Regrettably, in most of the African republics in the Sahara region—where the majority of citizens live below the poverty line, with an ever-widening gap between the rich and poor, and with governments that are not concerned with the welfare of the people because of corruptions, impunities, and dictatorships—superstitious ideas often turn into something so lethal that if the population is not sensitized against such beliefs there are bound to be increasing human rights violations in the coming years and beyond.

First, HIV/AIDS is one of the nightmares in the region. It is estimated that 22.5 million people live with the disease; of these, 2.3 million are children. During 2009, an estimated 1.3 million people died from AIDS. This situation led to many children orphaned at a young age. As a result teenagers are left with the task of looking after families; most girls resort to prostitution and a majority of young men engage in crimes just to fend for the family.

Unluckily, despite the effort of science to let HIV-positive individuals lead normal lives by providing anti-retroviral drugs, which delays the virus from turning into AIDS, religious bigots and traditional witch doctors have been using this epidemic to exploit superstitious beliefs, thwarting this positive effort to help the human race.

Recently, the situation of Loliondo stunned many people. Loliondo is a village situated in the Nyorongoro district of Arusha in northern Tanzania. In Kenya, everywhere you went, you could not fail to see posters and signs of this place advertised. This village became famous when word spread throughout sub-Saharan African countries that retired Lutheran pastor Ambelike Mwasapile had found a miracle cure that many believed could cure incurable diseases like HIV/AIDS, cancer, ulcers, and many more. Ambelike, who is widely known as Babu wa Loliondo, used a tree from the Apocynacea family called Carissa edulis to make his famous herb, which was administered in a cup.

Suddenly, it became a shock when patients were taken out of bed in hospitals and rushed to Loliondo. Drinking the herb invoked the superstitious nature of many HIV/AIDS victims and they believed they had been healed; hence almost all abandoned taking anti-retroviral drugs. However, this fakery did not last when victims who had abandoned taking the anti-retroviral drugs started dying and a large number deteriorated in health.

Despite such kinds of failure, many religious institutions in Africa have copied this fakery and continued to organize miracle healing of HIV/AIDS. Sadly, after such healing crusades most individuals are told to throw away anti-retroviral drugs. As much as there is a struggle to help and sustain people living with the virus, irrationality advanced by religious dogmas and traditional societies has continued to usher people into deathbeds even when they could live longer lives.

Many people who have been liberated from irrational beliefs in Africa have wondered whether our great grandparents believed knowledge was expensive and decided to plant these irrational, superstitious ideas into the minds of younger generations, causing unwanted human crises up to this century. The situation in Africa, caused by irrational beliefs, is so disturbing that if it is not tackled by rationalists, freethinkers, skeptics, and others who have been liberated from the dogmas that thwart knowledge, many human crises will be massive in the upcoming years.

That is the reason why, at CFI–Kenya, we have held so dearly to the anti-superstition campaign. This year we managed to organize four major community-based workshops where we expressed concerns about how irrational beliefs were becoming a thwart to the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We demonstrated this by giving examples of the Loliondo saga, now widely known because of the crisis it brought, which was publicized in various media houses. For example, we printed a piece from the Star, which covered the story well (http://www.the-star.co.ke/national/national/30533-aids-patients-reject-arvs-die-after-loliondo-visit), and also one from Allafrica.com (http://allafrica.com/stories/201103280148.html and http://allafrica.com/stories/201105241304.html). We printed many copies and distributed them during these workshops.

We organized debates about the issue on the campuses where we have established movements. The University of Nairobi Academic and Freethinking club organized a debate sponsored by CFI–Kenya on 22 October, 2011, with the title, “Does religion kill HIV/AIDS Victims in the name of God?” This debate had a controversial title and the attendance was overwhelming. Nevertheless, the message was clear and many, even the religious who attended, saw the need to change perceptions. This approach was the best towards extending our mission. The Moi Freethinkers at Moi University also organized two workshops and closed with their annual meeting.

In the month of November, the humanist movements in East Africa realized that if they don’t double their efforts and give much of their time to the empowerment of the various populations, then irrationality would soon threaten to consume the human population because of widespread superstition.

As a result, from the 25th to 28th of November 2011, East African humanist leaders gathered in Kampala, Uganda, to discuss the way forward and how humanist organizations could work together to spread the ideals of reason and science to combat widespread irrationality. Here, leaders from Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania drafted a two-year work plan (2012–2013) that would make sure their objectives are met within this framework. This included organizing joint meetings, mobilization, workshops, and conferences within the countries of East Africa.

East African Humanists’ Meeting, Kampala, Uganda: 25 November 2011

This plan also included going into schools and institutions of higher learning where we could launch debating clubs and sponsor publications. In Kenya, the Center for Inquiry–Kenya was given the task of coordinating these activities; hence I was appointed the country coordinator for these events. Jackson Ezekiel, who is the chairperson of Tanzania Humanist Movement, was chosen to coordinate Tanzania, and in Uganda, Betty Nassaka, who is the head of International Humanist and Ethical Youth Organization, will act as the chair of this process. Also in the meeting, a resource mobilization plan was drafted outlining how the involved groups would solicit for resources to make sure that this mission is effective within the two-year plan.

To add, I also managed to meet students from Dar-es-salam University in Tanzania and Makerere University in Uganda who were interested in our On Campus program. Already they are in the process of starting On Campus movements and I have been invited to give a talk to a mass of students in February 2012 at Dar-es-Salam University.

I believe that with this initiative taken by the humanist body in East Africa, a lot of impact is going to be felt and we shall be steps ahead in the fight against irrationality in the two-year plan. Again, this is going to give CFI–Kenya an advantage in spreading the ideals of the Center for Inquiry beyond borders. We hope for the best in the year 2012 and beyond.

From second-to-left: George Ongere; Robert Bwambale, director of Kasese Humanist Movement and Kasese Humanist School; Jackson Ezekiel, chairman of the Tanzanian Humanist Movement; and Esther Nakate of the Ugandan Humanist Effort to Save Women.

George Ongere with Betty Nassaka, Secretary General of International Humanist and Ethical Youth Organization (IHEYO), in Kampala, Uganda, 27 November 2011.

Deo Sessitoleko, East African Representative of International Humanist and Ethical Union, presenting at the East Africa Humanist meeting.

Bob Churchill of the British Humanist Association presenting a point.

George Ongere leading the meeting in drafting an activity plan.

I was wondering if the hosts would actually take a skeptical look at the paranormal, so I checked out their website and was happy to find an article titled 5 Historic - and Spooky - Hoaxes. The five hoaxes in question are The Blair Witch Project (yes, that was debunked. The same day that Ghost Dad was debunked), The Amityville Horror (ditto), Ghostwatch (a BBC show that was debunked literally in the credits of the show), War of the Worlds (ditto), and THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS. Did you guys know that that had been debunked? Chief investigator: my fourth grade social studies teacher.

Good job, team. Good debunkings. It should now be clear that this team isn't afraid to go after the tough cases.

But really, I like the idea of the show—in each episode the hosts try to recreate "paranormal" videos in an attempt to explain them. So I decided to go ahead and watch the latest episode, which is called the “Mexico City Cave Witch.” That is a superb title and it filled me with hope.

Here's the promo for the episode, for those who aren't in the United States or don't want to waste their brain cells watching an entire episode.

The show opens with the team hanging out, showing each other the spooky videos they found on YouTube this week. The FoFPF team includes Ben, a former FBI agent (no explanation for why he left the FBI, but we can probably extrapolate from the fact that he is now on a show talking about how spooky witches are); Jael, an investigative reporter; Bill, the "lead scientist" with absolutely no scientific qualifications; Austin, a personal trainer with "a degree in biology"; Lanisha, a photographer; and Devin, "tech specialist."

Austin breathlessly shows the cave witch video, which I have turned into an animated gif for your convenience:

Professor Bill provides the scientific description of what he has just seen: "To me it looked like she's just floating there, and then it took off."

One host suggests that maybe someone just stood on top of the cave and pulled an object up, but Austin counters with the ironclad fact that the video maker claims he has nothing to gain from hoaxing this video . . . besides appearing on television, of course. People eat rat intestines for the chance to be on television, but Austin doesn't think someone would spend ten minutes making a "witch" video? No matter—if they act like it might be real, they get a free trip to Mexico. Admit it: you, too, would exchange your very dignity for a vacation in Mexico.

But first, they need to investigate the Case of the Exploding Bar Ashtray. There's security cam footage that shows an ashtray sitting on a bar, and then it explodes. Oh, also, everyone pretends to see some kind of ghostly orb that is nearly invisible on my computer screen, but never mind that, because the ashtray explosion is actually a pretty neat puzzle. My hopes are high.

The team heads to the bar, where they test a few hypotheses, just like in real science. One idea is that something fell on the ashtray, so they drop a "very small screw" approximately 2.5 feet into a glass ashtray to see if it will explode. They count down to make everything more dramatic.

"3-2-1 GO DEVIN!"

Nothing happens of course, so next they drop a ball bearing.

"3-2-1 RELEASE THE BALL!"

The ball bearing broke the ashtray, but they act as though the breakage is substantially different from the original video (it isn't), plus they point out that there's no visible falling object in the original video.

At this point I had to wonder if any of them had ever worked in a restaurant, or if they would talk with someone who works regularly with glass. If they had, I feel like maybe it would have occurred to them sooner that glass explodes more often than one might think. Tempered glass with a small defect could break at any time, but particularly with quick temperature changes that could be caused by, say, an ashtray that comes straight out of an industrial dishwasher and onto a counter directly above an ice box. This, of course, would be difficult to recreate with a single "experiment" because it's a rare event that requires a flawed glass.

They do come tantalizingly close. They talk about temperature changes, and they have a very high-tech animation showing what happens to the molecules in glass that undergoes thermal shock. They suggest that maybe the ashtray was very cold for some reason and someone put a lit cigarette in it, which they test by placing a hot coal in an icy ashtray. Nothing happens, so they take a blowtorch directly to the ashtray. It explodes! They astutely point out that there is no blow torch visible in the footage, so they deem the possibility of extreme temperature change "unrealistic." Remember that line in five minutes when they're talking about how maybe ghosts did it.

Next they try a controlled explosion, and of course the ashtray explodes. But then they realize that ghosts are the more likely explanation so they go looking for "cold spots." They use walkie talkies, despite being in the same bar, because without walkie talkies you can't say things like "NEGATIVE" without looking just plain silly. They find a warm spot along the bar where an electric cord is. They do recall that they took a blow torch to that bar hours ago but declare that it is impossible that it would still be several degrees warmer.

"Maybe this is a communication attempt," they guess. They think it's the previous owner of the bar, who shot himself. No one asks the important question: Did he hate smokers?

Suddenly, a glass falls in the darkened bar, confirming the fact that this is definitely a ghost with little respect for expensive glassware.

As a final nail in the coffin, Professor Bill finds electronic voice phenomena (EVP), which is just garbled white noise and background sounds that cause people to hear any message they'd like, such as Satanic messages in Queen songs.

Anyway, yes, the group agrees that "ghost" is the most likely explanation. I was disappointed—not just because they settled for a supernatural explanation, but because they didn't even bother to get an opera singer in to sing a note at the exact frequency of the glass. "3-2-1 RESONATE!"

Next up: Witch cave. Let's go to Mexico!

So, this video is pretty obviously not a witch. In fact, it is so obviously not a witch that I was initially astounded that these people could actually keep a straight face while pretending as though there's a possibility this is a video of an honest-to-goodness witch. But then I thought, "Wait a minute, Rebecca. You're an adult of average intelligence. Maybe it's not so obvious to other people."

That's why I decided to poll some children to find out what they think of it. Each of the kids' parents showed them the above animated gif, explained that a man says it's a witch but he may or may not be telling the truth, and asked them what they thought it was. Here are the responses:

"It could be, I dunno, a bird flying off carrying a black cloth?"
Joe, age 10

Joe's mom Lorna says: I told Joe about the man saying it was a witch, but who might or might not be a liar, and he climbed right behind me on my office chair to view the gif, which is a signal that he was *expecting* it to be a witch or something scary, but when I asked him afterwards if he thought it was a witch, he gave a very emphatic and scornful "no".

“That’s not a witch! Looks like someone doing their washing! … Looks like a bit of cloth being caught by the wind. Witches don’t exist.”
Scarlett, age 10

“Looks like something leaping, like a cat? You can see its tail.”

"So, you don’t think it’s a witch?"

“No, everyone knows witches aren’t real.”
Lucas, age 7

"It looks like a bin bag."
Natasha, age 10

"I think I know what that is. I think it's an animal that's either going off looking like it's flying or it's a kind of bird with a long tail. Or it could be someone just playing a trick on him and like, just lifting up some black clothes. It's not a very good job with the camera either."
Izzie, age 8

So there you have it—from this sample we can conclude that the majority of children aged seven to ten understand that witches don't exist and that even if they did exist, this is not a video of one. However! I bet if you offered those children the opportunity to go to Mexico to be sure, they'd … well actually they probably wouldn't do it, because most children have yet to learn the joys of spending long days on sandy beaches drinking margaritas.

Anyway, our intrepid team of adults decide to start their investigation with the hypothesis advanced by Joe (age 10), by dragging an owl out to the cave in the middle of the day to see if the witch could have been a bird. The poor nocturnal creature is clearly not amused, but this is science.

"3-2-1 RELEASE OWL!"

The lack of any kind of flapping wing in the original video shoots this hypothesis down. Next theory: parkour. It is obviously not parkour, any more than it is planking or coning. Parkour does not involve a floppy, limp body wobbling several feet into the air. They are now really stretching my patience by pretending to be morons in order to get a few more hours in Mexico. Again, maybe I would do the same. It looks nice there. Anyway, physical therapist and "stunt expert" Austin gets to show off his skills.

"3-2-1 MAKE THE MOVE!"

They figure out that it's probably not parkour, so at last they make a dummy, dressed all in black, and tie it to a string. Just like the original video maker obviously did.

"3-2-1 PULL THE DUMMY!"

Kudos to the editing team who valiantly tried to make this part suspenseful. The team was pulling a string with a dummy attached, but the music suggested they were firing their last bullets at an advancing horde of zombies.

Everyone is surprised that the video of their dummy looked exactly like the original. Final conclusion: hoax. Final cost: hotel and airfare to Mexico for three hosts, cameraperson, audio tech, and producer, plus one-day owl rental.

All in all, I can't say this is the worst paranormal show on television. The hosts act like morons, but I think it's pretty clear that most of them (I'm really not sure about Bill) are just going through the motions to be on television and get free trips to Mexico. This is pretty much just the world we live in now, and we're all complicit … especially me, because I watched this show and then wrote a really long article about it.

Final rating: 2 out of 5 broken ashtrays for FoFPF. 1 out of 5 floppy witches for society. 5 out of 5 angry owls for the kids in my survey group, who were so great that I'm thinking of using them as a regular resource.

Related Articles

For further reading about Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, please see CSI's earlier article by Karen Stollznow.

In early December 2011, “Operation Nutcracker” was born.

Meryl Dorey, the president of the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN), was booked for a talk on December 29, 2011, at the Woodford Folk Festival—an annual festival located between the Brisbane Valley and Queensland’s Sunshine Coast in the North-East of the country.

Don’t be fooled by the name of the group: The Australian Vaccination Network is an anti-vaccination lobby group, registered in New South Wales, dedicated to promoting the view that community health can be promoted without the use of vaccines. Upon hearing of Dorey’s appearance, the Stop the Anti-Vaccination Network (Stop the AVN)—a loose affiliation of concerned citizens and skeptical activists—moved rapidly to protest this appearance; through Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and email-writing campaigns, they rallied for her presentation to be cancelled for the good of public health.

By the December 13, an article appeared in MamaMia, a pop-culture opinion site, questioning Dorey’s appearance at the festival. The article called for some accountability and responsibility, but the overall response by the organizer Bill Hauritz was unapologetic. The media picked up the story, with Australian Medical Association of Queensland’s President Kidd and Queensland’s Health Minister Geoff Wilson both expressing their disapproval—the latter even calling the AVN a “fringe group.”

Then, at nearly the twelfth hour, an interesting compromise emerged. The talk had been changed to a “forum,” with Dorey joined by Andreas Suhrbier, head of the immunovirology laboratory at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research and moderated by John Parker, a veteran of Doctors without Borders.

Despite the concessions, the Stop the AVN was determined to make a public statement at the festival about Dorey’s appearance. Thirty-four donors contributed to a tow-banner on a plane, which would appear for half an hour on either side of the vaccination forum’s scheduled run time. The banner simply read: VACCINATION SAVES LIVES.

The media release, written by Queenslander Chrys Stevenson, was forwarded to concerned parties and flyers were handed out at the event itself. The release captured the media’s attention and was considered a win by the Stop the AVN for its innovative activism.

I spoke to four members of the Stop the AVN for the Token Skeptic podcast on the evening of the event itself.

*****

Kylie Sturgess:  So what inspired a plane?

Robin Hilliard:  It really was just an idea that struck me when I was sitting there watching what was happening on Twitter. My actual action, although I’ve been much heralded for it, was really just to say, “I wonder what it would cost to hire a plane?” and to look up skywriting in Google. I fired off an email saying, “Hey, what would it cost to put this kind of message over Woodford on this date?”

They got back to me the next day and I direct-messaged Jason [Brown], and just said, “People are interested in this.” That apparently was my ticket of entry into the Illuminati.

Kylie Sturgess:  That’s all it takes?

Daniel Raffaele:  Oh God, don’t mention the Illuminati!

Kylie Sturgess:  Nobody suspects the Illuminati!

Robin Hilliard:  Can I go on to my lizard sun bath now?

Jason Brown:  But it was just the kind of money that if we clubbed together, and we cared enough, we could do. It was also exactly one percent of the AVN’s revenue for 2010, which was quite amazing.

Robin Hilliard:  That’s what I love. Instantly, the moment we thought of a plane, we knew what the reactions would be: “Oh, Meryl will say something about chemtrails. Or that Big Pharma sponsored it”—but that’s so the opposite of what actually happened.

We got the quote for the plane and it was $2,800. You can look up “skywriting” in the phone book or do the same with a Google search. I was really stunned by how fantastic the response was when I suggested it; we had students who were putting in $15 because they just wanted to be a part of the plan.

We had, I think in the end, thirty-four people, with individuals chipping in amounts from $15 up to a few hundred bucks to pay for it. The amazing thing was at the end of collecting all that money from people, and putting it all together, we were less than one percent of the AVN’s declared audited annual income for last year.

The funny thing was, Meryl was actually the first person to report online about the plane over the festival. She said, “How can I possibly afford that kind of advertising? I couldn’t even afford this advertising.” I said, “Of course you could, Meryl. This is less than one percent of what you get every year from all your income.”

Dave the Happy Singer:  If you think that we’re indulgent by buying a plane to fly “Vaccination Saves Lives” above Woodford, just remember Meryl Dorey could do it a hundred times over.

Robin Hilliard:  This is something we can all do. There’s no hurt in throwing out a big idea. I particularly thank [founding Australian Skeptic] Dick Smith for his stunts back in the ’70s and ’80s when I was a kid, he used to do all of these sorts of things. And I just thought, “Let’s just find out. Throw out a big idea and see if we can do it. If we can do it, let’s go and do it.”

Kylie Sturgess:  It’s such a classic thing to have a banner up in the sky. I was so surprised when I saw the promo email that went around saying, “OK, everyone be prepared,” and there was a little airplane logo at the bottom of the email—I had no idea there was going to be a real plane! There were also people in the audience on the day handing out fliers. How did the audience respond from what you’ve heard?

Daniel Raffaele:  I actually found out that the plane had arrived from Meryl Dorey because we were all timed to release the news at 1:45 PM Queensland time—we were all going to start blogging and tweeting en masse. Then we were all sitting around for those first couple of minutes, saying “Has the plane got there? Has the plane got there? Has the plane got there?!”

Jason Brown:  We were freaking out big time!

Daniel Raffaele:  Yes! Then I see this post from Meryl Dorey saying, “You won’t believe this … but there’s a plane flying overhead with ‘Vaccines Saves Lives’ on it…” That was when I knew. But the response from the public has been pretty positive. I was on Twitter the whole afternoon, and seeing people going, “There’s a plane overhead with a banner!” We were getting extra followers on Twitter for Stop the AVN.

Dave the Happy Singer:  I suppose the other thing we should mention is that Meryl Dorey had her nose put out of joint, because as a result of our campaigning, Meryl was no longer giving her solo talk, which was titled, “Autism Emergency: One in Thirty-Eight.” That was scrapped; she was no longer giving her unchallenged solo speech. It was replaced with a forum where there were a couple of experts, chaired by a real doctor and just Meryl on the fringes. It was still too much for us to be happy. She had no business being there in the first place.

Daniel Raffaele:  That’s precisely the point of the campaign: she’s harping on about freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is fine, but it doesn’t mean that you get to sit up on stage with a microphone.

Dave the Happy Singer:  Yeah. You don’t have a right to speak at Woodford with your freedom of speech. If not, I would be up there speaking about my future marriage to Keira Knightley, but that invitation has not come through again…

Kylie Sturgess:  I would fly a plane in protest about that quite frankly, Dave, I’m sorry.

Dave The Happy Singer:  So would the world, Kylie, I think!

Kylie Sturgess:  There’s only so much we can stomach! How did the crowd respond to the protest overall?

Dave the Happy Singer:  From what I’ve heard it was about a 50/50 split. But that’s not really that surprising given that the Sunshine Coast isn’t really that much of a drive from Meryl Dorey’s heartland. She would have had people following her up there. The Sunshine Coast in Queensland does have a bit of a “rainbow region”/New Age leaning. Not as bad as the Northern Rivers in New South Wales, but still pretty intense. So it’s not surprising that there was a split. But the split I guess was more in our favor than we would have thought.

Robin Hilliard:  I think the split that was reported during the talk … was 50/50. But then [Stop AVN member] Phil Kent was handing out flyers there, with a little spitfire cap and a “Vaccination Saves Lives” T-shirt! He was saying that he got a very positive response as he was handing flyers out. So I don’t know if that just meant he was talking to fifty percent of the room, or if it meant that people who had been undecided were talking to him as well.

Dave the Happy Singer:  It’s entirely possible that people had gone into that undecided, genuinely seeking information, and got to see Meryl Dorey completely shot down.

Jason Brown:  Suddenly from the social media monitoring we were doing at the time, we knew it was all ours. There’s hardly an anti‑vaccination voice on the Woodford Twitter hashtag or on the “Stop the AVN” hashtag. Everybody seemed to be excited; people we didn’t know, people unrelated to “Stop the AVN,” were interested to see that there was a plane out there challenging Dorey, and that Phil was there handing out fliers. There were people posting on Facebook that heckled Dorey, and the audience had cheered them.

These weren’t people we’d know. These weren’t people that we put up there. But general members of the public are getting the message that these anti‑vaccination views are full of crap, and I think that’s positive. With all the sad news that’s been happening with the vaccine preventable diseases, there is good news there. I think the message is getting through.

Daniel Raffaele:  I think we do it better than anyone in the world really. We’ve really taken the AVN to task. But we’d love to be proved wrong.

Jason Brown:  Absolutely!

Dave the Happy Singer:  Yeah, come on America! I think the other interesting thing is that we’ve come under fire with “Stop the AVN.” We are by definition quite a negative campaign because we’re focused on the AVN. But this has been an entirely positive action. The message is, “Vaccination Saves Lives.”

As Meryl would have it, we’re trying to put the other side. We’re trying to help people get a free and informed choice. But a free and informed choice depends on that word informed. If you’re badly informed then you’re going to make bad choices. But I’m quite happy that we’re doing a positive campaign with a positive message. We could have put up a banner saying, “Meryl Dorey is full of ...” But that wouldn’t have won us any friends.

Kylie Sturgess:  What could people do to help or what do you suggest they emulate? For example, I know that over in the U.S. it’s just been announced that apparently there’s going to be more advertising in Time Square in New York, by the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). Is there any advice that you have for other activists out there?

Dave the Happy Singer:  I think that the best thing that Australians can do is to go to the Stop the AVN Facebook group and join up with us. Basically take it from there. We do things like this from time to time. But this is, I think, with the possible exception of the Western Australian advertising blitz for her talks earlier in 2011, the biggest thing that we’ve done. It’s certainly the biggest thing that we’ve done on any single day.

I think the best thing that you can do is join us on Facebook and basically take it from there. As for what’s happening in America—perhaps they’ll be inspired by just how easy it is to rally the troops, or maybe we make it look easy?

The official Stop the AVN site is at http://www.stopavn.com.

When I had set up the appointment by phone, I had asked all of the claimants if they were able to detect magical objects if it were hidden under a cup. All of them said yes, so I gave them a very brief overview of the experiment. Of the four claimants, two backed down: the sorcerer from Mt. Merapi and the witch doctor from Surabaya.

One of the claimants from Surabaya happened to be in Jakarta recently. He had a job interview the day before and was willing to meet me at my office the following day, the 26th of November. This claimant, whom I’ll call DD, was recommended by one of my coworkers. DD arrived at my office with his cousin at around noon, about an hour late for the appointment. After the introduction I began the preliminary interview. DD is only twenty-four years old, is single, and has a diploma in mechanical engineering from a respectable university in Surabaya. He is currently working in a construction company as a project engineer in Surabaya. He claims he has a sixth sense and has had it since he was around six years old. He can sense when there are ghosts, djinns, or other spirits around him when other people can’t see them. He is also a healer and specializes in sprained limbs and broken bones. He heals people by massaging them and praying at the same time. People are healed not because of him but because of the prayer and the power of Allah through his massages. I observed during the preliminary interview that DD was calm and even-headed when I asked him about his background. When I started to ask about his abilities, he started showing signs of nervousness by brushing his left hand through his hair numerous times.

Claimant 1, Exhibit A

Claimant 1, Exhibit B

I had asked him to bring a magical object with him for the experiment. He showed me his ring. I photographed the ordinary-looking ring next to a Rp 200 coin (Claimant 1, Exhibit A & B). The ring became magical because he always wears it when he prays. It says it always protects him from harm. He claimed that during a fight the ring helped him defeat his opponent with just a few punches. I asked him if he can feel the aura of the ring with his hands and he said yes. I then asked him if he could feel the aura of the ring if I put a coffee cup on top of it and he also said yes. Finally, I asked him if he can detect the ring if I hid it under one of ten coffee cups and he also said yes, albeit with same hesitance. I then asked him if he is willing to perform the experiment and he also said yes, but with a lot of hesitance this time. I then explained the double-blind experiment to him and also stated that I have to record the experiment with a video camera. When I asked him how many times he can correctly pick the right cup out of ten tries, he finally balked and said that his powers aren’t that strong yet—that he was only an apprentice and would probably fail the test. I encouraged him to take the test just for fun without the video camera and he finally agreed.

By coincidence, my coworker who recommended DD was also at work that day, so I had asked him to be my assistant. After I explained the protocol to him, we started the double-blind experiment. The procedure is exactly the same as the one with the sorcerer in the article “A Mug of a Different Color”, but this time I used a meeting room for the experiment, a hallway for my coworker to hide behind, and another hallway to the toilet. DD was with me the whole time and we never saw my coworker during the course of the experiment.

I am happy to report that even though my assistant and the claimant are old friends, the double-blind experiment still worked. Out of five tries, DD missed all of them! He then quit after the fifth try. Once again he said that he is still an apprentice and told me that he has a friend in Surabaya who is much more powerful than he is. He would try to arrange for him to meet me when I got to Surabaya the following week. I then thanked him for coming and for having the courage to do the experiment. I would be contacting him again when I arrived in Surabaya.

On the 29th of November, I took the first flight to Surabaya to meet with the second claimant, who I will call FKL. Another coworker had recommended him to me. We had scheduled the meeting at my hotel room at 1:00 PM and he arrived quite promptly. FKL came with his nephew, who works as a reporter for a local Surabaya newspaper, along with him. FKL looked the part of an Indonesian sorcerer. He wore a black shirt and pants, longish curly hair, and a mustache and beard. We all sat down on the floor of my hotel room. My hotel room was a bit dark because the drapes were closed and there were only two lights on.

After the usual pleasantries, I asked him about himself. His day job is as a construction worker. Like DD, he felt he has had magical powers since he was a small child. He used to do black magic when he was in his teens but then finally realized the error of his ways and then turned to white magic. He realized that all the powers he has are given by Allah and has since used his powers for goodness. Besides healing people with prayers, he also persuades other people who use black magic to return to the right path.

He said he could prove to me the power of his magic. When his son was in elementary school, he had shown signs of dyslexia. FKL then meditated for a few hours to seek guidance from Allah. He then suddenly saw a vision of a black circle, which he took as a sign from Allah on how to heal his son. He then drew a black circle on a piece of paper and then asked his son to stare at it while he meditated nearby. His son says that he saw the circle disappear and reappearing over and over again. After that incident, his child’s academic record seemed to improve.

He told this story while drawing a round, black circle on a piece of paper. He then placed the paper upright against a chair and asked me to stare at it while he meditated nearby. The black circle seemed to disappear, of course, so I decided to give him some insight on how the rods and cones of the retina work in a dark room. He looked deflated after my explanation, but, to his credit, he didn’t become defensive about it and actually seem to accept my scientific explanation for this phenomenon.

Claimant 2, Exhibit A

Claimant 2, Exhibit B

I then asked him about the magical object that I asked him to bring. He pulled out a gold and diamond ring that once belonged to his grandfather (Claimant 2 Exhibit A & B). As with DD, I asked him if he could detect the aura of the ring if placed under a coffee cup and whether he could select which cup the ring is under if there are ten cups in front of him. Like DD, he balked at the protocol of the experiment. His excuse was that his powers are from Allah and he should not show off or else Allah would take the powers away from him. Also as with DD’s experiment, I encouraged FKL to take the test just for fun without the video camera and he finally agreed.

The ten cups were on the desk beside the bed. I asked FKL’s nephew to be the hider. After arranging the cups by random, hiding the ring, then rearranging the cups again, he then went into the bathroom and closed the door. Meanwhile, FKL and I were in the hallway facing the other way. After I hear the door to the bathroom close, FKL and I then went to the cups. He hovered his hand above each of the cups before finally picking one of them. I am pleased to say that out of six tries he only got one right. He quit after the sixth try. He restated his initial excuse that his powers are not for showing off but only to help other people. I still thanked him for his participation in the experiment and I also asked him if he can find other people like him who are willing to be tested. Since this is the third time I have tested sorcerers with white magic, I asked him to find someone with black magic for me to test. He doubted he could find one that is willing to do the experiment but he was willing to try.

After they left, I called DD and asked him if his friend was able meet me at my hotel. DD was apologetic but his friend happened to be out of town that week. DD has promised to arrange the meeting the next time I go to Surabaya.

Well, that’s how the experiments went. I realize that the two experiments above couldn’t be considered valid because:

• The claimant and the hider knew each other.
• The rooms where the experiments were held were less than ideal.
• There were no video recordings of the experiment.

However, even with those extremely less-than-perfect conditions for an experiment, the double-blind experiment still works and both claimants badly flunked their tests.

Each month I’ll bring you a new example of sciencey-ness that falls short of giving us credible knowledge yet fools at least some of the public into thinking that it is the real deal. For this initial go, I wanted to share my realizations about science talk and the people who utilize it like a toupee of credibility to hide the lack of substance underneath. Once you’ve spotted their ways, it’s hard to ignore.

Science.

It is a bit hard to define what that is. Meanings change through time. If you are one who values science as the most reliable way to understand the world, you likely have a much stronger definition of the term than someone who values it less. Science is all these things: a process, a way of looking at a topic, a community, an infrastructure, a career, a set of results, an authority, and more. We can use the word in many ways. That means it can be abused in many ways as well.

Daniel Patrick Thurs’s aptly named book Science Talk is an interesting walk through how we have historically talked about science. He takes us through the terms and rhetoric that the public and purveyors of sciences used through the development of the scientific age and demonstrates how meanings are constructed based on the needs we have at any time.

Popular ideas about science have evolved significantly since the word came to be. At first, it just meant a body of reliable and systematized knowledge. That really general way of referring to “a science” was in use until the early 1800s. When “scientist” became an actual profession—where certain training was expected, amateurs were pushed out, and a unique jargon was developed—boundaries formed (and were actively built) around science.

Constructed boundaries enhanced the reputation of science as a distinctive (perhaps “honored”) way of knowing about the world and excluded that which wasn’t science (conveniently judged by the scientists themselves).

The new and improved version of “science” now encompassed all the activities which, collectively, serve the aim of explaining the natural world and how it works.

As the scientific community organized into an “establishment,” an ethos [group of practices] developed. Certain standards of practice were expected of a “scientist,” foremost of which was the entrance to the club through higher education.

Scientific discoveries contributed to human societies in (mostly) positive ways; therefore, the prestige of being “scientific” grew. “Scientific” was associated with being “more true” and more reliable. The biggest drawback of this prestige—which was derived from the rigor and professionalism of science—was that the scientific community itself and the capacity to understand how science really worked receded from the grasp of the non-science public. Being a scientist was special because not everyone could do it. Being scientific was a high standard. Science was hard.

Use of the scientific method

Science progresses on a path quite different from what the public sees. Regular surveys about the public understanding of science tell us that the non-scientist doesn’t comprehend well the importance of critical concepts like controlled trials, peer review, skeptical criticism, and the holding of ideas as provisional. It’s not a surprise that the public doesn’t get how science works; they aren’t exposed to it. People form their ideas about science from the input they DO get—mostly from basic education and popular culture.

In order to do science and be scientific, we are told, you must follow the scientific method.

Once upon a time, though, “scientific method” was not part of the common vernacular. When it began to be used, in the mid-19th century, it was synonymous with “thorough” and “careful.”

Perhaps your first introduction to science may have been in elementary school, when you were taught the “scientific method” presented as a step-by-step prescription to investigate nature that went something like this: observe and gather facts; derive the question you need answered about those facts; propose an explanation for the facts that answers that question; test that explanation.

Sounds easy enough for anyone to do! But, it’s an oversimplification for today’s complicated world. There really is no foolproof, formulaic method that one can apply to all subject areas. Even diligently using the above process, one can go off the rails immediately and end up with nonsense.

Right off the mark, we are all noticeably poor observers—we assume many “facts” that have not actually been confirmed. Many trip up constructing the proper question in order to get a precise, meaningful answer. People regularly make utterly untestable hypotheses (e.g., invoke supernatural causes) then bias the evidence collection process to support a favored explanation, run bogus tests to confirm it, package their conclusions in an enticing way, and then sell it to others. Indeed, this happens all the time, often under the label of “science.”

Ghost science: no substance at all

Instead of playing by the established rules, fields of study with premises that have been rejected by mainstream science attempt an end run around the scientific process. Working backwards from conclusions to evidence so they can support their pet ideas, they co-opt the symbols and processes of science. Dressing up and acting all sciencey-like is a tactic used by intelligent design advocates/creationists, cryptozoologists, ghost hunters, and UFOlogists, among others. It’s a handy gimmick—one that is frequently effective with the public as laypersons may not notice the missing rigor. That it works so often is a reflection of how shallowly the public understands science.

For example, let’s examine the popular paranormal-based hobby of ghost hunting/paranormal investigation.

About half of all paranormal research groups prominently boast that they use a/the “scientific method.” (Whether they use the definite or indefinite article, you will see, does not matter at all.) They frequently present themselves this way to clients, public audiences, and the media.

Curious as to what they meant by that, I contacted a number of paranormal research groups that specifically said they used a “scientific method” or “science” in their methodology. I picked several that really spread the scienceyness on thick. “Science” was in their name or appeared to be of great importance to them. If they promoted science so strongly, were they, in fact, scientists? Did they have a well-thought-out protocol? Since science is a community activity and you are expected to put your findings out there for others to critique, I expected they would be confident in sharing their work with others and defending their conclusions.

Not so much.

The replies I received, though few, spanned a curious range from haughty self-confidence to realistic admissions of failure.

When asked if any of their group members had experience in scientific research outside the paranormal group, a few said “No” outright but several hyped their personal background, equating their ghost investigation activities, computer science experience, or electronics expertise with “scientific training.” That’s not only odd but disingenuous, stretching even the most generic idea of “scientific.”

What did they mean by a scientific method? As I anticipated from the emphasis on gadgetry on their websites, they defined their methods in terms of objectivity, such as data collection through use of equipment. But, nearly universally, their idea of being scientific was simply to be methodical and systematic. For one group their idea of doing science was only “in depth research and investigation,” harkening back to the original and nonspecific idea of science as the organized study of anything. Nonetheless, many who claim to be objective use various subjective means of investigation: intuitives (psychics), dowsing, pendulums, and even Ouija boards.

One particular group with the word “sciences” in its name offers classes to the community on how to investigate using a scientific method. My respondent replied to the question “What about your methods is scientific?” with the elementary definition: identify problem, form hypothesis, test, and conclude. She also added that they were “creating a model of examined evidence or data then trying out different hypothesis.” That sounds sufficiently perspicacious and purposeful, but according to the investigation results from their fancy-worded website they weren’t producing anything testable or vaguely coherent enough to be called a “model.” Their “facts” were more appropriately labeled “opinions,” “feelings,” or “stories.” Their conclusions were unsupported and biased by their obvious belief in paranormal explanations.

Finally, I queried the host of a local radio show called Paranormal Science (You can’t get much more sciencey than that!) who proved to be both the most vague and the most direct at the same time. The group leader said, “I think what we are referring to is ‘as scientific as possible with the means we have.’” Contrasting this to the use of metaphysical means of investigation (i.e., psychics or occult means), they wish to document “hard” evidence, yet admit they are never in a position to fully control the environment.

I would guess that this is the first time anyone has asked them questions about science as they outright concede, “We by no means are using THE Scientific methods [sic]. Just various “as-scientific” methods or ways of trying to document activity.”

I was puzzled. Calling themselves “scientific” where there was no admittedly no science going on was dodgy, to say the least. When I had asked if they had science training, I got a resounding “Yes!” but no details. When they started talking about quantum physics and “energy,” I figured out they knew enough high-falutin’ sciencey talk to be dangerous to the public, who are often too easily impressed by a cheap tuxedo, so to speak.

I saw them as science poseurs who were playing up a manufactured sense of self-importance. They wanted to “take an intelligent look at all this stuff, or at least a common sense approach. LOL!.”

In a P.S. to my reply, the Paranormal Science show host blew the game by conceding, “The ‘science’ in Paranormal Science just refers to the ‘workings’ behind various topics we will be covering. It has nothing to do with actual science. Just a catch phrase. LOL!”

LOLs indeed…

I observed two things about these sciencey-sounding groups. First, they had little to no idea what modern science is or how to do it. Instead, they were operating on their perceived, old-fashioned idea of what sounded sufficiently sciencey and impressive to them. Second, they were co-opting the memes of science to appear serious and careful. They were perfectly comfortable playing scientists to their clients, the media, and the public, who assumed they were conscientious. But when someone who knew a little more about standards of real science knocked on the door to question them, they shifted their ground. Their methods were not scientific; their work was not science at all.

Calling out counterfeit science talk

I reached Daniel Thurs, the author of Science Talk, via email to ask why he thought these researchers who claim to use science immediately backpedaled from the strong version of the term when I questioned them on it.

The “scientific method,” he said, “seems to be one of the most portable parts of science.”

It works because it’s vague and it sounds prescriptive. Anyone can use it. When one tries to pin down exactly what aspects of science they are practicing and how they achieve each step in a scientific method, the smoky vagueness has to be cleared up. Are they possibly using the term “scientific method” to suppress debate? “Look! We use the scientific method so we obtain reliable results and are superior to that group who is just out to have fun.” If that’s a purpose, the usefulness is diminished by my questioning, which sent them scrambling to places where they were obviously uncomfortable (thus causing random outbursts of acronymical laughter).

But it’s not funny. These researchers claiming to use the scientific method failed to understand that science is powerful in our society precisely because it is hard and not everyone can do it. Instead, they adopted the gimmick of sprinkling “scientific method” and other sciencey-sounding words around because others relate to that and associate that with being more correct or genuine.

It is difficult to talk concisely about the practice of faking science, even though it is so prevalent. The words available to me were just not adequate to express what I was trying to say. I went through books and essays about “stuff” done outside of scientific orthodoxy. It was labeled as pseudoscience. Alternatively, one could be said to be conjuring science [Toumey 1996], constructing a scientific façade, imitating science, etc. The methods and ideas were described as “sciencey” or “scientif-ish.” No one term floated to the top as a succinct way to convey the meaning that claimants were mimicking science, especially when the perpetrators of the ruse may be sincere but misinformed.

One day, while working on the idea of “sham inquiry” as a description of what ghost hunters really do (work backwards from conclusion to evidence), I came across the word “scientifical.” I don’t remember how. Perhaps it popped into my head because it was the word that sounded just as silly as these weekend investigators looked to an actual scientist. It was not widely used although it existed in the Urban Dictionary:

“A term used to describe a situation when someone has mixed up or mispronounced words. It is so used because it is such a word itself. It is normally used to point out the persons [sic] blunder.”

And also,

“A way to make yourself sound intelligent when you have no idea what you are talking about.”

These definitions certainly resonated with me in terms of what I found when looking at amateur paranormal investigation groups. So I used it. Being scientifical means hijacking the authority of science to sound credible and believable by misappropriating the terms, methods, and imagery.

Acting scientifical reflects a desire to be included within the scientific realm as opposed to excluded and ridiculed. This semblance is convincing to the non-science public where real-life experience can be valued more highly than academic credentials.

Everyone wants science on their side. If you can’t get that to legitimately happen, it’s not too difficult to bluff by manufacturing a facsimile. You fool some of the people a lot of the time. Those who play at this also fool themselves. They fail at obtaining useful, reliable knowledge about the natural world. Still, they are certain of their ways—using their scientifical methods, telling the public how serious and important their work is, and succeeding at converting some nonbelievers that there is something to it. That’s dangerous and should be challenged.

References

Carey, S.S. 2004. A Beginner’s Guide to Scientific Method (3rd ed). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Thurs, D. P. 2007. Science Talk: Changing Notions of Science in American Popular Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Toumey, C. P. 1996. Conjuring Science: Scientific Symbols and Cultural Meanings in American Life. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Located in Downtown San Jose, California, this incredible Gothic Victorian mansion is an oddity, surrounded by freeways, fast food outlets, and the high rises of Silicon Valley. In the bygone days, when Santa Clara County was known for its orchards, the eccentric Winchester Rifle heiress, Sarah Winchester, designed and built this legendary house. This is another of the “Most Haunted Houses in America,” but this isn’t so much a paranormal story as one about a woman whose life was reputedly ruled and ruined by belief in the paranormal.

Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1839. In 1862, during the height of the American Civil War, Sarah married William Winchester, the sole child of Oliver Winchester, owner of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The couple only had one child, Annie, who died in infancy of tuberculosis. Oliver died in 1880 and was quickly followed by William, who died in 1881. Her husband, like her child, died of tuberculosis and Sarah became a major benefactor to pulmonary research, donating $2 million during her lifetime to this cause. As the last Winchester, Sarah became an independently wealthy woman. Her husband bequeathed to her fifty percent of the Winchester Company and the substantial income of $1,000 per day, tax free as it was then.

Sarah slipped into a deep depression following the deaths of her family members. But do the facts end here? Sarah, now alone and vulnerable, was reputedly convinced her family members were victims of a curse. Allegedly, she travelled to Boston to consult with psychic medium Adam Coons (also reported as “Coombs”), who confirmed the wealthy widow’s fears that the Winchester family was cursed. He explained that the spirits of those people and animals who had died at the hands of a Winchester rifle, “the gun that won the West,” were avenging their deaths by claiming the lives of her husband, child, and father-in-law. Sarah was next.

Coons had a peculiar solution. The only way Sarah could appease the spirits was to build them a house in which they could live. Others claim she was told to build a house to confuse the spirits. He advised that his client move west and build this home. As long as the house was being built, the spirits would not harm Sarah. Utterly convinced by Coons and desperate to remove this “curse,” Sarah relocated to San Jose and purchased an eight-room farmhouse. Coons’s cruel counsel commenced Sarah’s mission to create a house that became a constant thirty-eight-year work in progress leading to an astonishing labyrinthian mansion. On what was once a hundred-sixty-acre estate, the contemporary building boasts some staggering statistics: one-hundred-sixty rooms and four stories (in its prime the house had seven stories), with six kitchens, forty bedrooms, nineteen chimneys, forty staircases, forty-seven fireplaces, fifty-two skylights, nine-hundred-fifty doors, three elevators, two ballrooms, and ten thousand windows!

It’s said that Sarah had builders working twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, over the four decades of construction. In total, the mansion was remodelled over six hundred times at a cost of five and a half million dollars. However, there were only ever two sets of formal blueprints, for the elevators and the boiler. All other plans were sketched onto scraps of paper, napkins, or even tablecloths and were destroyed upon implementation. The construction began in 1884 and ended on the day of Sarah’s death on the fifth of September, 1922. Apparently, Sarah’s goal was to never complete the remodelling, lest the spirits exact their revenge upon the last living Winchester.

I attended the complete Estate Tour of the house, including a guided tour of the mansion and the estate grounds. Sadly, none of the original furnishings adorn what must have once been an opulently decorated home. Upon Sarah’s death, her sole relative, niece Frances Marriot, auctioned off most of the furnishings. The tour guide informed us that it took eight weeks to remove all of the furniture from the premises, at six truckloads per day! Only twenty-four of the rooms are now furnished sparsely with donations, all genuine period furniture but not the original household décor. Aside from the fireplaces, elevators, a chandelier, an organ, and some original marble and tiling, all that remains now is the house.

One of the first rooms we visited was the “Séance Room,” built deep inside the house. The room has three exits but only one entrance. One door leads to a sink while another door opens to a ten-foot drop to the kitchen! According to our guide, this is where Sarah held nightly séances between the hours of midnight and 2 AM. At midnight the bells in the bell tower would ring to summon the spirits to the séance. When the séance was completed, the bells would toll to signal that it was time for the spirits to depart. Conflicting stories state that Sarah’s construction efforts were guided by the spirit of her husband, while the guide asserted that Sarah’s séances were an attempt to contact the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles, to seek their advice and instructions on how the following day’s construction should proceed. Of course, this runs contrary to the claim that she wanted to conceal her plans from the spirits.

If we believe the stories, when Sarah began her quest to placate the “spirits,” her life became inextricably bound to the paranormal, with superstition and fear influencing every part of her life. Sarah Winchester was, by all accounts, an educated woman of her time. She had attended school, was fluent in four languages, and was an accomplished musician. So why did she succumb to the occult? Why did she believe Coons’s superstitious theory and illogical solution, and to such an obsessive extent? It appears that Sarah suffered a powerful combination of grief, a natural predisposition to depression, and considerable guilt at her family’s bloodthirsty trade and subsequent affluence. Apparently, Sarah often referred to her family’s wealth as “blood money” derived from misfortune. Furthermore, this was still the zenith of Spiritualism. Perhaps these factors led to Sarah’s superstitions, her substantial wealth allowing for the indulgence of her eccentricity.

The Winchester mansion has many peculiar and redundant features. This is a house that could have been the brainchild of M.C. Escher. The house itself looks like an elaborate, colourful Victorian mansion, albeit with many add-ons; turrets, cupolas, and cornices. We started the tour in the stagecoach entrance and as we entered the house itself, we were directed to peer around a corner at a stairwell. This infamous stairwell leads straight to the ceiling!

This house is as eccentric as its owner and designer. The legend asserts that Sarah built the maze-like mansion to confuse and disorient any lurking spirits. However, the design truly succeeded in confusing her staff given the large and complicated nature of the premises coupled with the fact that Sarah didn’t ever want anyone to know her exact whereabouts—servants were summoned to a wing rather than a room. The house is a web of corridors, stairwells, and rooms within rooms within rooms. There are many doors high enough to only accommodate Sarah’s diminutive four-foot-ten-inch frame. There is a tiny, superfluous balcony. One room has a window built into the floor. Countless closets, doors, and windows open out onto blank walls. A “door to nowhere” opens outward to an eight-foot drop! A blind chimney stops short of the ceiling. There are numerous trapdoors and double-back hallways. There are security bars on internal windows. There is a “Room of Fires,” a sauna-like room with seven sources of heat, built to “ease Mrs. Winchester’s arthritis.” Most rooms have strange, awkwardly shaped alcoves of varying height and depth that aren’t large enough to house anything at all.

All of the bathrooms have glass doors and spy holes, while the kitchen was designed so that Sarah could overhear the gossip of her staff. Apparently, if anyone ever proposed building plans, or discussed her plans or her, they were fired on the spot. For their loyalty and silence, her staff was paid $3 per day, triple the standard rate of the time. Throughout the house, curious, winding stairwells climb only a few feet and are raised only two inches high. While the tour guide initially explained this as another architectural attempt to “confuse the spirits,” the alternate theory was far more skeptical and realistic: that Sarah designed these “easy riser” stairwells with her chronic arthritis in mind.

During the 1906 earthquake, in the early hours of the morning, Sarah became trapped in a room in the front section of the house. The walls shifted and the door became jammed shut. She had been in the habit of sleeping in a different room each night, purportedly to “confuse” the spirits as to her whereabouts. Again, this only confused her staff when they couldn’t find her. Eventually, after a full hour of searching, she was located. The marks still exist on the door where a crowbar was employed to wedge it open.

The earthquake damage to the house was extensive. The entire top three floors collapsed into the garden and were never rebuilt. We were told that the incident convinced Sarah that the “spirits” were displeased with the progression of her handiwork as it appeared that she was nearing completion of the home. She promptly sealed off the front section of the house, thirty rooms in total, and they were never again used during her lifetime. Supposedly this was to ensure that the house was perpetually “under construction.” To this day they remain as they were, partially remodelled and with broken plaster and damaged walls as evidence of the quake. This episode also persuaded Sarah to select a permanent bedroom (with easy access to her séance room) and it was here that she died in her sleep at the age of eighty-three.

Today, the Winchester Mystery House is regarded as the safest house in California as far as earthquakes are concerned, as the mansion is built on floating foundations. This is a feature implemented by Sarah’s builders and not of her own design. Sarah’s builders were ahead of their time for environmental design—an upstairs green house was designed to conserve water. This feature was also built into her kitchens and bathrooms. The house has many modern conveniences that were seldom found at the time of its construction, including steam and forced-air heating, indoor toilets and plumbing, button controlled gas lights, a hot water shower, and the three elevators, one model of which is unique to the house. Sarah had yet another strange feature built into her home. A Victorian superstition of the time dictated that one column in every home must be installed upside down for good luck. As usual, Sarah took this notion to the extreme. She reversed the tradition and had every column placed upside down, bar one!

Despite her many guest rooms, parlors, and ballrooms, obviously named for convention, Sarah never had any guests, aside from one famous gentleman who never made it past the front door. One day, U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt made an unannounced visit to the Winchester home. A particular rifle had been named after him, a limited-edition commemorative weapon. When Roosevelt appeared on the doorstep of the home, the staff member who greeted him, obviously unaccustomed to visitors, reprimanded the startled president for daring to try to enter through the front door. Obviously mistaken for a disruptive job applicant, Roosevelt was advised, “You’ll enter the house through the back entrance, like the rest of the servants!” Roosevelt was so highly offended that he left the grounds and never returned. In a more likely but less dramatic account, Roosevelt had requested a visit with Sarah but he was flatly refused. Another account claims that Harry Houdini once made an impromptu visit to the house. Houdini was graciously welcomed and even attended a midnight séance. However, the tour guide confirmed that this event took place in 1924, two years after Sarah’s death.

If we believe the stories, Sarah must have led a lonely and tortured life. Despite her painfully arthritic hands, she would often play the ballroom organ with great energy, “for the spirit guests.” Every night, the lady of the house would sit down to a lavish dinner alone—or so it would seem. The elaborately decorated table was always set for thirteen: Sarah, and her twelve spirit guests. Sarah was no Friggatriskaidekaphobe; she had an obsession with the number thirteen that was reflected throughout the house. This is a reoccurring theme, from the thirteen windows in most rooms to the thirteen steps for each stairwell and the thirteen drains in every sink. In the séance room, there are thirteen clothes hooks for the thirteen coats she supposedly used in her nightly ceremonies. Sarah was a preferred customer of the Tiffany Company in New York and the house still contains many fine examples of leadlight windows. The most prized example contains hundreds of crystals and cost $15,000. She was once invited to design her own leadlight window and created a piece that is a swirl of colours and stars (thirteen stars, of course).

One of the last rooms we visited was the ballroom, an elegant room that cost $9,000 to build. A door in the centre of the room was locked at all times during Sarah’s lifetime and only she had the key. Upon her death, her staff eagerly seized the keys and unlocked the door. Inside, they found a vault. Inside, they found another vault, and yet another within that. After unlocking a total of five vaults, they came to the treasure: not money or jewellery, as they had expected, but a lock of her husband’s hair, a lock of her daughter’s hair, and their obituaries. If Sarah was truly superstitious, perhaps she so carefully stored these precious keepsakes to hide them from those who would use them against her in a spell or a curse.

San Jose wasn’t always known as Silicon Valley. The region was previously known as the “Valley of the Heart’s Delight” as it was renowned for the Winchester orchards and local farms. The 160-acre Winchester estate was mostly farmland where plums, apricots, almonds, and walnuts were grown, dried, and sold at markets under Sarah Winchester’s own packing label. Only a few trees still exist on the grounds. The estate also contains a Firearms museum. But the Winchester Company didn’t only produce guns; they made silverware, flashlights, fishing tackle, roller skates, and electric irons. They were also the country’s largest producer of hardware, including farm and garden tools.

But are there any ghost stories surrounding the Winchester Mystery House? It must be noted that the tours are marketed as historical rather than ghost tours. I questioned the guide and while she didn’t have any personal experiences, she had heard stories from visitors. As always, these are stock ghost stories: footsteps down the halls, cold spots, orbs captured in photographs, the sound of doorknobs turning and doors banging, and sightings of Sarah. Various books and websites repeat these same stories about the mansion, including other tales of phantom organ playing, disembodied voices and screams, strange lights, strange smells, and even sightings of ectoplasm! Of course, various psychics have toured the house and capitalized on its reputation, including Sylvia Browne, who confirmed the “curse” and reported she witnessed the spirits of Sarah and fallen soldiers from the Civil War. Most surprising of all, there aren’t any reports of phantom hammering and construction. These people just don’t know how to invent a plausible ghost story! It seems that the stories come from the visitors, not the staff.

We should be skeptical about the stories surrounding the Winchester Mystery House. There are no primary documents attesting to the stories; in fact, they are all anecdotal and usually conflicting. Sarah was extremely reclusive and didn’t leave behind any diaries or letters revealing her beliefs. Books about the house and owner all provide second-hand information; one popular book was written by the grandson of a former gardener. The stories have likely been embellished over time. After all, Sarah was the subject of much gossip and rumour during her lifetime and beyond.

Did Sarah really visit a psychic? Even if she did, what took place during the sitting? Did she receive other advice that influenced her actions? She probably wasn’t instructed to move west; she had relatives in California and thus a reason to move. But what motivated her to build the house? Was she profoundly superstitious, or was this all-consuming project a hobby for the eccentric Sarah—a distraction from her loneliness and sorrow? The woman behind the Winchester Mystery House really is a mystery.

But the house’s strange design features are artifacts of previous renovations and designed for special needs. The winding double-back steps were designed with a pragmatic purpose—Sarah’s mobility. The barred windows in internal rooms were once external and the bars served a valid security purpose. The chimney that stops short of the ceiling is located where a roof once stood. The windows in floors were once skylights in roofs, and the doors that open onto walls are simply examples of rooms added on to other rooms.

It is said that when Sarah died the news of her demise spread quickly throughout the estate. Her servants and builders immediately laid down their tools; half-hammered nails can be found throughout the mansion, the work halted mid-task. However, the existing house and six acres of the estate necessitate constant maintenance: there are gardens to care for, rooms to paint, and constant cleaning and repairs. In a way, Sarah’s project continues to this day.

An Interview with Andy Lewis of Quackometer

Kylie Sturgess:  Who is Stanislaw Burzynski?

Andy Lewis:  Well, that’s a very good question. As far as I can understand, he’s a doctor based in Texas who a number of years ago came up with an idea that certain sorts of chemicals were missing from cancer patients, and if you could inject those chemicals back into the cancer patient then you might cure all sorts of cancers. He found these chemicals in the patients’ urine, so he started off extracting these compounds. If this had worked, it would have been fantastic. This was an idea.

The problem was this was thirty years ago. Since then no real evidence has emerged that I have seen which shows this is anything but an idea.

Kylie:  In fact, the Burzynski Clinic is in the United States? So it’s not even an English thing, all the attempts to silence criticism.

Andy:  Absolutely. Most people in England, a vast majority of them, never heard of this chap. But ten days ago in a Sunday paper an article was published that highlighted this clinic. It was a heartbreaking story, really, about a young girl with a brain cancer that was just highly inoperable. And her parents were trying to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to send her over to Texas for what might be the last months of her life, which sounded tragic. And when you look into this clinic, it looked like this was not in her best interest, I would say.

Kylie:  So how did the Observer get ahold of this story in the first place? There are plenty of people who, at a very desperate time in their lives, are trying to find a cure for cancer. How did this group step in?

Andy:  I understand that the little girl was the niece of an editor at the paper. So it was his story, really. You understand the problem here. It probably never went through a science desk or a health desk or anything like that at the paper. So it never really was checked. It was a feature article. This happens a lot in papers, where health claims sort of slip by the normal editorial process. But this time it was quite an important, serious one: people were being lured into this idea that our National Health Service is not offering this lifesaving treatment and these parents are having to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds through charitable concerts and so on to send her to the United States, which is the only place willing to treat this poor girl.

It played into a lot of these myths, I think, that the U.K. press like, about how our National Health Service is failing people and how the United States is so great with its free market approach and so on. It really is a collection of myths. And unfortunately because of that, I fear other people will be sucked down that route.

Kylie:  In order to be accepted into the trial, according to the article, the family needed £200,000—it’s an incredibly compelling story, isn’t it?

Andy:  Yeah. I think the sheer expense of it added to the allure, really. Who would charge that much for treatment that didn’t work? It’s even more disturbing because Burzynski is not allowed to offer this treatment on its own. He’s only allowed to treat people within a trial. So what he seems to be doing is setting dozens of trials—and he’s been doing this for decades now—and then asking the patients to pay money to join the trial. Even if this was a working treatment, I’d find it ethically very problematic. Because obviously you’re asking parents of terminally ill children to essentially mortgage their homes and raise huge amounts of money for one last chance for their child’s life.

This doesn’t happen elsewhere in medicine, really. This seems to be a pretty unique case, where the doctor is charging people to join trials. That raises lots of red flags all over and I think that’s a question that this clinic really needs to respond to.

Kylie:  The thing that really got me about your article, which is on Quackometer.net (“The False Hope of the Burzynski Clinic”), is the part where you mention that this isn’t the first time this has happened.

Andy:  I think lots of people were going back through the archives and so on and searching the internet for it. This seems to be cropping up fairly regularly, where young children have cancers and are obviously in a very poorly state and the parents are raising money. This is the sort of heartwarming story that tends to crop up in local papers quite regularly, but I think this is one of the first times it’s appeared in a national newspaper. So this would be a fairly common occurrence in how this clinic appears to operate: by asking patients to rely on the goodwill of friends, family, and other people to stump up huge amounts of money for this treatment, which appears... well, there’s no good evidence that I’ve seen that it’s effective.

Kylie:  There’s even a film that’s been produced by the Burzynski Clinic in order to promote its claims?

Andy:  This is where it gets really disturbing: Burzynski appears to be up against the Texas Medical Board, next April I believe, where he’s been charged with various things—using off‑label medications inappropriately and engaging in practices that might not be in the best interests of his patients. It’s online now, the sort of [questions] he’s got to answer to this committee. But it looks like there’s a chance that he could lose his license. If he is doing things that aren’t above‑board I think it would be a very good thing indeed.

You mentioned this film. This film is supposedly being made by an independent filmmaker. It’s ninety minutes long, showing what a wonderful doctor Burzynski is. It’s essentially a conspiracy‑theory film about how the medical profession is trying to stop this wonderful new cure from being given to poorly children. It doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny, really. He has a number of case histories in there that are not conclusive at all by the look of things. And the rest of the film is just a conspiracy theory. It may be that this clinic is whipping up support. He seems to get a lot of very, very emotional support from people who believe he’s doing wonderful things, particularly in the alternative medicine world, where the story plays into their worldview very nicely: that there is such a thing as the “cancer industry” that keeps people sick and pumps them full of poisons and makes huge amounts of money from dying people. It seems to me the exact opposite is true here.

Kylie:  Why attack bloggers? How come you have suddenly appeared on their radar as someone worthy of getting threatening letters?

Andy:  Well, I mean, I think one of the most amazing things about today is that bloggers can automatically appear quite high up in Google searches and so on. People have readerships and they talk to each other and reference each other. So people can easily find out if there are dissenting voices out there these days. That’s quite difficult for all businesses, really, legitimate ones as well as illegitimate ones. How do you manage PR around that? And obviously there are firms out there and people out there who specialize in trying to shut people up if they don’t like what you’re saying. And obviously you can be quite aggressive about that if you want to, particularly in the United Kingdom, which has some libel laws that are quite friendly to such approaches.

So I think it’s an easy route, really; rather than address the concerns raised by lots of people about this clinic, it’s much easier to try and make them disappear. It looks like for a number of months now a chap called Marc Stephens has been writing to bloggers worldwide and threatening all sorts of horrible things against them unless they remove their posts. Some people have; other people haven’t. And I think it just hit the perfect storm in the past week or two by threatening one too many people.

Kylie:  Looking at your site, it appeared to have started with you, in fact. There’s a blog post called “The Burzynski Clinic Threatens My Family.” What’s the experience been like?

Andy:  Oh, good grief!

Kylie:  Sorry, but it has to be asked! It looks like it must have been dreadful.

Andy:  It was within a week of my little baby girl being born as well. To be honest, it’s the second most important thing that’s happened to me this week. But it’s still quite amazing, and a large number of people have been talking about this on Twitter and writing posts. One of the most amazing things was that I think on Friday evening I got a frantic phone call from my web host saying, “What on Earth is going on with the servers?” I’m going to give them a plug now: Positive Internet. They’re wonderful. They wanted to make sure that their servers were Stephen Fry–proof! They wanted to make sure if Stephen Fry tweeted about it they could cope. So they spent an hour or two hardening up the servers and making sure everything was cached properly, which was exciting and fun.

And sure enough, Stephen Fry tweeted on Sunday, I believe, about all of this. And suddenly there were 100,000 hits on the server. And it stayed up, which was fantastic. From a technical point of view it’s been quite interesting. From an emotional point of view, my wife doesn’t know what’s been going on this week. And I didn’t want to worry her with trivialities like this, really. So, we keep our voices down while we are talking, OK?

Kylie:  Well, one good thing is that the Internet is certainly shouting loudly about it. It is starting to become what is known as the “Streisand effect,” isn’t it?

Andy:  Yes. I’m not quite sure. I think Barbra Streisand—I hope I’m right here, because I don’t want to libel her—a number of years ago tried to suppress someone saying something bad about her. I don’t know the details at all.

Kylie:  I think it was photographs of her house. She didn’t want them out in the public eye. Someone said, “Well, it’s a house. Deal with it.”

Andy:  Right. She was perfectly right to try and do that. The problem with the Internet is that things can get out of hand very quickly. This happened a few years ago when the Society of Homeopaths tried a very similar thing. They threatened me with all sorts of things for saying that their Code of Ethics was worth nothing, because they didn’t stop their members from trying to treat HIV and AIDS, which was likely to kill them. They didn’t like that. So they tried to threaten me there. Within a few days, my post had been replicated to about 100 sites.

So, far from shutting up criticism, the effect is that a lot more people tend to see it, which is what happened here. My original post, the one you mentioned, I think over the day had about 4,000 or 5,000 readers. Since they tried to threaten me, we have had well over 100,000 readers now. So, in general, I think it’s not a good idea to threaten people. It’s always best to try and talk to them first.

Kylie:  Speaking of threats, it has become even more nefarious now. They started to threaten a seventeen‑year‑old blogger, Rhys Morgan, as well?

Andy:  Yeah, Rhys Morgan. I knew about Morgan. Part of the reason I wrote about it was I knew that Morgan was being threatened. This was taken quite seriously to begin with. Morgan is seventeen. He became quite famous a year or so ago because he suffers from Crohn’s disease. He was looking on various websites, partaking in forums and so on that were saying people with Crohn’s disease ought to take something called Miracle Mineral Supplement, I believe it was called, which is basically bleach. It has been a worldwide thing.

He said this is nonsense. He was attacked by other people with Crohn’s for trying to stop what might be a really good treatment. People who believe in these things really tend to get quite emotional about them, don’t they?

Morgan said, “No. This is nonsense.” He was hounded off the forum. So he tried to do something about it. I think he wrote to Trading Standards. He wrote to the Welsh government as well, and various other people. He got on the BBC. Eventually I think a lot of websites were taken down that were selling [the product].

For his efforts, James Randi gave Morgan an award as Skeptical Activist of the Year or something like that, which is fantastic for having been sixteen years old [at the time]. So he’s got a bit of form. He decided to make a bit of a hobby of this, trying to expose things.

So he wrote about Burzynski six weeks ago now. He then got this horrible letter. What was even more amazing was this Marc Stephens chap, who wrote a very legalistic sounding letter. He also [mailed] a picture of Morgan’s house to him, saying basically, “We know where you live,” which is quite incredible.

What Stephens didn’t know is that he was talking to a schoolboy! Morgan has got a lot of good friends, people like Simon Singh, who was threatened by the chiropractors a few years ago. Singh gave him some very good advice.

So Morgan wrote to Stephens, saying, “I received your email. But I’ve just got to finish school for the day and then I’ll get back to you.” This must have been quite a shock to Stephens. I’m not sure Stephens has that much insight, because he continued to threaten him anyway, threatened to tell his school and all sorts of things.

That’s bad now, because I can generate so much publicity. But someone threatening a seventeen‑year‑old boy is going to get in the newspapers without a shadow of a doubt. So that was a very, very bad tactical mistake on Marc Stephens’s part.

Kylie: Who exactly is Marc Stephens? What part does he have to play in all of this?

Andy:  He wrote to me claiming to represent the Burzynski Clinic and so on. The letter looked like a lawyer’s letter, though it didn’t explicitly say that. But a bit of searching quickly [revealed] that he doesn’t seem to be registered. Also, there is someone called Marc Stephens with the same spelling, M‑A‑R‑C, who works for the Burzynski Patients Forum, or something like this, as a PR person. So it looks like he is associated with this doctor, working in marketing and PR. Quite what the relationship [entails] is still a little bit up in the air. But we know emails have been [exchanged] between the Burzynski Clinic and Stephens. So we know that, well, it appears that the Burzynski Clinic was aware of what Stephens was doing. Whether they sanctioned it or not, I don’t know.

So the Burzynski Clinic [officials have] some questions to answer, really. Did they tell Marc Stephens to do this? Were they condoning? Were they happy with him doing it? What is their relationship with him exactly? Do they want to stand by what he said or did they want to disassociate themselves? I’m quite happy for them to just disassociate themselves from his threats. But that still means the Burzynski Clinic has a huge number of questions that need answering about how they it is treating its customers.

Kylie:   Obviously Simon Singh is stepping in to help.

Andy:  Yes. Well, do our libel laws help? No, they don’t. The laws are that people can be stupid here. Still, if the Burzynski Clinic decided to be really stupid, it could cause a lot of problems for an awful lot of people. So, people are speaking out with some risk, shall we say, that things could get pretty nasty. There is no automatic protection for voicing our concerns. What Simon Singh found, as other people have done, like Ben Goldacre and other people who have been defending malicious suits, is that even if you win it can cost you in time and money.

This is exactly why these people make these threats. They know that once they have made a threat it’s a no‑win situation for you. Something needs to change. Hopefully, in the Queen’s speech this year, the government will commit to making a more robust set of libel laws.

Of course, it has got to be seen from both points of view. We have got to protect people from the newspapers, as well, printing malicious things. So there is a balance to be found here. There is not an easy path through here, but there are a number of obvious improvements that could be made that I think would improve the situation to no end.

So let’s hope the government doesn’t flinch on this one—doesn’t bend to the power of vested interests that want to preserve their right to issue threats—and makes Britain, once again, a place where free speech is valued and protected.

Kylie:  So, what is going to happen next? Obviously the network of bloggers is uniting together in order to raise awareness. Do you think that the media should be stepping up, as well?

Andy:  Well, absolutely. I understand that some things are going to start being published now. It has reached a critical mass. So I understand that tomorrow there will be newspaper articles on this. I don’t know the specifics yet. What I would really like is the original newspaper, the Observer, to tackle this.

They really shouldn’t be trying to ignore this. So we will wait and see. I think worldwide, we are starting to see newspapers in Texas printing things, which is great. It’s the home of the Burzynski Clinic. The British Medical Journal, I understand, is going to be writing something. So this has gone beyond a few people at home at their desks writing blogs now. It’s going to be raising awareness of these issues.

I think entertainers are involved in raising money as well; it would be good for them to start engaging in conversation. I understand why they’re raising money for this poor little girl; I would too. I think now that they have committed to do it, of course that is a very difficult decision to turn back from. But there is a discussion to be had about how this money is spent. I know for the parents it’s going to be impossible, I would imagine, to turn their backs on the hope that this person has raised for them. I can’t imagine what it must be like. I don’t expect them to take part.

But I think there are many things here that need addressing whether you are a celebrity endorsing cancer treatments, whether you are newspaper writing about them, whether you are the clinic itself offering them, whether you are a charity that claims to help cancer patients—but really what you are doing is funneling them towards quacks. I know there are quite a few charities that do that.

There are lots of issues here that I think, hopefully, are going to be discussed and raised. That will help prevent people making terrible decisions in the future.

Kylie:  Where can people go to find out more and keep up to date with the events that are going on?

Andy:  Well, come to my blog, Quackometer.net. There are a number of good websites around. If you search for Josephine Jones’s blog, she is collating a list of sites that are writing about this. It’s getting up near 100 now, I believe.

Go to Rhys Morgan’s website, obviously. I think Googling “Burzynski Clinic” now will ensure you find lots and lots of discussions going on, which is something that I’m sure the Burzynski Clinic is not too happy about!

Kylie:  No! Thank you very much for talking to me, Andy Lewis.

Andy:  Thank you very much indeed.

True to Andy Lewis’ words, on Tuesday, the 29th of November, the Guardian newspaper reported on Rhys Morgan’s posting of the entire correspondence from Marc Stephens on his blog. The Burzynski Clinic has revealed that Stephens was only a web marketing contractor and that “no one approved [Stephens] sending pictures of Morgan’s house to him.” At time of writing, more and more bloggers are continuing to question claims by the Burzynski Clinic.

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

Civilizations Lost

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

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

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

The Lost Civilizations of North America

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

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

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

An Alternate Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Hidden History?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secret Cities of Ancient America?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer:

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

References Cited:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rose without a Thorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Machine in the Ghost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Subtle Hint of Silage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ghosts, Gods, and Goblins

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

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

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

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

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

On Publishing Paranormality

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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