Q: What explains the ability of some people to insert sharp spikes into their skin without bleeding or pain?

I’m sure there is nothing paranormal involved, but my friend believes otherwise.

—A. Lawson

Zamora the Torture King with skewers through his jaw and arm. (Photo by Benjamin Radford)

A: With perhaps the notable exception of masochists, sticking sharp spikes and skewers into your body isn’t something most people do for fun. It hurts, it can be dangerous, and it’s one of those skills that’s best left off your resume.

However, there are a few who do it for a living as part of an act. One of them is Zamora the Torture King, a Las Vegas-based performer who has entertained (and disturbed) audiences for years with his peculiar brand of showmanship.

In his book Secrets of the Sideshows, fellow SI columnist and CSI investigator extraordinaire Joe Nickell discusses this as a version of the “human pincushion act” well-known to sideshow performers during the heyday of the carnival (Nickell 2005, 234).

There are several psychological and physiological processes at play. The first is the audience’s expectations: when they see a large, sharp, gleaming spike, they tend to overestimate the damage it will do. They may picture what it would do to their own bodies if they stepped on it or jabbed it into their chests. Yet in the right hands, the sharper the skewer is, the less blood there will be, since the performer can then carefully guide it into place with minimal dermal damage.

Then there’s the psychology of the victim/performer. He (it’s usually a he) knows when the pain is coming and, through practice, can steel himself against it. In some cases, the skeweree seems better able to control pain than most people: Zamora’s tolerance for pain was tested by Dr. Joshua Prager of the UCLA School of Medicine. According to Prager, Zamora’s ability to withstand pain was “off the charts,” most likely due to meditation and self-hypnosis (Is It Real? 2005). Another simple way to ease the discomfort is to take painkillers beforehand—though not aspirin, which would thin the blood and create more bleeding.

The other part is physiological: cleanly made puncture wounds bleed far less than scrapes or cuts, and the skewers are often placed in the fleshy parts of the body, away from major veins and arteries. The inside of the forearms is a popular puncture place, as it has relatively few areas that register pain and even fewer that will bleed profusely. It’s not quite accurate to say that there is no blood or pain, but there is certainly less than most people would expect upon seeing a huge metal spike through the arm or jaw.

References

• Is it Real? Superhuman Powers. 2005. National Geographic Television. Airdate August 20 (season 1, episode 7).
• Nickell, Joe. 2005. Secrets of the Sideshows. University of Kentucky Press: Lexington, Kentucky.

In the winter of 2000, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a study indicating that 200,000 two- to four-year-olds had been prescribed Ritalin for an “attention disorder” from 1991 to 1995. Judging by the response, the image of hundreds of thousands of mothers grinding up stimulants to put into the sippy cups of their preschoolers was apparently not a pretty one. Most national magazines and newspapers covered the story; some even expressed dismay or outrage at this exacerbation of what already seemed like a juggernaut of hyper-medicalizing childhood. The public reaction, however, was tame; the medical community, after a moment’s pause, continued unfazed. Today, the total toddler count is well past one million, and influential psychiatrists have insisted that mental health prescriptions are appropriate for children as young as twelve months. For the pharmaceutical companies, this is progress.

In 1995, 2,357,833 children were diagnosed with ADHD (Woodwell 1997)—twice the number diagnosed in 1990. By 1999, 3.4 percent of all American children had received a stimulant prescription for an attention disorder. Today, that number is closer to ten percent. Stimulants aren’t the only drugs being given out like candy to our children. A variety of other psychotropics like antidepressants, antipsychotics, and sedatives are finding their way into babies’ medicine cabinets in large numbers. In fact, the worldwide market for these drugs is growing at a rate of ten percent a year, $20.7 billion in sales of antipsychotics alone (for 2007, IMSHealth 2008).

While the sheer volume of psychotropics being prescribed for children might, in and of itself, produce alarm, there has not been a substantial backlash against drug use in large part because of the widespread perception that “medically authorized” drugs must be safe. Yet, there is considerable evidence that psychoactive drugs do not take second place to other controlled pharmaceuticals in carrying grave and substantial risks. All classes of psychoactive drugs are associated with patient deaths, and each produces serious side effects, some of which are life-threatening.

In 2005, researchers analyzed data from 250,000 patients in the Netherlands and concluded that “we can be reasonably sure that antipsychotics are associated in something like a threefold increase in sudden cardiac death, and perhaps that older antipsychotics may be worse” (Straus et al. 2004). In 2007, the FDA chose to beef up its black box warning (reserved for substances that represent the most serious danger to the public) against antidepressants concluding, “the trend across age groups toward an association between antidepressants and suicidality . . . was convincing, particularly when superimposed on earlier analyses of data on adolescents from randomized, controlled trials” (Friedman and Leon 2007). Antidepressants have been banned for use with children in the UK since 2003. According to a confidential FDA report, prolonged administration of amphetamines (the standard treatment for ADD and ADHD) “may lead to drug dependence and must be avoided.” They further reported that “misuse of amphetamine may cause sudden death and serious cardiovascular adverse events” (Food and Drug Administration 2005). The risk of fatal toxicity from lithium carbonate, a not uncommon treatment for bipolar disorder, has been well documented since the 1950s. Incidents of fatal seizures from sedative-hypnotics, especially when mixed with alcohol, have been recorded since the 1920s.

Psychotropics carry nonfatal risks as well. Physical dependence and severe withdrawal symptoms are associated with virtually all psychoactive drugs. Psychological addiction is axiomatic. Concomitant side effects range from unpleasant to devastating, including: insulin resistance, narcolepsy, tardive dyskenisia (a movement disorder affecting 15–20 percent of antipsychotic patients where there are uncontrolled facial movements and sometimes jerking or twisting movements of other body parts), agranulocytosis (a reduction in white blood cells, which is life threatening), accelerated appetite, vomiting, allergic reactions, uncontrolled blinking, slurred speech, diabetes, balance irregularities, irregular heartbeat, chest pain, sleep disorders, fever, and severe headaches. The attempt to control these side effects has resulted in many children taking as many as eight additional drugs every day, but in many cases, this has only compounded the problem. Each “helper” drug produces unwanted side effects of its own.

The child drug market has also spawned a vigorous black market in high schools and colleges, particularly for stimulants. Students have learned to fake the symptoms of ADD in order to obtain amphetamine prescriptions that are subsequently sold to fellow students. Such “shopping” for prescription drugs has even spawned a new verb. The practice is commonly called “pharming.” A 2005 report from the Partnership for a Drug Free America, based on a survey of more than 7,300 teenagers, found one in ten teenagers, or 2.3 million young people, had tried prescription stimulants without a doctor’s order, and 29 percent of those surveyed said they had close friends who have abused prescription stimulants.

In a larger sense, the whole undertaking has had the disturbing effect of making drug use an accepted part of childhood. Few cultures anywhere on earth and anytime in the past have been so willing to provide stimulants and sedative-hypnotics to their offspring, especially at such tender ages. An entire generation of young people has been brought up to believe that drug-seeking behavior is both rational and respectable and that most psychological problems have a pharmacological solution. With the ubiquity of psychotropics, children now have the means, opportunity, example, and encouragement to develop a lifelong habit of self-medicating.

Common population estimates include at least eight million children, ages two to eighteen, receiving prescriptions for ADD, ADHD, bipolar disorder, autism, simple depression, schizophrenia, and the dozens of other disorders now included in psychiatric classification manuals. Yet sixty years ago, it was virtually impossible for a child to be considered mentally ill. The first diagnostic manual published by American psychiatrists in 1952, DSM-I, included among its 106 diagnoses only one for a child: Adjustment Reaction of Childhood/Adolescence. The other 105 diagnoses were specifically for adults. The number of children actually diagnosed with a mental disorder in the early 1950s would hardly move today’s needle. There were, at most, 7,500 children in various settings who were believed to be mentally ill at that time, and most of these had explicit neurological symptoms.

Of course, if there really are one thousand times as many kids with authentic mental disorders now as there were fifty years ago, then the explosion in drug prescriptions in the years since only indicates an appropriate medical response to a newly recognized pandemic, but there are other possible explanations for this meteoric rise. The last fifty years has seen significant social changes, many with a profound effect on children. Burgeoning birth rates, the decline of the extended family, widespread divorce, changing sexual and social mores, households with two working parents—it is fair to say that the whole fabric of life took on new dimensions in the last half century. The legal drug culture, too, became an omnipresent adjunct to daily existence. Stimulants, analgesics, sedatives, decongestants, penicillins, statins, diuretics, antibiotics, and a host of others soon found their way into every bathroom cabinet, while children became frequent visitors to the family physician for drugs and vaccines that we now believe are vital to our health and happiness. There is also the looming motive of money. The New York Times reported in 2005 that physicians who had received substantial payments from pharmaceutical companies were five times more likely to prescribe a drug regimen to a child than those who had refused such payments.

So other factors may well have contributed to the upsurge in psychiatric diagnoses over the past fifty years. But even if the increase reflects an authentic epidemic of mental health problems in our children, it is not certain that medication has ever been the right way to handle it. The medical “disease” model is one approach to understanding these behaviors, but there are others, including a hastily discarded psychodynamic model that had a good record of effective symptom relief. Alternative, less invasive treatments, too, like nutritional treatments, early intervention, and teacher and parent training programs were found to be at least as effective as medication in long-term reduction of a variety of symptoms (of ADHD, The MTA Cooperative Group 1999).

Nevertheless, the medical-pharmaceutical alliance has largely shrugged off other approaches and scoffed at the potential for conflicts of interest and continues to medicate children in ever-increasing numbers. With the proportion of diagnosed kids growing every month, it may be time to take another look at the practice and soberly reflect on whether we want to continue down this path. In that spirit, it is not unreasonable to ask whether this exponential expansion in medicating children has another explanation altogether. What if children are the same as they always were? After all, virtually every symptom now thought of as diagnostic was once an aspect of temperament or character. We may not have liked it when a child was sluggish, hyperactive, moody, fragile, or pestering, but we didn’t ask his parents to medicate him with powerful chemicals either. What if there is no such thing as mental illness in children (except the small, chronic, often neurological minority we once recognized)? What if it is only our perception of childhood that has changed? To answer this, we must look at our history and at our nature.

The human inclination to use psychoactive substances predates civilization. Alcohol has been found in late Stone Age jugs; beer may have been fermented before the invention of bread. Nicotine metabolites have been found in ancient human remains and in pipes in the Near East and Africa. Knowledge of Hul Gil, the “joy plant,” was passed from the Sumerians, in the fifth millennium b.c.e., to the Assyrians, then in serial order to the Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Indians, then to the Portuguese who would introduce it to the Chinese, who grew it and traded it back to the Europeans. Hul Gil was the Sumerian name for the opium poppy. Before the Middle Ages, economies were established around opium, and wars were fought to protect avenues of supply.

With the modern science of chemistry in the nineteenth century, new synthetic substances were developed that shared many of the same desirable qualities as the more traditional sedatives and stimulants. The first modern drugs were barbiturates—a class of 2,500 sedative/hypnotics that were first synthesized in 1864. Barbiturates became very popular in the U.S. for depression and insomnia, especially after the temperance movement resulted in draconian anti-drug legislation (most notoriously Prohibition) just after World War I. But variety was limited and fears of death by convulsion and the Winthrop drug-scare kept barbiturates from more general distribution.

Stimulants, typically caffeine and nicotine, were already ubiquitous in the first half of the twentieth century, but more potent varieties would have to wait until amphetamines came into widespread use in the 1930s. Amphetamines were not widely known until the 1920s and 1930s when they were first used to treat asthma, hay fever, and the common cold. In 1932, the Benzedrine Inhaler was introduced to the market and was a huge over-the-counter success. With the introduction of Dexedrine in the form of small, cheap pills, amphetamines were prescribed for depression, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, motion sickness, night-blindness, obesity, narcolepsy, impotence, apathy, and, of course, hyperactivity in children.

Amphetamines came into still wider use during World War II, when they were given out freely to GIs for fatigue. When the GIs returned home, they brought their appetite for stimulants to their family physicians. By 1962, Americans were ingesting the equivalent of forty-three ten-milligram doses of amphetamine per person annually (according to FDA manufacturer surveys).

Still, in the 1950s, the family physician’s involvement in furnishing psychoactive medications for the treatment of primarily psychological complaints was largely sub rosa. It became far more widespread and notorious in the 1960s. There were two reasons for this. First, a new, safer class of sedative hypnotics, the benzodiazepines, including Librium and Valium, were an instant sensation, especially among housewives who called them “mothers’ helpers.” Second, amphetamines had finally been approved for use with children (their use up to that point had been “off-label,” meaning that they were prescribed despite the lack of FDA authorization).

Pharmaceutical companies, coincidentally, became more aggressive in marketing their products with the tremendous success of amphetamines. Valium was marketed directly to physicians and indirectly through a public relations campaign that implied that benzodiazepines offered sedative/hypnotic benefits without the risk of addiction or death from drug interactions or suicide. Within fifteen years of its introduction, 2.3 billion Valium pills were being sold annually in the U.S. (Sample 2005).

So, family physicians became society’s instruments: the suppliers of choice for legal mood-altering drugs. But medical practitioners required scientific authority to protect their reputations, and the public required a justification for its drug-seeking behavior. The pharmaceutical companies were quick to offer a pseudoscientific conjecture that satisfied both. They argued that neurochemical transmitters, only recently identified, were in fact the long sought after mediators of mood and activity. Psychological complaints, consequently, were a function of an imbalance of these neural chemicals that could be corrected with stimulants and sedatives (and later antidepressants and antipsychotics). While the assertion was pure fantasy without a shred of evidence, so little was known about the brain’s true actions that the artifice was tamely accepted. This would later prove devastating when children became the targets of pharmaceutical expansion.

With Ritalin’s FDA approval for the treatment of hyperactivity in children, the same marketing techniques that had been so successful with other drugs were applied to the new amphetamine. Pharmaceutical companies had a vested interest in the increase in sales; they spared no expense in convincing physicians to prescribe them. Cash payments, stock options, paid junkets, no-work consultancies, and other inducements encouraged physicians to relax their natural caution about medicating children. Parents also were targeted. For example, CIBA, the maker of Ritalin, made large direct payments to parents’ support groups like CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) (The Merrow Report 1995). To increase the acceptance of stimulants, drug companies paid researchers to publish favorable articles on the effectiveness of stimulant treatments. They also endowed chairs and paid for the establishment of clinics in influential medical schools, particularly ones associated with universities of international reputation. By the mid 1970s, more than half a million children had already been medicated primarily for hyperactivity.

The brand of psychiatry that became increasingly popular in the 1980s and 1990s did not have its roots in notions of normal behavior or personality theory; it grew out of the concrete, atheoretical treatment style used in clinics and institutions for the profoundly disturbed. German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, not Freud, was the God of mental hospitals, and pharmaceuticals were the panacea. So the whole underlying notion of psychiatric treatment, diagnosis, and disease changed. Psychiatry, which had straddled psychology and medicine for a hundred years, abruptly abandoned psychology for a comfortable sinecure within its traditional parent discipline. The change was profound.

People seeking treatment were no longer clients, they were patients. Their complaints were no longer suggestive of a complex mental organization, they were symptoms of a disease. Patients were not active participants in a collaborative treatment, they were passive recipients of symptom-reducing substances. Mental disturbances were no longer caused by unique combinations of personality, character, disposition, and upbringing, they were attributed to pre-birth anomalies that caused vague chemical imbalances. Cures were no longer anticipated or sought; mental disorders were inherited illnesses, like birth defects, that could not be cured except by some future magic, genetic bullet. All that could be done was to treat symptoms chemically, and this was being done with astonishing ease and regularity.

In many ways, children are the ideal patients for drugs. By nature, they are often passive and compliant when told by a parent to take a pill. Children are also generally optimistic and less likely to balk at treatment than adults. Even if they are inclined to complain, the parent is a ready intermediary between the physician and the patient. Parents are willing to participate in the enforcement of treatments once they have justified them in their own minds and, unlike adults, many kids do not have the luxury of discontinuing an unpleasant medication. Children are additionally not aware of how they ought to feel. They adjust to the drugs’ effects as if they are natural and are more tolerant of side effects than adults. Pharmaceutical companies recognized these assets and soon were targeting new drugs specifically at children.

But third-party insurance providers balked at the surge in costs for treatment of previously unknown, psychological syndromes, especially since unwanted drug effects were making some cases complicated and expensive. Medicine’s growing prosperity as the purveyor of treatments for mental disorders was threatened, and the industry’s response was predictable. Psychiatry found that it could meet insurance company requirements by simplifying diagnoses, reducing identification to the mere appearance of certain symptoms. By 1980, they had published all new standards.

Lost in the process was the fact that the redefined diagnoses (and a host of new additions) failed to meet minimal standards of falsifiability and differentiability. This meant that the diagnoses could never be disproved and that they could not be indisputably distinguished from one another. The new disorders were also defined as lists of symptoms from which a physician could check off a certain number of hits like a Chinese menu, which led to reification, an egregious scientific impropriety. Insurers, however, with their exceptions undermined and under pressure from parents and physicians, eventually withdrew their objections. From that moment on, the treatment of children with powerful psychotropic medications grew unchecked.

As new psychotropics became available, their uses were quickly extended to children despite, in many cases, indications that the drugs were intended for use with adults only. New antipsychotics, the atypicals, were synthesized and marketed beginning in the 1970s. Subsequently, a new class of antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft was introduced. These drugs were added to the catalogue of childhood drug treatments with an astonishing casualness even as stimulant treatment for hyperactivity continued to burgeon.

In 1980, hyperactivity, which had been imprudently named “minimal brain dysfunction” in the 1960s, was renamed Attention Deficit Disorder in order to be more politic, but there was an unintended consequence of the move. Parents and teachers, familiar with the name but not always with the symptoms, frequently misidentified children who were shy, slow, or sad (introverted rather than inattentive) as suffering from ADD. Rather than correct the mistake, though, some enterprising physicians responded by prescribing the same drug for the opposite symptoms. This was justified on the grounds that stimulants, which were being offered because they slowed down hyperactive children, might very well have the predicted effect of speeding up under-active kids. In this way, a whole new population of children became eligible for medication. Later, the authors of DSM-III memorialized this practice by renaming ADD again, this time as ADHD, and redefining ADD as inattention. Psychiatry had reached a new level: they were now willing to invent an illness to justify a treatment. It would not be the last time this was done.

In the last twenty years, a new, more disturbing trend has become popular: the re-branding of legacy forms of mental disturbance as broad categories of childhood illness. Manic depressive illness and infantile autism, two previously rare disorders, were redefined through this process as “spectrum” illnesses with loosened criteria and symptom lists that cover a wide range of previously normal behavior. With this slim justification in place, more than a million children have been treated with psychotropics for bipolar disorder and another 200,000 for autism. A recent article in this magazine “The Bipolar Bamboozle” (Flora and Bobby 2008) illuminates how and why an illness that once occurred twice in every 100,000 Americans, has been recast as an epidemic affecting millions.

To overwhelmed parents, drugs solve a whole host of ancillary problems. The relatively low cost (at least in out-of-pocket dollars) and the small commitment of time for drug treatments make them attractive to parents who are already stretched thin by work and home life. Those whose confidence is shaken by indications that their children are “out of control” or “unruly” or “disturbed” are soothed by the seeming inevitability of an inherited disease that is shared by so many others. Rather than blaming themselves for being poor home managers, guardians with insufficient skills, or neglectful caretakers, parents can find comfort in the thought that their child, through no fault of theirs, has succumbed to a modern and widely accepted scourge. A psychiatric diagnosis also works well as an authoritative response to demands made by teachers and school administrators to address their child’s “problems.”

Once a medical illness has been identified, all unwanted behavior becomes fruit of the same tree. Even the children themselves are often at first relieved that their asocial or antisocial impulses reflect an underlying disease and not some flaw in their characters or personalities.

Conclusions

In the last analysis, childhood has been thoroughly and effectively redefined. Character and temperament have been largely removed from the vocabulary of human personality. Virtually every single undesirable impulse of children has taken on pathological proportions and diagnostic significance. Yet, if the psychiatric community is wrong in their theories and hypotheses, then a generation of parents has been deluded while millions of children have been sentenced to a lifetime of ingesting powerful and dangerous drugs.

Considering the enormous benefits reaped by the medical community, it is no surprise that critics have argued that the whole enterprise is a cynical, reckless artifice crafted to unfairly enrich them. Even though this is undoubtedly not true, physicians and pharmaceutical companies must answer for the rush to medicate our most vulnerable citizens based on little evidence, a weak theoretical model, and an antiquated and repudiated philosophy. For its part, the scientific community must answer for its timidity in challenging treatments made in the absence of clinical observation and justified by research of insufficient rigor performed by professionals and institutions whose objectivity is clearly in question, because their own interests are materially entwined in their findings.

It should hardly be necessary to remind physicians that even if their diagnoses are real, they are still admonished by Galen’s dictum Primum non nocere, or “first, do no harm.” If with no other population, this ought to be our standard when dealing with children. Yet we have chosen the most invasive, destructive, and potentially lethal treatment imaginable while rejecting other options that show great promise of being at least as effective and far safer. But these other methods are more expensive, more complicated, and more time-consuming, and thus far, we have not proved willing to bear the cost. Instead, we have jumped at a discounted treatment, a soft-drink-machine cure: easy, cheap, fast, and putatively scientific. Sadly, the difference in price is now being paid by eight million children.

Mental illness is a fact of life, and it is naïve to imagine that there are not seriously disturbed children in every neighborhood and school. What is more, in the straitened economy of child rearing and education, medication may be the most efficient and cost effective treatment for some of these children. Nevertheless, to medicate not just the neediest, most complicated cases but one child in every ten, despite the availability of less destructive treatments and regardless of doubtful science, is a tragedy of epic proportions.

What we all have to fear, at long last, is not having been wrong but having done wrong. That will be judged in a court of a different sort. Instead of humility, we continue to feed drugs to our children with blithe indifference. Even when a child’s mind is truly disturbed (and our standards need to be revised drastically on this score), a treatment model that intends to chemically palliate and manage ought to be our last resort, not our first option. How many more children need to be sacrificed for us to see the harm in expediency, greed, and plain ignorance?

References

• Flora, S.R., and S.E. Bobby, 2008. The Bipolar Bamboozle. Skeptical Inquirer 32(5): 41–45 (September/October).
• Food and Drug Administration. 2005. FDA Confidential NDA 11-522. Available online at fda.gov (PDF).
• Friedman, R.A., and A.C. Leon. 2007. Expanding the black box—Depression, antidepressants, and the risk of suicide. New England Journal of Medicine, 356(23): 2343–2346.
• IMSHealth. 2007. Available online at imshealth.com (PDF).
• The Merrow Report. 1995. A.D.D.—A Dubious Diagnosis? PBS.
• The MTA Cooperative Group. 1999. A 14-month randomized clinical trial of treatment strategies for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Archives of General Psychiatry, 56, 1073–1086.
• Sample, Ian. 2005. Leo Sternbach’s Obituary. The Guardian (Guardian Unlimited) Oct. 3.
• Straus, S.M., et al. 2004. Antipsychotics and the risk of sudden cardiac death. Archives of Internal Medicine, 164(12): 1293–1297.
• Woodwell, DA. 1997. 1995 Summary. National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. May 8; 286, 1–25.

Over the years, I have collected examples of the art, together with many books and articles on the topic. In January 2007, my wife and I went on a self-guided driving tour of the Berks County, Pennsylvania, countryside, studying and photographing hex-sign-emblazoned barns (figures 1 and 2), even lunching on Pennsylvania Dutch fare at a homey village inn. I also later sought out information on the signs’ reputed cultural antecedents on a trip to Germany the following May. Here is my attempt to bring some clarity to a most controversial subject.

Controversy

Circular designs painted on southeastern Pennsylvania barns have a murky history. One claim is that they were originally “fire signs.” That is, they gave notice that the owner’s property was covered by an insurance company (Smith 1993, 2). Reportedly, prior to 1800 the Insurance Company of North America used a six-pointed star as its fire mark, and another company, the Sun Fire Office, required insurees to mount on their property its Sun-Mark (Lerch 1949). But this hardly seems a convincing theory of the designs’ origin in light of other information.

Another source, in attributing designs to the “Mennonites, or Amish (or Pennsylvania Dutch. . .)” (Lehner 1957, 26–27), confuses matters. While the signs are indeed products of the Pennsylvania “Dutch”—a corruption of Deutsch or “German”—such colorful decorations were avoided by the Mennonites (an offshoot of the Anabaptists) and especially by the Amish (members of a Mennonite sect founded by Jacob Ammann in the seventeenth century)—both groups being noted for their “plain” living.¹ Most of the colorful folk arts and crafts were produced by the “fancy” or “church” Dutch—that is, those of the Reformed and Lutheran heritage (Wentz 1993, 21; Mauer 1996, 5). (I interviewed several Amish in New York about this issue and discovered that most knew nothing about hex signs [Nickell 2003].)

It is important to recognize that the Pennsylvania Dutch were not a culturally homogenous group. They were an admixture of Germans and Swiss, together with some German-speaking Alsatians and Lorrainers—their ancestors were mostly German dialect-speaking colonial immigrants. Moreover, they exchanged cultural practices with their Quaker and Scotch-Irish neighbors (Yoder 1971).

Figure 2: The author photographing a barn emblazoned with “hex signs” in the Berks County, Pennsylvania countryside. (Photo by Diana Harris)

Research for my book Pen, Ink and Evidence, showed that pictoral elements similar to some that appear as barn signs were found elsewhere in Pennsylvania Dutch creations, including their documents. Called fracturs (after the “fractured”-looking, old-German gothic lettering), these were hand-drawn certificates of birth, baptism, and marriage, embellished with colorful designs. They consisted of birds, hearts, flowers, and other motifs, including geometrical forms (Nickell 1990, 126–127, 152; Lichten 1993, 246–249). But was their purpose purely decorative, or did they serve some other function, with hearts invoking love, six-pointed rosettes good luck, and “distelfinks” (goldfinches) happiness, as is often reported (Mauer 1996; Legendary 1999, 5–15)?

In Search of “Hex” Signs

The derivation of the name “hex” signs is much disputed. One school of thought holds that the earliest ones were six-sided geometric designs, and thus hex was short for hexagram, from the Greek hex-, meaning “six” (“Hex sign” 2007), or it was an English corruption of the German word for “six,” sechs (“Hex Signs” 2007). Others argue that the word hex is from the German Hexe, “witch,” and indicates that the designs were used for magical protection (“Hex sign” 2007).

Scholar Alfred L. Shoemaker (1971, 2) reports finding “the identical geometrical designs as in Pennsylvania in German, Swiss and Alsatian folk art.” Shoemaker insists the designs are purely decorative and therefore refers to the “hex” concept as “myth.” Folklorist Richard M. Dorson (1972, 274) agrees, labeling the notion a bit of “urban apocrypha.” But were the European designs used only as decorations?

I turned my focus to Germany. Although I did not see the designs on barns in Bavaria during my travels there in 2002 and 2007, on the latter trip I did discuss the question of hex signs with folklorist Stephan Bachter. He said that today’s Pennsylvania designs appear to him to be decorative folk-art creations. However, it is difficult to know, he cautioned, to what extent people might be genuinely thinking magically—making magic part of their reality—as opposed to simply following some traditional practice. He observed that there were superstitious customs among rural Germans that focused on their barns, including painting pentagrams on the buildings. There were also other such magical practices as placing a broom upside down beside the barn door to keep witches at bay. In addition, certain spells might be written on paper and placed at specific hidden places in a barn, such as under the roof. Bachter even took me with him to the archives at Schloss Darmstadt (Darmstadt Castle)² where we were permitted to examine rare German charm books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These contained various spells and magical designs, including pentagrams (Bachter 2007).

Origin of Barn Signs

The modern concept of Pennsylvania barn designs as “hex” signs can be traced to 1924, when Wallace Nutting, in his book Pennsylvania Beautiful, stated: “The ornaments on barns found in Pennsylvania . . . go by the local name of hexafoos or witch foot. . . . They are supposed to be a continuance of very ancient tradition, according to which these decorative marks were potent to protect the barn, or more particularly the cattle, from the influence of witches. . . . The hexafoos was added to its decoration as a kind of spiritual or demoniac lightning-rod!” (qtd. in Farrell 1971). Nutting reportedly got his information from one man who convinced him of the antiquity of the practice (Farrell 1971).

However, it seems that Pennsylvania Dutch barns were rarely painted before the 1830s due to the cost of paint (Shoemaker 1971, 4; “Hex sign” 2007). So, distinguished from earlier folk-art motiffs, “hex” signs developed after that time, the earliest one reported in 1850 (having been painted on a barn in Lehigh County, near Chestnut Hill [Smith 1960, 13]). Subsequently, “Barn decoration reached its peak in the early twentieth century, at which time there were many artists who specialized in barn decorating” (Hex sign 2007). One old barn painter, Harry Adams, who painted barns in Berks and nearby counties, stated that he had never been asked to paint special designs for protection or good luck, adding that “I simply make them up as I go along. . . .” Adams acknowledged that while the designs were frequently attributed to witchcraft or other superstitious belief, during all the time he had created them they never had any such actual significance (Smith 1965, 21).

According to Johnnie Brendel, whose grandfather painted “hex signs,” the local Pennsylvania Dutch themselves refer to the designs as “barn stars” or “barn flowers.” While a particular design might be considered rather vaguely to represent good luck, the real reason it is painted on a barn is to beautify it (Dorson 1972, 275–276).

Most of today’s “symbolic” hex signs are copied from traditional folk designs but are usually produced in quantity for the tourist trade or silk screened on discs of pressed wood for later mounting. Referring to these modern artists—some of whom call themselves hexenmeisters (i.e., “hexmasters” or “sorcerers” [Gandee 1971; Herr 2002]), one experienced painter remarked, “I doubt if some of those self-styled ‘hex’ sign painters have ever actually raised a ladder against a barn, let alone paint[ed] one” (qtd. in Smith 1965, 23).

The real hex-signmen are barn painters who first outline the circles on the bare wood planking and fill them in with white paint. Next, using “barn red” paint (originally made with an iron-oxide pigment known as Venetian red [Wendt 1993, 250]), they paint around the circles and then complete the painting of the barn. Finally, they finish the circular decorations by drawing and painting the designs in brilliant colors (Smith 1965, 21–23). For this work, a painter may place extension ladders on both sides of the circle and, using a large iron bracket affixed to each, secure a plank on which to stand or sit (Pennsylvania 1971, 3).

Conclusions

The Pennsylvania Deutsch have decorated their barns since the 1830s, and hex signs have been painted since 1850. They may have evolved from the practice of painting birds, flowers, and various geometric designs on other folk-art creations, but it appears that any magical or symbolic meaning was effectively lost as the designs became largely or entirely produced as decorations. The modern silk-screened “hex” signs sold to tourists are less a product of folklore than what has rightly been dubbed “fakelore” (Wentz 1994, 12; Dorson 1959, 4).

Notes

1. An exception—a star design on a Mennonite barn in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia (Smith 1965, 37)—proves the rule.
2. This was at the Technìche Universität Darmstadt where we were generously assisted by Dr. Silvia Uhlemann, manuscripts’ librarian.

References

• Bachter, Stephan. 2007. Interviews by Joe Nickell, Darmstadt, Germany, May 17 and 18.
• Dorson, Richard M. 1959. American Folklore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• —. 1972. Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Farrell, W.E. 1971. Quoted in Shoemaker 1971, 13.
• Gandee, Lee R. 1971. Strange Experience: The Secrets of a Hexenmeister. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
• Herr, Karl. 2002. Hex and Spellwork: The Magical Practices of the Pennsylvania Dutch. York Beach, Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser.
• Hex sign. 2007. Available online at wikipedia.org; accessed January 22, 2007.
• Hex Signs. 2007. Available online at padutch.com; accessed January 22, 2007.
• Legendary Hex Signs. 1999. Paradise, Pa.: Will-Char the Hex Place.
• Larch, Lila. 1949. Scholla. Reading Times, June 10; cited in Smith, 1965, 35.
• Lichten, Frances. 1993. Folk Art of Rural Pennsylvania. In Wentz 1993, 240–252.
• Mauer, Walt. 1996. Hex Signs and Their Meanings. Gettysburg, Pa.: Garden Spot Gifts.
• Nickell, Joe. 1990. Pen, Ink and Evidence: A Study of Writing and Writing Materials for the Penman, Collector, and Document Detective. Reprinted New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2003.
• —. 2003. Interviews with Amish farmers in the vicinity of Cherry Creek, New York; case-file notes, June 14.
• Nutting, Wallace. 1924. Pennsylvania Beautiful. Cited in Farrell 1971.
• Pennsylvania Dutch Hex Signs: Their Origins, History, Usage and Significance. 1971. Lancaster, Pa.: Vincent R. Tortora.
• Shoemaker, Alfred L. 1971. Hex Signs, in Pennsylvania 1971, 1–13.
• Smith, Elmer L. 1965. Hex Signs and Other Barn Decorations. Lebanon, Pa.: Applied Arts Publishers.
• Stoudt, John J. 1948. Pennsylvania Folk Art; cited in Smith 1965, 12–13.
• Wentz, Richard, ed. 1993. Pennsylvania Dutch: Folk Spirituality (from the Sources of American Spirituality series). New York: Paulist Press.
• Weygandt, Cornelius. 1929. Red Hills; cited in Smith 1965, 15.
• Yoder, Don. 1971. Who are the Pennsylvania Dutch? Pennsylvania, 18.

In 2007, D. Jeffrey Meldrum, a professor at Idaho State University, published a paper in a scientific journal¹ arguing that footprints from the site where Roger Patterson filmed his infamous 1967 Bigfoot footage support the idea of a giant North American ape. He has even given it a scientific sounding name: Anthropoidipes ameriborealis. Crammed with scientific jargon, the paper repeatedly refers to casts of footprints located at the Smithsonian Institution. Meldrum, quoting the editor of Nature, notes that perhaps it is “time for cryptozoology [the study of unknown animals] to ‘come in from the cold.’” To complete the impression of scientific accountability, Meldrum writes, “Much of the more serious literature on the subject [of Bigfoot] has been written by bona fide scientists with anthropological or biological credentials from recognized institutions.”²

To understand the significance of the Meldrum paper, a little background is needed (for a good overview, see Benjamin Radford’s article “Bigfoot at 50,” SI March/April 2002).³ Among supporters of the idea that North America is home to a giant bipedal ape, known as Bigfoot or Sasquatch, almost all agree on the authenticity of the Patterson-Gimlin film. The 952 motion-picture frames, allegedly shot by Patterson on October 20, 1967, and seen many times on television, is considered the most impressive evidence for the existence of the giant creature—the star “proof” in almost every book making a case that Bigfoot is a real animal. Unfortunately, the distance of the “ape” figure from the camera and the resolution of the film (the original transparencies are only 16mm) limit the film’s practical value.

The image is striking; even some skeptics are impressed with the footage. But several issues, besides a complete lack of subsequent corroborative evidence, cast doubt on the film’s authenticity. Significant and troubling is the fact that the original film is missing. More importantly, three key issues cannot be resolved. According to Patterson and his partner that day, Bob Gimlin, the film was “mailed” from California on a Friday evening (approximately 9 p.m.) and arrived in Yakima, Washington, the next day. Supposedly processed on Saturday at an unidentified photography lab, the film was viewed by several Bigfoot buffs (including the late René Dahinden and John Green) on Sunday. The two surviving witnesses to these events, Bob Gimlin and Patterson’s brother-in-law and financial partner Al Detley, have been unable or unwilling to explain how the film got to Yakima so quickly (in an era before overnight couriers), how the film was processed so quickly (in a time when development normally took a week), or even where the processing took place.⁴

Patterson’s sketchy reputation looms over all of these issues. Most Bigfoot believers admit that Patterson was no one’s choice for a reliable witness. In his authoritative 1992 monograph on the film (“Bigfoot at Bluff Creek,” a Bigfoot Times special), Daniel Perez, perhaps the film’s strongest supporter, called Patterson “shady.” Other Bigfoot investigators have not been as complimentary.

A recent book by Greg Long, The Making of Bigfoot,⁵ cast further doubt on the film. Long establishes in his book that Patterson was shadier than even most of those familiar with the story imagined. Of course, just having an unseemly past does not make the man a hoaxer, but Long convincingly portrays Patterson as a man with the ability, aptitude, and motive to fake a Bigfoot film. Through multiple interviews with people, both friends and acquaintances of Patterson, Long creates an unflattering but believable image of the most important man to the Bigfoot story. Long bolsters his arguments with objective data such as court records, contracts, and photographs.

Meldrum claims that “both the [Patterson] film and the tracks [supposedly recovered at the site] have been intensively studied by numerous researchers.” But do the plaster casts really lend support to Patterson’s account?

A careful examination of the circumstances of the footage suggests instead that the footprints are a hoax.

A little background is necessary. Purported Sasquatch footprints, in most instances, lack a chain of custody. The impressions are not normally associated with a specific individual, nor are the environmental conditions or context of the time the prints were made usually known. The moisture content of the soil, soil mineralogy, organic content, grain size, or the mode of traverse by the animal (was it bounding across the terrain or tiptoeing) are seldom reported. In the case of the Patterson film, we need not speculate on any of these parameters, because the film site is available and we know the alleged creature’s gait, the conditions at the time, and many other factors.

Although Patterson is now dead, his filming partner Bob Gimlin (who supposedly stood nearby with his rifle ready) gave a detailed account of the events on several occasions.

Author John Green interviewed Gimlin in 1992 and videotaped the session. In 1997, the interview was transcribed and published on Bobbie Short’s Bigfoot Web page⁶ and through this interview we get Gimlin’s story.

“I rode the big horse,” he tells Green. “The horse that I was riding was around 1,200–1,300 pounds. I rode him along side the [Bigfoot] tracks with this new film in the camera [and] Roger took pictures of how deep the horse’s prints were in the soil compared to the creature’s tracks. Then I got up on a stump, which was approximately three to four feet, you know? We didn’t measure it, probably should have. Anyway, I jumped off with a high heel boot as close to the track as we could. Then we took pictures of that to illustrate the depth that my footprint went into the same dirt with a high heel cowboy boot, and at that time I weighed 165 pounds. These were all things that we did prior to leaving the scene.”

Were the plaster casts of the creature’s alleged tracks made on the same day? Gimlin answers, “Yes we did, in fact right that afternoon. By the time we got the tracks cast . . . it was getting late.”

Green asks, “[Do you] remember how deep the horse tracks were compared to that of the Sasquatch tracks?”

Gimlin replies, “The horse tracks were not as deep as the Sasquatch tracks of course. I just walked the horse through. I walked him as slow as I could but you figure he is distributing his weight on four feet. The tracks were better than half as deep but they weren’t as deep as the tracks of the creature.”

At this point in the interview, Green notes a contradiction in Gimlin’s account and asks him, “You have estimated this thing [at 300 pounds] a great deal less than the horse and yet the footprints were deeper, what explanation could you think of?”

Gimlin replies, “there was no way of really knowing. We knew it had to be heavier than it appeared to be when we first saw it. Of course, we thought the horse’s weight was distributed on four feet, and I’m not good with the mathematics of such things, but . . . if you figure 1,400 pounds [for horse and rider] distributed on four feet would be about 350 to 400 pounds, so we figured it must have weighed much more than we originally figured.”

Figure 1. Copy of one of the casts of the “tracks” from the Patterson film site.

The fact that something is seriously wrong with Gimlin’s account should have been obvious to Bigfoot researchers. A horse is a big creature, and because its feet are relatively small in comparison to its weight, a horse makes deeper and more visible tracks than almost any other animal. The depth of an impression is not only based on the weight of an animal but also on weight distribution as a function of foot size and downward force at a given point, which is expressed in terms of pounds per square inch.

Is Gimlin’s account credible? Forest Service worker Lyle Laverty, who was on the scene the following Monday, said he “walked along the sand adjacent to the tracks and didn’t come anywhere close to sinking to that kind of depth.”⁷

Figure 2. Elevation view of the same cast showing a remarkably deep impression with the maximum depth just behind the ball of the foot.

Laverty also took photos of some of the impressions showing they were about one-inch deep in the substrate, something confirmed by duplicates of the original casts (see figures 1 and 2).⁸

Recently when I talked with Laverty, he confirmed his statement about the depth of the tracks. To clarify, I asked, “And the horse’s hoof prints were deeper than your foot prints?”

“Of course,” he answered.⁹

John Green viewed a second film reportedly showing the making of the casts. In his 1978 book Green notes that “There was also some film taken later when they were making casts of the tracks. It seems to have shown that when the men walked beside the tracks their feet did not sink appreciably into the packed sand. The prints of the creature on the other hand, sank about an inch deep, indicating tremendous weight. Its feet measured fourteen inches in length, five inches in width at the ball, and four inches at the heel. The prints were flat¹⁰ [emphasis added], and there were five toes of fairly human pattern, except that there was less difference in size from largest to smallest. The men [Patterson and Gimlin] made beautiful casts of both left and right feet.”^11,12

Gimlin is correct when he says he is not good with numbers; let us do the math. For an experimental comparison, I obtained tracings of the footprint of several horses,¹³ and their size, weight, and hoof measurements agree with Gimlin’s description of his horse. From the interview Gimlin tells us, “the hoof print area, if you’re familiar with sizes of horses’ hoof prints, well the horse wore a size one shoe, which is not quite six inches in diameter, probably more like five inches in diameter with a number one shoe on the front feet. The shoes were a little bit smaller on the back feet. They were size ones trimmed down is what they were.” At another point, he describes his horse as sixteen hands high.

The three horses in my sample were 15.3 to 16.1 hands high, and all had hooves approximately five inches in diameter. Asher, a 16.1-hands-high horse who weighs about 1,300 pounds and wears a size one shoe, was the closest fit. Asher’s hoof covers an area of 20.5 square inches. Of course, horses make the impressions as they walk or run, which means when they are walking they distribute their weight on two or three feet. The surface area of three of Asher’s hooves is 61.5 square inches. (The two other horses had a total area for three hooves as follows: Jasmine 63.6; Sonny 64.5 square inches.)

What about the surface area of the purported Sasquatch foot? With a copy of the figure’s alleged footprint, it is easy to compute its¹⁴ supposed displacement.

Figure 3. View of a horse’s hoof. This is a photo of one of Spencer’s hooves. Note most of the hoof area is recessed.

The figure in the film is placing its weight on one foot at a time, so we must compare a single foot with two or three from a horse. But, the fourteen-inch monster feet each cover 66.3 square inches of surface area! (The plaster casts from the film site and Green’s description confirm the entire foot made the impressions.) Using these simple calculations, one alleged Sasquatch foot roughly displaces about the same area as a horse does. So, if the figure made an impression the same depth as Gimlin’s horse, and using this simple reckoning, we could gauge its weight to be 1,400 pounds!

The true measure is more complex.¹⁵

Seldom will the entire surface area of the hoof actually come into contact with the ground, because the inner hoof is recessed, especially so once the hoof is shod (see figure 3). In reality, since the horse distributes its weight on two or three sharp-rimmed hooves, normally only the horse’s shoe touches the terrain. The figure in the film, however, distributes weight on one broad, padded, round-edged foot, allowing a maximum surface area to make contact with the ground. This means that the foot of the figure in the film will make less of an impression per more weight than a horse.

Figure 4. Full view of Spencer, a horse similar in size to the one descibed by Gimlin in his account.

Even if we base our comparison on the entire area of three hooves, we get a measurement of about 22.7 pounds per square inch for Gimlin’s horse. If the figure in the film applied the same pounds per square inch, it would have weighed 1,505 pounds.¹⁶

This calculation works if the impressions were the same depth as a horse, but from all indications (photos, film, and testimony), they were not. We are told they were noticeably deeper. This means the creature in the film had to exert more downward force than the horse. If the force exerted by the figure in the film was 1.5 times our estimates, that would yield 34 pounds per square inch. This means the creature weighed 2,254 pounds if the earth compacted evenly. As sediment compacts, it causes more resistance to penetration in a nonlinear progression. In this case, we know the surface material compacted enough to support a horse hoof at a shallow depth, meaning the filmed subject would have needed to exert even more pressure on the sediment!

Could the Bigfoot in the film realistically displace the weight needed to make the impressions? For this assessment, we must take into account that the figure is allegedly a female Sasquatch (some claim to see its furry breasts) about to winter in Northern California. The images suggest a thick coat of fur. Fur accounts for little weight. The creature would have to bulk up with a layer of fat, and fat accounts for far less weight than muscle. We don’t know how tall the figure is, but Roger Knights, an active Bigfoot booster, has recently taken a look at this issue. According to Knights, “we are probably looking at maybe six feet at most.” Gimlin’s original estimates were “six-feet one-inch or six-feet two inches.”¹⁷

Figure 5. The copy of the Patterson film site cast next to Spencer’s front hooves.

Others envision the subject as taller. According to longtime Bigfoot enthusiast Peter Byrne, the creature’s height is somewhere between “Jim McClarin’s [another Bigfoot enthusiast] height estimate of eighty inches and mine of seventy-seven inches. This would give the figure in the footage [an average] height of six feet, six-and-a-half inches. This is the maximum that I would allow.”¹⁸

When one views the image, does it look like an animal, whatever the height, of such enormous weight? If we could accept that this figure made these incredibly deep tracks, shouldn’t there have been many more impressions found just before and after the event? According to Laverty, “there was some skepticism, because we had been up and down that same road all summer long and never saw anything . . . and then all of a sudden Mr. Patterson comes in for a couple of days and bang! Yeah, I think there was some skepticism.”¹⁹

Gimlin would have us believe the creature in the film is of enormous weight.

Isn’t a hoax more plausible? Is it possible Patterson and Gimlin conceived a way of making deep impressions before they left Yakima?²⁰

Readers must draw their own conclusions, but this track depth analysis casts additional scientific doubt on the Patterson film. In view of the litany of discrepancies swirling around the film’s origin and circumstances, the revelations in the Long book, and this evidence of possibly faked tracks, we are exceptionally close to a judgment against the authenticity of the film.

Notes

1. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, Bulletin 42, 2007. Lucas, Spielmann, and Lockley, editors.
2. In the paper, Meldrum makes bold statements about the Patterson film, such as “several footprints were clearly filmed.” Because Meldrum does not mention the “second film” allegedly made later in the day, the readers of the paper would assume this statement refers to the film including the figure. He labels a clear photo from the second film simply as “from the Patterson-Gimlin film clip . . .” leaving the uninformed reader to believe this still is from the film showing the figure.
3. The best book-length account of the legend of Sasquatch is Bigfoot Exposed by David J. Daegling, 2004, AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
4. These issues are the result of troubling questions raised by Bigfoot believers.
5. The Making of Bigfoot by Greg Long, Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 2004.
6. For the complete interview go to www.bigfootencounters.com/interviews/john.htm.
7. Bigfoot Times, October 20, 1992, page 22, and personal conversations with Lyle Laverty.
8. I am indebted to Don Ryan for the loan of his copy of one of the Patterson film scene casts as well as for many other favors concerning this investigation.
9. Subsequent telephone conversation with Lyle Laverty on February 16, 2007.
10. In his paper, Meldrum confirms: “the footprint is notably flat . . . presumably to maximize distribution of the plantar pressures at the onset of touchdown.” N.M. Museum Bulletin 42, 2007, Page 228.
11. Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, by John Green, Hancock House, Saanichton, B.C. Canada, 1978, page 118.
12. Elise Kirk, an associate producer with National Geographic Television, asked several questions about the footprints associated with the Patterson film when she interviewed me while making a film on Bigfoot. Her insightful questions caused me to reexamine the way I viewed the impressions.
13. I had help from two horse aficionados: Nancy Stutzman and Christy Sanders-Meena. The horses cooperating in my initial survey were Sonny, Jasmine, and Asher. Asher weighs about 1,300 pounds; Sonny, the smallest horse, weighs about 900 pounds, and Jasmine about 1,100 pounds. Later, for photos, a four-year-old named Spencer posed for comparison with a copy of the Patterson cast. Spencer is almost sixteen hands high and weighs about 1,100 pounds.
14. For those readers who have not examined the film image in detail, the figure in the film has large, fur-covered breasts. It is the consensus of the Bigfoot community that the creature is allegedly female, one of the few issues skeptics do not dispute.
15. Not factored into the calculations is the body shape of a horse. Unlike a primate who displaces all of its weight evenly but alternately on each foot, approximately 60 percent of the body mass of a horse is distributed over the front legs, due to the size of the head and neck. Of course, this means the weight per surface area is even greater than the number given in my calculation, making the case even stronger against the authenticity of the Patterson tracks.
16. I am indebted to Anton Wroblewski for comments about the details related to the mechanics of human and horse footprints and many other helpful suggestions.
17. Big Foot-Prints by Grover Krantz, Johnson Books, Boulder, Colorado, 1992, page 96.
18. The Search for Bigfoot Monster, Myth or Man? by Peter Byrne, Acropolis Books Ltd., Washington D.C., 1975, page 141. To be fair, there are many other height estimates. The late Grover Krantz, using film speed as a measure of height (a most unimpressive argument), calculated the image between 5-feet-9.3-inches and 8-feet-6-inches tall (see Big Foot-Prints, page 96). Patterson claimed the creature was 7-feet-4-inches tall and in the 1992 interview Gimlin revised his estimate of the creature to “about 9-feet high.”
19. Bigfoot Times, October 20, 1992, page 21, and telephone conversations with Robert Lyle Laverty.
20. Gimlin says that in the night it began to rain. “Around 5:30 a.m. or so it started raining and it was just a pouring down rain. I told Roger we better get up and do something about the tracks or they’d wash out, and he said no, it would stop raining after a while. I went ahead and got up, put the saddle on my horse and decided I would ride up there while it was raining really hard and Roger says ‘ah it’ll quit, don’t ride up there.’ I said ‘no I’m going to go ahead and ride on up there.’ I had gotten a couple of cardboard boxes from Mr. Hodgson’s to cover these tracks the night before. So when I went outside to get a couple of these boxes that were folded up out there, they were just soggy old pieces of cardboard. I disregarded [sic] taking those back up there—so I rode back up to the scene, pulled some bark off some trees and covered up the tracks as best I could and went back to camp.” Is it possible that after spending the day making fake tracks showing unusual weight Gimlin wanted to protect his work? When I showed this quote to Anton Wroblewski, he commented: “Isn’t it curious Gimlin uses the word ‘scene’ as if from a movie.”

“Anybody who’s not bothered by Newtonian gravity has to have rocks in his head.”

The above is not a genuine quotation, but I hope you will agree that it is a fair summary of the original, made over three hundred years ago: “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else . . . is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.”

This quotation highlights the controversy that surrounded Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity, put forth in his astonishing book Principia, published in 1687. His theory says that anything with mass exerts an attractive force on anything else with mass, depending only on the masses and their separation in a very simple way. Through virtuoso mathematics, Newton showed how this force accounts precisely for the known motions of the planets, the comets, the moon, and the sea.

His book does not attempt to explain how this “action-at-a-distance” actually works—indeed Newton makes a point in Principia of saying that he would not speculate on this. He used the Latin phrase “hypotheses non fingo,” which can be loosely translated as “shut up and calculate.”

You might think that the quotation mentioned earlier came from one of the many philosophical critics of Newtonian gravity, perhaps Newton’s great German contemporary and rival Gottfried von Leibniz, but you would be wrong—the words were written by Newton himself. Newton was very bothered by the issue of how a planet could “know” about the sun’s gravitational pull without something physically giving it a nudge, and he tried hard to invent a plausible mechanism. One such mechanism he proposed was a fluid that fills all space—the ether—which is somehow sucked toward the sun, tending to carry the planets with it and thus keep them in orbit instead of flying off. Needless to say, this idea does not stand up to scrutiny, which is why Newton wisely left it out of Principia.

In fact, Newton and Leibniz had very similar views on the plausibility of gravity as a force without a mechanical agent. As Leibniz put it: “if [gravity] transpires without any mechanism . . . then it is a senseless occult quality, which is so very occult that it can never be cleared up, even though a Spirit, not to say God himself, were endeavoring to explain it.”

Why are these quaint problems from the ancient history of physics worth mentioning? There are two related reasons. First, the borderlands of scientific knowledge have always contained some ideas considered virtually supernatural at the time, and it is instructive to see with hindsight how such ideas are ultimately accepted or rejected by mainstream science. Second, there are illuminating parallels between gravity and quantum theory that may help us come to terms with the current philosophical difficulties surrounding quantum theory.

Whatever Happened to the Problem of Action-at-a-Distance?

If we accept that Newtonian gravity was considered seriously weird 300 years ago but is seen as simple and old fashioned now, what happened to change people’s minds? I suggest five possibilities:

1. Gravity, in the sense of a force between distant, separate objects, was shown to be an illusion and does not really exist.
2. Gravity is both real and weird, but a conspiracy of small-minded scientists has persuaded everyone that there is nothing wrong, because they cannot bear to admit that there are phenomena they cannot explain.
3. A crucial experiment, unknown to Newton, showed how gravity works and that it all makes sense.
4. A new theoretical idea (the gravitational field, curved spacetime, or gravitons, perhaps) showed that gravity acted without a problem with action-at-a-distance after all.
5. After a while, people forgot why they found the idea so weird and moved on to other things.

It is my impression that most physicists, if they thought about it at all, would subscribe to the fourth reason on the list—the idea that physics moved on in a way that solved the problem of action-at-a-distance. For instance, by the nineteenth century, the idea of space as empty was replaced by the idea that it contains, at every point, a gravitational field. And so gravity does not act mysteriously across a vacuum—there is something in the vacuum that does whatever it needs to do.

Unfortunately, the truth is not so simple. The gravitational field is something that has strength and direction at every point, determining what force affects any passing mass at that point. The field does not transmit the force like Newton’s ether; it provides information about the force. But how does the field adjust correctly at every point? Instead of the object responding to distant masses, we now say that the field responds to them instead. Furthermore, there are no measurable consequences of the existence of the field that differ from the old action-at-a-distance view of gravity, which of course worked remarkably well all along. Newton and Leibniz would have seen the gravitational field for what it is—a mathematical device that has its uses but doesn’t help with the underlying philosophical problem.

However, we don’t have to rely on the gravitational field, because we can move on to the improved theory of gravity that replaced Newton’s theory—Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, published in 1915. In this view, there is no gravitational force across empty space. Matter causes space-time itself to curve: objects move in curved paths accordingly, and the problem is solved. We know that the new theory is correct because there are observable differences, like the detailed motion of the planet Mercury.

And yet the fundamental question remains more or less unchanged—how does the Sun make space-time curve by just the right amount near the Earth, 93 million miles away? In practice, there is little conceptual difference between curved space-time and the gravitational field. Nobody said at the time: “Gravity is explained by the curvature of space-time—physics is no longer weird!”

While ideas have indeed moved forward, the main reason that action-at-a-distance no longer bothers people is the fifth option. In Newton’s time it was an unquestioned assumption that there could be no force without contact, partly from experience and partly because to think otherwise appeared to open the door to all kinds of “occult” forces. In these days of mobile phones and television remote controls, the idea is no longer disturbing, and we can see how such forces act without making our familiar world fall apart—indeed our world wouldn’t be the same without them.

The Problem of Quantum Mechanics

Of course, 300 years is a long time in physics, and we cannot compare past intellectual problems with current ones. The twentieth century was so much more sophisticated than the seventeenth. Everybody knows that quantum mechanics really is weird, and no amount of explanation can change this simple fact—just look at the quotations:

“Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” —Niels Bohr

“Anybody who’s not bothered by Bell’s theorem has to have rocks in his head.” —Arthur Wightman (A description of Bell’s theorem, and its relevance to quantum physics, is given below.)

“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” —Richard Feynman

Now, quotations are useful things, but they are not what good science is about. In fact, the idea that scientific questions are settled by finding statements made by great scientists—by appealing to authority—is the opposite of science. After all, didn’t Einstein say, “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth,” and “To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself”? I rest my case.

Another problem with relying on quotations is that it is often possible to find contradictory views expressed by the same person. Niels Bohr, more than any single person, spread the idea that the interpretation of quantum mechanics was a job completed in the 1920s, causing Murray Gell-Mann to comment in 1976 that “Niels Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem [of the interpretation of quantum theory] had been solved fifty years ago.” Bohr evidently thought that the shock of encountering quantum mechanics would soon wear off.

Richard Feynman, too, in his later years expressed a very different view of quantum mechanics from the one quoted above, saying in 1982: “We have always had a great deal of difficulty understanding the worldview that quantum mechanics represents. . . . You know how it always is, every new idea, it takes a generation or two until it becomes obvious that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.”

So rather than rely on a few quotations to confirm the weirdness of quantum mechanics, it is far better to concentrate on the evidence for it. And as Feynman implies, this is not a straightforward task.

There is no single definitive example of quantum weirdness. For many years, the best example was “single particle interference,” usually presented as the double-slit experiment. In recent decades, more subtle phenomena based on separate but correlated events, grouped under various banners such as Bell’s theorem, EPR, and entanglement, have taken center stage. I will consider these two categories briefly, in turn.

Single Particle Interference

Richard Feynman described the double-slit experiment as the only mystery in quantum mechanics. It is well described in all good presentations of quantum mechanics—if you need a specific example, you cannot really improve upon Chapter 37 in Volume 1 of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. The weirdness is summarized by the illustrations below. If particles are aimed at a barrier containing two slits, in the right circumstances they will form a pattern on a screen behind the barrier, like the one shown.

Figure 1: A double-slit experiment.

The screen in detail.

The difficulty is not in describing what you see—it is a pattern of stripes—but in explaining how they could possibly arise. The particles can be seen arriving one by one, building up the pattern randomly. How can the particles form a pattern that depends on there being two slits, when each particle can surely only be affected by one? And, if we stop worrying about that, how can large numbers of particles, separated in time, cooperate to make sure the right pattern is formed?

When the result is simple to describe but impossible to explain, chances are that we have begun our explanation in the wrong place—we must question our assumptions. One assumption that we tend to make is that every event can be predicted in advance. This is essentially a neo-fatalist assumption that all events are inevitable and that there is only one possible version of the future. This may be true, but it is far from proven, and most of us don’t actually subscribe to this belief as we live our lives. The pattern is much less mysterious if we assume instead that the destination of each electron is not fixed in advance but only governed by probabilities. This covers the second question.

The first question is more interesting. The pattern is similar to what is seen when two waves interfere—like ripples on a pond—as if each particle changes into a wave and passes through both slits at once before hitting the screen. It is better explained as a consequence of the surveyor’s wheel mechanism described in my earlier Skeptical Inquirer article (Quincey 2006). The mechanism calculates the probabilities for particles to end up at different destinations without the need for the particles to morph into waves, and it makes no distinction between situations normally labeled either “classical” or “quantum.” However we choose to describe it, though, all we are really saying is that particles follow rules as they move from place to place. We may find it weird that particles (or rocks, for that matter) follow rules, but then we may just as well find it weird that the sun rises every morning.

Single particle interference is, to me, the best and clearest example of quantum behavior—simpler to describe and actually harder to explain than examples based on Bell’s Theorem.

Bell’s Theorem, or Quantum Sudoku

The second type of quantum weirdness was first highlighted by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen (EPR) in 1935. There is an excellent presentation of the problem in an article by David Mermin (1985), whose approach I have followed here.

Figure 2: Schematic of an experimental test of Bell’s theorem with typical results below.

The central feature is a device (the central box in Figure 2) that creates pairs of particles, the particles of each pair flying away from each other. They head toward detectors positioned to either side, which are entirely independent of each other and can be far apart. Some property of each particle triggers one of two responses in the detector indicated by a green or a red light (G or R), so when each particle pair is created, let us say by pressing the black button in the center, one of the two lights flashes on each detector shortly afterwards. Crucially, each detector has three settings, each measuring a different property of the particle, and these settings are changed randomly and independently before each run. The results from an experiment of this type look like the tables below—a series of settings and flashes from Detector A and a separate series from Detector B.

So where does the weirdness come in? To see it, it is helpful to present the results in a different way. Take a three-by-three grid with a square for each of the nine ways the detectors could have been set (A on 1, B on 1; A on 1, B on 2, etc.). For each run, put a mark in the appropriate square—a dark one if the two lights flashed the same color, or a light one if they were different. Figure 3 shows an example in which the first nine runs for each of the nine settings are recorded.

Figure 3: Bell’s theorem test results presented on a convenient grid.

The results here have been invented, but they represent what happens when a carefully chosen experiment is conducted in a laboratory. They show something that is about as weird as physics gets, although you can be forgiven for not noticing. The pattern that emerges when this experiment is repeated many times is this: when the settings on the detectors are the same, the lights always flash the same color, while in all other cases the lights only flash the same color a quarter of the time. What makes this truly weird is that if you make superficially reasonable assumptions about what must be going on, you would expect this last fraction to be around half, and certainly no less than a third of the time—definitely not a quarter of the time. The fact that there is a clear difference between results predicted by quantum physics, now confirmed to be the same as the results of real experiments, and those predicted by any theory that makes the superficially reasonable assumptions was discovered by John Bell and is called Bell’s Theorem.

Should we be bothered by this? Being bothered shows we are clever enough to understand the logic,¹ but as in the case of the double slit, if an observation is impossible to explain, we are probably making the wrong assumptions.

The two assumptions that make the results mysterious are usually called “locality” and “reality.” The first, in effect, says that things cannot form conspiracies without being able to send signals to one another. The second says that any properties of particles, like the ones measured by the detectors, are defined at all times, even when they are not being measured. Einstein took the reality assumption for granted, so this sort of result implied non-locality. He called this “spooky action-at-a-distance.”

With hindsight, it is the restrictive idea of reality that is the root of the problem. To restate a point made earlier, if we accept that there are different possible versions of the future, any properties of particles in the future will exist only as a mixture of probabilities. So before they are measured, the properties are indeed undefined and hence not real in the sense that is needed to make the results weird. We can, if we like, see results from tests of Bell’s theorem as confirming experimentally what we instinctively feel—that the future is genuinely uncertain until it happens. The choice we are presented with is not between a conspiracy and a reality that falls apart when we try to come to grips with it—it is between a conspiracy and a reality that falls into place, bit by bit, just in time. The world may not be as real as we might like it to be, but it is as real as it needs to be.²

This argument could be said just to transfer any weirdness into a magical process that transforms a mixture of possibilities into a single result in the moment we call the present. This is indeed magical, but it is a kind of magic that we experience all the time. We can make it seem more exotic by dressing it up as quantum physics, but the underlying magic remains the same.

A Posthumous Last Word from Newton

To return from spooky action-at-a-distance to the old non-spooky variety, perhaps Newton had something to say that is relevant to the conceptual difficulties with quantum mechanics. In Principia his final word on action-at-a-distance was this: “It is enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.”

We could use this almost word for word as a statement about quantum mechanics:

“It is enough that quantum mechanics does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the observations of elementary particles, and of our world.”

Notes

1. The logic is explained very neatly in Mermin’s article.
2. Any set of future possibilities will have some general constraints, for example, that the total number of some type of particle remains the same. This being the case, the future is both unreal and non-local, in the sense that an actual event at one place has immediate consequences for other places. This amounts to little more than noting that this time next week I could be in many different places, but I will only ever be in one place at a time.

References

• Mermin, N. David. 1985. Is the moon there when nobody looks? Reality and the quantum theory. Physics Today (April) 38—47.
• Quincey, Paul. 2006. Why quantum mechanics is not so weird, after all Skeptical Inquirer 30:4 (July/August) 38—43.

It is something that many of us have experienced, at least once. Many don’t take notice, but others do and wonder if the cause of such interference lies inside them.

“The fact that so many witnesses are making claims which seem to involve a Street Light Interference (SLI for short), that they are doing so in apparent good faith, and doing so independently of one another and without awareness, that the effect may constitute a phenomenon in its own right, these circumstances encourage us to proceed on the basis that SLI, whatever its nature, does indeed occur.” These are the words of Hilary Evans, English author, fellow researcher and friend, who in 1993 founded “Project SLIDE”.

Says Evans: “Project SLIDE was created simply as a first step towards defining and assessing the apparent phenomenon. As its name implies, it sets out to be little more than an exchange of information between those who are interested.”

The idea is that there appears to be an effect that is not consistent with our current knowledge of how people interact with the physical world, and which occurs in specific circumstances.

Four explanations for SLI have been proposed.

Delusion

“A primary question must be: does SLI occur at all, or are the alleged witnesses deluding themselves?” wonders Evans. “Until the phenomenon is scientifically tested, it is not possible to give a decisive answer to this question. However, SLI has not the ‘appeal’ of witchcraft or abductions: there is nothing like the same psychological pay-off. Individuals seeking to enhance their reputation for possessing special gifts will not find much to flatter themselves with in SLI. In short, it seems highly unlikely that all SLI experiences are delusory.”

Energy Fields

Some believe that what is causing street lamps to turn off could be some kind of “energy” emitted by the human body. Eyewitnesses report that the turning off of the lamp happened while they were tired, stressed, furious, or sad. Some others, however, think it might be some kind of static electricity produced by their body.

However, the only form of energy known to science produced by the human body comes via food and breathing and is then used by the body to walk and work. There are no other energies produced or emitted by the human body (except for body warmth, of course). Static electricity is not produced by the human body but by rubbing things, usually synthetic clothes, in a dry climate. It has nothing to do with one’s state of mind. Furthermore, the static electricity produced by a polyester jacket has no way of interacting with street lamps, usually high above street level.

Paranormal Phenomenon

Paranormal phenomenon is the least likely possibility. Science has never confirmed that the human mind can cause physical effects at a distance, which is what seems to be occurring in SLI. “However,” says Evans, “SLI does have one great advantage over most psychokinetic experiments: the subjects of the effect—the street lamps— are not easily manipulated.” The only problem is that experiments to test SLI are not easy to conduct since this appears to be a phenomenon that just happens at random and is not produced by one willing for it to happen.

Mechanical Effect

“The fact that a mechanical device is involved logically suggests that a mechanical explanation should be looked for,” says Evans. But what kind of explanation?

In order to answer this, we need first of all to determine what kind of lamps we are talking about. I asked Mario Bonomo, professor of illuminating engineering at the University of Milano, to illuminate me. “The most common ones, almost all over the world, are sodium vapor lamps. These are gas-discharge lamps that use sodium in an excited state to produce light.” There are two varieties of such lamps: low pressure and high pressure. Low pressure are those that produce the characteristic yellow light, while high pressure give a whiter light that allows colors to be recognized. Street lamps usually have low pressure bulbs.

“These bulbs take three to four minutes to light up and have a lifespan of 8,000 hours, two years approximately,” continues Bonomo. “When a bulb reaches the end of its life it shows a behavior that could explain SLI. Older lamps need a higher tension than the one they receive. This means that when they are turned on, the tension is sufficient. But when they reach their maximum luminosity, the tension required is more than what is received. This causes the lamp to turn off. Now, in order for it to light up again, the bulb needs to cool off first. And this takes a few minutes. After this, the process, known as cycling, starts again from the beginning until the bulb is substituted with a new one.”

This could explain the repeated turning on and off of the lamps. But how can we explain it when it is not just one lamp turning off but all the lamps on a street?

“There are two possible causes,” says Bonomo. “The first one is that the bulbs on that specific street are all the same age and, thus, they all get old at the same time, producing clustered but random on and off cycles. However, if street lamps in a specific street turn off all at once, then the problem lies in the central electric-control panel. There usually is one that controls all the lights in a specific block, or one every 200 square meters. A power failure or a short-circuit can cause all the lamps controlled by that panel to turn off.”

Finally, if the connection between the lamp and its socket is faulty and gets interrupted for some reason, even for a fraction of a second, the bulb turns off and then it will need a few minutes to turn on again. A contact, especially if already faulty, can be interrupted even by some minor vibration, like a kid kicking the lamp post, a large truck passing in the street, wind rocking the bulb, and so on.

The Power of Suggestion

This is all very interesting and could actually explain much of the SLI phenomenon. However, in order to understand fully what might be taking place here, it is important to consider the observer bias as well. Our mind is drawn by significant coincidences, and so we are much more likely to notice when a street light near us turns on or off than when a street light is in a steady state.

It could just be, then, that SLI is a mix of different natural factors. The normal behavior of bulbs getting older, observer bias, and maybe something else, like the fact that some specific lamps, such as those in gardens or on patios, have infrared sensors that can turn them on or off when something is moving within range. Other lamps are programmed with a timer that turns them on or off at specific hours. Some people realize this is the cause of such changes in the lights.

Evans, however, feels that there is something more in SLI and, thus, he says we should proceed as though the phenomenon exists. “For one very good reason, the fact [is] that a good many people are reporting the experience as though an actual phenomenon is involved. Certainly, people can be mistaken or deluded, and we must keep this possibility in mind. But that, too, is something that would have to be proved before we would accept it; and until such time as it is proved, it is right to respect the testimony of people who claim these experiences at first hand.”

The whole thing, however, could become really significant when the same person, at different times and with different lamps, over a consistent period of time, keeps on noticing anomalous behavior of street lamps. So far, however, nobody seems to have had this experience.

Further Reading

1. You can download for free Hilary Evans’s booklet, The SLI Effect, Assap Publications, at assap.org.