The intent of Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite is to provide scientific explanations for various monsters found in historical legend and literature up through the monsters of today as seen, mostly, in film. Had Kaplan succeeded in this task, he would have produced an exciting and interesting book. Instead, the book is filled with over-explanations, just-so stories, and college-level film criticism, all leavened by one howling error.

The topics covered are arranged in rough chronological order. Thus, the first half of the book deals with monsters from ancient myths and legends such as the Nemean lion, chimeras, the Minotaur, Medusa, Charybdis, and the like. But modern monsters are tossed in too—King Kong and the giant squid (the latter doesn’t really belong since it does exist).

The explanations for ancient beasts are often fairly reasonable. For example, monsters that are giant versions of already scary animals are scary because, well, a giant version of something already scary (e.g., a lion) is even scarier. Snakelike monsters are scary because snakes are scary in the first place. Why do snakes, to this day, generate fear? Kaplan argues, convincingly, that the fear of snakes is part of human’s evolutionary heritage. They posed real danger as proto-humans evolved. So there is an advantage to avoiding snakes even if one has not had a direct scary experience with them.

There is, however, a bit of a problem with this explanation of the commonality of snakes as ancient monsters. Spiders, like snakes, continue to generate fear. Spiders, like snakes, posed a hazard to humans while we were evolving. However, spiders, unlike snakes, did not serve as the basis for legends of any ancient monsters, as far as I know.

Kaplan does occasionally go overboard by trying to come up with a specific explanation for every little variation in a myth. For example, on pages 54 and 55 there is a discussion of the possible factual basis of the “cruel bellowing” of the Minotaur. There is much discussion of caves and other geologic phenomena. But isn’t it just simpler to explain the details of this, and other, myths as devices to make them scarier? Or, as Amazon reviewer sonabeta pointed out in a November 20, 2012, review, “People sometimes just make things up.”

Similarly, on page 102 the discussion turns to dragons. The question is why dragon myths are not consistent across time and place—some with wings and some without, some breathing fire and some not. Well, dragons aren’t real so why should all stories about them be consistent? Still, Kaplan’s explanation for the fire-breathing part is plausible and I won’t spoil it for the reader by giving it away here.

Chapter 6 on “Hauntings—Demons, Ghosts, Spirits” is long on description of these phenomena and short on explanations. Hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations go unmentioned, although there is a brief discussion of sleep atonia and sleep paralysis. But the full power of hypnogogia—with all of its attendant hallucinations—to convince people that ghosts are real is not made clear at all. This is a serious omission.

The book does contain one major and inexcusable howler in Chapter 7, a chapter dealing with vampires, zombies, and werewolves. Kaplan swallows hook, line, and sinker the long-refuted claim of Wade Davis that zombies are real and that they can be created by witch doctors using the poison tetrodotoxin (TTX), found, among other places, in the skin and internal organs of puffer fish native to Haiti. In accepting Davis’s claims Kaplan ignores the overwhelming scientific literature that shows that 1) the “zombie powder” that Davis claims had TTX in it didn’t and 2) even if it did, TTX in any quantity cannot produce zombies. TTX is a nerve poison that does not get into the brain. In terms of motor control, it affects only the skeletal musculature. Its specific effect is to render victims paralyzed, but it is not the stiff (rigid) paralysis of zombie legend but a flaccid paralysis where muscles lose their tone. In addition, in nonlethal doses TTX causes nausea and vomiting. The idea that just the right dose of TTX could transform a person into a zombie and keep them that way while they were walking around being productive slaves is absurd. And its absurdity has been known since the late 1980s. Sadly, Kaplan obviously didn’t get the memo. For a more detailed discussion with appropriate references, see my article “Zombies and Tetrodotoxin” in the May/June 2008 Skeptical Inquirer (vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 60–62).

The last few chapters change focus from creatures of ancient myth and legend to more recent creations, especially alien abductions and movie monsters. The discussions here are quite poor, almost sophomoric, especially where movie monsters are concerned. The first topic in Chapter 8, “The Created,” is the golem. Here either through bad writing or ignorance (or maybe both) Kaplan seems to state that there was only one golem, in Prague, and the whole golem legend dates only from 1909. In fact, there is ample evidence that the golem legend is much, much older. The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia (Facts on File, 1992) notes that the legend dates from at least the fifteenth century. The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (Ktav Publishing, 1964, reprint of the 1901–1906 edition) states that “In the Middle Ages arose the belief in the possibility of infusing life into a clay or wooden figure of a human being, which figure was termed a ‘golem’ by writers of the eighteenth century” (p. 37). Sadly, missing from this chapter is any discussion of that most modern of mythical creatures, the chupacabra. The creation of the myth of this creature was ably told by Ben Radford in his 2011 book Tracking the Chupacabra.

Chapter 9 is devoted to “Terror Resurrected—Dinosaurs.” Here Kaplan discusses the recreation of our old thunder lizard friends in the movies and the possibility for real recreation through use of dinosaur DNA, which, of course, is the theme of the movie Jurassic Park. The discussions of both the film and dinosaur DNA leave much to be desired. Kaplan’s critique of the problems with using DNA to recreate a dinosaur does not come close to that of Desalle and Lindley in their 1997 book Science of Jurassic Park. Kaplan does nicely discuss the problems of recreating a species that would find itself without its natural ecosystem to live in and would thus be confined to some sort of enclosures. However, even here he stumbles by an embarrassing acceptance of the characterization of chaos theory taken directly from the movie—a characterization that is typical Hollywood fantasy. In the film the character Dr. Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) says that chaos theory means that “biological systems are uncontrollable by [their] nature and therefore inherently threatening” (p. 187). Thus, no matter what protective measures are taken, any recreated dinosaurs will break free and terrorize the world. Or at least the local natives. This is Hollywood nonsense. It bears about as much relationship to actual chaos theory as the view of quantum mechanics espoused by New Age proponents does to actual quantum mechanics. In fact, chaos theory deals with systems in which tiny changes in initial conditions can have very large effects on the state of these systems at later times. The theory does not allow the impossible to happen or even predict that the very unlikely will.

The final chapter, “Extraterrestrial Threat—Aliens,” suffers from much the same problem as the section on ghosts: long on description but short on explanation. The chapter starts with a description of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case. It then states that: “Countless tales of abductions and bizarre sightings followed” (p. 198). Kaplan then asks why aliens are visiting Earth but not being detected by “all the space scanning technology that has been developed during the past decades” (p. 199). His answer? “It is an enigma.” No, it’s not, as even a slight familiarity with the skeptical literature on UFOs and alien abduction would have made clear. The rest of the chapter wanders in sort of a haze through various alien-themed science-fiction movies, including an interesting digression on parasites and how they can change animal behavior. And then it stops. It doesn’t end. It just stops.

Perhaps this review should just stop as well. In summary, the book does contain a few interesting insights into the factual backgrounds of several legendary creatures. But in general it is poorly researched and written. Is it good enough for me to recommend that my university library purchase a copy? No. I make the same recommendation for the readers of this review.

Cognitive science research on belief in the 2012 “apocalypse” demonstrates that dissociative processes contribute directly to this belief through reduction of the “feature-intensive” cognitive processing that would engender appropriate skepticism.

The Earth’s rotation, angle of inclination, and passage around the sun result in astronomical and meteorological regularities. These regularities allow us to use a variety of relatively arbitrary mathematical systems to provide dates for all sorts of useful things, such as the proper seasons for agriculture. In view of the arbitrary nature of these systems, however, it is reasonably obvious that specific dates within any given system have no particular significance for sweeping change in the human or natural realms.

This leads to a fascinating psychological question: Why do such arbitrary dates cause so many human beings to become so hysterical?

We are currently being told by some media sources that the world will end on December 21 of this year. It is suggested that this was predicted by the Maya, given that this date coincides with the end of a specific calendric cycle, a baktun, within their “long count.” This date has also been suggested to coincide with a “galactic alignment,” a phenomenon that would seem to rely more on vague terminology than on actual astronomy for its very existence (Krupp 2009), but that would, even if valid, have no terrestrial significance whatsoever. It is also true that there is at least one Maya document that mentions this date without affording it any apocalyptic significance whatsoever (Bower 2012).

However, we are also told that the same date was of significance for the Hopi people of the American Southwest. Of course, the Mexican (Aztec) pochtecatl, or long-range merchants, maintained a trade network that reached from the Maya country at least to the southern reaches of the American Southwest. It is not an impossible speculation that a few calendric ideas, together with tourmaline, obsidian, and Central American parrots, might have been passed along these trade routes.

Although this possibility presents an interesting question for archaeology, the alleged Maya/Hopi coincidence in dates simply doesn’t provide sufficient cause to sell your house and move up into the mountains, away from this doomed civilization, with a rifle and a staggering number of canned goods. This is especially true in view of the fact that human beings have an abysmal record of predicting the future. Of course, this is not surprising, as the future hasn’t happened yet. Even so, from the oracles at Delphi and Cumae all the way through the surprisingly inaccurate predictions of the precise consequences of climate change in the modern world, people have always sought accurate knowledge of the specifics of the future. Human beings have repeatedly failed, and these failures have occasionally been horrendously consequential.

During the Greco/Persian wars, for example, the Delphic Oracle’s prediction that the Athenians would be safe behind their “wooden wall” did not work out so well for the Athenians, who built such walls around the Acropolis and were promptly slaughtered by the Persians (wooden walls are amazingly flammable). This prophecy of wooden walls was immediately fine-tuned by the admiral Themistocles to refer to his ships at Salamis (Herodotus 2006); admittedly, they were made out of wood, but a ship is not a wall, and to claim them as such was, and is, something of a stretch.

Apocalyptic dates have come and gone many times. In recent years, we have seen the “Heaven’s Gate” hysteria (Vick 1997), in which people sold their possessions, gathered under a charismatic leader, and prepared to leave Earth in a UFO apparently hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet (a physical impossibility). Physics aside, the Heaven’s Gate devotees committed mass suicide so that at least their souls could travel to Heaven, Nirvana, or somewhere else, flying to this indefinable infinity in the company of hypothetical space aliens in their physics-proof starship.

The Y2K phenomenon provided another well-documented instance of apocalyptic revelation (Nolte 2009), in which many people sold all and headed for the hills because, somehow, all of our computers were going to fail, providing the basis for the death of civilization.

Obviously, these things didn’t happen.

Despite these facts, however, many people remain wedded to the idea of apocalyptic prophecy. We are currently inundated with cable-television programs on the forthcoming end of the world. The authors, together with the rest of the world, have seen numerous documentaries “proving” the apocalyptic significance of December 21, 2012. These programs have roped in everything from the Maya and the Hopi to the predictions of Nostradamus and even the influence of space aliens.

What is the psychological basis for this phenomenon? What do people actually think is going to happen on December 21?

We decided to find out.

The Psychology of 2012

One hundred and ten college students at a California university completed several surveys in which they were asked to rate the degree of their belief that major world changes would happen on December 21, 2012. They were also asked about the sources of this belief; about their beliefs in a variety of related areas, including various kinds of prophecies; about their specific beliefs concerning what, precisely, is supposed to happen on the infamous date; and finally about their own characteristics. One of these characteristics lay in the realm of dissociation.

Dissociation was measured by means of the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES), which directly addresses this psychological attribute. Dissociation leads to a diminished critical assessment of reality. As discussed in an earlier Skeptical Inquirer article (Sharps 2012), dissociated people may feel “strange” about themselves and the world around them. They may have anomalous perceptions of the passage of time or of their own experience. The world may appear to be “not quite real or . . . diffuse” (Cardena 1997, 400). Practically everyone feels this way, to a limited extent, from time to time; dissociation per se is not a mental illness. However, the disconnection with reality might incline those with even subclinical levels of dissociation—levels typical of many people in the general population and in no way diagnostic of mental illness—to view impossible or highly improbable things with an enhanced level of credulity (see DePrince and Freyd 1999).

Is this supposition correct? In previous published work (Sharps et al. 2006; Sharps et al. 2010), including a recent article in the Skeptical Inquirer (Sharps 2012), our laboratory addressed the role of dissociation in paranormal beliefs. We found that not only are the dissociated likely to believe in ghosts, aliens, and “cryptids” such as Bigfoot, but they are actually more likely to see these things, to interpret ambiguous stimuli as paranormal in nature. Where others see a hoax, the dissociated see Bigfoot. It is important to reiterate that dissociative tendencies are endemic in the general population; anyone, in any walk of life, may possess dissociative tendencies that influence the accurate judgment of reality.

Given the relationship between dissociative processes and beliefs in the “paranormal” realm, it was anticipated that people with dissociative tendencies would be prey to paranormal beliefs, such as those surrounding the 2012 phenomenon, at a higher level than those without such tendencies.

Do People Really Believe in the 2012 Apocalypse?

The population for this research, college students, is continually involved in the scientific evaluation of textbook information and media sources, together with courses that emphasize critical thinking. Even so, this population gave evidence of unexpected levels of credulity in the case of the 2012 apocalypse. When asked if “major changes” would occur as a result of December 21, 44.6 percent stated that they anticipated no such changes, or that such changes would be very unlikely. However, 9.8 percent anticipated such changes as either very likely or certain. 45.6 percent endorsed such changes as possible, without a strong opinion either way. The inference is that over half of this population, 55.4 percent, is at least somewhat influenced by the 2012 hype, either believing or at least entertaining the hypothesis that this date may result in major changes to Earth and to human ways of life upon it.

Dissociative Tendencies

As suggested by our previous research, dissociative tendencies played a role in this phenomenon. A series of regression analyses was conducted, examining dissociation with reference to the variables discussed above.

There was some good news. Dissociative tendencies were not associated with belief that major changes, either physical or social, would occur. However, there was bad news as well: regression analyses showed that those with more dissociative characteristics tended to believe that Maya prophecies, together with the Maya calendar, predicted these changes if they in fact occurred.

More dissociated individuals did not endorse the predictive power of the Hopi prophecies, nor of biblical prophecies, nor such prophecies as those of Nostradamus. Nor were they more likely to believe in the return of Quetzalcoatl, other messiahs, or the advent of space aliens. Specific predictions of the apocalypse, including terrestrial causes such as global warming, also remained unendorsed. So did those of human origin (e.g., war, terrorism) and extraterrestrial origin (e.g., asteroids). However, dissociation did predict belief in the power of unspecified prophecies, including those that were “religious” or derived from “computer simulations.”

Taken together, these results provide a complex but revealing pattern. Although the dissociated did not evince belief in major physical or social changes as a result of December 21, they believed in the power of the Maya prophecies to predict these changes, an obvious cognitive incoherency. At the same time, no additional specific prophecies, other than those of the Maya, were endorsed. However, more general realms of prophecy (religious, computer, etc.) for which no specific features were provided were endorsed as having predictive power. How are we to explain this psychological pattern?

Gestalt and Feature-Intensive Processes

In previous research (Sharps and Nunes 2002; Sharps 2003; Sharps 2010) we discussed a continuum in human information processing. This continuum ranges from feature-intensive processing, in which a given concept is subjected to the consideration of its specific features, to gestalt processing, in which such feature-based considerations are absent and therefore moot, and in which the logical consideration of specific details is reduced in favor of a more global, uncritical acceptance of the given phenomenon as a whole.

This continuum is strongly relevant to the pattern of results observed here. In the present research, we see a statistically significant relationship between dissociative tendencies and the tendency to process the 2012 phenomenon as a gestalt whole, without attention to the details (feature-intensive processing) that might otherwise give rise to an appropriate skepticism. This interaction of gestalt and dissociative processes appears to be a major source of credulity and to the essential cognitive incoherency that makes apocalyptic beliefs possible.

What is the evidence for this pattern of cognitive processing? As mentioned above, a major incoherency is immediate and obvious; dissociation led to an acceptance of the Maya prophecies of apocalypse, even when there was no belief in the apocalypse predicted. Those with dissociative tendencies believed in the Maya prophecies, but not in the phenomena that those prophecies predicted.

Also, there was a notable absence of feature-intensive processing in the cognitive systems involved. There was no endorsement of specific causes of change (e.g., war, global warming). In other words, when the specific causes of the apocalypse were “pinned down” in a feature-intensive manner, the dissociated were not inclined to believe that anything was going to happen. Even when the prophecies in question were specific (biblical, Nostradamus, etc.), no endorsement of the end of the world was forthcoming. However, when the prophecies were left without specificity (with only vague, gestalt references to “computers” or “religion”), dissociative tendencies predicted significant apocalyptic beliefs.

What Makes the Maya So Special?

This argument might seem to be contradicted by the specific endorsement of Maya prophecies observed. However, “Maya prophecies” are a major emphasis of the vast corpus of apocalyptic nonsense currently infesting television and the Internet. According to the availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman 1973), sources of information that are relatively available are likely to influence human judgment even when there is no factual basis for this influence; and nonspecific, quasi-mystical references to the Maya are nothing, at the present time, if not available. Also, the average believer in these prophecies is typically not a Maya scholar. Lacking the feature-intensive information characteristic of the relevant expertise, it would be anticipated that, in general, the Maya references to 2012 would be processed by the average person in a gestalt manner, with an absence of the feature-intensive considerations that would engender reasonable skepticism.

In Summary

In this study, we have seen that dissociative tendencies, at a subclinical level and in the general population, incline people to cognitive incoherency; the dissociated believe in prophecies of apocalypse, even when they do not believe in the apocalypse itself. There is a belief in prophecies of the apocalyptic future, even in the absence of belief that major physical or social changes will actually take place.

How is this incoherency possible? The answer lies in gestalt/feature-intensive theory. Those who tend toward dissociation generally fail in the feature-intensive dynamics that would lead to appropriate skepticism. Rather, they deal in gestalt processing, in which the relative absence of definable features and cognitive structure makes it possible to hold conflicting thoughts simultaneously. In the present study, this was demonstrated in the rejection of specific apocalyptic considerations, even by the relatively dissociated, in favor of more amorphous, general predictions of doom. This was highlighted by general dissociated acceptance of the Maya prophecies, both because of the availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman 1973) and because of relatively nebulous and ethereal understanding of the specifics of Maya thought and culture.

How to Promote Rational Skepticism

These results provide a scientifically coherent explanation of current beliefs in the 2012 apocalypse. These beliefs have their source entirely in scientific human psychology, rather than in parapsychology or in unknown mystical factors. Of potentially greater importance, however, these results may also point the way to the reduction of absurd, mystical, or apocalyptic thinking in the future. It should be noted that even those of high degrees of dissociation did not endorse “prophecies” when these were made explicit and amenable to feature-intensive processing.

The implication here is that the key to the avoidance of superstitious thinking, including apocalyptic thinking such as in the current 2012 absurdity, lies in the promotion and facilitation of feature-intensive processing. If concepts are dissected in terms of their features, elements, and processes, there is no room for the vague, gestalt ideas that lead to such nonsense as the uncritical acceptance of such ethereal concepts as “Maya prophecies” and “the end of the world.”

This idea is not unprecedented; a similar insistence on the specific (feature-intensive) definition of terms was demanded by Plato (Cornford 1957). However, in the present research, it is shown that such attention to detail, to the feature-intensive nature of argument, leads to the ability to reject such vague, gestalt concepts as “Maya predictions of the end of the world,” and thus to the beginning and basis of rational consideration.

The implication is obvious. Better education in the scientific basis of reality, in the precise, feature-intensive consideration of facts, can reduce vague, gestalt processing, and can even provide a defense against the superstitious inclinations inherent in dissociative tendencies. It is hoped that the present results will incline educators to provide such feature-intensive analyses of ethereal and apocalyptic concepts, such as those inherent in the current 2012 hysteria, thus reducing the cognitive incoherency of those caught up in the hype, and further enhancing the rational consideration of the realities of the natural and social worlds.

References

Bower, B. 2012. Apocalypse not written in stone. Science News 182(3): 15.

Cardena, E. 1997. Dissociative disorders: Phantoms of the self. In S.M. Turner and Michel Hersen, eds. Adult Psychopathology and Diagnosis, third edn.: 400. New York: Wiley.

Cornford, F.M. 1957. Plato’s Theory of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

DePrince, A.P., and J.F. Freyd. 1999. Dissociative tendencies, attention, and memory. Psychological Science 10(5): 449–452.

Herodotus. 2006, reprinted. The Histories. London: The Folio Society.

Krupp, E.C. 2009. The Great 2012 Doomsday Scare. Online at http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012-guest.html; accessed October 12, 2012.

Nolte, C. 2009. False alarm of millennium: Y2K cost counties millions. San Francisco Chronicle (December 12): A2.

Sharps, M.J. 2003. Aging, Representation, and Thought: Gestalt and Feature-Intensive Processing. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction.

———. 2010. Processing Under Pressure: Stress, Memory, and Decision-Making in Law Enforcement. Flushing, NY: Looseleaf Law.

———. 2012. Eyewitness to the paranormal: The experimental psychology of the “unexplained.” Skeptical Inquirer 36(4): 39–45.

Sharps, M.J., J. Matthews, and J. Asten. 2006. Cognition, affect, and beliefs in paranormal phenomena: Gestalt/feature intensive processing theory and tendencies toward ADHD, depression, and dissociation. Journal of Psychology 140(6): 579–590.

Sharps, M.J., E. Newborg, S. Van Arsdall, et al. 2010. Paranormal encounters as eyewitness phenomena: Psychological determinants of atypical perceptual interpretations. Current Psychology 29(4): 320–327.

Sharps, M.J., and M.A. Nunes. 2002. Gestalt and feature-intensive processing: Toward a unified theory of human information processing. Current Psychology 21(1): 68–84.

Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. 1973. Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology 5(2): 207–232.

Vick, K. 1997. The purgatory behind Heaven’s Gate: Ex-member breaks his silence on cult. The Washington Post (May 2): C1.

Appeals to righteous indignation or sanctity—which attempt to shield ideas from contemplation, discussion, investigation, or criticism—are common, impede rational discourse, and should be recognized as logical fallacies.

This article was previously published online as a Skeptical Inquirer Online Extra. Continue to article »

Most skeptics are familiar with the questionable nature of the scientific arguments made by young-Earth creationists—those who take the Bible literally and believe that Earth is less than ten thousand years old. What is less often appreciated is the violence some creationists wreak on works of literature and fine art, especially those that feature dragons and other monsters. In particular, Beowulf has recently enjoyed great popularity with creationists. For instance, Kent Hovind’s now-defunct Dinosaur Adventure Land featured a Beowulf display,¹ and the Creation Museum in Kentucky has a statue of Beowulf over the door of its Dragon Hall Bookstore.² Curiously, creationists not only interpret the Bible as the literal, inerrant word of God, they read fictional works like Beowulf as literal, if not inerrant, accounts of actual events.

The most thorough creationist treat­ment of Beowulf appears in the book After the Flood: The Early Post-Flood History of Europe Traced Back to Noah by Bill Cooper, a trustee of the Creation Science Movement, the “oldest creationist movement in the world,” according to its website (https://www.csm.org.uk/index.php). Cooper’s primary purpose is to test the accuracy, veracity, and validity of the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 and 11 and, by extension, the rest of the Bible. He compares the Table of Nations, which describes the descendants of Noah’s sons, with Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian gene­alogies that trace various European dynasties back through a collection of pagan heroes and gods to a son of Noah, often one born on the ark. Cooper argues that these genealogies more or less accurately preserve pre-conversion traditions that are independent of the Bible. However, since they mention Noah, his sons, and the ark, Cooper interprets them as independent corroboration of the biblical account. In fact, the evidence suggests that Noah and his sons were a late addition to the genealogies.³

In the last two chapters, Cooper shifts from genealogies to stories of monsters and suggests that these monsters were actually dinosaurs. To Coop­er, tales of dragons and sea monsters provide evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time and that Earth is therefore much younger than scientists will admit. Beowulf ties his themes together: it mentions the Flood and Cain; it refers to some of the characters who appear in the genealogies; and it contains monsters. As in the case of the genealogies, Cooper finds it necessary to move the date of Beowulf back to a time before the Anglo-Saxon conversion to Chris­tianity. Indeed he argues that the “poem pre-dates the migration of the Saxons to these isles” (147). While the date of Beowulf is controversial,⁴ such an early date is impossible. For one thing, the Anglo-Saxons began arriving in Britain in the fifth century, slightly before the main events of the poem unfold. Further­more, if Beowulf is a continental composition, it is in the wrong language. Since it focuses on Scandinavian tribes, one would expect it to be in Old Norse or perhaps even Proto-Norse, but it’s not: it’s in Old English, a language that evolved in England after various tribes had migrated there from their continental homelands.

Cooper needs to push the date of Beowulf as far as he can into the past, partly so he can argue that the poem is independent of the Bible and Christian thought and therefore confirms the biblical account of the Flood, and partly so he can argue that it is a poetic but basically historical account of real people, real events, and real animals. He notes that the poem preserves “not just the physical descriptions of some of the monsters that Beowulf encountered, but even the names under which certain species of the animals were known to the Saxons and Danes” (150). In an appendix, he includes a list of “Zoo­logically applied terms in the Beowulf epic” (Appendix 10, 238–40). None of these resemble what we usually think of as zoological descriptions, and many of Cooper’s translations, such as “devil,” “demon,” “fiend,” “evildoer,” “night evil,” “wicked destroyer,” “wicked ravager,” and “unholy monster,” belie his argument that Beowulf is a pre-Christian poem.

While Beowulf recounts stories of feuds, battles, and alliances, the poem focuses primarily on the protagonist’s encounters with monsters. In his youth, the Geatish hero travels to the court of the Danish king Hroðgar to fight Grendel, who has been ravaging the hall and killing and eating the men. When Grendel’s mother seeks revenge for her son’s death, Beowulf tracks her to her lair and kills her as well. In his final battle, Beowulf, now an old king, faces a dragon that is attacking his own homeland. In addition to his main antagonists, Beowulf also encounters a number of sea serpents.

In his analysis of Beowulf, Cooper discusses words, phrases, and passages in some depth, giving the impression that he has some familiarity with Old English. In one instance, he provides his own translation of a short passage. The passage is not particularly difficult, and the gist of his translation is accurate enough but reveals that he does not actually understand how the language works.⁵ Elsewhere, he relies on the translation by Michael Alexander, although it is not always clear from his citations when he is using Alexander’s translation. He calls Alexander’s translation “the best translation” of the poem (154).⁶ To be clear, there is nothing wrong with Alexander’s translation, but it is a verse translation, and Alexander uses poetic license in adapting the story. For a discussion of precise word usage, a verse translation is largely useless. For such a discussion, a fairly literal prose translation is necessary—at the very least. Much better would be a text in Old English that has a good glossary, such as an edition by Frederick Klaeber. Cooper cites and quotes Klae­ber—and in places criticizes Klaeber’s commentary—but to a large extent, he ignores Klaeber’s glossary in favor of Alexander’s translation. In doing so, he ends up making mistakes, such as discussing at some length the name of a sea serpent “species,” unaware of the fact that the word he’s discussing, yðgewinn, does not refer to the creature but to its movement.⁷

Cooper turns Beowulf’s three main antagonists into dinosaurs by interpreting poetic descriptions as zoological terms and cherry-picking details of a poetic translation, while giving the impression that the Old English text backs up his argument. Unsurprisingly, Cooper identifies the dragon as a pterosaur. More specifically, he believes the use of the term widfloga (far-flyer, ll. 2346, 2830) “would have distinguished this particular species of flying reptile from another similar species which was capable of making only short flights” (152). He therefore concludes that it is a pteranodon, despite the fact that pteranodon remains have been found exclusively in North Amer­ica. In addition, the word pteranodon means a winged, toothless creature, while the dragon in Beowulf definitely has teeth. More importantly, he assumes that the creature can be identified as a specific animal based on a poetic de­scription. Old English poetry is based on alliteration rather than rhyme. A poet may use many different terms to refer to the same creature, person, or object, often choosing the term that best fits the alliteration and meter. Occasionally, this can lead to confusion for the reader. For instance, in Beowulf, the terms “East Danes,” “West Danes,” “North Danes,” and “South Danes” are all used to describe the same people. Both times widfloga occurs, it alliterates and fits the meter of the line.⁸

Cooper also mentions that the poet calls the dragon ligdraca or fire-dragon (ll. 2333, 3040),⁹ but he does not explain how this appellation is appropriate to a pteranodon. The poet re­peatedly associates the dragon with fire. It uses fire to wreak its vengeance on Beowulf’s land, burning homes and killing people, and Beowulf has a shield of iron prepared to protect him from the dragon’s flames. Yet the paleontological record is conspicuously silent about pterosaurs’ ability to breathe fire. Another notable characteristic of the dragon is its inordinate love of treasure. It had spent 300 years in its barrow, lying on its treasure until the theft of a single cup spurred it to fury. The love of treasure is common among Germanic dragons, mentioned in many Old English and Old Norse works. If the Beowulf poet were describing a real animal as Cooper claims, we would expect to find pteranodon bones on top of or near treasure hoards, yet the massive Anglo-Saxon treasure trove recently discovered in Staffordshire, England, is surprisingly free of pterosaur remains, as are the great ship burials, such as Sutton Hoo in England and Gokstad and Oseberg in Norway.

While the association between dragons and dinosaurs is common among young-Earth creationists, Cooper goes a step further and argues that the other monsters in Beowulf are dinosaurs as well: “Our attention must now be drawn towards another reptilian monster which was surely the most fiercesome [sic] of all the animals encountered by Beowulf, the monster called Grendel” (152–53). In the poem, the Danish king Hroðgar provides the following description of Grendel and his mother:

Ðæra oðer wæs,

…………………………………….

idese onlicnæs; oðer earmsceapen

on weres wæstmum wræclastas træd,

næfne he wæs mara þonne ænig man oðer. (ll. 1349b-1355)

Cooper then provides Alexander’s translation of the passage:

[A]nd one of them

……………………………………

was in woman’s shape, but the shape of a man,

though twisted, trod also the tracks of exile

—save that he was more huge than any human being. (ll. 1348-52)¹⁰

“But,” asks Cooper, “what exactly do the descriptive terms tell us that is of such importance? Simply this: that the female was in the shape of a woman . . . and the male was in the shape of a man. . . . In other words, they were both bipedal, but larger than any human” (155, emphasis in original). Actually that’s not really what the description tells us at all. Alexander, presumably for poetic reasons, leaves out one word: oðer, “other” (l. 1355b). Grendel was larger than any other man. Cooper’s entire argument hinges on the omission of one little adjective.¹¹ Grendel was abnormally large, but he was man-shaped, and his mother had the likeness of a woman. Twice the Beowulf poet connects the Grendel-kin to the race of Cain (ll. 104–114, 1256–68), and several times he either calls Grendel a giant or associates him with giants.¹² Never does he describe them in a way that would suggest that they are reptiles. He calls the dragon wyrm (serpent) and draca and repeatedly refers to it as “coiled.” Similarly, the water monsters (that are not called yðgewinn) are called wyrm and draca. No such terms are applied to Grendel or his mother.

Having turned more or less human creatures into mere bipeds, Cooper twists the description of Beowulf’s battle with Grendel into something quite different from what the poet describes. Cooper says that the Danes “had themselves attempted to kill Grendel with conventional weapons. . . . Yet his im­penetrable hide had defied them all, and Grendel was able to attack the Danes with impunity. Beowulf considered all this and decided that the only way to tackle the monster was to get to grips with him at close quarters” (155–56). In fact, Beowulf chooses to fight unarmed because he knows that Grendel does not use weapons. He regards it as a matter of honor (ll. 433–40).¹³ It is only during his battle with Grendel’s mother, to which he does bring a sword, that he discovers that the two are invulnerable to ordinary weapons.

Despite Beowulf’s explanation for his actions, Cooper argues that it was a strategic position because “the monster’s forelimbs . . . . were small and comparatively puny. They were the monster’s one weak spot, and Beowulf went straight for them. He was already renowned for his prodigious strength of grip, and he used this to literally tear off one of Grendel’s weak, small arms” (156). Cooper is coy about identifying what kind of dinosaur Grendel is. “Is there,” he asks “a predatory animal from the fossil record known to us, who had two massive hindlegs and two comparatively puny forelimbs?” (159). He answers that there are several. After describing the species he refers to as “the Grendel” for another page, he concludes, “I doubt that the reader needs to be guided by me as to which particular species of predatory dinosaur the details of his physical description fit best” (160). Though he refuses to say it directly, he clearly means to imply that Grendel is a Tyrannosaurus Rex.¹⁴

The problem is that his description is inaccurate. The poet never says that Grendel’s arms are puny, weak, or small, or that his hind legs are massive. As Cooper says, Beowulf’s strength is prodigious: he is said to have the hand-grip of thirty men (ll. 379–80). Grendel immediately recognizes Beowulf’s strength and wants to get away (ll. 750–56). Strictly speaking, Beowulf does not tear off Grendel’s arm at all. Rather, it is the combined strength and determination of the two combatants that results in Grendel’s injury. Beowulf is determined to retain his grip on Grendel, while Grendel is desperate to escape. In the end, both achieve their goals: Grendel flees to the mere, and Beowulf is left holding his arm.

Although Cooper misidentifies Gren­­­­del as Beowulf’s most formidable foe (each fight is more difficult than the previous one),¹⁵ he diminishes Grendel’s significance and Beowulf’s accomplishment by continuously misrepresenting the text. Cooper’s Grendel is not only puny-armed but is “only a youngster, and not by all accounts a fully mature adult male of his species” (156). I’m not sure what “accounts” Cooper is reading, but the poem in no way supports his assertion. Grendel, as we have established, is much larger than any other man and unusually strong. He is not an immature, puny-armed T-Rex; he is a large, strong, man-shaped creature who has a taste for Danish.

Cooper’s book may seem a slightly silly contribution to the creationist arsenal. Certainly, it is easy for anyone with a background in medieval history, languages, or literature to refute many of his arguments. Unfortunately, his target audience probably does not in­clude many medieval scholars. Very few people have expertise in the medieval genealogies of Wales, Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England, or Scandinavia, for instance. The scholarly trappings of Cooper’s work give it an air of authority, and it has become extremely popular among creationists. A Google search of the words “Beowulf” and “dinosaurs” returns over twelve million hits. Some of these sites refute creationist claims, but many are verbatim copies of all or parts of After the Flood or adaptations of it.

Most disturbingly, Cooper’s ideas are repeated in works intended to educate children. Ruth Beechick recycles Cooper’s arguments in “Beowulf: Fic­tion or History” on Crosswalk.com, a homeschooling site.¹⁶ Although her language is geared toward young children, she follows Cooper’s arguments very closely, occasionally adding her own errors.

Also aimed at homeschooled children is the “audio adventure,” Jonathan Park and the Hunt for Beowulf. The Hunt for Beowulf is volume IV (of eight) of the Jonathan Park Adven­tures, radio dramas that are also sold as CD sets. The series is sold by Answers in Genesis¹⁷ and the Creation Museum gift shop (as is After the Flood), was originally developed by the Institute for Creation Research,¹⁸ and is currently produced by Vision Forum Mini­stries.¹⁹ The series follows the Creation Response Team, led by Jonathan’s father, Kendall Park, a paleontologist who, based on “scientific evidence,” has converted from a belief in evolution to strict adherence to young-Earth creationism. In The Hunt for Beowulf, the Creation Response Team seeks to recover the stolen Beowulf manuscript, “the oldest English manuscript ever discovered.”²⁰ The team is eager to find the manuscript (far more eager than either the British police or the British Library, apparently) because it contains evidence that dinosaurs and man lived together. As in Cooper’s book, Grendel has been added to the list of (comparatively) modern dino­saurs. In the Jona­than Park adventure, he has also become a dragon. Each audio adventure comes with a substantial study guide that includes fun activities and much false information and pseudoscience. Earnest advertisements after each installment also encourage listeners to find more study material at www.jonathanpark.com.

When creationists co-opt Beowulf as a tool for their agenda, they contribute to the misinformation they are providing their homeschooled children. Beo­wulf is twisted and mangled to ac­commodate pseudoscience and pseudo-history. Al­most as disturbing is the way it limits the appreciation and understanding of one of the earliest masterpieces of our language. Literary criticism allows multiple interpretations of any work, as long as those interpretations can be supported by textual and contextual evidence. Crea­tionists allow only one interpretation of Beowulf, and it is one that is in direct conflict with textual and contextual evidence. By trying to force the poem to fit a rigid and fallacious understanding of world events, creationists also ignore the literary merits of the work. Cooper condescendingly de­scribes the poetic language of Beowulf: “The Anglo-Saxons (like the modern Ger­mans and Dutch) had a very simple method of word construction, and their names for everyday objects can sometimes sound amusing to our modern English ears when translated literally. . . . It was thus an intensely literal but at the same time highly poetic language possessing great and unambiguous powers of description” (150). This definition of the language of Beo­wulf fits Cooper’s agenda: the word construction is simple, and the descriptions are unambiguous, making his interpretations self-evident. In reality, there is much in Beowulf that is obscure or ambiguous, and the cultural and linguistic gap between modern readers and the poet makes interpretation all the more challenging. In addition, it is difficult to see how a poem that heavily employs kennings, a type of metaphor, can be considered “intensely literal,” though Cooper’s view may help us understand why he mistakes poetic de­scriptions for “zoologically applied terms.”

Though Cooper and his followers may occasionally give lip service to Beo­wulf’s poetic power, it is clear that to them, its only value is as a tool of in­doctrination, and children cannot be trusted to interpret it for themselves.

Notes

1. See G. Martinez, “Stupid Dino Tricks: A Visit to Kent Hovind’s Dinosaur Adventure Land,” Skeptical Inquirer (November/De­cem­ber 2004): 47–51. Available online at http://www.csicop.org/si/show/stupid_dino_tricks_a_visit_to_kent_hovindrsquos_dinosaur_adventure_land/. In 2009, the park was closed down. It will be sold to help pay off the taxes owed by Hovind, who is currently in prison. In April 2010, Hovind’s Crea­tion Science Evangelism ministry opened The Creation Store not far from Dinosaur Adv­en­ture Land. See http://www.dinosauradventureland.com/aboutDAL.php.

2. K. Ham, “Serbia and Beowulf,” Around the World with Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis (September 30, 2008). Available at http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2008/09/30/serbia-and-beowulf/.

3. In particular, most of the Old English ac­counts seem to date to the reign of Alfred the Great, the Christian king of Wessex in the late ninth century, and the Norse accounts are based in part on the English genealogies. See Anlezark (2002) and Faulkes (1983). Anlezark traces the Anglo-Saxon tradition of an ark-born son of Noah, and Faulkes traces the complex history of the Norse genealogies.

4. Most scholars place the composition somewhere between the eighth and late tenth or early eleventh centuries. Robert E. Bjork and Anita Overmeier discuss the dating in “Date, Prove­nance, Author, Audiences” in Bjork and Niles (1997).

5. Cooper translates lines 815b–818a as, “Searing pain seized the terrifying ugly one as a gaping wound appeared in his shoulder. The sinews snapped and the (arm-)joint burst asunder” (155). He assumes that the noun that precedes the verb in the first clause is the subject, and the noun that follows it is the direct object; in fact, the second noun is in the nominative case and must therefore be the subject. To accommodate the reversal of subject and direct object, he changes the meaning of the verb. Later he makes a plural noun singular. A more accurate translation of the passage is “The terrible, ferocious fighter experienced bodily pain; a very great wound became apparent on his shoulder; the sinews sprang asunder; the joints burst.”

6. He says this specifically about the passage that describes Grendel and his mother. We will see why he favors Alexander’s translation of this particular passage.

7. Cooper translates yðgewinn as “wave-thrasher” (51, 61 n. 9). It actually means “wave-strife,” a kenning or short metaphor for “swimming.” When shot with an arrow, the creature is “deprived of life, of wave-strife” (ll. 1432–35). “Wave-thrasher” comes from Alexander (l. 1433), although Cooper does not cite him in this in­stance. Alexander’s version poetically captures the feel of the passage, but it is far from being a literal translation.

8. Beowulf, l. 2346: “þæt he þone widflogan weorode gesohte” ([Beowulf scorned] to attack the far-flyer with a war-band); l. 2830: “þæt se widfloga wundum stille” (. . . so that the far-flyer, still from wounds. . .). Emphasis added to highlight alliteration.

9. The dragon is also called fyrdraca (fire-dragon, l. 2689).

10. When Cooper quotes Alexander, he prints the lines as prose, as he does with the Old English. This may be a quirk of formatting, but it disguises the fact that Alexander’s translation is a non-literal verse translation. He also leaves out the subtitle “A Verse Translation” when he cites it (Cooper cites the 1973 edition, but it too was subtitled “A Verse Translation”).

11. This omission is particularly glaring be­cause, when Cooper quotes Old English, he transliterates þ and ð as th. Consequently, he in­cludes the phrase, “thonne aenig man other,” which is not difficult to translate into modern English; however, since he prints a large chunk of Old English (ll. 1345–54) as a block of italicized prose, with two phrases bolded (idese onlicness, the likeness of a woman, and weres wæstmum, the form of a man), it’s unlikely that most readers will look too closely at it.

12. Eoten, ll. 761 and 112; þyrs, l. 426. In l. 112, giants (eotenas) are said to have sprung from the race of Cain, along with elves and monsters. The poet says that Grendel lived for a time among the race of Cain.

13. Beowulf says, in part, “I have also heard that the wretch, because of his recklessness, does not care about weapons. Therefore, I . . . scorn that I should bear sword or large shield, yellow shield, to battle, but rather I shall grapple with the fiend with my grasp.” Later he says, “I do not claim for myself any lowlier battle-stature than Grendel [claims for] himself; therefore, I will not put him to sleep with a sword, deprive him of life, although I can” (677–80), clearly indicating that he doesn’t realize that a sword would be useless against Grendel.

14. As with the pteranodon, the T. Rex has only been found in North America. In their book Claws, Jaws, and Dinosaurs (Pensacola: CSE Pub­lications, 1999), born-again cryptozoologist William J. Gibbons and Kent Hovind echo Cooper’s arguments concerning Grendel and the water monster, although they don’t credit him. However, they suggest that Grendel was “the fearsome Megalosaurus, a dinosaur found in Britain and similar to Tyranosaurus-Rex [sic]” (19).

15. Beowulf successfully fights Grendel un­armed, but he brings a sword to face Grendel’s mother. When that sword fails, he uses a magic sword he finds in her lair. For the fight with the dragon, he is fully armed and has a specially made shield. In addition, he is only able to overcome the dragon with the assistance of Wiglaf, and he is mortally injured in the battle.

16. The article is no longer on crosswalk.com’s website. It is, however, available at http://www.christianity.com/1261413/, among other places. It was originally published in The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, another homeschooling re­source. A review of Beechick’s arguments appears in J.P. Walter, “Dinosaurs, Mnemonic Com­munities and Rewriting the Literary History of Beowulf,” Machina Memorialis 31 Aug. 2006. Available at http://www.jpwalter.com/machina/archives/352.

17. Http://www.answersingenesis.org/PublicStore/product/Jonathan-Park-Complete-Audio-Series,5478,188.aspx.

18. Jonathan Park behind the Scenes: The Unofficial Website of the Jonathan Park Audio Adventures includes a video of the actors recording an episode at the Institute for Creation Re­search. Available at http://www.creationadventurefamily.com/jonathanparkbts.

19. Vision Forum Ministries discuss their views on education in “The Tenets of Biblical Patriarchy,” http://www.visionforumministries.org/home/about/biblical_patriarchy.aspx.

20. The Beowulf manuscript, written c. 1000, is not the oldest English manuscript. Among the earliest copies of Old English poetry are texts of “Cædmon’s Hymn” included in Latin copies of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Cambridge, University Library MS kk 5 16 and St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia MS lat. Q.v.I.18. Both date to the eighth century. Possibly even earlier is the Ruthwell Cross, which preserves part of the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood. This, however, is not a manuscript, but a runic inscription on a stone cross. There are prose works that pre-date Beowulf as well. For instance, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History was translated into Old English in the late ninth or early tenth century. All four major Old English poetic codices (the Beowulf MS, the Exeter Book, the Vercelli Book and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11) date from roughly the same period.

References

Alexander, Michael, tr. 2003. Beowulf: A Verse Translation. Rev. ed. London: Penguin. Cooper cites the original edition from 1973.

Anlezark, Daniel. 2002. Sceaf, Japheth and the origins of the Anglo-Saxons. Anglo-Saxon England 31: 13–46.

Bjork, Robert E., and John D. Niles, eds. 1997. A Beowulf Handbook. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Cooper, Bill. 1993. After the Flood: The Early Post-Flood History of Europe Traced Back to Noah. Chichester: New Wine Press.

Faulkes, Anthony. (1978–79) 1983. Descent from the gods. Orig. published in Scandinavia 11: 92–125. Corrected and revised version available from the Viking Society for Northern Research Web Publications at http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Descent-from-the-gods.pdf.

Fulk, R.D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. 2008. Klaeber’s Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg. 4th ed. University of Toronto Press. All quotations are from this edition. This updated edition is based on Fr. Klaeber’s 3rd edition (1950) with first and second supplements (Lexington, MA: Heath), the edition Cooper cites, although he prints the lines as prose. All translations are mine unless indicated otherwise.

It was a “road to Damascus” experience for the Mad Men era. In 1966, the respected astronomer J. Allen Hynek had gone—seemingly overnight—from a determined debunker to an ardent apostle of the UFO gospel. A longtime consultant to Project Blue Book noted for his skeptical stance toward UFOs, Hynek suddenly began telling anyone who would listen that the UFO phenomenon merited serious scientific scrutiny. The great director Stanley Kubrick was among the many who listened. In a 1968 Playboy interview promoting his science-fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick spoke approvingly of what he termed Hynek’s “belated but exemplary conversion” (Phillips 2001, 58).

In fact, the professor’s apparent trans­formation from skeptic to UFO proponent was not quite the conversion event that it appeared on the surface. Since his teens Hynek had been an enthusiastic though closeted student of the occult. The French-born Jacques Vallee, a computer scientist and UFO author, was one of the few persons who knew Hynek’s secret. Hynek once told Vallee that he had become an astron­omer in order to discover “the very limitations of science, the places where it broke down, the phenomena it didn’t explain” (Vallee 1996, 232). Nonethe­less, the scientist’s public U-turn gave a big boost to the UFO movement, lending it a measure of credibility, and made Hynek into a celebrity as the nation’s “foremost expert on flying saucers” (O’Toole 1966). For two decades people could point to Hynek and say, “He’s a trained scientist, an astronomer no less: if even he believes in this UFO stuff then there must be something to it.”

Who was Josef Allen Hynek? He was born on Chicago’s West Side on May 1, 1910, only a little over a week after Halley’s Comet had swung around the sun. Hynek’s Czech-born father made cigars for a living while his mother, Bertha, taught at a local grammar school. Josef credited his mother for his early interest in astronomy.

“When I was seven, I had scarlet fever and was quarantined with my mother in our apartment at 15th and Ayers,” Hynek explained. “There was nothing to do except read, and since I was so young, my mother read to me. Pretty soon we ran out of children’s books and she started reading textbooks. Among them was a high school astronomy book. I guess it interested me the most” (Berland 1962).

Maybe astronomy textbooks didn’t give him the answers he wanted, and so, as a bookish teenager, Hynek began to study what he called “esoteric subjects.” After reading widely in the occult, he developed a particular fondness for the writings of the Rosicrucian secret societies, with their tantalizing promises of hidden ancient knowledge, and those of the so-called hermetic philosophers, especially Rudolf Steiner.¹ The high schooler spent over $100—roughly $1,300 in today’s dollars—to purchase the Canadian mystic Manly Hall’s massive, richly illustrated tome An Encyclo­pedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy: Being an Interpretation of the Secret Teachings Concealed within the Rituals, Allegories and Mysteries of All Ages, better known simply as The Secret Teachings of All Ages. “All my student friends thought I was crazy: why didn’t I buy a motorcycle instead, as they all did,” Hynek later told Jacques Vallee (Vallee 2010, 64–65).

Hoping to discover “the very limitations of science,” Hynek decided on a career as an astronomer. After receiving his bachelor’s degree from the Uni­versity of Chicago in 1931, Hynek went on to pursue a doctorate in astron­omy. He worked on his doctoral thesis—“A Quantitative Study of Cer­tain Phases of F-Type Spectra”—at the Yerkes Observatory, a Romanesque temple of astronomy on the serene shores of Lake Geneva in Wisconsin.

“The whole thing had a sort of mystical quality,” Hynek would later revealingly refer to his monastic existence at Yerkes. “One shouldn’t say that in connection with science, I guess, but I was so utterly absorbed in the life of the observatory that I had hardly heard of Hitler” (Ridpath 1973, 423).

Shortly after receiving his PhD in 1935, Hynek obtained a position as an instructor at Ohio State University and four years later became a professor there. He was still teaching at Ohio State in 1948 when a trio of Air Force officials approached him: They were looking for a scientist to help them with a puzzling problem that had recently cropped up (Ridpath 1973, 422–24).

On June 24, 1947, a salesman by the name of Kenneth Arnold reported seeing a formation of shiny objects pass in front of Mount Rainier while he was flying his private plane. In the weeks following Arnold’s alleged sighting, hundreds of persons claimed to observe similar “flying saucers.” Fearful that that these so-called “saucers” might be Soviet aircraft, U.S. Air Force officials formed Project Sign early in 1948 to investigate the phenomenon. Hynek was recruited to be the project’s astronomical consultant.

In his role as Project Sign’s scientific advisor, Hynek made periodic trips from Columbus to Wright Patterson Air Force Base (where Project Sign and its successors, Projects Grudge and Blue Book, were based) to examine the UFO case files. He proved to be a shrewd and relentless debunker, a Sherlock Holmes of sky phenomena. “I’d go through them and say, ‘Well, this is obviously a meteor,’ or ‘This is not a meteor, but I’ll bet you it’s a balloon,’” he recalled in 1985. “I was a thorough skeptic, and I’m afraid I helped to engender the idea that it must be nonsense, therefore it is nonsense” (Weintraub 1985, 74).

One of Hynek’s earliest efforts at debunking—and one of his most famous—concerned the 1948 case of Cap­tain Thomas Mantell, an Air Force pilot who, while investigating a UFO, died when his P-51 Mustang crashed. In his report of the incident Hynek suggested that the UFO may have been Venus, even though, as he later admitted, the planet would have been too faint to be seen in the bright daylight sky (Ruppelt 1956, 41–47). The astronomer had another—probably correct—theory on that case: the UFO Mantell observed and pursued too high was a Skyhook balloon (Vallee 1987, 72).

Hynek at first figured flying saucer sightings were merely “a post-war craze that would disappear as quickly as the hula-hoop” (Hall and Connors 2000, 240). But the UFO reports kept on coming as Project Sign turned into Project Grudge in 1949 and then into Project Blue Book in 1952. During the latter year a wave of UFO sightings prompted Hynek to begin reconsidering his views on the subject. He openly speculated that UFOs might be a new kind of natural phenomenon he dubbed “nocturnal meandering lights” (Swords and Powell 2012, 191). The astronomer’s change of mind was so apparent that Captain Edward Rup­pelt, the first director of Project Blue Book, judged Hynek to be “very much pro-UFO” (Hall and Connors 2000, 205, 212).

Hynek later attributed this shift in his thinking to two things:

One was the completely negative and unyielding attitude of the Air Force. . . . Everything had to have an explanation. I began to resent that, even though I basically felt the same way, because I still thought they weren’t going about it in the right way. Secondly the caliber of the witnesses began to trouble me. Quite a few instances were reported by military pilots, for example, and I knew them to be fairly well trained, so this is when I first began to think that, well, maybe there was something to all this. (Stacy 1985)

As early as 1960, Hynek had begun to argue behind the scenes that UFOs deserved serious scientific scrutiny. “I need only remind you,” he wrote to an Air Force official that year, “that less than two centuries ago the entire province of meteorites was kept out of legitimate astronomy because stories of ‘stones that fell from the sky’ were regarded as old wives tales. Had these accounts been given careful attention by the scientists of that day, the productive branch of astronomy which we now know as meteoritics would have been born well over a century earlier than it was” (Hynek 1960). Hynek would often cite this incident from the history of astronomy to justify himself when he later became an outspoken UFO proponent.

Hynek’s true views on UFOs were still unknown to the public when the astronomer, now teaching at North­western University, first met Jacques Vallee in the fall of 1963. Taking a job as a computer programmer at North­western, Vallee became a close friend of Hynek and soon they formed a UFO discussion group: The astron­omer would eventually nickname this group “the Invisible College” (Vallee 1996, 270)—a term first used by the Rosi­crucians in the early 1600s. Vallee began prodding Hynek to break with the Air Force and publicly admit that the UFO phenomenon was real and worthy of serious scientific investigation. Project Blue Book’s longtime scientific consultant—still known as a staunch UFO de­bunker—stubbornly resisted this ad­vice (Vallee 1996, 80–94).

Hynek had a lot to lose. He enjoyed a respectable reputation in the astronomical world: while he had a sizeable number of journal articles on stellar astronomy to his credit, he was better known for his work behind a desk than for his labors in front of a telescope. He had been a director of the McMillin Observatory in Ohio, a co-director of the Operation Moonwatch satellite tracking program, secretary of the American Astronomical Society, and the guiding force behind the Project Sky Gazer balloon astronomy program (Ridpath 1973, 422–24). He understandably wasn’t eager to risk his name—and his career—in the interest of UFOs. The astronomer was waiting, in Vallee’s words, for “the single big case that no one would be able to deny because the evidence would be overwhelming” (Vallee 1996, 96).

And then, on April 24, 1964, the single big case arrived, or so it seemed. In Socorro, New Mexico, police officer Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeder in his squad car when he suddenly heard a roar and noticed a flame in the sky. Investigating, Zamora spotted an egg-shaped, “aluminum white” object with legs that extended to the ground, and he noticed two white-cloaked figures nearby. As the officer cautiously approached it, the object began to bellow, and Zamora high-tailed it back toward his car. The UFO then ascended into the sky and soon disappeared from view (Hynek 1972, 144–45).

Badgered by the news media, Major Hector Quintanilla, Project Blue Book’s director, reluctantly dispatched Hynek to Socorro to investigate the alleged sighting. At the landing site Hynek examined charred plants and four impressions that had been left in the ground and persuaded Zamora to reenact the events (Huyghe 2001, 317–18). The astronomer left New Mexico “more puzzled now than I arrived,” he confessed to a reporter, but he was convinced that Zamora had in­deed seen something (Chicago Tribune 1964).²

Hynek and Vallee frequently discussed the Socorro case, but the astronomer was still unwilling to publicly come out as pro-UFO (Vallee 1996, 118). Things changed in the spring of 1966. On March 20 of that year, dozens of persons reported viewing glowing objects hovering over a swamp near Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the following night, eighty-seven students at Hillsdale College, also in Michigan, claimed to have seen strange red, white, and blue lights. The Michigan sightings received massive media coverage, and Major Quintanilla once again sent Hynek out into the field. The professor rushed out to Michigan and conducted his investigation in an atmosphere of “near-hysteria,” dogged almost every step of the way by reporters and cameramen. After interviewing thirty-two witnesses and conferring with several University of Michigan professors, Hynek concluded that at least two of the Michigan UFOs may have been manifestations of swamp gas (Hynek 1966a, 20).

On March 26, Hynek announced his findings at a packed press conference in Detroit—supposedly “the largest in the history of the Detroit Press Club” (House of Representatives 1966, 6006). After suggesting swamp gas as a likely explanation for some of the Michigan UFOs, Hynek stressed that he could not prove “in a court of law that this is the full explanation of these sightings” (Los Angeles Times 1966). The media mostly ignored this qualifier and Hynek immediately became a national laughingstock for his swamp gas theory, lampooned in cartoons and lambasted in editorials as a puppet of the Air Force (Huyghe 2001, 9–10).

Hynek’s swamp gas theory also attracted the notice—and the ire—of Gerald Ford, the powerful Republican congressman from Michigan and future president. In response, Ford promptly requested the U.S. House Armed Services Committee to investigate the UFO phenomenon, believing that “the American public deserves a better explanation than that thus far given by the Air Force”—meaning the explanation given by Hynek (House of Representatives 1966, 6047). The wish of the House minority leader was equivalent to a command and so the UFO hearing took place only one week after Ford had made his request.

On April 5, 1966, Hynek made his first public break with the Air Force, boldly using the occasion of his testimony before the Armed Services Com­mittee to do so. Stung by the “swamp gas” criticism, the astronomer apparently wanted to show that he wasn’t the Air Force’s or anyone else’s puppet. In a statement not cleared by Major Quin­tanilla, the Project Blue Book director, Hynek told the sitting congressmen that there were aspects of the UFO phenomenon “worthy of scientific attention,” and he called for the creation of a panel of physical and social scientists to seriously analyze what he termed the “UFO problem” (House of Representatives 1966, 6007–6008).

“The swamp gas episode boom­eranged like hell on me and the Air Force,” Hynek later explained his about-face. “I began to feel guilty about my skeptical attitude. And once you open the gates to the possibility that all these people can’t possibly be mistaken, then you see a lot of other cases in a totally different light” (Huyghe 2001, 33). As we have seen, Hynek’s “skeptical attitude” was in fact a façade for public consumption. A longtime student of the occult, he happened to be very open to outré notions: he, for example, believed that there were planes of existence beyond the physical, and he even endorsed alleged instances of “psychic surgery” and “psychic photography” (Vallee 1996, 240, 306). But it took the media furor over the “swamp gas episode” for an angry and embarrassed Hynek to publicly air his long-held views on UFOs.

It was a risky move for Hynek but not as risky as it would have been a few short years before. Since then his astronomical career had stalled in a big way.³ In 1957, Hynek launched in collaboration with the Air Force a program for balloon-based astronomy—later named Project Star Gazer. The plan was to send telescope-equipped balloons high above the image-distorting lower layers of the atmosphere. Un­fortunately, a series of failed test launches prompted the Air Force to scrap Project Star Gazer in 1963. The decision was devastating for Hynek, who seems to have bet his professional career on the success of the project. In a scathing final report to the Air Force the astronomer didn’t hold back. “In any event,” he wrote, “the setting aside of a project which had engaged so many for such a length of time, at a time when success seemed assured, can only be listed in the scientific annals as a criminal act, and one carried out in a callous, cavalier manner without regard for the desires, objectives and ideals of the people involved” (Hynek 1966b). Was Hynek’s emergence into the open as a pro-UFO crusader partly an at­tempt, whether subconscious or not, to get back at the Air Force for torpedoing Project Star Gazer?

As Hynek had recommended during his congressional testimony, the Air Force soon funded a scientific study of UFOs and the renowned physicist Edward U. Condon, of the University of Colorado, was chosen to direct it. After three contentious years, the Condon Com­mittee concluded in 1969 that “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be ad­vanced thereby” (Hynek 1972, 192–93). Hynek predictably dismissed the committee’s report, calling it “a waste of time” (Kotulak 1969), but the Air Force went ahead anyway and closed Project Blue Book later that year. The professor was now on his own as a UFO investigator.

Back in 1966, Hynek had chosen the biggest megaphone he could find to announce his new career as a UFO advocate: He sent a bombshell letter to the prestigious and widely read journal Science in which he argued that UFOs merited scientific investigation. The Science editors grudgingly published the letter but only after the astronomer had leaked its contents to the Chicago Sun-Times (Vallee 1996, 222). Hynek subsequently wrote articles on UFOs for such national publications as The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, and even Playboy, and he became a ubiquitous presence on television and radio shows. “Media men hire Allen as they would hire a guitar player,” Jacques Vallee wrote in his journal. “He rushes wherever he sees a spotlight, and if the spotlight moves, he moves with it” (Vallee 1996, 259).

Hynek’s fame came at a great cost: he lost the respect of his peers in the scientific community. “His colleagues’ attitude towards him is changing to the point of contempt, and this pains him,” Vallee noted in 1968. “He is no longer taken seriously among astronomers” (Vallee 1996, 339).

Determined to prove his colleagues wrong, Hynek began working on a book that he said would take a scientific approach to the study of UFOs. Pub­lished in 1972, The UFO Experi­ence: A Scientific Inquiry argues for the reality of the UFO phenomenon in a dry, matter-of-fact manner. The book is most noteworthy for its classification of certain UFO reports into Close En­counters of the First Kind (sightings), the Second Kind (sightings with physical effects), and the Third Kind (sightings of UFO occupants) (Hynek 1972, 86).

Unfortunately for Hynek, The UFO Experience did further damage to his academic standing. According to an astronomer friend of Vallee, Hynek’s book “created antagonism among the (Northwestern) Faculty and made him a controversial figure. In spite of a fair review in Science Magazine, many professors have felt that the reputation of the school was tainted” (Vallee 2010, 156). Indeed, speaking for his faculty colleagues in 1982, the dean of North­western’s College of Arts and Sci­ences categorically declared to a University official: “We are not, have not been, and will not be proud of Hynek’s UFO affairs. There are many who think that what he’s up to has nothing to do with research” (Wein­gart­ner 1982).

Hynek may have genuinely wanted to restore his scientific standing, but his behavior during the 1970s certainly didn’t help matters. The bespectacled, goateed astronomer was a familiar sight to television viewers of the era, pontificating on the “UFO problem” on programs ranging from The Dick Cavett Show to In Search Of. Late in 1973, he endorsed the alien abduction claims of two Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyard workers, saying the men had “a very real experience” (Los Angeles Times 1973). He joined a UFO panel formed by the National Enquirer: $50,000 was to be awarded to “the first person to prove to the panel that UFOs are from outer space and are not natural phenomena” (Dick 1972). Near the end of the decade Hynek even made an eight-second cameo appearance in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Huyghe 2001, 32). He was also a popular figure on the lucrative college lecture circuit. He later boasted to a friend “that each one of my lectures brings me more than my monthly pay from Northwestern” (Hynek 1978).

Hynek in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Hynek’s extracurricular activities did not endear him to the Northwestern University administration. In the fall of 1973, following a wave of alleged sightings, the astronomer formed the Center for UFO Studies to serve as a clearinghouse for UFO reports. He hoped that the Center could be located on the North­western campus, but university officials adamantly rejected this idea. School administrators insisted that there be no connection whatsoever between Northwestern and the UFO center; Hynek was not even allowed to use his Northwestern mailing address for any Center-related correspondence. Eventually protesting, the professor fired off a series of angry letters. “Frankly, I am quite embarrassed to have to say that the University has been so conservative as to not see the potential here, both for science and for publicity,” he raged in one letter. “And, of course, I personally resent the implication that the subject is sheer nonsense and that anyone connected with it is a crackpot (speaking bluntly!)” (Hynek 1974).

After he retired from Northwestern in 1978, Hynek devoted much of his time to the Center for UFO Studies. Despite having a good track record as a fundraiser—he had obtained money from private donors for Northwestern’s Lindheimer Astronomical Research Cen­ter—Hynek struggled to put his UFO center on a secure financial footing: Wealthy would-be benefactors frequently tantalized him with offers of monetary support only to let him down in the end. Finally in 1984, Hynek packed up his research files and relocated his UFO center to Scottsdale, Arizona, having been lured there by a rich Englishman with promises of money and the use of his “quite luxurious” home (Witt 1984). Once again the astronomer was doomed to disappointment: this particular patron “was only interested in keeping a few scientists in his entourage to promote his personal theories about the (UFO) phenomenon,” Jacques Vallee maintained (Vallee 1996, 423).

Hynek was often evasive when asked to give his own theories on the nature of UFOs. Despite his cameo in 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he had by then rejected the notion that UFOs were “nuts and bolts” spacecraft piloted by extraterrestrials (Gardner 1997, 247). His occult studies had pointed him in a very different direction. As early as 1967, he speculated that UFOs might be “observational devices that are materialized into our world by the denizens of another” (Vallee 1996, 306). He later offered a variation on this theory: UFOs as “psychic projections” created by an “extradimensional intelligence in some parallel reality” (Gardner 1997, 253). Speaking to the UFOlogist Jerome Clark, Hynek was more specific. The astronomer allegedly told Clark that he believed “elementals”—nature spirits—were behind the UFO phenomenon (Clark 1998).

It is easy to question the veracity of Clark’s startling claim, but it makes sense when one realizes that Hynek was strongly influenced by Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian mystic. Steiner argued that the hard sciences merely offer human­kind “a vast amount of popular information.” By employing sense-free thinking, the enlightened individual, on the other hand, could “pierce the veil” and discover what lay behind the material world revealed by science. In Steiner’s view, elementals—spirits of air, earth, water, and the ether—dwelled in this hidden realm inaccessible to the senses. If Hynek did indeed believe that UFOs were nature spirits, he may have specifically identified them with this last class of elemental—the etheric “beings of the higher elements.” Steiner claimed that “what exists in the sky is not merely the physical sun, but that with the sun’s warmth and light etheric beings stream down to earth” (Steiner 1922). Did Hynek suspect that UFOs were Steiner’s “etheric beings” streaming down to Earth?

For those very few who knew of Hynek’s fascination with the occult, his 1975 piece on Johannes Kepler—the great seventeenth-century astrono­mer—in the journal Vistas in Astronomy had an extra meaning. In this eye-opening, one-page article Hynek argued that science historians are wrong to dismiss Kepler’s practice of astrology as merely something he did to keep alive. “Both his [Kepler’s] astrology and astronomy grew out of and partook in large measure of his deep mystical outlook,” Hynek (1975) wrote. He went on to assert that modern astronomy, with its exotic concepts like quasars, pulsars, and black holes, offered “a broad playing field for the metaphysicist.” According to Hynek, there was a “tenuous bond” linking present-day astronomy’s metaphysical thinking and Kepler’s brand of metaphysics, with both systems of thought being “the repository of fundamental questions not entertained on the present playing field of physical science” (Hynek 1975, 455). Hynek apparently saw Kepler as a kindred spirit, and, in this article, he was defending not only Kepler’s beliefs but his own.

“I have never stopped thinking about what must lie beyond all this,” Hynek once remarked to Vallee in Colorado as he sweepingly gestured toward the Rockies and the Great Plains (Vallee 1996, 232). For the professor, UFOs represented the “beyond,” that point where science could not reach. Having become an astronomer in order to discover the limits of science, Hynek wanted, maybe even needed, to believe in UFOs. It was a case of wishful thinking.

Hynek died of a brain tumor at Memorial Hospital in Scottsdale, Ari­zona, on April 27, 1986 (Folkart 1986). Halley’s Comet was then making its return appearance after a seventy-six-year journey through the solar system. Like Mark Twain, Josef Allen Hynek came into the world with the great comet, and he went out with it as well.

Notes

1. Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) was an Austrian-born mystic who propagated a belief known as anthroposophy or spiritual science. According to Robert McDermott, the purpose of anthroposophy was “to bring to humanity an entirely new capability—knowledge of the spiritual world by conscious sense-free thinking” (McDermott 1984, 3). In his classic Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, Martin Gardner called Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society “the fastest growing cult in post-war Germany” (Gardner 1957, 169).

2. In a recently unearthed 1968 letter, the then-president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology indicated to the chemist Linus Pauling that the Zamora episode was in fact a hoax perpetrated by a student (Sheaffer 2010, 25).

3. According to the SAO/NASA Astro­physics Data System, out of the over 100 astronomical publications Hynek had to his credit, only about a dozen appeared after 1966. Nearly one-half of these dozen articles related to Image Orthicon—a ground-breaking system using television technology to boost the light grasp of telescopes that Hynek helped develop in the 1950s and 1960s (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observ­atory/National Aeronautics and Space Admin­istration, N.d.).

References

Berland, Theodore. 1962. New look at the stars. Chicago Tribune (December 9).

Chicago Tribune. 1964. Probe flying object reports in 2 states. (May 1).

Clark, Jerome. 1998. UFO UpDates Mailing List, December 1. Online at http://www.cohenufo.org/Hynek/clark_re_hynk2.htm.

Dick, William. 1972. Letter to J. Allen Hynek dated February 11. J. Allen Hynek Papers. Northwestern University Archives, Evanston.

Folkart, Burt. 1986. J. Allen Hynek dies; led AF investigation of UFOs. Los Angeles Times (May 1).

Gardner, Martin. 1957. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. 2nd ed. New York: Dover Publications.

———. 1997. The Night Is Large: Collected Essays, 1938–1995. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

Hall, Michael David, and Wendy A. Connors. 2000. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt: The Summer of the Saucers—1952. Albuquerque, New Mexico: Rose Press International.

House of Representatives. Armed Services Com­mittee. 1966. Unidentified Flying Ob­jects. 89th Cong., 2nd sess., Committee Print No. 55.

Huyghe, Patrick. 2001. Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO Beat. New York: Paraview Press.

Hynek, J. Allen. 1960. Letter to Brigadier B.G. Holzman dated February 17. J. Allen Hynek Papers. Northwestern University Archives, Evanston.

———. 1966a. Are flying saucers real? Saturday Evening Post (December 17).

———. 1966b. Scientific Report on Project Star Gazer: Final Technical Report. July. J. Allen Hynek Papers. Northwestern University Archives, Evanston.

———. 1972. The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.

———. 1974. Letter to John E. Fields dated November 18. J. Allen Hynek Papers. North­western University Archives, Evanston.

———. 1975. Kepler’s astrology and astronomy. Vistas in Astronomy 18: 455.

———. 1978. Letter to John E. Fields dated September 7. J. Allen Hynek Papers. Northwestern University Archives, Evanston.

Kotulak, Ronald. 1969. U.F.O. report rapped as ‘waste of time.’ Chicago Tribune (May 18).

Los Angeles Times. 1966. Air Force investigator blames swamp gas for ‘flying saucers.’ (March 26).

———. 1973. Recent UFO sightings: reports, answers—and a few mysteries. (October 18).

McDermott, Robert A., ed. 1984. The Essential Steiner: Basic Writings of Rudolf Steiner. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

O’Toole, Thomas. 1966. Can’t shrug off UFOs, says saucer expert. Washington Post (October 26).

Phillips, Gene D., ed. 2001. Stanley Kubrick: Inter­views. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.

Ridpath, Ian. 1973. The man who spoke out on UFOs. New Scientist 58 (May 17): 422–24.

Ruppelt, Edward. 1956. The Report on Unidenti­fied Flying Objects. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

Sheaffer, Robert. 2010. Famous Socorro ‘UFO landing’ a student prank? Skeptical Inquirer 34(2): 25–27.

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory/National Aeronautics and Space Administra­tion Astrophysics Data System (ADS). N.d. Online at http://adswww.harvard.edu/.

Stacy, Dennis. 1985. Close encounter with Dr. J. Allen Hynek. CUFON: The Computer UFO Network. Online at http://www.cufon.org/cufon/hynekint.htm.

Steiner, Rudolf. 1922. The elemental world and the future of mankind. May 28. Rudolf Steiner Archive. Online at http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19220528p01.html.

Swords, Michael, and Robert Powell. 2012. UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry. San Antonio, Texas: Anomalist Books.

Vallee, Jacques. 1987. UFO’s in Space: Anatomy of a Phenomenon. New York: Ballantine Books.

———. 1996. Forbidden Science: Journals 1957–1969. New York: Marlowe & Company.

———. 2010. Forbidden Science: Journals 1970–1979. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Docu­matica Research.

Weingartner, Rudolph. 1982. Letter to Chuck Loebbaka dated May 11. J. Allen Hynek Papers. Northwestern University Archives, Evanston.

Weintraub, Pamela. 1985. Interview: J. Allen Hynek. Omni 7(5): 70–76, 108–114.

Witt, Howard. 1984. UFO expert moving to Arizona. Chicago Tribune (August 21).

Figure 1. The author, in the persona of a pilgrim, visits the famous “Lourdes of America,” where holy dirt supposedly effects miracle cures. (Author’s photo by Vaughn Rees)

The Legend

The word Chimayó derives from hot springs that were sacred to the Tewa Indians (a linguistic group of Pueblos) who called them Tsimajopokwi (pokwì in Tewa means “pool of water”). After the springs dried up, the name was shortened to Tsimayo (Nealson 2001, 62). According to a pious legend (of which there are many versions), brethren from the secret Penitente Brother­hood were engaging in rites on a nearby hill on a dark Good Friday in 1810 when one saw a mysterious light coming from the valley. Investigating and finding a half-buried crucifix, the men sent for a priest, the nearest church being ten miles away in Santa Cruz. The priest had the wooden crucifix carried in a procession to his church, but by the next morning it had disappeared—having been miraculously re­turned to its original site! This removal and return occurred two more times before people understood the message: the crucifix was to remain on the spot, which had reportedly been a sacred area for the Pueblo Indians (Eckholm 2008).

This grafting of a Roman Catholic element onto a native one—a process called syncretism—was common. It was often similarly accomplished by the shrewd use of a “miracle.” (For example, a “miraculous,” actually tempera-painted, image of the Virgin of Guada­lupe appeared in Mexico City in 1531 to prompt the building of a Catholic shrine—on a hill where the conquered Aztecs had had a temple to their virgin goddess, Tonantzin [Nickell 1988; 2004].)

One of the Penitente brothers, Don Bernardo Abeyta, built a small hermita (shelter) onto his house to enshrine the miracle crucifix. The hermita also allegedly “covered a hole from which came a blessed dirt that cured all ailments” (Kay 1987, 35). Abeyta himself was “instantly healed” of an undisclosed illness (Kutz 1988, 46–47). Alternately, Indian stories from the twentieth century suggested that a Tewa pueblo had once stood on the spot next to a pool whose mud had healing properties (Harring­ton 1916, 342). Revealingly, the chapel’s full name (El Santuariò de Chimayó de Nuestro Señor de Esqui­pulas) evokes a shrine in Guate­mala that had long been venerated for its miraculous healing crucifix and surrounding earth with curative powers. As well, there are much-touted healing mud baths at Chilca, Peru (which I visited with a guide in 2006). In any event, in 1816 a chapel was completed on the Chimayó site by Father Fran­cisco de Otocio, who was in charge of all New Mexico missions (Kay 1987, 29–37; Eckholm 2008).

The Nitty Gritty on the Dirt

Today, pilgrims visiting El Santuariò de Chimayó stoop to enter a small, single-windowed room that is said to be Abeyta’s original hermita. The central hole, El Posito (“little well”), measures some sixteen to eighteen inches wide and less than nine inches deep. Con­sider­ing the great amount of earth that must have been scooped from it during its almost two centuries of history, however, this is a small hole indeed! Hence, there grew a pious legend “that the pit was refilled by divine intervention” (Eckholm 2008). (This was similar to the claim that regardless of how many pieces were taken from the True Cross, the alleged holy relic of Jesus’s Crucifixion, it never diminished in size [Nickell 2007, 91–92].)

But even though “legend still maintains that the hole miraculously replenishes itself,” in fact “priests periodically refill the hole with dirt from outside the church” (Kay 1987, 77). Indeed, previously tipped off to this fact by a television cameraman (Del Monte 2001), we searched for and found the storage area where five-gallon containers of the reddish soil are stored (Figure 2). In recent years, priests at El Santuario de Chimayó have increasingly taken pains to point out the shed where the trucked-in soil is stored, with one complaining, “I even have to buy clean dirt!” (Eckholm 2008).

Figure 2. Despite a legend that the dirt, scooped from a small hole in the church floor, replenishes itself, it is actually purchased from outside and kept in a storeroom until it’s time to refill the hole. (Author’s photo)

In fact, the “holy dirt” is nothing very special. An analysis conducted for The Miracle Detectives television series identified the presence of carbonates that might have a beneficial effect on heartburn by neutralizing excess acid. “Beyond that,” stated series co-star Indre Vìskontas, the show’s skeptic, “there doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary” (Miracle Detectives 2011).

I agree. I had collected my own samples for testing on a visit to Chi­mayó in 2003 with investigator Vaughn Rees. In the guise of a pilgrim needing healing (again see Figure 1), I obtained a small plastic container from the gift shop, sold empty but labeled “Blessed Dirt.” My examination, in my little lab at CSI headquarters, showed that the “dirt” contains no appreciable humus but is largely sand, consisting of tiny grains of minerals and small bits of rock. (Appli­ca­tion of hydrochloric acid yielded a strong effervescence that confirmed the presence of carbonates. The addition of potassium ferrocyanide reagent produced a Prussian-blue reaction that identified a significant amount of iron, consistent with its color of red ocher, an earthy iron oxide. Stereomicroscopic examination showed grains of such common minerals as crystalline quartz and mica, as well as small lumps of sandstone and occasional bits of organic material, including tiny fragments of bone and fine root stems.¹)

Chimayó priest Father Jim Suntum concedes that the dirt itself has no miraculous power (Miracle Detectives 2011). In fact, the local dirt has actually acted in a very anti-miraculous way: it has posed a threat to the church’s artworks. As conservators found in 2003–2004, they “had to deal with the dirt.” Indeed, “It had drifted down from the ceiling and walls in the almost 200 years the church had existed, covering the paintings on the five altar screens, the crucifix and the carved bultos [sculptures] with a fine dust that needed cleaning. Dirt also had fallen behind the main altar screen to push it out of joint and threaten its very existence.” Still, a writer would claim that the preservation process itself, at least, was “almost a miracle” (Russell 2004, 36, 40).

The Healing ‘Miracles’

Nevertheless, while Father Suntum concedes it is not the holy dirt that heals but rather one’s “relationship with God,” he insists: “Something happens in this place.” However, he admits: “We can’t quantify it. We can’t document it. We do ask people to tell their story” (Miracle Detectives 2011). In fact, “officially, the Church has never investigated any of the claims” (El Santuariò ... 1994, 26).

The complete lack of records re­garding alleged miraculous experiences means that claims are entirely dependent on anecdotal evidence, such as the unverifiable stories told by an aging priest at the site. For example, in the mid-1950s, he recalled, a man carried his frail, ill mother into the church. “A few minutes later,” said the priest, “he called me, something has happened. She was kneeling in front of the altar. She was talking and full of health” (Hamm 2006, 42, 45). Yet we do not need to invoke the miraculous to explain what may have been only a simple rejuvenation of the woman’s spirits.

Or consider the tale about a girl from Texas whose family “was told she had little time to live” and that even an operation might not save her. Follow­ing their visit to Chimayó the child was well and no operation was necessary. “Two days later,” recalls the old priest, “they came back to thank God for the cure” (qtd. in Hamm 2006, 45). Now, we cannot prove this story is untrue, but fortunately we do not have to. The tellers of such unverifiable tales have the entire burden of proof.

However, when such cases can be investigated, they are invariably illuminating. For instance, The Miracle Detec­tives examined the case of a Colo­rado woman, Deseree “Dese” Mar­tinez, who claims the dirt of Chimayó helped her cancer go into remission. Diagnosed at the age of fifteen with aggressive bone cancer at numerous sites in her body, she visited Chimayó where she mixed the holy dirt with spit and applied it to a sore spot on her leg. The pain was gone by the next morning, and scans the following week showed the area healed. Inexplicably, she did not then rub dirt on the other lesion spots, but they soon disappeared too.

However, the woman’s doctor, Brian Greffe, at The Children’s Hospital in Denver, observed that with such non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in pediatric cases, the hospital’s “cure rates are quite high.” He attributed Martinez’s success to the chemo treatments, which had worked “within days” of their be­ginning. Obviously, there is no evidence that the interim application of holy dirt to a single site had any effect, although Greffe did say Martinez’s positive outlook and the support of her family were helpful (Miracle Detectives 2011).

As invariably shown by the evidence, so-called miraculous healings are never scientifically verified. Such claims, like those at Lourdes, the most famous “miracle” shrine, are derived from cases that are supposedly “medically inexplicable”; therefore, they are really examples of a logical fallacy called “arguing from ignorance”—that is, drawing a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. Besides, some illnesses are known to exhibit spontaneous remission, and other reputed cures may be attributable to a host of other factors: misdiagnosis, psychosomatic conditions, the body’s own healing mechanisms, and the like, including—as in the case of Martinez—prior medical treatment (Nickell 2008).

While the church displays crutches and canes—ostensibly cast off after previous cures—they may well have been discarded prematurely. Persons may feel better temporarily after experiencing the hope and excitement of a pilgrimage. Writer Anatole France, on visiting Lourdes and seeing the abandoned canes and crutches there, sagely remarked, “What, what, no wooden legs???” (qtd. in Hines 1988, 250).

Conclusions

As the evidence shows, therefore, claims made for holy dirt at Chimayó are unwarranted. Despite borrowed and contrived legends that the site is miraculous, the soil is actually an ordinary variety trucked in from elsewhere and merely blessed. Priests admit that the “something” that happens at the site cannot be quantified or documented—and indeed a major healing claim fell apart on investigation.

One suspects that the “something” is merely what is termed confirmation bias—the willingness to credit any supposed benefits while ignoring countless failures. One writer offers the apologetic, “It is a mystery why certain people and situations are granted a miracle and others are not” (Hamm 2006). But it is only a “mystery” if one chooses to be blind to the evidence.

Note

1. Finally, I ran a battery of standard analyses using a commercial soil-test kit determining the pH was 7.0 (neutral), and that nitrogen, phosphorous, and potash were at insignificant levels.

References

Del Monte, Steven. 2000. Personal communication, October 20.

Eckholm, Eric. 2008. A pastor begs to differ with flock on miracles. The New York Times (February 20).

El Santuariò...: A Stop on the “High Road to Taos.” 1994. Silver Spring, MD: Sons of the Holy Family.

Hamm, Elizabeth Catanach. 2006. It’s a miracle: Hope, faith bond at El Santuario de Chi­mayó. New Mexico (March): 40–45.

Harrington, John Peabody. 1916. Cited in Kay 1987, 14.

Hines, Terence. 1988. Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

Kay, Elizabeth. 1987. Chimayó Valley Traditions. Sante Fe, New Mexico: Ancient City Press.

Kutz, Jack. 1988. Mysteries & Miracles of New Mexico. Corrales, NM: Rhombus Publishing Co.

The Miracle Detectives. 2011. Holy Dirt of Chimayó. Episode aired April 10.

Nealson, Christina. 2001. New Mexico’s Sanc­tuaries, Retreats, and Sacred Places. Engle­wood, CO: Westcliffe Publishers, 61–63.

Nickell, Joe. 1988. Secrets of the Supernatural. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 103–17.

———. 2004. The Mystery Chronicles. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 51–55.

———. 2007. Relics of the Christ. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

———. 2008. Lourdes medical bureau rebels (blog entry). Free Thinking (December 25). Online at http://www.centerforinquiry.net/blogs/entry/lourdes_medical_bureau_rebels/.

Russell, Inez. 2004. Saving El Santuario: Preservation process almost a miracle. New Mexico (December): 36–41.

“Searching for Hitler’s DNA in Antarctica.” This is the bizarre headline that made the news a few months ago, launched by Russian news agency Ria Novosti and picked up by the world media after scientists were able to successfully drill into Antarctica’s Lake Vostok. The lake, a massive liquid reservoir cut off from daylight for fourteen million years and buried beneath two miles of ice, is the object of a years-long project to study its waters, which may house life-forms new to science. But what immediately caught the imagination was what seemed to be a revamping of the long-held myth that Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide in his Berlin bunker in May 1945 but was able to escape via submarine to a secret base at the South Pole.

Doubtful Death

Such an idea started circulating immediately after the end of the war. In 1952, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “We have been unable to unearth one bit of tangible evidence of Hitler’s death. Many people believe that Hitler escaped from Berlin.” Stalin’s top army officer, Marshall Gregory Zhukov, whose troops were the first to enter Berlin, flatly stated after a long thorough investigation in 1945: “We have found no corpse that could be Hitler’s.” The chief of the U.S. trial counsel at Nuremberg, Thomas J. Dodd, said: “No one can say he is dead.” Former Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes in his book Frankly Speaking stated that, after the war, at the Potsdam Conference of the Big Four, he met Stalin, who “left his chair, came over, and clinked his liquor glass with mine in a very friendly manner. I said to him: ‘Marshal Stalin, what is your theory about the death of Hitler?’ Stalin re­plied: ‘He is not dead. He escaped either to Spain or Argentina.’ ”

Hitler’s Berlin bunker, after the Soviet army destroyed it.

If so many Nazi officers and criminals, like Adolf Eichmann or Joseph Mengele, were able to escape undisturbed from defeated Germany, who’s to say that a diabolical mind like Hitler’s could not have set up a plan in order to simulate his own death? After all, it was known that, like many dictators, he used doubles in order to disorient his enemies. What if he had left the body of one such double in Berlin while he was fleeing to the South Pole?

It appears that in the early 1930s, the imaginations of Nazi hierarchs and maybe Hitler’s as well was captured by theories that the Earth was hollow inside and inhabited by a superior race. In particular, Madame Blavatsky’s esoteric theories had inspired the notorious Thule Society, the extremist right-wing German secret group that later reorganized and became the Nazi Party. Anxious to demonstrate the superiority of the Aryan race, theorists accepted legends of advanced civilizations living inside the Earth: such a superior breed had to be the Reich’s progenitor.

Nazis on Ice

Proof is lacking, but some claim that Hitler had ordered an expedition aiming to find the entrance to the inside of the Earth and that this had been located at the South Pole. Admiral Karl Doenitz referred to this during the Nuremberg trial when he stated: “The German submarine fleet has even now established an earthly paradise, an impregnable for­tress, for the Fuhrer, in whatever part of the world.” Although he did not specify where the exact location was, many believed it was Antarctica.

After the war, Nazi sympathizer Ernst Zundel claimed that Hitler and a trusted group of men had been able to escape aboard a ship in which they entered the Earth through a hole at the South Pole. Inside the Earth, Nazi scientists worked to build a new army with which to take over the world. An army that could count on revolutionary round, flying vehicles: UFOs.

Daring fantasies that, only fifty-five years after the end of the conflict, were dissolved after documents from the Russian secret service came out. The dictator had taken his life; Eva Braun and trusted propagandist Joseph Goeb­bels had as well. Following Hitler’s orders, the bodies had been burned. When the soviet army arrived they found the charred remains and could not recognize who they belonged to. Stolen by soldiers, the remains were subsequently examined with forensics, and their true identities were ascertained. The corpses were then buried and in 1970 Breznev ordered them ex­humed, incinerated, and dispersed in the waters of the Ehle, in order to prevent fanatics’ pilgrimages.

Legends Never Die

If all of this is clear, then why is it that the claim of a possible escape by Hitler can still make front-page news? Be­cause urban legends never really die, and with the new findings at Lake Vostok, someone unearthed a forgotten story. Some claim that according to German marine records, months after the Nazis surrendered to the Allies in 1945, a U-530 submarine reached Antarctica from Keil. There, the members of the crew did not build a fortress for the Fuhrer, but inside an ice cave they may have hidden some crates containing Third Reich relics and, even, DNA samples of Hitler and Eva Braun for cloning purposes. With their mission accomplished, the sailors reached Argentina and surrendered to Mar del Plata authorities.

However, notwithstanding sensational headlines in some newspapers, it appears highly unlikely that we will soon read about the finding in Lake Vostok of such a cave and its crates. And this silence, without a doubt, will represent further proof that the relics really exist, at least to those who love to see conspiracies everywhere.

Solving the Communion Enigma: What Is to Come. By Whitley Strieber. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York, 2011. ISBN: 1585429171. 240 pp. Hardcover, $25.95.

Here we go again. Whitley Strie­ber, author of numerous best-selling books of fiction, horror, and some that defy categorization, spins a few more yarns as he re-hashes some familiar old ones. In his best-selling books Communion (1987) and Transfor­mation (1988), Strieber claims to have experienced inexplicable en­counters—including an infamous one involving an anal probe—with “the visitors.” Though they seem to be extraterrestrials, Strie­ber claims not to know who—or what—the visitors really are. His latest book, Solving the Communion Enigma: What Is to Come, picks up where these other tales leave off in an effort to provide a solution to their unbelievable, though familiar, otherworldly mysteries. It is not those who’ve experienced such encounters who are delusional, says Strieber—it’s those who deny the truth of them. So if you doubt that Strieber was stalked in New York and Texas by “a sinister chain-smoking dwarf” who was apparently able to climb walls but could not be photo­graphed, you are probably delusional.

Strieber’s attempt to bolster his message with the help of prestigious intellectuals and authors separates Solving the Communion Enigma from the author’s previous Whitley-isms. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Chair of Religious Studies at Rice University, writes in his foreword to the book that Strieber understands that “we sit on an intellectual precipice, that a ‘new world’ is just over the horizon, that science and its clunky methods are not going to get us there.... Only the future can finally read a great book like Communion.” Someone of Kripal’s credentials should know better than to write something like that. Strieber also calls upon the UFO writings of authors such as Leslie Kean, Jacques Vallee, John Mack, Paul Hill, and Kenneth Ring—the latter two of whom provide a suitably esoteric and obscure complement to Strieber’s own homespun wisdom.

But take away the pretension and the same old Whitley emerges from this book, describing his latest hair-raising scrapes with the paranormal. One rainy night, Strieber awoke to find himself experiencing “the consciousness of a number of different Whitleys” who exist, apparently, “in different parallel universes.” Another night, he awoke and “found myself to be invisible. I had no body.... A cold uneasiness went through me. Where was my body?” Fortunately, he located his missing body nearby. At breakfast the next morning, his son and the son’s friend chirped about how “Whitley came down through the ceiling last night!”

Perhaps the most extraordinary claim in the entire book, though, is Strieber’s repeated claim of poverty. He laments that in the early 1990s he ran out of money and could no longer afford either his Upstate New York cabin or his New York City apartment: “In August of 1994, we ceased to be able to pay our mortgage.” He moved his family to the small, modest condominium they owned in San Antonio, Texas. Yet Strieber’s New York Times best sellers must have brought him more money in a few years than the average person could hope to see in a lifetime. How could he possibly have spent so much money so quickly, especially since none of his writing indicates the author’s extravagant lifestyle?

So, what solutions to “the Com­munion Enigma” does the book offer? Sadly, none—although Strieber does suggest that “one thing our visitors are doing is creating situations that are designed to increase our left-brain functioning.” He views this as a hopeful conclusion since “nobody who is trying to improve our brain function is interested in our death.” In fact, Strieber “began to see, more and more, that the dead were involved with our supposed alien visitors, and through them with us.... I have seen the joy of the dead, but I have also seen their suffering.” (See my review of Strieber’s earlier book The Key, “He Sees Dead People,” SI, July/August 2011). Toward the end of the book he warns, “Mankind is going to die, one way or another, to the world that we know now. But, at the same time, mankind is going to be born—literally born again.”

According to the website for his book Hybrids, the Striebers now have residences in New York, Texas, and California—which means, I’m sure, that the visitors will provide Whitley Strieber with many more profitable adventures before he ever solves his “enigma.”

In the nineteenth century, phrenology was hugely influential despite being totally invalid. Its history shows why we must be skeptical of any belief based solely on experience.

Phrenology. The science of picking the pocket through the scalp.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

Today, phrenology (“head reading”) is usually seen as the fossilized stuff of cranks and charlatans. But in the nineteenth century it had a huge influence at all levels of Western society, more than all of its later competitors (such as psychoanalysis) put together. It was in­fluential because of its attractive philosophy and because practitioners and clients saw that it worked. But we now know that it could not possibly work; personal experience had led millions of people astray. Indeed, few beliefs can match phrenology for its extent of influence and certainty of invalidity. So it has valuable lessons about any experience-based belief.

Phrenology’s Influence

In the nineteenth century, phrenology affected all levels of Western life and thought. In Britain, Europe, and Amer­ica, its influence was felt in anthropology, criminology, education, medicine, psychiatry, art, and literature. In France, it eroded established power and led to wide social changes. In Australia, it rationalized the violence against Abo­rigines and explained the criminality of convicts. For ordinary people everywhere a head reading was often required for employment or marriage.¹ But how could this happen if phrenology was totally invalid? For answers, we need to start at the beginning.

First Steps to Delusion

Around 1790, the German-born anatomist Franz Joseph Gall, one of the founders of modern neurology, put together his skull doctrine that later led to phrenology. He held that behavior such as painting or being careful had their own specialized organs in the brain, and that they influenced the shape of the skull. So the skull’s bumps would indicate behavior and abilities that were innate. Gall spent eleven years examining hundreds of heads to test his ideas: “If ... he observed any mechanician, musician, sculptor, draughtsman, mathematician, endowed with such or such faculty from birth, he examined their heads to see whether he might point out a particular development of some cerebral part.... He also called together in his house common people, as coachmen and poor boys, and excited them to make him ac­quainted with their characters” (Spurz­heim 1815, 271).

Gall’s seemingly logical approach had two fatal defects. First, his claims were often based on a single striking case, for example “Cautiousness” was placed above the ears because an extremely cautious priest had a large bump there. Second, Gall looked only for confirming cases and ignored disconfirming cases, a flaw not lost on his critics. Thus David Skae (1847), a physician at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum, noted that once the truth is “fixed upon our minds,” looking for confirmation is “the most perfect recipe for making a phrenologist that could well be devised.” But to Gall and the thousands of phrenologists who came later, personal experience mattered more than procedural defects. Phren­ology had taken its first giant step on the road to delusion.² Note that the delusion of experience is not limited to artifacts of reasoning such as the Barnum effect.

How to read heads. For each “brain organ” (whose number and location depends on which book you read) you guess its development (no yardsticks here) and thus its meaning (based on speculation), which you juggle (more speculation) against all the other speculative meanings and the all-important temperament based on external signs such as build and vulgarity (i.e., on even more speculation) to obtain a final assessment of character and destiny. If unsatisfactory, try again. This was phrenology’s secret weapon—it was based on an experience that could never be wrong.

Spurzheim Nails the Coffin Shut

The next step was due to Johann Spurz­heim, Gall’s coworker. Gall had linked brain organs to behavior, but Spurzheim held that organs cannot relate to behavior, only to traits. Gall disagreed (the origin of traits was then a complete mystery), arguing that every person has imagination whereas not every person can paint. So in 1813, Spurzheim broke away. He renamed organs after the traits said to underlie behavior, invented organs to cover apparent gaps, and in due course adopted the name phrenology (a name suggested in 1815 by the naturalist Thomas Forster from the Greek words for mind and discourse). The focus was now on speculative divisions of the mind. Since behavior was now related more or less vaguely to several traits, and therefore more or less vaguely to several brain organs, everything was now open to interpretation. In one hit, Spurzheim had moved the system from a biological science to a mental philosophy; from observation to nonfalsifiability. It was the classic pseudoscientific move. Grand delusions were now inevitable.

Feel the Bumps, Know the Man

In those days, the workings of the brain were largely unknown. The idea of the four humors was still popular, as was bloodletting. Traits of ability and of character were held to be equal in all men at birth and were wholly determined by upbringing. To claim otherwise was a crime against morality and God.

But phrenology did claim otherwise. It said traits were innate, localized in the brain, and measurable by head shape. What was once a mystery was now widely seen as an exact science. If true, it promised to revolutionize just about everything.

But it was not true. Phrenology was partly right about brain functions being localized but wrong about the actual functions. Not slightly wrong; totally wrong. The brain involves processes such as moving, touching, hearing, and seeing, not phrenological traits such as neatness, curiosity, love of children, at­tachment to home, and relish for food.³ As shown by modern imaging techniques, some of these processes are localized in distinct regions, while others are distributed and interactive. But all are sufficiently diversified that brain damage or cell loss may have no noticeable effect. The same techniques have shown that the claimed phrenological organs do not exist.

Nor is brain size a measure of power to the extent claimed by phrenologists. So we can look at phrenology knowing that a certain head shape cannot possibly mean what it is supposed to mean. Few beliefs about man can match phrenology for such certainty of invalidity.⁴

Unsurprisingly, phrenology copped unceasing parody. A modern example appeared in the U.K.’s Independent Long Weekend of January 11, 1997, suggesting how “to improve people’s personalities by rearranging their head bumps. With a mallet. Do not try this at home” (p. 2).

Influence Revisited

What attracted millions of converts and made phrenology historically important was the appeal of its philosophy. By offering a recipe for living and self-improvement based not on metaphysics but on claims testable by ex­perience, phrenology was a dream come true. And in the 1810s it took off like a rocket; first in Europe, then Britain, then America.

The average life expectancy in Britain (adjusted for high infant mortality) at that time was forty years, a quarter of the population was illiterate, few homes had running water or even a clock, and a phrenology book cost a quarter of the average weekly wage. Yet in less than twenty years about thirty phrenological societies were formed, and roughly one person in 3,000 was “moderately well instructed in phrenology, [more] than there are of persons equally advanced in geology, entomology, botany, astronomy, or similar sciences” (Watson 1836, 223).

But by implying that man rather than God was in charge, phrenology created an unceasing storm of religious and moral protest. Critics said it reduced the soul to anatomy and gave too much power to ordinary people. Never­theless, it attracted people of in­telligence and a vast responsive literature wherein every criticism was furiously attacked.⁵

When critics said (in tracts of paralyzing wordiness) “there is no evidence favoring phrenology but much favoring Christianity, so we prefer the latter,” the reply was “if there is no God, what is the organ of Veneration for?” When critics said “phrenology is without intellectual challenge and suits only the coarsest taste,” the reply was “it is so simple and natural that ordinary people can put it to immediate use.”

Soon there was a runaway demand for character readings, and by the 1840s phrenology had divided into two camps: one a fortune-telling scam where a travelling phrenologist could earn more in a week than in a whole year of farm laboring; the other a serious study whose journals were filled with alarms against the impostors. (The later parallel with newspaper astrology is unmistakable here.) Both camps promoted phrenology as a matter not of belief but of demonstration. Test-it-and-see was an essential part of the message. So how could an actually invalid phrenology survive such a process? First, a look at replies to stock objections.

Pioneers of phrenology. From left: Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), Johann Spurzheim (1776–1832), George Combe (1788–1858), Orson Fowler (1809–1887), Lorenzo Fowler (1811–1896). Pictures are from Severn (1929, 244, 256, 257) and Davies (1955, 48, 49).

Stock Objections

Phrenologists felt they had convincing replies to every stock objection: The skull varies in thickness. Not enough to matter. Everything relates to size not quality. Experience shows that phrenology works. Stomachs digest different foods, so why can’t brain organs do different things? Stomachs may be versatile but their function is the same. Parts of the brain can be destroyed without apparent effect, so how can traits be localized? The investigators were ignorant of phrenology and missed the relevant behavior.

But other objections were ignored. Organs could be in layers (so head shape could be meaningless?), the same organ appears on both sides of the head (so we believe with one and disbelieve with the other?), important traits such as sympathy and love of truth are missing, and worst of all any head can be made to fit any behavior so nobody could know if phrenology was wrong. For example, a small Combativeness could still be combative due to a large Firmness, a large Destructiveness, or a large Approbation (fights to gain admiration). Spurzheim’s nonfalsifiability was working well. But phrenologists were not interested. Why worry when there were testimonials?

Two heads typical of those in the above New Illustrated Self-Instructor. Arrowed is Parental Love large (left) and small (right), with spikes and dashed lines added by me to indicate Fowler’s organ boundaries and average contour. The largeness or smallness extends beyond the boundaries on either side, which is contrary to the independence required by phrenology.

Testimonials

Critics of New Age beliefs “typically encounter anecdotes and testimonials where there ought to be rigorous pre- and post-treatment comparisons” (Beyer­stein 1990, 33). Phrenology provides a definitive test of testimonials because it had lots of them, even from the very top:

“I never knew I had an inventive talent until phrenology told me. I was a stranger to myself until then” (Thomas Edison). “The phrenologist has shown that he is able to read character like an open book ... with an accuracy that the most intimate friends cannot approach” (Alfred Russel Wallace, cofounder of the theory of evolution). “I declare that the phrenological system of mental philosophy is as much better than all other systems as the electric light is better than the tallow dip” (William Gladstone, four times prime minister of England). All are from Severn (1913, 6).

There were also countless testimonials from ordinary people. “Scarcely a day passes that the editor of the Phren­ological Journal does not receive some outburst of thankfulness from a grateful recipient of needed counsel” (Sizer and Drayton 1899). “35,000 testimonials” said a sign in the window of a London phrenologist (see picture in Parker and Parker 1988, 34). How could 35,000 clients be wrong, to say nothing of Edison, Wallace, and Glad­stone? The answer boils down to experience. And wishful thinking.

In 1929, the British Phrenological Society published thirty testimonials entitled The Revival of Phrenology: The Phrenological Principles and Localisations Confirmed by Modern Scientists. None mentioned the results of actual tests, yet they supposedly showed that “the main principles of phrenology can no longer be disputed.”

Plainly Demonstrated

Yes, phrenology seemed to work. It was the apparent accuracy of readings that was so convincing to practitioners and clients. It was “so plainly demonstrated that the non-acceptance of Phrenology is next to impossible” (British Phren­ological Association 1896, 64).

For example, Severn (1929, 84) cites a reading of himself, made when he was twenty-five, that “was a remarkably true description ... probably the best I have ever had.” Here are some excerpts: “Great firmness and reality of purpose. The mind is sensitive and active. The judgement is keen, and logical in its conclusions. He is not very original, but may be in his habits. Fond of reform and improvements of all kinds [note the contradiction]. He loves truth, and will have it at any price. The mind is sceptical and too honest to believe without reasonable evidence. A lover of moral and personal liberty. Is warm-hearted.” More on this later.

The phrenologist Stackpool O’Dell (1925, 12) explains how “in his daily experience, when he says that a child has unusual talent for drawing, he finds that it is so, or when he says of another that he has exceptional musical capacity, it proves correct.... He judges these points by the shape of the head, and a due consideration of temperament. And ... his conclusions, in most instances, will be recognised as strikingly correct.”

1895 edition of Lorenzo Fowler’s New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology. It cost two shillings post free (then about one-fifteenth of the average weekly wage) and had 182 pages with over one hundred engravings of heads showing large and small organs. You felt your head, ticked fifty-one boxes on a seven-point scale, and looked up the details, some worthy of today’s newspaper horoscopes as in “Expect next to nothing, and undertake less” (p.122). Including other editions, sales reached 100,000 in the United Kingdom and 150,000 in the United States.

George Combe

The experience of George Combe, the most famous British practitioner of his time, seems even more convincing. In 1829, he visited a Dublin asylum to demonstrate phrenology to its doctors who, when his readings of selected in­mates were over, compared them with their own diagnoses. For a male aged thirty-seven Combe found “predisposed to melancholy” versus the diagnosis “melancholy, great timidity of disposition.” For a female aged forty-eight Combe found “self-esteem is predominant” versus “monomania, pride.” There were sixteen hits as good as these, two nearly as good, one miss, and four passes with “no grounds for inference.” In general, the outcome was “completely in harmony with what was anticipated.” Combe’s many visits to prisons and other asylums were just as successful (Williams 1894).

In short, people saw how phrenology seemed to work and were convinced. Experience was the only game in town. But how could people be convinced if phrenology was totally invalid?

Encouraging Delusion

The problem in the above cases is that there are no controls to guard against delusion. In Severn’s case, the reading is either very general (so anyone would agree with it) or is guessable from personal contact. In O’Dell’s case, we cannot tell if his hits are genuine or are due to circumstances, including not wanting to be seen disagreeing with a renowned phrenologist.

This is similarly true in Combe’s case, which allowed cueing by the subject’s appearance and by sensing the attitudes of those present. Given a timid, fearful subject, or a proud disdainful one, together with reciting aloud the often opposing indications, and no doubt a practiced skill in reading human nature and onlookers, Combe could hardly go wrong. Indeed, he almost never mentions unobservable phenomena such as abilities, preferring things like melancholy (a term then applied to any personal distress) and propensity to thieving, both consistent with a dependence on cues. If this failed, the result could always be ex­plained by an opposing organ, by up­bringing, or by declaring that criticism comes from men and not Nature—and only Nature had the authority to say whether phrenology was true or not.

Alternatively, failures could simply be ignored, as when Severn (1929, 83) visited O’Dell and asked if he could be a phrenologist. “He examined my head and pointed out so many mental faculties detrimental to my acquiring proficiency that I gave up further thought of qualifying professionally.” Yet he became a top British phrenologist! Notice how easily the obviously wrong reading was ignored.

Frontispiece to a seventy-two-page booklet provided with each reading by J. Millott Severn, the last major British phrenologist, c. 1920. The booklet included interpretations on a seven-point scale for each of forty-nine brain organs. For five shillings (then about one-eighth of the average weekly wage) Severn (pictured) would tick the ones applying to you.

Rare U-Turns

To their credit, not every believer remained a believer. American psychologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) practiced phrenology and invented a device to improve the measurement of cranial features, but he later abandoned phrenology as unscientific.

The British botanist Hewett Wat­son, author of the 1836 survey Statistics of Phrenology, was convinced of phrenology’s validity. But after three years as editor of the Phrenological Journal, which “obliged him to make more close scrutiny into various points,” he saw that much “is doubtful, if not erroneous.” Given a choice between upsetting be­lievers and promoting nonsense, he preferred to resign (Watson 1840).

Uncovering Delusion

The following study, the only one of its kind that I could find, shows how a simple control uncovers the delusion. A female patient aged twenty-two of Morgenthaler (1930), a Swiss psychiatrist, was amazed at the penetrating accuracy of her phrenological reading. It had twenty-six statements such as: “You are a blend of natural feelings and much stronger emotions. You are a definite female, which explains your weaknesses. You are not sharply focused. Critical judgments give way to warm-hearted feelings.” So Morgenthaler asked ten female subjects to judge how well each statement applied to them. An average of 70 percent said the statements were definitely or probably correct, 13 percent were uncertain, and 17 percent said they were definitely or probably wrong. It was the classic Barnum approach to instant delusion. The subjects knew the reading was not theirs; otherwise their acceptance might have been even higher.

Bird Brains Tell All

In the 1840s, the eminent French physiologist Pierre Flourens introduced the experimental approach that phrenologists had steadfastly rejected. He found that the intellect in pigeons and chickens gradually weakened as the brain was cut away, but still remained even when very little brain was left, which effectively demolished the claims of phrenology. A similar point had been made earlier by the American anatomy professor Thomas Sewall. So the need to test actual people disappeared, ironically just at the time when the rise of experimental psychology would have made such tests possible. But enough tests were made to confirm the expected negative results.

The cumulative growth of populations over their lifetime, whether of cathedrals or phrenology books, traces an S-curve that shows when the end is near. For phrenology this was around 1900. In the 1960s, historians became aware of phrenology’s importance in nineteenth-century life, and historical studies duly increased. Of course some people said phrenology would last forever. Thus in his 1898 book The Wonderful Century, Alfred Russel Wallace held that “in the coming century phrenology will assuredly attain general acceptance” (p.192). It was all part of the delusion inspired by experience.

Experimental Tests

Some tests were obvious. When a phrenologist was given the supposed head cast of an eminent professor (it was actually the cast of a large turnip), the reading emphasized wisdom and intelligence (U.K.’s Times newspaper, Febru­ary 2, 1824). When the humorist Mark Twain visited Lorenzo Fowler (under a fictitious name) he was told he had no sense of humor, but on a repeat visit under his own name he had “the loftiest bump of humor” ever encountered (Twain 1959; Lopez 2002).

Skae (1847), mentioned earlier, made a test that today would seem just as obvious. He went to the Phren­ological Society’s collection of head casts, picked ten famous cases “whose character was well known,” measured the elevation of each organ by calipers, and corrected it by the cube root of head size shown by immersion in water. “I assumed that the measurements of the crania thus calculated would correspond with the known characters of the individuals, if phrenology was true.” But the results were “generally speaking at variance with phren­ology, and in many instances so utterly irreconcilable with its truth, as to appear altogether subversive of it.” The ten casts had not shown the bumps that phrenology said they should.

The response by phrenologists to Skae’s results was polemic, lengthy, and largely irrelevant. To them, the principles of phrenology were absolute; therefore, negative results were sure proof of incompetence. They said the correction for head size was inappropriate, and that the phrenologist’s eye and hand were sensitive to nuances missed by calipers.⁶ Skae then challenged them to get positive results from his data but they declined, arguing that the unsoundness of his measurements “entirely vitiates every conclusion to which they have been supposed to lead.”⁷

Nearly eighty years later, Cleeton and Knight (1924) read physiognomy and phrenology books to find out what each cranial feature meant, but they found “great disagreement.” So they selected ten traits such as IQ, sociability, and willpower for which the disagreement was least. They then re­cruited twenty-eight adults, measured their cranial features, and had their traits rated by twenty close associates who knew all twenty-eight subjects. The results showed no link between cranial features and traits. Of 201 correlations, four were significant (p=0.04) versus six expected by chance. The mean correlation was a negligible 0.004.

Phrenology heads still provide an appealing and appropriate image for the covers of modern psychology books, here in 2001 and 2010.

Slow to Die

The above tests confirmed that phren­ology cannot deliver benefits beyond those due to non-phrenological factors. But phrenology was slow to die. In the 1950s, phrenologists still existed in Britain and in the larger American cities (Dallenbach 1955). Today there is at least one pro-phrenology website, so supporters are not yet extinct.⁸ But in practice, phrenology “lasted only long enough to become one of the most thoroughly discredited theories in the history of physiological psychology” (Uttal 2001, 102). It “was the most popular of all the doctrines of psychology in the whole history of the science, and at the same time the most erroneous. It affords a striking example of the danger of erecting a vast superstructure on inadequate observation and inexact methods” (Flugel 1964, 36–37). “Eventu­ally phrenology lost out to science and to public indignation, and degenerated into a sect of zealous extremists unable to pass on discredited knowledge to a new more enlightened generation” (Van Wyhe 2002).

Neglect of Scientific Caution

It is easy to see why the scientifically invalid phrenology could have been so popular. To millions of people it was so fashionable and so satisfying, and its invalidity was so invisible, that it could not fail to work. Their experience of phrenology could not fail to be convincing. But it was a delusion. And all due to a neglect of scientific caution.^{9, 10}

We might hope that such neglect is less likely today. But the literature of any experience-based belief shows it to be raging out of control on every page. As with phrenology, believers refuse to accept that experience is unreliable; they brush aside contrary evidence and dismiss critics as bigoted and closed-minded. They don’t want to know. Neglect of scientific caution is much more fun.

For believers, the lesson is that experience means nothing without controlled tests. In the Encyclopedia Britannica, phrenology now occupies one paragraph whereas it once occupied many pages.

For skeptics, the lesson is that the delusion of experience should never be underestimated. It dies only when believers die. Reformers should forget the present generation and target the next.¹¹

Notes

1. The historical importance of phrenology was not widely documented until after the 1960s, when science historians became sensitive to social considerations. Today it has been minutely examined in scholarly books, articles, at least twenty PhD theses, and various websites, of which easily the most comprehensive is John van Wyhe’s www.historyofphrenology.org.uk/. But these sources are invariably concerned with social issues and not the role of experience in the acceptance of phrenology. Indeed, the literature of phrenology is so clogged with side issues (of philosophy, of politics, of religion, of morality, of society in general), so often tedious to read (wordiness being the style of the day), and so hard to find (notwithstanding the many early publications now available online via the above website), that the role of experience has been largely unexamined. The source material for this article includes books and journals previously in the library of the British Phrenological Society and now held by the University of London.

2. Jerison (1977) argues that Gall went wrong in the same way that others went right. Gall happened to pick the wrong hypothesis and spent the rest of his life trying to prove it. Ironically, Gall failed not because he was reductionist but because he was not reductionist enough. Had he reduced brain organs to simple things like toe-twitches and thumb-tingles, he would have found success because only such simple functions are localizable in the brain.

3. The record for odd traits, albeit in physiognomy rather than phrenology, must go to Joseph Simms who, in a 600-page book running to at least ten editions by 1891, proposed Aqua­sorbitiveness (love of water), Mnemoni­conominality (ability to remember names, presumably the author had it), Morival­orosity (moral courage), Philomonotopicalness (love of one particular place), Temporinaturalitiveness (appreciation of time passing), and many others.

4. We have a certainty here well beyond that presently possible in, say, psychoanalysis. But we should not go overboard. Phrenology for all its faults led to the discovery that brain and mind were associated and that localization existed. Along the way it established function as a psychological term, popularized the expression of traits on scales such as one to five, and confirmed the futility of purely metaphysical speculations about the nature of man. Which is why phrenology appears in every history of psychology, unlike unproductive beliefs such as astrology.

5. During 1801–1889, The Index to the English Catalogue of Books recorded a total of eighty-five phrenology titles versus sixteen astrology, fifteen physiognomy, and six palmistry (graphology did not appear until the 1870s in France). In 1928, after forty years of searching through libraries in America, Britain, France, and Germany, the phrenologist John Melville estimated that about 4,000 books and pamphlets had been published on phrenology (Severn 1929, 438, 442). Best sellers included George Combe’s Constitution of Man (500,000 in sixty years), Fowler’s Phren­ological Self-Instructor (250,000), and Sizer and Drayton’s Heads and Faces (150,000). For comparison, works by popular novelists such as Dickens typically sold 50,000 copies. Today the British Library has about 300 phrenology books and pamphlets, the New York Public Library about 400.

6. That the supposed sensitivity of the phrenologist’s eye and hand led to delusion is shown by phrenology’s golden rule, namely size=power. Other things being equal, the bigger the head the better. What could be more reasonable? Thus Severn (1913, 20), who in thirty years as a practicing phrenologist had examined more than 100,000 heads, or roughly fifteen each working day, says, “Persons of commanding mentality invariably have heads above the average size.” But ten scientific studies of IQ versus head size involving a total of more than 11,000 adults found a mean correlation of only 0.13 (based on data in Wickett et al. 1994), which is too small to be observable by phrenologists—indeed their observations should have denied it. So their claim was a case of believing is seeing. Nevertheless their claim was not entirely wrong, for the correlation between IQ and actual brain size (as opposed to head size) measured by magnetic resonance imaging is about 0.4 (Rushton 1997).

7. Phrenology had one disadvantage seldom admitted by phrenologists, especially in their re­sponse to critics, because “In numberless in­stances, [plaster] casts form our only source of phrenological observation” (Hytche 1844). Most enthusiasts had a collection, in rare cases exceeding one or two thousand casts. But applying plaster of Paris to a thickly lathered and oiled head was quite unpleasant for the subject. The setting plaster prevented free respiration and generated much heat, whereupon some subjects “become so nervous, that the features are distorted, and ... the very character of the head becomes changed.” Due to bunched-up hair, or to expansion of the setting plaster, “the cast is always larger than the head [in diameter by an inch or more] ... when we consider the additional energy conferred by every extra inch of healthy brain, we shall perceive how different will be our estimate of cerebral power.” So when using casts, “in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred our judgement is likely to be incorrect” (Hytche 1844).

8. The largest (and very user-friendly) pro-phrenology website is www.phrenology.org operated out of Belgium. It proclaims “Phrenology is a true science.... Today, much of the criticism against Phrenology can be easily dismissed. Extensive experimental verification of the Phren­ological localisations have proved their practical value.” No experimental verifications are cited. Nearly 700 images, mostly of heads, can be found by Googling phrenology > images.

9. Whether the price paid for such neglect is worth whatever satisfaction it brings, including keeping people off the streets, is a topic that skeptics might like to ponder. The problem of course is that a belief may be a crutch, but hearts are not won by kicking away crutches.

10. The satisfaction brought to clients by a warm and sympathetic phrenologist should be self-evident. The satisfaction brought to phrenologists may be less evident but is beautifully ex­pressed by Severn (1929, 504): “It is a great career, and a splendid and glorious mission to be a phrenologist. There is life and vitality in the work, and though it may not yield big financial gains, in a thousand ways it will amply repay such as are adapted to the calling, and are desirous of doing great good in the world, and of being of immense service to their fellow creatures. I have frequently said that notwithstanding all the adverse circumstances I have experienced, if I had a hundred lives, I would devote them all ab­solutely and wholly to phrenology.”

11. Among the exhibits at the Minneapolis Museum of Questionable Medical Devices are machines with a headpiece of thirty-two mechanical probes, each with five contact points to measure size on a five-point scale. In ninety seconds it will print out for each of thirty-two phrenological organs a brief reading with moral overtones. “Secretiveness – Average – You are fairly secretive but can improve. You tell things to your friends. Don’t do it.” The readings are popular (fifty a day) and are billed as entertainment, but many people see them as accurate and are unwilling to accept that phrenology is invalid. The delusion of experience is alive and well. From McCoy (1985; 1996).

References

Beyerstein, B.L. 1990. Brainscams: Neuromyth­ologies of the new age. International Journal of Mental Health 19(3): 27–36.

British Phrenological Association. 1896. The British Phrenological Year Book 1896. London: British Phrenological Association. There were then 123 practicing phrenologists in the United Kingdom. In 1967, after eighty years of existence, the Association went into voluntary liquidation.

Cleeton, G.U., and F.B. Knight. 1924. Validity of character judgements based on external criteria. Journal of Applied Psychology 8: 215–231.

Dallenbach, K.M. 1955. Phrenology versus psychoanalysis. American Journal of Psychology 68: 511–525.

Davies, J.D. 1955. Phrenology Fad and Science: A 19th-Century American Crusade. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Flugel, J.C. 1964. A Hundred Years of Psychology. 3rd edition. London: Duckworth.

Fowler, L.N. 1895. Fowler’s New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology. 20th edition. London: Fowler.

Hytche, E.J. 1844. A glance at the imperfections of phrenological casts. Phrenological Journal 17: 246–253.

Jerison, H.J. 1977. Should phrenology be rediscovered? Current Anthropology 18: 744–746. Title refers to accepting the place of phrenology in the history of anthropology.

Lopez, D.J. 2002. Snaring the Fowler: Mark Twain debunks phrenology. Skeptical Inquirer 26(1): 33–36

McCoy, R.W. 1985. Phrenology and popular gullibility. Skeptical Inquirer 9(3): 261–268.

———. 1996. Phrenology. In G. Stein (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Morgenthaler, W. 1930. Über populäre Charak­terdiagnostik. Schweizerische Medi­zinische Wochenschrift 39: 912–914.

O’Dell, S.E. 1925. Phrenology: Essays and Studies. 2nd edition. London: London Phrenological Institution.

Parker, D., and J. Parker. 1988. The Future Now: How to Use Prediction in Your Life. London: Mitchell Beazley.

Rushton, J.P. 1997. Race, intelligence, and the brain: The errors and omissions of the revised edition of S.J.Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1996). Personality and Individual Differences 23: 169–180.

Severn, J.M. 1913. Popular Phrenology. London: Rider.

———. 1929. Life Story and Experiences of a Phrenologist. Brighton: Severn. An endearing account of forty years of experience including how he married his wife on the basis of phrenology two months after meeting her, since when “we have neither of us had the slightest reason to regret the step we had seemingly so hastily taken” (p. 157).

Sizer, N., and H.S. Drayton. 1899. Heads and Faces and How to Study Them: A Manual of Phrenology and Physiognomy for the People. New York: Fowler and Wells.

Skae, D. 1847. Letter. Phrenological Journal 20: 273–283. Responses by phrenologists appear on pp. 43–48 and 283–290.

Spurzheim, J.G. 1815. The Physiognomical System of Drs Gall and Spurzheim Founded on an Anatomical and Physiological Examination of the Nervous System in General and the Brain in Particular and Indicating the Dispositions and Manifestations of the Mind. London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy.

Twain, M. 1959. Autobiography of Mark Twain Including Chapters Now Published for the First Time. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Uttal, W.R. 2001. The New Phrenology: The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Processes in the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Van Wyhe, J. 2002. The History of Phrenology. Online at www.historyofphrenology.org.uk/.

Watson, H.C. 1836. Statistics of Phrenology, Being a Sketch of the Progress and Present State of that Science in the British Isles. London: Long­mans.

———. 1840. Editorial. Phrenological Journal 13: 386–387.

Wickett, J.C., P.A. Vernon, and D.H. Lee. 1994. In vivo brain size, head perimeter, and intelligence in a sample of healthy adult females. Personality and Individual Differences 16: 831–838.

Williams, W.M. 1894. A Vindication of Phren­ology. London: Chatto & Windus.

Homeopathy has remained one of the most controversial medical treatments in the world. It is based on the “like cures like” principle and the idea that serial dilution of a substance renders it not less but more potent. Both of these axioms of homeopathy lack biological plausibility (Sehon and Stanley 2010). Nevertheless, homeopathy was recently cited as one of “the most popular and widely used forms of medicine in the world” (Chatfield 2011).

Advocates of homeopathy argue that homeopathy’s “clinical effectiveness cannot be disputed” (Chatfield 2011). To prove their point, they produce evidence that seems to confirm this assumption (Fisher 2011). Critics tend to counter that these data are seriously flawed—so much so that they cannot be relied upon (Bewley et al. 2011).

The aim of this article is to critically evaluate the clinical research of the research group that, in recent years, has published most of the clinical research in homeopathy.

Table 1. Click for full-size PDF.

Methods

Medline searches were conducted to identify the team that, in the period between 2005 and 2010, had published more original, clinical research in home­o­pathy than any other group world­­wide. Subsequently, all their publications were obtained and read in full. Data were extracted according to pre-defined criteria (Table 1). Each article was then critically evaluated.

Results

The most prolific research group in this area was identified to be from Berlin. Within the last five years, this team published a total of eleven clinical studies (Brinkhaus et al. 2006; Keil et al. 2008; Teut et al. 2010; Witt et al. 2005a; Witt et al. 2009a; Witt et al. 2005b; Witt et al. 2008; Witt et al. 2009c; Witt et al. 2009b; Witt et al. 2010; Witt et al. 2011) (Table 1). The articles refer to randomized clinical trials and cohort studies published in both conventional (n=7) and alternative medical journals (n=4). Most of the articles have major limitations, which will be discussed below.

Discussion

Homeopathy is not an area of buoyant research activity; the fact that one center published eleven clinical studies of homeopathy within five years is re­markable. The eleven publications fall in three categories: randomized clinical trials (RCTs); cohort studies without controls; cohort studies with controls. These will be discussed in turn.

Three RCTs of homeopathic arnica were published in one single article (Brinkhaus et al. 2006). They all in­cluded patients undergoing arthroscopic knee surgery and all used change in knee circumference after surgery as the primary outcome measure. The first study included 227 patients with arthroscopy, the second thirty-five patients with artificial knee joint implants, and the third fifty-seven patients with cruciate ligament reconstructions. No power calculations were provided. The first two RCTs showed no significant effect of peri-operative homeopathic arnica D30 compared to placebo. The third RCT did demonstrate a significant reduction of 1.8 percent. The authors also mention a post-hoc pooled analysis of all three RCTs that revealed a borderline significant effect (p=0.04). They conclude that “patients receiving arnica showed a trend toward less post-operative swell­ing compared to patients receiving placebo” (Brinkhaus et al. 2006) and recommend that the observed effects “seem to justify the use of homeopathic arnica in cruciate ligament reconstruction” (Brinkhaus et al. 2006). The authors did not critically discuss the clinically irrelevant reduction in knee circumference. The stated aims include investigating the safety of homeopathic arnica, yet the sample size is far too small for identifying rare adverse effects. No conflicts of interest were mentioned in the article (Brinkhaus et al. 2006).

This cohort study was submitted to a multitude of analyses that (so far) have been published in a total of seven articles (Teut et al. 2010; Witt et al. 2005b; Witt et al. 2008; Witt et al. 2009c; Witt et al. 2009b; Witt et al. 2010; Witt et al. 2011). The first two of them refer to the results at year two (Witt et al. 2005b), the third at year eight (Witt et al. 2008). The stated aims of the two- and eight-year follow up are, however, remarkably different (Table 1). The authors recruited 103 primary care practices in Germany and Switzerland employing homeopathy. All patients consulting the homeopathic physician for the first time were included regardless of diagnosis. About 68 percent of the patients “believed” in homeopathy. The main outcome measures were patients’ and physicians’ assessment of complaints. The questionnaire used for children had been validated, but the other outcome measures had been developed by the researchers themselves and had not been formally validated. All patients underwent an initial consultation by their homeopathic doctor lasting two hours on average.

Despite the multiple publications, only scant details were provided in the articles about the actual treatments administered. In one article, “recording all treatments” was mentioned in the meth­ods section, but the results did not provide these details (Witt et al. 2011). Half of the patients also consulted non-study physicians who were not necessarily homeopaths (Witt et al. 2005b). In the article reporting the eight-year follow-up (Witt et al. 2008), the authors state that “all physicians were completely free to choose a treatment”; presumably this included conventional therapies as well.

Despite the fact that patients had been recruited regardless of their medical condition, the conclusions of one of the articles refer to “patients with chronic diseases” (Witt et al. 2005b). The authors stress repeatedly that cause and effect cannot be inferred in a study of this nature. Yet, they repeatedly imply causal inferences, for example: “younger patients and those with more severe disease appear to benefit most from homeopathic treatment” (Witt et al. 2005b); “the effect must not be attributed to homeopathic treatment alone” (Witt et al. 2008) (implying that at least part of it can be); “fully cured: 12.2%” (Witt et al. 2011); “under homeopathic treatment the severity of the disease and the quality of life im­proved substantially, which supports the ‘whole person’ approach prevailing in contemporary homeopathy”; “homeo­pathic medical therapy may play a beneficial role in the long-term care of older adults with chronic diseases” (Teut et al. 2010).

The subsequent publications of this study relate to subgroups of patients with specific conditions at the two-year follow-up (Teut et al. 2010; Witt et al. 2009c; Witt et al. 2009b; Witt et al. 2010; Witt et al. 2011) (Table 1). The two-year follow-up results were published in two strikingly similar articles (Becker-Witt et al. 2004; Witt et al. 2005b). One of them falls outside the reporting period of the present analysis (Becker-Witt et al. 2004), and it is therefore only mentioned in the discussion of my analysis. In none of these articles was the disease in question diagnosed according to rigorous criteria. Even though sample sizes were often low (Table 1), the authors believe their results are “representative” (Witt et al. 2011).

All of these publications report highly encouraging results for homeo­pathy. The possibility that these findings might not be due to the treatment but caused by the natural history of the disease, regression toward the mean, placebo effects, the therapeutic relationship, other context effects, or a mixture of any of these factors is repeatedly mentioned but then either dismissed or deemed unlikely. In some instances, even the stated aim of the article seems to imply causality: “evaluate ... effects of homeopathic treatment” (Witt et al. 2011), “our study was designed to evaluate homeopathic treatments” (Witt et al. 2011), “evaluating homeopathic treatment” (Witt et al. 2009b), “to evaluate ... effects of an individualized homeopathic treatment” (Witt et al. 2010). Conflicts of interest were often not mentioned, but if they were, none were declared. Some of the articles in this series stated that the research was funded by the Carstens Foundation, an organization well-known for its pro-homeopathic stance.

The third category of articles (Keil et al. 2008; Witt et al. 2005a) is based on comparative cohort studies. For the first of these investigations, 493 patients with five selected chronic conditions were recruited by 101 homeopathic and fifty-nine conventional study physicians. These patients had chosen homeopathic and conventional healthcare according to their own be­liefs and preferences. Therefore, the two groups yielded numerous significant differences at baseline, e.g., conventional patients were seven years older, had used more medical services in the past, and were more likely to be male. Half of the homeopathic cohort used conventional treatments in addition to homeopathy. Only scant details were provided about the treatments ad­ministered in each group.

The main outcome measures in­cluded a non-validated symptom score, quality of life, and overall costs. The latter was only available for 38 percent of patients, which seems to invalidate any conclusions regarding cost. Yet the authors fail to discuss this point critically and present these data as valid. The results seem to indicate that homeo­pathy “had a better overall outcome compared to ... conventional treatment” (Witt et al. 2005a). The obvious fact that this could be due to a range of factors, including the lower age of these patients or the additional attention by homeo­paths, is not critically discussed.

The data of the same study were submitted to a subgroup analysis of 118 children suffering from eczema (Witt et al. 2005a). In this paper, the authors again imply causal inferences that, due to the study design, are not warranted, e.g., “the extent of the improvement was significantly different, in favour of homoeopathically treated patients” or “... it is noteworthy that the outcome was at least similar (by patients’ assessment) or significantly superior (by physicians’ assessment) to conventional treatment” (Keil et al. 2008). Again, the study is presented as though it was a comparison of homeo­pathy with conventional care, while it was, in fact, a comparison of homeopathy plus conventional care versus conventional care alone.

Witt et al. also published a separate but similar comparative cohort study with children suffering from eczema (Witt et al. 2009a). Again, the parents had selected either homeopathic or conventional based on their beliefs. Consequently, there were multiple baseline differences between the relatively small groups (n=48 and 87). Only scant details were provided about the treatments used in both groups. In particular, it is unclear to what extent the homeopathic physicians also employed conventional treatments. Neither was it clear on what basis the physicians decided to include some patients and exclude others. The primary outcome measure was a validated symptom score administered by blinded evaluators. The results showed no inter-group differences at six or twelve months, but a graph provided in the article depicts a steeper decline of the symptom score in the homeopathy group. The costs for homeopathic patients were about twice of those of the control group. Closer inspection of the results reveals that, because the homeopathic group was more severely ill at baseline, the apparent improvement in this group might have been due to a more pronounced regression toward the mean. Yet this possibility was not discussed by the authors of this paper.

This critical analysis is, of course, limited by the fact that only the publications of one research group were scrutinized. Thus, generalizations across the field of homeopathy are not permissible. Nevertheless, my evaluation suggests numerous flaws in the design, conduct, and reporting of clinical research in homeopathy recently published by the most prolific research unit in this area. It also reveals multiple publications of similar data, which might be regarded as ethically debateable. Most important, it points to a phenomenon that, according to my experience, seems to be common in this line of investigation (Ernst 2010): relatively weak data tend to be over- or misinterpreted to such an extent that the casual reader of such publications can be seriously misled. Consequently, homeopathy appears to have clinical effects which, with critical analysis, can be attributed to bias or confounding.

Future research in this area should be more rigorous and readers of biased research papers should apply appropriately critical assessments.n

References

Becker-Witt, C., R. Ludtke, T. E. Weisshuhn, et al. 2004. Diagnoses and treatment in homeopathic medical practice. Forsch Komple­mentarmed Klass Naturheilkd. 11: 98–103.

Bewley, S., E. Ernst, J. Garrow, et al. 2011. The evidence for homeopathy is not positive: A rapid response to Bewley, S., On behalf of N. Ross, A. Braillon, E. Ernst, et al. Letter: Advice on homoeopathic products: Clothing naked quackery and legitimising pseudoscience BMJ 2011; 343:doi:10.1136/bmj.d5960.

Brinkhaus, B., J.M. Wilkens, R. Lüdtke, et al. 2006. Homeopathic arnica therapy in patients receiving knee surgery: Results of three randomised double-blind trials. Com­ple­mentary Therapies in Medicine 14(4): 237–246.

Chatfield, K. 2011. Progress in the placebo debate for homeopathy? Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 17(8):663–664.

Ernst, E. 2010. Classic flaws in clinical CAM research. Focus on Alternative and Comple­mentary Therapies 15(3):207–209.

Fisher, P. 2011. Homeopathy: A rapid response to Bewley, S., On behalf of N. Ross, A. Braillon, E. Ernst, et al. Letter: Advice on homoeopathic products: Clothing naked quackery and legitimising pseudoscience BMJ 2011;343:doi:10.1136/bmj.d5960.

Keil, T., C.M. Witt, S. Roll, et al. 2008. Homoeopathic versus conventional treatment of children with eczema: A comparative co­hort study. Complementary Therapies in Medicine 16(1): 15–21.

Sehon, S. and D. Stanley. 2010. Applying the simplicity principle to homeopathy: What remains? Focus on Alternative and Comple­mentary Therapies 15(1): 8–12.

Teut, M., R. Lüdtke, K. Schnabel, et al. 2010. Homeopathic treatment of elderly patients—a prospective observational study with follow-up over a two year period. BMC Geriatrics 10: 10.

Witt, C., T. Keil, D. Selim, et al. 2005a. Outcome and costs of homoeopathic and conventional treatment strategies: A comparative cohort study in patients with chronic disorders. Complementary Therapies in Medicine 13(2): 79–86.

Witt, C.M., B. Brinkhaus, D. Pach, et al. 2009a. Homoeopathic versus conventional therapy for atopic eczema in children: Medical and economic results. Dermatology 219: 329–340.

Witt, C.M., R. Lüdtke, R. Baur, et al. 2005b. Homeopathic medical practice: Long-term results of a cohort study with 3981 patients. BMC Public Health 5: 115.

Witt, C.M., R. Lüdtke, N. Mengler, et al. 2008. How healthy are chronically ill patients after eight years of homeopathic treatment? Results from a long term observational study. BMC Public Health 8: 413.

Witt, C.M., R. Lüdtke, and S.N. Willich. 2009b. Homeopathic treatment of patients with dysmenorrhea: A prospective observational study with 2 years follow-up. Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics 280(4): 603–611.

———. 2010. Homeopathic treatment of patients with migraine: A prospective observational study with a 2-year follow-up period. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 16(4): 347–355.

———. 2011. Homeopathic treatment of patients with psoriasis—a prospective observational study with 2 years follow-up. European Journal Acta Dermatologica Venereological 23(5): 538–543.

———. 2009c. Homeopathic treatment of children with atopic eczema: A prospective observational study with two years follow-up. Acta Dermatologica Venereologica 89(2): 182–183.