Anti-Stratfordians start with the answer they want and work backward to the evidence—the opposite of good science and scholarship. They reverse the standards of objective inquiry, replacing them with pseudoscience and pseudohistory.

Could a mere commoner have been the greatest and most admired playwright of the English language? Indeed, could a “near-illiterate” have amassed the “encyclopedic” knowledge that fills page after page of plays and poetry attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon? Those known as “anti-Stratfordians” insist the works were penned by another, one more worthy in their estimation, as part of an elaborate conspiracy that may even involve secret messages encrypted in the text.

Now, there are serious, scholarly questions relating to Shakespeare’s authorship, as I learned while doing graduate work at the University of Kentucky and teaching an undergraduate course, Survey of English Literature. For a chapter of my dissertation, I investigated the questioned attribution of the play Pericles to see whether it was a collaborative effort (as some scholars suspected, seeing a disparity in style between the first portion, acts I and II, and the remainder) or—as I found, taking an innovative approach— entirely written by Shakespeare (see Nickell 1987, 82–108). However, such literary analysis is quite different from the efforts of the anti-Stratfordians, who are mostly nonacademics and, according to one critic (Keller 2009, 1–9), “pseudo-scholars.”

Through-the-Looking-Glass Syndrome

Like many other crank ideas and conspiracy theories, the notion that William Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems attributed to him may at first sight seem absurd. But step through the looking glass (to use Lewis Carroll’s term) and adopt the farfetched premise, and things can look very different. By thus starting with the answer and working backward to the evidence—the opposite of the approaches of science and scholarship—one can seemingly reverse the burden of proof and mirror the development of a viable hypothesis.

I call this process the Through-the-Looking-Glass Syndrome because the individual who suffers from such a bout of contagion has entered a realm in which the very standards of objective inquiry are effectively reversed, becoming their superficial lookalikes: pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and so on.

People are drawn into this illusory world, it appears to me, by something other than impartial reason. Having investigated questionable claims for more than four decades, I have marveled at how certain persons have walked, been lured, or stumbled headlong into some strange but profound belief. For example, time and again someone has been so attracted to the “haunting” image on the Shroud of Turin that he will not accept it as the red- ocher (iron-oxide) pigmented work of a confessed fourteenth-century artist, which has been confirmed by microchemical tests and radiocarbon dating. Wishfully believing that the cloth really wrapped the body of Jesus in the tomb, he sees the forger’s confession as false, the iron-oxide as a contaminant, and the carbon-dating as an error resulting perhaps from a burst of radiant energy that altered the carbon ratio at the moment of Christ’s miraculous resurrection (Hoare 1994; cf. Nickell 1998).

Countless more examples could be given. Anthropologist Grover Krantz believed that Bigfoot—indeed as portrayed in the famously faked Roger Patterson “Bigsuit” film of 1967— was the surviving giant ape Gigantopithecus. Harvard psychiatrist John Mack ignored evidence of his patients’ fantasy proneness and “waking dreams” to suggest they had been abducted by aliens. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the rationalist detective Sherlock Holmes, was easily duped both by séance trickery and schoolgirls’ hoaxed fairy photos (Nickell 2011, 68–72; Nickell 2007, 251–58; Nickell 1994, 153, 175–76).

As we see, many of the proponents of such ideas are quite intelligent. However, it seems that—just as in jujitsu when one’s large size becomes a liability once one has been thrown off balance—a person’s own intelligence can work against him when he is under the spell of the Through-the-Looking-Glass Syndrome: the intelligent person may be able to think up rationalizations and theoretical complexities of breathtaking cleverness, fooling first himself, then others. So it is with the Shakespeare-wasn’t-written-by-Shakespeare minions, as we shall see.

Stage Left: The Baconians

For nearly two centuries after his death, Shakespeare went unquestioned as the author of the plays and poems bearing his name. The first recorded doubter was a Reverend James Wilmot who—having undertaken to write a biography of the Bard but being unable to turn up a single original manuscript in Stratford—expressed his suspicions to a Quaker acquaintance, who reported them to his local Philosophical Society in Ipswich in 1805. In 1848, Colonel Joseph C. Hart published a book on seafaring that also included his notions on various other topics. Hart despised Shakespeare, whom he accused of buying or stealing plays that he “first spiced with obscenity, blackguardism and impurities before they were produced”; he felt the admirable portions, such as Hamlet’s soliloquies, were attributable to another (keller 2009, 138–41).

The first book-length assault on the Bard was launched in 1857 by a woman named Delia Bacon. Her 675-page The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded cast Shakespeare as “a stupid, ignorant, third-rate player” in a “dirty, doggish group of players.” Surely he could not have written the great works bearing his name, she concluded. Rather, Bacon (the sister of Congregational minister Leonard Bacon) believed the works must have been produced by a secret society of literary figures with Sir Walter Raleigh (1552– 1618) as head and Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) as guiding light. She believed, wrongly, that she was descended from the latter. So fanatical was Delia Bacon that she once spent a troubled night, armed with lantern and spade, at Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church planning to literally dig for answers. Believing she had deciphered cryptic messages in Francis Bacon’s letters that pointed to certain secrets—perhaps even manuscripts—hidden in a hollow beneath the gravestone, she fully intended to excavate but then struggled with her supposed evidence and finally lost her nerve. She died insane at age forty-eight (Keller 2009, 141–42; Schoenbaum 1991, 385–94).

Figure 1. The 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s complete works.

Delia Bacon had set the stage, as it were, for subsequent “Baconians”—those who became convinced Sir Francis Bacon had indeed written as “Shakespeare.” Enter a Minnesota crank named Ignatius T. Donnelly, who had previously “proved” that both Aztecs and Egyptians descended from a race that inhabited the (imaginary) “lost continent” of Atlantis. Donnelly pored over a copy of Shakespeare’s complete plays, the 1623 First Folio (see figure 1), and divined certain mathematical formulas (involving a set of “basic numbers” and “factor numbers”) that let him “decipher” supposed messages from the text. When the result was gibberish, as it often was, Donnelly modified the rules, which made cryptographers quick to laugh at his approach. “They pointed out,” explains code master Fletcher Pratt (1942, 87), “that his rules for solution were practically all variables, and that his solution in fact consisted of finding whatever words he wished to make up part of his ‘decipherment’ and then finding some combination of basic numbers and factor-numbers that would yield the desired result. Given so many variables it is possible to extract almost any message from a wordage as large as Shakespeare’s. . . .”

Nevertheless, other Baconians followed. Orville Ward Owen, a physician in Detroit, caught the bug and spent the remainder of his life utilizing his own supposedly improved method of decipherment. One of Owen’s divined Baconian messages urged, “Take your knife and cut all our books asunder, And set the leaves on a great firm wheel/ which rolls and rolls.” Inspired, Owen constructed two massive reels, turned by (appropriately) a crank, which unrolled a thousand-foot canvas. Mounted in rows on this were the printed pages of text from Shakespeare, Bacon, and others. Owen or a member of his three-woman staff operated the machine using “key” words to extricate text dictated to a typist. In time Owen published five of his six volumes of Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story. Still later he received communications from Bacon’s ghost (Schoenbaum 1991, 411–13).

Owen’s secretary, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, next launched her own unique method of deciphering Bacon’s supposedly concealed messages. She in fact employed a “biliteral cipher” actually invented by Bacon. (One of the ciphers I studied as a budding cryptanalyst of about twelve, it employs two fonts of printing type, say, roman and italic, which we can designate a and b. The text that will carry the secret text is marked off in five-letter units, so that the letter A can be represented by aaaaa, B by aaaab, and so on [see Gaines 1956, 6– 7].)

Unfortunately, Gallup’s supposed decipherments were subjected to detailed analysis, most thoroughly by the famous American code experts Colonel William and Elizabeth Fried man, with devastating results. The type of Elizabethan times bore imperfections, became battered, was often mixed indiscriminately, which—coupled with the effect of rough paper and other factors—meant that “differences” in type could easily be found, even where none existed (Pratt 1942, 90–91). As Shakespearean scholar Samuel Schoenbaum (1991, 419) says of Gallup, “What she had discovered was not a biliteral cipher but a biliteral Rorschach test.” Moreover, the revealed text bore words that were not in use until after Bacon’s death. Gallup did admit, at one point, that to distinguish between a and b typefaces, it was necessary to use “intuition” (Pratt 1942, 91–92). The entire quest of the Baconians to find secret texts in Shakespeare’s writings is reminiscent of journalist Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code books (1997; 2002), which tout “predictions” of modern events that were allegedly “encoded” in the Hebrew Bible about three thousand years ago. (See Thomas 2003 for a rebuttal.)

Marlowe et al.

Although there is no convincing evidence that Bacon ever wrote a single play, there were many adherents to the Bacon-as-Shakespeare “theory.” However, that conviction was eventually followed by a Marlovian craze—the belief that Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), the greatest Elizabethan dramatist prior to Shakespeare, penned “Shakespeare.” The fact that Marlowe was killed in a tavern fight before the majority of the Bard’s plays had been written did not faze the Marlovians. Having stepped through the looking glass, their chief advocate, a Broadway press agent named Calvin Hoffman, conjured up an explanation.

Marlowe’s death, Hoffman imagined, was staged by killing some foreign sailor in his stead, while Marlowe fled via France to Italy where he began to write plays before eventually returning to England in disguise. Everything was supposedly arranged by his aristocratic gay lover who hired an actor, Will Shakespeare, to allow his name to grace the manuscript. This imagined scenario was, said the Times Literary Supplement (January 24, 1956), “a tissue of twaddle,” but surely the reviewer was being too kind (Schoenbaum 1991, 445–47).

Beyond Marlowe, some seventy other candidates have been proposed, ranging from Sir Walter Raleigh, Cardinal Wolsey, and Ben Jonson to various earls—of Darby, of Essex, of Rutland, and, of course, of Southampton (the latter having been Shakespeare’s patron)— and even Queen Elizabeth I (Wilson 1993, 15–20; Keller 2009, 135–36 Schoenbaum 1991, 395–404). Then there is the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, the current favorite of the anti- Stratfordians.

The Earl of Oxford

In 1920, an english schoolmaster with the unfortunate name J. Thomas Looney published his “Shakespeare” Identified, setting forth the claim that the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (1550–1604), was the true author of the plays and poems bearing Shakespeare’s name. Intellectually naive, the book unsurprisingly attracted many followers.

The Loonies adopted “Oxford” as their standard bearer even though he had died before King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and several other plays were performed. They postulate that scholars misdated Lear and Macbeth and that the other plays, having been left unfinished, were subsequently completed by inferior dramatists (Schoenbaum 1991, 430–34).

Their evidence for Oxford as author is as questionable as their belief is impassioned. They discovered, for example, in a 1578 address to Oxford by fellow poet Gabriel Harvey, a tell-tale clue: Harvey says, “Thine eyes flash fire, thy will shakes spears…” [emphasis added]—an unmistakable reference to the Bard! Unfortunately, this is a rogue translation of the Latin, which really just says, “Thine eyes flash fire. Thy countenance shakes a spear” (Keller 2009, 162–64).

One Oxfordian of the 1940s even enlisted the aid of a spiritualist. The medium used “automatic writing” to link Shakespeare, Bacon, and Oxford, who supposedly had collaborated to produce the plays (Wilson 1993, 19–20).

Oxfordians believe the Earl of Oxford adopted “William Shakespeare” as a pen name. That the hyphenated version is used for about half of the quarto editions of the plays led one recent Oxfordian, Charles Ogborn Jr., to write in 2009, “When we come upon a regularly hyphenated English name compounding two words not in themselves names and also descriptive of an action, we may be sure that the name is fictitious and intended to be understood as of allegorical significance.” This is absurd and begs the question, why then was not the hyphenated spelling used for all printed versions of the plays? In fact, creative phonetic spelling was common in Shakespeare’s time, as evidenced, for example, by such different versions as Will, Willm, William, Willelmum, etc., and Shakspere, Shackspere, Shaxpere, Shagspere, Shakespear, Shake-speare, and Shakespeare; likewise, there were eleven different versions of Christopher Marlowe’s surname (Keller 2009, 156–57).

In 1987 a moot-court debate on the Oxford-versus-Shakespeare controversy was held at the American University. It was presided over by three U.S. Supreme Court Justices: Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, and John Paul Stevens. They found in favor of Shakespeare, and Justice Stevens pointedly concluded that “the Oxfordian case suffers from not having a single, coherent theory of the case” (qtd. in Bethell 1991, 47).

Will the Real Shakespeare…

Or this heading could read, “Will, the real Shakespeare.”

Although the anti-Stratfordians savage Shakespeare (but resent any criticism of themselves or their candidate for authorship), the fact is that there is no proof (innuendo and coincidence and mystery mongering are not proof) that “Shakespeare” was written by anyone other than William Shakespeare. And there is much evidence that he was indeed the author.

The famous individual of that name was a historical personage born at Stratford in 1564 and christened (according to the Holy Trinity Church baptismal register) on April 26: “Guliel mus filius Johannes Shakspere”—that is, translating from the Latin, “William, son of John Shakspere” (Schoenbaum 1991, 7–8). While there is no record of Shakespeare attending Stratford’s grammar school, there is no record of anyone doing so prior to the nineteenth century (Matus 1991, 66); old records are frequently incomplete or missing (as I learned during my years as a certified geneaological specialist). A marriage license was issued on November 27, 1582, to “Willelmum Shaxpere et Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton”— the clerk apparently mis-hearing the bride’s surname, which was Hathaway; the matter was resolved by a bond of the next day for “Anne Hathwey” to wed “William Shagspere.” Subsequent records list the baptism of their eldest daughter Susanna (in 1583) and twins, Hamnet and Judith (1585) (Schoenbaum 1991, 10–12).

From 1585–1592 transpired the somewhat misnamed “lost years,” during which Shakespeare was known to have been in London. In 1592 Robert Green alerted his fellow dramatists to Shakespeare as a young literary encroacher, calling him

. . . an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide [quoting from Shakespeare’s Henry VI¹] supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse [unrhymed iambic pentameter] as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum [Jack-of-all-trades], is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in the country.

The pun on his name, coupled with the readily identifiable line, represents the earliest mention of Shakespeare as an actor and playwright (Wilson 1993, 124–25).

Additional evidence reveals the continuing life of a very real person:

For instance, Shakespeare is by no means without background documentation, albeit mostly of a dry-as-dust legal variety. With occasional exceptions, the christenings, marriages and deaths of the close members of his family are all to be found in the still-extant registers of his home parish church, Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon-Avon. As record of his life as a successful working actor, his name appears high in Ben Jonson’s First Folio’s cast lists of the performances of some of Jonson’s plays by Shakespeare’s company. In the case of some, but by no means all, of Shakespeare’s plays as published in his lifetime, his name is linked with them formally both on the title page and on the surviving official register of the Stationers’ Company, the official trade union of the booksellers and printers of his time. London Public Record Office documents show him to have acted as witness in a court case, complete with his authenticated signature to this effect. Also in London’s Public Record Office and elsewhere are to be found deeds of his property dealings (with two more of his signatures), the wills of his London fellow actors and Stratford friends, which include some kindly remembrances of him, and his own will, the latter of which bears the final three of the six signatures generally agreed as authentically his. (Wilson 1993, 9)

William Shakespeare died about April 23, 1616, and was buried on April 25. In 1623 the famous First Folio of his plays, collected by fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, was published (again, see figure 1), showing a body of work so impressive that many believe it must be the work not of a commoner but an aristocrat.

How did the Bard acquire the vast learning shown in his writings? Shakespeare’s inherent genius would have been supplemented by a serious education in grammar school (where he would have learned some Latin and Greek) and later residence in London, Britain’s intellectual center, where he obviously read omnivorously. Himself an actor, as well as a shareholder in an acting company and a theater, he befriended many playwrights, poets, scholars, travelers, gentlemen, and others (Keller 2009, 12, 271)—sources of knowledge indeed. (Nevertheless, Shakespeare did not always get things right: for example, he gave Bohemia a seacoast and put clocks in ancient Rome [Evans 1949].)

Oxfordians wonder at the absence of any manuscripts, letters, or diaries in Shakespeare’s handwriting, but there is a general lack of such materials from Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists (Keller 2009, 4). They apparently placed little value on keeping such items, since collecting literary autographs did not become a serious endeavor until the latter part of the eighteenth century (Matus 1991, 70).

To sum up, there really was a Shakespeare, and to believe that someone else wrote the plays and poems bearing his name—that there was in fact a conspiracy to perpetrate an elaborate hoax—is to gratuitously violate the principle of Occam’s razor, the dictum that the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is to be preferred.

But those who have stepped through the looking glass will not be dissuaded. As Schoenbaum (1991, 451) notes, nothing “will erase suspicions fostered over a century by amateurs who have yielded to the dark power of the anti-Stratfordian obsession. One thought perhaps offers a crumb of redeeming comfort: the energy absorbed by the mania might otherwise have gone into politics.”

Note

1. From part III, act I, scene iv, line 137. Shakespeare’s correct wording is “O tiger’s heart wrapt in a woman’s hide!”

References

Bethell, Tom. 1991. The case for Oxford. The Atlantic Monthly October: 45–61.

Drosnin, Michael. 1997. The Bible Code. New York: Simon & Schuster.

———. 2002. The Bible Code II. New York: Viking Press.

Evans, Bergen. 1949. Cited in Keller 2009, 48–49.

Gaines, Helen Fouché. 1956. Cryptanalysis: A Study of Ciphers and Their Solution. New York: Dover.

Hoare, Rodney. 1994. The Turin Shroud Is Genuine. London: Souvenir Press.

Keller, Frederick A. 2009. Spearing the Wild Blue Boar—Shakespeare vs. Oxford: The Authorship Question. New York: iUniverse, Inc.

Matus, Irvin. 1991. The case for Shakespeare. The Atlantic Monthly October: 64–72.

Nickell, Joe. 1987. Literary investigation: Texts, sources, and “factual” substructs of literature and interpretation. Doctoral dissertation, Lexington: University of Kentucky.

———. 1994. Camera Clues. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.

———. 1998. Inquest on the Shroud of Turin: Latest Scientific Findings. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

———. 2007. Adventures in Paranormal Investigation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

———. 2011. Tracking the Man-Beasts. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

Ogborn, Charles. 2009. Quoted in Keller 2009, 157.

Pratt, Fletcher. 1994. Secret and Urgent: The Story of Codes and Ciphers. Garden City, New York: Blue Ribbon Books.

Schoenbaum, S[amuel]. 1991. Shakespeare Lives. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Thomas, David E. 2003. It’s ba-a-ack! The Bible Code II (book review). Skeptical Inquirer 27(2) (March/April): 59–60.

Wilson, Ian. 1993. Shakespeare, The Evidence: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and His Work. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

“Our histories should give only what is known to be the truth, and falsehood should always be cried down whenever it is known to exist.”

—David Wyrick, accused perpetrator, but likely victim, of the Newark “Holy Stones” forgeries (1860)

As noted in Part One of this discussion (SI, September/October 2011), the documentary The Lost Civilizations of North America (produced by Steven Smoot, Rick Stout, and Barry McLerran) purports to be an exploration of “the fascinating world of ancient North America, and why the artifacts and evidences of ancient civilizations have been lost and largely ignored” (qtd. from the DVD’s website at www.lostcivilizationdvd.com/documentary.html). The ancient civilizations that are alleged to have left their mark in pre-Columbian North America include, at a minimum, Egyptians, Hebrews, and Celts. The documentary acknowledges that “mainstream archaeologists” do not accept the claim that any of these civilizations had contact with the indigenous North American cultures, yet it features the views of several “diffusionists,” none of whom appear to be archaeologists (“mainstream” or otherwise). These diffusionists argue that a wealth of artifacts appears to support the “lost civilization” claim, and they purport to explain why mainstream archaeologists have so assiduously ignored or suppressed this evidence for numerous episodes of intercontinental intercourse.

What Is the Evidence for Lost Civilizations in North America?

Interspersed throughout Lost Civilizations of North America are images of a bewildering variety of artifacts, some of which are recognized icons of American archaeology while others are less familiar and even startlingly odd. The narrator explains these puzzling juxtapositions as follows:

Many artifacts are shown throughout this film. Some artifacts are accepted as authentic by the scientific community today, and some are not. In many cases authentic artifacts may be shown alongside controversial ones. This is done in part to underscore the difficulty in determining authenticity, and also to illustrate a conflict that exists between mainstream anthropologists, and those who have been termed “diffusionists.”

Figure 1. Ostensibly discovered in an ancient mound located in West Virginia, the Grave Creek Stone’s inscription (top) reflects an impossible mixture of a number of Old World written languages (Grave Creek Mound Museum). The artifact on the bottom is one of hundreds of “Michigan Relics” produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that were supposed to prove the presence of all manner of Old World people in the New World in antiquity (courtesy of Thom Bell).

There are numerous problems with this justification for intentionally blurring the distinction among verifiably ancient artifacts, objects of questionable authenticity, and objects that are demonstrably fraudulent. First, it falsely suggests that there is a legitimate scientific controversy over the interpretation of these artifacts. Framing this alleged controversy in this way is very similar to creationists attempting to characterize their argument with evolutionary biologists. As with that more familiar canard, there is no real scientific controversy. We are not aware of any contemporary anthropologist who thinks there is scientific validity to the infamous artifacts featured in this documentary, such as the Michigan Relics (Halsey 2004), the Grave Creek Stone (Lepper 2008), the Bat Creek Stone (Mainfort and Kwas 2004), and the Newark “Holy Stones” (Lepper and Gill 2000) (figure 1).

The effect of presenting these bogus objects in juxtaposition with ancient masterpieces, such as the Adena effigy pipe (figure 2), also shown in the documentary, is to validate infamous frauds at the expense of the authentic artifacts. It appears deliberately obfuscatory and is demeaning to the achievements of the ancient Native American artisans.

Second, we believe that the documentary’s justification for mixing authentic with “controversial” artifacts wildly exaggerates the “difficulty in determining authenticity.” In any archaeological analysis, the key to determining the authenticity of a putative ancient artifact is to establish its context. For virtually none of the disputed artifacts shown in the documentary is there any reliable information about its archaeological context. To begin with, none of the artifacts shown, nor any similar pieces that might lend support to the authenticity of the objects highlighted in the video, has been recovered in any modern archaeological excavation using the tools and techniques of late twentieth-century archaeology. This is a crucial point: by and large, artifacts with putative ancient Old World writing were found in New World sites during only a rather narrow window of time (primarily from the mid-nineteenth into the early twentieth century), a period during which there was enormous controversy concerning the origins of the mound builders of the American Midwest and Southeast. In the far more extensive archaeological fieldwork accomplished between 1930 and the present, no such artifacts have ever been discovered by professional archaeologists. We can think of no legitimate artifact category in which archaeologists ceased finding examples of an artifact type once the field became professionalized with applied scientific methodology.

Figure 2. The Adena effigy pipe is a remarkably decorated tubular smoking pipe made from Ohio pipestone. It was found in the Adena Mound in Chillicothe, Ohio, which gave its name to the Adena culture, circa between 800 BCE and 100 CE. (Ohio Historical Society)

In many cases, moreover, information on the historical context of these inscribed objects has demonstrated that they are frauds or forgeries. The video’s narrator asserts, for example, that the Bat Creek Stone was “found using modern methods within the original surroundings” (emphasis added) (figure 3). Donald Yates, a featured diffusionist who holds a doctorate in classical studies, goes on to assert that naysayers can’t dismiss this artifact because it was recovered in an “official excavation by the Smithsonian Institution,” as if that alone should be considered sufficient evidence—by professional archaeologists or anyone else, for that matter—for its acceptance as genuine.

It certainly is true that John Emmert, the man who claimed to have found the Bat Creek Stone, was in the employ of the Smithsonian Institution at the time of its discovery. During this period, the Smithsonian hired an eclectic assortment of individuals with varying levels of expertise to conduct local operations on the Institution’s behalf. Emmert appears to have been one of the lesser qualified excavators, and he was later fired because of questions about the quality of his work (Mainfort and Kwas 1991, 12). Even discounting the obvious questions about his competence, since Emmert excavated the stone in 1889, his methods could hardly be considered “modern” in any meaningful sense. Finally, since the archaeologists Robert Mainfort and Mary Kwas discovered the source used by the forgers of the Bat Creek inscription, conclusively demonstrating it to be a fraud (Mainfort and Kwas 2004), consideration of Emmert’s qualifications is moot. It is clear now that Emmert either perpetrated the fraud himself or failed to detect the imposture because of his dodgy methods.

Figure 3. The Bat Creek Stone is one of a number of ancient artifacts found in North America bearing inscriptions in Old World scripts. All such artifacts have been shown to be fraudulent.

The Newark Holy Stones

The artifacts given the most screen time in the documentary are the so-called Newark “Holy Stones.” In fact, the narrator refers to the controversy surrounding the interpretation of these artifacts as a case study that “demonstrates the division between some diffusionists and most mainstream archaeologists.” If the producers of the documentary sincerely believe this statement, then it is difficult to understand why they feature only the diffusionist side of the argument. What makes this one-sided presentation particularly perplexing is that one of the scientists interviewed (one of the authors of this article) has written extensively on the Newark “Holy Stones” and therefore could have ably represented the “mainstream” view (Lepper 1999; Lepper and Gill 2000). Note that the narrator’s use of the qualifier in his phase “most mainstream archaeologists” leaves the listener with the false impression that there might be some “mainstream archaeologists” out there who accept the Newark “Holy Stones” as authentic. We are aware of none who have gone on record in support of these egregious, if historically interesting, forgeries.

Figure 4. About 6.8 inches in length and made from black limestone, the Decalogue Stone is named for the fact that it is inscribed with the Ten Commandments in an ancient-looking form of Hebrew. It was discovered in 1860 during excavations in the remains of the largest stone mound in North America. (Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum)

The Newark “Holy Stones” consist of five separate artifacts, at least two of which even many diffusionists acknowledge to be fraudulent (Lepper 1991). The documentary focuses on the second of the artifacts to be reported although both of the two surviving “Holy Stones” are featured in various video clips.

David Wyrick, a Licking County, Ohio, surveyor and avocational archaeologist, made his first sensational discovery, the so-called “Keystone,” in a shallow excavation at the monumental Newark Earthworks. He found the “Decalogue Stone” (figure 4), even more spectacular and apparently definitive proof of his belief that ancient Israelites had built the ancient mounds, just five months later at a different site a few miles south of Newark (Lepper and Gill 2000).

The Reservoir Stone Mound, also known as the Jacksontown Stone Mound, was the largest aboriginal stone structure in North America north of Mexico. It was forty feet in height and 180 feet in diameter. First described in 1822 in a call to preserve the magnificent edifice, it was, nevertheless, largely destroyed between 1831 and 1832 when the stones were used in the construction of an extensive series of dikes framing the reservoir on the Licking summit of the Ohio and Erie Canal. Estimates vary, but between 10,000 and 15,000 wagon loads of stone are said to have been hauled away for this purpose. When the bulk of the stones had been removed, a portion of a circular arrangement of ten to twenty eight-foot-tall earthen mounds was revealed.

In the video, Ancient American magazine’s publisher Wayne May narrates the story of Wyrick’s discovery of the Decalogue Stone:

They found one major earth structure in the center surrounded by twelve small burials. David Wyrick went straight for the middle one with nine other gentlemen and they began to dig that mound down and they uncovered it—and when they did they found a wooden coffin made out of oak and opening up that coffin in there was a large skeleton of a man, but also in this coffin was a little box no more than maybe about eight or ten inches in size and it was cemented shut. Wyrick and the men, while they were all there together, they pried this box apart and in it was a black stone. They opened this box and here was this unusual artifact.

This account of the basic facts of the discovery is riddled with errors. Some may seem trivial, but they are important to document because they demonstrate a pattern of carelessness with regard to facts that is depressingly typical of the diffusionist literature.

1. The Decalogue Stone was not found in the central mound but in one of the ten to twenty mounds arranged in a ring at the base of the stone mound. The exact total of these small mounds was never recorded, probably because the entirety of the stones have never been removed, leaving some still buried beneath the remnants of the mound. May’s reference to “twelve” leaves the unwarranted impression of an exact count. The fact that May settled so precisely on the number twelve may have something to do with the mystical significance of that number in the Judeo-Christian tradition (twelve tribes of Israel, twelve disciples, etc.).

2. Wyrick did not undertake his investigation with nine other men but with five.

Sources allow us to identify at least four of them: Jacob Wyrick, John Nicol, John Haynes, and John Larett. Nicol’s presence is significant, because he was directly implicated in the blatant hoax of two of the subsequent “Holy Stones” (Lepper 1991).

3. Wyrick’s team did not discover the wooden “coffin.” The “coffin,” originally described as a “trough,” was found in 1853 by William Parr (Wyrick 1860). Parr cut off a piece of the wooden trough to retain, but he left the rest in the hole to be reburied. Wyrick and a group of men returned to the site in August of 1860 to re-excavate the mound in order to recover the wooden “sarcophagus.” The excavation that resulted in the recovery of the Decalogue Stone was Wyrick’s second expedition to the site and at least the third time the mound had been dug into.

4. Neither Wyrick nor Parr recovered the skeleton of a “large man,” and the Decalogue Stone was not found in the coffin but rather several inches beneath it. Wyrick (1860) reported that Parr found human bones, but they amounted to only “bits of skull,” a few teeth, and some hair. There would have been no way to reliably identify either the sex or the size of the person represented by these meager human remains, and the bones are not known to be curated in any museum collection where they could be re-studied using modern forensic methods. The only artifacts associated with the human remains were ten copper bracelets. The Decalogue Stone was found in clay well below the original depth of the wooden burial platform.

May then recounts Wyrick’s efforts to interpret the Decalogue Stone:

They took it to some scholars—identified that it was probably some type of Hebrew. They took it to some rabbis living in the area and looking at it, they said yes they could read it and it was a complete rendition of the Ten Commandments. They called it block Hebrew. And so then naysayers started picking on Wyrick. He was accused of sticking this stone in front of these nine men somehow and being able to hide it and conceal it.

And it wasn’t until sometime in the 1900s, lo and behold, in Israel they find, guess what, they found block Hebrew. The block-style of Hebrew was given a name by the experts—monumental Hebrew, because of the way it was written. Long after Wyrick. After!

In other words, May is claiming that the version of Hebrew found on the Decalogue Stone could not have been fraudulently produced in 1860 because this form of writing was not known until years after the discovery of the stone. This is all nonsense. In fact, Wyrick took the Decalogue Stone directly to the local Episcopal Minister, John McCarty, who published a comprehensively annotated translation of the inscription within a week of its discovery (McCarty 1860).

There were rabbis who could, indeed, read the inscription. Abraham Geiger, a highly respected German rabbi and scholar of Hebrew, concluded in the July 27, 1860, New York Times that the Decalogue Stone inscription was “the bungling work of an unskilled stone mason and the strangeness of some letters as well as the many mistakes and transpositions was his fault. The letters are not antique. This is not a relic of hoary antiquity” (qtd. in Alrutz 1980, 41).

Geiger’s assessment has been confirmed and elaborated by our colleague Jeff Gill, who noted specific errors in the inscription that could have occurred only if someone were working from a conventional nineteenth-century typeface Hebrew text and then converting each letter into the corresponding antique-looking character of the Decalogue alphabet. Doing so would result in a recurring pattern of error, which confirms the modern source for the inscription (Lepper and Gill 2000, 20). Frank Moore Cross, Harvard University professor of Near Eastern languages and one of the foremost contemporary authorities on ancient Hebrew, fully corroborated Gill’s conclusions, writing that it was clear that “the modern forms of the Hebrew character[s] . . . stand ultimately behind” the Decalogue Stone inscription (Cross 1991). Cross offered his opinion that the Decalogue Stone was a “grotesque” forgery that could not be taken seriously.

May’s peremptory dismissal of the idea that Wyrick might have been able somehow to bury the fraudulent Decalogue Stone in front of the “nine” witnesses is completely unwarranted, since the mound in question had been dug into on at least two previous occasions. Moreover, Wyrick’s plan to continue his investigation of the mound was known by at least five other individuals, any one of whom would have had ample opportunity to plant the artifact within the excavation before the day arranged for the second expedition. Nicol’s subsequent involvement in a similar proven hoax casts considerable suspicion in his direction.

May’s claims about the significance of block Hebrew, also called monumental Hebrew, are specious and uninformed. “Block Hebrew” is simply what palaeographers and epigraphers call Classical Hebrew orthography from the Second Temple–era down to the present, and there is no coherent correspondence between any ancient epigraphic Hebrew and the Decalogue alphabet.

Finally, by ignoring the historical context in which the Newark “Holy Stones” appeared, May and other diffusionists lose the opportunity to understand the true nature of the forgeries. The Newark “Holy Stones” represented an attempt to encompass the prehistory of the New World within the biblical history of the Old World, thereby undermining the dangerous doctrine of polygenesis, which sought to provide a scientific justification for both the enslavement of African people and the forced removal of Native Americans from their homelands. Ironically, these ideas would have provided some support and nuance for a central theme of the Lost Civilizations of North America documentary.

How Did Important Evidence of a Lost Civilization Come to Be ‘Lost’?

Lost Civilizations of North America advances the unsupportable proposition that the epigraphic evidence supporting diffusionist claims was not simply discarded after a thorough review by fair-minded scholars, but that it was actually accepted and deliberately suppressed by official historians because “the idea that ancient inhabitants knew of and used Middle Eastern Hebrew symbols undermined the notion that Native Americans were isolated savages.”

The claim that scholars have dismissed or even destroyed data to support racist interpretations of America’s past are made explicitly by Wayne May in the documentary. His argument rests on the use of a selectively edited quotation by John Wesley Powell, who served as the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology and the U.S. Geological Survey: “Hence, it will be seen that it is illegitimate to use any pictographic matter of a date anterior to the discovery of the continent by Columbus for historic purposes.” This quote appears on the screen just as we show it here, ending with a period as if this were the complete thought expressed by Powell. From this it is asserted that scientists knew about Native American writing and conspired to suppress the truth about such writing and its connection to Old World alphabets by forbidding the scientific use of these “pictographs.” This is, of course, patently false, and when his statement is read in its full context it is clear that this was not what Powell meant. The quoted phrase does not end in a period as shown in the documentary. Instead, a semi-colon separates the first part of the sentence from the rest of Powell’s thought. Powell’s entire statement is repeated here with the part excised in the documentary in italics:

Hence, it will be seen that it is illegitimate to use any pictographic matter of a date anterior to the discovery of the continent by Columbus for historic purposes; but it has a legitimate use of profound interest, as these pictographs exhibit the beginning of written language and the beginning of pictorial art, yet undifferentiated; and if the scholars of America will collect and study the vast body of material scattered everywhere—over the valleys and on the mountain sides—from it can be written one of the most interesting chapters in the early history of mankind. (Powell 1881, 75)

In other words, while Powell felt it “illegitimate” to interpret pictographs (figure 5) directly as a form of written history, he nevertheless felt they were of enormous importance and should be collected and analyzed precisely because they represent the beginning of a written language (exactly what the documentary claims Powell and others were attempting to hide) and a history could be derived by those who studied them. Powell was not attempting to suppress archaeological evidence but simply trying to subordinate theory to the collection of data.

Figure 5. Petroglyph panels, like this spectacular example called Newspaper Rock (in Utah), are splendid works of art. While pointing out that petroglyphs and pictographs could not be identified as a formal written language, John Wesley Powell nevertheless explicitly recognized their significance for the stories they told of the lives of Native Americans. (K. Feder)

Clearly, Powell got it wrong on some issues. For example, while he correctly noted that the “pictographs” produced by the civilizations of Mesoamerica were more “conventional” than those seen in North America, he incorrectly surmised that theirs wasn’t a true system of writing. This error, however, does not warrant the implication made in the documentary that his goal was to suppress any evidence showing that the native people of North America were capable of developing civilization. Exactly the opposite is true. As a matter of fact, Powell worked to dispel the myth of a mound-building people distinct from Native Americans, a conclusion he based not on armchair theorizing but on masses of data from extensive American ethnological and archaeological fieldwork. It is incredible that anyone would suggest, as the producers of Lost Civilizations clearly do, that Powell “robbed” Native Americans of their history. This is one of the more egregious of several non sequiturs present in the documentary. Powell’s purpose was to unite American archaeology and ethnology in the study of the mounds, not to suppress evidence. That is not to suggest that he did not have predispositions, opinions, and biases. Who does not? Yet Powell did as much as anyone at the close of the nineteenth century to make American archaeology and ethnology more exacting sciences. His critical comments on limitations attending the use of certain kinds of anthropological data still bear reading today.

Why Are Archaeologists Skeptical about Old World Visitors to the New World?

This brings us to a subject touched on only briefly in the documentary: the Norse settlement of North America circa 1000 CE. The clear implication in the documentary is that since it can be demonstrated that the Norse were here one thousand years ago, it is also possible that Middle Easterners were in the New World two thousand years ago.

In fact, before the 1960s, archaeologists were generally skeptical about claims of a pre-Columbian Norse discovery and settlement of the New World primarily because these claims were based not on material remains found in North America reflecting a pre-Columbian Norse presence but on the interpretation of historical documents—specifically, two Norse sagas (Eric the Red’s Saga and the Greenlander’s Saga), both of which had been committed to paper fully two centuries after the events discussed were supposed to have taken place.

Archaeologists, with a focus on material evidence, tend to subscribe to essayist Ambrose Bierce’s definition of written history: “An account mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools” (Bierce [1911] 2003). Essentially, material remains—the things people made, used, and then either lost or discarded—represent the gold standard in archaeological analysis. So, while the two aforementioned sagas claimed that lands to the west of the Norse settlements in Greenland had been discovered, explored, and briefly settled, most in the archaeological community were skeptical of taking the sagas literally without material evidence as confirmation.

This all changed when, in the early 1960s, artifacts and even structures unquestionably of Norse origin were found by archaeologists working in Newfoundland at the site of L’anse aux Meadows. Items such as a ring-headed bronze pin, a soapstone spindle whorl, iron boat rivets, and the remnants of turf houses were excavated, all in the clear context of the remains of an entire ancient settlement (Ingstad and Ingstad 2000). These material remains looked nothing like any that had been found at native sites but matched, in detail, objects found in known tenth- and eleventh-century Norse sites in Greenland, Iceland, and Scandinavia. Radiocarbon dates proved that the Newfoundland village had been occupied before 1000 CE, placing it in time roughly contemporaneous with the events described in the sagas. Subsequent research throughout northeastern Canada has revealed additional material evidence of a Norse presence there about one thousand years ago (Sutherland 2000). As a result, archaeologists now fully accept that the Norse came to the New World, explored, and, in some cases, settled there five centuries before Columbus.

The Norse example is an instructive lesson in assessing the underlying claim made by the Lost Civilizations documentary. It is, unfortunately, a lesson lost. If interlopers from the Middle East arrived in North America two thousand years ago, one would expect there to be abundant material evidence of their presence. If a handful of Norse explorers and settlers left behind recognizable elements of their material culture scattered across Canada, certainly a large contingent of Hebrews moving into Ohio and building the literally thousands of mound sites found there would have, just like the Canadian Norse, left behind villages littered with material objects diagnostic of their culture and easily distinguishable from that of the native people already there. Their material culture would be found abundantly virtually anywhere archaeologists—or, for that matter, anyone else—dig. They certainly would have left behind more than a handful of inscribed tablets. But there is no such evidence for the presence of Hebrews or any other Old World people in pre-Columbian Ohio. In this case we are confident in turning the old cliché on its head: here, at least, the absence of evidence is, indeed, evidence of absence.

Finally, we wish to make one additional point. It is not surprising that when individuals in the nineteenth century, for whatever reason, wished to convince their contemporaries that the mounds had been constructed by Middle Easterners, the most obvious and, to be frank, easiest way to attempt this was to manufacture fake artifacts, like the Newark “Holy Stones,” with inscriptions on them. It would have been far more difficult (in reality, virtually impossible) to concoct entire sites with trash pits, house remains, and burials—all reflecting the morphology, artifact types, skeletons, and burial practices appropriate for and diagnostic of Hebrews dating to the first century. Let’s not be too hard on the fabricators of these frauds, hoaxes, and forgeries; they did the best they could—and they’re still fooling some people even today.

One additional category of evidence discussed in Lost Civilizations will be examined in the third article in this series: genetic data used to trace the origins of the Native Americans in general and the mound builders in particular.

References

Alrutz, Robert W. 1980. The Newark Holy Stones: The history of an archaeological tragedy. Journal of the Scientific Laboratories, Denison University 57: 1–57.

Bierce, A. [1911] 2003. The Devil’s Dictionary. New York: Bloomsbury.

Cross, Frank Moorel. 1991. Personal correspondence to Lepper (September 15).

Halsey, John H. 2004. Forgeries, fakes and frauds. Michigan History (May/June): 20–27.

Ingstad, H., and A.S. Ingstad. 2000. The Viking Discovery of America: The Excavation of a Norse Settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. St. John’s, Newfoundland: Breakwater Books.

Lepper, Bradley T. 1991. ‘Holy Stones’ of Newark, Ohio, not so holy after all. Skeptical Inquirer 15(2): 117–19.

———. 1999. Newark’s ‘Holy Stones’: The resurrection of a controversy. In Newark ‘Holy Stones’: Context for Controversy, ed. P. Malenke (Coshocton, Ohio: Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum), 15–21.

———. 2008. Great find in West Virginia nothing more than a fraud. Columbus Dispatch (November 11): B7.

Lepper, Bradley T., and Jeffrey B. Gill. 2000. The Newark Holy Stones. Timeline 17(3): 16–25.

Mainfort, Robert C., and Mary L. Kwas. 1991. The Bat Creek Stone: Judeans in Tennessee? Tennessee Anthropologist 16: 1–19.

———. 2004. The Bat Creek Stone revisited: A fraud exposed. American Antiquity 69: 761–69.

McCarty, John W. 1860. Philology of Holy Stone No. 2. Cincinnati Daily Commercial (November 7).

Powell, John Wesley. 1881. On limitations to the use of some anthropologic data. In First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution 1879–80 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), 73–86.

Sutherland, P.D. 2000. The Norse and Native North Americans. In Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, eds. W.W. Fitzhugh and E.I. Ward (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press), 238–47.

Wyrick, David. 1860. The recent mound exhumations. Saturday Evening Post (September 8): 6.

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.

It has been considered “one of the best-documented UFO accounts on record” (APRO Bulletin 1965) and “one of the most spectacular and best-corroborated UFO close encounters of all time” (Davenport and Geremia 2001). What journalist John G. Fuller would subsequently relate in his book Incident at Exeter (1966) began in the early hours of a September morning in 1965 near a small town in southeastern New Hampshire. It has never been satisfactorily explained—until now.

Exeter Incident

The story begins at 12:30 AM on September 3, 1965, at Exeter, New Hampshire. A policeman cruising on Route 101 came upon a woman parked beside the road. She told him excitedly that a flying object with red flashing lights had chased her for some distance. She pointed to a bright light on the horizon. The policeman, Eugene Bertrand, watched it for a short time and, unimpressed, left after reassuring the woman there was nothing to worry about.

Then at 2:24 AM, eighteen-year-old Norman Muscarello burst into the Exeter police station, “white, and shaking.” He had been hitchhiking along Route 150 toward his home in Exeter when he saw what he called “the Thing,” as big as or bigger than a house (Fuller 1966, 11). As Muscarello (1965) later described it in a signed statement:

A group of five bright lights appeared over a house about a hundred feet from where I was standing. The lights were in a line at about a sixty-degree angle. They were so bright, they lighted up the area. The lights then moved out over a large field and acted at times like a floating leaf. They would go down behind the trees, behind a house and then reappear.

Muscarello then described what would prove to be a powerful clue to the UFO’s identity:

[The lights] always moved in the same sixty-degree angle. Only one light would be on at a time. They were pulsating: one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one. They were so bright I could not distinguish a form to the object. I watched these lights for about fifteen minutes and they finally disappeared behind some trees and seemed to go into a field. At one time while I was watching them, they seemed to come so close I jumped into a ditch to keep from being hit.

Bertrand drove with Muscarello to the site just before 3 AM. The two walked into the field, and Bertrand himself witnessed the lights Muscarello had described. He stated, “At one time they came so close I fell to the ground and started to draw my gun.” The officer stated that there were “five bright red lights”; indeed they were “extremely bright and flashed on one at a time.” He added that “The lights were so bright, I was unable to make out any form” (Bertrand 1965). The pair ran to the police car. Bertrand radioed Patrolman David Hunt, who arrived and also witnessed the lights, which finally moved away, eastward, toward the ocean (Fuller 1966, 14).

Over the next several weeks, some sixty reports of UFOs followed in the area around Exeter. The case resulted in an article in Look magazine (February 8, 1966), the book by Fuller (expansively subtitled The Story of Unidentified Objects over America Today), and a host of articles, entries in UFO encyclopedias (e.g., Clark 1998, 364–67), and discussions in books (e.g., Hynek 1977, 154–66), as well as lectures, radio shows, and television documentaries.

J. Allen Hynek—the astronomer who began as an admitted “outright ‘debunker’” but became, by the late 1960s, a true believer in the reality of “the UFO phenomenon”—considered the case “a fine example of a Close Encounter of the First Kind” (1977, 1, 154), terminology he created. Hynek observed that the Pentagon was unable to explain the September 3, 1965, Exeter phenomenon and that “the scientific establishment” (a phrase dear to true believers) “in failing to deal with the evidence” was, like the Pentagon, “actually admitting that it has no explanation” (Hynek 1977, 165–66). In short, the object was still an unidentified flying object, implying that the mystery indicated something momentous. Skeptics were, of course, skeptical.

‘Solutions’

Not surprisingly, the Exeter incident provoked many speculations as to what the UFO might have been. Here are some of the proposals:

Astronomical bodies. As shown by a folder in the files of Project Blue Book (the U.S. Air Force’s UFO evaluation operation, 1952–1969), the Pentagon considered—and rejected—the possibility of “astro-stars/planets.” Supposedly, the witnesses had merely seen “stars and planets twinkling” due to a temperature inversion (a meteorological phenomenon in which a layer of warm air is trapped above cold night air and thus is capable of causing visual distortions) (Clark 1998, 365). The totality of evidence was incompatible with that hypothesis, leading Hynek (1977, 154) to declare, “The astronomical evaluation is completely untenable.”

Glare of airport landing lights. One air force officer hypothesized that the Exeter sighting merely resulted from the glare of landing lights at nearby Pease Air Force Base, a Strategic Air Command (SAC)/North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) bomber base. This possibility was tested by having both the runway marker lights and the approach strobes turned off and on during a fifteen-minute period, but observers saw no effect from the Exeter site (UFO Phenomenon 1987, 103–104).

An Air Force Operation. Blue Book suggested the incident might have been caused by planes from a SAC/NORAD training exercise dubbed “Big Blast,” which occurred on September 2–3, 1965. Blue Book noted that “the town of Exeter is within the traffic pattern utilized by Air Traffic Control in the recovery of these aircraft at Pease AFB [Air Force Base], N.H.” The exercise was active—according to Blue Book’s chief (Quintanilla 1965)—between midnight and 2 AM. However, Bertrand noted that he and young Muscarello had witnessed the flashing UFO “nearly an hour after two a.m. which would eliminate the Air Force Operation Big Blast” as an explanation (qtd. in Clark 1998, 366). Hynek (1977, 154) concurred.

Advertising plane. Newspapers in the Exeter area ascribed the lights to “a flying billboard”—an ad plane—owned by the Sky-Lite Aerial Advertising Agency of Boston. The Amesbury (Massachusetts) News thus claimed the UFO “has finally been identified!” But alas, that plane was on the ground between August 21 and September 10, and furthermore it bore no red flashing lights, instead having “a rectangular sign carrying white flashing lights” (Fuller 1966, 51).

Corona discharge from power lines. The late UFO skeptic Philip J. Klass agreed that the eyewitnesses had indeed seen something unusual, but he speculated that “the Exeter UFOs” (including the one seen by Muscarello and the two police officers) might have been “power-line coronas,” that is, clear-weather plasmas (luminous clouds of ionized air) that were generated by electrical charges emanating from high-tension power lines (Klass 1968, 12–25). This clearly did not explain the original Exeter incident, and Klass later backed away from his “plasma UFOs” theory (see Clark 1998, 366).

Prank with lighted kite. Skeptical UFO buff Martin Kottmeyer (1996) weighed in with the notion that a prankster flew a kite, most likely “a large box kite” with “five strobe flashers linked to a sequencer” that “hung along the kite-line rather than a tail” (thus accounting for the observed sixty-degree angle). However, not only is the kite hypothesis cut from whole cloth, but the imagined prankster seems to have gone to considerable effort for such a deserted place and time.

Other objects. Still other possible candidates were proposed—helicopter, balloon, civilian plane—but nothing seemed likely.

As Jerome Clark summed up in his The UFO Encyclopedia (1998, 366) after noting the case had received much notoriety, “The attention ensured that this particular close encounter of the first kind would be remembered in a way few have been. Still, by any standard the sighting remains puzzling and impressive.”

Perceptions

People misperceive—especially when they suddenly encounter something that is unknown, is seen under adverse conditions, and frightens them. Recall that at Exeter the unidentified lights were so bright that witnesses could not make out the shape of the UFO. Not knowing the craft’s size, its altitude, or its distance from the viewer—that is, with multiple unknowns—a witness has no basis for estimating any of these factors. And Exeter witnesses were indeed afraid: a woman who felt she was being chased by a UFO had pulled off the road; a teenage witness arriving at the police station was white and shaking; and one officer admitted he almost shot at the bright lights.

Consider that even something as distant as a meteor hundreds of miles away, passing out of sight behind trees, can seem to have landed in a nearby woodland—a common illusion. The brightness of the Exeter UFO’s lights (greater than that of a mere airplane and ultimately providing a clue to its identity) probably made the craft seem much closer than it really was.

Consider, too, that something that is frightening tends to loom large in one’s consciousness. Chad Marsolek of the University of Minnesota, an expert in memory distortion, describes a “weapon-focus effect.” This may cause an eyewitness who is focusing on something frightening (such as the barrel of a gun) to lose focus on other elements. As it happens, when people view a disturbing image they tend to be confident of their accuracy—even when their memory is wrong (Marsolek 2010).

All of these issues apply to the Exeter incident. However, much of what the eyewitnesses described was still accurate, as we shall see presently.

Solved!

For forty-five years the incident at Exeter remained unsolved. Then, while we were working together on some ongoing UFO research, one of us (Joe Nickell), an investigator and science writer, recalled the cold case to the other (James McGaha), an astronomer and former military pilot. We brainstormed the case, shared sources, and discussed details—soon agreeing that one particular element held the key to the solution. We might call it (with homage to Hardy Boys’ mysteries) “The Clue of the Sequencing Lights.”

As it happens, the military pilot of our team has actually docked with a craft like the UFO at Exeter, and he recognized the sequencing lights for what they surely were: those on a U.S. Air Force KC-97 refueling plane. To check his memory and obtain photos (figures 1–3), he visited an aerospace museum. Like seeing an old friend, he gazed on a mothballed KC-97 tanker (figure 1) whose fuselage is arrayed with a row of five red sequencing lights (figure 2). These would reflect onto the refueling boom (figure 3), which (according to the flight manual) when lowered is inclined at sixty-four degrees.

Figure 1. A U.S. Air Force KC-97 refueling tanker like this one became an unintentional UFO, sparking the “Exeter Incident” of September 3, 1965.

Just this type of craft operated out of Strategic Air Command bomber bases like that of Pease AFB and, indeed, would surely have been involved in a SAC/NORAD training exercise like that dubbed “Big Blast” of September 2–3, 1965. But what about the “fact” that this exercise—which was ongoing in the skies over Exeter at the time of the first sightings—had supposedly ended about an hour before Muscarello and officer Bertrand had their “close encounter”?¹ It seems quite apparent that, although the particular exercise was reportedly over, there were still planes in the sky. Bertrand and Hunt, in fact, witnessed a B-47 jet at about the time the UFO disappeared (Fuller 1966, 67). Perhaps it had just refueled.

Figure 2. On the underbelly of the KC-97 are (closest to the camera) a set of three high-intensity lights and (farther from the viewer) the five red panels of sequencing lights. (These were described by eyewitnesses as “five bright red lights” that “flashed on one at a time,” specifically “pulsating: one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one.”)

The airborne refueling process of the KC-97 is both interesting and relevant. Briefly, it involved the KC-97 making long circuits of the rendezvous area. As the jet to be refueled began to approach, the boom was lowered and the receiver (sequencing) lights were turned on. However, when the jet was in very close proximity, the receiver lights were turned low; otherwise their extreme brightness would temporarily blind the approaching pilot. (The sequencing stopped as the aircraft hooked up.) There would be some jockeying as the two planes connected, and all of this could look exceedingly strange to an observer on the ground.

Thus, on one of its long passes the slow-moving KC-97 could have seemed to be “chasing” the first eyewitness on Route 101. It was subsequently seen by young Muscarello and, later still, Bertrand, with its boom down at its characteristic angle. This boom, which bore its own small wings (again, see figure 3), would actually flutter in the air currents (except when specifically being controlled by the boom operator), which no doubt explains eyewitness Muscarello’s statement that the UFO “acted at times like a floating leaf.” Most notable were the tanker’s five red lights, which were flashing—in the sequence accurately described by the two witnesses—one, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one. The extreme brightness of the lights, rendering other features of the object indistinguishable from the ground, is further corroborative evidence of the UFO’s identification as a KC-97 refueling plane.

Figure 3. Underneath the KC-97 is also a refueling boom (shown here in stowed position). When down, the boom is at an angle consistent with the sixty degrees an eyewitness reported (specifically sixty-four degrees, according to the flight manual). The sequencing lights would reflect onto the boom, which would flutter “like a floating leaf” when not controlled by the boom operator (note its small wings). (Photos by James McGaha)

Why did the Pentagon not solve the case at the time? Perhaps in the welter of paperwork the clue we found so significant went unseen by anyone who could fully grasp its import and who had time to devote to the case. Naturally, everything is much clearer in hindsight.

We believe this solves the so-called incident at Exeter. As to the weeks of subsequent UFO reports in the vicinity, they were beyond the scope of our investigation. (See Fuller 1966; Sheaffer 1986, 111–19.) As our work shows, “cold cases” may be solvable with perseverance and some luck, keeping in mind that luck is most likely to come to those who go looking for it.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank James Stemm, curator of the Pima Air and Space Museum, and Tim Binga, director of the Center for Inquiry Libraries, for their help with this investigative project.

Note

1. Hynek (1977, 154) misstated the situation when he wrote that “Operation Big Blast terminated more than an hour before the incident at Exeter began.” He should have said that the operation was in progress during the earlier sightings but had reportedly ended about an hour before Bertrand (1965) witnessed the UFO.

References

APRO Bulletin. 1965. Reprinted as “Exeter (New Hampshire) sightings” in Story 1980, 113–14.

Bertrand, Eugene. 1965. Statement, full text in Hynek 1977, 158–59.

Clark, Jerome. 1998. The UFO Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (in two vols.). Detroit, Michigan: Omnigraphics.

Davenport, Peter B., and Peter Geremia. 2001. Exeter (New Hampshire) sightings. In Story 2001, 170–72.

Fuller, John G. 1966. Incident at Exeter. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Hynek, J. Allen. 1977. The Hynek UFO Report. New York: Dell.

Klass, Philip J. 1968. UFOs—Identified. New York: Random House.

Kottmeyer, Martin S. 1996. The Exeter file. The REALL News, Part I, 4(9) (September): 1, 5–6; Part II, 4(10) (October): 1, 6.

Marsolek, Chad. 2010. Episode of Monster Quest (on “Mothman”). History Channel, aired February 10.

Muscarello, Norman J. 1965. Statement, full text in Hynek 1977, 158.

Quintanilla, Hector, Jr. 1965. Letter, reprinted in Hynek 1977, 161–62.

Sheaffer, Robert. 1986. The UFO Verdict. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

Story, Ronald D. 1980. The Encyclopedia of UFOs. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

———. 2001. The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters. New York: New American Library.

The UFO Phenomenon (Mysteries of the Unknown series). 1987. Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Life Books.

Miracle Detectives is a new television series that examines miracle claims via a team of investigators—one a believer, the other a scientist. The show premiered with the launch of the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) in January 2011.

The believer of the show’s team is Randall Sullivan, journalist and author of the book The Miracle Detective (Grove Press, 2005). Sullivan reportedly experienced his own personal religious event in Medjugorje, Bosnia. He is an avowed believer in the existence of miracles.

The adept foil for Sullivan is neuroscientist Indre Viskontas. Broadly trained in psychology, specifically in cognition, at UCLA, Viskontas specializes in the neural basis of memory and creativity. She is affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco, Memory and Aging Center and edits the journal Neurocase. (She is also an accomplished opera singer, having obtained a master of music degree at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.)

At least two miraculous claims are highlighted in each episode. The miracle detective team of Sullivan and Viskontas (a setup akin to Mulder and Scully in The X-Files) travels to the location of the event to interview witnesses and also consult with various experts.

Questioning witnesses who believe a miracle has taken place is as much of an art as a science. Viskontas employs both to examine the claims made by people who believe these events are miraculous communications from God. In this interview, she shares with Sharon Hill strategies and some insights into working in television.

In the show’s introduction, you say, “Some would call me a ‘skeptic.’” Do you identify as a skeptic?

Would I call myself a card-carrying skeptic? No. I didn’t know of the whole skeptical community until I started doing research for the show. I hadn’t been involved in it previously, so for me to say “Yeah, I’m a skeptic too” seemed disingenuous. I know what it means to be a scientist because that’s what I’ve been trained to be. I don’t have a good sense of what it means to be a “skeptic.”

What is the scientist’s role on the show?

My goal is to get people to think more deeply about what they believe without threat or disrespect. The target audience is not exactly on “my side,” and so I have to walk a very fine line.

When I talk to people, I try to assess whether their stories are backed up by other evidence. I realize people are very susceptible to all kinds of memory failures. Misremembering things that happened, while at the same time conflating memories from similar but separate events, is very common. Of course, most of us are not very good at resisting the temptation to infer causality when two events follow each other closely in time.

What’s it like to do an episode and a whole season?

The shooting schedule was grueling. It was a twelve-hour day on camera. We’d shoot for twelve hours and then return to the hotel room, where I’d still have to do a diary cam session (talking about your feelings into the camera) and research for the following day.

Also, I’d be preparing for the next week’s case at the same time, so if I got six hours of sleep a night that was great. It was nonstop. I would do so much background research on each case, downloading and reading papers from PubMed, calling up colleagues, talking about the case with my husband, and so on.

For the interviews [with experts and witnesses], I didn’t always have enough preparation time, and sometimes I didn’t know what to expect. That’s part of the challenge on a show like this.

How do you go about interviewing witnesses who have a story about a miracle? How do you use that information?

I look to question witnesses in a way that gets around them just telling the story in the same way they’ve told it before. Instead, we try to access other information they might not share in the regular telling. They might have told this story a hundred times before. When you start to ask them questions about the event—things they aren’t used to talking about, other aspects they aren’t used to recalling—you can find out if what they are saying makes sense or if they are conflating multiple incidents or coloring the past with their knowledge of what happened after the incident.

I assume that people are telling me honestly what they remember, but when there is something out of the ordinary [such as an event they may attribute to paranormal causes] there are other ways in which I can corroborate their story. For example, I can look at a police report and at specific details of the account. Then I can get a sense of how accurate a memory is and to what extent the person’s recollection is faulty.

How does editing for television affect the presentation of the investigation? Have you been pleased with the editing?

For the most part I’ve been pleased. When you have a television show, you need to make a story out of [the content]. There was one episode about a medical intuitive where I felt that . . . [the editors] left out some critical components. We picked a subject with one salient complaint. The intuitive came back with a very long list of potential problems but no mention of that complaint. Many items mentioned on that list were cut out to save time, and the editors decided to keep the relevant bits in—that is, the ones that the subject felt actually did apply to him. They edited out stuff that seemed superfluous. But in the case of an intuitive, this is really problematic! When listing every possible symptom that a person could experience, you’re going to get some hits, but what’s important is the ratio of hits to misses—not simply the hits.

The editing is not designed to show that the skeptic is wrong and Randall is right. The goal is to make good television. Especially given the target audience, [the editors] do a good job. If I felt they were really skewing it, I would have left the show midway. But we have to remember that the target audience won’t watch a show debunking miracles, and what’s important here is to engage that audience, not simply to preach to the choir.

Is it hard to explain the science in a one-hour show?

It’s very hard; it’s one of the biggest challenges. What I say is, “The evidence suggests it’s most likely this thing over the other.” That’s not very satisfying to many people but it’s the truth. To say that God did that or it was some supernatural thing requires such a mountain of evidence.

What has been the viewer reaction?

The feedback has been mixed. I get emails from people who say they like my point of view. They’ll say, “Most of the time I find myself siding with Randall, but you’ve made me think about things that I hadn’t before.” Other times they’ll say, “Wow, I never really thought about that possibility. It’s changing the way I think about my relationship with God because maybe he acts in ways I never considered before.”

It can also be hard to hear the criticisms from the skeptical community, such as “You weren’t hard enough on him!” In some cases they’re right; there were better ways to do it. But I did the best I could, since one of my goals was to engage the audience, not be dismissed outright by them. I think in most cases I did a pretty good job of bringing things to the table that people hadn’t thought about.

To me, it’s not exciting to say, “This is not a miracle.” It’s exciting to say, “There is something here we hadn’t thought about before that’s worth investigating further,” or “Look how interesting the brain is that it can do this.” That’s what fascinates me.

How do you think skeptical/rational advocates can successfully promote their viewpoint?

I’d say don’t simply discount a person’s belief but find what it is that interests you both. For example, a Bigfoot print: Instead of dismissing it by stating that’s not what you think it is, bring up another discussion point. Find something interesting [to discuss] that doesn’t rely on the existence of a mythical creature or supernatural explanation. Perhaps you can find something in common that you can start out with: “Isn’t it odd that there is one footprint here and nothing else around it? How do you think it got there? What are possible explanations? Let’s explore and keep talking.” Once you dismiss them, you’ve lost them. They don’t want to talk to you anymore.

When you ask people questions that force them to come up with answers, they are much more likely to change their belief system if they realize these questions are unanswerable within their viewpoint.

They also want to talk about the experience. So, if you question and try to understand what they base their beliefs on, you can lead them in a direction to show them that their beliefs might be fiction, and you can also develop a rapport with them that will encourage them to trust you.

What are your future plans?

My goal in the future, through this show or other means, is to share my passion for life and to illuminate what I can about the human experience. Just as physicist Richard Feynman has observed, we can enjoy beauty at all levels of observation, from the microscopic to the abstract. Knowledge doesn’t take away; it only adds.

Massimo Polidoro and I explored the great labyrinth beneath Buda Castle, a network of caves and rock vaults created by hot water springs and used as refuge by prehistoric man; it was later linked by cellars, dungeons, and military store rooms into a complex that runs for 1,300 yards (Eyewitness 2007, 65) and is billed as “one of the seven underground wonders of the world” (“The Labyrinth” n.d.). Polidoro and I also went in search of a fabled statue of the Virgin. Legend says it was enclosed in the wall of Mátyás Church during the Turkish occupation, and when the edifice was all but destroyed in 1686, the statue miraculously appeared (Eyewitness 2007, 62). Alas, however, it would not reappear for us: it was in a part of the church undergoing renovation, and we could not beg or buy our way in.

Another investigation had me accompanying scholar Benedek Lang to the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to assist him in studying a most mysterious manuscript, the Rohonc Codex. This—like the famed Voynich Manuscript (Schmeh 2011)—is written in an unknown language. Using techniques from my book Pen, Ink, and Evidence (Nickell 1990), I provided information relating to the codex’s authenticity, date of composition, and other issues. Still another excursion took me to the purported birthplace of Harry Houdini at No. 1 Csengery Street, District 7, Budapest.

The remainder of my investigative work in Hungary—which relates more or less to the field of parapsychology—was conducted with the untiring assistance of Gabor Hrasko (who negotiated arrangements, drove, took photographs, and much more), and Veron Eles (who has a definite talent for undercover work). Here is a very brief account of each of four excursions.

Experiencing Healing Energy

Our first visit was to a site called Attila Domb (Attila Mound), part of a commercialized Kincsem Horse Park near the village of Tápiószentmárton. The site’s supposed connection with Attila the Hun is tenuous, but the name Kincsem (“My Treasure”) was that of a “wonder mare” of the nineteenth century who never lost a race. The 37.5-acre site was said to have an energy emanation that attracted horses and endowed them with better health and a greater foaling rate than elsewhere. A “seriously ill” horse was reportedly also healed there (“Attila” 2011; Olsen 2007, 128–29). From this folklore grew rumors that the site was a “healing mound” that could cure sick people.

Figure 1. Village mayor prepares to catch the author, who seems under the power of a mystical energy.

The owner (and local mayor), Kocsi János, graciously hosted us and gave us a demonstration of the site’s supposed magical energy. He sat Eles and me down in his on-site restaurant and suggested that our hands, placed flat on a table, would mysteriously rise and a warmth or tingling or other effect would spread from our fingers throughout our bodies. Eles followed my lead as I played along, and she did so again when János took us just outside and suggested the energy could cause us to fall backward—much the same as at an American Pentecostal healing service where people supposedly “go under the power” of the Holy Spirit but actually are role-playing in response to suggestion and expectation (Nickell 2002). János played catcher as we fell backward on cue (see figure 1).

Hrasko, Eles, and I then walked to the mound, a gentle knoll where “geomancers,” or dowsers claim to detect the crossing of “a strong ley line”—leys are imagined lines of “earth energy” that supposedly connect ancient mounds, churches, legendary trees, and other alleged mystical “power” sites (Tietze 2004, 12; Olsen 2007; Guiley 1991, 329–30; Nickell 2003). This mix of superstition and pseudoscience will have no medical benefit of course, although the site can take advantage of the same factors that are behind the touted successes of faith healing: misdiagnosis, prior medical treatment, psychosomatic conditions, spontaneous remissions, the placebo effect, and so on. As always, believers emphasize any supposed successes while ignoring the numerous failures.

Across the top of the mound is a ditch where an archaeological dig took place in 1924 in a search for traces of Attila the Hun’s wooden palace. (His grave is also located at the site, according to legend.) Nothing was discovered relating to Attila, but of several unearthed objects, one, attributed to the Scythians and now reposing in Hungary’s National Museum, is descriptively called the Golden Stag. Its namesake is János’s restaurant, and the wonderful lunch to which he treated us there—beginning with palinka (an alcoholic peach drink) and including Kincsem ragout (a stew named for the famous racehorse) along with many other treats—was the most magical part of our visit.

Hanging Up on Phone Psychics

We three investigators next met with Jeno Torocsik, a Hungarian mathematician who operates a number of interactive television shows. These include game shows that, critics complain, are essentially gambling enterprises (since they depend more on chance—the winning caller being picked randomly—than skill) (“TV” 2006). Torocsik also operates several psychic telephone networks—in Spain, Romania, and the United States, as well as Hungary. (Do the psychics know who will win on the game shows? Apparently not.)

We skeptics had a debate with Torocsik over the evidence for and against psychics and psychic phenomena. He was opposed to his “psychics” being tested by famed magician and psychical investigator James Randi, whose James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) offers one million dollars to anyone who can, under scientific test conditions, demonstrate genuine psychic ability. Torocsik asserted that Randi is not impartial (when in fact JREF protocols eliminate tester bias), and he claimed that “psi” (psychical phenomena) is too elusive to be tested effectively! When I attempted to make the case for the necessity of scientific testing, pointing out that it was he who appeared not to be impartial, he became rather impatient.

Figure 2. An operator connects hopeful callers with work-at-home telephone “psychics.”

Nevertheless, he did permit me to photograph an operator who handles psychic-seeking callers (figure 2). Using a computer screen, she matches callers with at-home fortunetellers who, he insisted defensively, were at least effective counselors, if not actually psychic. (In a Skeptical Inquirer exposé of telephone psychics, C. Eugene Emery, Jr. [1995] describes how some admittedly phony psychics attempted to gently provide traditional counseling as a substitute for supernatural insights. But callers resisted. For example, one woman wondered if her husband was going to beat her but rejected the advice to call 911 or turn to available sources of assistance. Indeed, only after the “psychic” concocted a tarot-card reading to support her commonsense recommendation did the caller seem inclined to accept the advice.)

Tapping My Telepathic Powers

I was much intrigued by our visit to Budapest’s Esoteric University and its Psi Lab, where researcher Paulinyi Tamás gave us an overview of the experiments he and his colleagues are conducting. They gave a demonstration (not an actual experiment of record) using me as a test subject for a ganzfeld experiment. This involves parapsychologists creating an environment of sensory deprivation to supposedly stimulate the subject’s receptivity of ESP (Guiley 1991, 225–26). This particular laboratory has claimed quite significant results, in contrast to others that have reportedly gotten only average or low scores.

Figure 3. The author serves as the subject of a ganzfeld demonstration—an experiment in telepathy—in a “psi” laboratory.

For the experiment, a random number generator was used to select one of a set of four pictures. I was then subjected to mild sensory deprivation (involving diffuse light and white noise) in a soundproofed test room (figure 3) where Tamás joined me. Unknown to me, Eles was chosen as “sender”—that is, one tasked with looking at the target picture and attempting to convey it to me telepathically.

On request, I made verbal descriptions and later a sketch of what I had envisioned in my mind’s eye, then was shown the four pictures and asked to pick the one best matching my impressions. As it happened, my selection was the one Eles had “sent.” This was only a one-in-four guess, but everyone was amused—both at the outcome and at my pretense of having discovered I was actually telepathic.

Joking aside, I had some criticisms to share, and the parapsychologists listened earnestly. I thought the person who monitors the experiment by sitting in the room and interacting with the test subject should not have seen (or actually been familiar with) all of the two hundred or so photos used in the series of ganzfeld experiments. And I wondered why the researchers did not attempt to further test those subjects who scored consistently well (or poorly, for that matter), to see if their results might represent only a statistical fluke or could have some other explanation.

(This entire subject is complicated and deserves a more detailed description and analysis than I am able to provide here. Those who are further interested should read the critiques of ganzfeld and other psi experiments by CSI’s Ray Hyman [1996; 2008], who is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon and an expert in cognition, the psychology of deception, and the evidence for paranormal claims, including parapsychological ones.)

Wondering at the Gypsy’s Trance

The most sensational of our investigative adventures was surely our encounter with a “gypsy” (Roma) fortuneteller and medium at her apartment in Budapest. She wore a colorful scarf and treated us to music from Radio C, the local Roma channel, while I idly looked at her well-worn deck of fortune-telling cards. For an unstated fee (more about that later) she offered to enter into a trance in order to get some important advice that Eles was seeking from the spirit of her deceased twin.

Eles had invented the dead twin in a conversation with me on the way to the medium’s apartment. Her original imaginary creation was female; however, when the Roma woman (who does soothsaying weekly on Radio C) began to fish for information and asked if the twin had been male, Eles decided to go with that. She also agreed with other gleanings by the medium that culminated in the tale of the brother having died in a car accident caused by his own drunkenness. Eles played her role admirably, and the medium swallowed the bait, hook and all.

Figure 4. Gypsy fortuneteller and medium is about to return from the Other Side. (Photographs by Joe Nickell)

As the medium prepared to communicate with the alleged twin, she warned us not to be afraid if she should fail to emerge from her trance state but simply try to revive her by calling her name and having some water ready. I took the warning as an indication that the woman was going to put on a good show, and I was not disappointed. She knelt to pray, then sat in a chair where she embarked on her voyage to the Other Side (figure 4).

Suitably “entranced,” she was soon spinning a “message” from the nonexistent twin to Eles, who seemed obviously moved by the heartfelt outpourings. At length, the alleged communication over, Eles dutifully attempted to revive the medium, who appeared to be immersed in her role, eventually coming to with great histrionics, including a bout of sobbing. After she had finally calmed down, I asked her about her gifts, and she told us that her maternal grandmother had also been clairvoyant. We were not quite prepared for what would soon be the most elaborate act of all: her attempt to wrest from us a whopping fee.

She apparently thought—wrongly again—that we were wealthy gorgios (non-gypsies) who would cough up a lot of cash. Not a speaker of Hungarian, I left it to Hrasko and Eles to conduct the negotiations, which I could see were filled with reasoned if angry discourse from our side and more anger, bluster, and histrionics from the Roma woman. I had thought at one point we might throw down some cash and walk out, but I did not know that—surreptitiously following our entry into her apartment—she had locked us in! What a gal! Still, I will not use the term “attempted extortion.” Maybe she just did not want us to be disturbed. In time, for a fee of about fifty U.S. dollars—excessive, considering the mediumistic communication was at best a work of imagination—we were on our way, and the Roma woman was all smiles. We were smiling too, from our different perspective.

References

Attila Hill. 2011. Available online at www.caboodle.hu; accessed February 24.

Eyewitness Travel: Hungary. 2007. New York: Dorling Kindersley Publishing.

Emory, C. Eugene. 1995. Telephone psychics: Friends or phonies? Skeptical Inquirer 19(5) (September/October): 14–17.

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 1991. Encyclopedia of the Strange, Mystical, and Unexplained. New York: Gramercy Books.

Hyman, Ray. 1996. The evidence for psychic functioning. Skeptical Inquirer 20(2) (March/April): 24–26.

———. 2008. Anomalous cognition. Skeptical Inquirer 32(4) (July/August): 40–43.

The Labyrinth of Buda Castle. N.d. Advertising card, obtained September 17, 2010.

Nickell, Joe. 1990. Pen, Ink, and Evidence: A Study of Writing and Writing Materials for the Penman, Collector, and Document Detective. Reprinted New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2000.

———. 2002. Benny Hinn: Healer or hypnotist? Skeptical Inquirer 26(3) (May/June): 14–17.

———. 2003. Dowsing mysterious sites. Skeptical Inquirer 27(3) (May/June): 14–17.

Olsen, Brad. 2007. Sacred Places—Europe—108 Destinations. San Francisco, California: Consortium of Collective Consciousness, 128–32.

Randi, James. 1991. James Randi: Psychic Investigator. London: Boxtree.

Schmeh, Klaus. 2011. The Voynich manuscript: The book nobody can read. Skeptical Inquirer 35(1) (January/February): 46–50.

Tietze, Harald. 2004. Dowsing Manual. N.p.: Harald W. Tietze Publishing.

A TV show makes millions with a call-in quiz that critics consider gambling. 2006. International Herald Tribune (November 20).

Take antioxidants (or rather, don’t take them): if you believe the hype, then you want them in your food; you want to take them as pills; and you want the maximum most powerful antioxidants that can be found in nature (especially from some obscure tropical fruit). Unfortunately, the evidence does not support the claim that there are any health benefits to taking antioxidants.

The theory behind antioxidant claims sounds very compelling. Oxidants are chemicals (free radicals, also called reactive oxygen species or ROS) that are the products of metabolism; they are highly reactive and can cause damage to proteins and cells. This damage is a major contributor to aging and disease. Antioxidants neutralize these free radicals and prevent damage.

Unfortunately, medical science is rarely so clean and simple. This nice story is true, as far as it goes (the best lies always contain a kernel of truth). Twenty years ago this was the state of our knowledge of ROS and antioxidants, and there was legitimate hope that antioxidants would be a useful therapeutic tool. However, as research continued we learned that the picture is more complex: The body has evolved a natural defense against the onslaught of ROS. These compounds are called free radical scavengers or antioxidants (such as the protein superoxide dismutase and some vitamins like C and E) and their job is to gobble up ROS before they can damage cells.

In addition, some ROS actually serve a purpose in the body, for example as signals to cells or as neurotransmitters (nitric oxide). In fact, the body has evolved a balanced and complex system to maintain homeostasis between ROS and antioxidants. Influencing that system by taking large amounts of exogenous antioxidants may not be such a good idea. In other words, if a balance between ROS and antioxidants has evolved, there is no reason to believe that there are any benefits to tipping the scales in one direction—toward antioxidants. In fact, doing so may cause harm.

What does the actual clinical evidence show? Well, to find out we have to go claim by claim.

The best current evidence shows that antioxidant vitamins are of no use in improving cognitive function or in preventing dementia (Gray et al. 2008). If we look at other specific neurodegenerative diseases, the picture is a bit more complex. Some studies show that vitamin E (but not C) may slightly reduce the risk of motor neuron disease, but only in women (Wang et al. 2011). Overall, the evidence is ambiguous and does not support a benefit for treatment.

In Parkinson’s disease (PD) the picture is more complex. There is some evidence that eating foods rich in vitamin E may help prevent PD, but taking vitamin E supplements does not. So perhaps it is something other than the vitamin E in these foods that is of benefit, or perhaps eating healthy foods in general is simply a marker for some other variable that protects against PD. Other studies show a benefit from taking the vitamin supplements but not changing diet (Miyake et al. 2011). In other words, the evidence is ambiguous.

It is reasonable to conduct further research into antioxidants and degenerative diseases. Current evidence is mixed, without any clear benefit, but there is enough positive preliminary evidence to continue to study the potential of antioxidants in preventing degenerative diseases.

The evidence for taking antioxidant supplements in the general population is also less than definitive. In addition, it actually suggests the potential for harm. A comprehensive review published in 2008 concluded: “We found no evidence to support antioxidant supplements for primary or secondary prevention. Vitamin A, beta-carotene, and vitamin E may increase mortality” (Bjelakovic et al. 2008).

That’s right—there might be an increased risk of death from taking vitamins A and E. The data is far from definitive, but it shows that we cannot assume that supplements, even vitamins, are harmless. It also shows that we need to be humble with our simplistic theories of biology. Until the research has had time to fully explore a biological question, we should not be confident in our extrapolations to clinical effect. Therefore, even when the theory sounds good, we always need to do clinical studies to see what the net effects are in humans.

When it comes to antioxidants, there is still the potential that they may be useful in specific situations. At present, however, there is no evidence to support going out of your way to eat lots of antioxidants in food or to take antioxidant supplements. In fact, doing so may be harmful. This evidence is at odds with the overwhelming marketing hype that has successfully created an irrational demand for a dubious product.

References

Bjelakovic, G., D. Nikolova, L.L. Gluud, et al. 2008. Antioxidant supplements for prevention of mortality in healthy participants and patients with various diseases. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2008, Issue 2. Article No.: CD007176.

Gray, S.L., M.L. Anderson, P.K. Crane, et al. 2008. Antioxidant vitamin supplement use and risk of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease in older adults. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 56(2) (February): 291–295, doi: 10.1111/j.1532-5415.2007.01531.x.

Miyake, Y., W. Fukushima, K. Tanaka, et al. 2011. Parkinson’s disease study group. Dietary intake of antioxidant vitamins and risk of Parkinson’s disease: A case-control study in Japan. European Journal of Neurology 18(1) (January): 106–13, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-1331.2010.03088.x.

Wang, H., É.J. O’Reilly, M.G. Weisskopf, et al. 2011.Vitamin E intake and risk of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: A pooled analysis of data from 5 prospective cohort studies. American Journal of Epidemiology 173(6) (March): 595–602.