So lonely I could die

I just got back from a ten-day visit to my publisher, wherein I attended a writers' retreat and about 150 different meetings with other writers and staff members of Oghma Creative Media.  This was great from the standpoint both of seeing some old friends, and also networking, which is pretty critical to a fiction author.

Simultaneously, however, it made me want to curl up into a ball and whimper softly.  I am dreadfully shy and a natural-born introvert, and crowds of people, however friendly, sap my energy like nothing else.  I did kind of crash-and-burn one day, during which I was in conversation with people from, no lie, 7:30 in the morning until 10:30 at night without a single break.

By the end, my publisher said I looked like a lost puppy, standing there with a dazed, "where am I?" expression on my face.  He did bring me a scotch, which helped considerably.

This is why I took such interest in a paper presented last week at the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, entitled, "Loneliness: A Growing Public Health Threat."  The paper described a meta-analysis done by a team led by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, professor of psychology at Brigham Young University.  What they did was first combine the results of 148 different studies of over 300,000 people, correlating social isolation with the risk of early death, and then do the same for a larger group of 3.4 million people.

The results were unequivocal.  Social isolation correlates with premature death -- and in fact is as big a risk factor as obesity!  Holt-Lunstad said in her presentation:

Being connected to others socially is widely considered a fundamental human need — crucial to both well-being and survival.  Extreme examples show infants in custodial care who lack human contact fail to thrive and often die, and indeed, social isolation or solitary confinement has been used as a form of punishment.  Yet an increasing portion of the U.S. population now experiences isolation regularly... There is robust evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality, and the magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators.  With an increasing aging population, the effect on public health is only anticipated to increase. Indeed, many nations around the world now suggest we are facing a ‘loneliness epidemic.’ The challenge we face now is what can be done about it.

Which of course got me thinking about my own situation.  I'm pretty solitary even for an introvert; I have lots of pleasant acquaintances, a few true and deep friends, but almost no social life.  The majority of the people in my life are there because of my (much more extroverted) wife, and even most of the people that I consider good friends I seldom see.

Me and one of my best friends, who unfortunately lives 230 miles away...

The problem, apparently, is worse in men than in women, probably because we guys have been told since birth that to be a strong man means to be tough, silent, and to downplay our emotions.  This comes at a cost -- for men, social isolation is as correlated with heart attack and stroke risk as smoking is, and in fact shows an actual biological marker -- an elevated level of fibrinogen, a protein involved in blood clotting.

Of course, correlation isn't causation.  It could be that the elevated risk and social isolation are correlated because both of them are caused by something else -- such as depression.  Establishing a causation was beyond the scope of this study, although it is to be hoped that the researchers will investigate that next.

The problem, both in general and for me personally, is what exactly socially isolated people are supposed to do about all this.  Heaven knows I'd like more social connections, and I suspect others like me feel the same way, but connections don't just magically appear.  They require us to put ourselves out there and be more outgoing.  Which gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Maybe a scotch would help.

Anyhow, forewarned is forearmed, and there's nothing to be lost by trying to forge a better social life for myself.  I doubt that I'll ever be extroverted no matter what I do -- but I have to say that a couple of buddies with whom I could have a beer every now and then would be mighty nice.

Spell check

If you were wondering why the Trump administration has turned out to be a slow-moving train wreck, it's not because the American people saw fit to elect an unqualified, ignorant, narcissistic sociopath to the highest office in the land: it's because Trump et al. are being cursed by witches.

At least that's the contention of Lance Wallnau, pastor, author, speaker, "spiritual guide," and writer for Charisma News, who has been something of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia.  Here are just a few of the appearances Wallnau has already made:

• He predicted that the Cleveland Indians were going to beat the Chicago Cubs in the 2016 World Series, because Chicago is cursed by god because Obama lived there or something.  When the Cubs won, he claimed his prophecy was still correct because of Satan.
• Hillary Clinton was motivated by a "spirit intent on destroying America."  And just one man stood in her path... namely...
• Donald Trump's win was because of god applying a "wrecking ball" to the "higher level demon principality" the United States had become, which means that if you don't like Trump, you're motivated by demons.

So you can see that Wallnau's grip on reality isn't that strong to begin with.  Despite the fact that he's one of these "traditional family values" guys who thinks that social liberalism is sending America into the pit of hell, he is staunchly behind a thrice-married serial adulterer for whom money and power are the sole motivators.  And, apparently, he sees no internal contradictions in this stance, to the point that he thinks that Trump is the next best thing to the Second Coming of Christ.

And now, Wallnau thinks that his Deputy Lord and Savior is under attack.  Because, let's face it; you can't be the Chosen One and expect that all the bad guys in the world are just going to accept it.  So Wallnau thinks that Trump is being cursed by witches, presumably using spells that make the target individual sound like a spoiled and inarticulate toddler.

But there's a twist in all this; since the president is being "protected by the prayers of Christians," most of the evil magic is being deflected, and is instead striking the members of Trump's family.  This could certainly explain some of the trouble that Donald Jr. and Jared Kushner are in at the moment.  And if some of the collateral damage is striking members of Trump's inner circle, this could also make sense of the resignation of Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci, and the rumors surrounding some impending upset involving Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

I don't know how I feel about this.  I mean, taking down Donald Jr., Kushner, Spicer, Scaramucci, and Sessions is all very well, but it leaves so many other deserving recipients of evil spells uncursed.  I mean, come on; Kellyanne Conway?  Betsy DeVos?  Paul Ryan?  And most of all, Mitch McConnell?  If ever there was someone who needs to be targeted by the "Silencio" charm from Harry Potter, it's Mitch McConnell.  The only thing that would be better is to (1) make it permanent, and (2) add some other spell that would get rid of the slimy smirk he always wears.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So anyway, Wallnau wants his followers to rectify this oversight.  “People are praying for the president, but they’re not necessarily praying for his family,” Wallnau said.  “So right now, all those witchcraft curses that did not land on Donald Trump are trying to take out his kids, trying to take out his offspring, trying to attack anything near him.”

As proof of the danger, Wallnau cites an exorcism he once witnessed, wherein the demon was expelled from the possessed person, but instead of hauling ass back to the Pits of Darkness, the demon instead jumped into the body of the family dog, who proceeded to fling himself out of the car window as it sped down the highway.

Which brings up an important question, to wit: who the hell does an exorcism on someone in a moving car?  I'll admit that some people do drive as if they had taken classes in Hell's Driving School.  But even so, it seems like a dangerous thing to do.  Even if it wasn't the driver who was being exorcised, you'd still have the risk of sharp objects being flung around the car and the possessed person puking up pea soup all over the place.

Which would make it kind of hard to concentrate on watching the road.

But Wallnau apparently doesn't find anything at all weird about this.  He told his listeners exactly what they should say.  “We take authority over every hex, vex, spell, jinx, satanic curse, blood curse, every demon assigned to destroy the health of the president, to destroy the health of his family, to harass him, to vex him, to cause him to lose sleep.  In Jesus's name, we veto every curse that has been brought against Donald Trump and his family and his administration.”

And I have to admit that sounds pretty authoritative.  But you have to wonder why they don't do anything more productive, like praying that god vetoes Trump's Twitter account.

Anyhow, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  I have to admit that Lance Wallnau is always good for a laugh, even if my chortling is tempered by the fact that he has a large number of people who actually listen to him and believe what he says, and damn near all of those people voted for Donald Trump.  All of which makes my laughter ring a little hollow.

So I think to cheer myself up I'll go practice hurling spells like "Petrificus Totalus" in Mitch McConnell's direction.  Who knows?  Maybe it'll work.  And if my aim is bad, it could still hit Paul Ryan, which would be almost as good.

Worrywarts

It will come as no particular surprise to people who know me that I can be a little neurotic at times.  I'm nervous to the point of not being able to sit still, and get seriously worked up before (for example) races, because I can so vividly envision everything going wildly wrong.  Mental images of me running out in front of a truck or collapsing with heat stroke or simply being the last person to limp across the finish line gain a life of their own, despite the fact that none of those things have ever happened to me.

Traveling is worse.  I say I love to travel, but what I actually mean is that I love being at my destination.  Traveling with me is kind of a nightmare, because I experience gut-clenching anxiety about missing a connection or losing my luggage or worse.  I still vividly recall watching with increasing horror as my wife tried to get through the immigration checkpoint on our way back into the U.S. from our first trip to Ecuador fifteen years ago.  I watched her searching her pockets and backpack for her passport, her expression gradually moving from perplexity to worry to outright panic -- and there was nothing I could do.  I couldn't go back in the line from the other side of the checkpoint and help her; even if I could, it's not like I knew where her passport was.  Images of Carol being hauled off to a windowless room with a bare light bulb to be interrogated as to why she was trying to enter the country illegally flitted through my head.

Of course, in short order she did find her passport, and disaster was averted, but it took me about three weeks to calm back down.

We also ended with nothing more than a serious adrenaline rush the time the drug-sniffing dogs flagged my backpack in Belize, although I did have to find a place to change my pants afterwards.

It's not like I have a history of terrible things happen to me.  I've never had anything worse than getting ill for a day or two, on any trip I've ever taken, and even that has been mild.

So none of this is connected to reality, not that this matters.  If no real crisis presents itself, my brain is perfectly capable of inventing various scenarios on its own.  The fact that these are highly improbable, and many of them are mutually exclusive, doesn't seem to matter.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Which is why I have now been sent a link three times by various friends and family members about a recent study showing that people who are neurotic live longer.  The study, conducted by Catharine Gale of the University of Edinburgh et al., was huge -- Gale and her team tracked 500,000 people aged 37 to 73 in the United Kingdom for six years, after giving them a personality assessment designed to determine their degree of anxiety and neuroticism.

The results were fascinating.  Even when controlled for typical risk factors -- smoking, heavy alcohol use, genetic predispositions to heart disease, cancer, or stroke -- neurotic people were less likely to die young.  Gale says:

There are disadvantages to being high in neuroticism, in that it makes people more prone to experiencing negative emotions.  But our findings suggest it may have some advantages too...  For some individuals, it seems to offer some protection against dying prematurely. 

At this point, Gale has no idea why this trend exists, so the next step is to figure out whether there's a causative link to something else, either genetic or behavioral.  Their first conjecture was that neurotic people, being worriers, might be less prone to engaging in unhealthy habits, but that turned out to be incorrect.  The percentage of smoking, drinking, and obesity among the neurotic group was not appreciably different from that of the control group.  Gale says:

We had thought that greater worry or vulnerability might lead people to behave in a healthier way and hence lower the risk of death, but that was not the case...  We now have to figure out why [this correlation] exists.

My own supposition is that neurotic people don't actually live longer, it just seems longer to their family and friends.  Heaven knows my wife, who has the patience of a saint, puts up with a great deal from my tendency toward getting anxious about damn near everything.  Amazingly enough, she still likes to travel with me, which I find a little baffling.  Sometimes I even drive myself crazy; I can't imagine what it'd be like for a normal person to put up with my continual twitching.

In any case, the whole thing is pretty fascinating, and I'm looking forward to seeing what more comes out of the study by Gale et al.  But now I need to wrap this up, because I have a race in three weeks and I need to start worrying about it.  What shall I fret about this time?  Maybe being chased and mangled by a Rottweiler.  I don't think I've used that one yet.

Refusing to play by the rules

As a fiction writer, I'm frequently asked where I get the ideas for my stories.  I sometimes respond, "Being dropped on your head as an infant will do that to you," but the truth is, I have no idea.  A few of them have a clear moment of origin (such as my novel Gears, the plot for which first came to me when I read a paper on the Antikythera Mechanism).

For most of them, however, the genesis is not so clear.  I've had stories that came from a single powerful image that begs explanation, such as my short story "The Hourglass," which resulted from a vivid mental image of two young men, ostensibly strangers to each other, having a peculiar conversation over pints of Guinness at a dimly-lit bar.  I then had to figure out what they were talking about, and why... and what it all meant.

A lot of my ideas pop into my head at unexpected moments, when my mind and/or body is otherwise occupied.  I've had plot lines (or solutions to plot problems) suddenly appear while showering, while on a run, while mowing the lawn, while trying to get to sleep (the latter is especially annoying, because it necessitates my getting up and writing it down, lest I forget what I'd come up with).

In any case, most of the time, the origins of my own creative expression are as mystifying to me as they are to my readers.  So the most honest answer to the question "Where do you get your ideas?" is "I simply don't know."  But a recent bit of research has elucidated at least a piece of the origin of creativity.

Apparently, you become more creative when your rational thought processes are suppressed.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The study, by Caroline Di Bernardi Luft, Ioanna Zioga, Michael J. Banissy, and Joydeep Bhattacharya of the University of London, which appeared in Nature last month, is entitled "Relaxed Learning Constraints Through Cathodal IDCS on the Left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex," and at first probably sounds like something that would only be of interest to serious neuroscience geeks.  Here's how the authors describe their own work:

We solve problems by applying previously learned rules.  The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a pivotal role in automating this process of rule induction.  Despite its usual efficiency, this process fails when we encounter new problems in which past experience leads to a mental rut.  Learned rules could therefore act as constraints which need to be removed in order to change the problem representation for producing the solution.  We investigated the possibility of suppressing the DLPFC by transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to facilitate such representational change.  Participants solved matchstick arithmetic problems before and after receiving cathodal, anodal or sham tDCS to the left DLPFC.  Participants who received cathodal tDCS were more likely to solve the problems that require the maximal relaxation of previously learned constraints than the participants who received anodal or sham tDCS.  We conclude that cathodal tDCS over the left DLPFC might facilitate the relaxation of learned constraints, leading to a successful representational change.

In other words, if you suppress the part of the brain that understands and obeys the rules, you have more flexibility with regards to seeing solutions that require lateral, or "outside-of-the-box," thinking.

As an example of one of the problems the researchers gave their subjects that required lateral thinking, try out the following.

You're shown a (false) equation made of matchsticks that looks like this:

III = III + III

How can you make this a true statement with only moving one matchstick?

It turns out that there are two ways to do it, but both involve the expedient of adjusting not the numbers, but the equal or plus sign.  You could do this:

III = III = III

Or you could take any of the matchsticks and lay it across the equals sign to make an "is not equal to" sign -- one possibility of which is:

II ≠ III + III

Both, of course, require a bit of creative thinking.  As Luft put it, "[Problems like this one] are very hard because in mathematics it is not a valid operation at all – we normally don’t decompose the plus sign, you see that as an entire entity."

It turns out that we become better at seeing these kinds of solutions when we are given transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) that temporarily suppresses the activity of the aforementioned left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  Nick Davis, a professor of psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University (and who was not involved in the research), found the study by Luft et al. to be fascinating.  "Creativity is highly prized in most areas of our lives, from work to leisure to politics and war," Davis said.  "When the [left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex] was ‘cooled down’, the brain seems to have stopped applying old rules, and been more successful at finding new rules – this is the essence of creativity in problem-solving."

All of which makes me wonder if the most creative people have less activity in the left DLPFC to begin with, at least intermittently.  And also, if so-called "mindless" activities -- such as running, showering, or mowing the lawn -- naturally slow down the left DLPFC, allowing creative ideas to bubble up unimpeded.

I'd love to see that researched... maybe it's a direction that Luft and her team could go.

From there, of course, the next step would be to find a way to switch the rational, rules-obeying brain module off and on at will.  I, for one, would love that, especially now, because I'm at a point in my work-in-progress where I've kind of painted myself into a corner.  I know I'll find my way out eventually -- I always seem to -- but while you're there, operating within what Luft et al. call "learned constraints" it's pretty damn frustrating.

Bloomin' onions for Satan

As I mentioned earlier this week in my post about the "Majestic 12" conspiracy, once you've fallen down the rabbit hole of seeing conspiracies everywhere, there's no getting out.  Anyone who doesn't see the pattern is a dupe; anyone who tries to argue you out of believing it is a shill, or worse yet...

... one of the conspirators.

And the power of a conspiracy theory seems completely unrelated to its plausibility.  After all, we still have people believing that HAARP is creating hurricanes and tornadoes and blizzards and earthquakes, despite the fact that (1) it was shut down completely two years ago, (2) it never could do that stuff in the first place, and (3) if it could have done that stuff, there's no way in hell the government would have shut it down.

But logic doesn't stop people from yammering on as if what they were saying made sense.  Which is why a tweet a week ago about Outback Steak House having ties to the Illuminati has gone viral.

It all started with Twitter user @eatmyaesthetics, who noticed that if you mapped out the positions of five Outback Steak House in various cities, you could connect them with lines to form a pentagram -- a five-pointed star.  Of course, the emphasis here was on the sinister connotations of this symbol, especially when it's upside-down, which it was if you turned the map the right way.

Then the retweet machine got started, and within short order the tweet had been reposted tens of thousands of times.  Undoubtedly some of the people who retweeted it did so because of the humor value, but some of them evidently believed that @eatmyaesthetics was on to something, because people started mapping out the positions Outback in their own cities, and lo and behold, found the same scary pattern.

Then Lauren Evans over at Jezebel threw her two cents' worth into the mix, saying, "Now that I know the truth, it's impossible to see it any other way.  And you don't get a ten-ounce steak for twelve dollars without at least a little help from the devil."

Which was tongue-in-cheek.  I think.

Then Outback itself got involved, first stating that that their official position was that they "neither would confirm nor deny" Illuminati involvement in their restaurants, following it up with a tweet that "If the Bloomin' Onion is evil, then we don't want to be good."  They added a winky-face emoji after the tweet, which could alternately be interpreted as "we're kidding, of course" or "we are an evil agency allied with the Forces of Darkness to engage in mind control via drugs sprinkled on your medium-rare ribeye steak."

All of which induced multiple orgasms in the conspiracy theory world.

But here's the thing, of course; what shape did they expect you'd get by connecting five dots with lines?  Here's an experiment I want you to run: get a sheet of paper, and draw five dots on it.  The only requirement is that no three of the dots can be in a straight line.  See if you can find a configuration of dots that you can't inscribe with a pentagram.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

So this isn't so much a conspiracy theory as it is a test to detect who failed 10th-grade geometry.  In fact, any business that has more than five locations in a city can be connected with at least a reasonably recognizable pentagram.  So if Outback is an arm of the Illuminati, then so are McDonald's, Dairy Queen, and Taco Bell.

Although now that I come to think of it, I've been suspicious about Taco Bell myself for a while.

So as usual, we've got a case of what Michael Shermer calls "You can't miss it when I tell you what's there."  The upshot is that if you like Outback, you don't have to worry that part of the money you spend for dinner is going to support the New World Order.  Your biggest concern is that there have been people whose arteries have clogged up just looking at "Bloomin' Onions," but I doubt seriously whether that has anything to do with the Illuminati.

Our alien ancestors

A friend and long-time faithful reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link a few days ago to a webpage entitled, "Expert Says Humans Are Aliens -- and We Were Brought to Earth Hundreds of Thousands of Years Ago."

Now, I hasten to state for the record that this friend didn't send me this because she believes it; she clearly sent me this so I would do a faceplant on my desk so hard that it would leave a comical impression of my computer keyboard on my forehead for the rest of the day.  But I have to admit it starts out with a good question, to wit: "What if Humans are the aliens we've been looking for all along?"

To which I would answer: "What if C-A-T spelled 'dog'?"  Even if you were to entertain seriously the possibility that the ancestors of today's humans were dropped off here from another planet, which I am not for a moment suggesting you should, there's the pesky little problem of human DNA showing 70-80% homology with that of other mammal species, presuming of course that those species didn't come from other planets, too.

I mean, I'm a little suspicious about platypuses, myself, because it's hard to imagine how evolution would produce something so completely ridiculous looking.  It's not so hard to believe that aliens deposited platypuses in Australia as some kind of bizarre prank, and we humans just haven't gotten the joke yet.

But I digress.

So we're off to a rocky start, but it gets worse.  The author goes on to describe how the development of written communication is an indication that we're different from other species, and the only possible reason for this is that we're aliens.  But the problem is that you can do this with damn near any species on Earth.  For example: the archer fish of Southeast Asia has evolved the ability to spit water at insects on overhanging leaves and branches, to knock them into the water, whereupon the archer fish has dinner.  To my knowledge, no other animal can do this.

Does this mean the archer fish is also an alien?

Argument #2 goes something like, "Humans can't be evolved from other terrestrial life forms, because if you took a typical human and put him/her in the jungle, in short order (s)he would become jaguar chow, if (s)he didn't starve to death first."  But again, consider other earthly species; of course if you stick some unlucky individual into an environment that's hostile, or radically different from where it evolved, it's gonna die.  I'm guessing if you took a spider monkey and put it on the coast of Greenland, you would very quickly have a monkeysicle.  But that doesn't mean that monkeys aren't from the Planet Earth; it just means they're not from Greenland.

Oh, and then there's the argument that since we can't look at the sun directly without hurting our eyes, we must be from a planet where the sun is dimmer, or it's cloudy all the time.

For fuck's sake.

A photograph of my Cousin Fred, taken at last year's family reunion on the planet Gzork.  I told him to smile, but this is the best he could do.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then the "expert" gets on board, in the person of Dr. Ellis Silver, who has written a book called Humans Are Not From Earth: A Scientific Evaluation of the Evidence.  The first thing I did was to look up Dr. Silver's book on Amazon, and I found it had received 115 reviews, which follow the usual horseshoe-shaped distribution typical of wacko ideas; lots of 5s, lots of 1s, and not a hell of a lot in between.  In other words, either you're a true believer or a doubter right from the outset, and the book itself didn't make any difference to either group.  Here is a sampler of the reviews:

• [T]here is not a shred of logic, science, empricism, or plausibility in this book.  It is SO bad that I'm almost inclined to think it's a hoax.
• This author seems to have no understanding of either evolution or the scientific method.  On the bright side, whenever I go outside now and find myself squinting at the sun, I take comfort in the notion that on my home planet it's always cloudy.
• If you're thinking of buying this book save yourself the time and money and don't.  More evidence to support my opinion: study the book cover for a few moments and tell me it wasn't made up in MS Paint in 2 minutes.
• The author really should take a couple anthropology classes at a community college.

So not exactly ringing endorsements.  The author then goes on to cite a different "expert," one Robert Sepehr, who has written his own book (of course), this one called Species With Amnesia: Our Forbidden History.  So of course I had to check that one out.  The basic idea here is apparently that the Rh-negative blood type allele is weird, therefore we have to be the descendants of technologically advanced aliens who have forgotten where we came from and are now in the process of reinventing everything our ancestors knew.  Which, I think we can all agree, is what lawyers call an "air-tight argument."

Only one review for Sepehr's book stood out:

• [T]his author is obviously creating multiple Amazon accounts to leave favorable rankings and reviews on his books.  Click on the hyperlinks of the names of the people leaving five star reviews; all of them have left reviews on Sepehr's books only, all 5-star, and most left on the same day!  The author's credentials seem nonexistent, and with 5 minutes of research I could plainly see that the majority of praise for his work online is fake.

So there's that.

On the other hand, my mother was Rh-negative, meaning she has not just one, but two Rh-negative alleles, so she's alien on both sides of her family.

Which, now that I think about it, explains a great deal about my mother's relatives.

In any case, the whole thing seems to be a non-starter, which is kind of a shame.  I'd love nothing better than to discover that I'm an alien, especially if it meant that at some point my extraterrestrial cousins would whoosh down on their hyper-light-speed spaceship and pick me up to return to our home world, light years away from Donald Trump.  But I suppose that's too much to hope for, even if I do have at least some Rh-negative alien DNA.

Majestic 12, anachronistic typeset, and Cigarette-Smoking Man

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia said, "You haven't yet 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 are 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.")

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.

But wait, you may be saying; what if the government was engaged in covert nasty stuff?  How would you know, given that the government would certainly deny their involvement, claim it was a hoax?   Well, first, I'm sure that the government is, in fact, engaged in covert 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?

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 skeevy way of his, and walk off into the night until the next episode.