Visting the Zak Bagans (Non) Haunted ‘Museum’

Sep 302022
 

During a recent visit to Las Vegas, Nevada, a few friends and I got the chance to visit the Zak Bagans Haunted Museum, said to house some of the most powerful and dangerous objects in the world, curated by the ghost-hunting star of several popular series including Ghost Adventures on the Travel Channel. We had several noted skeptics including Ian Harris, Susan Gerbic, and Kenny Biddle with us. Photographs were strictly forbidden during the tour itself, though we were allowed to take pictures outside and in the entrance room.

While waiting outside I took some photos and was later stunned to discover a strange haze or mist that seemed to envelop Kenny. It looked similar to many ghost photos that Kenny and I had investigated (and debunked).

Disguised Kenny Biddle surrounded by a mysterious mist outside the Haunted Museum

Sometimes those images can be accidentally created by cigarette or vaping smoke—yet no one in our group or nearby was smoking. In other cases, a person’s breath on a cold day can mimic the smoky haze—but it was warm and midday. Adding to the mystery, Kenny reported that he felt a chill in the air, as if the otherworldly ectoplasmic mist was somehow drawing energy from around him in order to manifest—and potentially harm him or someone else.

Before we could investigate, we were ushered into the museum—and right past Zak himself, who (thanks to our clever disguises and pseudonyms) didn’t recognize either of us, or anyone else in our party. We then filled out a bunch of releases and embarked on a nearly two-hour tour.

Unsuspecting Canadian tourists Coral Pollock and Matt Harakal upon reading the “No Refunds” sign at the Haunted Museum

There are too many exhibits to enumerate, and Kenny Biddle has done an excellent job of investigating some of the most prominent “haunted” objects on display there, including a haunted guitar, a supposedly haunted mirror once belonging to Bela Lugosi, and perhaps most prominently, the infamous dybbuk box which may or may not be among the most powerful evil objects in the universe.

There were some items that I was familiar with, including the famous Crying Boy prints that folklorist David Clarke expertly explained and investigated years ago (for more on this check out his appearance on the Squaring the Strange podcast). The write-up on the haunted item, of course, made no mention of any skeptical or scientific explanations.

Another item on display which I’d researched was the “James Dean Death Car” involving the transaxle from James Dean’s 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder (nicknamed “Little Bastard”), allegedly the same vehicle that Dean was driving when he was killed in a car crash on September 30, 1955. Bagans claims to have spent $382,000 on the piece, which is one of the car parts that has supposedly injured or killed several people who owned them or used them in their vehicles.

Writer Jason Colavito poured cold water on the James Dean exhibit. Writing on February 12, 2022, he noted that

Given that Bagans promised that the exhibit would celebrate Dean’s life, not just linger on his death, the grotesque fixation on his demise is a disappointment. As we look around the “exhibit”—rather, the transaxle assembly, a terrible bust, and a collage—we note the life-sized photo of the crashed Porsche, but also the lack of any obvious narrative or context. It’s just a picture of car crash and a chunk of wreckage, mounted like some type of automotive crucifix. The adjacent wall is still worse. It contains what at first glance seem to be news clippings about Dean’s death. But on closer inspection, they are not. The New York Times front page with the banner headline about Dean’s death is a fake. The real Times ran a spall interior piece on the actor’s death the day after. Another clipping is the cover of W. Scott Poole’s book on Maila Nurmi, TV’s Vampira, which has only a tangential connection to Dean. A bit of the 1956 tabloid story alleging Vampira had witchy powers she used to curse Dean appears, as does an alleged newspaper story claiming that Little Bastard killed “more” people. Since the car’s parts allegedly killed just two others besides Dean, it’s not clear who the “more” are. The text appearing in the article on the wall is word-for-word copied from a blog post last updated in 2020. Bagans’s unconvincing mockup is an obvious fake.

It’s a grotesque collage, both promoting a sexist bit of 1950s rumormongering and all but celebrating Dean’s death. As a supernatural exhibition, it lacks imagination. Many supernatural stories have been told about James Dean, so why choose the most obviously fake one, except that it’s the first thing Bagans found in a Google search? A richer exhibit might have presented a range of supernatural stories about Dean, from alleged posthumous psychic contact to, ghostly apparitions, to, yes, supposedly haunted car parts, and asked a serious question about why so many people—thousands, by one count—think they have had supernatural experiences with the dead star. The only real competition is the rash of 1980s sightings of Elvis in 7-Elevens.

Lee Raskin, author of James Dean On the Road to Salinas, notes that most of the stories about the curse originated with a car customizer known for telling tall tales; indeed as one article put it, “Raskin is convinced that most of his stories were fabrications, and several are demonstrably false.” Nevertheless, the truth never stands in the way of a good story (or a quick buck) and Bagans was happy to buy and present it.

I had several reactions to the museum, chief among them that it contained a lot of material that was at best tangential to anything spooky or ghostly. It’s packed with random stuff, including clowns, dolls, guns, sideshow freaks (such as some two-headed animals), old stuff, and so on. There is a lot on circuses, including a diorama, which is okay but has nothing really to do with evil spirits or ghosts. In several places they had surveillance videos of people passing out while on the tour, and of course this was attributed to evil spirits instead of the fact that it was hot and stuffy throughout most of the tour, with no place to sit or rest.

Personal injury lawyers get a good laugh from this sign.

It’s 60% random “weird” or “creepy” stuff, about 30% murderabilia, and about 10% of the museum are objects that—assuming they are authentic, which is not at all likely—may have some genuine interesting story. As Susan Gerbic noted in a conversation afterward, there is, arguably, legitimate historical interest in some of the objects on display. Whether personal effects (allegedly) belonging to serial killers and mass murderers such as John Wayne Gacy and Charles Manson are important or relevant is up for debate, though the van that Jack Kevorkian used in carrying out his assisted suicides is also on display. Was the cauldron on display really owned by serial killer Ed Gein? (Maybe?) Did it ever have any of his victims’ bodies in it? (Maybe?) For more on the experience, check out our recent episode of Squaring the Strange.

Exploiting the Dead

The sensational and exploitive nature of some of the exhibits was, while not unexpected, distasteful. I have encountered this several times over the years. In my investigation of the haunted KiMo theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was contacted by a relative of the boy, Bobby Darnall, who died there. Stories of his ghost have haunted the Darnall family for decades. His sister and brother feel exploited by the story and do not appreciate the fictional claims that their beloved brother is a resident poltergeist ruining performances at the theater.

In my investigation into Jamaica’s Rose Hall Plantation (the subject of Chapter 12 in my book Scientific Paranormal Investigation and the 2015 season premiere episode of the Travel Channel show The Dead Files) I revealed that the evil woman widely claimed to haunt the mansion—Annie Palmer, the so-called White Witch—was in fact based on an innocent historical person. I asked readers to consider the feelings of others: “Imagine if, a century from now, due to some strange mix of myth and circumstance, people describe you as a cruel, perverted, sadistic serial killer. Psychics and ghost hunters claim to contact your spirit, and relay your sensational confessions to the public.” How would you feel to have your good name ruined by sensational, ill-informed ghost hunters who claim to contact your spirit and perhaps elicit a “confession” to murder, sexual abuse, or worse?

Bagans released music that he claims includes the voice of a television actor’s ghost. According to a press release issued on behalf of Bagans and reposted on several Web sites, “In 1999, actor David Strickland, best known for his role on the NBC sitcom Suddenly Susan, committed suicide in room 20 of the Oasis Motel in Las Vegas. More than a decade later, Zak Bagans, the host and lead investigator for the hit TV series Ghost Adventures, spent hours in that very room attempting to establish communication with Strickland’s departed soul. The results of that investigation can be heard on the track Room 20 from NecroFusion, the album from Bagans and musical partner, The Lords of Acid’s Praga Khan.” I found that CD on sale in the gift shop.

According to Bagans he went to the motel and “after hours of recording sessions… I began communication with mind-blowing responses. One of the responses I got was when I said ‘hello’ to David, and a male voice who I believe was his, replied ‘Hi, Zak.’ I asked if he could hear me and he said ‘yea.’… I asked him if he knew where he was, and told me the name of the hotel… Oasis. This was one of the most powerful spirit communication sessions I have ever conducted.”

Bagans offered no scientific evidence for his claim. But assuming for a moment that Bagans did in fact contact a ghost, how does he know it was actor David Strickland? Several other people are known to have died violently in that Las Vegas hotel, including murderer Theodore Sean Widdowes in 1996 and professional poker player Stu Ungar in 1998. In fact given the sketchy area of Las Vegas where the Oasis is located, there might be dozens of people who died nearby by murder, accident, or suicide over the years— any or all of whom could presumably haunt the motel. Yet Bagans somehow positively identified a few short, muffled, ambiguous bits of words (what he hears as, “yea,” “Hi Zak,” “Oasis,” etc.) as spoken by Strickland’s ghost.

If what Bagans claims is true, he may have a unique opportunity to prove skeptics and scientists wrong, and show once and for all that EVP really are ghost voices instead of an auditory illusion. If the sounds that Bagans recorded are indeed the voice of deceased actor David Strickland, it should be easy enough for an audio expert to compare the EVP to voice samples taken from Suddenly Susan or any other of Strickland’s television appearances. Either the sounds that Bagans recorded match Strickland’s voice or they don’t. Strangely, despite being “one of the most powerful spirit communications” Bagans has encountered, such a basic analysis was apparently never done. It’s unclear how David Strickland’s family felt about his tragic suicide (fueled by the actor’s drug addiction and mental illness) being exploited as entertainment by Zak Bagans.

Everyone likes a good story, and ghost hunters especially love a creepy and compelling ghost story. Truth is often stranger than fiction, but ghost hunters must be sensitive to the people (with lives, loves, and families) behind their stories. Real people and reputations can be harmed—and the dead dishonored—by careless investigation. Ghost hunters have an obligation, to both the living and the dead, to act ethically and responsibly.

On the tour we also saw a strange replica of the Titanic, in the same room as a display about Natalie Wood; if you’re thinking the connection between the two is tenuous, you’re right. Toward the end of the tour a huge painting of P.T. Barnum is on display. Bagans is said to idolize Barnum, which makes sense, and it’s clear that Bagans’s career is built largely on lessons learned from the consummate showman. Barnum was not an investigator but an oddity collector, and proud fast-talker who freely mixed the real and the fake together as long as he could make a buck and promote the brand; as Barnum surely believed—though may not have actually said—there’s a sucker born every minute.  

Knowing that Zak Bagans was caught in a recent plagiarism scandal by Kenny, I innocently asked the gift shop employees where his book Ghost Hunting for Dummies was. The woman said she didn’t know, but they just had what was there on the table. I thought about informing her that the reason they didn’t have the book was that the publisher was forced to recall the book and credit the real authors that Bagans—and or his ghostwriter, Troy Taylor—had somehow omitted.

The guides were well-prepared and well-rehearsed, important because there are cameras everywhere and Zak is said to sometimes listen in on tours and berate guides through earpieces if they flub something. In the end, though the museum itself was mostly a boring bust, we were still baffled by the strange misty form that appeared in the photo of Kenny just outside the museum. We may never know what, exactly it was—or whose tortured spirit may have been reaching out to him from beyond the grave at what’s widely described as the most haunted place in the United States, or even the world. We may send it to Zak and ask him to investigate.

 

 

 
 

Squaring the Strange # 178: You Don’t Know Jack (alopes)! Michael Branch and the Art of the Hoax

Sep 202022
 

Squaring the Strange features the JACKALOPE EPISODE! Yes, a favorite kitchy cryptid / hoax / souvenir / tall tale from the American West. Professor Michael Branch discusses his new book and brings us so many jackalope facts you may have to listen twice. Check it out!

 

Bob Bartholomew on a Phantom Cat Killer in New Zealand

Sep 102022
 

Interesting article in Psychology Today by my colleague and co-author Bob Bartholomew, about the strange case of a phantom cat killer in New Zealand…

 

One feature of human psychology is that people tend to see what they expect to see. As meaning-oriented beings, we are wired to interpret information patterns that reflect our expectations and beliefs. A prominent example is a face on Mars–which turned out to be a mound of shifting soil.

Another illustration is the curious case of Maria Rubio of Port Arthur, New Mexico, who, in 1977, became convinced she saw the face of Jesus in her tortilla. This process also aids in the creation of moral panics–exaggerated threats to the social order by a malevolent actor. Moral panics are heavy on rumors and hearsay and light on facts.

Take the case of New Zealand’s Raglan Cat Killer. For a decade, citizens have read stories and watched TV reports of a serial cat killer on the loose in the rural town of Raglan. A group, Stop the Cat Killer, was even formed, and a blog was created under the heading The Raglan Ripper. In 2014 near the height of the panic, residents began flying flags with a cat and crossbones symbol and the words “Stop Raglan Cat Killer” (Harry, 2014). A conspicuous aspect of this case has stood out over the years: no culprit has ever been identified despite living in an age of phone cameras and surveillance video. Furthermore, police have found no evidence of a cat killer…

 

You can read the rest HERE.

America the Fearful: Parsing America’s Ubiquitous Referenda

Aug 252022
 

In the wake of the July verdict in the dueling defamation lawsuits between actors Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, there was of course much punditry, commentary, and crystal gazing. It was seen not merely as an outcome of one trial between two often-toxic celebrities but a harbinger of social trends to come.

New York Times staff editor Spencer Bokat-Lindell wrote a piece titled “Is the #MeToo Movement Dying?” in which he noted that the trial “has been read as a low-water mark for the movement: After and even before the jury found last week that each had defamed the other, awarding $2 million in damages to Heard and $10 million to Depp, commentators were declaring ‘the death’ and ‘the end’ of #MeToo.” Rolling Stone magazine added: “’This is basically the end of MeToo,’ Dr. Jessica Taylor, a psychologist, forensic psychology Ph.D., and author of two books on misogyny and abuse, tells Rolling Stone. ‘It’s the death of the whole movement.’”

Conservative news media also joined in the chorus; as Media Matters noted, “After the verdict was announced, Fox News gleefully celebrated the supposed end of the #MeToo movement. In the minutes after the news broke, anchor Martha MacCallum declared, ‘This puts a bit of a stake in the heart of the notion that you believe all women.’ On The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld sniped that Heard had ‘used the #MeToo movement and now she’s betrayed the #MeToo movement. You can’t believe all women, is basically what this case is saying.’”

However, it seems that pundits on both sides of the issue got it wrong—as they often do.

The verdict was about the claims and evidence in that case specifically, and there’s little evidence suggesting that it would (or will) be a death knell for the movement. I described this phenomenon as the Ubiquitous Referenda in my new book, America the Fearful: Media and the Marketing of National Panics:

It seems that these days most news national and world events are treated as important bellwethers or referenda about the state of our country and the state of the world. This is partly why activists on all sides feel the need to characterize events as a clear step toward social destruction. For example in early 2016 predictions were made that if Trump was elected his sexism and misogyny would influence a generation of young American men and lead to increases of sexual harassment and assault.

Every politically or socially charged news event is framed as a decisive moment where the misguided must be corrected, others must be shown the error of their ways. We jump from week to week, hearing about mistreated airline passengers or people saying mean things about celebrities. The barbarians are at the gates again today, everything is outrageous, everything is crucial, and all dutiful Americans should once again gather along the virtual parapets to loudly remind ourselves (and those misguided souls on the other side) that we publicly denounce them.

There are several problems with this approach. First, it seems to assume, without evidence, that American culture itself is fragile and hinges on some event, that if these incidents are not strongly and widely denounced then American society will self-evidently come to see these things (sexism, racism, sexual assault) as socially sanctioned and acceptable or “normal.” A popular headline for op-eds is, indeed, “This Is Not Normal,” as well-intentioned critics remind readers about some abnormal aspect of their lives against which they should remain vigilant. The fact is that people are not nearly as easily influenced as widely believed (and especially as advertisers would have us believe, as described later); we should know how hard it is to convince people of anything—even when we have facts and science on our side.

The idea that America is on a powderkeg, on a razor’s edge and about to explode into riots and wars based on gender, politics, or race. Ironically, it’s often fringe right-wingers—those who obsess over and interpret each real or perceived racial injustice through some blinkered prism—who are most likely to believe that America is a small step from cultural revolution.

When a Ku Klux Klan rally was scheduled for downtown Dayton, Ohio, in May 2019, Rabbi Ari Ballaban, director of Dayton’s Jewish Community Relations Council, was quoted in local news media warning of unrest and violence, stating that “Courthouse Square will be a powder keg.” Those expecting blood in the streets and race riots need not have feared; a grand total of nine people showed up for the racist rally. They were dwarfed by the estimated 500 to 600 counter-protesters of all races and colors, many shouting slogans and holding signs such as “You Are Not Welcome Here,” “Refugees Welcome, Racists Go Home,” and “Injustice Anywhere Is a Threat to Justice Everywhere.” Local businesses displayed signs such as “Get your hatin’ out of Dayton” and “fucKKK off.” There are many other examples, but for a country as deeply racist as America is said to be, the vast majority of Americans seem to be doing their best to denounce racism and intolerance at every turn. The rabbi, like many others, had overestimated the support that the Klan had locally.

It’s very difficult to get individual people to change their behaviors, even when they are given explicit information on what to do and how to do it. There’s no mystery about how to lose weight or quit smoking, but few people do. People, like ships, have difficulty changing direction; inertia and routine (physical as well as mental) keep us doing the same things, even when we know we shouldn’t. Countries, that is, collectives of hundreds of millions of people, change even more slowly. Institutional reforms take years or decades, not weeks or months—a point often missed by those who demand immediate social and justice reforms. 

For some reason people who are comfortably stuck in their own ways and worldviews assume that other people—They of the third-person effect—are on the precipice of changing their minds (for the worse, of course) should they be exposed to “wrong” ideas. They are in danger of adopting sexist behavior because of Game of Thrones or the optional female voices available for Siri and Alexa, or going down the rabbit hole of violence because of violent video games or movies.  

There’s also outrage fatigue to consider; when everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis. When people spend their days looking for (real or imagined) things to be outraged about, it muddies the waters and makes it hard to distinguish real problems from manufactured ones, serious issues with a high potential for real harm from others with a much lower potential for some inchoate, potential harm. Just as atmospheric smog takes a toll on the health of both people and societies, fear smog takes a collective toll on psychological and social health.

Part of this is the fear that the unwashed masses, the semi-fictional “They” who aren’t as enlightened as you and I, will be easily swayed and misunderstand the situation: If we don’t make it clear that Trump’s sexism is unacceptable, They (high school kids? young men?) will think it’s okay and America will have a generation of rapists and misogynists. If we don’t make it clear that racist marchers are unacceptable, They (non-racists or those on the fence about whether to be racist?) will think it’s okay and America will sow a generation of Nazis.

The good news is there’s little or no good evidence for this assumption. Most of these are testable claims: either sexual assaults go up in the months and years following Trump’s election, or they don’t (they didn’t). Critics might argue an essentially unfalsifiable claim, that their protests prevented or minimized the harm (i.e., if Trump hadn’t been universally condemned for his remarks about grabbing women, he would have had more influence, or if the Virginia and Ohio racists hadn’t been drowned out by counter-protestors and a deluge of mockery and bad press, they would have gotten more recruits). It’s possible, though doubtful—and of course we will never know, precisely because all these things have been widely condemned by most Americans.

This rationalization is reminiscent of doomsday cults, who, when confronted with the fact that the world did not end as they had predicted, claim that their dire prophecy, along with the resulting awareness campaigns and vigilant prayers, had saved the day. The doomsday cultists then pat themselves on the backs, because, after all, they just saved the world—and no one can prove otherwise. As Trump’s presidency ended we have not seen a jump in Americans who think sexually assaulting women is acceptable. Nor was there a surge in membership to white nationalist organizations after people saw the Charlottesville rally and said, “Wow, those guys are right and make sense!” Instead, virtually all the news coverage about it has been negative—as it always is.

Are there exceptions? Of course. Out of hundreds of millions of Americans, a few will see some Klan rally, ignore the overwhelming social criticism of it, and join up. Similarly it’s possible (though unlikely) that a few women may in fact be deterred from reporting their assaults because it took so long for Bill Cosby to be convicted, and that some trolling dudebro will cite Trump when he’s arrested for grabbing his date’s crotch. These are the rare exceptions, not the rule, and the amount of energy directed to these specific events (as opposed to the larger issues—sexism, racism, etc., which are valid and real but hardly represented by these events) is wildly disproportionate to the threat.

Protesting can bring about change, and that’s valuable. But over-protesting undermines its effectiveness, and saturating our airwaves (or social media feeds) with the worst elements of society as if they are representative of America insults those who have worked so hard to bring about the progress we should celebrate and emulate. There’s also an element of virtue signaling and pageantry in today’s clever protest march signs and hashtag activism, of course. The point is not that people shouldn’t protest things they find offensive or wrong (do whatever you want), but instead that there are dangers and pitfalls in how people are approaching it. There are real, legitimate watershed moments in American history (Roe v. Wade and its overturning, Obama’s election, George Floyd’s death, etc.) but we lose our ability to spot these moments if we are feeding ourselves a daily diet of outrage.

Whether the Heard/Depp verdict truly is the nail in the #MeToo coffin—as both progressives and conservatives have claimed—remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely. For years, polls and survey have found that the American public overwhelmingly does believe women when they come forward with claims of abuse. Whether Americans supported Heard, Depp, or were indifferent, the verdict is likely to have little effect on real victims coming forward.

For more on this, see my book America the Fearful, and check out my recent lecture for Skeptical Inquirer Presents.

Squaring the Strange # 179: Deviant Death Rites and Bizarre Burials

Aug 202022
 

Word around the campfire is that there’s a new episode of Squaring the Strange! This week we dug up some strange ways people have sent off their deceased loved ones. As a medieval person, how would you keep Aunt Edna from coming back as a vampire or a bitey undead plague-spreader? Or in the Victorian era, how would you make sure you weren’t accidentally buried alive? From deviant burial practices to waiting morgues with bells and strings to the practicality of sky burials, we’ve got some interesting facts and folklore. Check it out!

False Abuse Claims Used in Politics

Aug 082022
 

False abuse claims are, sadly, being used to settle grudges: “The partner of Vanessa Wilson, the former Aurora, Colorado police chief, was charged with filing a fabricated child sex abuse report. Robin Niceta anonymously called Arapahoe County social services on Jan. 28 ‘to falsely report that Aurora Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky was sexually abusing Jurinsky’s two-year-old son.’ The call prompted a 2-week investigation. After finding that the claims were false, investigators traced the tip to Niceta’s phone.”

 

Guest on ‘New Mexico Living’ for ‘America the Fearful’

Aug 022022
 

For those who didn’t see it: I was a recent guest on ‘New Mexico Living’, talking about my new book ‘America the Fearful: Media and the Marketing of National Panics.’ You can watch the short interview HERE!

 

Squaring the Strange # 178: You Don’t Know Jack (alopes)! Michael Branch and the Art of the Hoax

Jul 252022
 

For the recent episode of Squaring the Strange we are joined by Professor Michael Branch, who has just released his new book On the Trail of the Jackalope. What began as an idea for a taxidermy correspondence course 90 years ago has blossomed into a cultural phenomenon. Michael Branch shares his appreciation for the Western tall tale, the whimsy and skill that went into original Wyoming jackalopes, and what sets a hoax apart from a scam or a con. We discuss tall tale postcards and other “jackalopiana” and uncover the surprising role jackalopes have played in the history of medicine and public health.

 

Check it out HERE!

Parsing America’s Ubiquitous Referenda

Jul 232022
 

In the wake of the recent verdict in the dueling defamation lawsuits between actors Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, there was of course much punditry, commentary, and crystal gazing. It was seen not merely as an outcome of one trial between two often-toxic celebrities but a harbinger of social trends to come.

New York Times staff editor Spencer Bokat-Lindell wrote a piece titled “Is the #MeToo Movement Dying?” in which he noted that the trial “has been read as a low-water mark for the movement: After and even before the jury found last week that each had defamed the other, awarding $2 million in damages to Heard and $10 million to Depp, commentators were declaring ‘the death’ and ‘the end’ of #MeToo.” Rolling Stone magazine added: “’This is basically the end of MeToo,’ Dr. Jessica Taylor, a psychologist, forensic psychology Ph.D., and author of two books on misogyny and abuse, tells Rolling Stone. ‘It’s the death of the whole movement.’”

Conservative news media also joined in the chorus; as Media Matters noted, “After the verdict was announced, Fox News gleefully celebrated the supposed end of the #MeToo movement. In the minutes after the news broke, anchor Martha MacCallum declared, ‘This puts a bit of a stake in the heart of the notion that you believe all women.’ On The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld sniped that Heard had ‘used the #MeToo movement and now she’s betrayed the #MeToo movement. You can’t believe all women, is basically what this case is saying.’”

However, it seems that pundits on both sides of the issue got it wrong—as they often do.

The verdict was about the claims and evidence in that case specifically, and there’s little evidence suggesting that it would (or will) be a death knell for the movement. I described this phenomenon as the Ubiquitous Referenda in my new book, America the Fearful: Media and the Marketing of National Panics:

It seems that these days most news national and world events are treated as important bellwethers or referenda about the state of our country and the state of the world. This is partly why activists on all sides feel the need to characterize events as a clear step toward social destruction. For example in early 2016 predictions were made that if Trump was elected his sexism and misogyny would influence a generation of young American men and lead to increases of sexual harassment and assault.

Every politically or socially charged news event is framed as a decisive moment where the misguided must be corrected, others must be shown the error of their ways. We jump from week to week, hearing about mistreated airline passengers or people saying mean things about celebrities. The barbarians are at the gates again today, everything is outrageous, everything is crucial, and all dutiful Americans should once again gather along the virtual parapets to loudly remind ourselves (and those misguided souls on the other side) that we publicly denounce them.

There are several problems with this approach. First, it seems to assume, without evidence, that American culture itself is fragile and hinges on some event, that if these incidents are not strongly and widely denounced then American society will self-evidently come to see these things (sexism, racism, sexual assault) as socially sanctioned and acceptable or “normal.” A popular headline for op-eds is, indeed, “This Is Not Normal,” as well-intentioned critics remind readers about some abnormal aspect of their lives against which they should remain vigilant. The fact is that people are not nearly as easily influenced as widely believed (and especially as advertisers would have us believe, as described later); we should know how hard it is to convince people of anything—even when we have facts and science on our side.

The idea that America is on a powderkeg, on a razor’s edge and about to explode into riots and wars based on gender, politics, or race. Ironically, it’s often fringe right-wingers—those who obsess over and interpret each real or perceived racial injustice through some blinkered prism—who are most likely to believe that America is a small step from cultural revolution.

When a Ku Klux Klan rally was scheduled for downtown Dayton, Ohio, in May 2019, Rabbi Ari Ballaban, director of Dayton’s Jewish Community Relations Council, was quoted in local news media warning of unrest and violence, stating that “Courthouse Square will be a powder keg.” Those expecting blood in the streets and race riots need not have feared; a grand total of nine people showed up for the racist rally. They were dwarfed by the estimated 500 to 600 counter-protesters of all races and colors, many shouting slogans and holding signs such as “You Are Not Welcome Here,” “Refugees Welcome, Racists Go Home,” and “Injustice Anywhere Is a Threat to Justice Everywhere.” Local businesses displayed signs such as “Get your hatin’ out of Dayton” and “fucKKK off.” There are many other examples, but for a country as deeply racist as America is said to be, the vast majority of Americans seem to be doing their best to denounce racism and intolerance at every turn. The rabbi, like many others, had overestimated the support that the Klan had locally.

It’s very difficult to get individual people to change their behaviors, even when they are given explicit information on what to do and how to do it. There’s no mystery about how to lose weight or quit smoking, but few people do. People, like ships, have difficulty changing direction; inertia and routine (physical as well as mental) keep us doing the same things, even when we know we shouldn’t. Countries, that is, collectives of hundreds of millions of people, change even more slowly. Institutional reforms take years or decades, not weeks or months—a point often missed by those who demand immediate social and justice reforms. 

For some reason people who are comfortably stuck in their own ways and worldviews assume that other people—They of the third-person effect—are on the precipice of changing their minds (for the worse, of course) should they be exposed to “wrong” ideas. They are in danger of adopting sexist behavior because of Game of Thrones or the optional female voices available for Siri and Alexa, or going down the rabbit hole of violence because of violent video games or movies.  

There’s also outrage fatigue to consider; when everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis. When people spend their days looking for (real or imagined) things to be outraged about, it muddies the waters and makes it hard to distinguish real problems from manufactured ones, serious issues with a high potential for real harm from others with a much lower potential for some inchoate, potential harm. Just as atmospheric smog takes a toll on the health of both people and societies, fear smog takes a collective toll on psychological and social health.

Part of this is the fear that the unwashed masses, the semi-fictional “They” who aren’t as enlightened as you and I, will be easily swayed and misunderstand the situation: If we don’t make it clear that Trump’s sexism is unacceptable, They (high school kids? young men?) will think it’s okay and America will have a generation of rapists and misogynists. If we don’t make it clear that racist marchers are unacceptable, They (non-racists or those on the fence about whether to be racist?) will think it’s okay and America will sow a generation of Nazis.

The good news is there’s little or no good evidence for this assumption. Most of these are testable claims: either sexual assaults go up in the months and years following Trump’s election, or they don’t (they didn’t). Critics might argue an essentially unfalsifiable claim, that their protests prevented or minimized the harm (i.e., if Trump hadn’t been universally condemned for his remarks about grabbing women, he would have had more influence, or if the Virginia and Ohio racists hadn’t been drowned out by counter-protestors and a deluge of mockery and bad press, they would have gotten more recruits). It’s possible, though doubtful—and of course we will never know, precisely because all these things have been widely condemned by most Americans.

This rationalization is reminiscent of doomsday cults, who, when confronted with the fact that the world did not end as they had predicted, claim that their dire prophecy, along with the resulting awareness campaigns and vigilant prayers, had saved the day. The doomsday cultists then pat themselves on the backs, because, after all, they just saved the world—and no one can prove otherwise. As Trump’s presidency ended we have not seen a jump in Americans who think sexually assaulting women is acceptable. Nor was there a surge in membership to white nationalist organizations after people saw the Charlottesville rally and said, “Wow, those guys are right and make sense!” Instead, virtually all the news coverage about it has been negative—as it always is.

Are there exceptions? Of course. Out of hundreds of millions of Americans, a few will see some Klan rally, ignore the overwhelming social criticism of it, and join up. Similarly it’s possible (though unlikely) that a few women may in fact be deterred from reporting their assaults because it took so long for Bill Cosby to be convicted, and that some trolling dudebro will cite Trump when he’s arrested for grabbing his date’s crotch. These are the rare exceptions, not the rule, and the amount of energy directed to these specific events (as opposed to the larger issues—sexism, racism, etc., which are valid and real but hardly represented by these events) is wildly disproportionate to the threat.

Protesting can bring about change, and that’s valuable. But over-protesting undermines its effectiveness, and saturating our airwaves (or social media feeds) with the worst elements of society as if they are representative of America insults those who have worked so hard to bring about the progress we should celebrate and emulate. There’s also an element of virtue signaling and pageantry in today’s clever protest march signs and hashtag activism, of course. The point is not that people shouldn’t protest things they find offensive or wrong (do whatever you want), but instead that there are dangers and pitfalls in how people are approaching it. There are real, legitimate watershed moments in American history (Roe v. Wade and its overturning, Obama’s election, George Floyd’s death, etc.) but we lose our ability to spot these moments if we are feeding ourselves a daily diet of outrage.

Whether the Heard/Depp verdict truly is the nail in the #MeToo coffin—as both progressives and conservatives have claimed—remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely. For years, polls and survey have found that the American public overwhelmingly does believe women when they come forward with claims of abuse. Whether Americans supported Heard, Depp, or were indifferent, the verdict is likely to have little effect on real victims coming forward.

For more on this, see my book America the Fearful, and check out my recent lecture for Skeptical Inquirer Presents.

Squaring the Strange # 179: Deviant Death Rites and Bizarre Burials

Jul 172022
 

New episode of Squaring the Strange is out! This week we dug up some strange ways people have sent off their deceased loved ones. As a medieval person, how would you keep Aunt Edna from coming back as a vampire or a bitey undead plague-spreader? Or in the Victorian era, how would you make sure you weren’t accidentally buried alive? From deviant burial practices to waiting morgues with bells and strings to the practicality of sky burials, we’ve got some interesting facts and folklore. Check it out HERE! 

 

What’s ‘Problematic,’ When, and Why

May 182022
 

In my previous blog I discussed the (real and performative) outrage over Will Smith attacking Chris Rock at the Oscars, and the curious lack of outrage over co-host Amy Schumer’s long history of (alleged) racism. From racist jokes to behavior, Schumer’s past would seem to be problematic—especially for an Oscars that, for the first time, was run by an all-black production team. I wondered whether Schumer’s inclusion would only be seen (or, if you prefer, recognized) as problematic in retrospect.

My interest here is the how the subjective assumptions of harm change over time.

The question of “How did we not see this?” is often asked, retrospectively, about problematic entertainment such as beloved teen comedies including The Breakfast Club.

This response is interesting for a couple of reasons, including that the film’s plot contains a problematic theme or message. Of course many popular films and TV shows have potentially problematic plots, ranging from murder to incest to abuse (Game of Thrones, for example, manages a hat trick here); there’s nothing necessarily bad or toxic about messed up plots. So the real concern seems to be that The Breakfast Club—to take just one prominent example—was intended to depict aspirational and healthy real-life situations; that is that the audiences watched the film and believed that the characters’ behaviors were good or should be modeled. For many reasons—including having a background in psychology, education, and media literacy—I don’t actually think that’s a valid assumption (for more on this, see my CFI blog Fifty Shades of…Fear).

Policing Problematic Content

There is a long history of people fearing what nefarious influences in entertainment—typically on those society deems most gullible and feeble-minded; in centuries past this usually meant women and children, and in practice this fear of entertainment was often used to justify censorship and women’s oppression. The same principle underlies recent conservative concerns over Critical Race Theory and the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bills. The foundational fear is that children will be influenced—that is, corrupted—by exposure to information (never mind that Critical Race Theory has never been taught in public schools).

In her 2001 book Not In Front of the Children: ‘Indecency,’ Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth, Marjorie Heins notes that “Contemporary concerns about shielding children and adolescents from corrupting sexual ideas are traceable directly to Victorian-era fears that libidinous thoughts would lead to the ‘secret vice’ of masturbation. Proscriptions against arousing literature, relatively rare before 1800, thus became pervasive in the century that followed.”

Those proscriptions were often formalized into law. “The purpose of obscenity law was thus to prevent immoral literature from falling into the wrong hands, whether they be those of servants, the mentally deficient, women, or minors. That women and mental defectives were included among the classes to be ‘protected’ was consistent with the ideology of an era when, as Peter Gay recounts, women were also classed with ‘criminals, idiots, and minors’ for purposes of property and inheritance law.”  

Though ostensibly claimed to protect women, the fears were used to oppress them, deny their agency, and treat them as vulnerable victims. In fact, Anthony Comstock, director of the notorious censorship-happy Society for the Suppression of Vice, singled out feminists for targeting. Concerns over needing to “protect” delicate women from potentially harmful materials was a central feature of Comstock’s misogynistic mission. Suffragette and birth control advocate Mary Ware Dennett wrote a frank (and sex-positive) sex education pamphlet The Sex Side of Life in 1911, which later caused her to be targeted by Comstock. For more, see my interview with feminist sex educator Shelby Knox.

Problematic Subjectivity

What’s often missed in these arguments is that in many cases there were people objecting to the content at the time, and they were largely ignored. Why? Because the people complaining were often (rightly or wrongly) dismissed as religious fundamentalist ninnies who needed to lighten up and take a joke.

I lived through it and remember it well; the Moral Majority crowd and Tipper Gore, among many others, were trying to tell musicians and artists what content they should create (and succeeded in getting parental warning labels on potentially objectionable music content that remains to this day). For a reminder, see RUN-DMC’s video for their hit “Mary Mary,” which features protesters complaining about the sex and violence in rap videos.

It’s satire, of course, but represents a vocal minority that tried to curb entertainment, from RUN DMC and NWA to Guns N Roses to Judas Priest. It wasn’t just rap lyrics; it was also violent video games and even tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons—with all the accompanying Satanic Panic fears. And, yes, it was also raunchy teen comedies of the 1980s and 1990s, claimed to be exposing impressionable youth to inappropriate language, nudity, and sex.

I always wonder what things we take as acceptable today will be considered problematic in 20 or 30 years. For example the recent Superbowl halftime performance was widely praised, but featured at least three performers who have been accused of rape, abuse against women, and/or having violent, rapey and homophobic lyrics (Eminem, Dre, and Snoop Dogg). Some conservatives predictably groused, but the liberals and progressives were another matter. Most of them (rightly) praised the show for its diversity and performance, but were conspicuously silent about the problematic pasts of several of the performers. Like Amy Schumer four months later—and, arguably, like The Breakfast Club some 37 years earlier—it was ignored.

To be clear: I take no particular offense at any of these performers—Dre’s NWA colleague Eazy-E is more my style, and I’ve seen Schumer perform live—but why their problematic pasts were ignored is an interesting question: Is it a lack of sufficient sensitivity (what some might derisively term “wokeness”), or due to the inherently subjective and ambiguous nature of outrage and offense, or even hypocrisy?

Were 2022 audiences oblivious to, or unaware of, Schumer’s racist past or the problematic pasts of Eminem, Dre, and Snoop Dogg? Possibly. Or they just didn’t care or take it seriously because they were enjoying the show.

Were 1985 audiences oblivious to, or unaware of, the (apparently) problematic themes in The Breakfast Club? Possibly. Or they just didn’t care or take it seriously because they were enjoying the show.

Will our kids look back and shake their heads in dismay about why we didn’t stand up and protest? Are we right now to let those things pass without objection, or were we right then? In other words if the difference is that we (that is, kids today and ourselves) are more enlightened than we were back then, why aren’t we (and they) expressing due outrage now?

Part of the answer may lie in the fact that the idea that lay audiences have a social obligation to complain or “make their voices heard” and warn others about potentially problematic scenes and themes in entertainment is a relatively recent development. In decades past, some people might complain about sex or violence in entertainment, but it was often a handful of self-appointed moral guardians (Anthony Comstock, Fredric Wertham, or Tipper Gore, for example) who would champion the cause, often for personal and political gain.

But there has been a rise in offense culture over the past decade—greatly enabled by social media—of people who feel the need to denounce and highlight materials they believe are socially damaging, regardless of whether there is any objective evidence for that harm or not. It’s not so much that audiences in the 1980s didn’t necessarily find some of the materials objectionable—although most didn’t—rather, most just didn’t feel the need to vigorously denounce it. Cultural sensitivity has dramatically changed, but it’s also that most people in the 1980s and 1990s didn’t fear that innocuous teen films of the era would or could damage America’s moral fiber.

Chronically popular-but-politically incorrect (and often sexually explicit) television shows such as Archer, Shameless, Family Guy, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Girls, and Game of Thrones, to name just a few, demonstrate that American appetites for crudity are as strong as ever. Game of Thrones is an especially interesting example; it was widely praised and beloved by critics and fans alike, winning a Peabody, 59 Emmies, and eight Screen Actors Guild Awards. It was also criticized by some for depictions of rape, as well as gratuitous nudity and violence. Will the next generation wonder how such a (potentially) problematic and sexist show could have been so popular among both women and men?

It would be a difficult task to find an American over the age of 13 who has not seen some of this questionable content; the fact that acting like the characters in these shows is not an epidemic problem in our country bears out the theory that viewers are able to enjoy crude comedies or dramas without absorbing some polluting message that will alter their behavior or morals. By the same token, introducing grade schoolers to age-appropriate gender identity issues isn’t likely to cause harm. As long as the debate remains unanchored in scientific evidence of demonstrable harm, the cycle will continue.

A longer version of this piece appeared on my CFI website blog. 

 

 

 
 

Investigating the ‘Stonehenge Surprise’ Crop Circle

May 152022
 

The new issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine features my investigation into the amazing crop circle that appeared near Stonehenge in 1996. It’s unique in its complexity and that it’s said to have been created in under an hour during daytime. I offer a different explanation… If you’re not a subscriber you can sign up here! 

 

‘Science Friction’ Documentary Now Out!

May 082022
 

The long-awaited documentary SCIENCE FRICTION, which is pretty good despite my involvement, is now available on Prime Video! It’s about how scientists are deceptively edited on TV, and available now on Amazon Prime and Tubi, find it at https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B09RQFWJ4L, Add to Watchlist or buy or rent it, then you can see it on your Prime TV app.

Check it out!

Squaring the Strange #174: A Musical History of the Devil

May 062022
 

New episode of Squaring the Strange is out! This time the devil’s not in the details, he’s in the music! From violinists centuries ago to hard rock and even country music, the devil shows up quite a lot. Pascual takes us on a diabolical tour of musical folklore involving Mr. Scratch… Check it out!

 

Chapter in New Book: ‘North American Monsters’

Apr 182022
 

I’m delighted to have contributed a chapter in this new book on the folklore of monsters! I haven’t read it yet but many of the other authors are brilliant friends and colleagues, and I’m looking forward to it.

Mining a mountain of folklore publications, North American Monsters unearths decades of notable monster research. Nineteen folkloristic case studies from the last half-century examine legendary monsters in their native habitats, focusing on ostensibly living creatures bound to specific geographic locales.

A diverse cast of scholars contemplate these alluring creatures, feared and beloved by the communities that host them—the Jersey Devil gliding over the Pine Barrens, Lieby wriggling through Lake Lieberman, Char-Man stalking the Ojai Valley, and many, many more. Embracing local stories, beliefs, and traditions while neither promoting nor debunking, North American Monsters aspires to revive scholarly interest in local legendary monsters and creatures and to encourage folkloristic monster legend sleuthing.

 

More info HERE!

Squaring the Strange # 170: Pet Psychics and Psychic Pets

Apr 152022
 

In case you missed our recent Squaring the Strange, we talk about people who think they can talk to animals. Or people who think their animal can talk to them — psychically, of course. Yes, it’s Pet Psychics and Psychic Pets time… Listen HERE!

 

Mystery of the Borderline Bar Silent Shooting

Apr 122022
 

A few years ago I investigated and solved a mystery that stumped both conspiracy theorists (not hard to do) and a noted science educator (more difficult). Why did eyewitness video of a nightclub shooting contradict eyewitness accounts?

 

On November 7, 2018, a shooting at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, by former Marine Ian David Long left nearly a dozen people dead, including the shooter. 

One victim, Sgt. Ron Helus, it was revealed recently, was killed not by Long but instead “friendly fire” from another police officer’s gun in the chaos. Dozens more were injured, mostly while escaping the club.

It was the latest horrific mass shooting, and Dann Broadbent, a science communicator, writer, and cohost of A Science Enthusiast podcast, examined it on his website. Broadbent wrote, “It was the 307th mass shooting this year (today is the 312th day of this year, too). This is our new normal. We consider ourselves to be better than the rest of the world, yet we have more gun violence per capita than any other developed country in the world.”

There are a few things we could unpack in this comment. In a future article I’ll examine the seeming epidemic of mass shootings, but in a previous column I wrote about concerns that Americans are numb, that mass shootings are becoming so routine and “the new normal” that citizens have lost their ability to be outraged.

What caught my eye was this comment: “I watched videos of the shooting last night. I heard the gunshots. But I didn’t hear people screaming, because we as a society now know that in an active shooter situation, you don’t scream because that draws extra attention to you. You get down, and look for ways to get out as quickly as possible.”

That seemed like a strange—and improbable—aspect of the attacks. No one screamed as a self-described “insane” maniac shot people in the nightclub? Everyone was silent (well, as silent as a country music nightclub would be) and careful not to yell or make a noise lest he or she draw attention?

After the attack had begun, of course, the circumstances would change. Potential victims hiding and staying silent in the presence of enemies with weapons is nothing new; it’s been a defensive tactic for millennia and was described in accounts of the Columbine school shootings in 1999. But perhaps in today’s world where shootings seem common, people in the Borderline Bar really did have the savvy and self-control to keep silent during the attack.

I didn’t follow the news coverage that closely, but I saw and read many interviews with survivors, none of whom mentioned an eerie silence from the killer’s potential victims.

Instead they described chaos: people yelling, screaming, and shouting. One victim, Bryce Colvard, described his friends shouting at him to get down; another student, Teylor Whittler, said that during the shooting “Everyone just yelled, ‘Run, he’s coming!’” and so on. Multiple news reports described victims screaming and yelling.

It got me wondering why someone would think or assume that the club’s victims were silent during such a terrifying scene. Where did that odd bit of misinformation come from? Broadbent referenced his source: the video he watched of the shooting in which “I didn’t hear people screaming …You can watch one of the videos yourself, but I must warn you that it’s extremely disturbing.”

Tale of the Tape

I watched the one-minute video he linked to, posted (and presumably taken) by Dallas Knapp on Instagram, from inside the club. Loud gunfire can be clearly heard, as can breaking glass and some indistinct sounds.

The video is dark and unclear; at first glance I had initially thought it was taken outside the club. It shows a chaotic scene and a dark, empty dance floor. A man is seen in the background, but it’s not clear if it’s the shooter, a victim, or a police officer. The cameraman turns and runs, exiting the building moments later.

Chicago’s ABC 7 News described the video: “The video shows what appears to be a semi-empty dance floor as a man dressed in dark clothing is behind a counter-like wall and shooting. About 10 gunshots are heard in the video. The man taking the video runs out of the venue and yells, ‘Guys, run, he’s coming out this door!’ Several people are heard screaming in the distance.”

It’s not just Broadbent of A Science Enthusiast who remarked on the video and noted there was something odd about it. In fact, myriad conspiracy theorists watched the same video and suggested that the shooting was a hoax, a “false flag” operation. A sampling of these opinions can be found in the responses to the video linked to within a CNN report:

  • “I don’t see anyone except one man not running but casually behind in the next room and the camera man. There would be people running all over the place and people on the ground.”
  • “THE ROOM WAS EMPTY!!! LET THAT SINK IN PEOPLE!!! YOU ARE BEING PLAYED!!!”
  • “You’re telling me a club with hundreds of people and an active shooter was quiet enough for the microphone to CLEARLY pick up the sounds of glass breaking and not be drowned out by the sounds of panic?”
  • “Either THAT VIDEO was staged independently of the actual incident where people may have truly been injured or it’s ALL bullshit.”
  • “WTF did I just watch? A video of an empty bar and then audio of gunshots. What happened to the 100s of people who were supposedly partying and line dancing? Where was all the mayhem that ensued afterwards? What, no one screaming? No one diving for cover on the floor. No stampede for the doorways and no one throwing chairs through windows? Oh my how horrific this video is indeed. It seems to contradict the eyewitness accounts. I’m calling BS.”

The last conspiracy poster’s comment reflects Broadbent’s observation: “What, no one screaming? … It seems to contradict the eyewitness accounts.” It’s a fair and accurate statement, so what can we make of it?

The Video versus the Victims: What’s Going On?

We can examine this through the lens of critical thinking, science, and skepticism. On one hand we have dozens of eyewitnesses who described the horror they saw and heard, including shouting and screaming; on the other hand, we have a short, ambiguous video clip that, superficially, seems to contradict them.

In fact there’s no contradiction: Eyewitnesses, such as Holden Harrah interviewed on the Today Show, stated that Long appeared at the door and immediately began shooting people. News reports state that the attacker fired at least sixty rounds; of those, about nine or ten can be heard in the video. Thus, we are seeing about one-sixth of the number of shots fired, with the balance coming before and/or after the video was recorded.

The dance floor is largely (or entirely) empty when the video was recorded because by that point the shooting had been going on for some time; it only takes a few seconds to clear a small dance floor. The room is very dark, and no victims can be seen; if there are any, they’re hiding behind tables or are in other rooms or are already outside. It’s true that in that video clip there’s no loud screaming, since the place is mostly empty at that point; few if any of the fifty or so patrons originally in the main room were left. There were reportedly about 200 people on the premises, including cooks, staff, people in other rooms, etc., most of whom fled in other directions and never directly encountered the shooter; the video depicts Knapp moving from the dance floor to the exit in seconds.

No music can be heard in the clip either—not because no music was being played that night at the nightclub but because the music, like the screaming, ceased soon after the shooting began. There’s nothing unusual or suspicious about it. We would not expect to hear people screaming in that room for the same reason we would not expect to see a full dance floor.

It’s like watching video taken by a driver after a car accident and finding it curious or suspicious that the footage doesn’t show the entire event before the cars collided. Why would it? Just because we don’t see some specific aspect of an event in a short video clip of that event doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Conspiracy theorists find it suspicious that more videos of the shooting have not been made public. It seems likely that most of the victims that night were too busy running or hiding to pull out their cell phones and record the events; that one person did isn’t particularly surprising.

There are likely additional videos from police body cameras and security systems that have been reviewed by police but may not be made public. Since the suspect is dead, there will be no criminal trial and no necessary reason to release them.

In fact just recently, after a protracted legal battle by journalists at The Hartford Courant, police released documentation about Adam Lanza, the shooter in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre—six years after the conspiracy-laden event.

Authorities are not legally obligated to release any and all information about a crime simply to satisfy the morbidly curious and conspiracy theorists. (And, of course, such videos will not satisfy the conspiracy minded: “Yeah, so if this is real, why wasn’t this video released right away? FAKE!!!”)

Anyone can make mistaken assumptions; we all do it. It’s not a question of believing the victims or believing the video; we can do both if we examine the evidence closely—and we must be careful not to create contradictions where none exist, because those are the building blocks of conspiracies.

 

A longer version of this piece appeared on my CFI blog; you can find it here. 

 

 
 

 

 

Parsing ‘Possible’

Apr 082022
 

One of the favorite techniques of mystery mongers when confronted by skeptics or good evidence—or just plain common sense—is to reply “But isn’t it possible?” This is a standard ploy on countless paranormal-themed television shows, including (and especially) those dealing with ancient aliens.

This is often said with some degree of smug satisfaction, as if some universal truth had been laid down and the critic should just concede defeat and move along. Sure, maybe there’s no evidence whatsoever for Claim X—but how arrogant it would be to confidently and omnisciently rule it out! When I’m confronted with this fallacy, as I often am, I explain that there’s some (often unintentional) confusion between possible, plausible, and probable. This is a point that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention in critical thinking and skeptical circles, and I thought it would be worth exploring.

To scientists, statisticians, and actuaries the distinctions between what is possible, plausible, and probable are important, especially in the context of threats and dangers. Because these distinctions are rarely made (and in fact are routinely conflated) by the media, understanding how risk is measured is an important part of critical thinking and media literacy.

• Possible is of course the lowest bar, and from a scientific view anything is possible. It’s possible that a huge asteroid might come out of nowhere next month and kill all life on the planet. It’s possible that as you’re reading these words a child is being born in Pakistan who can fly like Superman and breathe underwater. It’s possible that a close friend of yours will be mugged by a left-handed serial killer named Wilbur. Science does not operate on certainties, and strictly speaking, anything is possible. As such, it’s essentially meaningless. Defense attorneys and conspiracy theorists love to use this “retreat to the possible” logical fallacy despite significant evidence to the contrary: “Yes, my client was seen and videotaped robbing this store, and sure, his fingerprints were found at the scene—but isn’t it possible that he has an evil twin that no one knew about who did this crime, while my client was busy volunteering at the homeless shelter across town?”

• Plausible is a more subjective measure; what’s plausible, or believable, depends on who you ask, what their knowledge base is, the context, and other factors. Often a claim that is plausible to a layperson is implausible to an expert; for example, a religious group’s claim of reducing a city’s violent crime through prayer will likely seem implausible to a police chief, who would use other methods. Or a president’s claim that building a border wall will stop illegal immigration would be considered implausible by experts on national security. What’s plausible also depends on what sort of information a person has access to—which is why it’s vital to have accurate information about the world upon which to reach a conclusion.

• Probable is the most valid, important, and science-based criterion. Unlike the meaninglessness of stating what is possible, and the vagaries associated with plausibility, probability has recourse to hard data and statistics. Experts may have honest disagreements about data interpretation, but we have reasonably good data on baselines for countless metrics and demographics—from the causes of car accidents to cancer incidence to the numbers of homicides. Statisticians and actuaries can tell you what your overall likelihood is of anything from being a crime victim to getting cancer (based on your genetics, diet, and lifestyle choices). It’s not precise or guaranteed, and there are outliers—some hamburger-loving chain smokers live to be 100, and some diligent vegan exercisers drop dead at 30—but typically the data conforms to a normal, bell-curve distribution. This is the power of data over anecdotes.

Yet we do not see many accurate discussions on probability in news stories designed to gather clicks as they ride currents of fear or outrage. Getting into the habit of looking for data on probabilities—and noticing when it is conspicuously absent from an article or discussion—is a valuable way to cut through misleading narratives and claims. Doing so will not just raise your level of media literacy, it will likely also decrease your anxiety—if you, like many, find yourself overwhelmed at times by the flood of panic-inducing stories served up as news and social media commentary.

Fearmongers routinely inflate dangers in an attempt at social control. If you can exaggerate small, remote dangers into prominent and visceral ones, you can scare the public and create division. This is often done by activists or candidates with a social or political agenda in mind, but the media also regularly subjects the public to alarmist news and studies, some more fact-based than others. The same applies to mystery mongers forced to concede the paucity of evidence for their claims. As always, skepticism is an important tool in critical thinking, so the next time you hear the lame rhetorical ploy “Isn’t it possible?” just reply, “Of course; anything is possible. You’re asking the wrong question.”

 

A longer version of this piece appeared on my CFI blog; you can find it here. 

 

 

 
 

Squaring the Strange #17: Deathbed Confessions, Real and Rumored

Apr 062022
 

The new episode of our podcast Squaring the Strange is out! This time we discuss a short list of purported deathbed confessions. The last words of a consequential figure can be hijacked or twisted to fit agenda — or, sometimes, it’s not just the words that are made up, it’s the person too. From cautionary tales to urban legends, deathbed confessions are a peculiar branch of the folklore tree. There are also very real deathbed confessions that have solved mysteries, revealed crimes, or reversed a long-held position. Check it out!

 

Searching for Cressie, the Crescent Lake Monster

Apr 042022
 

The UK Skeptics have a fun piece I wrote about investigating Cressie, a lake monster in Newfoundland. Check it out, and for more on this see my book “Lake Monster Mysteries,” co-written with Joe Nickell! An excerpt is below, and you can read the rest HERE!

 

 

Crescent lake is a picturesque body of water in northeastern Newfoundland, Canada, near the small town of Robert’s Arm. Settlement of the area dates back to the 1870s, though other native peoples, including the Beothuk Indians, were early visitors. Robert’s Arm (formerly Rabbit’s Arm) has a population of about a thousand. The scenery is gorgeous, with walking trails snaking over lush green hills and around the placid lake. Though the region’s natural beauty is the main attraction, it is the huge, dragon-like creature with fearsome teeth by the side of the road that draws visitors’ stares. Next to it a sign welcomes visitors to “The ‘Loch Ness’ of Newfoundland!” Crescent Lake, deep and cold, is allegedly home to a local lake monster affectionately known as Cressie.

Along with colleague Joe Nickell, I’ve previously investigated other Canadian lakes in search of the reputed denizens in their depths (Radford & Nickell, 2006). Ontario beasties Champ (of Lake Champlain; Nickell, 2003; Radford, 2003), Igopogo (of Lake Simcoe), and Quebec’s Memphre (of Lac Memphremagog) were no-shows despite our best efforts. I arrived at the lake on a crisp spring day last year hoping that Newfoundland’s famous hospitality extended to their local monster.

But it was not to be. I scanned the horizon and quickly determined that Cressie was not on hand to greet me, so I headed a short distance into Robert’s Arm and inquired about it at the town hall. I got a few curious looks from the pleasant, raven-haired woman behind the desk. Finally her face lit up and she said, “Oh, you need to talk to Fred Parsons, he’s your monster man.”

I’d been traveling in Newfoundland for less than a week and hadn’t quite acclimated to the local accents and cadence. Because of that, I sort of missed the first name and just made a mental note to ask for a man named Parsons; in a town as small as Robert’s Arm, I thought, surely there’s only one. Little did I know that half the town was named Parsons.

I finally did find Fred, a former teacher (and “Citizen of the Year”) with an easy smile and warm handshake. We sat on the town hall steps while he told me about his Cressie sighting: On July 9, 1991, Fred and his wife left Robert’s Arm at around noon for a doctor’s appointment in Corner Brook. As he drove along the lake, he saw something in the water perhaps 100 yards out. “What I saw was like a long, snake-like creature on the water,” he told me. “It was about fifteen or twenty feet long and a dark brownish colour – It was a long, sleek body without any significantly large head, basically right on the water.” He glimpsed it only briefly, and by the time he realized he might have seen Cressie he had passed it by. In the years following his sighting, Fred became the area’s resident collector of lake monster reports, clipping local newspaper items and interviewing witnesses…

A Book of Books about Beasts

Mar 282022
 

Review of Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist’s Library

By Matt Bille

The subject of cryptozoology, like many Fortean fields, is plagued by poor scholarship. This is not a dig at the topic, but merely an undeniable and unfortunate fact. Whether the subject is psychics, or ghosts, or anything else, there is no shortage of information on these topics, but what’s needed is not merely information but good, valid, well-researched information. There is a huge difference between some random blogger’s opinions of the existence of Bigfoot, and, for example, organized, published research by noted, credible researchers such as John Green, Jeff Meldrum, Karl Shuker, or Daniel Perez. Cryptozoology is a big tent, and for any given cryptid there will be a variety of sources and researchers; for lake monsters, for example, one might look for noted researchers such as John Kirk, Roy Mackal, Loren Coleman, Michel Meurger, or Peter Costello (or even, I might modestly add, Joe Nickell and myself).

Of course for every one of these people there are dozens or hundreds of others who have also written on the same topic. The point is not to create or enforce some arbitrary cutoff for who is or is not a good scholar or careful researcher—though hopefully that would become apparent in the process—but instead to give the casual reader some guide to it all.

In many cases it’s simply plagiarized, cut-and-pasted material from elsewhere. About ten years ago while reviewing a cryptozoological topic I stumbled across huge swaths of a popular book that had simply been lifted from internet sources: The Element Encyclopedia of Vampires: An A – Z of the Undead, by Theresa Cheung and published by an otherwise reputable house, HarperCollins. It became clear that Cheung “wrote” many entries her book by merely typing a subject name into Google and then cutting and pasting paragraphs from the top three or four hits, changing a few words, and then submitting it as her own work. (For more on my investigation see my article “Investigating Plagiarism in New Age Books” in the July/August 2013 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine). My colleague Kenny Biddle exposed similar plagiarism issue with the Zak Bagans book—or, rather, the book attributed to Bagans—Ghost-Hunting For Dummies.

I mention this because just as one of the chief challenges for cryptozoologists is trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, the hoaxes from the good evidence, the same challenge applies to scholarly researchers. There’s no central authority making any attempt to hold evidence to any scientific evidential standard. In scientific research, there is some semblance of gatekeeping (imperfect as it is), partly because researchers are held professionally accountable for mistakes. For example, if the editor of a top medical journal publishes highly dubious (or even outright hoaxed) research, he or she can expect significant opprobrium, including calls to resign. There is no analogous position in Bigfoot research; a handful of journals have attempted to impose some scholarly standards on the research, including Cryptozoology: Interdisciplinary Journal of the International Society of Cryptozoology (1982–1996). But most of what passes for cryptozoological research appears in blogs, New Age books, and social media posts with little or no quality control or outside input (much less skeptical commentary).

This is one reason why Matt Bille’s book Of Books and Beasts is useful, providing some token effort at quality control and a sense of what’s useful. As the back cover notes, “Science writer and cryptozoology researcher Matt Bille offers 400 reviews of significant books in cryptozoology, supporting sciences like biology, and cryptozoological fiction. Matt’s selections, based on 45 years of reading and writing on zoology and cryptozoology, favor reliable science and history, providing an essential foundation for enthusiasts and skeptics alike. The search for unknown animals starts here.” I have several of his cryptozoology-related books, my favorite of which is Shadows of Existence: Discoveries and Speculations in Zoology.

The book is a delight to peruse, and offers excellent capsule descriptions on hundreds of books and sources that had flown under my—and surely most people’s—radar. It is sprinkled with quotes and occasionally whimsical “Matt’s Musings,” brief commentary set off in italics. The book is culled primarily from book reviews written over the decades for the Exotic Zoology newsletter, his blog, and other sources. The entries, which range from a few sentences to a few pages, are engaging and concise, and occasionally point to updated or reissued volumes. The book is divided into four sections: Cryptozoology Books; Related Sciences; Crypto-Fiction; and A Marvelous Miscellany.

My main reservation about Of Books and Beasts is not Bille’s writing style nor expertise but instead the book’s purpose and scope. When eager authors ask me for book writing advice I first ask them to identify their audience and tell me how the book will serve that audience. What will they get from it? How will it help them? Why should they pick up that book instead of another, similar title by a different author? What, specifically, are they bringing to the project that makes it worth their (often considerable) time to write, and more importantly their readers’ time to read?

This reader’s perspective was an issue I repeatedly returned to reading Of Books and Beasts. Bille is candid about the scope of the material in the book, offering many broad caveats about why books were left out. Some are fairly understandable and straightforward, such as including only books in English, original editions, and under a century old. He reviews only books he’s personally read; omitted most (but not all) of the state-specific titles (e.g., Monsters of Missouri); and skipped over annuals published by periodicals. But he also “passed over or culled many of the Sasquatch and Loch Ness books because they’d overwhelm this entire book,” with no indication given about which books are omitted, or why (other than that the sheer quantity of them, regardless of their quality, would render them unmanageable). If Bille was not interested in (or didn’t read about) a particular cryptid, no matter how popular—say, Mothman, thunderbirds, or the chupacabra—then they may merit only a passing mention, if they appear at all.

I understand that the book is not meant to be, and cannot be, definitive or exhaustive, and I’m sympathetic to his plea of “too many books” (p. x) but this speaks to a basic problem in the scope of the book. You can’t write a dictionary and arbitrarily omit some words merely because including them would be too cumbersome, in the same way that you can’t offer a book on the fifty states and leave out a few because the task became overwhelming. For the same reason you can’t offer a seemingly authoritative book on the cryptozoological literature and leave out swaths of material. I suspect that George Eberhart and Michael Newton, authors of the two main cryptozoology encyclopedias, encountered the same issue. It’s a monumental task, if done correctly, to write informative entries, along with references, for hundreds of reputed cryptids.

For a book whose subtitle promises cryptozoology, surprisingly little of the book is dedicated to cryptozoology per se; only the first section (about 125 pages) deals with, in order: A Basic Library of Cryptozoology, Primates, Land Animals, Lake and Sea Creatures, and Others. This raises the venerable questions of demarcation in cryptozoology, which can profitably be approached from many different angles including eyewitness accounts, folklore, and so on. The second half of the book covers a much broader scope, from evolution to paleontology to fiction involving cryptids and monsters. These are all arguably within the purview—but again so are folklore, eyewitness testimony, forensics, and so on, all of which are absent here. This is not Bille’s fault, of course, and there’s no particular reason he would have reviewed books on those topics. But it does limit the book’s utility for its intended audience, who likely would have preferred a broader selection of core cryptozoology books. The review copy I was provided had nearly thirty pages of unnumbered indices—containing only lists of authors but no corresponding page numbers—which made it very difficult to use as a reference, though I was told that later editions would have a numbered index.

The book is best understood and appreciated as a well-read cryptozoology researcher’s interesting (albeit idiosyncratic and limited) thoughts and reviews of books he’s read on the topic of cryptozoology. The book walks a fine—and occasionally crossed—line between straight book review and commentary about the topics under review; despite Bille’s note in the afterword that “I’ve avoided offering my opinions in the various cryptids as much as I can,” his opinion on many come though clearly. This is not a criticism, and in fact if anything I would have welcomed a section at the end of each chapter (instead of at the end of each review, which would quickly become repetitive) on his learned take on the topics. After all, he has read more cryptozoology books than most of us (even in the field) ever will, so he’s in a great position to do so. Nevertheless, that material can be found in his other books, including Shadows of Existence, as noted above. For what it is, overall Of Books and Beasts is an informative and entertaining collection of one noted cryptozoologist’s book reviews.

 

 

 
 

Chapter in New Book: ‘North American Monsters A Contemporary Legend Casebook’

Mar 182022
 

I’m delighted to have contributed a chapter in this new book on the folklore of monsters! I haven’t read it yet but many of the other authors are brilliant friends and colleagues, and I’m looking forward to it. I also did the cover art!

Check it out HERE!

Squaring the Strange # 170: Pet Psychics and Psychic Pets

Mar 162022
 

New episode of Squaring the Strange is now out! After a brief discussion on the recent jailbreak (rock break?) of a Japanese nine-tailed fox demon and some thoughts on war rumors we talk about people who think they can talk to animals. Or people who think their animal can talk to them — psychically, of course.

Yes, it’s Pet Psychics and Psychic Pets time… check it out!

 

Evidence for ‘The Entity’ Case? Still Waiting…

Mar 142022
 

Kenny Biddle and I wrote articles on the true story behind “The Entity” 1982 horror film. We were challenged in an episode of the Three Tortured Souls show by a guy who complained that we weren’t being fair to the original paranormal researcher, Barry Taff, upon whose work the film was loosely based. Taff did an astonishingly bad investigation job, which his defender basically admitted, but said that the original research (somewhere in a CA storage unit) would prove us wrong.

Kenny and I offered to pay to have the research located and analyzed, but we never heard back..

 

Squaring the Strange #168 – Sex Urban Legends

Mar 102022
 

Did you miss out recent show on Sex Urban Legends? First, all the way from New York City Skeptics, Russ Dobler drops in to tell us about AIPT Comic’s skepticism month — and we also chat about Joe Rogan and Ivermectin. Then our main topic is sex urban legends, a field so fertile it’s a veritable cornucopia of naughty, forbidden, lurid, or merely humiliating tales that someone swears happened to a friend’s cousin’s boss’s uncle. From Lemmiwinks the gerbil to the poor woman impregnated by a Civil War bullet, we dive into stories old and new about a topic people never seem to tire of.

 

Check it out HERE!

‘Clerical Error Fries Phoenix Faithful’ by Jim Underdown

Mar 032022
 

My buddy Jim Underdown asks some pointed questions about recent news that a priest’s wrong spoken word during baptisms jeopardized souls: “Fr. Andres Arango has jeopardized the everlasting souls of (presumably) hundreds of parishioners who were baptized by him — and potentially sent them hell bound. If your church is telling you that a random error by someone else is putting your eternity in jeopardy, then they’re out of their minds and it’s time to move on. Enough is enough.”

 

Check it out HERE!

Quoted in New Book: ‘Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment, and Folklore Genres’

Feb 282022
 

Not the most compelling cover art, but I’m quoted in this new book from the Belgrade Institute for Literature and Arts. The subject, of all things, is my research into the Pokemon seizure panic of 1997.

 

Check it out HERE! 

 

Squaring the Strange #167: Bob Larson, the D-List Demon Dispatcher

Feb 202022
 

The new episode of Squaring the Strange is out! This week we discuss an old Satanic Panic dog learning some new tricks. Televangelist Bob Larson has turned to giving remote exorcisms via Skype and Zoom these past few years, and we speak with two people who have endured such events, as both participant and audience. JD Sword wrote a recent article about his strange (and underwhelming) experience with Larson exorcising a doll (or not), and Alisa Yang has turned her exorcism into a short-form documentary called “Sleeping with the Devil,” available on Vimeo now.

Check it out! 

 

The Battle Over Wikipedia Misinformation: Interview with Guerilla Skeptic Guru Susan Gerbic

Feb 152022
 

If—like most people—you’ve ever searched Wikipedia for skeptical topics, or looked there for topic covered by organized skepticism, chances are you’ve probably read some of Susan Gerbic’s work. She’s a (very) active member of the Center for Inquiry and the Independent Investigations Group. She’s also one of the driving forces behind trying to bring skepticism, balance, and critical thinking to the world’s most-used reference. In 2011 she responded to e-mailed questions from a secret bunker somewhere in California; this interview revisits that time, with a few updates. You can hear more from Susan on the podcast I co-host, Squaring the Strange, as well as YouTube. Susan and her colleagues have also garnered significant attention from the mainstream news media, including Wired, Medium, The New York Times magazine, and other places.

BR: What’s your background?

SG: Born and raised in Salinas, California, the youngest child of a youngest child. Professional portrait photographer for three decades, I specialize in people who do not want their portrait taken—which means the very young and the old and cranky. 

I was four classes away from a Masters degree in American History when I quit college in 2004, it was either the Graduate degree or a long-distance relationship with skeptic Mark Edward (author of Psychic Blues: Confessions of a Conflicted Medium) who lived 6 hours away.  I have two grown sons, Caspian, and my younger son Stirling who attends all the skeptical functions with me.

Raised Southern Baptist, I never heard the word atheist until I was in my late teens, once I found out there were other people who felt like I did, I read everything I could on the subject.  Discovered skepticism as a community in 2000 while looking for a topic for a college paper.  Attended a small gathering in San Jose, met Carol and Ben Baumgartner, Dr. Wallace Sampson, Dr. Jere Lipps and was hooked.  Went to the Skeptic Toolbox in Eugene, Oregon that August and felt like I found my people! I’m officially a skeptical junkie, just waiting for the paperwork to prove it [I’ve been promised by those at CFI that it’s on its way and should be there soon–BR].

I’m the co-founder of Monterey County Skeptics which is a social group that hang out together.  Being in the L.A. Area so much with Mark we both got involved with the Independent Investigations Group (IIG) for a while, but I’ve been busy with more since then.

BR: Do you think Wikipedia is really one of the main battlegrounds for skepticism?

SG: Yes I do, and I think I can prove it with numbers—skeptics like numbers. Podcasts, lectures, blogs etc. are all wonderful and needed as it builds a stronger skeptical community.  They also introduce us to more and more outlets that we can explore. But with a few exceptions we are still preaching to the choir.  

We still have to have investigations and video media to release to the public.  It is like an ecosystem all the different parts working together.  Wikipedia is where it all comes together.  We know how many people are accessing Wikipedia pages, we can compare those numbers to the amount of hits an article on the same topic is generating when it comes from a personal website or blog.  The numbers are staggering and varied, but generally Wiki hits outnumber articles every time. 

Look, we also know that people rarely change their mind when someone is yelling at them telling them how stupid they are.  Most of us skeptics have been believers on some level, we should know better.  What people need is reasoned discussions and the ability to do their own research.  They are going to go to a neutral site to do so, and Wikipedia is waiting for them.  When they have looked over the page and hyperlinked to all the pages linked, they are better able to change their mind. 

 

BR: What about projects like SkeptiWiki, which is devoted solely to skeptical content? Do you think that’s useful?

SG: I don’t think I have ever used that site, and almost never heard it referred to. We need neutral sites. The public is trying to understand a topic and they can tell from the name that it is one-sided.  All that talent would be better used editing in a place that the public are already going to. I have no idea what the numbers would be comparing them, but I can image that there is little use trying to fight something as successful and powerful as Wikipedia. Why not use it to our advantage?

BR: How is Wikipedia structured and administered?

SG: All volunteers working towards creating a living, breathing encyclopedia, that’s pretty awesome I think.  They have their own rules and language that take time getting used to.  I’m totally self taught, I’ve tried reading the instructions on how to edit and it’s like reading a tech manual.  I ask people for help, and look at well authored pages, copy what I like and paste into the page I’m editing.  Change it to reflect the person/topic I’m working on, and I’m done.

BR: How is the Wikipedia content judged?

SG: Mainly peer reviewed.  Some editors are considered higher level than others, but for the most part I’ve had little problem with the edits they have reverted.  You can’t take it personally, we are creating a better encyclopedia which must be the main goal.  If you are having problems with an editor then step back and try to see what is really the problem, usually you can work through it.  There is a process for peer-arbitration which I’ve threatened someone with but never used.  Once you get a bunch of edits under your belt you can start editing with confidence.  Be bold, cite everything and usually people leave you alone.

BR: What have been some of the main challenges to injecting skepticism into Wikipedia?

SG: Probably only time.  There is so much to be done, and people are always telling me “good job!” which is nice to hear, but what I badly need is help editing. Kudos are nice, but help is better. The project is that important.  The tips and ideas I give on my blog are from copy/paste/save types of edits, to fixing grammar, to rewording blurbs to more advanced items. 

BR: Obviously some skeptical content will upset people, such as psychics who rely on the general public not knowing about their track record of failure. What sort of opposition have you seen? Can you give a few examples?

SG: I have had almost no contact with anyone upset about my edits.  I do see some frustrated comments people have left in the discussion area of pages—almost all from believers upset that their favorite psychic’s page is not balanced.  Wikipedia is not balanced, you will never see a citation about the earth being flat on the “Earth” Wiki page.  Nor will you see anything about a moon landing hoax on NASA’s page.  Just cited fact after cited fact. 

[Convicted felon] Sylvia Browne’s page is a great example that I discuss in my blog, believers do not always understand that you can’t post opinions and stories, it has to be cited, and neutral.  Over and over people complain that there isn’t anything about how Browne “helps people” and is “a wonderful person”.  They say that the only thing that the editors ever show is Browne’s failures.  I love it when I read the editors respond that if they will find her successes in print (not her book) that can be substantiated then we will gladly post it on her page.  Usually we never hear from that believer again, one man said he would find the evidence, but it would mean long months in the library, but he will eventually find proof for us.  We are still waiting, the exchange can be read on Sylvia’s discussion page.  Great reading, BTW. 

Psychics themselves have rarely if ever commented or edited their own page. It’s a losing battle, they have to show proof of their claims and that isn’t likely to hold up to review.  Personally I think they would rather the believers not go to Wikipedia to see what is there.  I’m sure they downplay the site if it is mentioned to them. 

BR: What topics have you tackled?

SG: All have been in some way associated with the skeptic movement.  Tim Farley (who started me on this project) believes that an editor should not stick to one topic all the time, he suggests editing your home town page and other places so you don’t get a reputation amongst editors for having a “cause.”  I’m all over the place so much that there is no pattern to see unless the editor looks closely at my edits—which I doubt they will do. 

My “hit list” is pretty long but needs to be a lot longer.  I’ve done UFO’s, Power Balance, ghost hunting sites, most of the psychics and anything else that attracts my attention. I’m very interested in beefing up all the pages of our skeptical spokespeople.  This is a sub-project of Guerrilla Skepticism that I call “We Got Your Wiki Back!”.  The main idea is to remember we are not improving Wikipedia for the skeptical choir, our audience is the public.  When they access our spokespeople’s pages they should find well-written, well sourced information.  How can we expect others to respect our spokespeople if we don’t respect them enough to maintain their Wikipedia pages? 

BR: What mysterious or paranormal topics get the most controversy?

SG: Usually it comes in waves.  When a page is vandalized over and over, there is a protection put on the page that anonymous editors cannot edit.  The Scientologist page is the first one that comes to mind, I believe that many of the positive edits happening there were traced to Scientology headquarters, and there was a stop to that (plus some bad publicity for them).  The astrology page is really getting hit lately, believers just can’t allow the already determined consistence wording to remain.  They keep fussing with the definition, then editors have to change it back and tell them not to change it again.  Along comes another believer who changes it again…and on and on. 

BR: Many people use Wikipedia but don’t feel tech savvy enough to become editors or contributors. What is the actual process to edit pages? Can you give a short introduction to show people the basics?

SG: Start by opening a Wikipedia account.  Read my blog for ideas and tips, or go to pages and click around.  In time you will get comfortable finding misspelled words and bad grammar.  You fix things by clicking on the “edit” page.  Make simple changes and at the bottom of the edit page you will see the tabs for “preview page” “save” “watch this page” and an area to comment.  First “preview” your change, if it looks okay then write in the comment area what you just did “corrected spelling” or “added a period”, click “watch this page” so that you will be notified on your “watch list” if there is a change to the page.  Then when you are sure you have done all this correctly, click save. 

You will know when you are ready to try more difficult changes.  I learned to go to a well-written page, click edit, copy the area that I know I wanted to duplicate elsewhere.  If you want to write a blurb about a SI article you just read, start by opening a word document somewhere so you can just play with what you are doing.  Write your two or three sentences you think will neutrally reflect the article.  Copy a <ref> citation from some other page that you know was done correctly.  Paste that into the word document you are using.  Change the citation that you know does not apply to your new citation.  For example the date the article was published, as well as the name of the article will need to be changed in the new edit.  Once you are completely happy with the blurb and reference, paste it into the Wiki page.  Follow the directions in the paragraph above. 

I would love to mentor anyone interested in learning how to edit. If anyone wants to watch me edit and learn that way, please contact me! You can find GSoW on Twitter.

 

A different version of this interview appeared in the March/April 2012 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.

 

 

 
 
 Older Entries