Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

so, if the lake happens to have the reputation of housing a monster, a monster will likely be perceived. Binns reports one case in which enlargement of a photograph of the monster revealed a swimming deer. Floating logs and bizarrely shaped pieces of driftwood can also be mistaken for a monster, if that is what one is half-expecting to see. And who could go to Loch Ness without at least half hoping to get a good view of the monster? Lehn (1979) has demonstrated that atmospheric refraction, associated with a temperature inversion layer (cold air near the surface of the lake, warmer air above), can produce striking illusions in which otherwise well-known objects are visually disorted, both in shape and size. The perfect conditions for such illusion-creating temperature inversions exist at Loch Ness and many other lakes where monsters are occasionally reported.

Photographs exist that are said to show the monster and, here again, the parallel between monsters and UFOs is striking. Many of the photographs show nothing other than indistinct shapes in the water. They could be anything, and probably are. Further, some of the photos don’t include any shoreline in the image and could have been taken anywhere—in a pond in the photographer’s backyard, for instance. Given the number of people toting cameras and video recorders around it is astonishing that more and better monster photos don’t exist, if the monster does. Fraud has also played a role in monster photographs. Photos taken in 1934 by R. A. Wilson that show a reasonably clear dinosaur-like shape are now known to be fakes (Binns 1984).

The most famous Loch Ness photographs—actually a film—were taken by Tim Dinsdale in the spring of 1960. The film was analyzed by the Royal Air Force Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Center in 1966. The center reported that the moving object in the film was “probably an animate object” (quoted in Binns 1984, p. 109). This report has received much publicity, but Binns shows that it faces real problems as proof of the existence of the monster. A careful reading of the report shows that the object’s appearance is equivalent to that of a rather fast motorboat. This explanation is rejected because such boats are “normally painted in such a way as to be photo visible at any time” (quoted in Binns 1984, p. 123), and Dinsdale said it wasn’t a motorboat. On the day the film was taken, Dinsdale, an ardent believer in the existence of the monster, was greatly fatigued and had already mistaken a floating tree trunk for the monster. The report, then, actually shows that the object could have been a motorboat that was painted an unusual (i.e., dull as opposed to bright) color.

Loch Ness in the 1970s was the site of enormous efforts to obtain, once and for all, proof positive of the monster’s existence. Round-the-clock surveillance was maintained for months. Sensitive sonar scanned the lake and sensitive cameras were lowered into it. (One of the problems facing underwater photography in the lake is that the water is extremely murky.) A small underwater submarine spent 250 hours in the lake. The results of all this? Nothing: no surface sightings, no surface photographs, no sonar tracings of a monster, no monster skeletons found on the bottom of the loch, and only one photograph, obtained from an underwater camera in the summer of 1972, that showed a clear image of what appeared to be the large flipper of an unknown species. Was this proof at last? Robert Rines, who set up the camera that took the photograph, felt that it did establish the existence of the monster (Rines, Edgerton, Wyckoff, and Klein 1975–76). The original photograph was sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for computer enhancement, a technique used to clarify photographs such as those beamed back to Earth from space by interplanetary probes. It was allegedly the computer-enhanced photo that was published in the article by Rines et al. (1975–76) and reproduced widely throughout the world. But the published photo was not the computer-enhanced photo. The published photo had been greatly retouched and appears much more obviously to show a flipper, while the actual computer-enhanced photograph could be of almost anything. An investigation by Razdan and Kielar (1984–85) revealed the true nature of the photograph in this case. Razdan and Kielar also point to serious shortcomings in the sonar evidence that Rines et al. argue supports their interpretation of the photograph.

The Loch Ness monster has been the object of much searching for almost seventy years. In all that time and with all that effort using some of the most technologically sophisticated devices available, no trace of conclusive evidence has been uncovered that the monster exists. It is most instructive to compare this situation to another where a creature, if by no means a monster, was actually found alive, in spite of the fact that the scientific world believed that it had been extinct for 200 million years. The creature is a fish called a coelacanth, which runs to about five feet in length and lives in the Indian Ocean. In 1938 a single specimen was caught, arousing considerable interest among scientists (Smith 1956). The story of the discovery of the coelacanth has been very well told more recently by Thomson (1991) and Weinberg (2000). In the next few years following 1938, the interest of scientists turned up some additional specimens of this “living fossil.” Compare the Loch Ness monster and the coelacanth. The monster is said to be a very large creature living in a lake in a rather heavily populated and traveled area, which is a favorite summer vacation spot with a highway running along it. In the nearly seventy years that people have so diligently looked for the monster, no satisfactory evidence for its existence has ever been found. The coelacanth, on the other hand, is a relatively small fish living in a vast ocean. When it was discovered in 1938, the countries bordering on the Indian Ocean were largely primitive colonial states. And yet in just a few years several more examples of the fish were found. It strains credulity to argue that if the coelacanth was found so rapidly and under such unfavorable conditions, the Loch Ness monster has somehow managed to evade its much more persistent and sophisticated searchers for so long.

The evidence for the reality of the yeti in the Himalayas and bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest is little better than that for the Loch Ness monster. Napier (1972) and Wylie (1980) have reviewed the evidence for these two creatures. Regarding the yeti, several large mammals are found in the Himalayas that are mistaken for yeti. These include the woolly wolf and brown and black bears. Bears occasionally stand on their hind feet, and in that posture can present a most frightening and unbearlike apparition. So-called yeti tracks are often actually the tracks of one of these animals, sometimes strangely enlarged by melting of the surrounding snow. The Yeti skins that are reported from time to time turn out to be skins of the various mammals that inhabit the Himalayas.

Eyewitness reports, reports of strange large tracks, and even a film help to convince many that bigfoot, or sasquatch, is an actual creature. Initially confined to the Pacific Northwest, bigfoot sightings have become a nationwide phenomenon in the past decade or so. Eyewitness reports, with their notable lack of reliability, can be attributed to misidentification of local species (bears again) and the constructive nature of memory and perception. For example, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported on May 13, 1982, that a bigfoot- type creature had been spotted in the Los Angeles area. According to eyewitnesses it was between seven and nine feet tall and was “too hairy and smelled too bad to be human” (quoted in Dobson 1982–83, p. 10). The “creature” turned out to be a bum, of normal height but unwashed and unshaven an no doubt quite odiferous. Bigfoot footprints have been reported since the 1930s in the Pacific Northwest. Many of these are apparently the work of hoaxers. Dennett (1982–83) reported that Rent Mullens, a retired logger, had confessed to carving eight sets of “bigfeet,” one of which he used to produce fake bigfoot footprints. Most of his carved bigfeet ended up in California.

The most famous photographic evidence for bigfoot is a film taken by Roger Patterson on October 20, 1967, which shows a creature walking through brush in front of the camera. Grieve’s (1972) analysis of the film shows it to be inconclusive as support for bigfoot, as it could have been the result of a hoax. Occasionally, bits and pieces of alleged bigfoot remains appear. The number of these reported far exceeds the number submitted for scientific testing, perhaps because when the testing is performed it shows the remains to be those of some known species. Kurtz (1980–81) reported that the partly decomposed remains of a bear found in northern New York near the Ontario border caused much excitement as “real proof” of bigfoot in the area until analysis revealed their real origin.

The creatures in Loch Ness, the Himalayas, and the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest are not the only mysterious creatures to intrigue the monster hunters of the world. The International Society of Cryptozoology has been involved in expeditions to the Congo to hunt for living dinosaurs and to New Guinea to try to find mermaids, called ri by the natives, according to the society. These are described as “an air breathing mammal, with the trunk, genitalia, arms and head of a human being, and a legless lower trunk terminating in a pair of lateral fins, or flippers” according to Dr. Roy Wagner of the University of Virginia Anthropology Department (quoted in Sheaffer 1983–84, p. 117). Why should one believe that such creatures exist? Wagner points to eyewitness reports and says, “I don’t think the credibility of some of my informants can be lightly dismissed” (quoted in Sheaffer 1983–84, p. 117).

DOWSING AND THE MAGIC PENDULUM