Vol.26 No.2 2021 Skeptic

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DRUG TRIPS & REALITY • WEIRD: THE NEW NORMAL? • LIZARD PEOPLE

SKEPTIC Extraordinary Claims, Revolutionary Ideas & the Promotion of Science—Vol.26 No.2 2021 $6.95 USA and Canada

www.skeptic.com

THE NATURE OF REALITY ARE THE EXPERIENCES OF DMT DRUG TRIPS REAL OR IMAGINED?

“...This is easily one of the most interesting channels on YouTube” https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/

Hear leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers discuss the most important issues of our time. Hosted by Michael Shermer. (Formerly The Science Salon.) # 180 Dr. Andy Norman—Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think

# 165 Dr. JoHN McWHorTer— The Elect: Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and their Threat to a Progressive America

# 179 Dr. NIAll FerguSoN— Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

# 164 Dr. NeIl degrASSe TySoN —Cosmic Queries: StarTalk’s Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going

# 176 Dr. MINoucHe SHAFIk— What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract for a Better Society

# 162 Dr. BeNJAMIN FrIeDMAN— Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

# 175 Dr. BrIAN keATINg— How it All Began: Cosmic Inflation, the Multiverse, and the Nature of Scientific Proof

# 161 Dr. roy rIcHArD grINker —Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

# 174 Dr. JorDAN PeTerSoN & MIcHAel SHerMer on Science, Myth, Truth, and the Architecture of Archetypes # 173 Dr. NAoMI oreSkeS— Why Trust Science?

# 160 ABIgAIl SHrIer— Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters # 159 Dr. JoSHuA glASgoW— The Solace: Finding Value in Death Through Gratitude for Life

# 172 Andrew Doyle—Free Speech: And Why It Matters

# 158 Dr. JASoN D. HIll—We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to The American People

# 171 Dr. JoHN Mueller—The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency

# 157 Dr. JoSHuA glASgoW— The Solace: Finding Value in Death through Gratitude for Life.

# 170 Dr. MIcHIo kAku—The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything # 169 JeFF HAWkINS— A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

by Sergio Veranes

# 177 Dr. ANguS FleTcHer— 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature

# 163 HeleN PluckroSe— Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

By Dale Stine

# 178 Dr. JAMeS HuNTer & Dr. PAul NeDelISky—Religious vs. Secular Morality…The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality

# 156 Ayaan Hirsi Ali—Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights

# 151 Trump & Truth—A commentary by Dr. MIcHAel SHerMer # 150 Dr. DANIel lIeBerMAN — Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding

# 155 Dr. MArTIN SHerWIN— Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Misstle Crisis

# 149 Dr. MIcHAel SHerMer– The After Time: The Future of Civilization After COVID-19

# 154 Dr. DAVID SloAN WIlSoN— Atlas Hugged

# 148 Have Archetype—Will Travel: The Jordan Peterson Phenomenon by Dr. MIcHAel SHerMer

# 167 gAry TAuBeS—The Case for Keto: …Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating

# 153 Dr. keVIN DuTToN —Blackand-White Thinking: The Burden of a Binary Brain in a Complex World

# 147 Dr. DAVID BArASH — On the Brink of Destruction

# 166 Dr. MIcHAel Heller & Dr. JAMeS SAlzMAN—Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives

# 152 Politics & Truth—Dr. MIcHAel SHerMer responds to critics of His commentary “Trump & Truth”

# 146 Dr. DoNAlD ProTHero— Weird Earth: Debunking Strange Ideas about Our Planet

# 168 Dr. DANIel DeNNeTT & Dr. gregg cAruSo—Just Deserts: Debating Free Will (moderated by Michael Shermer)

# 145 greg lukIANoFF—Mighty Ira: The Aclu’s controversial involvement in the Skokie case of 1977. #144 Dr. AguSTIN FueNTeS— Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being #143 Dr. NIcHolAS cHrISTAkIS— Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live #142 Dr. PHIlIP goFF— Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness #141 rIcHArD kreITNer— Break it Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union

# 139 Dr. SHelBy STeele— Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country & the film What Killed Michael Brown? # 138 DouglAS MurrAy— The Madness of 2020 # 137 MArTA zArASkA—Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, & Kindness Can Help You Live to 100 # 136 Dr. gAD SAAD— The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense # 135 Dr. PAul HAlPerN— Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect # 134 Dr. JoSePH HeNrIcH— The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically

# 128 MIcHAel SHelleNBerger —Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

# 117 Dr. MATT rIDley— How Innovation Works: and Why It Flourishes in Freedom

# 99 Dr. BoBBy DuFFy— Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything: A Theory of Human Misunderstanding

# 127 Dr. WIllIAM Perry and ToM collINA—The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump

# 116 Dr. HoWArD STeVeN FrIeDMAN—Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life

# 98 Dr. roBerT PeNNock— An Instinct for Truth: Curiosity and the Moral Character of Science

# 115 Dr. MATTHeW coBB— The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience

# 97 AMBer ScorAH—Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

# 126 SArAH ScoleS—They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers # 125 Dr. BJørN loMBorg— False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet # 124 Dr. DAVID J. HAlPerIN— Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO # 123 gerAlD PoSNer— Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America

# 114 kATHerINe STeWArT—The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism # 113 DAVe ruBIN—Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason # 112 ANN DruyAN—Cosmos: Possible Worlds. How science and civilization grew up together

# 91 JAMeS TrAuB—What Was Liberalism?: The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea

# 109 Dr. NeIl SHuBIN— Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA

# 90 Dr. Mel koNNer—Believers: Faith in Human Nature

# 105 Dr. DIANA PASulkA— American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology # 104 JuDITH FINlAySoN—You Are What Your Grandparents Ate: … Nutrition, Experience, Epigenetics and the Origins of Chronic Disease

# 132 Dr. leoNArD MloDINoW— Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics # 131 Dr. STuArT rITcHIe— Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth # 130 Dr. DeBrA SoH— The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex & Identity n Our Society # 129 Dr. MoNA Sue WeISSMArk —The Science of Diversity

# 120 Dr. ANDreW rADer— Beyond the Known: How Exploration Created the Modern World and Will Take Us to the Stars # 119 HoWArD BlooM—Einstein, Michael Jackson, and Me: A Search for the Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll # 118 Dr. STuArT ruSSell— Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

# 93 Dr. geoFFrey MIller— Virtue Signaling: Essays on Darwinian Politics and Free Speech

# 110 Dr. BArT eHrMAN—Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

# 106 Dr. DANIel cHIroT— You Say You Want a Revolution? Radical Idealism and its Tragic Consequences

# 121 Dr. MArIA koNNIkoVA—The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

# 94 Dr. DAVID leISer—How We Misunderstand Economics and Why it Matters

# 92: TIM SAMuelS—Future Man: How to Evolve and Thrive in the Age of Trump, Mansplaining, and #MeToo

# 107 Dr. FreD kAPlAN— The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

# 122 Dr. WAlTer ScHeIDel— Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity

# 95 Dr. JoHN MArTIN FIScHer— Death, Immortality and Meaning in Life

# 111 Dr. ScoTT BArry kAuFMAN —Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization

# 108 Dr. BrIAN greeNe— Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

# 133 Dr. MIcHAel e. MccullougH—The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code

# 96 Dr. cATHerINe WIlSoN— How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well

# 103 Dr. roBerT FrANk— Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work # 102 Dr. cHrISToPHer ryAN— Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress # 101 Dr. Hugo MercIer— Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe # 100 Dr.MIcHAel SHerMer— 100th episode Special: Ask Me Almost Anything #6

# 89 Dr. rIcHArD DAWkINS—outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide # 88 DANIel oBerHAuS— Extraterrestrial Languages # 87 DouglAS MurrAy— The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity # 86 Dr. NeIl DegrASSe TySoN— Letters from an Astrophysicist # 85 Dr. DeePAk cHoPrA— Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential # 84 Dr. cHrISToF kocH— The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed # 83 Dr. PeTer BogHoSSIAN— How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide # 82 Dr. PHIl zuckerMAN— What It Means to Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living an Ethical Life # 81 Dr. Bruce HooD— Possessed: Why We Want More Than We Need # 80 BryAN WAlSH: End Times— A Brief Guide to the End of the World # 79 Dr. ANTHoNy kroNMAN— The Assault on American Excellence

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volume 26 number 2 2021

EDITORIAL / ADVISORY BOARD Arthur Benjamin Professor of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College, Magician

Roger Bingham Science Author & Television Essayist

Napoleon Chagnon Professor of Anthropology, U.C. Santa Barbara

CONTENTS 37 Notes on a Haunting

COLUMN 4 The SkepDoc Mark Twain and Alternative Medicine by Harriet Hall, M.D.

K.C. Cole Science Writer, Los Angeles Times

64 Authors & Contributors

Richard Dawkins Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford

Jared Diamond Professor of Geography & Environmental Health Sciences, UCLA

Clayton J. Drees Professor of History, Virginia Wesleyan University

Mark Edward Professional Magician & Mentalist

Gregory Forbes Professor of Biology, Grand Rapids Community College

COVER ARTICLE 22 DMT and the

William Jarvis President, National Council Against Health Fraud, Professor, Loma Linda University

Lawrence M. Krauss Theoretical Physicist, Arizona State University

Christof Koch Professor of Cognitive & Behavioral Biology California Institute of Technology

William McComas Director, project to advance Science Education University of Arkansas

Are the Entities and Experiences of a DMT Drug Trip Real or Imagined? by George Michael

ARTICLES 7 Johannes Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Scientific Martyrdom by Christopher Graney

12 Lizard People, 5G and the Nashville Bomber by Tim Callahan

Bill Nye Executive Director, The Planetary Society

Leonard Mlodinow Physicist, Caltech

Donald Prothero Professor of Geology, Cal Poly, Pomona

Nancy Segal Professor of Psychology, CSU. Fullerton

Eugenie Scott (Retired) Executive Director, National Center for Science Education

Julia Sweeney Writer, Actor, Comedian

Frank Sulloway Research Scholar, MIT

Carol Tavris Social Psychologist / Author

Stuart Vyse Behavioral Scientist, Author

by Barry Markovsky

57 Trial, Error, and Success How People Learn and Think by Sima Dimitrijev and Maryann Karinch

Nature of Reality

John Gribbin Astrophysicist & Science Writer

How Science Can Explain Ghosts and Haunted Houses

14 The Fringe Is Mainstream Why Weird Beliefs Are a Normal, Central, Almost Universal Aspect of Human Affairs by Daniel Loxton

30 Astrology as a Spiritual Belief System Why a Focus on Empirical Evidence and Objective Truth May be Missing the Point by Geoffrey Dean, Don Saklofske and Ivan Kelly

EXCERPT 46 Twenty-five Fallacies in the Case for Christianity by John Campbell

JUNIOR SKEPTIC 65 Cognitive Dissonance Our Mysterious Brain Superpowers; Philosophy and the Unconscious: Thinking We Don’t Notice; Learning the Vocabulary; Dissonance Theory; Uncomfortable Inconsistencies; When Prophecies Fail; A Modern Doomsday Group; Repeated Disappointments; Doubt and Denial; Distorting Reality; No Problem; Dissonance Theory Put to the Test; Dissonance Confirmed; Dissonance in Real Life; Forming Beliefs; Defending Beliefs—and SelfImage; If I’m Not Horrible, You Must Be; Dissonance and Society. by Daniel Loxton Hallucination illustration by Pat Linse. The drum playing model is Melinda Carney (aka Shaman MiMi), who was photographed by Ed Pastor.

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C O LU M N

The SkepDoc Mark Twain and Alternative Medicine BY HARRIET HALL, M.D.

What do you know about Mark Twain? That he was a famous humorist? That he wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn? Maybe you know he questioned many conventions like organized religion. What you may not know is that he was an enthusiastic proponent of “alternative medicine” long before the term was coined. Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Clemens, was born in 1835, long before germ theory, antibiotics, randomized clinical trials, or modern vaccines. The medicine of his day was pre-scientific and unregulated, splintered into sects with allopaths, homeopaths, hydrotherapists, osteopaths, and others battling each other for primacy. Anyone could practice medicine without a license. Twain had no rational basis for choosing one sect over another. Twain always feared death, with good reason. In his day, life was very uncertain, with 25 percent of children dying before their first birthday, and 50 percent by age 21. Twain was a premature, sickly child. As an adult, he asked his mother if she had been afraid he wouldn’t live; he claims she said no, she was afraid he would! He saw four of his siblings die. Frequent epidemics of smallpox, cholera, and scarlet fever tore through the population; mortality was high due to poor nutrition and poor public sanitation. As a child, Twain was so afraid of measles that he decided to put an end to the fear by catching measles; he deliberately exposed himself to a patient. He found that having measles was nowhere near as bad as the fear had been. He learned there was something worse than death: worrying about it.

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Twain was raised with alternative medicine. His mother, Jane Clemens, dabbled in everything from homeopathy to spiritualism to patent medicines. As a boy, Twain saw a faith healer cure his mother’s toothache with suggestion. His mother frequently dosed him with Perry Davis’ “Pain Killer”—a mixture of alcohol, camphor, and cayenne pepper. All treatments apparently worked: he survived. As an adult, Twain experimented with everything, sampling every system of medical treatment. He thought there was no reliable way to find out why people got sick or the best way to make them well. Back then, there wasn't; but today we do have a reliable way: science. Twain thought that if enough treatments were sampled, there might be a remote chance of finding one that actually worked. Twain always distrusted conventional medicine, and not without reason. The medicine of his day was pre-scientific: ideas about disease were fuzzy, and conventional medical treatments were harsh, ineffective, and often toxic, leaving a fertile field for other options. Twain called doctors “killers,” saying they were deadlier than the most efficient army. He may have been the first to use the “death by medicine” meme that is so popular in alternative medicine today. It no longer reflects reality, but it did then. Before 1900, doctors were just as likely to harm as to help their patients. Always a contrarian and a skeptic, Twain questioned the consensus of experts because “experts” squelched new ideas and refused to recognize lone geniuses like Semmelweiss, who struggled to get his fellow physicians to wash their hands.

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Neurasthenia and Twain’s Wife Olivia Neurasthenia was the disease du jour, “the American disease.” America was thriving, but many individuals were not. They complained of vague symptoms of weakness, fatigue, malaise, dyspepsia, depression, insomnia, and “nervous exhaustion.” Neurasthenia was thought to affect the best and brightest, and everyone believed it was a physical disorder, not an emotional problem. Excessive stimulation was said to “dephosphoralize” the nervous system. It could be caused by accidents or environmental stresses, or the body itself could produce toxic agents. Twain’s wife Olivia (Livy) was diagnosed with neurasthenia and was bedridden for two years in her late teens. Today she might be diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivity, somatization, hormone imbalance, impaired immunity, hypoglycemia, chronic systemic candida, Lyme disease, or one of many other questionable diagnoses. Neurasthenia was a wonderful diagnosis with many symptoms and no organic pathology, and it was an excuse for failure or for not living up to expected roles. A quack told Livy she would get up and walk, and she did. For what was essentially faith healing he charged the family $15,000. Electrotherapy was recommended for neurasthenia to replenish nerve force and as a way of providing exercise at rest. When Livy developed heart failure, at first electrotherapy seemed to restore her lost vitality, but the effect didn’t last. In a misguided attempt to protect Livy from stress, Twain lied and concealed things from her. Autonomy is

basic to medical ethics, but it requires truth. One can’t be autonomous if misinformed or deprived of all hope. He Wanted to Try Everything Mark Twain married into his wife’s family’s belief in hydrotherapy, and he taught his daughters to believe in this discredited treatment, as well as that they could improve their vision by “mind over matter.” He and they fooled themselves into believing they had succeeded, but they soon resumed wearing their discarded eyeglasses. Later in life Twain suffered from gout and was often bedridden with disabling attacks. When he tried electrotherapy, he was enthusiastic because it relieved his symptoms in a day. But it failed to prevent recurrent lifelong attacks. He wanted to try everything because “they can’t all fail.” He needed to sustain hope. “They can’t all fail.” And yet they did. They promised much but were only fool’s gold. They were better at creating feasible explanations for why they should work than at showing that they did work. Twain tried everything: water cures, rest cures, electrotherapy, osteopathy, homeopathy, faith healing, and many more. His gout appeared to improve with electrotherapy, his daughter’s epilepsy with osteopathy, Livy’s health with the water cure; but enthusiasm turned to disappointment and frustration when the improvements didn’t last. Twain’s experiments fell into a consistent pattern. At first, he believed each new treatment he adopted was highly effective and he spoke out loudly and forcefully in support of it. Later he was reluctant to let it go, clinging to it beyond all reason even as he realized that the improvements had been illusory or only temporary. He didn’t understand factors like the natural course of disease, variations in disease pattern, regression to the mean, the imperfections of memory, and the misperceptions due to human psychology. Many diseases were self-limited; and when the body healed itself, any medical system the patient was currently using might falsely get the credit. Most of the things he tried were

only elaborate ways of doing nothing. But doing nothing was not an acceptable option. Mark Twain heard good things about cocaine and planned to go to the Amazon and establish a business. He only made it as far as New Orleans and became a river pilot instead. His experiences as a river pilot would later color his writing. At one point he believed in Plasmon, a dietary supplement, and invested in it. He even invented his own patent medicine to treat chilblains: it was just kerosene. Was this fraud or intelligent capitalism? He had faith in it and gave his own testimonial. Twain did recognize that some treatments were scams. When he sent a servant to the Oppenheimer Institute for alcoholism, it cost $150 and the servant came back drunk. Oppenheimer blamed failures on patients for not following his advice, which was to stop drinking alcohol! Twain always rejected Christian Science. He hated it intensely but acknowledged that faith did appear to heal some patients. His sister tried to treat his arthritis at long distance with Christian Science; it didn’t work. Twain’s Children and Their Discontents Twain’s son Langdon was born prema-

turely and was chronically ill. He was delivered by a homeopath and treated by one in his final illness until Twain lost confidence in the homeopath and replaced him with a hydrotherapist. Langdon died of diphtheria at the age of 18 months. Twain felt responsible for his death, not for having let quacks treat him, but for having brought on the illness by letting him get chilled. Twain’s daughter Clara underwent a rest cure for significant emotional problems after her mother’s death. She was bedridden and distraught for seven months. She spent most of a year in a sanatorium and eventually became a Christian Scientist. Twain’s daughter Jean had epilepsy. When the family took her to Sweden for treatment at an osteopathic sanatorium, the whole family seemed to benefit. Twain enthusiastically praised osteopathy and sought equivalent treatment in the U.S. Jean seemed to improve at first but then her seizures got worse. She was institutionalized in sanatoriums off and on for five years. The seizures came and went, interspersed with violent behavior (she tried to kill the housekeeper twice). She eventually died in her bathtub, apparently from a seizure. Finally, Twain’s oldest daughter Susy died of meningitis; he was convinced osteopathy could have saved her.

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Disease and Illness are Not the Same Thing Diseases have biological origins. Unlike a disease, an illness is not a specific biomedical entity, but the way a patient experiences a sickness. The suffering is a personal experience but also a social experience influenced by cultural factors, education, belief systems, expectations, and the norms of society. Diseases can kill, but illnesses cause most of human suffering, often as a result of imaginings. Alternative medicine excels at illness, not disease. Giving hope is its forte; it is better than doctors at providing hope. A doctor’s words have great impact, and sometimes conventional doctors’ words can seem impersonal, detached, mechanical, uncaring, and devoid of humanity. Perhaps the greatest sin of today’s science-based medicine is when it destroys hope. Doing nothing is rarely acceptable to patients even when it’s the safest course; and alternative medicines, while ineffective, serve as placebos so patients can believe they are doing something. Placebo Power Twain failed to find a miracle cure, but he succeeded in demonstrating the role of placebo. He found that treatments that can’t possibly benefit do seem to help some people’s ailments. When placebo controls are used in clinical research, they produce no objective improvements; but 35 percent of subjects report improvement in their subjective symptoms. The cancer doesn’t go away, but the pain is lessened. Placebo effects are an essential part of all medicine, including mainstream medicine: any positive interaction between healer and patient has a placebo effect. The simple act of following a treatment plan can create something of value. Placebo response relies on: (1) positive expectations of patients, (2) positive expectations of providers, and (3) a good patient-provider relationship. A good provider can modify patients’ perception of their illness in a way that makes them feel better. Placebos alone can’t heal. What heals is one person helping another. Homeopathy is the quintessential placebo: any active ingredient has been

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diluted out of the remedies. When Mark Twain employed homeopaths in the 1870s, 10 percent of all U.S. practitioners were homeopaths. Homeopathy was safer than the harsh treatments of mainstream medicine, since it is basically water with no harmful ingredients. It allowed for natural recovery and was at least as effective as any other medical system of the time. When warts go away with homeopathy, patients will say “I saw it with my own eyes” and will become believers, not realizing that the homeopathic remedy had nothing to do with it. “Plus ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose” The old adage is true: the more things change, the more they remain the same. Much remains the same in alternative medicine as in Mark Twain’s time. Conventional medicine is still vigorously attacked. Allopathic purging has morphed into “detox.” Patent medicines have morphed into dietary supplements, with the same exaggerated claims. Testimonials from celebrities are still common. Neurasthenia is gone, but it has been replaced by chronic fatigue syndrome and numerous questionable diagnoses. Hydrotherapy has fallen out of fashion, but many of its ideas have been incorporated into mainstream medicine, making it more holistic and humanistic and more appreciative of hygiene, good diet, stress reduction, and the general well-being of the individual. Homeopathy is available in every drug store. Folk remedies and placebos rely on ritual. If they fail, the patient can be accused of not following the ritual properly. The treatment is never blamed. The Future of Alternative Medicine Alternative medicine will never go away. The treatment of disease has always been emotionally based as well as intellectually driven. Up to 80 percent of doctor visits are because of worry and anxiety not related to any disease. Alternative medicine is really not alternative, but parallel. Orthodox medicine can’t win because it is not fighting the same battle. Alternative

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Medicine is not interested in why its treatments are illogical and shouldn’t work; it just wants to convince patients that they do work. People will continue to use them for the same reasons people turn to religions, cults, psychics, and faith healers: they want control over uncontrollable events. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain wrote that any mummery will do if the patient’s faith is strong in it. Cures are rarely achieved, but healing is always possible. The role of doctors is “To cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always,” an adage that originated in the 1800s with Dr. Edward Trudeau, the founder of a tuberculosis sanatorium. Mark Twain came to understand the mysterious force that underlies every successful interaction between a patient and a healer: the positive and caring interaction of one human being with another. Twain Was Not to Blame for His Errors Mark Twain believed in starving a cold and fasting for health. He smoked and never exercised. He believed bad habits were good because they can be discarded to promote recovery from illness. He tried all kinds of ineffective treatments. But he shouldn’t be blamed: he had no way of knowing any better. Sciencebased medicine was only one among many competing medical systems. Finally, in 1910, the Flexner Report recommended that medical education be regulated, standardized, and given a scientific basis. That was also the year Mark Twain died. He wasn’t gullible or misinformed; he was simply uninformed. He didn’t understand the need for controlled scientific studies, and he didn’t have the advantage of knowing what we have learned about human foibles and critical thinking in the last 11 decades. For further reading: I highly recommend K. Patrick Ober’s book Mark Twain and Medicine: “Any Mummery Will Cure.” It is based on Twain’s life, his published writings, and his private letters; and it offers insights into why the things Twain experimented with seemed to help.

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Johannes Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Scientific Martyrdom BY CHRISTOPHER GRANEY

How do we cope with today’s problem of truth? Our instincts might incline us to cope through gathering with friendly minds to tell familiar stories about what truth is and how we are the ones who recognize it. But what if those stories turn out to illustrate that the problem of truth is longstanding, even when those stories are about objective truth, such as truth revealed by science? One of the most famous of such stories is that of Giordano Bruno, the supposed martyr to science.1 Bruno was burned alive in Rome in 1600—scorched, the story goes, for his ideas about the stars being other suns, orbited by other earths. “It was because the philosophical astronomer, Giordano Bruno, asserted these distant suns to be centers of other systems that the Inquisition caused him to be burned alive at Rome before the terrified people.” So wrote Camille Flammarion, a prominent science writer of the later 19th century.2 In his 2015 The Invention of Science, David Wootton describes Bruno as having been subject to years of solitary confinement and prolonged torture before finally being burned, as “he had refused to recant his heresies, including his belief in other inhabited worlds.” Bruno matters, says Wootton, because of the truth of his ideas:

Druyan’s television series Cosmos contained within it a short, animated feature on Bruno.4 The climax was a confrontation between Bruno and a cartoon churchman—Bellarmine, presumably—and the churchman’s supporting band of robed uglies who condemn Bruno. Presumably, the story would have been less relevant to a science series such as this had he been burned at the stake for some other offense. In point of fact, Bruno said a n u m b e r o f things that many people of his time found deeply offensive, most of which had nothing to do with science. Note Wootton’s reference to “heresies,” plural. Whether Bruno’s advocacy of other suns and earths actually played any part in his condemnation is a subject that historians have

because he was, on occasion, right…. [W]e now know that the sun is a star, that other stars have planets…. We are not at the center of the universe: rather, the Earth is just another planet. Bruno would find himself more at home in our universe than would Cardinal Bellarmine, the man who played the key role in his trial, as he played the key role in the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Copernicanism in 1616. On crucial points Bruno was right before anyone else….3

Of course, Bruno was right about that particular matter of science. The first episode in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s 2014 reboot of Carl Sagan’s and Ann

Giordano Bruno (left) and Johannes Kepler (right). Image credits: Wikimedia Commons.

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considered, given his skepticism of the central tenets of Christianity, such as “holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith” in denying the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Jesus’ mother Mary, transubstantiation, and others. But let us suppose for the moment that Flammarion’s assessment is correct, and it was just for his advocacy of the plurality of worlds that Bruno was condemned. As it happens, even under this supposition, Giordano Bruno could never have been a martyr to science. His ideas about other worlds, for which he was supposedly burned, were contrary to science. Indeed, they were contrary to what persons with even a rudimentary understanding of astronomy could see with their own eyes. One person who pointed this out was the astronomer Johannes Kepler. Kepler argued that Bruno was entirely mistaken about the stars. Like Bruno, Kepler supported Copernicus’s idea that the Earth, along with Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc. orbited the sun. Indeed, Kepler is the genius who worked out the laws of orbital motion for these bodies, laws we still use today. But Kepler rejected the idea that stars were other suns. Why? Not because he was insufficiently bold, or excessively attached to traditional ideas. In developing those laws, he had boldly set aside ideas about celestial objects and perfect circles to which astronomers had been attached for over two millennia. No, the reason Kepler gave for rejecting the idea that stars were other suns was because observations, measurements, and calculations—science, if you will—showed that they could not be suns. Kepler explained this in an essay he wrote to Galileo in 1610.5 Noting Galileo’s description of the appearance of stars as seen through the telescope, Kepler says that Galileo’s observations indicate that “the fixed stars generate their light from within, whereas the planets, being opaque, are illuminated from without; that is, to use Bruno’s terms, the former are suns, the latter, moons or earths.” Kepler grants to Bruno that stars are like the sun insofar as they generate their own light. But that is all he grants Bruno, for he then continues, Nevertheless, let him [Bruno] not lead us on to his belief in infinite worlds, as numerous as the fixed stars and all similar to our own…. You [Galileo] do not hesitate to declare that there are visible [with a telescope] over 10,000 stars…. Suppose that we took only 1000 fixed stars, none of them larger than 1' (yet the majority in the catalogues are larger).

This measurement of 1' that Kepler gives is one

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minute of arc, one 30th the apparent diameter of the full moon in the night sky. Kepler continues: If these were all merged in a single round surface, they would equal (and even surpass) the diameter of the sun. If the little disks of 10,000 stars are fused into one, how much more will their visible size exceed the apparent disk of the sun? If this is true, and if they are suns having the same nature as our sun, why do not these suns collectively outdistance our sun in brilliance? Why do they all together transmit so dim a light…? When sunlight bursts into a sealed room through a hole made with a tiny pin point, it outshines the fixed stars at once. The difference is practically infinite…. Will my opponent tell me that the stars are very far away from us? This does not help his cause at all. For the greater their distance, the more does every single one of them outstrip the sun in diameter.

Kepler makes three important points about stars here. The first pertains to their apparent sizes. When he refers to how “large” stars appear, he is referring to the fact that, when people with excellent vision look up at the stars, they see dots of light of varying size. People with weaker eyes may see stars as being spiked with flares or looking like fuzzy balls; Kepler writes that, to his own weak eyes, “any of the larger stars, such as Sirius [the most prominent of the naked-eye stars in our night sky]… seems to be only a little smaller than the diameter of the moon.” However, to those with clear eyes, Sirius is a bright dot, much smaller than the moon, yet slightly larger than the stars Betelgeuse and Rigel that mark nearby Orion’s upper left shoulder and lower right knee; these in turn appear larger than the stars that mark Orion’s belt; and the belt stars appear larger than the stars that comprise the Pleiades that Orion faces. When clear-eyed people try to ascertain the size of those dots, they find that the brighter ones appear to have a diameter at least one thirtieth that of the moon—at least 1'. Astronomers ranging from the ancients right up to Kepler’s late boss, Tycho Brahe, had measured the apparent sizes of the stars. They consistently reported that the most prominent stars measured at least 1', and thus Kepler’s reference to “the majority in the catalogues.” The second point Kepler makes pertains to the light of the stars. He is saying that their light is inherently weaker than the sun’s. They cannot be suns that just appear small on account of distance. Distance makes objects appear smaller, but not weaker in light. Imagine standing on a beach, or in a grassy field in a park. A square foot of the ground’s surface

Diagram of the universe of stars from Kepler’s Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, showing a small sun (the dot at the center) surrounded by large stars. Image credit: ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Alte und Seltene Drucke.

appears no dimmer to you on account of it being farther away from you. If it did, then the ground would fade to dark as you looked farther and farther out along that beach or field. It does not. The “surface brightness” of the ground does not depend on distance. The ground is illuminated by the sun, but surface brightness is constant with distance for objects illuminated from within, too—light travel and the rules of geometry that govern it do not change based on how the light is produced. The surface brightness of stars, then, will not depend on distance, and, as Kepler notes, the surface brightness of stars obviously does not match that of the sun. Add up all those starry dots of light, he says, and you have something that rivals the sun in size but is so much weaker in light output that “the difference is practically infinite.” And indeed, modern measurements show it would take ten billion Siriuses in the night sky to light up the ground

the way the sun does. Kepler is showing us that observation, measurement, and calculation reveal that stars are not suns. Science, he is saying, reveals Bruno to be wrong. But Kepler has a third point to make about the stars. The sun and moon appear nearly equal in diameter, as a solar eclipse so dramatically illustrates. Thus, a star that appears one 30th the diameter of the moon also appears one 30th that of the sun. Here lies the further trouble for Bruno. Imagine that the typical star is in fact another sun—identical to the sun in actual physical bulk. That star would then have to be 30 times more distant than the sun to appear the size it does. That is not possible. It is not possible because in the Copernican system, the Earth circles the sun annually, moving with respect to the stars. Were stars merely thirty times farther away than the sun, then astronomers like Kepler would have easily detected Earth’s

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A star as seen through a very small aperture telescope, from John F. W. Herschel’s Treatises on Physical Astronomy. The star appears as a disk of measurable size, but the image is an entirely spurious product of optics and does not reflect the physical size of the star. This is a telescopic view, but observers using naked eye instruments saw and measured similarly spurious stellar disks, and recorded the measurements in catalogs. Image credit: ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Alte und Seltene Drucke.

motion by observing them. But in fact, astronomers could detect no sign of any annual motion relative to the stars. Copernicus had said that this was because the stars were so far away that by comparison Earth’s annual movement was as nothing; they were much farther away than 30 solar distances. Now note how Kepler says “the greater their distance, the more does every single one of them outstrip the sun in diameter.” For stars to be at the distance required by Copernicus, and still be seen from Earth as dots one thirtieth the diameter of the moon, they would have to be enormous. Kepler calculated that Sirius was larger than the entire solar system, meaning that even the smallest stars visible to the eye had to be the size of Earth’s orbit—utterly dwarfing the sun.6 Kepler has already shown us that stars are not suns as regards light. Now he shows that stars are not suns as regards size. Kepler shows us that the most simple, reproducible observations and measurements, combined with the most basic geometrical calculations, seem to reveal that, contrary to Bruno, stars are not suns. Rather, stars seem to be enormous but dim bodies—utterly dwarfing the sun by size, utterly outclassed by the sun in brilliance. So it follows that while there are many stars in the visible universe, there is only one sun, and thus only one solar system. “It is quite clear,” Kepler wrote in his essay to Galileo, “that the body of our sun is brighter beyond measure than all the fixed stars together, and therefore this world of ours does not belong to an undifferentiated swarm of countless others.” Bruno had written of a universe in which “the stars beyond Saturn are…those innumerable suns or fires more or less visible to us around which travel their own neighboring earths.” 7 That idea could not stand up to the simplest science. Thus, Bruno could be no martyr to science, even were Flammarion right that Bruno was burned because of what he asserted about other systems of suns and earths. Bruno was no martyr to science, but rather just one more person caught up in the cruelties of the 17th

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century, when many people were executed for even relatively petty crimes. Claes Visscher’s panorama of London in Kepler’s time (following page) illustrates the grimness of that era, showing over a dozen severed heads stuck on poles atop the southern end of London Bridge, there for all to see as they went about their daily business. Theft of a pail of milk could bring the death sentence. A certain 17th-century Welsh milkmaid is said to have escaped such execution only because she could read, and, being sent to America in bondage instead, she would marry an African prince kidnapped into slavery, and eventually teach a future astronomer, her grandson Benjamin Banneker, to read.8 In such a world, a man burned for refusing to recant heresies that deeply offended his contemporaries would seem sadly unremarkable. Then how did Giordano Bruno end up being known as a man who was right about a matter of science? He became right because science’s history was forgotten. Astronomers in Kepler’s time widely debated the nature of stars in a Copernican universe. Even Galileo addressed the issue. The question of enormous star sizes in particular became important. Many astronomers agreed with Kepler that stars in a Copernican universe must be huge; many opposed Copernicanism because they found such stars absurd (if Earth did not move, by contrast, then the stars need be not even 30 solar distances away, and no larger than the sun). Kepler saw no absurdity in enormous stars, by the way: he said that God could create on a huge scale (the stars), yet also shower even the small things in his universe with brilliance (the sun) and life (the Earth) and creativity (human beings). Anti-Copernicans scoffed at such arguments. The debate raged for decades.9 But the whole business was moot. The apparent diameters of stars turned out to be spuriously large, an illusion caused by the wave nature of light and other effects; they do not, in fact, reflect the physical sizes of stars at all. It took another century after Kepler before astronomers understood this. By Flammarion’s time astronomers, having developed

From Visscher’s panorama of London. Note the heads on poles at the end of the bridge. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

tools in previous decades to study the nature of light, to measure the distances to stars, and even to determine the compositions of stars and sun both, had powerful scientific evidence saying that stars were suns. The fact that at one time powerful scientific evidence had said that stars were not suns was forgotten. Giordano Bruno ended up being the guy who was right, the guy who would find himself at home in our universe. A statue of him was erected in Rome in 1889, with a plaque to that effect. He became a martyr to science, despite his ideas being contrary to what persons of his time possessing even a rudimentary understanding of astronomy could see with their own eyes. Today, when uncritical and conspiratorial think-

ing can seem preferred over the methods of science, and truth to belong to whoever can seize the narrative, Giordano Bruno and Johannes Kepler further challenge our ideas of what is true. One of these men was right in his day but is wrong now; the other was the opposite. Science strongly supported one then; it strongly supports the other now. But Bruno and Kepler do illustrate how the process by which we select familiar stories about what truth is can lead us astray; their writings show that their story is not the received narrative, told for the past century and a half by storytellers ranging from Flammarion to Cosmos. Bruno and Kepler illustrate that determining what the truth is, even about something objective like science, is a longstanding challenge.

REFERENCES 1.

2.

3.

Prothero, D. 2014. “Cosmos Reboots” SKEPTIC, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 62-63 (on 63); Shackelford, J. 2009. “Myth 7: That Giordano Bruno was the First Martyr of Modern Science.” In Numbers, R. Galileo Goes to Jail, and Other Myths about Science and Religion. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Flammarion, C. 1894. Popular Astronomy (translated by J. E. Gore). London: Chatto & Windus, p. 601. Wootton, D. 2015. The Invention of Science. Allen Layne/Penguin/Random House (UK), p. 149. Italics added.

4. 5.

6. 7.

Prothero 2014. All Kepler quotations here are from Kepler, J. 1610 (1965). Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Starry Messenger (translation by Edward Rosen). New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, pp. 34-36. For further discussion of Kepler’s views regarding the stars as illustrated in a variety of his writings over time, see Graney, C. 2019. “The Starry Universe of Johannes Kepler.” Journal for the History of Astronomy, vol. 50, no. 2, pp. 155-173. Graney 2019. Crowe, M. J. 2008. The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to

8.

9.

1915: A Source Book. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 46-48. Perot, S. W. 2017. “The Dairymaid and the Prince: Race, Memory, and the Story of Benjamin Banneker’s Grandmother.” Slavery & Abolition, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 445-458. Graney 2019. An extensive discussion of the star size question in the early seventeenth century is available in Graney, C. 2015. Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science Against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

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Lizard People, 5G and the Nashville Bomber BY TIM CALLAHAN

On Christmas morning 2020, Anthony Quinn Warner detonated explosives packed in his motorhome in Nashville, TN, and blew himself and the surrounding environs to smith-ereens. Thankfully, police were alerted to the pending explosion by a bizarre warning emanating from the RV and managed to evacuate people in the community and no one else was killed. It was quickly determined that it was not an act of terror, and not long after reports emerged that took the case down a strange alley, well captured in a December 31, 2020, Yahoo News headline that read “Nashville bomber linked to lizard people myth investigators say.” That rang a skeptical bell in my head. When I was co-authoring the book UFOs, Chemtrails and Aliens with Donald Prothero, I came across a number of what were essentially modern mythic systems involving extraterrestrial aliens who had either visited Earth in ancient times, were actively creating hybrids with human beings, and/or were secretly controlling governments. In these new myths created during the latter half of the 20th century, there were three major types of aliens: (1) the benevolent Nordic aliens, who are human, blond, and beautiful, (usually hailing from the Pleiades star cluster); (2) the less kindly gray aliens of dubious intent, often said to be from the Zeta Reticuli double star system; and (3) the evil reptilians, extraterrestrials who look like us but are really lizard people, emanating from the single star system Tau Ceti.

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Of these, the reptilians were the most far-fetched. While conspiracy theorist David Icke has been the chief popularizer of the reptilian theory, the origin of the belief that the world is secretly controlled by malicious reptilian aliens or lizard people can be traced back to the 1983 television mini-series V, written and directed by Kenneth Johnson. In V a race of seemingly human aliens arrive on earth in 50 huge ships, which hover over the major cities of the world. The “Visitors,” as the aliens are called, ostensibly wish to trade knowledge for Earth’s mineral resources. However, it turns out that the aliens are not really human beings. Beneath their human-like façade—a thin, synthetic skin and human-like contact lenses in public—they are actually cannibalistic reptilian humanoids who harvest Earthlings for food, but who also enjoy eating live rodents and birds. Of course, like all evil aliens, they seek world domination. According to the reptilian conspiracy theory, hiding under artificial human skins are none other than Queen Elizabeth, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Lindsey Graham and others. While this idea might seem too absurd for anyone to believe, a 2013 survey by Public Policy Polling found that 12 million Americans said they believed that our government was secretly run by lizard people. As in V, these reptilians not only seek to become the secret and nefarious masters of our world, they also want to seduce our women and interbreed with

them. In a subplot of V, one teenager, Robin Maxwell, has a sexual relationship with a male visitor named Brian, who impregnates her as one of the reptilians’ “medical experiments.” According to one of the many websites 1 describing the “real” reptilian aliens, they exist in a different dimension from ours and are manipulating us by using telepathy:

human immune systems, despite the fact that very few communities that COVID ravaged, have 5G towers): David Vaughan Icke…[pronounced like former President Eisenhower’s nickname “Ike”]; born April 29, 1952, is an English writer and public speaker who has devoted himself since 1990 to researching what he calls “who and what is really controlling the world.” One of his main focuses is the influence that extra-terrestrial beings have on our world order, one of these alien races being the Reptilian Aliens, also known as Reptilians, Reptoids, or Lizard people. In The Biggest Secret (1999), Icke introduced the “Reptoid Hypothesis.” He identifies the Brotherhood as originating from reptilians from the constellation Draco, who walk on two legs and appear human, and who live in tunnels and caverns inside the earth. They are the same race of gods known as the Anunnaki in the Babylonian creation myth, Enûma Eliš. Lewis and Kahn write that Icke has taken his “ancient astronaut” narrative from Israeli-American writer Zecharia Sitchen.

The Reptilians exist in the third and fourth dimension manipulating the minds of society through thought control. Reptilian abduction, therefore, is often a product of mind abduction rather than physically taking the abductee’s body into a Starship and flying through space. These abductions can sometimes be experienced in the form of “nightmares.” The shape-shifting nature of Reptilians makes them exceedingly dangerous when abducting human minds. The Reptilian will often use the appearance of other benevolent alien races to disguise themselves. A common example is the use of a Nordic alien body in order to seduce the abductee with a sexual fantasy. Reptilians often use sexually aggressive attacks as the emotion of sex is one of the main drives of human beings. Interestingly, many ancient legends tell of us of great leaders (Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great) being conceived by intercourse between a woman and a serpent. The sexual nature of these attacks can be physical (in the flesh), mental (as a sexual perversion), and in the dream state. The Reptilians use abduction for feeding purposes. These entities thrive off of human trauma, horror, fear, and submission. Additionally, Reptilian abduction has served the purpose of DNA experimentation, which through the years have developed the human race. The Reptilians enjoy the process of control and this is their purpose for abductions.

To what extent this many people really believe such nonsense is difficult to say (people may tick boxes on surveys for a variety of reasons unrelated to the actual claim in question). But one true believer appears to have been be Anthony Quinn Warner who— whatever motivated him—was willing to act on his beliefs (not unlike the gunman who showed up at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. in search of the pedophile ring purportedly being run by Hillary Clinton). Quinn also appears to have ascribed to the belief that AT&T’s rollout of the 5G network was the deliberate cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the leading promoters of the reptilian UFO theory, David Icke, also emerged in 2020 as a major proponent of the 5G conspiracy behind COVID19 (the energy from the towers is said to weaken

Icke even claims that certain powerful, well-known families are of mixed human and reptilian descent. Specifically he asserts the Rothschilds are one such family: The Reptilian Alien bloodline streaming through the global elite cannot be seen more clearly than with the aristocratic family the Rothschilds. The Rothschilds family holds, by far, the largest private fortune in modern history. The Rothschilds rose to power under the leadership of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a German money changer and banker (said to be of the same Reptilian bloodline as Herod the Great). He spread his empire out through his five sons which he spread throughout Europe to “spread the empire.” The Rothschilds used the reptilian aristocratic technique of successfully keeping fortunes and businesses within the family through arranged marriages and interbreeding. It is not uncommon for Reptilian bloodlines of this rank to keep the aristocratic ties by marrying first and second cousins.

Not only the Rothschilds but the British royal family, theWindsors, as well are said to be shape-shifting lizard people. That would explain a lot, at least about what was revealed on the wildly popular streaming television series The Crown. Don’t believe everything you see on television.

REFERENCES 1.

HTTP://arcturi.com/Reptilian archives/ReptiliansAnd Abduction.html. Accessed December 30, 2016.

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The Fringe Is Mainstream Why Weird Beliefs Are a Normal, Central, Almost Universal Aspect of Human Affairs BY DANIEL LOXTON

As we enter into our second year of the fight to control the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s clear that misinformation continues to threaten millions of lives. I believe this developing crisis holds critical lessons for the future of skepticism. To bring these lessons into focus, I’d like to begin by considering a far more apocalyptic pandemic from centuries past: The Black Death. In October of 1347, ships from Eastern ports brought a terrifying, unknown disease to the harbors of Italy. Authorities were quick to confine sick and dying sailors on board their vessels, but the disease still came ashore, where it swiftly annihilated 30 to 40 percent of the population. The Black Death was the worst pandemic the world had known in 800 years. It was an unprecedented, catastrophic disruption to medieval civilization. It wasn’t just a plague; it was a major depopulation event. The plague altered the society, the economy, and even the ecology of Europe, re-wilding so much of the continent that we can physically measure the effects of the plague from pollen deposits. Much of the pandemic playbook we’ve used during COVID was conceived during the Black Death. After the initial outbreaks, most places had warnings about what was coming. They tried their best to prepare for the threat. Many organized central health authorities, created emergency plans, and dedicated vast resources to protecting their people. By definition, they were working with medieval levels of medical knowledge, but they actually knew enough—or they would have, if they were dealing with a different disease. Despite the prevailing idea that bad air caused disease, the people of Europe did know about contagion, and they knew what to do about it. They had learned how to manage contagious diseases such as leprosy: keep sick people isolated from healthy people. That’s what they tried to do. Italian cities closed their walls and borders. They

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first turned away, and then isolated the sick. They quarantined ships from offloading cargo or crew. (This is where we get the word “quarantine”: from the Italian word for 40, or 40 days of isolation). They led massive public hygiene campaigns. All of their efforts failed. The plague spread to every city and town, claiming rich and poor, righteous and wicked, clever and foolish alike. People fled, or prayed, or looted the riches from abandoned mansions. Others partied to their graves, stumbling drunk and hysterical past bodies rotting in the streets. “So many died that all believed it was the end of the world,” 1 said one man who buried his five children with his own hands. Society broke down completely. There was no rule of law, “for the plague struck so suddenly that at first there weren’t enough officials and then there were none at all.” 2 Around a third of the people in Europe died in four years. In some places, the death toll reached 50 or even 70 percent. In places struck by the deadlier pneumonic form of the plague, hardly anyone survived. Emergency measures failed because health authorities simply did not have the information they needed, information that would remain unknown for centuries, through countless waves of plague. No one even suspected that bubonic plague was carried by rats and fleas. Without that knowledge, the best advice was useless. Medieval people were told to “mix little with people…it is best to stay at home until the epidemic has passed.” One church leader sensibly warned, “In pestilence time nobody should stand in a great press of people because some man among them may be infected.” Also,“it is good to wash your hands oft times in the day.” 3 Unfortunately, neither individual precautions nor official safety measures offered any protection. Infected rats climbed down the ropes of quarantined ships, slipped into locked down cities, and carried fleas into socially distanced homes.

Illustration by Izhar Cohen

The failure of rationalist responses to the plague left the field open for supernatural explanations and conspiracy theories. Of course, many people interpreted the plague as a punishment from God. What other cause was big enough to explain destruction on such a scale? The people prayed desperately for mercy that never came. The most extreme was the “flagellant” movement. The flagellants were violent fanatics who stripped down in town squares to whip their own skin to shreds. Great crowds of these zealots travelled from town to town. They called on the people to save themselves from God’s wrath by purging themselves of sin—and purging their communities of God’s enemies. As bad as all this was, it was about to get worse. In various places, an old rumor resurfaced: epidemics were caused by enemies who poisoned the drinking water. In some places suspicion fell upon beggars and outsiders. In most places, with the encouragement of the flagellants, suspicion fell upon the Jews. At that time, there were Jewish quarters in many European cities and towns. When they were accused of poisoning their neighbors, authorities arrested Jewish suspects and interrogated them under torture. As later happened during the witch hunting

mania, victims were tortured until they agreed to tell the stories their interrogators demanded. They falsely “confessed” that the Black Death was a vast Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christians. According to this torture-based fiction, every Jew in Europe was in on this genocidal plot—every man, woman, and child above the age of seven. All were guilty. All deserved to die. Hearing this now, it seems obvious that this story shared a basic flaw with modern conspiracy theories: the plot was too big and too evil to exist in real life. Even at the time, critics pointed out that hypothetical poison attacks “could not have been solely responsible for so great a plague or killed so many people.” 4 And why would anyone want to? The Pope himself argued that the accusations couldn’t be true. The story didn’t even make sense! As the Pope pointed out, “throughout many parts of the world the same plague…afflicts the Jews themselves and many other races who have never lived alongside them.” In Europe, Jews drank the same water as their neighbors, and died of the plague like everyone else. The Pope, Clement VI, ordered Christians “not to dare…to capture, strike, wound, or kill any Jews” under pain of excommunication.5

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None of that mattered. People believed the wellpoisoning rumors—and they acted on their beliefs. Murderous mobs rose to attack Jewish communities and kill every person they found. Some of their innocent victims were impaled or drawn and quartered. But the scale of the killing was too large for individual executions. Most victims were killed by the only technology of mass destruction available: fire. Whole communities of Jews were herded into their homes and synagogues and the buildings set on fire. “Once started, the burning of the Jews went on increasing,” recalled one account.6 Genocidal violence spread from town to town like wildfire…or plague. Soon it burned everywhere Jews could be found. As another chronicle described, “The whole world brutally rose against them, and in Germany and in other countries which had Jewish communities many thousands were indiscriminately butchered, slaughtered and burnt alive by the Christians.” 7 There were massacres in hundreds of towns and cities. Few escaped. All resistance failed. In one town, it took six long days to burn all the victims. In other places, prisons were specially built for mass burning. In others, whole crowds were flung together into vast flaming pits. One account describes this last scene of incomprehensible horror: “And when the wood and straw had been consumed, some Jews, both young and old, still remained half alive. The stronger of [those watching] snatched up cudgels and stones and dashed out the brains of those trying to creep out of the fire….” The Black Death and COVID-19 Conspiracies Can we learn from this terrible story? Does this have relevance today, as we confront COVID conspiracy theories, systemic racism, and the storming of United States Capitol Building by conspiracy theorists? I think it does. Let’s consider these three domains of response to the threat of the Black Death. (1) The rationalist response: plan and prepare; take every precaution possible based on the best available information. (2) The religious response: supplication for divine mercy. (3) The conspiracy theory response. We should not be surprised that people turned to conspiracy theories during a time of calamity. This essentially always happens during epidemics, especially with novel and frightening diseases. It happened with AIDS, and with SARS, and now it’s happening with COVID. We could predict that conspiracy theories would be a typical response to pandemics based purely on the psychological research into conspiracy thinking. It

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turns out to be easy to make people more receptive to conspiracy theories in an experimental setting: all you have to do is to make them feel uneasy, uncertain, or scared. A mere reminder of risks beyond our control— such as “whether I am exposed to a disease” or “whether my family members suffer or not”—increases our openness to conspiracy claims. Some psychologists propose that this is a subconscious defense mechanism to regain a sense of control—that it’s more comfortable to think about shadowy evil forces than the unpredictable threats of daily life, because an enemy is at least specific. An enemy can be outsmarted, exposed, or defeated. Third Domain Explanations This three domain model makes a useful lens for understanding human events, even though these domains are fuzzy and overlap one another. Humans have always known that there are events and forces beyond our control, such as earthquakes, weather, or the changing of the seasons. We have tended to intuit these as the domain of the gods. We may accept these forces as inevitable, or we may beseech the gods—but we do not expect to command these forces ourselves, using our own power. Then there is the practical realm of natural things. Here we have agency to bring about change. We can seek knowledge, solve mysteries, take action, counter threats, design solutions. Then there is a third realm—a realm which is considered beyond the ordinary, but not necessarily beyond reach. Sociologists have sometimes defined this realm as “dually rejected”: “Beliefs, practices, and experiences that are not recognized by science and not associated with mainstream religion.” This is the subject matter for “skeptics” under the tradition of “scientific skepticism.” And yet, we do not have a good umbrella term for this domain. “Paranormal” is most often used as shorthand, but this category includes many claims that are not “paranormal” in a technical sense. For example, most conceptions of Bigfoot would not be “beyond scientific explanation.” Likewise, many conspiracy theories, pseudoscience claims, and denialist movements are not paranormal (although they may contain paranormal elements). The claims in this X-files domain have some “thisness” in common, but it’s hard to specify exactly what that is. For now, let’s differentiate the rationalist domain from its spookier mirror image by loose contrast: Ordinary / Extraordinary Mundane / Mystical

Knowledge / Intuition Science / Pseudoscience Natural / Magical Explained / Mysterious Visible / Hidden History / Conspiracy Beliefs in this X-Files realm are often described as “fringe claims”—outlandish beliefs clustered at the lunatic outlier end of human thought. I’m going to argue that the “fringe” umbrella term is critically misleading. As it turns out, fringe claims are not very fringe. In fact, the opposite is true: weird beliefs are a normal, central, almost universal aspect of human affairs. They are as thoroughly woven through society as creativity, prejudice, or love. The prevalence of weird beliefs has been discussed for centuries, though rarely fully appreciated. Older umbrella terms include “impostures,” “humbugs,” “paradoxes,” and the memorable book title, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. This last one gives us some clues about the true nature of this beast. “Paranormal claims” in the wider sense are: “extraordinary”; unproven or demonstrably false; and, popular. So-called fringe beliefs are actually popular mass culture—a phenomenon of crowds. If you’re alone in thinking you have telepathic conversations with your dog, you’re merely delusional. This becomes a paranormal belief when other people agree with you. Historical Lessons It’s often fruitful to view paranormal claims from the perspective of history. Many paranormal mysteries effectively solve themselves if you trace their origins and put things in chronological order. It becomes clear, in many cases, that they had a specific origin in time and then evolved in a feedback loop with Hollywood and pop culture. When you repeat that exercise a number of times, another thing becomes clear: new claims are constantly emerging and mutating, but paranormal belief in general is kind of a “steady state” thing. Paranormal beliefs are always common, always popular, and always kind of the same. For example, think of Marley’s chain rattling ghost from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. That image feels very 19th century. In fact, it’s virtually identical to a ghost story told in Ancient Rome, complete with rattling chains. The belief in haunted places is so ancient that its origin is lost in time. It’s likely that ghost stories predate written language by thousands of years. Ghosts, monsters, fortune tellers, divining devices, spirit mediums—these ideas all go back to antiquity,

and are found all over the world. They are evergreen parts of human culture. Conspiracy theories are no different. When researchers analyzed a century of letters to the New York Times, the details changed often—but the frequency of conspiracy claims remained roughly constant. Paranoia springs eternal! The Black Death’s well poisoning rumor had unusually terrible consequences, but it was not remotely novel. There was a similar rumor almost two millennia earlier during the Plague of Athens: they felt their enemies the Spartans must have poisoned the drinking water. The study of paranormal history also reveals something else rather striking: while paranormal claims are always popular, always located near the center of human affairs, there is always a true fringe of genuine outliers—skeptics who just don’t buy this stuff, but for some reason think it’s important anyway. It’s hard to overemphasize how weird these people are! Debunkers pop up throughout history, but they’re always rare. They too are doubly rejected. Paranormal believers invariably consider debunkers to be persecutors or fools; disbelievers tend to think debunkers are perversely obsessed with unseemly trivia. Why would anyone care about stuff that doesn’t even exist? It’s frequently been argued that it’s shamefully wasteful to study the paranormal when the world has so many real problems of pressing concern. And so, skeptics have often apologized in advance for merely talking about paranormal claims. “I confess to being a little ashamed” to write an exposé of a popular fake psychic, said the ancient Roman skeptic Lucian of Samosata. In critiquing homeopathy in 1842, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. asked doctors and scholars not to “smile at the amount of time and labor expended in these Lectures upon this shadowy system; which, in the calm and serious judgment of many of the wisest members of the medical profession, is not entitled by anything it has ever said or done to the notoriety of a public rebuke, still less to the honors of critical martyrdom.” Carl Sagan anticipated in 1974 that, “The attention given to borderline science may seem curious to some readers. The usual practice of scientists is to ignore” paranormal believers, “hoping they will go away.” Sagan begged the indulgence of readers because he “thought it might be useful—or at least interesting” to consider their claims “a little more closely.” Haunted Humanity I’d like to argue that it’s well past time to look at fringe claims a lot more closely. I’d like to reject altogether

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the notion that studying weird things is a shameful waste, and turn that on its head: I submit that the study of fringe beliefs may be one of the greatest outstanding tasks for our civilization. In making that claim, I’d also like to challenge some of the rhetoric of my own field. I contend that we are not witnessing a “rising tide of irrationality.” Nor are we ever going to win a war against false beliefs. Science advocacy and critical thinking can improve people’s lives, but they will not make paranormal beliefs go away. The paranormal isn’t like a war, or like any other acute emergency that has a beginning, middle, and end. Paranormal beliefs are chronic—like crime, disease, alcohol, or fire. They’re as endemic to humanity as generosity and greed. Consider renaissance skeptic Reginald Scot, who wrote a stunningly modern exposé of the witch hunting mania in 1584. His book The Discoverie of Witchcraft correctly condemned all witchcraft claims as “false and fabulous.” He correctly explained that witch hunters were accusing, torturing, and murdering poor old women who were as innocent they were vulnerable. He correctly predicted that the witch trials would stand forever as a monument “to the everlasting, inexcusable, and apparent shame of all witchmongers.” Few listened. Scot was considered a heretic who rejected the simple facts of consensus reality. Witch burnings continued for another century and a half. Moreover, humanity’s capacity to believe in witches continued long after the trials ended. In the 1980s, belief in witchcraft exploded back into the popular imagination in the form of the Satanic Panic—a conspiracy theory that barely repackaged witch covens for modern sensibilities. One survey in 1994 found up to 70 percent of Americans believed that Satanic Ritual Abuse cults truly were abusing children. Extensive investigations eventually made clear that these cults did not exist. Not a single claim ever panned out. But this shameful debacle has not prevented witch belief belief from resurging yet again—right now, in the form of QAnon! A December 2020 survey found that 13 percent of Democrats and 23 percent of Republicans agreed: “A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.” Millions more stated they were unsure. Only 38 percent of Republicans said this Satanic cabal claim was false! QAnon claims that supposed Satan worshippers torture children to extract a magical youth potion from their blood! This is an obvious continuation of very old witch folklore. Reginald Scot was clearly correct that people in his day were so immersed in supernatural folklore about

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ghosts and demons that “we are afraid of our own shadows” and even a “right hardy man” could feel his hair stand on end when passing a graveyard in the night. But Scot was mistaken to think all such “illusions will in short time (by God’s grace) be detected and vanish away.” They did not vanish away. We are still thoroughly haunted, four centuries later. Up to 58 percent of Americans still believe places can be haunted by ghosts! At any given time, numerous weird beliefs are shockingly popular and widespread. Various surveys over the past two decades have found that about quarter of the American population believe people can move objects with their minds; another quarter believe that some UFOs are alien spacecraft; about 4050 percent accept ESP; another 40 percent believe in demonic possession. This is hardly an outlier lunatic fringe; these are substantial minorities that clearly place these ideas in the mainstream of American thought. And yet, this barely scratches the surface. In some cases, more people believe a “fringe” claim than believe the “mainstream” facts. For example, since the 60s, consistent majorities have believed that JFK was killed by a conspiracy. About 80 percent support alternative medicine. Almost 60 percent believe in Atlantis. The survey data for paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are surprisingly patchy, but the general picture is clear: individual beliefs rise and fall with fashion, but almost everyone believes weird things in general— even when we exclude articles of mainstream religious faith. When asked about 7 to 10 typical paranormal claims, such as “ghosts are spirits of the dead” or “Bigfoot is a real creature,” sizable majorities consistently “agree” or “strongly agree” with at least one of those claims. Typically between two thirds and three quarters of people agree with at least one paranormal claim from even a short list. Majorities of people also accept one or more conspiracy theories. One 2013 survey found that 63 percent accepted one of just four then-current conspiracy theories. A pioneering earlier survey found that almost everyone accepted at least 1 of 10 conspiracy theory claims. Only 6 percent of participants rejected everyone. The reality is clear: when we talk about “fringe believers,” we’re actually talking about most people. It’s easy to predict that a long enough survey list would reveal almost everyone is believer in something. Believers are mainstream; skeptics are the outliers. “Fringe” beliefs are normal. And yet, this truth seems difficult to hold in one’s mind. I believe that widespread biases prevent society from taking paranormal beliefs seriously. First, a lot of those beliefs are goofy in content. Nonbelievers struggle to comprehend how any sane, intelligent person

could think the Earth is flat, for example. We also tend to overlook the collective prevalence of weird beliefs, and instead consider individual claims in isolation. It’s easy to dismiss a belief as “fringe” if it is held by a small minority, such as the roughly 5 percent of Americans who believe the chemtrails conspiracy theory. The goofiness and relative rarity of a belief such as chemtrails reinforce a powerful natural bias: false consensus. Everyone tends to assume that most normal, decent, intelligent people believe what we believe. That assumption is a major blind spot for every society. It’s why one side always feels blindsided by U.S. Presidential election results. Nor are skeptics immune. Cognitive biases are like optical illusions: they don’t stop working when we give them names. It takes focused mental attention to (partially!) compensate for bias. Overcoming bias isn’t some level we can unlock; it’s a practice we can apply… to some topics, some of the time, when we’re making an effort. As it happens, we do not spend much time examining our tendency to underestimate the spookiness of the human experience. I think we probably should. Consequential Beliefs The illusion that weird beliefs are marginal has allowed society to ignore them most of the time. We lapse again and again into complacency. The problem is that marginal beliefs don’t always stay that way. Consider Sagan’s famous warning: I worry that… pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us — then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

How does this passage read in the light of COVID conspiracy theories and the storming of the U.S. Capitol? Sagan urged us to be ready. We weren’t. Society dismisses irrational beliefs until they become impossible to ignore. By then, it’s too late. COVID conspiracy theories began on the margins, but now pose a serious threat to our ability to control a global pandemic. Similarly, it’s hard to ignore far right conspiracy theories now, after the mob attack on the Capitol Building— but QAnon was festering for years before it attracted serious attention. When unproven or false beliefs suddenly prove

consequential, there’s often a scramble for understanding from mainstream thinkers who can’t quite believe what they’re seeing. How can so many people believe something so bonkers? The answer is simple: people believe bonkers stuff all the time—and we act on those beliefs. We always have. We’re always going to. And that shapes world events. Consider the existence of the Unites States. It’s well known that the colonies declared their independence in response to efforts from the British administration to levy new taxes and exert increased control. It’s also well known that the Founding Fathers had philosophical interests in individual freedom and new conceptions of government. It’s less widely appreciated that the Declaration of Independence was built on a conspiracy theory! American revolutionaries were alarmed, not just by what the British were actually doing, but by what they imagined the British were secretly plotting to do. They saw the new laws as “glaring evidence of a fixed plan of the British administration to bring the whole continent into the most humiliating bondage.” Samuel Adams claimed “the plan of slavery seems nearly completed.” If Americans didn’t fight back, Washington said, the British would “make us as tame and abject slaves as the Blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” Jefferson agreed: British abuses “too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery,” Jefferson said. “We are threatened with absolute slavery,” warned Alexander Hamilton. That plot was the “offspring of mature deliberation,” he claimed. “It has been fostered by time, and strengthened by every artifice human subtlety is capable of.” Or, consider the Third Reich and the horrors of the Holocaust. Hitler promoted the conspiracy theory of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion—a hoaxed document that was fully debunked in the 1920s but still believed by anti-Semites today. The Protocols pretended to record a secret Jewish plan to achieve “absolute despotism” over the entire world. Hitler claimed The Protocols were authentic. He said they revealed the true “nature and activity of the Jewish people and…their ultimate final aims.” The Protocols helped justify the oppression and murder of Jews in Germany and around the world. False beliefs routinely shape global events. There is no end of cases. In Nigeria in 2003, a conspiracy theory claimed that “modern-day Hitlers have deliberately adulterated the oral polio vaccines with anti-fertility drugs and…HIV.” This scare caused a polio epidemic across 20 countries—and paralyzed 5000 people. In 1999 and 2000, the President of South

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Africa claimed that the CIA and U.S. pharmaceutical companies were engaged in a “conspiracy to promote the view that HIV causes AIDS.” He claimed HIV deniers were unfairly targeted by “modern propaganda machines,” and denied his people access to life-saving medications. Experts estimated that this conspiracy theory cost 330,000 South African lives by 2008—and infected 35,000 newborns with HIV. Facing Reality It’s a fact of history: conspiracy theories and medical misinformation can be pretty important. But can’t we just ignore the wacky, harmless stuff like ghosts and Bigfoot and the Flat Earth? I’ve argued for years that there are many good reasons to study weird beliefs beyond the question, “How dangerous are they?” But if “potential for danger” is the measure we’re looking at, consider these two things: First: serious belief in any paranormal claim usually entails believing evidence is being suppressed by malicious actors; Second: the best predictor of who will believe any new conspiracy theory is whether they already believe any other conspiracy theory. Psychologist Rob Brotherton sums up the implications in his book Suspicious Minds: “the details don’t seem to matter much. If you know a person’s attitude toward one conspiracy theory, you can predict his or her attitudes toward other conspiracy theories with a fair degree of certainty, even when there is no obvious connection between the theories.” For example, if you’re convinced that NASA is concealing the Flat Earth, you’re primed to also believe that COVID is “fake news,” an engineered bioweapon, or somehow both. This is how we get the bizarre bedfellows of QAnon, in which wellness influencers adopted white supremacist talking points in an effort to root out Satanic witches. We can assume with confidence that the mob at Congress included people who were radicalized through “harmless” prior beliefs. What can we do about all that? I’d like to make some suggestions. First, we should get serious about the paranormal. It is a big deal, and it is not going away. Neither is religion. We’re never going to get to Scientopia. If our species lasts another thousand years, there will be people on Mars who think the Earth is a hoax because their psychic said so. To understand why, let’s go back to those three domains: the mundane, the divine, and the realm of paranormal weirdness. It’s normal for people to intuit and occupy all three domains at the same time. In general, it’s perfectly comfortable for people to accept scientific facts based on evidence, religious beliefs based on faith, and paranormal claims based on mystery and personal experience. After all, science is com-

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pletely compatible with the sentiment, “we don’t know everything.” The fact that we can believe all these things at once isn’t a bug. Weird beliefs are built right into our operating system. This goes beyond the cognitive biases that help explain “how thinking goes wrong.” The truth is that our greatest strengths as a species predispose us to perceiving worlds that don’t exist. Think of the cognitive superpowers that underlie so much of human achievement: curiosity; pattern recognition; perception of connections; inference of cause and effect; imagining hypotheticals; learning from past experiences. These abilities allow us to discover the real world through science—and also to conjure up alternative worlds of possibility, pseudoscience, and paranormal belief. What did it take to land rovers on Mars? We imagined a future with Mars landings, and we believed enough to make it come true. We are a species built on dreams. Dreams and storytelling. We need to work harder to understand the stories humanity tells itself. We should multiply our efforts to study and understand paranormal beliefs. That work is barely started, and it’s important. We’re talking about an understudied major facet of the human condition, with serious implications for politics, medicine, and the whole of society. We need a robust community of focused, rigorous scholars of weird things. We need the ongoing capacity to track new developments in the ecosystem of belief, refine our understanding, and ensure continuity of knowledge from one generation to the next. We need many more people working together much more closely. My dream? For every major university to have a department devoted year round to the critical study of paranormal, pseudoscientific, conspiratorial beliefs. There are certainly enough beliefs to go around! The situation since the 1970s is like putting one person in charge of the bureaucratic backlog at some vast federal agency, and then telling them that paperwork is a shameful waste of time. Step two is to refine and improve the service skeptics already do: sharing the best available facts with people who want them. Every year, millions of people seek out information about conspiracy theories, paranormal claims, pseudoscience, denialist movements, and scams. Simply making reliable information available is a legitimate and important public service. Of course, it’s a better and more useful public service when we remove unnecessary barriers that prevent people from accessing the information they need. In health care, for example, practitioners worry about systematic barriers to care, such as racism, cultural insensitivity, poverty, or the stigma of addiction.

Here’s the bad news: the skeptical literature is generally rife with barriers, to an almost absurd extent. To begin with, we’re a lot more rude than we realize. Even when we’re not gleefully ranting and railing against “wingnuts” and “idiots,” it’s difficult to find skeptical material that isn’t at least somewhat insulting to paranormal believers—which is to say, insulting to almost everyone, and specifically the people who could most benefit from the information we have to share. We erect further barriers when we package our information within a generalized worldview the public does not share. Paranormal believers and people of faith can and do appreciate the wonders of science. They can benefit from information about scams and pseudoscience. They’re happy to improve their critical thinking skills and science literacy. They are not interested in disrespect. Nor do they want to be converted! When people seek information about, say, vaccine safety, the last thing they want is to be upsold atheism or partisan politics. This should be obvious to anyone, because none of us want our science sources to sell us their religion or politics either. If they tried, we would simply stop trusting those sources. The True Challenge I’m going to wind up with the wildest frontier for skeptics of paranormal claims. First we study and solve mysteries; then we share what we have learned with people who want it. Those are works in progress. The next step is much, much harder: sometimes there’s a need to intervene in popular belief. Sometimes there’s a need to change people’s minds—about something like pandemic safety measures, for example, or whether it’s a good idea to overturn democracy. Here we are still on square one. Square zero. In fairness to skeptics, no one is very good at this, because it’s very hard to do. We’re up against human nature: it’s incredibly difficult for any of us to change our minds about anything. We’re engineered not to. Powerful unconscious mechanisms actively work to prevent it. This, of course, is cognitive dissonance theory. Many skeptics have some familiarity with this idea, but I think the implications are not fully appreciated. Nor are we always aware of the convergence between experimental psychology and fields that attempt to change minds or behaviors (self-help, talk therapy, advertising, addiction treatment, and so on). Briefly, normal people with healthy self-worth believe they are good, smart, decent people—and they will automatically downgrade their opinion of any fact or person that threatens to make them feel otherwise. This is a problem for skeptics, because “this idea is wrong” comes loaded with a self-image challenge: “I am

wrong.” The more wrong an idea is, the more it challenges us: “If my belief is wicked and stupid, that implies I am wicked and stupid.” That’s a very serious threat to self. Our unconscious mental processes will not take that lying down. Our defenses kick in, without us even realizing. “I am smart and good; therefore this idea is sound after all—and the person challenging my belief must be wicked and foolish!” This is a doozy of a thing to contend with. It’s why modern addiction treatment often attempts to moderate behavior through nonjudgmental Motivational Interviewing techniques. It’s why mediators struggle to coax that unreasonably hostile spouse to find any shred of middle ground. It’s why oppressors often remain proud of their participation in brutal dictatorships. It’s why people will reject their own party’s policy if they’re told it came from the other guys. And it’s why paranormal believers are usually unmoved by strong evidence against their beliefs. Here’s the thing: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. That isn’t in your power. What is in your power is a decision: “Am I going to build fences around the water—or should I open up the gate?” You can’t make someone believe you, any more than you can make someone love you. But it’s pretty easy to ensure they do neither! When we approach believers with condescension or ridicule, we put minefields and barbed wire between them and the information we’re asking them to consider. So here’s my takeaway: “paranormal believers” are most people. They aren’t the weird ones. We can’t expect them to listen if we pretend that they are. We cannot hope to change anyone’s beliefs about anything without taking them seriously as bright, curious, normal people who are worthy of empathy and respect. As Carl Sagan understood, “The least effective way for skeptics to get the attention of these bright, curious, interested people is to belittle, or condescend, or show arrogance toward their beliefs.” Since it is literally true that the future of our species hinges on belief, I submit that this is something to bear in mind.

REFERENCES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Robert Gottfried. The Black Death: Natural and Human Catastrophe in Medieval Europe. (New York: The Free Press, 1983.) p. 45 Rosemary Horrox, Ed. The Black Death. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.) p. 36 Ibid. pp. 175–177 Ibid. p. 57 Ibid. p. 222 Ibid. p. 209 Ibid. p. 56 Ibid. p. 208

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AR TI C LE

DMT and the Nature of Reality Are the Entities and Experiences of a DMT Drug Trip Real or Imagined? BY GEORGE MICHAEL

DMT, or N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, is an extremely powerful yet short-acting psychedelic drug, derived from tryptophan, a chemical substance that is found universally in living systems.1 Pharmacologically, DMT is a relatively simple molecule. It has been used for centuries by various cultures for ritual purposes in that it induces alterations in perception, mood, consciousness, and cognition. For example, in South America, indigenous tribes have long consumed ayahuasca, which is derived by decocting two plants native to the Amazon forest—Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis. Taken separately they have no hallucinogenic effect, but when brewed together they can induce an extraordinary visionary state lasting for several hours.2 It was not until 1931 that Western science became aware of DMT after it was synthesized in a laboratory by Canadian chemist Jeremy Manske. In 1946, a Brazilian chemist and ethnobotanist, Gonçalves de Lima, isolated DMT from plant sources. The psychotropic effects of DMT were first described in 1956 by the Hungarian-born chemist and psychiatrist Stephen Szára after he self-injected the synthesized substance.3 In 1965 a German team announced that they had discovered DMT in human blood.4 The “clandestine chemist” and advocate for psychedelics, Nicholas Sand, is credited with being the first person to discover that DMT could be smoked.5 DMT has been called “the crack of ayahuasca.” 6 Physiological changes under the influence of DMT include a rapid increase in pulse (up to 150 bpm) and in blood pressure, but both tend to fall quickly once the peak of the trip had been reached.7 Inasmuch as DMT metabolizes very quickly, users typically reach a peak high about five minutes after taking the drug. When DMT is smoked, the full “trip” typically lasts between 20 to 25 minutes. In order to “breakthrough”—to reach the DMT realm—a user has to inhale and hold three hits

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of the smoked drug. Unlike most other drugs, people who use DMT over time do not build up a tolerance for it. Smokable DMT is in a sense a rediscovery of a mechanism that has long been used by shamans to access what they believe to be hidden realms in order to obtain sacred knowledge. DMT and the Shamanic Tradition DMT has been employed by shamans in the Amazon jungles, where they are referred to as “vegetalistas,” or those who work with plants.8 Ayahuasca is regarded as an entheogen, an ethnographic term used to describe a plant or drug that evokes a sense of the numinous or a mystical experience.9 Encounters with entities in the form of jaguars and snakes are frequently reported. According to the Amazonian tradition, jaguars represent power, while snakes represent knowledge.10 The shaman’s role is important, for he serves in the name of the community and conducts intermittent commerce with the spirits of nature. During his journey, the shaman goes somewhere and brings back information that he uses to improve the well-being of the community. The entities with whom the shamans entertain a relationship are morally ambiguous. Whereas some have healing knowledge, others have destructive knowledge. It is usually easier to get knowledge that can harm people faster than to get knowledge that can heal them. For this reason, it is crucial for the community to keep a close eye on the shaman so that he uses his skill to benefit the group.11 In his 2007 book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, journalist and “alternative archaeology” writer Graham Hancock linked cave paintings dating back 35,000 years with shamanic traditions throughout the world. He noted that many of the paintings depicted therianthropic (human-animal hybrids) images not unlike the descriptions of entities that people had reported meeting under the influence

The often experienced “insectoid being” of a DMT experience.

of ayahuasca. The paintings depict these figures in various stages of their transformation and have appeared diachronically and across cultures.12 Hancock speculates that perhaps the total darkness of the caves facilitated the production of melatonin and DMT that contributed to spiritual voyages.13 As Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, and Karl Ruck have argued, shamanic plants and practices played a vital role in the genesis of many of the great world religions.14 In that same vein, Hancock adduces evidence that that the Abrahamic religions were inspired by hallucinogenic visions. He notes, for example, that the ordeal of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ followed by his death and subsequent resurrection is essentially the narrative of the wounded man, which is commonly found in visions of Amazonian shamans. Similar stories are told by shamans everywhere of their own initiatory agonies, death, and resurrection.15 In recent years, Rick Strassman has advanced the idea that the Hebrew Bible could be the accounts of people who entered a prophetic state under the influence of some hallucinogen, possibly DMT, and he calls this model “theoneurological.” 16

The Varieties of DMT Experience When DMT is smoked, initially users will often hear ringing sounds followed by a feeling that they are traveling through a tunnel. After that, there is a feeling that one has entered another realm that appears to be hyper-dimensional with intricate morphing patterns. The environments often appear to evince landscapes with hyper-advanced structures and vessels of complexity beyond human imagination.17 Users report seeing extraordinary visual phenomena, including kaleidoscopic lights, geometric forms, tunnels, and a variety of unusual entities.18i The experiences often seem veridical to the users; indeed, the realms are often described as more real than normal reality. In his self-published book, DMT & My Occult Mind-lite, Dick Khan, who describes himself as a “working-class man from the North of England,” chronicled his experiences under the drug.19 They are consistent with the accounts of other users. In most of his experiences he first heard a high frequency sound, then his room would seem to pulse with energy and images, then he perceived the presence of some form of conscious intelligence even if it was not

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visible. Occasionally he felt a distinct pressure bearing down upon him from above in the early moments of his experiences, perceiving this feeling as a psychospiritual entity’s effort to interact with him. At times he felt as if the entities were forcing him to laugh, and quite often they appeared joyful and happy and shared in his delight. From what Khan could infer, the entities seemed to operate interactively and communicatively across a wide spectrum of human emotions. His varied experiences led him to believe that he had rediscovered something primordial about the nature of humanity and his relation to other realms that shamans in the past had known. Mostly, Khan’s experiences were positive, but occasionally his DMT experiences were frightening. For instance, sometimes he thought that some entities were warning him to leave the area of the realm that he had entered. He felt as if his thoughts and feelings were not private to the entities and that they were adept at misdirecting the human mind as his thoughts seemed exaggeratedly amplified. There were times in which the entities would seemingly argue among themselves about how they should deal with him. In one such case, he perceived one entity to be very angry at him while another one seemed to be holding him back. Likewise “Ken”—a subject in Dr. Rick Strassman’s DMT study (discussed below)—felt that he had actually been sexually assaulted during his trip: There were two crocodiles. On my chest. Crushing me, raping me anally. I didn’t know if I would survive. At first I thought I was dreaming, having a nightmare. Then I realized it was actually happening.20 In a bizarre experience, a journalist and DMT researcher, James Oroc, claimed to have once encountered a female friend who had died years earlier. Another female friend of his watched over him during his DMT trip but abstained from the drug throughout the experience. She told Oroc that a vision of a woman appeared in the room while he was in his DMT trip, seemingly occupying some place between two worlds. She claimed that she saw a beam of light the size of an American quarter come out of his chest. Then Oroc split into two perfect copies of himself, sitting side by side on the couch. Soon thereafter the spirit of Oroc’s dead friend suddenly appeared. His living friend claimed to have been sober throughout the entire incident and not influenced by any drug, but of course we have only their account on which to rely.21 DMT users who smoke even higher doses can experience an even greater breakthrough that engenders a feeling not unlike a Near Death Experience. A very

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potent form of the drug derived from the Colorado River toad—5-MeO DMT—is reported to facilitate this breakthrough.22 It has been described as an “utter blast-off into hyperspace” followed by a dissolution of the ego and everything that makes up consensus reality. Surroundings completely disintegrate, time ceases to exist, and all individual traits, including personality, memories, intelligence, and language, are forgotten and all that is left is an energetic essence that feels like floating in an ether of eternity. This powerful dissociation effect can leave one with the feeling of profound insight into the nature of reality.23 Some voyagers recount living all of their life experiences in an instant. Many people report the DMT experience as an event that brings about a total awareness, a cosmic consciousness of sorts; however, this profound sense of knowledge and awareness is often fleeting and dissipates after a day or two.24 After the DMT experience wears off, the voyager often feels a sense of disorientation, asking himself “who am I?” 25 The dosage of 5-MeO DMT needs to be carefully calibrated to have the desired effect. A certain amount is needed to breakthrough, but too much can result in the user remembering little or nothing of the experience other than a bizarrely frightening “white hole.” James Oroc reported bursting through a realm that he described as pure light with an indescribable radiance and beauty that pulsed with its own intelligence.26 Voyagers report the feeling of expanding outward and becoming part of everything as if connecting with the entire universe from within their very being. Such descriptions are not unlike the Tibetan Book of the Dead which posits that in the bardos—a state of existence between death and rebirth—a soul possesses a body of light that is capable of crossing into universes in faraway dimensions at the speed of thought. The experience often has a transformative effect, occasioning a change in the user’s worldview. For that reason, Oroc counsels that the drug should be regarded as a life-changing sacrament and used with the utmost respect. Considering the profundity of DMT testimonials, the medical community was bound to eventually take notice. The Medical Community’s Research into DMT From 1990 to 1995, a physician named Dr. Rick Strassman conducted a government sanctioned study of DMT at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine in Albuquerque. Adhering to a painstaking protocol, he recruited 60 volunteers with prior experience using hallucinogenic drugs. He found that almost 50 percent of his subjects reported encounters with bizarre figures, described as “beings,” “aliens,”

“guides,” and “helpers,” which they perceived as residing in different dimensions.27 Initially, Strassman thought that these encounters were entirely subjective experiences that his subjects had conjured from their own psyches. But as his research continued, he began to believe that these entities were “autonomous noncorporeal beings.” Because of the lucidity of his volunteers’ accounts, he decided to act as if the realms they described and the inhabitants with whom they interacted were genuine.28 Not unlike the psychedelic researchers Aldous Huxley and Albert Hoffman who came before him, Strassman felt compelled to consider the possibility that certain hallucinogens might change the receiving wavelength of the brain enabling it to make contact with unseen realms and their denizens that are opaque to us in normal states of consciousness but are nonetheless real.29 More recently, Professor Roland R. Griffiths led a study to examine the variety of experiences users had under the influence of DMT. The fact that this study was conducted by personnel at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine added much gravitas to the subject.30 To recruit their subjects, the researchers posted notices on a variety of websites, including Facebook, Reddit, and recreational drug websites, between February and December 2018. Volunteers had to be at least 18 years of age and had at least one “breakthrough” experience while using DMT. If they had more than one experience, they were asked to recall their most memorable one. The majority of the participants reported having communicated in some way with an entity, 49 percent recalled only the entity communicating with them, and 40 percent claimed to have two-way communication. Not surprisingly, 99 percent reported having an emotional response. Although a sizeable minority—41 percent—felt afraid of the entities they encountered, most respondents felt “love,” “kindness,” and “joy” from the entities, describing them as “conscious,” “intelligent” and “benevolent.” Roughly 60 percent said the experience occasioned a change in their perception of reality. Not surprisingly, the experiences often changed the spiritual beliefs of the participants.31 The bizarre nature of these experiences could perhaps explain the oft-derided claims of UFO abductees. Can the Alien Abductee Experience be Explained by DMT? When skeptics challenge UFOlogists to produce physical evidence of UFOs and close encounters of the third kind, one response is that aliens might have originated from other dimensions beyond our spacetime.32 The late Harvard psychiatrist John Mack

conducted some of the most extensive research on alien abduction cases. Initially very skeptical, over time Mack concluded that the vast majority of those subjects that he interviewed were psychologically healthy persons that were trying to contend with an extraordinary experience.33 Reviewing the research of the UFOlogist Budd Hopkins, for example, Mack was intrigued by the consistency of the abduction accounts,34 employing hypnosis as a tool in the study of the abduction phenomenon.35 In his books, Abduction and Passport to the Cosmos, Mack referred to the abductees as “experiencers,” shifting the focus from something that happens in the physical world (say, a bedroom) to something that happens in the minds of abductees. Experiencers often reported humming sounds, strange bodily vibrations, paralysis, or sometimes being placed on an examining table. Some abductees claimed to have received implants that were designed to monitor them, not unlike those that scientists use to track bears and wolves.36 Mack and other researchers found that some of the abductees bore small scars that seemingly corroborated their claims of implantations.37 They commonly reported seeing energy filled tunnels and cylinders of light during their experiences. The typical alien was usually described as short, with a large head, skinny body, big eyes, gray skin, and a small mouth. Some, however, were described as reptoid and insectoid. Not unlike the ordeal of Betty and Barney Hill, many abductees reported that the aliens seemed to be interested in the reproductive apparatus of humans, possibly to breed some kind of humanalien hybrids.38 The abductees recounted that the aliens attempted to communicate with them, often by way of telepathy, as if they heard alien voices speaking inside their heads. It was not uncommon for abductees to feel that there is one alien in particular with whom they have a special relationship.39 According to Mack, interactions with extraterrestrials often had a transformative effect on the experiencers as many of them became committed to a number of progressive political causes, including environmentalism, and peace and disarmament movements.40 He speculated that the aliens performed a role not unlike shamans, insofar as they come to Earth to open the minds of humans and awaken them, opining that the encounters seemed “almost like an outreach program from the cosmos to the spiritually impaired.” 41 Similarly, under the influence of DMT many of Strassman’s subjects reported experiences not unlike those detailed by alien abductees.42 Their experiences were lucid and did not seem dreamlike, although Strassman observed that some of his subjects

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displayed rapid eye movement, and he wondered if the DMT had induced a wakeful dream state.43 Strassman found striking commonalities between the reports of John Mack’s subjects and those of his DMT volunteers.44 For instance, sound and vibration would build prior to the encounter just before the scene explosively shifted to an alien domain. The “autonomous noncorporeal beings” were usually described as insectoid or reptoid in appearance. In some instance, the beings were described as bearing a resemblance to praying mantises, albeit in humanoid form. Like Mack’s subjects, Strassman’s volunteers often found themselves on a bed or landing bay, or some high technology room, placed on an examination table. Usually, one particular alien seemed to be in charge. The aliens sought to communicate with the subjects using gestures, telepathy, or visual imagery. Some abductees report a feeling of neuropsychological reprogramming or a transfer of information involving unusual symbols, rather than words or sounds.45 The purpose of the contact was uncertain, but some subjects believed that the aliens were attempting to improve humans individually or as a species.46 Perhaps the setting influences the experience. Opining on Strassman’s research, Nicholas Sand noted that the clinical setting might have contributed to the accounts that told of alien doctors conducting probes. By contrast, if the setting would have been a temple with pleasant music and the smell of incense, the trip reports Sand conjectured, might have been quite different.47 The DMT experience has some overlap with the alien abduction phenomenon. According to many accounts, the abductee is awoken in his or her bedroom in the presence of some humanoid entity and is then transported through solid surfaces and onto an awaiting craft.48 But if these entities are real, then where do they reside? What is the Nature of Hyperspace? Most users and dedicated researchers to the topic believe that DMT actually does provide access to alternate dimensions inhabited by independently existing intelligent entities.49 Hyperspace is the name given to the realm that DMT users enter when their experiences begin. Various theories have been propounded to understand its essence. One theory held by shamans in Peru is that it is the abode of departed souls that people enter when they die. Graham Hancock says that shamans in Africa who follow the spiritual discipline known as Bwiti frequently report meeting with deceased fathers and grandfathers who serve as guides to them in the spirit world.50 Similarly, Peter Meyer, a software developer and one of the first researchers to

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write about the DMT realm, posits intelligent beings in hyperspace are what we might conceive as “souls” who are born into human bodies. He speculates that most of us were once souls inhabiting this limbo-type province and have been incarnated this way. To make his case, he notes that psychonauts often feel an odd sense of familiarity when entering hyperspace.51 In that same vein, Terrence McKenna, who arguably did more than anyone to popularize DMT, recounted that entities often lavished him with presents, as if he were being received in a kind of homecoming ticker tape parade. Elves presented gifts that resembled Fabergé eggs devised from complex arcane symbology and constructed in patterns that were not immediately comprehensible. Objects appeared like puzzles to be solved, messages to be translated, and hieroglyphs to be interpreted. These features suggesting that there was some mystery to be unlocked comprised the esoteric core of the DMT experience.52 Others speculate that DMT allows access to a kind of universal conscious, such as the Theosophical notion of Akashic Records or Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconscious that is purportedly pervasive throughout the universe. Consistent with that theme, one user reported the feeling of entering an open space where a kind of Internet opened up to him that seemed to take the form of a web of particles that connected the universe together. He felt as if he was moving through some type of advanced grid-like matrix made up of numbers, characters and symbols that he could not understand. As he looked in one direction of one part of the grid, he sensed as if he could take in the experiences of all the collective civilizations that existed in that part of the matrix.53 Interestingly, the DMT experience does not seem to be culturally dependent, that is, people under the influence of the drug report similar occurrences across time and cultures. Graham Hancock argues that this similarity lends credence to the theory that these realms are free standing: [W]hen huge numbers of people over enormous periods of history from entirely unrelated cultures keep on experiencing the same “unreal” things—as we know has consistently and continuously been the case—then perhaps the time has come for us to stop dismissing and discounting such visions and to seek out a proper explanation for them instead.54 Hancock describes DMT as a form of technology, not unlike a telescope or a microscope, which allows users to see something real that is normally not accessible to their senses. Perhaps, he speculates, there is a

secret doorway inside our minds through which we can project our consciousness into other dimensions. In these rarefied areas, intelligent sentient beings can teach us things that we did not know before.55 Hancock did, however, report important qualitative differences between his ayahuasca and DMT experiences. While the former seemed to be filled with organic and supernatural entities and surroundings, the latter seemed to exhibit high tech landscapes with seeming biotechnic entities.56 Where, exactly, do these entities exist? One suggestion by believers is that there may be spatial dimensions that we are unable to see. Since the latter part of the 20th century, research in string theory has dominated theoretical physics in an attempt to unite Einstein’s theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. According to string theory, there are a number of unobservable dimensions in which the building blocks of nature—extremely tiny vibrating strings—developed.57 Curled up, these dimensions are purportedly infinitesimally small, perhaps the size of the Planck length.58 Similarly, Rick Strassman speculates that perhaps DMT provides access to “other” channels, or dimensions that we cannot usually perceive with our five senses.59 Under the influence of DMT, the brain might switch channels that enable the person to access other domains. To support this view, he points out that the images are often so vivid and spectacular that they could not have been endogenously produced by the brain because the construction of such worlds would be beyond the imaginative capacity of most individuals. Perhaps, Strassman wonders, these mysterious realms might reside in dark matter. He speculates that humans may actually have parallel “dark matter bodies.” Based on this assumption, subjects could indeed undergo surgical procedures, such as implants during alien encounters, but there would be no physical evidence of the procedure in our world.60 DMT Skeptics Skeptics are loath to accept such fantastic claims without more evidence and a plausible causal explanation. Although they do not necessarily impugn the emotional intensity and vividness of the users’ experiences, they are more likely to believe that the experiences most likely are hallucinations concocted by the human mind. Psychologist James Kent, for example, notes that people have a natural tendency to perceive anthropomorphic shapes when they see random data, such as seeing faces in inkblots, dragons in clouds, or the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. Furthermore, the landscapes that the psychonauts observe frequently morph and lack a solid and consistent structure, not

unlike dreams. After the experience, they often reconstruct their memories so that they produce a more consistent and coherent narrative.61 While Kent conceded that DMT is often stunning in its effects (he used the drug on a number of occasions), he concludes that the experience is an exotic aberration of the brain’s perceptual mechanics. He points out that the drug acts primarily at the 5HT2A receptor where the hallucinogenic tryptamines seemingly work their magic. Using the analogy of computer programming, he notes that a single line of code consisting of just a few characters can drastically alter the way a computer screen presents data, appearing to make it flicker, blink, warp, or twist into intricate patterns. Likewise, the DMT molecule can induce similar effects on the brain. Furthermore, the perception of encountering aliens and elves is not unique to DMT users, as similar experiences occur in people diagnosed with psychosis. Kent rejects the notion that DMT is a gateway to an alternate dimension with autonomous entities. The more he experimented with DMT, the more he came to believe that the entities were merely machinations of his own mind, as he developed the ability to both think them in and out of existence, not unlike a lucid dream. What is more, UFO abduction cases are often surreal and dreamlike in character and often end up as hallucinogenic journeys. In many cases, humanoid aliens shapeshift into birds, giant insects, and other phantasmagoric creatures.62 One explanation is that hypnagogic (toward sleep) and hypnopompic (awakening from sleep) anomalies induce fantasies in some individuals who then attribute the experience to an alien encounter.63 As far as certain recurring themes or archetypes in reported DMT experiences—such as encounters with jaguars and elves—Kent sees this as a form of pareidolia, or the tendency for people to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. To be sure, the DMT-scape is startlingly sophisticated and complex, leading some users to believe that they could not possibly have envisaged such things on their own. But Kent suggests that people sell the human imagination short. Think of the fantastical worlds concocted by J.R.R.Tolkien or J.K. Rowling. Moreover, the messages that DMT users receive from entities that are of putatively superior intelligence seem to amount to generalized common wisdom applicable to the user’s own life. Nevertheless, he concedes that there are aspects of the human mind, including creativity, which can be amplified under the influence of DMT.64 Furthermore, the DMT experience often seems

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very personalized, which would suggest that it ultimately derives from the individual psyche and not some free standing realm. Perhaps aliens and entities do exist but are ultimately psychological and transpersonal in nature. That is, they are unfamiliar aspects of ourselves.65 But how could that ever be tested? What is more, the perception of alien entities can also be artificially induced. For example, the Swiss neuroscientist, Olaf Blanke and his colleagues were able to produce a “shadow person” in a patient by electronically stimulating the left temporoparietal junction in her brain. “When the woman was lying down a mild stimulation of this area gave her the impression that someone was behind her; a stronger stimulation allowed her to define the ‘someone’ as young but of indeterminate sex.” 66 Additional natural explanations include migraine headaches, which can produce hallucinations. A longtime suffer, the noted neurologist Oliver Sacks, recounted in his book Hallucinations, that when his migraine headaches came on he experienced visions that included a dazzlingly bright shimmering light that stretched from the ground to the sky, with sharp glittering, zigzagging borders and blue and orange colors. In his autobiography, On the Move, Dr. Sacks recounts an incident in November of 1965 during which he was putting in marathon work weeks as a medical intern and downing huge doses of amphetamines to stay awake, topped off with generous measures of sleep inducing chloral hydrate. One day while dining in a café, as he was stirring his coffee, “it suddenly turned green, then purple.” When Sacks looked up he noticed that the customer at the cash register “had a huge proboscidean head, like an elephant seal.” Shaken by this

image, Sacks ran out of the diner and across the street to a bus, where all the passengers “seemed to have smooth white heads like giant eggs, with huge glittering eyes like the faceted compound eyes of insects.” At that moment the neurologist realized he was hallucinating but that “I could not stop what was happening in my brain, and that I had to maintain at least an external control and not panic or scream or become catatonic, faced by the bug-eyed monsters around me.” There may even be an evolutionary basis for the sensed presence of others, as Sacks conjectures: “Thus the primal, animal sense of ‘the other,’ which may have evolved for the detection of threat, can take on a lofty, even transcendent function in human beings, as a biological basis for religious passion and conviction, where the ‘other,’ the ‘presence,’ becomes the person of God.” 67 Sacks explained that the reason hallucinations seem so real “is that they deploy the very same systems in the brain that actual perceptions do. When one hallucinates voices, the auditory pathways are activated; when one hallucinates a face, the fusiform face area, normally used to perceive and identify faces in the environment, is stimulated.” 68 Another factor to consider is how the brain processes information. As Michael Shermer explained in his book Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia, the way the brain operates, it does not perceive its own neural processing. For that reason, mental activity is often attributed to some other source, whether it be a “mind, or “soul” or “consciousness.” 69 As a result, although the DMT hyperspace may be endogenously produced, those people who experience it may ascribe it to some agency beyond the human brain.

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Luke, David. 2011. “Discarnate Entities and Dimethyltr yptamine (DMT): Psychopharmacology, Phenomenology and Ontology,” Journal of the Society of Psychical Research, Vol.75.1, No. 902, 26. Don Jose Campos. 2011. The Shaman & Ayahuasca. Studio City, CA: Divine Arts, xiv. Rettig Hinojosa, Octavio. 2016. The Toad of Dawn: 5-MeO DMT and the Rise of Cosmic Consciousness. Studio City, CA: Divine Arts, 28. Luke, “Discarnate Entities and Dimethyltryptamine (DMT),” 27. DMT: The Truth about Dimethyltryptamine. (Self-published, n.d.). St. John, Graham. 2015. Mys-

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tery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT. Berkeley, CA: Evolver Editions, 176. 7. Luke, “Discarnate Entities and Dimethyltryptamine,” 30. 8. Campos, 2011, 3. 9. Oroc, James. 2009. Tryptamine Palace: 5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 3. 10. Campos, 2011, 113. 11. Narby, Jeremy. 2018. “Amazonian Perspectives on Invisible Entities” in David Luke and Rory Spowers, DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 79. 12. Hancock, Graham. 2007. Supernatural: Meetings with the

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13. 14. 15. 16.

Ancient Teachers of Mankind. New York: The Disinformation Company Ltd., 68-98. Likewise, John Mack, who conducted extensive research on UFO abduction cases, noted that the aliens appeared to be consummate shape shifters, often appearing initially as animals. Ibid. Ibid., 341. Ibid., 311. Strassman, Rick. 2018. “The Nature of DMT Beings, DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 282-294 and Strassman, Rick. 2014. DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation

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in the Hebrew Bible. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. Michaelson, Jared. 2018. “The DMT Drug Is not a Drug, it’s Much Stranger,” Kahpi, https: //kahpi.net/dmt-drug/. Luke, 2011, 31. Khan, Dick. 2019. DMT & My Occult Mind-lite. Self-published, 51. Strassman, Rick. 2000. DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences. Rochester, VT: Part Street Press, 252. Oroc, 2009, 46-47. In 1965 5-MeO DMT was discovered in the venom of the Bufo alvarius toad (also known as the Colorado River toad and the Sonoran Desert toad) which inhabits the Sonora Desert, an area of 200,000 square kilometers extending from California and Arizona in the United States to Sonora, Mexico. Oroc, 2009, 23 and Hinojosa, 2016, 17. Michaelson, 2018. Wojtowicz, Slawek. 2008. “Magic Mushrooms,” in Rick Strassman, Slawek Wojtowicz, Luis Eduardo Luna, and Ede Frecska, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds though Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 142-161. Oroc, 2009, 11. Oroc, 2009, 46. Strassman, Rick, Slawek Wojtowicz, Luis Eduardo Luna, and Ede Frecska. 2008. Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds though Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 5. Strassman, 2000, 201. Hancock, 2007, 104. Davis, Alan K., John M. Clifton, Eric G. Weaver, Ethan S. Hurwitz, Matthey W. Johnson, and Roland R. Griffiths. 2020. “Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine: Phenomenology, interpretation, and enduring effects,” Journal of Psychopharma- cology, Vol. 34, No. 9, 1008-1020. Gander, Kashmira. 2020. “Taking DMT Can Lead to Experiences Similar to Those Reported by People Who Claim to Have Been Abducted by Aliens, Study Shows,” Newsweek, May 18, https://bit.ly/30g2Oic Marrs, Jim. 1997. Alien Agenda: Investigating the Extraterrestrial Presence Among Us. New York: Harper, 483. Moroney, Jim. 2011. “An Alien

34. 35. 36.

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Intervention,” In Michael Pye and Kirsten Dalley (eds.), UFOs & Aliens: Is There Anybody Out There? (Pompton Plains, NJ: The Career Press, 59. Marrs, 1997, 340. Marrs, 1997, 337. Steiger, Brad and Sherry Hansen Steiger. 2011. Real Aliens, Space Beings, and Creatures from Other Worlds. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 44. Marrs, 1997, 355. For more on the ordeal of Betty and Barney Hill see: Friedman, Stanton T. and Kathleen Marden. 2007. Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. Pompton Plains, NJ: New Page Books. Strassman, 2011, 217-219. Salla, Michael E. 2004. Exopolitics: Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence. Temple, AZ: Dandelion Books, 21. Wojtowicz, Slawek. 2008. “Hypnosis, Past Life Regression, Meditation, and More,” in Rick Strassman, Slawek Wojtowicz, Luis Eduardo Luna, and Ede Frecska, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds though Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 256. Gander, Kashmira. 2020. “Taking DMT Can Lead to Experiences Similar to Those Reported by People Who Claim to Have Been Abducted by Aliens, Study Shows,” Newsweek, May 18, https://bit.ly/30g2Oic Strassman, 2011, 200. Strassman, Rick. 2008. “The Varieties of the DMT Experience,” in Rick Strassman, Slawek Wojtowicz, Luis Eduardo Luna, and Ede Frecska, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds though Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 73. Strassman, 2008, 73. Strassman, 2011, 199. Davis, Erik. 2018. “How to Think about Weird Beings” in David Luke and Rory Spowers, DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 133. Marden, Kathleen. 2011. “Alien Abduction: Fact or Fiction?” In Michael Pye and Kirsten Dalley (eds.), UFOs & Aliens: Is There Anybody Out There? Pompton Plains, NJ: The Career Press, 99-100. Luke, “Discarnate Entities and Dimethyltryptamine (DMT),” 36. Hancock, 2007, 6.

51. Meyer, Peter. 2018. “Concerning the Nature of the DMT Entities and Their Relation to Us” in David Luke and Rory Spowers, DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 95-113. 52. St. John, Mystery School in Hyperspace, 352. 53. Fabrikant, DMT: Alien Encounters in Hyperspace, 28. 54. Hancock, 2007, 264. 55. Hancock, Graham. 2018. “Psychedelics, Entities, Dark Matter, and Parallel Dimensions” in David Luke and Rory Spowers, DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 254-255. 56. Hancock, Supernatural, 240. 57. Kaku, Michio. 2004. Einstein’s Cosmos: How Albert Einstein’s Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time. New York: W.W. Norton, 226. 58. Minutely small, measuring at the Planck’s length, it is estimated that these strings are 100 billion billion times smaller than a proton in an atom. See: Kaku, Michio and Jennifer Trainer Thompson, 1997. Beyond Einstein: The Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe. New York: Anchor Books, 4-5; Greene, Brian. 2011. The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 78-79. 59. Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, 315. 60. Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, 314-322. 61. McGreal, Scott A. 2014. “DMT: Gateway to Reality, Fantasy, or What?” Psychology Today, August 30, https://bit.ly/3sRndq1 62. Talbot, Michael. 2001. The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality. New York: Harper/Perennial, 278. 63. Marden, “Alien Abduction: Fact or Fiction?” 101. 64. Kent, James. 2004. “The Case Against DMT Elves,” Trip, https://bit.ly/3e7DK57 65. Luke, 2011, 36. 66. Shermer, Michael. 2018. Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia. New York: Henry Holt, 93-94. 67. Sacks, Oliver. 2015. On the Move: A Life. New York: Random House, 142. 68. Sacks, Oliver. 2012. “Seeing God in the Third Millennium.” The Atlantic. December 12. http://theatln.tc/1bP4lK4 69. Shermer, 2018, 72.

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AR TI C LE

Astrology as a Spiritual Belief System Why a Focus on Empirical Evidence and Objective Truth May be Missing the Point BY GEOFFREY DEAN, DON SAKLOFSKE AND IVAN KELLY

Empirical research has consistently shown astrology to be without validity. Along the way it has been claimed that if people were educated in science a pseudoscience like astrology would cease to exist. But this argument misses the point. Education hasn’t worked because clients of astrologers see astrology as a source of meaning and spiritual benefit, not as a source of truth. It has survived because enough people find it personally meaningful (and enough other people find it lucrative) to give it a leading place in modern popular belief. In this article we explain how astrology is actually used, how it would apply to Hitler, the performance of astrologers when meta-analysed, legal views, astrology as a source of meaning, and astrology’s likely future. Astronomy and Astrology In a recent invited article for physicists in a special paranormal issue of Physics in Canada we stressed this key starting point about the difference between astronomy and astrology: To an astronomer or physicist the stars and planets are balls of plasma, gas or rock with interesting physical properties. For example, Venus is both our nearest neighbour and the nearest thing to hell, with the solar system’s thickest (90 bars) and hottest (470 ºC) atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide laced with sulphuric acid. They can also be a source of beauty and wonder (think of Saturn’s rings or the Crab nebula’s appendagelike filaments). But the one thing they definitely don’t have is a particular meaning. No astronomer or physicist can look through a telescope and believe that Venus is harmonious, Mars is martial or Jupiter is jovial. But to an astrologer, it is the other way round. The only thing that matters is not physical properties but meaning based on metaphor and mythology. No astrologer can look at a birth chart and not see Venus as harmonious, Mars as martial or Jupiter as jovial.1

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Just as metaphorical meaning and mythology are not science, neither is astrology. The picture could hardly be clearer: there is no known physical way— gravity, magnetism, radiation, quantum effects—that astrology could work. But there is still endless debate on countless websites. Scientists raise the same arguments about precession while astrologers dismiss scientists as ignorant (because precession is irrelevant) and make the same appeal that “more research is needed.” If anything is needed it is not more research. A thousand empirical studies have consistently shown that: (1) Astrology does not deliver any useful factual truth; (2) the as above so below links claimed by astrologers do not exist; (3) birth charts are meaningful but so are wrong charts; and (4) outcomes of chart readings are entirely explained by motivated reasoning and hidden persuaders—psychological factors like the Barnum effect, confirmation bias, and cold reading— and have no need of astrological explanations.2 Missing the Point On the other hand, what is needed is a wider recognition of what British science journalist Alison Brooks pointed out 25 years ago: many scientists believe that if people were educated in science then a pseudoscience like astrology would cease to exist. But history has shown that this approach doesn’t work. “They don’t understand that astrology’s appeal does not come from its truth,” Brooks wrote.3 They don’t understand that to be meaningful, astrology does not need to be true, so there is more to astrology than being true or false. They are missing the point. As an example, take the notorious Objections to Astrology launched in 1975 and endorsed by 186 (later 192) scientists, including Nobel prizewinners. As noted in a subsequent letter by U.S. professor of architecture Mimi Lobell to Science News:

Birth Chart Exploration Birth chart of client, partner, company, event, or whatever

Numerous interacting chart factors, each with its own meaning

Feedback new viewpoints

An Astrology Birth Chart Astrology offers people what science does not: a psychologically meaningful link between the individual and the cosmos…a need which has been part of the structure of the human psyche since the first extant traces of human life. By not acknowledging [this], scientists have not begun to understand the magnitude of the challenge put to them by astrology and other “superstitions.”4

Some readers disputed Lobell’s argument, asking why a hypothetical “meaning” link is needed when science has shown we are as much a part of the cosmos as any cosmic entity. They also called for evidence in lieu of hypotheses, and action by those holding the burden of proof (i.e., astrologers, not scientists). Today, 45 years later, the need for evidence has largely been met. But disputes rage on. Objections to Astrology never got past damp squib status. As Above so Below In antiquity astrology and astronomy were roughly lumped together into natural astrology (evaluating heavenly bodies) and judicial astrology (judging the future). Natural astrology is now astronomy and astrophysics in which metaphor and mythology are rejected in favor of science and progress in ways that were never possible in astrology. Judicial astrology is now simply astrology, which rests on the classical occult idea that events in the visible world are merely a reflection of events in the invisible world. More specifically, whatever is born at a particular moment—be it a physical person or animal or a nonphysical idea, question, company, or nation—will manifest the quality of that moment. This quality may be

Astrologer’s interpretation

Client’s situation

seen in the birth chart, a stylised map of the heavens at the moment of birth. In other words there is a correlation between the heavens and all kinds of terrestrial happenings. Or in classical terms: as above so below. This classical idea was enormously aided by our powerlessness to see the unseen world, and was helped even more by the proudly publicised inability of astrologers to prove astrology wrong. If a chart reading seemed less than a perfect fit it was due to stars inclining and not compelling, or an unreliable birth time, or the client did not know herself, or the potential shown was unfulfilled, or the manifestation was untypical, or other factors were interfering, or (as a last-ditch excuse) astrologers were not infallible5— which together unfailingly explain away all conceivable errors of interpretation. It means that astrology must always seem to work (i.e., match the target) even if every input is wrong. So why worry if tests show (as they do) that Virgos are no more Virgo than other signs? The fault lies not with astrology but with reality. Nevertheless, small changes have slowly been occurring behind the scenes. Astrology Today A birth chart is created from the time and place of birth, and a birth chart reading used to be based on the principle astrologer talks, client listens. Today, at least in the West, it is more likely to be astrologer and client explore chart together. So the reading is more like a discussion than a monologue. This discussion style had its beginnings in the 1960s in the person-centred astrology promoted by

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world do not accord with astrological notions or predictions, then yet another astrological technique will have to be invented to explain it.7

Against this tendency some British astrologers issued brave words of caution: If we do not understand what we are doing, and why we are doing it, then it becomes increasingly unlikely that we shall be able to understand what results from it. … how we lay out our information and the criteria we use for the methods we employ will finitely determine what we can expect to discover. In other words, what you get is what you see.8

Cartoon by Michael Harding

8

Dane Rudhyar (1895-1985), a disciple of occultist Alice Bailey (1880-1949), in reaction to the failure of ordinary astrology in the U.S. to satisfy spiritual needs. In 1973 Rudhyar pointed out that chart readings tended to be unhelpful because the client was dependent on the all-knowing astrologer and on the assumed truth of what the chart indicates. So it required a U-turn: What is required is NOT whether a particular type of system, or an interpretation of the basic data provided by astrology, is valid in itself…but whether the [astrologer has] a clear sense of his responsibility to the client whose mind and feelings may be deeply affected by what is told him.6

In other words, a successful reading required an ability to see faces in cherry-picked clouds, something which most of us do well. But Rudhyar tended to overemphasise the materialism of traditional astrology (understandable for anyone living in the USA), and many astrologers outside the country would have seen no need for a U-turn—a position supported by the way techniques of chart interpretation were changing. In 1982 Austin Prichard-Levy, then owner of Australia’s largest computerized birth chart calculation service, saw the changes in these terms: I often get the feeling, after talking to astrologers, that they live in a mental fantasy world, a kind of astrological universe where no explanations outside of astrological ones are permissible, and that if the events of the real

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Hallo Adolf As an example, take the case of Adolf Hitler, whose traditional Libra-rising chart inclines towards artistic talent (he actually did study art in his early 20s). But artistic sensitivity was hardly compatible with the tyranny and destruction he created after changing careers and going into politics and world domination. As noted by the astrologers Michael Harding and Charles Harvey in their 1990 book Working with Astrology: “It must be seriously doubted whether many traditional students of astrology, asked for vocational guidance by young Adolf Hitler, would have contradicted his wish to become an architect and artist. …even more importantly, [they] cannot suggest a spectrum of alternative ways in which the kind of energies present in Hitler’s chart might be used.” 9 New viewpoints were missing, as Harding suggested in the cartoon on this page. Today’s astrologers increasingly recognise this shortcoming by ignoring the chart as a source of assumed truth in favor of seeing it as merely a tool to stimulate therapy by conversation. This approach cannot fail because the chart (any chart) always contains more factors than are needed to explain anything. The trick is to find a factor (any factor, from traditional ones like planets and signs, to countless new ones all the way to hypothetical planets) that fits the client’s situation no matter how vaguely. And then to use the fit to encourage conversation regardless of what other factors may indicate. In this system it is the client who makes the reading fit, not the other way around. The modern astrological trend of inventing more and more factors produces more and more things to explore and therefore an even better chance of finding combinations, contradictions, motives, potentials— anything that the client can identify with. This of course provides even more opportunities for hidden persuaders to do their work. That in turn allows astrologers to be even more confident that astrology works and that scientists are ignorant.

Astrology as Spirituality According to Dr. Jeremy Patrick, a U.S. lecturer in law at the University of Southern Queensland, legal cases in the West focus on what the astrologer did and almost never on why they were consulted in the first place. Why were they consulted? Patrick suggests three main reasons (the comments are ours): (1) Personal support. A confident assertion from a perceived expert beats relentless uncertainty. (2) Entertainment. Bored people love it. (3) Spiritual connections. Embracing higher powers. Here’s how Patrick analyses the last one: Whether these supposed higher forces are conceptualized as God, the Universe, the True Self, Fate, Mother Earth, or something else, interest in divination [here astrology] is often tied up with a person’s sense of spirituality. This is usually a spirituality that is almost distinctly non-religious (in a traditional sense) insofar as it does not require doctrine, organization, fellowship, or commitment. It is an individualistic personal spirituality that allows one to feel special and connected simultaneously. The fact that it is an amorphous, idiosyncratic spirituality whose composition and description could vary dramatically does not necessarily make it any less “real” or important to the believer.10

Indeed, to Patrick, the fascinating thing is the fact that “the question that lawmakers and skeptics are most concerned about—whether the predictions are “real” or “true”—is a thing of trifling importance to most clients. [They] are far less concerned with accuracy than they are with the perceived emotional, recreational, or spiritual benefits.” 11 If you seek personal meaning (Saturn aspects in your chart incline you to delays, obstacles, and material difficulties), you can pick and choose what to pay attention to—so you can believe whatever you like. At that point hidden persuaders, clever arguments, hard facts and all conceivable objections become irrelevant. All that really matters is that you find spiritual comfort and guidance in astrology. For you it works. That means you can cheerfully ignore every book, every opinion, and every empirical finding you disagree with. Facts simply don’t matter. True believers never had it so good. On the other hand, if you value facts (Saturn aspects have no actual effect in any birth chart) rather than personal meaning, you cannot believe whatever you like. Indeed, ignoring awkward facts will sooner or later catch up with you (think of believers in phrenology or bloodletting). So resistance is ultimately futile. Facts are bound to eventually prevail. True believers never had it so bad. Your choice. As Cicero put it millenia ago, what matters is not the soothsaying but the wisdom.12 That not surpris-

ingly is seen as making the difference between an average counsellor and a highly effective one.13 Or as one modern astrologer who recognised the problem put it: “Any good I’ve done as a consultant, and I have done some good, had less to do with my being a good astrologer than with my being a good person.” 14 New Viewpoints On Demand To put it another way, the perceived value of astrology is no longer its supposed ability to tell you what you want to know but the expansion it can bring to your awareness and understanding through chart exploration. It gives you new viewpoints and perspectives. Never mind that the same can be said of talking to close friends, or reading self-help books, or discussing classic novels, or travelling in strange countries, or subscribing to a course in critical thinking, any of which can provide you with new viewpoints and perspectives. But to what extent can each approach expand awareness, and what are its particular benefits and liabilities? No doubt different individuals will prefer different approaches, but until controlled tests are made we have no objective grounds for choosing one rather than another. But all is not lost. The process that underlies astrology (seeing meaning in ambiguous stimuli) also underlies projective tests, where subjects describe what they see in inkblots, incomplete sentences, or vague pictures—a process essentially no different from seeing meaning in birth charts or hand prints. Projective tests have been explored during 80 years of development, resulting in a vast literature that can exceed 6000 references for a single test. This may sound impressive, but the number of studies that have failed to show that projective tests such as the Thematic Appreciation Test’s vague pictures are valid—that they measure what they are said to measure—is even more impressive.15 Further, their value depends on the subject and especially on the skill of the therapist, so they cannot be evaluated independently of the therapist. The same applies to astrology and of things like palmistry, or Tarot cards. This means that a second opinion on your birth chart or hand is likely to differ substantially from the first. But nearly all have one important advantage, according to Anne Anastasi and Suzana Urbina in their 1997 textbook Psychological Testing: Most projective techniques represent an effective means for “breaking the ice” during the initial contacts between clinician [i.e., therapist] and client. The task is usually intrinsically interesting and often entertaining. It tends to divert the individual’s attention away from herself or himself and this reduces embarrassment and defensiveness.

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The Changing Fortunes of Astrological Research After growth that peaked during the period of 1989 -1990, study numbers decrease, with no matching tests after 2009. See reference number 2 for data.

Number of studies

300

Empirical Tests of Birth Charts Do characteristics shown on an individual’s birth chart match their actual observed traits?

200

Matching Tests Given individuals with a case history or personality test score, can astrologers match them to their correct birth chart?

100

0

1941–1960 1961–1980 1981–2000 2001–2020 Year of Study

And it offers little or no threat to the respondent’s prestige, since any response one gives is “right.” 16

Astrology as a Source of Meaning The case for astrology as a source of meaning has perhaps been most clearly expressed by historian and former professional astrologer Dr. Nicholas Campion, currently head of the Sophia Centre for Cultural Astronomy and Astrology at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. In his 2004 Book of World Horoscopes Campion confronts a problem usually ignored by others: There is a clear gulf between the rhetoric of astrology— that precise data is vital—and the practice (to judge from astrological books and journals)—which is that, in many cases, it just doesn’t matter. [It has been] argued that a horoscope is a divinatory mirror, like a crystal ball, a tarot deck or the leaves in the bottom of a tea cup. …[So] one may just as easily roll a set of astro-dice as go to the bother of casting a horoscope.17

But charts still have to be based on birth data if they are to be seen as personal. Therefore: many astrologers have persisted in regarding horoscopic astrology as scientific, assuming that the astrologer’s reading of the horoscope rests in an impartial reading of an objective truth. …[But in my view] little of what takes place in any ordinary astrological consultation requires any objective correlation between planetary positions at birth and the statements made by the astrologer. [The process] is analogous to the reading of a tarot spread or an I Ching hexagram [i.e., it encourages new viewpoints and thus] judgments which are relevant to the client at the time. I

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came to this conclusion…after considering many astrologers’ ability to make the right reading from the wrong horoscope. [So] it is not the astrology but the astrologer which works. …All that is required for the interpretation to be correct is that the time is believed to be correct.18

Or as pointed out by philosopher W. J. Thomas (1863-1947), “if men define situations as real [then even if not real] they are real in their consequences.” So we should be less concerned about birth charts and their supposed meaning and more concerned about how the astrologer can link them to the client’s interests to reveal meaning and new viewpoints. Or as Campion puts it: “astrology, as a symbolic language, becomes not a means to discover the truth, but to invent it.” 19 By now it should be clear that the astrologer and client create meaning from a mix of selected ambiguities. In short, forget textbook astrology, forget vexing problems, forget awkward research, just relax if you can and let your imagination do the work. Conversely, concrete interpretation of symbolism—the way skeptics imagine astrology works—leads to the dead end of scientific testing: “This approach plays into the hands of our skeptical critics, ever ready to devise more tests, which reduce astrology to nothing more than an absurd practice based on outdated theories of the cosmos, whose techniques do not stand up to empirical testing. …laboratory astrology…ensures that no magic can take place.” 20 Well, of course it does. Controls are like that. Ironically, empirical testing is precisely why most

Matching Tests Can Astrologers Make Accurate Judgements When Matching Birth Charts to Personality or Case Histories

d Tren

2020

Year of test

2000

1980

Mean 0.054 sd 0.169 N=69

1960

0 -0.4

-0.2

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

Mean agreement between the astrologers' judgement and the correct match Agreement is measured as a correlation, which is a number between +1.0 (perfect agreement) and –1.0 (perfect inverse agreement). At 0.0 the agreement is no better than chance, as in tossing a coin. At +0.1 it is still useless—-on average out of every 100 judgements only 5 would be better than tossing a coin. In practice the agreement needs to be consistently better than +0.4 (which is slightly better than the agreement between the heights of husbands and wives) before it can be considered useful, which according to this plot is not attainable. It means the astrologers tested (and they included top experts) were unable to usefully tell apples from oranges. Also it seems reasonable to expect the agreement to improve as tests and astrologers improve. As it happens the results are too scattered to allow a clear conclusion but the trend is in the wrong direction---the agreement between an astrologer's judgement based on a birth chart and its actual owner is getting worse, not better. The above plot shows the results for 69 tests involving a total of 1050 astrologers and 2363 birth charts. Mean charts per matching tests = 25. Range 2-200. See reference number 2 for data.

astrologers became believers in the first place—they tried it and it seemed to work. So why is testing suddenly absurd? History gives us an answer in the following way: Tests are absurd because they don’t deliver the positive results astrologers expect.21 That is why many researchers of astrology have lost interest—they have found something better to occupy their time. And as if this was not enough, there is the hugely awkward testimony provided by wrong charts. Why Wrong Charts are Bad News Do astrologers get right answers from wrong charts? This would be problematic for astrology since right answers should come only from right charts based on the right birth data. But if wrong charts based on wrong birth data actually work and there is no opportunity for cold reading, their success cannot be due to astrology. The idea might seem difficult to test—what as-

trologer would willingly read wrong charts for clients?—but it happens by accident to most astrologers and is surprisingly common. Here is just one example: Several astrologers (myself included) have conducted experiments where the interpretation of a completely wrong chart has been accepted willingly as a true description. …It is well-known that ingenious astrologers can read anything they want from any chart, indeed you have only to read Astrological Journal or Transit for a few issues to see them doing it.22

It makes no difference whether the chart is wrong by minutes, hours, days, months or years. The wrong chart still works. The client still thinks the reading is spot on. All that matters is that the astrologer and client are unaware that the chart is wrong. Don’t be surprised if you don’t find this mentioned in astrology books. So, what can be said about astrology’s future?

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Will Astrology Last? The findings from half a century of empirical research explain two key observations that any debate about astrology’s future must address before proceeding further: (1) The universal personal experience of astrologers that astrology seems to work; and (2) The failure of astrology to work when psychological artifacts and biases are controlled. The research findings indicate that astrology is simply a time-honoured cover for the operation of artifacts and biases that better explain the outcomes. In effect, astrology is seeing faces in clouds, albeit faces that enough people find personally meaningful (and enough people find lucrative) to elevate astrology to a leading place in modern popular belief. Will it last? Like palmistry, phrenology, and tea

leaf reading, astrology may well continue to provide meaning and guidance to those unconcerned about underlying artifacts.23, 24 In the academy it will be left behind as our understanding of human thinking and behaviour increase through systematic study.25, 26, 27 Even human history, when considered in a multidisciplinary way through the modeling of large databases,28 emerges as incompatible with traditional astrological ideas such as the Age of Aquarius. Astrology is irrelevant to such scientific understanding except as an example of how to be led astray. That said, astrology could hardly be better suited to the study of pseudocience. In terms of longevity and ongoing popularity it has a clear edge over other questionable beliefs. For any student of pseudoscience, astrology would seem to be a good place to start.

REFERENCES 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

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Kelly, I. W., G. A. Dean, and D. H. Saklofske. 2020. “Astrology For The Physicist.” Physics in Canada, 76(1), 1-7. Dean, G., A. Mather, D. Nias, and R. Smit. 2021. Understanding Astrology: A Critical Review of a Thousand Empirical Studies 1900-2020. Amsterdam: AinO Publications. Open Access, 900 pages, 620,000 words, 1500 pictures, tables, or graphs, 2000 references. After publication it will be available for free download from www.astrology-and-science.com. Brookes, A. 1995. “Soothsayers, Suckers and Sceptics.” New Scientist, 145 (issue 1963), 46. Lobell, M. 1975. Letters. Science News, 108(14), 223. Kelly, I.W. 1998. “Why Astrology Doesn’t Work.” Psychological Reports, 82, 527-546. Rudhyar, D. 1973. An Attempt at Formulating Minimal Requirements for the Practice of Natal Astrology. Portland Astrology Center, p. 20. A. Prichard-Levy. 1982. “Rectification and Predictions.” Australian Astrologers’ Journal, 6(3), 19-23, p. 20. Harding, M. and C. Harvey. 1990. Working with Astrology: The Psychology of Harmonics, Midpoints, and Astro*Carto*Graphy. Arkana, p. 3. The Hitler cartoon, although unsigned, is Harding’s work and was published in the UK Astrological Association’s newsletter Transit for February 1983, p. 23. Ibid, p. 392.

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10. Patrick, J. 2020. Faith or Fraud: Fortune-Telling, Spirituality and the Law. Vancouver: UBC Press, p. 134. 11. Ibid, same page. 12. Cicero c.40 BC. De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione. English translation by W. A. Falconer. 1938. London: Heinemann. Quote is from De Divinatione [On Divination]. 13. Hanna, F.J. and A. J. Ottens. 1995. “The role of wisdom in psychotherapy.” Journal of Psycho-therapy Integration, 5(3), 195-219. 14. Ashmun, J. 1984. Editorial. The Seattle Astrologer, 16, 4-5. 15. Anastasi, A. and S. Urbina. 1997. Psychological Testing, Seventh edition. Prentice Hall, p. 440. 16. Ibid, p. 433. 17. Campion, N. 2004. The Book of World Horoscopes 3rd edition. Bournemouth UK: The Wessex Astrologer. First page of unpaginated Preface. 18. Ibid, pp. 10 and 13, his italics. 19. Ibid, p. 19. 20. Little, K. 2014. Review of Rafael Nasser’s 2004 book Under One Sky, a comparison of blind readings of the same accurately timed chart by 12 reputable astrologers each using a different technique, with disastrous disagreement. Available from www.skyscript.co.uk/rev_nasser. html, no pagination. 21. Plotted data are from reference 2. 22. Dwyer, T. 1986. Astrological Journal, 28(3), 99 and 129. 23. Agarwal, Pragya. 2020. Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias.

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24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

Bloomsbury Sigma. Many biases can be overcome by becoming aware of them in our slow, deliberative thinking. Rowland, I. 2008. The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading: A Comprehensive Guide to the Most Persuasive Psychological Manipulation Technique in the World. 3rd edition. Free download available from Rowland’s site http://www.coldreadingsuccess.com. Chart readings especially lend themselves to deception because believers are, by definition, capable of seeing significance where none exists. Jones, M. J., S. R. Moore and M. S. Kobor. 2018. “Principles and Challenges of Applying Epigenetic Epidemiology to Psychology.” Annual Review of Psychology, 69, 459-485. Muthukrishna, M., J. Henrich and E. Slingerland. 2021. “Psychology as a Historical Science.” Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 27-97. Henrich, J. 2020. The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Also in Penguin 2021. Argues via a goldmine of facts that WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Intelligent, Rich and Democratic) are among the least representative populations for generalising about humans. See articles in Cliodynamics: the Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution.

AR TI C LE

Notes on a Haunting How Science Can Explain Ghosts and Haunted Houses BY BARRY MARKOVSKY

We meet them at the door-way, on the stair, Along the passages they come and go, Impalpable impressions on the air, A sense of something moving to and fro. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Haunted Houses” Some years ago I was walking and talking with a friend in Charleston, South Carolina, when the topic of his city’s many “ghost tours” came up. I remarked on the sheer number of these businesses thriving on gullible tourists. He stopped, faced me, looked me in the eye and said “Oh, ghosts are real!” Moreover, this belief was important to him. I felt astounded by his certainty. He felt annoyed rather than enlightened by my skeptical suggestions. He is not alone in his views. One recent poll finds 45% of American adults believe in ghosts and demons.1 Gallup polling in the early 2000s reported beliefs in ghosts to be in the upper 30% range. With 75-95 million adult believers just in the U.S., TV programming both reflects and fuels these beliefs. Since 2000, networks have aired dozens of ghost-related reality series in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and elsewhere,2 not including countless one-off investigative specials, documentaries, and “based on real events” features. A documentary filmmaker recently contacted me about a haunted local business that witnesses had found compelling. I thought it would be useful to

summarize what I have since learned about this case. It illustrates how even a preliminary analysis can go a long way toward demystifying ghost claims and understanding why people find them so believable. Overview I will refer to the business as “Vital Vapors” and its owner as “Ben,” both pseudonyms. Ben hired filmmakers to produce a video about the haunting, and they agreed to do so on the condition that they also interview an informed skeptic. There had been no serious attempt to identify non-paranormal causes, and paranormal conclusions were legitimated by people unqualified to conduct rigorous investigations. They asked me to do an interview, and I agreed. There are four primary claims: (1) Objects propel themselves off a shelf; (2) “spirit orbs” fly around rooms; (3) audio recordings capture disembodied voices; and (4) ghostly wisps float through the air. My approach was to find plausible non-paranormal explanations for each claim. Vital Vapors is a retail shop in South Carolina situated at a corner of a typical suburban mini-mall. Its footprint is outlined in the aerial view in Figure 1. Another business abuts the unit to the southeast, and three other walls are exterior-facing. The unit includes retail, storage, and office areas. I interviewed Ben in an hour-long phone call.

Figure 1: A red line marks the location of the Vital Vapors retail shop in South Carolina. Figure 2: Surveillance video shows area behind the counter where several bottles seemed to leap off the top shelf (the red box in the upper right hand corner).

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When I asked about other witnesses, he indicated that at least two employees, six “mediums,” and two church representatives confirmed that something unusual was occurring. He added that there had been 16 “spirit

cleansings.” As for video evidence, the filmmakers sent me a 5-minute compilation (Video 1) from Ben’s surveillance videos, and Ben sent 11 clips totaling about 12 minutes. (See Appendix for links.)

Figure 3: Top photo—a closeup of the shelving area with bottles shown in Figure 2. Figure 4: Several bottles seem to leap off the top shelf. View the falling bottles in Video 1 in the Appendix at about 3:31 to 3:55, and in closeup frame by frame at 4:00 to 4:21.

Claim #1: Products Fly off Store Shelves Surveillance video first shows a man at the retail counter seen in Figure 2. After he walks off-camera, several bottles seem to leap off the top shelf from the area highlighted in the photo (Video 1: 3:31- 4:21). Explanation: A shelf-shift jolted the bottles. Figures 3 and 4 enlarge the area highlighted in Figure 2.

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Arrows point to several distinct bunches of colored bottles arranged up to seven deep along the front of the shelf. The first movement occurs when a phalanx of yellow bottles jerks downward. They appear to hit the adjacent purple bottles, which then bump the black-and-white bottles. Like racked pool balls hit on a “break,” the packed-in black and white bottles want to scatter. The front row has nowhere else to go but off the shelf’s front edge (Figure 4).

Why did the yellow bottles move in the first place? Figure 5 shows the glass shelving system from a different angle. The shelf installer simply may not have fully engaged one of the many support brackets into the backing board, or the glass shelf may not have been seated properly in the notch on the bracket. Eventually, the weight of the shelf and its stock caused the bracket to snap down into place. The catalyst might have been gravity, vibrations from a passing vehicle, or even an earth tremor common to this region. The settling bracket set off a chain reaction, jerking the shelf and shifting the sets of bottles. Also, the gray line noted in Figure 3 appears to correspond with either a bracket or a shelf’s edge. It disappears in Figure 4 following the shift. Most likely, either the adjacent shelf is hiding this shelf’s edge, or else the shelf’s new angle causes reflections to obscure the underlying bracket. In any case, there is no need to insert a ghostly hand into this scenario to understand what actually happened. Not

ch o n

bra ck

et

Figure 5: The Vital Vapors shop’s glass shelf and bracket system.

A slat wall bracket system

Claim #2: Spirit Orbs Swoop Through the Darkness Ben supplied multiple videos showing alleged spirit orbs in the darkened rooms of his shop. Figure 6 (Video 2 at 1:27) captures a typical one streaking from upper right to lower left. Orbs in the other videos also tend to be relatively small, move in straight lines or long curves, and last only 2-3 seconds. Ben reports seeing them exclusively on security camera feeds, not with the naked eye. Explanation: Spirit Orbs are Dust There is a remarkable abundance of spirit orb videos on the internet, but a shortage of skepticism about their true nature. Across these videos, orbs vary in size, number, brightness, definition, and movement. Most are round, some are elliptical. Some are obvious “lens flares,” discussed below under Claim #4. Most resemble so-called “blooming” effects, and I would put Ben’s in this category. A “bloomed” image appears when a high contrast light source overwhelms some of a digital camera’s sensors. This triggers adjacent sensors, causing the object to look much enlarged and washed-out. Vital Vapors uses Nest Cam IQ Indoor cameras with infrared (IR) lights, and Ben is aware that these cameras may cause blooming. He is confident,

nevertheless, that his videos capture real spirit orbs. He reasons that, unlike dust particles, the objects in his images must be self-propelled because he eliminated drafts by turning off the heating/cooling system. Ben’s convictions notwithstanding, his orbfilled videos are typical of those known to be caused by illuminated dust particles close to the camera.3 Even if orbs are not dust, it would be fallacious to conclude that eliminating forced air currents leaves “spirits” as the only viable explanation. However, the orbs are still impressive and warrant discussion. Size and distance. If orbs were, say, golf ball-size objects moving around the room, their images would vary in size and vividness depending on their distance. Instead, they tend to remain constant in size and nearly identical to each other throughout their brief existence. This makes it doubtful that they are multi-inch objects moving about the room. But how big are they? If an orb passes in front of an object 10 feet from the camera and then behind another object 7 feet away, we would know it is 7-10 feet from the lens. We could then also estimate its size. This never happens. Orbs do not interact this way with objects in the room—another important clue that they are dust particles drifting close to the camera. One video clip (Video 10) seems to show orbs

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Figure 6: photo above —A typical orb streaks from upper right to lower left. Figure 7: The top right photo is a still from Video 10 that shows an orb made visible by its contrast with the dark background. The photo below it, with two arrows added, combines two shots showing the same orb moving from right to left.

streaming right to left through the open door in Figure 7. If so, this would be a crucial size-distance clue. However, closer examination shows that the orbs are not entering the doorway. They are merely somewhat obscured by the white wall and door until they reach the darker wall where the contrast makes them more vivid. Shape and composition. The name “orb” suggests that our brains should impose a spheroidal shape onto the circular video image. Such an inference is never contradicted in these videos. However, if orbs were not spheres but, say, puck-shaped, then some would appear rectangular or oblong when seen edge-on. That this never occurs reinforces the false perception that they are three-dimensional spheres, multiple inches across and multiple feet from the camera. These are weak grounds for any argument about spirits, but precisely what we would expect if orbs are dust particles blooming under infrared lights. Movement and location. An orb traversing the 15 or so feet of the Vital Vapors stockroom in 2 seconds would put its rate at 5+ mph. This would indeed require a significant breeze unless the orb is self-propelled. Alternatively, a dust particle drifting 3 inches from the lens would be wafting at under .1 mph. Could this happen in a room with the heating/cooling system turned off? Yes, absolutely. In fact, it

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would be virtually impossible to eliminate all air currents in this setting. Open air ducts can transmit breezes through pressure changes across rooms, as can gaps around doors, windows, or ceiling tiles. Moreover, convection currents may occur when the surface of a wall, floor, or ceiling is warmer or colder than the interior air temperature. Vital Vapors has three exterior-facing walls, making convection all the more likely. To illustrate how this might work, I calculated the convection airflow near a wall that is just 3 degrees cooler than the ambient temperature in the room.4 The airflow would be over .5 mph, more than enough to move dust particles past cameras. A simple test can determine a moving orb’s location in a room: Set two identical, synchronized cameras two feet apart and pointed in the same direction. The parallax effect will cause objects in the room to be offset in one video image relative to the other. Knowing the distance between lenses and the orb’s shift across images, one can calculate an orb’s distance from the cameras (and its size!) using trigonometry. If the object is very close to one camera—as I would suspect—it will not appear at all in the other camera’s image. In sum, orb evidence needs to meet significantly higher standards before we entertain claims invoking spirits or demons.

Claim #3: Things Go Bump (and Talk) in the Night Five videos have audio events inexplicable to Ben. My hearing tests normal, and I listened to them played at maximum volume with high quality ear monitors. Below I summarize what I could discern and what Ben claims to have heard in the five videos. Video 1: (i) retail area; male at counter; “thud” (ii) back room; “clunk,” shuffling; (iii) voice allegedly says “miss you.” Video 5: back room; male asks the spirit questions; voice allegedly says “inside.” Video 6: retail area; “clunk”; rumbling sounds Video 7: back room; alleged sounds of footsteps and Bible pages turning. Video 9: back room; two males sitting; one asks for responses to knocks and questions; voice allegedly says three words. Explanation: Ambient Noise, Recording Artifacts, People, Apophenia All of the clips have numerous incidental, unwanted sounds or “artifacts.” These include static, hisses, crackling, and other muddled noises. Some of the sounds might be construable as very garbled human voices, perhaps crosstalk from people outside the room or building, or even radio broadcasts interacting with the surveillance system. None of the background sounds are discernable as meaningful human speech. Most of the alleged voices are indecipherable and barely rise above background noise. Below I discuss two types of non-background sounds: Physical and “EVP.” Physical sounds. There is nothing at all remarkable about the “thud,” “clunk,” and “rumbling” sounds cited above. The alleged sound of turning Bible pages is extremely weak, unidentifiable, and barely above the static. Nothing is identifiable as turning pages, much less Bible pages specifically. Overall there is little to conclude about these physical sounds without knowing the camera’s audio characteristics. How sensitive and accurate is the microphone? How do impediments such as distance, walls, and competing ambient sounds affect recordings? We also cannot evaluate these sounds without having a baseline of everyday audio events at the location. Microphones in the non-haunted unit next door might detect similar sounds just as often. A coffee mug dropped on the carpet in the next room, a car door closing in the parking lot, or rooftop equipment operating above adjacent units all may be picked up in recordings. Generally speaking, the existence of spirits will always be less probable than the existence of ran-

dom, mundane noises. It would be unwise to leap to the paranormal conclusion before ruling out more prosaic causes. EVP. “Electronic Voice Phenomena” are alleged communications by spirits by way of electronic devices. In the video where the words “miss you” are supposedly uttered (Video 1), there are only very soft hissing sounds and static. The word “inside” (Video 5) is the only EVP of the bunch that most would agree is an actual spoken word—soft, but reasonably distinct. However, it does not appear to be a reply to questions being asked aloud by the man who was present. It is intriguing, but we would want to rule out mundane possibilities such as the witness talking under his breath, or someone else talking in another room or outside the building. Finally, regarding the “whispers three words” claim, I cannot discern three distinct sounds of any kind above the background noise. EVP methods offer low quality evidence under the best of circumstances. They have been roundly debunked by scientific paranormal investigators and regarded as worthless even by parapsychologists eager to find evidence of survival after death.5 Reasons include a lack of standards for equipment and procedures, and an absence of safeguards against subjective interpretations and social influences. Ben’s approach reflects what we typically see on ghost hunting shows: Go to the haunted place; turn on a recorder; ask questions aloud; give spirits time to respond; repeat. Later, pore through the recordings; play them at maximum volume; listen for any anomalies; interpret them; validate the interpretation by telling others what you heard, then having them listen to the recording and agree with you. This approach encourages a state of expectant hypervigilance. It renders the listener highly sensitive to stimuli, primed for emotional reactions, prone to over-interpreting, and far more likely to attribute significance to insignificant events. Enter confirmation bias, i.e., “The tendency to test one’s beliefs or conjectures by seeking evidence that might confirm or verify them and to ignore evidence that might disconfirm or refute them.” 6 When listeners know what they are supposed to hear, they tend to infer audio patterns supporting those expectations. Expectant hypervigilance helps account for the interpretations and significance Ben attaches to barely discernable sounds on the video tracks. Especially when so motivated, humans are adept at inducing patterns where none exist. In her book Spook, Mary Roach describes an experiment in which subjects were asked to transcribe a poor quality lecture recording that in actuality consisted only of white

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noise.7 Despite the absence of any content, subjects heard and reported numerous snippets of nonexistent words and sentences. The more general phenomenon is called apophenia, “the perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.” 8 As often seen in the ghost hunting shows, social conditions enhance apophenia when listening for EVP with one or more other people. Typically one person cajoles the others into hearing what he hears, and then everyone gets excited as unanimity emerges. Once told what to hear in garbled EVP, it becomes almost impossible not to hear it. Moreover, listeners are unaware that the social cues colored their interpretations. The EVP at Vital Vapors have the earmarks of so-

cially induced apophenia (the same can probably be said for inferring a spirit orb’s third dimension from a two-dimensional image). The sounds are ambiguous, and generate cognitive biases, impelling listeners to attach great significance to barely discernible sounds. The shop is near busy streets, parking, retail, and pedestrian areas, each a potential source of mundane sounds and vocalizations. Yet, there has been minimal effort to control or monitor the environment. As for social factors, Ben interacted with numerous other people about his situation: spirit cleansers, mediums, church personnel, friends, and employees. It is probably safe to infer that few if any of them challenged his supernatural conclusions. This is a perfect formula for confirmation bias.

Claim #4: Will O’ the Wisps Six video segments show gossamer objects moving across the screen Videos 1-4, 10 and 12). These “wisps” move at about the same pace as orbs but are more subtle in appearance. Figure 8 shows one of the most prominent and coherent, angled diagonally from the lower left to the upper right corner of the screen. Many of the wisp clips also have orbs.

the room. Using non-haunted spaces as control sites for comparison purposes would also be helpful. Below are some other considerations. Banding. This phenomena appears in videos as step-like gradations in color saturation. For example, instead of a smooth transition from black sky to light gray horizon, one may see a series of increasingly lighter bands. They are caused by an interplay of light source, image characteristics, and camera sensors. Banding may alter the wisps’ appearance in Ben’s videos, but they do not seem to account fully for their existence. Webs. Most wisps look like what we would expect to see if a strand of spider web or cobweb drifted near the camera and bloomed under IR lighting. To rule this out would require air purification comparable to that of an industrial cleanroom. The parallax test is probably a cheaper alternative, at least for determining whether wisps are large and out in the room, or tiny and near the camera. Lens flares. These are bright streaks, blobs, or

Explanation: Environmental Phenomena, Video Artifacts. Compared to the previous claims, I’m less sure about the wisps’ true nature and found nothing exactly like them in the scientific literature. I will offer some thoughts and welcome ideas from readers more familiar than I am with the technical subtleties of security cameras. Wisps have many of the same qualities as orbs: always in motion, comparable speed, but unknown size, distance, or composition. The parallax test mentioned earlier could be used to locate wisps in

Figure 8: A very subtle wisp moves diagonally from the lower left to the upper right corner of the left hand photo. The path is indicated by arrows in the right hand photo.

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other visual artifacts that appear in an image when a light source bounces around within a camera’s lens system. The flare is often offset from the source which may even be off-screen. In our case, we would have to ensure that there are no off-camera light sources, such as an open laptop’s screen saver or car headlights glaring into the showroom and leaking under the stockroom door. Given that orbs are also present in most wisp videos, blooming dust particles may also be a source. Infrared artifacts. Could wisps result from temperature gradients in convection currents being detected by the camera’s IR sensors? It seems plausible, but I have not found any research on it. Another possibility is that wisps are caused by the shop’s motion sensors. Many popular motion detectors emit IR waves that cause video artifacts. Do wisps still appear when motion sensors are blocked? Are motion sensors ever triggered by wisps (or orbs) when they appear on video? Vape smoke. A video shows two men watching a surveillance feed on a laptop. One of them is vaping. Vape smoke is mostly fast dissipating water vapor, but perhaps more vapor hangs in the air where a lot of vaping occurs. Could these traces show up in IR-lit videos? Is vape smoke more persistent under certain combinations of temperature and humidity? Do other vape shops’ surveillance cams also detect wisps? Without answers to such questions, there simply is not enough evidence to make the leap from wisp images to disembodied spirits of the dead. Such a conclusion would ignore a fact on which I think we can all agree: The videos show vague clouds of lighter pixels on backgrounds of darker pixels. Their exact nature remains unclear, but lacking answers to the above questions is not tantamount to evidence that wisps are spirits. Foibles of Perceiving and Sleuthing I have tried to imagine how the vape shop events appear through witnesses’ eyes. (Though I would bet otherwise, I cannot rule out the possibility that Ben is perpetrating a hoax. Whether or not this is true, my points stand given the existence of widespread beliefs based on similar evidence.) Their experiences are visceral, while I opine from the safety of my armchair. For credulous witnesses, my analysis probably seems toothless. On the other hand, if this is their first exposure to some informed skepticism, perhaps it will get them thinking. Just as I wrote that last sentence, something weird occurred. It is an unseasonably warm November (2020) afternoon here in North Carolina. I am on a folding chair outside a friend’s house, in a

short-sleeve shirt, writing on an iPad. The sun is low in the sky, shining on my face from off to my right. I mindlessly scratch my right arm with my left hand. Suddenly there appear hundreds of tiny UFOs (spirit orbs?) swarming around my arm. I try scratching my left arm, but nothing happens. Can you, dear reader, guess what’s happening? You probably know that scratching sloughs off dead skin cells. That suggests a short inferential leap: The UFOs are probably not spirit orbs, but dander flakes exaggerated by back lighting. Nothing happened with my left arm because it was shaded by my torso. So here was a small mystery that could be solved from the comfort of an armchair—or a lawn chair, as it were. A little background knowledge led to a provisional, rational conclusion. This doesn’t mean that logically we can rule out all other hypotheses, such as that the specks were insects or extraterrestrials. Occam’s Razor compels the dander explanation, however, over the presumptive leaps required to arrive at wilder conclusions.9 Methodological Problems Nobody has summarized the problems with amateur ghost hunting more thoroughly than Ben Radford.10 He compiled a list of them including the following: Lack of specialized knowledge. A magic trick looks paranormal when you don’t know how the magician does it. When you do know, you may be amazed at the craftiness, but any temptation to infer unknown forces dissipates. To offer plausible explanations for paranormal claims, much like knowing the magician’s methods, may require an odd collection of informational resources. In our case, it helps to know some things about dust particles, convection currents, heating systems, shelf brackets, audio recorders, sound waves, and human physiology. Reliability and validity. Science rejects unreliable or invalid research findings. “Reliability” means obtaining the same result when repeatedly measuring the same thing. Electronic devices used in ghost hunting render very low signal-to-noise ratios, making their output unreliable,11 and others have thoroughly debunked “spirit boxes,” EMF (electromagnetic frequency) meters, and other popular devices used by self-proclaimed ghost hunters. “Validity” is the extent to which a measurement accurately reflects the thing it is supposed to measure. Not knowing the physical properties of spirit orbs or wisps makes it impossible to validate measures for them. Alternative explanations. My analysis identifies naturalistic explanations for paranormal claims. Knowledge vacuums result from the lack of such

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explanations and encourage leaps from the mundane to the paranormal. Filling those vacuums is like exposing the magic tricks. Stakeouts and postmortems. In typical ghost hunting stakeouts, participants move about a site noting impressions and taking readings with various devices. Afterward, in the “postmortem,” they mine their data for anything they can interpret as anomalous. Radford shows that, contrary to the ghost hunter TV shows’ claims, such activity is not “scientific” for many reasons, not the least of which is its propensity for false positives. He emphasizes that not a single piece of significant evidence for spirits has ever emerged from the use of these methods. In our case, Ben had multiple visitors to his shop helping with his investigation, some with equipment in tow, none working systematically. History and feelings. TV ghost hunters promote the use of historical lore and subjective impressions as evidence. Both are anecdotal and low quality. Ben told me that his unit had been vacant for many months before he rented it. As a devout Christian, he believes that may have been due to the presence of demonic forces. He also gives much credence to his subjective impressions and those of church representatives, mediums, and spirit cleansers. Unfortunately, this evidence fails to establish a connection between the personal experiences and the external realities, as I will discuss next. The Social Psychology of Hauntings Several psychological and sociological factors bridge the gap between perceiving video images and believing in ghosts. Emotions and judgment. We are largely unaware when emotions bias our judgments. Witnesses’ emotional reactions can so intensify an unusual experience that they presume the only sensible conclusion is otherworldly. Worse, we readily use our “gut” to separate fact from fiction, often excluding more objective sources.12 Others’ emotional expressions of fright, grief, joy, or wonderment are contagious and impact our judgments vicariously. An emotionally fraught testimonial affects us more, and feels more believable, than the same story delivered without expression. Motivated cognitions. When people have a vested interest in a belief, they are motivated to validate that belief and become more prone to bias.13 A deeply held belief may feel indisputable even if false, making it all but impossible to correct it.14 If you believe that spirit orbs are 4-inch globes flying around rooms, you are unlikely to accept them as specks of dust near the camera. In our case, the effect is amplified further by

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what appear to be multiple lines of evidence: orbs, wisps, EVP, flying objects, eerie feelings, and social reinforcement. To have multiple strands of evidence feels convincing, but in reality they cannot magically combine to make bad evidence good. Scripts. These are socially acquired mental road maps that guide interpretations and responses to situations.15 In our case, the term is quite literal as Ben and associates took cues from ghost hunting TV shows. Sharon Hill shows how these programs have shaped popular culture and normalized amateur ghost hunters’ beliefs.16 Social impact. Social impact theory asserts that we are more susceptible to influence when there are multiple consistent sources, they are close to us, and they are “strong”, e.g., high in status, power, or legtitimacy.17 The same factors have been shown to induce paranormal beliefs.18 TV ghost hunters influenced Ben because he regards them as role models who always appear unanimous and self-assured. Ben’s friends are socially close, and the spirit mediums and church representatives appeared to make authoritative assessments. Impediments to these factors—such as an authoritative skeptic—can thwart social impact. However, it appears that Ben was either not exposed to the views of any well-informed skeptics, or his confirmation bias led him to dismiss their explanations. Conclusion Science does not set out to frustrate popular beliefs. It just happens sometimes. In part it is because paranormal claims would have to defy physical laws and scientific precedents to be true. Nonscientific approaches to paranormal claims almost appear to be custom made to generate fantastic but false claims. Those false claims then anneal into bad evidence and false beliefs, aided by normal human limitations in perceptual acuity, judgment formation, and memory retrieval. False beliefs become socially contagious and collectively held when supported by social groups and networks, social media, and mass media. Despite my investigation’s limitations in breadth and depth, I found nothing to suggest that Vital Vapors is haunted—and much to suggest otherewise. I don’t claim to have proven with certainty either that ghosts do not exist in general or that this particular business is spirit free. However, the combination of weak evidence and alternative explanations makes this alleged haunting very unlikely. Acknowledgment: The author thanks Will Kalkhoff for his videographic insights, and Lisa Baugh for her many useful editorial suggestions on a previous draft.

APPENDI X VIDEO FROM THE FILMMAKER Video 1 https://bit.ly/3sHPfUu 4:43 VIDEOS FROM THE BUSINESS OWNER (with his titles in quotes) Video 2 https://bit.ly/3axGlm3 1:59 “Flying around office.” (Orbs and wisps.) Video 3 https://bit.ly/32EB5c0 1:10 “Flies right over my head.” (Orbs and wisps.) Video 4 https://bit.ly/32DjWzr 1:56 “Through the office.” (Best wisp example.) Video 5 https://bit.ly/3awyndb 0:56 “Says ‘Inside’ 0:44 Mark” (apparently didn’t hear at the time) Video 6 https://bit.ly/3v7FiRR 0:21 “Listen only” (clunk, rumble, static) Video 7 https://bit.ly/3vcl7lC 1:45 “:27 mark footsteps/Bible pages turning” (Much hiss, tiny clicks; maybe paper sounds around 1:03) Video 8 https://bit.ly/3n8Mevg 0:51 “33 second mark Ciska [sic]/orb” Video 9 https://bit.ly/3gxnfjJ 0:33 “Whispers 3 words 0:14-16/Orb Top L to R” (I hear soft mumbling) Video 10 https://bit.ly/3asyhmE 0:21 “Door on the right” (orbs, wisps; not coming in the door) Video 11 https://bit.ly/3gqCXxg 0:38 “Privilege” (Orbs. He’s vaping!) Video 12 https://bit.ly/3sIqN5a4 1:10 “Appears out of nowhere” wisps (moving streak; 2 guys sitting, at least one holding vape)

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