Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
Showing posts with label The Sun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Sun. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 2, 2025

Cry me a river

Urban legends often have nebulous origins.  As author Jan Harold Brunvand describes in his wonderful book The Choking Doberman and Other Urban Legends, "Urban legends are kissing cousins of myths, fairy tales and rumors.  Legends differ from rumors because the legends are stories, with a plot.  And unlike myths and fairy tales, they are supposed to be current and true, events rooted in everyday reality that at least could happen...  Urban legends reflect modern-day societal concerns, hopes and fears...  They are weird whoppers we tell one another, believing them to be factual.  They maintain a persistent hold on the imagination because they have an element of suspense or humor, they are plausible, and they have a moral."

It's not that there's anything wrong with urban legends per se.  A lot of the time, we're well aware that they're just "campfire stories" that are meant to scare, amuse, or otherwise entertain, and (absent of any further evidence) are just as likely to be false as true.  After all, humans have been storytellers for a very long time, and -- as a fiction writer -- I'd be out of a job if we didn't have an appetite for tall tales.

When it becomes problematic is when someone has a financial interest in getting folks to believe that some odd claim or another is true.  Then you have unethical people making money off others' credulity -- and often along the way obscuring or covering up outright any evidence to the contrary.  And it's worse still when the guilty party is part of the news media.

Which brings us to The Sun and the legend of the "Crying Boy."

Back in 1985 the British tabloid newspaper The Sun reported that a firefighter in Essex had more than once found undamaged copies of a painting of a crying child in houses that had otherwise been reduced to rubble by fires.  Upon investigation, they said, they found that the painting was by Italian painter Giovanni Bragolin.


If that wasn't weird enough, The Sun claimed they'd found out that Bragolin was an assumed name, and that the painter was a mysterious recluse named Franchot Seville.  Seville, they said, had found the little boy -- whose name was Don Bonillo -- after an unexplained fire had killed both of his parents.  The boy was adopted by a priest, but fires seemed to follow in his wake wherever he went, to the extent that he was nicknamed "El Diablo."  In 1970, the engine of a car the boy was riding in exploded, killing him along with the painter and the priest.

But, The Sun asked, did the curse follow even the paintings of the boy's tragic, weeping face?

It's not a headline, but we can invoke Betteridge's Law, wherein we learn that anything like that phrased as a question can be answered "No."  Further inquiries by less biased investigators found that the story had enough holes to put a Swiss cheese to shame.  There was no Don Bonillo; the model for the little boy was just some random kid.  Yes, Bragolin went by the pseudonym Franchot Seville, but Bragolin was itself an assumed name; the painter's real name was Bruno Amadio, and he was still alive and well and painting children with big sad eyes until his death from natural causes in 1981 at age seventy.

As far as the survival of the painting, that turned out not to be much of a mystery, either.  Bragolin/Seville/Amadio cranked out at least sixty different crying child paintings, from which literally tens of thousands of prints were made and then shipped out to department stores all across southern England.  They sold like hotcakes for some reason.  (I can't imagine why anyone would want a painting of a weepy toddler on their wall, but hey, you do you.)  The prints were made on a heavy compressed cardboard, and then coated with fire-retardant varnish.  Investigators Steven Punt and Martin Shipp actually purchased one of the prints and tried to set it alight deliberately, but the thing wouldn't burn.  The surmise was that when the rest of the house went up in flames, the string holding the frame to the wall burned through and the print fell face-down on the floor, protecting it from being damaged.

Of course, a prosaic explanation like that was not in the interest of The Sun, which survives by keeping sensationalized stories alive for as long as possible.  So no mention was made of Punt and Shipp and the probable explanation for the paintings' survival.  Instead, they repeated the claims of a "curse," and told readers that if they owned a copy of The Crying Boy and wanted to get rid of it, The Sun would organize a public bonfire to destroy the prints forever.

How they were going to accomplish this, given that the whole shtick had to do with the fact that the painting couldn't be burned, I have no idea.  But this evidently didn't occur to the readers, because within weeks The Sun had received hundreds of copies.  A fire was held along the banks of the Thames in which the mailed-in prints were supposedly destroyed, an event about which a firefighter who had supervised the burning said, "I think there will be many people who can breathe a little easier now."

This in spite of the fact that the whole thing had been manufactured by The Sun.  There would have been no widespread fear, no need for people to "breathe uneasily," if The Sun hadn't hyped the claim to begin with -- and, more importantly, ignored completely the entirely rational explanation for the few cases where the painting had survived a house fire.

It's probably unnecessary for me to say that this kind of thing really pisses me off.  Humans are credulous enough; natural conditions like confirmation bias, dart-thrower's bias, and the argument from ignorance already make it hard enough for us to sort fact from fiction.  Okay, The Sun is a pretty unreliable source to start with, but the fact remains that thousands of people read it -- and, presumably, a decent fraction of those take its reporting seriously.

The fact that it would deliberately mislead is infuriating.

The result is that the legend still persists today.  There are online sites for discussing curses, and The Crying Boy comes up all too frequently, often with comments like "I would never have that in my house!"  (Well, to be fair, neither would I, but for entirely different reasons.)  As Brunvand points out in The Choking Doberman, one characteristic of urban legends is that they take on a life of their own.  Word of mouth is a potent force for spreading rumor, and once these sorts of tales get launched, they are as impossible to eradicate as crabgrass.

But what's certain is that we do not need irresponsible tabloids like The Sun making matters worse.

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Monday, June 2, 2025

Moon madness

There's a general rule that once a lie gets out into wide circulation, trying to replace it with the truth is damn near impossible.  We've seen lots of examples of that here at Skeptophilia -- chemtrails, the HAARP conspiracy, the whole "vaccines cause autism" thing, and "Pizzagate" come to mind immediately.  No matter how thoroughly these are debunked, they never seem to die.  In fact, legislation in my home state of Louisiana to "ban chemtrails" just passed in the state House of Representatives.  It was sponsored by Kim Landry Coates (R-Ponchatoula).  When Coates was asked what chemicals were allegedly in these "chemtrails," she responded, I shit you not, "Barium.  There is a few, some with long words that I can’t pronounce."

Which illustrates another general principle, which is that there is no intelligence criterion for being elected to public office.

This is not a new problem, much as the Trump administration has cornered the market on egregious lies in the last few years.  Humans have always been credulous, and once convinced of a lie, unconvincing someone is the very definition of an uphill struggle.  Take, for example, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835.

In August of 1835, writers at The Sun (a New York City newspaper, not the British tabloid of the same name) dreamed up a scheme to boost circulation -- a hoax article (complete with illustrations) claiming that astronomers had spotted life on the Moon.  The discovery, they said, was made using "an immense telescope of an entirely new principle," with a lens that measured eight meters in diameter and weighed seven metric tons.  Using this, the researchers were able to see living things on the Moon, including bat-winged humanoids the scientists called Vespertilio-Homo, as well as single-horned goats, miniature zebras, and bipedal tailless beavers.

A drawing of one of the lunar inhabitants [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Moon, they said, was also covered with active volcanoes, but the beings there used them as power sources, allowing the Vespertilio-Homo to live in large thriving cities:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

And just like today, when Trump invariably precedes his lies with "my advisors are telling me" or "I've heard from reputable sources," The Sun gave this "research" an attribution -- but they boldly named names.  The source, they said, was one Andrew Grant (who was fictitious), the assistant and dear friend of John Herschel (who very much was not).

John Herschel was a highly respected British astronomer, mathematician, chemist, and polymath, son of William Herschel (who discovered Uranus).  The younger Herschel had established a name for himself in planetary astronomy, and in fact had studied and named seven of the moons of Saturn and four of the moons of Uranus.  So his was a canny choice by The Sun -- it gave automatic legitimacy to the article's contents.

It took over a month for the entire story to come unraveled.  Pressed by scientifically-literate readers to show them the amazing telescope, they responded that it had sadly been destroyed in a fire -- the enormous lens's capacity for "concentrating the rays of light" had proved its own undoing, and completely burned down the observatory where it resided.  It was only when Herschel was asked about the research and said he knew nothing about it that the owners of The Sun were confronted, and finally -- reluctantly -- they admitted it had been a hoax all along.

Interestingly, though, they never published an actual retraction of the articles.  Five years later, one of The Sun's reporters, Richard Adams Locke, admitted he'd written the story, but said he'd done it as satire, to "show how science can be and is influenced by the thoughts of religion."  Which seems like a pretty flimsy claim to me.  I think the great likelihood is that it was a publicity stunt to boost circulation, and as such, it worked brilliantly -- The Sun became one of the bestselling newspapers in the United States, and survived until 1950.

The lie also had astonishing longevity.  Even after the owners of The Sun admitted it had all been a hoax -- there were no bat-creatures, no miniature zebras, no bipedal beavers -- people still claimed it was true.  The admission, not the original story, had been the hoax, they said, and The Sun's owners had only changed course because they thought the American people couldn't handle how weird the truth was.  Years later, poor John Herschel was still being asked about the bat-winged Moon men and his role in discovering them.

My dad used to say that trying to clean up the results of a lie was about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube.  And the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 illustrates another dark truth; the fact that getting suckered by an attractive lie can cause you to swing all the way over into cynicism.  Some readers who found out about the hoax concluded that nothing in the newspaper could be trusted.  It's like Mark Twain's observation: "You can learn too much from experience.  A cat that sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again, but it probably won't sit on a cool one, either."

Cynicism, as I've pointed out more than once, is no smarter than gullibility.  It's just as lazy to conclude that everyone is lying to you as it is to believe that no one is.  But it's a tragedy when the media itself is the source of the lies.  While I can't condone cynicism about the media, I do understand it.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts."  Which is true enough, but that presupposes we can actually find out what the facts are.  And when the sources you are supposed to be able to trust are themselves lying to you, it creates a catch-22 that I'm damned if I know how to get out of.

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Saturday, June 29, 2013

Naveena Shine and the revision of worldviews

Being a woo-woo apparently means never having to admit that you're wrong.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia will undoubtedly remember my post last month about "Naveena Shine," a Seattle guru who wanted to demonstrate to the world that it was possible to live on nothing but sunlight and water.  Shine, who is evidently under the impression that she is a house plant, finally discontinued her month-long fast last week after losing 33 pounds.


But did Shine do what any sensible person would do in this situation, namely, to say, "Wow, I guess I was wrong!  Humans do need food after all!  What a goober I was!"?

Of course she didn't.  Oh, she starts out sounding uncertain enough.  Shine wrote on her Facebook page:
After 47 days [actually, the post was written after 44 days] I still feel really good, weight loss is slowing and all seems well.  However, I still have no evidence that I am actually living on light and it could well be slow starvation.  Now that I am ending the experiment I will never know.
But soon afterwards, she turns positively militant:
A doctor can't see living on light because he looks through different lenses...  From the feedback I am getting, it is becoming patently clear that most of the world is by no means ready to receive the information I am attempting to produce.  Even if it were true that a person can 'live on light' and I were successful in demonstrating that, I see that it would be synonymous with putting a non-driver behind the wheel of a huge truck.  It would be an accident in the making.
About her decision to end her fast, she says:
There are many, many complex reasons for ending this experiment...  I received a simple message from the universe that it is time to stop.  Because I'm closing it doesn't mean to say there's any failure here.  I'm looking healthy, I feel healthy, bouncing with energy, none of those dire predictions that people were saying were going to happen happened.
No, obviously everything is completely A-OK with you!  Losing 33 pounds in four weeks is perfectly normal!

So, this ended the way all of us thought it would; she finally realized that she couldn't go through with it.

What always interests me in these sorts of situations whether the person in question actually knows that what (s)he is saying is false -- i.e., whether (s)he is lying or simply delusional.  I wonder the same thing about "Psychic Sally Morgan" who, appallingly, just won a £125,000 libel case in England against The Sun, who had called her out for receiving information at a "psychic reading" through a headset.  "I got lots of loving care from my family and fans and that’s the only thing that got me through," Morgan said in an interview with the very paper she sued, excerpted in an article that was just published two days ago.  "Now, when I look back at how I felt, I think it wasn’t such a bad thing. I have even more empathy for the people I give readings to now. I really feel like I’m one of them."

 There is, apparently, a fairly thin line between belief, self-delusion, and outright charlatanism, and it can be awfully difficult to tell the difference between them.

What bothers me about all of these sorts of beliefs is how difficult they are to challenge.  In science, it's a case of The Best Model Wins; if your theory fits the available evidence better than mine does, mine simply has to be scrapped.  I may not be happy about it, but that's the way it goes. 

Here, though, there's always an argument, always a rationalization, always a way around admitting that you're simply deluding yourself and your followers.  Naveena Shine gets ample evidence that she can't live on light and water?  It's not that she's wrong; the doctors who advised her to give up and have a cheeseburger are "looking through lenses."  It's the fault of the unenlightened masses who aren't "ready to receive the information she is attempting to produce."  Tell Sally Morgan that she is a skilled cold reader who is defrauding her fans?  She sues you for libel.  Anything but revise their worldviews; anything but publicly admit that what they are claiming is simply false.

In the case of Shine, the damage is minimal.  Almost no one took her seriously, even at the beginning.  In the case of other woo-woo claims -- psychics, mediums, homeopaths, astrologers -- the cost, both literally and figuratively, is far higher.  These people take your money and give you nothing in return (especially the homeopaths!).

And if you challenge them, you can be sure of one thing; they will never, ever admit that they were wrong.