The California Board of Registered Nursing (CBRN) oversees and licenses more than 350,000 registered nurses in the Golden State.¹ Nurses in California must complete thirty hours of continuing education units (CEUs) every two years to remain licensed. These units must be issued by certified CEU providers and “must be relevant to the practice of nursing.”² The courses may, however, be related to topics as varied as “social and behavioral sciences . . . therapeutic interpersonal relationship skills. . .and nursing administration.”³

There is no ongoing reporting mechanism to keep track of each individual’s CEUs. Nurses comply based on the honor system but are expected to submit proof of coursework if requested. Correspondence courses can qualify for credit, and the board requires little substantiation that anything has been learned.⁴

A Tectonic-sized Crack in the System

The Independent Investigations Group (IIG) at the Center for Inquiry/Los Angeles has been an active skeptics group since January 2000. When we at the IIG learned that a nursing CEU provider called Clearsight was offering credits for a class in “energetic medicine,” we investigated. “Energetic medicine” is Clearsight’s name for therapeutic touch (TT), the manipulation of alleged energy fields such as chakras and auras over the body. (The practitioner’s hands make no actual contact with the patient.) Clearsight advertised that they were licensed by the state of California to teach the following to registered nurses:

The skills of “seeing energy” to see and diagnose body organs; to scan the physical and energetic bodies for dis-harmonies or illness; and to heal the aura and chakras, the energetic systems of the body.

Clearsight introduces you to the skills of Free Will, the art of energy diagnosis, how to make Separations from your Healee so you do not take another person’s energy or dis-ease home and how to release old patterns and stuck energy in your body and auric field. When you use Clearsight healing skills you clear and clean the entire energy field (chakras, channels and aura) and grow and evolve evenly at the rate of growth you are ready to access.⁵

Our shock at discovering that such a pseudoscientific course had been sanctioned by an ostensibly scientific government agency led us to inquire about Clearsight’s application. Had Clearsight defrauded the CBRN in order to cash in on the CEU market?

Sacramento, We Have a Problem

After some prodding to remind the CBRN that Clearsight’s provider application was public record, the IIG received a copy of the application and discovered that it was blank in some places and that the instructor’s educational credentials consisted of a BA in comparative religion and a ministerial certificate from the Church of Divine Man a psychic institute that offers healings, psychic readings, and other such activities.⁶ The application also made the unsubstantiated claim that “medical science has recognized and quantified the existence of a human energy field which, when blocked, may result in a broad range of physical and psychological ailments.”⁷

From January to May 2006, IIG investigators had a frustrating series of exchanges with the nursing board. Initially, we asked that they withdraw Clearsight’s certification to teach energetic medicine based on the omissions in the application and the lack of supporting medical value for the practices being taught. We naively thought that after we pointed out these (what we thought were stunning) revelations, the board would recognize their oversight and withdraw Clearsight’s certification to teach New Age malarkey. We had no idea our odyssey was just beginning.

In a February 2006 letter, then CBRN Executive Officer Ruth Ann Terry wrote to IIG investigator Owen Hammer that “nurses . . . need to be informed about these techniques in order to understand the patient’s/client’s perspective and learn what is involved in each technique.”⁸

IIG Chair James Underdown addressed the board personally in May and June of 2006 and argued that Clearsight’s course was not a class about energetic healing; it was a course teaching (i.e., endorsing) energetic healing, an unscientific concept. The IIG submitted a proposed rewrite of the current rules that would help prevent future lapses in science standards.

The current rules say (in effect) that content must be relevant to the practice of nursing, related to scientific knowledge, or related to client care.⁹ Our proposed change was that content must be relevant, scientific, and related to client care. We also submitted a clause clarifying the definition of scientific and a change providing for automatic withdrawal of certification from CEU providers who give false information on an application.

The IIG then contacted the California Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees nursing regulations, and received a reply in July 2006 that defended the granting of Clearsight’s certification. In August 2006, Underdown addressed the board’s Education/Licensing Committee in Sacramento. There, the IIG was informed¹⁰ that the board will “award a CE Provider number to the applicant if the alternative or complementary medicine modality is discussed in the publication Best Practices in Alternative and Complementary Medicine¹¹

Best Practices, which would be key to our investigation, is a hard-to-find publication that is regarded by the board as its guidepost to educational policy. It contains sections on TT, magnet therapy, Reiki, aromatherapy, homeopathy, and qigong. The material on these topics is highly credulous¹² despite poor scientific support and wide criticism in the Skeptical Inquirer and other journals. The board nevertheless defended the licensure of energetic medicine classes and other alternative medical practices by citing Best Practices as an acceptable standard.

After an exhaustive search, we found Best Practices in a library and carefully read the sections that dealt with TT. We then crafted a comprehensive, well-documented refutation of Best Practices’s TT claims and sent copies of this refutation to each board member. This was in addition to literature we had already given the board, including material from Robert Park’s SI piece “Alternative Medicine and the Laws of Physics”¹³; “A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch”¹⁴ by Linda Rosa, Emily Rosa, Larry Sarner, and Stephen Barrett (in TheJournal of the American Medical Association and Kevin Courcey’s “Further Notes on Therapeutic Touch,” which is available online at www.Quackwatch.org.

Oddly enough, Rosa et al’s JAMA paper was cited in the Best Practices literature despite the fact that it elegantly refutes claims that TT works!

The board promised to consider our suggested changes to the regulations, but we never heard from them or saw any sign that the item was listed on any subsequent board agenda or addressed at any meeting. We were stonewalled.

You Want Crazy? You Got It!

We then decided to see for ourselves just how lax California’s CEU provider application process really is. We created a CEU provider called the California Foundation for Institutional Care or CFI-Care and sent an application with the $200 fee to the CBRN. We called our course “Feng Shui for Home Care Providers” and listed IIG investigator Karen Kensek as the instructor because she teaches architecture at the University of Southern California and thus meets the qualifications of a certified instructor. But we didn’t stop there.

The following sections appear on our application for this course aimed at professional nurses:

1. Möbel Kinesiology (Möbel is the German word for furniture, so möbel kinesiology is, essentially, furniture moving.)
2. Feng Shui (a practice in which a structure or site is chosen or configured so as to harmonize with its qi, or life energy)
3. Chinese ShŽy—u (translation: snake oil)
4. Vapor and Reflective Surfaces (another way to say smoke and mirrors)
5. Apophenia (the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data)
6. Anthropomancy (divination through human entrails)
7. Canupiary Flexibility (The word canupiary exists in no language we could find. We made it up.)

When the unfamiliar content on our application was initially questioned, we simply pointed out that the sections we proposed were consistent with material found in Best Practices, the board’s own gold standard for educational content. They would either have to certify CFI-Care or reject Best Practices.

CFI-Care was certified as Continuing Education Provider #15166 on August 28, 2008. We were officially in the for-profit business of teaching wacky ideas to professional nurses.

Feng Shui for Nurses: The Class

After much discussion about how to use our newfound state-sanctioned authority to disseminate false information, we decided to teach the class as-applied-for at the Center for Inquiry/Los Angeles. Part of the class would include revealing our motives to embarrass the CBRN into recognizing the flaws in its continuing education system. We certainly wouldn’t want to see a class like “Feng Shui for Home Care Providers” taught for real.

In late March 2009, we issued press releases announcing that we would be teaching this state-approved class for the first time. We invited nurses, the press, and any other concerned citizens interested in the state’s healthcare status. We even offered nurses free entry, free coffee, and two hours of CEU credit for attending.

But the board had one more roadblock to throw in front of us. Days after publicizing the class to the world, we received a letter (dated March 27, 2009) from CBRN Executive Officer Ruth Ann Terry stating that our certification had been “issued in error” and was now rescinded. We found it interesting that it took the CBRN eight months to discover this (as yet unnamed) error and only after our extensive publicity campaign spotlighting the folly of their approval.

We taught the class anyway, with no promise of CEUs, to an amazed and incredulous crowd. The handful of nurses who attended the class with around seventy-five others were appalled that the class’s ludicrous content had been approved by the board. Jim Underdown reaching into an anatomically correct rubber corpse and flinging an armful of bloody latex entrails onto the stage to read the future was particularly memorable.

As of late July 2009, our inquiries into the reason for the revocation have been ignored.

Arnold Terminates the Board

On July 13, 2009, Governor Schwarzenegger replaced six of the seven appointed members of the CBRN.¹⁵ The following day, CBRN Executive Officer Ruth Ann Terry resigned. It seems that while the board was taking its time responding to our objections over the teaching of pseudoscience, it was also taking its time (an average of three to five years, according to the nonprofit news organization ProPublica) investigating and closing complaints against nurses. The Los Angeles Times and ProPublica reported last fall that nurses with serious or multiple criminal convictions kept their licenses for years before the board acted against them.

We should note that the former board was not unanimously against our efforts and that the IIG is not taking sides regarding the replacement of the California Board of Registered Nursing. We are hopeful that the new board will take this opportunity to reexamine its continuing education polices. We will petition them to support high scientific standards in the care of California residents. Nurses and patients both deserve the best information scientific medicine can provide. l

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the invaluable help and dedication of the rest of the IIG with special thanks to Karen Kensek, Jim Newman, Jerry Buchanan, Wendy Hughes, and Bernie Eisenberg. They would also like to thank Linda Rosa, RN, and Wally Sampson, MD, for their advice and guidance throughout this investigation.

Notes

1. http://www.rn.ca.gov/about_us/whatisbrn.shtml.
2. California Code of Regulations, Title 16, Division 14, Article 5, Section 1456.
3. Ibid.
4. CME Resource Catalogue 2009.
5. www.clearsightaura.com/index.php?topic=engmed (accessed July 20, 2009).
6. See their Web site at http://www.c-d-m.org/.
7. Clearsight application for certification as a provider of continuing education units in the State of California, 1994. Page 1.
8. Letter to IIG investigator Owen Hammer from CBRN Executive Director Ruth Ann Terry, February 2, 2006.
9. Paraphrasing of “Nursing Practice Act with Rules and Regulations,” section 1456.
10. Language copied from the official minutes for the California Board of Registered Nursing Education/Licensing Committee meeting on August 31, 2006.
11. Formally, Best Practices in Complementary and Alternative Medicine: An Evidence-Based Approach with Nursing CE/CME by Lynda W. Freeman. Aspen Publishers 2001.
12. The studies cited had no control group, were not blinded, were never replicated, were conducted in secret, or actually disproved the efficacy of TT.
13. Skeptical Inquirer September/October 1997.
14. JAMA 1998.
15. http://gov.ca.gov/press-release/12803/.

I doubt it. These men had the laudable ambition to organize leading thinkers and social critics to respond authoritatively to growing trends of credulity in society: increased belief in the power of psychics, the phenomenon of Uri Geller, UFO beliefs, ancient astronaut theories, popular belief in ghost hauntings and channeling, faith healers and religious charlatans, and the like.

The founders of CSICOP succeeded admirably by many measures: they published magazines and books, spoke out in the entertainment and news media (including on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, which repeatedly featured CSICOP founders), and convened national and regional conferences for subscribers.

But I submit that they didn’t plan a movement from the start. The movement grew organically around the ideas that CSICOP and the Skeptical Inquirer, and later other skeptical organizations and magazines, promoted.

Within about a decade of the Skeptical Inquirer’s launch, the members of the educated public who subscribed found that it wasn’t enough for them to get a magazine about skepticism in the mail four or six times per year. So
CSICOP helped found local skeptical organizations, often at the behest of subscribers in a given area, initially drawing from CSICOP’s own magazine subscriber lists. Groups were formed in the Washington, DC, and Los Angeles regions and in a number of other cities around the U.S. and abroad. A movement, not merely a magazine, was beginning to form.

In recent years, new developments in technology and society have allowed this skeptical movement to reach out in new directions, sometimes departing from tested ways of advancing the skeptical outlook that have worked in the past. This is the next generation of skepticism. This is Skepticism 2.0.

New Media for New Audiences

Often citing inspiration from the founders of CSI, an “average Joe” skeptical citizen, possibly without special training or background in skepticism and with the help of only a computer connected to the Internet, can reach out to an audience that the skeptical magazines and organizations never would have reached just a few years ago. Blogs, podcasts, and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow anyone—including skeptics and believers—to advance a point of view to the wider public.

Promise and Problems of Skepticism 2.0

Podcasts such as the New England Skeptical Society’s Skeptics Guide to the Universe, online communities such as the one found at the James Randi Educational Foundation’s Web site, and blogs such as Rebecca Watson’s Skepchick.org shine as examples of Skepticism 2.0, as do amateur skeptical projects such as Tim Farley’s WhatstheHarm.net and the growing SkeptiCamp events started by Reed Esau. But local individuals and groups using the Internet to reach out to and inform the public about skepticism can do only so much.

The national organizations, such as CSI, offer an opportunity for inspired local activists and groups to avoid “reinventing the wheel” and may provide valuable promotional and underwriting support of important new local projects, as well as offer expertise on various skeptical topics (Joe Nickell’s work comes to mind). Even more important is the professionalizing of the movement, which the national organizations allow for and encourage. A case in point is skeptical campus outreach: a national organization, with the support of donors and a paid staff, can impact campuses in joint effort with local activists in ways that neither can do alone.

Skepticism’s cultural competitors (purveyors of “woo woo,” as James Randi would call them)—the New Age movement, alternative medicine hucksters, UFOlogists, etc.—often draw on the resources and organizational power of national groups devoted to pushing those agendas. The same should be true of the next generation of the skeptical movement, Skepticism 2.0.

Skeptics in the Pub and the Future of Skepticism

Over the last few years, fueled primarily by Internet outreach through social networking Web sites, Skeptics in the Pub and similar activities (skeptical meet-ups and Facebook groups, etc.) have cropped up in dozens of cities, often independent of preexisting local or national skeptical organizations.

What happens when these groups grow and their members want to “take it to the next level”? New local groups are formed with structure, leadership, and programs. Money is raised, membership programs are created, and if all goes well staff is hired and buildings are bought. In other words, new national organizations may grow out of the local and independent projects of Skepticism 2.0. But is that the best path to plot if the movement is to be plotted and planned?

I think a better model is for independent local projects—the successful examples of Skepticism 2.0—to find organizational homes. When they need resources, they should look to the long-standing local and national organizations for support. They should be part of the organized skeptical movement, not outside of and apart from it.

“Mom?”

“Yes, honey?”

“Where did people come from?”

“You mean babies? Well, um, first the man takes his penis and . . .”

“No, no, I mean the very first people. Where did the first people on Earth come from?”

I was dumbfounded. What could I say? I knew this moment was coming and yet was completely unprepared. I would be more than happy to discuss sex with him, but evolution? How could I explain evolution to my three-year-old when I myself was fuzzy on the process? I was, after all, the product of the South Carolina public education system.

And that is when I said the worst possible thing any parent can say to a child asking about this controversial subject. No, I did not tell him that we came from God or that we were planted here millennia ago as an extraterrestrial experiment. I told him something much, much worse.

“Baby, one day monkeys turned into people.”

Skepticism is a worldview that has come to me slowly over the years, under less than illustrious circumstances. Although I had been an atheist for years, I was not practicing critical thinking and had never heard of skepticism. Due to hormonally-based “appreciation” of a certain skeptical magician, I began to listen to the now-defunct Penn Radio show. One of his guests was Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer. After hearing Phil on the show, I went to his blog and was hooked. With Penn and Phil acting as the gateway drugs of skepticism, I quickly found myself needing harder and harder fixes. I listened to Point of Inquiry and Skepticality, read the blog of P.Z. Myers, and devoured the writings of both Richard Dawkins and Neil de Grasse Tyson. Ultimately, I went to the source of the love and appreciation of science and critical thinking for many of us in the movement, the works of Carl Sagan. He was my heroin of skepticism. There was no going back to the dark for this small-town Southern girl. I had become a full-blown skeptic.

Although being a skeptic usually involves many, if not all, aspects of a person’s life, turning the skeptical lens on our personal lives is sure to bring attention to the most sacred of cows. How do you put critical thinking into practice without losing friends and alienating family? Although my husband and I had agreed to raise our children without religion, I found myself wanting to go even further. I wanted to help my children develop critical thinking skills I had only recently acquired myself.

Why Parent at All?

Many of the skeptical parents I talked with came to skepticism after having children and admitted that choosing to become a parent was not always a rational decision. Even for those of us who planned our parenthood, many of us did it because it just “felt right” or seemed like the “right next step” in our life plan. Though not logical, our love for children and desire to have them was reason enough. Sara Rosinsky of Lakeland, Florida, admits that choosing to have a child was a “bit of a leap of faith,” an approach that can be quite foreign to many skeptics. Jason and Kim Bilotta of Punta Gorda, Florida, said that although they discussed the pros and cons of having children, they are not entirely sure if the decision could be considered rational.

Of course, having children greatly reduces free time available for skeptic-related activities. Blogs, books, and magazine articles can get pushed to the wayside after the arrival of children, and funds that would go to registration at the Amaz!ng Meeting or a Center for Inquiry conference often go for private school tuition or medical care (not that I am bitter). In fact, it is not surprising to this author that many of the most prolific writers/activists/members of this movement are either women without small children or men.

Raising Skeptics

Once parenthood is achieved—by choice or by happenstance—the challenge of raising a child to be a critical thinker begins. So many of us were indoctrinated with a religious or political worldview as children and want nothing more than to avoid indoctrination in our own families. So what should the goal be? Are we trying to raise a flock of miniature James Randi clones? Do we want to tell our children what skepticism says the world is or, as Jeff Wagg, communications director for the James Randi Educational Foundation, says, accept that “the process teaches kids to think about things.” Critical thinking and science are tools to learn about the world, and teaching our children to correctly use these tools will help them not only to understand the true nature of the world but be the innovators and visionaries of the next generation.

Children are born scientists. Toddlers are tiny behavioral psychologists taking detailed notes on just how many times the large people in charge will bend over and pick up the sippee cup hurled at their heads. This curiosity can be harnessed and used for less painful lessons by encouraging a dialogue with your child. When your child asks you why the sky is blue, which Jeff Wagg claims is a deceptively complicated answer, ask her what she thinks and then research the topic together. You can even help your child design experiments; you can ask her what her hypothesis is and then help her to test and retest the hypothesis to form a theory. This works especially well in crowded stores when she asks you what you are going to do if she refuses to stop screaming at you while stamping her feet!

Science can be woven into children’s lives at every opportunity. Sara Rosinsky, mother of ten-year-old Helen, says that “Science is the soundtrack by which we live our lives.” There are many new and amazing resources available for bringing science to children. One of my favorites is www.CharliesPlayhouse.com, an online store with games and toys inspired by Charles Darwin. Children also love dinosaurs, a trait the Creation Museum in Kentucky exploits to get bodies in the door. Even children, though, can understand the foolishness of believing that dinosaurs and humans lived together in harmony before the fall of man or that the giant, sharp teeth of Tyrannosaurus Rex were used to eat plants before Eve ruined everything by eating the apple. The Creation Museum does score points, however, by offering children the chance to ride a triceratops. Science needs to work on that—perhaps by cloning!

The Real World

Although most of the parents I talked to were raising children with fellow skeptics, this is not always the case. Although my own lovely husband refuses to call himself a skeptic, he has been my best resource in learning the value of critical thinking. Perhaps it is less important that we wear the same team hat and more important that we agree on the importance of using evidence over faith in making decisions.

A few of the single parents I talk with struggle with exes who want children involved in organized religion. Even for those of us who are married to skeptics, extended family often presents many opportunities for children to be exposed to pronouncements about the world with which we disagree. In these instances, I find it helpful to tell my children that religion is what people “believe,” not what “is.”

When my children go to church with their grandparents, I tell them that while a man named Jesus probably existed 2,000 years ago, some people think he was the son of god and other people do not. I then tell my children that I see no evidence that such claims are true or that the Bible is anything other than a book of stories. We have also used the fantastical nature of biblical stories to explore the validity of miracles, and we question the lack of miracles present today. This approach must also be tempered with a warning to children to use discretion in talking with family and friends about religion. Grandma and Grampa may not be ready to hear their precious grandchild talk like Nietzsche.

Holidays and cultural celebrations can cause strife with family and friends but can also be used as another opportunity to teach critical thinking. It seems that many skeptics do what Michael Blanford, president of the Skeptical Society of St. Louis and father to three-year-old Atom, calls the “half-assed Santa” approach—you don’t tell the children there is a Santa but don’t tell them Santa is fake either. When the child is old enough to ask questions, the whole thing is presented as an exercise in skepticism, and the child is helped in drawing the correct conclusions through scientific inquiry. Brad Fusilier, president of the Southern Skeptical Society and father of four, asks his children “Why wouldn’t Santa be able to deliver 2.2 billion presents in twenty-four hours with or without time zones?” Again, though, as with religion, children must be warned that these matters should not always be discussed with other children. Hell hath no fury like a mother whose child has been told the truth about Santa against her will.

Skeptic parents consider the love of learning one of the most important values to pass on to their children. They often see themselves as their child’s first teacher and seek out the highest quality education available. Many of the people I talked to were fortunate enough to live in areas with excellent public schools and had no qualms about sending their children there. Others, like Myndee White of Lakeland, Florida, mother of sixteen-year-old Kyree, fourteen-year-old Nate, and eleven-year-old Tyson, found their best solution was to home-school the children for much of their educational career. Myndee tries very hard to keep the study of science fun and relevant to everyday life and has particularly enjoyed the Growing Up in the Universe series by Richard Dawkins. Still others, myself included, have chosen to send our children to private school to avoid poor-quality public schools and the lack of inquiry-based curriculum. (Plus, public school teachers in my town seem to be unappreciative of a child who respects evidence over authority!)

Before anyone reports me to Child Protective Services or, worse, to Richard Dawkins, I did go back and explain evolution to my child correctly. I told my son that I was not sure how evolution worked, and we went to the library and read as many books as they had on the subject. I then went online and ordered many amazing books on evolution written especially for children. (See Center for Inquiry librarian Tim Binga’s piece “Skeptical Books for Children and Young Adults,” on page 43.)

The point of that story is not that I was an idiot but that I took a question from my child and used it as an opportunity to help him learn the process of critical thinking. Instead of passing dogma down from generation to generation, skeptical parents seek to teach their children the importance of inquiry. Inquiry, and the willingness to consider ideas on the merit of their evidence, can make parenting more complicated and certainly more mentally exhaustive, but the results speak for themselves.

When one of my son’s friends told him that he had a ghost in his house and that the friend’s mother “confirmed” the story, my son was not frightened at all. He simply looked his friend in the eye, raised his eyebrow, and asked, “Where is your evidence?”

I have never been more proud in my life.

I started with the premise that critical thinking as a methodology is the main divide between skeptical inquirers and scientific naturalists and those whose worldview is based on other ways of knowing. I then explained how such a methodology, when applied to different scopes of inquiry, leads to both the secular humanist worldview and skepticism of the paranormal.

As it turned out, the students were proficient critical thinkers, although critics might be a more apt label. Here are some dos and don’ts they taught me that might be of use to anyone attempting to introduce skeptical thinking to Generation Y, or, as some call them, the Entitlement Generation.

DO explain the major tools for critical thinking and argumentation. No high school I know of has a course in critical thinking, and few do a good job of introducing the real spirit of how science approaches questions beyond the stale list of steps given almost as the doctrine of the Scientific Method. These independent presentations are therefore ideal opportunities to rectify that lacking. However . . . 

DO NOT engage in long blackboard lessons. My attempt to introduce the concept of skepticism and critical thinking through a history of the various schools of philosophy going back to the ancient Greek Pyrrhonians did not go over well. The presentation was too detailed and abstract and probably too similar to an everyday classroom lesson. Clearly the students were anticipating a break from that and wanted engagement in more interactive discussions.     

DO incorporate multimedia where appropriate. My presentations included excerpts from Richard Dawkins’s Enemies of Reason, featuring a simple double-blind test debunking water dowsing and a short interview on the dangers of spiritualism addiction with famous magician Darren Brown, with whom many of the students were familiar. We listened to a clip from a Point of Inquiry episode featuring Andrew Fraknoi on our body’s cosmic history. Finally, we watched an excerpt from Here Be Dragons, a video that serves as a critical thinking primer from Skeptoid podcast host Brian Dunning. This led into a discussion of the red flags and keywords of pseudoscience, such as “ancient wisdom,” “energy fields,” “all natural,” or simply ads featuring a man in a lab coat.

DO incorporate interactive games. To investigate the veracity of the newspaper horoscopes many of the students read, students were divided along the wall of the room based on zodiac sign. The day’s horoscope was then read from a local newspaper and each student was asked to identify whether the descriptions did or did not apply to their day. Unbeknown to the students, a deception was taking place, for students in fact read from the horoscope that corresponded not to their own sign but to the one following theirs. Upon completion, we tallied the number of “hits” and “misses,” compared them to what might be expected by chance, and then announced the deception.

DO NOT read FAQs directly. I prepared well-articulated answers to a self-created list of Frequently Asked Questions, such as “Why are you concerned with people’s personal beliefs” and “Would any evidence convince you of paranormal activities beyond science?” Although these made me feel I had gone through all my material comprehensively, it left little time for answering the student’s own questions and probably made me appear overly distant. So . . .

DO interact directly with the students. It would be much better to first entertain questions from students in order to respond to the exact nuance and examples given by a questioner and then read from any remaining FAQs that have not been covered. Other more creative interactive activities might have the students reflect on the possible bias or misrepresentation of particular science articles in the newspaper or ask them to apply critical thinking to a contemporary political issue or the recent speech of a local politician.

DO personalize the presentation. I provided a short background to the events that lead me to adopt a skeptical and secular humanist worldview. I included a slide with names and photos of famous skeptics and freethinkers from lots of different fields—scientists, philosophers, authors, lawyers, politicians, activists, and celebrities.

DO take the opportunity to promote the wonders of science.  This is a good opportunity to excite students by explaining how science affects our lives and our society. I covered the scientific outlook, focusing on science that speaks to our biggest questions—evolution, cosmology, and neuroscience—as well as the scientific revolution’s historical ties to notions of democracy, freedom, and progress. Much of this science is covered in technical detail in classes but would never have been tied to these larger societal issues.

DO define new terms like skepticism, atheism, secularism, naturalism, and methodology, but . . .

DO NOT over-define. Differentiating between weak and strong atheism, for example, will probably confuse the bigger issues.

DO NOT leave students with homework, but . . .

DO leave students with handouts. I ended by passing out copies of the Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry magazines, skepticism-themed stickers, excerpts from Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World, and a list of books, podcasts, and films of interest.

But a month earlier, rival Bigfoot enthusiasts and skeptics had carefully pored over one of Whitton and Dyer’s promotional videos on YouTube (“Bigfoot Tracker Video 8”) in which they met an alleged Texas scientist named Paul Van Buren who said he would authenticate the carcass (Bigfootpolice 2008). Sharp-eyed viewers quickly determined that “Van Buren” was actually Whitton’s brother, a wedding photographer from Texas, and even found pictures online of the two together at one of their weddings (Coleman 2008).

The video was pulled off the Web and acknowledged by the hoaxers as a fake days later in another video. Whitton and Dyer said the video was an attempt to distract people who were harassing them. (They did not explain how a hoaxed video would accomplish such a thing.) This all happened weeks before the national press conference. Those who followed the whole fiasco from the beginning via YouTube were not surprised when the hoax was finally revealed nationally weeks later.

YouTube might seem an unlikely venue for skeptical investigations. The online video site originated as a way for individuals to easily share videos online without having to deal with technical issues like file formats and software compatibility. YouTube gained fame through a series of “viral” videos of various ephemera such as laughing babies, stunts gone wrong, adorable kittens, and so on. It hardly seemed a good venue for skepticism in those early days.

But like most new tools, uses far beyond those initially anticipated were soon discovered. The availability of low-cost video cameras and editing software means that video production is now something that many hobbyists can attempt at home. Purchased by Google in 2006, YouTube is now home to hundreds of millions of videos and serves over a hundred million individual video views per day. Google claims that over thirteen hours of new content is uploaded on YouTube every minute (Google 2008).

Many skeptical organizations now use YouTube to distribute video content to the public. Videos of the James Randi Educational Foundation’s July 2009 test of dowser Connie Sonne for their Million Dollar Challenge, among other videos, can be found on JREF’s own channel (JREF 2008). The Skeptical Inquirer’s parent organization, the Center for Inquiry, also has its own YouTube channel (see figure 1) with hundreds of lectures, debates, and other videos. It is often rated in the top ten most viewed nonprofit channels on the site (Center for Inquiry 2006). These are fantastic educational resources for both skeptics and the general public.

The site has always been friendly toward individuals as well as organizations, and individual skeptics have fittingly stepped forward to create content. Richard Wiseman used YouTube videos to promote and support his book Quirkology by demonstrating optical illusions and other psychological effects (Wiseman 2009). His video “Amazing Colour Changing Card Trick” has been viewed over three million times and has even been redone by several other YouTube users (Wiseman 2007; see related story). Phil “The Bad Astronomer” Plait has a channel as well, where he posts his own special mix of skepticism and astronomy (Plait 2009).

Some of the most interesting aspects of skepticism on YouTube do not come from organizations or professional skeptics but are occurring at the grassroots level between individual users. Simple, short videos debunking paranormal or pseudoscientific concepts, when created with cleverness and good visuals, can be very effective. One example, “Bigfoot Myths: Where are the Bones?” addresses the simple question: Why have we never found Bigfoot bones? (Doctor Atlantis 2007). Resources like this can easily be hyperlinked from discussions of the topic online or even embedded directly into posts on other Web sites. They help to explain key scientific concepts using visuals instead of words alone (in this case, photos of actual bear bones and interview footage with a cryptozoologist).

Aside from the general availability of the service and the fact that it is free, there are two other key elements that help maintain the grassroots skepticism phenomenon on YouTube: the fair use clause in U.S. copyright law and the explorative nature of the YouTube user interface.

Figure 2: Captain Disillusion

Fair use is vital to the very existence of YouTube. The law holds that it is legal to reuse small portions of copyrighted material, even without the owner’s permission, for comment, criticism, or parody (Stanford 2007). This allows skeptics to freely post online videos that include portions of the pseudoscientific or religious videos they are debunking.

The Uri Geller videos posted by YouTube user The Friendly Skeptic are a good example. By implicitly invoking fair use, The Friendly Skeptic can post small broadcast clips from programs in which Geller’s conjuring and trickery is plainly visible. In one he shows quite clearly where Geller puts on a false thumb tip just prior to making a magnetic compass move ostensibly by paranormal means (The Friendly Skeptic 2007). When, in another video from an older talk show, Geller bends a spoon using a decidedly nonpsychic technique (i.e., his hand), the exact moment is highlighted (The Friendly Skeptic 2008).

Another creative use of this method is employed by putative superhero Captain Disillusion (portrayed by actor and filmmaker Alan Melikdjanian; see figure 2). As Captain Disillusion, Melikdjanian humorously deconstructs the very viral videos that make YouTube so successful by explaining the digital editing techniques used in their creation (Captain Disillusion 2007). Many of these are simply viral advertising but others cover skeptical topics. Captain Disillusion debunked the November 2007 “Blue Ghost” incident at a Parma, Ohio, gas station, re-editing the news coverage to clearly show the actual cause: a bug on the camera lens (Captain Disillusion 2008). There were other, more scientific YouTube debunks of this incident as well; an excellent example included hypotheses, predictions, and conclusions (Answers in Skepticism 2007).

The skeptical movement online has flourished in part because of YouTube’s site design. It is in Google’s own interest to keep users on the site as long as possible since their revenue comes from advertising. The site is designed to encourage exploration with features that link videos together via “responses,” add hyperlinks between videos, and mark a video with a world location so it can be found within mapping services (see figure 3). These features allow skeptics to make their content more discoverable from within the site and elsewhere. Debunking videos, for instance, can be posted as responses that are directly linked to (and therefore discoverable from) the original pseudoscientific content. This technique has been used in responses to the Georgia Bigfoot hoaxers, in Captain Disillusion’s videos, and elsewhere.

This explorability of YouTube helps address a key question often asked among online skeptics: Where should we focus our efforts? Many skeptics post almost exclusively on skeptic-run Web sites, forums, or blogs. The obvious disadvantage is that one often ends up “preaching to the choir.” The alternative posting on Web sites run by believers in pseudoscience or paranormal has its own hazards. Often these sites are not interested in debate and will delete skeptical posts or even ban skeptics from posting entirely.

By posting material on YouTube and making the content as discoverable as possible, skeptics avoid both issues. The content can still be embedded or hyperlinked from skeptic sites as desired, but it can also be found by many more people via the YouTube site directly. This helps get the skeptical message out to those who most need it.

Figure 3: Example of a skeptical YouTube video being discovered via a mapping application.

One of the most visible uses of the YouTube discoverability and response format are the creationism-related videos posted by users VenomFangX and ThunderF00t (VenomFangX 2006; Thunderf00t 2006). VenomFangX is the online handle of Shawn, a Christian teenager who posted a series of videos in which he claims to debunk evolution. YouTube user Thunderf00t (an adult academic) responds to each of the teen’s videos and answers them point by point in the series “Why do people laugh at creationists?” The entire exchange lasted for almost two years. Thunderf00t also addressed the claims of other evolution deniers in the series, such as Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute and evangelist Ray Comfort. Each video (over thirty in all) received at least 100,000 views, and some have been seen nearly half a million times (Thunderf00t 2009).

The Thunderf00t versus VenomFangX exchange also highlights one of the current pitfalls of U.S. Copyright law: the application of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Takedown Notices. This is a clause in the DMCA under which copyright owners who believe their work is being infringed upon (beyond fair use) via the Internet can merely notify the carrier to remove the material. On December 9, 2008, someone claiming to be a third party acting on behalf of VenomFangX contacted YouTube claiming that Thunderf00t’s videos violated copyright. Two videos were restricted as a result. Thunderf00t issued a counterclaim, and a very public war of words ensued between the two parties (Thunderf00t 2008). The issue was resolved when VenomFangX’s parents became aware of his activities. He withdrew the DMCA claims, apologized, and temporarily stopped posting.

False DMCA claims and other digital shenanigans continue to be a problem for skeptics on YouTube. According to Thunderf00t, creationists hurt his videos’ rankings in the YouTube rating system by using automated scripts to send thousands of negative votes to each of his videos. The comments system provided by YouTube is also somewhat hit or miss. Occasionally some videos will attract reasonable commentators, but most of the time the comments aren’t much better than digital graffiti. (The problem is so rampant on YouTube that a number of third-party software tools have been designed solely to “clean out” undesirable comments from YouTube pages.)

Overall, however, YouTube is an excellent avenue for skeptical outreach on the Internet. Its ease of use and lack of fees lower the barrier of entry so almost any skeptic can participate. Fair use ensures a steady stream of source material to debunk. The high traffic of the site and its explorability make the skeptical message accessible to people who may not even be aware of organized skepticism. Any skeptic with minimal audiovisual editing skills should consider YouTube an outlet for their efforts. l

References

1. Answers In Skepticism. 2007. Blue gas station ghost explained. November 23. Available online.
2. Bigfootpolice. 2008. Bigfoot tracker video 8. July 20. Available online.
3. Captain Disillusion. 2007. Captain Disillusion’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
4. —. 2008. Gas station ghost recut. Available online.
5. Center for Inquiry. 2006. Center for Inquiry’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
6. Coleman, Loren. 2008. Bigfoot body brouhaha. July 23. Available online.
7. Doctor Atlantis. 2008. Bigfoot myths: Where are the bones? Available online.
8. The Friendly Skeptic. 2008. Uri Geller bends a spoon with his hand! May 22. Available online.
9. —. 2007. The moment Uri Geller cheats . . . watch the thumb. April 2. Available online.
10. Google. 2008. The future of online video. September 16. Available online.
11. The James Randi Educational Foundation. 2008. James Randi Foundation’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
12. Plait, Phil. 2006. The Bad Astronomer’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
13. Stanford University Library. 2007. What is fair use? Available online.
14. Thunderf00t. 2006. Thunderf00t’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
15. —. 2008. False DMCA consequences. Available online.
16. —. 2009. Why do people laugh at creationists? Thunderf00t’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
17. VenomFangX. 2006. VenomFangX’s YouTube Channel. Available online.
18. Wiseman, Richard. 2007. Quirkology YouTube Channel. Available online.

While there are so many great new podcasts promoting skepticism, here is a survey of some of the best and most popular. They vary in length and format: some are very short and feature just one person; others are long-format interview programs. While almost all are free, some require a paid subscription or a fee to listen to its archives. Some of the skeptical podcasts are humorous and involve a lot of banter, and some have specific themes, such as cryptozoology or conspiracy theories. The thing they all have in common is that they reach out to new people with a critical, rational, and scientific point of view toward pseudoscientific and paranormal claims.

The Conspiracy Skeptic

Started in late 2007, The Conspiracy Skeptic is hosted by Canadian Karl Mamer, an expert in conspiracy theories. The show focuses on various conspiracy theories, such as those promulgated by Alex Jones about the New World Order, those on the Moon landing hoax, and HIV/AIDS denialists’ theories that HIV/AIDS is a government plot. He also has had shows about The Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, vaccine conspiracy theories, and many more. Most shows are about a half hour and feature Mamer speaking on various topics rather than featuring expert guests on a regular basis.

The Geologic Podcast

Hosted by musician and comedian George Hrab, The Geologic Podcast features a monologue by Hrab, comedy sketches, and news about general developments in science and skepticism. Hrab doesn’t apply his skepticism merely to the paranormal or the pseudoscientific; he often turns a skeptical eye on religion with his regular humorous feature “Religious Moron of the Week.” This podcast is very funny, often containing adult humor. With episodes running about an hour in length on a weekly basis, this show is a favorite among skeptical podcast lovers.

The Infidel Guy Show

Started by trailblazer Reginald Finley in 1999, The Infidel Guy Show paved the way for Internet audio outreach about skepticism and related subjects. Most shows feature a listener call-in interview with an authority in a given field. While the majority of episodes focus on skepticism of religion and on atheism, many episodes have explored topics more central to the organized skeptical movement’s interests: psychics, ghosts, cryptozoology, and the like. Although listening to recent episodes is free, one must become a gold member ($8.50 monthly or $75 annually) to hear most of the episodes from over the last decade.

Logically Critical

Logically Critical was “intended to encourage critical thinking in everyday situations without the hassle of checking facts at the library.” The podcast ceased production in late 2007, but all previous shows are still archived online and available for free. The show often focused on one theme per episode and featured the host speaking on the topic at hand. Skeptically themed episodes included shows on ghosts, ancient monsters, the power of suggestion, the Law of Attraction, and the best-selling New Age book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Each episode is about a half hour and still worth a listen.

Point of Inquiry

As the host of Point of Inquiry, the weekly podcast of the Center for Inquiry (of which the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry is a vital part), I often assume the role of “devil’s advocate” with my guests. The podcast was founded in late 2006, and almost two hundred episodes are available for free online as well as through iTunes and other podcatchers. While the program frequently focuses on topics in religion, ethics, philosophy, and public policy, it also concentrates on traditionally skeptical topics such as Bigfoot, ghosts, UFOs and alien abduction, pseudoarchaeology, psychic investigation, and alternative medicine in addition to a number of shows on conjuring and its relationship to skepticism. Each episode features a long-form interview with a leading thinker in science, skepticism, or philosophy, and most of the biggest names in the skeptical movement have appeared on the show, including Michael Shermer, James Randi, Joe Nickell, Ray Hyman, and Kendrick Frazer, as well as a number of Nobel Prize-winning scientists and other leading public intellectuals.

Pseudo Scientists

The podcast of the Young Australian Skeptics, Pseudo Scientists, has a pronounced fun and youthful vibe. The show begins with an often humorous short audio clip of some purveyor of pseudoscientific nonsense followed by a shout of “That’s Impossible!” It is hosted by Alastair Tait and features Jason Ball (a Center for Inquiry campus leader who recently spoke at CFI’s World Congress), Jack Scanlan, Jacqui Williams, Elliot Birch, and others. The podcast airs a couple times a month; each episode is over an hour in length and includes interviews, book reviews, and other segments, including witty banter among the hosts about skepticism and irrational trends in Australia and around the world.

Quackcast

Quackcast’s Web site declares it “A podcast review of Quacks, Frauds and Charlatans. Oops. That’s not right. That should be Supplements, Complementary and Alternative Medicine i.e. SCAM.” Generally running over an hour, each episode features a critical and skeptical exploration of alternative medicine topics, such as herbal remedies, chiropractic, homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, Reiki, therapeutic touch, the medical efficacy of prayer, and even questions like “can high doses of Vitamin C shorten the duration of the common cold?”

Reality Check Podcast

Considered a Canadian version of the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe (see below), Reality Check Podcast is produced by the Ottawa Skeptics and features skeptical banter from some of the group’s members, including Jonathan Abrams and Xander Miller. The show focuses on various skeptical topics, such as the Moon landing hoax conspiracy theory, Bigfoot, various alternative medicine claims, pyramidology, and feng shui, and also features regular interviews of some of the leaders in the skeptical movement. Reality Check, like many of the other podcasts listed here, is a great example of what independent skeptical groups can accomplish even if they lack the resources of a national skeptical organization.

The Skeptic Zone

Sponsored by the organization Australia for Science and Reason, The Skeptic Zone is hosted by Richard Saunders. Each episode generally runs over an hour with multiple segments. Saunders frequently interviews luminaries of the skeptical movement, such as Joe Nickell, and engages in news reports and panel discussions with co-hosts Rachael Dunlop, Joanne Benhamu, and Eran Segev, among others. The Skeptic Zone shows how the new medium of podcasting allows for worldwide skeptical outreach with minimal investment relative to print publishing.

Skepticality

The skeptical movement owes a lot to “Derek and Swoopy,” hosts of the first skepticism podcast, which started in April 2005. Skepticality is now the official podcast of Michael Shermer’s Skeptical Society. In September 2005, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, mentioned Skepticality during his keynote address about the iTunes music store. On that same day, co-host Derek Colanduno suffered a brain aneurysm. As a result, no new shows were produced until August 2006, after he had recovered, and now episodes appear about twice a month. The shows average an hour and feature interviews with famous skeptics, such as James Randi, Ben Radford, and Joe Nickell, in addition to skeptical and science news and extemporaneous chitchat between the co-hosts.

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe

One of the top skeptical podcasts on iTunes, The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, is a one-hour weekly talk show produced by the New England Skeptical Society, in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation. It is hosted by Dr. Steven Novella, professor of neurology at Yale University, along with his two brothers, Bob and Jay Novella, Rebecca Watson (founder of skepchick.org), and Evan Bernstein. Each episode features many segments, including a guest interview and a segment called “Science or Fiction,” in addition to a lot of light and witty conversation. The show covers a broad range of skeptical topics but generally avoids applying skepticism to religious faith claims except during some of the satire and jokes, which are a popular component of the banter among the co-hosts.

Skeptoid

Started in October 2006, Skeptoid is a “weekly pro-science, anti-pseudoscience podcast” hosted by Brian Dunning. Episodes average about ten minutes in length, and each features Dunning expounding on a topic of interest to skeptics, such as pseudoscientific products and consumer frauds, urban legends, alternative medicine, and conspiracy theories. His short episodes are well-researched, and when taken collectively, very comprehensive. Dunning’s podcast is a shining example of what one skeptical activist with a computer, a microphone, and an entrepreneurial spirit can accomplish for the skeptical movement.

Though hardly comprehensive, this list shows the array of skeptical audio that is available for your enjoyment on the Web and on your iPod or other MP3 player. Now more than ever, it is easier for you to share skepticism with those around you by turning them on to these podcasts.

In the early days, skepticism was like a trail through the deep woods. Traditional skeptics’ organizations were the only guides; by publishing skeptical magazines and books, organizations effectively were skepticism. As skepticism attracted more people, an oxymoron began to emerge: skepticism became a sort of centrally controlled popular movement. This situation was tied to technology, and it was destined to change.

It takes funded organizations to promote skepticism through expensive, high-risk means such as magazines and printed books. By contrast, the past decade (and the past five years in particular) have brought digital communication tools that make publishing and networking easy and cheap for grassroots skeptics everywhere. No longer restricted to specialist organizations, the trail is now shared by the thousands of amateur enthusiasts, social networks, and independent projects that make up the popular movement of skepticism.

This changes everything. It’s true that digital outreach may bring new grassroots support to traditional skeptical organizations, but realizing that potential requires facing up to a more fundamental shift: traditional skeptical organizations are no longer the default leaders of the popular movement. Indeed, new skeptics may not even realize the traditional skeptical groups exist.

The new wave of skeptics is comprised of children of the Internet who find skepticism first through online sources (such as iTunes or Google) where they happen across independent skeptical efforts (blogs like Pharyngula or podcasts like The Skeptics Guide to the Universe). From there they branch off to other online sources (other podcasts, especially) and communities (such as the James Randi Educational Foundation [JREF] Forum or the skeptical presence within social networks like Facebook or Twitter).

For these skeptics, traditional print sources (like Skeptic or the Skeptical Inquirer) are not the automatic flagships of skepticism but rather afterthoughts—perhaps welcome as further reading but frequently off the radar altogether. Explosive grassroots growth thus comes at a cost. New skeptics may have little-to-no knowledge of the decades-long literature and hard-won lessons of skepticism. Some may not even be interested in learning about it. Nonetheless, communication technologies allow anyone to mouth off in the name of “skepticism,” even with minimal experience or expertise. This can lower the bar for quality, tarnish our public face, and offer further cover for fringe pseudo-skeptical elements (such as climate change deniers). That’s the bad news; an amateur movement is necessarily burdened with some degree of amateurism.

But the good news is so good that it’s worth almost any cost: thousands of people are actively taking up the call to skeptical activism in a distributed-yet-networked fashion that is qualitatively different from all that has come before. Many are young (astonishingly, given the traditional demographics of skepticism), and many are women. Some are natural, powerful new leaders who might never have discovered skepticism without the new digital tools. All bring their ideas—some of which are spectacularly good ideas—to the table.

The Change Is Upon Us

This change has already happened. How can traditional groups come to grips with this new distributed grassroots skepticism?

For some, an essential step must be to give up on the dream of a unified, centralized rationalist movement—and to give up the hard feelings and sense of schism that was so often the result. Personally, I don’t believe that unification was ever particularly desirable, but in any event, that ship has sailed. Or, rather, ships: the reality we are faced with is a flotilla of national, regional, and local skeptical organizations (plus all manner of humanist, atheist, and rationalist groups) moving independently and chaotically yet roughly in parallel. Some groups are larger and more influential than others, of course—there are aircraft carriers as well as rowboats—but the variety of organizations, efforts, projects, and mandates is dizzying. Traveling with those groups, variously leading or following in their wake, are many thousands of individual grassroots skeptics tethered by an ever-shifting maze of networking tools (from Skeptics in the Pub to Twitter).

How can this ragtag fleet accomplish anything? How can existing skeptics’ groups help it to do so? I think there are several answers to this.

First, skeptics must set aside the conceit that our goal is a cultural revolution or the dawning of a new Enlightenment. That concept resonates with me as powerfully as it does with anyone, but it is a dream with a bitter price: exhaustion and disappointment. After decades of labor, the horizon is just as far away as ever. When we focus on that distant, receding, and perhaps illusory goal, we fail to see the practical good we can do, the harm-reduction opportunities right in front of us. The long view subverts our understanding of the scale and hazard of paranormal beliefs,¹ leading to sentiments that the paranormal is “trivial” or “played out.” By contrast, the immediate, local, human view—the view that asks “Will this help someone?”—sees obvious opportunities for every local group and grassroots skeptic to make a meaningful difference.

Second, we should recognize that the long-standing isolation-versus-unification conundrum is a false dichotomy. There are practically infinite opportunities for skeptical organizations to help each other toward our common goals, even as we diverge on areas of specialty or points of policy. Skeptics, like other groups, have their huffy schisms, but there is good news on this front, too: buoyed by grassroots enthusiasm and innovative independent projects, skeptical groups are more cooperative now than ever before. Old wounds are healing; new connections are being forged. There’s something in the air: a hopefulness and sense of purpose that wasn’t there even five years ago. (And I have to say that it feels wonderful.)

This brings us to the third point. It’s not just that there are more grassroots skeptics. Here I must borrow a slogan from crowd-sourcing guru Clay Shirky: “More is different.”² Yes, more supporters widen the net for the discovery of new activist leaders and breakthrough ideas, but the real untapped power of the new grassroots skepticism is its vast global distribution and its potential for collective action.

In the past, skeptical groups have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of paranormal industries and pseudoscientific claims. The few skeptics were all required to know something about everything, with the result that general remarks were often the best we could manage in response to specific claims. Now, suddenly, the community of skeptics is large enough for many independent skeptics to specialize to a wholly new degree and to engage thousands of regional or particular claims. This is a profound change. When skeptics in every town and nation are networked globally, our resolution increases by an order of magnitude. This trend is already visible in watchdog projects so specific that they can monitor single paranormal claimants (Robert Lancaster’s Stopsylvia.com is a wonderful example) and blogs that focus on the skeptical challenges of a single industry (like skepticism in nursing) or avocation (consider Skepticdad.wordpress.com or Rationalmoms.com). This distributed, specialized, individual action should be assisted and celebrated.³

Different again is the power of thousands of grassroots skeptics to act collectively. This is the power of the “long tail of skepticism” concept promoted by SkeptiCamp⁴ pioneer Reed Esau.⁵ Not every skeptic can be an expert, even regarding a small, local mystery. Few grassroots skeptics are qualified to be investigators or spokespeople and fewer still wish to be. But most skeptics are sufficiently interested to take some small action if barriers to participation are low enough. Taken collectively, thousands of tiny actions can have enormous effect. The classic example is Wikipedia. By making it push-button easy for millions of users to take occasional tiny actions, Wikipedia has become one of humanity’s greatest resources. This is unquestionably one of the key tasks for skepticism in the coming years: discovering ways to harness that long tail.

To these ends—practical goals, cooperation, and grassroots activism—I recently had the honor of presiding over the production of What Do I Do Next? Leading Skeptics Discuss 105 Practical Ways to Promote Science and Advance Skepticism.⁶ This free, sixty-eight-page ebook is formatted as a broad-ranging panel discussion in which thirteen experienced skeptics explore many possible avenues for grassroots skeptical activism. I submit that it is a useful model in two respects: it embodies generous collaboration and assistance across institutional boundaries, and it takes the new grassroots skepticism seriously.

The What Do I Do Next? panelists represent a fair cross-section of skeptical thought (including leaders from several national skeptics’ groups and five leading podcasts). It was inspiring to see so many groups and independents come together eagerly to openly share notes and promote grassroots activism. I take that as a wonderfully symbolic event—and as a road map.

More Professional

If independent amateur activism increasingly defines the road ahead, does this make traditional skeptical groups obsolete? Is their role merely to prop up amateur efforts? Are skeptical magazines, as some suggest, irrelevant?

No. I think the exact opposite is true. In my opinion, this is a watershed moment for traditional skeptical organizations, the moment when we start to really come into our own. As amateurs take up more of the burden of skeptical activism, organizations are increasingly free to focus on those things that only groups can accomplish. This is the paradox: the rise of the amateur skeptical movement makes professional skepticism a more important and more reachable goal than ever before.

Many tasks require dedicated organizations.⁷ In this article, I’ll concentrate on just one, a task that is among the most crucial: professional journalism. This is one undertaking in which traditional large skeptical organizations can and should remain the leaders of the skeptical movement—and in which they must dramatically improve if they are to remain relevant.

For decades, skeptical magazines have been rare sources for skeptical news items, opinion pieces, critical articles, and book reviews. Most of these pieces are unsolicited, unpaid, one-time submissions. They are rarely subject to detailed and expert fact-checking. Even with careful magazine editors, this process guarantees uneven quality, which is what we see: much good, some great, and some terrible.

More importantly, the reliance on unsolicited submissions severely limits editorial discretion and reaction time. When a paranormal story breaks or becomes visible on the horizon (as in the case of upcoming paranormal Hollywood movies) skeptical editors almost never have the ability to do the obvious: put a researcher or reporter on the story. This means the skeptical response is usually a dollar short and a day late, missing the news cycle and letting paranormalists frame the story.

I don’t intend any reproach when I say that. I’m one of the staffers working hard to make skeptical magazines as good as they are, and I think our efforts have paid off very well. Modern skepticism is built on this model, but today the field of possibility has expanded.

Where the skeptical print literature was once a unique candle in the dark, independent skeptical blogs and podcasts can now deliver similar unpaid opinion content at a similar level of quality, often with better production values and much, much faster. But skeptical organizations can (sometimes) do something blogs can’t: pay experts to pursue original investigative research.

Whether we think of Joe Nickell inside a haunted house, James Randi dialing into Peter Popoff’s secret radio signals, Michael Shermer speaking in depth with Holocaust deniers, or even a contribution as modest as Junior Skeptic’s archival sleuthing, there is a special satisfaction in seeing someone dig into a mystery in a serious, sustained way. The active investigation model that made Scooby-Doo a beloved hit is also the proudest (and rarest) tradition of organized skepticism.

At the core of the skeptical literature is a promise: “If you read this, you will find out what’s really true about weird claim X.” Skeptical magazines can aspire to keep this promise, to accurately deliver the best available science and scholarship, only when they’re able to identify mysteries, set experts to work solving them, and set other experts to work fact-checking the answers. That editorial power requires writing and research staff, which requires money—which is why only a small minority of the content of skeptical magazines is written by professionals.

Can skeptical magazines move toward greater professionalism? Can they find ways to support high-caliber, full-time writers and researchers, fund sustained investigations, and market their findings with professional design, photography, and illustration?

Money is indeed an obstacle. (As Skeptic co-publisher Pat Linse often points out, “It’s a miracle any of this happens at all.”) This brings us back to our paradox and to the great opportunity and danger it represents. The rise of digital, grassroots skepticism makes some of the work of skeptical organizations obsolete, but it also represents a huge increase in potential support for our core investigative work.

It’s no accident that the explosive grassroots growth centers on classic skepticism: podcasts debunking paranormal claims, Web sites fighting quack medicine, conferences examining pseudoscience, and so on. New skeptics are not bored by these core topics. For new skeptics (and for me) the fun of skepticism is in things that go bump in the night, and the ethical heart of skepticism is protecting the sick and the poor from callous exploitation by scam artists. The question new skeptics ask is not whether this work is worth doing but “Are skeptical organizations effective at doing it?”

If they believe organizations deserve attention and assistance, grassroots skeptics can offer two kinds of help: they can pursue independent skeptical activism in parallel to the work of skeptical organizations, or they can directly help those organizations by contributing money, buying magazine subscriptions, sharing Web links, and so on.⁸ Skeptical organizations have a mandate to be as effective as possible, so it’s responsible and practical for them to solicit this latter kind of direct help.

Can grassroots moral support be translated into the actual funds needed for better journalism? I submit that the answer is “yes”—if organizations send the right signal in a sustainable way. Skeptical organizations must demonstrate that they’re clearly focused on the work that matters to grassroots skeptics: solving mysteries, catching bad guys, and helping people. They must show that they share the grassroots desire to creatively and passionately work together to move the ball down the field.

In my opinion, the first step is clear. If magazines want the resources to improve, they must first communicate a decision to improve. It’s a catch-22, but the only way to send this signal is to act on it. Simple intention is more important than even money: skeptical magazines have not yet made it their explicit goal to evolve toward the reliability, investigative power, and production values of professional journalism. When this becomes the systematic goal—when skeptical organizations seize the forward momentum—the grassroots will respond.

Here at the crossroads, thousands of independent new skeptics stand ready to define the road ahead. If traditional skeptical organizations are to remain a central part of that definition, they must ask two questions: “How can we use our hard-won expertise to help grassroots skepticism reach its potential?” and “How must we change to deserve the help of the grassroots in return?”

Notes

1. In an essay called “Where Do We Go From Here?” I offered the example of astrology. From a “culture war” perspective this is an utterly trivial issue, but, as the essay argued, “fully 25 percent of Americans say they ‘believe in’ astrology. For those keeping count, that’s 75 million astrology believers in the U.S. alone. Can it really be that this number isn’t vast enough to be worth our time?” Loxton, Daniel. “Where Do We go From Here?” 2007. www.skeptic.com/downloads/WhereDoWeGoFromHere.pdf.
2. Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody. New York: Penguin Books. 2008.
3. Established groups can assist independents in many ways, sharing promotion, resources, or expertise. The Skeptics Society, for example, invited the established independent podcast Skepticality to come under our banner as collaborative allies. The show hosts kept their autonomy while gaining our resources, and Skeptic gained a podcasting capability; both brands reenforced each other, and the overall goals of communicating skepticism were advanced in a non-zero-sum fashion.
4. SkeptiCamps (http: //skepticamp.org/wiki/Main_Page) are small- to medium-scale, self-organizing grassroots skeptical conferences in which the audience members are also the presenters. The SkeptiCamp concept has taken off, with events taking place in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Austria.
5. Esau, Reed. “Raising Our Game: the Rational to Embrace SkeptiCamp.” 2008. (PDF).
6. Loxton, Daniel, ed. What Do I Do Next? Leading Skeptics Discuss 105 Practical Ways to Promote Science and Advance Skepticism. 2009. (PDF).
7. Examples include lobbying, providing a central contact point for media, maintaining libraries, and launching sustained research efforts.
8. For in-depth thoughts on 105 ways grassroots skeptics can either independently further skepticism or offer direct support for skeptical groups, see (PDF).

Maher was born in New York City in 1956 to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother but grew up in New Jersey. After graduating from Cornell, he began a highly successful career as a comedian.

In his first television show, Politically Incorrect, Maher exchanged banter with various celebrities. After carelessly remarking on the show that the September 11 terrorists were brave men (meaning that they were courageous to die for their cause), ABC canceled the show’s contract. Maher soon began a new show called Real Time with Bill Maher, which is still doing well on HBO. He was also a writer for the Roseanne television series and has appeared in numerous films.

Politically, Maher is an outspoken liberal with many libertarian views, such as favoring legalization of prostitution and marijuana. His attacks on conservative Republicans are merciless (e.g., he called Sarah Palin a “category 5 moron”). Philosophically, he prefers to call himself an agnostic rather than an atheist because he accepts the possibility of some sort of transcendental force or intelligence superior to our own.

In addition to his well-known disbelief in God, Maher also rejects modern medical science. He is firmly persuaded that almost all ills, including diseases, are the result of bad eating habits. “We eat shit,” he likes to say. As for germs, he believes they play no role in our illnesses. As a result, Maher is strongly opposed to all vaccines. He even denies that the Salk vaccine played any role in the decline of polio! Here is what he said in an interview:

[Germ theory] is another theory I think is flawed. And that we go by the Louis Pasteur theory even though Pasteur renounced it on his death bed and said Beauchamp is right. It’s not the invading germs. It’s the terrain. It’s not the mosquitoes. It’s the swamp that they’re breeding in.

Maher is referring to Antoine Beauchamp, a French biologist who opposed Pasteur’s germ theory. The claim that Pasteur renounced his theory on his death bed is pure mythology. A surgeon who posts remarks on the Internet under the pseudonym Orac referred to this myth as one “routinely parroted by credulous idiots like Bill Maher.”

Maher told Larry King that he never takes aspirin because, like all other drugs, he thinks it’s harmful. Owners of the big drug companies are evil men because they bilk the public with expensive and worthless drugs. On the Late Show with David Letterman he advised Letterman, then recovering from quadruple bypass surgery, to stop taking the “harmful” pills his doctor had prescribed.

Too bad Mary Baker Eddy believed in both God and Christ; otherwise, Bill Maher might have become a Christian Scientist. Fortunately, he has no children he could let die because of his refusal to vaccinate or because he would not accept medicine from a doctor in cahoots with those dreadful pharmaceutical companies that make and sell worthless products.

Let Orac have the final word: “I used to kind of like Maher,” he wrote, “but I really think that as he gets older he’s getting flakier and flakier.”

The Lady Appears

The reported visits of the Virgin Mary to Fatima occurred in a time of trouble. After the fall of the Portuguese monarchy in 1910, there came a wave of anti-clerical sentiment and persecution, followed by various revolutionary conflicts and Portugal’s involvement in World War I.

On May 13, 1917, three shepherd children were tending their flock about two miles west of Fatima in a town near Ourém. The children were Lucia Santos, age ten, and her two cousins, nine-year-old Francisco Marto and his seven-year-old sister, Jacinta. A sudden flash of lightning sent the children fleeing down a slope, whereupon the two girls beheld the dazzling apparition of a beautiful lady, radiant in white light, standing among the holly-like leaves of a small holm oak.

Lucia was the only one who talked with the figure, who promised to identify herself at the end of a six-month period, during which time the children were to return to the site on the thirteenth day of each month. The woman said that all three of them would go to heaven but that Francisco, who could not see her, would have to recite many rosaries. When she instructed Lucia to have Francisco say the rosary, the boy became able to see the apparition, but he was still unable to hear her speak. After she instructed the children to pray for an end to the war, the lady vanished into the sky.

Even though the children had agreed that they should keep the event secret, once home, little Jacinta blurted out to her parents that she had shared in a vision of the Virgin Mary. News quickly spread throughout the town, and when the children revisited the site on June 13, they were accompanied by some fifty devout villagers. Kneeling in prayer at the oak, the children saw the woman glide down from heaven and take a position amid the oak’s foliage (Arvey 1990, 66; Rogo 1982, 221—223).

Thus began a pattern that was repeated each month during the specified period, although the children were absent on August 13 (having been detained by secular authorities who disbelieved their tale and held them briefly for questioning in the public jail at Ourém). On July 13, the children claimed to have received a special revelation that the lady forbade them to disclose. The apparition remained invisible to the onlookers, but some reported seeing a little cloud rise from (or from behind) the tree, together with a movement of the tree’s branches “as if in going away the Lady’s dress had trailed over them” (Dacruz n.d.).

When the period ended on a stormy October 13, as many as seventy thousand people were gathered at the site anticipating the Virgin’s final visit, many anticipating a great miracle. Again, the figure appeared only to the children. Identifying herself as “the Lady of the Rosary,” she urged people to repent and to build a chapel at the site. After predicting an end to the war and giving the children certain undisclosed visions, the lady lifted her hands to the sky. Thereupon Lucia exclaimed, “The sun!” As everyone gazed upward to see that a silvery disc had emerged from behind the clouds, they experienced what is known in the terminology of Marian apparitions as a “sun miracle” (Arvey 1990, 69—71).

Miracle of the Sun

This Fatima “miracle” has been described in many very different ways. Some claimed that the sun spun pinwheel-like with colored streamers, while others maintained that it danced. One reported, “I saw clearly and distinctly a globe of light advancing from east to west, gliding slowly and majestically through the air.” To some, the sun seemed to be falling toward the spectators. Still others, before the “dance of the sun” occurred, saw white petals shower down and disintegrate before reaching the earth (Larue 1990, 195—196; Arvey 1990, 70—71; Rogo 1982, 227, 230—232).

Precisely what happened at Fatima has been the subject of much controversy. Church authorities made inquiries, collected eyewitness testimony, and declared the events worthy of belief as a miracle (Zimdars-Swartz 1991, 90). However, people elsewhere in the world, viewing the very same sun, did not see the alleged gyrations; neither did astronomical observatories detect the sun deviating from the norm (which would have had a devastating effect on Earth!). Therefore, more tenable explanations for the reports include mass hysteria and local meteorological phenomena such as a sundog (a parhelion or “mock sun”).

On the other hand, several eyewitnesses of the October 13, 1917, gathering at Fatima specifically stated they were looking “fixedly at the sun” or “tried to look straight at it” or otherwise made clear they were gazing directly at the actual sun (qtd. in Rogo 1982, 230, 231). If this is so, the “dancing sun” and other solar phenomena may have been due to optical effects resulting from temporary retinal distortion caused by staring at such an intense light or to the effect of darting the eyes to and fro to avoid fixed gazing (thus combining image, afterimage, and movement).

Most likely, there was a combination of factors, including optical effects and meteorological phenomena, such as the sun being seen through thin clouds, causing it to appear as a silver disc. Other possibilities include an alteration in the density of the passing clouds, causing the sun’s image to alternately brighten and dim and so seem to advance and recede, and dust or moisture droplets in the atmosphere refracting the sunlight and thus imparting a variety of colors. The effects of suggestion were also likely involved, since devout spectators had come to the site fully expecting some miraculous event, had their gaze dramatically directed at the sun by the charismatic Lucia, and excitedly discussed and compared their perceptions in a way almost certain to foster psychological contagion (Nickell 1993, 176—181).

Not surprisingly, perhaps, sun miracles have been reported at other Marian sites—at Lubbock, Texas, in 1989; Mother Cabrini Shrine near Denver, Colorado, in 1992; Conyers, Georgia, in the early to mid-1990s; and elsewhere, including Thiruvananthapuram, India, in 2008. Tragically, at the Colorado and India sites, many people suffered eye damage (solar retinopathy)—in some instances, possibly permanent damage (Nickell 1993, 196—200; Sebastian 2008).

At the Conyers site, the Georgia Skeptics group set up a telescope outfitted with a vision-protecting Mylar solar filter, and on one occasion I participated in the experiment. Becky Long, president of the organization, stated that more than two hundred people had viewed the sun through one of the solar filters and not a single person saw anything unusual (Long 1992, 3; see figure 1).

The Secrets

Those who believe in the Fatima “miracle” also cite certain predictions the apparition allegedly made to Lucia, one being that Jacinta and Francisco would soon die. Both did soon succumb to influenza: Francisco in 1919 and Jacinta the following year. However, Zimdars-Swartz observes, “much of what devotees today accept as the content of the apparition comes from four memoirs written by Lucia in the convent [where she later resided] between 1935 and 1941, many years after the series of experiences that constitute the apparition event” (Zimdars-Swartz 1991, 68). Indeed, Lucia recorded her first “prediction” of the children’s deaths in 1927—several years after the fact!

As to the other predictions, they were supposedly part of three secrets that had been delivered to Lucia by the apparition on July 13, 1917 (Gruner 1997, 290—291). Lucia’s Third Memoir gave the first secret as a vision of hell. The second was a statement that World War I would end, “but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the pontificate of Pius XI” (who was pope from 1922 to 1939). However, since the Third Memoir was penned in August 1941, the so-called predictions were actually written after the fact (Zimdars-Swartz 1991, 198—199).

Before considering the important third secret of Fatima, and to fully comprehend the entire Fatima experience, we must look more closely at its central figure—not the Virgin Mary but Lucia de Jesus Santos. Born on March 22, 1907, to Antonio and Maria Rosa Santos, Lucia was the youngest of seven children. Five years younger than her next-oldest sibling, Lucia was a petted and spoiled child. Her sisters fostered in her a desire to be the center of attention by teaching her to dance and sing. At festivals, Lucia would stand on a crate to entertain an adoring crowd. Among her other talents was a gift for telling stories—fairy tales, biblical narratives, and saints’ legends—which made her popular with village children, as well as an ability to persuade others to do her bidding.

Two years before the famous series of apparitions occurred at Fatima, eight-year-old Lucia and three girlfriends claimed to have seen apparitions of a snow-white figure on three occasions. Lucia’s mother called the experiences “childish nonsense.” The following year, Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta were thrice visited by an “angel.”

Lucia’s background is revealing. The seeds of her later visionary encounters were clearly contained in her childhood experiences and in her obviously fantasy-prone personality.1 Her charismatic ability to influence others drew little Francisco and Jacinta into the Fatima fantasy. As Zimdars-Swartz says of Lucia:

It is clear that she played the leading role in the scenario of the apparition itself. All accounts agree that she was the only one of the three seers to interact with both her vision and with the crowd, carrying on conversations with both while her two cousins stood by silently. She has said, moreover, and probably not incorrectly, that Francisco and Jacinta had been accustomed to follow her directives before the apparition began, that they turned to her for guidance afterwards, and that it was she who convinced them that they had to be very careful in their experiences. (Zimdars-Swartz 1991, 68)

Further evidence that Lucia orchestrated the fantasy and manipulated the other children is provided by certain incidents. For example, when Jacinta first told the story, she stated that the Virgin had said many things that she was unable to recall but “which Lucia knows.” Lucia’s own mother was convinced that her precocious daughter was, in her words, “nothing but a fake who is leading half the world astray” (qtd. in Zimdars-Swartz 1991, 71, 86).

Third Secret Revealed

But there was a third secret of Fatima, possessed by the Vatican since 1957 and the subject of endless interest and speculation (Gruner 1997, 291). Certain Catholic notables have claimed to have the third secret, but their credibility is at issue because they seem to describe documents that were not first hand in their accounts. Nevertheless, they have hinted that the text predicted another world war and a great disaster of some kind (see Kramer 2006).

In mid-2000, the Catholic Church revealed the third secret that was supposedly imparted to Lucia in 1917, which she set down as text in a 1944 letter. It was forwarded in 1957 to the Secret Archives of the Vatican’s Holy Office where it since reposed.

On Monday, June 26, 2000, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—then prefect of church doctrine, now Pope Benedict XVI—spoke in a nationally televised news conference at the Vatican. Scrawled with a thick-nibbed pen in Portuguese—in wording Ratzinger characterized as “symbolic and not easy to decipher” (Valpy 2000)—Lucia had described seeing (at no specific time in the future) “an angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendor that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the angel cried out in a loud voice: ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’”

The visionary continued describing the appearance of a “bishop dressed in white,” who was “afflicted with pain and sorrow” as he made his way through a ruined city. Moreover, “he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another, the other bishops, priests, men and women Religious.”

Now, many of the faithful have seen the text as having forecast the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, who was shot and wounded by a Turk in 1981 (Fleishman 2000). However, nearly every aspect of the vision—if indeed it was supposed to predict the assassination attempt on John Paul—was in error. It described not a pope but a bishop, who was not killed, who was not shot by soldiers, certainly not by arrows (an implausibility attributable to a child’s imagination); neither were all of the other bishops and priests killed.

The vision only seems accurate if one engages in “retrofitting”—after-the-fact matching that fits statements to facts once they are known. This is the same process used to claim that the prognostications of Nostradamus (1503—1566), the French seer, accurately described future events (see Nickell 1989, 45—47). In the case of the “third secret,” the retrofitting involves counting the plausibly correct statements (e.g., the pope is “Bishop of Rome,” was dressed in white, and was struck by a would-be assassin’s bullet), while ignoring—or rationalizing—the many erroneous facts. Nevertheless, the Vatican statement claimed all three secrets represented authentic prophecy: “No one could have imagined all this” (qtd. in Valpy 2000).

In any event, many conspiracy-minded Catholics refuse to believe that the third secret has been fully revealed. They opine it may be “an indictment of most of the changes in the Church since Vatican II” (held 1962—1965) and would thus cause embarrassment to the current defenders of that council (Gruner 2006, 42). Meanwhile, the visionary who started it all, Lucia Santos—who became a Carmelite nun, Sister Lúcia of Jesus, and died on February 13, 2005—has been placed on the fast track to sainthood (“Lúcia” 2008). Certainly, the story will continue.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Luis Helbling (Nepean, Ontario, Canada), Sherman Harbeson (Milton, Florida), and Timothy Binga (director of CFI Libraries, Amherst, New York) for generous research assistance.

Note

1. For a discussion of fantasy proneness, see Wilson and Barber 1983.

References

• Arvey, Michael. 1990. Miracles: Opposing Viewpoints. Great Mysteries series. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press.
• Barss, Patchen. 2000. The sun-dance secret. National Post (Canada), May 13.
• Dacruz, Rev. V. n.d. Quoted in Rogo 1982, 224—225.
• Fleishman, Jeffrey. 2000. Vatican says “third secret” speaks of renewal. The Buffalo News, June 27.
• Gruner, Nicholas. 1997. Fatima Priest. Pound Ridge, NY: Good Counsel Publications.
• —. 2006. Living our daily lives in light of the Fatima secret. The Fatima Crusader 82 (Spring): 5—10, 40—51.
• Kramer, Paul. 2006. The third secret predicts: World War III and worse? The Fatima Crusader 82 (Spring): 11—13, 52—62.
• Larue, Gerald A. 1990. The Supernatural, the Occult, and the Bible. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Lúcia Santos. 2008. Wikipedia. Available online at http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_dos_Santos (accessed September 3, 2008).
• Long, Becky. 1992. The Conyers apparitions. Georgia Skeptic 5(2) (March/April): 3.
• Nickell, Joe. 1989. The Magic Detectives. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
• —. 1993. Looking for a Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions and Healing Cures. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. (The present discussion is largely abridged from this work—pp. 176—181—and expanded to include revelation of the Third Secret.)
• Oliveira, Mario de. 1999. Fátima Nunca Mais (Fatima Never Again). Porto, Portugal: Campo des Letras.
• Rogo, Scott D. 1982. Miracles: A Parascientific Inquiry into Wondrous Phenomena. New York: Dial Press.
• Sebastian, Don. 2008. 50 people looking for solar image of Mary lose sight. Available online at www.dnaindia.com/dnaprint.asp?newsid=1152984 (accessed March 12, 2008).
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• Visions: Messages from the Virgin Mary or delusions? 1989. Los Angeles Times, April 9.
• Wilson, Sheryl C., and Theodore X. Barber. 1983. The fantasy-prone personality: Implications for understanding imagery, hypnosis, and parapsychological phenomena. In Imagery, Current Theory, Research and Application, ed. Anees A. Sheikh, 340—390. New York: Wiley.
• Zimdars-Swartz, Sandra L. 1991. Encountering Mary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.