Near the very beginning of the modern UFO craze, in the summer of 1947, a crashed “flying disc” was reported to have been recovered near Roswell, New Mexico. However, it was soon identified as simply a weather balloon, whereupon the sensational story seemed to fade away. Actually, it went underground; after subsequent decades, it resurfaced as an incredible tale of extraterrestrial invasion and the government’s attempt to cover up the awful truth. The media capitalized on “the Roswell incident,” and conspiracy theorists, persons with confabulated memories, outright hoaxers, and others climbed aboard the bandwagon.

We identify this process—a UFO incident’s occurring, being debunked, going underground, beginning the mythmaking processes, and reemerging as a conspiracy tale with ongoing mythologizing and media hype—as the Roswellian Syndrome. In the sections that follow, we describe the process as it occurred at Roswell and then demonstrate how the same syndrome developed from certain other famous UFO incidents: at Flatwoods, West Virginia (1952); Kecksburg, Pennsylvania (1965); and Rendlesham Forest (outside the Woodbridge NATO base) in England (1980). Between us, we have actually been on-site to investigate three of the four cases (Joe Nickell at Roswell and Flatwoods, and James McGaha—a former military pilot—at Rendlesham).

Roswell (1947)

Here is how the prototype of the Ros­wel­lian Syndrome began and developed:

Incident. On July 8, 1947, an eager but relatively inexperienced public information officer at Roswell Army Airfield issued a press release claiming a “flying disc” had been recovered from its crash site on an area ranch (Berlitz and Moore 1980; Korff 1997). The next day’s Roswell Daily Record told how rancher “Mac” Brazel described (in a reporter’s words) “a large area of bright wreckage” consisting of tinfoil, rubber strips, sticks, and other lightweight materials.

Debunking. Soon after these initial reports, the mysterious object was identified as a weather balloon. Although there appears to have been no attempt to deceive, the best evidence now indicates that the device was really a balloon array (the sticks and foiled paper being components of dangling box-kite–like radar reflectors) that had gone missing in flight from Project Mogul. Mogul represented an attempt to use the airborne devices’ instruments to monitor sonic emissions from Soviet nuclear tests. Joe Nickell has spoken about this with former Mogul Project scientist Charles B. Moore, who identified the wreckage from photographs as consistent with a lost Flight 4 Mogul array. (See also Thomas 1995; Saler et al. 1997; U.S. Air Force 1997.)

Submergence. With the report that the “flying disc” was only a balloon-borne device, the Roswell news story ended almost as abruptly as it had begun. However, the event would linger on in the fading and recreative memories of some of those involved, while in Roswell rumor and speculation continued to simmer just below the surface with UFO reports a part of the culture at large. In time, conspiracy-minded UFOlogists would arrive, asking leading questions and helping to spin a tale of crashed flying saucers and a government cover-up.

Mythologizing. This is the most complex part of the syndrome, beginning when the story goes underground and continuing after it reemerges, developing into an elaborate myth. It involves many factors, including exaggeration, faulty memory, folklore, and deliberate hoaxing.

For example, exaggeration played a large role in the Roswell case. Major Jesse Marcel, who had helped retrieve the wreckage, often made self-contradictory and inflated assertions, giving, for example, grossly exaggerated statements about the amount of debris, its supposed imperviousness to damage, and other matters. It is now known that Marcel made claims about his own background—that he had a college degree, was a World War II pilot who had received five air medals for shooting down enemy planes, and had himself been shot down—that were proved untrue by his own service file (Fitz­gerald 2001, 511). Kal Korff (1997, 27), who uncovered many of Marcel’s deceptions, found him “exaggerating things and repeatedly trying to ‘write himself’ into the history books.” As he described the debris, Marcel said the sticks resembled balsa but were “not wood at all” and had “some sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could decipher” (apparently referring to the floral designs). As well, there were “small pieces of a metal like tinfoil, except that it wasn’t tinfoil” (Berlitz and Moore 1980, 65).

Faulty memory was another problem. For example, Curry Holden, an anthropologist from Texas Tech, claimed a student archaeological expedition he led had actually come upon the crashed flying saucer and the bodies of its extraterrestrial crew. Holden’s wife and daughter, however, insisted that he had never told them of such an event; neither was there any corroboration in his personal papers. Holden was ninety-six when he provided his account to UFOlogist Kevin Randle, at which time his wife told Randle her husband’s memory “wasn’t as sharp as it once had been. He sometimes restructured his life’s events, moving them in time so that they were subtly changed” (Fitz­gerald 2001, 514). Roswell mortician W. Glenn Dennis, who provided information on alien “bodies” at the Roswell AAF Hospital, also seriously misremembered and confabulated¹ events. According to James McAndrew’s The Roswell Report: Case Closed (U.S. Air Force 1997, 78–79), Dennis’s account “was compared with official records of the actual events he is believed to have described” and showed “extensive inaccuracies” that included “a likely error in the date by as much as twelve years.”

The processes that create folklore also played a role in shaping the Ros­well legend. As reported in Leonard Stringfield’s book Situation Red: The UFO Siege (1977), a great number of tales proliferated about an alleged crash of an extraterrestrial craft and the retrieval of its humanoid occupants. The many versions of the story—what folklorists call variants—are proof of the legend-making, oral-tradition process at work. The aliens were typically described as little, big-eyed, big-headed humanoids, a type that began to be popularly reported after they were described by “abductees” Betty and Barney Hill in 1961 (Nickell 2011, 184–86). The pickled corpses were secretly stored—mostly anonymous sources claimed—at a (nonexistent) hangar-18 at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, or some other location subsequently supposed to be Area 51 (the U.S. govern­ment’s secret test facility). From a folkloristic point of view, the crash/retrieval stories seem to function as “belief tales,” that is, legends told to give credence to a folk belief—in this instance a burgeoning one (Nickell 1995, 196–97).

Roswell folklore was obviously fed in part by deliberate fakelore. Related hoaxing began in 1949 when—as a part of the forthcoming sci-fi movie The Flying Saucer (1950)—an actor posing as an FBI agent avowed its claim of a captured spacecraft was true. In 1950, writer Frank Scully reported in his Behind the Flying Saucers that the U.S. government possessed three Venusian spaceships complete with humanoid corpses. Scully got his information from a pair of confidence men who were hoping to sell a petroleum-locating gadget allegedly derived from alien technology. By 1974, a man named Robert Spencer Carr was giving talks in which he claimed firsthand knowledge of where the preserved aliens were hidden; however, the late claimant’s son reported that his father made up the entire yarn. Other Roswell hoaxes in­cluded the ineptly forged “MJ-12 documents” (that continue to fool UFOlogist Stanton T. Friedman); a diary that told how a family came upon the smoldering crashed saucer and injured aliens (but was written with an ink not manufactured until 1974); and the notorious “Alien Autopsy” film, showing the dissection of a rubbery extraterrestrial who appeared to be from the distant Planet Latex (Nickell 2001, 118–21).

Reemergence and Media Bandwagon Effect. In 1980 the story resurfaced in the media with publication of the book The Roswell Incident. Its authors were Charles Berlitz (who had previously written the mystery-mongering best seller The Bermuda Triangle, containing “invented details,” exaggerations, and distortions [Randi 1995, 35]) and William L. Moore (who was a suspect in the previously mentioned “MJ-12” hoax [Nickell with Fischer, 1992, 81–105], as well as author of The Philadelphia Experiment, an expanded version of another’s tale that itself proved to be a hoax [Clark 1998, 509]). The Roswell Incident’s book jacket gushed: “Reports indicate, before government censorship, that occupants and material from the wrecked ship were shuttled to a CIA high security area—and that there may have been a survivor!” It adds that “. . . Berlitz and Moore uncover astonishing information that indicates alien visitations may actually have happened—only to be hushed up in the interest of ‘national security.’”

The book is replete with distortions. Consider rancher Mac Brazel’s original description of the scattered debris he found on his ranch—strips of rubber, sticks, tinfoil, tough paper, and tape with floral designs (Nickell 2009, 10)—the same as shown in photos (U.S. Air Force 1997, 7) and consistent with a Mogul balloon array with radar reflectors. However, Berlitz and Moore impose a conspiratorial interpretation, saying that in a subsequent interview Brazel “had obviously gone to great pains to tell the newspaper people exactly what the Air Force had in­structed him to say regarding how he had come to discover the wreckage and what it looked like.” In fact, Brazel quite outspokenly insisted, “I am sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon,” and he was right: the debris was from a Project Mogul array, much of it foiled paper from the radar targets (Berlitz and Moore 1980, 40).

Berlitz’s and Moore’s The Roswell Incident launched the modern wave of UFO crash/retrieval conspiracy beliefs, promoted by additional books (e.g., Friedman and Berliner 1992), television shows, and myriad other venues. Roswell conspiracy theories were off and running, typically linked to strongly anti–U.S. government attitudes. The Roswellian Syndrome would play out again and again.

Flatwoods (1952)

About 7:15 pm on September 12, 1952, at the tiny village of Flatwoods, Brax­ton County, West Virginia, some boys on the school playground saw a fiery UFO apparently land on a hilltop. Running to a nearby home, they ob­tained a flashlight and were joined by a beautician, her two sons, and a dog. As the unlikely group went up the hill toward a pulsating light, one boy aimed a flashlight at a pair of eyes shining through the dark. The group saw a tall “manlike” entity with a round face surrounded by a “pointed hood-like shape.” Suddenly the monster emitted a high-pitched hissing sound and swept at them with “a gliding motion as if afloat in midair,” while exhibiting “terrible claws.” The group ran in panic, and the next day skid marks and a black gunk were found at the site (Nickell 2000).

The incident attracted journalists, writers (like paranormalist Ivan San­der­son), and apparently two Air Force investigators in civilian clothes. Soon, the UFO was identified as a meteor; seen in three states, it had only ap­peared to land when it disappeared behind the hill. The pulsating light was obviously one of three airplane beacons in view at the site. The tall “monster” was believed to have been a large owl on a limb (since then, more evidentially determined to have been a barn owl [Nickell 2000]), and a local man identified the ground traces as caused by his pickup truck and its leaking oil pan. The case soon slipped into obscurity.

Fifteen years elapsed, then Sander­son included the case as Chapter 3 of his Uninvited Visitors (1967). The credulous Sanderson (once fooled by a rubber Sasquatch frozen in ice [Nickell 2011, 87–90]) opined that the Flat­woods incident involved multiple UFOs—citing contradictory accounts of, in each instance, a single object. Instead of suspecting that witnesses were mistaken or that the meteor might have broken apart, he insisted that “to be logical” we should believe that there was “a flight of aerial machines” that were “maneuvering in formation.” For some reason they lost control, but one managed to land at Flatwoods. Its pilot emerged “in a space suit” but, observed, headed back to the craft, which—like two others that “crashed”—soon “vaporized” (Sander­son 1967, 37–52).

Sanderson was followed in 2004 by Frank C. Feschino Jr., who published—with an introduction and epilogue by Stanton T. Friedman—The Braxton County Monster: The Cover-Up of the Flatwoods Monster Revealed. Feschino interviewed elderly witnesses, who, according to the book’s promotional copy, “wanted to talk about the story for the first time in fifty years.” For example, Kathleen May, the beautician who was with the boys when they encountered the “monster” in 1952, recalled a mysterious “government” letter that had been shown her by local reporter A. Lee Stewart Jr. She claimed it told of experimental craft the “Navy Depart­ment” operated in the area the evening of the incident. Feschino huffs: “The test ship explanation told to Mrs. May in the mysterious letter was not even remotely possible in 1952. The Air Force knew that Mrs. May did not see a meteor in Flat­woods. So they convinced her that it was something explicable, like an experimental ship. But there were no experimental ships in 1952!” (Feschino 2004, 336). Actually, according to reporter Stewart, what he had shown May was only a press release for an issue of Collier’s magazine with an at­tached photo of a moon ship (Feschino 2004, 323–36).

Kecksburg (1965)

About forty miles southeast of Pitts­burgh, in Kecksburg, Pennsyl­vania, on December 9, 1965, a boy playing outdoors saw an object plummet into nearby woods. In fact, a brilliant aerial object had been seen by numerous observers over a large area. The Greens­burg Tribune-Review reported in its county edition of December 10, “Unidentified Flying Object Falls Near Kecksburg” and “Army Ropes Off Area.” However, that newspaper’s city edition headlined its story “Searchers Fail To Find Object” (Gordon 2001, 288). From photographs of the cloud train from the object, Sky & Telescope magazine (February 1966) identified it as a very bright meteor (a type of fireball known as a bolide). The story went underground.

The Kecksburg incident remained ob­scure until September 19, 1990, when it became the season opener for NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries. The show launched the story as one of a crashed UFO, its secret retrieval, and a government conspiracy to hide the truth. Nearly a quarter of a century after the original incident, two local men had begun to claim that before authorities arrived they had entered the wooded area and encountered a large metallic object, shaped like an acorn, partially embedded in the earth. At the back of the object, the witnesses said, using wording that is curiously similar to that of the Roswell incident, were markings like ancient Egyp­tian “hieroglyphics.” And, also like the Roswell case, the UFO was allegedly transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, where it was kept in a sealed building (Gordon 2001, 288–90). Such shared motifs (as folklorists call story elements) suggest the Kecksburg incident was influenced by the Roswell story. One source even claimed bodies were recovered at Kecksburg but subsequently retracted the claim (Young 1997).

The various later claims do not fare well, and more than fifty residents of Kecksburg sent a petition to Unsolved Mysteries attempting to forestall the broadcast. These included the fire chief in 1965, Ed Myers, and a couple, Valerie and Jerome Miller, whose home the TV show wrongly claimed had served as a “military command post” during the UFO recovery. Actually, both the Air Force and the state police reported the day after the incident that nothing had been discovered and that all that had been carried from the site was search equipment (Young 1997).

Rendlesham Forest (1980)

For three days in late December 1980 in East England, a series of UFO close-encounter incidents occurred in Ren­dle­sham Forest, located between two British NATO bases—RAF Bent­waters and RAF Woodbridge—that were at the time being leased by the United States Air Force. The incidents began in the early morning of Decem­ber 26 (although sources disagree, some giving December 25 or December 27) and lasted for three successive days. Security patrolmen witnessed a bright streaking light that appeared to crash into the forest. Investigating, the men soon saw lights they attributed to a UFO—a bright white light plus an apparent vehicle with “a pulsing red light on top” and “blue lights underneath.” As the patrolmen proceeded closer, the object “maneuvered through the trees and disappeared” (Halt 1981). The following day, three seven-inch-diameter depressions were found at the site. That night “burn marks” were seen on trees, and radiation readings were also obtained. On an audiotape made by Deputy Base Commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt that same night, one hears an unidentified person call out regarding the bright light, “There it is again . . . there it is,” with a five-second interval (“Rendle­sham” 2011). Later that night “three starlike objects” were seen in the sky; one to the south, Halt (1981) said, “was visible for two or three hours and beamed down a stream of light from time to time” (Butler et al. 1984; Ridpath 1986; Hesemann 2001).

As we now know, a bolide (a brilliant meteor) streaked over southern England at the time of the first Ren­dle­sham sighting. Subsequently, the Suffolk police investigated the initial sighting and determined that the only light visible from the area was that of the Orford lighthouse (Ridpath 1986). The Orford Ness beacon stood in the very direction airmen were looking and flashed at the same five-second interval reported for the UFO. Later, other claims were convincingly de­bunked: the red and blue lights were from a police car; the “landing” depressions were rabbit diggings; “burn marks” on pines were axe blazings oozing resin; the low radiation readings had been taken with equipment not intended to measure background radiation and were therefore meaningless; and the starlike lights were probably indeed stars, namely Sirius, Vega, and Deneb (“Rendle­sham” 2011; Ridpath 1986). Mean­while, the Rendlesham story remained unpublicized for almost three years.

In October 1983 the story leaked out and made headlines in the British tabloid News of the World: “UFO Lands in Suffolk—and That’s Official.” It was followed by a book, Sky Crash: A Cosmic Conspiracy (1984), written by Brenda Butler, Jenny Randles, and Dot Street and based in part on hypnosis sessions with “Art Wallace”—actually former U.S. Airman Larry Warren who was the News of the World’s informant. Warren’s claim to have been a witness to the Rendlesham incident has been disputed by others, including Halt (“Rendle­sham” 2011). By this time bizarre rumors had surfaced that a com­mander had met three little humanoid extraterrestrials who had emerged from the landed UFO, but the alleged contactee denied it (Butler et al. 1984, 86).

In time, Jenny Randles, who helped hype the Rendlesham incident, came to doubt the extraterrestrial connection, stating, “While some puzzles remain, we can probably say that no unearthly craft were seen in Rendle­sham Forest. We can also argue with confidence that the main focus of the events was a series of misperceptions of everyday things encountered in less than everyday circumstances” (qtd. in “Rendle­sham” 2011).

* * *

No doubt other instances of the Ros­wellian Syndrome could be given (even beyond UFO encounters), but the ones we have presented here are major examples of the type. Of course, each is different in its own way (for example, the Rendlesham Forest case had a much briefer period of submergence than did Roswell). And some famous UFO incidents—the Phoenix Lights of 1997, for instance (Daven­port 2001)—have not followed the same course. (For one apparent reason, it did not involve a specific site on the ground visited by investigators.)

Nevertheless, we believe we have identified a genuine pattern in cases in which, during a period of submergence, the mythologizing tendency has been at work followed by a reemergence—rather like a new, more virulent strain of a virus. It appears that UFOlogists are always looking for a Holy Grail case to verify their belief in extraterrestrial visitation, and when that does not pan out (most UFO reports prove little more than misidentifications, ambiguous sightings, fake photos, and the like) they seek out the old cases and are rewarded with much more sensational testimony. By identifying and analyzing this process, we hope to promote more critical thinking regarding these and other sensationalized cases.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks are due Timothy Binga, director of CFI Libraries, and Lisa Nolan, CFI librarian, for their repeated help with this report.

Note

1. Confabulation is a distortion of memory in which gaps in one’s recollection are unintentionally filled in with fictional experiences (Golden­son 1970, I: 249).

References

Berlitz, Charles, and William L. Moore. 1980. The Roswell Incident. New York: Grosset and Dunlap.

Butler, Brenda, Jenny Randles, and Dot Street. 1984. Sky Crash: A Cosmic Conspiracy. Lon­don: Nevile Spearman.

Clark, Jerome. 1998. The UFO Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. Detroit, Michigan: Omnigraphics.

Davenport, Peter B. 2001. Phoenix (Arizona) lights. In Story 2001, 426–28.

Feschino, Frank C., Jr. 2004. The Braxton County Monster: The Cover-Up of the Flatwoods Monster Revealed. Charleston, West Vir­ginia: Quarrier Press.

Fitzgerald, Randall. 2001. In Story 2001, 507–14.

Frazier, Kendrick, Barry Karr, and Joe Nickell, eds. 1997. The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Cover-Ups. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

Friedman, Stanton T., and Don Berliner. 1992. Crash at Corona: The U.S. Military Retrieval and Cover-Up of a UFO. New York: Paragon House.

Goldenson, Robert M. 1970. The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, in two vols. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company.

Gordon, Stan. 2001. In Story 2001, 288–90.

Halt, Lt. Col. Charles. 1981. Report of January 13, given in Fitzgerald 2001, 487.

Hesemann, Michael. 2001. In Story 2001, 487–88.

Korff, Kal K. 1997. What really happened at Roswell? Skeptical Inquirer 21(4) (July/August): 24–30.

Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

———. 2000. The Flatwoods UFO Monster. Skeptical Inquirer 24(6) (November/December): 15–19.

———. 2001. Real-Life X-Files. Lexington: Uni­versity Press of Kentucky.

———. 2009. Return to Roswell. Skeptical Inquirer 33(1) (January/February): 10–12.

———. 2011. Tracking the Man-Beasts: Sas­quatch, Vampires, Zombies, and More. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

Nickell, Joe, with John F. Fischer. 1992. Mysterious Realms: Probing Paranormal, Histor­ical, and Forensic Enigmas. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.

Randi, James. 1995. The Supernatural A-Z: The Truth and the Lies. London: Brockhampton Press.

Rendlesham Forest incident. 2011. Available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendlesham_Forest_incident; accessed March 31, 2011.

Ridpath, Ian. 1986. The Woodbridge UFO incident. In Frazier, Karr, Nickell 1997, 166–70.

Saler, Benson, Charles A. Ziegler, and Charles B. Moore. 1997. UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth. Old Saybrook, Connecticut: Konecky & Konecky.

Sanderson, Ivan T. 1967. Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks at UFOs. New York: Cowles.

Story, Ronald D. 2001. The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters. New York: New American Library.

Stringfield, Leonard H. 1977. Situation Red: The UFO Siege. Garden City, New York: Double­day.

Thomas, Dave. 1995. The Roswell incident and Project Mogul: Scientist participant supports direct links. Skeptical Inquirer 19(4) (July/August): 15–18.

U.S. Air Force. 1997. The Roswell Report: Case Closed. Authored by Captain James Mc­Andrew for headquarters USAF; Washing­ton, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Young, Robert R. 1997. ‘Old Solved Mysteries’: The Kecksburg UFO incident. In Frazier, Karr, Nickell 1997, 177–83.

Since 1980 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has been a major mental illness category of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In this article I critically examine the use of this diagnosis to treat soldiers suffering from the aftermath of physical and emotional war trauma. The term PTSD, referring to a psychiatric disease or disorder, appeared in the New York Times 19,000 times in the ten years between August 14, 2000, and August 15, 2010, compared to only 450 times during the prior twenty years.

Today, 400,000 war veterans obtain financial assistance for this medical condition. Of two million Iraq and Afghan­istan veterans, 10 percent are estimated to have PTSD. It is the topic of hundreds of psychiatric and psychology articles per year and absorbs large annual national expenditures for treatment and re­search. Out of $3.8 billion awarded as a result of U.S. Congres­sional funding bill HR2638 to the U.S. Veterans Admini­stration (VA) in 2009 for mental illness, the single largest mental disease category funded was PTSD. Between 2004 and 2009, 20 percent of the estimated half a million Iraq-Afghanistan war veteran patients were treated for PTSD. The first year of this health care cost was 1.4 billion dollars (U.S. Congres­sional Budget Office 2012). How did it come about that the diagnosis of PTSD became so widely accepted by the Veterans Health System (VHA), the American Psychi­atric Association, and the American public?

This question first was raised in my mind when two decades ago I did a psychiatric evaluation of a fifty-year-old Vietnam veteran, a Purple Heart recipient with a voluminous official history of treatment for PTSD. A few weeks earlier he had threatened to kill both himself and his therapist in her office at a VA outpatient psychiatric clinic. He was disabled by use of a Taser gun by police, who had stormed the building.

They seized him while he was un­conscious, and transported him to a prison. The patient was an unemployed married Hispanic man, wounded during the war’s Tet offensive. His record indicated that he had suffered for many years from PTSD symptoms such as hyper-arousal, insomnia with nightmares about Viet Cong snipers, and paranoid fears; these increased during binges of alcohol use. I had anticipated a confrontation with a huge, menacing figure but found the man to be a mild-mannered little guy who resembled Woody Allen. He said that he had noted none of the above PTSD symptoms for many months, but he was deeply concerned about retaining maximum VA compensation for this diagnosis.

My surprise at the apparent cure of this former soldier’s mental disease prompted me to review several dozen medical-psychiatric records of Vietnam veterans diagnosed with PTSD by me or other VA and military psychiatrists. I also reinterviewed over a dozen patients. PTSD symptoms listed in DSM-IV are memory loss or distressing flashbacks referring to battle events, hyper-vigilance, poor sleep with recurrent nightmares, irritability, startles, and episodes of emotional numbness. (This last symptom appears to be the single most important one in verifying the PTSD diagnosis [Pietrzak 2009].) The current APA diagnosis re­quires appearance of characteristic symptoms after a latency period of time subsequent to a specific severe precipitating traumatic event—constituting “Criterion A,” discussed below.

Several patients also shared with me considerable discomfort with the label of PTSD, which to them signified an emasculating weakness or dishonesty rather than a genuine illness. A search for financial benefits did appear to be one important factor in shaping the narratives of both patients and clinicians. This suggested the advantages for veterans (“secondary gain”) of re­porting typical PTSD symptoms, but it also reflected compassion of VA evaluating staff toward patients who clearly had suffered severely during and after warfare. The record review showed considerable co-morbidity (when a disease category overlaps with one or more other major psychiatric diagnoses, such as Major Depressive Disorder or Acute Stress Disorder), and many of the patients used addicting drugs (alcohol, marijuana, pain killers, or amphetamine stimulants). Substance dependence was almost impossible to disentangle from PTSD symptoms.

Unlike my patient whom I de­scribed earlier, few veterans with PTSD im­proved very much during the many years that had elapsed since their initial clinical assessment. Often DSM-IV clinical criteria for PTSD had been carelessly applied to veterans whose post-war lives had been dominated by poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and family disruptions because of violence, drugs, or divorce.

A Brief History of PTSD

The DSM classification system was created in 1952. Its first two editions (I [1952] and II [1968]) were based upon Freud’s psychoanalytic formulations. The etiology of mental disorders was thought to originate in early-life traumatic experiences. However, a major change in thinking about the concept of a mental disorder and its etiology occurred in the 1970s, reflected in DSM-III (1980). There was a marked shift away from attention to early childhood histories. Valiant attempts were made to mimic mainstream medicine and surgery using their ancient etiological categories—trauma, cancer producing, infectious, toxic, degenerative, genetic, metabolic, and endocrine.

But psychiatric disorders proved difficult to classify with quantifiable chemical findings or specific identifying clinical signs. The revised DSM systems (in an effort to establish reliable guidelines for diagnosticians) still had to rely substantially upon self-reported descriptions of symptoms, not on measurable data. DSM I–III systems’ categorical decisions reflected literature reviews, some data analysis, periodic field trials, and the outcome of verbal debates between experts. That complex decision-making process used patients’ clinical information but had to rely upon fallible doctors’ judgments. A better approach to diagnosis creation was clearly needed, and so psychiatric research in the early 1990s was increasingly devoted to the human brain.

A 1889 line drawing of the Greek hero Herakles, afflicted with something akin to PTSD brought on by the violence of his twelve labors, by the artist August Baumeister. It originates in a Greek-Sicilian vase painting signed by the artist Asteas (350–320 BCE), depicting a theater performance in which the Herakles of the dramatist Euripides is about to immolate the first of his three children while his wife attempts to escape his psychotic wrath.

PTSD was first listed in the 1980 edition of the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) and modified later in DSM-IV and DSM-IV-TR. Its ap­pearance in the official APA nomenclature followed years of intense lobbying effort by Vietnam veterans’ organizations, activist social workers, psychologists, and anti-war psychiatrists. Advo­cates for the PTSD diagnosis asserted that traumatic memories of war experiences were being revived in contemporary time, producing a new serious men­tal illness. Soldiers should be treated and compensated for a disorder attributable to events that took place many years earlier. This understanding necessitated a shift in attention away from the psychodynamics of individual veterans, and other risk variables, to a heavy emphasis upon a single major factor—the negative aftereffects of war trauma on later mental health.

The leaders of the American psychiatric profession who became midwives to the official birth of PTSD during the 1970s shared today’s almost universal belief that large-scale suffering of others matters universally and that it demands to be recognized and ameliorated. This moral value probably accounted for the diagnostic inclusion of Criterion A, which has generated heated debate since its original inclusion in the 1980 DSM-III. Criterion A for PTSD states that a patient diagnosed with PTSD was confronted with “events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury. . .” and responded with “intense fear, helplessness, or horror.” Criterion A made PTSD the only DSM mental disorder that required a subjective appraisal of an external environmental stressor as part of its diagnosis. Retention of the trauma criterion has been supported by the observation that studies of symptoms unconnected to a specific precipitant have failed to identify any “characteristic set of symptoms” (North et al. 2009). Also this position is consistent with the conclusion that treatment concentrating on specific trauma memories and their meaning is more effective than nontrauma-focused therapy (Ehlers et al. 2010).

But the criterion does have many problems. One statistical piece of evidence against inclusion of documentation of a quantitative trigger to facilitate making a diagnosis is that most soldiers do not develop an anxiety disorder or any major psychiatric disorder even when exposed to the most horrific trauma. The widespread application of Criterion A ignores vast individual variations in patients’ resilience and capacity to adapt. Its reliance upon subjective reports rather than objective eyewitness evidence further weakens its scientific status. For the preceding reasons, Criterion A does not appear in the PTSD diagnosis category of the International Classification of Mental Diseases (ICD-10).

The importance of this diagnostic criterion in determining the size of disability benefits for veterans with PTSD has been diminished by new VA standards issued by the Obama admini­stration in 2010. The VA policy now states that VA psychiatrists need not require proof of the quantitative impact of a traumatic precipitant. This VA policy change was inspired by a deep concern for the suffering of victims and largely ignored the APA’s PTSD Criterion A, which may be deleted from DSM-V’s definition.

Does PTSD Meet the Criteria for a Valid Psychiatric Diagnosis?

The diagnosis of PTSD has always had many critics, ranging from McHugh and Treisman (2007), who boldly consider PTSD to be a “faddish postulate” that “creates a medical condition out of normal distress,” to the meticulous scholars Rosen and Lilienfeld (2007), who concluded that the disorder’s “core assumptions and hypothesized mechanisms lack compelling or consistent empirical support.” Robins and Guze (1970) proposed five research areas in which a psychiatric diagnosis might be validated: (1) clinical description including precipitants and diagnostic stability over time; (2) biological, hormonal, and radiological quantitative evidence; (3) distinct boundaries be­tween the disorder’s characteristics and other psychiatric conditions; (4) family or genetic statistical connections be­tween patients in the diagnostic category; (5) treatment relevance and success related to precise diagnosis. Schizophrenia, major depression, and alcohol dependence are examples of mental disorders that have achieved considerable legitimacy through this process, but PTSD as a diagnosis for war veterans has not yet attained comparable validity.

The above five research domains constitute fertile ground for further re-examining PTSD’s diagnostic weaknesses and generating potential remedies:

Clinical Description and Precipitants. The VA patient I described earlier is an example of diagnostic instability. The weakness of Criterion A suggests a problematic relation between PTSD and specific precipitants. These days it is obvious that patients suffering from the emotional aftermath of warfare have not demonstrated consistent symptom patterns. Perhaps, then, we can better comprehend the emotional toll of recent American wars by applying the sociological concept that throughout history powerful professional and political communities have constructed truth, established definitions, and generated rules for the interpretation of trauma’s impact. This viewpoint provides insight into the history of emotional war trauma and explains its massively varying conceptualizations and manifestations. Like “Historical Critical Psychopathology” (Bald­win et al. 2004), it emphasizes“his­­torically situated and contingent aspects of mental disorders.”

Using such a framework of understanding, the earliest PTSD portrayal may be the fourth-century character Herakles, created by the dramatist Euripides. Driven insane by a Greek goddess, he suffered a transitory murderous frenzy precipitated by the violence of his twelve labors. A messenger inquires of him, “Has the blood of the men you recently killed driven you out of your wits?” Over two millennia later, emotional victims of American Civil War trauma were said to be afflicted with “Soldier’s Heart” (1864–1868), and those suffering from “Railway Spine” in America (circa 1886) showed psychological and physical characteristics quite different from those used currently to identify PTSD. Such patients in the latter half of the nineteenth century experienced bodily shaking and tremors of arms and legs, stuttering, and limping, but they did not report anger, numbing sensations, or flashback symp­toms as contemporary PTSD victims often do.

Civil War victims’ clinical presentations resembled those reported during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), when emotional casualties began to be treated with considerable respect. Many Russian psychiatrists argued that afflicted soldiers had a “real illness.” English and German “shell shock” victims and Russian “contusion” casualties during World War I (1914–1918) also demonstrated a quite different symptom constellation from that characteristic of PTSD in twenty-first-century America. European patients manifested multiple sensory-motor signs such as deafness, muteness, and blindness. Such striking historical dissimilarities in the psychological clinical phenomena of post-war emotional syndromes suggest they resemble cultural constructions more than disease categories. Cultural factors may also influence treatment outcome; PTSD victims in Kenya found help in their religious community, in contrast to Okla­homa City bombing survivors who received benefit from medical treatments (North 2009).

Brain Structure and Neurophysiologic Studies. Since DSM-IV appeared in 1994, there has been a massive increase in U.S. research efforts to demonstrate that an organic central nervous system disturbance causes PTSD. This campaign was named “embodiment” by skeptics who deplored the use of inappropriate comparison groups and the contaminating role of “cultural ex­pectancy” in the studies mobilized to create a more precise and useful PTSD diagnostic category (Baldwin et al. 2004). The search for organic brain changes as the source of PTSD symptoms was fueled by the belief that war’s emotional stress could affect brain physiology and chemistry negatively, producing permanent and characteristic post-trauma symptom patterns. The first major effort to argue this position originated during the 1905 Russo-Japanese war through studies of soldiers who suffered from “contusion,” a puzzling nervous breakdown during or after combat. The psychology versus brain change etiological debate became even more active during World War I (1914–1918) in Europe with research about “shell shock.”

Since the Korean War (1950–1953), multiple research efforts in English-speaking countries have sought distinct patterns of psycho-physiological arousal in PTSD. But measurements of neurotransmitter levels across most populations with the disease showed marked differences of quantity, including a complete failure to show heightened re­sponses in a quarter of cases. Acute stress has been shown to activate the central nervous system to release catechola­mines, norepinephrine and epinephrine, into the bloodstream. But patients with acute PTSD symptoms have normal plasma concentrations of these substances. Only those with chronic PTSD have increased cerebrospinal fluid norepinephrine levels that correlate with the severity of PTSD symptoms. But all situations that produce stress for human primates—not just emotional war trauma—are associated with catecholamine release.

Malfunction of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal hormonal axis has been postulated in those PTSD victims who have lowered blood cortisol levels and who demonstrate enhanced cortisol suppression with dexamethasone and exaggerated cortisol secretion during stressful exposure. But findings have been inconsistent or subtle, and many hormonal studies lack hormone level data pre-exposure to stress. Recent prospective longitudinal studies have shown that low cortisol levels in PTSD patients may actually have preceded, not followed, a traumatic event. Finally, cortisol levels vary dramatically secondary to numerous biological, temporal, and psychological variables, making them an unreliable biological marker.

Another major effort to find a neurobiological correlate to PTSD has focused upon brain morphology studied through brain scanning. Extrapo­lating from animal stress models, it was suggested that elevated corticosteroids (adrenocorticotropic hormone, or cortisol) in patients with PTSD could produce toxic damage to the hippocampus. The function of memory is thought to reside there, and the structure’s compromise might be related to flashbacks and nightmare symptoms. But there is only weak evidence for this link in humans. Also, most human studies have failed to control for other psychiatric disorders associated with hippocampal atrophy, including alcoholism. Smaller hippocampal volume is a relatively nonspecific finding that also has been reported to be associated with depression and even borderline personality disorder. Statistical associations between emotional war trauma, PTSD, and size of brain structures remain highly speculative and unproven.

PTSD Boundaries with Other Psychiatric Disorders. The diagnosis of PTSD today is made by the use of standardized tests, such as the self-report PTSD Symptoms Checklist, the Clini­cian Administered PTSD Scale, and a Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders. But still, PTSD is poorly separated from other major psychological disorders, and its diagnostic stability is low, as illustrated by my patient vignette in the introduction of this article. Using current diagnostic criteria, PTSD has consistently been found to overlap other major psychiatric disorders. Kessler et al. (1996) found that 88 percent of a large sample of U.S. patients with PTSD met DSM-III or IV clinical-case data criteria for at least one other major mental disorder, most often chemical dependence. PTSD does have convergent validity with major depressive disorder (95 percent lifetime and 50 percent co-occurring) in combat veterans. Further research on the centrality of “numbing” may help establish PTSD as an independent diagnostic entity (Pietrzak 2009).

The medical condition traumatic brain injury (TBI) is also difficult to distinguish from PTSD. TBI is a brain concussion caused by a blow to the head that changes a soldier’s consciousness, resulting in amnesia and neurological abnormalities. TBI can result from damage sustained from bullets, bombs, falls, or vehicle accidents. TBIs may be conceptually related to the above historical concepts of English “shell shock” and Russian “contusion” traumata.

Genetic Studies Related to Emotional Consequences of Battle Trauma. Such research remains suggestive rather than convincing. Molecular genetics has yet to identify specific genes that confer a vulnerability to PTSD. Although genetic research does support a biological component of PTSD, it has failed to distinguish it from other related (co-morbid) psychiatric diagnoses. One study showed that shared genetics accounted for 30 percent of the variance in PTSD symptoms in Vietnam War veteran twins, even after taking into account different levels of combat exposure. Stein et al. (2002) proved in 1999 that genetics contributes to both the tendency for a subject to be exposed to traumas involving assault and a vulnerability to develop PTSD after exposure. Such results have led to the theory that a combination of genes and environment are necessary to develop PTSD symptoms, a proposal that contradicts the assumption that trauma is the core etiological agent. The preceding observations are consistent with the idea that PTSD may be distinguishable from other common disorders.

The PTSD Diagnosis Used to Guide Treat­ment of the Illness. Experts today do not yet know if the prolonged emotional suffering following physical or emotional war trauma can be ameliorated, let alone cured. The Institute of Medicine carefully evaluated fifty-three drug studies and thirty-seven psychotherapy studies (National Acad­emy of Sciences 2008). Their team of academic specialists examined the evidence (or lack of evidence) for the success of anticonvulsants, benzodiazepines, MAOIs, SSRIs and other antidepressants, and other remedies such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EM­DR). Their summary concluded that there was insufficient scientific evidence to determine that any treatment (except possibly Prolonged Exposure Therapy) had beneficial long-term effects for PTSD. Their report noted that drug manufacturers had funded many studies, possibly biasing their outcomes, and that too many research patients had dropped out of experiments to allow robust conclusions about efficacy. Little is known about what kind of patients benefit from which treatments.

On April 26, 2010, the New York Times published an article that de­scribed the plight of veterans who were physical and emotional casualties, slated for discharge, temporarily hospitalized at Fort Carson’s Warrior Transi­tion Battalion unit. Inmates and their close family members depicted absent or poor psychiatric treatment, overmedication, bureaucratic delays, and prescription of drugs that fostered ad­diction to heroin. Poly-pharmacy treatment for PTSD (combining anti-anxiety, antidepressant, antipsychotic, and anti-insomnia agents) recently has been associated with accidental death in U.S. veterans with this condition (New York Times, February 14, 2011). Such reports are painful reminders that neither the U.S. military establishment nor the Veterans Administration has learned quite enough to treat victims of emotional war trauma effectively.

“Prolonged Exposure Therapy,” originated and proven efficacious by Edna Foa, remains the most evidence-supported successful intervention. It helps traumatized soldiers to approach trauma-related thoughts, feelings, and situations previously avoided because they cause distress. The technique uses education, breathing exercises, safe re-exposure to painful avoided or un­avoidable war experiences, and “talking through” a patient’s individual history of trauma. A couple of my own PTSD patients who tried this method felt that it reawakened and reactivated traumatic memories that appeared to have been forgotten, making their emotional distress even worse. This possible disadvantage for a portion of the war-traumatized population may be comparable to the reaction that some alcoholic addicts have experienced during Alco­holics Anonymous meetings. The ex­plicit sharing with others of vivid ex­periences associated with the ravages of the disease stimulates them to drink right after a seemingly successful meeting. Also evidence for effectiveness of exposure therapy is not as strong for veterans as it is for civilians.

Recent empirical research studies indicate that cognitive processing therapy (CPT) is also often effective in treating the emotional aftermath of warfare. The method tries to modify perceptions of a specific war trauma and its reproduction.

Conclusions

Currently there is little benefit in directing treatment interventions toward patients diagnosed with PTSD, an amorphous disease category with indistinct conceptual boundaries and without a firm biological foundation. Money might be more prudently spent on im­mediate post-trauma intervention ad­dressing individual patients’ symptoms. Treatment of concurrent depression, addiction, and other anxiety conditions may be far more valuable than targeting chronic symptoms and decades-later psychological aftermaths. All ap­proaches must ameliorate veterans’ social conditions—poverty, homelessness, and marital and familial friction. Acute post-traumatic symptoms must not be transformed into a chronic compensated disability, set in stone by its designation as an official major DSM disease syndrome.

The use of the PTSD diagnosis may contribute to treatment failures because it fabricates a spurious invalid category of illness, rather than seeing a unique sufferer. A humane society must compensate and reward all military victims with generosity, but strict application of Criterion A of the PTSD diagnosis does not accomplish this purpose. PTSD appears to be more of a social construction than a medical brain disease, and as of this date can best be considered “as encompassing a broad range of possible reactions to adverse events” (Rosen and Lilienfeld 2007, 858). Finally, the stigma associated with this diagnosis of a mental illness may keep some veterans from seeking care. The shortcomings of the current PTSD diagnosis jeopardize the treatment of the terrible aftermath of war’s emotional trauma.

Acknowledgment

I thank Dave Wilson, MD, (an internal medicine resident at Stanford Medical School) for assistance with review of the biological substratum of PTSD.

References

Baldwin, S.A., D.C. Williams, A.C. Houts. 2004. The creation, expansion, and embodiment of posttraumatic stress disorder. The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice 3(1): 1–39.

Ehlers, A., D.M. Clark, M. Creamer, et al. 2010. Do all psychological treatments really work the same in posttraumatic stress disorder? Clinical Psychology Review 30: 269–76.

Kessler, R.C., C.B. Nelson, K.A. McGonagle. 1996. The epidemiology of co-occuring ad­dictive and mental disorders. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 66(1): 17–31.

McHugh, P.R., and G. Treisman. 2007. PTSD, a problematic diagnostic category. Journal of Anxiety Disorders 21(2): 211–22.

National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine. 2008. Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Published by Institute of Medicine, National Academic Press.

North, C.S., A.M. Suris, M. Davis, et al. 2009. Toward validation of the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry 166(1): 34–40.

Pietrzak, R.R. 2009. The importance of four-factor emotional numbing and dysphoria models in PTSD. American Journal of Psychiatry 166(1): 40–41.

Robins, E., and S.B. Guze. 1970. Establishment of diagnostic validity in psychiatric illness. American Journal of Psychiatry 126: 983–87.

Rosen, G.M., and S.O. Lilienfeld. 2007. Post­traumatic stress disorder: An empirical evaluation of core assumptions. Clinical Psychology Review 28: 837–68.

Stein, M.B., J.L. Jang, and S. Taylor. 2002. Genetic and environmental influences on trauma exposure and posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms: A twin study. American Journal of Psychiatry 159: 1675–81.

U.S. Congressional Budget Office. 2012. The Veterans Health Administration’s treatment of PTSD and traumatic injury among recent combat veterans (CBO study, February 2012).

The Roman Catholic Church’s remarkably concise statement of its core beliefs, the Credo, includes this pivotal article of faith that sustains and justifies most religions: “Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venture seaculi”—“[I believe] and await the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” Surely, life on Earth was truly miserable for nearly everybody until fairly recently. Through the ages the promise of comfort and immortality after earthly demise has been a powerful incentive for religious adhesion. In fact, failure to belong in toto to the Church, for example, was harshly punished by the ecclesiastical Roman Inquisition tribunal (1542–1908), which dealt out severe questioning that included torture to coerce the victim to recant and return to the fold. Those judged guilty of heresy incurred harsh penalties including death by fire.

There remain in the world today several other orthodoxies, led by religious fanatics, that torture and kill in the name of religion. Some of them use animal and human sacrificial rituals. On the other hand, to have one’s virtual ticket to heaven punched one must pay for the privilege granted religion by exacting a number of conditions in return. They include strict adherence to specific rules of conduct and financial sacrifices by the willing believer. By contrast, the wicked (comprising those born or raised outside the faith, unbelievers, nonbelievers, cheats, murderers, thieves, and the like) are likely to be condemned to eternal damnation, which usually involves a hellish existence in some underground sea of eternal flames ruled by the Devil. The miscreant’s fall from grace, however, need not be fatal if he or she recants the behavior in time. He or she may yet be pardoned by taking on burdensome obligations for the remission of sins. This is how religions have dominated man­kind since time im­memorial. They offer a collective vision of a benevolent eternity for the price of remaining an integral, potent part of human society. But today, life on Earth is more rapidly becoming gratifying while the possibility for a supernatural life after death is becoming increasingly problematic and distant.

The cornerstone of almost all established religions rests on ancient texts claimed to have been divinely inspired, although an argument can be made that all of them qualify as heavenly hearsay. Many have been translated into the common spoken and written language. They include the Septuagint, an early translation of the Hebrew Old Testa­ment into Greek. Then there is the Complutensian Polyglot, the Old and New Testament of the King James Bible rendered in quintessential Eng­lish, the Ramayana, the Bhagavad Gita as part of the Mahabarata, the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price, the Koran and the Hadith, the Torah and the wisdoms of the Midrash with the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Tal­muds. These texts are usually grounded on a set of archaic dogmas, implausible beliefs, and fallacious precepts, such as the golden tablets as one of the divine sources for the Book of Mormon.

These texts inevitably clash against the coherent, rational, scientific ad­vances that increasingly overwhelm religious histories, dictates, and dogmas. In all seriousness, some advanced religions still dispense such improbable yarns as a naked Eve in the Garden of Eden speaking with a snake. They allege the immaculate conception of Jesus by Mary through the intervention of the Holy Ghost. They assert that the Red Sea parted to allow Jews dry passage from Egypt to the Holy Land. More generally, these religions have been generating miraculous happenstances for which reliable evidence is never likely to be found.

For the rational person, it is increasingly difficult to accept these religious tenets. Indeed, to belong to most religions one must suspend wholesale monumental disbeliefs of the modern world and instead accept supernatural magical explanations. With scientific advances expanding the human view of the universe, it is understandable why so few major religions have emerged in the past thousand years. Given these wide-ranging impediments, it is not surprising that religions in almost all their forms are neither willing to deal with the modern world nor capable of doing so. This explains, in part, why the attendance at churches, synagogues, and mosques for religious events is slowly but palpably decreasing. Religions over the longer term seem doomed to eventual irrelevance. They appear to be well on the way to eventually turning into mere historical curiosities, but that will not happen effortlessly or soon because religions still carry considerable sway in the world.

Among the active religions of today, Judaism is one of the oldest and is conspicuous for its remarkable survival in the face of brutal existential assaults. Judaism covers a gamut of conflicting factions, many of which are based on fierce resistance to change. The scholars of old wrote many religious texts by borrowing liberally from other mythological traditions. For example, the four-thousand-year-old Babylonian Epic of Gamesh originated the story of a heavily animal-laden ark enduring a torrential rainfall and then ending up stuck on a mountain top. The Roman Catholic Church was eventually divided as a result of the sixteenth-century Refor­ma­tion into Protestant denominations, which in turn were still further divided. Islam emerged from the dictates of the prophet Muham­mad, who preached an uncompromising form of monotheism in the seventh century. Although there is a theoretical Islamic underpinning of belonging to a single community, Islam also fragmented early into a number of sects, some of which continue to fight each other in a murderous frenzy to this day. Hinduism emerged from bloody sacrificial cults brought in by Arian invaders in India around 1500 BCE. Buddhism began as a revolt in the sixth century BCE against orthodox Hinduism through the influence of Siddhartha Gau­tama, universally known as Buddha. Confucius in China did not preach the existence of a deity but of a mandatory system of good conduct that he introduced 2,500 years ago. Jainism was also introduced in the sixth century BCE, as yet another religion that taught nonviolence in revolt against Hinduism. Shinto in Japan was once a sect with reverence for Kami, a polytheist sacred power that eventually became distorted in order to sustain the brutal militarism of the 1930s and early 1940s—but its origins are lost in the early folklore of the country.

The central conclusion about religion has to be that it has not made any lasting impact on human ethics, the primary engine for its existence. In this respect alone, religion has failed dismally, as the world remains today at the uneasy threshold of a worldwide nuclear threat, looking helplessly at the hecatomb that was the twentieth century.

The single most significant element discrediting religion is the inexorably growing impact of science. That pro­cess began in earnest in sixteenth-century Europe and received a dramatic boost that had far-reaching implications not only for science but for the Roman Catholic Church as well. It was Copernicus (1473–1543) who mathematically dethroned Earth as the center of the Ptolemaic universe and postulated a heliostatic solar system, degrading the Earth to a much lesser position in the firmament. His work was confirmed by Galileo (1564–1642), who not only experimentally confirmed and supported the heliocentric theory developed by Co­pern­icus but is actually considered the pioneer of the experimental method. This did not sit well with the Roman Catholic Church of the time, and stern opposition to Galileo’s heliocentric system by the Church did not fully end until 1922. Now the Church has issued restrictions to human reproduction and stem cell research. Many other religions also have concerns about where scientific research is going and the risk it is posing to their beliefs. In the long run these restrictions are not likely to be effective. There can be no doubt that science will eventually triumph.

What makes the advance of scientific work possible is that there is an easy and fruitful give and take between science and technology; neither of these can possibly have an intrinsic fruitful relationship with religion. There is a major difference between science and technology: science is a way of thinking while technology is a way of doing. Technology provides no clear contribution to the eventual doom of religion because it dwells on an entirely different logical platform from science. That difference between them is important. Technology is an altogether distinct concept from science, although these two terms are almost always used interchangeably and indiscriminately. The extraordinary example is China, which was a veritable fountainhead of major technological inventions. These included the compass in the third century BCE and the development of medicine—the use of the pulse for diagnosis was recorded in the remarkable Book of Titles, dating back to the eleventh century BCE. Gun­powder was first used for fireworks in the second century BCE; writing paper was available from 105 CE onward, and printing with movable type was developed in the seventh century CE.

These were truly remarkable technological fruits of the human mind that Europeans didn’t recognize and adopt until much later. Not surprisingly, there is no whiff of religious chicanery in them because religion is blinded by “having the word” that transcends scientific thoughts and technological pursuits, intentionally resisting change to protect its wobbly edifice of dogma. This is what makes every attempt to reconcile religion with science and/or technology a virtually unattainable goal.

One of my sometime mentors was paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). We encountered each other in France, where I lived, and later on in New York, where he died. He tried but failed to convince me to consider a Jesuit framework for my life, but I learned the catechism in the interim and sang until fairly recently exquisite masses and requiems by a variety of composers—from Gregorian chants and early music to contemporaries—in a number of churches and secular venues. Much of that music is awesomely beautiful in the main, but it neither subverted me nor provided me with a coherent convergence between religion, science, and technology, just as Pierre was unable to do so. This discouragingly futile effort to achieve consistency between science and religion is broadly ongoing today. A dominant factor is individuals’ repeated but failed attempts to seek at least a rational link between religion and ethics. Ethics is a major factor in science but plays no discernible role in technology. Ethics consists of wise guides for human behavior that are vitally important to civilizing pursuits. They ensure the survival and prosperity of the human society. By contrast, religious precepts and prohibitions usually impose a hostile burden on outsiders and infidels who reject adherence to traditional and ancient norms, most of which long ago reached obsolescence.

It was Voltaire (1694–1778) who ex­claimed in disgust as he left one of many interminable religious disputations of his time, “There are no sects in geometry!” By contrast, here is one shining example among many that illuminates how science and technology complement each other to advance both: In 1928 Karl Jansky, a newly minted MIT graduate engineer, was hired by the then-prestigious Bell Tele­phone Laboratories. He was as­signed the difficult task of tracking down all sources of noise that interfered with telephone communications. By 1931 Jansky had systematically detected and identified all sources of telephonic noise, with one glaring exception. It took him many additional months to finally pinpoint that finicky last source of noisy interference. It originates in deep space from the direction of Sagit­tarius, located at the center of our own galaxy. Although Jansky published the results of his seminal work, he perplexingly didn’t follow through on it but went on to do other things. It fell to an amateur astronomer, Grote Beber, to pursue this spatial mystery further; thus was born the science of radio astronomy, emerging as it did from technology rather than from science. Such fortuities are the bread and butter of science and technology, where no quarter is ever taken or given to claims that are beyond the realm of rational inquiry.

The one central position that distinguishes science and technology from religion is the tradition of unrelenting attempts to falsify the observations before they are accepted by the community of scientists and engineers, a demanding standard that religion could never accomplish or even consider. Religion is incapable of granting believers the thought that there may perhaps be errors in its tenets that might contradict any part of the platform on which they stand.

Nonetheless, religion has to rationalize its usually convoluted dogmas by giving them ethical dimensions—as already noted, an ultimately futile exercise. For example, the “Right to Life” has long been a dead letter in the Roman Catholic Church. Even Vatican scholars of the Scriptures no longer uphold the erroneous reading of Genesis 38:9. Among the Ten Com­mand­ments “Thou shalt not kill” does not even begin to encompass all human life- forms, and the human construct is open to wide interpretation; consider the resulting dogma that “life begins at conception.” That is an utterly false assertion on its face because spermatozoa and ova cells are vibrantly alive long before they meet. Life most assuredly does not begin at conception. There are no discontinuities here as life just persists and inexorably continues and matures. Thus the inevitable conclusion embraced by religion is that the sacred status of an individual and his society is dependent on properties possessed by human cellular tissues.

This has a startling consequence that is rarely if ever invoked by religion. Indeed, if all forms of human life were truly recognized as sacred down to the unicellular form, religious authorities would be compelled to insist on the ceremonial burial of every human cell, every strand of hair, every bit of skin, and every tissue removed from surgery. From the formal religious assertion of the sublime value of a single fertilized human cell, we are, alas, left with a preposterous notion that is not enforceable in the real world. Sooner rather than later these concepts will determine at some point in the future that all human life is sacred in fact as it is in theory. The quoted Roman Catholic Credo dogma that begins this essay is based on the proposition that life on Earth is assumed to be unlikely to improve and will remain irretrievably miserable. Only in life after death can one be granted perpetual solace in one of several forms. This precept has no place in science or technology, but it still finds a declining refuge in religion. The ultimate contradiction is the pro-lifer who supports the death penalty. H.L. Menc­ken witheringly summarized how science could overcome the limitations of theology and autocracy: “Every time the scientists take another fort from the theologians and the politicians there is genuine human progress.”

© Copyright 2012 by Elie A. Shneour. — All rights reserved.

Very Close Encounter

Hickson, then forty-two, was fishing from an old pier on the Pascagoula River with a friend, nineteen-year-old Calvin Parker Jr., on the night of Octo­ber 11, 1973. Hickson claimed they heard a “zipping” sound and en­coun­tered a glowing object—an elongated UFO—hovering above the ground. Three robotlike aliens exited from the craft; although they were gray humanoids just over five feet tall, they were otherwise of a type not reported before or since (Nickell 2011): each entity lacked a neck, exhibited only slits for eyes and mouth, had a nose and ears that were sharply pointed protrusions, and possessed clawed hands. The legs were joined, pedestal-like, and the entity glided (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Recreation of Hickson and Parker’s encounter, based on several sketches made from their descriptions. (Drawing by Joe Nickell)

The two men claimed they were taken aboard the spacecraft, where they were examined, after which they were returned to their fishing site. Un­nerved, they sat in a car to regain their composure (with Hickson, at least, drinking whiskey), then reported their experience to the sheriff.

Although the UFO reported by the men had apparently not been seen by people on the heavily traveled nearby highway (Randle 2001), there had been other UFO sightings in the area, including on the night in question. The UFOs were variously described—some saw a helicopter-like object; one person re­ported a supposed “experiment” from an Air Force base; and so on (Clark 1998, 715; Blum with Blum 1974, 14–19).

Controversy

The pair’s veracity was accepted by UFO believers J. Allen Hynek of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and James Harder of the Aerial Phe­nomena Research Organization (APRO), both of whom rushed to interview the “abductees.” Harder tried unsuccessfully to hypnotize the men (Clark 1998, 717) but did conclude they had experienced “an extraterrestrial phenomena [sic].”¹ Hynek believed the pair had at least had “a very real, frightening experience” (Blum with Blum 1974, 24–25). The sheriff’s de­partment also felt the men were telling the truth, and Hickson requested and passed a lie-detector test arranged by the agent with whom the men had signed a contract to promote their story. Parker suffered a breakdown and was briefly hospitalized (Clark 1998, 714–17).

The men’s fantastic report drew much skepticism. Famed UFO skeptic Philip J. Klass noted discrepancies in Hickson’s account (for instance, once referring to the creatures as having a “hole” for a mouth but later calling it a “slit”). Klass also pointed out that the lie-detector test was conducted by an “inexperienced” polygraph operator and that Hickson refused to take another administered by an expert police examiner. Based on other evidence—including the fact that Hick­son had once been fired for improperly obtaining money from employees under his supervision—Klass concluded the case was a hoax ([1974] 1976, 347–69; 1989, 18–19).

A Solution

So which was it: a genuine alien abduction or a hoax? Or is that a false dichotomy? In reviewing the case, I thought there might be another possibility: the two men, who might have been drinking before the incident (as Hickson admitted he was after), might have dozed off. Hickson could then have entered a hypnagogic (“waking dream”) state, a trancelike condition between waking and sleeping in which some people experience hallucinations, often with bizarre imagery, including strange beings (aliens, ghosts, etc.). This state may be accompanied by what is called “sleep paralysis” (the body’s inability to move due to still being in the sleep mode). In fact, Hickson not only reported the bizarre imagery but also said that the aliens “paralyzed” him before carrying him aboard the UFO in what sounds like a hypnagogic fantasy.

The imagery might even have been triggered by Hickson actually sighting something—almost anything—that, while he was in the waking-dream state, appeared to be a “UFO.” During a recorded interview with Sheriff Fred Diamond (Blum with Blum 1974, 30–36), Hickson described the UFO as “a blue light,” adding: “It circled a bit.” He emphasized it was blue, saying, “And you think you dreamin’ about something like that, you know” (original emphasis). Hickson also reported that it made “a little buzzin’ sound—nnnnn­nnnnn, nnnnnnnnn” (Blum with Blum 1974, 31). Bright lights and odd noises can also be part of the waking-dream experience, as can the sense of floating (Mavromatis 1987, 148). Hickson stated, “I couldn’t resist [the extraterrestrials], I just floated—felt no sensation, no pain” (Blum with Blum 1974, 32). These phenomena, coupled with the paralysis and fantastic imagery, corroborate the diagnosis of a hypnagogic experience.

Of additional corroborative value are other factors, including Hickson’s description of the aliens as speaking inside his head (Clark 1998, 715), be­cause a feature of hypnagogia is the sense of perceiving “with whole consciousness.” This explains the bright lights and clarity of his experiences, since hypnagogic visions often seem particularly illuminated, vivid, and de­tailed (Mavromatis 1987, 14–52, 148).

But if Hickson had a hypnagogic experience, what about Parker? Actu­ally, he need not have been in such a state himself because, as he told officers, he had passed out at the beginning of the incident and failed to regain consciousness until it was over (United Press International 1973). Later he “remembered” bits and pieces of the alleged encounter. This would be consistent with an example of folie à deux (a French expression, the “folly of two”) in which a percipient convinces another of some alleged occurrence (as by the power of suggestion, the force of a dominant personality, or the like) or the other person simply acquiesces for whatever reason. (Young Parker’s position was vulnerable: he had recently joined the shipyard where Hickson worked and was residing with the Hick­sons.) It would have been significant if Parker had himself been in a hypnagogic state, since “suggestibility is high during this state” (Goldenson 1970, I: 574). Interestingly, when the two men were left alone in a room at the sheriff’s office, where they were secretly tape recorded (Clark 1998, 716), they did not make incriminating statements as they might have if perpetrating a hoax but acted more like people comparing notes to see if they were in agreement with each other.

Still, some of Hickson’s behavior is questionable. For example, he kept adding to his story. He claimed on a television show a month later that the interior lights of the UFO had been so intense as to cause eye injury lasting for three days, although an extensive hospital examination the day after the incident had shown no such eye damage (Klass 1974, 349–50). But this is a familiar story: even accounts of the truest occurrences gain distortions and embellishments over time, so why should Hickson’s story be any different? UFOlogist Kevin D. Randle (2001) in­sists Hickson’s alterations “went be­yond that.” Specifically, he says, “These changes seemed to be in response to criticisms and appeared to be an attempt to smooth out rough spots in the story.” But to me that just signals Hickson’s defensiveness brought on by people ridiculing him—not proof of initial hoaxing.

When all the facts are weighed, the preponderance of evidence appears not only to favor the hypothesis involving the hypnagogic state but to provide corroboration as well. The realization may not benefit the late Charles Hickson, but it could help others who hear of supposed alien abductions to rest in peace.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Major James McGaha (USAF retired) and CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga for help with this article.

Note

1. The men were later hypnotized by another person (Hickson and Mendez 1983). ↩

References

Blum, Ralph, with Judy Blum. 1974. Beyond Earth: Man’s Contact with UFOs. New York: Bantam Books.

Clark, Jerome. 1998. The UFO Encyclopedia, vol. 2. Detroit, Michigan: Omnigraphics, 714–19.

Goldenson, Robert M. 1970. The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior: Psychology, Psychiatry, and Mental Health. New York: Doubleday.

Hickson, Charles, and William Mendez. 1983. UFO Contact at Pascagoula. Tucson, Arizona: Wendelle C. Stevens.

Klass, Philip J. (1974) 1976. UFOs Explained. New York: Vintage Books.

———. 1989. UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game, updated edition. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.

Mavromatis, Andreas. 1987. Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness between Wake­ful­ness and Sleep. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Nickell, Joe. 2011. Tracking the Man-Beasts. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 184–86.

Peebles, Curtis. 1995. Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth. New York: Berkley Books.

Randle, Kevin D. 2001. Pascagoula (Mississippi) abduction. In Story 2001, 423–24.

Story, Ronald D. 2001. The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters. New York: New American Library.

United Press International. 1973. Wire-service story, “Creatures” (Pascagoula, Mississippi, October 12). In Blum with Blum 1974, 9–11.

Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!
By Robert Todd Carroll. James Randi Educational Foundation, 2011. Available through Amazon.com and other electronic outlets exclusively in e-book format, $9.99.

Robert Todd Carroll, the author of the invaluable Skeptic’s Dictionary, has written an e-book that makes a perfect complement to his Dictionary. Titled Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!, it is essentially a primer on how to think.

The “unnatural acts” of the title are the acts of critical thinking, which don’t come naturally to our imperfect human brains. Our brains evolved an instinctive, intuitive, quick-and-dirty way of thinking that served our forebears well in their environment. A slower, more systematic, more critical way of thinking developed later and brought us science. It serves us better in today’s world but is more difficult to achieve. It requires education and concentrated effort to overcome the natural tendencies imposed on us by our evolutionary history.

The brain is an illusionist. It works by taking shortcuts, deceiving us into seeing things that aren’t there and believing things that aren’t true. We see the sun apparently moving across the sky, and it takes sophisticated understanding to overcome our first assumptions. Nature has programmed us to in­crease our chances of survival and reproduction, not to seek the truth. Religious literalists, New Age philosophers, and other true believers prefer magical thinking to science because we are hardwired to think that way. So creationism is often preferred over evolution, and fanciful medical quackeries are often preferred over effective treatments proven by scientific studies.

Critical thinking is hard. We must learn that we can’t trust our perceptions, memories, and intuitions. This requires education and practice. It’s frustrating to accept that our most cherished beliefs might be wrong. And it’s frustrating to know that success is elusive: the truths we learn will always be provisional, and we can never be certain whether we have looked at all the relevant data objectively.

In successive chapters, Carroll ex­plains:

• Critical thinking is unpopular: you will lose friends and alienate your neighbors.
• Trust no one, not even yourself: you, too, are subject to perceptual distortions and cognitive biases.
• Language is often used to manipulate thought and behavior.
• Groupthink—communal reinforcement—seduces groups of people into bad decisions.
• It is becoming increasingly difficult to identify reliable information amid all the hype, propaganda, advertising, and misinformation.
• Anecdotes are compelling: a good story trumps a dozen scientific studies. Scientific studies are more reliable in the search for truth but are also subject to bias.
• Fallacies in reasoning are widespread and natural; man is an irrational animal.
• Natural factors conspire to lead us into error, but there is hope that we can learn to overcome our natural tendencies and become critical thinkers.

In the final chapter, Carroll provides practical advice: fifty-nine ways to develop your unnatural talents in critical thinking, skepticism, and science. This list will be enhanced by the blog Unnatural Acts (www.59ways.blogspot.com), where he will be offering commentary and examples of the fifty-nine ways (plus a few more). Five appendices round out the banquet with detailed discussions of cell phone radiation, interstellar travel, acupuncture, what it really means to think critically, and step-by-step instructions on how to create your own pseudoscience. Refreshingly, he admits to errors of his own in The Skeptic’s Dictionary and corrects the record.

I laughed out loud at Carroll’s account of his first attempt at teaching logic as a newly minted philosophy PhD. “If I remember correctly, about twenty-five students signed up for the class and three finished. One of the three stayed because he liked me. Another stayed because he didn’t know how to drop a class. The remaining student understood the material in the text . . .” Over time, he progressed from teaching traditional logic to offering more useful courses in critical thinking as a way of life, emphasizing an understanding of the psychology of bias and other sources of error and embodying an attitude of intellectual humility, confidence in reason, intellectual curiosity, and intellectual independence.

Since critical thinking is important to every aspect of human life, he illustrates his points with examples drawn from every imaginable field: religions, UFO cults, psychology, alternative medicine, politics, parapsychology, martial arts, criminology, climate change, news media, vaccines, cell phone radiation, cancer clusters, and more.

Some of his examples will be familiar from other skeptical writings, like Clever Hans (the horse that responded to its owner’s unconscious body language) and the basketball/gorilla video illustrating inattentional blindness. Others were new to me, like the example of audio pareidolia where a Bob Dylan song lyric is heard as “throw my chicken out the window.”

There can never be too many books on critical thinking. Carroll’s is a worthy contribution to the skeptical literature: comprehensive, easy to read, and packed with entertaining examples that vividly illustrate the concepts. For those new to skepticism, it can serve as a valuable textbook for learning how to think. It will be useful to even the most jaded skeptics among us who think we already know how to think; we all still make mistakes, we need to be reminded anew of old lessons, and there is always more to learn.

Some 216 years later, “Patience” made her debut one July evening while Curran and a friend, who was a writer, were playing with a Ouija board. With their fingers pressing on the planchette, it began to spell out a strange message:

Many moons ago I lived. Again
I come — Patience Worth
my name —

Figure 1. Pearl Curran channeled “Patience Worth” from 1913 until her death in 1937. (Photo by Joe Nickell from original at Missouri Historical Society)

The message unleashed a flow of Patience Worth writings that eventually filled whole volumes: The Sorry Tale, Hope Trueblood, and The Pot Upon the Wheel were followed soon by Light from Beyond and Telka. By 1918, the phantom writer had her own Patience Worth Magazine, which lasted ten issues (Christopher 1970, 128–30).

Historical Fiction

Curran eventually abandoned the cumbersome Ouija board, discovering that Patience Worth could guide her fingers while she typed and could speak through Curran’s voice while a friend took dictation “at a tremendous speed” (Cavendish 1974). “Go Ye to the lighted hall to search for learning?” asked Patience in a typical communication. “Nay, ’tis a piddle, not a stream, ye search. Mayhap thou sendest thy men for barleycorn. ’Twould then surprise thee should the asses eat it.” And so on, in her quaint, facile manner.

A New York Times reviewer praised her style: “Notwithstanding the serious quality and the many pitifulnesses and tragedies . . . [there is] much humor of a quaint, demure kind . . . [and] the plot is contrived with such skill, deftness, and ingenuity as many a novelist in the flesh might well envy” (qtd. in Christopher 1970, 128).

One Elizabethan scholar, a Profes­sor Shelling, was less impressed. As he stated:

The language employed is not that of any historical age or period; but, where it is not the current English of the part of the United States in which Mrs. Curran lives, it is a distortion born of superficial acquaintance with poetry and a species of would-be Scottish dialect . . . the borrowing of some dialect words and the clear misuse, misunderstanding and even invention of many others. . . . There is an easy facility of phrase almost wholly in our contemporary idiom and showing nowhere the qualities of the language of Elizabeth’s or any previous age. (qtd. in Christopher 1970, 129)

I concur with this assessment.

Moreover, as is now well known, the productions of the Ouija board are actually due to “the involuntary muscular actions of the players”—as the effect was described in toy maker Isaac Fuld’s application for a patent on the device. Although Fuld added, “or through some other agency,” an explanation adopted by Spiritualists and other mystics, the truth can be easily demonstrated (as magician Milbourne Christopher has explained): when the board is out of sight and the alphabet scrambled, only gibberish is spelled out. (Curran rejected such “conditions” [1920, 399].)

Fantasy Proneness

Indeed, I find that Pearl Curran exhibits several traits consistent with having a fantasy-prone personality. Such persons are sane and normal but generally enjoy a rich fantasy life, which may include experiencing a previous lifetime. “While they are pretending,” state Wilson and Barber in their classic study (1983, 354), “they become totally absorbed in the character and tend to lose awareness of their true identity.” They may believe they receive special messages from paranormal entities, possess psychic powers, or the like. A short autobiographical sketch penned by Curran reveals her to have been an imaginative child who played the piano at her uncle’s Spiritualist church. Of her supposed communication with Patience Worth, she wrote: “I am not a Spiritualist, but am in sympathy with the furtherance of psychic facts and believe that the pioneers of today are but groping toward fact. I am not a ‘medium’ in the common sense. Am deeply interested in the study of psychic phenomena, using myself as a study” (emphasis added, Curran 1926, 15).

“Patience Worth” seems to have been, according to philosopher Charles E. Cory (1927, 432), Curran’s “other self,” a form of alter ego. He characterizes the phenomenon as follows (1927, 433–34):

I accept the judgment that Patience Worth is a genius of no mean order. And, perhaps, there is in the genius of this writer a concrete illustration of what freedom a mind may achieve when released from the inhibitions that clog and check the normal consciousness. She is a dissociated self, and this dissociation has taken place in such a way as to free her from the burdens and concerns of life, from all the claims that split the will and bind the fancy. And perhaps in this fact, and all that it implies, lies the condition of her genius. The division of the self has resulted in a division of labor. To Mrs. Curran falls the care of the needs of the body, and the interests of the social life. Their reactions and distractions are hers. . . .

But turn to this dissociated mind and the conditions have changed. The work of adjusting the organism to the environment being left to the other self, the inhibitions which perception places upon the imagination are removed. This sets free and un­fettered the mind of Patience Worth. In the realm of the idea she lives, and there she sustains herself without effort. She acknowledges no tie or bond that might take her out of her dream. She is a dreamer that never awakens. And the conditions of this spell are, in a way, the conditions of her genius. With her our moments of abstraction, moments that life affords us the luxury of thought and imagination, are prolonged indefinitely. They are, in fact, a fixed condition. In other words, she lives only in a world of thought. And so far she has shown no desire to displace the other self, and alternate with her in the role of action. To do so would result in essential modification of her consciousness, and put her under inhibitions from which she is now free.

Although Curran refused to be hypnotized, and it is said she did not go into a “trance” while writing (Prince [1927] 1964, 428, 431), her dissociated mode is clearly similar to what today would be recognized as “self-hypnosis”—a state she entered and left easily. Therefore she probably would have been an excellent subject had she agreed to undergo hypnosis. Interest­ingly, Curran eventually discovered she could write short stories of her own but emphasized that she could “feel the difference between the conscious effort of the ordinary manner of writing, as against the unconscious manner in which the Patient Worth material comes to me” (1920, 403).

Smoking Gun

But Curran was not just receiving “dictation.” Like other writers (including me) before and since, she embarked on the creative process and was carried to that far-away place in the mind whence inspiration comes, producing things that often seemed quite mysteriously bestowed—as if from one of those goddesses of art in Greek mythology, the Muses. Curran may have simply perceived her muse as a character named Patience Worth.

Figure 2. The “Patience Worth” papers at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis are a trove of “automatic” writings.

I have researched the matter over the years. In 2010, after speaking to the Rationalist Society of St. Louis on “Hunting for Ghosts and Spirits,” I was able to study Pearl Curran’s writings at the Missouri Historical Society Archives (which very graciously accommodated me on a day they were otherwise closed). For five hours I pored over the Pearl Cur­ran/“Patience Worth” papers—numerous boxed documents and twenty-nine bound volumes of typescripts (Figure 2). Even though it is known that “Patience” could compose on demand (Prince [1927] 1964, 56, 281–300), I found evidence that some of the writings were the product of the creative process—showing various revisions—rather than, as alleged, mere dictation from the supposed spirit of the nonexistent “Patience Worth” of the seventeenth century.

For example, I found two versions of a 1920 poem, “My Love Is Old.” In the bound typescript, vol. 12, p. 2302, the last line of the poem reads, “Who bending whispers forget, forget.” But there is an earlier loose manuscript of that same page with the typed line originally reading, “Who bending responds forget, forget”—but the word responds has been stricken and the word whispers penned instead.

Several poems had fold marks in the paper, indicating they had been mailed to persons for whom they were written—one “For Grace Parrish,” for in­stance. When that poem appeared in the bound typescripts, numerous changes in punctuation and line divisions had been made, and stanza divisions had been added. More telling is another poem for Parrish containing some very different text in the typescripts, revised wording, a line added, and changes in punctuation and line divisions.

Quite revealing is a typed page of yellowed copy paper with penciled notation (“3 carbons please”) that is rough­ly typed and marked over. A few typed lines have been crossed out (having read, “How could I know until you came how close God was/How could I comprehend the Cross and all the agony . . .”). There are also numerous penned edits and revisions in Pearl Curran’s handwriting, as well as a note to someone addressed as “honey” (presumably a typist) to “break it up—it will look better I think,” apparently referring to the line breaks (see Figure 3).¹

Figure 3. A few surviving telltale documents like this reveal that Pearl Curran did not merely take spirit dictation but engaged in the revision process—like ordinary writers. (Photo by Joe Nickell at Missouri Historical Society)

I suspect that there were once many more such drafts but that they were subsequently destroyed, replaced by what manuscript experts call “fair copies”—that is, neat, final versions as preserved in the bound volumes.

Conclusions

The weight of the evidence—the lack of historical record for “Patience Worth,” the fantasy proneness of Cur­ran (consistent with producing an imaginary “other self”), the writings’ questionable language, and the evidence of the editing and revision process—indicates that Patience was merely a persona of Curran’s.

I can relate to that: When I visited the archives I was accompanied by a number of my own personas, including paranormal investigator, historical
document examiner, poet, fiction writer, editor, literary critic, forensic linguist, handwriting expert, photographer, and more—all of which played their role in my examination of the manuscripts. The century-old case can now be closed. It is about time.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the many people who assisted with my research, including Kath­leen Kelly and Larry Jewell of the Ration­alist Society of St. Louis, the generous staff of the Missouri Historical Society Ar­chives, CFI Libraries Director Timothy Binga, and my assistant, Ed Beck. I am especially grateful to John and Mary Frantz for their crucial financial support.

Note

1. This document is in the third of three folders of loose documents dated September 8–15, 1924, Patience Worth Collection, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri.

References

Cavendish, Richard. 1974. Encyclopedia of the Unexplained. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 278.

Christopher, Milbourne. 1970. ESP, Seers & Psychics: What the Occult Really Is. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 124–31.

Cory, Charles E. 1927. In Prince (1927) 1964, 428–37.

Curran, Pearl. 1920. A note for psychologists. In Prince (1927) 1964, 392–403.

———. 1926. Autobiographical sketch. In Prince (1927) 1964, 11–15.

Prince, Walter Franklin. (1927) 1964. The Case of Patience Worth. New Hyde Park, New York: University Books.

Wilson, Sheryl C., and Theodore X. Barber. 1983. The fantasy-prone personality: Impli­cations for understanding imagery, hypnosis, and parapsychological phenomena. In Imagery, Current Theory, Research and Appli­cation. Anees A. Sheikh (ed.) New York: Wiley, 340–90.

It is a sign of our times that we have to defend having standards of good science in the practice of medicine and the teaching of a science-based curriculum in universities. High standards of science in medicine are necessary in order to ensure, as best as we can, that treatments and interventions are safe, effective, and ethical. It is extremely complicated and tricky to determine safety and efficacy. Humans suffer from numerous mechanisms of self-deception, cognitive flaws and biases, poor grasp of statistics, and perceptual failings that are likely to lead us astray. In fact our biases tend to systematically lead us to false conclusions that we wish to be true, rather than to the truth.

These flaws, biases, and cognitive errors make it difficult to come to reliable conclusions in any area of exploration, but perhaps particularly so in the applied science of medicine. This field is further plagued by placebo effects, which represent the above effects in addition to a complex emotional and physical response to the nonspecific aspects of getting attention from an attentive practitioner.

Science is the only system that we have developed that systematically controls for all of these biases and flaws to see through to reliable information. Science endeavors to be transparent, thorough, and rigorous. The application of scientific principles has demonstrably transformed medicine (and human knowledge in general) for the better. As a society we should not lightly abandon the principles of science or try to change them to meet the needs of the current fads.

Universities in particular are supposed to be the exemplars of scholarship and intellectual legitimacy. People believe universities are intellectual leaders, not followers, and they are correct (or at least, they should be). Teach­ing a topic in a university is absolutely an endorsement of the legitimacy of that topic. We can distinguish between teaching about something and teaching the thing itself. It is okay to teach about so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as a sociological phenomenon or even as an example of pseudoscience. Practi­tioners also need to learn about any method their patients may be using or about which they are curious. Credu­lously teaching CAM, however, is an endorsement, the granting of the imprimatur of the university.

It is tempting to cater to prevailing fads, to acquiesce to the vocal advocates and give them what they want, especially when there isn’t much protest. That is exactly what intellectual integrity is about, however—doing the right thing because it is right, not because it is popular or expedient.

I will acknowledge perhaps the only legitimate argument on the other side: that of academic freedom and diversity of opinion. I agree with the principle that a university should also be a place for the free exchange of ideas and should not easily impose censorship. Proponents of nonsense, however, have taken this principle too far. Academic freedom needs to be tempered with quality control. Professors should not be allowed to teach absolutely anything they want without limit. The university has a duty to ensure that the minimal standards of academic legitimacy are met.

This duty includes ensuring that science is taught in science classes. This debate has come up with reference to teaching creationism as science as a matter of academic freedom. Such freedom does not extend to the point of teaching demonstrable pseudoscience as if it were a legitimate science. The exact same thing can be said about teaching homeopathy, for example, as if it were legitimate science-based medicine.

The argument above should not be difficult to make and should resonate with academics. It has worked well in the United Kingdom, spearheaded mostly by David Colquhoun, who has used freedom of information requests to obtain the CAM curricula at universities teaching CAM, and then simply sent them to the dean and/or board of trustees of the university. This one act has led to the removal of CAM courses from universities in the United King­dom. Simply shining a light on what was happening was enough.

In the United States we are having a harder time, although we have had some successes also. The American Medical Student Association (AMSA) has been infiltrated by CAM proponents who have managed to get requirements for CAM to be taught in American medical schools. Of course, we can still teach about CAM (which I actually advocate) rather than promote pseudoscience—something that is not a subtle distinction but is often difficult for some to make.

Australia is perhaps having the most difficult time with this issue, leading to the formation of the Friends of Science in Medicine. Their request is simple: no pseudoscience in universities. They have helped bring the debate to the forefront. CAM’s greatest ally in infiltrating universities is stealth. I have seen this infiltration occur deliberately under the radar with the stated goal of avoiding too much attention, which might draw criticism. This violates the principle of transparency, and it illustrates why focusing attention on this trend is so useful.

Of course, CAM proponents are not going to just lie down and go away. There have been many responses to the criticism of teaching CAM in medical schools, none of which is valid. In Australia, the most frequently quoted defender of teaching on nonsense in universities is Iain Graham, professor at Southern Cross University’s School of Health. He is quoted in several articles, but this quote responding to criticism from John Dwyer, emeritus professor of medicine at the University of New South Wales, is representative:

Professor Dwyer’s sweeping discussion about the issue are to do with quackery really, and the rooting out of poor practise. But if we look historically at the evolution of health care and the health professions, there are many similarities with where things started.

He mentioned homeopathy for ex­ample, well homeopathy is as old as Greek Hypocrates in terms of practising medicine. (Australian Broad­casting Company 2011)

Here we have a blatant misstatement of fact combined with a logical fallacy. Graham probably (if I am being generous) did not mean to state that homeopathy can be traced back to ancient Greece, just that some CAM therapies can. Homeopathy was in­vented by Samuel Hahnemann about 200 years ago (Novella 2009).

But I wonder what CAM modalities he had in mind. Chiropractic? About 100 years ago. Therapeutic touch? A few decades ago. Acupunc­ture is a complex question, but what passes for acupuncture today is less than 100 years old. Perhaps he was thinking about bloodletting or trepanation.

However, it is true that some basic concepts, like the notion of “life energy,” can trace their roots to ancient Greece and other ancient cultures. However, such notions are pre-scientific nonsense. Scientists abandoned the notion of life energy over a century ago because there was no evidence that such a force exists (and there still isn’t). After figuring out all the basic processes of life, there was essentially nothing left for the alleged life force to do.

For some reason, however, Graham believes that antiquity in science is a virtue—the “argument from antiquity” logical fallacy. The unstated assumption is that if an idea has survived for hundreds or thousands of years it must be legitimate. This is demonstrably false. Galenic medicine (bloodletting, purging, etc., based on the notion of the four humors) survived for thousands of years, and yet it was based on complete and utter primitive nonsense. In fact its tendrils still exist. There is still bloodletting, cupping (which is just another form of bloodletting), and similar practices going on in the world. It was replaced in the West because of the advent of science in medicine—a trend that Graham apparently wants to reverse.

Graham’s second swing and a miss: “Eighty per cent of Australians seek alternative therapies,” Graham is quoted as saying by Australian newspaper the Northern Star. “Obviously orthodox medicine is not working for everyone” (www.northernstar.com.au/story/2011/12/12/alternative-therapy-course-not-magic/). I highly doubt that the 80 percent figure is correct. Most such figures are highly inflated by including all sorts of practices in the CAM category, such as exercising and eating organic food—and sometimes prayer is included. U.S. surveys show the percentage of CAM use is around 33 percent (NIH 2008), but this is mostly things like massage and chiropractic manipulations. Home­o­­pathy use is around 3–4 percent, and acu­punc­ture 6–7 percent. In fact, only manipulation and massage were in the double digits.

This is all marketing deception. Create a false category (CAM), pad it out with commonly used methods, and then claim that the extreme fringes are therefore getting more popular. I don’t know how Graham got to 80 percent (I doubt such methods are that much more popular in Australia than in the United States) but it is close to one survey from 2007 that found that 69 percent of Australians used one of the seventeen most popular forms of CAM in the last year (Xue et al. 2007). However, that study included in its list martial arts, yoga, massage, meditation, and taking multivitamins. I am not sure what taking multi­vitamins says about the popularity of homeopathy, but apparently Graham thinks it is significant.

In any case, I will grant that CAM as a marketing concept has been somewhat successful—and even that it has gained popularity recently (although not as much as advocates would have you think). That is entirely irrelevant, however, to the question of whether or not any particular CAM modality is science-based and appropriate for a university curriculum (which is the question at hand).

Universities are supposed to be thought leaders with intellectual standards that rise above the mere notion of popularity. They are supposed to uphold academic standards of scholarship, especially in scientific disciplines with high standards in science. It is therefore very odd and disturbing to defend a university policy based upon popularity. Should we allow surveys of public opinion to determine whether or not we teach creationism or astrology in our universities?

It is good to see some organized backlash against the infiltration of pseudoscience and nonsense into the very institutions that should be teaching against such things. It is good to see more and more articles written about this topic—we want attention for the issue. We want a discussion of the merits of our position verses the pro-CAM position. Let’s have a very public debate about the facts, about what is science, and how we as a society should determine what medical interventions are worth our public support.

We will confidently stand by our position. CAM proponents, like crea­tionists, have nothing but weak and fallacious—and long discredited—arguments on their side.

References

Australian Broadcasting Company. 2011. Uni criticised for teaching alternative therapies (De­cem­ber 9). Available online at www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2011/12/09/3387574.htm.

NIH. 2008. 2007 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) Adult Alternative Medicine Public Use File (althealt) IDN Variables Wednesday, June 4, 2008. Available online at ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/health_statistics/NCHS/dataset_documentation/NHIS/2007/althealt_freq.pdf.

Novella, S. 2009. Homeopathy awareness week (blog entry). NeuroLogica (June 15). Avail­able online at http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/homeopathy-awareness-week/.

Xue, C.C., A.L. Zhang, V. Lin, et al. 2007. Com­plementary and alternative medicine use in Australia: A national population-based survey. Journal of Alternative and Comple­mentary Medicine 13(6) (July/August): 643–50.