(NASA) show that “somebody else is on the moon.” Leonard contends that he has discovered this secret and is trying to inform the public about it in spite of a massive conspiracy of silence. Leonard’s evidence consists of low- resolution NASA photographs, many of them poor reproductions rather than crisp originals. The objects Leonard sees, such as huge bridges and construction equipment of various types, are all just at the limit of resolution of the photos he uses. MacRobert points out that “when he had a chance to get better photos and see the terrain more clearly, he didn’t. One of his pictures is supposed to show miles-long bridges. The photo is a very distant shot, and the bridges are the vaguest smudges. Equally good close-ups have been taken of the bridge areas, and if the bridges were there, they would reach from one side of the photos to the other like a wall poster of the Golden Gate. For some reason Leonard did not get those particular close-ups, readily available from NASA. He was unwilling to look carefully” (p. 47) Oberg (1982) has discussed Leonard’s errors in detail.
It will be seen throughout this book that there is a general unwillingness on the part of promoters of pseudoscientific claims to look carefully at the evidence they put forth to support their claims. This contrasts, of course, with the behavior of scientists, who try to be extremely careful in examining evidence.
What Radner and Radner (1982) term “looking for mysteries” is another common feature of pseudoscientific claims. Here the proponent searches for allegedly unexplained phenomena and says, in effect, “There, Science, explain that.” If science can’t fully explain the phenomena, reasonable explanations are ignored or dismissed and the proponent concludes that his pseudoscientific theory is supported. This type of accumulation of stray events is best illustrated by UFOlogists, who claim that unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are extraterrestrial spacecraft. Proponents of such claims compile long files of UFO sightings and other UFO-related phenomena. The skeptic is then told that unless he can explain away
In reality, the burden of proof should rest squarely on the one who is making the extraordinary claim. This is because, as we have seen, it is often impossible to disprove even a clearly ridiculous claim. Consider the claim that Santa Claus is a real, living person: What evidence might one offer for such a claim? The proponent might point to the hundreds of children who say every year that they have seen Santa Claus. They can’t all be lying, can they? Surely there is some grain of truth in all these reports. And didn’t the astronauts on
This may seem like a silly example, but the type of “evidence” listed above for the existence of Santa Claus would be more than sufficient to convince many proponents of pseudoscience that a real phenomenon exists. In fact, it was just such evidence—the testimony of two little girls and some photographs that they faked—that convinced none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, that fairies really existed in the English countryside. The story is important because it illustrates how reversal of the burden of proof can lead to the uncritical acceptance of the most absurd claims.
The story starts in Cottingley, England, in 1917. Two girls—Elsie Wright, thirteen, and a cousin, Frances Griffiths, ten—claimed to have taken two photographs of fairies who played with them. Three more photos were apparently taken in the summer of 1920 (Sheaffer 1977–78). It was Doyle who brought the photos to the public’s awareness, and he later wrote a book arguing for the real existence of fairies, based largely on these photos (Doyle 1921). The photographs, one of which is shown in figure 1, have always looked fake. But neither this nor the inherent absurdity of the claim has stopped many people, including Doyle, from taking the existence of fairies seriously. As Sheaffer (1978) points out, UFOlogists have been interested in fairy sightings, believing they may be related to the UFO phenomenon and extraterrestrials. Various reports of fairies, leprechauns, and the like are all brought together to argue that maybe there really is some substance to the reports. And, again, the skeptic is challenged to explain away each and every report. Just as in the case of the Santa reports, however, it’s impossible to explain every case. For example, we can never expect each child who has reported seeing fairies to admit lying. But the Cottingley photos can be explained. They were—and this should come as no great surprise to the reader—a hoax. The “fairies” were cutouts from a children’s book, and many years later Frances and Elsie admitted the hoax (Cooper 1982). Crawley (2000) has described the creation of the photos and the hoax in detail. Finally, Sheaffer (1978) has subjected the photographs to computer enhancement and found evidence of a string that was used to hang the cutouts from shrubs while the photos were taken. So what began as a hoax and concerned a clearly absurd hypothesis—that fairies really exist—turned into pseudoscientific belief that required sixty years and much effort to put to rest. And none of this would have happened if the burden of proof had been on the proponents in the first place to provide adequate evidence of their claim—such as a fairy or a leprechaun in a cage. Instead, the burden was shifted to the skeptics who were told, “If you can’t explain away every photo and every report, then fairies must exist.”
Proponents of pseudoscience often complain that skeptics are unfair in demanding more proof for pseudoscientific claims than for the claims of “establishment” sciences. This is both true and reasonable, under the circumstances: Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. For example, consider the following two claims about transcendental meditation (TM): (1) TM can make you feel better; (2) TM can teach you how to defy the law of gravity and float in the air at will. Most people would accept the validity of the first claim based simply on the testimony of several people who say that they felt better after they learned how to meditate. Clearly, one would demand more proof for the second claim. Most people wouldn’t accept statements from several people that they knew how to levitate at will. Additional evidence would be needed. Pictures wouldn’t do, because the TM movement has been known to fake photos of people levitating (Randi 1980). You’d probably demand that someone actually levitate right in front of you. And you’d want a professional magician present as an observer to ensure that no trickery was involved.
In short, you would demand more rigorous confirmation of the second claim than of the first. So not only is the burden of proof on the proponents of pseudoscience to prove their claims, but the burden on them is greater than on someone making a claim that does not challenge the bulk of known facts.
Proponents of pseudoscience often use myth and legend as support for their claims. After all, they reason, myths and legends have been around for a long time, so they must contain a kernel of hard truth. In fact, myths are primitive attempts to explain natural phenomena in a way that the culture using the myth could understand (Barnard 1966; Vitaliano 1973). Myths should never be taken literally. Thus, one can trace the modem Santa Claus myths back through Christian thought to Saint Nicholas, and the customs surrounding the giving of gifts at Christmastime (Revzin 1986). Nowhere, of course, is it ever suggested that the current image of Santa Claus, complete with sleigh and reindeer, is or ever was a real being. But anyone who took the modern myth literally would be fooled into believing that such was the case. Many proponents of pseudoscience have been similarly fooled.
Another characteristic of many pseudosciences is the failure of the proponents to change or update their theories in the light of new evidence. For example, in 1950 Immanuel Velikovsky put forward his theory of “worlds in collision” (see chapter 9). Knowledge of the solar system in particular and astronomy in general changed vastly in the thirty-two years between 1950 and Velikovsky’s death in 1982. Yet not once during that period did Velikovsky change his theories to reflect this new knowledge. Like many proponents of pseudoscience, he felt the theory was written in stone. It was, so to speak, revealed truth not to be changed by mere facts. If the facts don’t fit, the proponents of pseudoscience prefer to ignore the facts. The theory must be preserved at all costs.
This is rather ironic, as I suspect the general public’s impression is that scientists are conservative, closed- minded, stodgy folk who rarely change their minds. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. In the last thirty years all areas of scientific investigation have undergone radical changes. New theories have appeared, been useful for a time, then given way to even newer theories as new data and facts have demonstrated that the old theories
