The fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy

Ironic that yesterday's post was about aliens, because today we have a story of the discovery of a crashed UFO in the Baltic Sea.

Before we proceed further, let's take a look at the photograph, which was taken by the Swedish treasure-hunting group Ocean Explorers:

What I think is interesting about this is that every single site on this story that I looked at did exactly what I just did to you; the writer primed readers to interpret what they were looking at by telling them ahead of time what the subject of the photograph was. In fact, a good many sites had headlines such as "Swedish Team Finds Millennium Falcon in Baltic Sea," thereby not only telling you that you were going to be looking at a photograph of a spaceship, but telling you which spaceship it was.

Humans are pattern-finders.  It's a very important skill.  Our ability to make sense of the millions of visual inputs our eyes register daily -- to notice some, disregard others, and to focus on recognizable patterns -- is of obvious evolutionary significance.  It is critical in most situations, however, to have some idea of what you're looking at ahead of time.  Take the following random pattern of black dots and white spaces:

Unless you'd seen this rather famous photograph before, you probably didn't see a damn thing in it.  Then, I used the word "photograph," and you very likely went, "Wait..." and looked again.  Then, if I tell you it is a photograph of a dalmatian dog... suddenly it pops out.

The point is, when you already have a guess as to what you're looking at, it makes it much easier to see.  This would have been pretty helpful to proto-hominids on the African savanna, where being able to pick out a lion's face from amongst the dried tufts of yellow grass would have been a major life-saver.  However, like most things, this ability can backfire -- and make you see things that aren't there, simply because you were already convinced that you knew what you were looking at.

There are a great many examples of perfectly natural objects that have a peculiarity about them that might lead you to believe that they're manmade.  Take the Giant's Causeway, in Ireland:

The sheer regularity of this structure -- thousands of hexagonal, smooth-sided pillars -- has led people to variously surmise that they were made by gods, giants, and the lost civilization of Atlantis.  In fact, all they are is hexagonal cooling cracks in igneous rock -- a perfectly natural occurrence.  Now that you know that (which you may have already), you notice that they're not perfectly regular, and they're packed too tightly to be anything likely to be made by humans.  However, if I'd told you that these were pillars of an ancient temple before showing you the photograph, I wonder if that would have even occurred to you?

Back to our crashed spaceship.  What makes it look like a spaceship?  It's (1) vaguely oval in shape; (2) has long, parallel lines in it; and (3) there's a section of it (the "back end of the spaceship") that has a gap, right where we are accustomed to seeing the exhaust system of spaceships in movies.  All right, could this be a spaceship?  I suppose, but aren't there other explanations that are a tad more likely?  It may not be a natural object -- its regularity supports that conjecture -- but maybe it's just a piece of a sunken ship (a gun turret, perhaps?).  Alternately, it could just be a rock formation.  Recall how convincingly face-like the "Face on Mars" looked -- until you saw it from another angle.

In any case, I'm not ready to accept that it's an alien spacecraft, based on one photograph, nor to warn divers to watch out if they approach it so they don't get infiltrated by the Black Oil (sorry for the X Files reference if you're not an aficionado).  Given how easy it is to fool the human mind, especially if they're already primed to interpret what they're seeing in a particular way, I'm perfectly willing to delay my excitement until we get more information.

Aliens, abductions, and ashtrays

The subject of alien abductions has come up a lot lately.

I'm currently writing from a beautiful house in the Adirondacks, which would be apropos of nothing whatsoever except that it has an outdoor hot tub, and we were in it last night with the friends we're vacationing with, and one of them looked up at the brilliant stars scattered through the sky and asked, "Do you think there's intelligent life on other planets?"

I was tempted to respond, "I'm sometimes in serious doubt that there's intelligent life on Earth," but for once I chose the Road Less Sarcastic and said, "I'm sure there is.  I bet that one of those stars we're seeing has a planet around it that has intelligent life, and they may well be looking back at us and wondering the same thing."

Note that this is not, in any sense, a scientific conjecture.  We have no evidence whatsoever that life of any kind exists anywhere but right here.  We do, however, have two intriguing pieces of information -- the recent, and continuing, discovery of exoplanets (the current number of known exoplanets is 563, although the majority of them seem to be inhospitable to life as we know it), and the relative ease with which organic compounds can form, in the absence of life.  The combination of these two facts leads me to the belief (because here we cross the line from what I know to what I am speculating about) that life is probably very common in the universe.  And since a third fact -- the drive of organic evolution -- very likely works the same way on other planets as it does here, I see no reason to doubt that there could be a great many planets that harbor intelligence.

The next question my friend asked was, "Do you think that aliens have visited here?"  My answer there is a fairly resounding "no."  Again, this is not based on a theory in the scientific sense, but on two simple facts -- the absence of any credible evidence, and the seemingly insurmountable distances between the stars. Astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson, who has spent a lot of time thinking about such matters, agrees.  About the absence of evidence, he wonders why there has never been a single tangible piece of evidence of alien visitation, despite the fact that the number of UFO reports make it seem like Earth is some kind of Grand Central Station for Little Green Men.  Tyson adjured an audience to take matters into their own hands, if they were ever abducted.  "You'll be lying there on the table, waiting to be probed," he said, "because you know how aliens love to do that.  Then, when the alien comes over to you, yell, 'Look at that!' and when the alien turns, grab the ashtray, and stick it in your pocket.  Then, when you come back, you'll have something tangible.  Because, you know, anything that's of alien manufacture is bound to be interesting."

The second part, the immensity of space, seems to me to be the real issue, though.  It would take tens of thousands of years for us to reach the nearest star, if we were travelling in the fastest man-made vehicle currently available.  Even if faster travel becomes possible, you run into the mind-bending relativistic effects on time; and unfortunately, there is no scientific support for the idea, popularized by science fiction shows such as Star Trek, of faster-than-light travel.  "Warp Six, captain!" looks like it will remain an interesting, but impossible, fiction.

So, what about all of the alien abduction stories?  I started this piece by mentioning abduction stories, and indeed the impetus for this post was the fact that the state of New Hampshire just put up a historical marker commemorating the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, who were two of the first (and still two of the most famous) alleged abductees.  The marker says:

On the night of September 19-20, 1961, Portsmouth, NH couple Betty and Barney Hill experienced a close encounter with an unidentified flying object and two hours of “lost” time while driving south on Rte 3 near Lincoln. They filed an official Air Force Project Blue Book report of a brightly-lit cigar-shaped craft the next day, but were not public with their story until it was leaked in the Boston Traveler in 1965. This was the first widely-reported UFO abduction report in the United States.

The story has all of the hallmarks of the classic abduction story -- the brightly-lit craft that followed the car down a lonely road, the interference with their radio, the gaps in their sense of time (and also in their memories).  However, as much as I'd like to believe it, the complete lack of hard evidence leaves me skeptical.  My answer, with this as with everything, is: if you want me to believe something, show me the goods.  Otherwise all you have is a curious story, and I'm under no obligation to think you're telling the truth.

And the last reason I've been thinking a lot about alien abductions is that the novel I'm currently writing, Signal to Noise, is about a series of mysterious kidnappings in a small town in Oregon.  I'm not going to tell you any more about the plot -- you'll just have to read it when it's done.  But I'll end with a rather telling quote from my wife:  "For someone who doesn't believe in all of this stuff, you spend an awful lot of time thinking about it."

Guilty as charged.

Pyramid scheme

Another of the stories that will never die is the ridiculous notion that aliens built the Egyptian pyramids.

I bring this up because of a story describing events that occurred late last year, which was nevertheless posted only a few days ago by some woo-woos connected with the site UFO Blogger.  Titled "Egyptian Archaeologist Admits Pyramids Contain Alien Technology," it describes an alleged statement by Dr. Alaaeldin Shaheen, the Dean of the Faculty of Archaeology at Cairo University.

The story goes that in December of 2010, Dr. Shaheen was speaking to an audience about Egyptian archaeology, and stated, "there might be truth to the theory that aliens helped the ancient Egyptians build the oldest of pyramids, the Pyramids of Giza."  A reporter from Poland, one Marek Novak, then questioned Shaheen further, asking if there might be evidence of alien technology within, or perhaps buried under, the pyramids.  Dr. Shaheen responded with the mysterious pronouncement, "I cannot confirm or deny this, but there is something inside the pyramid that is 'not of this world'."

There are a variety of problems with this statement, besides the fact that anyone who believes it has been spending too much time watching Stargate-SG1. 

The most important problem, and the one I'd like to analyze in this post, is that the event never happened.

Which apparently didn't matter, because nobody much bothered to check.  The idea that a respected archaeologist would even waffle on the question of aliens being involved with the building of the pyramids caused multiple orgasms throughout the the woo-woo world, and began to spread through alien-conspiracy blogs without anyone even verifying the story.  One of the first to make the claim was noted wingnut Andrew Collins.  Collins has been into pyramid-lore for some time, and has also delved into the crop-circle nonsense, the Atlantis nonsense, and the Holy Grail nonsense.  Not content to stop there, he has developed a whole new branch of nonsense all his own, the "Cygnus theory," which is that the constellation of Cygnus has been a "guiding force in human evolution" and will be the place where the "new sun" will be born following the events of 2012.  He also thinks that the fact that Cygnus is vaguely cross-shaped is why the cross is an "important symbol in Christianity."  (I can think of at least one other plausible reason, can't you?)

In any case, Collins did an extensive post on the Shaheen/pyramids/aliens story, basically claiming that this was the "smoking gun" of the alien conspiracy world.  Then, however, the whole thing came to the ears of Dr. Shaheen himself.  Shaheen wrote to Collins, and his response said, in toto, "Kindly be informed that I did not give such stupid statements about aliens and Pyramids.  As I am an Egyptologist, I would not say such stupid words and ideas."

Well, that sounds pretty unequivocal, don't you think?  Even Collins had no choice but to print a retraction, although he did end it by wistfully stating, "I would still love it if a super crystal of Atlantean or alien origin were to be found inside the Great Pyramid, or anywhere else on the plateau for that matter." Okay, Mr. Collins, if we find any "super crystals," you'll be the first to know.

Now, remember that this whole thing happened last December.  You'd think that with one of the most prominent pyramid woo-woos backing down from the whole story, it would just fizzle.

You'd be wrong.

The claim is still popping up on sites today, and the amazing thing is that even now, hardly anyone bothers to check whether it's true or not.  The UFO Blogger article referenced at the beginning of this post treated the story as if it were breaking news, and stated that it supported earlier allegations that the KGB had discovered an alien mummy inside the Great Pyramid. 

It's a little ironic that, given that the motto of this crew is "The Truth Is Out There," they're so willing to play fast and loose with the facts.  One site I looked at even went so far as to insinuate that Dr. Shaheen's exasperated email to Andrew Collins was a belated attempt to cover up for what had slipped out at the conference!  Of course, the same site contained the following statement:

The Great Pyramid is a geophysical computer showing the half-life of our local universe within the geophysical foundations of the Earth’s biophysical, geophysical, and astrophysical meridians.  It is connected with Orion which is the region for positive programming in our local universe.  It is an amplifier for the natural energies of the earth that run along, inside, and celestially.  The vibration of the King’s Chamber, in the key of F# (the fundamental mode of vibration in quantum mechanics physics and string theory) is meant to create an open channel with higher consciousness and the human soul.  It is a model for the light continuum of the many universes connected with the earth.  Think of a doorway for consciousness which allows it to connect with Orion and regions of higher intelligence.

Which narrowly edges out J. Z. Knight's "What the Bleep Do We Know?" as being the most highly distilled example of bullshit I've ever heard.

All of this serves to point out, once again, a few key concepts.  First, most people believe what they want to believe, facts be damned.  Second, the same people referenced in #1 generally prefer elaborate, mysterious nonsense over simple, prosaic, factual claims.  Third, despite how simple it now is to check on the facts of a story, very few people bother to do so.

And fourth, once ridiculous claims become entrenched on the internet, they will never die.

Airborne chihuahuas and missing tortoises

Today we have a story in from Kankakee, Illinois about someone who has allegedly gotten into psychic contact with a missing tortoise.

This is not the first time that psychics have come forward to try to help find a wayward pet.  A while back, for example, we had the case of the chihuahua owned by Michigan couple Lavern and Dorothy Utley.  The tiny dog was with its owners at a flea market, and was blown away by a windstorm.  Note that I'm not using "blown away" to mean "landing, with bruised dignity, several feet away;" I mean, "blown away, in the fashion of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz."

I should mention at this juncture that the dog's name is "Tinker Bell."

In any case, it all ends happily, because a pet psychic got in contact with Tinker Bell, and assured the Utleys the she was fine.  After some searching, the Utleys and the psychic found the bedraggled pooch in the woods over a mile away, shaken up but otherwise okay.

Of course, my question is why on earth anyone would even think of consulting a "pet psychic."  I'm sure they don't work for free, and as far as I'm concerned, you'd be just as well off taking a stack of money and setting fire to it and hoping that your pet would be attracted to the smoke.  But apparently such things are commonplace, judging by today's news from Illinois.

"Rex," a six-year-old, forty pound African spurred tortoise, has been missing for ten days, according to owner Charlotte Ramirez.  Ramirez had contacted the local newspaper and asked them if they'd post a notice asking local residents to keep an eye out.  Then, a couple of days ago, Ramirez got an interesting phone call.

A woman, identifying herself as "Sheri," stated that she had read the story and then had had a "vision" in which she got into psychic contact with Rex.  She informed Ramirez that Rex was in a neighbor's yard, under a shed, and that nearby was a "pit bull-like dog with two different colors of tan on its coat."  Sheri has now offered her services in helping Ramirez to locate her pet.

Instead of saying "you think you've been in psychic contact with a reptile?" and then guffawing and hanging up, Ramirez and her husband dutifully went searching the neighborhood for a shed and a pit bull.  They haven't found one yet, but state that they are "still looking."

I wonder, if psychics can contact something as far down the intelligence scale as a tortoise, how much further down can they go?  Could they get into psychic contact with a goldfish?  A bug?  A single ant in an ant farm?  A jellyfish?  How about plants?  Samuel Butler famously said, "Even a potato... has a certain low cunning."  I wonder if a psychic could sense that?  I don't know about you, but I'd certainly like to watch a psychic attempt to establish some sort of Vulcan mind-meld with, say, a zucchini.

What strikes me about all of this is how unquestioningly people accept this kind of thing as the truth.  Whenever some bizarre idea is proposed, my first question is, "how could that possibly work?"  So, in cases like these, the relevant question is, "How could a tortoise's brain somehow send out a signal that then gets picked up by a random stranger?"  Isn't it far more likely that Sheri simply read the story about the missing pet, and then either fabricated, or possibly dreamed, a scenario that seemed plausible?

In any case, I want to go on record as wishing Charlotte Ramirez well in locating her wandering tortoise.  I can't say I have any confidence that Rex will show up anywhere near a tan pit bull, but that's just me.  And it could be worse; at least tortoises don't get blown away in windstorms.

We're having a heat wave

Breaking news has come in from noted climatologist Rush Limbaugh, with regard to all of you people in the Midwest and on the East Coast who think it's been a bit hot out for the last week:  you're wrong.  If you think it's hot, you're falling prey to a government conspiracy.  Here are his exact words, which I transcribed myself at the cost of uncounted millions of brain cells that I can ill afford to lose:

They're playing games with this heat wave again.  It's gonna be 116 degrees in Washington DC... no, it's not, it's gonna be 100, maybe 99.  The "heat index" is manufactured by the government.  They tell you what it "feels like" when you add the humidity!  When's the last time the heat index was reported as an actual temperature?  It hasn't been, but it looks like they're trying to get away with doing that now...  It's 100, maybe 97, it's gonna top out at 102, 103.  It does this every year.  We have this heat dome over half the country.  It's in the Midwest, moving east, and it happens every summer.

Well, sorry, Rush, but the heat index is not a "game," or an invention of the government.  It's a number calculated based on the rate of heat loss by the human body, which is lower when the humidity is high (thus resulting in your feeling hotter).  Even if you're equally hydrated, a temperature of 100 is more dangerous in Philadelphia than it is in Phoenix, because when it comes to health, what matters isn't the ambient air temperature, what matters is your core body temperature -- which rises faster if the humidity is high, because your body can't throw off excess heat as quickly.

Which is why, so far, there have been 22 heat-related deaths from this heat wave that "happens every year."

What bothers me most about all of this is that science should not have a political agenda, either liberal or conservative, and the facts of climatology (such as the fact that this summer the Arctic pack ice is melting at the fastest rate ever recorded) get spun as having a political bias.  Whatever your political beliefs, facts have no bias at all.  The heat index comes from a calculation that anyone with sufficient brainpower can perform.  The rate of the pack ice melt is something that anyone with access to the data could calculate.  Limbaugh, and others like him, are playing the dangerous game of pretending that the facts themselves are suspect -- they have gone beyond accusing the scientists themselves of skewing their theories to forward a political agenda, they now have sunk to claiming that even the raw data is being cooked by the politicians.

For the record, I am well aware that scientific theories can have political ramifications, and that science itself is never free from biases of various kinds.  I also understand the difference between climate and weather, a distinction that seems to escape people like Sean Hannity, who claimed last winter that the enormous snowstorm that blanketed the East Coast in February "buried the idea of global warming."  And, for the record, I don't think that the warm-up we've seen to date (which is a fact) has been absolutely demonstrated to have a solely anthropogenic origin (which is a theory).

However, what bloviating blowhards like Limbaugh and Hannity do is to pump up the distrust by the public of the facts generated by science, and call into question the scientific process itself.  As I've commented before, I find it curious that people are perfectly willing to believe that the scientific process discerns the truth when it comes to things they'd like to trust (such as medicine, engineering, and materials science) and yet gives wildly wrong answers when it comes to things they wish weren't true (such as evolutionary biology and climate science).  I'd like someone to explain to me how the same process, applied in the same way, can find the truth in certain instances and be crazily wrong in others -- especially when the times it's crazily wrong seem to fall coincidentally in line with the political agenda of the speaker.

And while you're explaining that, will someone get me a glass of iced tea?  'cause it's freakin' hot in here.

Down the drain

A friend of mine, also a blogger, is doing a post about the weirdest Google search keywords that get people to our blogs.  I know I've thought about that before -- how do people find me?  (My submission: I had one person find Skeptophilia after searching "I saw a light with a vapor."  I still have no idea how that worked.)

In any case, I saw that another contender was that several people had found me after searching "huge whirlpools in Atlantic," which linked them to my post from a few weeks ago about the wingnuts who think that Comet Elenin is going to cause the end of the world.  Mark Sircus, who made the original claim, had made a passing reference (which I had quoted) to the formation of huge Atlantic whirlpools, and that's why the keywords pointed them at my site.

So, this morning, I started thinking, "what huge Atlantic whirlpools?  I haven't heard about any huge Atlantic whirlpools."  So I did a search of my own.  Besides finding a link to my own site, I found a number of references to whirlpools off the coast of Guyana and Suriname.  The original source of the story seems to have been Pravda:

According to Brazilian scientist Guilherme Castellane, the two funnels are approximately 400 kilometers in diameter. Until now, these were not known on Earth. The funnels reportedly exert a strong influence on climate changes that have been registered during the recent years.

"Funnels rotate clockwise. They are moving in the ocean like giant frisbees, two discs thrown into the air. Rotation occurs at a rate of one meter per second, the speed is sufficiently large compared to the speed of oceanic currents, on the border hoppers [sic] is a wave-step height of 40 cm," Castellane said.

I have no idea what the phrase "on the border hoppers" means, and can only assume that it is a mistranslation of some sort -- that phrase appears in every article I looked at that quotes Castellane.

When people read this sort of thing, they typically arrive at several wrong conclusions.  First, they picture these sorts of "whirlpools" as looking like water going down a bathtub drain, and worry that ships might get sucked down to the bottom.  In fact, these rotating discs of water aren't uncommon at all; they're called gyres, and there are two huge ones that have been extensively studied, one in the North Atlantic and one in the Central Pacific.  Gyres are thought to be caused by the flowing of currents in opposite directions on either side of the oceanic basin -- the drag ultimately causes a layer of water in the center of the ocean to rotate.  Unfortunately, these gyres tend to become filled with floating trash, and are a major concern to environmental scientists.

Pravda, however, disagrees that the newly-discovered Atlantic gyres are caused by drag and differential water movement.  The article states that instead, these phenomena might have something to do with the magnetic field of the Earth:

Why do those whirlpools exist for such a long time?  This is partially the effect of Earth's magnetic field. In addition, marine water contains many charged ions, Na and Cl for example.  To crown it all, water molecules are dipoles that are charged both positively and negatively.

Any dipole starts spinning when moving in the magnetic field.  An oceanic ring gathers millions of billions of molecules together.  That is why the giant circle movement triggered by the vertical movement of water may last for months and years mechanically. Ions also give more power to the craters.  Natrium and Chlorum [sic] are charged as well, and their movement in the magnetic field of the Earth also leads to the appearance of the circle movement.

Well, at the risk of angering my Russian comrades, this is patent horse waste.  Water is diamagnetic, which means that it creates a magnetic field in opposition to any applied external magnetic field, but only on a molecule-by-molecule basis.  It's a weak effect; in an extremely powerful magnetic field (such as would be generated by a large electromagnet), the surface of a container of water will dimple slightly.  There is no way that water, even salt water, would generate enough of a magnetic field in response to Earth's that it would move significantly.

But of course, you have to know some science to realize that, and you also have to have some degree of skepticism regarding woo-wooism in general.  Otherwise, you know what happens when someone mentions "giant whirlpools" and "magnetic fields" in the same paragraph?  All of the end-of-the-world loonies remember their ninth-grade Earth Science teachers mentioning something about how the Earth's magnetic field reverses periodically, and they add that to any other nutty ideas they may have heard (2012, the Rapture, conspiracies), and pretty soon you have people running around in circles themselves, but not because they're Experiencing Magnetic Forces on the Natrium and Chlorum ions in their blood.

To illustrate this, here are a few of the more interesting comments I saw on some of these websites, most of which referenced the Pravda article as their source:

"This just blows my mind.  I would love to see a giant whirlpool like this.  I wonder where all the water is going?"

"This just shows that all of the so-called laws of science will be broken as the End Times approach, to show that there is just one law:  the Law of God."

"I heard that this is because of a geomagnetic storm going on right now, a high-speed solar storm.  Basically, spaceweather."  (This reminds me of how the people on Lost In Space were always having to run and hide because of "cosmic storms.")

"Is this near where the Hopi mystics predicted that the Earth would birth a new Moon?"

"This could be the water draining into the Earth.  But remember that water vapor has to condense somewhere.  What if it's just going into the core and staying there because of gravity?"


After that last one, I have to stop, because major sectors of my brain are whimpering in agony.  In any case, if you're planning a Caribbean cruise, I wouldn't worry about huge whirlpools pulling your cruise ship down to the bottom.  I am also not losing any sleep about spaceweather, new Moons, or the End Times.  My general sense is that everyone should just calm down, not to mention learn a little science before you write articles about it.

The false hope of Facilitated Communication

Despite the scorn I frequently heap upon woo-wooism of various types, I honestly feel that most of it is pretty harmless.  Hunting ghosts, chasing Bigfoot, messing with Tarot cards or numerology or astrology -- about all that's really at risk is your bank balance, and if you're willing to pay for your own particular brand of pseudoscience, well, that's your choice and no real damage done.

Not so with Facilitated Communication.

I bring this up because MIT is hosting a conference on Facilitated Communication, starting today and running through Friday, a move that gives me further reason to question the judgment and critical thinking abilities of our educational leaders.  If you have never heard of FC, let me give you a brief rundown.

In the late 1980s, a woman named Rosemary Crossley had an idea.  This idea was that non-communicative children -- especially those with severe retardation, cerebral palsy, and severe autism -- might not lack intelligence, despite their inability to express themselves.  So she developed a technique by which a "facilitator" could use hand gestures and tiny changes in the affected individual's facial expressions and body language to "interpret" what the person was really thinking.

Despite a large number of controlled studies showing that FC doesn't work -- that the outcome is based upon the thoughts, wishes, and desires of the facilitator, not the patient -- FC has caught on, and for a very good reason.  It gives the family members and caregivers of non-communicative individuals a false sense of hope.  And because of this, it has proven to be very lucrative.  In 1992 a Facilitated Communication Institute was founded, under the aegis of Syracuse University.  (Largely because of the bad press FC has gotten, the institute was recently renamed "The Institute for Communication and Inclusion" and FC renamed "supported typing.")  Crossley herself has become famous for a book called Annie's Coming Out, with co-author Annie McDonald -- a severely retarded girl with cerebral palsy, who allegedly communicated her thoughts to Crossley via FC and helped to write the story.  The book later became the basis of an award-winning movie.

It's not that it's impossible that there are non-communicative individuals who still have highly active brains; consider Stephen Hawking, whose decades-long fight with ALS has still not stopped him from writing scores of books and academic papers.  But with FC, the "facilitators" are taking the easy way out, injecting their own knowledge, thoughts, and feelings into the "messages" that are supposed to come from the patients' minds.  More than thirty controlled studies of FC have shown that the practice has no value, and yet Crossley and her partner Chris Bothwick continue to rake in money, charging $250 for a six-part video series on how FC works and what it can do for non-communicative patients.  Practitioners of the technique charge hundreds of dollars an hour to create messages that are alleged to come from the patients, and of course Crossley and Bothwick are kept busy (and well-paid, not to mentioned wined and dined) on the world-wide academic lecture circuit.

It's bad enough that Syracuse University has bought into the whole thing -- their FC Institute (pardon me, the "Institute for Communication and Inclusion") continues to thrive -- but now MIT, traditionally a bastion of peer-reviewed science, has given its tacit approval to the whole thing by hosting the FC conference this week.

I am appalled, and it's not just at their embracing pseudoscience -- as if they were hosting a conference on telepathy, or something.  I am appalled mostly because this technique, which has failed every test that would be necessary to establish it as rigorous science, bilks people out of their money using the lever of the desperation of thwarted hope, love, and compassion -- by giving family members the promise of communicating with a loved one who is locked inside a hopelessly non-functioning body.  It makes them think, falsely, that children whose brains are damaged beyond repair are actually experiencing high-level thoughts.  It rips people off by providing them with false hope -- and as such, should be scorned by professional psychologists and educational institutions (and even more important, prosecuted by the legal system), just as we would scorn and seek to prosecute quacks who give patients with terminal illnesses useless medications.

And the administrations of Syracuse University and MIT should be ashamed of themselves.