Skeptics Proclaim Themselves the Odds-On Favorites

Posted on February 9, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

I’ve covered Daryl Bem’s precognition study here in the past. But I wanted to include a quickie here, from ScienceDaily, on a study by Jeffrey Rouder, at the University of Missouri, and Richard Morey from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who performed a new statistical analysis of Bem’s series of precognition experiments and determined his research offers only “modest” support for ESP.

Their application of a relatively new statistical method that quantifies how beliefs should change in light of data suggests skeptics should move their belief meter by a factor of 40. In other words, a skeptic giving odds against ESP being true at 1 million to 1 would now need to revise that down to 25,000 to 1.

The full paper is available here. But a couple of points from me, first.

Rouders and Morey are skeptical of psi but in one important instance they do all right by Bem, noting that the more scathing analysis of Eric-Jan Wagenmakers failed to capture the real success of his experiments.

“On balance, according to Wagenmakers et al., there is little systematic evidence for ESP. We have added a third column as a validity check, and it provides the direction of the effect. In several of Bem’s experiments, one could be reasonably sure that if ESP held, the effect should be in one direction and not the other. For example, in Bem’s Experiment 1, discussed previously, participants were instructed to indicate the curtain behind which there was an erotic picture, and, if ESP held, their performance should be greater rather than worse than chance. If there were no ESP, we would expect the observed performance to be slightly below chance for some experiments and slightly above chance for others. Table 1 shows that the direction of all 10 were in the direction hypothesized by Bem. This concordance serves as evidence for ESP that is not captured by Wagenmakers et al.’s analysis. In fact, the Bayes factor of getting all 10 contrasts to be in the same direction is about 100:1 in favor of ESP.”

What’s novel about their means of analysis is that it factors in the degree to which Bem’s psi-positive findings should influence what they call an “appropriately skeptical” reader.

In other words, the beliefs we build up, based on the evidence at hand, can be ascribed an odds value, and contrary evidence can then be rated in terms of how much this might reinforce our beliefs or force us to revise them. The amount of subjectivity involved in this process—anyone care to define the “appropriately skeptical reader”?—is itself staggering.

The full paper is worth reading, though, if only to see how quickly and casually Rouder and Morey unravel themselves. They dismiss the piles of evidence in favor of telepathy with a quick wave of the hand—”We worry about the frequency of unreported studies”—primarily, I think, because they have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. As I write in Fringe-ology, research actually shows that parapsychologists are far more likely than any other field of science to report negative results.

Rouder and Morey also don’t take the obvious and necessary step of calculating how many people are actually involved in conducting telepathy experiments around the world—maybe a dozen or 20?—and how many negative experiments they’d have to do in order to undo the positive findings that have been published.

Why don’t they look into these factors? My guess is simple confirmation bias.

They don’t believe psi is legitimately possible, focusing on the “lack of a plausible mechanism”, and so they aren’t interested in thinking as critically about their own analysis as they are psi itself.

 

 

 

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TOP 10 DEVELOPMENTS IN FRINGE-OLOGY: 6

Posted on February 1, 2012 by admin| 3 Comments

GREAT GHOSTS: SPIRITS, SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION

It would not be inaccurate to claim my book, Fringe-ology, is shot through with ghosts. Though I explore seven different paranormal phenomena in great depth, the book starts with ghosts, raises the subject in the middle, and concludes there, too.

We are used to encountering ghosts, as a culture, in several places. We have some strange experience in our own lives. We meet someone we trust who tells us some incredible story. Occasionally, a newspaper or some local TV news broadcast will cut some “light” news feature on a haunted hotel or bar, particularly around Halloween. Most commonly, I think, we happen across one of the many rigorously awful ghosthunting programs on television.

Of these, the one I think most worthwhile is the first-hand account.

My initial inspiration for writing Fringe-ology is an old family ghost story I grew up with as a child. So, as I promoted the book in various settings, I heard many ghost stories from attendees, usually after the crowd dispersed for the night. One man told me about a ghostly, feminine voice that would cry in the family dining room every night. A couple told me their daughter’s invisible friend proved to be the ghost of an old train conductor. Their daughter described him in detail, particularly his uniform, with the boxy hat, before they researched the house and found that a train conductor had lived and died there many years beforehand. A woman told me about a ghost who “played” with her, moving her car keys, for instance, from the peg where she habitually hung them to various, unlikely places, including inside the refrigerator.

There are potential skeptical explanations for some of this that should occur to us immediately. But the narrative arc of these stories often includes some fairly dramatic steps to come up with a prosaic explanation. During my time spent ghosthunting as part of my research for Fringe-ology, I ran across many people who seemed excited by the idea that their house was haunted and disinterested in any Earthly explanations. But I also met many who felt they were being plagued by something they didn’t understand, and hoped for a rational, terrestrial cause to be discovered.

One story passed on to me concerned a woman who claimed her house was haunted by a pair of children, who had the highly annoying habit of messing with various devices around the house. They changed stations and volume settings on the radio. They turned the lights on and off. She would go to the radio or the light afterward and see that the controls in question appeared to have been physically manipulated—the light switch maneuvered “up” and “on” from the “down” and “off” position, for instance. But the most dramatic and annoying thing they did is switch the ringer off on her phone.

To provide some context, her whole story took place before cell phones, when handsets included a little plastic tab on the side that could be slid in the opposite direction to turn the ringer off.  Over a period of months, as these phenomena occurred, she got especially tired of friends, family and colleagues telling her they could not reach her. “I called again and again and you never picked up,” they’d say.

Finally, after finding the ringer turned “off” on numerous occasions, she put a strip of tape over the ringer to fix it in the “on” position. I find this detail delightfully funny. Why would a “ghost” have the power to move the ringer switch but not the tape? She told me that throughout the experience she doubted the idea that her home was haunted. She had, at this stage, conducted enough research to know that a pair of children had died in the basement of the house. And their antics did seem playful, and  attention-getting, like a child grabbing at her skirt. But she was skeptical and thought of the tape as a barrier and a test.

So she put the tape on and went about her business in the house for several hours. Then she returned to find the tape rolled into a tight little ball beside the handset. And the ringer? Now switched to “off.”

We are left with only a couple of possible explanations, including a stealthy intruder who crept into her home, undetected, for the sole purpose of mystifying its occupant. Or she was making the whole thing up. Or… well, we have to concede that there is a mystery afoot.

In the many months since I completed Fringe-ology, there have been plenty of ghost stories in the media: The publicity department at Thorpe Park, in Surrey, claimed a ghost caused an entire, 64-foot water ride to be moved because it was frightening everyone who caught sight of it. Cries of “hoax!” followed quickly. Touring comedienne Karen Rontowski revealed her alter-ago as a ghost hunter. Some paranormal investigators in Knoxville, Tennessee have cooked up a plan to restore a historic building by charging admission to give “ghost tours” of the site. Turning to the truly outlandish, Gawker reported on a ghost that supposedly liked to grope one old woman—all night long. (This reminds me of a story I’ll get around to writing in one of my next projects, an e-book.) Gawker also wrote an item on a pair of ghosts seen—and photographed—copulating in Ohio.

This next story sits behind a pay wall. But the sheer number of ghostly goings on at the Naval Academy Grounds in Annapolis, Maryland is impressive, complete with one employee who quit the place over ghosts. And lastly, unexpectedly, one Salem hotel operator denied her spot is haunted—never mind what extra business the reputation might bring her.

The best developments in this particular aspect of the paranormal, however, are more scientific. I myself guest-hosted an episode of Alex Tsakiris’s Skeptiko, interviewing writer Guy Lyon Playfair about some research he collaborated on with Dr. Barrie Colvin.

In the paper Colvin published, he claims that true poltergeist sounds actually demonstrate a different acoustic signature than “normal” sounds. But an even more intriguing study was just released from the lab of Dr. Michael Persinger, who partnered up with one of the early pioneers in parapsychology research: Dr. William Roll.

The paper, “A Prototypical Experience of ‘Poltergeist’ Activity,” is an adventurous ride across the far frontier of science—and a whole lot more intriguing, I think, then putting all hauntings down to superstition and imagination. In this instance, Roll, Persinger and their co-authors report on a woman they call “Mrs. S.”, a middle-aged woman with no kids, a divorce in her past and a husband in her present. About 17 years before the experiments discussed in the paper began, Mrs. S. suffered a traumatic brain injury so severe she fell into a coma for two days. After she awoke, strange things started to happen.

Knocking sounds, luminous discharges from her left hand, disruptions in electronic equipment, and an ability to see strange, colored lights—or “auras”—around people in her view. The authors further claim that The Incredible Mrs. S. can move a pinwheel with her mind. A photometer, which measures photon emissions, caught an increase in photons around her when she entered a particular, anomalous “brain state.” She hears voices, but displays no other signs of any mental illness. In fact, she seems to be functioning normally but for these strange occurrences, after which she feels a profound sense of… sadness.

As I read over the paper, I must confess to a profound feeling of skepticism. No matter how open minded we might be, such reports are tempting to simply dismiss. But the intriguing part of the study is the line of thought researchers are following. They claim to have found an anomaly, an uptick in electrical activity, over her right temporal lobe. They further claimed to have cross-referenced scans of 1,000 people who had suffered closed head injuries with a comparable number of students with no such medical history. No one had the same pattern of chronic, increased activity. Moreover, as it states in the abstract, “The rotation of a small pinwheel near her while she ‘concentrated’ upon it was associated with increased coherence between the left and right temporal lobes and concurrent activation of the left prefrontal region.”

A similar effect was noticed during these odd, spontaneous photon emissions.

What are we to make of this?

Well, Roll and Persinger conclude that there is no need to verify the more extreme claims reported by the woman, her husband and friends—or even the claims of the research group, which saw the pinwheel move at Mrs. S’s, presumably only mental, effort. Instead, they argue, the people reporting “sensed presences” or odd sounds and sightings of auras—who feel distressed about it all—can be investigated for this temporal lobe anomaly and perhaps treated with anti-convulsant medication. They also might be taught, the paper concludes, to see these phenomena not in supernatural terms but as the product of a dysfunction in the brain.

Of course, there are questions that remain: If Mrs. S can actually make a pinwheel move, why not something else, less prone to moving in an invisible breeze or exhalation? If she can make a physical object move, including the pinwheel, then just how is that happening? One thing to like about Persinger, who includes geomagnetic energy as part of the equation in this paper, as he has in the past, is that he is willing to man the gates of western science on one hand—undercutting the whole notion of ghosts as disembodied entities—while storming the ramparts on the other. After all, if Mrs. S. really can move an object with her mind, we do need to start drawing up some rather serious amendments to our current understanding of physics.

I’d like to toss out one intriguing point, by the way, which runs in favor of the paranormal. According to this paper, when Mrs. S. was asked to move the pinwheel, the anomalous activity in her brain occurred only when the pinwheel actually moved. Not when it didn’t.

I’ll leave this here, for now, on that mysterious note. And I will close by mentioning that Persinger’s co-author William Roll died just as this paper was published. An 85-year old psychologist, Roll was born in Germany and lived in Denmark before coming to America. He conducted parapsychology research at no less august an institution than Oxford for eight years, and worked with J.B. Rhine’s parapsychology lab at Duke, where some of the most successful and hotly contested telepathy experiments ever completed took place.

He was the lead investigator on a 1984 poltergeist case, which produced a famous—and again, roundly debated—photo of Tina Resch. And on his way out the door he left us this strange paper.

With any luck, perhaps someone will contact Persinger and invite the Incredible Mrs. S. to their own lab, to see if the results of this study can be replicated.

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TOP 10 DEVELOPMENTS IN FRINGE-OLOGY: 7

Posted on January 27, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

FASTER THAN LIGHT: SURGING TOWARD (THE NEED FOR) A NEW PHYSICS?

We’ll make this quick.

Dark matter is still mysterious. In fact, it is probably more mysterious than ever. This New Scientist article explains the problem. A dark matter experiment called CoGeNT seemed on the verge of triumph, turning up possible sightings of the invisible stuff scientists believe makes up roughly 85-percent of the Universe. Then everything went, well, in admittedly unscientific terms, higgledy-piggledy. The dark matter scientists thought they were glimpsing is proving wildly inconsistent, appearing to be different things in different detectors, heavier in some detectors and lighter in others.

From New Scientist:

In the most extreme case, it shows up in one instrument but not in another—even when both are made of identical material and are sitting virtually next door in the same underground lab.

“The present situation is pretty confusing,” admits Juan Collar of the University of Chicago, who is head of the CoGeNT dark matter experiment, based in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota. It is seeing something – hundreds of somethings – each of which could be a dark matter particle striking the detector. But if CoGeNT and the other experiments are truly seeing dark matter, then it’s not what anybody thought it was.

Moving on, researchers in Italy have conducted a pair of experiments they say proves the impossible: neutrinos travel faster than light, violating general relativity. The experiment itself is super-cool, sending neutrinos through the ground from Cern, near Geneva, to the Gran Sasso lab, in Italy, 450 miles away.

The results, however, qualify as an “extraordinary claim”—the theory of relativity has served us pretty well, after all—so this dispute figures to drag on for a while. (Indeed, physicists at Washington University argue that a systematic measurement error is to blame.)

Perhaps most importantly, the Higgs-Boson, predicted by the standard model of physics, and believed to confer mass to quarks, electrons and the other fundamental building blocks of our physical world, is proving elusive. And so I turn you over to novelist and physicist Alan Lightman, whose recent, brilliant Harper’s article muses:

*

“The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or to be the result of random events thereafter, have been explained as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws discovered by human beings.

“This long and appealing trend may be coming to an end. Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.”

 

*

The upshot of all this, as I see it, is that science may be leading us toward an incredible truth: That the Universe is unknowable, or at least not knowable in the way we’ve traditionally thought or hoped.

In Fringe-ology, I address some of the current debates in physics—including the Many Worlds hypothesis and Roger Penrose’s prediction that the mystery of consciousness will only be unraveled through a new physics. But, as a reporter, all I can do is wait for the jury to come in.

The wait, however, sure is entertaining.

Physics seems to encourage, if not outright require, some of the most outlandish claims in all of science. Luc Montagnier, the joint winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for medicine, is claiming that DNA can send electromagnetic imprints of itself into distant cells and fluids, which can then be used to create copies of the original DNA. If true, this finding would thrust quantum mechanics firmly into the realm of biology.

The results of Montagnier’s experiment seem far-fetched. But multiple research teams are finding evidence for quantum effects at the level of DNA (see here and here.

Biological systems are simply thought to be too warm, wet and noisy to sustain meaningful quantum effects, which are thought to require cold, stable environments to exist. But as I also wrote about in Fringe-ology, evidence does keep turning up to suggest the presence of significant quantum actions in biological systems. There is not yet evidence so unequivocal as to force acceptance. But something strange does seem to be happening in science’s most fundamental field. With the passage of time the amount of mystery present in physics isn’t decreasing—it’s growing.

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TOP 10 DEVELOPMENTS IN FRINGE-OLOGY: 8

Posted on January 24, 2012 by admin| 3 Comments

OH WOW: STEVE JOBS AND HIS PARTING GIFTS

We all know the basic bio: Apple mastermind Steve Jobs changed the way we relate to every manner of computer and gadget, marrying form, functionality and ease of use in a way unlike any electronics company before. The result—the iPod, iPhone and the company’s sleek computer line—are now cultural touchstones, changing the way we relate to information, entertainment and each other.

Thanks to Walter Isaacson’s revealing biography, Steve Jobs,  we now know that Jobs was a control freak and a monster of a boss. He drove his charges crazy, asking for things they didn’t think were possible. As a result, those same employees achieved more than they had ever dreamed. But when Jobs passed away last fall, after a long battle with a rare form of pancreatic cancer, there were new lessons to take from his life, both of which land in the realm of Fringe-ology.

For roughly the first nine months after Jobs was diagnosed with cancer in October, 2003, he pursued an alternative treatment regimen. He even declined an operation that, statistically speaking, promised him at least 10 more years of life.

When he finally did consent to surgery, in July, 2004, his cancer had advanced to his liver. The media gossip website Gawker quotes a specialist in Jobs’s form of cancer lamenting the corporate wizard’s decision-making: “In my series of patients, for many subtypes [of this form of cancer], the survival rate was as high as 100% over a decade… As many as 10% of autopsied persons in the general population have been reported to have one of these without ever having had any symptoms during their life.”

I have always maintained an uneasy relationship with alternative medicine as a whole. I don’t believe that all these therapies are as worthless as the skeptical community would have us believe. Acupuncture is often dismissed as outright quackery here in the west. But the record is mixed. (See this Mayo clinic roundup, for the list of pain-related uses of acupuncture. There is also evidence it reduces the symptoms associated with chemotherapy.) “Aromatherapy” is also a constant target of “quack” watchers. But a quick search at PubMed—a U.S. National Institutes of Health website—reveals multiple studies that show aromatherapy has a positive effect on anxiety and, in some cases, post-operative pain. The Mayo Clinic says research on aromatherapy is thin, but acknowledges there is evidence of some benefit for people suffering from anxiety or depression. But the tendency of skeptics to overstate their case isn’t reason for believers in alternative medicine to overstate their own.

The wisest course of action, it seems, is to pursue alternative therapies as additions to the most well researched, evidence based treatments. (Here in Philadelphia, actually, at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, one of the most advanced partnerships between alternative and mainstream medicine is underway.)

Jobs, sadly, reminded us in the most final possible terms that the quality of the information we’re using is critical. So take the lesson that tragedy offers to heart: Look at the available research, and engage in your own care—pro-actively and without prejudice. If Jobs had looked at all the data, free from his own biases, he would almost certainly still be with us today.

Of course, Jobs also left us something else when he passed away, something we first learned of through the eulogy delivered for him by his sister, the novelist Mona Simpson. The New York Times published the text of Simpson’s talk, in which she describes Jobs’ final days in unsparing terms—at turns romantic and bitter. But it was the final passage that got everyone buzzing, relating the very end of Jobs’ storied life:

Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.

   He seemed to be climbing.

   But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

   Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times. Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

   Steve’s final words were:

   “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”

Some speculated that Jobs was only reacting to the feelings of love he felt for those closest to him. Others (including me) pointed out that Simpson—a novelist, after all—undoubtedly chose her words very carefully. And she noted that he looked “over their shoulders past them” before uttering those last words: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

I contacted Simpson, to see if she did intend to suggest that Jobs had a deathbed vision—a glimpse of what’s next. She declined to be interviewed.

For the record, however, judging by the research I did for Fringe-ology, if Jobs did see something fantastic on his journey toward death, Simpson’s account seems to fit with the existing lore on the subject.

The deathbed vision is a staple in paranormal circles. In Fringe-ology, I relate the story of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the famous psychologist who wrote On Death and Dying—the book that gave life to the hospice movement.

Kubler-Ross repeatedly encountered terminally ill patients who claimed to see deceased loved ones in their hospital rooms. She initially resisted these stories, failing even to take notes. But the stories kept coming. As her research partner, the reverend Mwalimu Imara, told me: “We weren’t looking for this. It was just happening, again and again, to us.”

Over time, they relented. They decided that if their project was to chronicle the fears, wishes, hopes, needs and experiences of the dying, they needed to write it all down, no matter how strange it might seem. As their work continued, Kubler-Ross and Imara started filling filing cabinet drawers with these unexpected tales. In fact, patients who had been resuscitated told them stories of what we now call Near Death Experiences (NDEs), years before these stories became popularly known.

When it came time to write On Death and Dying, in 1968, Kubler-Ross included an entire chapter on the paranormal subjects of NDEs and deathbed visions in her original manuscript. But, as I chronicle in Fringe-ology, she ultimately decided against sending this outlandish material to her publisher, lest they deem she’d lost the plot. It was only years later, after the phrase “Near Death Experience” was coined and popularized, that she began sharing these stories at all.

Intriguingly, in the context of Steve Jobs, Kubler-Ross noted a stark difference between what she termed a “deathbed visitation” or vision and a mere hallucination.

Patients suffering from some form of dementia or drug-addled state are unable to understand or coherently interact with the objective, verifiable world around them. Patients Kubler-Ross described as having deathbed visitations, however, remained lucid. What this means is that they described people and things that weren’t visible in the room. They even carried on conversations with these unseen visitors. But they were also fully aware of their surroundings and able to continue interacting with the objective world, without fail.

In researching Fringe-ology, I found these reports remain prevalent among hospice professionals today. In the case of Steve Jobs, if he did have a deathbed vision, it’s far from the most spectacular. But it does fit the standard template: the dying man, encountering the material world before him and another one besides.

We should acknowledge that skeptics would scarcely spend any time on this subject, rebutting any idea that Jobs had a deathbed vision and positing that all such reports are the product of dying, deluded people, unable to discriminate any longer between hallucination and reality.

Believers might simply take such stories as evidence for an afterlife.

Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, offered the New York Post the following opinion: “Well, I’m glad—as with everything in Steve’s life—he leaves us with a slightly inspiring mystery.”

I don’t envy Isaacson, a terrific writer and researcher, who has likely never looked at any paranormal research, being put in the position of answering for Jobs’ last words. Reading the entire Post item, you can almost feel his discomfort as he tries to find some convenient exit. That said, I don’t think I’m being too unfair to Isaacson to say that his response is “slightly spot on,” while also being “slightly off.”

What are we to make of Jobs’ final words?

Well, in my opinion, no one should run from—or be embarrassed by—any hope occasioned by Jobs’s last statement. And the mystery of what awaits us—the suggestion of new lands beyond the veil—is more than “slightly inspiring.”

The way I think of it, Steve Jobs left us one last gift on his way out, a final, useful tool, which operated according to the same elegant aesthetic that marked his products: Monsosyllables, two words, repeated three times, capturing one of the great existential mysteries of humankind’s existence—and boundless possibilities.  Its function is merely to instill in us an appropriate sense of wonder. And it worked for me. In fact, the first time I read this passage, the day Simpson’s eulogy for her brother appeared, it put me immediately in mind of one of my favorite stories that never made it into Fringe-ology.

I spoke to a few hospice workers along the way, one of whom had read On Death and Dying but was unfamiliar with Kubler-Ross’s more metaphysical research. She, too, had encountered strange happenings. She, too, drew a sharp dividing line between patients suffering from hallucinations and those buoyed by what she took to be visions.

In most instances, she said, when a patient was consumed by a vision, she allowed them to narrate what they were seeing as they wished. But once, an old man to whom she felt particularly close had asked her to remain silent as he locked his eyes on a far corner of the room. He seemed pleased, excited even, and engaged someone or something in conversation.

She only saw the same old room.

“Hey,” she broke in, “what is it? What are you seeing?”

The old man glanced at her briefly. “Oh honey,” he said. “I could tell you. But you wouldn’t believe me.”

Author’s Note: As the year wound down, I started thinking about the most important things to happen in the realm of the paranormal since I finished writing Fringe-ology in the late fall of 2010. All the entries will be posted here, though many will run for a few days exclusively at The Daily Grail. You can also follow me on twitter @stevevolk

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TOP 10 DEVELOPMENTS IN FRINGE-OLOGY: 9

Posted on January 19, 2012 by admin| 3 Comments

UFOS—LOTS HAPPENING, LITTLE PROGRESS

The year or so since I finished Fringe-ology did not lack for activity on the UFO front.

The FBI and NSA made their declassified files easier to find. The Brits and New Zealanders released more UFO files. I was, I must admit, perversely pleased when the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) lost its funding in spring. In my opinion, searching for alien life—ie., advanced civilizations—using radio technology is almost guaranteed to turn up bupkus.

Also in spring, shortly before Fringe-ology was released, Annie Jacobsen released her provocative book on Area-51. The book held lots of surprises, but one got all the attention. A single, anonymous source told Jacobsen the famous Roswell crash of 1947 was a hoax engineered through a collaboration of Russian scientists and Nazi Joseph Mengele. Their purported, nefarious plot was to scare America into thinking aliens had landed. Presumably, chaos would ensue and we would, like, eat each other or something.

Just months after it shut down, SETI started up again. And somewhere along the way, astronomer Derrick Pitts came forward and said UFOs deserve serious study. I interviewed Pitts, who, like me, emphasizes the unidentified nature of Unidentified Flying Objects. I admire Pitts, lead astronomer at the Franklin Institute, for stepping up, publicly, and getting involved. Those who’ve read Fringe-ology know I believe believers and skeptics alike are too keen to define UFOs. Believers look mostly to aliens; skeptics claim weather anomalies, sky lanterns, balloons, flares and anything else that sort of comes close to maybe fitting any given sighting. And the upshot is this: Combatants insist so adamantly on their preferred explanation that we forget what we’re talking about: Something unidentified.

If we made progress on any front in the last 15 months or so, it’s that we might actually have more momentum now among people advocating for that middle position. For instance, Leslie Kean’s book collects UFO accounts from government and military sources around the world. And throughout, she diligently lets the UFO stay a UFO without insisting on an extraterrestrial explanation.

The rate of sightings appears to be on a steady rise.

MUFON reported that between 2008 and 20011 there was a 67-percent increase in claimed sightings. The early part of 2012 featured sightings in 36 of 50 states here in the U.S., and a wave of sightings around the world. But no sighting won the public’s widespread attention. Or, at least, there was nothing to equal the Stephenville Lights, of January, 2008, which I focus on in Fringe-ology. There were some sightings reported out of China. Robert Hastings reported a series of sightings around a military base near Cheyenne, Wyoming. He also released a report analyzing a photo of a Chilean UFO. But the two most intriguing developments have probably been psychological.

The Area-51 Nazi kerfuffle actually united skeptics and believers. Was the purported crash of an alien disc in 1947 the result of a foreign government’s attempt at psychological warfare? Proponents and opponents of alien visitation both cried no! in sweet, unlikely harmony. In my opinion, in addition to whatever fact-based reasons they listed, both had emotional reasons for adamancy. Many believers are invested, decades-deep, in claiming the 1947 Roswell crash is evidence of E.T. visitation. Skeptics likely can’t stand the idea that, if Jacobsen’s account is true, the Roswell witnesses would be duped innocents, who were right about a government cover-up, instead of fantasists and hayseeds with no credibility whatsoever.

The other story I found intriguing, in psychological terms, is the revelation that a man stepped forward to claim he hoaxed a very famous photograph snapped during a 1990 wave of sightings in Belgium. Granted, the hoax was the news. But it seemed curious to me that the hoax finding didn’t also provoke a fresh look at the numerous civilian, government and law enforcement eyewitnesses who professed to see something in the sky. In sum, the UFO reports seemed to get lost in the hoax they inspired, a fact Kean herself mourns in the story I link  to above.

I’ll conclude with one last event, which also fell far short of the clichéd UFO landing on the White House lawn. Huffington Post reporter Lee Speigel published a story claiming the Air Force deleted a passage about UFO policies and procedures from a personnel manual, just days after he requested an interview about the odd instructions. I call the instructions “odd” because the U.S. Government, officially speaking, stopped investigating UFOs in 1969, with the release of Project Blue Book—a report that dismissed the whole phenomenon.

The directive Speigel discovered, in a 2008 Air Force manual, asked personnel to note the size of any “UFO” by comparing it to a known object ranging from a “pea” or “silver dollar” to known, similarly sized “aircraft”. Witnesses were also asked to take down the “number, and formation” of UFOs and—gotta love this—“how it disappeared.”

What disappeared after Speigel made his inquiry was the UFO section of the directive. You can read all about it, and see the excised instructions at HuffPo.

For what it’s worth, the military claimed the timing of this pruning was a coincidence.

The event moves the needle, a bit. Believers would argue that the “UFO” reference was deleted because the government is hiding the truth about alien visitation, or at least about their own continued interest in these strange sighting reports.

Skeptics can claim the UFO-reference was deleted because it never should have been there, as the government doesn’t take UFO reports seriously and neither should we. Clearly, however, the incident reveals the government is concerned enough about how we perceive the subject of Unidentified Flying Objects to take action—deleting this intriguing little instruction right after a reporter started asking questions.

Further reading: Alejandro Rojas sent me his own personal Top 20 developments of the year, along with an article about a sharp uptick in celebrities talking about UFOs in surprisingly serious ways.

Author’s Note: As the year wound down, I started thinking about the most important things to happen in the realm of the paranormal since I finished writing Fringe-ology in the late fall of 2010. I’ll post all the items here, though a few will appear first on my guest blog at the Daily Grail.

 

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TOP 10 DEVELOPMENTS IN FRINGE-OLOGY: 10

Posted on January 18, 2012 by admin| 1 Comment

AFTER THE FALL: THE UNEXPLAINED DROPS OUT OF THE SKY

Paul Thomas Anderson, in his movie Magnolia, with its climatic rain of frogs plummeting out of the sky and pummeling people, windows and automobiles, did more to memorialize the odd phenomena of “falls” than anyone since Charles Fort.

The phenomenon qualifies as perhaps the least well-known and most whimsical in the entire realm of the paranormal—a strange happening that lacks the rabid following enjoyed by ghosts and UFOs. And Fort, a kind of professional, philosopher-crank—a whimsical human being, at least from a historical perspective—still seems similarly unable to get his due. For instance, in my proposal for Fringe-ology, I promised editors I would use Fort as a kind of launching point for the entire enterprise. That claim, on my part, received some gentle pushback. One editor in particular, who I shall not name, professed to “love Fort” but argued that he “was more a great personality and curator than a thinker.”

It is true that Fort’s reputation rests largely on his role as the ultimate chronicler of all things odd. But to me this pursuit itself reveals Fort to be a novel thinker—and moreover, committed enough that he built his life to accommodate his strange, singular passion.

For most of his young adult life, as the 1800s bled toward the 1900s, Fort engaged in menial day jobs and sporadic fits of journalism, breaking up furniture for firewood while buying armfuls of newspapers and scouring the stacks of the New York Public Library, making notes on “anomalous phenomena” at a time when literally no one else in recorded history had ever engaged in such a practice. Ultimately, a modest inheritance from an uncle allowed him to commit to writing and research, full-time. And the results, The Book of the Damned, Lo!, Wild Talents, and New Lands, suddenly and roughly formed the boundaries of what we now call “The Paranormal.”

Odd creature reports of humanoids and animals. Hauntings. Airships (which later came to be called UFOs). Psychic phenomena. All the biggies found their way into Fort’s pages. And those old writings admittedly did move in fits and starts. Fort was a passionate but often graceless writer, more bull than ballerina. But his efforts reveal a great depth of intelligence, and a unique, rigorously upheld commitment to, well, a lack of commitment.

Consider this passage on witches and ghosts:

“I’d not like to be so unadvanced as to deny witches and ghosts,” he writes in The Book of the Damned, “but I do think that there never have been witches and ghosts like those of popular supposition.”

Fort, as he often does, leaves this statement behind quickly, on his way to some other place. But the meaning of this passage is entirely clear once even a few whole pages of Fort have been read, starting and ending pretty much anywhere: To Fort, nothing was worse, nothing betrayed greater intellectual dishonesty or emotional fragility, than dogmatism. Whether the dogma he confronted was religious or scientific, he had at it with a hacksaw. So, while he clearly held grave doubts about “witches and ghosts,” he was simultaneously committed to maintaining an open mind on the subject and to considering all the possibilities.

The roots of all good scientific and philosophical thinking rest comfortably in this couple of sentences, I think. But there is something more in his books, besides: Namely that, while he had his doubts about ghosts and witches, he also believed that something of genuine interest was afoot.

Today, skeptics cleave to explanations that generally reduce down to “superstition.” But Fort would reject that—rightly, I should think—as useless dogma. The way to address these topics is with a light heart, a serious mind and a willingness to hear out every possibility, no matter how outlandish.

Finally, Fort seemed to anticipate pretty much everything that has happened in this field since he began studying it in the late-1800s: Namely, that anomalies of various kinds would continue to keep cropping up; that believers would embrace them and define them without enough supporting evidence; and that skeptics draped in the mantle of science would simply deny them outright.

Given these facts, I’d argue that defining Fort as “more a personality and curator” than a “thinker” because he did not write in a traditional, philosophical form reveals a sorely limited perspective of what it means to “think” at all. Fort gets us some place we need to be, at times by circuitous means, through sleight of hand and indirection. But he gets us there. And in the end, when I wrote Fringe-ology for HarperCollins I stood on many pairs of shoulders. But first and foremost, in order to get started at all, I clambered upon the shoulders of Charles Fort.

I give you that background as an introduction to the 10th-ranked development in Fringe-ology because Fort and Falls shall remain connected, forevermore. A surprising number of unlikely things fall from the sky. And Fort had the temerity to question the official explanation, which is that a whirlwind or storm picked the objects up in one place and deposited them back down in another.

I ran across reports of a few falls this year.

Orange eggs fell from the sky in Alaska.

Fish seem to fall from the sky, with some regularity, in Lamanju, Australia.

Worms, last spring, In Scotland.

Apples in Coventry.

The worm fall, for starters, is instructive. The report described the fall of a great many worms from what the leading witness described as a “cloudless sky.” Teacher David Crichton was leading his class through warm-ups for a soccer lesson (they call it football in the article, of course), when they heard a soft thudding noise in their midst. Many worms were lying on the ground. As reported by STV, “the class then looked to the cloudless sky and saw worms falling on to them.”

Crichton subsequently collected many of the worms, tallying more than 100.

The phenomenon of falls has its own Library of Congress entry, which puts forward the tornado- or storm-based theory. But for another possibility I’ll refer to the inimitable Brian Dunning, of Skeptoid.

I praise Dunning in Fringe-ology, and I won’t do anything different here. He does his level best to explain the phenomenon, and expresses grave doubts about the whirlwind or weather-based explanation.

If the wind is picking up animals, why is it so damn selective? Why just worms, and not dirt? Why just fish, or frogs, and not grass, sticks, twigs or other debris or… something of the same approximate weight and size.

In The Book of the Damned, Fort writes, more than a century before Dunning:

According to testimony taken before a magistrate, a fall occurred, Feb. 19, 1830, near Feridpoor, India, of many fishes, of various sizes—some whole and fresh and others “mutilated and putrefying.” Our reflex to those who would say that, in the climate of India, it would not take long for fishes to putrefy, is—that high in the air, the climate of India is not torrid. Another peculiarity of this fall is that some of the fishes were much larger than others. Or to those who hold out for segregation in a whirlwind, or that objects, say, twice as heavy as others would be separated from the lighter, we point out that some of these fishes were twice as heavy as others.

So, let’s set aside the whirlwind explanation as insufficient in the judgment of the philosopher-crank (Fort), the skeptic (Dunning), and the journalist (me). But Dunning, in one of his podcasts, has offered up a separate answer. His thesis is that the animals in question were already there, and then something happens—like a rainfall—to draw attention to their presence. The problem, of course, is that Dunning’s explanation is refuted by numerous reports.

First, let’s turn again to Fort, who tells of fish found flopping “atop haystacks”, or covering the “roofs of houses”; of frogs “seen to fall”; of one frog-storm in Kansas City, Missouri, that was so great the frogs “darkened the air”; of frogs found in impossible places for a Dunning-like migration to be remotely possible, like the “city of London” and “a desert.”

From well beyond the grave, this central mystery of Charles Fort’s work still holds up. And in the last year, since I finished my own book, falls continue to confound. Clearly, the idea that the insects or animals were already on the ground doesn’t fit Crichton, or his students, who observed the worms falling from the sky. It also wouldn’t explain the fish, in the other account I listed, which fell in the desert, hundreds of kilometers from water. One witness in that story even claims the fish were alive when they hit the ground.

I am a fan of Dunning. But like many skeptics, in this instance he chose to interpret the data that most readily yielded to a simple explanation and simply ignored the data that didn’t.

This doesn’t, of course, mean UFOs are responsible. It also, obviously, doesn’t mean anything particularly outlandish has to be happening at all. In short, the lack of a great, definitive explanation or explanations that account for all the cases—like the fall of worms from a cloudless sky on a “clear, calm day”—doesn’t mean no such information will ever be found. But it does mean that, for now, we must give this victory to mystery.

UPDATE: Brian Dunning responded to this post, over at the Daily Grail. Here’s a link. Also, please see my response.

Author’s Note: As the year wound down, I started thinking about the most important things to happen in the realm of the paranormal since I finished writing Fringe-ology in the late fall of 2010. I’ll post all the items here, though a few will appear first on my guest blog at the Daily Grail.

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Udderly Mysterious

Posted on January 7, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

The animal mutilation aspect of UFO-ology is one of these areas I find needlessly combative. Sometimes, farm animals turn up dead, their extremities—sex organs and udders—missing. Of course, predators might well start with these, er, dangling, tasty bits. But, sometimes predators seem unlikely. The missing parts don’t appear, from a forensic perspective, to have been gnawed or bitten off. Instead, they appear to be removed in a more, eh, surgical fashion. And the rest of the animal is curiously untouched. The detail that’s repeated, to most chilling effect, is that the animals and the scene around them are “bloodless.”

These reports have been with us a while now, first exploding into public consciousness in the mid 70s, or so. The F.B.I. has a comprehensive collection of press clippings and correspondence related to mutilations from 1974-78. But this case, recently reported in Kansas City, Missouri, is current and appears to be worth a look. Without going all “spooky” Mulder and heading for Kansas City, I can’t be sure about any of the reporting here. But this cow seems to have met with a nasty end—its udder and vagina removed in a way that indicated, to the veterinarian who investigated, that the culprit “knew what they were doing.”

Police said no footprints or tire tracks led  to or away from the cow in question, which was lying dead behind a locked gate. And while a lot of blood would be expected, there was none at the scene. To believers in alien visitation, this all sounds like evidence. And to skeptics, it probably sounds like a faulty investigation. But to me, just going by what’s been reported, I have to say it all sounds… intriguing. I tend to think ranch hands are familiar with what ordinarily happens to the animals that provide their livelihoods, but I also don’t think mysterious circumstances equal aliens.

Some think our own government might actually be at work in these instances. I’d personally love to see an investigation so authoritative it might put the subject to rest, once and for all. But as yet, no such full-scale inquiry has been mounted to settle the matter. The story, reported by the local Fox affiliate, includes video and a grisly, still photo of the deceased.

Big ups to the K.C. broadcasters for playing it straight. Stay tuned to the last second, when it’s mentioned that the vet believes “a scalpel” was used. But I do have one serious question I might look into if I can make the time on Monday. The report says the organs were removed while the animals was still alive, with no mention of what evidence they have for that.

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Less Said, The Better

Posted on January 2, 2012 by admin| Leave a comment

Part II

 

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There Is No God Particle

Posted on December 25, 2011 by admin| 2 Comments

Is one of these Navy soldiers the elusive Higgs Boson?

John Horgan at Scientific American conducts a pretty merciless take-down of all the hoopla surrounding the hunt for the Higgs boson particle, which generates breathlessly bad, over-hyped headlines like “How The Higgs Boson Could Change the Universe,” “Has the God Particle Been Found?” and dizzy claims by no less than Michio Kaku that scientists pursuing the Higgs are close to nabbing “the biggest prize in physics” and a possible Nobel Prize.

The truth, as Horgan helpfully points out, is that the Higgs is predicted by the standard model of physics, and believed to confer mass to quarks, electrons and the other fundamental building blocks of our physical world. But the Higgs wouldn’t actually bring science closer, in any meaningful sense, to a unified theory of everything—the real holy grail of physics (to keep up the religious metaphors). Even worse, Horgan seems to suggest the standard model is hardly worth rooting for, citing Kaku’s assessment that it is a theory “only a mother could love” and noting that it is so incomplete as to exclude gravity.

Why is everyone, then, so fired up about the Higgs?

Well, I’d wager the media is in heat because of the “G” word. That nickname for the Higgs, “The God Particle,” is supposed to reflect its fundamental nature, its primary importance. But it is not as if it’s discovery will really put paid to the big mysteries. And, by the way, if you actually read the articles describing the search for this elusive particle, it’s abundantly clear that scientists are not the least bit closer to discovering the Higgs—or, at least, they don’t actually have any more evidence for it. In fact, they are getting closer only in the sense that they are running out of places to look.

All that said, the best article about the Higgs at the moment is pure satire: “Higgs Boson found on Navy Frigate,” which claims the Higgs wasn’t missing—just visiting his mum in Dorking.

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Hitch, 62

Posted on December 17, 2011 by admin| Leave a comment

The death of Christopher Hitchens, too young at 62, set off a blitz of appreciations and recriminations. There was a pointed essay from a Christian believing “Hitch” is now in purgatory, being filled in on all the knowledge he lacked, so he can make his decision for Christ. The comments section on that particular missive are exactly what might be expected. There is a deeply moving remembrance by Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, the publications which broke the news of his demise. Carter actually refers to an uppercase “God” a couple of times in his column. The words of novelist Ian McEwan tremble on the page. In losing Hitchens, he clearly lost a close friend and something more—a totem, a man who acted as a guidepost for any writer who holds wit and honesty dear. McEwan glides momentarily from the main course of his narrative to observe that the children’s cancer ward, tucked near Hitchen’s own room, “denies the possibility of a benevolent god”.

Are you getting the picture?

Because Christopher Hitchens became so closely allied with the cause of atheism, his death presented itself as an occasion for us all to reflect, in part, on the existence of a creator—as opposed to Hitchens himself.

Of course, this was to be expected. And the God talk can hardly detract from all the applause. The Great Man is getting his due. Slate published a particularly fine set of reminiscences. And I must single out David Corn, who shared an office with Hitchens, describing the work habits—and generosity—of a man who somehow made it to alcohol soaked lunch appointments, late afternoon drinks, and dinner parties that stretched deep into the night, yet still hit all his deadlines. He also introduced Corn to people far beyond his station at the time, with the air of a man ushering about an equal, a fact that understandably maintains a grip on Corn’s heart today.

A generousness of spirit pervades all of the remembrances of Hitchens—by all accounts a man who loved as violently as he attacked—and poked through most of his own writing. Yes, he seemed to believe his own moral compass somehow inerrant. People who disagreed with him in the public sphere were subjected to all manner of mockery. But, I always felt, somewhere between the lines, and just under the surface of his blustering prose, a big-hearted giant who seemed to think that fierce argument might not bust us up—but unite us. He always seemed to be saying the same thing, from my perspective—that reason might give us all a common cause and suggest a way through the darkest problems we face.

I had the chance to speak to a colleague, who has written for Vanity Fair, on the morning of Hitchens’s death. He told me that Hitchens was known for not being a diva. In fact, when the magazine tried to supply him with better accommodations on one particular trip he essentially waved them away. I suppose that after he had taken up a famous vow, early in his career, to travel once a year to war torn and volatile countries, he realized that a warm, comfortable bed is a luxury, even when it isn’t luxurious.

In one sense, I cannot write enough about Christopher Hitchens. I disagreed with him about God and religion. I think he was a bit hard, to put it mildly, toward Gandhi. But… who cares? Gawker published this screed attacking Hitchens for his position on the Iraq war, and I did not, for an instant, think that this criticism was coming too late after the writings that comprised its subject, or too soon after Hitchens’ death. What I thought was: The vast outpouring of words Hitchens sent spiraling off his keyboard, over four decades, had amounted to something so great, and so vast, that the rest of us should respond with a respectful silence.

Sitting in silence isn’t the way of the world, and I am of course shoveling my own meager offering on you right now. But in the wake of Hitchens’ passing, I feel a need for white space. Just print the news of his death and follow it with what’s left.

A void.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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