While there are many vernacular meanings of the term civilization, archaeologists tend to use it in a limited and precise way to signify a particular kind of society. For example, in his classic enumeration of the features that characterized humanity’s earliest civilizations, prehistorian V. Gordon Childe (1951) included labor specialization, social stratification, production of a food surplus, construction of monumental edifices, urban settlements, and a consistent system of record keeping (usually, but not always, writing). More recently, Joseph Tainter (1988) added the development of a formal government apparatus to that list.

Civilizations Lost

To many at the fringes of the historical sciences, the term civilization takes on an entirely different, often coded, meaning—especially when a seemingly innocuous modifier, such as “lost,” is applied to its front end. A vast amount of pseudoscience has been inspired by the simple phrase “lost civilization,” particularly by those who believe that they have found its archaeological spoor and can thus recast the history of a particular people, an entire continent, or in the most extreme cases, all of humanity (Childress 1992; Hancock 1995, 2003; Haughton 2007). The history of American archaeology for the aboriginal cultures of North America is especially rife with problems relating to the indiscriminate and often confusing use of the phrase “lost civilization” and its cohorts “lost race,” “lost city,” and “lost tribe.”

Many claims about the existence of a lost civilization in antiquity are, in effect, warmed-over versions of Plato’s Atlantis myth: Long ago (commonly placed at more than ten thousand years before the present) and far away (on an island in the Atlantic or under the Antarctic ice cap or off the coast of Japan, etc.), an enormously advanced and technologically sophisticated civilization existed whose impact on human history was vast. In extreme versions of the lost civilization myth, the society in question possessed technologies that even modern people have not mastered. Alas, as the result of some terrible accident or war or natural catastrophe, that civilization was destroyed virtually overnight and thus became “lost.” In such stories, conventional historians and archaeologists are described as being blind to the evidence for such a civilization or, in some cases, well aware of the evidence but part of a longstanding conspiracy to keep it all quiet, lest it upset the convenient apple cart of history concocted in their ivory towers.

In one subset of the lost-civilization genre of pseudohistory, the lost civilization is not a previously unknown group of people residing in the clichéd “dim mists of time” but instead an otherwise well-known ancient society that is remarkable primarily as a result of its geography, not for its precocious level of technological sophistication. Even restricting ourselves to just North America, the list of such claims is long—though evidence is short—and includes: Celtic kingdoms in the northeastern United States thousands of years ago (Fell 1976); Coptic Christian settlements in ancient Michigan (based on the so-called Michigan Relics) (Halsey 2009); Roman Jews in Arizona (the Tucson Artifacts) (Burgess 2009); the Lost Tribes of Israel in Ohio (the Newark Holy Stones) (Lepper and Gill 2000); and strange mixtures of various ancient Old World peoples secreted in hideouts in the Grand Canyon in Arizona (“Explorations in Grand Canyon” 1909) and in a cave in southeastern Illinois (Burrows Cave) (Joltes 2003). These claims are predicated essentially on the same notion: ancient Europeans, Africans, or Asians came to the Americas long before Columbus and long—perhaps thousands of years—before the Norse; they settled here and had a huge impact on the native people but then somehow became lost, both to history and to historians. Today, a group of “independent scholars” (a euphemism often used to mean writers without institutional affiliation, formal training, or archaeological experience) trumpet the evidence for these ancient settlers of the Americas, disseminating their revisionist histories—not in refereed, professional journals but in popular books, magazines, and, perhaps most broadly, on websites and in cable TV documentaries.

The Lost Civilizations of North America

A recent iteration of this “alternative archaeology” (another euphemism, this one used for claims about antiquity lacking in credible scientific evidence) can be seen in the documentary The Lost Civilizations of North America (produced by Steven Smoot, Rick Stout, and Barry McLerran), described on its DVD packaging as “the compelling account of the wanton destruction of an ancient history.” According to the video, this claimed “destruction” is both actual (in the sense of the physical, perhaps intentional, destruction of the archaeological evidence of this civilization) and metaphorical (in the sense of the intellectual denial of its existence). It is the embarrassing admission of the authors of this article that we naively agreed to participate in the program.

We do not agree with the vast majority of the interpretations of ancient American history presented in the documentary. While it is tempting to ignore the documentary as nonsense, the high production values coupled with the selective inclusion of academically credible scholars have resulted in its gaining international attention. Glenn Beck featured it prominently and favorably in the August 18, 2010, broadcast of his television program, and the website promoting the DVD claims it won the Best Multicultural Documentary Award at the 2010 International Cherokee Film Festival.

In a series of three articles, we will provide a scientific commentary on the interpretations expressed in this video concerning the ancient history of North America, using the documentary itself as emblematic of a far broader attempt to write an alternative history of the New World that is wholly unsupported by any archaeological or historical evidence. In this and two subsequent articles, we will address two questions that are particularly relevant: What is the evidence for the “lost” civilizations in North America? And how did this evidence come to be “lost”?

An Alternate Reality

Consensus among investigators in organized fields of knowledge is not a conspiracy to ignore, destroy, or sequester deviant or anomalous evidence, as is implied several times in the Lost Civilizations video. Consensus is based upon recognized rules of investigation and principles of interpretation that have been developed in relation to specific research problems. The emergence of consensus among anthropologists regarding the origin and antiquity of humankind in the New World is no exception.

Figure 1. This map shows the configuration of the modern coastlines of northeast Asia and northwest North America, along with the maximum Late Pleistocene extent of the Bering Land Bridge. Its existence, between thirty-five thousand and eleven thousand years ago, provided a broad avenue across which human beings first entered the New World from the Old.

The consensus view on this subject among archaeologists (together with geologists and biologists) is based on more than a century of excavating literally thousands of archaeological sites. A convergence of interdisciplinary data indicates that the New World was first populated at least thirteen thousand and perhaps as many as thirty thousand years ago by migrants from Asia (Meltzer 2009). These people entered the Americas via a wide expanse of land—called Beringia—connecting northeastern Asia with northwestern North America during periods of glacial expansion and concomitant lower sea levels (see figure 1). The first human migrants were few in number and entered a continent teeming with wildlife, including many now-extinct forms such as mastodons, wooly mammoths, giant ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats. Exploiting the richness of this “new world,” the human population grew quickly and expanded across the North and South American continents over a few thousand years. As settlers moved into new habitats and as the climate ameliorated at the end of the Pleistocene era (or “Ice Age”) ten thousand years ago, descendants of those first settlers adapted to a great diversity of new and changing environmental conditions, producing an abundance of differing ways of life. Each group adjusted to the natural conditions with which it was faced. In some regions, extremely rich habitats and, ultimately, the development of agricultural subsistence systems allowed for the production of a substantial food surplus and led to the growth of stratified societies with many of the characteristics outlined by Childe and Tainter that define a civilization. Among these were societies of the American Midwest and Southeast—the so-called mound builders—whose ability to marshal the communal labors of large groups of people is clearly seen in an archaeological landscape of monumentally scaled earthworks that include conical burial mounds, truncated pyramids of earth called “platform mounds,” effigy mounds (in the shape of various animals and birds), and vast areas enclosed by geometrically patterned earth embankments (Milner 2004) (figures 2a–2d).

Figure 2a. Miamisburg Mound, located in Miamisburg, Ohio, is one of the largest conical mounds in eastern North America. It is a burial mound built by the people that archaeologists have called the Adena culture, circa 800 BCE to 100 CE. (Ohio Historical Society) (K. Feder)

Figure 2b. The Fort Ancient Earthworks are a series of earthen embankments that extend for more than three and a half miles around a high bluff along the Little Miami River in southwestern Ohio. The earthworks were built by the Hopewell culture, circa 100 BCE–400 CE. (CERHAS, University of Cincinnati)

Figure 2c. Serpent Mound is the largest serpent effigy in the world. Located in Adams County, Ohio, it is thought to have been built by the Fort Ancient culture, circa 1000–1650 CE. (Center for the Electronic Reconstruction of Historical and Archaeological Sites [CERHAS], University of Cincinnati)

Figure 2d. Monks Mound, at Cahokia in Illinois, is by volume the fifth largest pyramidal monument in the world. Ultimately more than one hundred feet high, Monks Mound was constructed and maintained between 900 and 1300 CE. It served as the elevated platform on which stood the home of Cahokia’s ruler. Cahokia was, effectively, the capital of a powerful, indigenous political and economic entity. (K. Feder)

It is the archaeological consensus that the myriad cultures seen in native North America, including the mound builders, for the most part developed independent of any external inspiration. Contact almost certainly occurred between ancient societies in North America and the civilizations to the south—there is evidence, for example, of turquoise trade between the native people of the American Southwest and the cultures of Mesoamerica (Powell 2005), and maize, a Mexican domesticate, eventually made its way northward into essentially all regions of the continent in which it could be grown. But there is no credible scientific evidence for the wholesale movement of people from the Old World into sub-arctic North America after the initial incursion from northeast Asia at the end of the Ice Age. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that the cultural developments exhibited in the archaeological record here—like the monumentally scaled earthworks shown in figures 2a–2d—were in any way inspired by visitors or migrants from Africa, Europe, or Asia (Fritze 2009). Native Americans were fully capable of developing complex and sophisticated cultures on their own without help from other societies. The archaeological record of North America clearly shows the indigenous development of the technologies, art, architecture, social systems, subsistence practices, and engineering accomplishments seen in native America. There is no archaeological or biological evidence for the presence of interlopers, and there is no need for their presence in explaining the archaeology of native America.

The producers of the Lost Civilizations documentary clearly do not subscribe to this “mainstream” interpretation of American archaeology. Instead, what seems to emerge is the following less-coherent “diffusionist” alternative history:

Sometime toward the end of the last Ice Age, a few Asians stumbled into the New World across the Beringian land bridge. They developed indigenous societies, some of which may have been the beneficiaries of various unspecified contacts from the Old World over the millennia. By two thousand years ago, descendants of the original settlers living in eastern North America were building modest earthworks and scratching out a living by growing a few varieties of local plants. Then, a contingent of Israelites from the hills of Galilee arrived somewhere on America’s east coast, spreading through the indigenous cultures, acting like missionaries and igniting the cultural florescence of the mound-building cultures we know today as the Hopewell (as well as the subsequent Mississippian). These new migrants brought with them their religion (Judaism, apparently) and their written language (Hebrew), which appears in some regions as inscriptions on stone tablets or other artifacts of special significance. They also inspired the construction of vast cities across the Midwest and Southeast, raising up the locals to a high level of civilization, changing fundamentally and forever the cultures and histories of the previously benighted indigenous people.

In stark contrast to the elegant consensus achieved by the interdisciplinary work of archaeologists, geologists, geneticists, and linguists (Meltzer 2009; Goebel et al. 2008), recent issues of the diffusionist Ancient American magazine amply demonstrate that there is, in fact, no consensus among diffusionist researchers concerning which African, Asian, or European cultures arrived in America to serve as the elevators of Native American savagery, when they arrived, or which cultural achievements they are supposed to have introduced or inspired.

A Hidden History?

In support of the claim that there is a hidden history of ancient America, the documentary narrator asks a number of leading questions, such as: “Most Americans have no idea that ancient cities with advanced architectures once dotted the ancient North American landscape. . . . Why is it that top historians didn’t know about such things and why is it that they are not generally known among the modern public either?”

Here the documentarians use an unsupported assertion (top historians don’t know about the ancient mound-building societies of North America) to imply a scenario suggested throughout the rest of the documentary: that there has been some kind of conspiracy to keep the true history of North America quiet—so much so that even “top historians” don’t know about it. In setting up this assertion, the producers interviewed Roger Kennedy, who served as the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History from 1979–1992 and director of the National Park Service between 1993 and 1997. Kennedy admits that even into the early 1990s he was personally unaware of the fact that “massive city remains existed in North America.”

It is a curious statement given the state of archaeological knowledge in the early 1990s. It is possible that Kennedy either did not understand the question or misunderstood its specific context. But it does not follow from such a candid and honest personal admission by a single historian that, as a group, archaeologists and historians were similarly uninformed and that these recognized leaders in the scientific community are therefore the victims (or perhaps the perpetrators) of a conspiracy of silence. It is problematic that the producers based a conclusion on what was effectively a sample size of one before asking the leading question: “Why is it that top historians didn’t know about such things?” Was this really generally true in the early 1990s? Is it true today? In fact, it was not then, and it is not now. To better answer such a question, one might simply have skimmed through the Guide to Departments of Anthropology (published by the American Anthropological Association, a professional organization) for an answer. From that guide one would have determined that there are literally hundreds of archaeologists who have devoted their careers to the study of the mound-builder cultures and dozens of university programs that focus on them.

That many (likely, most) Americans don’t know much of anything about the mound builders is unfortunately true, but this ignorance is part of a larger issue. Most Americans don’t know much of anything about Native American cultures, which is of course a shame. But it is an enormous jump to imply from this sad reality that there is any kind of a conspiracy of silence about the sophistication of ancient American mound-building societies.

In fact, just the opposite is true. Professional archaeologists in universities and museums have made a concerted effort to get the word out about the mound builders. Archaeologists have written a series of popularly oriented books about mound societies, for example: Milner (2004); Lepper (2005); Pauketat (2009); and Iseminger (2010). Glossy magazines with a broad popular readership have published extensively on the mound-building societies. The magazine of the National Museum of the American Indian (a publication of the Smithsonian Institution) featured an article about Cahokia, the largest of the mound-builder sites, in its Winter 2010 issue (Adams 2010). As we were preparing this article in January 2011, National Geographic magazine published a major piece about that same site (Hodges 2011). It certainly is not the first time the mound builders have been highlighted in National Geographic. Also, over the past few decades there have been numerous articles about the mound-building cultures in Archaeology, the magazine published by the Archaeological Institute of America, aimed at a mixed professional and popular audience (see, for example, Iseminger 1996 and Lepper 1995), as well as in American Archaeology, published by the Archaeological Conservancy.

There are dozens of websites, many produced by universities along with the federal and state governments, dedicated to the mound builders in general and specific sites in particular. Typing “mound builders” into a Google search box returns nearly four hundred thousand hits! It’s not for lack of trying on the part of archaeologists and historians that most Americans are ignorant of the mound builders. To imply a conspiracy to keep the public unaware of them is to ignore the facts.

Secret Cities of Ancient America?

Beyond the factually incorrect conclusion that even at the end of the twentieth century historians were ignorant of the mound-building native societies of the American Midwest, there are additional problems with the Kennedy interview. The first results from an imprecision in terminology, specifically settlement and city. In fact, there is no archaeological evidence of widespread “massive city remains” in North America by any formal definition of the term city. With the possible exception of Cahokia, there are no archaeological settlements in North America that are comparable in size and population density to, for example, the earliest city-states in Mesopotamia, the first cities located along the Indus River in Pakistan, or any of the large urban settlements located in the Valley of Mexico. Even estimates for Cahokia rarely calculate its population at more than ten thousand people, a number sometimes used as a statistical cutoff point for the designation of a settlement as a city (see figure 3).

Figure 3. Artist’s conception of Cahokia at its peak, focused on the elite precinct of the community. Archaeological evidence indicates the presence of an extensive palisade consisting of an estimated twenty thousand logs isolating an elite compound of a city of as many as ten thousand inhabitants. (Courtesy of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. William R. Iseminger, artist. Reproduced with permission.)

Other than Cahokia, all of the other large mound sites in North America appear to have been a different kind of settlement entirely: not cities but rather ceremonial centers with relatively small residential populations surrounded by numerous hamlets dispersed in vast areas around them. The people living in these hamlets produced the surplus (in the form of food, wealth, and labor) that supported the ritual elites living in the mound centers. In a particularly egregious example of misuse of terminology, the documentary describes the earth embankment that encloses the Newark Earthworks in Ohio as “city walls.” This is nonsense. The Newark Earthworks include a spectacular array of more than four and a half square miles of geometric enclosures and mounds in a variety of shapes and sizes, but there is no archaeological evidence for an urban population here (Lepper 2004) or at any of the other monumental earthworks of the Hopewell culture (figure 4).

Figure 4. The Octagon Earthworks are one part of the much larger Newark Earthworks located in Newark, Ohio. The elaborate monumental earthworks, built by the Hopewell culture circa 100 BCE–400 CE, incorporate a sophisticated knowledge of geometry and astronomy in their form and alignments. The first of the Newark “holy stones” was found just east of the octagonal enclosure. (Tim Black and/or Greater Licking County Convention and Visitors Bureau)

To be clear: stating that places like the Newark Earthworks, Poverty Point in Louisiana (Gibson 2000), Etowah in Georgia, Moundville in Alabama (Welch 1991), Town Creek Mound in North Carolina, or Crystal River Mounds in Florida were not cities is not to disparage them or minimize the achievements of those who produced them. It merely points out the fact, as shown clearly by archaeological investigation, that this architecture was not urban in character and was wholly unlike cities as ordinarily defined. Indeed, one of the fascinating challenges posed by such structures is how a population dispersed in small hamlets without hereditary kings or pharaohs could have organized the labor to erect such massive earthworks.

About such sites, the documentary asks: “The real question is, why were these sites not preserved? And why are these advanced civilizations not commonly known of today?” To answer these questions about the perceived lack of preservation of sites from an ancient “lost civilization” in North America, the documentary points to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the theory of evolution. It is asserted in the documentary that it was crucial for many Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to denigrate the cultural evolutionary status of the native residents. By either destroying or ignoring archaeological evidence of a sophisticated North American civilization, the film’s producers maintain, settlers were clearing their consciences about dispossessing native peoples of their lands.

This in itself is hardly a revelation. Manifest Destiny, the belief that the American republic was destined to colonize the trans-Mississippian West, was a largely unexamined assumption that affected scientific attitudes toward Native Americans and profoundly shaped federal Indian policy from the 1840s through the end of the nineteenth century (Horsman 1981). That the mounds were viewed as problematic to those who perceived Native American culture as fundamentally primitive and destined for extinction is an underlying theme of Robert Silverberg’s classic work, Mound Builders of Ancient America (1968). It is a point likewise made in the mound chapter of Kenneth Feder’s Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology (2011). So, any notion that the documentary has exposed a conspiracy here is nonsense. And it should be further noted that roughly half of the documentary is devoted to asserting that Native Americans were historically denied civilized status by destruction of their mounds, and the other half is devoted to asserting that the mounds were actually built by interlopers from the Middle East. That unsupported claim denies the cultural achievements and heritage of the mound-building peoples just as surely as did those in the nineteenth century who argued that the ancestors of prehistoric North American Indians had not built the mounds.

Implicit in the narrator’s statement that “whether intentional or not, whether motivated by religious or political agendas or not, modern experts agree that wanton destruction did occur” is the suggestion that the mound sites may have been singled out for deliberate destruction to eliminate evidence of an ancient native civilization in North America. This takes great liberty with history. There were those in the nineteenth century who believed they had a duty to both the past and the future to survey and minutely describe prehistoric sites while it was still possible to do so. They were regrettably a minority, but far from an insignificant one. Many of the survey maps used in the Lost Civilizations video, in fact, were the fruit of those historically conscious antiquaries of the nineteenth century (Barnhart 1998, 2005).

While the documentary focuses on the “wanton destruction” of prehistoric mounds and geometric enclosures, it largely glosses over the fact that there has been a concerted effort to preserve some of the most impressive of these sites for archaeological research and public education. Many mound sites are open to the public, and many have on-site museums where the public can learn the story of the site’s inhabitants in some depth. One recent compilation lists no fewer than seventy mound and earthwork sites in the states of Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia that are preserved and accessible to the public (Woodward and McDonald 2002). Among the more prominent are Hopewell Culture National Historic Park, Serpent Mound, the Newark Earthworks, and Fort Ancient Earthworks (see figures 2b, 2c, and 4). These sites, along with Poverty Point National Monument, recently have been placed on a short list by the U.S. Department of the Interior to be nominated for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage List. Cahokia Mounds in Illinois is already one of the few prehistoric sites in the United States on the World Heritage List. Furthermore, recent figures from Hopewell Culture National Historic Park in Ohio show that between thirty and forty thousand people visit this mound site each year. Also in Ohio, more than twenty thousand people visited Serpent Mound in 2010. Cahokia reports an attendance of approximately 320,000 people annually. If there is a conspiracy within the “mainstream” scientific community to keep the mound cultures a secret, we haven’t been doing a very good job of it. The implication that such sites have been systematically and intentionally destroyed or kept hidden for the nefarious goal of concealing the truth about Native American societies is self-evidently ludicrous.

Beyond attempting to prove a nonexistent conspiracy to hide the mound-builder cultures from the public, the Lost Civilizations documentary presents what is to be interpreted as evidence of the movement of Old World people, specifically migrants from the ancient Middle East, to the New World. It then outlines the enormous impact these interlopers had on the already in-place indigenous societies. The bulk of this “evidence” consists of artifacts bearing written messages in Old World languages, especially Hebrew, and DNA that, it is claimed, proves a connection between the Hopewell mound builders of Ohio and ancient people from Israel. We will deal with these two sets of evidence in the second and third articles in this series, respectively.

Disclaimer:

We are well aware that a claim underlying the Lost Civilizations documentary—that the mound-building people of the American Midwest were migrants from the Middle East 2,000 years ago—may be informed by religious doctrine. It is our position in this paper, however, that whatever inspires this claim is not nearly as important as the fact that it is plainly wrong. As such, we will leave it to others to assess the role played, if any, by religion in shaping Lost Civilizations and focus instead on scientific evidence relevant to that claim.

References Cited:

Adams, J.R. 2010. Cahokia 101: A primer on a hidden past. National Museum of the American Indian, 11: 12–21.

Barnhart, Terry A. 1998. In search of the mound builders: The State Archaeological Association of Ohio, 1875–1885. Ohio History 107 (Summer/Autumn): 125–70.

———. 2005. Early accounts of the Ohio mounds. In Lepper 2005, 236–50.

Burgess, D. 2009. Romans in Tucson? The story of an archaeological hoax. Journal of the Southwest 51.

Childe, V.G. 1951. Man Makes Himself. New York: Mentor Books.

Childress, D.H. 1992. Lost Cities of North and Central America. Stelle, Illinois: Adventures Unlimited Press.

Explorations in Grand Canyon. 1909. Phoenix Gazette (April 5). Available online at http://grandcanyontreks.org/fiction.htm.

Feder, K.L. 2011. Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Fell, B. 1976. America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World. New York: Demeter Press.

Fritze, Ronald H. 2009. Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-Religions. London: Reaktion Books.

Gibson, J.L. 2000. The Ancient Mounds of Poverty Point. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

Goebel, Ted, Michael R. Waters, and Dennis H. O’Rourke. 2008. The late Pleistocene dispersal of modern humans in the Americas. Science 319: 1497–1502.

Halsey, J.R. 2009. The “Michigan Relics”: America’s longest running archaeological fraud. Presented at the Midwest Archaeological Conference, Iowa City, Iowa.

Hancock, G. 1995. Fingerprints of the Gods. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Hancock, G. 2003. Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Haughton, B. 2007. Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries. Franklin Lakes, New Jersey: New Page Books.

Hodges, G. 2011. Cahokia: America’s forgotten city. National Geographic 219: 126–45.

Horsman, Reginald. 1981. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origin of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Iseminger, W.R. 1996. Mighty Cahokia. Archaeology 49(3): 30–37.

———. 2010. Cahokia Mounds: America’s First City. The History Press.

Joltes, R. 2003. Burrows Cave: A modern hoax. Available online at www.criticalenquiry.org/burrowscave/burrows.shtml.

Lepper, B. 1995. Tracking Ohio’s Great Hopewell Road. Archaeology 48(6): 52–56.

———. 2004. The Newark Earthworks: Monumental geometry and astronomy at a Hopewellian pilgrimage center. In Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, edited by Richard V. Townsend and Robert V. Sharp. New Haven: Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University Press.

———. 2005. Ohio Archaeology: An Illustrated Chronicle of Ohio’s Ancient American Indian. Wilmington, Ohio: Orange Frazer Press.

Lepper, B., and J. Gill. 2000. The Newark holy stones. Timeline 17(3): 16–25.

Meltzer, D.J. 2009. First Peoples in a New World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Milner, G.R. 2004. The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America. London: Thames and Hudson.

Pauketat, T.R. 2009. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. New York: Viking.

Powell, E. 2005. The turquoise trail. Archaeology 58(1): 24–29.

Silverberg, Robert. 1968. Mound Builders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth (original, unabridged edition). Greenwich, Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, Ltd.

Tainter, J. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Welch, P.D. 1991. Moundville’s Economy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Woodward, Susan L., and Jerry N. McDonald. 2002. Indian Mounds of the Middle Ohio Valley: A Guide to Mound and Earthworks of the Adena, Hopewell, Cole, and Fort Ancient People. Blacksburg, Virginia: McDonald and Woodward Publishing.

There is an old joke about a university lecturer who asks his class, “Has anyone here ever seen a ghost?” Fifteen students put their hands in the air. Next, the lecturer says, “Well, who here has touched a ghost?” This time only five hands go up. Curious, the lecturer adds, “OK, has anyone actually kissed a ghost?” A young man sitting in the middle of the lecture theater slowly raises his hand, looks around nervously, and then asks, “I’m sorry, did you say ‘ghost’ or ‘goat?’”

Thankfully, the results from national surveys have yielded more clear-cut findings. Opinion polls have consistently shown that around 30 percent of people believe in ghosts, and about 15 percent claim to have actually had a ghostly experience (Musella 2005). James Houran has carried out a great deal of research into the nature of these ghostly experiences. Houran is an interesting fellow. During the day this mild-mannered statistician works for a well-known Internet dating site creating mathematical models that help promote compatibility. By night Houran transforms into a real-life ghost buster, conducting surveys and studies that aim to solve the mystery of hauntings. Fifteen years ago, he analyzed almost a thousand ghostly experiences to discover what people report when they believe that they have encountered a spirit (Lange et al. 1996).

Houran’s work revealed that reports of full-fledged apparitions are very rare. In fact, they account for only 1 percent or so of sightings; when such figures do turn up, they usually appear at the foot of a bed as people are either waking up or drifting off to sleep. Around a third of Houran’s reports involve rather fleeting visual phenomena, such as quick flashes of light, odd wisps of smoke, or dark shadows that move furtively around the room. Another third involve strange sounds, such as footsteps from an empty room or ghostly whispering. The remaining third are a mixture of miscellaneous sensations, including odd odors of flowers or cigar smoke, sensing a ghostly presence, or feeling a cold shiver down one’s spine.

For well over a century, scientists have attempted to explain these strange experiences. Like much of the research into alleged paranormal phenomena, their work tells us a great deal about our brains, beliefs, and behavior.

The Rose without a Thorn

London’s Hampton Court Palace has been home to some of Britain’s most famous kings and queens. Nowadays the palace is a popular historical attraction, playing host to more than half a million visitors each year.

The palace is famous for many things: It houses invaluable works of art from the Royal Collection, contains the best-preserved medieval hall in Britain, and boasts a giant Tudor kitchen. It is also considered one of the most haunted buildings in Britain. Various spirits allegedly haunt the palace. There is a “lady in gray” whose walks through the cobbled courtyards are as regular as clockwork, a “woman in blue” who continuously searches for her lost child, and a phantom dog that lives in Wolsey’s closet. However, despite stiff competition, Hampton Court’s most famous spirit is that of Catherine Howard.

Henry VIII ruled Britain during the first half of the sixteenth century, but he did not have a great track record when it came to relationships. He cheated on his first wife, beheaded his second, lost his third while she was giving birth to his only son, and divorced his fourth. In a move that would make even the most experienced marriage counselor raise an eyebrow, the forty-nine-year-old Henry then became infatuated with a nineteen-year-old courtier named Catherine Howard. After a brief period of wooing, Henry married Howard, publicly declaring that she was his “rose without a thorn.”

A few months after getting married, Catherine found herself very much in love. Unfortunately, the apple of her eye was not her husband, Henry, but rather a young courtier named Thomas Culpepper. News of their affair eventually reached Henry, who promptly decided to fetch the garden shears and remove the head of his beloved rose. Upon hearing the bad news, Catherine was understandably upset. She ran to Henry to plead for her life but was stopped by Royal guards and dragged back through the corridors of the palace to her apartments. A few months later both Thomas Culpepper and Catherine Howard were beheaded at the Tower of London.

The ghost of Catherine Howard is said to haunt the corridor down which she was dragged against her will. By the turn of the last century this area of the palace had become associated with a whole host of ghostly experiences, including sightings of a “woman in white” and reports of inexplicable screams.

In January 2001, a palace official telephoned me, explained that there had been a recent surge in Catherine-Howard-related phenomena, and wondered whether I might be interested in investigating. Eager to use the opportunity to discover more about hauntings, I quickly put together an experiment, assembled a research team, photocopied hundreds of blank questionnaires, loaded up my car, and headed off to the palace for a five-day investigation (Wiseman et al. 2002, 2003).

The palace had called a press conference to announce the start of my study, attracting the attention of journalists from all around the world. We decided to make the press conference a two-part affair, with a palace official talking about the history of the haunting in the first half, a brief break, and then my good self describing the forthcoming investigation. A palace historian kicked off the proceedings by telling a packed room of reporters what happened when Henry met Cathy.

During the brief break, I stepped outside to get some fresh air. The strangest thing happened: A car containing two tipsy teenagers drove slowly past me. One of the teenagers rolled down the window and threw an egg at me. The egg smashed on my shirt. Unable to change, I tried to remove the worst of the stains and then returned to the press conference. A few minutes into my talk, one of the journalists noticed the marks on my shirt and, assuming that it was ectoplasm, asked whether Catherine Howard had already slimed me. I replied, “Yes. This is going to be a tougher investigation than I first thought.” Although said in jest, my comment was to prove prophetic.

Prior to the experiment, I had asked the palace to supply me with a floor plan of the corridor that would have held such unpleasant memories for Catherine Howard. I then met with Ian Franklin, a palace warder who had carefully catalogued a century of reports of unusual phenomena experienced by staff and visitors, whom I asked to secretly place crosses on the floor plan to indicate where people had consistently reported their experiences. To avoid any possible bias during the investigation, neither I nor any other member of the research team knew which areas had been marked by Franklin.

During the day, groups of visitors were transformed into ghost hunters. After hearing a brief talk about the project, each participant was handed a blank floor plan and asked to wander along the corridor and place an “X” on the floor plan to indicate the location of any unusual experiences that they might have (essentially playing a game of “spot the ghoul”). Each night we would place a variety of sensors and a £60,000 ($100,300) heat imager in the corridor in the hope of catching Catherine mid-“boo!”

Day one of the investigation went badly, with several participants wandering into the wrong corridor and then wondering why the floor plan was so wildly inaccurate. On day two, we were joined by a woman who claimed to be the reincarnation of Catherine Howard and said that she could provide a unique first-person perspective on the proceedings (“Actually, I was dragged up the corridor, not down it”; “Not sure that the new paint job in the kitchens works for me,” etc.). Day four turned out to be especially interesting. The team (which now included the reincarnated Catherine Howard) assembled in the morning as usual and reviewed the heat sensor data from the previous night. It was immediately obvious that something very strange had taken place, with the graphs showing a massive spike in temperature around 6 AM. We eagerly rewound the recording from the thermal imager to discover whether we had caught Catherine on tape. At dead-on 6 AM the doors at one end of the corridor burst open, and in walked a figure. The reincarnated Catherine Howard instantly recognized the figure as a member of Henry VIII’s court. However, a few seconds later the proceedings took a decidedly more skeptical turn when we saw the figure walk over to a cupboard, remove a vacuum cleaner, and start to clean the carpets. Thankfully, the data from the rest of the investigation proved more revealing.

People who believed in ghosts experienced significantly more strange sensations than the skeptics. Interestingly, we have obtained the same pattern of findings in several investigations at other supposedly haunted locations. Time and again those who believe in the paranormal experience more ghosts than those who don’t. As I loaded my equipment back into my car and said goodbye to our well-meaning but intensely annoying Catherine Howard wannabe, one question nagged away in my mind: Why?

The Machine in the Ghost

Neuropsychologist Michael Persinger, of Laurentian University in Canada, believes that ghostly experiences are caused by the brain malfunctioning and, more controversially, that these sensations can be easily elicited by applying very weak magnetic fields to the outside of the skull (Cook and Persinger 1997, 2001).

In a typical Persinger study, participants are led into a laboratory and asked to sit in a comfortable chair. They then have a helmet placed on their heads, are blindfolded, and are asked to relax for about forty minutes. During this time several solenoids hidden in the helmet generate extremely weak magnetic fields around the participant. Sometimes these fields are focused over the right side of the head; at other times they switch to the left, and once in a while they circle around the skull. Finally the helmet and blindfold are removed, and the participant is asked to complete a questionnaire indicating whether he or she experienced any strange sensations, such as the sense of a presence, vivid images, odd smells, being sexually aroused, or coming face-to-face with God.

After years of experimentation, Persinger claims that around 80 percent of participants tick the “yes” box to at least one of these experiences, with some even going for the “all of the above” option. The study has been featured in many science documentaries, resulting in several presenters and journalists putting Persinger’s magic helmet on their heads in the hope of meeting their maker. For the most part, they have not been disappointed. Psychologist Susan Blackmore, for example, felt as if something had gotten hold of her leg and dragged it up the wall, followed by a sudden sense of intense anger (which is exactly how I would feel if someone took my leg and dragged it up a wall).

All was going well with Persinger’s theory until a team of Swedish psychologists, led by Pehr Granqvist from Uppsala University, decided to carry out the same type of experiments (Granqvist et al. 2005; Larsson et al. 2005). (For additional information about this work, see www.nature.com/news/2004/041206/full/news041206-10.html.)

It all started well, with some of the Swedes visiting Persinger’s laboratory and even borrowing a portable version of one of his helmets for their own study. However, Granqvist became worried that some of Persinger’s participants may have known what was expected of them, and their experiences could therefore have been due to suggestion rather than the subtle magnetic fields. To rule out this possibility in his own work, Granqvist had all of his participants wear Persinger’s borrowed helmet but ensured that the coils were turned on for only half of the participants. Neither the participants nor the experimenters knew when the magnetic fields were on and when they were off.

The results were remarkable. Granqvist discovered that the magnetic fields had absolutely no effect. Three of his participants reported intense spiritual experiences, but two of these were not being exposed to the magnetic fields at the time. Likewise, twenty-two people reported more subtle experiences, but the coils were turned off for eleven of them. When Granqvist’s work was published in 2004, Persinger argued that the poor showing may have been due, in part, to the fact that the participants who had their helmet coils turned on were exposed to the magnetic fields for only fifteen minutes and to the fact that Granqvist ran the DOS-based software controlling the coils in Windows and thus possibly altered the nature of the magnetic fields. The Swedish team defended their work and stood by their findings.

The idea of electromagnetic spirits has caught the imagination of the media and public alike. However, the scientific jury is unconvinced. So has anyone solved the mystery of hauntings? Before we delve deeper, it is time to discover more about the power of suggestion.

The Subtle Hint of Silage

In the late 1970s, sensory scientist Michael O’Mahony from the University of California took the power of suggestion to new heights when he persuaded the BBC to undertake an ingenious version of his well known sensory study during a live program (O’Mahony 1978). O’Mahony constructed some mock scientific apparatus (think a large weird-looking cone, masses of wires, and several oscilloscopes) and managed to keep a straight face as he told viewers that this newly devised “taste trap” used “Raman Spectroscopy” to transmit smells via sound. He then proudly announced that the stimulus would be a country smell. Unfortunately, the studio audience interpreted his comments to mean the smell of manure, resulting in a significant amount of laughter. After clarifying that they would not be broadcasting the smell of cow shit into people’s homes, the research team played a standard Dolby tuning tone for ten seconds. Just as the bottles in the more pedestrian versions of O’Mahony’s study contained nothing but water, so the tone did not actually have the ability to induce smells.

Viewers were then asked to contact the television station and describe their experiences. A few hundred viewers responded, with the majority stating that they had detected a strong smell of hay, grass, or flowers. Although they were explicitly told that the smell would not be manure-related, several people mentioned that they had detected the subtle hint of silage. Many respondents described how the tone had brought about more dramatic symptoms, including hay fever attacks, sudden bouts of sneezing, and dizziness.

The “Raman Spectroscopy” was simply scientific mumbo-jumbo. In reality the experimenters were exploring how the power of suggestion can cause people to experience various smells. James Houran (of Internet dating and ghost-busting fame) also believes that suggestion may play a vital role in unlocking the mystery of hauntings.

Houran speculated that if suggestible people believe that they are in a haunted house, they may experience the strange sensations typically attributed to ghostly activity. In addition, he noted that those experiences are likely to create a feeling of fear that will cause people to become hyper-vigilant and pay attention to the subtlest of signals (Lange and Houran 1999). They will suddenly notice that tiny creak in the floorboards, the swaying of the curtains, or a brief whiff of burning. All of this will cause them to become even more afraid and therefore exhibit even greater hyper-vigilance. The process feeds on itself until the person starts to become highly agitated, anxious, and prone to more extreme sensations and hallucinations.

Findings from many studies support Houran’s ideas. In my own work, those who believed in ghosts reported far more weird experiences than skeptics, and their sensations tended to focus on the type of scary-looking locations that are frequently featured in horror films. Although these findings are encouraging, the ultimate testing of the theory involves taking suggestible people to a place that does not have a reputation for being haunted, making them believe that it does, and seeing if they experience the same kind of ghostly activity reported in “genuine” hauntings. Houran has conducted several of these experiments with intriguing results.

In one experiment he took over a disused theater that had absolutely no reputation for being haunted and asked two groups of people to walk around it and report how they felt (Lange and Houran 1997). Houran told one group that the theater was associated with ghostly activity and the other that the building was simply undergoing renovation. Those in the “this building is haunted” group reported all sorts of weird sensations, while the other group experienced nothing unusual. In another study, Houran asked a married couple living in a house that had no reputation for ghostly activity to spend a month making note of any “unusual occurrences” that they noticed in their home (Houran and Lange 1996). Reporting the results in the paper “Diary of Events in a Thoroughly Unhaunted House,” he noted that the couple reported an amazing twenty-two weird events, including the inexplicable malfunctioning of their telephone, their name being muttered by a ghostly presence, and the strange movement of a souvenir voodoo mask along a shelf.

Hauntings do not require genuine ghosts, underground streams, low frequency sound waves, or weak magnetic fields. Instead, all it takes is the power of suggestion.

Ghosts, Gods, and Goblins

Although the psychology of suggestion accounts for many ghostly phenomena, there still exists one final mystery—why on earth should our sophisticated brains have evolved to detect nonexistent ghostly entities?

Scientists have proposed various theories to account for what goes bump in our minds. Psychologist Jesse Bering (2006) from the University of Arkansas has suggested that both ghosts and God help forge a more honest society by convincing people that they are constantly being watched. Bering and his team tested their idea by carrying out a somewhat strange experiment. In their study, students were asked to complete an intelligence test. The test had been carefully constructed to ensure that the students could cheat if they wanted to, and the experimenters could secretly monitor each person’s level of deception. Just before taking the test, a randomly selected group of students was told that the test room was apparently haunted. As predicted by the “ghosts make people more honest” theory, the students who thought that they were in a haunted room were far less likely to cheat on the test.

However, perhaps the most popular theory to account for the evolution of ghostly experiences concerns the “Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device” (Barrett 2004). Oxford University psychologist Justin Barrett believes that the idea of “agency”—being able to figure out why people act the way they do—is essential to our everyday interactions with one another. In fact, it is so important that Barrett thinks the part of the brain responsible for detecting such agency often goes into overdrive, causing people to see human-like behavior in even the most meaningless stimuli.

In the 1940s, psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel conducted a now-classic experiment that provides a beautiful illustration of Barrett’s point. Heider and Simmel created a short cartoon animation in which a large triangle, a small triangle, and a circle moved in and out of a box. They then showed the meaningless cartoon to people and asked them to describe what was happening. Most people instantly created elaborate stories to explain the cartoon, saying, for example, that perhaps the circle was in love with the little triangle, and the big triangle was attempting to steal away the circle but the little triangle fought back, and the small triangle and circle eventually lived happily ever after.

In short, people saw agency where none existed. Barrett believes that the same concept helps explain gods, ghosts, and goblins. According to the theory, many people are very reluctant to think that certain events are meaningless, and they are all too eager to assume that the events are the work of invisible entities. They might, for instance, experience an amazing stroke of good luck and assume it is angels at work, be struck down with an illness and see it as evidence of demons, or hear a creaking door and attribute it to a ghostly woman in white. If Barrett is right, ghosts are not the result of superstitious thinking. Neither are they spirits returning from the dead. Instead, they are simply the price we pay for having remarkable brains that can effortlessly figure out why other people behave the way they do. As such, ghosts are an essential part of our everyday lives.

On Publishing Paranormality

All of my previous books have been produced by large American publishing houses. However, when it came to my new book, Paranormality (www.paranormalitybook.com), the situation was different. Many major publishers were convinced that there simply isn’t a market for a skeptical book about the paranormal. When no serious offers came forward, I decided to take a bold step. I will publish the unashamedly skeptical Paranormality as an e-book in America and have my U.K. publisher ship physical copies of the British book to the United States. It is a daring experiment, and I have no idea how it will work out. I don’t have the large-market budget and connections of a large publishing house. However, I hope that I will have the support of the skeptical movement and anyone else who cares about science. Psychic hotlines and television shows are a multi-million dollar business. Many people do not want the American public to read books like Paranormality. For that reason alone, I believe that they deserve the largest audience possible.

References

Barrett, J.L. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? United Kingdom: AltaMira Press.

Bering, J.M. 2006. The cognitive psychology of belief in the supernatural. American Scientist 94: 142–49.

Cook, C.M., and M.A. Persinger. 1997. Experimental induction of the ‘sensed presence’ in normal subjects and an exceptional subject. Perceptual and Motor Skills 85: 683–93.

———. 2001. Geophysical variables and behavior: XCII. Experimental elicitation of the experience of a sentient being by right hemispheric, weak magnetic fields: Interaction with temporal lobe sensitivity. Perceptual and Motor Skills 92: 447–48.

Granqvist, P., M. Fredrikson, P. Unge, et al. 2005. Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of weak complex transcranial magnetic fields. Neuroscience Letters 379: 1–6.

Houran, J., and R. Lange. 1996. Diary of events in a thoroughly unhaunted house. Perceptual and Motor Skills 83: 499–502.

Lange, R., and J. Houran. 1997. Context-induced paranormal experiences: Support for Houran and Lange’s model of haunting phenomena. Perceptual and Motor Skills 84: 1455–58.

———.1999. The role of fear in delusions of the paranormal. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 187: 159–66.

Lange, R., J. Houran, T.M. Harte, et al. 1996. Contextual mediation of perceptions in hauntings and poltergeist-like experiences. Perceptual and Motor Skills 82: 755–62.

Larsson, M., D. Larhammar, M. Fredrikson, et al. 2005. Reply to M.A. Persinger and S.A. Koren’s response to Granqvist et al. ‘Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak magnetic fields.’ Neuroscience Letters 380: 348–50.

Musella, D.P. 2005. Gallup poll shows that Americans’ belief in the paranormal persists. Skeptical Inquirer 29(5): 5.

O’Mahony, M. 1978. Smell illusions and suggestion: Reports of smells contingent on tones played on television and radio. Chemical Senses and Flavour 3: 183–89.

Wiseman, R., C. Watt, E. Greening, et al. 2002. An investigation into the alleged haunting of Hampton Court Palace: Psychological variables and magnetic fields. Journal of Parapsychology 66(4): 387–408.

Wiseman, R., C. Watt, P. Stevens, et al. 2003. An investigation into alleged “hauntings.” The British Journal of Psychology 94: 195–211

Once upon a time, at the tender age of ten, I was playing with a magnet and an empty tin can. Suddenly I noticed that if I moved the magnet away from the can, with the distance between them remaining the same, the can rolled faster and faster in its pursuit of the magnet. But what if the can was rigged to the magnet, I thought? Obviously, the device would continue accelerating, without the aid of any outside force, at least until it hit the nearest wall. Three pencils and some duct tape were enough to constrain the magnet in front of the can at the desired distance. But to my great dismay, the resulting system remained completely motionless.

Undoubtedly, many people of the inventive type can relate to this experience—thinking up a seemingly ingenious idea for making a system that generates persistent motion with no energy source. Recorded propositions for building similar contraptions, usually called perpetual motion devices¹ or perpetuum mobile (PM for short), date back to at least the seventh century CE (Peter 2004). A plethora of mechanisms based on such ideas have been designed and built, ranging from the stunningly trivial to the ridiculously complex. Different though they may be, all share one common quality: much like my “magnetic can,” they do not work.

Only in the nineteenth century were the culprits behind this perpetual failure (pun intended) discovered. These are the relentless laws of physics, or more specifically, the first and second laws of thermodynamics. One would expect that ever since these laws were established (with solid theoretical and overwhelming experimental basis), PMs would have become history. Surprisingly, that hasn’t happened. In fact, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the PM “industry” isn’t just alive and well but, arguably, more popular than ever before. And it’s not just the “modern” kinds of PMs, like “zero-point modules”² or “torsion field generators,”³ but the most classical ones too—the “overunity devices,”⁴ which violate the first law of thermodynamics. In fact, at http://tinyurl.com/magnetPM you can see a grown man playing with magnets in almost the same way I did as a child. This is just one example, but many more exist. The forum at www.overunity.com alone lists more than 25,000 members (as of December 2010), most of whom describe themselves as overunity inventors, and YouTube contains hundreds, if not thousands, of videos showing supposedly working PMs of all kinds. And the numbers keep growing.

Of course, such a high interest in PMs is easily understandable. In light of the global energy crisis, pollution, and human-induced climate change, an inventor of a free and clean energy source would certainly become rich and famous beyond imagination. On the other hand, centuries of utter failure and PMs’ scientifically proven impossibility should serve as an overwhelming demotivator. So, how can all these people still believe in PMs—and not just believe but waste a lot of time and effort in trying to build such machines?

There are several possible explanations. As the famous case of John Keely suggests (“Keely’s Secret” 1899), some of the “inventors” of PMs might well be frauds who are looking for an overly naive investor or just seeking publicity. Others are simply ignorant about the abovementioned impediments, especially at first. But, judging from various forum discussions, the majority appear to be honest and knowledgeable in this particular field. These people sustain their beliefs in the manner typical of most pseudoscientists—by denying the validity of scientific laws (Choronzon 1991) and by postulating a grand conspiracy theory, which might explain all the seeming failures. According to this theory, working PMs are not only possible, but they have already been built and the truth has been suppressed for various reasons and by various means, ranging from hostile discouragement to physical elimination of the invention along with its inventor (Bearden 2009).

Of course, thorough arguments have been mounted against conspiracy theories in general and this one in particular (Volkay 2007). But overall, a good skeptic should rely on testable facts rather than abstract arguments as much as possible, no matter how well reasoned these arguments are. Fortunately, testing conspiracy theories—at least this particular one—isn’t difficult (albeit potentially lethal if the conspiracy theorists are correct), and I have done exactly that on two separate occasions.

The first opportunity came along in November 2007, during an annual technological competition called BizTec. Competitors had to submit a description of some novel invention of their own to be judged by a panel composed of industrialists, venture capitalists, and academic staff. The best proposals in terms of practicability, innovation, and commercialization would get a cash prize, but I was only interested in the judges’ reaction to my proposal. According to the contest rules, every submitted idea—no matter how silly—would receive thorough feedback. For my submission I selected one of my own designs, which I had come up with awhile back. At the time of its conception, I even believed it was a valid idea for a short while before I realized it was just another PM. (It’s so hard to criticize your own ideas.)

Figure 1. The “flying saucer”—or rather a plate (holes up).

The idea is pretty straightforward. Imagine a simple saucer lying on a table. Both sides of the saucer are subjected to a constant and equal air pressure, so it doesn’t move. But the air pressure is caused by the air molecules randomly bouncing off the saucer’s surfaces. Now, suppose that the saucer’s lower surface was shaped (on a microscopic level) in such a way as to reflect the air molecules in some specific direction rather than randomly. Then, the air pressure on this surface might be different from normal. Even if the pressure changed only by one percent, the resulting difference would be enough to lift the saucer itself, as well as a two-pound weight attached to it, off the table. Of course, this principle isn’t new—it’s just an unusual variation of an old PM concept known as Maxwell’s demon, except that my PM doesn’t have any moving parts. Richard Feynman showed that Maxwell’s demon cannot work (Feynman et al. 1963), but his proof applies only to the moving trapdoors of the PM. So my design, having no moving parts, does appear to have a fighting chance of working; provided, of course, that we throw away the second law of thermodynamics, which explicitly forbids energy extraction from a static pressure.

According to the conspiracy folks, the judges at the competition, after seeing my proposal, had to make sure that I wouldn’t build such a device. At best, they’d just laugh at my idea until I gave up and threw it away in frustration. At worst, they’d call the Men in Black to erase my memory or even my very existence. Needless to say, I’d prefer the first option. But their actual response was something I wasn’t expecting at all: of some 150 submissions, ten received a $1,000 prize, my “flying saucer” being among those ten! The promised feedback was also quite encouraging. In all fairness, some judges did express their doubts that such a device could work, but they all liked the idea.

My experience is far from unique. Just a few months after the BizTec competition, designer Clay Moulton made headlines after winning a similar competition with his “gravity lamp” concept: a 600- to 800-lumen light source powered for a period of four hours by a slowly descending 50- to 100-pound weight (Moulton 2008). Simple high-school-level calculations show that these requirements correspond to the device having an efficiency of far beyond one hundred percent.

My second opportunity to test the conspiracy theory hypothesis came along a year after the BizTec competition. As part of my graduate training, I had to design and implement a laboratory experiment. Even though I came up with a few other interesting ideas, I decided to present my “flying saucer” first, again just to test the reaction of the professor in charge of the lab (hopefully not the “morph into an alien and devour me” kind of reaction). I was in for another surprise. Professor Yakov Krasik, the professor in charge, became excited about the idea and decided to go forward with it. Being a seasoned physicist, he of course recognized a PM at once, but that didn’t seem to bother him. So we started building our “flying saucer.”

Due to financial constraints, we couldn’t reshape the surface on a microscopic level, so instead we made a macroscopic array of conic holes to concentrate the reflecting air molecules. Computer simulations showed that this should work,⁵ provided that the air molecules didn’t collide with each other while inside the holes (which would randomize their trajectories, destroying the alleged concentrating effect). To meet this condition, we put the whole contraption into a vacuum chamber and reduced the air pressure until the mean free path⁶ of the air molecules became larger than the size of the holes (at about 10,000 times less than the normal air pressure). According to simulations, even under such low pressure the lifting force would be strong enough to be detected by high-precision scales. The experimental setting is shown in figures 1 and 2.

Figure 2. Vacuum chamber with the test “saucer” on the scales.

It should be noted that I only ran the experiment after I personally tested the equipment to make sure that neither High Cabal nor Illuminati agents had messed with it. Naturally, there was no measurable difference in the plate’s weight—with the holes facing up or down—at any pressure. Of course, if the results had been positive, then the second law of thermodynamics would fly out of the window faster than any flying saucer. Science prevailed once again when the saucer failed to work.

However, to my great surprise, Professor Krasik was genuinely disappointed by the negative result. I asked him whether he really believed this experiment could possibly have worked. After all, I told him right from the start that it couldn’t, and I thought we were on the same page. This was his response: “I was almost sure that nothing [would] be positive, but … life is [a] complicated thing—and the more I’m working, the more I understand that not all what I know, or what I studied, is correct” (ellipsis in the original). Now, dear reader, I ask you this: does that really sound to you like someone who is trying to suppress anything? To me it surely doesn’t.

No, I can definitely say that I have found no attempt at conspiracy. So, if no one has been able to build a working PM over the centuries, then perhaps the devices are indeed useless. Well, maybe useless isn’t the proper word here. After all, a PM has already earned me (despite myself) a thousand dollars, some lab experience, and this journal publication. But do PMs really work or could they even possibly work? There’s not much chance of that, I’m afraid.

Some may point out that a few isolated examples don’t constitute a thorough study, and they’d be right. However, it takes only one whistleblower to expose a conspiracy (if it exists) and only one small hole in the wall of pigheadedness to push a radical idea through (if it’s valid). I have discovered two such holes in the first two places that happened to come along. Not even once have I encountered any hostility or ridicule of the kind that PM proponents claim to suffer. If anything, my experience shows that the academy and the industry are more lenient toward PMs than they should be. This observation probably doesn’t apply to most scientists and engineers, but the level of acceptance for PMs that I’ve witnessed is still surprising—if not troubling. As for the more extreme conspiratorial ideas, there is the undeniable fact that as I write these lines, I’m still very much alive.

Notes

1. The term perpetual motion device is actually a misnomer because the existence of perpetual motion is assured by Newton’s first law. a more proper name would be perpetual motor (still abbreviated PM), because the idea is to generate useful work from the perpetual motion, whereas the real perpetually moving object is useless in this respect. If you try to produce work from its motion, it will cease to move as soon as its initial kinetic energy is depleted.

2. The zero-point module (ZPM) is a hypothetical device that can utilize vacuum energy. According to quantum field theory, each point in space contains an enormous, perhaps even infinite, amount of energy. However, there is no scientifically plausible way to harness this energy, at least not without violating the existing laws of physics. Although some PM inventors claim to have constructed devices that use vacuum energy, the whole ZPM concept is regarded as pseudoscience or, at best, science fiction.

3. Torsion field theory, originally put forward by a few Soviet scientists, postulates an existence of fields unknown to science with amazing properties, among which is the ability to produce unlimited energy, antigravity, and faster-than-light travel. The theory (and resulting devices) is generally considered to be pure nonsense.

4. An overunity device is any system that produces more useful energy than it consumes. In technical terms, this means that its energy efficiency is greater than one or unity (i.e., more than 100 percent), hence the name “overunity.” Such devices would obviously violate the law of energy conservation (the first law of thermodynamics) and thus are scientifically impossible.

5. It was discovered later that one of the formulas for the simulation was missing a sine factor, which explains the false-positive result. Of course it was obvious from the start (at least to me) that a simulation that produces nonphysical results must be flawed.

6. The mean free path is the average distance that an air molecule traverses before hitting another molecule. At normal air pressure, it’s less than one-tenth of a micron. Reduced air pressure means fewer molecules flying around, hence the increase in the mean free path.

References

Bearden, Tom. 2009. Suppression of The MEG. Public correspondence, February 11. Available online at www.cheniere.org/correspondence/021109.htm.

Choronzon, Frater. 1991. Perpetuum mobile: An assessment of the ‘laws of thermodynamics’ from a Gödelian viewpoint. Available online at http://freespace.virgin.net/ecliptica.ww/book/perpetuum.htm.

Feynman, Richard, Robert Leighton, and Matthew Sands. 1963. Ratchet and prawl. In The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Keely’s secret disclosed. 1899. The New York Times (January 20). Available online at http://tinyurl.com/nyt-keely.

Moulton, Clay. 2008. Gravia. Greener Gadgets Design Competition 2008. Available online at www.core77.com/competitions/greenergadgets/projects/4306/.

Peter, Hans. 2004. Perpetuum mobile: Concepts I. Available online at www.hp-gramatke.net/perpetuum/english/page0020.htm.

Volkay, Chris. 2007. Is this article on conspiracies part of a conspiracy? Skeptical Inquirer 31(5) (September/October): 44–46.

Sathya Sai Baba died in April 2011 after illness due to respiratory and kidney problems. He was a “living god” for nearly forty million people worldwide, and his believers have credited him with resurrecting the dead and healing the sick. To his Hindu followers, Baba was an avatar, or an incarnation, of a god who performed miracles, including materializing jewelry and vibuthi (holy ash) out of thin air. With schools in more than thirty-three countries and educational programs in 166 countries, Baba became a global figure despite having left India only once (to visit Uganda in 1968). His supporters, including high-profile Indian politicians and American businessmen, proudly celebrated his mystical feats and humanitarian efforts. But his critics denounced him as a fraud for decades, claiming his feats were common magic tricks. Later, former followers accused him of child molestation, after which the U.S. government issued travel warnings to its citizens about the allegations.

Sathya Sai Baba was born in 1926 in Puttaparthi, India. At fourteen, he declared he was the reincarnation of Sai Baba of Shirdi (1835–1918), an Indian guru who remains a popular Hindu figure and was rumored to levitate, read minds, and even heal the sick. In the 1940s, Baba began attracting attention when he started “materializing” items out of thin air. He then began traveling throughout South India building a following (Babb 1991). His celebrity was cemented when Americans traveled to India on spiritual voyages in the 1960s. In the past several years, Baba established many centers in the United States. For example, the USA Sai Organization lists eight locations in New York and twenty locations in Southern California.

Besides being a spiritual guru, Baba was well-connected politically in India, with high-profile believers in the two major parties: the right-leaning Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the left-leaning Indian National Congress (INC). These included former Prime Ministers A.B. Vajpayee and P.V. Narasimha Rao (Goldberg 2005). Journalist Khushwant Singh explained Baba’s ties to politicians in the 1995 documentary Guru Busters: “At many times some decisions and particularly the [political] appointments are made in consultation with him . . . people like Sai Baba have a national influence.” In the documentary, T.N. Seshan, then chief election commissioner of India, held up a ring Baba gave him and said, “He gave this ring out of nowhere, which is set with nine gems; there is a ruby in it, a pearl in it, sapphire in it, there is an emerald in it, there is a diamond in it . . . he realized this for me out of nowhere.” Seshan later explained, “I am not a jumbly person. I’ve got a master’s degree in physics; I have a master’s degree in administration economics from Harvard. I find nothing contradictory between the physics and the fact that I believe this [ring] came out of the blue.”

By 2011 the state’s tax department estimated the worth of Baba’s Sathya Sai Central Trust at about nine billion dollars. One of the Trust’s most notable projects was the building of the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences in Puttaparthi with donations, including a twenty-million-dollar contribution from Hard Rock Café and House of Blues cofounder Isaac Tigrett. In mid-June, nearly two months after Baba’s death, 216 lbs. (98 kg) of gold, 676.8 lbs. (307 kg) of silver, and about $2.5 million in cash were discovered in Baba’s personal chamber after it was opened for the Trust to inventory items (“98 kg Gold Found . . .” 2011).

Baba’s critics and former followers accused him of serious crimes. P.C. Sorcar Jr., a well-known Indian magician, has been a Baba critic for several years. In 2000, Sorcar explained that Baba’s miracles, such as making vibhuti (holy ash) appear, are “common tricks” using sleight of hand (“P.C. Sorcar: Baba’s a Bad Trickster” 2000). In that example, he says, the holy ash is from a capsule hidden in the palm of Baba’s hand, which is then crushed with his thumb to make the ash appear. Likewise, Basava Premanand (1930–2009), one of the most respected Indian rationalists, started investigating Baba in 1968. Premanand, who was the head of Indian Skeptics and wrote thirty-five books (five in English), devoted years to examining Baba (Polidoro 2003). He released his findings about the sleight-of-hand techniques used in Baba’s “miracles” to the public as early as 1976.

Perhaps more damaging was Tal Brooke’s 1970 book Lord of the Air (later called Avatar of Night), which recounted the author’s doubts about Baba upon learning of his sexual activities with young boys. The allegations did not go away. In 2004, stories of sexual abuse and child molestation surfaced in the BBC2 documentary The Secret Swami, in which journalist Tanya Datta interviewed former Baba devotees in the United States who said they had been sexually abused by him. The documentary featured interviews with government leaders who called the claims “baseless.” On the other hand, the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning in 2001 about “inappropriate sexual behavior by a prominent local religious leader” and later confirmed it was referring to Baba (Lewis 2006).

Datta’s report also explored a strange and still unexplained event in 1993. On June 6, 1993, four boys supposedly entered Baba’s bedroom with knives and were shot to death by local police. The police claimed they had to fatally shoot the boys after the boys attacked them with knives. A report from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India’s organization to investigate corruption and special crimes, discovered flaws and contradictions in the police reports, and it was rumored that police killed the four boys in cold blood. Datta said, “Some police officers were arrested but never charged. The case was eventually dropped.” She further reported, “Critics say police connections ensured that Sai Baba wasn’t even interviewed, despite being one of the witnesses to the events of that night.” Attempts by the former Home Secretary to reopen the case were unsuccessful, and the reasons behind the killings as well as the boys’ motives for entering Baba’s bedroom remain unknown. Premanand later published a book titled Murders in Sai Baba’s Bed Room that discussed the CBI’s description of the police cover-up and destruction of evidence.

Indian police officials spread the national flag on the transparent casket containing the body of Hindu guru Sathya Sai Baba. (PHOTO CREDIT: AFP PHOTO/Dibyangshu SARKAR/FILES)

On April 24, 2011, Baba died at the age of eighty-five. His death was likewise full of controversy. For one, Baba’s death contradicts his prediction posted on his website: “He is expected to leave His body [in] 2019” (International Sai Organization 2011a). After he was put on life support, medical specialists from the United States, Britain, and Australia traveled to Puttaparthi to help Baba. On April 5, as rumors of his illness spread, hundreds of devotees attempted to break into the hospital and attacked officials “for not allowing them to have a glimpse of the ailing Baba” (Das 2011). The next day, doctors reported progress when Baba’s alertness improved, but the state government worried about the impact of the organization becoming leaderless. Knowing the region was dependent on Baba, it sent a five-member team “to find out whether there is any system in place for running the scores of charitable schemes” created by Baba under the trust (“Andhra Govt Team . . .” 2011).

While Baba remained in the hospital, a miracle was proclaimed with followers and reporters flocking to see a four-foot wax figure of Baba “oozing perfumed oils from its feet” (Kumar 2011). The Times of India noted, “Devotees refused to consider that the wax idol could be melting in the sweltering heat and the oil was a resultant residue” (Kumar 2011). The same day, the Deccan Herald noted that the “idol stopped releasing the liquid after it was shifted to the ground floor of the residential complex” (“Axe Effect of Baba Wax Statue” 2011).

The next day, Baba’s liver stopped responding to treatment and he was pronounced dead due to multiple organ failure. The faithful flocked to Puttaparthi, paying their respects in prayer, and a memorial service was held with full state honors. In attendance were governors from two Indian states, four former or current chief ministers, and two Andhra Pradesh ministers (Krishnamoorthy 2011).

Baba’s death likely won’t bring an end to any controversy about his activities or supposed “miracles.” Many people are dependent on Baba’s humanitarian organization for free medical care and drinking water. With his unexpected death, it remains unclear what will happen to his organization and those who rely on it. One prediction is that there will be at least one person who will claim to be the third incarnation of Sai Baba. How that person will be received by Sathya Sai Baba’s followers is anyone’s guess. But an important lesson about supernatural claims can be learned from this case. During my 2010 visit to India, I was told a story by Lalitha Rajaram, who attended a Baba event in Delhi as a young girl decades ago. At the event, she was told by her friend to watch Baba carefully so as not to miss anything he did. She concentrated on Baba, closely following his movements with her eyes. Her concentration was abruptly shattered when Baba, through his handlers, told her to leave. Rajaram surmised that Baba saw her in the audience and, being wary of skeptics, did not want her there. Why would a god not want someone to watch him closely? More than likely because he was not a god but rather a human who lived within the laws of physics like the rest of us.

References

98 kg gold found in Sai Baba’s room. 2011. The Hindu (June 17). Available online at http://www.thehindu.com/news/article2113195.ece.

Andhra govt team to assess Saibaba trust takeover. 2011. Times of India (April 6). Available online at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/New-Article/articleshow/7880018.cms.

Axe effect of Baba wax statue. 2011. Deccan Herald (April 19). Available online at www.deccanherald.com/content/155075/axe-effect-baba-wax-statue.html.

Babb, Lawrence. 1991. Redemptive Encounters: Three Modern Styles in the Hindu Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Das, Ashok. 2011. Sai Baba remains critical, devotees asked to stay calm. Hindustan Times (April 5). Available online at www.hindustantimes.com/Sai-Baba-s-remains-critical-devotees-asked-to-stay-calm/Article1-681433.aspx.

Goldberg, Michelle. 2005. Untouchable? Salon.com (July 25). Available online at http://archive.salon.com/people/feature/2001/07/25/baba/index.html.

International Sai Organization. 1999. Sathya Sai Speaks 32(2). Available online at www.sssbpt.info/ssspeaks/volume32/sss32p2-01.pdf.

———. 2011a. A short history of Sathya Sai Baba. Available online at www.sathyasai.org/intro/history.htm.

———. 2011b. Introduction to Sathya Sai Baba. Available online at www.sathyasai.org/intro/message.htm.

Krishnamoorthy, Suresh. 2000. Sathya Sai Baba interred with State honours. The Hindu (April 28). Available online at www.thehindu.com/news/national/article1772631.ece.

Kumar, G. Arun. 2011. ‘Miracle’ in Puttaparthi, Baba statue oozes scented oil. The Times of India (April 20). Available online at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Miracle-in-Puttaparthi-Baba-statue-oozes-scented-oil/articleshow/8032118.cms.

Lewis, Paul. 2006. The Indian living god, the paedophilia claims and the Duke of Edinburgh awards. The Guardian (November 4). Available online at www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/nov/04/voluntarysector.india.

P.C. Sorcar: Baba’s a bad trickster. 2000. India Today (December 4). Available online at www.india-today.com/itoday/20001204/cover3.shtml.

Polidoro, Massimo. 2003. Don’t try this at home. Skeptical Inquirer 27(1) (January/February).

Secret swami. 2004. BBC2 (June 11). Available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/3791921.stm.

Sathya Sai Baba passes away, leaves behind Rs 40000-cr worth empire. 2011. The Economic Times (April 24). Available online at http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/sathya-sai-baba-passes-away-leaves-behind-rs-40000-cr-worth-empire/articleshow/8075953.cms.

Sathya Sai Baba’s gargantuan empire. 2011. India Today (April 5). Available online at http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/134423/latest-headlines/sathya-sai-babas-gargantuan-empire.html.

Tension in Puttaparthi, Sai Baba’s devotees attack district collector. 2011. India Express (April 5). Available online at www.indianexpress.com/news/tension-in-puttaparthi-sai-babas-devotees-attack-district-collector/771831/.

In the old-town portion of Genoa, Italy, the city where Christopher Columbus was born, stands the great Romanesque-Gothic cathedral of San Lorenzo (Saint Lawrence).¹ Here in the subterranean Museum of the Treasury—which houses reputed pieces of the True Cross, relics of John the Baptist, and other religious objects—is displayed Il Sacro Catino, “The Holy Basin.” This is one of the most famous embodiments of the legendary “Holy Grail,” and I was able to study both it and its legend there in the fall of 2009 (figure 1), attempting to resolve some of the mysteries and controversies concerning it.

Grail Legends

Romantic stories about the quest for the San Gréal, or “Holy Grail”—reportedly the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper—have proliferated for centuries. Popularly, the Grail (originally the word meant “dish”) is the talisman sought by the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table. The quest is known to English audiences largely though French romances compiled and translated by Sir Thomas Malory in his Morte d’Arthur in 1470. Therein the Grail is represented as the chalice from which Jesus and his disciples drank at the Last Supper and which was subsequently used to catch and preserve his blood from the Crucifixion. This act was usually attributed to Mary Magdalene or Joseph of Arimathea (the latter having claimed Jesus’s body for burial—see Mark 15:43–46).

The earliest Grail romance is Le Conte du Graal (“The Story of the Grail”), which was composed by Chrétien de Troyes around 1190. It describes how, when a girl “entered holding the grail, so brilliant a light appeared that the candles lost their brightness like the stars or the moon when the sun rises…. The grail... was made of fine, pure gold, and in it were precious stones of many kinds….” Two other grail stories, both written by Robert de Boron circa 1200, were Joseph d’Arimathie and Merlin. These gave the Grail quest a new Christian focus, representing it as a spiritual rather than chivalrous search. This epic constitutes the most important and best-known English version of the Arthurian and Grail adventures (Barber 2004, 19; Cox 2004, 75–76).

Other legends represent the Holy Grail variously as a silver platter, a miraculous cauldron or dish of plenty, a salver bearing a man’s severed head (like that of John the Baptist in Matthew 14:3–12), or a crystal vase filled with blood. Over time the Grail has also been represented as a reliquary (containing the Sacred Host or holy blood), a secret book, an effigy of Jesus, the philosopher’s stone, and many other portrayals. Around 1205 in a Bavarian poem titled Parzival, it was described as a magical luminous stone, more specifically as an emerald from Lucifer’s crown that had fallen to earth during the struggle in heaven. The term Holy Grail now popularly refers to any object of a quest, usually an unattainable one (Nickell 2007, 50–53).

The Historical Evidence

Unfortunately, there is no story about Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail in any text until the close of the twelfth century, when Robert de Boron penned his romance. Notably, the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s death do not suggest that Joseph or anyone obtained a dish or other vessel from the Last Supper and used it or any other receptacle to preserve Jesus’s blood. Records of the Holy Blood—the reputed contents of the cup Joseph possessed—are also of late vintage, perhaps the earliest coming from Mantra, Italy, in 804 (Nickell 2007, 53–56).

Nevertheless, several vessels lay claim to being the true Holy Grail—some twenty of which had surfaced by the sixteenth century. John Calvin ([1543] 2009, 62, 63) reported on several of the rival claimants for the title of “the cup in which Christ gave the sacrament of his blood to the apostles” (at the Last Supper). Calvin mentioned one at Notre Dame de l’Isle, near Lyons; another was in a monastery in the Albigéois; still another could be found at Genoa. This was “a vessel or cup of emerald” so “costly,” says Calvin sarcastically, that “our Lord must have had a splendid service on that occasion.” (See also my introduction to Calvin [1543] 2009, 32–33.)

The Emerald Bowl

Figure 2. A Genoese palace fresco depicts Guglielmo Embriaco, merchant and military leader, with the Catino as war booty.

Calvin is clearly referring to Il Sacro Catino, “The Holy Basin.” Most sources allege that this vessel—actually an emerald-green, hexagonal bowl—was brought to Genoa by Guglielmo Embriaco, following the conquest of Caesarea in 1101.² A fresco on the main façade of the Palazzo San Giorgio (figure 2) depicts crusader Guglielmo (“William” in English) holding as war booty the distinctive Catino. Twelfth-century writers acknowledged the purported intrinsic value of the bowl. For example, William of Tyre noted circa 1170 that it was “a vase of brilliant green shaped like a bowl” and that “the Genoese, believing that it was of emerald, took it in lieu of a large sum of money and thus acquired a splendid ornament for their church.” He adds, “They still show this vase as a marvel to people of distinction who pass through their city, and persuade them to believe it is truly an emerald as its color indicates” (quoted in Barber 2004, 168).

Others have seemed even more skeptical. States George Frederick Kunz in his The Curious Lore of Precious Stones ([1913] 1971, 259):

A queer story has been told regarding the Genoese emerald. At one time when the government was hard pressed for money, the Sacro Catino was offered to a rich Jew of Metz as pledge for a loan of 100,000 crowns. He was loath to take it, as he probably recognized its spurious character, and when Christian clients forced him to accept it under threats of dire vengeance in case of refusal, he protested that they were taking a base advantage of the unpopularity of his faith, since they could not find a Christian who would make the loan. However, when some years later the Genoese were ready to redeem this precious relic, they were much puzzled to learn that a half-dozen different persons claimed to have it in their possession, the fact being that the Jew had fabricated a number of copies which he had succeeded in pawning for large sums, assuring the lender in each case that the redemption of the pledge was certain.

Be this anti-Semitic folktale as it may, the Catino was pawned in 1319 and redeemed in 1327 (Marica 2007, 7; “The Dish of the Last Supper” 2010). It is still owned by the municipality of Genoa (Marica 2007, 12).

In any event, the Catino is not made of emerald—no matter how much its color and hexagonal shape give it the appearance of a faceted gemstone. At about fifteen inches in diameter it would have been an immense emerald indeed! Actually, according to the museum’s guidebook (Marica 2007, 12), it is simply of “mould-blown green glass.” Its manufacture is said to be Egyptian (Barber 2004, 168) or ninth-century Islamic (Marica 2007, 12), or possibly later.

Figure 3. Supposedly made of emerald, the Catino was broken in the early nineteenth century, disproving the claim. (Photos by Joe Nickell)

Its glass composition was revealed when it became broken (figure 3). According to the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica (s.v. “Genoa”), the Catino “was long regarded as an emerald of matchless value, but was found when broken at Paris, whither it had been carried by Napoleon I., to be only a remarkable piece of ancient glass.” (Another view is that it was broken on its return to Genoa [Marica 2007, 7], and a 1914 New York Times story claimed—possibly because of erroneous translation—that it had just been “accidentally broken” and was “beyond the possibility of repair” [“‘Holy Grail’ Shattered” 1914].) In any case, the bowl was restored in 1908 and again, finally, in 1951, when it received the metal armature that holds the pieces together (“The Dish of the Last Supper” 2010; Marica 2007, 7). (A rumor claims that the missing piece—again see figure 3—was kept in Paris in the Louvre [“The Dish of the Last Supper” 2010].)

Unholy Grail

When the belief that the Catino was made of emerald was broken to pieces, so was the claim that it was the Holy Grail. Its alleged Christological link was asserted long after the bowl arrived in Genoa, and it was predicated on the basis of its supposed emerald composition. This leap of faith was made by Jacopo da Voragine, archbishop of Genoa and author of Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend).

In a chronicle of Genoa written at the close of the thirteenth century, Jacopo, believing the vessel was indeed made of emerald, linked it to one of the Grail traditions. He cited certain English texts that claimed that Nicodemus had used an emerald vessel to collect Jesus’s blood when his body was placed in his tomb and that these texts called it “Sangraal”—that is, “Holy Grail” (Marica 2007, 7; Barber 2004, 168).

Alas, there is nothing to credibly connect the Sacro Catino to a first-century Grail, and the same may be said of other supposed Grail vessels. Indeed, observes Barber (2004, 170), “there is little or no evidence that anyone claimed in the thirteenth century to possess the Grail.” Certainly, claims for all such vessels date from after the period when most of the Grail romances were penned: between 1190 and 1240 (Nickell 2007, 60). This realization should put an end to fanciful Grail quests, but it probably will not: witness the popularity of such books as The Da Vinci Code (Brown 2003) and the book on which its author drew heavily, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Baigent et al. 1996)—silliness all.

Acknowledgements

I appreciate the help I received from Massimo Polidoro, who in 2009 not only saw to it that I was invited to Italy’s largest science festival, held in Genoa, but who, with other skeptics including Luigi Garlaschelli, accompanied me to the Cathedral of San Lorenzo. CFI Libraries Director Timothy Binga and CFI visiting scholar Christina Stevens provided valuable research assistance.

Notes

1. St. Lawrence was a deacon of the Roman Church, martyred during the persecution of Valerian in 258.

2. Another source reports that the bowl was booty from Almeria, Spain, taken in 1147. (See Marica 2007, 7.)

References

Baigent, Michael, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. 1996. Holy Blood, Holy Grail. London: Arrow.

Barber, Richard. 2004. The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Brown, Dan. 2003. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday.

Calvin, John. (1543) 2009. Treatise on Relics, from a translation of 1854. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books (introduction by Joe Nickell).

Cox, Simon. 2004. Cracking the Da Vinci Code. New York: Barnes and Noble.

The dish of the Last Supper. 2010. Available online (in Italian) at http://www.cicap.org/new/articolo.php?id=102013. Accessed January 26, 2010.

Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. 1910. New York: The Encyclopedia Britannica Co.

‘Holy Grail’ shattered. 1914. The New York Times (April 18.)

Kunz, George Frederick. (1913) 1971. The Curious Lore of Precious Stones. New York: Dover Publications.

Marica, Patrizia. 2007. Museo del Tesoro. Genoa, Italy: Sagep Editori Sri.

Museum of the Treasury of the Cathedral of St. Lawrence of Genoa. N.d. Museum handout in English. Copy obtained by author, October 31, 2009.

Nickell, Joe. 2007. Relics of the Christ. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. (Additional sources given in this source.)

Actually, stem cell therapies have been around for years, but only for very limited applications such as treating certain blood cancers. The debate surrounding the ethics of using embryonic stem cells, however, has highlighted the great potential of therapies based on stem cells.

Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that have the potential to turn into specific cell types. Embryonic stem cells are the most potent because they can theoretically turn into any cell type in the body. The hope of research into stem cells is that we can learn how to control the process of differentiation so that stem cells can be used therapeutically.

Potential applications that are already being researched include injection of stem cells into failing hearts—cells that will then turn into heart muscle cells and start beating along with the rest, strengthening the heart. While still experimental, this is likely to be an early application of this kind of use of stem cells. Similar experiments are underway using stem cells to repair damaged brains or spinal cords.

Stem cells might also be used not as replacement cells but as support cells. Genetically engineered stem cells can essentially become drug delivery systems or support cells that allow diseased cells to survive longer and function better.

But many hurdles remain, the biggest of which is keeping stem cells from becoming cancer cells. There is a reason our bodies are not already infused with stem cells that have unlimited regenerative ability (our bodies do have natural stem cells, but they are in specific numbers and locations). Stem cells share some characteristics with cancer cells, and injected stem cells are as likely to become cancers as replacements for diseased or injured cells.

Getting stem cells to do what we want them to, and getting them to survive long enough to do it, is also no trivial matter. Stem cells have tremendous potential, and they will likely be playing an increasing role in medical therapies over the next twenty years. But reality has yet to catch up with the hype.

The situation is ripe for exploitation. Stem cell clinics have been set up, mostly in poorly regulated countries such as China, India, and several countries in South America. They exist to lure in wealthy (by international standards) Westerners desperate for a cure (such as the parents of young blind children). Fees range from the tens of thousands to even hundreds of thousands of dollars, including the costs of travel. Most victims are not wealthy people who simply write a check but instead members of middle-class families who need to raise money for the treatments.

Once they have invested so much time, effort, and emotion and so many resources in the stem cell treatment—which often includes taking money from family, friends, and coworkers—these families have a huge investment in believing the treatment has worked, even when all objective evidence says otherwise. Often there is a temporary placebo effect from getting the treatment—or perhaps a temporary effect from the anesthesia or other aspects of the treatment—but no real improvement. But any fluctuation in symptoms is often interpreted as a sign the treatment has worked, which sometimes motivates the patients and their families to raise more money for more stem cell treatments.

The clinics themselves are not producing useful scientific data but are instead simply publicizing anecdotes of their success. There is often little transparency in what they are doing and no way of knowing what they are even injecting into their patients.

What little objective investigation we have into these stem cell clinic treatments reveals that patients are either unchanged or even harmed by the therapies. Ophthalmologist Shakesh Kaushal, of the University of Massachusetts, examined eight children treated with stem cells for blindness. “There didn’t seem to be any ostensible benefit from the stem-cell infusion,” he is quoted as saying in an NPR report, “in all of them, as far as we could tell” (Knox 2010).

Dobkin et al. (2006) reviewed the cases of seven patients who received stem cell injections for spinal cord injury. They conclude, “No clinically useful sensorimotor, disability, or autonomic improvements were found.” In other words, there was no benefit. There were, however, complications, including meningitis in five of the seven patients.

The media, for their part, mostly promote these fraudulent stem cell clinics. They often report stories of “miracle cures” in gushing terms, without the slightest amount of skepticism. These reports are little more than free advertisements for these clinics, driving more desperate patients through their doors.

Hope is a very positive emotion; it can keep us going in hard times, and it motivates all the hard work and investment it takes to develop high-tech treatments such as stem cell therapy. But there is a dark side to hope: false hope, promoted by premature uncritical hype. Unjustified hype also undermines legitimate therapies and scientific research as the public becomes disillusioned. While it is legitimate to discuss the great potential of stem cell therapies, such discussions must include the proper context. Stem cell therapies remain largely experimental, and there is no telling when or even if they will pan out.

The media need to take greater responsibility in relating these stories to the public. Medical professionals need to pay attention to what is happening, and they also need to get involved in properly informing the public. Governments need to pay close attention to how such clinics are regulated. And the public needs to approach claims of stem cell “miracles” with extreme skepticism and get advice from professionals before investing emotion and large amounts of resources into what is likely to be all hype and no hope.

References

Dobkin B.H., A. Curt, J. Guest. 2006. Cellular transplants in China: Observational study from the largest human experiment in chronic spinal cord injury. Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair 20(1) (March): 5–13.

Knox, Richard. 2010. Offshore stem cell clinics sell hope, not science. NPR.org (July 26). Available online at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128696529