There’s two things the general public are guaranteed to be concerned about: their health and the contents of their wallets. Yet somehow we are drawn to claims that you can make your thighs thin via a tube of goop and eagerly purchase promises of perfect complexions through using gunk best slapped on with a spatula.

Just look at any of the millions of products on supermarket shelves worldwide touting legally defensible scientific-sounding advertising gibberish (with no explicit claims as to what exactly the “life-enhancing collagen” will do for your dead hair follicles). Skepticism and questioning the pseudoscience in cosmetics should go together like the products’ endless promises of long-life and perfect skin. With that in mind, I set off to conduct a series of interviews over several months on this topic, hoping to get some sensible advice as to what to do when making up my mind about makeup.

When talking to people for the episode of the Token Skeptic podcast (“On Myths and Makeup”), I tracked down representatives from the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia. While all of them encouraged a skeptical outlook, they all had slightly different takes on the cosmetic industry and how laws in their countries deal with the more questionable efforts to promote products.

For my interview with a representative of the United States, I spoke to Perry Romanowski. He’s a member of the Beauty Brains Podcast and the Chemists Corner website, where he reviews cosmetic products and solves consumer problems. Perry has written and edited numerous articles and books, taught continuing education classes for industry scientists, and is the author of the book Beginning Cosmetic Chemistry.

Perry Romanowski: It’s actually an area in skepticism that I don’t think is really analyzed that much. We don’t really look at consumer advertising, and at least I don’t know of other podcasts dedicated to consumer products and the kind of information that people are getting through advertising, and how they can be skeptical about those things.

Kylie Sturgess: Do you think people are naturally skeptical about cosmetic claims, or do we just lap it up and accept what’s being fed to us?

Romanowski: I think there’s kind of a dichotomy there. People don’t want to know the truth. People actually want to buy the story. But I think in buying the story, they sort of accept that it is a story.

For example, you know, the best functional ingredients might be something like petrolatum, but nobody wants to buy a petrolatum-featuring lotion; what they’d rather have is an aloe vera lotion. So what the companies are going to do is create the best working lotion, but then they’ll drop in some aloe vera because it’s the glitz and the story that people really are ultimately going to buy.

Sturgess: Do you think that people have overly high expectations of what cosmetics can do for them?

Romanowski: Some people do have unreasonably high expectations, yes. I mean, it is sad to me when I see people spending hundreds of dollars on beauty products which I know are not going to work any better than something that would’ve cost them five dollars. But if you put it in the right packaging, you put the right story, have a dermatologist behind it saying it’s going to work better… that is enough to convince people to buy a product for an amount of money that they don’t really need to spend.

Sturgess: What’s some of the best advice that you give to people when they’re heading towards the cosmetic counter, some of the key terms that we should be more skeptical about?

Romanowski: Well, if you look at the United States (and I think it’s pretty much true around the world) we have a law here where it says you cannot lie in advertising. So you can say whatever you want about your product—you just can’t lie. Some of the beauty claims, the way the things are worded, give an impression of a meaning that maybe isn’t there.

For example, the marketing people, when creating an anti-aging product, they may say something like, “Rejuvenex” or something like that, and that’s just a made-up word. The way that the claim is written, they’ll use the words, “With Rejuvenex.” So they’ll say, “This product moisturizes your wrinkles with Rejuvenex.” The way that they write the claim implies that the Rejuvenex actually does something—but it doesn’t, really, if you look at the way the sentence is written. So it’s a little bit complicated, and that’s one of the ways that people can trick you.

Another thing to look for is when you see the word unique. Pretty much anybody can use the word unique in their advertising, because if you made the product, it is unique to you, so... But it doesn’t really mean anything.

You know, another thing that doesn’t really mean anything is when you see a claim about “cruelty-free” or “not animal-tested.” It’s a big area that people are concerned about. But the truth is you can say “not animal-tested” as long as you didn’t personally test the product on animals. Now, you could’ve had all your raw material suppliers do all the testing using animals, but you still can say that you didn’t do it. So you should be wary of those kinds of claims too.

Sturgess: Just how ludicrous can advertising about cosmetics get?

Romanowski: Well, anti-aging is probably one of the biggest areas for cosmetics where you see products that say that they work as well as a facelift, and this is absolutely untrue. There’s no way that a topical product will work as well as surgery. I don’t care how much money you spend on it, it just doesn’t work that well!

Sturgess: So what’s the legislation like in the USA? You mentioned that there are requirements in terms of advertising; is there a difference between federal and state level?

Romanowski: As far as it goes, not really. The cosmetic industry is regulated in a variety of ways. Mostly it’s self-regulated in the United States. But we have to follow the laws of the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration. And you have to follow the FTC [Federal Trade Commission], which talks about the advertising. But the industry is largely self-regulated, and it has worked. As far as producing a safe product, it has worked rather well for a lot of years, and that’s sort of why there hasn’t been any push for more regulation. But, you know, cosmetic companies are interested in selling products and getting people to re-buy products, and so it is in their interest not to produce products that are dangerous!

Sturgess: Are women still targeted more than men by cosmetic products? I mean, historically, they clearly have been, but is there a growing trend for men to be drawn to the cosmetic counter?

Romanowski: Well, there absolutely is a push by the cosmetic industry to grow and segment. Every year, that’s always touted as the next hot segment. And the truth is I think it’s like pushing a rock up a hill, because it turns out that men mostly don’t buy cosmetics. There’s been small growth in the development of cosmetics for men in the market, but it just ends up that wives or girlfriends are the ones buying the products for them!

There has been some small growth in the market, but it has never caught on the way that people have thought it would. Cosmetic companies still focus on selling primarily to women, because women are the people who buy the products.

Sturgess: So what would you say is a good blanket strategy to adopt when you’re shopping for cosmetics? What should people be mindful about?

Romanowski: Well, the number one thing to do is to be skeptical and to know that the price of a product is not reflective of how well it’s going to work for you. So if you think you’re going to buy a really expensive product and you’re going to get the best-working one, that’s not necessarily true. Price is not reflective of how it works.

What I would suggest is that you go through and start with the lowest price that you feel comfortable paying and try products on that level. The truth is, most products are going to work and function pretty well because a lot of it is about the experience of using the product. So if you start at the lowest price that you feel like spending, and if those products don’t work for you, go up to the next level of pricing. Find a level of product that you like how it works and you feel comfortable spending that amount of money. And stay away from products that really cost a lot of money, because they aren’t working any better—it’s all just marketing.

SkeptiCal, a one day conference billed as Northern California's science and skepticism conference, was host to more than 260 skeptics at the DoubleTree Hotel in Berkeley, California on April 21, 2012. The convention day was split between speakers giving talks to all the conference goers and two breakout sessions, each of which had three options. Lunch featured live entertainment and there was a live skeptic poetry reading between talks. Altogether, there were approximately fifteen speakers and entertainers.

Conference Speakers

Dr. Sarah Strand's talk, "The Neurobiology of Religious Experiences," offered an explanation of out-of-body experiences. Out-of-body experiences (OBE) were explained in most cases as having the following characteristics: peace and connection to the universe, sense of release from one's body, movement toward a bright light down a dark tunnel, and a vision of a deity or people from one's life. OBEs may occur when the part of the brain that connects the right and left parietal lobes—the angular gyrus—experiences an interruption in activity. The perception of the space of our bodies (where our bodies start and end) is controlled by the left parietal lobe. The right parietal lobe controls the perception of space outside our bodies (the space after our bodies end). When the connection between right and left parietal lobe is disrupted, we can no longer differentiate between our bodies and the surrounding space. As a consequence, a person can experience the sensation of floating. People who have OBEs do not universally interpret them as religious; such an experience could simply be the result of a physiological difference in the sensitivity of one part of their brains. When stimulated, people with high sensitivity in their right temporal lobe see or feel a presence in the room more often than those with low sensitivity. Religious believers and non-theists both experience a sensed presence, the feeling that there is someone or something in the room, during an OBE. Sensed presence may be the neurological exemplar of religious experience. To summarize, we need not look outside our own skulls to explain an out-of-body experience because the answer is between our ears.

(In a follow up e-mail, Dr. Strand graciously offered her e-mail address to Skeptical Inquirer readers who have further questions. Contact Dr. Strand at scstrand@gmail.com.)

"Homeopathy: How Does It Work?" QR code sticker

Jay Diamond, outspoken international skepticism activist and the founder of Reason4Reason and the 10:23 Campaign, gave an impassioned talk about how to advance skepticism publicly and facilitated acts of activism during his talk. The audience attempted to overdose on a homeopathic remedy for insomnia made primarily of coffee (and water, of course), each person taking approximately fifteen doses in a small cup. (There were no reported cases of death or persons falling asleep during the conference.) Diamond encouraged the audience to take a QR code sticker and put it on the shelves of stores that sell homeopathic remedies. He also led a twitter bombing of Pauley Perrette, who plays forensic scientist Abby Sciuto on NCIS, because she participated in an anti-bullying campaign with self-proclaimed psychic John Coffey.

Executive Director of Chabot Space and Science Center Alex Zwissler provided a light-hearted examination of the rational and irrational aspects of belief in his talk, "How Do We Know What to Believe." Zwissler combined important insights into the reason's behind people's choice to believe with disarming, witty slides—featuring such captions as "Stand back, there is science in this shit"—and stories of nuclear scientist climate change deniers. Zwissler even presented a belief equation: If A is true, then B and C must follow. In this equation, skeptics spend most of their time worrying about proving A but most people are more concerned about B and C. Before a lengthy and at times hilarious Q&A session, Zwissler left the audience with the question, "What beliefs would you be willing to change in order to get others to change their beliefs?" His talk in five words: Be smart and speak gently.

Television skeptic, world class soprano, and cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Indre Viskontas's talk "The Allure of Mystery: Why Debunking Falls Flat" outlined the value of story when trying to get people's attention and change their minds. Viskontas explained that people generally remember stories better than they remember facts. Specifically, if given a list of facts and a list of myths, after a short time people tend to misremember some of the myths as facts. An interesting aspect of her talk was a brief explanation on what skeptics often do wrong; in essence, Viskontas encouraged skeptics to employ storytelling when it is important to the speaker that the listeners remember the content or change their beliefs.

Dr. Alison Gopnik's eye-opening and adorable talk, "The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us about the Truth," offered some insight into our own minds by unveiling the minds of children and the value of immaturity to an intelligent species. Using a clever arrangement of Ping-Pong balls of two different colors, Gopnik's graduate students were able to ascertain that babies can do basic statistical reasoning by indicating when something unexpected happened. Children will override their experience for what they are told. Researchers gave children a strange toy that did several things and made various noises. When a child was asked to figure the toy out, the child would seek out its functions. If the child was told that one of the toy's functions was what that toy does, then the child would not seek out the toy's other functions. Succinctly: Hey teacher, leave them kids alone.

Mentalist and former James Randi Education Foundation Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge protocol tester Jonny Zavant showed off whimsical works of trickery and flimflammery with his assistant Caroline. The highlight of the performance was when we learned that "Roar is dinosaur for I love you."

Breakout Sessions

A note on breakout sessions: Since there were three going on at one time, it was not possible to attend them all. I attended two.

Morning Session

Not covered: "This Week in Science" Live Podcast by Dr. Kiki & Justin and "Extreme Weather: World Temperature Records" by Christopher C. Burt.

"Vaccinate Your Damn Kids" by Elyse Anders, the founder of the Women Thinking Free Foundation and Hug Me! I'm Vaccinated Campaign, encouraged people to vaccinate their kids. She addressed concerns of adult vaccination and arguments presented by anti-vaxxers, and participated in a lengthy question and answer session. In the back of the room, the City of Berkeley's Health Department offered free Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis/whooping cough) vaccines and Anders encouraged everyone whose vaccinations were out-of-date (or who thought they might be) to get vaccinated. Approximately 12% of conference goers did their part to keep up a strong herd immunity by getting vaccinated.

Afternoon Session

Not Covered: "This Year the World Will End—Or Will It?" by David Morrison and "Fear, Magic and Death: My Escape from Wooville" by Kernan Coleman.

In "Grassroots Skepticism" Brian Thompson, the Field Coordinator for the James Randi Educational Foundation, led a discussion about how to successfully start and maintain a group for skeptics. In it, he encouraged skeptics who want start a group to first see if other groups exist because it is easier to join or take over an existing dead group than to start a new one. Thompson advised a founder to consider the focus of the group: educational, social, activism, or all of the above. When an outsider wanders into a group, Thompson advised that skeptics go out of their way to be nice, like Mormons—whom he called "sneakily nice."

To Better Hear a Skeptic-Do You Have a Solution?

"Now in a class of twenty five, I have ten that are not vaccinated."
"I worry about my friends who think that using these remedies will treat them."
"How do we get people to stop believing in woo?"
"She is my hero."
"I get extra credit for being here."
"I wanted to meet like-minded people."
"My family does not know I am skeptical of religion."
"Now they are saying that vaccines have parts of aborted fetuses in them."

In the hallway between talks; in the seats while waiting for a speaker to get started; and during the question and answer section of a presentation, a careful observer could see what conventioneers were hoping to get out of SkeptiCal 2012: satisfying and practical solutions. For many, advice was needed to address pressing and frustrating concerns. Others' reasons were as personal as meeting a hero or getting a better grade. The specific issues that brought conventioneers to SkeptiCal were nearly as diverse and numerous as the convention-goers themselves; yet almost every question and conversation could be whittled down to "I have a problem. Do you have a solution?"

During Anders's talk, often exasperated and obviously extremely concerned people who feared the consequences of not finding a solution posed questions to her. A teacher from California's Central Valley—a generally poorer and more conservative area in California—explained the changes in her classroom to the group during the question and answer portion of Anders's talk.

"Ten years ago, I only had one child who was not vaccinated in my class. They were a Christian Scientist or something. Now in a class of twenty five, I have ten that are not vaccinated."

The teacher went on to explain that her friends and the parents of her students alike flood her inbox with e-mails that contain pseudo-scientific and fear-mongering information about vaccines. She reported that these concerns keep changing: first, parents were concerned that their children would develop autism due to mercury poisoning from thimerosal; then they were worried that their children were receiving too many medications at once; then the fear was of toxins; and now a rumor that vaccinations are made of parts of aborted fetuses is frightening a new population of poor religious conservatives into refusing to vaccinate their children.

Even after sitting down with parents and explaining vaccines, this teacher could not persuade them to vaccinate their children. Several disappointing attempts to set them straight failed and she did not know how to effectively convey the safety of vaccines to them.

Anders replied, "We can say the Lancet retracted the 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that showed a connection between vaccines and autism. They don't care about that. When I went to get my child vaccinated, I had a moment of terror and thought-what if I'm wrong? And I know better."

Audience members chimed in with advice on how to send information to the worried parents, ideas on how to combat the parents' emotional concerns, along with words of support. Helpful websites—including http://www.hugmeimvaccinated.org—were also discussed.

Sheldon Helms, psychology professor at Ohlone College, Bay Area Skeptics Board Member, and SkeptiCal 2012 event planner, wanted to inspire his students to attend science and psychology talks they might not see elsewhere. (One of his many hats is adviser to Ohlone's psychology club.)

"The majority of my students who came to SkeptiCal were members of the Ohlone College Psychology Club," said Helms. "They were very excited about the fact that the conference had so many topics related to psychology and social science in general, and voted to use club funds to pay for their registration as a field trip. I offered my other students extra credit to encourage them to attend, and many did so. I would estimate that about thirty of my students attended, and at least seventeen of those were Psychology Club members."

In a follow up e-mail about the conference, Helms explained the impact the conference had on his students: "I have no doubt that my students benefited from being at SkeptiCal. … After returning to my classes, my students who attended were abuzz with excitement about the speakers they heard, the people they met, and the camaraderie they felt being there."

It probably comes as no surprise that after a desire to learn something new, fellowship and camaraderie may be the single most sought-after aspect of SkeptiCal 2012. Being a skeptic can be lonely and isolating; outside of online communities, it can be hard to find a supportive ear. Skepticism often puts the skeptic at odds with the harmful yet deeply-held personally-identifying beliefs (e.g., I am a healer because I do reiki) of otherwise decent people. Many skeptics feel an obligation to engage woo because of its potential harms. Even those who do not actively engage it may find their personal value of rational thought or admiration of science attacked, dismissed, or devalued, even by their families.

Numerous people who were interviewed refused to give their names out of fear that their loved ones would find out they are skeptical. Some had family members and friends who celebrated woo, while others who had become extremely skeptical of religion feared being disowned if their skepticism became public knowledge. Some expressed a frustration at finding a skeptical or skeptic-friendly romantic partner.

In his talk, Brian Thompson asked the crowd why they were in a group or why their skeptical groups started. The overwhelming answer was that people were lonely and wanted to find like-minded people. Thompson summarized their answers: loneliness.

A perceived failure to live up to a duty to protect, a feeling of inadequate persuasive arsenal to attack these ideas effectively (how do we convince people to stop believing in woo), fear, and isolation create a frustrated, marginalized, and often lonely population needing to connect with others of a like mind for emotional recharging and idea exchange.It is no surprise that so many conversations at the conference revolved around meeting other skeptics, having a friendly ear to bounce ideas off of, and trying to develop ideas with people supportive of and familiar with the scientific thought process.

Eddie Scott Horsfall performed skeptic-inspired songs during the lunch break for the crowd, but his reason for coming was not solely musical. "I want a sense of community, and to be around like-minded people."

Horsfall was seeking other people who shared the sentiment that "The universe we live in is explainable and understandable through science and that's awesome!"

Similarly, Helms wanted to show his students a community of people who value critical thought:

...the impetus for encouraging them to attend was to expose them to information about psychology, other sciences, and critical thinking in general. Equally important, however, was that they do this in an atmosphere where they would be surrounded by like-minded people who are also interested in those topics. We live in a world that openly discourages critical thinking and that, all too often, disparages those who seek an education. One of the best antidotes to that negativity is to gather together with others who think like you do, and whose behavior sends the message that it's not only okay to be interested in science, but actually cool.

We might take away from SkeptiCal 2012 that in order to persuade people to re-examine their beliefs, it is necessary to tell a story that illustrates the facts without confusing the audience with comparisons to untruths—in other words, stories that convey realities without explicitly outlining them. Once minds turn to skepticism and are convinced of their mistakes in method of thought or belief, their irrational needs do not evaporate. Open skepticism is often adversarial and heated; its products bounce off of closed minds more often than they seep into open ones. Skeptics may grow thicker skins, use more energy in thought, and seek truth before good feeling, but skepticism is not immunity to feeling the sting of failure, the pain of rejection, and or the burden of worry. Skeptics, just like everyone else, need support, camaraderie, and acceptance.

The answer may be to follow Brian Thompson's advice to be sneakily nice—most of the time.

Links

SkeptiCal 2012: http://www.skepticalcon.org/

Sarah Strand: http://sites.google.com/site/strandpsychology/about-me

Jay Diamond: https://twitter.com/#!/jaydiamond

Reason4Reason: http://reason4reason.org/

10:23 Campaign: http://www.1023.org.uk/

Pauley Perrette: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauley_Perrette

Chip Coffey: http://www.chipcoffey.com/

Alex Zwissler: https://twitter.com/#!/alexzwissler

Chabot Space and Science Center: http://www.chabotspace.org/index.htm

Indre Viskontas: http://www.indreviskontas.com/

Alison Gopnik: http://www.alisongopnik.com/

This Week in Science Live Podcast: http://www.twis.org/

Brian Thompson: http://www.amateurscientist.org/

Sheldon Helms: http://www.ohlone.edu/people/shelms/

Here are some typical “facts”:

• Bigfoot has been spotted all over the world, often in wooded and mountainous areas.
• Bigfoot is an omnivore, eating plants, nuts, berries, fish, deer, and other animals.
• Bigfoot is shy. He just likes to be around others of his own kind but not around people.
• Since Bigfoot doesn’t want to be noticed or photographed, he is hard to spot and difficult to capture on film.
• He is curious, aware of people, and can stealthily avoid them.
• Bigfoots talk to each other by making loud howls across long distances or by wood knocking.
• Bigfoot throws rocks at people to scare them away. He isn't mean, just territorial.

How do they know these things? I asked the site owner. My comment got rejected and my question was never answered. Did I cross a line? I just wanted a reference. Apparently, that was too much to ask.

Self-styled Bigfoot researchers make claims that suggest they know more about Bigfoot than Bigfoot might know about himself. They can tell me what Bigfoot likes and doesn’t like, where he sleeps at night, how he avoids detection, and how he communicates. They tell the public that Bigfoot makes those sounds they hear at night. They find locations where a Bigfoot passed through or slept or built a shelter. These researchers even know about Bigfoots’ “culture”—what they do with their dead relatives, how they can fool humans. But apparently they don't know enough to catch one.

Fact? You Keep Using that Word But I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means

Perhaps there is confusion over what exactly is meant by “fact.” That word doesn't have a hard and fast definition, but rather one that is based on how the statement is verified—from universal on the left end to personal verification on the right. A scientific fact is at the extreme left end. It is incontrovertible, verifiable to anyone who wants to check it. Facts are the building blocks of theories that describe how nature works.

A more everyday usage of the term “fact” is in the middle: a statement that can be confirmed to the point where the consensus will be that it is true, it really occurred, or it is certainly the case. That infers that there was some process undertaken to establish some basis for what is stated. We accept a lot of things as facts not because we have personally verified them but because others probably have and/or because it is reasonable to accept those facts as true.

On the extreme right side is a fact based on personal verification. “Fact” is used as a label for a statement that a person very much wants to believe or believes to be true. It's a fact in that person’s mind because he or she has accepted it completely: “I know this is true. I’ve seen it.” You probably won't be able to sway that person’s belief with any counter facts of your own. Religious facts are in this category.

Squatchy Facts from the Bigfoot Experts

Matt Moneymaker (of the Bigfoot Field Research Organization [BFRO] and Finding Bigfoot TV show) and I once got into a comical yet revealing Twitter exchange regarding his statement of facts. The exchange began when he posted these statements (that I interpreted as a matters-of-fact on his part):

MattMoneymaker1: Only 2 threats to human safety: Some throw rocks & some vehicle collisions with deer at night are caused by bigfoots November 17, 2011

In response to another user, he continued:

MattMoneymaker1: … IN SOME PLACES they spook deer to run into traffic at night, then pick up the roadkill afterward. Makes hunting easier. November 17, 2011

Here I go again:

DoubtfulNews: How do you know? December 3, 2011

MattMoneymaker1: @DoubtfulNews You will come understand how I know, albeit gradually. December 3, 2011

Ah, so the truth will be revealed to me. Revelation is a way of knowing different than science. It’s one I don’t use too much since it’s historically unreliable. But cryptozoologists (who study Bigfoot and other mystery creatures) and paranormalists seem to like it. It provides great flexibility in “knowing.”

Here are more claims from Matt on Twitter:

What do you mean "we" can't find their droppings? Do you look for them? BFRO members have found BF droppings many times. February 17, 2012

...Squatch todlers swing through trees like gibbons. Squatches r lk apes in many was. They r vry smart but very...[shy] July 5, 2011

Definitely some squatches in Indiana. Check out damned [sic] rivers near Huntington and Mt. Etna. Look 4 combo of deer and catfish. July 12, 2011

Hey #Rutland #Vermont ppl, u got a family of squatches living n Bird Mt WMA. We heard them knocking in there a few nights ago. Awesome place Apr 17, 2012

Squatches r using powerline cut between Jehova's Witness Hall outside Whitehall & north flank of Bird Mt. That is the route from Adirondacks Apr 17, 2012

Want to catch a Squatch? Here are some curious suggestions I bet you haven't heard before:

MattMoneymaker1: Got a howling BF near your home/cabin at night? Step outside w/ a pumpkin or watermelon during howling. Walk toward sounds, set it on a log. April 10, 2012

MattMoneymaker1: Whistle or sing as you carry the pumpkin or watermelon. Set it on a log somewhere dark and out of view of your home/cabin. Walk back inside. April 10, 2012

And then what happens? Despite looking a bit strange, I'd bet lots of people have tried this on Matt’s advice, yet we have no Bigfoot to show for it. Is it a fact that Bigfoot likes singing, squashes, and melons? I'm just bursting with questions about this.

Matt is always churning out such surprisingly specific details about Sasquatch. I refrain from asking each time “How do you know?” I suspect he is already annoyed with me and it’s tough to carry on an in-depth conversation in 140 characters or less. Conveniently, someone else asked and Matt tells the public he can prove it.

In a response to the question “How can you say that it is a well-known fact that BigFoot likes to throw rocks when you can't prove he's real?” (July 8, 2011) Matt replies:

MattMoneymaker1: We can prove "they" are real 2 anyone who wants 2 go into 1 of their cribs at night with us. We're not trying to catch one July 8, 2011

Plenty of people take him up on this offer. The BFRO runs sold-out camping expeditions into “squatchy” (Sasquatch-friendly) places. I don’t know how many people would say they found proof of Bigfoot on these trips but I haven’t seen any proof emerge. I get the impression that if you think Bigfoot is out there, everything is evidence of his presence. And the evidence is, again, of a personal nature.

Maybe all those things they say about Bigfoot are true (even though some are contradictory). But they aren't yet verified facts. We cannot verify Matt's facts because no one has documented conclusively that a Bigfoot/Sasquatch really exists nor has there been produced an actual body or body part for study or incontrovertible photo documentation. Bigfoot researchers have created a natural history of Bigfoot and pass it off to the public looking like a fact when it’s really a personal belief kind of fact, derived from personal observations or eyewitness reports.

Entire arrays of cryptids (mystery animals) are classified based on eyewitness descriptions from stories with no other corroborating evidence to support them. Examples of this speculative taxonomy are in so-called Field Guides or Handbooks to *insert any mystery thing here*. Such guides exist for lake monsters and sea serpents, Bigfoot and similar upright hairy man-like things, monsters (werewolves and the like), ghosts, vampires, little people (fairies and such), and all sorts of paranormal beings. They describe a wide range of creatures and their behaviors with (what looks to the reader like) facts. Most people are skeptical enough to view this literature as mostly entertainment but there actually are people that believe anything can exist, even magical creatures of folklore.

It's fine to speculate but when the whole premise of your field relies predominantly on anecdote-fueled interpretations, you are on thin ice making claims that there all these new animals are out there for us to find. Centuries ago, people knew facts about witches and demons, their behaviors, and reality. Historical natural history books had vivid descriptions of monstrous creatures. Here is one for the basilisk:

…he is king of serpents, and they be afraid, and flee when they see him. For he slayeth them with his smell and with his breath: and slayeth also anything that hath life with breath and with sight. In his sight no fowl nor bird passeth harmless, and though he be far from the fowl, yet it is burned and devoured by his mouth.

We never found anything that quite fit that description.

A Purpose Behind Manufacturing Facts

Any fact can be pulled out of the air when you are an expert in a field unconstrained by limits or rules, as is cryptozoology. Coming up with your own facts works well in the media and on TV shows because you can easily sound like you know what you are talking about. Most of the audience doesn't check your facts. These facts are repeated, catch on, and become public knowledge. This type of expert-looking testimony occurs not only on monster hunting shows but also on programming about UFO mysteries and especially on ghost hunting shows. Facts just spring up, fully formed, from imaginative speculation.

I have my own suspicion for why such manufacturing is so common today. It stems from the strong beliefs held by Bigfoot researchers and their need to justify their continued work and intellectual investment in their subject. Researchers get frustrated that not even one of these creatures can be found to unquestionably show the public they are real. They have to deliver to the public something to keep Bigfoot alive in their minds. The quest to find Bigfoot has gone on for so long that all the stories and hypotheses have woven themselves into an imagined biological sketch of Bigfoot. Researchers fit the debatable evidence they find into that framework and use it as inspiration to sustain and enhance belief about Bigfoot-like creatures.

Science isn’t such a house of cards. It’s built upon concepts we’ve already established to be true. Thinking that something ought to be one way is very different from something actually being that way. This important distinction is lost on wishful mystery hunters. Wishful thinking prevents them from seeking real world explanations for things like creature sightings, hauntings, and UFOs.

I often see comments that such TV shows are so silly, they should be labeled as comedy, that no one could believe they reflect reality. Skeptics often take a hard line against even the possibility of cryptids and see those handbooks and guides as fun entertainment. But consider this: many people around the world have formed paranormal investigation teams in response to ghost hunting shows on TV and people all around the U.S. have formed Bigfoot search groups. Do not underestimate the public buy-in to these activities. The more popular the topic becomes, the easier it is for people to accept.

Sure, Finding Bigfoot is clearly not a scientific expedition; it’s a TV show. Matt Moneymaker’s BFRO, however, labels itself “The only scientific research organization exploring the Bigfoot/Sasquatch mystery.” Matt himself is considered an authority (Note: he is trained in law, not science). Is this what people see as “scientific” enough to emulate? Indeed they do. And they buy those “facts” they are sold.

Comments on this story can be emailed to the author at shill@centerforinquiry.net

If you are at all familiar with modern American conspiracy theories, you will know something about the Denver International Airport (DIA). The main terminal, designed by Fentress Bradburn Architects and completed in 1995, is striking, cutting a serrated line in the sky, a visual echo of the surrounding mountains on the horizon.

Somehow, the conspiratorial world has convinced itself that, to use Richard Dreyfus’s phrase as he sculpts his mashed potatoes into a replica of the Devil’s Tower, the Denver International Airport “means something.” What exactly it means is unclear, but conspiracy theorists know its meaning is sinister. Numerous hypotheses about the facility’s real purpose have been proposed, most of them rooted in the assertion that the truth is to be found underground in the bowels of the airport. This element of the conspiracy seems to stem from a misinterpretation of events surrounding DIA’s construction. First is the extensive excavation, construction, and inexplicable (to conspiracy theorists) reburial of tunnels on the site, which now house the airport’s rail system. Second, cost overruns on the order of $2 billion raised eyebrows and left conspiracy theorists wondering where all that extra money was going.

The explanations that conspiracy theorists have offered range from the absurd to the even more absurd: DIA is the home of the global shadow government of Illuminati/Masons/New World Order; DIA is the site of a future FEMA concentration camp; it sits atop an underground city that is in turn connected to a network of other underground cities populated by aliens. One idea that seems be on the ascendance is an assertion made by governor-wrestler Jesse Ventura that DIA will be a refuge for global elites during a world-wide catastrophe, not unlike the “arks” seen in the almost unwatchable movie 2012.

According to conspiracy theorists, the key to discerning the conspiracy and understanding the real purpose of the airport is the artwork found throughout the building.¹ Two of the richest sources of clues are a pair of murals by Leo Tanguma, “The Children of World Dream of Peace” and “In Peace and Harmony with Nature,” both of which are found near the baggage claim area. These two pieces are diptychs, each consisting of a small panel and a much longer panel. While each smaller panel portrays a truly dystopian world of destruction and decay, the much larger panels display celebratory and vibrant symbolism suggestive of a utopian vision of the future.

On a recent long layover at DIA, I made a point of studying the Tanguma murals. I first came upon “The Children of the World Dream of Peace” and found it utterly enormous.

Details from “The Children of the World Dream of Peace”. Photos by Susan Gerbic

I stood back to see how people reacted to the mural. Most did not look up, but about one in 200 travelers would pause, shake his head, and move on. I approached one, a slim African American man who looked like he was in his late twenties. He agreed to an interview on the condition that I did not record his voice or give his real name. I will call him Jim.

“This is like a concentration camp,” he said, pointing to the smaller of the two panels in the diptych. And it’s true: the smaller panel looks a little like a poster for a Holocaust movie. A ghastly military figure in a gas mask dominates the scene, striking down a dove of peace with a vicious-looking scimitar. Behind him, a line of dispossessed people shuffles off endlessly into the distance. Jim pointed to the children lying on the ground near the feet of the faceless soldier. “I mean, who puts dead children in a painting? That’s sick.”

“I don’t think that they are dead, actually,” I said. “I think they are asleep.” I pointed out a little note painted into one corner of the mural, near the sleeping children. The note reads:

I was once a little child who longed for other worlds. But I am no more a child for I have known fear. I have learned to hate.... How tragic, then, is youth which lives with enemies, with gallows ropes. Yet, I still believe I only sleep today, that I’ll wake up, a child again, and start to laugh and play.

The quote is attributed to a fourteen-year old who died in December of 1943 at Auschwitz. “Look,” I began. “You see these sleeping kids? They are literally dreaming of a peaceful world.” All of the important themes of the piece, the contrast of war and peace and the dream motif, are introduced in the quote, serving as a key for interpreting the mural. “It’s all about yearning for peace,” I said.

Jim was doubtful. We drifted over to the other panel, and he pointed to all the children and noted that many carry weapons. “That makes them soldiers, right?”

“But they are taking the swords and beating them into ploughshares. That’s a biblical reference. It’s not subtle!” I laughed.

Jim shook his head. “That’s what they want you to think.” He pointed to the smiling, happy children. “See that? That’s the antichrist. The antichrist is going to promise us a world of peace, but he is going to give us that,” he said, gesturing toward the gray panel.

“How do you know this?” I asked, and he gave me some quotes from Revelation. But he finished with a curious statement: “Also, nobody who works here, if you ask them, will talk about the conspiracy.”

Finally, something that we can put to the test, I thought. “Do you want to go ask someone?”

He stepped back and crossed his arms, as if it had never occurred to him that someone might actually go ask. In a moment he shook his head. “No. No.” His unease was clear, and I told him I wouldn’t delay him any longer. I went to talk to the people at the information booth.

When I reached the booth, I asked the woman behind the desk if she could tell me about the conspiracy theories, and I’ll be damned if she wouldn’t talk to me about it! Was Jim right?

Not exactly. They gave me the contact information for the media office. It was clear by the way she rolled her eyes when I mentioned the conspiracy theories that I was not the first person to ask about them.

I headed over to see the other mural, “In Peace and Harmony with Nature.”

Details from “In Peace and Harmony with Nature”. Photos by Susan Gerbic

There I met traveller Matt Brown, a new resident of Denver who was encountering the murals of DIA for the first time. I asked him why he was interested in the murals.

“I was just interested because my dad just sent me an e-mail about some of these different murals, and I said that I didn’t even notice. So on my way back I’m going check [them] out and see what the deal is.”

“So, what’s your first impression?” I asked.

“I don’t see anything wrong with this one. I mean, peace and harmony with nature. There [are a] whole bunch of different nationalities and creatures. I don’t know what that is in the middle,” he said, pointing to a psychedelic-looking plant that dominates the middle of the mural. ”But it looks like that they are all having a good time.

“This [panel] over here,” he went on, “[is] a little different. There are flames up here, there’s a dead cheetah, and then a bunch of dead people. And so I don’t really know what to make this one is trying to say, to tell you the truth, but it’s pretty harsh!” he said, laughing.

“Is there some sort of Egyptian god of death somewhere also?” Matt asked me.

“Anubis?”

“That’s what I was told.”

I shrugged. “I’ve been told all sorts of things.” It turns out that the figure of Anubis was actually not part of the art collection at DIA. The figure was only a temporary exterior marketing display promoting “The Treasures of the Pharaohs” exhibit, which was at the Denver Art Museum from July 2010 to January 2011. It was not evidence that ancient mystery cults associated with the Masons were unabashedly announcing their resurgence.

Matt asked about the other mural’s location, and I showed him where it was at the other end of the terminal. When we reached it, I introduced myself to a young couple, Lauren and Tom. I asked Lauren what she thought.

“I’ve heard about these [murals],” she said, “but ... they have never caught my eye ’cause I was always on a mission to get to a plane. But today because we were here and just casually doing a pick-up without any time constraint, [so] I wanted to take notice. They’re very strange; they are kind of confusing. They’re...odd. Mass destruction and children and weapons...It makes no sense to me.”

“This statue guy over here,” Tom jumped in, “I mean, over here he’s in charge, and over here he’s dead.”

“I’ve seen little excerpts online about this thing,” Lauren said, “and it’s very strange and I’ve just never really been able to understand it. So this is really the first time I’ve looked at it in any kind of detail.”

“What do you think of the conspiracy theories that surround these?” I asked Lauren.

“I’ve heard a lot of different conspiracies, you know, preparing for mass destruction, that kind of thing, going underground. I’ve heard about those, especially about this airport.”

“So, what do you think about those?”

She paused. “Sure, why not? We’ve got NORAD not far from here. It makes sense that...”

Tom chimed in. “We’re at a high elevation here. So there is more room to dig, if you want. What better place to come to hide someone?”

“Wouldn’t NORAD’s presence make the area a potential target or at least a little more dangerous?” I asked.

“If you go down far enough, it doesn’t matter,” he replied. “Plus this is an airport, so if you have to fly Air Force One here for protection....”

“Well,” Lauren cut in, “I’m sure that there are plenty of locations which have underground cities and things in them.”

“Do you think of it as being a refuge for the President?” I asked.

Tom: “It could be. I mean, why not?”

Lauren: “I know they shut NORAD down a few years ago from having visitors, so....There’s probably places all over the world that have underground cities.

Tom: “If you can afford it, you can come up here and live. If you can’t, you’re screwed.”

I asked them why the conspirators had put so many hints around the airport if they wanted the secret city to remain secret.

“You just stand around here and look, and people don’t even stop and notice this,” Tom replied. “It’s blatant. It’s in your face. You walk right by it.”

Lauren nodded in grim agreement. “It’s denial, I guess.”

My layover in Denver was not long enough for me to hunt down all of the art associated with the conspiracy theories, so when I returned to Atlanta I contacted Matt Chasansky, the Art Program Manager at the Denver International Airport. I interviewed Matt and Jenny Schiavone, a representative from the DIA media office, in a conference call.

In recent years, I have seen lots of large art installations in airports like San Francisco’s and Atlanta’s. Is it a trend, and if so how does DIA fit into that trend?

Matt: Well, the way we fit into that trend is that we started the trend. When they began planning for the airport in the early 1990s, they very quickly gravitated to artists in the process in a very profound way, I think. There had been public art integrated into buildings before, but the Denver Airport was the first one to do it on such a massive scale. I think we had twelve artists in the room with the design team at the very early stages of the design of the airport, and the idea was to have these projects that are equally a part of the architecture and the experience made there. And that was in the early ’90s. It was one of the last fully built out airports before 9/11, and since then there’s been [an] interesting discussion about civic spaces and what that means, and art ... has been a big part of that [discussion]. But a lot of the airports, including Denver, are city buildings, municipal buildings, so in Denver that triggers a percent for art work. On the one hand, like I said, there is a push towards art in civic spaces, and on the other hand it’s a mandatory thing to put art in airports because of how we have designed our public art program.²

How were artists or works selected for the airport?

Matt: It’s never one person selecting artwork. We form selection panels in order to have community representation and transparency and democracy in deciding how these things go. It’s really a community-wide effort and never an individual deciding what art should be, how public money should be spent on art. So, when the airport was built, a series of these community panels were assembled project by project in order to decide who are the best to work with and then once identified the airport contracted with the individual artists and began the design process.³

Are those records public?

Matt: Yeah.... All of the public records are open to scrutiny.

Jenny: I don’t know where those public records live, but since we are a government agency we are part of the [Colorado] Open Records [Act]. So it’s certainly something we could help you find.⁴

Why has Leo Tanguma’s work attracted the attention of so many conspiracy theorists?

Matt: They are striking, and Leo Tanguma is known for social and political subject matter [which he portrays] in a very up-front manner. Not the least of which [are] his choices of color and his format and the way he brings the style, the approach of the WPA murals, and the Mexican visual realists to contemporary narrative. So all that comes together. As far as not being subtle in any way, I think that’s quite intentional just because what Leo chose to do, what he proposed to be in ... his two pieces. In one mural the subject matter was overcoming war, violence, and aggression. In the other [it was] was overcoming the challenges of the environment. In both cases, he felt that you can’t pull your punches on subjects like that. You don’t talk about war with images that are anything less than powerful and emotional and striking. In order for him to complete his narrative, what he gave us was a mural, in the case of “The Children of the World Dream of Peace,” a smaller panel on one side that is that metaphor for war and is very direct because its subject matter is dealt with in a very passionate way and the solution equally so. [In] the larger panel we see the children of the world gathering ... the swords of war and destroy[ing] them in the symbolic end of violence, [which comes from] a biblical verse, beating the swords into plowshares.... On the one hand I get it; when people say that they are very unsubtle works to have in an airport, that’s very true. The reason is not because of the airport or the way they were selected. The reason is because you’re dealing with serious subject matter here. You can’t do anything short of being very serious about his approach.

What conspiracy theories have you heard about the airport?

Matt: I think it’s more “what conspiracy theories haven’t we heard about the airport?” Basically, you name it. You name a conspiracy theory and somehow we seem to be connected to it.

It’s one of the exciting parts about the story, the culture, that has built up around these; … we can fit into pretty much any story you want to tell because the assumptions and the misinterpretations have gotten wilder and wilder.... It’s a very plastic narrative that’s been created. But probably the most common is that there’s an underground city and that it is a part of a network of underground cities that the government or some sort of shadow international government or aliens are building, depending on your perspective...or Masons.... DIA just seemed to fit that story.

I met a passenger who said that if you ask an employee about the conspiracy theory, they won’t tell you anything. I asked, and she didn’t.

Matt [laughing]: I know there’s no airport policy about not talking about the conspiracy theory. I think that some people are so flabbergasted by the attention that people are paying to that that they don’t know what to say and choose not to say anything.

What are the positive and negative aspects of having conspiracy theories associated with your collection?

Matt: The positive is that everyone talks about it. It’s a culture of itself now, and there’s always more discussion, people all around the world paying attention to this art collection. And once you get past the irreconcilable conversation of “Is there or is there not going to be an end of the world in 2012 and will DIA be the capital of the new world order” ... you can actually talk about what art means and how the artist conveys the information and how artists when they create and put their whole abilities into telling a story, they hand it over to the people looking at the art. And they really do sacrifice a lot of their own personal endeavor to what people bring to these sculptures, to these pieces of artwork. So that super valuable conversation about what public art is and how we should properly spend this money and how things are selected is really good to have. And that’s the big positive.

I think the negative is [the difficulty of knowing] how to educate people because the power of a single person with a blog taking a picture of a corner of one of our murals and interpreting that—that has so much more resonance than anything official that we could do, that telling the other side of the story is a big challenge.

How have you tried to tell that story?

Jenny: ...We have tried to use social media to our benefit in that area. We have a very popular Facebook page and we do get a lot of commenters who are conspiracy theorists and people who are clearly only following us because … they want to see what the Illuminati is up to, what the aliens are up to underneath the airport, that sort of thing. It’s been fun for us to open up that dialogue between the public and the airport, where we’ll go and post a photo and a short story about a new art work, and it’s fun to see the comments roll in. You may see a few comments that are accusing us of starting another conspiracy or playing into a conspiracy theory, but then immediately following that you’ll see a conversation starting with other fans who are trying to explain what the artwork is. That really goes even beyond our art program.

Would you host a piece of artwork that addressed the conspiracy theory?

Matt: We don’t really dictate what artists should do. The artists come to our selection panels proposals based on the nature of the site.... We want things to be very site specific and serious....The approach on how to spend the public money on the art is ... a serious undertaking.

Who runs the airport operation on a daily basis? Have you been to the areas singled out by conspiracy theorists?

Jenny: We definitely have, and I would say Matt has more so than me. [W]e’re a city agency, we’re part of the city and county of Denver. And the employees who run the airport are all City and County of Denver employees. We have about 1,100 employees here who make up our operations team, our maintenance team. Matt and I, our marketing, PR, and finance divisions, those are all City employees. [There are] another 30,000+ people who work out here for the airlines, concessionaires, and other vendors who do business with the airport. But in terms of who runs the airport, it’s essentially the City and County of Denver Department of Aviation. I have been in many if not all of the places that the conspiracy theorists are fond of “calling out,” and I’ve never seen anything that was even remotely suspicious looking. There have been [people] who have asked me that [question], and I have given them that same answer. [T]hey of course think that I am brainwashed and I’m supposed to say that, but I can 100 percent honestly say that.

Matt: It’s interesting, I can’t give a tour in the airport without at least one person attaching themselves to the tour and starting to ask questions about that. [R]eally it’s fascinating that there’s nothing that you can say. There’s not [any] evidence you can provide, there are no assurances you can give that the conspiracy theory is wrong, because ... obviously it’s going to be a cover up or brainwashing or chips installed in brains.

Where do you folks plan to be in December, oh, around the 21st?

Matt: I’m going to have a stock of food in my office, but not for any particular reason.

Jenny: I think I will be on Christmas vacation, but who knows?

Notes

1. For a typical taste of DIA conspiracy theories, see the Vigilant Citizen website, which specializes in misinterpreting artwork. ↩

2. According to the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, since 1988, Denver’s Public Art Program directs that “1% of any capital improvement project over $1 million undertaken by the City be set aside for the inclusion of art in the design and construction of these projects”. ↩

3. The complete process of selecting artwork for capital improvement projects is outlined in exquisite detail in a brochure produced by the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs, which can be downloaded in PDF format. For a full account of the process by which Tanguma’s murals and all the other works in the airport were selected, see pages 10–16. ↩

4. If you are in Denver and would like to examine the records relating to any of the art in the Denver International Airport, visit the Airport Public Record FAQ page. ↩

On my regular stop to see the newest beverages one day, I noticed a slick, thin black bottle. The label read “Spring water enriched with Fulvic Acid.” Intrigued, I bought the 16.9 ounce bottle for $1.89.

Time for a Taste Test

After giving the water a day to chill, I poured. I was shocked to see that it was not the bottle that was black: it was the water that looked like flat cola. Because I knew the product was water, not coffee or cola, the color of the liquid was slightly off-putting. Most people associate the color black with dirt or being “dirty,” while the clearness of water has an aesthetic appeal, indicating purity. By coloring the water black, this manufacturer encourages consumers to visit “the dark side.”

I tasted. I had been expecting an earthy or metallic flavor, but the water had no noticeable taste. Had I been blindfolded, I would have said that it was plain old water. After some research, I have concluded that this product is no more than fancy colored mineral water.

Designer bottled water seems like a huge waste of money. Yet it has been around for years, marketed with a bucketful of hype and sold at a premium price.

I prefer my water run through a charcoal filter (for purity), direct from my tap. Municipal water suppliers undergo regular standard testing to ensure quality at all times. Laws enacted by individual states are decent insurance that the states’ water sources and processing systems prevent unhealthy levels of contaminants in their drinking water.

But the regulation of bottled water is not as straightforward. In the U.S., the Federal Food and Drug Administration regulates bottled water as a food product, not as a water supply. Under federal law, manufacturers of bottled water are responsible for creating a safe product for consumption.

The “Blackground”: Fulvic and Humic Acids

Black water was placed on shelves in 2011 by two manufacturers, Blackwater and, shortly thereafter, the blk. brand. (A lawsuit alleging that blk. stole the idea for black bottled water from Blackwater followed the release of the blk. product.) A third brand, ECLIPSE, is slated to debut its black water this year in some trendy Vegas nightclubs. All three brands market essentially the same thing: natural spring water with added fulvic and humic acids. It is this proprietary mineral mixture that gives the water its black color.

But what are these fulvic and humic acids, and why would manufacturers add them to their water?

Humic substances result from the partial decomposition of plant materials under low oxygen conditions, such as those found in peat bogs and swamps. The composition of these substances varies, since the substances themselves are complex mixtures of different acids. Fulvic acids have lower molecular weights and higher oxygen contents than humic acids, and are unique in that they are able to travel across cell membranes.

Humic substances are the primary organic component of soil; they are used to make poor soil more nutrient-rich. Humic acids can also capture heavy metals such as copper, iron, lead, mercury, and zinc in their structure. [Reference] Currently, fulvic acid cannot be synthesized, but must be derived from material taken from humate mines.

By all accounts, fulvic and humic acids in water do not apparently pose health hazards—unless they are a sign of some other form of contamination. The FDA notes, however, bottled water in general has a good record of safety.

Yet why do manufacturers enrich their water with these substances? Well, that is where all the sciencey bits come in … and where we find some seriously sciencey—and not-so-sciencey—claims.

What’s in It and What’s Not

Black water manufacturers claim on their websites that black water contains about seventy minerals and trace elements. Each manufacturer has its own proprietary blend of minerals, so we don’t know exactly which minerals and trace elements are present in the water. Supposedly this mineral content creates a superior electrolyte with antioxidant properties that makes black water better for hydration than regular water. Since hydrate means “to add water,” I’m not sure how black water can be more hydrating than any other kind.

I assume the idea is that the added minerals give black water its superior ability to hydrate, yet we need so little of trace elements and minerals that we have no trouble obtaining them through our normal eating habits. In fact, overconsumption of these minerals and elements can be toxic to our systems.

According to the Blackwater website, current foods are not nutritious enough because crops are grown in nutrient-deficient soils with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides; the extra minerals from their beverage enhance all sorts of bodily functions. Such claims appeal not only to the naturalistic fallacy that organic products are somehow better for the body but also to what might be called the fallacy of the “good old days,” a time when food was better.

That’s bogus. Carrots today are no less nutritious than they were years ago. I could argue that our diet today is far more nutrient-rich than it was in the “good old days,” since we now have year-long access to food that was once seasonal or strictly tropical. What’s more, many foods are already enriched with extra vitamins and minerals.

Black water sites repeatedly use the words “perfect” and “balanced” to refer to the mineral content of their products. But what is “perfect,” and how do the manufacturers know? According to the label from ECLIPSE, its water contains 0 percent of the vitamins and minerals listed on the food label (iron, copper, magnesium, zinc, etc.). If the company’s special proprietary blend does not include these standard minerals, then what substances does it contain? There was no additional quality information on the bottle or on the company’s website regarding the minerals, metals, and other materials present in its water. Perfect and balanced seem arbitrary and meaningless: I need more than just this water to stay alive, so it is far from perfect!

I wondered, too, if the mineral content includes high levels of unwanted metals like mercury or arsenic. So, I contacted the companies to see how much information they would share about the content of their proprietary blends.

I requested water sample results from blk. and ECLIPSE to compare to drinking water standards established by the EPA for municipal water supplies. An email and Facebook wall post to blk. Beverages garnered no response from that manufacturer. ECLIPSE did reply to my email to say that they were in the process of obtaining water samples. That seemed odd since they have apparently bottled and marketed the stuff already: they don’t know what’s in it yet? Interestingly, ECLIPSE wanted to know with whom I was affiliated. (Perhaps a rival company?) When I said I was “independent,” I received no follow-up response.

On the other hand, the label on my favorite clear flavored water notes that water quality information is available by contacting the beverage company and even provides a phone number and website. Quite a black and white contrast!

Claims for Health Benefits

The Blackwater website has pages of hype about the benefits of its black water. It is worth reading through for all the examples of “sciencey-ness.”

Yet manufacturers of black water admit that research to support the supposed health benefits of black water is scant; what research has been conducted has focused on the benefits to plant and livestock growth in China and Europe, not to people, and not here in the United States. My Pub Med search confirmed this. Research papers on “fulvic acid supplement” returned 5 results; “humic acid supplement,” 11 results; and, in combination, the two items returned 3 results. By comparison, similar searches for calcium, vitamin D, or iron supplements returned 2,000–4,000 results each. The manufacturers of black water seem to have extrapolated from a few studies and gone beyond them into the land of anecdotes, testimonials, and imaginative tales of the benefits of their products. Another “fact” used to market black water products: Black water has a naturally high pH level of 9. Its low acidity, the black water people say, “balances natural bodily pH levels.” ECLIPSE water coined a new verb out of its water’s pH-balancing abilities, saying that its water “alkalines the blood faster than any other natural product on earth.” Whatever their meaning, drinking water will not affect your blood pH. This pH puffery is associated with alkaline diet claims that promote an alkaline body pH as a cure for cancer. None of these claims is supported by medical consensus.

Blk. does not provide an extensive list of health claims on its website (smart move), nor does the company claim that its product has cancer-curing properties; but it draws a definite connection between the product and cancer treatment. The Manzo-Laurita family obtained the idea for blk. water from a family who claimed it helped their mother beat breast cancer.

Miracles and Magic

A good indicator to stick a skeptical red flag on any product is that it is credited with treating a wide array of conditions. I found fulvic acid noted for all of the following: a potential treatment for benign (and some cancerous) tumors; a chelation agent for removing toxic metals; a metabolism booster; “a donor and acceptor free radical scavenger and antioxidant”; a corrector of cell imbalances and an aid in cellular regeneration; an antiviral; a destroyer of the HIV virus; a blood coagulant; a treatment for eye diseases, thyroid tumors, colds and asthma, diabetes, and tuberculosis; and a key to longevity and health. [Reference – PDF] No one product has yet been found that can realistically do all this.

Calling fulvic acid “the miracle molecule,” ECLIPSE water claims detoxifying properties due to fulvic acid’s ability to bind to metals. It also lists the typical claims that supplements make about sustaining the immune system and aiding the body in nutrient absorption. This places their water on a growing list of nutraceuticals, products with lower profits than pharmaceuticals but also far less clinical research to back them up.

The site Supreme Fulvic, which promotes fulvic acid as a dietary supplement, was especially effusive in its hype, stating that “fulvic acid has been discovered to be one of the most important miracles of life itself.” Of course, they add, doctors don’t want you to know about this “miracle of unparalleled proportions” because it would threaten the future profits of pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and health professionals.

This claim is a silly but common and faulty ploy of marketers. Doctors are not in business, however, to keep you sick regardless of the claims of conspiracy theorists.

Finally, Shilajit, a product that contains fulvic acid, is said to be associated with “magical” properties and part of the ancient yogis’ secrets of longevity and health.

So, black water marketers have taken the sciencey angle to target the new age and organic folks and the alternative medicine subscribers. All bases covered! But wait, they also appeal to real housewives. Laurita on Real Housewives of New Jersey says, "Scientists called it [fulvic acid] the miracle molecule because it’s so small." She added that drinking blk. water would make your hair, nails, and skin glow and could also help with hangovers. Wow! I bet it cleans my car too. What doesn’t it do?

Black water has a dark side, for sure. It’s a gimmick. Once you learn the sales pitch used to market useless dietary supplements or overpriced, overhyped food stuffs, you can begin to understand sciencey market-speak pretty easily. There is much of it in the organic aisle of the supermarket.

I can’t conclude that any of us needs fulvic/humic acid supplements, and there currently is no evidence I have found to support that the “miracle” fulvic acid does anything to benefit your health. I would predict that the oddness of the black water products and the price, combined with no observable benefits to the consumer, will likely result in this fad fading away. But give them a prize for their stylish, sciencey black marketing.

Have comments on this article? Send them to Sharon at shill@centerforinquiry.net. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @idoubtit.

“We could make a movie about just a simple biography of Randi and his background—but we’re a little more ambitious than that.”
—Documentary Filmmaker Justin Weinstein

It’s a funny thing that one of the most influential figures in skepticism has never had his life properly documented in a film. That is about to change.

An Honest Liar will profile the life of famed magician turned professional skeptic James “The Amazing” Randi as he embarks on a series of public crusades to expose America’s beloved psychics, mentalists, preachers, and faith healers with religious fervor. Along the way, the film will show how easily our perceptions can be fooled by magicians, con artists—and even documentaries.

Justin Weinstein has been making documentaries for television broadcast, theatrical release, and commercial clients for over ten years. Most recently, he wrote and edited Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey, which premiered at Sundance in 2011 (Special Jury Prize). Prior to that, he produced science and environmental documentaries, including Face Off at Coal River Mountain for Al Jazeera English and Dirty Business, a feature documentary about the global coal problem that was produced in collaboration with Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney. He has also produced numerous projects for ABC News, Peter Jennings Reporting, and PBS, including Hot Politics for Frontline and the ABC News special Last Days on Earth.

Tyler Measom is the codirector/producer of the documentary film Sons of Perdition, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, screened at over forty-five festivals, and was acquired by the Oprah Winfrey Network. Measom is also the producer of the feature film Take, starring Minnie Driver and Jeremy Renner. He has written, produced, and directed over one hundred commercials, short documentaries, and industrials for a wide range of national and international clients.

Justin Weinstein: My background is kind of varied; I grew up being interested in two different things, basically: film and science. And for a lot of that, the connection for me was nature documentaries and science documentaries when I was a kid. I wasn’t sure which direction I wanted to go. I started out by going to film school. I studied filmmaking at NYU in New York. I decided after I did that I wanted to learn more, so I went into science and I considered becoming a scientist and went so far as to get my doctorate in genetics, which took me a few years but was a lot of fun. A lot of fun but in the lab, for me, it’s a lot more interesting to learn science than to practice science—because it can be slow and tedious!

So with that, I took my film background and my science background and went into science documentary filmmaking. I’ve done a bunch of work for PBS, the Public Broadcasting System in the U.S.; for the national commercial channels like ABC News, doing two-hour special documentaries on a number of different topics. I have dealt with things like UFOs and alien abductions for actually a very high-minded documentary program in the U.S., something for Peter Jennings Reporting.

I have also got into independent feature documentaries—the last one I worked on was Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey, which premiered at Sundance last year and has been doing great. It’s been in theatres around the country and played internationally. I’m about to head to the Sedona International Film Festival in Arizona with the film.

Tyler and I met at a film festival—SilverDocs I believe it was—in Maryland. Tyler came to me with this great idea. I saw it. I got it. He saw that I was a likeminded person, and now we’ve started doing An Honest Liar.

Tyler Measom: I didn’t get my doctorate in science by any means—so I came to it in a different way!

I knew when I was ten years old that I wanted to be a filmmaker. I always knew what I wanted to be, but I grew up in a small town in Utah, raised in a very strict Mormon family who didn’t encourage that kind of thing. So it was very difficult for me to decide I wanted to be a filmmaker and convince my parents that it was the right thing to do. I still convince my parents that it’s the right thing to do—if that matters at all!

I started when I was seventeen, working in the film industry, and I started doing a lot of commercials. Then I made a big narrative film called Take, which starred Minnie Driver and Jeremy Renner, but I’ve always loved documentaries. I was always deliberating whether I wanted to be a narrative filmmaker or a documentary filmmaker, and there’s no reason one can’t do both.

So then my partner, Jennilyn Merten, and I made Sons of Perdition, which follows three kids who are exiled from their polygamist community—and it actually did quite well.

Kylie Sturgess: I noticed that you yourself came from a similar faith background?

Measom: Yes. Mormonism is similar in some ways. It’s not to the degree that polygamy is in any means. I left the Mormon faith and I had those same trappings: guilt and “Did I do the right thing?” and worries about disappointing community and family. So when this film came and a friend of mine suggested, “You know what would make a great film?” And after you make your first documentary, it was very difficult to think about “What is the next film I want to make?”

When you make a film, you live above the store for a while; you don’t just finish and go, “Okay, I’m moving on to the next one” because there’s a lot of post-production. There’s a lot of marketing and distributing and traveling around to film festivals. Everyone always asks, “What’s your next film? What’s your next film? What’s your next film?” I didn’t know; I had no idea!

I wanted to do something that was important to me, and a friend mentioned, “You know this guy James Randi? He’s very interesting.” I looked him up and the more I realized how interesting he was, I realized, “What a great topic!”

So I talked to the James Randi Educational Foundation and they said they [have] a lot of people wanting to do documentaries and none of them really understand. None of them had the professionalism. So I sent them Sons of Perdition and Sadie Crabtree watched it and said, “It’s great. We want you to make the documentary.” It all just happened. Then I met Justin at a party. I told him the idea and then we went and had dinner. We just dove in from there!

Weinstein: We found that we both live in the skeptical world in a sense. I was aware of Randi growing up. Having scientific training and having experiences in my life with a lot of non-skeptical people, it has always been something that has been a major part of my life and affects my life in a lot of ways. I think Justin coming out of a more religious background and leaving that, he’s obviously been dealing with some similar issues. We clicked on [the subject] and sent JREF a copy of Being Elmo as well. They were like, “Oh, okay, you guys. We’re on board.”

Sturgess: A meeting of minds as it were! So how challenging has it been documenting the very early years of Randi’s career?

Measom: We’re still in early production, so we haven’t really dived into his life more than just research.

Weinstein: We’ve only scratched the surface. The amount that we’ve found just in our preliminary research is so rich—but we also know from filming and going to the Amazing Meeting last year with Randi and knowing more about his history how much more great material is out there that we’ve got to track down and the wealth of it and the great nature of it. It’s really fascinating, entertaining, and amazing stuff.

We could make a movie about just a simple biography of Randi and his background—but we’re a little more ambitious than that. We have a lot of great ideas. That’s going to be part of it, but it’s still going to take a lot of work on our part to have people open up their closets and find their old VCR tapes or whatever we need to do to get it.

Sturgess: So you’re drawing on a lot of sources to make the film. Certainly James Randi’s offices—he’s got a lot of material there from over the years. He’s got a library and so forth.

Weinstein: Yes, we have only just begun to tap into that great, great resource. We’ve got to do a major comb through their archives; I’m sure there’s stuff out there that even the JREF doesn’t have, because over the years he’s done TV shows in so many countries—even a lot of material that’s out there that highlights his hoax investigations and exposures. They did a lot more work and detective work—preparation for exposing somebody that hopefully was filmed and people have tapes. It’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Measom: I think with Randi’s early days of television, “Wonderama” for example, it wasn’t common in those days to keep tapes, to keep what’s in the past. They would rerecord or would just go live and they wouldn’t record it at all. So I would dare say some of his early stuff will be very difficult to find.

Weinstein: If anybody listening has any of those materials, please let us know. We’d be thrilled to hear from them!

Sturgess: That would be wonderful if material can be crowd-sourced. So what are some of the people who have been interviewed for this documentary?

Measom: As you see from the trailer, we’ve been fortunate to get Neil deGrasse Tyson and Penn Jillette. Adam Savage was a phenomenal interviewee and is such a Randi fan. He was so gracious and spoke so well of him. Richard Dawkins, of course. Then we interviewed a lot of people that didn’t make it into the trailer: Michael Shermer was there; Bill Nye, of course, was in the trailer. We were very, very lucky to get these people.

The minute we just said we’d like to do something on James Randi, they would drop everything. They just revere this man like he is their hero. A lot of people really got into skepticism because of him and what he has done.

Weinstein: Penn and Teller for example. He introduced Penn to Teller! Penn Jillette is very outspoken about how, essentially, there would be no Penn and Teller, as he says in the trailer, without Randi. Obviously, Randi has a huge circle of very accomplished friends and admirers. There was an animator for The Simpsons…who told us that they are all huge fans, and they’re thinking of having Randi as a guest voice. I think, Tyler, you were saying that Matt Parker and Trey Stone of South Park are also big Randi fans?

Sturgess: This might be a difficult one to answer, but what about the detractors of James Randi, the people who were critical of him? Will they feature in this documentary?

Weinstein: We are interested in talking to some of them, and we’re going to try. We really hope to speak to people like Uri Gellar or Peter Popoff—people who have direct experience with Randi’s debunking, let’s say. We’re not looking to just make a big, wet kiss to James Randi! We’re not looking to dig up dirt or create controversy—but he and JREF are totally aware of how there are strong feelings about him and what he’s done from the other side. I think it would be remiss of us not to address that.

But, I think, within the scheme of the film that we want to make, I wouldn’t say it’s a major part of it. It’s just necessary to present the audience—who might not be aware of any of this material—with a sense of the range of feelings and responses and thoughts about Randi.

Measom: The first day I met James Randi, I flew down to Fort Lauderdale to visit him. He had watched Sons of Perdition, and I went over to his home. It was interesting, because I was so nervous meeting him, and I could sense that he was kind of nervous meeting me. As much press as he’s had in his life, he’s never had a feature length documentary dedicated to him. That’s unfortunate, very unfortunate, but it’s a blessing for us.

I said, “Let’s go to lunch,” and we drove off and went to Ikea! They have a little deli in there, [and Randi] likes the meatballs. We sat down, and he got recognized going in. And the first thing he said to me—he said, “I’m in, but under one condition: warts and all!”

To hear that, was so amazing. To hear that—as a documentary maker to know that he’s open to showing every bit of who he is—really just made it so much easier for us.

Sturgess: What are some of things that will be profiled?

Measom:  The Carlos Hoax will definitely be featured. I think that’s my favorite Randi episode!

Weinstein: I’m partial to the Alpha Project! But I think…we’re certainly going to try to do justice to all of these great episodes of his past. Because for a lot of them, like the Alpha Project and Carlos, a lot of the people are still around. Banachek, for example; there’s a lot of great media coverage to be used for storytelling purposes. These are just great little amazing, entertaining tales. That’s one part of what we’re planning on the biographical side. There are a couple of other elements that we’re going to incorporate, one of which is a little bit of the history of magic and deception—and the relationship between magic, deception, science, and skepticism, of course.

I think that there are going to be some other layers to the film that are going to be a lot of fun for viewers, and they’re going to help make it a richer experience. We might make some people in the audience disappear while they’re not looking! Hopefully, we’ll make more people appear in the audience than disappear, and the balance will be in favor of bottoms in the seats!

To find out more or to even help fund the creation of An Honest Liar, head to the official website at http://www.anhonestliar.com.

In the several years I've been working around the United Nations, he's been a treasured source of free entertainment for me, the inadvertent star of an Andy Kaufmann–routine version of himself. The only way to listen to his deadpan, ploddingly loopy soliloquies without withering in vicarious embarrassment or despair at human folly is to assume that they are part of an act of long-form satire that will eventually end in relieved applause.

As ever, representative Marghoob Saleem Butt was doing Pakistan proud.

I caught his act in New York in early February during a meeting of the Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations, a group of nineteen UN member states that considers the applications of NGOs wishing to affiliate themselves with the Economic and Social Council. Pakistan and the other so-called Islamic states in its international coalition, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (now renamed the Organization of Islamic Cooperation), were still worked up over a major symbolic defeat they suffered in June 2011 when the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning discrimination and violence on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

OIC v. LGBTQ

Introduced by South Africa—to the great consternation of the other members of the African group—the non-binding resolution expresses the Council's “grave concern at acts of violence and discrimination, in all regions of the world, committed against individuals because of their sexual orientation and gender identity.” Astonishingly, this was the first time in its history that the UN’s human rights body had addressed violence and discrimination against sexual minorities.

The pride of Pakistan. (Image by Fry1989, Wikimedia Commons)

Before the vote in June, Pakistan spoke on behalf of the OIC to chastise the Council for discussing “controversial notions” of sexual orientation and gender identity, questioning “the attempt to introduce to the United Nations some notions that have no legal foundation in any international human rights instrument.” Contrary to this protest there is a twenty-year-old legal precedent holding that the protection against discrimination on the basis of “sex” contained in Articles 2 and 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights extends to sexual and gender minorities.¹

In a 14 February 2012 letter to the president of the Human Rights Council, Pakistan's Ambassador Zamir Akram repeated the complaint, saying, “We are even more disturbed at the attempt to focus on certain persons on the grounds of their abnormal sexual behavior.” Then, most OIC members boycotted a 7 March UN panel on “Discrimination and Violence based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity,” which had been called for by the June 2011 resolution. Meanwhile, at the Committee on NGOs, Pakistan was working hard to prevent any LGBTQ–rights group from gaining formal affiliation with the UN. At this particular session, the lightning rod was the Vienna-based Homosexuelle Initiative Wien, a group focused on equal rights for gays and lesbians in Austria. In tandem with the representative of Morocco, Butt trained his crypto-absurdist wit on the organization’s use of a medical scientific conception of homosexuality in describing their work.

They say there is some kind of scientific, you know, dictionary on which you can consult the definition of sexual orientation. I can quote a number of other scientific research [sic] in which this—there are different, I would say definitions of, let’s say, sexual orientation. I was just going through one which comes as the definition provided by American Psychiatric Association diagnostic. And they are giving twenty-two possible, I would say, forms of sexual orientation. I would really like to know, does this organization really attest to all of those twenty-two types of sexual orientation? Some of them are really even disgusting to read. Anyway, that’s beside the point. . . .

To say of this mental discharge even that it was beside the point would already be too unkind to the point. But the talk I heard coming out of the delegate from Pakistan was, I learned, representative of a new rhetoric being deployed across the board by the OIC at the UN. Interestingly for those who patrol the borderlands of science, the argument turns on a willful misreading of an already problematic and politicized publication, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM.

Textual deviance

The DSM, published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), may be the closest thing to a trusted practical guide for clinicians, hospitals, insurers, and regulators as they plumb the human soul. A flippant skeptic might say that it answers to a deep need to know which of all of the weird things that people do are eligible for reimbursement by a medical insurance company. As it happens, the plenary sessions of psychiatric conventions are already quaking with debates over the preparation of the next revision, DSM-V, scheduled for release in May 2013.

For some perspective on the politics of the DSM, consider the fact that its 1917 predecessor had twenty-two psychiatric diagnoses in total. The current edition, DSM-IV-TR (text revision), put out in 2000, has 350. The most notorious change came in 1974 when the APA determined by majority vote among its members that homosexuality is not a mental “disorder” and revised subsequent editions accordingly. The vote was 5,854 to 3,810, inviting one to conclude that non-hetero people are roughly 35 percent screwed up, like everyone else.²

The prevailing version of the DSM does not contain diagnostics for bisexuality, homosexuality, and heterosexuality as such. It does contain numerous conditions labeled Paraphilias, which are “characterized by recurrent, intense sexual urges, fantasies, or behaviors that involve unusual objects, activities, or situations and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”³ Among these are the familiar forms of sexual deviance (“paraphilia” is preferred by some as a purportedly less value-laden term than “sexual deviation”) along with some forms that were, there’s no shame in reporting, unfamiliar to this author. The list includes Voyeurism, Exhibitionism, Sadism, Masochism, Fetishism, Autogynephilia (the sexual arousal of a man by his own perception of himself as a woman or dressed as a woman), Frotteurism (arousing fantasies, urges, or behaviors involving touching and rubbing against a nonconsenting person—something that former doyen of cognitive behavioral therapy Albert Ellis used to enjoy regularly on the New York City subways), and Telephone Scatalogia (sexual arousal associated with making or receiving obscene phone calls).

The same list includes Zoophilia and Pedophilia. Pakistan was misreading the DSM as classifying every paraphilia a “sexual orientation” in order to draw the conclusion that a new international human right to non-discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity would give protection to rapists of children and animals. This was in the service of the OIC’s spurious insistence on the need for a consensus legal definition of “sexual orientation” before the UN can make any further advances in the protection of the human rights of sexual minorities.

In bed with conservative Christians?

There is some evidence to suggest that this devious argument originated with North American evangelical groups such as Concerned Women for America and the Traditional Values Coalition and that it has been circulated in UN circles by Thomas W. Jacobson, a United Nations representative for Focus on the Family—one of thousands of religious organizations that have received affiliation, while Homosexuelle Initiative Wien and other LGBTQ–rights applicants languish in bureaucratic purgatory thanks to OIC–led obstructionism.

When the Israeli representative on the Committee on NGOs intervened to point out that this Austrian organization would never be able to define sexual orientation to the satisfaction of the governments of Pakistan and Morocco, he turned the tables in a way that had to be admired.

I’m not really certain what the distinguished representative of Morocco means when he says that they try to justify homosexual behavior. What really is there to justify? And why is the reference specifically to behavior? How can a man or a woman justify who they are? I’m sorry I think these questions will remain open and I believe that we shouldn't present questions that have no answer to NGOs, questions that may be discriminatory. In this case, it seems they are.

That got Pakistan hot.

Let me start by saying that while I have full respect for the views expressed by my distinguished colleagues from United States, Belgium, and Israel, irrespective of the fact that how [sic] I may differ with them, I would never be calling them discriminatory because these are the views that they are entitled to and as sovereign states they have the right to express them in any forum, especially in the UN forum.

Throwing up his hands at Israel’s sensible observation that governments such as Pakistan’s that criminalize homosexuality must themselves be in possession of a working definition, Butt brought the curtain down:

I think this type of discussion should end. Let me just say that yes we know what we mean in our countries what is sexual orientation. But we are not granting the consultative status to these NGOs in our countries. We are granting consultative status to these NGOs in the United Nations. That is why we need a definition from the United Nations. So I think this discussion should stop here. We know that this is for the sake of political argument and if that be the case I thought that it’s appropriate that I should also put on record what we believe on the subject.

With that, he bolted to the back of the hall to make some calls, leaving his colleagues to respond to his performance. I got the distinct feeling that the discussion would not stop here.

Notes

1. Toonen v. Australia, Communication No. 488/1992, U.N. Doc CCPR/C/50/D/488/1992 (1994). ↩

2. John Cloud, “What Counts as Crazy?” Time magazine (March 19, 2012), 44. ↩

3. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth edition, Text revision (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), 535. ↩

In January 2012, the Internet was buzzing over a string of reports about strange sounds coming from the sky. It’s what Forteans would call a “flap,” meaning there is an outbreak of activity in a relatively short time span that causes a commotion. This flap reminded me of last January (2011), when another flap manifested. This one got the public all aflutter over mass animal deaths, mostly birds and sea critters.

Interested in the cause behind these anomalies, I noticed some common causal agents proposed as plausible in mainstream commentary that were very similar to those thrown around on conspiracy and paranormal forums. They were science-based Doomsday agents, effective in scaring the bejeezus out of generally rational people. And the arrival of 2012—heavily weighted with (very commercially exploited) “End of the World” overtones—serves to popularize these stories even more.

A Mad Start to 2011

It began on New Years Eve 2010…

More than 1,000 birds fell out of the sky in Beebe, Arkansas. In the Arkansas River 125 miles away, 100,000 drum fish were found floating. A few days later, with the mystery of the Arkansas mass deaths still fresh in the news, another 500 dead blackbirds fell dead in southern Louisiana. Millions of fish washed up on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.

On January 6, the U.K. Daily Mail called the mass animal deaths a global phenomena, citing the following list:

• “3,000 blackbirds on roofs and roads in Beebe, Arkansas
• 450 red-winged blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, grackles, and starlings found littering a highway in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
• Thousands of fish found floating in Florida
• 200 birds found dead on highway bridge in Texas
• 50 dead jackdaws found on city street in Sweden
• 100 tons of sardines, croaker, and catfish dead on Brazilian coast
• Thousands of drum fish washed up along a 20-mile stretch of the Arkansas River
• Tens of thousands of small fish dead in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland
• Hundreds of snapper fish dead in New Zealand
• 40,000 devil crabs washed up along the Kent coast near Thanet”

Web pages and newspapers featured front-page photos of dead animals strewn about beach and pavement. Phrases such as “gruesome horror” and “terrifying carnage” described bodies raining from the sky and creating a “carpet of death.” Maps pinpointed the disparate events from all over the world. As our brains are wired to do, people felt compelled to connect them together and then freak out over the imagined agents causing this destruction. Are humans next to experience mass mortality?

To their credit, most media outlets sought wildlife experts for comment alongside the gratuitous mention of Biblical plagues and secret governmental testing. The official explanations did not go over well with observers. The Arkansas blackbirds were killed when fireworks scared them from their roosts at night, resulting in mid-air collisions with houses and each other and, finally, the ground. Dead water creatures suffered from a cold snap experienced by the southern U.S. and Europe at the time. In other cases, the reasons why dead animals appeared were related to bad weather or even human agents. No, that couldn’t be it, said the witnesses. “Why doesn’t this happen all the time?” people remarked. For them, the events were too shocking to have mundane explanations.

Commenters on news stories often cited certain catastrophic natural events, such as earthquakes, as reasonable-sounding causes for the deaths. All sorts of related events were mentioned—gas releases, vibrations, or stress buildup in the earth affecting animals. Even more popular than earthquake theories was the magnetic pole shift idea: The magnetic field is weakening and the poles are moving, disrupting animal life. One person said about the magnetic pole shift theory: “Not saying it’s the best explanation but it’s better than fireworks.”

As people connected all these events in their heads with a single mysterious cause, some members of the public perceived the chain of events as evidence of the wrath of nature. The planet was out to kill us all. It was not unusual to find commentary describing the earth as a vengeful goddess punishing us for our transgressions. The environmental consequences of humans on the planet were frequently cited. Global warming, pollution, and use of pesticides were feared culprits responsible for animal deaths. People saw dead animals and wondered if they would be next. Will the cats die from eating the dead birds and fish? Is there a disease or virus that could spread? Testing was demanded. When it came up negative, conspiracy was always an option.

The next step away from the natural toward the unnatural was the suggestion that the government had something to do with this. Were they testing killing devices? Injecting gas into the ground? Conducting experiments that went awry? The favorite go-to excuse was HAARP—the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. HAARP sends signals into the atmosphere and measures the response. Conspiracy minded people have a love/hate relationship with HAARP. They hate it because they “know” its purpose is evil, but they love it because it provides a convenient scapegoat to blame for everything—bad weather, animal deaths, technology malfunction, mind control, whatever you can imagine.

The mass animal deaths served as a nexus for speculation and conversation, reflecting public belief in these uncertain times and people’s emotional reactions to frightening, potentially threatening events without obvious causes. The “animals dying all over the place” hype passed in the media after experts showed nothing mysterious killed the animals. Eventually people stopped reporting every floating fish or dead bird on their lawn. But people didn’t forget the “aflockalypse.” Every now and then, it happens again, and the connection is reinforced.

2012 Apocalypse Fever

Intermingle elements from various cultures, religion, and fictional tales with some very “sciencey” sounding scenarios and, voila, we have widespread anxiety over the 2012 end of the world prophecies.

Throughout 2011, the 2012 Apocalypse fever spread via television and particularly on the web to the point where it was entertainment. In the popular 2009 movie 2012, earthquakes and tsunamis—geologic events familiar to the public—destroyed cities. The website 2012 Hoax lists proposed scenarios for the end of the world, which all sound very “sciencey.” Here is a selection of agents: various celestial alignments (planets, galaxies), a slew of Doomsday objects approaching Earth (Nibiru, comets), pole shifts (magnetic and rotational), and energy bursts directed toward Earth (solar flares and supernovas).

While some of these events are plausible and would indeed have catastrophic impact on Earth, many are nonsense, wouldn’t have the effect as dramatized, and/or are not anticipated to occur in the near future. Nothing astronomically unique is predicted to occur in 2012, and scientists say no catastrophe appears imminent. If a mystery star/planet/comet were on a collision course with Earth, we would be seeing its approach by now. If any unforeseen disaster occurs in 2012, it would be just that. Unforeseen—both by science and by ancient civilizations. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make headlines.

As with the unofficial explanations proposed for the animal deaths, the 2012 end of the world agents of doom provided a curious hybrid of sciencey sounding plausible reasoning that seamlessly morphed into full-blown science fiction scenes.

This takes us into the actual year 2012, which is off to a rough start.

Strumming HAARP Strings

On January 9, 2012, unexplained noises coming from the sky were reported in Costa Rica, followed days later by reports from Malaysia. For the next two weeks, dozens of reports of sky sounds surfaced from all over the world. They varied widely in type: booms, roars, mechanical, musical, single tones, whooshing.

The media once again offered natural or man-made explanations. Initially, the Costa Rica sounds were suspected to be military aircraft, fireworks, or seismic events. The Malaysia sound was from a local factory. But before a source could be pinpointed, speculation went off the edge into the fringe. News spread via Facebook, and discussions appeared on Internet forums. Such forums are incubators for imaginative and completely unsupported ideas to “explain” events. Many of the previous agents suspected in the mass animal deaths were mentioned now as behind the sky noises: HAARP, pole shifts, and earthquake precursors. Solar flares (which happened to deliver us a big blow during this time, producing spectacular aurora displays and feeding the speculation) were a popular suggested cause. HAARP and solar flares were said to produce the sounds by various means, none of which is plausible or supported by strong evidence.

Commentators on these news stories, blog posts, and forums often knew just enough science to be dangerous. Words like ionosphere, electromagnetic, and frequency were peppered through the comments to suggest scientific credibility. Core ideas about how the atmosphere works were warped into fantastic scenarios of global superstorms and worldwide disruption. All touch with reality is forsaken by this comment on a story in the Daily Mail: “HAARP as electromagnetic warfare makes the most sense.” I also saved this one for its sheer sciencey goodness: “What you hear is Harmonic Resonance, caused by the HAARP project. They are heating up the ionosphere to steer the jet streams and weather patterns and it causes the ionosphere to vibrate. The result is the ionosphere vibrating and causing a harmonic between it (ionosphere) and the earth. All part of the Chemtrail program.”

Artwork by David Dees

It’s Going to be a Bumpy Ride

These examples showing the incorporation of bits of scientific knowledge into what the public frames as evidence for a coming worldwide cataclysm is curious. The sciencey bits make the Doomsday scenarios sound serious, no matter what your religious background. And they sound plausible to many, no matter what their education levels.

Whether it was pole shifts or angels trumpeting Armageddon, everyone volunteered their “informed” opinions in those free-for-all places on the Internet. This “opinionating” was equated to “theorizing,” and the most extreme supernatural explanations were considered “as good a theory as any.” Valid explanations were frequently confused with ones that were personally satisfying to the individual.

In both of the January Fortean flaps, unrelated events grouped into a pattern reinforced the idea that these events were “portents of doom.” When facts were hard to establish, rampant speculation based on this idea filled the vacuum. When that happens, it’s too late to appear rational. The right questions were not asked of real scientists. I’m reminded of the famous Mark Twain quote: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” It was damn hard to try to talk any sense into those pushing sciencey sounding ideas and conspiracies. I know because I tried.

Using a dramatic explanation when an obvious one is not forthcoming (or acceptable) gives the explainer a sense of control. Strangest of all, the fatalistic attitude of the public about these “end of the world” scenarios appeared more appealing to them than accepting that “We don’t know what’s going on.”

I’m expecting more of this throughout the year.

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For daily news on anomalies and pseudoscience, visit my website Doubtful News.

In the early days of the Republic, there was no guarantee that the American experiment would succeed, and many thought that the ballot box was especially vulnerable to undue influence. Even in the fairly egalitarian period following the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers thought that the American system of democracy was especially vulnerable to manipulation by outside interests, and Catholicism, with its hierarchical institutional structure, seemed to be a special threat. In 1816, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson: “I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits,” maintaining that they are

more numerous [in the United States] than everybody knows. Shall we not have more of them here, in as many shapes and disguises as ever a king of the gypsies … assumed? In the shape of printers, editors, writers, schoolmasters, &c? … If ever any congregation of men could merit eternal perdition on earth and in hell, it is the Company of Loyola. Our system, however, of religious liberty must afford them an asylum. But if they do not put the purity of our elections to a severe trial it will be a wonder. (Adams 219)

Jefferson agreed that the restoration of the Jesuits from one of their many suppressions was a “retrograde step from light” but insisted, “We shall have our follies without doubt. … But ours will be follies of enthusiasm, not bigotry, not of Jesuitism” (Jefferson 223).¹

By the 1830s, the warm, fuzzy afterglow of the American Revolution—which had brought many colonists together to fight with a common purpose—had faded, and nativist factionalism emerged as more Catholic immigrants came into the country. One of the most curious salvos in these early culture wars arrived in 1836, when an anti-Catholic New York periodical, the Protestant Vindicator, announced the upcoming publication of Awful Disclosures by Maria Monk, purportedly written by an escapee from a Montreal convent. The supposed author, Maria Monk, related a story of deception, torture, idolatry, rape, priest worship, and murder. Awful Disclosures was perhaps America’s most widely distributed book before Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it was popularly republished throughout the nineteenth century. Awful Disclosures was part of a spate of similarly themed books in the period, including Rosamond (about the wife of a Cuban priest), and Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent.² Forty years later, Awful Disclosures was still being published, with the publishers’ hope that it would “inspire a wholesome and practical hatred of Popery and all that means to-day in our very midst” (iv).

In Awful Disclosures, young Maria finds herself commended into the care of the Catholics for her education due to the indifference of her widowed Protestant mother. She learns little at her convent school because the nuns are coarse and ignorant, though the nunneries manage to maintain an outwardly pious and holy appearance. Despite the neglect of the girls’ education (Maria says her studies never progressed beyond grade school), Maria decides to take vows and join the convent, believing that she will “retire from the temptations and trouble of this world into a state of holy seclusion, where, by prayer, self-mortification, and good deeds, [she will prepare] herself for heaven” (18). It’s hard to imagine how she comes to this conclusion, given the stories of abuse she hears while at Catholic school. For example, take the tale of a young squaw, La Belle Marie, who

had been seen going to confession at the house of the priest, who lived a little out of the village. La Belle Marie was afterwards missed, and her murdered body was found in the river. A knife was also found bearing the priest’s name. Great indignation was excited among the Indians, and the priest immediately absconded, and was never heard from. A note was found on his table addressed to him, telling him to fly, if he was guilty. (16)

A trope introduced early in the book that bodes poorly for every female character is “what happens in the confessional.” Of course, because the book was written in the 1830s, we don’t get descriptions of exactly what goes on there, which, of course, makes the goings-on all the more sinister because the mischief is limited only by the reader’s filthy imagination. For instance, Maria relates the testimony of a thirteen-year-old acquaintance: “She told me one day of the conduct of a priest with her at confession, at which I was astonished. It was of so criminal and shameful a nature I could hardly believe it. … She was partly persuaded by the priest to believe that he could not sin, because he was a priest, and that anything he did to her would sanctify her… ” (15). When this girl tells her mother what has happened, the mother “expressed no anger nor disapprobation; but only enjoined it upon her not to speak of it; and remarked to her, as priests were not like men, but holy, and sent to instruct and save us, whatever they did was right” (16). The corruption of the Church, Maria suggests, is known to every Catholic daughter and embraced by the faithful.

While in the convent, Maria becomes a witness to extravagant and perpetual horrors. Following her initiation ceremony, which involves a coffin and only the occasional novice’s death, she immediately becomes privy to the secrets of the Black Nunnery, including the women imprisoned in the basement and the fate of babies born in the convent (presumably conceived in the confessional): “Infants were sometimes born in the convent, but they were always baptized and immediately strangled…. ‘How happy,’ [the Superior] exclaimed, ‘are those who secure immortality to such little beings! Their souls would thank those who kill their bodies if they had it in their power’” (40). As a result, a surprisingly large number of corpses are tossed into an apparently bottomless pit in the convent’s basement.

The women are kept largely in the dark about the horrific goings-on elsewhere in the convent, but Maria learns a lot through the intervention of a nun who may or may not be crazy, Jane Ray. She is a defiant character who is largely unaffected by the discipline inflicted upon her and who seems to know a lot more than most of the other nuns. Much of the rest of the narrative is filled with stories of the bizarre abuses and punishments inflicted upon the nuns, including kissing the floor, kissing other nuns’ feet, kneeling on hard peas or walking with them in their shoes, eating meals with a rope around their necks, being fed only food that the nuns detest (like eel), drinking the water in which the Superior’s feet had been washed, brandings, whippings, mass gaggings, standing or sleeping in uncomfortable conditions for hours, and “the cap,” a leather hat that causes convulsive pain by unknown means.

Eventually, Maria learns that she is pregnant. To avoid the inevitable infanticide, she leaves this elaborate chamber of horrors by walking out quickly and fleeing to New York, where her book was presumably ultimately written. As her due date approaches, Maria fears that she may not survive the labor and feels compelled to share what she has witnessed. She openly acknowledges that the reader only has her word that any of this has happened:

If the interior of the Black Nunnery, whenever it shall be examined, is materially different from the following description, then I shall claim no confidence of my readers. If it resemble it, they will, I presume, place confidence in some of these declarations, on which I may never be corroborated by true and living witnesses.

I am sensitive that great changes may be made in the furniture of apartments; that new walls may be constructed, or old ones removed; and I have been credibly informed that masons have been employed in the nunnery since I left it. (53)

She nonetheless maintains that “ … there are some facts for which I can appeal to the knowledge of others” (130). For instance, when priests take “Holy Retreats” and disappear from the public eye for a while, they are actually recovering from venereal diseases at the Black Nunnery (131).³ This is as good as her evidence gets, unfortunately.

The publication of Monk’s memoirs was a sensation, but the account seems to have been entirely fabricated. An exchange of charges and counter-charges ensued in the press between those involved with the publication of Awful Disclosures, those familiar with Maria Monk’s personal history, representatives of the Catholic Church, and investigators who conducted inquiries into the matter. The Protestant Vindicator attempted to validate the story that Maria told by vouching for her character. It turned out, however, that the editors, especially minister J.J. Slocum, had either helped her fabricate or were otherwise intimately involved in the writing of Awful Disclosures.⁴

Six affidavits were published in the Montreal press in November 1835 that seemed to illuminate some of the background to the publication of Awful Disclosures, though in every single aspect they cast doubt on Monk’s reliability. Nonetheless, these were republished in the 1936 edition of Awful Disclosures as evidence of the veracity of Maria Monk’s testimony by virtue of “discrepancies” in the testimony. In this edition, Monk answers what she calls the three lines of attack by her critics: “1st, That I had never been in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery; 2d, That my character entitled me to no confidence; 3d that my book was copied, ‘word for word, and letter for letter,’ from an old European work, called ‘The Gates of Hell Opened’” (204). Monk’s publishers offered a $100 reward for any book resembling hers (206). Any resemblance in content, they maintained, between her account and any other exposé was due to both being factually true.⁵

In the first affidavit, justice of the peace and physician William Robertson of Montreal swore in an affidavit that three men had encountered Maria Monk by the Canal on 9 November 1834, and saw her acting in such a way that caused them to fear she was contemplating suicide. She claimed to be Robertson’s daughter, but as Mrs. Robertson turned them away when they came to his door, they took her to a watch-house, where she remained in custody. When Robertson himself went to assess the situation, “[A]s she could not give a satisfactory account of herself, I, as a Justice of the Peace, sent her to jail as a vagrant” (in Monk 213). After she was identified by her pastor and released, he heard no more about Monk for many months until he was approached to take her deposition about her experiences in the convent, but, he says, “I declined doing so, giving as reason, that, from my knowledge of her character, I considered her assertions upon oath were not entitled to more credit than her bare assertion, and that I did not believe either… ” (214). He does say that if she wants to level specific criminal charges, he would be willing to participate in the investigation. Given the seriousness of accusations, Robertson did try to ascertain where she had been during the years she claimed to be at the convent: “During the summer of 1832 she was at service in William Henry’s; the winters of 1832-3, she passed in this neighborhood, at St. Ours and St. Denis” (215).

Maria Monk’s mother, Isabella Mills, also gave sworn testimony about her daughter. In the testimony, taken down and prefaced by Robertson, she claimed that “designing men… have taken advantage of her daughter, to make scandalous accusations against the Priests and the Nuns in Montreal, and afterward to make her pass herself for a nun, who had left the Convent” (215). These men, including W.H. Hoyte of New York, with whom Maria and her child had been lodging at a local hotel, told Mills that Monk had escaped from the hotel, leaving the child behind. They claimed she had been found sick and destitute in New York and had wanted to make a confession about the Montreal Convent. Mills’s warning that they really should not trust her daughter is one for the ages:

I expected to get rid of their importunities, in relating the melancholy circumstances by which my daughter was frequently deranged in the head, and then told them, that when at the age of about seven years, she broke a slate pencil in her head; that since that time her mental faculties were deranged, and by times much more than at other times, but that she was far from being an idiot; that she could make the most ridiculous, but most plausible stories; and that as to the history that she had been in a nunnery, it was a fabrication, for she was never in a nunnery…. (217)

But Hoyte was not willing to accept that his informant was anything but absolutely trustworthy:

Next morning Mr. Hoyte returned, and was more pressing than in his former solicitations, and requested me to say that my daughter had been in the nunnery: that should I say so, it would be better than one hundred pounds to me; that I would be protected for life, and that I should leave Montreal[;] I answered, that thousands of pounds would not induce me to perjure myself; then he got saucy and abusive to the utmost; he said he came to Montreal to detect the infamy of the Priests and the Nuns; that he could not leave my daughter destitute in the wide world as I had done; afterward said, No! she is not your daughter, she is too sensible for that, and went away. (218–9)

Most of the action in Awful Disclosures happens without reference to external, historically verifiable events, with the exception of Montreal’s 1832 election riots and the arrival of cholera in the city. In every respect, her account of the convent’s behavior during the cholera epidemic fails to jibe with Montreal citizens’ accounts of the nuns’ actions. Many published accounts of the epidemic concur that the residents of the convent made their reputations as valuable members of the larger community for highly visible selfless acts during those terrible times, and it is because of this reputation that the community, including Protestants who openly reviled popery, rejected Monk’s claims.

Of course, little could be settled by vouching for the character of the nuns or author. Luckily, Monk made specific statements about the interior of the nunnery, and in the 1836 edition even provided a diagram of the interior of the convent.⁶ The Church opened the building for inspection. The most impressive investigation was carried out by Colonel W. L. Stone, the Presbyterian editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser. He visited Montreal with the most recent edition of Awful Disclosures, which included the diagram of the convent interior. The full narrative of his investigation was republished in the U.S. Gazette. He inspected every room, and the nuns opened every door and cabinet he asked to peek into. He inspected the walls and floors for evidence of recent construction. In every specific, Monk’s descriptions of the convent—some of which were very detailed, such as her escape through a gate that did not exist—were inaccurate. Based on his inspection Stone concluded, “[I]t may well be said that the girl must be an incorrigible blockhead, not to be able to remember somewhat of the interior of a house in which she pretends to have been a resident” (qtd. in Englund, 395). Most interesting, however, is what else Stone uncovered while in Montreal, hitting on the likely source of the story:

[I]t is a little remarkable that the only internal resemblance to the diagram she has given are said to be found in the recent Catholic Magdalen Asylum of Mrs. McDonnell, which was dissolved about a week before our visit, and in which the celebrated Jane Ray remained until the last. (qtd. in Englund 395)

In a deposition taken in July 1836, the matron of that institution—a reformatory for prostitutes—verified that Monk had been a resident between November 1834 and March 1835 and testified that Maria Monk had “for many years led the life of a stroller and a prostitute.”⁷ Monk seems to have been pregnant while at the asylum. I believe that it is a reasonable conclusion that during her confinement at a religious charity in New York, Monk came into contact with a group of anti-Catholics, told them what they wanted to hear, and collaborated with them on the book, inventing details from her own past experiences in Montreal.

An interesting stylistic note about Awful Disclosures is that the story shares numerous conventions with popular gothic novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, Frankenstein, and Melmoth the Wanderer.⁸ One can go through a checklist of the conventions of the gothic novel and find most of them in Awful Disclosures: Large isolated building with secret passageways and terror around every corner? Check. Imprisoned heroine? Check. Tyrannical or abusive male characters? Check. Overwrought emotion? Oh god, yes. Atmosphere of suspense? Check. Supernatural occurrences? Sort of—the nuns believe they live with a “true saint,” a holy daughter of a wealthy citizen who is restricted to one part of the convent and is said to bodily occupy heaven from time to time. Violent or macabre events? Even better—hilarious nun murder.

Let me explain.

In her fifth month as a nun, Maria witnesses the death of a young woman, who has taken the name Saint Frances, at the hands of her sisters. Maria helps carry the poor woman to the place of her “trial” though, she reports, “I had not a moment’s doubt that she considered her fate as sealed, and was already beyond the fear of death” (85). While the interrogation and evidence is being presented against the nun, the bishop seems impatient to see the sentence passed. When Saint Frances plainly states that she refuses to kill a baby, even if it means her own death, Maria reports:

“That is enough; finish her!” said the bishop.

Two nuns instantly fell upon the woman, and in obedience to directions given by the Superior, prepared to execute her sentence.

“She still maintained all the calmness and submission of a lamb. Some of those who took part in this transaction, I believe, were as unwilling as myself; but of other I can safely say, I believe they delighted in it. Their conduct certainly exhibited a most blood-thirsty spirit. But above all others present, and above all human fiends I ever saw, I think Saint Hypolite was the most diabolical; she engaged in the horrid task with all alacrity, and assumed from choice the most revolting parts to be performed. She seized a gag, forced it into the mouth of the poor nun, and when it was fixed between her extended jaws, so as to keep them open at their greatest possible distance, took hold of the straps fastened at each end of the stick, crossed them behind the helpless head of the victim, and drew them tight through the loop prepared as a fastening.

They then tie Saint Frances to a bed. “In an instant,” Maria reports

another bed [later referred to as a feather-bed] was thrown upon her. One of the priests, named Bonin, sprang like a fury first upon it, with all his force. He was speedily followed by the nuns, until there were as many upon the bed as could find room, and all did what they could, not only to smother, but to bruise her.

After about fifteen or twenty minutes of jumping on the bed, the nuns stop and have a good laugh. Later, she reports that St. Frances’ body

was taken down into the cellar and thrown unceremoniously into the hole which I have already described, covered with a great quantity of lime, and afterwards sprinkled with a liquid, of the properties and name of which I am ignorant. This liquid I have seen poured into the hoe from large bottles, after the necks were broken off; and have heard that it is used in France to prevent the effluvia rising from cemeteries. (87–90)

I bring up these gothic elements in this historical discussion of the conspiracy theory because a frequent feature of conspiracy theorists is an apparent inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, and this seems to have always been true. Awful Disclosures was marketed as a non-fictional account, but a cursory glance at the conventions reveals it to be strongly influenced by fiction. The mind-bending improbability of the story is surpassed perhaps only by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Michael Barkun identifies the tendency of conspiracy theorists to commit such fact-fiction reversals in his A Culture of Conspiracy; one should note that many modern conspiracy theories are built around transparently fictitious plots and stories. For instance, you can look to Edward Bulwer-Lytton (of “It was a dark and stormy night” fame), who wrote of subterranean beings who made use of limitless Vril energy in his 1871 The Coming Race.⁹ This story jumped into the occult literature and found its way into modern conspiracy literature in the form of free energy narratives and underground civilizations.

It is telling that Maria Monk escaped from Catholic French Canada. Nativists were quick to see Catholics menacing the United States from across both the northern and southern borders. Coordination and cooperation between the Catholics in these countries was thought to be inimical to the well-being of the nation. This strikes me as especially important to an understanding of nativist conspiracy theory—transnational entities, like international Judaism, Catholicism, Freemasonry, big oil, or Google, which do not have strictly defined geographical borders, have historically been the objects of suspicion because their members may have alternative loyalties that do not entirely or exclusively coincide with that of the nation. And the wicked Catholics were thought to especially prize Americans: “The priests and nuns used often to declare that all of all the heretics the children from the United States were the most difficult to be converted; it was thought a great triumph when one of them was brought over to the ‘true faith’” (182–3).

Monk’s story does not have a happy ending. In September 1837, a report appeared that Maria Monk had tried to enter another Catholic institution, this time an asylum in Philadelphia, under an assumed name as the basis of another abduction scheme (qtd. in Englund 418). She was discovered under the name Jane Howard. In 1849, she was arrested in New York for theft; she died, insane, in Blackwell’s Island Prison two months later.

Notes

1. It should be noted that in 1816 “enthusiasm” did not have the entirely positive connotation that it has today. ↩

2. Susan M. Griffin finds that 300,000 copies of Monk’s memoirs had been sold by 1860. “Awful Disclosures: Women’s Evidence in the Escaped Nun’s Tale.” PMLA 111.1 (1996): 93–107. 93. ↩

3. A fascinating discussion of how anti-Catholic authors grounded the devious character of the priest in his celibacy and rejection of “family” can be found in Marie Anne Pagliarini’s “The Pure Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America.” Religion and American Culture 9.1 (1999): 97–128. See also Sandra Frink’s “Women, the Family, and the Fate of the Nation in American Anti-Catholic Narratives, 1830–1860.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.2 (2009), 237–264. ↩

4. On Slocum’s admission of his involvement, see Frink, 238. ↩

5. A book by this title does exist, but it appears to be a satire in verse of two rival British political publications early in the previous century. ↩

6. A great deal of collected published matter related to the Monk affair appeared in an edition of the complete works of the first bishop of Charleston, SC, John Englund, titled The Works of the Right Rev. John Englund, vol 5. 5 vols. Ed. Ignatius Aloysius Reynolds. Baltimore: John Murphy and Co., 1849. Unless indicated otherwise, all quotations about the investigations into the convent and Monk’s “catchpenny libel” (347) come from this. ↩

7. A copy of this deposition may be found at: http://www.canadiana.org/view/50665/0002. ↩

8. It also shares a number of conventions with the escaped slave narrative, a popular form of abolitionist literature at the time. It is interesting to note that often the same people who are crusading against slavery during this period are the ones who are crusading against popery. See Griffin. ↩

9. Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. 31–32. ↩

References

Adams, John. 1856. “To Thomas Jefferson, 6 May 1816.” The Works of John Adams, volume 10. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 216–219.

“Maria Monk; Affidavit of Madame D.C. McDonnell, Matron of the Montreal Magdalen Asylum, Ste. Genevieve Street.” 1836. Republished on Early Canadiana Online. <http://www.canadiana.org/view/50665/0002>. 5 Feb 2012.

Barkun, Michael. 2003. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Englund, John. 1849. The Works of the Right Rev. John Englund, volume 5. Ed. Ignatius Aloysius Reynolds. Baltimore: John Murphy and Co.

Frink, Sandra. 2009. “Women, the Family, and the Fate of the Nation in American Anti-Catholic Narratives, 1830–1860.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.2, 237–264.

Griffin, Susan M. 1996. “Awful Disclosures: Women’s Evidence in the Escaped Nun’s Tale.” PMLA 111.1: 93–107. 93.

Jefferson, Thomas. “To John Adams, 1 Aug 1816.” In Adams. 222–223.

Monk, Maria. 1836. Awful Disclosures, by Maria Monk, of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal. New York: Francis F. Ripley.

---. 1878. Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings. New York: D. M. Bennett.

Pagliarini, Marie Anne. 1999. “The Pure Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America.” Religion and American Culture 9.1: 97–128.

Author. Nickell’s latest book, Tracking the Man-Beasts: Sasquatch, Vampires, Zombies, and More (Prometheus Books, 2011), received excellent reviews from major venues, and he promoted the book on the talk-show circuit. (However, Bigfoot Times groused, “Make no mistake about it, Nickell is a skeptic and debunker of genuine mysteries”—or did the writer mean “investigator and solver of countless former mysteries”?) He has just completed the manuscript for a new book and is at work on five others, including another children’s book.

Blogger. Since December 18, 2008, Nickell has been a regular contributor to the Center for Inquiry blog Free Thinking. His blog, called Investigative Briefs, featured some forty-five postings in 2011, consisting of field-investigation reports, editorials, and other writings for skeptics and humanists. Among his postings were “Thermal-image ‘Ghosts,’” “Mothman: the Continuing Saga,” “Trump Trumped!,” and “Turin ‘Shroud’ called ‘Supernatural.’”

Book Contributor. Among several books to which Nickell contributed in 2011 were La Scienza dei Mostri (published by the Italian skeptics group CICAP) and Who Believes in Roswell? (Nickell, with others, provided a running commentary on statistics concerning conspiracy theorists’ and skeptics’ views on the 1947 Roswell UFO incident).

Chupacabra Examiner. One of Nickell’s on-site investigations in 2011—of a “chupacabra attack” on farm animals near Springfield, Missouri—has been turned into a new episode of his YouTube video series, Joe Nickell Investigates (see also “Co-Producer,” below). Nickell actually examines and identifies the carcass of the predator, shot dead by the farmer’s stepson (see also “Slain Paranormal Investigator,” below).

Columnist. Among Nickell’s 2011 writings were his regular columns in the bimonthly Skeptical Inquirer magazine (“‘Pop’ Culture: Patent Medicines Become Soda Drinks”; “Heaven’s Stenographer: The ‘Guided’ Hand of Vassula Ryden”; “The Case of the Miracle Oil”; “The Séances of ‘Hellish Nell’: Solving the Unexplained”; “In Search of the Emerald Grail”; and “Psychic Connections: Investigating in Hungary”) as well as in the quarterly Skeptical Briefs (“The Atlanta Child Murders: Evidence vs. Psychics”; “The Doctor’s Ghostly Visitor: Tracking ‘The Girl in the Snow’”; “On a Wing and a Prayer: The Search for Guardian Angels”; and “Chinese Ape Men”).

Co-Producer. As already mentioned, a series of short videos titled Joe Nickell Investigates is being developed and posted on YouTube (the first focused on Alcatraz). The series was conceived by CFI videographer Adam Isaak; with Isaak, Nickell is a co-producer.

Cryptozoologist. As a skeptical cryptozoologist (one who studies “hidden” animals such as Bigfoot) and monster hunter, Nickell offered not only his latest book (see above) but lectures and appearances in documentaries and other venues featuring his latest investigations of aliens, chupacabra, Mothman, and many others, including the Loup-garou (a French-American werewolf).

Document Examiner. Known for his examinations of such sensational documents as the Jack the Ripper “diary” and the pre–Civil War manuscript novel The Bondwoman’s Narrative, and for his books on forgery and authentication, Nickell continued his work in the field of questioned documents. His investigative article on the writings of a “visionary” who allegedly takes dictations from Heaven appeared in SI. Also, mid-2011 brought the conviction in Germany of Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk, whose family once asked Nickell to prove his incriminating SS identity card a forgery; instead Nickell found further evidence of his guilt, and he was deposed by American OSI agents for a superior court trial that revoked Demjanjuk’s citizenship.

Ghostbuster. Halloween came with its obligatory media treatment of ghosts and with Nickell in his familiar role as ghostbuster, notably on NPR’s All Things Considered and CBS News Sunday with Charles Osgood, among numerous other venues. Nickell’s next book will be titled The Science of Ghosts.

Lecturer. Nickell lectured at a number of conferences, including SkeptiCon IV in Springfield, Missouri (“Undercover: Clandestine Paranormal Investigation”); the CFI Institute in Tallahassee (“Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal”); and at the University of Buffalo’s Science Exploration Day (“Investigating Paranormal Mysteries,” presented to three different audiences). He also spoke to Buffalo State University Freethinkers (“Investigating the Paranormal”) and to Friends of the Center at CFI in Amherst (“Quack Remedies in WNY,” with Libraries Director Tim Binga). For other short lectures, see “Panelist,” below.

Magazine Subject. Nickell appeared in several magazine features such as Esquire (UK), Buffalo Spree, and Extra (Italy). (For the latter see “Profilee” below.)

Miracle Detective. Well known as an investigator of miracle claims (he was an inspiration for Hilary Swank’s role as such in The Reaping), Nickell appeared on an episode of the Oprah Winfrey Network’s Miracle Detectives debunking oil-exuding effigies he examined in a California home. He also investigated other miracle claims and discussed related topics on various venues; for example, how the Vatican “investigates” alleged miracles (NPR); exorcisms (USA Today); the “miraculous” image on the Turin “Shroud” (MSNBC online); and stigmata (Smithsonian Magazine blog).

Movie Critic. As a blogger (see above), Nickell occasionally reviews movies with a relevance to skepticism and humanism. His 2011 critiques—of such movies as The Rite (about exorcism), The Illusionist, Paul (about a captured and escaped ET), The First Grader (an inspiring story of human values), Cowboys and Aliens, Anonymous (see “Shakespeare Defender,” below), and many more—are called “Nickell-odeon Reviews” and rated not with the usual stars but with Nickell’s trademark wooden nickels (which he gives out as business cards).

Newspaper Interviewee. A number of newspapers, large and small, interviewed Nickell on a wide variety of topics: USA Today (on exorcism, prompted by a new film starring Anthony Hopkins); Arkansas Gazette (ghost hunters); Miami Herald (psychic medium Chip Coffey); the Durham, North Carolina, Herald-Sun (on near-death experiences); the Jamestown, New York, Post-Journal (ghost hunting); the Wilmington, North Carolina, Star News (psychic Noreen Renier); the Buffalo News (“Monster Mania”); Japan’s Mainichi newspaper (“American Life: Living with Ghosts”); and the New York Daily News (on the 2012 apocalypse supposedly predicted by the Mayan calendar).

Panelist. The panels on which Nickell appeared included—in addition to the 2011 CFI Leadership Conference’s “Decades of Leadership” (with Ronald Lindsay, Thomas Flynn, Barry Karr, and Andrea Szalanski)—“Skepticism on TV” and “Ethics of Paranormal Investigation” at TAM9; “The Investigators” and “Louisiana Folklore and Fakelore” at CSIcon in New Orleans; and three panels at Dragon*Con in Atlanta including, in addition to a “chat” and a wrap-up panel, one titled “Skepticism and the Humanities.”

Podcast Guest. Numerous podcasts featured Nickell as their guest. These included Skeptic Zone in Australia, Paranormal Podcast, Monster Talk, SETI’s Are We Alone?, and CFI’s Point of Inquiry, among others, including The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe.

Profilee. A major profile of Nickell appeared in a color spread in Italy’s Extra magazine written by Massimo Polidoro and titled “Il detective dell’ impossible” (“The Detective of the Impossible”). Also, NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor gave a salute to Nickell with a two-paragraph profile on December 1, his birthday. And the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences website profiled alumnus Nickell under the heading “Curiously Inclined.”

Publisher’s Reader. Nickell’s expertise in the paranormal is sought in many ways. For example, publishers sometimes commission him to read new book manuscripts and report on their worthiness to be published. In 2012 he gave a thumbs-up to a book on historical hoaxes and another on the search for extraterrestrial life.

Radio Talk-Show Guest. As usual, Nickell appeared on numerous radio shows: Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson (on ghostbusting—live by hookup from New Orleans on Halloween eve); Northeast Pennsylvania’s WIOK (on spontaneous human combustion); Yankton, South Dakota’s KYNT (re near-death experiences); Culture Shocks with Barry Lynn (debating Mack Maloney, author of UFOs in Wartime); Milton Rosenberg’s Chicago radio show (on the paranormal); WECK’s Edge of the Unknown (investigating the paranormal); Rob Breckinridge’s show in Alberta, Canada (The Shroud of Turin); and SETI’s Are We Alone? and Buffalo’s WBFO (both on his book Tracking the Man-Beasts).

Shakespeare Defender. One of Nickell’s most controversial efforts was his cover story, “Did Shakespeare write ‘Shakespeare’?,” in Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Editor Ken Frazier notes that it generated an abundance of reader response—some favorable, some criticizing Nickell for his penetrating ridicule of the “anti-Stratfordian” position, namely that only an “aristocrat” could have written the Shakespearean canon. Writing in the Guardian, Simon Hoggart called Nickell’s article “splendid” and Skeptical Inquirer “admirable.”

“Slain Paranormal Investigator.” An episode of the TV series Bones featured the ostensible death by chupacabra (but actually a careless shooting and coverup) of a Nickell-like character, with elements closely paralleling his book The Mystery Chronicles (which pictures a chupacabra on the front cover).

Television Guest. Nickell was interviewed, as usual, for a number of television shows, including three episodes of National Geographic’s The Truth Behind . . . (on the Crystal Skull, UFOs, and King Arthur); one episode of the Oprah Winfrey Network’s The Miracle Detectives (on “Mysterious Oils”); three for William Shatner’s Weird or What? (on spontaneous human combustion, demonic possession, and psychic detection); three for Canadian television’s The Conspiracy Show (on past lives, alien abductions, and the Beast of Bray Road); and a prominent pre-Halloween appearance on CBS News Sunday (on ghosts and ghost hunting). He also appeared in the reruns of many documentaries produced in earlier years.

Turin “Shroud” Expert. New claims regarding the image on the infamous Shroud of Turin—that it has characteristics suggestive of a burst of high-intensity radiant energy at the moment of Jesus’ supposed resurrection—drew Nickell into the fray. Notable was his interview by Alan Boyle for an online MSNBC article—“Was Holy Shroud created in a flash? Italian researchers resurrect claim”—which soon had Nickell and a shroud scientist engaged in a running debate. At one point Nickell suggested his opponent “stop slashing carelessly with Occam’s razor.”

UFOlogist. As a longtime skeptical researcher of flying saucers, Nickell has teamed up with fellow UFO expert Major James McGaha, an astronomer and former military pilot, to continue to research important cases. Their solution to the forty-five-year-old mystery known as the Exeter Incident appeared in the November/December 2011 Skeptical Inquirer, and more of their combined work is forthcoming.

Workshop Conductor. For the James Randi Educational Foundation’s The Amaz!ng Meeting in Las Vegas, Nickell conducted a well-attended workshop on “Problems in Paranormal Investigation” in addition to appearing on two panels.

“Zombie.” Investigating the popular topic of zombies, Nickell even appeared as an extra in a zombie movie (having previously written about his experiences and research in SI’s special issue on “Monster Mayhem” [Nov./Dec. 2010] and in his book, Tracking the Man-Beasts).