The conspiracy theory that won't die

A while ago, a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia said, "You haven't written about my favorite conspiracy theory -- Majestic 12."  There was a brief moment in which I wondered whether "Majestic 12" might be some kind of sequel to Ocean's Eleven, but then I realized that they've already done that (they're up to what, now, Ocean's Seventeen, or something?), so it had to be something else.

It turns out that Majestic 12 is a code name, which makes it cool right from the get-go.  The story is that during the presidency of Harry Truman, a secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials was formed in order to investigate the Roswell incident and to keep tabs on the aliens.  Since that time, thousands of pages' worth of documents have been "leaked" from this alleged committee, most of them dealing with covert operations by the CIA, and giving highly oblique references to UFO sightings.  A few of the documents have hinted at darker doings -- alliances with evil aliens, and a secret intent to use technology of extraterrestrial provenance to further our military goals and monitor our enemies.

The original members of Majestic 12 were allegedly the following prominent individuals:

Roscoe Hillenkoetter (first director of the CIA)
Vannevar Bush (president of the Carnegie Institute, amongst many other titles)
James Forrestal (Secretary of the Navy)
Nathan Twining (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)
Hoyt Vandenberg (Air Force Chief of Staff)
Robert Montague (Commander of Fort Bliss)
Jerome Hunsaker (aeronautics engineer at MIT)
Sidney Souers (first executive secretary of the National Security Council)
Gordon Gray (Secretary of the Army)
Donald Menzel (astronomer at Harvard)
Detlev Bronk (chair of the National Academy of Sciences)
Lloyd Berkner (prominent physicist)

And because no good conspiracy would be complete without throwing around a few well-known names, the Majestic 12 were supposedly advised by Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, Wehrner von Braun, Albert Einstein, and Cigarette-Smoking Man.

Oh, wait, the last one was fictional.  Silly me.  The problem is, so are the documents.  The FBI has done a thorough investigation of the various Majestic 12 files, and declared them "completely bogus."  Of course, they would say that, claim the conspiracy theorists; the government's response is always "deny, deny, deny."  However, there have been independent studies done, by reasonably objective and disinterested parties (for example, Philip J. Klass, noted UFO skeptic and debunker), and virtually all of them think that the whole thing is a hoax -- probably perpetrated by Stanton Friedman, William Moore, and Jaime Shandera, three UFOlogists who were more-or-less obsessed with the Roswell Incident.  In fact, Moore and Shandera were actually the recipients of some of the Majestic 12 documents -- sent to them by an "anonymous source high up in the government."

How did the skeptics come to the conclusion that the whole thing was a hoax?  One of the main pieces of evidence was the simple, pragmatic matter of how the documents were typed.  In many cases, it's possible to date a document simply by looking at the font, spacing, and ink -- these changed with fair regularity, and even a discrepancy of a couple of years can be enough to prove a document to be fake.  In the case of a number of the Majestic 12 documents, there were font changes and space-justification that were impossible in the late 1940s and 1950s -- the first typewriter capable of this was invented in 1961.

An amusing sidebar: when Philip Klass was investigating the Majestic 12 claim, he offered $1000 to anyone who could produce government documents that had typefaces matching the ones found in the Majestic 12 papers.  Who popped up to claim the prize?  None other than Stanton Friedman, prime suspect as the chief engineer of the hoax.  As skeptic Brian Dunning wrote, "Don't take the bait if you don't want to be hooked."

One of the frustrations with debunking conspiracy theories, though, is that once someone believes that a conspiracy exists, there always is a way to argue away the evidence.  One of the most popular ones is argument from ignorance -- we don't know what the government was doing back then, so they could have been doing anything.  As for the typewriters -- oh, sure, the first typewriter capable of justification (the IBM 72) was released to the public in 1961, but maybe the Big Secret Government Circles had access to it fourteen years earlier.  Who knows?  (And by "who knows?", of course what they mean is "we do.")

The problem with the argument from ignorance is that you can't create a logical case for something based on what you don't know about it.  It's like what astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said about UFOs:  "Remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for.  People say, 'I saw a bright light in the sky, I don't know what it was.... so therefore it must be a spaceship from another planet.'  Well, if you don't know what it was, that's where the discussion should stop.  You don't then go on to say it 'must be' anything."

And as far as my aforementioned "objective and disinterested" investigators -- in the conspiracy theorists' minds, there is no such thing as an objectivity.  Anyone who argues against the theory at hand is either a dupe, or else a de facto member of the conspiracy.  Between this and the argument from ignorance, there is no way to win.

And that's why Majestic 12 has turned into the conspiracy theory that won't die.

But wait, you may be saying; what if the government was engaged in top-secret nasty stuff?  Even if you accused them, the government would certainly deny their involvement and claim it was a hoax.  Well, first, I'm sure that the government is, in fact, engaged in top-secret nasty stuff.  I just don't think this is it.  We fall back on Ockham's Razor yet again -- what is the simplest explanation that adequately accounts for all of the known facts?  

And second, if there is some diabolical stuff happening, and it was top-secret, you wouldn't know about it.

Because that's what top-secret means.

So, anyway, I think we can safely say that the Majestic 12 papers are fakes.  Which is, no doubt, exactly what Cigarette-Smoking Man wants us to think, and will make him smile in that creepy way of his, and walk off into the night until the next episode.

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Missing the target

I suppose it's natural enough, but people are always looking for a magic bullet.

Doesn't matter what part of the human condition you're talking about.  Improving health, losing weight, gaining muscle, learning something new, increasing stamina, boosting libido... just listing all of the examples would be a post in and of itself.  I get it, you know?  Most of these are frustrating and difficult to cope with.  For myself, I can't tell you the number of times I've been out for a run, and at about mile three have cursed my age and poor physical condition and the entire universe that came together in such a way as to make me completely suck at running, and wished fervently that there was some kind of supplement I could take that would magically reduce my average mile-time to below eight minutes and leave me grinning cheerfully as I cross the finish line, instead of the reality of ten-minute miles being a victory and crossing the finish line sweaty and breathing hard and swearing that I will never, ever, ever sign up for a race again.

But human nature being what it is, I also tend to go home and immediately look for more races to sign up for.  People are strange.

The reality is that all of those battles we fight are battles for a reason.  They require consistent hard work to overcome.  So all the panaceas you see advertised on social media -- promising long life, six-pack abs, endless energy, and a screaming hot sex drive -- are very, very likely to be ripoffs, trying to capitalize on the natural human tendency to look for an easy solution.  It's like the old joke about the guy in New York City who asked a passerby how to get to Carnegie Hall, and was told, "Every day -- practice, practice, practice."

That was why I gave a skew glance at an announcement a couple of years ago that researchers in Australia had developed a new type font that improved memory by making it a little more effort to read.  Dubbed "Sans Forgetica," it takes the letters, slants them to the left, and creates diagonal breaks -- so it confuses the eye enough to make the brain stay focused while reading it.

"The mind will naturally seek to complete those shapes and so by doing that it slows the reading and triggers memory," said Stephen Banham, who studies typography at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

And indeed, studies by Banham et al. indicated a small improvement in information retention -- 57%, over the 50% retention when the same information was written in Arial.

"When we want to learn something and remember it, it’s good to have a little bit of an obstruction added to that learning process because if something is too easy it doesn’t create a memory trace," said study co-author Janneke Blijlevens.  "If it’s too difficult, it doesn’t leave a memory trace either. So you need to look for that sweet spot."

Sounds plausible, doesn't it?

There's only one problem with the claim.

It doesn't work.

A team of researchers at the University of Warwick (UK) and the University of Waikato (New Zealand) released a paper this week about a set of four experiments with 882 test subjects, over twice the number used in the earlier study.  They made four conclusions from the data:

• Sans Forgetica is, indeed, harder to read than Arial.
• Asked to recall pairs of words in one font or the other, people tended to remember the ones in Arial better than the ones in Sans Forgetica.
• When tested on recall of factual information from paragraphs written in either font, there was no significant difference in the retention between the two fonts.
• When tested on depth of understanding of information, once again there was no difference observed.

So, to put it simply: Sans Forgetica makes reading a pain in the ass for no good reason.

Study lead author Andrea Taylor put it in a little more genteel fashion: "Our findings suggest we should encourage students to rely on robust, theoretically-grounded techniques that really do enhance learning, rather than hard-to-read fonts."

Sad to say, there's no easy road to better recall and comprehension.  Difficulties in the human condition are difficulties for a reason; if they were easy to solve, there wouldn't be so many people worried about them.  Magic bullets, unfortunately, are almost guaranteed to miss the target.

And now, I better get out there for my daily run.  Maybe mile three will be easy today, but I'm not counting on it.  All I'm honestly looking for is a marginal improvement, day to day.

Practice, practice, practice.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one: acclaimed science writer Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way: A New Look at how Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think.

It's been known for some years that a lot of birds are a great deal more intelligent than we'd thought.  Crows and other corvids are capable of reasoning and problem-solving, and actually play, seemingly for no reason other than "it's fun."  Parrots are capable of learning language and simple categorization.  A group of birds called babblers understand reciprocity -- and females are attracted to males who share their food the most ostentatiously.

So "bird brain" should actually be a compliment.

Here, Ackerman looks at the hugely diverse world of birds and gives us fascinating information about all facets of their behavior -- not only the "positive" ones (to put an human-based judgment on it) but "negative" ones like deception, manipulating, and cheating.  The result is one of the best science books I've read in recent years, written in Ackerman's signature sparkling prose.  Birder or not, this is a must-read for anyone with more than a passing interest in biology or animal behavior.

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

Font of knowledge

Punching yet another hole in our sense that humans are at their core a logical, rational species, filmmaker Errol Morris has done an elegant experiment that shows that our perceptions of the truth value of a statement are influenced...

... by what typeface it's set in.

Morris conspired with The New York Times to run a part of David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity that looks at the Earth's likelihood of having its habitability destroyed by an asteroid collision.  (Deutsch's conclusion: not very likely.)  Afterwards, the readers were invited to take a survey entitled, "Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?" which ostensibly measured the degree of pollyanna-ism in the reader, but was really set up to see to what extent readers bought Deutsch's argument that humanity has no real cause to worry.

The variable was the font that the passage was written in.  He used six: Baskerville, Helvetica, Georgia, Comic Sans, Trebuchet, and Computer Modern.

40,000 people responded.  And the results were as fascinating as they were puzzling; Baskerville had a 5-person-out-of-a-thousand edge over the next highest (Helvetica), which may not seem like much, but which statisticians analyzing the experiment have declared is statistically significant.  Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, who helped design the experiment, said:

(The score spread is) small, but it’s about a 1% to 2% difference — 1.5% to be exact, which may seem small but to me is rather large.  You are collecting these data in an uncontrolled environment (who knows, for example just how each person’s computer is rendering each font, how large the font is, is it on an iPad or iPhone, laptop or desktop), are their kids breaking furniture in the background, etc.  So to see any difference is impressive.  Many online marketers would kill for a 2% advantage either in more clicks or more clicks leading to sales.

The whole thing is a little disturbing, frankly -- that our perceptions of the truth are so malleable that they could be influenced by a little thing by what font it's set in.  Morris writes:

Truth is not typeface dependent, but a typeface can subtly influence us to believe that a sentence is true.  Could it swing an election?  Induce us to buy a new dinette set?  Change some of our most deeply held and cherished beliefs?  Indeed, we may be at the mercy of typefaces in ways that we are only dimly beginning to recognize.  An effect — subtle, almost indiscernible, but irrefutably there.

 Morris was interviewed about his experiment, and was asked a particularly trenchant question: When people read this for the first time, how do you hope that will change their own perception of the world?  Morris responded:

I'm not really sure. I'm not even sure what exactly to make of the results, in truth.  Everything I do—everything I write about and everything I make movies about—is about the distance between the world and us.  We think the world is just given to us, that there's no slack in the system, but there is.  Everything I do is about the slack of the system: the difference between reality and our perception of reality.  So in the sense that this essay lets us further reflect on the world around us, and even makes us paranoid about the slack in the system, then I think it's a good and valuable thing.

And I certainly agree.  Anything that makes us aware of our own biases, and the faults in our logic and perceptual systems, is all to the good.  We need to realize how inaccurate our minds are, if for no other reason, to reinforce how important science is as a tool for improving our knowledge.  Science, relying as it does on human minds for data analysis and interpretation, is far from perfect itself; but as a protocol for understanding, it's the best thing we've got.  Without it, we have no way to winnow out the truth from our own flawed assumptions.

So watch for more and more articles and advertisements appearing in Baskerville, because you just know that the media is going to jump on this study.  And I hope that this once and for all stops people from using Comic Sans, because I can't see that font without thinking of Garfield, and heaven knows that's not a good thing.