Skepticblog

Working on refinements to my upcoming cryptozoology book with Skepticblog’s own Don Prothero (due out later in 2012) gave me a chance yesterday to dip back into Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy’s fascinating 2005 book about her studies of alien abductees, Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. I thought I might share a couple of passages from the book here, partly because they dovetail so nicely with my own “Reasonableness of Weird Things” arguments.

Clancy’s area of primary interest is not skeptical investigation of paranormal claims, but false memory. To perform an ”honest broker” service as thorough and reliable guides to the evidence on paranormal topics, skeptical investigators are ethically obliged to seriously consider the (unlikely) possibility of paranormal phenomena. In her own work with abductees, Clancy’s obligations were different. She felt justified in taking it pretty much for granted that her subjects had not been kidnapped by space aliens. Abductees were, for Clancy, a proxy group to allow her to examine questions related to a separate population’s “recovered” memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Research into abuse is of course very complicated—and ethically fraught. It is surrounded by tension and the potential for harm for the simple reason that abuse really happens. By contrast, Clancy wrote,

…alien abductees were people who had developed memories of a traumatic event that I could be fairly certain had never occurred. A major problem with my research on false-memory creation by victims of alleged sexual abuse was the fact that it was almost impossible to determine whether they had, in fact, been abused. I needed to repeat the study with a population that I could be sure had ‘recovered’ false memories. Alien abductions seemed to fit the bill.¹

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Skeptics sometimes express impatience with discussion of seemingly quaint paranormal claims. (“What, Bigfoot—again?”) But the great lesson of paranormal history is that it is a wheel: no matter how passé or fringe a claim may sound, it is almost guaranteed to come ’round again, in the same form or in some novel mutation.

In the last few days, global headlines have resurrected a nostalgic case from my childhood, just in time for Christmas: “The Shroud of Turin Wasn’t Faked, Italian Experts Say.” The cutting edge of yesterday—today! Even in my youth, this mystery was centuries old.

The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot length of linen cloth that bears a stylized picture of a bearded man. Legend holds the Shroud to be a burial cloth wrapped around the Biblical Jesus following his execution. This linen was allegedly flash-imprinted with an image of Jesus during his miraculous resurrection, presumably by an intense burst of energy released under such circumstances.

The case for fraud has been strong since the 14th century, but enthusiasts insist on rolling that wheel ’round again. According to news reports this week, Italian scientists used an infrared CO₂ laser to scorch images onto cloth and ”conducted dozens of hours of tests with X-rays and ultraviolet lights” in an effort to prove that the image could be created by a burst of electromagnetic energy. (Here’s a PDF of their Italian-language report.) What is the wavelength of a resurrection miracle? If there is one, the scientists were unable to discover what it might be. They learned (in ABC News’s paraphrase) that “no laser existed to date that could replicate the singular nature of markings on the shroud.” (continue reading…)

Twenty years ago this past October, I discovered the skeptical literature at a panel discussion featuring BC Skeptics spokesperson Barry Beyerstein (a CSICOP Fellow, and psychopharmacologist at Simon Fraser University). In 2008, a year after Barry’s death, I took the opportunity to write about his influence upon me at the fledgling BC Skeptics blog site. Today, the BC Skeptics have largely faded from the stage, and I recently discovered that my tribute to Barry is no longer live. Happily, I am able to re-post it here now (with some minor revisions). For your interest, I have also talked about Beyerstein’s influence on my work on other, more recent occasions, including this eSkeptic article and my 2011 LogiCon keynote address (available on YouTube.)

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In recent months I’ve had my head down in research for my upcoming cryptozoology book with Donald Prothero. Especially daunting, by weight of years and by weight of literature, has been the vast topic of sea serpents (an old tradition embodied today by cryptids including Cadborosaurus and Ogopogo). But I did manage to find an excuse to spend a few minutes playing with playdough at the kitchen table as part of that research. I thought I might share that here, just for fun.

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JREF President D.J. Grothe coaches zombie horde. Photograph by Eduard Pastor

Just in time for Halloween, our colleagues over at the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) have enlisted a (rather modest) zombie horde to carry a serious consumer protection message: if psychics who accept money for communicating with the dead cannot actually do so, then they are taking unfair advantage of the bereaved. Led by JREF President D.J. Grothe, these volunteers carried the JREF’s Million Dollar Challenge to alleged spirit medium James Van Praagh.

Uncouth as zombies are known to be, Grothe and JREF Communications Director Sadie Crabtree assured me that this particular group of undead Americans excelled in politeness. Van Praagh’s event was not disrupted, and the group left when requested to do so.

“All of our volunteers were determined not to disrupt the event; we just wanted to get James Van Praagh to come out and talk to us, or to capture on video the fact that he’s hiding from our Million Dollar Challenge,” Grothe told me. “We stuck to the publicly accessible area and we left when we were asked. We didn’t do the action to disrupt an event, but to highlight the offense to reason and conscience that these stage mediums cause when they take advantage of people suffering from loss.”

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Daniel Loxton and Margriet Ruurs on stage at the 2011 Vancouver International Writers Festival during pre-show sound check.

I’ve just returned from the 2011 Vancouver International Writers Festival, where I shared the stage with veteran children’s author Margriet Ruurs at a sold out event at Granville Island’s Waterfront Theatre.

Our event was a behind the scenes tour of Margriet’s recent books (including Amazing Animals, beautifully illustrated by W. Allan Hancock) and my own new Ankylosaur Attack (illustrated by yours truly with Jim W. W. Smith).

Margriet’s talk introduced the audience to the production arc that takes an illustrated children’s book from idea to store shelves. My talk discussed some of the technical tricks and challenges of photorealistic CG dinosaur art that I’ve previously shared on Skepticblog and with Scientific American. I also took the audience through a number of step-by-step demonstrations of the modeling, texturing and compositing processes used in creating Ankylosaur Attack—and I thought I might share a peek at the compositing process here today.

Spread from Ankylosaur Attack (Kids Can Press, 2011). Art by Daniel Loxton with Jim W.W. Smith. All rights reserved. (Click image to enlarge)

With the release of my new dinosaur storybook, Ankylosaur Attack (available from most booksellers, including Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Skeptic.com) many younger scientists (especially those aged four to eight) are asking, “How did you make these pictures look so real?” I’ll be discussing that further at the Vancouver International Writers Festival next week, but I thought I might give Skepticblog readers a first glimpse behind the scenes.

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Wow—what a couple of days! I’m very proud to be able to say that my Junior Skeptic-based children’s book Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be took home the national Lane Anderson Award as the best Canadian science book for young readers at an award dinner in Toronto last night. The win was reported today by the National Post, the Vancouver Sun, Quill & Quire, the Canadian Children’s Book Center and other media.

This is an astonishing honor, for which I express my deepest thanks to the Fitzhenry Family Foundation. I cannot possibly express how much this means to me, and to everyone at the Skeptics Society. As an educational nonprofit organization, the Skeptics Society gathers folks who care—really care in our marrow—about sharing our love of science. With the creation of Junior Skeptic over 10 years ago, the Skeptics Society made a sustained commitment to science and critical thinking outreach for children—a commitment in which the Skeptics Society remains a trailblazer among skeptical organizations.

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Llamas! I mean, sheep. I used to know a lot about these critters, back in the 1990s when I took this picture.

I was saddened last weekend to miss Dragon*Con’s Skeptrack in Atlanta—usually a highlight of my year—due to family and professional obligations. I knew months in advance that I wouldn’t be able to go, but there were a number of panels on topics close to my heart (on the scope of skepticism, its history, and its future) in which I would have loved to participate. (Luckily, I was able to watch some of those streaming live, completely for free—something some of you may wish to note for next year.)

But for my family and I, there was a major silver lining: the 144th Saanich Fair! Western Canada’s longest running agricultural fair, the Saanich Fair has been a tradition in my family since—well, since about the 110th Saanich Fair. There’s a special kind of life satisfaction that can only arise when you gaze in wonder upon prize pumpkins and blue ribbon pies. It casts a powerful nostalgic spell. The scents of hay, dust, and manure. The cooing rows of fancy pigeons, each more Darwinian than the last. Teams of draft horses. Supporting the Lions Club through the delicious means of volunteer-sold midway hotdogs. Hearing the screams of teenagers spun, flipped, shaken, and dangled upside down for no good reason. It’s all so familiar and magical—the pleasure of being transported back to childhood (especially now that I have a child of my own to share it with).

But that sense of time travel is an illusion. Which brings me to my topic for today: the fading of expertise.

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Image by Daniel Loxton with Jim W. W. Smith. © 2011. All Rights Reserved.

Finally! After a year (and more) of work and months of anticipation, I’m able to reveal my newest children’s book: Ankylosaur Attack, from Kids Can Press.

Illustrated by the Junior Skeptic art team of yours truly with Jim W. W. Smith, Ankylosaur Attack is a full-color hardcover storybook about a day in the life of a dinosaur. It’s intended for my youngest audience yet: ages four and up. (It’s approved by my own five-year old, whose discerning taste in dinosaurs is unparalleled.)

Ankylosaur Attack is in stock now at Amazon.com and available for pre-order at Amazon.ca. (The official release date is September 1, 2011. Skeptic.com and most other major North American booksellers will have it in stock in the coming days.)

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