presented with evidence from other studies showing that the risk of sexual transmission can be 20 percent or higher in developing countries, the denialists simply changed the topic. This prompted Chris Noble to comment:

Well, we seem to have drifted a long way from the famous Padian study which according to Harvey Bialy “demonstrated so well that sexually transmitted HIV was a figment.”

I note that Bialy never once made a comment that was relevant to the study. These are the people that claim that HIV cannot possibly cause AIDS. You ask them for justification and they give you the “Padian study.”

You demonstrate that this study cannot be used to conclude that HIV is not sexually transmitted and they go all silent, bring up other studies or in Bialy’s case proceed to insult everyone that doesn’t worship Peter Duesberg.

I predict that in the future the exact same people will again cite the “Padian study” as proof that HIV is not sexually transmitted. (Noble 2006)

Exactly as he predicted, the denialists continued to misrepresent Padian’s study (see Farber quoted in Kruglinski 2006 and Turner 2006, 13—14) and, even when Padian herself protested about the way that AIDS denialists have misused her work and ignored the available evidence (Padian n.d.). The denialists dismissed her piece as “info-ganda” (George 2006).

This lack of respect for the integrity of scientists makes it very difficult for AIDS scientists to make any headway. As Brian Foley, a scientist who works with the HIV database at Los Alamos National Laboratory, commented after a long blog exchange with South African AIDS denialist Anita Allen:

There is no such thing as “scientific debate” really. Science is about experiments, data and theories to explain the data. If Anita says “The virus has never been isolated” and I say “In fact dozens of infectious molecular clones of HIV-1 have been generated and that is as good as “isolation” gets for retroviruses,” one of us has to be lying. (Foley 2006) Foley’s comments point to the central role of integrity and respect for expertise in science. He is saying that for Allen, who is not a scientist, to claim that HIV does not exist amounts to her accusing him of misunderstanding or lying about the vast HIV databank he has at his fingertips. For him, her refusal to accept the mountain of evidence (and his bona fides to report it) amounts to her opting to believe—and propagate—lies. As far as the scientific community is concerned, the “debate” over whether HIV causes AIDS has long been settled. As the AIDS scientists and activists who run the Web site www.aidstruth.org put it:

For many years now, AIDS denialists have been unsuccessful in persuading credible peer-reviewed journals to accept their views on HIV/AIDS, because of their scientific implausibility and factual inaccuracies. That failure does not entitle those who disagree with the scientific consensus on a life-and-death public health issue to then attempt to confuse the general public by creating the impression that scientific controversy exists when it does not. (AIDSTruth 2007)

Unfortunately, President Mbeki was precisely one of those who was convinced that a scientific controversy existed—and, by slowing the rollout of ARVs in the public sector for both HIV prevention and AIDS treatment, his belief resulted in the loss of many thousands of lives (Nattrass 2007). He has also been associated with Christine Maggiore, the controversial HIV-positive American AIDS denialist who does not practice safe sex and campaigns actively against the use of ARVs (Moore and Nattrass 2006). When Maggiore was pregnant with her second child, she was featured on the cover of Mothering magazine with “no AZT” emblazoned across her abdomen. She did not take ARVs to prevent infecting her baby with HIV and increased the risk of transmission yet further by breastfeeding the child. Tragically, her daughter died three years later of what the Los Angeles coroner attributed to AIDS-related pneumonia (Ornstein and Costello 2005). Maggiore, however, continues to deny that HIV had anything to do with the death, claiming instead that the child died because of an allergic reaction to an antibiotic, despite substantial evidence to the contrary (Bennett 2006).

People in positions of authority, be they statesmen like Mbeki or parents like Maggiore, hold the lives of others in their hands. For them to reject science in favor of AIDS denialism is not only profoundly irresponsible but also tragic. But responsibility for unnecessary suffering and death rests also with the AIDS denialists who promote discredited and dangerous views and encourage people to reject scientifically tested treatments.

Notes

1. See, e.g., virusmyth.net.
2. Another AIDS denialist with scientific credentials is Kary Mullis, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for inventing the polymerase chain reaction. However, he, too, has never done any scientific research on HIV or AIDS and, unlike Duesberg, is not active in the AIDS denialist movement. His autobiography (Mullis 1998) documents his skepticism about the relationship between HIV and AIDS as well as his encounters with aliens and his belief in flying saucers and astrology.

References