The truth is that self-identified skeptics are not so terribly good at critical or scientific thinking. There’s little shame in that; nobody is all that good at those things. Nor, on the other hand, are paranormal “believers” all that terribly bad. Regardless of our intellectual commitments, regardless of our investments in this or that ideology or belief, humans everywhere are pretty damn smart—and also pretty dumb.

To get at this complexity, I’d like to share this prescient 1857 description of an approach to fringe claims that we would now call “scientific skepticism.”

The power of drawing correct inferences from what we see, and even of knowing what we do really see, and what we only imagine, is vastly augmented by the rigorous training of the faculties which long habits of observing certain classes of phenomena induce; and every man of science must have met with numberless cases in which statements egregiously false have been made to him in the most perfect good faith; his informant implicitly believing that he was simply telling what he had seen with his own eyes. A person the other day assured me, that he had frequently seen hummingbirds sucking flowers in England; I did not set him down as a liar, because he was a person of indubitable honor; his acquaintance with natural history, however was small, and he had fallen into the very natural error of mistaking a moth for a bird.

It is quite proper that, when evidence is presented of certain occurrences, the admission of which would overturn what we have come to consider as fixed laws, or against which there exists a high degree of antecedent improbability—that evidence should be received with great suspicion. It should be carefully sifted; possible cause of error should be suggested; the powers of the observer to judge of the facts should be examined; the actual bounding line between sensuous perception and mental inference should be critically investigated; and confirmatory, yet independent testimony should be sought. Yet, when we have done all this, we should ever remember that truth is stranger than fiction; that our power to judge of fixed laws is itself very imperfect; and that indubitable phenomena are ever and anon brought to light, which compel us to revise our code.¹

Couldn’t say it better myself! But this is not a quote from anyone that skeptics think of as one of “us,” but from one of the more infamous creation theorists of all time: Philip Henry Gosse, whose Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot proposed that the apparent geological antiquity of the Earth was built into God’s instantaneous creation as a kind of virtual past. It is a book that stands as the ultimate example of an untestable hypothesis in the history of science—”spectacular nonsense” in the words of Stephen Jay Gould.² Moreover, the sensibly skeptical passage above is part Gosse’s defense of the great Atlantic sea serpent, a cryptid whose existence he advocated alongside a Bigfoot-like creature in Venezuela—and even unicorns!

“So what?” you may think. Even the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose, right? Gosse made some skeptical noises, but clearly he should be dismissed as a kook…shouldn’t he? Once again we find that it’s a bit more complicated than that. As Gould explained, Gosse was also one of great science popularizers of the English-speaking world, “the David Attenborough of his day, Britain’s finest popular narrator of nature’s fascination. He wrote a dozen books on plants and animals, lectured widely to popular audiences, and published several technical papers on marine invertebrates.”³ He was a friendly personal acquaintance of Charles Darwin, to whose theory of natural selection he gave a friendly shout-out and hefty quote earlier in the same book that promotes sea serpents.⁴ You may even have a part of Gosse’s scientific legacy right in your own home: he was among the first to experiment with salt water “aquariums”—a word he popularized with his books on the topic, inspiring both the continuing household hobby and the tourist industry of marine animal exhibition parks. It’s fair to look back at Gosse through many different modern lenses, as a scientist, pseudoscientist, naturalist, supernaturalist, skeptic, wild-eyed speculator, creationist, cryptozoologist, and more. Each description is as true as such retrospective judgements can be; each is also incomplete. Gosse was complicated.

As are we all. In more recent years, astronomer Carl Sagan described science and skepticism as “an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas.”⁵ He was of course correct about the value of this “exquisite balance,” and movement skeptics often quote that evocative phrase. But here’s the thing: everyone embodies that balance to a substantial degree. Every person on every side of every paranormal question believes that they are both skeptical and open-minded—and they are all both correct and incorrect. This is possible because people are people, and not cardboard cutouts. We’re verbs, and we’re complicated. Our internal equalizer bars of gullible and shrewd, foolish and wise, willful and humble are in constant flux. We all try our best. We all get the balance wrong.

Does this mean there is no value to the skeptic label? Is it an affectation, a flag for arbitrary tribal affiliation? I’ll come back to my own defense of the term in another post, but for now: I think the answer in some ways is “Yes.” I’m persuaded that there is nothing very special or different about skeptics. Certainly, we are not immune to base tribal impulses. It’s worth considering that Sagan’s “exquisite balance” passage followed immediately after these sentences of warning:

I want to say a little more about the burden of skepticism. You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don’t see things as clearly as you do. This is a potential social danger of an organization like CSICOP. We have to guard carefully against it.⁶

Remember as well that most skeptics are not scientists, but (at best) science enthusiasts. The social danger Sagan warned about is not merely that we may be impolite, but that we may express certainty that goes beyond the evidence, or beyond our own command of the evidence. Science-y language and the unearned pretension of scientific authority — pseudoscience, in short — may be used as a cudgel by those selling science just as easily as by those selling homeopathy.

And yet, the situation is a bit more complicated than that, too, isn’t it? Because while people are much the same, in all our flaws and glory, ideas are not. As Sagan explained, it’s not enough to have skepticism and open-mindedness in our hearts; we must also have rigorous techniques for putting these shared human values to work on the task of untangling the external complexities of the universe and the internal complexities of our biases and tribal dispositions. “Some ideas are better than others,” Sagan wrote. “The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science.”⁷

Which brings us to a further irony of our nature, which I’ll leave to Mike McRae’s Tribal Science to describe: “The universe is at once confusing, majestic, beautiful, logical and incomprehensible. And yet something in our tribal wiring makes it impossible for us to stop trying to understand it.”⁸

To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.

If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don’t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetizing diet.¹

This straightforward advice—try not to take people’s word for stuff, especially when we’re promoting a position in public—is a core skeptical concept. It underpins all of skeptical scholarship, for responsible skeptical outreach demands the due diligence exercise of checking everything twice. Someone says they saw something? Maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. We ought to try to find out. Someone says they know something? Well, maybe they do—and maybe they don’t. If skeptical sources (for example) confidently assert that a case is solved or a paranormal topic debunked, we ought to ask ourselves, “I wonder if this topic is really understood, and how well?” —and then try to find out before repeating assertions from the sources we admire. Sometimes it turns out that the best available scholarship is preliminary, or incomplete, or even downright speculative.

As I’ve learned again and again from my own research experience, it’s not even safe to assume that apparently reputable secondary sources provide accurate quotations, let alone correct analysis. This reminds me of a saying in my family: “Everyone is just some guy.” Celebrity authors, paranormalists, scientists, skeptics—all just people feeling their way as best they can with the incomplete information they have in front of them. I’m just some guy; why take my word on anything much? Why take anybody’s?

And yet we have to. There is no practical alternative: we have to take other people’s word all the time, on all sorts of stuff. As I’ve argued, we lay skeptics have extremely little justifiable ability to dissent from the prevailing current of opinion among domain experts on any topic of mainstream science or scholarship. Without deep expertise earned through years of training, we are often unable even to understand why experts think the things they do, let alone determine whether they’re right.

Nor is the course always clear even among experts within their own fields—perhaps especially in areas relevant to skeptical research. Consider this troubling meditation from parapsychologist and skeptic Susan Blackmore, reflecting upon her Ten Years of Negative Research in Parapsychology:

How far could I generalize these negative results? …I had to ask whether my negative results applied only to those experiments carried out by me, at those particular times, or whether they applied to the whole of parapsychology. There is no obvious answer to that question. … How could I weigh my own results against the results of other people, bearing in mind that mine tended to be negative ones while everyone else’s seemed to be positive ones? …  At one extreme I could not just believe my own results and ignore everyone else’s. That would make science impossible. Science cannot operate unless people generally believe each other’s results. Science is, and has to be, a collective enterprise.

At the other extreme I could not believe everyone else’s results and ignore my own. That would be even more pointless. There would have been no point in all those years of experiments if I didn’t take my own results seriously.²

What’s the answer to these conflicting challenges to our wish for reliable knowledge? There is no answer. Or rather, there are techniques to somewhat reduce our fallibility—techniques we call “science”—but no magic window on reality. We’re stuck with uncertainty on all topics, at all times.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Bertrand Russell was quite right to observe, “When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.”³ But let’s try to set that too-easy response  aside for a moment. Let’s set ourselves on the less secure footing of genuinely confronting uncertainty—of letting the problem of uncertainty resonate for a while, before turning to the standard canned answer.

Skeptics make much of our rhetoric of the virtue of doubt, but often we mean merely that we think we are right and the other guy is wrong. We may well be correct, but the belief that we are correct is small achievement—no more and no less than what everybody thinks already. We are, all of us, built for belief. “Man is a credulous animal,” Russell explained, “and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.”⁴ Given the innate human talent for unearned certainty, I submit that it is valuable for skeptics to open ourselves to the idea that the world is very much more complicated than we currently understand.

This feeling of intellectual vertigo is easier to describe than it is to achieve—and it is effectively impossible to sustain. I’m reminded here of the title of Damien Hirst’s famous sculpture featuring a preserved shark, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” Like the knowledge of our own mortality, we’re just not built to comprehend the depths of our own ignorance, nor to feel the possible truth of things we believe to be false. I mean, we can say it—”Maybe they’re right”—but moments of truly honest inward doubt are rare and vertiginous things. There’s abstract understanding that we could, in principle, for the sake of argument be wrong, and then there’s truly knowing it—and the latter decays like experimental antimatter, reverting almost instantly back to the comforting, constructed reality that served our ancestors in their search for food and shelter. Yet fleeting as that feeling is, it’s worth reaching for, experiencing, and internalizing to the greatest degree we can manage.

Maybe they’re right. I could be wrong right now. 

This, after all, is the heart of both modern scientific skepticism and the older philosophical traditions that gave us the word “skeptic.” Certainty will always be suspect. The problems with knowing will always remain.

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

I won’t comment on Clancy’s research in regard to sexual abuse—it is not my area of expertise, and I have not read Clancy’s book on that topic—but I was very struck by her sympathy for abductees.

Throughout the book, she took pains to emphasize that alien abductees have ordinary mental health (with “little evidence that this was a particularly psychopathological group”²) and that their beliefs are fundamentally understandable—given the information they have to work with.

The disconnect between these experiencers and their critics is that only one group has access to what appears to abductees to be the key information in their own cases: the overwhelming subjective reality of their personal, visceral experiences. So real are abduction memories to those who hold them, in fact, that this subjective reality can in some sense be quantified.

And we don’t have to accept only the abductees’ word for it when they say they feel powerful emotions as they remember their abductions. Laboratory data confirm it. My colleagues and I…recorded the heart rate, sweating, breathing, and muscle tone of abductees while they recalled their abduction memories. Not only were the physiological reactions of abductees similar to those of documented trauma victims, such as combat vets and rape victims; in some cases, they were even more extreme.³

Think about that one for a moment.

However, abductees do not start with such overwhelmingly persuasive memories. As Clancy explained, “coming to believe one has been abducted by aliens doesn’t happen overnight. It progresses in fits and starts, through many stages, in which the possibility comes to seem more and more believable.”⁴ Victims first have an experience or series of experiences they find odd or difficult to explain; then they begin to assemble this strange data into a pattern, using the best explanatory framework available to them; eventually they may wind up in the hands of a hypnotherapist specializing in recovered memories of alien abduction; and then, finally, abduction memories emerge under the influence of hypnosis.

Recovered memory is a murky, complex area—too murky to explore in detail in a blog post. For today, I would like to focus on the period in an abductee’s development before vivid abduction memories are recovered—the period before they become part of a therapy relationship or support structure that may generate traumatic memories. In this early period, “abducted by aliens” is not a permanently cemented subjective reality for an abductee, but a suspicion or inference. Once one can literally remember being abducted, belief is essentially guaranteed. But how do people come to suspect that they might have been abducted? That is, for skeptics, a more interesting and fruitful question.

Everybody I spoke with had one thing in common: they’d begun to wonder if they’d been abducted only after they experienced things they felt were anomalous—weird, abnormal, unusual things. The experiences varied from person to person. They ranged from specific events (“I’ve wondered why my pajamas were on the floor when I woke up”) to symptoms (“I’ve been having so many nosebleeds—I never have nosebleeds”) to marks on the body (“I wondered where I got the coin-shaped bruises on my back”) to more or less fixed personality traits (“I feel different from other people, a loner—like I’m always on the outside looking in”). Sometimes they included all of the above. Though widely varied, the experiences resulted in the same general question: “What could be the cause?” In short, it appears that coming to believe you’ve been abducted by aliens is part of an attribution process. Alien-abduction beliefs reflect attempts to explain odd, unusual, and perplexing experiences.⁵ 

In many cases the original seed for later, hypnosis-recovered memories may be well-understood but frightening natural phenomena such as sleep paralysis (a sleep disruption in which awareness of surroundings returns before the dreaming and immobility of sleep are complete). According to Clancy, abductees with recovered memories find the sleep paralysis explanation “stunningly unpersuasive. After all, they’re the ones who were abducted—the ones who experienced the fear and the horror. And when you pit the cold, remote virtues of scientific data against the immediacy of personal experience, science is bound to lose.”⁶ 

At earlier stages, however, abductees have no such certainty. What they have are increasingly troubling questions that they need answered.

Consider an experiencer of sleep paralysis—any of countless millions. Paralyzed, hallucinating, terrified, perhaps sensing or seeing a presence in the room. How do people cope with the aftermath of such an unexpected and seemingly inexplicable experience? Well, they’re humans. They’re smart. They try on a range of explanations, and try to reason it out. But here’s the problem: everybody knows about ghosts and demons and aliens and gods, but only a few people know about the normal brain functioning that can mimic those phenomena. As Clancy put it,

When you are looking for the cause of an anomalous experience, your search is limited to the set of explanations you’ve actually heard of. For most of us, the set of possible explanations is far from complete. We’re unaware of the prevalence of sleep paralysis, sexual dysfunction, anxiety disorders, perceptual aberrations, chemical imbalances, memory lapses, and psychosomatic pain. But our set of possible explanations does include alien abduction, because everyone knows about aliens and their modus operandi (they come in the night, fill you with terror, kidnap you and erase your memories).⁷ 

Once people begin to try out the culturally available scripts (“Was it a ghost?” perhaps, or “Could I have been abducted?”) they find more and more pieces that seem to fit. The reason abductees endorse abduction, Clancy discovered, “is actually quite scientific: it is the best fit for their data—their personal experiences.”⁸  It is exactly their reasoning powers, their human legacy as puzzle-solvers, that leads them into that trap. And belief is a trap: once you start on that path, it’s very difficult to turn back.

But what might they do with more complete information—with an alternate explanatory framework—at an earlier point in their investigations? My personal, anecdotal experience is that this is one of the most powerful interventions that skeptics ever get the chance to perform: simply telling puzzled people that sleep paralysis (for example) is a thing. It’s a conversation I’ve had many times as people have described their sense of a ghostly presence at the foot of the bed, their terror at the blankets pulled back through supernatural influence, or other frightening classic experiences. “Well, I don’t know what happened to you. I wasn’t there, and I didn’t share your experience. But have you heard of something called ‘sleep paralysis’? It’s a normal event that can create experiences similar to the one you describe.” I’ve had strangers latch onto that like a drowning person grabs a rope, because, no, they hadn’t heard of that. They hadn’t heard any viable explanation except “I was attacked by a ghost” or “I am a lunatic.”

So the question I’ll leave you with today is this: what can skeptics do to ensure that our forums and media and comment threads and public presentations are welcoming to those people who most need reliable information about paranormal topics? What can we do to make the skeptics movement a safe place for vulnerable people who need our help—a safe place for people who (for example) think they were probably abducted by aliens?

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.”

Full-length photograph of the Shroud of Turin which is said to have been the cloth placed on Jesus at the time of his burial. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

All this business with lasers is neither here nor there. I’m reminded of magician James Randi’s line from Flim-Flam! about the pseudoscience technique of the Provocative Fact.

The same technique was used by the Gellerites when they assured us that at no time did Uri Geller use laser beams, magnets, or chemicals to bend spoons. This was quite true. It is also quite true that he had no eggbeaters, asbestos insulation, or powdered aspirin in his pockets either. So what?¹

Turns out it’s hard to make a Shroud copy using lasers. That’s hardly surprising, but neither is it relevant. There was never a good reason to think the Shroud was created by anything but the tools and artistry of a painter. Failed attempts to replicate the Shroud image using lasers only underline the argument skeptics have made for decades: the object is a medieval fake.

The bottom line on the Shroud remains the same: the Shroud continues to fail several key practical tests, as discussed by skeptical investigator Joe Nickell in his classic work on the subject, Looking for a Miracle:²

• Provenance: there is no sign that this object existed before the 14th century;
• Art history: the Shroud fits into art history as part of a genre of artistic depictions and recreations of burial cloths of Christ;
• Style: the image upon the shroud looks like a manufactured illustration consistent with 14th century religious iconography, not like a real human being;
• Circumstance: a 14th century Catholic bishop determined that the Shroud was a “cunningly painted” fraud—and discovered the artist who confessed to creating it;
• Chemistry: the Shroud contains red ochre and other paint pigments;
• Radiometric dating: carbon-14 dating tests showed in 1988 that the Shroud was likely created between 1260 and 1390 CE. In 2008, the hypothesis that this date was distorted by carbon monoxide contamination was tested—and results of the original tests confirmed.

Overturning the robustly supported conclusion that the Shroud was manufactured by a medieval artist would take extraordinary levels of evidence in favor of some alternate explanation. The current media hype carries no such breakthrough news. The opposite is true, in fact: the Italian researchers concede (as quoted by Vatican Insider) that their “inability to repeat (and therefore falsify) the image on the Shroud makes it impossible to formulate a reliable hypothesis on how the impression was made.”

After decades of controversy, the real shame is not merely the miasma of pseudoscience surrounding the relic (that’s a fog skeptics are happy enough to cut through) but the blurring of the lines between science and metaphysics—or if you like, between science and faith. The Shroud’s popularity seems to stem from the hope that it could deliver tangible evidence for the divine, but that hope is misplaced. Even if Shroud researchers were to prove their (exceptionally unlikely) speculation that the Shroud image was imprinted by “a short and intense burst of VUV directional radiation,” this would in no way confirm the existence of God, only of a unique printing process—a process enthusiasts have thus far been unable to demonstrate. The truth is that the tools and methods of empirical science would remain powerless to confirm the existence of a transcendent metaphysical God even in the event that such a being existed. It’s just not the sort of question science can answer.

Pressing science into the service of metaphysics may do harm to religion—I’ll leave it to the religious to say if that is so—but it cuts out the heart of the scientific enterprise. And that is a Christmas present that none of us should want.

Barry Beyerstein. Image courtesy Lindsay Beyerstein. All rights reserved.

A Life of Service.

(Originally published in 2008.)

When considering my first BC Skeptics blog post, the subject seemed to me obvious and unavoidable: remembering the great Barry Beyerstein, who passed away in 2007.

“Obvious” because Barry personally introduced me to skepticism; “unavoidable” because of the influence he continues to wield over my work.

I was in Junior High when I discovered skepticism at a small science fiction convention in Victoria, BC. I’d long been a fan of all topics paranormal, both the fictional (comics, sci-fi, D&D) and the allegedly true. At that point, it was a fond, long-standing dream of mine to pursue cryptozoological creatures and weird goings on. Even as a child, I’d devoured everything weird I could get my hands on, from the miracles of Uri Geller to the leviathan at Loch Ness.

Yet, everything I’d read had come from the credulous paranormal literature. I was passionate about the material, deeply interested in exploring these mysteries, but I hadn’t a clue that any sort of critical literature existed. How could I? At that time, Skeptic magazine didn’t exist. The venerable Skeptical Inquirer had a proud history already, but was known for the most part only to subscribers and university libraries. No skeptical magazines were available on newsstands. (No one was even dreaming of the access points that exist today, like skeptical podcasts and online forums.)

So, I walked into a small, poorly attended panel discussion at “I-Con 2” completely unprepared. What I heard was a life-altering shock to me, a road to Damascus moment.

On the panel was one Barry Beyerstein, from an organization called the BC Skeptics. He was genial, warm, and clear. He distributed free copies of the BC Skeptics newsletter, the Rational Enquirer (which was then a print publication).

And, he knew what he was talking about.

The small crowd meant there was ample chance to pepper him with questions. “What about UFOs?” from one side of the room. “What’s your take on Bigfoot?” from the other. Each time, his answers easily lifted another cobwebby shroud of misinformation and assumptions from my eyes.

I remember his answer to one question in particular, because it was so concrete and commonsensical and (once pointed out) so obviously true. In my memory I asked this question myself. (I know that’s not likely to be an accurate memory, but even now I can see him in my mind’s eye: speaking directly to me from the panel, treating a chubby, magic-besotted teenage nerd with respect and dignity.)

“What about firewalking?” I asked, shaken by the experience of finding myself woefully misinformed on the very topics of my greatest passion.

“Well,” Barry explained, patient and friendly, “it’s all a matter of how heat conducts. Imagine a tray of muffins in an oven. Everything in the oven—the walls of the oven, the tray, the muffins—has the same very high temperature. But if you’re careful and move quickly, you can kind of juggle the muffins out of the oven with your bare hands—so long as you don’t touch the tray or the sides of the oven.”

Lightbulb. You mean these mysteries can actually be solved?

I remembered that, and my interest in skepticism started to grow. I wrote to the BC Skeptics, asking for more copies of the Rational Enquirer. They were kind enough to send some, and I studied every word. Perhaps three years later, as a penniless freshman, I was overjoyed to discover a complete back issue collection of the journal-format Skeptical Inquirer in the fine little library at Bishop’s University in Quebec. Day after day, I worked happily through it all, cover to cover. I eagerly learned at the knee of my heroes: Isaac Asimov. James Randi. Joe Nickell. Martin Gardner. And, Barry Beyerstein.

When Skeptic magazine launched, I was there reading it (over coffee I couldn’t afford) in a little newsstand café in snowy Sherbrooke, Quebec. I was in love from the moment I opened it. (I can still hardly believe I’m a columnist for Skeptic today.)

After I took over the Junior Skeptic section of Skeptic magazine, I had the chance to tell Barry about the impact he had on me. And, I even had the opportunity to work with him on occasion. (We shared an interest in a particular bogus faith healer.) I’m pleased about that. It helps make up for the happenstance that I had to decline a lunch invitation from Barry just a few days before he passed away.

Today, Barry’s influence on me goes well beyond that “aha!” moment two long decades ago. In my view, Barry Beyerstein was the best of what skeptics can be—and should be. He was the class act we should follow.

In a Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast tribute to Barry, Dr. Steven Novella put it simply: “He was, without exaggeration, the single nicest guy I’ve met in the skeptical movement.” Echoing this thought, co-host Rebecca Watson put her finger on something I think is very important: warm personalities like Barry are “the people we most need in the skeptics movement, because it shows people that we’re not just all cynics. There are people out there [in skepticism] who are, y’know, enjoyable to be around.”

Amen. We skeptics are in the communication business, and communication begins with respect and approachability. As Eugenie Scott (another class act whom I greatly admire) told me, “Persuading people means treating them with respect—which is something we all ought to be doing anyway.”

I think that came naturally to Barry Beyerstein. The rest of us can do our best to live up to his example, and to his sense of mission.

Shortly before his death (in the last hard-copy issue of the Rational Enquirer, as it happens), Beyerstein addressed a topic I tackled myself in a manifesto-type essay (first released in audio format in the podcast Skepticality): the question of what the skeptical movement should be for. He was writing at almost the same time as I, and I’m pleased to know now that our opinions were in accord. Our resources, he wrote, should be spent “in direct pursuit of our skeptical mandate—investigation and education” without distraction into culture war issues.

Upon his passing, Barry’s daughter Lindsay wrote a concise and immensely moving memoriam note I feel compelled to quote: “Dad loved all knowledge, no matter how arcane or obscure. He believed in the power of reason, compassion, and humility. He lived a life of service.”

A year later, that phrase—“He lived a life of service”—continues to echo in my head. What a wonderful legacy. Will my own son one day be able to remember me in such a light?

I hope so. I’m working on it.

Because here’s the thing: in my mind, the skeptical project shouldn’t be a stage for self-promotion. It shouldn’t be a theatre in a culture war.

It’s a chance to help people. That, and only that.

And Barry Beyerstein knew it.

—Daniel Loxton, July 2008

It’s important to recognize that sea serpent witnesses do not usually report seeing animals shaped like serpents. Instead, they report a series of discrete coils or humps or dark rounded objects (“like a string of buoys” is a typical description¹) and infer that these are connected beneath the water’s surface. The problem, of course, is that such sightings are by their nature ambiguous: a humungous serpentine animal might resemble a string of buoys, but it’s also possible for a group of smaller individual objects (say, an actual string of buoys) to resemble a string of buoys. For this reason, smaller, known animals such as seals, sea lions, dolphins, porpoises, and waterfowl have always been obvious sources for false positive sea serpent sightings. For generations, this has been the most common explanation offered by those skeptical of sea serpents: could witnesses in a given case have misidentified a group of smaller animals that were swimming together in a follow-the-leader arrangement?

From the perspective of many cryptozoologists, these “group of X swimming in a line” explanations seem forced. Nonetheless, naturalists routinely observe such following in a line behavior in many species, and it’s well-known in the cryptozoological literature as well. (I give a number of examples in the book.) But all that is largely beside the point: the illusion does not depend on the animals traveling in a line, but merely traveling in any clustered group.

This is perhaps one of the least appreciated principles relevant to the sea serpent literature: thanks to perspectival effects, any cluster of distant objects at sea will appear as a line when viewed from near sea level—as from a small boat or shoreline.

It’s an effect you can observe yourself on your kitchen table. Just plunk down some small objects in a random-looking cluster at the other end of the table, and then bend down to view the scene from an edge-on perspective. I just did this with some blobs of modeling clay. Viewed from above, my squishy blue seals comprise a more or less random cluster; viewed edge-on, presto—a squishy blue sea serpent. (See image below.)

We know that many animals move in groups on or near the water’s surface, from otters to ducks to dolphins. Given perspective, many of these groups of animals will appear sea serpent-like; therefore, it’s predictable as clockwork that some witnesses will believe they have seen sea serpents when in fact they have not. Consider, for example, the misperception of a flock of birds by key Loch Ness monster witness Alex Campbell:

I discovered that what I took to be the Monster was nothing more than a few cormorants, and what seemed to be the head was a cormorant standing in the water and flapping its wings as they often do. The other cormorants, which were strung out in a line behind the leading bird, looked in the poor light and at first glance just like the body or humps of the Monster, as it has been described by various witnesses.²

Perspective transforms playdough "seals" (top) into playdough "sea serpent" (bottom) at Daniel Loxton's kitchen table.

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.”

This planning highlights two key ingredients of a successful protest stunt (as I’ve discussed previously): agreeing in advance on rules of engagement, and designing that engagement to keep the protester on the moral high ground. In this case, as Grothe explains, “Everyone was clear from the outset that we wouldn’t engage with any audience members, and we deliberately arrived outside after most people had already been seated. The ones who saw us were mostly just confused by the costumes, and the ones who got it seemed to understand that we weren’t there to make fun of them, but to confront Van Praagh.”

Video and JREF press release below. (A Picasa photo gallery is available here.)

Video: Zombies bring challenge to celebrity ‘psychic medium’

Dodging questions, James Van Praagh won’t even talk to dead people about JREF’s Million Dollar Challenge

Laguna Beach, Calif.—James Van Praagh has made himself rich by claiming he talks to the dead on daytime TV and at pricey ticketed seances—but he wouldn’t talk at all when ‘the dead’ actually turned up at his $100-a-head seminar to ask why he won’t prove his psychic powers.

A video released today by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) shows a small horde of costumed ‘zombies,’ carrying signs reading “Van Praaaaaaagh” and “talk to us, we won’t bite,” shambling up to the building where Van Praagh’s “Spirit Circle” was set to begin, and asking to speak with him. Led by JREF President D.J. Grothe, the groups asks why Van Praagh is dodging questions about whether he’ll accept the Foundation’s million-dollar challenge to prove his claimed psychic medium abilities. Van Praagh’s representatives first promise to get someone to talk with the group, but instead have the group kicked out by security.

Van Praagh has refused to answer emails and certified letters about the JREF’s challenge, and has refused to comment to the media.

JREF representatives say they’ve seen nothing that distinguishes Van Praagh’s performances from common psychological tricks traditionally used by magicians and phony psychics.

“If James Van Praagh is making his living by faking psychic powers and pretending to speak to people’s deceased family members, that’s truly shameful,” said D.J. Grothe, JREF president and a former professional magician. “That’s why we put a million dollars on the line and gave him the opportunity to prove he can really talk to dead people.”

“It seems that when James Van Praagh is asked to prove his ‘psychic’ powers, even dead people get the silent treatment.”

This release and further info is available from the JREF, here.

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.

My first answer to this question is always, “Time machine.” It’s even true, as long as we understand “machine” to mean my Mac, and “time” to mean “countless months of my life.” According to early reviews, that effort paid off. Calling Ankylosaur Attack one of “the best of this fall’s new children’s books,” Canada’s national Globe and Mail newspaper raves,

A combination of minimal text containing maximal information and computer-generated, photo-realistic images of the creatures in their natural setting makes Loxton’s book a mind-blower/eyeball popper for that dino-crazy species that lives among us.

Here’s a peek at how we did it.

On Location

On location in Dominica in 2006 (and clearly shot in Sasquatch-O-vision!)

Location photography for Ankylosaur Attack began long before the project was even conceived. In 2006, I shot several thousand texture shots and dinosaur-ready background plates in the island countries of Dominica and St. Lucia (many at locations used for the film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest). These were intended especially for second installment of the two-part Junior Skeptic story on evolution—which would become my book Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be—but as we’ve joked at Junior Skeptic, “We eat every part of the animal.” Aiming to provide high-end production values on a non-profit budget has taught me to waste nothing, and to maximize every opportunity. With that in mind, I banked thousands of pictures against future needs, feverishly documenting everything from rusting cannons to crumbling walls to volcanic steam. This became a fabulous treasure trove, which I constantly dip into for Junior Skeptic and other projects. For example, if you look very closely at the Ankylosaur Attack spread at the top of this post, you may be able to spot a concealed gecko. That gecko is a Dominica boy (or girl).

Photographic assistant (and long-suffering spouse) Cheryl Hebert on location in BC in 2010

The first round of principal photography for Ankylosaur Attack took place in southern British Columbia and Alberta in the Summer of 2010.

The basic magic of projects like Ankylosaur Attack or the photorealist CG monster scenes I create for Junior Skeptic is to take fake creatures and insert them into the middle of real photographs. Not on top, mind you, but into the photographic backgrounds. That means the creatures—whether computer generated like the dinosaurs in this story, or physical sculptures like the Bigfoot on the cover of Junior Skeptic #21—must be inserted behind foreground and mid-ground elements, such as ferns or mossy branches. That can be done with great difficulty by hand using a Wacom tablet and many long days of effort (there was a lot of that for Ankylosaur Attack) but the process can be sped along by tools like a portable greenscreen. First, the camera is locked off on a tripod, and the location shot without a greenscreen. Then, the screen is set up, and the shots taken again. Thankfully, my wife Cheryl is very used to this tedious process. At least she didn’t have to jump in a lake to create splash elements this time! Water or no, however, the process was complicated for this project because the resolution needed for full-spread art for print far exceeded the resolution of my DSLR. Every image in Ankylosaur Attack is a mosaic sewn together from multiple shots!

Cheryl Hebert holds mirror ball on location in BC's coastal rainforest

Detail from Ankylosaur Attack, showing reflections on scales

The fake creatures must also share the lighting of the objects in the scene, and interact with those objects by casting and receiving shadows and bounce light. Even more complicated, reflective elements in the location (puddles, say) must reflect the creature, while reflective elements of the creature (scales!) must reflect the background. For this, we use a mirror ball to capture the lighting conditions of the environment. Once wrapped around a virtual sphere, this provides highly accurate reflections on the scales of our dinosaurs.

All of the backgrounds in Ankylosaur Attack started as photographs, but none of them went to print looking as they did when we stood there. All the shots in the book are highly modified. Not counting the dinosaurs, I added logs and ferns and boulders, removed roads, replaced skies, and many other tricks besides. In some cases, the environments were almost completely synthetic, constructed from elements taken from multiple locations.

We’ll take up some of those compositing challenges in an upcoming post—and reveal how beautiful maple leaves almost defeated this project. Stay tuned!

Postscript

Until then, I’ll leave you with this shot, which is one of the images I used to create the spread at the top of this post. Photographic assistant Crystal Cerny spent many hours holding a white screen over her head (for this and many other shots) while I looked through the viewfinder and yelled, “Left! More left. Higher. OK, got it. Now, left again….” She exhibited tremendous patience (thanks, Crystal!) but, alas, was unable to be fifteen feet tall. For this reason, it took me days of post-production to finish extracting all the moss and branches for this spread.

Photographic assistant Crystal Cerny on location in BC's coastal rainforest

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.

I would like to thank the Fitzhenry Family Foundation for the powerful encouragement this award represents. I’d also like to thank (and congratulate!) Evolution‘s publisher, Kids Can Press, for embracing this book and throwing their full weight behind its quality and its wide distribution. My deepest thanks as well to Pat Linse for supporting Evolution as its Producer during its long road to publication; to Michael Shermer for seeing in the first place that a clear, simple primer on evolution for kids was still something the world needed; to the donors who support the ongoing work of Junior Skeptic and the Skeptics Society; and to editor Valerie Wyatt, illustrator Jim W. W. Smith, and designer Julia Naimska, whose work was so essential to achieving Evolution‘s level of polish. Finally, I’d like to thank my wife Cheryl and my family for the sacrifices this long road required.

We’ve done some good here, folks. Thank you. Thank you all.

Too Hot for the USA?

Last night’s Lane Anderson Award revelation was an amazing honor. It also came as a staggering coincidence, capping what was without question the most frenzied press in the lifetime of the book, or indeed in my career. Yesterday, the Globe and Mail (arguably Canada’s most prestigious newspaper) carried columnist Tom Hawthorn’s lighthearted story on Evolution and Junior Skeptic, running under the headline “Children’s book too hot for U.S. publishers wins accolades, prize nominations here.” The online version of this story has gone totally ballistic. As of this writing, it has been tweeted 572 times (including once by Roger Ebert), and shared on Facebook by over 4000 people. It has 793 comments. I’ve been fielding press ever since.

All this attention speaks to an unease about the state of understanding of biology in the US, but also to a passion for education. People care whether the children of America are given the chance to appreciate, in a deep way, the central truth about the history of life on Earth.

Can it really be that a mild children’s book about fundamental biology is “too hot” for America? I’ll discuss this topic more in the coming days, but I’d like to touch on it briefly here. It’s important to realize that most of the publishing professionals I dealt with in the US were lovely and encouraging. They all said “no,” but some recommended smaller, artier presses they felt might consider Evolution. It’s likely that Evolution would eventually have found a home in the US (which is, after all, the country that took us to the Moon!), but we struck out consistently for quite a while. This was surprising, I felt, given that we were pounding the pavement during the lead-up to the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species (celebrated in 2009). Evolution was an attractive, almost ready-made package: already written, illustrated, and vetted to the same quality that the Lane Anderson Award Jury described as a “tour-de-force of science writing”—ready to become what the (US) National Science Teachers Association recommends as a book that “complies with the ideas set forth about evolution by the National Science Education Standards and fills a gap in books about evolution for this age group.” We were even willing to let it go cheap, just to get the information into the hands of kids—and with a guaranteed sale (1000 copies!) and marketing support from Skeptic to sweeten the pot. Despite all that, some of America’s top children’s publishing professionals rejected Evolution, some citing concerns that it was too controversial, too much of “a tough sell,” or (“in today’s climate”) too likely to find needed distribution channels closed.

Many people have reacted badly to hearing this. As children’s author Helaine Becker (now revealed as one of the Lane Anderson Award Jurors) blogged last night, 

As a born-and-bred Yank, I’m appalled by this thoroughly chickenshit (a well-known scientific term) behavior on the part of my fellow Americans. Book people should know better. Forgive the book-related pun, but book people should  show some spine. Yes, I know, the book biz is struggling, publishers need to feel certain that a book will make money. But really—you don’t think there’s a big enough market to support a terrific science book? Puh-leeze.

It was certainly frustrating to knock on cold doors, but I am sympathetic to publishers. As Becker notes, it’s a tough time for book producers, and they need to work hard to mitigate risk. Publishers face the on the ground reality that almost half of American adults—many of them reviewers, librarians, booksellers, or teachers—believe that evolution did not happen at all.

So, reluctant as they may be, I don’t see American publishers as villains—but I do see the wonderful people at Kids Can Press as heroes!

When we turned to Canadian publishers, we aimed straight for the top—and hit a home run on the very first swing. Kids Can Press, the largest publisher of children’s books in Canada (owned by media giant Corus) is a big player that works in the same tumultuous times and with the same corporate concerns as other large publishing houses. Nonetheless, Kids Can Press embraced Evolution, warmly and immediately. They stood behind it—bracing for controversy, but not afraid of it—and gave their full support to the idea that it should embody the best of current scientific knowledge, without apology and without compromise. With no end of encouragement and no hint of interference, KCP (and especially the wise and brilliant Valerie Wyatt) pressed for even greater care and accuracy.

But the folks at Kids Can aren’t the only heroes in this story. What I find most moving about this experience is that those New York publishers were, I think, wrong in an important respect. This uncontroversial book about uncontroversial science was embraced by readers, librarians, and booksellers of many faith traditions and of none—especially in Canada, but many in the US as well. Could it be that we underestimate regular Canadians and Americans?

For me, the real test—the moment when I found myself holding my breath—was Evolution‘s nomination for the Ontario Library Association’s Silver Birch Award (which I blogged about here). That award went in the end to a book written by Val Wyatt, but the nomination made Evolution—the book, and the topic—part of the massive Forest of Reading program promoted widely throughout Canada’s largest public school and public library systems. If there was a moment for controversy, that was it. But no controversy came, explained the Executive Director of the Ontario Library Association to a reporter last week. “We always get [complaints] about some of the books, but this was not one of them,” quoted Victoria’s Times Colonist newspaper.

What does all that mean? I don’t know—not in a larger sense—but I’ll tell you what it means to me. It means that I owe my biggest thanks and most profound admiration to the awesome, open-minded, astonishing kids and families of North America. A toast to every one of you!