Mapping out a fraud

Ever heard of the Vinland Map?

Supposedly dating from the fifteenth century, this map shows the outlines of Europe, Greenland, Asia, Africa... and North America, which is labeled "Vinland Insula" (the island of Vinland).  The map surfaced in 1957, and was widely hailed as a genuine depiction of the Norse exploration of northeastern North America, drawn using information gathered as far back as the tenth century C.E.

Interestingly, the map surfaced three years before the discovery of the (authentic) Viking-era archaeological site at L'Anse-aux-Meadows, Newfoundland, the first (and at this point, only) certain Norse site in North America.  When tenth-century Norse artifacts were found there in 1960, it bolstered the claims that the map was genuine.  We know the Vikings made it to "Vinland," as per the stories of Leif Eiriksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni, and the Map seemed to indicate they'd made it a lot farther, possibly to what is now coastal New England and points south.

Very quickly, it became the center of a lot of wilder claims.  Ancient Aliens aficionados said that not only did it show that the Norse had visited North America and surveyed it closely enough to get a lot of the details of the coastline correct, it contained enough information to support that the drawing had been made from a higher vantage point -- i.e., from the air.  In a spaceship.  Because the Norse gods were actually Ancient Astronauts.

Even the less up-in-the-stratosphere claims were given substantial momentum by the Vinland Map.  I remember when I was working on my master's thesis -- about the effects of the Viking invasions on the Old English and Old Gaelic languages -- running into an apparently serious study purporting to find evidence of borrow-words from Old Norse into various Algonkian languages, including Malecite, Abenaki, and Mi'kmaq.  The difficulty with this sort of thing is in determining whether pairs of similar words from otherwise unrelated languages are related genetically (i.e. from a common root) or are just chance correspondences; in fact, that was one of the more difficult parts of my own research.  Sometimes it's obvious, but that's the exception.  An example is the English word window -- the Old English word was eagþyrl and the Norse word at the same time was vindauga.

Doesn't take a linguist to figure that one out.

Most, however, are not that clear-cut, and it takes more evidence than "they sound kind of the same" to establish a genetic connection.  And the vast majority of linguists think that any similarities between Norse words and Algonkian words are chance -- and cherry-picking.  You can find those sorts of accidental correspondences between just about any two languages you pick if you're allowed to ignore all the pairs of words that don't sound alike.

In any case, the Vinland Map was considered support for the contention that the Vikings did get south of L'Anse-aux-Meadows, whether or not they left linguistic and/or archaeological traces.  This claim gained some credence when a physicist tested the parchment of the Map back in 1995 and found that it dated somewhere between 1432 and 1445, exactly as advertised.

Unfortunately, the age of the parchment is irrelevant -- because a study published last week by some researchers at Yale University, where the map is housed, found that beyond question, the Vinland Map is a fake.

The researchers were able to do an analysis of the ink used on the Map without destroying it, and found that it is unquestionably modern ink.  It contains anatase, a form of titanium dioxide first used in inks in the 1920s.  Also, it was discovered that one of the inscriptions on the map had been overwritten to appear as if it was a bookbinder's instructions to assemble the map pages in concordance with the Speculum Historiale, a thirteenth-century encyclopedia intended as a compendium of everything known to the intelligentsia of Europe at the time.

"The Vinland Map is a fake," said Raymond Clemens, curator of early books and manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.  "There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest...  The altered inscription certainly seems like an attempt to make people believe the map was created at the same time as the Speculum Historiale.  It’s powerful evidence that this is a forgery, not an innocent creation by a third party that was co-opted by someone else, although it doesn’t tell us who perpetrated the deception."

My first response to reading this was to get really pissed off.  Not only does this claim have significant bearing on the subject of my own research, it muddies the waters considerably with respect to any legitimate claims that the Norse reached mainland North America.  Historical linguistics is hard enough; having some asshole create a highly-plausible fake -- good enough that it took sophisticated ink analysis to detect it -- makes it more difficult for those of us who just want to know what really happened.

Fakes in general really make me see red.  We already have the natural biases all humans come equipped with (confirmation bias, correlation/causation errors, and dart-thrower's bias, particularly) gumming up the works even for reputable scientists who are trying their hardest to see things clearly.  It may seem like a minor concern -- who really cares if a particular old document is genuine?  But truth matters, even if it's an argument about what might seem like academic trivia.

Or it should matter.  What's most troubling about this is that whoever created the Vinland Map evidently knew what (s)he was doing, and knew the subject well enough to fool historians for over fifty years.  (Well, some historians -- there were researchers who doubted it pretty much from the get-go.)  So the great likelihood is whoever perpetrated this fake was an academic him/herself.

And to me, that's unconscionable.

So that's our disappointing piece of news for the day.  It still seems pretty likely to me that the Norse did make it to mainland North America, but even if I'm right we're back to having zero hard evidence.  I guess I'm lucky that I chose the thesis research I did; there's no doubt the Vikings made it to Britain.  The monks at Lindisfarne would have been happy to tell you all about it.

At least the ones who survived.

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My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Beneath the shroud

One of the most revered, and controversial, relics of the Roman Catholic Church has finally been shown to be an unequivocal fake.

The Shroud of Turin has engendered more speculation, criticism, and questioning than any other relic, and that includes things like the skull of Mary Magdalene.  The Shroud is a 4.4 meter long piece of linen cloth with the impression -- it looks very much like a photographic negative -- of a naked man showing the traditional injuries suffered by Jesus Christ during the crucifixion.

I've always suspected it was a fake, but I have to admit, it's a pretty inspired one.  The image is nothing short of creepy in its realism:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's generated incredible devotion -- not least from an Italian firefighter who dashed into the burning Guarini Chapel in 1997 and risked his life to save it.  While church leaders have not come right out and said it's real, they've made statements that amount to the same thing.  In 1958, Pope Pius XII approved reverence of it as "the holy face of Jesus."  More recently, Pope John Paul II called it "a mirror of the Gospel."

The whole thing began to unravel -- literally -- about thirty years ago, when scientists were finally allowed to do radiocarbon analysis on a tiny snippet of the linen cloth, and dated it to between 1260 and 1390 C.E. with 95% confidence.  Oh, but no, the True Believers said; it had more than once been through a fire, and soot would change the C-12 to C-14 ratio and throw off the dating.  Plus, the yellow-brown dye on the cloth was shown through chemical analysis to be older, and the cloth snippet was from a more recent repair job, anyhow.

So back and forth it went, with the skeptics saying the preponderance of evidence supported its being a hoax, and the devout saying it was the real deal.  But now two Italian scientists, Matteo Borrini and Luigi Garlaschelli, have presented a paper at the 66th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences that takes an entirely different approach.

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia may recognize Garlaschelli's name.  He was the one who back in 2016 did a simple little demonstration of how the miraculous "weeping saints" -- statues of saints that appear to cry real tears -- can be faked.  So he's not a man who would be easy to fool.

And what Borrini and Garlaschelli did was to look at the Shroud through the lens of blood-pattern analysis.  Anyone who's fond of the series CSI probably knows that a trained forensic scientist can tell a lot from blood spatter, and this is no different.  The story goes that Jesus's body was wrapped in the cloth after he died, staining it with blood from his various wounds, and that's what created the image.

But the problem is... gravity.  If he was laid on his back (which seems probable), any blood dripping from the wounds would land on the cloth in a distinct way.  (The same is true, of course, if he was laid on his side, or any which way.)  And what Borrini and Garlaschelli found was that the cloth shows a completely random pattern of blood drips.  On the same side of the cloth, drips appear to be coming from a variety of directions, consistent with... a fake.  A clever, highly artistic fake, but a fake nonetheless.  Borrini and Garlaschelli write:

An investigation into the arm and body position required to obtain the blood pattern visible in the image of the Shroud of Turin was performed using a living volunteer.  The two short rivulets on the back of the left hand of the Shroud are only consistent with a standing subject with arms at a ca 45° angle.  This angle is different from that necessary for the forearm stains, which require nearly vertical arms for a standing subject.  The BPA of blood visible on the frontal side of the chest (the lance wound) shows that the Shroud represents the bleeding in a realistic manner for a standing position while the stains at the back—of a supposed postmortem bleeding from the same wound for a supine corpse—are totally unrealistic.

And yes, you read that right -- they got a volunteer to lie enshrouded in a linen cloth after having nicked his/her wrists to simulate bleeding wounds.  (They didn't, fortunately, flog the poor sucker, or do any of the various other horrible things the Bible says happened to Jesus.)

Hey, all for the good of scientific research, right?

So this should close the book on the Shroud of Turin, but of course it won't.  The Shroud apologists have argued against every other piece of evidence, so I have no doubt that they'll argue against this one, too, especially since Garlaschelli is involved.  The Italian Catholic powers-that-be hate Garlaschelli for his role in the Weeping Mary Caper.  But anyhow, it's good enough for me, and should be good enough for anyone else who is a self-styled skeptic.

But it still leaves me wondering how it was done, because whatever else you can say about the Shroud, it's really realistic.  Take a look at many 14th century paintings of people -- they're stylized, cartoonish, with zero attention to perspective.   This?  It's painfully accurate, down to the last detail.  So say what you will, whoever created this thing had some serious talent.  It's a shame he put it to use creating a fake that has duped people for over six hundred years.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone concerned about the current state of the world's environment.  The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a retrospective of the five great extinction events the Earth has experienced -- the largest of which, the Permian-Triassic extinction of 252 million years ago, wiped out 95% of the species on Earth.  Kolbert makes a persuasive, if devastating, argument; that we are currently in the middle of a sixth mass extinction -- this one caused exclusively by the activities of humans.  It's a fascinating, alarming, and absolutely essential read.  [If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Miracles for sale

Two of the many things I do not understand have to do with fake faith healers (not, in my opinion, that there's any other kind).

The first is how, after a fake faith healer gets caught at his game, he has the gall to ignore the fact that he was caught in a lie, and do the same thing again.  If I were taking people's money by claiming I could do magic, and I got nailed as a phony, I would be so humiliated I would never want to show my face in public again, much less stand up in front of a sellout crowd and shout, "Jesus is acting through me to heal you (despite what you may have heard from my detractors)!"

The second thing is how there can be sellout crowds after someone is uncovered as a fraud.  Are people really that gullible?  Is I-Want-To-Believe really that powerful a driver?

The answer to both questions is provided by none other than Peter Popoff.  Popoff, you might recall, is a hands-in-the-air hallelujah-praise-be type of televangelist, who claimed to be getting messages from god but turned out to have been getting them from his wife via an earpiece.  Besides being clued in on names, illnesses, and other personal details about the people in the audience, Popoff also received edifying messages like "Keep your hands off her tits... I'm watching you."

And although the evangelicals do think that god is obsessed with telling people not to have sex, I kind of doubt that's the way the Almighty would have phrased it.

In any case, it is a bit of a shock to find that Popoff's back.  Again.  There was some indication last year that he had returned to his faith healing game, but now he's going at it a different way, by sending people letters claiming they're going to receive lots of money, if only they'll use his "Miracle Spring Water" (a packet of which is sent with the letter), and, of course, send Peter Popoff a donation.  Here's an excerpt of a letter received by one Mark Smith and turned over to authorities (which you can read in its entirety here):

What I have to tell you deals with a powerful sequence of events that will begin unfolding for you in the very near future... I see in the vision of the Lord a series of "Golden Miracle Manifestations" happening for you, Mark, in rapid succession, bringing you phenomenal wisdom, success, prosperity, happiness, and an abundance of supply... 

During the first manifestation I see a sudden release of money.  This financial influx is showered upon you from a totally unexpected source.  I cannot say exactly what the total amount will be, but it is somewhere between £2,700 and £27,000...  It is possible that you will receive much more... 

You will notice that there is a SECOND SEALED ENVELOPE enclosed with this letter.  In that envelope there is: (1) a packet of miracle spring water for you to use; (2) another faith tool that will completely foil Satan's attempt to hinder you and stop your miracle manifestations; (3) an anointed prophecy for you to read out loud... 

Quick now, while God's spirit is moving upon you, release your best financial seed-gift.  Don't let Satan hold you back any longer.  This is your opportunity to take your best action of faith that you can towards your secret miracle pathway that only God can uncover.  Right now, give Him your best gift of £27.00 or more.  There's something about £27.00 that so often releases your faith.

He's then told that if he misses the first "manifestation," god's done with him -- there won't be any others forthcoming.  "Don't let Satan make that happen," Popoff tells him.  So send lots of money right away.  The more the better.

This is apparently only one of 34 different letters that Popoff's sent out recently, asking for cash for miracles -- letters that differ only in their details.  "Send me money, or Satan wins" is the theme of all of them.

And you know that some people will.  There's something about this man that makes common sense and critical thinking go right out the window.

I have to wonder, though, if he may have crossed the line into a prosecutable offense.  I'm no legal expert, but isn't this mail fraud?  Maybe not -- it's not like "miracle manifestations" are a real commodity.  But dammit, there should be some way to stop this guy from ripping people off, preying on credulity and misplaced faith to rake in money hand over fist.

The sad part, though, is that even if he's arrested and prosecuted, he'll just bounce back.  Look at Jim Bakker.  Look at Jimmy Swaggart.   You can't, apparently, keep a bad man down.

Or as P. T. Barnum put it, "There's a sucker born every minute."

The return of the faith healer

Following hard on the heels of my post suggesting that caveat emptor is all well and good, but there should be a way to stop swindlers from rooking gullible people, I ran across a story that pushes me squarely in the opposite direction.

There are people who are so gullible that no amount of rationality will persuade them, and honestly, these people probably deserve everything they get.

The story came to my attention via Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News, and concerns veteran snake oil salesman and purported faith healer Peter Popoff.  Popoff goes back a long way; over thirty years ago, he had a nationally-broadcast faith healing show, during which he would call up audience members for a "laying on of hands" and would scream, "I heal you by the power of Jesus!"  He claimed to make paralyzed people walk, cured sufferers of cancer and chronic pain, and attracted standing-room-only crowds, many of whom paid hundreds of dollars for a ticket to attend.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole house of cards came crashing down around Popoff after an investigation by James Randi and his associate Steve Shaw.  Some of the dreadfully ill audience members that Popoff healed, it was found, were perfectly healthy people that Popoff and his crew had planted in the audience to give the appearance of miracles.  His knowledge of people's medical conditions ahead of time turned out to be messages delivered not by the voice of god, as Popoff claimed, but by the voice of his wife Elizabeth, who was scanning audience information cards submitted upon arrival and sending the details to Popoff via a wireless earpiece.  (Amongst the not-so-divine messages Popoff got caught receiving was a reference to an African American audience member by a racial slur, followed by the warning, "keep your hands off her tits... I'm watching you.")

After these revelations, the donations dried up, the audiences stopped showing up, and in 1987 Popoff declared bankruptcy, leaving over 790 creditors unpaid.

And that, you would think, would be that.

But no.  After a humiliating takedown that would leave most of us unwilling to go outside ever again without wearing a paper bag over our heads, Popoff has restarted his "healing ministries," this time in the UK.  According to a piece over at the site Good Thinking, we find out that he's once again raking in the cash:

Over the last six months, we have been investigating ‘faith healer’ Peter Popoff and his highly-lucrative current business of promising to heal sickness and cancel debts in exchange for ‘seed faith’, in other words: cash donations.  In May of this year we attended Popoff’s event at The Troxy Theatre, London, to covertly record his miraculous claims and supposed acts of faith healing, and to witness thousands of people donating large amounts of cash to his ministry.

The Daily Mirror did a story a couple of days ago about the investigation, and called it correctly:

Is the old charlatan “Reverend” Peter Popoff returning to his wicked ways? 

The American snake oil salesman has been in the UK, churning out begging letters and holding a rally to heal the sick. 

Among those “cured” at the latest London gathering was a woman who said her body was wracked with pain. 

Popoff laid his hands on her and yelled “Back to the pits of hell,” apparently with remarkable results. But was it all it seemed? 

Among the audience members was Michael Marshall of the Good Thinking Society, a charity that promotes rational debate. 

“The woman he ‘healed’ had a convulsive fit when he touched her on the head,” said Michael. 

“But she seemed to be part of his team, she was handing out pens and a questionnaire at the start, which leads us to believe that it is possible she was a plant. 

“If she was part of their team, they should have been open about this, but just before the ‘healing’ she came out of a row of seats in the auditorium as if she was just another member of the audience, and left soon afterwards.”

In other words: Popoff is once again rooking audiences, using exactly the same techniques as he did before.

I find it hard to believe that anyone could fall for his schtick, after the events of thirty years ago.  Did god forgive him for his earlier transgressions, and now he's actually healing people through divine power?  Or was James Randi persecuting an innocent man, leading us to the uncomfortable conclusion that god told Popoff "keep your hands off her tits?"

Or is he a cheater and a fraud who was so successful the first time that he is banking on people having short memories and more money than sense?

I'm pretty much certain it's the latter.

So we're looking at a situation where a proven swindler has returned to swindling, and people are once again falling for it.  Which returns me to my original point; if you are taken in by people like Popoff, as harsh as it sounds, you are so foolish that you deserve everything you get.

The case for optimism

A friend and frequent contributor of topics to Skeptophilia asked me recently how I don't completely lose faith in humanity, after all these years of focusing on the ridiculous things people believe.

"How you continue to post, day after day," he wrote to me, "and not end up raising your arms in the air, fists clenched in rage, throwing your head back, and screaming a slew of expletives that would make the San Quentin warden blush, is beyond me."

Well, sometimes I do, you know.  I spend a lot of time yelling at my computer, which may explain why it doesn't work sometimes.  But honestly, I'm an optimist.  If I thought that humanity was irredeemable -- that we will never learn, will never figure out how to think rationally, will always be mired in superstition -- my writing this blog would be kind of pointless.

So would my being a science teacher, now that I come to think of it.

 I am by nature an optimist.  A cautious optimist, but an optimist nonetheless.  And three stories that just came out in the last couple of days give me some support in my contention that humankind is capable of moving in positive directions.

First, from Australia, we have a story from The Brisbane Times, wherein we learn that a court in Queensland has denied a woman taxpayer-funded assistance for a $20,000 "spiritual healing" she received in Canada.  [Source]

The woman, who is identified only as "BN," sounds like she has had a rough time of it -- she was assaulted, and had trauma associated with a motor vehicle accident -- and I do not mean to sound unsympathetic with her plight.  In fact, the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal agreed; in their ruling, they said, "It is not disputed that BN suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder."

But the woman's claim was that she needed "Native spiritual healing," and the only place that she was willing to go was to a Cree spiritual retreat center in Canada.  She required the flight to and from Canada not pass through any American or Asian airports, because she found them "stressful."  The total bill, for travel and for the "spiritual healing"  came to close to $20,000, which she expected would be covered by the Australian health care system.

It is crazy that taxpayers should be expected to bear the costs when someone wants to pursue unscientific alternatives to conventional medical treatment.  I'm happy to report that the courts agreed.  Attorney General Jarrod Bleijie said, "I absolutely respect and understand the benefits of rehabilitation for victims of crime, but it was inconceivable that treatment couldn't be found here in Queensland."


A second story that gives me hope that rationality can sometimes win the day comes out of Florida, where a psychic is currently on trial for fraud to the tune of $25 million.

Rose Marks, who has used her alleged powers to advise such well-known figures as romance writer Jude Deveraux, is unrepentant.  Her lawyer, Fred Schwartz, said in an interview, "She said she uses psychic powers to help advise people as a life coach and that she's a spiritual adviser," and added that Ms. Marks' powers have "been in her family for 1,500 years."

You have to wonder how she knows that.  Psychically, I'd imagine.

Well, the U.S. Attorney's office isn't buying it.  The indictment, in part, reads, "Rose Marks, a/k/a Joyce Michael, along with co-conspirators, represented herself as a psychic and clairvoyant, gifted by God to communicate with spirit guides to assist her clients through personal difficulties...  [She] would offer services to walk-in customers, some of whom would be suffering from mental and emotional disorders, who had recently gone through personal traumatic events and/or who were emotionally vulnerable, fragile and/or gullible...  [Marks induced clients] to make 'sacrifices', usually consisting of large amounts of money (but also at times including jewelry, gold coins and other property) because 'money was the root of all evil.'"

Oh, indeed it can be, which is why these charlatans do what they do.  Well, if the prosecutors do their job, we may see one fewer of them out there defrauding their customers, a possibility that should give Sylvia Browne, Derek Acorah, Theresa Caputo, and Sally Morgan pause.


Our last story seems to indicate that courts are disinclined to let people get away with harming someone because of irrational beliefs even if those beliefs are part of their religion.  "It's my religion" has, for a long time, been a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card in the United States, and in many other parts of the world -- but that may be ending.  Just last week, two members of The Church of the First Born, a fundamentalist faith-healing sect in Albany, Oregon, were arrested for manslaughter after their daughter died of untreated type I diabetes.

Travis and Wenona Rossiter prayed over their twelve-year-old daughter, Syble, convinced that the line from James chapter 5 was true -- "Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord." 

This, despite the fact that two other children of members of this sect of loonies have died in similar circumstances -- a seven-year-old of leukemia in 1996, and a seventeen-year-old just last year of appendicitis.  You'd think they'd realize it wasn't working, wouldn't you?  Nope.  They probably just thought they weren't praying hard enough, or rationalized it by saying it was "god's will," or some such nonsense.

The courts aren't buying it.  The Rossiters are in jail, and with luck, will stay there.


Now, all of this is some pretty harsh stuff, and it might be hard to see how this supports my original contention that we have cause for optimism.  But look at the overall trend -- we've gone from rampant superstition, faith healing, and anti-science sentiment being the majority opinion, to its being repeatedly slapped down by the courts, in only a hundred or so years.  Even as little as fifty years ago, the authorities were reluctant to step in when cases involved "matters of faith" -- churches and "spiritual practices" were given carte blanche.

Now?  We're seeing an increasing push to revoke the tax-exempt status of churches, especially in cases where church leaders publicly push political agendas.  We're seeing courts uphold sentences in cases where people inflict damage, whether personal or financial, on the gullible, innocent, or helpless because of their commitment to counterfactional irrationality.  It's getting harder and harder to get away with murder -- sometimes literally -- because you hold an umbrella labeled "god's will" over your head.

And I, for one, find this to be movement in the right direction.

Sylvia Browne and the house of cards

Now, first of all, let me state up front that I know that science isn't perfect.

Scientists, after all, are only human.  They sometimes make mistakes, misinterpret data, come to the wrong conclusions.  A (fortunately) small number of them, for a variety of reasons, are dishonest and falsify results.

But science, as a whole, is pretty damn good at self-correcting.  The whole edifice is set up to facilitate it.  Even after a paper has run the gauntlet of peer review and has been published, it's read and questioned by researchers in the same field.  This makes it really tough to get away with "bad science" -- the outright frauds seem mostly to get caught in short order, and the resulting hue and cry by their colleagues makes it nearly certain they'll never receive a grant again.  Consider Hisashi Moriguchi, the Japanese stem-cell researcher who was discredited last year because of irregularities in his research protocol and reporting of results.  Consider Anil Potti, medical researcher for Duke University, fired in 2010 for padding his resumé and falsifying data.  Most famous, consider Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, who destroyed their own careers in 1989 with false claims to have discovered "cold fusion."

Not pleasant stories, to be sure.  It's never fun to watch someone sow the seeds of his or her own downfall.   But in losing grant money, research and publication opportunities, and status, we have at least to admit that justice was served.

Now, let's turn to the case of Sylvia Browne.

Browne, as you probably know, is a self-professed psychic.  She's also filthy rich.  Browne charges $700 for a half-hour psychic reading on the phone, and has a waiting list that extends for years.  She does her dog-and-pony show for packed houses, selling tickets for over a hundred dollars each.  Along the way, she has told thousands of people details about their lives, and given them information about their dead relatives, giving some people hope... and destroying the hopes of others.

In the latter category was Louwanna Miller, who was told on a talk show in 2004 that her kidnapped daughter, Amanda Berry, was dead.  "I see her in water... She's not alive, honey," were Browne's exact words.  Miller was devastated, as you might expect -- and died, heartbroken, in 2006, never knowing that her daughter was still alive.  Most of you, I'm sure, have heard by now about the spectacular escape of Berry and two others, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus, from the clutches of three brothers in Cleveland who had held the three girls captive for ten years.

Browne's only response?  She took down her Facebook page.

What's more interesting, however, is the response from other psychics.  So far it has been: silence.  This morning I checked websites and blogs that give publicity to these charlatans, and no one is even mentioning Browne's name.

• The latest story at Unexplained Mysteries: "New Bird Flu Strains Created In Lab."
• At Ghosts and Ghouls: "Spirits at Bobby Mackey's Music World."
• At Phantoms and Monsters: "Alien Agenda: Implants, Tumors, and Transmitted Diseases."
• At Paranormal Phenomena:  "Mysterious Orbs, Sasquatch Language, Humanoid Creature."
• At Unknown Country:  "Death Researcher Challenging Science on Resurrection and the Soul."
• At Paranormal News: "Mind Controlled Sex Slaves and the CIA."
• At National Paranormal Association:  "400 People on 1 Ghost Hunt, and Credibility Goes Out the Window."
• At San Diego Paranormal Research:  "Former Senator Mike Gravel and a Panel of Experts Says White House Suppressing Evidence of ETs."

And so forth and so on.

C'mon, psychics, why no mention of Browne?  Could it be that you're afraid that stating outright that she's a fraud will call into question the whole filthy lucrative game you're all playing?

What Browne did is reprehensible.  She is a swindler, a con artist, a master cold reader who takes money from people so vulnerable from grief or loneliness that they do not have the wherewithal to see what she's up to.  But by their response -- or lack thereof -- the rest of the psychic world is equally culpable.  Even if you have no intention to retract your own claims of ESP, you should call out Sylvia Browne for having failed, spectacularly, and at least lay claim to a few square inches of honor and fair play.

But I'm not expecting it to happen.  It's highly unlikely that anyone living in this fragile house of cards will do anything that might lead to its collapse.  And because of this, I'll make a prediction of the future of my own.

After a quiet period in which she lays low, Sylvia Browne's career, unlike that of the fallen scientists, will be reborn like a phoenix from the ashes.  She will croak her phony prophecies to packed auditoriums once more.  The cash will start to flow in again.  And she and the other self-proclaimed psychics -- James van Praagh, Psychic Sally Morgan, Derek Acorah, Ingo Swann -- will continue to defraud people, world without end, amen.

The psychic and the murder accusation

What will it take for people to stop believing in psychics?

Most big-name psychics -- James van Praagh, "Psychic Sally" Morgan, Sylvia Browne, Uri Geller, John Edward -- have come under fire from skeptics, and many of them have been caught cheating (in the case of Morgan, more than once).  Each time it happens, I think, "Maybe this will be it.  Maybe people will stop listening, stop going to their shows, stop sending them thousands of dollars for bogus 'readings.'"

And I keep being wrong.  Each time, no matter how plausible the accusation, no matter how well supported the criticism, they bounce back.  "... (W)e (psychics) are here to heal people and to help people grow," van Praagh said in an interview on Larry King Live.  "(S)keptics... they're just here to destroy people.  They're not here to encourage people, to enlighten people.  They're here to destroy people."

And their fans, bleating softly, come right back, and the money starts flowing in again.

A recent story illustrates this brilliantly -- and has me once again thinking, probably wrongly, that this will be the time people will sit back and say, "Okay, that's it.  We're done with you charlatans."  (Sources here and here.)

This is a tale about a psychic who calls herself "Angel" and a couple in Liberty County, Texas, north of Houston.  "Angel," whose real name has yet to be released, called the Liberty County Sheriff's Office in June of last year, to report that there were 25 to 30 dismembered bodies buried on a piece of property.  She directed them to the home of Joe Bankson and Gena Charlton, where she said the bodies were, and told them she'd received the information in communication directly from an actual angel.

The Sheriff's Office, astonishingly, didn't guffaw directly at "Angel" and hang up on her; they went and investigated, and in fact dug holes all over Bankson and Charlton's property looking for the alleged bodies.  Meanwhile, the story of the mass burial site was picked up by local news services, and it spread -- first to Houston-based KPRC-TV, then to ABC News, and finally to Reuters, CNN, and The New York Times.  All of this, based on (1) a tip from a "psychic" who heard it from an "angel," and (2) zero actual dismembered bodies.

Well, finally the police gave up, but not before Bankson and Charlton's property looked like a minefield, and the couple themselves had to defend themselves against accusations of being serial killers.  As far as "Angel," the Houston Chronicle said, "The 48-year-old woman, who asked to only be identified by her nickname of Angel, said she never wanted any attention and fears the worldwide interest in the case will destroy her life if her identity is known publicly." And about her failed psychic tip, she defends herself thusly, in an interview with KHOU News of Houston:

I didn’t file a false report.  If they make it to be false, that’s up to them, you know. ... I did what I was told to do.  I followed what Jesus and the angels told me to do.  It’s up to them from there. ...  They [the police] up front asked me how I got the information, and I am a reverend.  I am a prophet and I get my information from Jesus and the angels, and I told them that I had 32 angels with me and they were giving me the information.

So now she's bringing in the big guns: Jesus and no less than 32 angels.  Because that obviously makes it all right.

Well, predictably, Bankson and Charlton aren't buying it.  They're suing "Angel," the news outlets, and the Liberty County Sheriff's Office for defamation.  Now, I'm not a huge believer in lawsuits, but this is one I'm behind 100% -- and in a fair world, it should be a slam dunk for the attorney representing Bankson and Charlton, Andrew Sommerman of Dallas.  In fact, I think that Bankson and Charlton should not only win monetary damages, I think that "Angel," the Sheriff of Liberty County, and the CEOs of all of the news agencies that reported the story as legitimate news should be forced to completely re-landscape Bankson and Charlton's property using only hand tools.

But, of course, it's not a fair world.  Nor is it a rational one.  I don't think their lawsuit is a sure thing at all -- superstition, ignorance, and irrationality still rule the day all too often.  People are sadly prone to wishful thinking, clinging to a counterfactual view of the world that still for some reason gives them comfort, and their memories are short.  And if "Angel" is acquitted -- which I think is all too likely -- it wouldn't surprise me to hear that she puts her shingle back out, and will be back to passing along messages from Jesus and the angels in no time at all.

The strange, fictional life and death of Dana Dirr

A friend of mine sent me a link yesterday to a story that almost defies belief -- that a person (at this point, it's unknown if the perpetrator was male or female) invented a family, complete with a loving mother and father, grandparents, and ten kids (one on the way).  Not only that, but one of the kids, Eli, was suffering from a rare form of cancer,  but was approaching it so valiantly that they had nicknamed him "Warrior Eli."

Apparently the whole thing started several months ago, when "Dana and J. S. Dirr" appeared on Facebook and in the blogosphere, telling their stories of how they were dealing with the specter of childhood cancer.  "Dana" began to post daily, and included photographs of herself, Eli, and the rest of the family, and hundreds of people (eventually thousands) friended her on Facebook and subscribed to her blog.  People began to ask where they could donate money to help this poor family, and the American Cancer Society and such grassroots family aid organizations as Alex's Lemonade Stand became involved.  "Warrior Eli's Facebook Page" went viral, with people checking it every day to see how the brave little boy was doing.

Then, on the evening before Mother's Day, came a horrific announcement on Warrior Eli's page:

URGENT PRAYERS ARE NEEDED for Eli's mom Dana!  She was hit head on by a driver who was driving way too fast and crossed the center line.  She was flown to the hospital where she was supposed to be on duty tonight as a trauma surgeon.  Dana is almost 35 weeks pregnant right now so please pray for her and the baby!  Dane (Dana's dad/Eli's grandpa)

Then, later that evening:

Dana just gave birth to a beautiful baby girl.  J. and Dana had planned on naming her Evelyn and calling her Evie but they hadn't decided on a middle name yet.  J. has decided to call her Evelyn Danika -- Danika after her beautiful mother who we have always called Dana.  Dana is not doing well.  She has severe bleeding in multiple parts of her brain, she has several skull fractures, her C1-C4 vertebrae are crushed, and she has complete severance of her spinal cord at the C1-C2 level.  Please pray for comfort for Dana, J., Connor, and all 11 of Dana and J.'s beautiful babies. Dane (Dana's dad/Eli's grandpa)

And on Mother's Day morning came the dreadful announcement, of which I excerpt only three lines:

Last night at 12:02 AM I lost the love of my life.  I lost my wife, the mother of my children, and my best friend... She waited until two minutes past midnight on Mother's Day to leave us.

The outpouring of grief from all of the people who had followed this family's ongoing struggle was overwhelming.  But at this point, a few people smelled a rat.  The fact that a grieving father with eleven children (and a new baby) would get onto Facebook to announce his wife's death, only a few hours after it had occurred, seemed a little hard to believe.  So some people started digging, beginning with trying to find out if a pregnant mother of eleven had died from injuries received in a car accident on Mother's Day.  When no such case could be found, they begin to question other details of the situation, and after some intensive research, they found...

... the entire thing was made up.

There was no Dirr family, no Warrior Eli, no brave mother and father fighting for their kid.  The photographs on the Facebook page and blog had been lifted from all over the internet, many of them from family pictures posted by a South African blogger, Tertia Loebenberg, who writes at So Close.  (Here's her take on the affair.) 

Within hours of the hoax becoming public, the perpetrator(s) had taken down the Warrior Eli Facebook page and Dana's blog page.  And it seems like whoever engineered the whole thing is laying very, very low.

After getting over my simple, gut-level emotional reaction to all of this -- my main feeling being disgust -- I asked two questions.  First, what on earth could motivate someone to do something like this?  It is unclear to me if this was a simple attempt at internet fraud -- most of the money that was donated for Warrior Eli was given to charitable organizations, not directly to the family.  It seems more likely that this is a case of Münchausen's By Proxy, where a disturbed individual creates the impression that his/her child is ill because of the attention and sympathy that it garners for the entire family.  The elaborate nature of the Dirr hoax -- including dozens of apparently fictional family members and friends -- was only possible because of the anonymity conferred by the internet, and is now being called an excellent example of a new psychological disorder, Münchausen's By Internet.

My second question, which is why this whole story appears on my blog, is: how do we apply the principles of skepticism to what we read online?  Most of us, myself included, are fairly trusting, assuming that the majority of humanity is honest the majority of the time.  We all know that hoaxes and frauds occur, not to mention the fact that people can be delusional (witness the subjects of the majority of my blog posts).  But when someone posts something online that seems plausible, and (especially) yanks on the heartstrings, we get sucked in.  I suspect that if I had heard of "Warrior Eli" before the whole thing had been revealed as a fraud, I'd have been fooled just like thousands of others were.

The bottom line is: when you engage your emotions, don't disengage your brain.  The Warrior Eli case was cracked by people who recognized when the inventor of the Dirr family pushed the whole thing a little too far, straining credulity to the point that it began to splinter.  I'm not advising you to be suspicious -- heaven knows, we don't need any more cynics in the world.  But do be careful, and in this and in all things -- keep thinking, and keep asking questions.

Off the rails

One of the saddest things to me is to see a brilliant mind veer off course, and to be powerless to stop it.  I'm not talking about actual mental illness here, although that is a tragedy of considerable magnitude as well; I'm talking about someone with intact cognitive faculties who becomes, for whatever reason, attracted by an ideology, and abandons any sort of critical thinking in favor of its appeal.  I've only seen this happen a couple of times myself, but in my experience, any kind of rational argument is generally fruitless once it has occurred.

My most striking example of this was a young man who studied both introductory and AP-level biology with me.  I remember him as a humorous, friendly, open boy, who had an inquisitive mind and a fine understanding of science.  I was shocked to be contacted by him a couple of years ago and to find out that he had become an ultra-fundamentalist Christian, a young-earth creationist whose sole reason for writing to me was to express concern about the fact that I was headed to hell.  I was, he said, using my influence to draw teenagers away from god, not only by my teaching of the "flawed science" of evolution, but by my being an out-of-the-closet atheist.  He admitted that I didn't push my atheism on my students, but said that my standing as a respected teacher was "making atheism appealing."  His email was a long, rambling diatribe about the evil that "secularizers" like myself were perpetrating upon society, and completely devoid of the sense of humor (and perspective) that I recall as one of his best qualities.  After some consideration I wrote back, and this led to two or three back-and-forths -- but neither of us, of course, budged, and (I suspect) both of us were left saddened by the encounter.

A dear friend and former colleague of mine, one of the most talented teachers I've had the privilege of working with, told me yesterday about a recent similar occurrence.  She told me about a former student, with "a seemingly brilliant mind," who had contacted her by telephone.  The reason for the call was to ask her for money, because he was trying to get to Europe to meet with a healer, Dr. Philippe Sauvage.  My friend said she was not in the position to donate money to his cause, and the young man asked her to refer him to "any rich friends she might have."  Receiving a negative answer to this, the young man ended the conversation, presumably to canvass others to try to raise the money he needed.

I hadn't heard about Philippe Sauvage, so I decided to look into him, and what I found was fairly scary.  Sauvage's site (here) strikes me as the ravings of a megalomaniac.  Here's a sampling:

Philippe Sauvage has accomplished more in one of his 50 Earth years than any human dreams of in a lifetime. The contents of this page offer the barest sketch of his unbelievably dramatic career as Bio-Cosmic Justice Enforcer. Humanity has been not only blessed by his very presence this past half century, but just as we have begun to reap full force the effects of our own carcinogenetic destruction of our planetary organism (the Geo-Self), Philippe Sauvage has arrived to usher the Worthy through the cataclysmic geopolitical, geological, atmospheric and immunological disasters now emergent...  Know, beyond the shadow of ANY doubt, that you are now introduced to the greatest figure the inhabitants of this planet have ever seen. Know that this is THE pivotal time of Your Life. Nothing else matters now but what You DO in response to this knowledge (or, most unfortunately, what you do NOT DO). Awaken or not, it is of no consequence to Philippe Sauvage as he completely fulfills his role regardless, but be certain it is of VERY Real Consequence to You.

 He claims to be the World's Last and Most Powerful Druid, a shape-shifter, and the inheritor of "ancient Hyperborean spirituality" through his Breton ancestry.  He has made "revolutionary contributions" to evolutionary biology, criminology (through "subliminalistics" -- advanced technologies of distant subliminal mind control), psychology, anthropology, and medicine (this last was as a "charismatic miracle worker and healer").  He was also an undercover special agent, a paramilitary undercover anti-terrorist leader called "009."  (No, I'm not making any of this up.)

And more interesting, none of it is true.

An October 2009 BBC exposé (here) calls Sauvage a "conman," a "sham," and a "fraud," who has bilked people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and whose claims (including healing third-degree burns "overnight") are pure bullshit.  Sauvage has been the subject of a number of legal investigations, and in fact fled France because he was about to be jailed for fraud.  He has lived for a time in the United States, where he founded a "healing organization" called Catharsis, but after a judge in the US failed to grant him asylum with regards to the jail sentence pending in France, Sauvage went to England, setting up shop in Devon (and convincing dozens of people there of his powers, ripping more money off from the ill and vulnerable).  His latest home has been Italy, but no one really seems to be all that sure where he is.

Interpol, of course, would love to find that out.

I am mystified as to the appeal that people like Sauvage have.  I suppose, having never had a life-threatening illness, I may not fully understand the desperation that can sometimes engender.  But I'd like to think that even if I were dying of some terminal disease, that my mental faculties would not go off the rails to the extent that I would fall for the claims of someone like Sauvage.

And as far as my friend's former student: all I can say is that it is doubly sad to see a promising mind pulled into the orbit of a counterfactual, irrational, toxic worldview.  And unfortunately, from the (thankfully) few experiences I've had with this sort of thing, I don't hold out a great deal of hope for a positive outcome.  I can only wish, in the case of this student, that enough of his friends and family refuse to fund his trip to Europe that he is forced to stay here in the US... and can be helped to escape from the influence of these charlatans.