Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole (21 page)

Rigorous investigation of reports of unidentified flying objects has thrown up numerous examples of how our eyes can deceive us. In the autumn of 1967 there was a rash of reports of a UFO appearing nightly over the construction site of a nuclear plant. Sanitation workers reported it, then a guard. The police showed up. An officer confirmed, “It was about half the size of the moon, and it just hung there over the plant. Must have been there nearly two hours.” The strange object disappeared at sunrise. The next night the same thing happened. A county deputy sheriff described a “large lighted object.” An auxiliary police officer described “five objects—they appeared to be burning. An aircraft passed by while I was watching. They seemed to be 20 times the size of the plane.” A Wake County magistrate saw “a rectangular object, looked like it was on fire…. We figured it about the size of a football field. It was huge and very bright.” There was also a report from air traffic control of an unidentified blip on the radar scope.

When newspaper reporters arrived to investigate the mysterious object, it appeared again at 5:00 a.m. The reporters attempted to chase it in a car. They discovered that no matter how fast they drove, they couldn't get any closer. Finally, they stopped to take pictures of the mysterious object. The photographer looked through his long telephoto lens and said, “Yep … that's the planet Venus alright.”
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Once the planet had been mistaken for a large hovering object by one person, well, that's how everyone else saw it too, until, finally, someone finally looked at it through a magnifying lens and realized the truth. You might be surprised to discover that Venus is one of the biggest sources of UFO reports. Anyone who thinks that a group of honest, experienced, trained eye-witnesses—police officers, no less—can't be seriously and repeatedly misled by the power of suggestion should think again. Also notice how coincidence threw into the mix of this story an apparent “independent” confirmation—that spurious radar blip.

It's not just visual perception that's affected by the power of suggestion. An auditory example, widely available on the Internet, is provided by the song “Stairway to Heaven” by rock band Led Zeppelin, one passage of which, when played backward (easy to do on an old-style record player), is supposed to say:

Oh here's to my sweet Satan.

The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan.

He will give those with him 666.

There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.

Actually, if people listen to the song backward without having seen the suggested lyrics (obviously, I've ruined this for you now), they can't make out much at all, except maybe one or two words, such as “Satan.” Play the reversed passage to people with these words in front of them, on the other hand, and they find it almost impossible
not
to hear the words.

How did the myth of the hidden message in “Stairway to Heaven” arise? Someone playing rock records backward—either messing around, or actually looking for hidden messages—came across what sounds like the dramatic and noteworthy word “Satan” (thrown up by chance) in “Stairway to Heaven,” and they then constructed lyrics suggested to them by the surrounding noises. Having produced the satanic lyrics, the more they listened, the more obvious it seemed to them that the words were really there. The truth, of course, is that the satanic lyrics people “hear” are a product of the minds of listeners, not the mind of Led Zeppelin's lyricist, Robert Plant.

Even setting aside the power of suggestion, various other factors can shape perception, including our obvious perceptual sensitivity to faces. Look up at passing cumulus clouds or stare into the embers of a fire, and all sorts of things start to appear. By far the most common are faces. We are naturally attuned to them and can easily “find” a face in most randomly generated patterns.

In 1976, the space probe Viking Orbiter 1 was busy photographing the Cydonia region of Mars. On July 25 it took a picture of what appeared to many to be an enormous alien face carved onto the planet's surface. The Mars Face, as it has come to be known, caused much speculation. One author, Richard Haugland, suggested in his book
The Monuments of Mars: City on the Edge of Forever
, that the reptilian-looking face was a vast monument created by some ancient Martian civilization—the Martian equivalent of the Great Pyramid of Giza. However, other photographs of the same region reveal that the Mars Face is just a hill that doesn't look very face-like at all unless lit at a certain angle, when it happens by chance to take on a face-like appearance.

In fact, the Mars Face is a product of two factors: (1) Chance eventually threw up a rather face-like set of shadows among the hundreds of photographs of a planet's surface. This face-like image was then further enhanced by (2) our tendency to “see” faces in such patterns anyway. These same two factors account for the many reports of mysterious faces appearing in things. If you have five minutes to spare, a quick trawl through the Internet
will reveal Mother Teresa's face in a bun, Jesus's face on the back of a bedroom door, and a demon's face appearing in a cloud of smoke emerging from the Twin Towers.

The placebo effect provides another example of the power of suggestion. During the Second World War, anesthetist Henry Beecher, faced with a lack of morphine at a military field hospital, tried a rather desperate ploy. He injected a wounded soldier with inert saline solution but told the soldier it was a powerful painkiller. Amazingly, the soldier relaxed and stopped exhibiting signs of significant pain or distress. When Beecher repeated the ploy on other soldiers, he got the same effect. We are remarkably prone to the power of suggestion when it comes to medical treatment. Tell people something will make them better—that it will relieve their pain, give their joints better mobility, reduce their acne, or whatever—and they'll believe, and report in all sincerity, that it does. The placebo effect, as it's known, can create the illusion that a treatment is medically effective when it is not. However, it can also contribute to the effectiveness of even bona fide medicines.

Beecher subsequently went on to publish a seminal paper, “The Powerful Placebo,”
⁴
in which he argued for the importance of conducting
double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials of treatments to establish their efficacy.
If we want to know whether, say, homeopathic remedies have any effect other than placebo, we need two large groups into which individuals have been randomly assigned, one group receiving the homeopathic drug, the other, the medically inert placebo. The trial should be double-blind: the subjects should not know who is receiving the genuine treatment and who is receiving the inert alternative. The experimenters should also be blind to this information, in order to counter the “experimenter effect” (it is well established that experimenters can inadvertently influence the outcome of such trials if they know who is and isn't receiving the genuine treatment). Unfortunately for homeopathy, such well-conducted trials have failed to provide any convincing evidence of the efficacy of homeopathic treatments for any particular ailment.

It is not just perception that can be led astray by the power of suggestion. Psychologist Jean Piaget once claimed his earliest memory was of nearly being kidnapped at the age of two while being walked in his pram by his nurse:

I can still see, most clearly, the following scene, in which I believed until I was about fifteen. I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysées, when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened round me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches, and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a short cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station.

Later, when Piaget was about fifteen, his family received a letter in which the nurse admitted the story was false:

She had made up the whole story, faking the scratches. I, therefore, must have heard, as a child, the account of this story, which my parents believed, and projected into the past in the form of a visual memory.
⁵

Studies reveal that in somewhere between 18 and 37 percent of subjects, researchers can successfully “implant” false memories of events such as animal attacks, riding in a hot air balloon with one's family, and witnessing a demonic possession.
⁶

OTHER MECHANISMS: CHINESE WHISPERS, DECEPTION AND FAKERY, AND SO ON

Another factor that further undermines the credibility of much anecdotal evidence is what I call the
Chinese whispers effect.
When amazing tales are transmitted from one person to another,
the retellings often involve some subtle or not so subtle editing. Those details that are dramatic tend to be remembered and exaggerated. Those that undermine the credibility of the anecdote tend to be airbrushed out. Even if each reteller reshapes the original story only slightly, it takes just a handful of retellings for the story to change significantly. So we can place even less credence in stories that reach us fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-hand.

We should also remember that, when it comes to anecdotes about faith healing, spoon bending, mind reading, communication with the dead, and so on, many people have been revealed as deceptive. In 1983, Christian healer Peter Popoff, who regularly “cured” people of serious illnesses during his revival meetings, was exposed by magician James Randi. Popoff would wheel subjects onto the stage in wheelchairs—subjects who were then miraculously able to walk. It turned out that these people could already walk, and that Popoff had simply brought them on in wheelchairs. Popoff was also caught receiving information about audience members given to him by his wife via a radio earpiece.

The list of fakes and deceivers is long and includes the three Fox sisters, who helped generate huge mid-nineteenth-century interest in communication with the dead. The sisters conducted séances in New York in which the dead would communicate by making rapping noises. The Foxes performed in public theaters, and their work attracted many notable people. Two of the sisters were later to admit “perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too-confiding public.”
⁷
Though they later retracted their confessions, Margaret Fox had nevertheless demonstrated how she could produce the mysterious raps by cracking her toe joints at will.

Not all the claims made about the Fox sisters' séances were, however, a result of deception. In some cases, members of the public were to add dramatic details of their own. Margaret was to say:

A great many people when they hear the rapping imagine at once that the spirits are touching them. It is a very common delusion. Some very wealthy people came to see me some years
ago when I lived in Forty-second Street and I did some rappings for them. I made the spirit rap on the chair and one of the ladies cried out: “I feel the spirit tapping me on the shoulder.” Of course that was pure imagination.
⁸

Another form of fakery by psychics and mediums is the use of hot and/or cold reading. Hot reading involves research in advance. A psychic may prepare for a reading by researching the client on the Internet. Some psychics will place stooges in the foyers of theaters in which they are performing to overhear the conversations of audience members, make notes, and pass information back to the psychic. Sometimes the person for whom a public reading is done will be known to the psychic or to someone close to the psychic, who may then pass on information. Sometimes stooges will join the audience, pretending to be ordinary members of the public.

Cold reading is more of an art form and involves creating the illusion that the psychic knows things about her subject. Psychic readings typically begin like so:

PSYCHIC: I am getting someone whose name begins with “G.” George … [pause] … Or Gerald.

CUSTOMER: Gerald! My uncle's name was Gerald.

PSYCHIC: Yes, Gerald is here with me now. He is saying Hello!

CUSTOMER: That's amazing!

PSYCHIC: He being quite shy, quite coy.

CUSTOMER: [No reaction]

PSYCHIC: Which is odd, because he was such an outgoing chap, wasn't he?

CUSTOMER: Yes, that's right. He loved the social club.

PSYCHIC: Ah, yes, he was just saying he missed his friends there.

CUSTOMER. [Gets a little weepy] It's really him!

PSYCHIC: I'm sensing he had some back trouble.

CUSTOMER: Yes he did! A slipped disc.

PSYCHIC: That's right. He says that disc is all better now.

This customer may go away and tell her friends that the psychic knew she had a dead uncle named Gerald who was outgoing, missed his friends at the social club, and had a slipped disc. Her friends may well be amazed and think that perhaps there's
something
to this psychic business after all.

However, our psychic, in reality, knew nothing. Let's go through the reading again. The psychic tries a name. No reaction. Then another, and this time she gets a hit. But she does not say whether Gerald is living or dead (it could be a message concerning a living person called Gerald). It's the customer who supplies the information that she has a dead uncle of that name. The psychic then suggests Gerald is shy. No reaction, so the psychic switches to saying Gerald was outgoing and gets another hit. The customer supplies the information that Gerald attended a social club. The psychic then suggests Gerald had back trouble. “So-and-so had back trouble” is what is known as a
Barnum statement.
It sounds pretty specific, but it is actually true of most people. Almost everyone has back trouble at some point, so it's not surprising the psychic gets another hit. Other examples of Barnum statements are: “You had an accident when you were a child involving water” and “You have been worrying about money recently.” Psychics will typically make lots of Barnum statements. But notice that even if Gerald's back was always problem free, the psychic can switch tactics and say, “No, sorry, I misheard—Gerald is saying
you
have had some back trouble.” Even if that fails to score a hit, chances are the customer will quickly forget about it. As we have already noted, it's the hits we remember—the misses are soon forgotten.