Will the new presidency of Barack Obama usher in a more welcoming age for science and reason? We at least have cause for hope. A president’s intellectual outlook is only one of many things that shape changes in culture and society, but the early signs are encouraging.

The Bush administration chalked up so many negatives in regard to scientific thinking, reason, and open inquiry that there may be no way to go but up. The president himself was a born-again and encouraged the far-right evangelical wing of his party; he ascribed to the “equal time” strategy of creationists in their opposition to teaching evolution, for example. His political appointees left a long and well-documented record of ideological interference in the recommendations of scientists at NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and on and on. He restricted stem cell research, and only begrudgingly came to accept global warming. He actively practiced a “from the gut” style of decision making that marginalized well-informed rational analysis and caused a litany of international problems.

Obama, elected by a 53 to 47 percent margin, is the stark opposite in many key respects. His background is multicultural and his outlook international. He espouses learning and education, including science education. He has exhibited a welcome centrist, moderate, pragmatic outlook that seems to eschew ideological extremes on either side of the political spectrum. He has repeatedly demonstrated intellectual agility, a critical awareness, and an ability to synthesize and plan. He has shown an obvious willingness to entertain a wide variety of viewpoints before making decisions, one mark of a critical thinker. He has shown every tendency to welcome the best minds to his administration, including former rivals, and to listen to them. He signaled early on that he quickly would rescind the Bush administration’s rulings against research on new lines of stem cells. He recognizes that climate change is real and says, “We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now, that this is a matter of urgency and national security, and it has to be dealt with in a serious way.”

His lengthy written response during the campaign to the top fourteen science questions facing America (www.sciencedcebate2008.com) was shaped by numerous scientific notables including Nobel laureates—a welcome sign in itself—and said everything a science-minded person would like to hear. (The topics were climate change, energy, education, national security, pandemics and biosecurity, genetics, stem cells, ocean health, water, space, science integrity, research, and health.) He promised to defend scientific integrity: “I will restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically valid evidence and not on the ideological predispositions of agency officials or political appointees.”

His appointment of Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as energy secretary harks back to a welcome tradition when distinguished scientists not politicians headed the top energy agency (the Atomic Energy Commission, a forerunner to the Department of Energy).

Some scientists called for him to quickly appoint a top-flight science advisor and give that person prominent status in the White House. Obama had pledged to strengthen the role of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and to restore the credibility and role of the Office of Science and Technology Policy as an office within the White House structure. But it didn’t happen immediately. The first month of Obama’s post-election transition was necessarily devoted to responding to the sudden US and world financial crisis that brought the most serious downturn in the economy since the Great Depression. He rapidly assembled his economic and national security teams before beginning the rest of his cabinet and other appointments. Given the urgent circumstances, few would dispute that priority.

Word about Obama’s Science Advisor appointment then came on December 19, the day after he completed his cabinet appointments. His Science Advisor is John Holdren, a respected physicist long known for his work on energy, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. Holdren is director of the program on science, technology, and public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2006.

Obama’s appointee as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, another key science appointment, is marine biologist Jane Lubchenco. She is professor of marine biology at Oregon State University and the OSU Distinguished Professor of Zoology. She is a MacArthur Fellow and, like Holdren, also a former AAAS president. “When has NOAA been headed by a member of the National Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society?” commented Andrew Rosenberg, a University of New Hampshire professor of natural resources and a former NOAA deputy director under the Clinton administration. “That’s exactly the right signal¿. It establishes NOAA as one of those key scientific agencies.” He called her an “absolutely world-class scientist” and said the appointment means science agencies now have a role in policy.

In his science team rollout radio address of December 19, Obama not only announced those appointments but also revealed that science notables Harold Varmus and Eric Lander would be co-chairs of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, along with Holdren. “Together, they will work to remake PCAST into a vigorous external advisory council that will shape my thinking on the scientific aspects of my policy proposals,” said Obama.

Varmus is a 1989 Nobel laureate in medicine, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Lander, is director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard, and was, as Obama proudly said, “one of the driving forces behind mapping the human genome—one of the greatest scientific achievements in history.”

So the Obama White House could hardly have a more distinguished set of people in the key science positions. And it sounds as if Obama sees them as more than figureheads.

“It is time to once again put science at the top of our agenda and work to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology,” said Obama, words that should please all who have long been warning of America’s slippage in the world of science. And for those concerned about the integrity of science and its previous abuses, his words were an early Christmas present: “The truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources—it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say even when it’s inconvenient—especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth, and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as president of the United States—and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.”

So the outlook is tentatively hopeful for a time in which scientific thinking, education, learning, and unfettered inquiry will have some greater support and encouragement from the highest position in the land. And that is welcome.

Nevertheless, there are limitations to how much a president can do. Money is the top problem. The federal budget was under serious pressures even before the October-November financial meltdown and the resulting hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer-financed bailouts. Obama’s first large spending program announced as president-elect was to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, surely a welcome and much-needed enterprise. But that spending will further restrict his options on funding new programs of scientific research. Unless and until the economy can begin expanding again, science will have access to one piece of a shrinking pie.

An early sign of this problem was a statement from his new economic council director Lawrence Summers that while an increase in federal research and development is good for the long-term health of the economy, R&D would not be included in the economic stimulus package. The Association of American Universities subsequently released a proposal sent to Obama for just such a stimulus, including “academic research facilities modernization and $1.8 billion to research universities to hire more young scientists and engineers.

Secondary-school education in the U.S. is funded mainly at local and state levels, and those entities are likewise under new financial constraints. And, even if they weren’t, money isn’t the sole solution. Results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, announced in December, show U.S. students are doing no better on this international science exam than they were ten years ago, while a number of other countries’ performances rose. One bright spot was U.S. students’ performance in mathematics. The average score among fourth-graders has jumped 11 points since 1995, to 529. Eighth graders also earned a higher average score than in 1995 and were better than their counterparts in 37 countries (but still less than China, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong). Educators and policy makers have been focused on improving math education in recent years. One can hope science education and scientific literacy will likewise get a new emphasis in American culture.

And while it will be wonderful to have a president who doesn’t doubt evolution, national political leadership can only go so far in shaping attitudes in this area. Well-funded evangelical groups are still mounting intense media campaigns denouncing evolution as false science, or worse, and extolling two-thousand-year-old biblical stories as real science. Much of this effort takes place on religious television broadcasts, in churches, and in political action at the local and state level. As communications researcher Jon D. Miller has said, America is out on a limb by itself in its rejection of evolution. Polls show the U.S. is thirty-third out of thirty-four countries in evolution acceptance (only Turkey rates lower). That’s not going to be fixed by a new president, no matter how enlightened.

Whether the economy and budget considerations end up trumping the hopeful plans and intentions of the Obama administration remains to be seen. But he represents a welcome breath of fresh air and a sense of hope not only to the population at large (both in the U.S. and worldwide) but to all who support science-based inquiry and the use of rationality and reason in examining issues important to us all.

Every time I fly, I do something that ensures the plane won’t crash. Just as I am stepping aboard the aircraft, I touch the outside fuselage next to the door. And then the plane doesn’t crash! It’s a causal gesture. Every time I’ve flown I’ve touched the outside of the plane, and it hasn’t crashed. One event reliably preceding another proves that the first causes the second, right? Well, of course, intellectually, I know that my touching the plane doesn’t ensure that it won’t crash. After all, I am a scientist and I have been studying how the material world works all my professional life. Having said that, do you think I can ever bring myself to abandon my touching-the-fuselage practice? Well, what’s the harm? So what if science doesn’t inform my behavior?

Yet as a biology professor, I am concerned that science does not inform our behavior, not just as individuals but as a society. I can recall how this concern captured my attention with the urgency it now has for me: I was listening to the then-president of the United States on the news (George Bush), and he suggested that the jury was still out on evolution. And I began to push myself to articulate why I was so distressed. Each time I answered myself, I pushed again: so what? I answered, again with “well, so what?” and again, “so what?” So what if science doesn’t inform the decisions we make as a country, a people, a world?

The answer is that people suffer.

The absence of an understanding of how the AIDS virus is transmitted, for instance, has contributed to countless deaths and millions of children being orphaned in Africa. Scientists had been predicting that a Katrina-like storm was bound to hit low-lying areas in the U.S., and we now know the consequences of having ignored that prediction. Now scientists are concerned that global climate change will have terrible consequences for people living in poor countries.

One obstacle to people’s understanding of science is that we have a tendency to infer that one event, A, causes another, B, simply if B follows A. Moreover, we want knowledge to provide us with certainty. Science doesn’t always confirm causality and can’t always provide certainty. We don’t know when the next Katrina-like storm will occur or when or what the next pandemic will be. But these assumptions about direct causality and certainty speak of a misunderstanding of science.

People seem predisposed to infer causality. I’ve wondered how this predisposition might have come about. Biologically speaking, how might it have served our fitness as we evolved? Consider this: which is more risky, failing to attend to a true positive (Uncle Bob ate that mushroom and died) or attending to a false positive (When I touch the outside of a plane, it doesn’t crash). Attending to a false positive might not hurt me too much (that is, touching a plane before I get on is not particularly detrimental to me) but ignoring a true positive? (Oops, I ignored the fact that Uncle Bob died after eating the mushroom, and I then ate the mushroom and also died). So perhaps we are predisposed to infer causality. It serves us to make associations. If we happen to goof on a false positive (the airplane) we can still reproduce. But if we don’t make the association when someone eats a mushroom and dies, then we may die too. So on average, it probably helped us to infer causality.

But what’s the harm in inferring causality at the least provocation? Recently, I read a report noting that some parents in Indonesia have inferred a causal relationship between polio immunization and contracting the disease. In one instance, an Indonesian mother brought her child to be immunized and a day later he developed polio. The most likely explanation is that this child already had the virus incubating in his body prior to the vaccination and was vaccinated too late. But without understanding how the disease is contracted and how the vaccine works, the mother’s logic made sense. She discouraged her neighbors from immunizing their children, which will contribute to the spread of the disease.

Yet science relies on the association of events to make sense of the universe. Once we find an association or a correlation, we can begin to look for causality—the mechanisms underlying a phenomenon. For instance, scientists noticed an association between the acidification of lakes in the Northeast and the loss of many aquatic species of animals. And now, we are beginning to uncover the causal relationship, the mechanisms by which the acid content in lakes hurts animals.

The absence of certainty also contributes to a misunderstanding of science. Not every human being who smokes cigarettes will develop lung cancer; we can’t even predict (at least not yet) who will. So what do we know? Of thousands of people who smoke, some proportion of them will die prematurely as a consequence. We can only move closer to the truth of how the material world works through the play of large numbers, and thus probabilities.

Science requires openness to possibilities and skepticism about how things work. What were your hypotheses? By what observations or experiments did you test these hypotheses? What is your evidence?

The scientific method is such a powerful process because it is self-correcting: a hypothesis not supported by evidence doesn’t hang around long. Scientists are constantly testing their ideas and those of others with the bar set pretty high for what it takes to be persuaded. Just recently, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist retracted a paper she co-authored because she could not replicate the results.

Science is powerful because it accurately predicts events from the virtually certain (if I drop a ball from a building, it will fall to earth) to the probabilistic (people who don’t smoke are likely to lead healthier lives than those who do).

A misunderstanding of science is pervasive in many institutions that shape how we see and act in the world. There are too many such institutions to mention in this essay, so I’ll just highlight a few.

There is compelling evidence that the Bush administration manipulated data and coerced scientists when the data were not consistent with the administration’s view of the world. I was gratified when President Obama stated that we would “restore science to its rightful place,” in his inaugural address. Nevertheless, we must attend to the consequences of the Bush administration’s disregard of evidence in its decision-making process. In February of 2004, sixty-two leading scientists (including Nobel laureates, National Medal of Science recipients, and advisors to the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations) criticized the Bush administration for its science policies. Their declaration includes the statement that “When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions.” For example:

• After Bush took office, the Department of Health and Human Services deleted Web site references to the efficacy of condom use in the fight against the spread of AIDS
• NASA scientists have reported that they have been pressured repeatedly by Bush appointees to alter or delete climate change findings in their reports
• The Bush administration interfered with stem-cell research, which could have facilitated the development of treatments to ameliorate Parkinson’s disease and diabetes

So what if science doesn’t inform our decisions? People suffer.

Alas, the way in which science is often taught at colleges and universities can contribute to its misunderstanding. Too often, science is presented as a disembodied collection of facts. How many of us had science classes that failed to engage us in the actual enterprise? How many science classes insist that students generate their own questions, design and carry out appropriate experiments, and grapple with evidence?

I also have concerns regarding the ways in which the media report on scientific issues. For example, in the fall of 2005, the Dover (Pennsylvania) Area School Board passed the following resolution: “Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory of evolution and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to intelligent design.” The school board further required that science teachers read a kind of evolutionary disclaimer to their biology classes. The board was sued by a group of parents upset by this decision, and the case was widely reported for some time. Various print, TV, and Internet media interviewed one person who was in favor of the resolution and one who was not, as though both points of view reflected equally legitimate scientific understandings. At the time, I was teaching a course called “Science and Antiscience in America,” and I asked my students what they thought about this tendency of the media to present all sides (or more typically “both sides”) of an issue, particularly as it pertains to scientific questions. Mostly, my students thought that it was an appropriate way to cover an issue in order “to be fair.” I asked them to suppose the story was about teaching that the world was flat versus round? “Oh, that’s different,” they’d say. Yet the preponderance of evidence for the fact of evolution is as robust as that for a round earth.

It is, at times, difficult for any of us to confront our own biases and examine them in light of evidence. Many of my students had no difficulty disparaging the folks who eschew evolution. But some of them bristled when I suggested that dismissing science as simply “a vehicle for continued male domination” is equally problematic. When you begin your inquiry with the answer rather than the question, whether the answer is “God did it” or “Western intellectual thought is simply a way to ensure the power of white men,” then it isn’t inquiry at all; it’s dogma.

Finally, I am deeply disturbed that roughly half of Americans don’t accept evolution. (I don’t like to use the phrase “believe in” evolution; it’s like choosing whether or not to believe in gravity.) Darwinian evolution (including the modifications biologists have brought forth over the years) is the only explanation that scientists have found for the relevant data. The wealth of data is so vast, evolution explains these data so well, and nearly the entire community of professionally trained biologists is so persuaded by this explanation that it is unlikely any other explanation will come along to supplant it. However, as good scientists, we remain open to the possibility of a better idea developing to explain the data. Until it does, there is no scientifically valid reason to hold any other view than that our species (and all other species of animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria) have arisen on the planet through the process of evolution.

But more than that, this denial of evolution speaks to an anti-intellectualism, a brand of antiscience that contributes to human suffering. If people can deny evolution, which is well supported by scientific evidence and widely accepted by the professional scientific community, then they will deny any scientific findings they dislike. The same methods and insights that have informed how scientists understand the movement of the planets, how molecules work, and what medical remedies are most effective have also informed our understanding of evolution. We can choose to cherry pick only the data that support a particular bias about how the world works, but how does that help us if the world does not work that way?

Science is a way of asking testable questions about the material world; the knowledge we have gained is imperfect, provisional, and can be derived only through the play of large numbers, and yet it is the best we can do in addressing certain problems. Einstein expressed this view most eloquently:

All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

—D. Phillips

A: We have all seen those white cloudy lines trailing aircraft across the distant sky; most people pay little attention to the contrails, assuming that they are both commonplace and harmless.

Then there’re the conspiracy folks. According to myriad conspiracy theories, some of those “harmless” vapors are instead sinister “chemtrails.” They are allegedly different from ordinary contrails in that they do not evaporate but instead spread out, causing a haze that eventually settles over populated areas. Some say the cloudy lines are part of government weather-controlling experiments; others say that they’re a form of germ warfare. According to Jim Marrs, who claims to be the world’s leading conspiracy theory author (or, at least, that’s what they want you to think!), “the case for the reality of chemtrails is strong.”

Physicist Kim Johnson, of the skeptics group New Mexicans for Science and Reason, examined photos and evidence of chemtrails presented to the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office. Johnson concluded that “there is no evidence that these ‘chemtrails’ are other than expected, normal contrails from jet aircraft that vary in their shapes, duration, and general presentation based on prevailing weather conditions. . . . When a jet engine burns its fuel, the major byproduct is water vapor. When the exhaust passes over the rear stabilizer of an aircraft, the tips or ends of the stabilizer cause the exhaust to expand rapidly. When it does, the temperature decreases rapidly within a turbulent flow, and ice crystal formation is forced. Generally, this makes it look as if the jet were spraying a cloud from the ends of the stabilizer.”

Marrs disputes the scientific explanation, writing in his 2008 book Above Top Secret (published, ironically, by The Disinformation Company), “Chemtrails often occur at altitudes and in conditions where it would be impossible for a contrail to form.” As evidence of the threat posed by chemtrails, Marrs points to a 2007 “investigation” by a television station in Louisiana, KSLA. Investigative reporter Jeff Ferrell tested water captured under a crosshatch of alleged chemtrails. According to Ferrell, “KSLA News 12 had the sample tested at a lab. The results: high level of barium, 6.8 parts per million, (ppm). That’s more than three times the toxic level set by the Environmental Protection Agency.”

Scary, isn’t it? Except that SI contributing editor David E. Thomas, a physicist, took a closer look at the TV report. As Thomas notes, “The actual video clearly shows 68.8 μg/L (micrograms per liter), or 68.8 ppb (parts per billion). . . . 68.8 millionths of a gram per liter corresponds to 68.8 parts per billion. . . . Ferrell overestimated the amount of barium in the test report by a factor of 100. . . . The test result was not ‘three times the toxic level set by the EPA’; it was around thirty times less than the EPA’s toxic limit.” Apparently a big chunk of Marrs’s “strong evidence” for chemtrails is simply the result of a TV reporter’s poor math skills. Ooh, awkward—unless, of course, those who devised mathematics were in on it with their suspicious basic math and tiny percentages!

There’s also the question of what possible purpose the contrails (er, chemtrails) would serve. As Bob Carroll notes in The Skeptics Dictionary, “Any biological or chemical agents released at 25,000 feet or above would be absolutely impossible to control, making any measurement of effects on the ground nearly impossible. . . . Such an exercise would be pointless, unless you just wanted to pollute the atmosphere. And where is the evidence of the illnesses being caused by these agents?”

Alas, conspiracy buffs have no answers for these fundamental questions. It’s easier (and much more fun) to just sit back and wonder what secret government experiments we are being exposed to that “they” aren’t telling us about.

References

• Carroll, Robert. 2007. Chemtrails (contrails). Available online at skepdic.com.
• Johnson, M. Kim. 1999. Chemtrails analysis. NMSR Reports, 5(12), December.
• Marrs, Jim. 2008. Above Top Secret. New York, NY: The Disinformation Company.
• Thomas, David. 2008. “Chemtrail fears thrive on Internet.” Available on the Web site for New Mexicans for Science and Reason at nmsr.org.

One recent narrative is that vaccines cause autism in children (see the three-article special section “Vaccines and Autism: Myths and Misconceptions,” SI, November/December 2007). There are few narratives as dramatic, as inflaming, as that of a child being threatened, and that is the core conflict examined by Paul Offit, MD, in his masterful Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. In the course of his own carefully written narrative, Offit, the chief of Infectious Diseases and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, tells many stories that come together to provide a deeply disturbing depiction of how quack science based on falsified research quickly fueled a monstrous conspiracy theory accusing vaccine manufacturers and the physicians administering them of willfully harming children in a malicious conspiracy for profit.

Offit’s approach to this poisonous idea is to tell his tale from the beginning. He dates the earliest discussion of autism (as a diagnosis) to a paper published in 1943 and tells of the distressing rapidity with which bad information began to crowd out good research. Bruno Bettelheim and his harmful and incorrect ideas about autism and parenting provide an early model for the accusatory and factually deficient approaches taken up by many others, but the grandfather of this conspiracy theory lies in the “research” published in the Lancet in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist working at London’s Royal Free Hospital.

Offit weaves the story of Wakefield’s rise and fall through the book, vividly illustrating how his medical fraud and quackery metastasized through the autism community. It became the basis for the accusation that the medical community not only did not know what to do about autism but was actually intentionally causing it through an amoral and greedy pursuit of profits by administering immunizations that they knew caused the disease.

Offit carefully and clearly explains the shaky basis of Wakefield’s theory: that the MMR vaccine causes inflammation to intestines, allowing harmful proteins (though he could not identify what those were) to pass through the damaged intestine and harm a rapidly developing brain. That such a finding was published in one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in Great Britain, the Lancet, caused an explosion of press coverage whose shock waves carried over the globe. Wakefield’s hypothesis was not generally supported by his paper, but the sheen of legitimacy granted to it by its publication was thrown into the maelstrom of a sensation-seeking and conflict-hungry global media machine that roared to a white-hot pitch in a matter of days.

The need for a narrative took over at this point. That the scientific method (which takes time) and the court proceedings that arose in the aftermath (which take even longer) utterly disproved the legitimacy of this theory was lost on a media interested in dramatic conflict and the pronouncements of celebrities, no matter how incorrect and ignorant they may be, over clarity. The compelling, emotionally gratifying narrative of an evil entity defied by newly empowered victims sells better than the slow, reflective work of science.

Tragically, this story does not begin and end with Wakefield. Despite a lack of corroborative research and court proceedings that revealed the depth to which Wakefield falsified his dubious research, the idea of vaccines causing autism has mutated and survived. If it wasn’t MMR, then it was the mercury in the thimerisol used to preserve multidose vials of vaccines. Wakefield opened a Pandora’s box of bad science that shows no signs of abating. “Cures” have abounded, and some have caused greater harm and even death to the children treated. This is a narrative that still lacks a happy ending.

Science still hasn’t determined the cause of autism, which is frustrating a community of people who are desperate for a cure for their children’s medical condition. What this narrative provides to parents of autistic children (and anyone else interested in their fate) is someone to blame, a nemesis they can safely direct their anger toward. Autism has been a mystery since it was initially identified over half a century ago, and progress on research has only recently begun to illuminate its genetic basis. In the absence of a clear cause, it is more emotionally satisfying to identify already existing villains (Big Pharma and Big Medicine) as the cause of it all. Offit himself has been the victim of this abuse but has bravely produced a definitive account of this tragic story.

“By December 1941 American cryptology was a system that was stretched to the limit and pushed in too many directions,” they write. The American intelligence people had “conflicting missions” and too “few resources.” The ordersto monitor commercial Japanese broadcasts for a Winds execute message was just one more burden—“one more apple of chaos tossed into an already turbulent crisis.”

“The result of this skewed emphasis was that many messages encrypted in cryptographic systems other than Purple [Japan’s high-level cipher machine used for diplomatic traffic] usually took days, even weeks, to get processed to the point where a translation could be produced. After Pearl Harbor, when American codebreakers got around to decoding and translating some of the pre-attack diplomatic traffic, they discovered that many messages carried important details about the Japanese intentions.”

An example was a Tokyo message sent December 6 to its diplomats in Bangkok. It noted that “X-Day,” or “Declaration Day,” was set for Sunday, December 7 (December 8 in Tokyo). “Notice” was to be given on that date. That message was translated on December 8.

This “X-Day” was never mentioned in any Purple messages to Washington intercepted and worked by the Americans.

The report is filled with many other examples of how potentially critical intelligence was missed due to delays in translation.

It is not every day that one receives a report in the mail from the supersecret National Security Agency. NSA is the U.S. intelligence agency responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence. And when the report investigates the history of one of the long-disputed contentions about the worst war of the twentieth century, it deserves special attention.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, continues to inspire suspicion in some quarters that the U.S. knew it was coming. Some revisionist and conspiracy writers, historians, and critics of the Roosevelt administration contend that the U.S. intercepted a Japanese message that was a clear warning of the impending attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. Some further contend that this so-called “Winds Message” had been revealed to senior American military and civilian leaders. The implication is that the attack might therefore have been prevented.

The story long ago acquired near-mythic status in some circles and has never quite gone away. This group of believers may even have grown in recent years due to the proliferation of Web sites on the Internet with entries about the Winds message.

Historians Robert J. Hanyok and the late David P. Mowry of NSA’s Center for Cryptologic History have now published a new, detailed documentary history of the Winds message controversy in an attempt to clear up the issue and provide source documents for historical scholars and researchers. NSA recently issued the 327–page report (“West Wind Clear: Cryptology and the Winds Message Controversy”), which includes images of all the standard critical documents—as well as many never before seen. The authors debunk the view that a clear warning message was monitored before the attacks.

Hanyok told the Skeptical Inquirer that he believes his report “will dispel any further reference to a ‘Winds execute’ message being heard before the attack,” at least in conventional and academic circles. He says he holds few such hopes regarding most conspiracy-theory bloggers, unless they actually read the report. “Some conspiracy buffs might change their minds if they read my book.”

In a foreword, NSA historian David A. Hatch says Hanyok and Mowry “have made a significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of two of the event’s controversies, the Winds Message and the state of U.S. communications intelligence prior to the Hawaiian attack.”

Japan’s coded Winds message was intended by the Japanese foreign ministry as an emergency method to alert Japanese diplomats abroad that relations between Japan and the U.S., Great Britain, or the Soviet Union were about to take a downturn. They could then destroy cryptographic materials or sensitive messages.

One method involved placing innocuous-sounding phrases about the winds in weather forecasts transmitted by short-wave radio. For example, “Nishi No Kaze Hare [West Wind Clear]” repeated twice in the middle and twice at the end of the daily Japanese-language short-wave voice news broadcast meant Japan-Great Britain relations were in danger. The phrase “East Wind Rain” signaled damage to U.S. relations. The U.S. intercepted and decrypted the late-November 1941 messages giving these meanings and instructions—as had Great Britain and Australia. Allied monitoring stations were then tasked to search for and monitor any messages bearing these phrases.

Many scholars and researchers have been skeptical or critical of the various revisionist or conspiracist claims revolving around the eventual Winds execute message. Some suggest that the claims are based on a selective reading of testimony and evidence that subsequently surfaced (eight investigations into the Pearl Harbor attacks ensued, from 1942 to 1946). Hanyok and Mowry thought this material might allow them “to examine important aspects of the Winds message story in a deeper fashion than before.”

Battleship Row, where the most damage occurred during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

On December 7 in Hawaii, at 1:32 pm, Honolulu time, five and a half hours after the attacks began, a monitoring station on Hawaii heard a Japanese-language news broadcast from Tokyo breathlessly describing the day’s attacks by Japanese forces, including a “death-defying raid upon the American naval and air strength in the Hawaiian area.” The announcer then interrupted with a weather report: “West Wind Clear” (relations with Great Britain are in danger). He repeated the phrase and did so twice more at the end of the program. This Winds execute message was also monitored at Portland, Oregon, at 7:02 pm, Eastern Time. It also was: “West Wind Clear.” Again, this was hours after the attack. The code phrase referencing relations with the United States was absent from these messages.

Hanyok and Mowry conclude that the Winds message was neither actionable intelligence nor a useful war warning. “A Winds Execute message was sent on 7 December, 1941,” the authors say. “The weight of the evidence indicates that one coded phrase, ‘West Wind Clear,’ was broadcast according to previous instructions some six to seven hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.” They say it is possible that a British site may have heard a broadcast one to two hours after the attack, “but this only substantiates the anticlimatic nature of the broadcast” (p. 88).

Inside the shrine room of the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor.

“From a military standpoint, the Winds coded message contained no actionable intelligence either about the Japanese operations in Southeast Asia and absolutely nothing about Pearl Harbor. In reality, the Japanese broadcast the coded phrase(s) long after hostilities began—useless, in fact, to all who might have heard it.”

They further find that the controversy was in fact an artificial one, pumped up by misunderstandings and the imaginings of one of the key participants, whose narratives “ranged so far from the documentary evidence and the memories of all the other participants that it was completely detached from actual events.” And they say revisionist and conspiratorial writers since then have further strayed from the documented truth.

“There simply was not one shred of actionable intelligence in any of the messages or transmissions that pointed to the attack on Pearl Harbor” (p.95).

The “primary, and almost exclusive, source fueling these claims of a conspiracy surrounding the Winds message,” say the authors, was Captain Laurance Frye Safford, the founder and first commander of the U.S. Navy’s code-breaking unit, OP-20-G. Safford first publicized his views in early 1944 in the Hart Inquiry, the second of the eight investigations after the attack. He repeated his story in Army Board and Navy Board investigations later that same year. He was well regarded within the cryptologic and intelligence communities and therefore taken seriously.

In their report’s final section, “The Winds Message and the Historical Process,” Hanyok and Mowry are highly critical of Safford and later conspiratorial writers.

“The ‘conspiratorial’ version of the Winds incident was solely the product of Captain Laurance Safford’s imagining of events that had occurred prior to Pearl Harbor in the Washington, D.C., offices of naval and army intelligence,” say the authors (p. 99).

“Put to the test, though, Safford’s narrative about the Execute message simply failed to stand up to cross-examination. The Joint Congressional Committee shredded Safford’s story. The committee reduced it to the collection of unsubstantiated charges that all along had been its foundation. The documentary evidence he said was available simply did not, nor did it ever, exist. In truth, Safford produced nothing upon which any further investigation could proceed.” They say the most charitable assessment of his actions was that he was “mistaken.”

The story should have ended there, the authors say. But thirty-four years after the congressional committee report in 1946, a few private scholars resurrected Safford’s allegation of a conspiracy and with it the whole Winds controversy. These writers “inverted the normal rules of evidentiary argument,” insisting that “the government had yet to disprove Safford’s charges regardless of the fact that he never had produced any evidence to substantiate them thirty-some years earlier,” say Hanyok and Mowry (p. 99).

“The scholars and researchers who championed Safford’s version of the controversy abandoned the rigorous evidentiary requirements of the historical profession in order to advance their thesis. . . .

“Safford’s case was built on mistaken deductions, reconstructed, nonexistent documents, a mutable version of events, as well as a cast of witnesses that Safford conjured up in his imagination.

“In the end, the Winds message controversy was and remains an artificial historical phenomenon. . . . The artificial controversy that grew around the Winds message never advanced historical knowledge of the events of early December 1941. In fact, the Winds controversy distracted investigations and later historical analyses from far more important issues about the attack on Pearl Harbor.” These include, the authors say, “the fundamental organizational and operational shortcomings of American cryptology” and the “arrogant dismissal by American military and naval leaders of a Japanese capability and willingness to conduct such an operation.”

“That the Winds controversy persisted over decades is more a result of the misplaced belief by some that history is controlled by conspiracy than history being the product of human folly” (p. 100).

Hanyok told the Skeptical Inquirer that if there is anything he wanted to add to his book it would have been on “Captain Safford’s reason behind his dogged persistence in pushing his conspiracy theory.” Says Hanyok: “I came across some additional material after my book was at the printer. Safford firmly believed that radio intelligence could discover what the Japanese were up to. He was absolutely certain that the intelligence that tipped off the attack on Pearl Harbor was somewhere in the files of the Navy or Army. When he could not find what he was sure existed, he began to suspect that the files had been picked. So the vague sense of conspiracy came first. Then he began to fit the ‘pieces,’ no matter how untenable they were, to the story.”

He says some “conspiracy bloggers” have already dismissed his book as the work of “court historians.” This, he says, is “a curious insult considering that I blew the whistle on the Gulf of Tonkin coverup!” Says Hanyok: “This group is so committed that they will never change their collective mind. Believing in a conspiratorial view of history is a comfortable and comforting ideology.”

Note

1. West Wind Clear: Cryptology and the Winds Message Controversy—A Documentary History. By Robert J. Hanyok and David P. Mowry. United States Cryptologic History, Series IV: World War II, Volume 10. Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, Ft. George Meade, MD 20755-6886, 2008. The report was Hanyok’s final publication for the CCH before his retirement in August 2008 from a long career in government; Mowry died before its publication.

Toward the end of the tour, Giberson discloses his own allegiance: “I think evolution is true. The process, as I reflect on it, is an expression of God’s creativity, although in a way that is not captured by the scientific view of the world.” He was not always of that opinion. As a college student, he recounts, he was a hardcore fundamentalist armed with a copy of The Genesis Flood, the foundation of creation science, and eager to join the creationist cause as soon as he obtained his doctorate. His study of science, however, convinced him that evolution was scientifically robust, and his exposure to biblical and theological scholarship persuaded him that accepting evolution was not, after all, a problem for the essential tenets of christianity. Although Giberson offers a few tentative suggestions (describing them as “above my pay grade”) toward a reconciliation of evolution and christianity, the book’s subtitle, How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, is misleading. His main concern in Saving Darwin is not with how but why: he is not providing the theological details of such a project but arguing for its desirability.

Such a reconciliation may be desirable, but is it possible? Both creationists and at least a handful of atheist polemicists—if not as many as giberson seems to think—agree that it is not. Thus central to Saving Darwin is a rejection of the idea that there is a forced choice between christianity and evolution. “Almost everyone who talks about evolution insists that we must make a choice between evolution or creation, materialism or god, naturalism or supernaturalism,” Giberson declares. “But this dichotomy is wrong. These are not the only two options. These are not even the most reasonable options” (emphasis in original). Opposing the dichotomy, and thereby making space for reconciling science and faith, is the main concern of Saving Darwin. It is a praiseworthy concern, especially in a country where almost a third of science teachers report experiencing pressure to teach creationism in their classrooms. Even those who are not especially interested in whether christianity is able to accommodate evolution ought to respect sincere and honest efforts at reconciliation, if only in the hope that they will help to reduce the pressure on the beleaguered teachers, giving their students a better chance to attain a proper understanding of evolution.

But Giberson’s concern sometimes leads him to overstate the case. Is it really a fact that “almost everyone who talks about evolution” insists on the dichotomy? Then what of Howard van Till, Darrel Falk, Francis Collins (who contributed the foreword to the book), Kenneth R. Miller, John Haught, Alister McGrath, Keith Ward, and Michael Ruse, all of whom Giberson approvingly mentions as affirming the compatibility of christianity and evolution? Similarly, Giberson complains that “the content and significance of evolutionary theory is communicated to broad audiences by people like [Richard] Dawkins” in trade books like The Blind Watchmaker, which famously includes a hefty dollop of triumphal atheism along with evolution. But what about Carl Zimmer, Sean Carroll, and David Sloan Wilson, for example, who expound evolution in popular trade books without lashing out at faith? And surely the primary messengers of evolution for the broadest audience are biology textbooks, which are generally silent on or neutral about the implications of evolution for religion. Unmentioned, too, are the efforts of the scientific establishment to debunk the dichotomy that Giberson deplores, such as The Evolution Dialogues (published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006) and Science, Evolution, and Creationism (published by the National Academy of Sciences in 2008).

Perhaps in the spirit of Mercutio’s “A plague o’ both your houses,” Giberson sometimes draws a misleading equivalence between creationists and their opponents. His discussion of a fracas over a definition of evolution offered by the National Association of Biology Teachers in 1995, for example, is captious and uncharitable, perhaps because it relies on a tendentious account by Phillip Johnson, the godfather of intelligent design. Similarly, his discussion of a failed attempt to include antievolution rhetoric in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 criticizes the scientific community for its strenuous opposition to the so-called Santorum amendment, while not acknowledging that, even despite the amendment’s failure, it was subsequently invoked to justify policies that compromised the integrity of science education. He criticizes the National Association of Biology Teachers for claiming (in his words) “that evolution is a science because it is like physics” (emphasis in original), whereas, as acknowledged just two pages earlier, the comparison was not advanced in service of such a sweeping claim. Just as a more reflective Mercutio might have credited Romeo at least with trying to stop the duel, so a more thoughtful Giberson might have given creationism’s opponents their due.

There is still plenty to appreciate in Saving Darwin, especially the discussion of creation science and intelligent design. In such a thoroughly debated area, it is difficult to advance the argument, as Giberson realizes. After explaining his rejection of intelligent design on scientific and theological grounds, for example, he apologizes for the lack of novelty, explaining, “intelligent design is a nineteenth-century argument, flailing about in a new century where it doesn’t belong.” But he is familiar with his material, he organizes it well, and he possesses a good eye for the telling detail. A few bouts of whimsy induced a wince, such as the reference to “a leading French intellectual bearing the ponderous name Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon”; the Comte de Buffon’s given name was Georges-Louis Leclerc, which is two syllables less ponderous than “Karl W. Giberson”—but who’s counting? If Giberson’s name is comparatively ponderous, at least his prose is not: the writing is generally clear and fluent. Overall, anyone seeking a lively and engaging, if occasionally tendentious, introduction to the evolution wars from the standpoint of a Christian who accepts evolution will enjoy Saving Darwin.

New England

New England has always been an admixture of both austere skepticism and passionate superstition. Vampire legends lurk in the latter. According to one vampirologist, “The presence in New England of a strongly rooted vampire mythology is something of an enigma to folklorists. There is quite simply no other area in all of North America with such wealth of vampire lore” (Rondina 2008, 165).

One of the best known examples is the case of nineteen-year-old Mercy Lena Brown in Exeter, Rhode Island, in 1892—a case that supposedly influenced Bram Stoker, author of Dracula (1897). As Katherine Ramsland (2002, 18) concisely tells the story:

George Brown lost his wife and then his eldest daughter. One of his sons, Edwin, returned and once again became ill, so George exhumed the bodies of his wife and daughters. The wife and first daughter had decomposed, but Mercy’s body—buried for three months—was fresh and turned sideways in the coffin, and blood dripped from her mouth. They cut out her heart, burned it, and dissolved the ashes in a medicine for Edwin to drink. However, he also died, and Mercy Brown became known as Exeter’s vampire.

Accounts of the exhumation in the Providence Journal of March 19 and 21, 1892, acknowledge that the Browns died of consumption (tuberculosis). They do not mention the corpse of Lena (as she was actually known) being turned on its side or blood dripping from the mouth. The exhumation was conducted by a young Harold Metcalf, MD, from the city of Wickford. “Dr. Metcalf reports the body in a state of natural decomposition, with nothing exceptional existing,” stated the Journal. “When the doctor removed the heart and the liver from the body a quantity of blood dripped therefrom, but this he said was just what might be expected from a similar examination of almost any person after the same length of time from disease.” The article added, “The heart and liver were cremated by the attendants” (“Exhumed” 1892).

A follow-up article (“Vampire” 1892) noted that the heart’s blood was “clotted and decomposed . . . just what might be expected at that stage of decomposition.” The correspondent acknowledged the custom of an afflicted person consuming the ashes to effect a cure, stating, “In this case the doctor does not know if this latter remedy was resorted to or not, and he only knows from hearsay how ill the son Edwin is, never having been called to attend him.”

And so ends “Unarguably the best known incident of historical vampirism in America,” indeed the story of “The Last Vampire” (Rondina 2008, 83, 99). However, there are many other reported cases typically involving consumption. The victim’s lethargy, pale appearance, coughing of blood, and contagiousness all suggested to the superstitious the result of a “vampire’s parasitic kiss” (Citro 1994, 71).

The Demon Vampire

In 2008 I went in search of vampire cases in Vermont. Apparently the earliest reported vampire incident took place in Manchester in 1793. Four years earlier, Captain Isaac Burton—a deacon in the congregational church—wed Rachel Harris. Judge John S. Pettibone (1786 —1872) picks up the story:

She was, to use the words of one who was well acquainted with her, “a fine, healthy, beautiful girl.” Not long after they were married she went into a decline and after a year or so she died of consumption. Capt. Burton after a year or more married Hulda Powel, daughter of Esquire Powel by his first wife. Hulda was a very healthy, good-looking girl, not as handsome as his first wife. She became ill soon after they were married and when she was in the last stages of consumption, a strange infatuation took possession of the minds of the connections and friends of the family. They were induced to believe that if the vitals of the first wife could be consumed by being burned in a charcoal fire it would effect a cure of the sick second wife. Such was the strange delusion that they disinterred the first wife who had been buried about three years. They took out the liver, heart, and lungs, what remained of them, and burned them to ashes on the blacksmith’s forge of Jacob Mead. Timothy Mead officiated at the altar in the sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it was believed was still sucking the blood of the then living wife of Captain Burton. It was the month of February and good sleighing. Such was the excitement that from five hundred to one thousand people were present. This account was furnished me by an eye witness of the transaction.

Not only is Judge Pettibone’s informant unnamed, but his manuscript (which still exists in the Manchester Historical Society [Harwood 2008]) is of uncertain date, although penned sometime between 1857 and 1872 (Proceedings 1930, 147). I located a Burton family history (Holman 1926) that makes no mention of the vampire tale but does confirm the sequence of marriages and deaths. (Captain Burton married Rachel Harris on March 8, 1789, and she died on February 1, 1790. He married Hulda Powell on January 4, 1791, and she succumbed on September 6, 1793.)

Therefore, the Pettibone account could be true. The salient point, however, is that belief in “the Demon Vampire” was indeed nothing more than a “strange delusion.” Pettibone places the bizarre sacrifice about three years after Rachel’s burial, which means the event occurred in early 1793, and Huldah died later that year. Clearly, anti-vampire magic was no cure for consumption.

I attempted to locate Rachel’s grave. Isaac Burton and his fourth wife Dency Raymond (1774—1864) are buried together in the old section of Dellwood Cemetery in Manchester (Holman 1926, 25—28). The graves were relocated there from the old burial ground on the village green, today’s courthouse site, where many old, unmarked graves are thought yet to remain (Harwood 2008). Among them may be the lost grave of the beautiful but unfortunate Rachel Harris.

On Woodstock Green

Another story comes from Woodstock, where sources claim a vampire’s heart was burned on the public green around 1829. The earliest account appeared in The Journal of American Folklore (Curtin 1889, 58—59). The story was later retold in the Boston Transcript, followed by an expanded version “Vampirism in Woodstock” in the October 9, 1890, Vermont Standard (quoted in Stephens 1970, 71—74). This gave the man’s family name as Corwin. (Composite, garbled versions have since appeared [e.g., “Vampire Incidents” 2008].) According to the original source (Curtin 1889, 58):

The man had died of consumption six months before and his body buried in the ground. A brother of the deceased fell ill soon after, and in a short time it appeared that he too had consumption; when this became known the family determined at once to disinter the body of the dead man and examine his heart. Then they reinterred the body, took the heart to the middle of Woodstock Green, where they kindled a fire under an iron pot, in which they placed the heart, and burned it to ashes.

Figure 2. The author uses chalk to enhance the tombstone of Josiah Spaulding, which is topped with the familiar image of the Angel of Death.

Unfortunately, not only was the story sixty years old at the time it appeared, but the writer failed to give any source other than an “old lady” in Woodstock who “said she saw the disinterment and the burning with her own eyes.” The editor of The Vermont Standard added much supplementary material, claiming that the pot of ashes was buried under a seven-ton granite slab and that persons digging at the site a decade later encountered a sulfurous smell and smoke. This reference to the fires of Hell reveal the editor’s writing as tongue-in-cheek, even sarcastic, and discredits his other details: the man’s name as Corwin and burial in the Cushing Cemetery. Small wonder that no one of that name is buried in that graveyard—as shown by cemetery records (Stillwell and Proctor 1977) and confirmed by a search among the old tombstones by my wife and me (see also Crosier 1986; Wendlong 1990).

Misunderstanding the editor’s satire, popular writers have tended either to give too much credence to the story or to debunk or dismiss it altogehter. Possibly the original account did contain a nucleus of truth, an early account of consumption and superstitious belief associated with it.

The Killing Vine

Yet another old case, again involving consumption and associated superstition, has been reinterpreted by moderns as a “vampire incident” (“Vampire” 2008; Rondina 2008, 104). The story, in David L. Mansfield’s The History of the Town of Dummerston (1884)—itself an account written some ninety years after the events and based on oral tradition—has become somewhat garbled by writers copying writers. Therefore, I tracked down a copy of the original text for study. It relates that Lieutenant Leonard Spaulding died of consumption in 1788, aged fifty-nine, father of eleven children. Mansfield states (1884, 27):

Although the children of Lt. Spaulding, especially the sons, became large, muscular persons, all but one or two died under 40 years of age of consumption, and their sickness was brief.

It is related by those who remember the circumstance; after six or seven of the family had died of consumption, another daughter was taken, it was supposed, with the same disease. It was thought she would die, and much was said in regard to so many of the family’s dying of consumption when they all seemed to have the appearance of good health and long life. Among the superstitions of those days, we find it was said that a vine or root of some kind grew from coffin to coffin, of those of one family, who died of consumption, and were buried side by side; and when the growing vine had reached the coffin of the last one buried, another one of the family would die; the only way to destroy the influence or effect, was to break the vine; take up the body of the last one buried and burn the vitals, which would be an effectual remedy: Accordingly, the body of the last one buried was dug up and the vitals taken out and burned, and the daughter, it is affirmed, got well and lived many years. The act, doubtless, raised her mind from a state of despondency to hopefullness [sic].

Now, Spaulding and his wife Margaret (who died in 1827) were buried in separate cemeteries and in unmarked graves. However, I located all but two of the children’s graves, including a row of six in the Dummerston Center Cemetery (figures 1 and 2).

Unfortunately for the quaint legend related by oral tradition, the graves (whether linked by hidden underground vines or not) are not placed consecutively in the order of the family members’ deaths. Neither did the last of the six, Josiah, die very close in time to the previous sibling’s demise, since more than five-and-a-half years passed since the death of John. Of course, the family may well have been plagued by consumption, and it is possible Josiah’s body was disinterred and the vitals burned. In any event, he was indeed followed in death by one of Leonard Spaulding’s daughters, as the legend states, since after he died only Olive remained alive. Apparently, she lived on for years, moving with a second husband to Brattleboro (Mansfield 1884, 26)—perhaps this being the secret of her having avoided the contagion!

In New Orleans

In sharp contrast to vampire legends of New England are those of New Orleans. While Louisiana indeed has a folk tradition of werewolves (the Loup-Garous of the Cajuns), the vampire culture there is not folklore but fakelore.

When I investigated various topics in the New Orleans area in 2000 (Nickell 2004, 140—161, 165—175), I found frequent references to vampires. The various nighttime tours focusing on cemeteries, voodoo, and ghosts invariably touted vampires as well, and guides (like mine) regaled tourists with spine-tingling tales of the “undead.”

Anne Rice (born Howard Allen O’Brien in 1941) inspired legions of fans with her series of erotic horror novels, beginning with Interview with the Vampire (1976). Until she repudiated the genre, returned to her Catholic faith, and moved from New Orleans in 2005, many Rice devotees made pilgrimages to the Big Easy. Some walking tours included Rice’s home or the location of the filming of Interview. There was even a tour book, Haunted City: An Unauthorized Guide to the Magical, Magnificent New Orleans of Anne Rice (Dickinson 1997).

According to Victor C. Klein, who has compiled two books of New Orleans ghost legends, “Throughout my extensive researches I have never encountered any tangible trace of Vampirism in Louisiana or New Orleans.” He adds, “The genesis for such beliefs is directly attributable to the commercial imagination of Ms. Rice and the cebretonic endomorphs who, in their mad dash to establish a subjective species of identity and immortality, elevate her works to gospel status” (1999, 106). He also speaks of “the hyperbolic balderdash which spews forth from the black garbed tour guides who are more interested in money and sensationalism than accurate historical research” (1999, 64).

I recall one of the more responsible guides laughingly telling me how a customer once inquired about a particular grave featured in a Rice story and would not be convinced that the site was purely fictional. But I think the evidence shows that that grave is just as authentically vampiric as any real graves in New Orleans, New England, Europe, or elsewhere.

Acknowledgments

My wife, Diana G. Harris, helpfully accompanied me on my trip to Vermont. Timothy Binga, director of CFI Libraries, provided much research assistance, and I am grateful to Paul Loynes for typesetting and indeed the entire Skeptical Inquirer staff for help at all levels.

I am especially grateful to the following gracious Vermont people and institutions for their crucial assistance: in Woodstock, the staff of the Norman Williams Public Library, including reference-desk attendant John Donaldson, and the staff of the Woodstock Inn and Resort (for free coffee and tea!); in Dummerston, Town Clerk Pam McFadden and historian Paul Normandeau; and in Manchester, the staff of the Mark Skinner Library, Assistant Town Clerk Bear Scovil, Dellwood Cemetery caretaker Kurt Baccei, and, especially, curator of the Manchester Historical Society, Dr. Judy Harwood.

References

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• Curtin, Jeremiah. 1889. European folk-lore in the United States. Journal of American Folklore. 2:4 (March), 56—59.
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